All for One (17 page)

“I told you: Guy died.”

“How did he die?”

“He got hit over the head.”

“Who hit him over the head?”

Jeff’s expression feigned a careless ignorance. “I don’t know, but when you find them will you thank them for me?”

Dooley stood and spun the chair back around, pushing it under the table.

“You don’t want to talk anymore?” Jeff asked.

“You were the one who wanted to talk,” Dooley said. “I’m done listening.”

He left the library, turning left in the main hall. His footsteps echoed sharp in the long, empty space. Outside the snow was still light, settling earthward at a gentle angle, the wind surprisingly gentle but threatening. Dooley walked through the winter feint to where he’d parked on the street.

Once inside the Blazer, he saw an envelope tucked under one wiper.

*  *  *

Mess cats
, Caroline Hool thought to herself, looking at the pieces of crumpled paper scattered around the computer desk in their living room.
Boys were most definitely mess cats.

Not that her two little girls were above the ability to make clutter where an instant before there was none. But her Bryce—whew! Give him a tablet of paper and something to write with and watch the mess be born. He’d write his stories, then type them into the computer, and as he finished entering each page he’d tear the longhand version from the tablet, ball it up, and blindly toss it toward the waste basket she’d made sure was right next to the computer desk. Right next to it! And still he missed.

And so her routine was unbroken. Every few days she’d pick up what her son had produced and discarded (his own version of the artistic process, she figured), and wriggle her hand between the desk and the wall to feel for the wads of paper that had really gotten away. And once she’d gathered the strays she would pile them on the desk, sit down in the chair, and open each compacted sheet, pressing them flat as best she could beneath her palms.

The truth be told, she didn’t mind her son’s messiness that much. In its own way, that trait allowed her to know just that much more about him. He would never let either she or her husband read any of his stories. The only time he’d had to was near the end of the last school year when one of his stories,
Green Glass
, was picked as a ‘Distinguished Achievement’ by a panel of teachers.
Distinguished Achievement
, she repeated in her head, remembering the four pages, neatly typed, mounted to a board and displayed for an entire month in the display case just inside the school’s main entrance. Four pages about a boy who finds what he thinks is a huge green diamond, but learns later on that his diamond is only a lump of shiny, melted glass. A story about broken dreams, Caroline Hool thought. About more, she had feared.

Reading it through the display case glass, she recalled the blend of pride and sadness that rolled down her throat in a warm ball. And she knew that her little boy, her Bryce, still had not let himself believe that this family was
his
family. Not a temporary family, the kind that was paid to feed him and see that he did his homework. A
real
family. A
forever
family.

She suspected then, as she still did, that he still felt ‘adopted’. It was going to take more time. He had come far in the four years he’d been with them, particularly the last year. And Caroline Hool knew what was behind that recent spurt of progress: the same thing that was behind his writing.

‘Children sometimes need to express things, Mrs. Hool. In their own way. Maybe just to themselves, to let them out. This could be Bryce’s way of doing that.’

That was what his teacher had told her during a parent conference near the beginning of Bryce’s fifth grade year, when she’d inquired about her son’s sudden interest in writing. The same teacher who had encouraged him to put pen to paper. The same one who had peeled back more of the thick skin with which Bryce had cocooned himself, revealing, little by little, the child he was meant to be.

And so she sat quietly, the girls napping in their bedroom, and let her eyes sample the wrinkled pages. The stories her boy wrote. Prying? Maybe. But she needed this. Until he could tell her things, until he could freely share of his feelings, this was almost all she had of his inner self. These stories were his dreams.

Sometimes his nightmares.

But not this one. The one with Commander
Zaxar
. Caroline Hool remembered previous pages of this story. The Sun something, she thought. Quite a long story, really. And, most wonderful of all, it was pure, uncompromising fantasy. Ardent escapism. A shining knight in outer space defending the helpless against evil. A timeless theme in a fantastic setting.

Caroline Hool grinned eagerly as she leaned close to the desk and put the pages in order, then started reading. Yes. She remembered this part. It was picking up where the last scraps had left off. On a satellite high above a threatened earth.

The drone shop, where the satellite’s robot workers came day and night to have their energy packs recharged, was dim and dank. It reminded Commander Zaxar of the swamps of Maxa One after the twin suns had set. But in the swamps he only had to worry about the Glow Serpents. Glorified snakes! he thought. A near miss from a laser pistol would make them slither off to their submerged burrows. Yeah, the Glow Serpents were easy.

He wished there were Glow Serpents here. Not the Death Knight.

His wish was answered clearly and horrifically by a
burst from a laser
laser burst that passed by his right ear and punched a fat hole in a steam pipe ten yards behind him. Mist screamed from the
broken
ruptured pipe.

Commander Zaxar dove behind a tall mound of scrap metal. He peeked through spaces in the heap of old drone parts, but the far side of the drone shop was dark. As dark as the Grave Caverns on Thelos Antara. Dark and still.

Then, above the
high
shrill hiss of the escaping
steem
steam, Commander Zaxar heard it. That sound he would never forget. The same sound he heard the last time they met face to face. The Death Knight, somewhere in the shadows, laughing.

Laughing.

