by Rob Horner
But I didn't want to. We needed to get away from places where we could easily be located, yes. Beyond that, however, I had no desire to flee further.
Having remained quiet as we made our way to the bridge, leaving me to my thoughts, Crystal suddenly blurted my name, startling me. Until now she'd been gazing out the window, no doubt thinking of her family, of how her life had changed since getting up to go to school that morning. Heck, maybe she was regretting hooking up with me at the carnival yesterday, unconsciously blaming me for...everything. She'd have more than enough things to blame on me, before this was all over.
"What?" I asked, turning to her. She sat ramrod straight, staring at a mud-splattered, gray-brown, Jeep Wrangler, rag-top and sides rolled and tied to the uprights.
"Over there," she said, pointing at the Jeep. As we pulled beside it, I could see a t-shirt-and-jeans clad young man behind the wheel. "He's glowing."
Chapter 13
Flashes of red and white
"He's a demon?" I asked, suddenly terrified, ready to take the next exit and run. Despite that we’d caught up to him from behind, my mind insisted this Jeep-driving demon was after us.
"No," she chuckled, "he's like you, glowing white."
"Like us, you mean," I said.
"I didn't think of that," she replied, suddenly reaching up, dropping the passenger side visor down, and flipping up the cover over the tiny vanity mirror. She spent only a moment looking at her reflection, however, before her excitement faded to disappointment, evident in the way her bright blue eyes first widened, then drooped.
"Nope, can't see myself," she said. "Just you, so far. And now that guy." She pointed at the Jeep again, now cruising beside us. I'd cut my speed by a few miles per hour to match his.
"That means he must have some kind of power, like us," I reasoned. "But how can we stop him?"
Even though the question was rhetorical, she answered, "Try to stay next to him for a minute, let me get this window down. I'll see if I can get him to pull over." She began rolling down her window.
It occurs to me, as I write that sentence, there is an entire generation of readers out there who've never had to "roll down" a car window. This is one of those things I'll punt to your parents; it would take too many words to explain it.
With no interfering traffic it was easy to stay beside the Wrangler. In fact, at that time of morning, there weren't any cars visible ahead of us or in my rearview mirror.
I honked the Nissan's horn, aware of Crystal waving out the window at the driver of the Jeep. Whatever she did, he obviously took it the wrong way, because he stepped on his gas pedal and sped away. His might have been giving us a single-finger salute as he accelerated, but it was hard to tell for sure with all the mud dotting the windows of the Jeep.
Crystal sank back into her seat, dejected. "How will we ever find anyone to listen to us?" she asked miserably.
"It was just one guy," I said quietly.
"How many like him, like us, do you think there are?" she asked.
I shook my head. "I don't know, but I think we'll have a better chance of finding them, and getting them to talk to us, if we're not cruising down an interstate at sixty miles an hour."
She looked at me, maybe deciding whether that was meant sarcastically and if she should respond in kind. Then her features mellowed. "I guess you're right."
I reached over to take her hand, a much easier maneuver now that we weren't in my manual transmission Dodge, but then checked the motion. Resisting the impulse to shout, since all it would do was startle her, I tapped her leg and pointed to our left.
There, under the ribbon of freeway and fading in and out of view behind a screen of scraggly trees, was the Hampton Coliseum, easy to recognize because of it's large, humped-up-out-of-the-ground half-circle shape, curved stone arms arcing gracefully down from sixteen points around the circumference.
But I wasn't looking at the coliseum building. My attention was riveted instead by the numerous tractors and trailers scattered all around it, gaudy colors and fanciful shapes folded and stowed on flatbeds. There were more pieces and parts of carnival rides down there already than what had been present at Pembroke Mall. And more were coming in. A train of similar vehicles snaked down the nearest off-ramp, turning left at the bottom, then jamming the lanes all the way to the Coliseum.
Even from this distance, there was no mistaking the hundreds of tiny figures swarming over and around the trailers, appearing to be a large collection of ants with some interesting decor inside their glass case.
"They're red, all of them," Crystal said, confirming my worst suspicions. I tried to imagine what she must be seeing, hundreds of red dots floating among the trailers, and decided it would be too confusing. "It's like watching those tiny Christmas lights dancing, moving around." Her voice was lower, almost enthralled. "It's weird, too, because there's no reason I should be able to see any kind of light from this distance, especially not with the sun as bright as it is, but there they are."
"I wonder if you can turn it off," I said thoughtfully, not really meaning to direct the comment at her. We'd been so busy being caught up in the wonder of discovery, we hadn't had the time to truly experiment with our abilities. Like when discovering that I could project the force in a wave, or how, just by wishing hard, I'd been able to help my aunt without having to strike her. There could be degrees to which we could manifest our powers, or perhaps not manifest them at all. What if I just felt like hitting something, a door, a wall, but I didn't really want to create a hole large enough to walk through?
"Hey, great idea!" she said.
"It worked?"
"Yeah, I just, you know, thought about not seeing them, and the red went away."
