As Far as the Sky, part 6
May. 31st, 2008 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamcranverPart 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
“Shit,” Agent Viglione said, turning up the radio. The DJ continued blithely along, rattling off contact information and wondering aloud what might make two kids who’d, for all intents and purposes, been adopted by a multimillionaire want to run away. “This is just fucking excellent.”
Agent Palmer frowned thoughtfully, one hand on the steering wheel. “No, no,” she said. “This could be good.” Off Agent Viglione’s disbelieving look, she said, “Yeah, yeah, law enforcement and a moving target, I’m aware. And I know this way you don’t get to do any of that special ops shit you’re so fond of. But think about it. If we get to the extraterrestrials before the cops do, we don’t have to deal with any of the shit Wentz was gonna give us, we don’t have to worry about a publicity leak—we just take them, and it’s another tragedy where something terrible happened to those poor runaway children.”
Every line of Agent Viglione’s face radiated doubt. “What about the third kid?” he asked. “What are we supposed to do about him?”
“Jesus, Brian,” said Agent Palmer, rolling her eyes. “Let’s use a little creativity here, hmm? We knock the kid out, or we convince him that if he spills his guts, the government’ll arrest him, or hell, you distract him and I’ll grab the other two. We just have to find them, first.”
Agent Viglione leaned back in his seat. “Well, if you were twelve or whatever, no car, where would you go?”
“Twelve?” Agent Palmer snorted. “I’d fucking steal a car.”
“Okay, say you’re twelve and an alien and you don’t want to go down in a hail of gunfire. Then what do you do?”
“I don’t know.” Palmer took a long drag on her cigarette with her free hand and shot a quick look at Agent Viglione. “You got a map in the glove compartment? We’ve gotta figure out what’s around the Smith Home that they’d wanna get to.”
“There’s nothing around,” said Agent Viglione. “There’s a gas station a couple miles down the road, and that’s it. Place is in the ass end of nowhere.”
Palmer made a quick, darting gesture with her cigarette hand and smiled hugely. “Ooh!” she said. “That’s something. I mean, these backend country roads don’t get a lot of traffic, but maybe these kids figured they could hitch a ride at the gas station. Worth a shot, right?”
“Better than nothing,” said Viglione with a shrug. “I’m game for checking it out.”
“Excellent,” Palmer said, stubbing out her cigarette and shifting gears. “Let’s see how fast this thing can go.”
**
Bob sighed as he opened the passenger door to dump his stuff and went around to get into the driver’s seat. He thought that guy was never gonna stop talking to him. He must have found his job incredibly boring, if stuff like radio announcements and cats got him chattering away to complete strangers for fucking—how long had it been? Twenty minutes?
The whole point of this little trip had been to avoid spending all his time talking about stupid shit with people he didn’t know or like.
He turned the radio on as he pulled out of the gas station parking lot and let himself relax. The guys on tour probably would’ve given him a hard time about the poppy girl singer he was listening to, but one of the nice things about being on his own was that he didn’t have to give a shit. Although whoever mixed this song could have done a much better job, he thought. The bass line was rendering the singer almost inaudible.
He turned onto the highway and drove with the strange, freeing disorientation of having no particular goal. There were a ton of beaches along the coast; maybe he’d stop at one of them for lunch, when he got hungry, but it wasn’t like he had any place to be.
The morning passed in a comfortable, uneventful monotony, and the quiet of it settled Bob, soothed the lingering irritation from the misadventures at the gas station and let his mind drift from thought to thought without ever having to attach to anything. He sang along to the pop music on his radio, occasionally drumming on the dashboard, and pondered what he would eat for lunch, and wondered what Bert and Dan and Jepha and Quinn and everyone were up to. But not too hard.
Around noon, he started to feel hungry. He pulled off at the nearest exit to a parking lot on the side of the road, just a stone’s throw away from the beach. It was such a nice day, Bob was afraid he’d have to fight some mom and dad and their 2.5 adorable children for space, but this particular stretch of beach seemed empty as far as Bob could see. As he stepped out onto it, he realized why—it was one of those beaches made of jagged bits of shell and rock rather than smooth warm sand. Well, Bob had shoes, and he liked the quiet, so he pulled out the ready-made sandwich he’d bought at the gas station and settled down on a relatively not-sharp patch of ground.
Over the crunch of lettuce and the sound of waves splashing onto the rocky shore, he heard a soft rustling sound coming from behind him, and he swallowed, listening. Another rustling sound, and then a tiny, unhappy-sounding mew. Bob turned around to see a dark tortoiseshell kitten stalking towards him on skinny little legs, mewling pathetically and staring at his sandwich like it was the key to curing all his or her woes.
“Hey, there,” Bob said with a smile, tearing off a small piece of ham and holding it out to the kitten. He or she—Bob was gonna go with she, just because—took it, licking his fingers and staring at him with big eyes. He reached out to scratch under her chin, and she leaned into the touch, purring. Bob felt his smile get even bigger; he’d always had a soft spot for cats. He rubbed the top of her head with his other hand and said, “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?”
She mewed as if in agreement, and Bob laughed. She looked kind of familiar, almost like the cat that had appeared in the gas station earlier. Maybe it was the same cat, and she’d been hitching a ride this whole time, Bob thought with amusement. “Well, you,” he said, glad there wasn’t anyone around to hear him talking to a cat, “I have some milk in the van, if you’re interested.”
She mewed again. God, it was like having a conversation. “Aren’t you a smart girl?” Bob murmured, carefully picking her up. She didn’t scratch at him or try to bite, just made a small squeaky sound and curled into his chest. Bob wasn’t a mushy guy or anything, but it was maybe the cutest thing ever.
As he opened the passenger door to grab the milk though, though, he heard the sound of whispering. Coming from the back of his van. Shit. It stopped a second after he opened the door, but he’d heard it—somebody, or more than one somebody, was in his van. All warm and fuzzy feelings immediately vanished, and he put the kitten down. She darted away somewhere, mewing piteously. “All right,” Bob said loudly. Whoever it was couldn’t be too big if he or she had managed to squeeze in among all the sound equipment and luggage and random crap in the back of the van, and Bob was pretty confident about his ability to kick some ass. “Whoever the fuck you are, if you don’t get the fuck out of my van in the next three seconds, I’m gonna kick the shit out of you. One…two….”
“Wait! Wait!” a young, high-pitched voice said, and then three boys, all of them maybe between ten and fifteen, crawled out of the back and huddled against the open door of the van, staring at Bob with expressions of utter terror.
Well, Bob sure as shit wasn’t going to raise his hand to a bunch of kids. But seeing as how they had somehow crawled into his van at some point without permission, he didn’t see a problem with letting them be freaked out for a few more moments while he looked them over. The littlest one was tiny, though he didn’t look much younger than the other two, with bleached hair that looked like it had been shaved into patterns but was growing out thick and black. The middle one had wispy brown hair and big thick plastic-rimmed glasses. The biggest one had a round, pale face and dark hair hanging into his eyes.
Bob might not have been paying too much attention to the radio, but it didn’t exactly take a genius to guess that these were the three missing kids he’d heard about at the gas station.
“Ah,” he said. “You guys must be the runaways.”
The biggest one nodded unhappily.
Bob nodded. “Right. So, I’m gonna call the police now.”
“No!” said the littlest one. “You don’t understand! If you call the police, the guys that are after Mikey and Gerard’ll find them, and they’ll end up being dissected in some government lab or something!”
Bob had no idea how he was even supposed to respond to that. God, he hated kids.
“Way to keep a secret, Frank,” the biggest one said, giving the other one a frown. Turning to Bob, he said, “I know it sounds crazy, but there really are people after us. I mean, obviously Pete and Patrick and the police and stuff, but there are these other guys who wanted to kidnap us, and they were gonna kill anyone who got in their way. And we couldn’t let anything bad happen to them—to Pete and Patrick and Andy and Joe, I mean—so we decided to go back where we came from. If we ever find it.” He gave Bob a really earnest look, with big eyes, biting his lower lip.
Jesus, these kids were totally batshit insane.
“Hey,” the middle one piped up. “Have you seen a kitten around anywhere?”
Finally, a question Bob could answer. Maybe this kid was the sane one. “Yours, huh? I guess it was the cat from the gas station.” He looked around; the kitten had vanished. “She was here a minute ago. She’s gotta be around somewhere.”
The kid nodded and frowned as if in concentration. Bob waited for him to say something else, but he seemed to be carrying on an in-depth conversation with himself. So much for his being the sane kid.
“Okay,” said Bob, “So, I’m back to calling the cops now. I mean, I don’t know what kind of game you kids are playing, but you have people worried about you. You have to go home.”
“We left a note,” muttered the middle one, apparently done talking to himself.
The biggest one sighed. “See, that’s the thing,” he said. “We don’t really have a home. The guys at Decaydance are great, but they’re not our family or anything. We’re trying to figure out where we come from.”
Bob vaguely remembered hearing that the three of them were orphans or something, and he thought maybe he understood what the kid was talking about a little more. He seemed a little young to be doing the whole search for identity thing, but then, it had been a long time since Bob was a kid, and it felt like longer every day. Bob wasn’t an orphan, but he thought he could get the desire to want to figure out yourself by finding out where you came from. But still…. “If you want to find your birth parents,” he said, “you should ask your—you know, the people who take care of you. Foster parents or whatever.”
The littlest one—Frank, probably--rolled his eyes. “Dude, my parents are dead. That’s not the problem. And we can’t ask anyone about Gerard and Mikey’s parents because nobody knows about Gerard and Mikey’s parents. They were probably visitors from outer space or mutants or government experiments or something.”
Bob’s intention to shut down the conversation there was suddenly derailed. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked, then thought maybe he shouldn’t have said ‘hell’ around a bunch of kids. Oh, well.
“Frank!” the biggest one said, sighing dramatically. “See if I ever trust you with a secret again, bigmouth.”
Frank shrugged, looking pretty pragmatic for a grade-schooler. “Well, if we want this guy to give us a ride, we gotta explain stuff, right?”
