Chapter 68
THE MORE WE walked, the worse my father looked. I slowed down so he could keep pace with me.
“Everything okay, Daniel?” asked Dana.
“Yeah.” I glanced over at her. The scar still marred her cheek. Now my father was barely able to keep up with me. What was going on with my powers to create?
Both Dana and my dad were products of my imagination. Was my father’s deteriorating condition the result of my own deteriorating ability to generate his presence in the same way that Dana’s scar hinted at some serious flaw in my imagineering operating system?
“We need to move a little faster, sir,” Lieutenant Russell whispered to me.
Willy had finally spotted a patch of lush green foliage on the horizon. Some sort of oasis loomed one mile dead ahead.
“We need to get these men into the shade of those trees ASAP.”
I nodded. “Roger that.”
I turned to my father, whom only I could see.
Dad? We need to pick up the pace. Double-time it to those trees.
My father looked drawn and haggard. His eyelids kept drooping shut, like he was sleepwalking. I swear he had aged fifty years in the last fifty minutes.
Well, if you’re in such a dag-blasted hurry, go on without me, he snapped. I’ll catch up later.
He sounded crankier than the crabby old man on Alpar Nok who used to sit on a park bench and yell at me for squealing too loud in my zero-gravity crib. This wasn’t the real Dad I’d known, and it wasn’t the imaginary Dad I usually created. Something was seriously wrong.
“Willy?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Lead everybody into that grove. I’ll catch up with you in a few.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Get moving.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Willy called out, “if we push ourselves for one more mile, I guarantee we can peel off our boots in a beautiful oasis and tickle our toes in a cool, refreshing stream!”
“Hoo-ah!” the troops shouted as strongly as they could after climbing a mountain and crossing a desert. Chanting a running cadence, they trotted off after Willy, Joe, Dana, and Emma.
My father and I were all alone at the rear of the march.
“When we get to the oasis,” I said, “I’ll rest. Recharge my batteries. If I feel better, you’ll feel better.”
“It’s not an oasis,” my father grumbled. “It’s a jungle.”
“Well, it looks cooler than this desert plane.”
“It’s full of insects, Daniel. Bugs. I hate bugs.”
Of course he did.
When Number 1 killed my father and mother, he came at them in the guise of a giant praying mantis.
Was it any wonder my father had a thing about insects?