The Marus Manuscripts (20 page)

Anna nodded. “You are the king now.”

“Will we be victorious over the Palatians?”

“You will, but at a great cost.”

Darien gazed at her for a moment. “You’re not going back to Sarum with me, are you?”

She shook her head slowly. “I’m going to find Kyle.”

Darien didn’t understand. He couldn’t have. But he accepted it anyway. Kneeling again, he kissed her hand. “May the Unseen One allow us to meet again,” he said softly.

She smiled at him. She hoped He would.

Darien and Colonel Oliver strode quickly from the hotel. Anna was alone. She felt a heaviness in her heart that seemed to weigh down her feet as well. She stood and walked sluggishly up the stairs to her room. She wasn’t sure what she would find there, but she felt compelled to go.

Opening the door to her room, she saw that it was different. “Oh,” she said. The furniture and carpets were gone, replaced by broken boards, peeling wallpaper, and dirt. A white light flashed, grew in intensity, and seemed to swallow her up.

A
nna was on her hands and knees in the bedroom at the abandoned house back home. Somewhere, someone was groaning. She followed the sound to the door. Careful to avoid the section of the floor that had collapsed, she peeked through a large hole to the floor below. Kyle was lying there on his back. He was wearing his normal clothes. He moved his head slightly and groaned some more.

“Kyle!” she called out.

He didn’t answer.

Anna navigated the upstairs hallway back to the stairs. She took them two at a time, then raced into the room where Kyle still lay, semiconscious from the fall.

“Don’t move,” she whispered in his ear. “I’ll get help.”

The little sister who had seemed to hate adventure and screamed at bugs ran with all her might back through the woods. How she found her way to her grandparents, she didn’t know, but she did.

“What in the world . . . ?” her grandmother asked when Anna burst through the back door into the kitchen.

“In the woods—” Anna gasped, her breathlessness getting in the way of her words.

Her grandmother shook her head. “Calm down, child,” she said. “Take a deep breath while I get you some lemonade.”

“But Grandma—”

“I knew going to those woods was a bad idea,” Grandma said as
she started to pour a glass of lemonade. “I figured you were gone an awful long time. Two hours was long enough, but when it got to be three, well . . .” She
tsked
with her tongue.

“Three hours?” Anna said, shocked. “But we’ve been gone for months and months!”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Grandma scolded. “Now, where’s your brother?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Anna cried out. “He’s hurt!”

Grandma nearly dropped the pitcher of lemonade. Then, quickly regaining her composure, she shouted for Anna’s grandfather to come quickly. Anna told them both about Kyle’s fall. Grandma called an ambulance while Anna and Grandpa retraced Anna’s steps to the abandoned house.

Kyle was kept in the hospital overnight. His back was bruised, and the doctors were worried that he might have fractured a rib in the fall. More than that, though, they wanted to be certain he didn’t have a concussion. He seemed delirious when the ambulance brought him in. He kept talking about Darien, King Lawrence, and “a protector.”

That evening, Anna sat alone with Kyle in his room. They didn’t speak at first but seemed to scrutinize the room as if they’d never seen anything like it before. The silver metal on the bed frame above his head reflected the room in distorted shapes. The sheets on the bed were crisp and clean and smelled of detergent. A radio on the bedside table played a song by Doris Day. This was America. It was 1958.

He looked into her eyes. “They aren’t different colors anymore,” he finally said.

“I know.”

“Was it a dream?” he asked.

Anna shrugged. “It seems like it now.”

He looked away from her, and Anna thought he might cry. “I failed,” he said miserably. “I stopped believing. I should’ve listened to you and waited.”

Anna put her hand on his arm.

“I liked being a big shot,” he said. “But I forgot who made me what I was.”

A slight smile crossed Anna’s face. Her brother seemed bigger, much older somehow.

He faced her again. “Are we still chosen?” he asked. “I mean, does it work that way here?”

Her gaze moved upward to a symbol above the bed—a cross. “Yeah,” she said. “The Unseen One is here. We’re chosen.”

“But . . . for what?”

Anna shrugged. “That’s what we’re going to have to figure out. We were chosen for one thing in Marus. Maybe we’re chosen for something else here.”

They sat quietly together and thought about it until the nurse said it was time for lights out.

That night, Anna slept without dreams.

Manuscript date: September 18, 1945

A
punch to the stomach sent Wade Mullens doubled over to the ground. Black spots pulsated before his eyes, and he barely heard Steve Calloway mutter, “Kraut-loving freak!” before he walked away.

Bobby Adams rushed up to Wade. “Are you all right?” he asked. His voice seemed miles away.

“I . . . can’t . . . breathe . . .” Wade croaked.

“Stay calm,” Bobby said. “Relax.”

Wade rolled around on the ground, gasping like a fish out of water. After a few minutes, the air came back to him and he sat up.

Bobby knelt next to him. “Oh, boy, you’re going to have a shiner,” he announced.

Wade gently touched his left eye where Steve had punched him right before the decisive blow to his stomach. He could feel the eye swelling up.

“Can you stand up?” Bobby asked.

