Paranormal Realities Box Set (6 page)

When we reached the next level of the
building, Rom dragged me to the window. He released my hand to pry off the
plywood board cover. He lifted the sash. Rom ducked through the opening onto
the fire escape beyond. He stuck his head back in and motioned to us.

“The way is here,” he said.

I exited the window first, followed by
Petra and Chase. No police officers were below us, only the patrol car. The
officers must have been inside.

We began to run down the fire escape and
the metal stairs shook and swayed. The possibility the whole contraption would
break away from the wall and collapse to the ground exceeded fifty-fifty in my
opinion. Still we powered down as fast as we could, hearts pounding with every
step.

I hopped over the last four steps and
landed with both feet on the ground next to Rom. He took me by the hand again
and loped toward the gate of the hospital property. It stood open now. Petra
and Chase ran across the street and dashed south along the park while Rom
dragged me north. We didn’t stop until we arrived at my street corner.

For a few seconds we stared at each other
unspeaking, each of us with breath chugging in and out. When I noticed my
fingers still intertwined with his, I dropped them as if they’d given me an
electric shock. Turning on my heel, I walked away, toward home.

The tree I would climb to get to my
bedroom hadn’t changed in the two hours I’d been gone, but I felt changed
forever. I glanced back to the end of the block. Rom remained standing where
I’d left him. Unmoving. Staring. All his attention was directed on me.

* * * * *

“Kathleen Elizabeth Taylor,” I heard my
mother scream from the bottom of the stairs. “If I have to call you to get up
one more time, I’ll throw your breakfast onto the lawn.” Mom knew the way to get
my attention.

Groaning, I flopped from stomach to back
on my bed. I pried open my lids and stretched. A swivel of my head and the
clock became visible. When I saw the time, I leaped up. Ten minutes to get
ready.

Naturally, Juliette occupied the bathroom
we shared and was already dressed in her cheerleader’s uniform as she weilded a
curling iron on her long blond hair. I went directly to work brushing my teeth.

“I’m not your enemy, Kizzy.” Her eyes met
mine in the mirror.

I bent and spat into the sink. After
washing my mouth out, I spat again.

“I don’t know why we can’t be friends,”
Juliette said.

She was too perfect. Too sweet. Too
perfectly sweet. A girl could get diabetes just being in the same room with
Juliette.

“You should like me. Everyone does,” she
said in a half-joking tone.

Everyone did like Juliette. She excelled
as a student. She was on the cheerleading squad. She had a boyfriend others
would envy. What wasn't to like?

But to me Juliette beamed brightly as a
shining reminder light of how ordinary my life used to be. Even my mom treated
Juliette like a real teen. Me Mom eyed like I might go insane any minute. Mom
was probably thinking like
father like daughter.

 
“No offense Juliette. But just piss off.” I examined a
possible zit on my chin.

“If you’re angry about Billy, I’m sorry.”
Her wide-eyed expression, as she fingered Billy Broadrick’s class ring hanging
on a chain around her neck, was innocent and sincere. “He does stuff I can’t
control sometimes.”

“Your boyfriend acting like a jerk never
surprises me.” I turned and walked out of the room.

Naturally, Mom couldn’t drive me to
school, and since I was major league late I couldn’t walk, so Juliette came to
the rescue with her sweet yellow VW Beetle. “I don’t mind, Mom,” she had
replied sweetly to my mother’s request, making my teeth grind. Needless to say,
the silence of the ride rendered it more than a bit uncomfortable. When she
stopped the car I didn’t even wait for her to turn it off before hopping out.

A grinning Petra waited on the sidewalk
outside the school.

“I might as well be living in Iran,”
Petra said as I joined her.

“Good morning to you too.”

“I’m grounded. Dad caught me sneaking
into the house last night.”

“Yeah, grounded is totally like living in
Iran,” I drawled.

“Right.” Petra seemed to take my words as
seriously meant. “My dad is so Ayatollah. But last night was completely worth
it. So totally sick.”

“Sick is the word I’d use too,” I said.

Somewhere between three a.m. and four
a.m. I’d decided there must have been some kind of gas seeping into the tunnel
that had caused me to hallucinate. The wall couldn’t have moved like that. But
between four a.m. and five a.m. I’d decided I’d actually seen the hand.
Delusion couldn’t extend that far. Besides the scratches on my arm were real.

“Chase and I are like totally together
again,” Petra gushed.

“I could tell. Your tongue jammed down
his throat was my first clue.”

“Just wait until you have your own cute
throat to jam your tongue down, then you’ll see how I feel. Oh and here comes a
potential candidate now.” Petra inclined her head to the left and I glanced
over my shoulder.

Rom walked with a long and easy stride as
he approached us. For a moment he didn’t seem quite real. He had on the same
uniform he’d worn yesterday, except today he carried the jacket over his arm
and he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. Rom was quite simply
mouthwatering. The fabric of the ordinary white shirt molded to his wide
shoulders and broad chest like a second skin. Through the branches of the trees
lining the sidewalk, rays of sunshine shone down over Rom’s head as if nature
itself spotlighted him saying: look at this magnificent creature.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” Petra said,
her grin widening. She’d obviously seen me practically panting for the guy.

“Shut up."

She chuckled and bounced off into the
building.

Rom stopped on the sidewalk in front of
me. “Greetings of the morning, Kizzy.”

“Greetings,” I said, adopting his strange
phraseology. Where the heck had he learned English?

“Are you in good health?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t sleep at all. That
wall. That hand. What was all that?”

Rom stood silent.

“I mean the wall was moving and that hand
tried to grab me. You saw it right?”

“Kizzy, I know not of what you speak,” he
said.

