The Taking of Jake Livingston, page 18
Jake
We stumble across the floor, toward the door we came in through. Rod becomes crispy behind us, like a big burnt bit on a skillet fire. The flames have us dizzy and disoriented. My body feels like it’s been set on fire, even though the fire hasn’t touched it.
What the fuck is this?
Heat waves swim across our vision. Our eyes and heart burn like they’ve been set upon hot coals that are eating us from the inside out.
I think, This is just what I need—for Sawyer to be panicked. I should fight back now, while he can’t manage. But somewhere less obvious . . .
Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thinks, so loudly he doesn’t even hear my thoughts in our head.
He throws the door open and pulls us free from the house. A window explodes behind us, its glass shattering in bits along the porch as we stumble down the steps, across the lawn, gasping in the clean air.
Two ghouls pass us, going the opposite direction, likely drawn to the smell of Rod’s rotting flesh. They phase through the walls of Rod’s house as its wood is eaten alive.
Sawyer
when sawyer was twelve he played in his room with a doll named maxxy
she sat in a chair in the corner of gramma’s house
sawyer asked if he could take it home and gramma said yes without a question
just wanted to make her grandson smile
he braided maxxy’s black hair
and sat her in the closet and made her look beautiful
then one day she disappeared
come outside, bill said, i want you to see something
and there maxxy was again but not maxxy anymore— just a dead thing
burning in the fire pit out back
her hair roasting so the forest smelled of melting plastic and boy’s tears
sawyer cried and bill and rod laughed together, toasting their beer in joy
loving every minute of it
these are for girls, bill said
no more hanging out at gramma’s, rod said
and both laughed and mocked sawyer
now sawyer plays with guns and sets dolls on fire
now sawyer can’t stand to feel on fire
* * *
Momma was the first one to teach me how to hold it on a lazy late afternoon in the third grade, when I was lying on my bed, watching a spider crawl up the sunbaked wall, thinking about nothing.
She knocked and came in. “Hey, Sawyer? Come here real fast. I wanna show you something.”
We went out back, and Momma loaded up a cylinder.
“I’m telling Annie the same thing. If I’m not here and you see somebody strange out here you don’t know, trying to get inside? You have my permission to shoot them. It’s your Second Amendment right. It’s self-defense.”
The wind tickled the strands of blond hair around her ear as she squinted and then shot at a tree. I watched the bark explode as smoke trailed up from the barrel. Then she made me do it.
She put Bill up to teaching me to shoot a second time, age twelve. We shot at targets at an indoor shooting place. I flinched every time a bang exploded from my hands. The side of my face started simmering. A hot shell had bounced out the back of the gun and wedged between my glasses and face. I jumped out of the booth.
Bill came screaming at me. I’d dropped the gun.
“You don’t treat a gun like that.” He grabbed my arm like he was trying to break it loose. “You know better!”
The people near us turned around to glare at me.
I had the scar where my skin singed off for three years, and it took me just as long to return to the weapon and point it the right way.
* * *
I’m afraid this whole house will blow up, that the wood will crash under the pressure of the flame.
He is dead. I did it.
I pull out of the driveway and take off down the mountain, singing sweet freedom down the black lanes until my hands pull the steering wheel and twist, crashing the truck into a tree.
Jake
A chaos of trees. Trees on fire, ghosts flattening under trees, cars rolling down hills and crashing into them. My soul body soars through the forest over all of this chaos, tumbling through scenes of destruction.
We tumble until we crash into a thick mound of dirt, glittering with ecto-mist. It stops us, and then I sink through it, my calves and hands disappearing under the forest floor. All around me, stems, roots, and woody vines curl up from the soil, sprouting flowers of red, white, and pink.
They die as quickly as they grow. My astral body is up to its armpits in dirt and branches. My physical body is up the hill, in the seat of the crashed truck, its limp head resting on the wheel, the airbag deflating under its chin.
Impact must’ve knocked Sawyer out too . . .
