Worldwielder, page 4
But no, they weren't spiders, she saw a moment later. They were beetles. She released a pent-up breath and massaged her chest.
Luud removed one of the beetles from the cage, impaled it on a long knife (taking great care to slurp up the juice that drained), then roasted it over the fire and ate it with gusto. The noxious odor of the cooked bug prompted Brock to once again ask, this time between muffled coughs, how long they were going to stay here, and to inform her that he had asthma, and that when he suggested they hang out, this totes wasn't what he had in mind, not that he wasn't cool with it, but—
“Shh,” she replied, grabbing his hand again.
The beetle in his stomach, Luud cleaned his knife and took a folded roll of fabric from his bag, which he laid on the dirt beside the fire and curled up on. Within minutes, he was sleeping soundly, as evidenced by the blaring snores he emitted.
By this time the sun had vanished behind the trees, drenching the greenbelt in shadows. The traffic of passing runners and walkers had drained to a trickle, none within range of Melissa's mental sense at present. Luud was asleep. Beside him was the open duffel bag. Within it was, she assumed, the locutor, the necessity of which she was questioning further every second. But Kyle had told her to take it, so she would.
Now was her chance.
Before she could tell Brock to wait here, let alone step out from behind the bush, she detected the faint tickle of an approaching presence. By the speed of it, a biker. She stilled and waited for them to pass. But instead of riding by, the biker stopped and dismounted on the path directly between the bush she hid behind and Luud's campsite. Then Melissa saw the black uniform, duty belt, and silver badge. A bicycle cop. Of course. Luud was camping illegally, and he had started a fire in the middle of a forest.
Brock chuckled. “Hah. That dude's screwed!”
The cop ambled towards Luud's campsite, Melissa watching with equal parts excitement and dread.
“Excuse me, sir!” he announced.
AAAKKK! The shriek scattered birds for miles and sent the cop reeling, hands pressed to his ears. It was only then Melissa realized the shriek had come from Luud, who had awoken with a start.
His mind a faint red, the cop leveled an accusing finger on the prone form of the bald man. “Sir, I'm Officer Brian Sullivan with the Willowfork PD, and I'm going to need to see some identification.”
Luud's dubious glare demanded an explanation.
His tone incredulous, Officer Sullivan obliged. “You're camping illegally and you've started a fire in a woodland area. Now let's see some ID.”
By the confused look on his face, Melissa didn't think Luud knew what ID was, but he got up and rummaged through his bag, his back to the cop, removing something she couldn't see and… the knife. He slipped it into the front pocket of his pants, then straightened and turned.
“I do not have it right now. Perhaps I dropped it in the trees there.” A light amber flicker tainted his mind. A lie.
Melissa nudged Brock.
He hadn't seen the knife, so he wasn't concerned. He leaned closer to her and put an arm around her shoulder. “I'm here for you, Melissa.”
She was still too stunned by the scene playing out in the campsite across the path to shake him off. “He's going to kill the cop,” she whispered.
“Wha? No way.”
“Yes way! He just put the knife in his pocket! Do something!” She was too frightened to do anything. Just watching Luud handle the blade made her want to run. But surely Brock, a specimen of physical might and (she hoped) bravery, would take action and prevent the imminent atrocity.
Nope. Brock's face went white, his mind went lime, and he retreated several inches into the brush, shaking his head. “I don't wanna get stabbed,” he mumbled.
Of course. He would be a coward. Now she had no excuse for her passivity. A man's life was in danger, and here she was crouched behind a bush, doing nothing. She tried to tell herself the cop had a gun and would be able to defend himself. Tried, because it was little consolation. If Luud could make minds go gray, there was no defense. Except her.
But she couldn't move.
Irrational, rational, and all manner of other fears had their way with her, and she could only watch as Luud led Officer Sullivan off into the woods, ostensibly to look for his ID. Before long, they were far enough away that she could no longer see or sense them.
As she huddled there, petrified, the full gravity of Kyle's predicament hit her. People who would murder just to get away with illegal camping were holding him captive, and they were hurting him. This was the reality, and if she didn't shoulder her courage and act, her friend would end up like Officer Sullivan. Find the locutor.
She stumbled to her feet and crossed the path. Brock reached out a hand and said something about it not being safe over there, but she brushed him off. She'd be able to sense Luud coming from a quarter-mile off.
Once in the campsite, she upturned the duffel bag and emptied its contents onto the ground, then went through them in search of anything that could be called a locutor. She pocketed the book with Kyle's message and a small piece of paper with a few lines of messy writing on it, but found nothing else of note, even after going through the items twice.
With grim despondence, she realized Luud must have it on his person. This wasn't going to be easy. It might even be impossible. She didn't doubt he'd kill her if she tried to take it from him. How in the world am I going to do this? she wondered.
Tears formed in her eyes, hesitant at first, but soon their flow was downright trenchant, spurred on as her mind ran over each successive horror the day had brought.
As she crouched there, a momentary burst of light, like a slow camera flash, illuminated the forest around her. The light originated from behind her. She spun, and a fraction of a second before her eyes saw him, her mind sensed him.