Bob didn’t really feel like anyone had explained anything to him, and he was about to say so, when the biggest one sighed again and pulled out a harmonica. The fuck? What exactly about this situation made the kid think it was time for an impromptu performance?
But then he started to play. Just a few notes, the beginnings of a scale, and suddenly Bob’s sandwich had floated out of his hand, was hovering in midair between himself and the kids. The kid played a sloppy “Oh, Susannah!” and the sandwich started doing little loops in the air, bouncing around in a weird, almost dance-like motion.
And suddenly Frank’s suggestion that his friends’ parents were mutants made a whole lot more sense. Bob breathed out slowly, trying to collect his thoughts enough so that he didn’t freak out in front of the kids. “Did….are you doing that?” he asked carefully.
The kid pulled his face away from the harmonica with another painfully earnest expression, and Bob’s sandwich dropped onto the ground. So much for lunch, Bob thought, but he didn’t say anything. “Yeah,” said the kid. “I can do it without my harmonica, too, but it’s a lot easier with it.”
“Right.” Of course. Playing the harmonica made it easier for the kid to telekinetically float sandwiches. Why wouldn’t it? Bob turned to the middle kid. “Let me guess,” he said. “You’ve got a magical kazoo.”
He shook his head. “No. But I know….” He wrinkled his face up, staring at Bob. “You did sound for a band. For a living, I mean. But you had an accident. You got set on fire. And the nerve damage wasn’t that bad, you could still do your job, but you got sick of people acting like you were a whole different person than you were before the accident. So you’re taking a break, and you’re driving alone in the middle of nowhere because you don’t want to talk to anybody.”
A million thoughts warred for dominance in Bob’s brain. Part of him wanted to fucking shake the kid for talking about his life like he actually knew it, for rambling in an even monotone about things that actually meant something to Bob like they weren’t important at all. Part of him wanted to cringe and run away—he’d never been big on people invading his privacy, and this was the hugest invasion of privacy he’d ever encountered. Fuck cameras poking around his bunk, this kid was poking around in his mind. But another part of him was scared on the kid’s behalf. If he and his brother did this kind of shit all the time, Bob didn’t have any trouble believing that they had unscrupulous people after them. Finally, he managed to say, “So. You know a lot about me, I guess, but I don’t know much about you. What are your names again?”
The biggest one gave him a hopeful smile. “I’m Gerard, and this is my brother Mikey, and our friend Frank,” he said, holding out a hand. Bob shook it tentatively, hoping the kid wasn’t picking up anything he was thinking.
“I’m Bob,” he said. “Bob Bryar.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Frank with a brilliant smile. “So, dude, which band were you touring with?”
Bob blinked. He was still trying to get his head around the super powers thing, and this conversation was going way too fast for him. “Um. The Used.”
Frank nodded knowledgably, as if he were some sort of scene expert and not a four-foot tall eleven-year-old. “Pretty sweet, man. Mikey and Gerard and me are gonna be in a band.”
“Yeah?” Bob said, smiling in spite of himself.
“Hell yeah!” said Frank. “Mikey and me are gonna play the guitars and Gerard’s gonna sing and play the harmonica. We still gotta get a drummer, but it’s gonna be awesome.” Mikey and Gerard nodded.
Bob laughed. There was something kind of hilarious about these kids—two of them had super powers, they were on the run from (they said) some kind of killers, and they still got distracted by the idea of being in a rock band. He was fairly sure he was going to regret this—he didn’t know much about business, but he knew Pete Wentz was a pretty powerful guy—but he asked, “Where were you guys planning to go to get away from…whoever it is you think’s chasing you?”
Mikey scowled, his eyebrows pulling together into a thick dark line over his glasses. “We don’t just think they’re chasing us,” he said. “I saw them shoot Joe in my dream, and I’m really good at telling the future.” He pulled something out of his backpack—a little square box, it looked like, made of metal and wood—and pulled back a panel on the front of it. Underneath was a tiny map. “We’re pretty sure we’re supposed to go here,” he said, handing the box to Bob.
The print on it was really little, and not all of it was even in an alphabet Bob recognized, so it took a moment before he could make out any place names. “Hey,” he said, “Cork Valley! I know where that is.”
All three kids perked up like he’d told them he had a box full of candy in the back. “You do?” Gerard asked. “Will you take us there?”
“I’m not taking you anywhere,” said Bob. “Pete Wentz is made of money. You tell him what you told me—and showing him the whole super powers thing probably wouldn’t hurt—and I guarantee you, he’ll have a whole army keeping these guys away from you.”
“Pete already knows about us,” said Gerard, rolling his eyes. “That’s how the bad guys found out about us in the first place. We were at Pete’s office, helping him buy stocks and stuff, and this guy who wasn’t supposed to be there saw us.”
Bob could feel himself frowning. “Hold up,” he said, “Wentz was using you guys to make money in his business?” That was exactly the kind of shit the guy ought to be protecting these kids from, Bob thought.
Mikey shrugged. “He gave us twenty bucks.” A thought seemed to occur to him, and he said, “Hey, if we pay you, will you take us to Cork Valley?”
“I’m not taking your money,” Bob said automatically. He wanted to tell the kids to shut up a minute so he could think, but they seemed to get what he was thinking (and hey, if they were psychic, why wouldn’t they?) and stood quietly looking at him with mingled hope and fear in their faces. Well. Whoever it was that was after them, the kids clearly didn’t think Wentz’s money was going to keep them away. Beside, Bob was not at all sure at this point that they weren’t being used by Wentz as some sort of school-aged money-making machines. On the other hand, he wasn’t too eager to get arrested for kidnapping. From what he understood, Frank was a perfectly normal kid, missing from a group home where, as far as Bob knew, he wasn’t in any kind of danger. There wasn’t any reason he shouldn’t go back there. And, supernatural displays aside, he didn’t have any proof that Gerard and Mikey were right or telling the truth about people being after them.
“Hey,” Frank said, breaking into Bob’s reverie, “how ‘bout this? Cork Valley’s only, like, 200 miles away, right? So that’s not even a whole day’s drive! You take us, and if it really is just some nowhere town and we don’t find Mikey and Gerard’s long-lost family or whatever, you can call the cops.”
Gerard scowled at Frank, but Mikey nodded so hard he looked like a bobblehead.
He shouldn’t have even been considering it, seriously. This was some Grade-A moral ambivalence, here. And even if these kids were telling the truth, how the hell was Bob supposed to protect them better than a fucking millionaire with his own security force could? Or protect himself, for that matter? God, this whole thing was fucking his vacation all to hell.
And yet. He looked down at the starcase again, then back at the three kids. “Okay,” he found himself saying. “But I’m seriously not gonna take any shit from you, and I’m calling the cops if--”
He found himself cut off mid-threat by, like, sixty pounds of hurtling eleven-year old. “Yeah, yeah,” said Frank, wrapping his arms around Bob’s middle. “You’re the man, Bob!”
“Yeah!” Mikey echoed.
Gerard nodded fervently. “We really appreciate this, Bob, seriously, we’ll try not to be any trouble, and we can do all sorts of stuff to help. Like, if we get locked out of the car, Mikey can pick locks, and if we’re gonna drive over broken glass or something, I can move it out of the way, and--”
“All right, all right,” said Bob, trying to pry Frank’s arms off. Christ, the kid had a grip on him. “Just get back in the van. You guys hungry?”
Well, that got Frank off. “Man, we are so hungry, you have no idea! We were gonna have to start eating each other pretty soon!”
“I don’t think we need to resort to cannibalism just yet.” Bob said. “I got some chips and pretzels and soda at that gas station. Now get your asses back in the van, and let’s get this show on the road before I come to my senses.”
They scrambled back in, buckling themselves into the back seat of Bob’s van and looking at him expectantly.
Bob sighed, went back around to the driver’s seat, and tossed a bag of Tostitos to them, which they took with the single-minded glee and ravenous hunger of three growing boys. When Bob turned the ignition key, though, Mikey pulled his head up from the chips and said, “Wait.”
“Wait for what?” asked Bob, wondering why he was taking orders from a twelve-year old or however the hell old Mikey was.
Mikey didn’t answer, frowning into space like he was having especially deep thoughts at that moment. Suddenly, there was a small mewing noise, and Bob jumped in surprise as the kitten from earlier jumped through the open passenger side window and into the back seat. Mikey, looking calmly unsurprised, scooped the kitten into his lap and looked up at Bob. “Okay,” he said. “We can go, now.”
Christ, what was he getting himself into?
**
Patrick really hadn’t been big on the idea of calling Gabe. It wasn’t like he didn’t like Gabe or anything—he did, he thought the guy was a lot of fun, and they’d had some really interesting conversations together. It was just that, well, Gabe and his crew were bounty hunters, and Patrick really didn’t think they were the best people to go after three missing kids.
Not that Patrick’s opinion on the matter ever stopped Pete when he had an idea in his head.
The Cobramobile swerved sharply to one side, and Patrick felt his stomach lurch. “Gabe!” he yelled. “Can’t you slow it down a little?”
Gabe and Pete cackled from the front. “Not to worry, dude,” Gabe called. “The speed limit on this highway’s, like, seventy, and nobody pays attention to it, so I don’t think we’re getting pulled over.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I was worried about,” muttered Patrick. Next to him, Nate looked vaguely nauseated. If Patrick himself wasn’t so afraid Gabe was going to drive them over the median and into the lane of traffic driving the opposite direction, he’d spare a moment to send Nate a sympathetic glance. Apparently, he was pretty fierce when it came to the whole bounty-hunting thing, but he looked like just a miserable kid at the moment.
In the back seat, Alex hung up his cell phone and shoved Ryland’s face off his shoulder. “Dudes!” he called. “We got something!”
Pete turned around in his seat, fixing Alex with an intense look, a completely different man from the one who’d been laughing at Patrick from the shotgun seat. “Yeah?” he said impatiently.
