I Am Number Four (29 page)

“Coming here, to Paradise, it wasn’t by chance.” I don’t know what he means. “Read the letter.”

“Henri,” I say, and reach down and wipe the blood off his chin.

He looks me in the eye.

“You are Lorien’s Legacy, John. You and the others. The only hope the planet has left. The secrets,” he says, and is gripped by a fit of coughs. More blood. His eyes close again. “The Chest, John.”

I pull him more tightly to me, squeezing him. His
body is going slack. Breaths so shallow that they are hardly breaths at all.

“We’ll make it back together, Henri. Me and you, I promise,” I say, and close my eyes.

“Be strong,” he says, and is overtaken by slight coughs, though he tries to speak through them. “This war…Can win…Find the others…. Six…. The power of…,” he says, and trails off.

I try to stand with him in my arms but I have nothing left, hardly enough strength to even breathe. Off in the distance I hear the beast roar. Cannons are still being fired, the sounds and lights of which reach out over the stadium bleachers, but as each minute passes less and less of them are being fired until there is only one. I lower Henri in my arms. I place my hand to the side of his face and he opens his eyes and looks at me for what I know will be the final time. He takes a weak breath and exhales and then slowly closes his eyes.

“I wouldn’t have missed a second of it, kiddo. Not for all of Lorien. Not for the whole damn world,” he says, and when that last word leaves his mouth I know that he is gone. I squeeze him in my arms, shaking, crying, despair and hopelessness taking hold. His hand drops lifelessly to the grass. I cup his head in my hand and hold it close to my chest, and I rock him back and forth and I cry like I’ve never cried before. The pendant around my neck glows blue, grows heavy for just a split second, and then dims to normal.

I sit in the grass and I hold Henri while the last cannon falls silent. The pain leaves my own body and with the cold of the night I feel my own self begin to fade. The moon and the stars shine overhead. I hear a cackle of laughter carried on the wind. My ears attune to it. I turn my head. Through the dizziness and blurry vision I see a scout fifteen feet away from me. Long trench coat, hat pulled to its eyes. It drops the coat and takes off the hat to reveal a pale and hairless head. It reaches to the back of its belt and removes a bowie knife, the blade of which is no less than twelve inches long. I close my eyes. I don’t care anymore. The scout’s raspy breathing comes my way, ten feet, then five. And then the footsteps end. The scout grunts in pain, and begins gurgling.

I open my eyes, the scout so close that I can smell it. The bowie knife falls from its hand, and there in its chest, where I assume its heart must be, is the end of a butcher’s knife. The knife is pulled free. The scout drops to its knees, falls to its side, and explodes into a puff of ash. Behind it, holding the knife in her shaky right hand, with tears in her eyes, stands Sarah. She drops the knife and rushes over to me, wrapping her arms around me with my arms around Henri. I hold Henri as my own head falls and the world dims away into nothingness. The aftermath of war, the school destroyed, the trees fallen and heaps of ash piled in the grass of the football field and I still hold Henri. And Sarah holds me.

IMAGES FLICKER, EACH ONE BRINGING ITS
own sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst an impenetrable and sightless black and at best a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.

A warm summer day in the cool grass with the sun high in the cloudless sky. The air coming off the water, carrying the freshness of the sea. A man walks up to the house, briefcase in hand. A younger man, brown hair cut short, freshly shaven, dressed casually. A sense of nervousness by the way he switches his briefcase from one hand to the other and the thin
layer of sweat glistening on his forehead. He knocks at the door. My grandfather answers, opens the door for the man to enter, then closes it behind him. I resume my romping in the yard. Hadley changing forms, flying, then dodging, then charging. Wrestling with one another and laughing until it hurts. The day passing as time only can under the reckless abandon of childhood’s invincibility, of its innocence.

Fifteen minutes pass. Maybe less. At that age a day can last forever. The door opens and closes. I look up. My grandfather is standing with the man I had seen approach, both of them looking down at me.

“There is somebody I would like you to meet,” he says.

I stand from the grass and clap my hands together to knock away the dirt.

“This is Brandon,” my grandfather says. “He is your Cêpan. Do you know what that means?”

I shake my head. Brandon. That was his name. All these years and only now does it come back to me.

“It means he’s going to be spending a lot of time with you from here on out. The two of you, it means you are connected. You are bound to one another. Do you understand?”

I nod and walk to the man and I offer him my hand as I have seen done many times by grown men before. The man smiles and drops to one knee. He takes my small
hand in his right and he closes his fingers around it.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” I say.

Bright, kind eyes full of life look into mine as though offering a promise, a bond, yet I’m too young to know what that promise or bond really means.

He nods and brings his left hand on top of his right, my tiny hand lost somewhere in the middle. He nods at me, still smiling.

“My dear child,” he says. “The pleasure is all mine.”

I am jolted awake. I lie on my back, my heart racing, breathing heavily as though I had been running. My eyes stay closed but I can tell the sun has just risen by the long shadows and the crispness of air in the room. Pain returns, my limbs still heavy. With the pain comes another pain, a pain far greater than any physical ailment I could ever be afflicted with: the memory of the hours before.

