Kinetics: In Search of Willow (22 page)

"There's bound to be someone passing
by here in a car, Eugene. We can hitchhike."

I frowned at the back of his sandy
blond head and rolled my eyes. "Oh, great, then if we get picked up
by an axe murderer, it'll be just as dandy as rain."

"People are more likely to
think
 we're
 the axe murderers." Harry looked back and laughed over
his shoulder at the expression of distaste that I let twist my
face. Harry picked up his pace and 
sauntered
 as if we were only
taking a stroll, not walking 50 freaking miles to Springfield, and,
despite his cheerful walk, dark blue began staining the sky behind
us like a bad omen. I knew that if we didn't make it to someplace
soon, we would be out in the dark by ourselves in no time at all.
We passed a little Inn but Harry was really against stopping since
we still had a long way to go.

"We could get another car, I guess," I
said to him as we walked away from the place.

"Naw, we can't leave a trail. Besides
I thought you were against car thievery."

"I am. But we don't have a lot of time
to dilly-dally."

"If we are caught leaving a trail,
more than one of the people chasing you are going to know the
direction you are going."

"They won't know by where we left the
clunker?"

"They will, but at the same time the
more we do something like that, the more likely there are to want
to catch us. Besides that whole thing was to get us out of St.
Louis quick and fast. It wasn't supposed to be that permanent. It
just turns out that it wasn't as useful as I had originally
planned."

We continued in silence, but all too
soon, Harry's pace slowed to a steady walk. The only sounds were
the wind in the trees, and our feet scraping against the gravel
alongside the road. Darkness overcame us and the amount of cars
passing us on the road went from a steady flow to a slow trickle
until finally there were no cars at all. We had tried sticking our
thumbs out to get a ride, but no one even hesitated. By the time no
cars graced us with their presence we were ready to stand in the
middle of the road and make someone stop. But no one came
anymore.

"What do we do?" I asked at the night
sky. We were taking a breather, perched under an overpass just in
case it started to rain.

"Well, I figure we're just going to
have to keep going. These little exits we are passing don't really
seem to have lots of traveler's accommodations, but for now I think
we should stop in one of them and see if any locals will help us
out."

"Right."

"Let's rest for a bit
first."

Harry scooted a distance away and
called his Dad on his phone. Harry had told him he had taken up an
internship at a camp to explain away his absence. Harry's dad was
surprisingly cool with it all.

I closed my eyes and listened to the
faint sounds of the trees between the rushes of wind as cars passed
under the overpass. I let my mind wander. Things had been so
strange. I don't think a few weeks ago that I could have predicted
that I would be sitting under an overpass with the nerdy football
player.

I went back to what the
old man in St. Louis had said to me. 
"Marcus Grey was only the beginning, and Willow was not the
end."
But Willow had to be at the "end" of
this journey. She was the whole reason I was running out here into
the unknown. I wasn't about to let her become the host of some
deranged alien.

Nick was probably right. The old man
had probably read our minds and spouted out what he thought we
wanted to hear. That was the only thing I could think of that would
explain away his questions and his answers.

It disturbed me that he went right for
that dream. The dream I tried to not think about when I was awake
even though it visited me every night. I didn't want to think about
what it meant, and I certainly didn't want to believe that it was
anything more than a nightmare.

But the truth was seeping through the
cracks in my delusions. I knew that our first house when I was
nothing more than a baby had burned to the ground in a freak
accident. My parents had always said it was an electrical fire. But
the contents of my dream said otherwise. It was me. My fault. And
now that I knew that the latent power that I couldn't use was the
power over fire how could I not believe that I was somehow
responsible for the fire that destroyed our home and in the process
had hurt my mother.

I wiped away a sudden wetness on my
cheek and heard Harry say goodbye to his dad.

I opened my phone and stared at the
contacts list. Since this was the phone Nick had given me, I didn't
have any of my old numbers, but I knew one number by heart.
Willow's cell phone.

I called it. I didn't expect her to
pick up and my expectation was true. But the brief message on her
voicemail was what I wanted to hear.

"Hey guys, this is Willow,
the one and only. Tell me your name and number and I'll get back to
you as soon as I find my phone. Love you!"

I hung up and redialed the
number.

"Hey guys, this is Willow,
the one and only. Tell me your name and number and I'll get back to
you as soon as I find my phone. Love you!"

I buried my face between my knees and
listened one more time.

"Hey guys, this is Willow,
the one and only. Tell me your name and number and I'll get back to
you as soon as I find my phone. Love you!"

"Love you." I said into the phone and
closed it.

I let my eyes rest and
counted my breaths in and out, but my peace was short lived. My
entire mind suddenly became filled with an unfamiliar presence. It
was like feeling hot shards of glass slicing through my thoughts
followed by the whisper of a voice.
–Let
me out!-

And then it was gone. I was so shocked
I dropped my phone, and it skittered down the concrete slope
hitting the tiny patch of grass between the overpass and the
freeway.

"Eugene? What happened?" Harry
scrambled over and stared in concern at my face.

"I don't know." I said, gasping,
trying to organize the sudden chaos in my head.

I waved him off and told him I had
just lost my balance. He frowned at me. I knew he didn't believe
me, but he didn't press and went back to his spot.

I closed my eyes but didn't dare to
explore the strange feeling.

Briefly I wondered if my brother and
his friends were the cause.

