“You juust dount beeelieeeve the skyyyy can really faaaalll on yoooou, but guesss whoooot? It’s falllllling no wwwww. . . .”
I couldn’t figure out why they wanted to pick a fight with me, and I didn’t feel like hanging around to ask them. I scooped myself up and tried to run, but I was woozy and reeling from the thwack in the head. I staggered this way and that, and then another comet clown let go of his astrolabe, and it hit me in the small of the back. It was like getting stabbed. My knees folded, and I dropped again. I hit face-first and caught a chinful of fulgurite stickers. Fortunately, by then I had staggered to the edge of the road, and I fell into thick grass instead of against hard blacktop and rolled a few feet down the embankment.
I felt the way I imagine a caterpillar must when she’s closed into the fuzzy shroud of her cocoon. I could hear, and I could see a little—although everything had gone cloudy and out of focus—but I couldn’t feel my limbs, which were numb and boneless. All the thought had been knocked out of me. I wasn’t even in what you might call pain. I didn’t have enough sensation to feel pain.
They crowded in. I could see past them, too. The action had drawn the attention of the PTA mom pushing her shopping cart. She craned her head to see what was happening, her expression nervous but also excited.
The fat boy saw her looking and hissed, “Oh, man, oh, shit, we shouldn’t have done this right here, Sean, where people can see—”
“Shut up, Pat,” said the one who looked like Christ. Course the fat boy was named Pat. I’ve never seen anyone who was more Pat in his life.
Sean—Christ in a tinfoil gown—glanced up the embankment at the PTA mom.
“It’s for her own good,” he told her. “She’s crazy. We’re bringing her home to look after her. Right, Randy?”
The black kid who had vitiligo nodded with a frantic enthusiasm. “She gets like this when she’s off her meds. She thinks everyone’s after her!”
“Can’t imagine what gave her that idea,” the PTA mom said.
“You want her iPhone?” Randy gobbled. He had a querulous, jittery sort of voice. He picked my phone out of the dirt, dusted it off, and held it out to her. “It’s the new one.”
“The 7?”
“The 7 Plus! Take it. We just don’t want any trouble.”
“That’s right,” Sean said. “We’re doing what’s best for her—and for us. Same as you’re doing what’s best for you . . . even though the police might not see it that way. A cop might think you’re looting, when really you’re just surviving, aren’t you?”
Her face assumed a faintly sulky cast. “The people I took from aren’t going to complain.”
“No, they won’t. And this girl is mentally feeble and hysterical and needs looking after by her family. But some people might say we’re committing abuse, dragging her back home this way. It’s easiest to mind your own business, don’t you think?”
She didn’t reply for a moment but went on staring at the phone in Randy’s hand. “I always wanted to try the bigger one. But I bet you can’t unlock it.”
“Bet we can. It’s the one works off fingerprints,” Sean said.
He nodded at Randy, who bent down and grabbed my hand and squeezed my thumb against the sensor. The phone unlocked with an audible click.
Randy tossed it to PTA Mom, who caught it in both hands. In his nervous, twitchy voice, Randy said, “You’ll wanna reset the security right away, before it locks itself again.”
“Enjoy it,” Sean said. “Think different—we do!”
She laughed. “I can see that! Take care of the poor girl.” And she turned and puttered off, playing with my phone.
My insides hurt at the thought of losing it. It had all my text messages from Yolanda on it. She would send me pictures of the sky, big blue western skies with little lumps of white cloud in them, and she’d write: The cloud in the middle is my pet unicorn. Or: That cloud over the mountains is you hiding under a sheet. Once she sent me a picture of a mountain pool, a cloud reflected in it as if it were a mile-wide mirror, and texted: I want to hold you like the water holds the sky.
Seeing that woman wander off with my phone was worse than getting my head smashed in with an astrolabe. It was like wrapping Yolanda in her shroud all over again.
Randy, Pat, and Sean watched her go, with hunted, rascally eyes. You never saw a more demented-looking pack of weasels. I tried to move—to rise onto all fours—and just the thought of the effort pushed a sound out of me, something between a sob and a groan. That got their attention back. They circled me again.
“You know what the best thing would be, guys? Guys?” Pat said. He was the kind of huffy, breathless boy who’s always saying things that no one else listens to. “Guys? I think it would be easiest to kill this bitch. We could bang a nail into her temple. No one would ever know she didn’t die in the rain.”
“The Finders would know,” said Sean. “The Finders would see homicide in your mind and leave your quantum energy to fall into dissolution with all of the others who are unprepared.”
Or something like that. I’ve never had much of a grip on their cuckoo-bird theology. I think the Finders might be a higher breed of intelligence? And your soul, I guess, is your quantum energy? It’s hard to believe anyone could choke down Elder Bent’s fourth-rate Flash Gordon story. But humans are pack animals by nature and most will accept whatever they have to accept—wholly, enthusiastically—to keep an honored place in their tribe. Give a man a choice between reality and loneliness or fantasy and community, he’ll pick having friends every time.
“It’s not just the Finders we got to worry about,” Randy said, wiping a hand under his nose and sniffing. “She dragged Yolanda and Yolanda’s ma into the house across the street. You know, where the vampire kid lives.”
“Yeah, the Blakes,” said Sean. “Who cares about them?”
“Well, wouldn’t the woman wonder when she never hears from Honeysuckle again? I bet she’s expecting her to check in.”
“If Ursula Blake and her creepy little kid turn out to be a problem, then we’ll deal with them like we’re going to deal with her,” Sean said. “It’s not like we have to worry about getting locked up. Humanity will be extinct before the year is out. There’s not a prison in the world that can hold us, boys. We’ve got an escape tunnel that goes all the way to the seventh dimension!”