The Boy from the Woods(22)

“Hey there,” Gray Hair shouted to Wilde. “Nice fence hop.”

“Thanks.”

“Please keep your hands visible at all times.”

“I’m not armed.”

“We can’t let you go any farther.”

“I don’t have any interest in going any farther,” Wilde said. “I’m here for my godson, Matthew Crimstein.”

“I understand. But we have a policy.”

“Policy?”

“All the minors who entered tonight had to inform us of how they were leaving,” he began, the very voice of reason. “We clearly explained to them that no one is allowed in unless they are specifically invited or properly vetted. Matthew Crimstein came in with Mason Perdue. That was who Matthew told us he would be leaving with. Now you show up unannounced…”

He spread his hands, not only the voice of reason but the very essence of reason. “Do you see our dilemma?”

“So contact Matthew.”

“We have a policy about not disturbing social gatherings.”

“Lots of policies,” Wilde said.

“Helps keep the order.”

“I want to see my godson.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible at this time.” The gate behind him opened. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening.”

Gray Hair might have smiled.

“I’m going to ask you one more time.”

“Matthew texted me to pick him up now. So that’s what I’m doing.”

“If you’ll just go back to the other side of the gate—”

“Yeah, again, that’s not happening.”

The big guys didn’t like Wilde’s attitude. They furrowed their rather enormous brows. Dyed-Thor turned to Gray Hair, hoping for permission to take this to the next level.

“You have no legal standing, Mr. Wilde.” The use of his name threw him, but only for a millisecond. He’d shown his driver’s license at the gate. “You’re not the boy’s father, are you?”

Gray Hair smiled. He knew the answer, more specifically than just the part about Wilde being Matthew’s godfather, which meant somehow he knew the history.

“More to the point, you’re a trespasser who illegally scaled our security fence.”

They all took a step closer. Wilde stared straight ahead, at the leader, but using his peripheral vision, he could see Thor sidle a little closer, hunching down like he was some sort of invisible ninja. Wilde didn’t shift his eyes.

Gray Hair said, “We would be within our rights to meet your threat with physical force.”

So they were there now, all of them, standing on the same narrow precipice off which so many men over the entire course of human history had slipped and then plunged into bloody violence. Wilde still didn’t believe that they would go there, that they would risk a big incident which might make the news or social media and awaken whatever controversy had finally quieted down. But you never know. That was the thing with the precipice. It was slippery. The best-laid plans do indeed go awry.

Man may be evil or good, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that man rarely considered the consequences of his actions.

In short, man was often just plain stupid.

That was when it all changed.

At first, the change was noticed only by Wilde. For scant seconds, the knowledge was his and his alone. Two seconds, maybe three, no more. Then, he knew, this advantage—and the change would be, he hoped, an advantage—would be null and void.

Wilde felt what he had come to know as The Disturbance.

There were those who called it an omen or a harbinger or a premonition, something that gave his already heightened capabilities a supernatural undertone. But that wasn’t it. Not really. Over the millenniums, man has adapted both for better and worse. A recent example: Navigation GPS. Studies show that parts of our brain—the hippocampus (the region used for navigation) and the prefrontal cortex (associated with planning) are already changing, perhaps even atrophying, because we now rely on GPS navigation. That’s happened in a few years. But take the whole spectrum of mankind’s history, how we sat in caves and forests, sleeping figuratively with one eye open, no protection, our primitive survival instinct in overdrive, and then think of how that has softened and eroded over the years with the advent of homes and locked doors and civilization’s give and take. But Wilde didn’t have that. From the time he could remember, Wilde grew up with those primitive impulses awakened. He understood before he could articulate it that a predator could attack at any time. He learned to sense it, to be attuned to any sort of Disturbance.

You still see this in nature, of course, in animals with supersensitive hearing or smell or sight, who flee before the danger gets too close. Wilde had this ability too.

So he’d heard the sound. No one else had. Yet.

It was just a rustling. That was all. But someone was running toward them. More than one probably. Someone was in danger and sprinting fast. Someone else was giving chase.

Without so much as glancing away from Gray Hair, Wilde glided a little closer to Thor. He wanted to be as close to the armed man as possible.

A second later, no more, Wilde heard the scream: “Help!”

Matthew.