Luud was standing a foot from her in the clearing, staring at her.
Wrapped around his right hand was a brushed metal sphere about six inches in diameter, an intricate network of glowing blue lines crisscrossing its surface. Melissa dimly registered that an object this strange-looking had to be the locutor—dimly, because the bulk of her attention was held captive by the object in his left hand: the knife, bloody, rising in anticipation of a thrust.
She had seconds to live.
FIVE
Panic froze Melissa's muscles, stopped her heart, and blinded her to all rational thought. She should have moved, run, scrambled away, done something—but she couldn't. Then Luud's hand reached its climax and she knew it was too late. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Some part of her mind was still working, however, and from the dusty filing cabinets of old memories, it wheeled out one that at first seemed silly and inconsequential: red hands, a game she used to play with Kyle. One player attempts to slap the other's hands before they can withdraw them to safety. Now, other people played the game with their eyes open, but not Melissa and Kyle. To them, sight was only a distraction. If they allocated the entirety of their concentration on the other's mind, they could spot a faint flicker telling them of imminent movement. It worked so well that neither of them had ever succeeded in slapping the other's hands.
The relevancy of the memory quickly became clear, but Melissa had no confidence the same tactic would work now. She couldn't simply dive aside the moment Luud plunged the knife towards her. He would compensate. No, her only hope, if it was a hope, was to dodge at the last instant, when the knife was inches from her.
She hardly had time to think before the moment of truth was upon her. Luud's mind flickered. The knife was moving. She waited an agonizing quarter-breath that seemed to last minutes, then threw herself to the right. She felt a rustle as the blade swished by the sleeve of her t-shirt, just outside her shoulder.
She opened her eyes and scurried to her feet. Luud, she saw, had put so much force into his swing, having expected to impale her with it, that when his knife struck air instead, the momentum pulled him off his feet and carried him onto his hands and knees. The locutor remained around his right hand, and didn't look to be coming free without his cooperation. Not a chance on that front.
She didn't stay to watch what he would do next, instead sprinting towards Brock. He'd stood and was gawking at the scene before him, clearly in no condition to move.
As Melissa ran, she detected another flicker in Luud's mind. He'd thrown the knife. She diverted course to barrel straight into Brock rather than grab his arm in passing. For a moment, she feared his herculean frame would absorb the impact without going down, but his footing was unsteady enough that her weight succeeded in toppling him. They crashed into the bushes, the airborne dagger whizzing by overhead and burying itself in a tree.
Fueled by mind-numbing terror, Melissa wasted no time in jumping to her feet. Brock, on the other hand, still looked like he'd eaten the dictionary page with stupefied on it.
“Brock, move!” she screamed, yanking on his arm. Her touch worked to fire a few synapses in the ol' motor cortex, and he lurched himself upright, stumbling along at Melissa's side as she raced for the greenbelt entrance.
Luud hadn't moved from his campsite when he disappeared from view behind the trees, but Melissa could still see his mind, red as a beet, and she had no trouble hearing his algid voice when he called out. “I vill kill zoo if zoo come near me again!”
***
They didn't stop running until they were back at the now-deserted basketball court. Melissa collapsed in a traumatized heap, her whole body shaking. She hadn't even begun to process what had just happened, but already it felt somehow unreal, like the last, terrifying moments of a nightmare before waking. But there was the weight of the book in her pocket. There was the red mark on her sleeve where the bloody knife had grazed it. And there were the scratches on her arms and legs from the bushes she'd pushed Brock into. It had been real.
She jerked away when Brock tried to put his hand on her shoulder. He was the image of courageous concern now, but she hadn't so quickly forgotten his cowardice minutes ago.
Nor her own.
A man had died tonight due to her inaction, while she had escaped the same fate because she was… surely not braver or stronger or more deserving of life. She'd just gotten lucky, and it felt wrong.
She tried to calm her ragged breathing and think sensibly. If Kyle were here, he would tell her, perhaps rightly, that Officer Sullivan's death would have happened even if she hadn't been there, so it wasn't her fault. She would have made a half-hearted attempt to argue with him for another minute before conceding the point and leaning on his shoulder to cry for a while. Eventually he would have succeeded in consoling her, as he always did.
But not now. Now she was left to cry all on her own. The boy crouched opposite her was no substitute for her lost friend, much as he wished to be.
“It's okay, Melissa,” Brock said. “That dude's not gonna hurt you. Not while I'm around.” He was going for valiance, but it was undermined by the quaver in his voice.
“You can ask me,” she managed between sobs.
“Huh?” His confident façade cracked. Perhaps he'd expected her to fall into his arms after his last comment.
“How. Why. Who. All that. You wanna know, don't you?” She'd dragged Brock into this. She owed him some kind of explanation, even if she didn't have a complete one herself.
He looked betrayed. “You—you mean you know what was going on back there?”
She nodded. “Sort of.”
It hurt to watch the last of his concern melt away, replaced with an accusing frown. He didn't need to demand she go on. His expression said it well enough.
“Did you ever hear about my friend Kyle?” she asked. “He… disappeared before you moved here.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything.”