There he is. His soul took a different course, and now he’s stumbling up the hill, the dark quicksand of dead world pulling at his shoes. Flares of smoke shape his flailing arms. Shadows of faces reach out from his forehead. Figments of arms reach out of his skin.
How many people . . . I think as I race to my feet. How many people have you hurt?
He thrashes like lightning up the hill, toward the truck. I push through the foliage, and it disappears around me in fizzles of green and red.
I push off from my feet, fly across the forest, and crash into him, our souls colliding like two physical properties as we nick the dying bark and spin to the ground. Splinters of light. My hands, aglow in pink and blue, clutching his hoodie like he’ll sink through my fingers. We become swimmers in the ground of the forest, fighting to stay above the escaping earth. It’s crawling with beetles and springtails, centipedes and worms—corpses and husks, skittering and cracking and decaying.
Sawyer claws at my face and drags his nails down it so the maggots and insects can burrow there.
We drown further into the earth, Sawyer with his hand on top of my head, twisting my neck into the dirt to push himself up. A chaos of bugs. Tiny legs burrowing into my ear cavities. My eyes disappearing into the earth, my throat choking up. They treat my eyes and nostrils as a home for their endless squiggling, their birthing and dying.
Inside the earth, my hand glows as a silver-blue hilt appears between my fingers and thumb. A blade springs from the hilt in an explosion of mist.
I sprout like a tree from the dirt and wave the sword over my head, cutting away dirt and brambles and striking Sawyer in one fell swoop.
With a hiss, he throws himself off me in a backward dive to his feet.
I stab the ancestral sword into the ground and push down on the hilt to force my way up. I sprout like a tree as a cloud of ecto-mist forms beneath my feet, giving me a solid place to stand on the shifting dirt. I pull the sword out, twirl it around my wrist, and dive for Sawyer.
I cut his face open, once across, opposite the direction his hair sweeps. His skin cracks. Pieces cake away like volcanic dirt. From under the skin, creepy-crawlies pop like bullet shells, squirming and simmering, fading into nothing.
He is made of the earth and bugs and trees. The forest and its creatures.
Chunks of skin return to Sawyer’s lips, nose, and eyes, and I strike again, this time at the chest.
My weapon vanishes through a cloud of red smoke—he’s gone. He’s reborn again as a hand at my back. It pushes me beneath a falling tree that’s tilting over slowly, in its death loop.
Chains of red and black rise up, catch me by my wrists and ankles, and pin me to the ground. The ancestral sword disappears in a blur of smoke. And the tree falls, its shadow coming over me. The ecto-mist sweeps across the forest in a glittering semicircle of ice blue, capturing the restraints at my wrists and exploding them, freeing me in flight.
I flip backward to safety just as the tree hits the ground in a burst of light.
I land on my feet with a new sword in hand and catch Sawyer racing up the hill.
My physical body is knocked out in the truck. I command myself to rejoin it, and a carpet of mist forms beneath me. It flies me up the hill, over Sawyer’s head. I throw the sword toward him. It shanks one leg. His calf bursts into beads of red light. They escape like precious rubies down the sand and pull him lopsided into the earth.
I win.
He’s dying behind me. The souls and earth eating him. The ecto-mist is teaming up with ghost ticks and leeches to feast on his flesh and make him obsolete.
My soul hits my body like a train car collision. I pull my face off the steering wheel, inhaling a cyclone of cold air.
Back to the road . . . back to civilization . . . back to people . . . to trees.
I snatch my hand out of my lap and yank the gearshift back. The wheels rev up, only to roll circles in the dirt.
“Come on, come on,” I’m begging the truck, pushing the pedal to the floor so the vehicle operates at its most extreme power.
It veers into a clumsy backward swerve. I become a jangling dummy between the window and console. The truck wheels screech on the road, and it spins in a noisy circle.
