Weavers (19 page)

CHAPTER 41

Cynthia colored while her mother talked on the phone.
Mom was talking to Aunt Laura, who lived in Texas, and from the sound of it, they were both pretty fired up about divorce. Cynthia did what she could to ignore most of it, though. If she wanted to know what secrets Mom was holding, she could easily poke around and just find out. Cynthia didn’t want to know, however. She still wanted Mom and Dad to make things right, and she wanted to move back into the yellow house. She hadn’t seen Dad in over a week, and she missed her friends as well. Aside from Mrs. Martin, North Harbor wasn’t much fun, and even her time with Mrs. Martin had begun to feel more like school than just playing.

Cynthia sketched a little girl with a rainbow flowing from the top of her head. The girl in the drawing had far more colors than were listed on Cynthia’s chart and a much busier root of threads than she’d seen on a real person, but she was connected to at least fifty stick figures, which were surrounding her. After Cynthia had taken over the two men, she hadn’t told Mrs. Martin just how easy it had been. She was quite sure she could have easily handled all four of them on her own and maybe even more. Even though she was very young, Cynthia knew what a great power that must be. Mrs. Martin had needed her to take two of them, because two was the most her teacher had wanted to handle at one time.

Cynthia drew a full spectrum of colors coming from the girl on the page, with different color sequences connecting to the heads of the little people in her drawing. Mrs. Martin had told her about red, purple, blue, green, pink, and yellow. She hadn’t told her young student about black, not exactly, but Cynthia knew what black meant without being told. That was obvious from what happened when she tried to manipulate the black threads over Patrick. They were too ruined to fix. Once they were black, they were dead. Cynthia had a feeling that if she was to see a dead body, like when she’d gone to her great-grandmother’s funeral and there was an open casket, she would see a smattering of black threads coming from it.

“I didn’t want to at first,” said Mom from the kitchen, still ranting to her sister. “Yeah, I know. Now I get it. I do. When you told me about Nick, I said I thought it was ridiculous, but now I know better.” Mom paused, listening to Aunt Laura, and then replied, “Exactly. Exactly. I was wrong, and we both know it. I was a judgmental bitch, and I should have listened to my sister.”

Cynthia drew another stick figure, but this one she connected with just black threads to the girl at the center of the page.

“Well,” said Mom, getting louder now, “that’s what I’m going to do. He wanted to have fun, and now I’m going to take him to the goddamn cleaners. Eye for an eye, if you ask me. I mean, we bought that business together! If I’m going to be fighting for scraps in the world, then I’m going to get what I worked half my life for.” Mom paused, and Cynthia picked another stick figure at random and colored over its lines, switching them from pink and blue to black. She smiled at her work and then heard Mom say, “He’ll figure it out, you know? That’s what men do—they figure stuff out, like how to keep a piece of ass on the side. Now I’ll give him something else to figure out. It’s called, ‘Give me all of your money.’ If I’m lucky, he’ll talk to a lawyer, realize he doesn’t have a leg to stand on, and we can just work everything out in family court.” Mom sighed. “That would be the best for everyone involved. I mean, think of Cynthia. If he cares about her at all, he’ll agree that this is what’s best.”

Cynthia slowly slid her crayons back into the box, then slid the black one halfway out. She knew that neither Mom nor Dad had her abilities, knew they weren’t weavers in the same way that Mrs. Martin had known she was the second they met. She stared at the box of crayons, stared at her drawing, and then took the black crayon the rest of the way out of the box and got to drawing. When she was done, all of the little stick figures were connected to the girl in the middle, but now all of their threads were black. She understood things she never should have, and she knew if she looked at Mom she’d see threads of blue, red, yellow, and purple. Cynthia drew and drew and drew, and when she was done, the only color on the page was black.