He thought a moment, then nodded. “Uh… Kyle. Right. Yeah, I heard about him.”
“Okay. Read this.” She withdrew Luud's book from her pocket and handed it to Brock, who took it hesitantly before giving her an incredulous stare.
“Wait, you want me to read this whole book?”
“No, the message.”
“Huh?”
“Look at the cover.”
He did, but the confusion didn't leave his face. Melissa had known Brock wasn't the brightest bulb in the pack, but this was a new low. She snatched the book back and examined it herself just to be sure. Yes, there was the message on the cover, and there was the other one inside, just as before.
She was about to shove it back into his hands and ask him if he knew how to read when she realized something: Luud hadn't seemed to notice the message either, and thinking about it now, him carrying the book didn't make much sense if he could see it. What made far more sense, in an absurd way, was that the message was like a mind, and only she and Kyle could see it.
“Sorry,” she mumbled to Brock. “It's… never mind. I gotta go.”
She stood and was sprinting home, a fresh flood of tears falling down her face, before Brock could get out more than a single desperate, “Melissa!”
In that moment, as she'd contemplated telling him the truth, their subsequent conversation had played out in her head in its entirety. It wasn't pretty. He wouldn't believe her. He'd laugh at her. He'd tell her she was imagining things. He'd tell her, and not without just cause, that going near Luud again would be suicide. He'd tell her to forget Kyle. But he didn't know that forgetting Kyle was the one thing she could never do. It would be like growing a third arm or turning into a cat. Impossible. And there was no explaining it to him. She was, as usual, alone in her troubles.
***
That night, she sat up and shivered, imagining all the horrific things that might be happening to Kyle right now or, when her mind tired of that, all the horrific things Luud would do to her if she attempted again to take the locutor. She tried to think productively, but fear sent her thoughts running in circles.
She sought relief in the past, in the innocent beginning of things. Her heart still raced with the excitement of those first few weeks getting to know Kyle, which she remembered with picture-perfect clarity.
Even after discovering they could both mind-sense, a million things should have prevented them from becoming friends. In many ways, Kyle was her opposite—outgoing, carefree, resilient. Just the sort of person Melissa usually couldn't stand. But somehow, they became the best of friends.
It took some getting used to, having a friend. So long accustomed to being closed-off and disconnected around others, Melissa found the idea that someone else could understand her feelings, without her needing to speak a single word, a strange one at first. She felt violated when Kyle would tell her what she was thinking, like she had no privacy. She'd never before considered what it felt like on the other side of mind-sensing.
She quickly grew to like it, though, and began to sit with Kyle at lunch. They were an odd sight to any passerby, since they hardly said a word to each other. In lieu of verbal communication, they watched each other's minds and tried to send simple messages back and forth by thinking of things that made them feel different emotions, which in turn caused their color to change.
When they did talk, it was mostly about their unusualness. Together, they mastered the interpretation of every possible color a mind could turn, compiling a list of over two hundred shades, each with its own subtlety of emotion. Melissa was especially fond of one shade in particular, a hue of yellow they labeled Pineapple, for it was the color she turned whenever she was with Kyle. As a result, he took to calling her Pineapple at any and all opportunities.
They talked of why they were different from everyone else, though they could do little more than speculate. Melissa rather liked the idea that they were the result of a failed government experiment in genetic modification. Kyle had more romantic notions. If being left behind by aliens was romantic, that is.
It wasn't long before they were spending every free minute together—playing chess or exploring the town or planting flowers or talking in the upper reaches of the backyard tree.
A strange thing began to happen to Melissa then. For the first time in her life, she felt like she belonged somewhere. She had a reason to get up in the morning, something to look forward to. All the annoyances and terrors of life were so much easier to endure with a friend by her side.
As the years passed, their friendship took on the steady constancy of an old tree planted firmly in the ground. Melissa came to think of Kyle almost as a part of herself, something she couldn't live without.
Yet here I am, she now thought. I've lived two years without him. No, not lived. Just survived. She sighed and buried her face in a pillow. The night dragged on, one endless second at a time.
Her family didn't bother her, save a brief visit from Minnie near midnight. Little was said after her mother saw her tear-stained face, no doubt assuming Melissa's infraction at school was the cause. Minnie left with a pleased smirk.
Brock called no fewer than seven times, none of which Melissa answered. He must have gotten her number from someone in biology class. She knew he was worried about her, but worried in the way someone would be over their oddly-behaving goldfish. Worried down at her. And he probably wanted to pick up where he thought they'd left off in the bushes. As if.
In the wee hours of the morning, she calmed enough to think clearly, at which point she removed the book from her pocket and read over Kyle's message a few thousand times. She hoped to find some further clue in it, but there was none.
Next, she opened her laptop and performed all manner of Internet searches for a place called Melton. Her efforts yielded a dispiriting abundance of possibilities, among them a fishing store in Southern California and a town in Australia. But the uncertainty of Kyle's location worried her less in light of the locutor, which she guessed was some kind of GPS or map. Wherever Kyle was, it would take her to him. That was why he'd told her to use it.