Alex nodded. “Okay, so, my man Nick says the last time he filled up his gas tank at a station about two miles from the Smith Home. He knew we were on this case, so he asked around for us. Apparently it hasn’t been too busy today, but a little after eight this morning, he had a dude with a big van fill up his tank and get an oil change and stock up on junk food.”
“So?” asked Victoria shortly.
Alex rolled his eyes, and Ryland sighed exaggeratedly. “So, Victoria,” he said, “According to the security logs, they turned off the system at, like, three in the morning, right? So, riding Snowball, they probably got to the Smith Home, like, five, assuming they didn’t get lost. Give ‘em some time to get their shit together, eight’s not a bad estimate for when they could’ve gotten to that gas station. Think about it! You’re kids on the run, you see a van, the owner’s inside….”
“You think they hitched a ride with this guy?” Patrick asked sharply. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. Sure, it was a clue, but the idea of Gerard and Mikey hitchhiking with some random guy who drove around in a van made Patrick intensely queasy. Who knew what kind of shit could happen?
“Maybe,” said Alex with a shrug. “It’s better than nothing, right?”
“Totally,” said Gabe, executing a probably illegal U-Turn. “Your man Nick get anything else about the guy? The van?”
“No plate numbers, but it was a black van heading south on J-29, and the driver was a big blond guy who toured as a drum tech with some band.”
“Oh, shit,” Pete crowed, “Give me five minutes, and I’ll have that fucker’s name.”
Pete started punching keys on his Sidekick like a madman, and Patrick sighed and took out his own cell phone to text Andy and Joe. we have a clue. tell you more when i know more.
“Hey.” A hand reached out from the back seat to curl around his shoulder, and Patrick twisted his neck around to look at Victoria. She was smiling at him gently. “They’re gonna be okay, you know?” she said, squeezing his shoulder. “It hasn’t even been a day yet, they can’t have gotten too far.”
Patrick felt like he was going to be sick, seriously. “I know,” he said, but Christ, he shouldn’t have ever listened to Pete. If he’d put his foot down, Mikey and Gerard would still be at the Home, and whoever had found out about them wouldn’t have found out about them, and Patrick wouldn’t have gotten to know them, which was a bummer, but at least they’d be safe. Patrick had no idea what had frightened them so badly that they’d taken off without even telling anyone, but having seen the kind of stuff they could do, he feared the worst. A competing businessman, one even more ruthless than Pete, maybe, or some crackpot who chased UFOs and was on the lookout for some proof of alien invasion, or hell, the government.
Victoria was still smiling at him, and he tried to smile back, but it felt pretty feeble. Victoria had no idea. He shot a look over to the front, where Pete was still furiously typing away, and tried to quell the rush of conflicting emotions he felt. He was still insanely pissed at Pete—and at himself, because seriously, they could’ve brought some of those decisions home and not exposed Gerard and Mikey to whichever fucker had spilled the beans—but at the same time, he could see the dark circles under Pete’s eyes, the slightly unfocused expression he had when his brain was a million miles away from whatever was going on around him, and he knew that Pete was killing himself over this.
He wished that he and Pete were alone. If they were alone, they could snap at each other and fight over stupid stuff, like if they could’ve come up with psychic-proof locks or screened people at the meeting for suspicious interests in the paranormal, and maybe they could also reassure each other that the whole thing wasn’t entirely their fault.
Pete paused, and for a moment Patrick thought he was going to turn around, like maybe they were having the same thought right then. Instead, he ducked his head unhappily again, and Gabe turned around to give them all a huge grin.
“Exit to J-29’s thirty-six miles ahead,” he said. “How fast you think I can get us there?”
“Oh, God,” said Victoria, burying her face in Ryland’s shoulder. Nate popped up in his seat, straining at his seatbelt.
“Eyes on the road!” he shouted. “Motherfucker, don’t you dare crash this car!”
Gabe raised his eyebrows. “Whoa there, Nate my boy. Settle down. Think of your blood pressure. Nobody’s crashing anything—I’m a fucking awesome driver. Matter of fact, I bet I could do this with one hand. No hands, even!” He waved his arms in the air, to cheers from Alex and Ryland and angry shouts from Victoria and Nate.
It was going to be a long trip.
**
“Yeah? Yeah?” Agent Palmer said into her phone. She gestured at Agent Viglione, and he turned their convertible to the right. “Guy’s name is Bryar? What’s the license number again?” She scribbled it down, holding the phone between her jaw and her shoulder. “South on J-29? Awesome. You’re a queen among women, Katie.” She shut her phone with a snap.
“So,” said Agent Viglione, “they’ve found themselves a ride?”
“Apparently.” Agent Palmer smiled grimly. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“No. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking, if these two are from the ’99 crash, and they’re seeking more of their kind….” She wriggled her eyebrows at Agent Viglione, making him smile. “We could be stumbling onto the colony here.”
“Fuck,” Agent Viglione breathed, stretching out the word past the point where it had any meaning. “Maja’s gonna fucking flip.”
Agent Palmer smiled again, satisfied. “Yeah. Now all we gotta do is catch up with them, and get rid of this Bob Bryar, whoever the fuck that is.”
Agent Viglione fingered the gun at his side. He hadn’t even gotten a chance to take it out of his holster, yet. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.
**
“And then I got him right in the face, like smash! And believe me, that fucker went down!”
Bob wasn’t sure whether he ought to be amused or disturbed—Frank cussed more than any almost-eleven-year-old Bob had ever met before, and apparently he had a long history of getting into fights and playing pranks that’d probably get Bob sent to prison if he tried them. The Minnellis, though, seemed completely in awe of Frank’s tales. It was kind of adorable.
“Wow,” said Gerard. “Okay, so once this guy called me a sissy and shoved me up against a wall in the art room, and I was gonna dump a can of paint on his head, you know, with my mind, but then the teacher pulled him off and sent him to the principal’s office.”
Frank grinned. “That would’ve been awesome, with the paint,” he said. “I wish I’d been friends with you guys back when I was living with the Dirnts. Between my mad skills and your thing, we would’ve kicked some serious ass.”
Mikey grinned, and Bob, who’d never been the type to find kids cute or at all appealing, forced himself to turn back to the road.
He had to admit, though, as far as hitchhiking runaway kids went, he’d hit the jackpot. Mikey’d asked early on if he could play his iPod through Bob’s speakers, and Bob was kind of amazed at how awesome Mikey’s taste was. He was pretty sure he’d been listening to nothing but crap when he was Mikey’s age. Mikey was a pretty quiet kid, too, from what Bob could tell—no fighting for space in the seat, no “He started it!”, no whining about how long they’d been in the car. He just sat, occasionally smiling at something one of the other boys had said, and petting his cat or looking at his starcase.
Frank and Gerard weren’t exactly quiet, but they weren’t particularly whiny, either. Frank had more energy than any kid Bob had ever seen, and Bob was half tempted at times to stop the car just so the kid could stop wriggling in his seat and run around for a little on the side of the road. Gerard, on the other hand, was a talker. Bob hadn’t yet come across a topic Gerard wouldn’t talk about, at length, with expansive, dramatic hand gestures. Bob had a hard time believing that this was the same kid who, according to Frank, spent most of his time at the group home hiding from the other kids.
At a gesture of Gerard’s, a can of Coke flew from the front passenger seat to the back, and Bob remembered soberly why these kids were riding with him to begin with. Maybe Gerard being antisocial wasn’t so surprising after all
“Hey,” said Mikey suddenly.
Gerard paused mid-gesture. “What is it, Mikey?”
Mikey leaned his face forward, into the space between the driver’s and passenger seats, and frowned at Bob. “Bob’s wrist hurts,” he announced. “He’s been driving too long.”
Bob didn’t even bother asking how Mikey had known that. He himself hadn’t really been thinking about it, but now that the kid mentioned it, his wrist was getting a little sore, and his lower back was killing him. It wasn’t like there was anything they could do about it on the road, though—he couldn’t exactly get out his heating pad while he was driving—so he said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Frank. “I have to take a leak like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Maybe if we pulled into a rest stop,” Gerard said, “we could go to the bathroom and Bob could put on his heat pad thing. You know, Mikey, it’s kind of a bummer we don’t have healing powers. I mean, if we were gonna be freaks, how cool would it be if we were freaks who could, like, cure cancer?”
Frank hit Gerard on the shoulder, none too softly if the sound was any indication. “You’re not freaks,” he said crossly.
Bob could see Gerard making a face in the rearview mirror. He felt vaguely proud he’d been able to restrain his initial freaked reaction to Gerard and Mikey’s…thing. The last thing a teenage kid needed was an adult confirming his idea that he was a weirdo and no one would ever like him.
He checked the clock on the dashboard. 4:13. He hadn’t planned on stopping until six or so for dinner, and even then he was only going to drive through someplace—there wasn’t any sense in exposing the boys to danger just for the heck of it. But they had been driving for something like four straight hours now, so it was a little unreasonable to expect them all to sit quietly the whole way there. Plus, now that Mikey had brought up the pain in his wrist, it was really starting to throb.
“Okay,” he said, bringing the budding squabble between Frank and Gerard to a halt. “There’s a rest stop fifteen miles ahead. We’re gonna pull in, you guys are gonna go to the bathroom, and we’re gonna leave before anyone has a chance to see you. Don’t dawdle, don’t wander off, just, in and out.”
“Dawdle?” said Mikey. “Who says that?” Frank tittered.
“I’m serious, you guys,” said Bob. “You’re the ones who keep saying someone’s after you, right? Well, people who have people after them don’t hang out in rest stops waiting to get caught.”
Gerard nodded seriously. “You think we should have disguises?” he asked anxiously. “Like, do you have any huge sunglasses?”
Bob bit back a smile, and refrained from telling Gerard that three kids wearing huge sunglasses probably weren’t any less suspicious or less likely to be recognized than they would be otherwise. “Sorry,” he said. “Like I said, though, if you’re quick, I think it’ll be okay.”