CHAPTER 42

“I said take a fucking seat,” said the man with the gun, the badge at his waist now visible, and it took only a glance around the deck for Darryl to see that everyone but him and the cop were sitting.
“I’m serious, asshole. Take a fucking seat, and get your fucking hands in thggggnnnnnnnhhh—”

The cop dropped like he’d been hit in the head with a hammer, the gun clattering to the ship’s upper deck and away from him, and then the cop was shaking like an unmedicated epileptic moments after smelling sour oranges. Darryl hit him again, hard, before walking to the pistol and picking it up.

“Come on, Terry,” said Darryl as he stepped over the prone cop. Darryl considered the gun, his finger flexing on the semiauto’s trigger, then tossed it back to the deck and hit the cop again.

“Holy shit,” said one of the kids behind them.

“I said fucking come on.”

Terry stood—Darryl knew it without looking back at him—and the pair of them walked to the door and slid down the steps to the next deck. Here, people were milling about and preparing to dock, oblivious to the mess above them, while Darryl and Terry were gliding through the crowd like a hot knife through butter.

“What the fuck are we going to do, Darryl?” Terry asked as they moved to the next staircase.

“Whatever we have to.”

They moved past a large window. Inside, this floor was packed with young kids and their tired parents, and Darryl focused on a young mother near the back of the boat, sitting next to a sleeping baby in a stroller. He hit her as hard as he’d hit the cop, as hard as he’d ever bent anyone, and then grabbed the stroller. Terry shook his head while he and Darryl slipped away with the baby and the mother fell from her seat.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Terry asked as they moved back to the stairs they’d just come down, but Darryl said nothing in return. Terry already knew, and there was no reason to waste his breath on the words. Darryl hauled stroller and baby both up the stairs.

The voice over the loudspeaker returned as Darryl hurriedly pushed the stroller toward the bow of the boat. He handed off the stroller to Terry by shoving it in front of him and letting go. As Terry scrambled after it, Darryl could hear a humming noise as the ship approached the dock and could see police stationed by their cars, ready for them. Darryl took a deep breath and then was in the air above the ship, then descending to hover over the cop he’d left twitching on the deck. The man had settled down, was lying peaceably with a small crowd around him, and Darryl dove into him. One of his eyes was closed, most likely to never open again, and the cop was breathing harder than Darryl would have liked. Touching the wounded man with every bit of his skill, Darryl made the cop sit up.

The younger people gave the cop a wide berth as he stood up, the closest of them saying, “You better stay down, man. You don’t look so good.”

In answer, Darryl lurched the cop forward and used him to retrieve the pistol from the deck. The young man who had spoken gave him a puzzled look, and then Darryl made the cop raise the gun, point it at the kid, and pull the trigger. Darryl watched through the cop’s working eye as the kid dropped and the rest of the people on the top deck began to scream. Darryl made the cop lurch forward, then raise the gun again and shoot a pretty woman in the chest. This time Darryl didn’t watch her drop. He picked the next target, a man wearing a “Big Johnson” shirt with his arms outstretched as though to fend off the suddenly murderous zombie-cop. Darryl pulled the trigger again and shot the man just below the obnoxious design on his shirt, and he folded like an accordion as he fell.

Letting the rest of them run around him, Darryl made the cop walk to the end of the bow and then had him empty the pistol into the cops waiting on the dock. Darryl wasn’t even making the cop aim, just emptying the gun as fast as possible, and it had the desired effect. The boat was full of screaming and running passengers, and the cops on the dock had their heads down. Darryl checked the cop’s waist for extra magazines and found two in a discreet leather holster on the left side of his body. Darryl fumbled with one of the magazines when the
Badger
bumped into the dock, and then he stumbled backwards as a rifle round punched a hole in the cop’s left shoulder.

Darryl could hear Terry yelling while he worked one-handed to reload the gun, but he was forced to flush his friend’s voice from his mind. The cop was going to die soon—Darryl could feel it, even without the blood running down his side—and as he slid the new magazine in he stood and fired on the closest police officers. The cops ducked again, and then another pair of rifle shots cracked by him, both of them missing. Darryl felt a tug, almost as if Terry were trying to knock him loose from the cop, and he could feel his actual body moving on the boat.