I looked over at her, as her eyes went through an exaggerated blink, like something done in slow motion. She was leaning so close, looking past me but still filling my nose with the light scent of her perfume. A flush of heat crept up my face. If I tilted my head, just a little, I'd be able to see down the front of her t-shirt.
"And...they're back," she said, smiling, dropping back into her seat, completely oblivious to the effect she had on me.
"What's wrong?" she asked, still smiling, only now she'd placed a hand on my right leg. Maybe she wasn't oblivious after all.
I cleared my throat, fighting past a sudden huskiness, "Nothing, I...ahem...so it was that easy? Just turning it on and off?"
Still smiling, enjoying herself, she said, "It sure looks like turning it on was easy. I'm not sure I want to turn anything off right now." Then she fell back into her seat, laughing.
Face burning, I shifted to the right lane. The coliseum was long gone and far behind. Our exit was coming up. Mercury Boulevard, Hampton Coliseum, the sign proclaimed. Suddenly quite nervous about my decision to visit Tanya--she lived only a few short miles from the Coliseum--I steered for the exit, slowing to thirty to navigate the sharp curve, and exited onto Mercury Boulevard. On our left was the Coliseum Mall, the largest indoor shopping mall on the Virginia Peninsula, with its popular anchor stores and chain locations, as well as specialty stores that couldn't be found anywhere else. (It's gone now, with its funky 80's colors and unique stores, torn down and replaced by the Peninsula Town Center).
We went straight through the Coliseum Drive stoplight, staying on Mercury Boulevard for several miles. A right turn would have taken us straight back to the coliseum and the relocated carnival. It made me nervous, suddenly realizing how close to those things were.
Having regained a measure of composure, I explained why we were stopping in Hampton.
"I just thought you wanted to be close to the carnival, in case, you know, we decide to do something about it," she said.
I told her about Tanya and the friendship we shared, assuring her my only intention was to find a place for both of us to stay. It was at this time that the dumb dude part of my brain informed me--belatedly--that my new girlfriend might not like going to stay at my old girlfriend's house, even though
we'd never made it past our first date. I stammered, promising to tell Tanya all about her.
Looking back now, I must have sounded so insecure, so downright guilty, as if Crystal and I had been sneaking around behind Tanya's back. It's funny how things work out, how what you want isn't always what you get, or how the thing you think you don't want becomes the one thing you can't live without.
Whether it was to comfort me, or just because it amused her so much, Crystal started laughing.
I was shocked, for a moment, honestly wondering what could possibly be so funny. But her laughter was infectious, and soon we were laughing together. It felt good, just laughing, maybe never as good before as it did then, in that moment, sharing it with her. For just a few moments, we were free. We were free from whatever terrible responsibilities had been dumped on our shoulders. What made it even better for me, even funnier, was I had no idea what we were laughing at.
Finally, we slowed, calmed down, and I asked, "Now what was that all about?" Which of course set her off again.
It was another full five minutes before she managed to get herself under control again, and by then we were off Mercury Boulevard, pulling into a large residential area. I parked at the curb in front of Tanya’s home, a large, white, two-story affair with apple trees in the front and a backyard large enough for a pool, though the Fields didn't have one.
"It's just that...well," she began, fighting a constant struggle not to start laughing again, "you don't need to explain everything to me about your past. At least, not in the first twenty-four hours."
Of course, I still felt embarrassed, but it couldn't be helped. And at least her laughter was good-natured.
And that was when I realized we'd made another mistake, not catastrophic and completely understandable under the circumstances. It was only eleven-thirty by my watch. Tanya wouldn't be getting out of school until after two. It felt later to us, of course, but we hadn't exactly had a normal morning. Time, as it related to other people at least, had lost much of its meaning.
Still, sitting there and realizing how much time had passed, I was suddenly hungry.
"Are you okay with getting some lunch?" I asked.
"Good idea," she replied. "Let's get something to eat and come back later."
Chapter 14
Questions without answers
We only drove for a few minutes this time, stopping at a nearby Taco Bell. Food of the Gods, right? Some things haven't changed over the past twenty-some years, and that oatmeal-infused, spicy beef is one example of a good thing left alone.
Throughout the meal, Crystal kept pointing out features of the people around us. No demons, or at least, she didn't mention any people glowing red. But there were several customers who glowed white with varying degrees of brightness. Twenty other customers came and went while we nursed our tacos and Pepsi's, and seven of them had a white aura. It was hard for me to understand, but apparently, those of us with the white glow had varying levels of "whiteness." Since we assumed white meant some form of power, that seemed to equate to a difference in strength of ability.
Naturally, this was pure conjecture. Maybe the level of brightness had more to do with some strength of belief, or was some measure of purity, something we could never truly define.
Neither Crystal nor I could come up with a reasonable hypothesis why there would be such a high percentage of people with some form of power in this place. We'd seen no demons, other than the red forms swarming over the equipment at the coliseum. It seemed a faint hope, considering what happened in the last town this carnival visited, but we had no way of being certain the demons would even strike in Hampton. We didn't doubt something would happen, but we had no proof to back up our concerns.
