The Rising(43)

“We need to figure this out,” she said.

“Figure what out?”

“All of this. Why it’s happening. How it may be connected.”

Alex’s gaze cheated toward the wall again. “To that?”

“You know what I always tell you about math.”

“To reason the problem out, to approach it logically.”

“Let’s try that,” Sam told him. She shifted slightly, bracing her hand against the bedcovers and inadvertently running her fingers across his thigh. “Where should we start?”

“You tell me.”

“No, you’re the quarterback.”

Alex frowned, making himself hold his stare on the wall. Sam realized he hadn’t slid sideways to put some distance between them, any more than he’d stiffened or recoiled at her touch.

“Okay,” he said, focus still locked on his drawings, “what does that remind you of?”

Sam followed his gaze. “The things we saw tonight, the drone things dressed as cops. Machines like nothing that are supposed to exist today. That must be where these sketches come from too. Somehow.”

“Except I’ve got a sketchbook at home I filled with the same kind of drawings before tonight.”

“Oh” was all Sam could think to say.

“And then there’s the ash man.”

“Ash man?”

“That’s what the guy I cut in half back home looked like to me. Like he was coated in ash.”

“How’d he show up the way he did?” Sam interjected. “Where’d he come from?”

“And how could he still talk when he should’ve been dead?” Alex added.

“But he didn’t bleed,” Sam remembered. “He didn’t even seem to be in any pain. And then he disappeared. Poof!”

“Like magic,” Alex picked up.

“Maybe exactly like magic.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was never there, not really. Like an illusion.”

“You can’t cut an illusion in half.”

“I said like an illusion. Like those fake cops were like robots.”

“Androids.”

“Huh?”

“What you call a combination man and robot,” Alex explained. “An android. Or a cyborg, like in Terminator.”

“What’s that?”

“A movie.”

“Oh, yeah. Never saw it. So the ash man wasn’t just a projection. He had mass of some kind.”

“You’re doing it again,” Alex said, rolling his eyes as he canted his body to face her.

“What?”

“Saying things in a way I don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand mass?”

“Not the way you said it. We need to make a new rule. Whenever you do that, I’m going to say ‘time-out.’ Do this with my hands,” Alex continued, making a T with his right fingers stuck into his left palm, turned downward.

“‘Mass’ meaning there was something physical about him, even though he wasn’t really there. And something was there, on the floor when he disappeared, remember?”

“Like a shadow.” Alex nodded.

“Maybe that’s what he was, a shadow. Maybe he was a projection, but a projection with some type of gaseous mass, some type of substance included in the mix.”

“But the androids weren’t shadows or projections at all. They had real mass.”

“Until you tore them apart.”

“I did,” Alex nodded, “didn’t I?”

“What was it the ash man said about them?”

“He called them drones.”

“That’s right,” Sam followed. “And something about them being hastily assembled.”

“Because whatever brought them to my house must have happened fast, must have been unexpected. Sudden.”

“Even though the ash man said something about looking for you for a long time, even since you were born. So what changed? Why tonight?”

Alex shuddered, the memories striking him like an electric shock. “The hospital,” he muttered.

“Huh?

“CPMC. My doctor getting murdered in his office. Somebody waiting in my room.”

“That doesn’t tell us what changed,” Sam said, repeating her original point. “How the ash man found you all of a sudden.”

“Maybe it does,” Alex told her.





43

BY THE NUMBERS

“THE CAT SCAN,” ALEX continued, shifting his leg now so it rubbed against Sam’s. “Payne ordered a second one, remember? He told me the first one showed a shadow, said not to worry. Know what happens when someone tells you not to worry?”

“You worry.”

“Of course. Guess I should have figured.”

“Figured what?” Sam asked, liking the feeling of their knees pressed against each other.

“That something was wrong. Because of the headaches … the ones I was having before the game last night But I was afraid, afraid of somebody telling me I couldn’t play football again.”

“Like the headache you had when I came to the hospital.”