The Rising(89)

“All the more reason she doesn’t need to hear you’re a suspect, on top of everything else.”

“Guess that makes me a fugitive too,” Alex said, and finally reached for the latch.

*

There was no one watching the rear of the property, and his parents always kept a spare key inside a fake rock mixed into his mother’s flower garden. Her roses seemed to droop, looking almost sad. Alex wondered if it was possible for plants to have some degree of consciousness and awareness of their surroundings. Not here, probably, but who knew on the other planets both like Earth and advanced far beyond it.

Under cover of darkness, Alex used the key to unlock the back door and enter the house where his parents had been murdered twenty-fours earlier. He expected it to smell stale and musty, even faintly of death. Instead, though, the only scents that lingered were from the last meals his mother had cooked. The thought tightened his chest and thickened his throat, making it hard to breathe.

Focus!

That was easy to do on the football field, where moments unfolded quickly and melded into the next. But inside the house in which he’d grown up, everything slowed and lingered. Time seemed to have frozen in the moments before his parents were attacked, beaten by the drone things that had come for him.

Alex padded through the house and up the stairs, careful to avoid looking at the living room, where he’d held his mother’s hand as she took her last breath. It felt stuffy, the air trying to choke him as he sucked it in.

He reached the top of the stairs without remembering the climb, stopping when the vision of himself as a seven-year-old boy trampling across the Oriental runner in his football uniform struck him hard and fast. Alex watched his younger version tossing a football lightly enough to dash under it and snatch the ball from the air. Remembered doing just that for hours, conscious now but not then of the concerned voices of his parents coming through their cracked open bedroom door.

*

“He could be hurt,” his father raised in the cautious tone his voice took on when expressing such concern. “Then what?”

“He’s a boy,” came his mother’s retort. “He deserves a normal life.”

“If he were normal, you mean. But he’s not. And we are fooling ourselves to think otherwise. You knew that when you took him, when you brought him home.”

“I knew nothing until we took him to Dr. Chu.” His mother’s voice hesitated here. “Why do you look at me like that? What is it you’re not saying?”

“Dr. Chu is gone.”

“Gone?”

“His office is abandoned, closed up. No trace of his nurse or receptionist. He must’ve gone back to China.”

“Without telling his patients?”

“His filing cabinets and desk drawers were empty too—emptied, we must hope, by him.”

“He never would’ve written anything down about Alex. He was too careful a man.”

“As I said, that is what we must hope.”

*

Alex wondered if he eased open their door now whether they might be standing there, continuing the conversation. He’d tell them never to let him play football, warn them about what was coming a whole bunch of years down the road. Give them the exact date and time, so they could be someplace else. He’d never thought much about why he could never remember going to the doctor, but realized now it must’ve been because of Dr. Chu’s sudden departure.

Alex continued watching the vision of his younger self tossing the football into the air and running under it. The next toss struck the overhead ceiling fan and light fixture, splaying shadows in all directions until it stopped swaying at the same time his mother peeked out from her bedroom to survey the scene.

Don’t hurt yourself, Alex.

Spoken with her eyes seemingly fixed on him instead of his younger self. Then the little-boy version of Alex in football regalia vanished, and the Alex of today pressed on toward his bedroom.

The lump in his throat thickened further as he eased his bedroom door open, stopping just short of flipping on the light. Couldn’t do that, couldn’t do anything that might alert the cop watching the house that someone was inside. There wasn’t much light, but it was enough to move to his bed and clamp a hand onto the sketchbook he kept between his mattress and box spring. He hadn’t drawn in it for a while, not since football had started up again over the summer. And because of that the visions he’d failed to sketch out on paper, a kind of relief valve, had begun haunting his dreams. Visions of vast machine-like assemblages strung into barely recognizable forms lurking at the edge of his consciousness.

Just like in the motel room, covering the walls with the ink of a couple Monterey Motor Inn pens he must’ve dug out of a drawer. Once drawn, the subject of the visions would retreat to the farthest reaches of his mind, where they could not hold him hostage to their whims.

Sliding the sketchbook out in the spill of light coming from a streetlamp beyond, Alex realized very few pages were still blank, his efforts having filled far more than he had recalled. He sat down atop his bed, soothed by the familiar squeak of the springs, and paged to the end as if to refresh his memory.

But none of the drawings touched any chords, as if he’d traced them in his sleep. Had he woken up a few mornings with what he thought might be ink staining his fingers? That thought did strike a chord but he wasn’t sure. And what did these drawings mean in any event?