Her eyes had devoured the first page. She paused, impressed. Of course it was a child’s story, full of whimsy, superlatives, and new synonyms (it was no surprise, she thought, considering the thesaurus her son had asked for at the beginning of the school year), but it was his. It was part of him. Part of her son that she, for now, had to steal glimpses of. Someday, she prayed, maybe soon, she would know him openly.

When he was ready, she told herself, and continued on.

He was close, Commander Zaxar knew. Even if he couldn’t see him, he knew the Death Knight was close. Out there in the black
ness
recesses of the drone shop. Waiting for him to make his move. Waiting for him to dash for the door to the satellite’s reactor tunnel, knowing that in there was the only way for Commander Zaxar to shut down the power to the satellite’s tractor beam. The beam that was, even this split second, pulling the earth slowly out of its orbit and sending it surely toward the hot, burning sun. The Death Knight
new
knew this. He knew this was the only way in, and that the Commander would come. This was to be there final battle.

Fine, Commander Zaxar said to himself. If that was what the Death Knight wanted, that was what he would have.

The Commander rolled clear of the cover he’d
taken
sought and fired in the direction of the laughter. Laser bursts lit up the far side of the drone shop, and for
a split second
an instant he saw his enemy.

The Death Knight raised his laser pistol and fired back at Commander Zaxar. He missed, and fired again as the Commander
rolled
somersaulted across the drone shop, firing back with each tumble. The Death Knight moved also and kept firing himself. Before long the drone shop was a black, steamy room lit by laser bursts racing between Commander Zaxar and the Death Knight.

And, as suddenly as the fire
bega
erupted, it stopped.

Commander Zaxar looked at his smoking laser pistol. He shook it, hit it against his leg, and pulled the trigger. But there was nothing left. He was out. Out of ammo. And clean out of spare power cells.

The Commander looked up quickly, across the room to where his enemy stood in the glow of a crate
burning
set ablaze by a laser burst. The Death Knight held his own laser pistol at his side, useless as the Commander’s. He looked at it and tossed it aside.

Then he began to laugh again.

Yikes, Caroline Hool thought, a corner of her lower lip mashed between her teeth. This was...wow. She’d read pieces of this story— it was called the
Sun Beam
, she remembered now —and liked them, but this ‘installment’ had something extra. Something... Something...

...that she couldn’t put her finger on. Like something was...propelling the story. The words.

And then there was that laughing. The Death Knight hadn’t done that in any of Bryce’s earlier installments.

She slid the page just finished aside and read on, her pleased, plastered grin tempering ever so slightly.

Commander Zaxar saw his enemy coming closer, and saw him pick something up from the scraps on the drone shop’s floor. It was a pipe as black as the Death Knight’s own armor. Liquid dripped from it in long, slimy globs. He held it high and spun it like a baton.

And he laughed.

The Commander felt around his feet and found a
twisted
jagged piece of metal. He took it in his hand and held it tight like a sword and stood to face his enemy.

The Death Knight kept coming closer, taking slow steps. And laughing.

Commander Zaxar moved to his left, ducking
below
beneath a row of pipes hanging from the drone shop’s ceiling. His enemy was getting close now. With each step he looked bigger, meaner, darker. And he laughed louder.

The Commander’s blood boiled. His hand
held
gripped the
piece
length of scrap he had and raised it high in the air.

The Death Knight just laughed louder.

And when they were almost close enough to do battle with their weapons, when the Death Knight, big, powerful, and mean, could have taken one swing with his pipe and done
the Commander
his nemesis in, Commander Zaxar swung his weapon. But not at the Death Knight. Not yet.

The length of scrap in his hand struck the row of pipes hanging from the ceiling and cut into one of them.
Steam
A fountain of steam shot from the broken pipe and sprayed over the Death Knight. The steam worked its way through the joints of his armor like no laser blast ever could, filling his
armor
protective suit with a burning mist.

The Death Knight stopped laughing and started screaming. He fell to his knees, dropped his weapon, and pulled his helmet off. His face, one that might have been human a long time ago, was covered in oozing blisters. He cried in
pain
agony and looked up at his nemesis.

There was a tractor beam to shut off, but the Commander had something else to do first. He raised his weapon high over his head and laughed. Then
I
brought
......

Caroline Hool’s eyes were dragged back on the page, like eyes passing an accident on a small town road and drawn to it in the fear that someone in the mangled mass of steel might be a friend, or a loved one. Her eyes zipped back worriedly to that one word. The one her son had properly crossed out. ‘I’.

‘I’.

It was an odd mistake to make. But just a mistake.

She lifted the page from the desk and her eyes began to travel through the words again, forward, and with each line,...

(Just a mistake)

...with each crossed out mistake,...

(Oh, Bryce...)

...a fear crept into her chest from a cold place and laced long, threatening fingers around her heart.

The offending page trembled with her hand.

Mistakes?

She put the page back upon the desk and stared at it. Her heart chugged mercilessly, and did not slow until she looked away.

Her eyes averted, Caroline Hool put all the pages she’d read into a tidy, wrinkled stack, folded them again and again, and went tentatively to the kitchen. She stopped where the carpet became tile, moved on, stopped again at the stove, the thick, springy fold of pages cupped in her hands like an abandoned chick pushed from its nest by a careless mother. She chanced a look at it again, then let her eyes be drawn to the far side of the kitchen, to the squat, blue plastic wastebasket sitting empty by the mudroom door.