Jonah Havensby (40 page)

As he kept walking, he hunched over. His shoulders rounded and his skin turned from red to tan, and dense, dark hair sprouted in patches all over. He grew in size as his back widened. As he stepped one clawed foot in front of the escalators, he was fully Adam, the Ape-Man, who looked up at Jerrod and roared, a deafening sound that echoed through the entire mall.

Jerrod threw his side arm down at the beast below him and roared back, although it didn’t have quite the same impact. He grabbed the walkie-talkie that was positioned on the other side of his hip from his empty holster. “This is a general retreat. Repeat. General retreat. No man left behind. That’s an order.” Then he took off running down the second floor of the mall.

“What in the hell was that?” Doctor Wong said.

“Mom, get back. Both of you, get back.” Eric ordered. He grabbed Emma by the hand and moved well away from the cage.

Fortunately for them, Jerrod had come running in their direction, with an angry ape-man not far behind, although Jerrod was on the second floor and Adam was lumbering at top speed across the first in hot pursuit.

“Hey!” Eric yelled. “Down here!”

Adam saw them and moved even faster.

“Seriously. Move!” Eric demanded, and only then did Doctor Wong move Mrs. MacIntyre back into the doorway of the store.

Without stopping, or even missing a beat, Adam grabbed the gate and ripped the entire thing from its round tube-like container above the storefront like one might rip a paper towel off a roll. He swung it over his head and it crashed through another store window on the other side of the corridor, just as he bounded up, slammed one clawed hand into the tiled wall of the mall and swung himself up to the second floor.

It took both of their parents a moment to move after what they’d just seen, but now was not the time to question it. They both moved out and hugged their children. After a hasty reunion, Doctor Wong went back inside and retrieved a rather dazed Athena Stapleton who was now made worse by the billowing smoke inside the mall. Eric directed them toward one of the entrances that was not blocked by a vehicle.

By that time, however, they wouldn’t have had to worry. Both vehicles had already moved out, ignoring both the barrage of bullets fired from police officers and the parked vehicles in their way. The trucks were too large and barreled right through the blockade of police cars and they were armored, so not a single bullet hit its mark. The authorities, who had been on stand-by all night, were caught totally by surprise, but gave chase in the few undamaged vehicles.

Adam was just steps behind Jerrod as the Colonel swung into the stairway toward the roof and slammed the door behind him. Adam simply slammed right through it. As he was chased up more stairs, there were more doors that Adam treated the same way. They were nothing at all to him, but he was still a distance behind.

As he threw open the last door, Adam found himself on the roof of the mall and saw Jerrod charging toward a Blackhawk helicopter that had landed there. He gave chase again, but Jerrod just made it onto the rail of the helicopter as it was already five feet off the ground. By the time Adam got there, the chopper was too high to reach. As Jerrod hoisted himself inside, he gave the beast a final salute.

 “Back!” Adam howled and beat the rooftop. “Back!” He howled again louder. The sound vibrated through the silent snowy night. To the people below, it sounded like a sorrowful roar, full of pain.

A minute later, he was Jonah again. “Come back!” He was screaming, angry. “Come back!” he yelled over and over again. But after the fourth time, his voice broke. He could no longer be angry because he only had room for the loss. He had now lost his father twice, and the first was his doing. It all came crashing down. He fell to his knees sobbing, and then roaring in pain himself.

He looked around the dimly lit rooftop, broken and alone. He didn’t know if he had the strength to stand. The calm, breezy snowfall didn’t make sense in his roiling brain. He looked back and saw black smoke pouring from the rooftop stairway and he didn’t care.

After a few moments, the anger returned. He would find Jerrod. He would make him pay. Maybe he would find the other and let him work out his hate on the Colonel. He would have his father back. He silently promised all of this to his dad.

He stood up slowly. His head spun, not from the transformations, but from the edgy, thick emotion that filled him. He was exhausted and weak. He made his way to a fire escape at the back of the mall and climbed down.

