The Twelve Stones (5 page)

Tears welled up in Ted’s eyes as the flesh on his arm seared
with intense pain.
Ted grunted as the cigarette ember faded out, the wisps of smoke rising from the burnt hair and skin. The cigarette had left a black circle of ash and a sizable burn mark.

Gritting his teeth, he
opened up the flannel shirt he had kept the stone in and looked at it suspiciously. He
stretched his trembling hand toward
the rock in front of him, and for a moment, his fingers hovered about it.
What the hell was he doing out here? It’s just a rock
,
for Christ’s sake
!
D
on’t
expect miracles!
Finally, Ted composed himself and grabbed the stone
.

Ted gasped as the stone
again
flashed a brilliant blue. The light traveled up to the wounded skin
,
and
i
ncredibly, the red, angry mark
shrank
rapidly, leaving no indication of any damage from the self-inflicted wound.

“
How about that…?” Ted whispered quietly. But it seemed the stone wasn’t finished with him yet.

The light spread up and over his arm and across his chest, illuminating his body as the stone began to heal the years of damage created by the various toxins he had ingested into his body over the years. The glow surrounded his lungs, heart and other vital organs
,
healing each one to a pristine state. He coughed, expelling a particularly green and nasty lung bug
,
and drew in a deep breath.

His heart quickened as he realized what the glow was doing to his body
:
repairing all the damage that time, alcohol and various other follies of modern life had inflicted on him. He turned to look at his reflection in the window. His appearance remained the same, but he felt twenty years younger.

Processing this latest moment in an already
-
surreal sort of day, Ted sat down in his favorite
deck
chair
,
tilting his head back to look up at the stars above. Feeling for the stone in his pocket, he took it out and stared at the
smooth and polished surface. It was light
;
no more than a few grams, he estimated. It had a long and thin claw
-
like shape, as if taken from the hand of some great beast. The stone was smooth otherwise, with no
scoring or identifying features
visible.

Ted set the stone down on the table in front of him, staring at it thoughtfully as he considered the proper course of action for this mysterious and powerful artifact.

Ted didn’t like the idea of just handing it over to the government. It wasn’t that Ted was some conspiracy nut about secret men running things behind the scenes or anything so ridiculous as that. In fact, as a veteran of one foreign war, he was as certain
of
the power of American Democracy and its innate goodness as the Founding Fathers had been.

But, given the power of making any man invulnerable to injury, there was no telling what could happen even in the hands of a well-meaning government. Ted shook his head no
;
the instant he thought about turning the stone over to the government, his mind flashed on Hell and the road to it being paved
with
good intentions. If this stone’s power were somehow extended, the balance of global power would shift so greatly in the direction of the United States
that
the world might have no choice but to surrender to some sort of “
b
enevolent
d
emocracy
.” Absolute power in the hands of men had never turned out especially well for humanity in the past.

The same was true for science. Anyone connected enough to properly exploit the power in the stone would certainly be a target for other governments, or organizations that lusted after such power. Given enough money and time, any plan, any project to steal the stone was possible.

It seemed that the safest course of action was to do nothing. Scott and Alex were good kids, and they wouldn’t talk about what happened if he asked them not to. The most obvious argument was
,
“W
ho
would
possibly believe them?
”
Scott was injury
-
free, Ted had the stone, and so far in his limited experience of pa
renting, the best way to keep
kid
s
quiet was to bribe ‘em.

More importantly, the risks to Alex, Scott,
and
even himself outweighed any possible reward that could
come with
announcing the discovery of the stone. They lived a comfortable life. The settlement from his wife’s death was more than enough to cover their lifestyle for many years to come. Money was not an issue.

He frowned. It was unfortunate
,
Ted thought as he carefully wrapped the stone back in the scrap of the bloody flannel shirt and placed it back in his pocket. The stone could
do
a lot of good in the right hands. He opened the French door
s
to his house and retreated back inside.

Ted crossed to the other side of the house
, toward
his office
–
and
,
more importantly, a larger and more secure safe. Entering his office quickly, he opened
the safe
, moving aside some paperwork and placing
the stone
far in the back, out of sight and casual reach.
Out of sight, out of mind. H
e
could forget the whole thing and just provide a normal life for him and his kid. Maybe in a year or two
,
he’d rent a safety deposit box and put it in there. Hopefully, there wouldn’t ever be a call for him to use the stone, but knowing it was close made him feel a little safer. Ted closed the door on the safe and exhaled a long breath
,
one
he hadn’t even realized he
’d been
holding in.

Leaving his office, Ted closed the door behind him
,
making sure the door clicked completely shut.
He
walked down the carpeted hallway towards his son’s room. Stopping outside, he paused
,
listening to the familiar rhythmic breathing of his son in a deep sleep, hopefully guarded away from the demons Ted feared would come after them if the secret of this stone got out.

