Age of Power 1: Legacy (18 page)

Kular started to walk away when the police chief said, “Doctor!
What the hell are you talking about?”

Kular ignored his outburst. She turned and called out, “Mr.
Houseman, as I’m sending Mr. Hagen home, the ambulance is not required. Please
take me to the hospital. We are done here. And no doubt, you would like to see
how your son is.”

Turning back to the chief, she said, “As for your question,
Nathan Jessup told me what happened. He was in shock, and I wouldn’t consider
it a deathbed confession, but I got enough to tell you that he tried killing
Vaughn, missed him, and hit the light pole. Then he and the other survivor both
died. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return to work.”

Getting out, I joined my parents. Silently, we watched as they
secured the body bag in the ambulance. Once they closed the doors, Jim
Houseman went around and climbed into the front. Kular got in on the passenger
side. My hearing kicked up a notch, and then and I heard her order for him to
drive.

When he told her that the reporters were in the way, she
replied, “They’re vermin! Who cares?”

Houseman sounded bemused. “Please don’t make me answer that.”

The sirens started up. Reflexively, I clapped my hands over my
ears until it faded. I looked up to see the vehicle moving forward, reporters
scattering to get out of the way. Turning back, I saw that my parents were
looking at me with worry in their eyes. Whoops, they’d only heard the sirens at
a normal level.

I shrugged and said, “Sorry, guess I’m on edge.”

My dad came over and put an arm around my shoulders. “Well gosh,
son, I guess that’s normal after a quiet night of running for your life.”

My mom said, “Mark…”

He gave her an innocent look. “What?”

I didn’t want to hear any tension-breaking jokes
at the moment
. I said, “Mom, can we go to the hospital? I
want to be sure that Brand is okay.”

They looked at each other, then at me, and my mom said, “No,
honey, you're going to do what the doctor wants you to do. No arguments—I
don’t want to see you falling ill because you didn’t listen.”

“But—” I stopped. I was too achy to argue with her.

We left for home, ignoring the reporters. I ignored the look of
suspicion in Sinclair’s expression as we passed him. I let out my breath and
did my best to relax. My mom glanced back at me, giving me her best calming
smile. I smiled back. The ride home was silent.

At home, things relaxed, and I got a long, hot shower.
Afterwards, I finally got to rest. Dressed in a robe and underwear, I went
downstairs to find my parents watching the news. When the news story about what
happened with Nathan Jessup came up, I was happy to see that they got the story
about Nathan right. They mentioned the interviews I’d done, and I was surprised
at how gentle they were with how they talked about me. Guess I had some fans,
after all.
At least with the people on CNN.
I wasn’t
going to check the other networks.

After a while, I called the hospital, and Dr. Kular was kind
enough to take my call. She said Brand was going to be okay, but he’d be
spending the night there and he
’d be released
in the
morning. She also made it clear that she wanted me back in the hospital for a
checkup in the morning. She wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get sick.

We talked for a short bit, but she was busy, so after she agreed
to tell Brand that I would call, we ended the conversation.

I went to bed...but not to sleep. Throughout the night, every
attempt at rest turned
into a new nightmares
. Every
nightmare I had was one where I killed Nathan Jessup and his two friends in different
horrible ways. Worse, though, was the glimpse of some shadow that stood away
from it all, watching me in each awful scene. The weirdest of the dreams,
though, were scenes of Kular demanding what I knew. And then, she would fade as
Nathan appeared and died again. And still, a shadow watched.

With each deathly image, I kept waking up in a sweat, filled
with a sense of fear at what I’d done. Thinking on it, I felt lucky that I
didn’t yell. Something told me that it would have been a crushing experience
for my parents and me. Finally, as dawn approached, I quit trying to sleep and
pulled myself out of bed.

Upstairs, I checked the clock on the microwave. While I’d been
in bed for six hours, I knew that I had gotten a total of probably two hours of
sleep. Glancing outside, I saw the barest trace of light. I considered going
back to bed, but images of that car returned as soon as the thought came. With
a sigh, I grabbed some cereal and had an early breakfast. Barely awake, I
spilled the milk a couple of times and stubbed my toe on one of the dining room
chairs. At least that helped me wake up. Pain always did that.

To my annoyance, I found that we were out of sugar. Drat it all;
I so wanted sugar on my cornflakes. But sugar or not, I ate. After two bowls, I
started to feel awake enough to go to the couch and watch television. Or that
was the plan. I started toward the living room, but I stopped when my foot hit
something near the stairs. Kneeling, I hissed, worrying at I saw what was on
the floor. The flash drive that BJ had given me had somehow fallen out of my
clothes. I quickly looked it over, relaxing only when I found that there were
no cracks in the casing.

I almost dropped it again when I felt the creepy, yet familiar,
feeling of someone looking at me. I shivered as the feeling intensified. The
image of the figure in the shadows from my dreams returned, and I had to take a
deep breath to keep from throwing the drive. Somehow, I 
knew 
it
was the cause of this feeling. Finally, though, said feeling died, and I rushed
over and put the flash drive on the dining room table. This was getting
ridiculous. Having powers was freaky enough, but being haunted was just too
over the top.

But thanks to that, I was now fully awake. Pulling away from the
table, I stared at the drive. It took a few minutes for me to touch the thing
very, very lightly. Nothing happened, and, taking a deep breath, I wrapped it
in a napkin and took it down to my bedroom to drop it into a storage box.

I all but ran out of the bedroom and had to stop myself before I
tripped on the stairs. I was almost in a full panic. And, given what I’d done
the day before, I did not want to do anything that could cause more damage. So
I stood in the middle of the basement, taking in what had just occurred. The water
heater kicked on. The house creaked slightly. The basement stayed the same.
No ghosts.
But I needed sound, voices, silly stuff to break
the tension this little incident had built up.