Athena Stapleton was seated on the back of an ambulance wrapped in a blanket and getting checked out by an E.M.T. Doctor Wong proclaimed himself completely fit, but borrowed some medical supplies from that E.M.T. to check out Mrs. MacIntyre, who was also wrapped in a blanket, but leaning against the trunk of a police car.

On their way out of the mall, Eric spun a tale that they were taken from the dance just as their parents had been and they woke up three stores up at the athletic shoe store, but some kind of disturbance made their guard leave without locking them in, so they easily lifted the gate. Emma took in every detail and simply agreed with everything Eric said with an affirming nod. While they had a moment alone, she filled in details, like that he woke up first and she was afraid to leave the store but he talked her into it, and it was his idea to try his mother’s store for a way out. It was a story she felt they might have to tell more than a few times in the coming days.

Just as they had their story worked out, Jonah Havensby appeared, walking along the side of the mall, looking dazed and covered in ash.

“My dad’s in there!” He yelled at the top of his lungs. “My dad!”

The fire-chief alerted the six firemen who were inside fighting the fire as another E.M.T. moved toward Jonah with a blanket, but Emma was much closer. She ran to him and hugged him and he hugged her back.

“You weren’t with us,” she whispered. “You’re going to have to come up with your own story.”

He nodded into her shoulder, enjoying the feel of her long, black hair on his soot-stained face. His knees buckled and they both fell to the ground.

XXIV

They stayed most of the night, until the fire was under control. Jonah told the F.B.I., who showed up only shortly before the fire broke out, that he and his father were locked in La La’s Hair Salon but his father was unconscious when he made the decision to go for help out the backdoor, because he had used the backdoor at Vineyard Clothing before, but forgot that the door locked from the inside and he couldn’t get back in. He had been trying every door and that’s when he walked back around to this side of the mall where he found Emma.

The Sherriff approved Jonah going home with the MacIntyre’s for the rest of the night and Doctor Wong took Emma home. There would be more questions for everyone tomorrow and possibly the day after that.  The Federal authorities were not at all happy with the local police station’s handling of the situation.

For a week later, they were all questioned at length and recorded for the record. The story Emma and Eric told both together and then separately played out nicely. Both said they hadn’t seen Jonah or his father, but they hadn’t moved in the direction of the beauty salon.

Their parents were completely confounded by the situation or why any one of them would be taken by terrorists. The story came up about Doctor Havensby’s arrest warrant, which completely floored Mrs. MacIntyre. She told the authorities she had only spoken to the man a few times over the phone and that he seemed completely normal, if only a little hasty to get off the phone. Doctor Wong had never even heard of him. Athena Stapleton, who told all of her interviews from a hospital bed, said her statements about Nickolas Havensby had already been recorded the first time around and she hadn’t seen him since. She didn’t know Jonah, or any of the others involved. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In truth, she had been forcibly taken from her home, but artfully distanced herself from the entire situation claiming to have been dropping her youngest grandchild at the dance and having no other information or knowledge of the men who had taken her to the mall.

The F.B.I. explained that there was a television and a smashed wireless router at the scene and that both seemed to be jury-rigged into the emergency electrical system, but everything they found was stolen from inside the mall. They never mentioned a laptop. The armored vehicles were stolen property and not even a fingerprint was recovered when both were found at equidistant points on the opposite ends of town.

Mrs. MacIntyre insisted on being in the room while Jonah was being questioned, since he didn’t have a parent available. Barring that, she’d be more than happy to call her attorney. The authorities relented. Jonah wondered if they would spill his secret, but then he wondered if they even knew. They seemed far more interested in his father and seemed satisfied that he didn’t know anything about his father’s illegal activities. He told them the actual truth about growing up, even about living up on the highway turn-off, another shock for Mrs. MacIntyre.

He explained that his father made him promise never to tell anyone where they lived and that he only told Eric the truth a few days ago and that’s where they were when Eric got in trouble. Jonah realized the story fed into the government’s plot against his dad, but he couldn’t come out and say his father had been missing and he’d been wandering around town for months either. Mrs. MacIntyre proclaimed it a terrible burden to put on a boy.