The rest stop didn’t look too crowded as Bob pulled in and parked the van, which was a plus. The boys scrambled in the back for shoes, and Mikey pulled his backpack on.
“Hey,” said Bob, “you know you can leave your stuff in the van, right? We’re coming back in five minutes.”
Mikey gave Bob a solemn look, his eyes looking huge behind his glasses. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just…I feel like I should take it in with me.” He turned around to stare at his brother for a long moment. Bob didn’t know what passed between them with that look—wasn’t sure he wanted to, since it probably involved some weird telepathic mindmeld—but whatever it was, Gerard picked up his backpack, too, and slung it onto his shoulders.
Frank looked from Mikey to Gerard and back again and, with a shrug, picked up his guitar case. Bob rolled his eyes, but he didn’t say anything. If they wanted to lug their crap around the rest stop bathroom, who was he to judge?
When they got inside, the entrance to the men’s room was blocked off, and two guys who looked like they might be janitors or something were sitting outside on a bench next to a couple of mops and buckets. One of them, a big guy with fluffy reddish hair, stood up when he saw Bob and the kids.
“Sorry,” he said, “but one of the toilets overflowed all over the place in there. It’s real nasty. The plumber’s in there now looking at it.”
“So, what, we just go outside or something?” said Bob, feeling simultaneously irritated and kind of like a dick for taking it out on this guy.
The guy who was still sitting snorted, and the big guy sighed. “No,” he said. “You can use the women’s room. No one’s in there now.” He gave Frank, Mikey, and Gerard a narrow-eyed look and said, “Try not to make a mess.”
“How old does he think we are?” Frank grumbled as they walked into the women’s room. “Does he think we’re gonna, like, wet our pants and then wipe it on the floor?”
“Eww.” Mikey wrinkled his nose at Frank, who laughed.
“Just go the bathroom, would you?” said Bob. He felt pretty uncomfortable being in the ladies’ room, even if there weren’t actually any women in there. It was a little like when he was a kid and he’d gone in his mom’s room without permission.
While the kids used the restroom, Bob went out to the vending machines to restock on Coke Zero and pretzel rods. It was pretty amazing how fast those kids went through the soda and snacks.
When he got back, Mikey and Gerard were peering with interest at the road map on one wall, and Frank was pulling out tourist brochures by the handful, occasionally calling out, “Hey, you can actually pan for gold at this place, we should check it out!” or “They charge $35 for this lame-ass amusement park! I mean, like, Disneyland, I could see $35, but this rinky-dink place? I bet they don’t even have a real roller coaster!” The janitors were looking at the kids, frowning, and Bob wasn’t psychic or anything, but he had a pretty bad feeling about this.
“Guys. You done?” Without waiting for an answer, Bob walked up to grab Frank’s shoulder and ushered him and the Minnellis towards the door.
The big-haired janitor whispered something to the other one, who disappeared, and stepped forward with a big smile. “So, you guys on vacation?” he asked, pulling awkwardly at his fingers.
Bob barely looked at him. “Yeah,” he said shortly as he pushed open the door.
“That makes sense,” the janitor said quickly. “I mean, school starts in, what, like, a month, so this is like the last hurrah of summer and stuff. You gonna check out all the tourist traps on this highway? Some of them are a lot of fun.”
Mikey stopped and turned around to stare at the man.
Bob sighed and closed the door, his irritation sharpened on the edges by a real and unexpected fear. “Well, thanks for the tip,” he said. “But we’re gonna go now.”
“You sure?” the guy asked. He took another step closer, his eyes darting nervously between Bob and the kids. “’Cause, I mean, we have a lot of information here, so if you don’t have, like, a defined trip itinerary—I mean, I’m not like super-qualified, but I’ve worked here a long time, so I’d totally be willing to go over some brochures with you.”
Bob stepped forward, putting the kids behind him almost instinctively. “Look,” he said, completely giving up any pretense at politeness, “thanks, but I’d really appreciate it if you’d mind your own goddamned business.”
The man shot a quick, nervous look towards the back door where the other janitor had gone, and then squared his shoulders to look at Bob, looking angry himself now. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me what you’re doing with three kids reported as missing.”
“Oh, wait,” said Gerard, pushing past Bob, “you think Bob kidnapped us?”
“No way!” cried Frank.
Bob sighed. “Guys. Hush.” He knew they meant well, but frankly, they weren’t helping matters. The other guy must have gone to call the cops, leaving ‘Ray,’ as his nametag said, to keep them at the rest stop. On the plus side, Ray probably wasn’t a pedophile looking to grab Mikey, Frank, and Gerard. On the downside, the cops were probably gonna think Bob was.
Shit.
He should have just fucking called Pete Wentz or the cops when he had the chance. Maybe he would have been able to explain what the kids had told him, gotten them some kind of protection. Now…his best shot was probably to get them to the van, see if they could get to their safe place in the middle of nowhere before this turned into a police chase. Christ, he’d completely fucked up his life—the least he could do was get the kids out of danger before it all went to shit.
“Guys,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth, “when I say, ‘go,’ we’re gonna turn around and run for the van.”
Mikey, who’d been staring at Ray the whole time, turned back to grab at Bob’s hand. “Wait.”
Bob wasn’t sure what the hell they were waiting for. The other janitor was running back now, breathing hard—if they were gonna go, the time was now. Bunny was following on the guy’s heels, and Mikey picked her up.
“James!” Ray said, not taking his eyes off Bob. “Did you call them?”
“I did, but…dude, there are a couple of people hanging around the van in the parking lot, and I’m pretty sure they have guns. Like, out of their holsters, ready to shoot.” He looked from Bob to Ray and back again. “Christ. Weirdest day ever or what?”
“A couple of people?” Mikey drew himself up to his full height, all four and a half feet of it, looking at James with a sharpness that surprised the hell out of Bob. “A guy and a woman? What’d they look like?”
James looked at Mikey like it had never occurred to him that Mikey might be able to talk. “Um, yeah,” he said. “It was a man and a woman. They both had black suits on, dark hair…the guy had, like, an old-fashioned hat on….”
“That’s them.” Mikey dropped Bunny on the floor to pull at Bob’s hand again, looking at his brother with a wild-eyed, frantic expression, and Bob felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “Bob, Bob, we have to go now, that’s them, the ones who killed Joe in my dream. They’re after us!”
“What the hell?” asked Ray. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, man,” said Gerard, who was rapidly working himself into as desperate a fear as Mikey’s. “Oh, man, you don’t get it—Ray, you don’t know about us, you’re just trying to, like, do the right thing, I get that, but seriously, these people, they don’t have any problems killing people to get to us. That’s why we ran away, and they’re gonna—if you get in their way, they’ll probably kill you, too.”
“How much TV do these kids watch?” James asked, raising his eyebrows at Bob. Ray, however, frowned and pushed past Bob to poke his head out the door.
“Whoa,” he said. “Um, they’re screwing with your van, man.”
“What?” Bob shoved him aside. Sure enough, a man and a woman dressed like the Men in Black had the hood of his van up. The woman was bent over his engine and fucking pulling on stuff; the man was leaned against the passenger’s side door, smirking and stroking a huge fucking handgun. “Holy shit,” Bob breathed. He hadn’t exactly doubted Mikey and Gerard—they were the psychic ones, after all—but the sudden realization that there were people here willing to kill him hit him hard.
“Oh, man,” Frank said, breathing quickly like he was trying not to cry. “This is bad, this is so bad. Gerard, can’t you, like, get the gun from him?”
Ray gave Frank a scandalized look, which almost made Bob laugh despite the situation. “Oh, hell no,” he said. “I don’t know if those guys are cops, or FBI agents or something, but that’s some seriously suspicious behavior right there, and none of us are going anywhere near them. Especially not you guys.”
“So, what?” James asked. “Do we wait for the cops, or what?”
“We gotta go,” Mikey said again, softer. “Please.” The look he was giving Ray would have melted Vlad the Impaler’s heart.
Ray wavered for a minute, chewing his lower lip and staring at the floor. Every muscle in Bob’s body, every nerve strained to do something, to grab the kids and run out the back door. But being impulsive wouldn’t help anyone now, so he waited, restraining the urge to shake Ray and tell him to make up his damn mind.
Finally, Ray sighed. “We gotta get the hell out of Dodge,” he said. “Those guys in the parking lot seem like bad news. James, did you drive today?”
James nodded.
“Okay, then, why don’t you grab Matt and go to the police station?” Bob’s face must have shown his confusion, because Ray said to him, “Matt’s the plumber. So, where were you guys headed?”
Before Bob could answer, Mikey pulled out his starcase to show Ray the map. “Here,” he said. “We’re trying to find more people like us.”
“Like you?” asked Ray, one eyebrow raised. Wordlessly, Gerard made the brochures Frank had knocked to the floor fly back to their holders. Ray’s eyes got huge, his mouth fell open, and he looked at Bob as if to say, “Did you just see that?” Bob shrugged. At this point, he was less concerned with Mikey and Gerard’s particular brand of weirdness than what the people in the parking lot were gonna do to them—and him—because of it.
Ray closed his mouth and made a decisive-sounding noise in the back of his throat. “Okay, then. Um, I’ve got a camper parked out back, so I guess I could give you guys a lift.”
Bob could scarcely believe what he was hearing. “Really?”
Ray shrugged. “I’m probably going nuts, but…you know, I think I might as well go with it. Beats being shot by secret agent men in the parking lot.”
“Well, come on then,” cried Frank, picking up his guitar as if he expected to have to use it as a weapon. “Let’s go before they come in here.”
A part of Bob protested at the idea of leaving his van—his van, for Christ’s sake, the one he’d bought with money he’d saved from his first couple of touring gigs, the one with his fucking sound stuff in the back and his iPod on the passenger seat. On the other hand, losing the van kind of paled in comparison to losing his life, and time was kind of of the essence here. So he gave Ray a tight smile, said “Thanks,” and started ushering the kids towards the back door.
“Weirdest day ever,” James repeated, darting into the bathroom. Bob couldn’t really disagree.