What became obvious from observing these people was they had no idea anything was different about them. Perhaps their talents required some form of concentration, or a precipitating event that hadn't yet occurred. Maybe they were primed, like a weapon but, lacking a target, were in a kind of safety mode. Maybe acceptance had something to do with it. Everyone we saw was older than us, which made sense; anyone our age should be in school. Even in the eighties and nineties, before the recent glut of superhero movies made everyone a fan, there were those of us more willing to believe, more open to the amazing. Or, to put it another way, there were those like us who hadn't yet become jaded by the mill-works mundanity of life, wonder and amazement beaten out of us by the never-changing need to work, pay bills, and strive constantly to stay out of the poorhouse.
For people like Crystal and I, open-minded enough to accept the supernatural, willing to embrace the concept of superpowers, recognizing and using them shouldn't pose a problem. For the non-believer, however, such things might seem so far-fetched that the very idea was unacceptable, making the powers unusable.
There would never be a way to test this theory, but it seemed a good working hypothesis, a way to explain the seemingly large percentage of "talented" people who appeared not to have noticed anything extraordinary about themselves.
There was also the possibility some of them did know, but were keeping it a secret, something all good superheroes learned to do.
By now, we'd managed to kill over an hour, and as one o'clock approached, we decided to head back to Tanya's house. Her mother should be home, and we it would be better to gain her permission first, before bringing Tanya into the argument. If we waited and approached her with her daughter present, it could be seen as us ganging up on her.
We rode back in relative silence, avoiding the radio. Neither of us wanted to relive the misrepresented stories about us, and we weren’t prepared to hear of any new atrocities. But the silence wasn't uncomfortable. It gave us time to sort out our feelings and thoughts, to really absorb and process all that had happened.
Since barging in on the demon-statue presentation in the boy's bathroom, all I'd been doing was reacting, fighting or running as dictated by the situation, rather than planning or controlling a situation. There'd been no time to really think about what was happening. It was all well and good for Crystal to maintain that some reason, some ineffable thing about me, is what brought about the white light which saved me and imbued me with this...power.
Considering the number of people we'd now seen with the glow that--presumably--indicated they had an ability, I was ready to believe in a reason. Not one idea specifically, but the general concept that something had happened to us. Something had been done to us. And the logical conclusion was that it had been done to allow us to fight back.
It was easy to be seduced by Crystal's faith-based logic at first, when it was the two of us who'd been given abilities, two people who already had a connection. But the two had now become ten, when you counted the driver of the Jeep plus the seven in the restaurant. Did they have abilities too? Or did the white aura mean something else? Regardless of what it meant, much of the allure of the 'guiding hand' concept had faded with the introduction of so many strangers that glowed.
There might be no guiding hand behind it, or it could be that of God or some other being or beings with god-like powers.
Stretch the imagination however much you wanted, not too many things come to mind that would have the power or the technology to change the basic rules of the human body, not in such a drastic way that two people, like Crystal and I, would suddenly manifest such strikingly different abilities.
It was almost like something, or someone, way up on high knocked over a bottle of white-out, if you can wrap your head around the analogy. Little drops of power raining down from the skies, striking people at random, and each splotch its own little study in perfect imperfection, like how people always claim no two snowflakes are identical. There seemed to be a reason for the powers, if that reason was to balance against the presence of the demons, but no rhyme that made any kind of sense.
The creatures themselves were another matter. While Crystal was right in that the strange chanting carnies in the trapping-laced trailer certainly had the feel of ceremony,
it didn't necessarily make the ceremony satanic or demonic. The repeated callings to "Arise" might fit the bill, but did anything else? What if it was all an elaborate ruse, a carefully orchestrated disguise playing on the belief systems of an ultimately naive and easily beguiled race?
Would demons really hide themselves in statues, carried around in backpacks like so many cheap Happy-Meal toys? Would they really have such a ready stock of the things that, only a day after making their presence known in a city, there were already enough to indoctrinate a school full of teenagers, infiltrate a police department, and have enough left over for municipal employees like public park attendants? What if it was something else, a different kind of yang to the yin that was our new abilities? Did it make more sense to believe in the supernatural here, or to keep a mind open to the possibility of...I don't know...something else?
As much as it may be embarrassing to admit, considering the flop the big budget film turned out to be, I'd seen Howard the Duck in theaters. I'd watched all three Back to the Future titles, had seen Sigourney Weaver in her panties in Alien then as a bad ass Power Loader operator in Aliens, and had thrilled to the intergalactic swashbuckling action of the original Star Wars trilogy. I was fully in the mindset of believing there could be other life out there, there could be other dimensions. I dreamed of time travel being discovered in my lifetime, if only so I could go back and prevent my parents from dying.
Maybe it would be best if it turned out to be about good and evil, God and the devil, because that would mean someone was always on my side, always looking out for me.