I slam the brakes and stop, fingers wrapped around the wheel. Ahead is a patch of road, black with bright yellow lines. A place you’d catch a deer in the headlights half a second before it demolished your car.
The deep darkness beyond is where I have to go, until I find someone kind enough to help me.
But my hand is just stuck on the gearshift. I never learned to drive in daylight. How am I expected to do it at night?
A freezing air rushes through my lungs and pins me to the back of the seat. My chest punches the steering wheel, and the horn blares like an angry monster.
A vengeful scream tears across my mind.
“AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”
Sawyer is not dead yet. Sawyer is back inside my body—
My hand pushes the stick back to park.
—and my body can’t decide who to trust.
My head slams into the window, like it’s on punishment from itself. My fingers curl around the handle and open the door.
I slide off the seat. A SMACK on the asphalt. The door warning is beeping and beeping, cutting through the silence of the woods.
This road, where not a single car is driving, will silence my demise. Not one person will see what happens here tonight. No one will know until morning if this demon rips my body in half.
This road is full of the tiny pieces of rock that didn’t fuse properly with the paving. It cuts me up all over as I crawl forward—toward what, I don’t know. Barf explodes from my mouth, coloring the road’s yellow lines in reddish brown. Up the road, up the road, and I swallow spit, my elbows and knees scraping open little by little.
I detach.
My soul peels up from my body, and then I’m bathed in light, floating inches off the ground, backward and upward. I don’t feel right. My throat is dry, my stomach concave, my vision blurry.
Lower, I command myself, and float down so my feet meet the ground.
Sawyer, as me, stands up, in full control of my motor functions. All five-foot-nine of Jake Livingston in his St. Clair Prep uniform—red bow tie, gray sweater vest and slacks—is walking like a zombie toward itself. Smiling evilly, limping like a ghoul. The twisted look makes the face nearly unrecognizable.
I don’t have any help anymore. River’s not here. I have to do this part by myself.
I reach for the ecto-mist, willing it to help me, and it pulls from the spaces in trees, the cracks in the pavement, the inside of crystal rocks, rushing to swim around my hands and arms to promise me strength.
And I start my dance—whipping my arms around my body as my ancestors ground me in gravity and follow my movements. Energy bolts through my shoulders, lungs, chest, hands. I fire the energy at my body in a blast.
It hits the chest of the dummy Jake, and he flies through space, hitting his back on the asphalt, leaving Sawyer as a legless torso floating aimlessly above him.
I close my eyes and vortex into my skin, facing whiplash as my real eyes open to a star-filled sky.
I spring off my hands and knees, thrashing through Sawyer and toward the truck. These moments, where I’m synched with my body, soul, and mind, are so rare.
I dive in through the door and grab the kerosene off the passenger-side floor. My arm twists behind my back, and my legs sweep from underneath me.
I slam the pavement with my ribs and chin as Sawyer’s scream tears through my mind:
RELAX.
I pull down the asphalt, gripping the kerosene so hard my nails dig into my palm around the handle. My neck cracks like a crisp lobster. My head picks up the grime of the road, as if it wants to get dirty, and pain explodes through my network of bones.
I remember . . . in the bathroom, I tore through his being with the strength of my will.
You can beat him, comes a whisper through the darkness, an echo of assurance from the ecto-mist. It glows above my knuckles and fastens there, like weapons of glittering blue brass. Fight, it whispers—a choir of voices in perfect harmony.
I use my free arm to pull myself farther down the road.
“GET OUT!!!” The words erupt madly.
Gunshots explode through my brain and flash white across my vision, and through the noise, a thought is forming, like a stage whisper.
Circle, it says. Circle, circle, circle, circle, circle . . .
“A circle,” I respond.
A circle, they command. Close, close, close, close . . . close the circle.
I don’t ask questions. The mist has never guided me wrong, and it never would. I get on my knees and skid across the twinkling rocks in the blacktop, spilling the kerosene in a circle.
CIRCLE . . . CIRCLE . . . CIRCLE.