Part 7
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
“Shit,” Agent Viglione said, turning up the radio. The DJ continued blithely along, rattling off contact information and wondering aloud what might make two kids who’d, for all intents and purposes, been adopted by a multimillionaire want to run away. “This is just fucking excellent.”
Agent Palmer frowned thoughtfully, one hand on the steering wheel. “No, no,” she said. “This could be good.” Off Agent Viglione’s disbelieving look, she said, “Yeah, yeah, law enforcement and a moving target, I’m aware. And I know this way you don’t get to do any of that special ops shit you’re so fond of. But think about it. If we get to the extraterrestrials before the cops do, we don’t have to deal with any of the shit Wentz was gonna give us, we don’t have to worry about a publicity leak—we just take them, and it’s another tragedy where something terrible happened to those poor runaway children.”
Every line of Agent Viglione’s face radiated doubt. “What about the third kid?” he asked. “What are we supposed to do about him?”
“Jesus, Brian,” said Agent Palmer, rolling her eyes. “Let’s use a little creativity here, hmm? We knock the kid out, or we convince him that if he spills his guts, the government’ll arrest him, or hell, you distract him and I’ll grab the other two. We just have to find them, first.”
Agent Viglione leaned back in his seat. “Well, if you were twelve or whatever, no car, where would you go?”
“Twelve?” Agent Palmer snorted. “I’d fucking steal a car.”
“Okay, say you’re twelve and an alien and you don’t want to go down in a hail of gunfire. Then what do you do?”
“I don’t know.” Palmer took a long drag on her cigarette with her free hand and shot a quick look at Agent Viglione. “You got a map in the glove compartment? We’ve gotta figure out what’s around the Smith Home that they’d wanna get to.”
“There’s nothing around,” said Agent Viglione. “There’s a gas station a couple miles down the road, and that’s it. Place is in the ass end of nowhere.”
Palmer made a quick, darting gesture with her cigarette hand and smiled hugely. “Ooh!” she said. “That’s something. I mean, these backend country roads don’t get a lot of traffic, but maybe these kids figured they could hitch a ride at the gas station. Worth a shot, right?”
“Better than nothing,” said Viglione with a shrug. “I’m game for checking it out.”
“Excellent,” Palmer said, stubbing out her cigarette and shifting gears. “Let’s see how fast this thing can go.”
**
Bob sighed as he opened the passenger door to dump his stuff and went around to get into the driver’s seat. He thought that guy was never gonna stop talking to him. He must have found his job incredibly boring, if stuff like radio announcements and cats got him chattering away to complete strangers for fucking—how long had it been? Twenty minutes?
The whole point of this little trip had been to avoid spending all his time talking about stupid shit with people he didn’t know or like.
He turned the radio on as he pulled out of the gas station parking lot and let himself relax. The guys on tour probably would’ve given him a hard time about the poppy girl singer he was listening to, but one of the nice things about being on his own was that he didn’t have to give a shit. Although whoever mixed this song could have done a much better job, he thought. The bass line was rendering the singer almost inaudible.
He turned onto the highway and drove with the strange, freeing disorientation of having no particular goal. There were a ton of beaches along the coast; maybe he’d stop at one of them for lunch, when he got hungry, but it wasn’t like he had any place to be.
The morning passed in a comfortable, uneventful monotony, and the quiet of it settled Bob, soothed the lingering irritation from the misadventures at the gas station and let his mind drift from thought to thought without ever having to attach to anything. He sang along to the pop music on his radio, occasionally drumming on the dashboard, and pondered what he would eat for lunch, and wondered what Bert and Dan and Jepha and Quinn and everyone were up to. But not too hard.
Around noon, he started to feel hungry. He pulled off at the nearest exit to a parking lot on the side of the road, just a stone’s throw away from the beach. It was such a nice day, Bob was afraid he’d have to fight some mom and dad and their 2.5 adorable children for space, but this particular stretch of beach seemed empty as far as Bob could see. As he stepped out onto it, he realized why—it was one of those beaches made of jagged bits of shell and rock rather than smooth warm sand. Well, Bob had shoes, and he liked the quiet, so he pulled out the ready-made sandwich he’d bought at the gas station and settled down on a relatively not-sharp patch of ground.
Over the crunch of lettuce and the sound of waves splashing onto the rocky shore, he heard a soft rustling sound coming from behind him, and he swallowed, listening. Another rustling sound, and then a tiny, unhappy-sounding mew. Bob turned around to see a dark tortoiseshell kitten stalking towards him on skinny little legs, mewling pathetically and staring at his sandwich like it was the key to curing all his or her woes.
“Hey, there,” Bob said with a smile, tearing off a small piece of ham and holding it out to the kitten. He or she—Bob was gonna go with she, just because—took it, licking his fingers and staring at him with big eyes. He reached out to scratch under her chin, and she leaned into the touch, purring. Bob felt his smile get even bigger; he’d always had a soft spot for cats. He rubbed the top of her head with his other hand and said, “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?”
She mewed as if in agreement, and Bob laughed. She looked kind of familiar, almost like the cat that had appeared in the gas station earlier. Maybe it was the same cat, and she’d been hitching a ride this whole time, Bob thought with amusement. “Well, you,” he said, glad there wasn’t anyone around to hear him talking to a cat, “I have some milk in the van, if you’re interested.”
She mewed again. God, it was like having a conversation. “Aren’t you a smart girl?” Bob murmured, carefully picking her up. She didn’t scratch at him or try to bite, just made a small squeaky sound and curled into his chest. Bob wasn’t a mushy guy or anything, but it was maybe the cutest thing ever.
As he opened the passenger door to grab the milk though, though, he heard the sound of whispering. Coming from the back of his van. Shit. It stopped a second after he opened the door, but he’d heard it—somebody, or more than one somebody, was in his van. All warm and fuzzy feelings immediately vanished, and he put the kitten down. She darted away somewhere, mewing piteously. “All right,” Bob said loudly. Whoever it was couldn’t be too big if he or she had managed to squeeze in among all the sound equipment and luggage and random crap in the back of the van, and Bob was pretty confident about his ability to kick some ass. “Whoever the fuck you are, if you don’t get the fuck out of my van in the next three seconds, I’m gonna kick the shit out of you. One…two….”
“Wait! Wait!” a young, high-pitched voice said, and then three boys, all of them maybe between ten and fifteen, crawled out of the back and huddled against the open door of the van, staring at Bob with expressions of utter terror.
Well, Bob sure as shit wasn’t going to raise his hand to a bunch of kids. But seeing as how they had somehow crawled into his van at some point without permission, he didn’t see a problem with letting them be freaked out for a few more moments while he looked them over. The littlest one was tiny, though he didn’t look much younger than the other two, with bleached hair that looked like it had been shaved into patterns but was growing out thick and black. The middle one had wispy brown hair and big thick plastic-rimmed glasses. The biggest one had a round, pale face and dark hair hanging into his eyes.
Bob might not have been paying too much attention to the radio, but it didn’t exactly take a genius to guess that these were the three missing kids he’d heard about at the gas station.
“Ah,” he said. “You guys must be the runaways.”
The biggest one nodded unhappily.
Bob nodded. “Right. So, I’m gonna call the police now.”
“No!” said the littlest one. “You don’t understand! If you call the police, the guys that are after Mikey and Gerard’ll find them, and they’ll end up being dissected in some government lab or something!”
Bob had no idea how he was even supposed to respond to that. God, he hated kids.
“Way to keep a secret, Frank,” the biggest one said, giving the other one a frown. Turning to Bob, he said, “I know it sounds crazy, but there really are people after us. I mean, obviously Pete and Patrick and the police and stuff, but there are these other guys who wanted to kidnap us, and they were gonna kill anyone who got in their way. And we couldn’t let anything bad happen to them—to Pete and Patrick and Andy and Joe, I mean—so we decided to go back where we came from. If we ever find it.” He gave Bob a really earnest look, with big eyes, biting his lower lip.
Jesus, these kids were totally batshit insane.
“Hey,” the middle one piped up. “Have you seen a kitten around anywhere?”
Finally, a question Bob could answer. Maybe this kid was the sane one. “Yours, huh? I guess it was the cat from the gas station.” He looked around; the kitten had vanished. “She was here a minute ago. She’s gotta be around somewhere.”
The kid nodded and frowned as if in concentration. Bob waited for him to say something else, but he seemed to be carrying on an in-depth conversation with himself. So much for his being the sane kid.
“Okay,” said Bob, “So, I’m back to calling the cops now. I mean, I don’t know what kind of game you kids are playing, but you have people worried about you. You have to go home.”
“We left a note,” muttered the middle one, apparently done talking to himself.
The biggest one sighed. “See, that’s the thing,” he said. “We don’t really have a home. The guys at Decaydance are great, but they’re not our family or anything. We’re trying to figure out where we come from.”
Bob vaguely remembered hearing that the three of them were orphans or something, and he thought maybe he understood what the kid was talking about a little more. He seemed a little young to be doing the whole search for identity thing, but then, it had been a long time since Bob was a kid, and it felt like longer every day. Bob wasn’t an orphan, but he thought he could get the desire to want to figure out yourself by finding out where you came from. But still…. “If you want to find your birth parents,” he said, “you should ask your—you know, the people who take care of you. Foster parents or whatever.”
The littlest one—Frank, probably--rolled his eyes. “Dude, my parents are dead. That’s not the problem. And we can’t ask anyone about Gerard and Mikey’s parents because nobody knows about Gerard and Mikey’s parents. They were probably visitors from outer space or mutants or government experiments or something.”
Bob’s intention to shut down the conversation there was suddenly derailed. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked, then thought maybe he shouldn’t have said ‘hell’ around a bunch of kids. Oh, well.
“Frank!” the biggest one said, sighing dramatically. “See if I ever trust you with a secret again, bigmouth.”
Frank shrugged, looking pretty pragmatic for a grade-schooler. “Well, if we want this guy to give us a ride, we gotta explain stuff, right?”