I take a deep breath and exhale. A single tear rolls down the side of my face. I keep my eyes closed. An irrational hope that if I don’t find the day then the day won’t find me, that the things in the night will be nullified. My body shudders, a silent cry turning into a hard one. I shake my head and let it in. I know that Henri is dead and that all the hope in the world won’t change it.

I feel movement beside me. I tense myself, try to remain motionless so as not to be detected. A hand
reaches up and touches the side of my face. A delicate touch done with love. My eyes come open, adjusting to the postdawn light until the ceiling of a foreign room comes into focus. I have no idea where I am, nor how I could have gotten here. Sarah is sitting next to me. She brings her hand to the side of my face and traces my brow with her thumb. She leans down and kisses me, a soft lingering kiss that I wish I could bottle and save for all time. She pulls away and I take a deep breath and close my eyes and kiss her on the forehead.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“A hotel thirty miles from Paradise.”

“How did I get here?”

“Sam drove us,” she says.

“I mean from the school. What happened? I remember that you were with me last night, but I don’t remember a thing after,” I say. “It almost seems like a dream.”

“I waited on the field with you until Mark arrived and he carried you to Sam’s truck. I couldn’t stay hidden any longer. Being in the school without knowing what was happening out there was killing me. And I felt like I could help somehow.”

“You certainly helped,” I say. “You saved my life.”

“I killed an alien,” she says, as though the fact still hasn’t settled in.

She wraps her arms around me, her hand resting on the back of my head. I try to sit up. I make it halfway on
my own and then Sarah helps me the rest of the way, pushing on my back but being careful not to touch the wound left by the knife. I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and reach down and feel the scars around my ankle, counting them with the tips of my fingers. Still only three, and in this way I know that Six has survived. I had already accepted the fate of the rest of my days being spent alone, an itinerant wanderer with no place to go. But I won’t be alone. Six is still here, still with me, my tie to a past world.

“Is Six okay?”

“Yes,” she says. “She’s been stabbed and shot but she seems to be doing okay now. I don’t think she would have survived had Sam not carried her to the truck.”

“Where is she?”

“In the room next door, with Sam and Mark.”

I stand. My muscles and joints ache in protest, everything stiff and sore. I am wearing a clean T-shirt, a pair of mesh shorts. My skin is fresh with the smell of soap. The cuts have been cleaned and bandaged, a few of them stitched.

“Did you do all of this?” I ask.

“Most of it. The stitches were hard. We only had the ones Henri put in your head to go on as an example. Sam helped with them.”

I look at Sarah sitting on the bed, her legs pulled underneath her. Something else catches my eye, a small
mass that has shifted beneath the blanket at the foot of the bed. I tense, and immediately my mind returns to the weasels that sped across the gym. Sarah sees what I am looking at and smiles. She crawls to the bottom of the bed on her hands and knees.

“There’s somebody here who wants to say hello,” she says, then takes the corner of the blanket and gently peels it back to reveal Bernie Kosar, sleeping away. A metal splint goes the length of his front leg, and his body is covered with cuts and gashes that, like mine, have been cleaned and are already beginning to heal. His eyes slowly open and adjust, eyes rimmed with red, full of exhaustion. He keeps his head on the bed but his tail gives a subtle wag, softly thumping against the mattress.

“Bernie,” I say, and drop to my knees before him. I place my hand softly on his head. I can’t stop smiling and tears of joy surface. His small body is curled into a ball, head resting on his front paws, his eyes taking me in, battle scarred and wounded but still here to tell the tale.

“Bernie Kosar, you made it through. I owe my life to you,” I say, and kiss the top of his head.

Sarah runs her hand down the length of his back.

“I carried him to the truck while Mark carried you.”

“Mark. I’m sorry I ever doubted him,” I say.

She lifts one of Bernie Kosar’s ears. He turns and sniffs at her hand and then licks it. “So, is it true what
Mark said, that Bernie Kosar grew to thirty feet tall and killed a beast almost double his size?”

I smile. “A beast triple his size.”

Bernie Kosar looks at me.
Liar,
he says. I look down and wink at him. I stand back up and look at Sarah.

“All of this,” I say. “All of this has happened so fast. How are you handling it?”

She nods. “Handling what? The fact that I’ve fallen in love with an alien, which I only found out about three days ago, and then just happened to walk headlong into the middle of a war? Yeah, I’m handling that okay.”

I smile at her. “You’re an angel.”

“Nah,” she says. “I’m just a girl crazy in love.”

She gets up from the bed and wraps her arms around me and we stand in the center of the room holding one another.

“You really have to leave, don’t you?”

I nod.

She takes a deep breath and exhales shakily, willing herself not to cry. More tears in the past twenty-four hours than I have ever witnessed in all the years of my life.

“I don’t know where you have to go or what you have to do, but I’ll wait for you, John. Every bit of my heart belongs to you, whether you ask for it or not.”