I thought about it and muttered, “Yup, I need mindless
entertainment. Toons it is!”

For the next couple of hours, I became a proverbial couch
potato, watching the Cartoon Network. It helped. When it came to getting past
worries and such, there was nothing like mindless cartoons with fluffy
characters to help sludge the brain. I’d be watching this schlock until I was
an old man. I was calm by the time I heard creaking floorboards upstairs. I
watched for my parents to come down.

“When do we tell him?” I heard my dad ask. I winced, but at
least this time there wasn’t any pain. The subtle feeling of the buzzing nerves
had returned, though. Or maybe it had been there all this time and I was just
getting used to it. Didn’t matter; it was connected to what was happening with
my hearing, and now, my voice.

I tried not to listen in, but couldn’t stop hearing my mom
answer him. 
“Probably now would be a good time to tell him. I know it’s
a big thing, but we were planning on telling him last night, after all.”

I sighed. My dad was leaving. I was wrong about how they had
been getting along. Damn, so much for moving past the divorce. I supposed
I should have been glad that they hadn’t said anything last night. On top of
Nathan trying to run me down and me…changing, it would’ve been one hell of a
letdown on my birthday.

Hearing the stairs creak, I turned off a cartoon about a dumb
alien invading Earth. I was sad to do it, since I liked that episode. Ah well,
no lemony fresh victory for me. I waited for my parents to come down the stairs
to disappoint me with their announcement.

My mom and dad came down at the same time and stood in front of
the couch. My mom sat down as I made room for her while my dad stayed standing.
Great, I’d been here before. I had been young when the divorced had happened,
but I still remembered dad doing the same thing back then. Joy, this wasn’t
going to be any fun. A part of me wondered why everything on the planet had
decided to dump on me on my birthday.

“Vaughn, your dad and I have been talking. He came back
when Yama happened and he stuck around since. You’ve noticed that, I’m sure,”
my mom began.

I looked at them as my dad spoke up, giving me the expected
line. As I said, I’d been through this before.

He said, “Son, you know that we had a lot of issues when we
divorced. But putting all the problems aside, we realized that we were better
as friends than a married couple.” Yep, he was following the usual script. A
couple differences in the words, but it was close to what I’d heard before.

My mom reached up and took my dad’s hand. I saw it and looked at
the two hands. Something was off. Then my mom smiled and said, “But we’ve both
come to realize that more things have brought us together than have pushed us
apart.”

Wait a second
,
this wasn’t in the script
. My eyes narrowed. My
suspicions deepened when my dad got the same goofy smile on his face as my mom
had. Things went way off script when my dad leaned down, put his hand on my
shoulder, and said, “And Yama certainly showed us that things are just too damn
fragile. I've learned that even the strongest things—family, life, and love—are
garbage without having someone to be there for you, and you being there for
them.”

“Um, okay,” I said with riveting intelligence. This was getting
strange. Now my parents were acting like—well—parents. No, it wasn't that, it
was something worse. Gods, they were acting as if they were…in love.
Eww!

My mom said, “We realized that we were starting to fall into the
same trap that led us to divorce in the first place. So we looked at our
behavior over the last few months. Vaughn, we realized that we still loved each
other. Honey, we’re getting remarried.”

“Really?
 Not a
joke?” I asked. My mom smiled her happy smile.

My dad ruffled my hair. People liked doing that, I’d noticed. He
said, “No, not a joke. In fact—and this is a ways off—I want you to be my best
man at the wedding.”

My mouth worked, but I was having trouble saying anything. I was
speechless. It took a moment, but I grinned, at last, and said, “Damn straight!
That way I get to tackle my old man if he runs!”

“Hey!” he said in mock outrage.

For a while, I forgot what had happened the day before as we did
the family togetherness thing. Together, we made up a large breakfast with
pancakes, bacon, and eggs all but flying to the dining room table. While doing
that and then while eating the food, we started throwing out ideas about how
they wanted the wedding to go.

They wanted the ceremony in the spring, but it was getting too
late for that. I suggested sometime in May, but that was still too soon. No
other date sounded right, though, so we began to list off locations such as
churches or parks. Then I watched as they considered the list of people to
invite. I think by the time breakfast was over, we had settled on sometime this
year for the wedding, somewhere in Iowa, and half the town as guests.
All in all
, it wasn’t a bad list of ideas worked up in only
the first hour of planning. It just needed a little tweaking. Talking about
invitations reminded me of someone to call.

So I asked, “Can I tell Brand? Please?”

My parents looked at each other. My mom said, “Can Brand keep it
to himself for a little while? We want to tell Karla and James ourselves later
this morning…”

I thought about it. That kind of humor was right up his alley.
He’d do it in a heartbeat, and then he would laugh his ass off after Jim and
Karla heard the news. I nodded. But I held off for while longer to give Brand a
chance to wake up. And, to tell the truth, I found I wanted to be with my
parents and not just run to hang out with Brand or other friends, 
like
 I might on a normal day.

It hit me that they had been right about Yama. It had made
things clear for me, as well. Family was too important and precious to take it
for granted now. I had often wondered how things would change when a whole
world saw something like Yama happen.

I was as happy as
anything
as I had
ever been, and all the worries fell away as I called Brand. To my surprise, Dr.
Kular answered his room phone.

I chuckled in good humor, and then said, “Wow. Doc, are you
doing a full twenty-four hour shift?”

Her voice was taut. Hearing the edgy-sounding tone in her voice
blew my mood a little.

What she said next destroyed it. 
“Actually, yes, I’m
sorry to tell you, Vaughn, but Brand died last night.”