Bob didn’t really feel like anyone had explained anything to him, and he was about to say so, when the biggest one sighed again and pulled out a harmonica. The fuck? What exactly about this situation made the kid think it was time for an impromptu performance?
But then he started to play. Just a few notes, the beginnings of a scale, and suddenly Bob’s sandwich had floated out of his hand, was hovering in midair between himself and the kids. The kid played a sloppy “Oh, Susannah!” and the sandwich started doing little loops in the air, bouncing around in a weird, almost dance-like motion.
And suddenly Frank’s suggestion that his friends’ parents were mutants made a whole lot more sense. Bob breathed out slowly, trying to collect his thoughts enough so that he didn’t freak out in front of the kids. “Did….are you doing that?” he asked carefully.
The kid pulled his face away from the harmonica with another painfully earnest expression, and Bob’s sandwich dropped onto the ground. So much for lunch, Bob thought, but he didn’t say anything. “Yeah,” said the kid. “I can do it without my harmonica, too, but it’s a lot easier with it.”
“Right.” Of course. Playing the harmonica made it easier for the kid to telekinetically float sandwiches. Why wouldn’t it? Bob turned to the middle kid. “Let me guess,” he said. “You’ve got a magical kazoo.”
He shook his head. “No. But I know….” He wrinkled his face up, staring at Bob. “You did sound for a band. For a living, I mean. But you had an accident. You got set on fire. And the nerve damage wasn’t that bad, you could still do your job, but you got sick of people acting like you were a whole different person than you were before the accident. So you’re taking a break, and you’re driving alone in the middle of nowhere because you don’t want to talk to anybody.”
A million thoughts warred for dominance in Bob’s brain. Part of him wanted to fucking shake the kid for talking about his life like he actually knew it, for rambling in an even monotone about things that actually meant something to Bob like they weren’t important at all. Part of him wanted to cringe and run away—he’d never been big on people invading his privacy, and this was the hugest invasion of privacy he’d ever encountered. Fuck cameras poking around his bunk, this kid was poking around in his mind. But another part of him was scared on the kid’s behalf. If he and his brother did this kind of shit all the time, Bob didn’t have any trouble believing that they had unscrupulous people after them. Finally, he managed to say, “So. You know a lot about me, I guess, but I don’t know much about you. What are your names again?”
The biggest one gave him a hopeful smile. “I’m Gerard, and this is my brother Mikey, and our friend Frank,” he said, holding out a hand. Bob shook it tentatively, hoping the kid wasn’t picking up anything he was thinking.
“I’m Bob,” he said. “Bob Bryar.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Frank with a brilliant smile. “So, dude, which band were you touring with?”
Bob blinked. He was still trying to get his head around the super powers thing, and this conversation was going way too fast for him. “Um. The Used.”
Frank nodded knowledgably, as if he were some sort of scene expert and not a four-foot tall eleven-year-old. “Pretty sweet, man. Mikey and Gerard and me are gonna be in a band.”
“Yeah?” Bob said, smiling in spite of himself.
“Hell yeah!” said Frank. “Mikey and me are gonna play the guitars and Gerard’s gonna sing and play the harmonica. We still gotta get a drummer, but it’s gonna be awesome.” Mikey and Gerard nodded.
Bob laughed. There was something kind of hilarious about these kids—two of them had super powers, they were on the run from (they said) some kind of killers, and they still got distracted by the idea of being in a rock band. He was fairly sure he was going to regret this—he didn’t know much about business, but he knew Pete Wentz was a pretty powerful guy—but he asked, “Where were you guys planning to go to get away from…whoever it is you think’s chasing you?”
Mikey scowled, his eyebrows pulling together into a thick dark line over his glasses. “We don’t just think they’re chasing us,” he said. “I saw them shoot Joe in my dream, and I’m really good at telling the future.” He pulled something out of his backpack—a little square box, it looked like, made of metal and wood—and pulled back a panel on the front of it. Underneath was a tiny map. “We’re pretty sure we’re supposed to go here,” he said, handing the box to Bob.
The print on it was really little, and not all of it was even in an alphabet Bob recognized, so it took a moment before he could make out any place names. “Hey,” he said, “Cork Valley! I know where that is.”
All three kids perked up like he’d told them he had a box full of candy in the back. “You do?” Gerard asked. “Will you take us there?”
“I’m not taking you anywhere,” said Bob. “Pete Wentz is made of money. You tell him what you told me—and showing him the whole super powers thing probably wouldn’t hurt—and I guarantee you, he’ll have a whole army keeping these guys away from you.”
“Pete already knows about us,” said Gerard, rolling his eyes. “That’s how the bad guys found out about us in the first place. We were at Pete’s office, helping him buy stocks and stuff, and this guy who wasn’t supposed to be there saw us.”
Bob could feel himself frowning. “Hold up,” he said, “Wentz was using you guys to make money in his business?” That was exactly the kind of shit the guy ought to be protecting these kids from, Bob thought.
Mikey shrugged. “He gave us twenty bucks.” A thought seemed to occur to him, and he said, “Hey, if we pay you, will you take us to Cork Valley?”
“I’m not taking your money,” Bob said automatically. He wanted to tell the kids to shut up a minute so he could think, but they seemed to get what he was thinking (and hey, if they were psychic, why wouldn’t they?) and stood quietly looking at him with mingled hope and fear in their faces. Well. Whoever it was that was after them, the kids clearly didn’t think Wentz’s money was going to keep them away. Beside, Bob was not at all sure at this point that they weren’t being used by Wentz as some sort of school-aged money-making machines. On the other hand, he wasn’t too eager to get arrested for kidnapping. From what he understood, Frank was a perfectly normal kid, missing from a group home where, as far as Bob knew, he wasn’t in any kind of danger. There wasn’t any reason he shouldn’t go back there. And, supernatural displays aside, he didn’t have any proof that Gerard and Mikey were right or telling the truth about people being after them.
“Hey,” Frank said, breaking into Bob’s reverie, “how ‘bout this? Cork Valley’s only, like, 200 miles away, right? So that’s not even a whole day’s drive! You take us, and if it really is just some nowhere town and we don’t find Mikey and Gerard’s long-lost family or whatever, you can call the cops.”
Gerard scowled at Frank, but Mikey nodded so hard he looked like a bobblehead.
He shouldn’t have even been considering it, seriously. This was some Grade-A moral ambivalence, here. And even if these kids were telling the truth, how the hell was Bob supposed to protect them better than a fucking millionaire with his own security force could? Or protect himself, for that matter? God, this whole thing was fucking his vacation all to hell.
And yet. He looked down at the starcase again, then back at the three kids. “Okay,” he found himself saying. “But I’m seriously not gonna take any shit from you, and I’m calling the cops if--”
He found himself cut off mid-threat by, like, sixty pounds of hurtling eleven-year old. “Yeah, yeah,” said Frank, wrapping his arms around Bob’s middle. “You’re the man, Bob!”
“Yeah!” Mikey echoed.
Gerard nodded fervently. “We really appreciate this, Bob, seriously, we’ll try not to be any trouble, and we can do all sorts of stuff to help. Like, if we get locked out of the car, Mikey can pick locks, and if we’re gonna drive over broken glass or something, I can move it out of the way, and--”
“All right, all right,” said Bob, trying to pry Frank’s arms off. Christ, the kid had a grip on him. “Just get back in the van. You guys hungry?”
Well, that got Frank off. “Man, we are so hungry, you have no idea! We were gonna have to start eating each other pretty soon!”
“I don’t think we need to resort to cannibalism just yet.” Bob said. “I got some chips and pretzels and soda at that gas station. Now get your asses back in the van, and let’s get this show on the road before I come to my senses.”
They scrambled back in, buckling themselves into the back seat of Bob’s van and looking at him expectantly.
Bob sighed, went back around to the driver’s seat, and tossed a bag of Tostitos to them, which they took with the single-minded glee and ravenous hunger of three growing boys. When Bob turned the ignition key, though, Mikey pulled his head up from the chips and said, “Wait.”
“Wait for what?” asked Bob, wondering why he was taking orders from a twelve-year old or however the hell old Mikey was.
Mikey didn’t answer, frowning into space like he was having especially deep thoughts at that moment. Suddenly, there was a small mewing noise, and Bob jumped in surprise as the kitten from earlier jumped through the open passenger side window and into the back seat. Mikey, looking calmly unsurprised, scooped the kitten into his lap and looked up at Bob. “Okay,” he said. “We can go, now.”
Christ, what was he getting himself into?
**
Patrick really hadn’t been big on the idea of calling Gabe. It wasn’t like he didn’t like Gabe or anything—he did, he thought the guy was a lot of fun, and they’d had some really interesting conversations together. It was just that, well, Gabe and his crew were bounty hunters, and Patrick really didn’t think they were the best people to go after three missing kids.
Not that Patrick’s opinion on the matter ever stopped Pete when he had an idea in his head.
The Cobramobile swerved sharply to one side, and Patrick felt his stomach lurch. “Gabe!” he yelled. “Can’t you slow it down a little?”
Gabe and Pete cackled from the front. “Not to worry, dude,” Gabe called. “The speed limit on this highway’s, like, seventy, and nobody pays attention to it, so I don’t think we’re getting pulled over.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I was worried about,” muttered Patrick. Next to him, Nate looked vaguely nauseated. If Patrick himself wasn’t so afraid Gabe was going to drive them over the median and into the lane of traffic driving the opposite direction, he’d spare a moment to send Nate a sympathetic glance. Apparently, he was pretty fierce when it came to the whole bounty-hunting thing, but he looked like just a miserable kid at the moment.
In the back seat, Alex hung up his cell phone and shoved Ryland’s face off his shoulder. “Dudes!” he called. “We got something!”
Pete turned around in his seat, fixing Alex with an intense look, a completely different man from the one who’d been laughing at Patrick from the shotgun seat. “Yeah?” he said impatiently.