Wade nodded. Clasping hands with Bobby, he was tugged to his feet. His legs were wobbly.

“Where are my books?” Wade asked.

“All over the place,” Bobby replied. Silently the two boys retrieved Wade’s books, which had been littered around the school yard by Steve and his gang.

Bobby, a stout boy of 11 with curly brown hair, grunted at the exertion of bending over for the books and bits of paper.

Wade dusted the dirt from his blond hair and checked his clothes. A black eye was bad enough, but if he’d torn his trousers or shirt, his mother would have a fit. Apart from smudges of grass and mud, however, they seemed to be all right.

Bobby shook his head. “You shouldn’t have said it. How many times did I tell you not to say it?”

Wade shrugged. “I was just stating a fact.”

“Fact or not, you can’t go around talking about German airplanes as if you
like
them,” Bobby said.

“All I said was that the Messerschmitt has a sleek design. What’s so bad about that?”

“And you said that the German Me-262 has turbojet power and beats anything we’ve invented.”

“It’s true. It has a top speed of 540 miles per hour, and that’s a lot faster than—”

“You don’t have to tell me! I’m the one who first told you about the Me-262, remember? But Steve’s dad was at Omaha Beach on D-Day! You can’t talk to people like Steve about the Germans unless it’s something you
hate
about them. Otherwise you sound like a traitor.”

“I’m not a traitor. Steve’s dad came home after the Germans surrendered. My dad is still—” Wade stopped, unable to continue. America had just dropped two atomic bombs on Japan a month before, and the Japanese had surrendered, but Wade and his mother still hadn’t heard anything about his father. He’d been missing somewhere in the South Pacific for several weeks.

“You know that and I know that, but Steve doesn’t know.” Bobby handed him a sheet of paper he’d picked up from the ground. It was a picture Wade had drawn of the B-29 Superfortress, number 77.
Bockscar,
it was called. It had carried the second A-bomb to Japan.

In Wade’s picture, the plane flew through clear skies. Some
where below lay the great shipping center called Nagasaki, represented by a distant shoreline and dots depicting buildings. There were no people in Wade’s picture because, like most Americans, he didn’t want to think about the thousands who’d died from the two bombs. But, also like most Americans, he was glad that the force of those bombs, equivalent to 20,000 to 40,000 tons of TNT, had persuaded the Japanese to surrender. Now maybe they’d find his dad and let him come home.

Wade took a moment to assemble his textbooks so he could carry them home. Jammed between the books were comic books about space travel and war, a science-fiction novel, and one of the academic journals lent to him by Mr. Curfew, his neighbor. He’d brought that in for show-and-tell, and to tell the class about the various weapons of war. He had told them about the B-17G, the “Flying Fortress Bomber,” which was able to carry more than 6,000 tons of bombs over 2,000 miles. He’d also described the Hawker Tempest Mark V, with its ability to go faster than 400 miles per hour; it was one of the few Allied planes that could catch and destroy the German “buzz bombs” (the V-1 jet-powered bombs). Then he’d mentioned the superiority of the Messerschmitt’s design and the Me-262’s speed. This last part had guaranteed his afternoon fight with Steve Calloway.

Wade had tried to explain to Steve that he didn’t like the war or the Germans, but that didn’t stop him from learning about the machines and weapons they’d used in the war. Steve wouldn’t hear it, and the fists had begun to fly.

“Remember Pearl Harbor!” Steve had proclaimed when he hit Wade in the eye. “Remember the death march on Bataan!” he had then shouted before hitting Wade in the stomach.

Wade and Bobby made their way toward home.

“Do you want to stop by my house to clean up?” Bobby asked.

Wade nodded.

“Good, because there’s something I want to show you.”

Bobby’s mother worked afternoons at the downtown Hudson’s Drug Store, so the two boys could move around the house without adult supervision. Wade gave himself a quick wash in the bathroom while Bobby’s seven-year-old sister kept asking why Wade’s eye was so puffed up.
It looks bad, all right,
Wade thought as he inspected it in the mirror. It was already taking on the telltale tones of blue, black, and yellow.

Bobby gestured for Wade to follow him into his bedroom, then nearly closed the door on his younger sister, who whined and protested for a few minutes.

“Look what my cousin sent me,” Bobby said quietly. He looked around the room and out the window, then double-checked to make sure his sister was gone before spreading some pages out on his desk. On them were rough drawings of what looked like a large bomb.

“What are these?” Wade asked.

“Top secret,” Bobby said.

“Top secret?”

Bobby’s voice fell to a whisper. “This is from my cousin Lee in
New Mexico
.”

“So?”

“So! New Mexico is where they’ve been working on the atomic bomb.”

Wade looked from Bobby’s face to the pages, then back to Bobby’s face again. “You mean . . . ?”

“My cousin Lee’s dad—my uncle Walter—is a scientist who’s been working on the atomic bomb. Lee made these drawings from some papers and photos he’d seen in his dad’s briefcase.”