“The hand with claws. It was there.”

Rom shook his head. “I saw no hand in the
wall but your own.”

“Then how did I get this scratch?”
Holding out my arm, I pointed to bandage.

“Your arm caught in a hole in the brick
as you tagged the wall. You suffered injury against the sharp surface when I
assisted in a pull to freedom.”

“You must think I’m crazy,” I mumbled.

I shook my head. The thought of the gas
fumes again offered an explanation. The gas explanation was preferable to
drooling lunacy.

Rom had been speaking and I’d missed some
of it while wrapped in my own thoughts. I tuned in for the last bit.
"...If you would break bread with me this evening.”

“You want to go on a date? Have dinner?
Eat?” I tried to keep total shock out of my tone.

He nodded.

“With me?” I asked.

“Of who else would I speak?” He glanced
around us.

“But we should talk about what happened
in the tunnel.”

“I prefer discourse regarding our dinner
together.”

“If you think I’m crazy, why would you
want to date me?”

Rom’s smiled with that cutie pie smirk I
used to think of as an arrogant lip curl.

“Your features delight my senses,” he
said in his low baritone.

I could think of nothing to say to this.
The guy could really deliver a compliment.

“Would seven p.m. be customary?”

Nod Kizzy, I told myself and I managed to
do it. Just.

“That would be okay, I guess.” I kept my
answer to a nonchalant monotone.

Franky, his red hair appearing to be on
fire in the light of the sun, appeared at my side.

“Is this guy bothering you Kizzy?” He
glared up at Rom as he spoke.

“No.”

“Because I can take care of him if he
is,” Franky threatened.

As if he’d stand a chance in a
hand-to-hand with Rom. Franky turned his gaze on me and in his eyes was something
I didn’t want to see.

“We don’t need him in our mc² crew
do we?” he asked.

Omigod, Franky blue eyes had turned a
metaphorical green. Franky had some kind of crush. On me of all people!

“It’s cool, Franky. I’m fine with Rom
being on the crew.” I said. “I was just being a bitch yesterday.”

Rom snickered and I had a feeling my
defense of him gave him the idea I liked him or something. Bad news. Liking
someone meant total loss of leverage in the relationship, particularly if they
knew you liked them.

“I gotta go or I’ll be late for
homeroom.” Turning I said, “later,” and left the two of them standing in front
of the school.

I ran into the building and straight into
Billy Broadrick.

“If it isn’t one of the losers.” Billy
chuckled. “Looks like the BQs reign supreme.”

“We didn’t lose.” I corrected him. “Rom
and I got to the morgue long before you and Quinn came anywhere near the
basement.”

“Prove it,” Billy challenged.

Extracting the phone from my pocket and
touch flipping through my photo file, I came upon the morgue sign.

“There. See?” I held out the phone’s face
toward him to display the pic.

“I don’t see any proof here.” Billy waved
it away with a huff.

“What do you mean?”

“I see a sign with an arrow, not the
actual morgue. Plus, there’s no tag.”

He had me there.

“Okay. Where is your proof you and Quinn
were there?”

“I said so. That’s proof enough.” Billy’s
face twisted into a grimace.

“Yeah, sure,” I mocked. “And pigs fly. Oh
no they don’t since you’re still on the ground.”

“The crews will just have to settle this
tonight.” Turning on a heel, Billy spoke over his shoulder. “Tell Senji 8 p.m.
at the hospital.”

“You’re on,” I said before I remembered
the clawing hand and more importantly my date. Damn.

“Wait—” I called.

Too late. Billy was gone.

As Mr. Hutson, droned on I only halfway
listened.

“Einstein introduced the theory of
special relativity to explain an anomaly in the results of motion experiments,
an inconsistency if you will. First, it had been established through experimentation
that the velocity of objects was cumulative.”

“Man. That was so awesome last night,”
said Senji, sitting on my left.

“So that if one threw a ball with force
enough for it to travel 10 m.p.h leaving your hand from a train moving at 30
m.p.h., the ball’s velocity would be 40 m.p.h. Therefore velocity equals
distance over time or v = d/t.” Mr. Hutson sent a quelling stare at Senji.

“The police almost caught me,” Senji
continued over the teacher.

Franky, who’d positioned himself on my
right, whispered back. “Me too. We’ll have to be careful when we go back
tonight.”

“However, the speed of light, according
to experiments, is a constant 186,000 miles per second independent of motion.
Therefore, if someone standing still shines a flashlight, the light travels
186,000 m.p.s. And if one shines a light from a car moving at 50 m.p.h., the
light still moves at 186,000 m.p.s., in the view of a person traveling in the
car.” Mr. Hutson scribbled on the chalkboard and then turned back to the
students.

I held my textbook up to block Mr.
Hutson’s view of my face.

“I’m so not going back to the hospital
tonight. Weird stuff going on there. I think there might be some dangerous
gases in those tunnels.”

“Let’s say the train could move a third
of the speed of light. An observer standing at the side of the road would still
observe the light traveling 186,000 m.p.s. How is this paradox explained in
view of the v=d/t?”

“Come on Kizzy,” Franky urged. “We have
to go back there and destroy the BQs. Billy and Quinn are just too obnoxious
for words.”

“The solution is that time…and even
possibly distance…is relative for each observer,” Mr. Hutson said. “It is from
this theory that the concept of time travel becomes possible.”

A hand went up from the kid in the seat
in front of me. Mike something. A know-it-all.

“But what if someone went back in time
and killed his own great grandfather?” Mike asked. “Wouldn’t that mean that he
never existed? So if he never existed how could he travel back in time and kill
his great grandfather?”