Alex nodded. “Okay, so, my man Nick says the last time he filled up his gas tank at a station about two miles from the Smith Home. He knew we were on this case, so he asked around for us. Apparently it hasn’t been too busy today, but a little after eight this morning, he had a dude with a big van fill up his tank and get an oil change and stock up on junk food.”
“So?” asked Victoria shortly.
Alex rolled his eyes, and Ryland sighed exaggeratedly. “So, Victoria,” he said, “According to the security logs, they turned off the system at, like, three in the morning, right? So, riding Snowball, they probably got to the Smith Home, like, five, assuming they didn’t get lost. Give ‘em some time to get their shit together, eight’s not a bad estimate for when they could’ve gotten to that gas station. Think about it! You’re kids on the run, you see a van, the owner’s inside….”
“You think they hitched a ride with this guy?” Patrick asked sharply. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. Sure, it was a clue, but the idea of Gerard and Mikey hitchhiking with some random guy who drove around in a van made Patrick intensely queasy. Who knew what kind of shit could happen?
“Maybe,” said Alex with a shrug. “It’s better than nothing, right?”
“Totally,” said Gabe, executing a probably illegal U-Turn. “Your man Nick get anything else about the guy? The van?”
“No plate numbers, but it was a black van heading south on J-29, and the driver was a big blond guy who toured as a drum tech with some band.”
“Oh, shit,” Pete crowed, “Give me five minutes, and I’ll have that fucker’s name.”
Pete started punching keys on his Sidekick like a madman, and Patrick sighed and took out his own cell phone to text Andy and Joe. we have a clue. tell you more when i know more.
“Hey.” A hand reached out from the back seat to curl around his shoulder, and Patrick twisted his neck around to look at Victoria. She was smiling at him gently. “They’re gonna be okay, you know?” she said, squeezing his shoulder. “It hasn’t even been a day yet, they can’t have gotten too far.”
Patrick felt like he was going to be sick, seriously. “I know,” he said, but Christ, he shouldn’t have ever listened to Pete. If he’d put his foot down, Mikey and Gerard would still be at the Home, and whoever had found out about them wouldn’t have found out about them, and Patrick wouldn’t have gotten to know them, which was a bummer, but at least they’d be safe. Patrick had no idea what had frightened them so badly that they’d taken off without even telling anyone, but having seen the kind of stuff they could do, he feared the worst. A competing businessman, one even more ruthless than Pete, maybe, or some crackpot who chased UFOs and was on the lookout for some proof of alien invasion, or hell, the government.
Victoria was still smiling at him, and he tried to smile back, but it felt pretty feeble. Victoria had no idea. He shot a look over to the front, where Pete was still furiously typing away, and tried to quell the rush of conflicting emotions he felt. He was still insanely pissed at Pete—and at himself, because seriously, they could’ve brought some of those decisions home and not exposed Gerard and Mikey to whichever fucker had spilled the beans—but at the same time, he could see the dark circles under Pete’s eyes, the slightly unfocused expression he had when his brain was a million miles away from whatever was going on around him, and he knew that Pete was killing himself over this.
He wished that he and Pete were alone. If they were alone, they could snap at each other and fight over stupid stuff, like if they could’ve come up with psychic-proof locks or screened people at the meeting for suspicious interests in the paranormal, and maybe they could also reassure each other that the whole thing wasn’t entirely their fault.
Pete paused, and for a moment Patrick thought he was going to turn around, like maybe they were having the same thought right then. Instead, he ducked his head unhappily again, and Gabe turned around to give them all a huge grin.
“Exit to J-29’s thirty-six miles ahead,” he said. “How fast you think I can get us there?”
“Oh, God,” said Victoria, burying her face in Ryland’s shoulder. Nate popped up in his seat, straining at his seatbelt.
“Eyes on the road!” he shouted. “Motherfucker, don’t you dare crash this car!”
Gabe raised his eyebrows. “Whoa there, Nate my boy. Settle down. Think of your blood pressure. Nobody’s crashing anything—I’m a fucking awesome driver. Matter of fact, I bet I could do this with one hand. No hands, even!” He waved his arms in the air, to cheers from Alex and Ryland and angry shouts from Victoria and Nate.
It was going to be a long trip.
**
“Yeah? Yeah?” Agent Palmer said into her phone. She gestured at Agent Viglione, and he turned their convertible to the right. “Guy’s name is Bryar? What’s the license number again?” She scribbled it down, holding the phone between her jaw and her shoulder. “South on J-29? Awesome. You’re a queen among women, Katie.” She shut her phone with a snap.
“So,” said Agent Viglione, “they’ve found themselves a ride?”
“Apparently.” Agent Palmer smiled grimly. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“No. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking, if these two are from the ’99 crash, and they’re seeking more of their kind….” She wriggled her eyebrows at Agent Viglione, making him smile. “We could be stumbling onto the colony here.”
“Fuck,” Agent Viglione breathed, stretching out the word past the point where it had any meaning. “Maja’s gonna fucking flip.”
Agent Palmer smiled again, satisfied. “Yeah. Now all we gotta do is catch up with them, and get rid of this Bob Bryar, whoever the fuck that is.”
Agent Viglione fingered the gun at his side. He hadn’t even gotten a chance to take it out of his holster, yet. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.
**
“And then I got him right in the face, like smash! And believe me, that fucker went down!”
Bob wasn’t sure whether he ought to be amused or disturbed—Frank cussed more than any almost-eleven-year-old Bob had ever met before, and apparently he had a long history of getting into fights and playing pranks that’d probably get Bob sent to prison if he tried them. The Minnellis, though, seemed completely in awe of Frank’s tales. It was kind of adorable.
“Wow,” said Gerard. “Okay, so once this guy called me a sissy and shoved me up against a wall in the art room, and I was gonna dump a can of paint on his head, you know, with my mind, but then the teacher pulled him off and sent him to the principal’s office.”
Frank grinned. “That would’ve been awesome, with the paint,” he said. “I wish I’d been friends with you guys back when I was living with the Dirnts. Between my mad skills and your thing, we would’ve kicked some serious ass.”
Mikey grinned, and Bob, who’d never been the type to find kids cute or at all appealing, forced himself to turn back to the road.
He had to admit, though, as far as hitchhiking runaway kids went, he’d hit the jackpot. Mikey’d asked early on if he could play his iPod through Bob’s speakers, and Bob was kind of amazed at how awesome Mikey’s taste was. He was pretty sure he’d been listening to nothing but crap when he was Mikey’s age. Mikey was a pretty quiet kid, too, from what Bob could tell—no fighting for space in the seat, no “He started it!”, no whining about how long they’d been in the car. He just sat, occasionally smiling at something one of the other boys had said, and petting his cat or looking at his starcase.
Frank and Gerard weren’t exactly quiet, but they weren’t particularly whiny, either. Frank had more energy than any kid Bob had ever seen, and Bob was half tempted at times to stop the car just so the kid could stop wriggling in his seat and run around for a little on the side of the road. Gerard, on the other hand, was a talker. Bob hadn’t yet come across a topic Gerard wouldn’t talk about, at length, with expansive, dramatic hand gestures. Bob had a hard time believing that this was the same kid who, according to Frank, spent most of his time at the group home hiding from the other kids.
At a gesture of Gerard’s, a can of Coke flew from the front passenger seat to the back, and Bob remembered soberly why these kids were riding with him to begin with. Maybe Gerard being antisocial wasn’t so surprising after all
“Hey,” said Mikey suddenly.
Gerard paused mid-gesture. “What is it, Mikey?”
Mikey leaned his face forward, into the space between the driver’s and passenger seats, and frowned at Bob. “Bob’s wrist hurts,” he announced. “He’s been driving too long.”
Bob didn’t even bother asking how Mikey had known that. He himself hadn’t really been thinking about it, but now that the kid mentioned it, his wrist was getting a little sore, and his lower back was killing him. It wasn’t like there was anything they could do about it on the road, though—he couldn’t exactly get out his heating pad while he was driving—so he said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Frank. “I have to take a leak like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Maybe if we pulled into a rest stop,” Gerard said, “we could go to the bathroom and Bob could put on his heat pad thing. You know, Mikey, it’s kind of a bummer we don’t have healing powers. I mean, if we were gonna be freaks, how cool would it be if we were freaks who could, like, cure cancer?”
Frank hit Gerard on the shoulder, none too softly if the sound was any indication. “You’re not freaks,” he said crossly.
Bob could see Gerard making a face in the rearview mirror. He felt vaguely proud he’d been able to restrain his initial freaked reaction to Gerard and Mikey’s…thing. The last thing a teenage kid needed was an adult confirming his idea that he was a weirdo and no one would ever like him.
He checked the clock on the dashboard. 4:13. He hadn’t planned on stopping until six or so for dinner, and even then he was only going to drive through someplace—there wasn’t any sense in exposing the boys to danger just for the heck of it. But they had been driving for something like four straight hours now, so it was a little unreasonable to expect them all to sit quietly the whole way there. Plus, now that Mikey had brought up the pain in his wrist, it was really starting to throb.
“Okay,” he said, bringing the budding squabble between Frank and Gerard to a halt. “There’s a rest stop fifteen miles ahead. We’re gonna pull in, you guys are gonna go to the bathroom, and we’re gonna leave before anyone has a chance to see you. Don’t dawdle, don’t wander off, just, in and out.”
“Dawdle?” said Mikey. “Who says that?” Frank tittered.
“I’m serious, you guys,” said Bob. “You’re the ones who keep saying someone’s after you, right? Well, people who have people after them don’t hang out in rest stops waiting to get caught.”
Gerard nodded seriously. “You think we should have disguises?” he asked anxiously. “Like, do you have any huge sunglasses?”
Bob bit back a smile, and refrained from telling Gerard that three kids wearing huge sunglasses probably weren’t any less suspicious or less likely to be recognized than they would be otherwise. “Sorry,” he said. “Like I said, though, if you’re quick, I think it’ll be okay.”