Wade’s heart lurched. “Are you crazy?” he asked breathlessly.
“There are spies out there who would
kill
to get their hands on stuff like this.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bobby said. “Why do you think I’m being so careful?”

Wade pointed to the next page. “What’s all this stuff?”

“I think it’s how they make them. See?”

Wade glanced over the list: “Uranium 235 . . . Uranium 238 . . . plutonium . . . nuclear fission . . . isotopes . . . altimeter . . . air pressure detonator . . . detonating head . . . urea nitrate . . . lead shield . . .”

“Lee said he scribbled down everything he could,” Bobby explained.

Wade’s mouth was hanging open now. He read about how the various components interacted to cause an explosion. He also saw a page about the effects of radiation on human subjects after the bombs exploded. Many were burned, and some got sick and died. It also warned of radiation getting into water systems and sources of food. “We shouldn’t be seeing this,” he said finally.

“I know,” Bobby said, smiling. “That’s why I showed it to you.”

“We have to get rid of it.”

“I figured I’d throw it in the furnace as soon as we looked it over,” Bobby agreed. “Uncle Walt would put Lee on restriction for the rest of his life if he knew Lee had mailed this to me.”

Suddenly a voice at the door said, “Bobby?” It was his mother. The door handle turned. Acting quickly, Bobby grabbed and folded the sheets of paper and shoved them under Wade’s untucked shirt. “What’s going on in here?” Bobby’s mother asked.

“Nothing,” Bobby answered with a voice that said just the opposite.

His mother eyed him suspiciously, then looked at Wade. “Good heavens! What happened to you?” she said. “Is that a black eye?”

Wade stammered incoherently.

“He fell down on the way home from school,” Bobby lied.

“Looks more like you were in a fight,” his mother said. “I think you should go home right away.”

“But—” Bobby started to protest.

“No ‘buts’ about it.” She put a hand on Wade’s shoulder and guided him out of the room. “You go home and get that eye looked at,” she instructed him.

Bobby’s mother stayed with Wade all the way down the stairs to the front door. He tried to think of a way to get the papers back to Bobby, but Bobby’s mother was in the way the entire time. She handed him his jacket and books. Bobby shrugged helplessly at Wade as Wade walked through the door and it closed between them.

On the front porch, Wade zipped up his jacket and pressed his books to his chest. He could feel the papers under his shirt. He looked around nervously. What if there were spies watching him? What if the government found out that Lee had sent the drawings to Bobby and secret agents were coming to arrest them even now? Wade swallowed hard and walked quickly down the steps of the front porch and out onto the street. His walk soon became a run as he took off for home.

Every casual glance from people he passed took on sinister meaning.
They know about the papers,
he kept thinking. A large black sedan drove past, then suddenly pulled up next to him.
It’s them! It’s the agents!
Wade thought. The door opened, and Wade cried out—then blushed with embarrassment as an older woman got out of the car to put a letter in the curbside mailbox.

He ducked down some back alleys and zigzagged through his neighborhood, just to make sure he wasn’t being followed. When he finally reached his own home, he burst through the front door and raced up the stairs to his room.

“Wade?” his mother called from the kitchen.

Wade dropped the books on his bed, pulled out the papers, and shoved them under his mattress. It was the only place he could think to hide them on the spur of the moment.

His mother called for him from the bottom of the stairs. Forgetting about his black eye, he went back to the top and smiled down at her. “Hi,” he said innocently.

“What in the world are you doing?” she asked.

“Putting my books away.”

“Why the rush? Didn’t you hear me call you from the kitchen?” She wiped her hands on her apron.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What’s that on your face?”

“My face?”

“Come down here,” she ordered. Wade went down the stairs to her. She gasped. “Your eye! You’ve got a black eye!”

“I—”

“Who was it this time, Richard King or Jim McClendon?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wade said, shuffling uncomfortably as she ran her fingers gently around his eye.

“Oh, Wade!” she said. “Into the kitchen right now. We’re putting an ice pack on it.”

Wade groaned.

“And don’t make a fuss.”

As he walked down the hall toward the kitchen, he suddenly sneezed. It made his eye throb. Then, in the kitchen, he sneezed again.

“Are you coming down with a cold?” his mother asked.

Only then was Wade aware that his nose was running.

It
was
an illness. And in spite of Wade’s protests, his mother insisted that he have a bath after putting an ice pack on his eye and then
spend the rest of the evening in bed. As the night progressed, he began to feel worse. By bedtime, he had a full-fledged flu of some sort. His mother made him stay home from school the next day. And the day after. What made Wade feel worst of all, though, was knowing Steve and his gang would think Wade had missed school because of his black eye. When he returned to class, they would call him a sissy and a baby, and the teasing would be far more difficult to take than if they’d gotten into another fight.

In his illness, Wade dreamed of evil-looking men trying to sneak into his bedroom to steal the drawings of the atomic bomb. He dreamed of being arrested by government agents who accused him of being a spy. He saw his name in horrible accusatory headlines on the cover of every newspaper in the country. “Spy!” they said. “Hang him!” the editorials demanded. His mother would live in shame, and his father would never be allowed to come home from wherever he was.