He closed the door to his son’s room and went to bed, knowing full well he wasn’t going to sleep tonight.

Chapter Two

Twenty
-
Two Years Later…

At 2:30 in the morning
,
cab drivers at the airport don’t have much to do. The few flights that did land in the middle of the night were usually filled with short-tempered, tired businessmen and their non-existent expense accounts. But the man in the front of the line didn’t mind. He’d been doing this long enough to know there were good nights and bad ones. It was all in how you looked at things.

Tony Welk
had
started getting people where they needed to go when he was 16 years old, pedaling tourists around Venice Beach in a bike with a cart attached. Skipping his last year of high school, Tony turned his bike business
into a
full
-
time
job
. A few years after that, Tony had his own cabbie medallion, and now, thirty five years later, Tony had seen it all and had enjoyed most every moment. Sure, there had been robberies, fares that skipped out, but Tony was interested in meeting people, and driving characters
all over the Los Angeles metroplex
made Tony feel like he was in his element.

A knock on his window roused him back to the land of the living and conscious. He shook himself awake and turned
,
seeing a scraggly
-
looking man holding only a dark green rucksack. Lean and muscular, the man stood at least six feet tall, and had dark brown eyes with a closely cropped haircut. He moved towards the back of the cab, trying the handle. Finding it locked, he waited as Tony inspected him.

The man's pants had seen better days, and while they had no holes in them
that
Tony could see (usually the first indication whether someone was a legitimate fare or just a homeless junkie looking for a warm place to sit for a few minutes), they had definitely seen some miles. The light leather jacket that hugged the man’s frame obviously wasn’t a cheap knockoff, which in Tony’s eyes put him within the margin of respectability. What struck Tony most of all was the way the man’s eyes never stopped moving. Always darting around in different directions, careful to observe and watch his surroundings for anything that could be a threat. Tony had seen that look before in a lot of people, most of whom had been in prison or
w
ar.

T
he
man outside his cab
wasn’t setting off any of
his
alarm bells, the cab driver mused
, but it would probably be safer if he kept an eye on him.

Tony clicked the switch on his driver
-
side panel to unlock the doors of the cab
and
let the man in. His scraggly passenger entered quickly, throwing his backpack into the cab, slouching low into the seat as he got in.

“
Drive.” the low voice commanded.

Tony wasn’t scared
–
not yet
,
anyway. If you spent your life assuming everyone was out to get you, eventually, someone would get you. He had developed that philosophy on his first day, and it had served him well.

“
I’m gonna need somewhere to go.” Tony called back to his fare. “You’re already in for three and a quarter cause I picked you up at the airport, so you tell me where we’re going
;
o
therwise
,
I’m letting you out at the gate.”

The man tossed a
wad
of bills into the front seat
,
barely held together by a cracked and dried
-
out rubber band. Tony glanced at the
amount of
money the man had casually tossed
him
and decided this was a good time to stop asking questions.

“
Onyx Lake.” The man muttered.

Shrugging his shoulders, Tony picked up the roll of money that had fallen next to him. The roll was real; each bill contained within even had the crispness and smell of fresh currency. The trip to Onyx Lake from Los Angeles was maybe a three hundred dollar ride, but the man had just thrown him a few thousand dollars like it was nothing. Tony was wrong
;
he hadn’t seen it all. Nothing like this had ever happened to Tony before,
but
he quickly decided he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. He nodded to his mysterious fare, put his cab in gear
,
and drove off.

During the four
-
hour journey, the man stayed silent,
either
asleep or lost in his own thoughts
;
Tony couldn’t tell which it was. It was all the same to him
,
really. Some fares were talkative, and some preferred silence. Tony didn’t know what to make of the man in his backseat,
but
the money spoke loud enough. He kept the radio low, listening to some DJ take callers from people who claimed to see aliens and jabbered on endlessly about conspiracies. He just drove the cab towards the San Bernardino Mountains,
smoking his cigarettes,
while his passenger occasionally raised his head to look out the back window.

Whatever the man’s problems were, Tony figured, he could be long gone and spending the fare at Commerce Casino by the time he got back to L.A. When someone tossed you this kind of cash that casually, there was little reason to think that the money was clean. The only way he might get some fun out of it before the Feds came down and ruined his party is if he splashed it around doing what he loved more than driving cabs
:
playing poker.

The sun was just barely turning the
eastern horizon
pink when Tony and his fare
approached
the small township of Onyx Lake, California.

“
Pull over there,” the voice commanded from the back.

“
But we’re nowhere near town,” the cabbie called back at his fare, “You sure you don’t…”

“
Positive. Pull over.” The man said firmly.