The Meridians (34 page)

"Wet or dry?" he asked.

"Wet would be better if it's not too much trouble."

So Scott quickly went to the bathroom that was next to his office, unlocked it, and got out some paper towels, wetting them and returning them to the other room and Lynette and Kevin. Neither of them had moved, Lynette still holding Kevin's feet, Kevin still a rigid statue masquerading as a boy in pajamas.

Lynette took the towels from him and slowly, tenderly, wiped Kevin's right foot. "Kevin's foot is clean," she murmured.

"Kevin's foot is clean," repeated Kevin.

She then wiped down his left foot. "Kevin's other foot is clean," she said.

"Kevin's other foot is clean."

She checked his hands, carefully unclenching them to do so. "Kevin's hands are clean."

"Kevin's hands are clean," he repeated, and his hands stayed unclenched after she was done.

Finally, she looked at his face. Kevin closed his eyes, clearly unable to deal with the possibility of having to look at another human being in the face, but he had a smile on his lips.

Lynette smiled. "Kevin's feet are clean, his hands are clean. His body is well and Kevin is a-okay."

"A-okay," Kevin repeated. And a moment later, he had fallen asleep, snoring lightly, the soft snores of a little boy who was somehow so much more than other little boys. Then, and only then, did Lynette kiss Kevin's little cheek. He remained asleep, but Scott thought that he spotted the boy smile in his sleep, if only for a fraction of a second.

Scott watched the whole thing with a lump in his throat. Even though his son's routine had been nothing like this one, he still remembered it suddenly. Only this memory was not the crystal-clear, overly perfect conjurations of his melancholy, they were the real memories of a real person. Chad, screaming and hollering as he was forced to go to sleep one night before he was "ready" to go. Chad, hiding in his room so long and so well that Amy and Scott had nearly called the police, convinced that someone had somehow taken him - had spirited him away to a place of darkness and fear from which he could never escape.

This last brought to mind their current predicament.

"What now?" he asked, as much to himself as anything. Then, answering his own question, he said, "We've got to figure out what's going on."

"No kidding there, Sherlock," said Lynette with a smile. Then, before he could say anything else, she rose from her son's bed and crossed to him, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him once again. This time Scott responded faster than he had the first time, returning the kiss with something more than the surprised enjoyment with which had experienced the kiss the last time.

"That was nice," said Lynette when they came up for air. She waited as though for him to respond, and when he didn't her face grew comically unsure. "Are you...okay with this?" she said haltingly.

Rather than answer with words, Scott kissed her again, the first time he had initiated a kiss with anyone in nearly a decade. Unfortunately, however, it turned out that kissing was a bit unlike riding a bicycle: he didn't just automatically remember how to do it, and do it well. Indeed, when he went to kiss her, Lynette turned a bit. Just a bit, just a fraction, but it was enough that instead of kissing her on the lips, Scott ended up kissing her nose - rather passionately, in fact.

She giggled. He loved the sound. It made the dim ambience of the poorly-lit office brighten significantly, and the same brightness illuminated some of the shadowed recesses of his heart, casting aside the darkness of loneliness and the gloom of isolation, replacing them with something that Scott had not felt in too many years.

A sense of connection. Of belonging. Of
family
.

And surprisingly, the feeling did not come with accompanying sentiments of guilt at the fact that he was, in fact, kissing someone other than Amy; had just watched a boy who was not his own son be tucked in for bed. Rather, they came with feelings of happiness, gratitude...

And peace.

This last almost shocked him into stopping the silly bliss of the nose kiss. Almost. Because he realized that he had known no peace since the day he had lost his family. No peace through the years of boredom, of drudgery, of trying to put one foot in front of the other as he trudged the doldrums of life. No peace until today, the day after seeing a boy save a young family from certain death, the day that he was hunted in the same fateful alley where he
had
lost his family almost ten years previously, the day that he was chased by a grim reaper named Mr. Gray who seemed determine to destroy him and these two people that he had suddenly discovered he held so dear.

I love them, he realized. That was what the feeling was. The generosity of soul that he felt when he was with Lynette and Kevin. It was not, he realized with some shock, a feeling that had originated from his nearness to Lynette or to her son, but rather a feeling that originated within
him
. He had thought he was dead inside, that his heart had become a tomb dedicated to the ever farther away memories of his wife and son, but if once dead, those parts of him had undergone a marvelous resurrection, and what was once a tomb was now a birthplace of joy and love.

He ended the kiss, and smiled. "I hope that answers your question," he said.

She smiled back, looking as starry-eyed and dreamy as any teenager having a first kiss. "What question?" she asked.

He laughed, and kissed her again.

Then grew serious once more. "As much as I hate to say this, we need to talk about what's happened tonight," he said.

"I already told you about how we found you."

"I know," he said. "Tell me again. Slowly and in as much detail as possible. We need to crack what's going on around us, I can feel it in my bones, somewhere deep inside. We need to figure out what's been going on, or else we're not going to make it through this."

So she recounted the way she had found him: the terrifying drive she had endured; the strange screams of her boy and another boy, another Kevin who was not her own. Scott felt himself grow colder and colder inside with every new moment of her description, with every passing word of what had happened.

It didn't help that in addition to complete exhaustion which threatened to overwhelm his consciousness at any moment, he also had to deal with the fact that he was finding it immensely difficult to concentrate on her story. Not that the words themselves were any more terrifying than was anything else that had already happened in recent hours, but he kept finding his thoughts wanting to slide away from the content of her words in favor of the feelings that watching her speak evoked: goodness, kindness, hope...love.

