The Meridians(79)

It was a moment of supreme visual clarity. The other Kevin, the one that had been stuttering, looked at Scott and Lynette and, with a voice that was both strong and apparently untouched by the problems that plagued him as an autistic child, looked at them both and then spoke.

"Gray man is here."





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37.

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"Run!"

The words flew out of Kevin - or the person or thing that had taken Kevin's place - in a jumble. Scott understood them as words - there was no doubt they were English - but he had trouble following them beyond the obvious fact that Mr. Gray was somewhere near. And on the hunt.

"Run!" repeated the other Kevin. "He's stronger than ever, younger than ever. He's managed to insert himself into this timeflow for longer this time, maybe long enough to kill you all."

Scott noted - with a disinterested, detached part of him, the part that was able to visit horrific homicide scenes and think of the evidence rather than, say, the dead family beside him - that Kevin had said that Mr. Gray had "maybe enough time to kill you all." "...you all." Not "us all."

"Who are you?" he demanded. "Where's Kevin? Where's Mr. Gray?"

"Kevin's safe right now. He's safe until I leave, and then he's going to have to take my place again to preserve symmetry."

Again, the words didn't make much sense to Scott beyond the fact that they were English, unaccented, spoken clearly and - most important in this case - without the halting, somehow almost otherworldly quality of the typical speech of an autistic child.

The boy started phasing again, turning from sleeping child to wakeful one, then back.

"I don't have enough power to shape the nexus to do more," said the other Kevin. "Get Kevin up and run!"

Then the other Kevin blinked, and suddenly their Kevin - the real Kevin, as far as Scott was concerned, the one that they had to keep safe and protect at all costs - was back in the bed, still sleeping, as though completely unaware of the miraculous thing that had just occurred.

A slamming sounded nearby. Scott looked at Lynette, who was staring at him suddenly with a look of shock and horror on her face that he knew probably mirrored the one on his own.

"Get Kevin up, quietly," he said.

Lynette immediately went to her son, leaned over to him and woke him with the words, "Kevin honey, it's a-okay and morning to be borning."

Kevin opened blurry eyes that had had far too little sleep to endure the rigors he had gone through and, Scott suspected, would have to go through again. The boy looked around. "It's dark. Not morning, not borning," he said, and tried to burrow back under the worn and weathered blanket and sheet set on the cot.

"This is bad," murmured Lynette.

Bang! There was another slam nearby, nearer than the first had been. And Scott had no doubt who was behind the noises.

"What's wrong?" he demanded. "Sounds like someone's going door to door in the building."

"Kevin's not ready to wake up," she answered.

"We don't have time for this," he said.

"You think I don't know that?" she fairly hissed back. "I'm trying to think of how to get him moving without starting him screaming." She paused as another slam sounded. "How long do we have?"

"Some of the rooms in the building are pretty cluttered, but there aren't many of them. Say a minute. And I'm being generous there."

Lynette sat and cooed nervously to Kevin, rubbing his elbow and arm lightly. "Kevin, honey, morning to be borning."

"No," answered his muffled voice from under the covers.

BANG!

"That was maybe two doors down," whispered Scott.

Lynette looked at him with panicked eyes. Scott, in a surge of hopeful inspiration, grabbed Kevin's laptop off the nearby desk where they had deposited it when arriving only a few hours before. He quickly turned it on, then called up the document that Kevin had been working on the night before - the complex mathematical equations that he had written out and then proclaimed, "It's all wrong."

Scott erased Kevin's last words, the repeated "It's all wrong"s, and replaced them with three simple words.

"Kevin, buddy, I found something," he whispered.

BANG!

Lynette looked at him with horror. "That sounded like next door to us," she whispered.

Scott nodded. He didn't want to talk for fear of letting her detect how terrified he was at this moment. Instead, he focused on Kevin again. "I found something," he said, more urgently.

Kevin didn't react, just laying there like a slug wrapped in thin cotton bedding.

They could hear slamming around as someone - Mr. Gray - rummaged around through the office next to theirs.

Scott, desperate, leaned down and whispered in Kevin's ear, "Kevin, Witten was wrong."

That did it. Kevin's eyes flew open, and he positively glared at Scott. Not for long - there was no way that the autistic child was going to spend more than a moment or two looking in another human being's eyes - but it was long enough. Scott thrust the laptop monitor into Kevin's line of sight.

Again the boy's eyes widened, but this time Scott could swear he detected just the slightest bit of rage in the kid's usually peaceful and openly good-hearted face. The boy immediately sat up and began typing without further preamble.