When the authorities checked out the house and saw the destruction, they deduced that fire must be the way these terrorists cover their tracks. First at the house, and then at the mall. Since no body was found anywhere in the mall, their only conclusion was that Doctor Havensby was working with the terrorists for money. The newspapers made the same connections for weeks afterwards, until the investigation suddenly and mysteriously dried up again.

Yes, something had ripped the security gate from its hinges, but it happened so fast that no one could be sure what it was. Eric said he simply saw someone running down the hall and called out for help. He had no idea something would barrel through and tear the gate apart. But if he ever saw it again, he’d thank it. Strangely, that part of the story never made it to the press.

The F.B.I. played a game of cat and mouse with Mrs. MacIntyre for almost three weeks with regards to Jonah’s custody. They claimed he should be put in the foster care system for his own benefit. Every time he heard the words ‘foster care’ his mind inserted the words ‘high security lab’. He couldn’t get over the feeling they were going to push hard until they got him, but then again, no one even gave him a sideways glance. Was it possible that all this pressure was coming from somewhere higher up? Then again, how many people could have possibly been in on his secret?

Nevertheless, the terrorist story as well as his father’s story made the rounds in the national newspapers and he was too high-profile now to simply disappear, locked away in a government lab. People all over town would wonder where he went and what had happened to the boy with the oddly different eyes. Emma and Eric had become local celebrities at school. Not that Emma needed the boost, but Eric loathed the glare of the spotlight.

In the end, Mrs. MacIntyre was awarded temporary custody of Jonah Havensby until his father could be found and the mystery of his disappearance solved, under the condition he begin school immediately and Mrs. MacIntyre could provide a proper bedroom. She immediately had her decorator out and parceled out a small portion of her insurance settlement with the mall to re-do the second floor of the garage into a bedroom apartment for both he and Eric – on the condition that the minute any serious rules were broken, Eric would be right back to his old room.

A month later, everything seemed to die down and Jonah had settled into the ninth grade alongside Eric and Emma, although she seemed to keep a little bit of a distance in the wake of things. He had a feeling she had considered what she’d seen and couldn’t handle it, or maybe Doctor Wong might be feeling a little overprotective, which made it slightly awkward now that he was seeing quite a bit of Wendy MacIntyre.

As he approached his tree-house on a sunny, oddly warm, Saturday afternoon, Jonah noticed that the now-rusting pet carrier was still exactly where Adam had tossed it over by the large rocks. As he went to move it, he was stunned to see his same, scrawny, downstairs neighbor come trotting out of it. Even though Jonah was still on the other side of the creek, Grouchy reared up and gave him a suspicious look.

“You’re still here?” Jonah asked in surprised. “You know, I’m never going to understand you,” he added as he walked to the tree-house shaking his head in disbelief.

He noticed that the ladder was down and there was a bike tucked behind the long vines covering the trunk of the tree. Something he had shown Eric how to do, but he had Eric’s bike, which he parked right next to the other. It could only be one person.

He climbed to the top of the ladder and stepped onto the patio of his tree-house and took the time to pull up and secure the ladder. He ducked his head inside the door and saw no one there, so he walked the length of the patio. When he turned, he saw her. She was wearing a light blue sweater and dark blue jeans. The fur-lined boots she perpetually wore all winter hand been replaced with white sneakers. Her hair was up in a ponytail. She was enjoying a small patch of light through the trees with her back against the wall.

Without opening her eyes, she smiled and said “Sorry. Eric showed me where it was. You don’t mind, do you?

“No. Not at all, actually. But if you’re going to start hanging out, you should know it’s safer to pull the ladder up after you,” Jonah said with a big smile on his face as he joined her sitting in the sun.

“Sorry,” she said again. “I guess I don’t know the rules. I guess I don’t know a lot.” She said it a little more pointedly than it sounded in her head, and then looked at him. “Is there anything you
can
tell me?”