The Speed of Sound (Speed of Sound Thrillers #1)(71)
CHAPTER 64
West Forty-Fourth Street, New York City, May 27, 6:27 p.m.
Eddie looked scared. He had no idea how far he had walked, or for how long. He had just been walking to “nowhere in particular,” which he still found to be a very peculiar destination.
He had given up trying to find the exit pass that he was supposedly given by the Carnegie Hall security guard, because he had no idea what the pass looked like. Eddie also didn’t know why the man had locked him out of the fabled concert hall. It was all very confusing, and it made him feel uncomfortable, which was never a good thing.
Immediately after being locked out of the hall, he had trouble breathing. Then his vision became blurry. He put his hands on his knees because he thought he might fall over. But as his world started spinning and he was on the verge of slapping himself, something unexpected happened: Eddie imagined himself becoming completely helpless in this massive city of strangers. And the thought so terrified him that it somehow helped him to calm down. Because there wasn’t anyone around who would help him. No doctors. No nurses. No anyone. Worst of all, no Skylar. He could relax when he was once again with her, but not until then. For the time being, he knew he needed to help himself. So he did. Counting footsteps, mapping the city visually, as well as acoustically. He differentiated the great many SOUNDS being produced all around him, and he intended to catalog them all from memory at the earliest possible opportunity. He was going to need a lot more notebooks.
There was no way Eddie could recognize what a developmental leap he had taken: Eddie was in control of himself. Not completely, but enough so to manage. He was on his own, and he was doing okay. It wouldn’t last long. It couldn’t. But these were some of the most important minutes of his life.
He was surprised to realize he had become surrounded at an intersection by a group of elderly people who had just gotten off a bus labeled “Skyways.” He didn’t understand why a bus, which traveled on the ground, would be called Skyways. An airplane, maybe, or even a helicopter, but not a bus. It made no sense.
The old people were waiting to cross the street when Eddie remembered what Detective McHenry had said: “Find the largest group of tourists you can and stay in the middle of them.” So that’s what Eddie did. He wasn’t sure that these people were tourists, and was about to ask one of them, when he remembered that they were strangers. Mostly because he wasn’t sure what else to do, Eddie stayed within the group until they arrived at a theater where a musical called Chicago was being performed. Why a group of tourists would come to New York to see a musical called Chicago was another thing that made no sense to Eddie. Is there also a musical called New York being performed in Chicago? The world was so confusing.
In any event, a heavyset woman in a yellow vest was handing each of the senior citizens a ticket that allowed them to enter the theater for the musical’s next performance. The woman in the yellow vest did not hand Eddie a ticket, so he was not allowed to enter with them.
Alone once again, Eddie looked for another group to stay in the middle of. The next group he saw consisted mostly of men in dark business suits with either red or yellow ties. He had no idea what the significance of their tie colors was, but guessed each color must refer to a particular type of job. In Harmony House, different types of employees wore different types of outfits. The nurses wore tan. The cafeteria workers wore blue. The doctors wore white. Dr. Fenton sometimes wore a tie, but there was no consistent pattern to the colors of them. Eddie would have noticed if there was.
This particular group walked much faster than the older group from the Skyways bus. Eddie wanted to ask them to slow down, but didn’t speak to them because it wasn’t safe. He observed them, finding it curious that none of these men talked to each other. The old people in the other group didn’t stop talking to each other the entire time he was with them, but all of these men talked into devices to people who were somewhere else, or typed on devices with their thumbs.
Eddie had never talked on a mobile phone, or typed with his thumbs. He had never sent a text message or an email, never updated a social-media page. He understood that these things existed and more or less how they worked, but it was strictly against Harmony House policy for patients to contact the outside world without permission. He had asked Dr. Fenton on numerous occasions, but the doctor always said the same thing: there were a lot of bad people out there, and the only way Eddie could be protected was to prevent the bad people from getting to him. He looked at those around him, wondering which of them were the bad people. Some of them? All of them? How could he tell? It was all very scary.
His world started to spin as Eddie became increasingly uncomfortable. New York City was too loud and too crowded and too different from Harmony House. He didn’t belong here. He wanted to go home, but didn’t know where Skylar was. He was surrounded by strangers, and Eddie knew he shouldn’t be alone. It wasn’t safe. Something bad could happen. He might get hurt, and the thought of that frightened him. There were so many ways a bad person could hurt him. He knew that people got robbed and stabbed and raped and murdered and tied up and tortured, all the time. None of these things ever happened inside Harmony House. He had only read about them, or watched them on television. These were things that only happened in the outside world, which he was now in the middle of. And it suddenly all became much too much.
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