I pull her to me. “And mine belongs to you,” I say.

I walk across the room. Sitting on top of the desk are the Loric Chest, three packed bags, Henri’s computer, and all the money from the last withdrawal he made at the bank. Sarah must have rescued the Chest from the home-ec room. I place my hand on it. All the secrets, Henri had said. All of them contained within this. In time I’ll open it and discover them, but that time is certainly not now. And what did he mean about Paradise, that our coming wasn’t by chance?

“Did you pack my bags?” I ask Sarah, who is standing behind me.

“Yes, and it was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do.”

I lift my bag from the table. Beneath it is a manila envelope carrying my name across the front of it.

“What is this?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I found it in Henri’s bedroom. We went there after leaving the school and tried to grab everything we could; then we came here.”

I open the envelope and pull out the contents. All of the documents Henri had created for me: birth certificates, social security cards, visas, and so on. I count through them. Seventeen different identities, seventeen different ages. On the very front sheet is a sticky note in Henri’s writing. It reads, “Just in case.” After the last sheet is another sealed envelope, across which Henri has written my name. A letter, the one he must
have been talking about just before he died. I don’t have the heart to read it now.

I look out the window of the hotel room. A light snow sifts down from the low, gray clouds overhead. The ground is too warm for any of it to stick. Sarah’s car and Sam’s father’s blue truck are parked beside each other in the lot. As I stand looking down at them a knock sounds at the door. Sarah opens it and Sam and Mark walk into the room; Six limps behind them. Sam hugs me, says he’s sorry.

“Thank you,” I say.

“How do you feel?” Six asks. She is no longer wearing the suit but is now dressed in the pair of jeans she wore when I first saw her, and one of Henri’s sweatshirts.

I shrug. “I’m okay. Sore and stiff. My body feels heavy.”

“The heaviness is from the dagger. It’ll eventually wear off, though.”

“How badly were you stabbed?” I ask.

She lifts her shirt and shows me the gash in her side, then a different one on her back. All told, she was stabbed three times last night, and that’s not to mention the various cuts along the rest of her body, or the shot that left a deep gash in her right thigh, now wrapped tightly with gauze and tape, the reason for her limp. She tells me that by the time we made it back it was too
late to be healed by the stone. It amazes me that she is even alive.

Sam and Mark are wearing the same clothes as the day before, both filthy and covered in mud and dirt with smatterings of blood mixed in. Both with heavy eyes as though they’ve yet to sleep. Mark stands behind Sam, shifting his weight uncomfortably.

“Sam, I always knew you were a wrecking machine,” I say.

He laughs uncertainly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say. “How about you?”

“Doing okay.”

I look over his shoulder at Mark.

“Sarah told me you carried me off the field last night.”

Mark shrugs. “I was happy to help.”

“You saved my life, Mark.”

He looks me in the eye. “I think every one of us saved somebody at some point last night. Hell, Six saved me on three separate occasions. And you saved my two dogs on Saturday. I say we’re even.”

I somehow manage to smile. “Fair enough,” I say. “I’m just happy to find out you’re not the dick I thought you were.”

He half grins. “Let’s just say that had I known you were an alien and could kick my ass at will, I might have been a little nicer to you that first day.”

Six walks across the room and looks at my bags atop the table.

“We really should get going,” she says, and then looks at me with implicit concern, her face softening. “There’s really only one thing left undone. We weren’t sure what you wanted us to do.”

I nod. I don’t need to ask to know what she is talking about. I look at Sarah. It’s going to happen much sooner than I thought. My stomach turns. I feel as though I could vomit. Sarah reaches out and takes hold of my hand.

“Where is he?”

The ground is damp with the melting snow. I hold Sarah’s hand in mine and we pass through the woods in silence, a mile away from the hotel. Sam and Mark walk in the lead, following the muddy footprints they created a few hours before. Up ahead I see a slight clearing, in the center of which Henri’s body has been laid out on a slab of wood. He is wrapped in the gray blanket pulled from his bed. I walk to him. Sarah follows and places a hand on my shoulder. The others stand behind me. I pull the blanket down to see him. His eyes are closed, his face is ashen gray, and his lips are blue from the cold. I kiss his forehead.

“What do you want to do, John?” Six asks. “We can bury him if you want. We can also cremate him.”

“How can we cremate him?”

“I can create a fire.”

“I thought you could only control the weather.”

“Not the weather. The elements.”

I look up at her soft face, concern written upon it but also the stress of time at our having to leave before reinforcements arrive. I don’t answer. I look away and squeeze Henri a final time with my face close to his and I lose myself to grief.

“I’m so sorry, Henri,” I whisper in his ear. I close my eyes. “I love you. I wouldn’t have missed a second of it, either. Not for anything,” I whisper. “I’m going to take you back yet. Somehow I am going to get you back to Lorien. We always joked about it but you were my father, the best father I could have ever asked for. I’ll never forget you, not for a minute for as long as I live. I love you, Henri. I always did.”