"You paying attention?" she asked on one of several occasions when he felt a wholly inappropriate smile spreading across his face.

"Yeah," he said, trying to stifle the smile in favor of a more situationally-appropriate frown, but finally giving it up as a bad job. "Sorry, I'm just...."

"I know," she said, her hand touching his in a fleeting gesture that he took as an invitation to kiss her once again.

This time, a sound stopped them.

"G-g-g-g-g...."

Both Scott and Lynette looked over to where Kevin was sleeping.

Only the boy was no longer sleeping. And Scott could now appreciate how frightening it must have been for Lynette to drive around Meridian looking for him, driven by the twin screams of her child and some other entity that, though it looked exactly like Kevin, was nevertheless some other being, some other creature not her son.

"G-g-g-g-g...."

The boy was
phasing
. That was the only word that came to mind for Scott when he looked at Kevin: the kid was a blurry, ever-shifting outline. As though he was both there in bed, and two inches to the side - two images, overlapping almost perfectly, but still leaving the slightest gaps between them.

One of the two images sat up in the bed, while the other one slept on, unmolested and completely unaware of what was happening around him. The one who awoke was speaking, the source of the strange stutter that had arrested their attention in the first place.

"G-g-g-g...," said the image.

Then, abruptly, it solidified. The image of the sleeping Kevin - the one that Scott knew somehow was the image of "their" Kevin and which had remained inert through this moment - suddenly disappeared completely.

It was a moment of supreme visual clarity. The other Kevin, the one that had been stuttering, looked at Scott and Lynette and, with a voice that was both strong and apparently untouched by the problems that plagued him as an autistic child, looked at them both and then spoke.

"Gray man is here."

***

37.

***

"Run!"

The words flew out of Kevin - or the person or thing that had taken Kevin's place - in a jumble. Scott understood them as words - there was no doubt they were English - but he had trouble following them beyond the obvious fact that Mr. Gray was somewhere near. And on the hunt.

"Run!" repeated the other Kevin. "He's stronger than ever, younger than ever. He's managed to insert himself into this timeflow for longer this time, maybe long enough to kill you all."

Scott noted - with a disinterested, detached part of him, the part that was able to visit horrific homicide scenes and think of the evidence rather than, say, the dead family beside him - that Kevin had said that Mr. Gray had "maybe enough time to kill you all." "
...you
all." Not "
us
all."

"Who are you?" he demanded. "Where's Kevin? Where's Mr. Gray?"

"Kevin's safe right now. He's safe until I leave, and then he's going to have to take my place again to preserve symmetry."

Again, the words didn't make much sense to Scott beyond the fact that they were English, unaccented, spoken clearly and - most important in this case - without the halting, somehow almost otherworldly quality of the typical speech of an autistic child.

The boy started phasing again, turning from sleeping child to wakeful one, then back.

"I don't have enough power to shape the nexus to do more," said the other Kevin. "Get Kevin up and
run!
"

Then the other Kevin blinked, and suddenly their Kevin - the real Kevin, as far as Scott was concerned, the one that they had to keep safe and protect at all costs - was back in the bed, still sleeping, as though completely unaware of the miraculous thing that had just occurred.

A slamming sounded nearby. Scott looked at Lynette, who was staring at him suddenly with a look of shock and horror on her face that he knew probably mirrored the one on his own.

"Get Kevin up, quietly," he said.

Lynette immediately went to her son, leaned over to him and woke him with the words, "Kevin honey, it's a-okay and morning to be borning."

Kevin opened blurry eyes that had had far too little sleep to endure the rigors he had gone through and, Scott suspected, would have to go through again. The boy looked around. "It's dark. Not morning, not borning," he said, and tried to burrow back under the worn and weathered blanket and sheet set on the cot.

"This is bad," murmured Lynette.

Bang! There was another slam nearby, nearer than the first had been. And Scott had no doubt who was behind the noises.

"What's wrong?" he demanded. "Sounds like someone's going door to door in the building."

"Kevin's not ready to wake up," she answered.

"We don't have time for this," he said.

"You think I don't know that?" she fairly hissed back. "I'm trying to think of how to get him moving without starting him screaming." She paused as another slam sounded. "How long do we have?"

"Some of the rooms in the building are pretty cluttered, but there aren't many of them. Say a minute. And I'm being generous there."

Lynette sat and cooed nervously to Kevin, rubbing his elbow and arm lightly. "Kevin, honey, morning to be borning."

"No," answered his muffled voice from under the covers.

BANG!

"That was maybe two doors down," whispered Scott.

Lynette looked at him with panicked eyes. Scott, in a surge of hopeful inspiration, grabbed Kevin's laptop off the nearby desk where they had deposited it when arriving only a few hours before. He quickly turned it on, then called up the document that Kevin had been working on the night before - the complex mathematical equations that he had written out and then proclaimed, "It's all wrong."

Scott erased Kevin's last words, the repeated "It's all wrong"s, and replaced them with three simple words.

"Kevin, buddy, I found something," he whispered.

BANG!

Lynette looked at him with horror. "That sounded like next door to us," she whispered.

Scott nodded. He didn't want to talk for fear of letting her detect how terrified he was at this moment. Instead, he focused on Kevin again. "I found something," he said, more urgently.