The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(141)
“Yesterday I had a snapshot premonition of you and me,” he told her. “We were sitting just like this, chatting away at midnight in our sweatpants and underwear.”
“Is that why you came down here?”
“No. This was somewhere else. Some house on an army base. You looked a bit older. My guess is that it’s still a good four years away.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. It’s nice to know there’s at least one future out there where you and I are still alive in four years. Still friends.”
Hannah glumly stared out the window, listening to the owls.
“Friends. Strange word to use for any of us. I can barely separate you guys from Amanda anymore. It’s like you’re all my siblings now. Even you, as screwed up as that sounds.”
The two of them sat in silence for another long moment. Hannah rubbed her eyes.
“You’re a good man, Theo. You’re a good man and I love you and I really hope you’re wrong about tomorrow. You don’t deserve it.”
The augur breathed a long sigh of surrender. It seemed a cruel joke of the universe that the easiest things to predict were the ones that couldn’t be prevented. The pain. The rain. The natural disasters. And yet he couldn’t help but disagree with Hannah’s last sentiment. The girl with two watches had attributed alcohol damage as a primary cause of his neurological crisis. That made it his fault, which strangely made it easier to accept. For once there was justice, there was balance, there was karma in the situation. Theo planned to wield it like an umbrella. Like Hannah’s screwed-up love, he’d carry the blame with him, all the way through the storm.
—
Everything happened as foretold. At 5:02 in the morning, the sky over Nemeth offered ten seconds of warning drizzle before coming down in sheets. Dawn arrived in the form of a hundred lightning flashes.
At 9:20, Theo glanced down at his eggs and noticed a fresh drop of blood, another warning drizzle. He pressed a napkin to his nose, then looked to his troubled friends.
“Shit.”
The pain hit him like a cyclone. His muscles turned to liquid and he fell out of his chair. By the time David carried him to the couch, he’d lost all sense of time and place.
Theo lay on his back, writhing on the cushions like an uneasy dreamer. He was only marginally aware of the conversations that occurred around him, the feminine hands that comforted him in turns. While Mia stroked his fingers with sisterly affection and Amanda tended to him with clinical diligence, it was Hannah’s intimate caress that brought him back to the present. He lifted the damp cloth from his brow and tossed her a bleary stare.
“What time is it . . . ?”
She checked the grandfather clock. “Quarter after one. How you holding up?”
“Worse than anything I ever felt. I wanna . . . I wanna die.”
Hannah squeezed his hand. “Oh, sweetie. Just hang in there. The pain won’t last.”
“It’s not the pain . . .”
“What do you mean?”
Amanda rushed into the room and pulled at Hannah’s shoulder. “Let me look at him.”
“Just a second. We’re talking.” She looked to Theo. “What do you mean? Are you having visions?”
“I’m not just seeing,” he moaned. “I’m feeling. I keep feeling you guys . . . dying. Over and over. I feel Zack’s blood all over me. God. I can smell it.”
He seized Amanda’s arm, his eyes red and cracked. “I can’t take it. You have to knock me out. I don’t care how you do it. Just knock me out. Please.”
Amanda rooted through their pile of store-bought painkillers, then fed him the one with the drowsiest side effects. He gradually drifted off to sleep. Judging by his somnolent moans and cries, it seemed the future followed him there.
The next forty-eight hours passed like weeks for the sympathetic Silvers. By the morning of Sunday, October 3, they were all as pale and unrested as Theo.
They sat around the living room in a dreary daze, watching David jab the fireplace with a metal poker. Hannah cradled Theo’s head in her lap as he twitched in restless half slumber. Nobody thought he was getting better.
Hannah spoke in a hoarse and weary rasp. “We need to do something. He can’t take another day of this.”
“I’ll go to the drugstore,” Zack offered. “See if there’s something else.”
Amanda curled up with Mia on the love seat, absently stroking her hair. “We’ve been there twice. It’s all the same weak stuff. He needs a prescription-strength remedy.”
“We’re back on this,” David complained.
“Yes, we’re back on this. I’ve made up my mind. I’m taking him to Marietta.”
Yesterday, during their umpteenth discussion of Theo’s plight, Mia shared the information that the girl with two watches had given her about the local health fair. Amanda confirmed by phone that it was still going on and that anyone was welcome to bring their untreated ailments.
Even as she’d broached the idea, Mia wasn’t sure it was a good one. David had a stronger opinion on the matter.
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me last time . . .”
Amanda sighed at him. “I heard you, David. I understand your concern. But a health fair isn’t the same as a hospital. There’s no reason to assume it’s being monitored.”