It was a good thing it was so silent,
because I might not have heard the indistinct rumble of an engine.
I stopped and looked in both directions. Harry sat up and opened
his mouth to speak but I held up my hand and tapped my
ear.

He cocked his head to the side and did
as I did and looked in either direction for the cause of the
noise.

It was only a second later that I saw
the source of it. Through the darkness of night I saw the unevenly
lit headlights of a red pickup truck speeding toward us from the
west. The truck roared noisily toward us like a chugging
missile.

"I think we should hide." I said.
Something about the contact with the unfamiliar presence, and now
this, had me worried. There was no way that they could be related
but at the same time something was wrong.

Harry grinned at me and jumped down to
the road to stick his hitchhiker's thumb out. I followed and tried
to push his hand down, but the decision to do so didn't come fast
enough. The truck slowed impossibly quickly and came to a rolling
halt in front of us. The guy driving shifted the gears and rolled
down the window.

"Hey, you guys need a lift?" The guy
couldn't have been more than twenty-five but didn't look too
dangerous. But if what I was learning about Kinetics, what was on
the surface didn't tell you anything about what kind of powers they
had or even if they were a Kinetic in the first place. There was no
telling if this guy was the cause of the strange presence in my
mind, but I wasn't going to trust it.

Before I could even think of
responding to the guy, Harry jumped up close to the truck window.
"Yes! You're a godsend! We thought we were going to be walking
forever!"

You didn't seem worried at
all.
 I let my inner dialogue take
over for my lack of ability to speak aloud.

"Man, I've been there! I hitched
across the States when I was seventeen. I know how it can be
sometimes. I just so happened to be out for a ride. You guys are
lucky!"

"Oh, that's awesome." Harry didn't
seem at all concerned about that. But I knew otherwise.

"Well, I sure don't mind taking you
where you need to go. Where are you headed?"

"Ultimately, Wyoming," Harry supplied.
I balked at him. Why was he being so forthcoming? Especially after
his 'we can't leave a trail' bit.

"We just need to get to Springfield
for now," I interrupted and caught Harry's eyes, out of the sight
of the driver, and gave him a meaningful glare. He grinned and said
quickly, "yeah, we sort of got in a little trouble with our
car."

"How long have you been walking? From
over there?" He poked his thumb out in the direction of the
decrepit car.

Harry nodded. "We've been walking for,
what, five hours?"

"Six." I snipped. I didn't know what
his deal was right now, but we were going to have to have a talk
about this later. I just hoped that he knew what the heck he was
doing.

"Really, now?" The guy chuckled and
waved us into the cramped front seat of the truck. "Hang on tight!
I can be a bit of a crazy driver sometimes!"

The guy who introduced himself as
Chris yammered to us about fate and circumstance and that he just
knew he wanted to be out for a ride tonight.

"Been feeling a need for speed for a
whole day. Thought that I was going cray cray, if you know what I
mean."

I pressed myself into the door and
tried to tune out Harry striking up a conversation with the
guy.

He drove us all the way to Springfield
and dropped us off at a truck stop on the outskirts of
town.

We sat in the 24 hour fast food place
attached to the gas station and looked over the route. "The next
place is this town just inside Oklahoma. I'd say we're only about a
couple hundred or so miles away from it." Harry tapped the
map.

"Think we can sneak onto one of these
trucks." I tilted my chin at the window where we could see a whole
line of trucks idling in the parking lot. One of them had to be
heading in the same direction.

"We could try. I guess it depends on
the truck and how easy it is to break in."

I was beginning to feel the lack of
sleep setting in. As much as I wanted to keep going, I think I
needed sleep more than anything. I sighed and rested my head on the
table. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Harry watch me for a
moment before pulling the book the old man in St. Louis had given
him.

He read quietly and I drifted in and
out of sleep.

A few hours later we set out to find a
truck headed toward Oklahoma. A few short conversations with some
of the drivers revealed a few options. One of the trucks was
transporting what the guy said was farm equipment and his truck was
the one we were able to crack the lock and sneak inside. We sat
huddled between a few very large things of metal that I had no
earthly idea the use for.

We sat in quiet for a few moments and
then listened with anticipation as the truck rumbled to a start and
began moving. The farm equipment creaked and for a moment I
realized if this stuff moved wrong we could end up getting crushed.
That would bring a swift end to this journey.

After I was sure that we were on the
freeway I settled back into a cramped and semi-comfortable nook
between two parts that looked unlikely to move. Harry sat opposite
with his arms around his knees. There was so little light that I
could barely see him at all.

I sighed and opened the phone, dialing
Willow's number. It went straight to voicemail as
always.

"Hey guys, this is Willow,
the one and only. Tell me your name and number and I'll get back to
you as soon as I find my phone. Love you!"

When I closed the phone I saw Harry in
the glow of his own cell phone looking at me with a soft smile on
his face.

"You really love her." Harry
said.

"Yeah," I swallowed the lump in my
throat.

"Why didn't you tell her?"

I pinched the tips of my fingers. It
was all I had to keep myself from getting sad.

"Because I'm an idiot. A scared stupid
idiot. I don't know why I screwed it up."

Harry chuckled. "Man, you are just a
teenager. It's completely normal."

"You say that like you're not a
teenager."

Harry shrugged. "No, I'm just smarter
than most."

"Humble, too."

"Obviously." Harry quipped. "No, look.
I'm sure she feels the same way."