The rest stop didn’t look too crowded as Bob pulled in and parked the van, which was a plus. The boys scrambled in the back for shoes, and Mikey pulled his backpack on.
“Hey,” said Bob, “you know you can leave your stuff in the van, right? We’re coming back in five minutes.”
Mikey gave Bob a solemn look, his eyes looking huge behind his glasses. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just…I feel like I should take it in with me.” He turned around to stare at his brother for a long moment. Bob didn’t know what passed between them with that look—wasn’t sure he wanted to, since it probably involved some weird telepathic mindmeld—but whatever it was, Gerard picked up his backpack, too, and slung it onto his shoulders.
Frank looked from Mikey to Gerard and back again and, with a shrug, picked up his guitar case. Bob rolled his eyes, but he didn’t say anything. If they wanted to lug their crap around the rest stop bathroom, who was he to judge?
When they got inside, the entrance to the men’s room was blocked off, and two guys who looked like they might be janitors or something were sitting outside on a bench next to a couple of mops and buckets. One of them, a big guy with fluffy reddish hair, stood up when he saw Bob and the kids.
“Sorry,” he said, “but one of the toilets overflowed all over the place in there. It’s real nasty. The plumber’s in there now looking at it.”
“So, what, we just go outside or something?” said Bob, feeling simultaneously irritated and kind of like a dick for taking it out on this guy.
The guy who was still sitting snorted, and the big guy sighed. “No,” he said. “You can use the women’s room. No one’s in there now.” He gave Frank, Mikey, and Gerard a narrow-eyed look and said, “Try not to make a mess.”
“How old does he think we are?” Frank grumbled as they walked into the women’s room. “Does he think we’re gonna, like, wet our pants and then wipe it on the floor?”
“Eww.” Mikey wrinkled his nose at Frank, who laughed.
“Just go the bathroom, would you?” said Bob. He felt pretty uncomfortable being in the ladies’ room, even if there weren’t actually any women in there. It was a little like when he was a kid and he’d gone in his mom’s room without permission.
While the kids used the restroom, Bob went out to the vending machines to restock on Coke Zero and pretzel rods. It was pretty amazing how fast those kids went through the soda and snacks.
When he got back, Mikey and Gerard were peering with interest at the road map on one wall, and Frank was pulling out tourist brochures by the handful, occasionally calling out, “Hey, you can actually pan for gold at this place, we should check it out!” or “They charge $35 for this lame-ass amusement park! I mean, like, Disneyland, I could see $35, but this rinky-dink place? I bet they don’t even have a real roller coaster!” The janitors were looking at the kids, frowning, and Bob wasn’t psychic or anything, but he had a pretty bad feeling about this.
“Guys. You done?” Without waiting for an answer, Bob walked up to grab Frank’s shoulder and ushered him and the Minnellis towards the door.
The big-haired janitor whispered something to the other one, who disappeared, and stepped forward with a big smile. “So, you guys on vacation?” he asked, pulling awkwardly at his fingers.
Bob barely looked at him. “Yeah,” he said shortly as he pushed open the door.
“That makes sense,” the janitor said quickly. “I mean, school starts in, what, like, a month, so this is like the last hurrah of summer and stuff. You gonna check out all the tourist traps on this highway? Some of them are a lot of fun.”
Mikey stopped and turned around to stare at the man.
Bob sighed and closed the door, his irritation sharpened on the edges by a real and unexpected fear. “Well, thanks for the tip,” he said. “But we’re gonna go now.”
“You sure?” the guy asked. He took another step closer, his eyes darting nervously between Bob and the kids. “’Cause, I mean, we have a lot of information here, so if you don’t have, like, a defined trip itinerary—I mean, I’m not like super-qualified, but I’ve worked here a long time, so I’d totally be willing to go over some brochures with you.”
Bob stepped forward, putting the kids behind him almost instinctively. “Look,” he said, completely giving up any pretense at politeness, “thanks, but I’d really appreciate it if you’d mind your own goddamned business.”
The man shot a quick, nervous look towards the back door where the other janitor had gone, and then squared his shoulders to look at Bob, looking angry himself now. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me what you’re doing with three kids reported as missing.”
“Oh, wait,” said Gerard, pushing past Bob, “you think Bob kidnapped us?”
“No way!” cried Frank.
Bob sighed. “Guys. Hush.” He knew they meant well, but frankly, they weren’t helping matters. The other guy must have gone to call the cops, leaving ‘Ray,’ as his nametag said, to keep them at the rest stop. On the plus side, Ray probably wasn’t a pedophile looking to grab Mikey, Frank, and Gerard. On the downside, the cops were probably gonna think Bob was.
Shit.
He should have just fucking called Pete Wentz or the cops when he had the chance. Maybe he would have been able to explain what the kids had told him, gotten them some kind of protection. Now…his best shot was probably to get them to the van, see if they could get to their safe place in the middle of nowhere before this turned into a police chase. Christ, he’d completely fucked up his life—the least he could do was get the kids out of danger before it all went to shit.
“Guys,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth, “when I say, ‘go,’ we’re gonna turn around and run for the van.”
Mikey, who’d been staring at Ray the whole time, turned back to grab at Bob’s hand. “Wait.”
Bob wasn’t sure what the hell they were waiting for. The other janitor was running back now, breathing hard—if they were gonna go, the time was now. Bunny was following on the guy’s heels, and Mikey picked her up.
“James!” Ray said, not taking his eyes off Bob. “Did you call them?”
“I did, but…dude, there are a couple of people hanging around the van in the parking lot, and I’m pretty sure they have guns. Like, out of their holsters, ready to shoot.” He looked from Bob to Ray and back again. “Christ. Weirdest day ever or what?”
“A couple of people?” Mikey drew himself up to his full height, all four and a half feet of it, looking at James with a sharpness that surprised the hell out of Bob. “A guy and a woman? What’d they look like?”
James looked at Mikey like it had never occurred to him that Mikey might be able to talk. “Um, yeah,” he said. “It was a man and a woman. They both had black suits on, dark hair…the guy had, like, an old-fashioned hat on….”
“That’s them.” Mikey dropped Bunny on the floor to pull at Bob’s hand again, looking at his brother with a wild-eyed, frantic expression, and Bob felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “Bob, Bob, we have to go now, that’s them, the ones who killed Joe in my dream. They’re after us!”
“What the hell?” asked Ray. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, man,” said Gerard, who was rapidly working himself into as desperate a fear as Mikey’s. “Oh, man, you don’t get it—Ray, you don’t know about us, you’re just trying to, like, do the right thing, I get that, but seriously, these people, they don’t have any problems killing people to get to us. That’s why we ran away, and they’re gonna—if you get in their way, they’ll probably kill you, too.”
“How much TV do these kids watch?” James asked, raising his eyebrows at Bob. Ray, however, frowned and pushed past Bob to poke his head out the door.
“Whoa,” he said. “Um, they’re screwing with your van, man.”
“What?” Bob shoved him aside. Sure enough, a man and a woman dressed like the Men in Black had the hood of his van up. The woman was bent over his engine and fucking pulling on stuff; the man was leaned against the passenger’s side door, smirking and stroking a huge fucking handgun. “Holy shit,” Bob breathed. He hadn’t exactly doubted Mikey and Gerard—they were the psychic ones, after all—but the sudden realization that there were people here willing to kill him hit him hard.
“Oh, man,” Frank said, breathing quickly like he was trying not to cry. “This is bad, this is so bad. Gerard, can’t you, like, get the gun from him?”
Ray gave Frank a scandalized look, which almost made Bob laugh despite the situation. “Oh, hell no,” he said. “I don’t know if those guys are cops, or FBI agents or something, but that’s some seriously suspicious behavior right there, and none of us are going anywhere near them. Especially not you guys.”
“So, what?” James asked. “Do we wait for the cops, or what?”
“We gotta go,” Mikey said again, softer. “Please.” The look he was giving Ray would have melted Vlad the Impaler’s heart.
Ray wavered for a minute, chewing his lower lip and staring at the floor. Every muscle in Bob’s body, every nerve strained to do something, to grab the kids and run out the back door. But being impulsive wouldn’t help anyone now, so he waited, restraining the urge to shake Ray and tell him to make up his damn mind.
Finally, Ray sighed. “We gotta get the hell out of Dodge,” he said. “Those guys in the parking lot seem like bad news. James, did you drive today?”
James nodded.
“Okay, then, why don’t you grab Matt and go to the police station?” Bob’s face must have shown his confusion, because Ray said to him, “Matt’s the plumber. So, where were you guys headed?”
Before Bob could answer, Mikey pulled out his starcase to show Ray the map. “Here,” he said. “We’re trying to find more people like us.”
“Like you?” asked Ray, one eyebrow raised. Wordlessly, Gerard made the brochures Frank had knocked to the floor fly back to their holders. Ray’s eyes got huge, his mouth fell open, and he looked at Bob as if to say, “Did you just see that?” Bob shrugged. At this point, he was less concerned with Mikey and Gerard’s particular brand of weirdness than what the people in the parking lot were gonna do to them—and him—because of it.
Ray closed his mouth and made a decisive-sounding noise in the back of his throat. “Okay, then. Um, I’ve got a camper parked out back, so I guess I could give you guys a lift.”
Bob could scarcely believe what he was hearing. “Really?”
Ray shrugged. “I’m probably going nuts, but…you know, I think I might as well go with it. Beats being shot by secret agent men in the parking lot.”
“Well, come on then,” cried Frank, picking up his guitar as if he expected to have to use it as a weapon. “Let’s go before they come in here.”
A part of Bob protested at the idea of leaving his van—his van, for Christ’s sake, the one he’d bought with money he’d saved from his first couple of touring gigs, the one with his fucking sound stuff in the back and his iPod on the passenger seat. On the other hand, losing the van kind of paled in comparison to losing his life, and time was kind of of the essence here. So he gave Ray a tight smile, said “Thanks,” and started ushering the kids towards the back door.
“Weirdest day ever,” James repeated, darting into the bathroom. Bob couldn’t really disagree.
Part 7