Glug-glug-glug-glug-glug—the clear fluid spatters out of the bottle.
The ground rips from underneath me, and my body is tossed into the air, catching itself horizontally, five feet off the ground. The kerosene hits the road and continues to spill out.
And then my body is falling, pulling my soul out of its skin.
I am a soul again, floating, and watching from above as my body hits the asphalt and the breath leaves my lungs. In a glide toward the wobbly earth of dead world, I land on my fingers and toes outside the kerosene circle.
My physical body lifts itself behind me, charges forward—furious and determined under Sawyer’s control.
Kill him. The mist pulses around my hands like rings of magic, offering its power. Kill him.
I raise my hands in defense, and a surge of power runs up the veins in my arms and explodes from the center of my chest. A cannon of pink and blue light obliterates my physical self into a cluster of stars.
And in those stars, Sawyer separates from my body like apple skin ripping off the fruit.
And my body—it flies like a paper airplane backward through the air, landing on its back, outside of the circle.
Sawyer doesn’t turn around for it. So focused on killing my soul, he rises like a phoenix in front of me. Red flares roar around him in the shape of tortured faces and curled fingers, all reaching out and obscuring the shape of him. He rips his throat open, and the wraith hands lunge for me.
I block them with a field of ecto-mist, which rises like a wall from the concrete. As it falls, it forms a standing shape of blue dust and red smoke, all of it melting into solid colors and textures—a light blue diner dress, a blond-haired head. A woman with a tote bag strung over her shoulder, holding a gun. The weapon is both there and escaping through the night like bubbles in seltzer. I lift my arm, lifting hers with me. She’s only a wraith of my creation—a puppet attached to my string.
But Sawyer’s eyes widen in fear—his face is of a scared child as he floats down to the ground. His feet sink slightly into the asphalt. His body is curled back and fearful, like a baby deer in front of a speeding truck.
I thrust energy out of my chest-arm network and through the wraith of his mother, sending a perfect slice of blinding ecto-mist through his mother’s arm in a bomb-shaped bullet. It hits Sawyer hard in the chest, blasts through his heart, and blows him backward. Then he’s frozen in midair: one leg bent upward, an arm twisted behind his back, head wrenched toward one shoulder, chest aimed at the sky.
Mist particles stampede his veins, eating him from the inside out as the mother conjuring melts away. The skin of his cheeks sinks under the jawbones, and he rots as strings of ecto-mist deepen in his throat, choking him.
I saw something in that moment . . . There was a Sawyer that didn’t realize he’d become a mass shooter, one who maybe wouldn’t have if somebody had stepped in sooner.
But now there’s a decaying spirit, a harmful person who chose to play parasitic leech, to suck joy out of people and kill everyone it could until it met its match.
I—Jake Livingston—am Sawyer Doon’s match.
I run around the circle and find my scrawny body curled like an S.
I fall through my skin, and reality pangs through me like a gong. Fierce sensations come back—damp asphalt, blinding headlights, thrumming engine, and the aches. Aches in my elbows and knees.
I touch the lighter to the wet asphalt. Fire erupts and travels in an arc around the dying Sawyer, forming a full circle. Scooting backward from the insane heat, sweat spills down my neck, clavicles, and chest.
Sawyer pulls at the mist chain around his neck, but it’s too strong for him. His body chips away as the termites of stars make him their victim. Ecto-mist insects burrow under his skin, weakening every part of him. His hair—wispy string. His arms—strips of thread. A concert of noise from the mist—screaming, whips, gunfire. Horses, dogs, police sirens.
“Sawyer Doon.” My voice is, at first, a polite mutter, directed at the unrecognizable thing hanging in the ring of fire. “I banish you.” From the dredges of the fight left in me, I scream it at the top of my lungs, expelling it into the heat waves. “I BANISH YOU FROM LIFE AND MEMORY, FOREVER. I BANISH YOU TO DEATH.”