Looking through the battered and bloodied cop’s eyes, Darryl could see a flood of people on the boat running past the police barricade that had been erected to control the situation. Not seeing Terry or himself, Darryl fired into the crowd of people rushing from the
Badger
, fighting their way off the boat in a frenzy. Darryl dropped the new magazine from the gun and was reaching across the cop’s body for the last spare when he was hit by a deluge of gunfire. Darryl fell backwards onto the
Badger
’s deck, then roared up above the boat, before plunging into his body.

“Fuck, thank God,” said Terry as Darryl’s wits came back, and Darryl saw that they were off of the boat and Terry had him pinned between himself and the stroller.

Cops were everywhere, but no one was paying much attention to the people flooding the streets. Most of the
Badger
’s passengers were corralling themselves just past the barricade, waiting for their cars most likely, but Darryl didn’t care if they ever saw Lee’s old truck ever again. He looked sideways as they ran past a couple of geared-up police readying themselves to board the boat, and he fell into Terry as he leapt into the closest cop. Darryl pushed the cop hard, took control, and then raised the M4 the man was holding on to and shot into the chests of the two police officers closest to him. Both of them collapsed, and Darryl turned to the crowd still streaming from the boat and sent bullets there as well. He wasn’t aiming, just firing from the hip, and then it was over.

Darryl fell back into his body, once again having been carried on between Terry and the stroller. He looked over his shoulder and saw his cop lying next to the two he’d shot. The back of his head was blown out.
Somebody figured that out quick
,
thought Darryl, vowing that if he survived this he was going to be sure to watch the evening news.

“Ditch the baby,” said Darryl to Terry as they ran through the crowd, and Terry did, letting go of the stroller and then falling in next to Darryl as they sprinted away from the docks and into downtown Ludington, Michigan.

Darryl wanted a bar, and for the first time in his life, not just because he wanted a drink. They found one a few blocks from the dock and ran inside as the sirens of emergency vehicles shook the windows. There were three men sitting at the bar, no bartender in sight, and Darryl pushed the two closest to the bar. They were drunk and it was easy, and a few seconds later the pair of them were sawing logs with their faces on the bar. Darryl gave the third man a shove, and then he and Terry followed the old man out of the bar to his truck.

The old man laid his keys on the hood and then said, “Got to pay my tab,” and went to walk back inside.

Darryl gave him one more little shove and sent the man behind the bar to make his own drinks for a change.

“Let’s go,” said Darryl as he grabbed the keys and clambered into the truck just as an ambulance went screaming past them down the road. Terry hopped in the passenger side, Darryl turned the key, and they got moving.

The only traffic was emergency vehicles going the other way, and Darryl couldn’t imagine what a mess the docks were going to be to sort out.

“They’re going to blame us for that, Darryl,” said Terry, a little stupidly.

“Well, that’s probably fair enough. Let them blame all they want. We’re getting out of town, and we’re going to figure this out.”

Terry didn’t say anything, just kept staring out the window, and Darryl rubbed his left temple with the palm of his hand.

You’re going to need to let all of that out soon
,
Darryl thought, and the idea was sickening. He had a whole load of poison to throw into Terry, but he could tell by looking at him that the man was close to his own breaking point. Terry’s topknot was a sick mixture of half purple and half pink, and Darryl watched for a moment as it swayed with the motion of the truck.
I need to figure out something, and fast.
The idea of getting rid of Terry was dead in the water, at least for now. Darryl needed him as a receptacle for all of that bad juju, but first he needed to figure out how to control him after shooting him full of the rotten stuff.

“We’ll figure it out, Terry,” said Darryl as another ambulance ripped down the road, headed in the opposite direction. “We’ll get over the border, or drive south and get a flight. We can do this, man. It’s going to be good.” Terry nodded, not saying anything in response. The world rushed by them, but all Darryl could think about was how much longer they could possibly keep going.
We’ve been burning bridges from Mexico to Michigan, and we’re about out of highway.
Darryl’s hands tightened on the wheel as two sheriff’s cars drove past them.

“They’re going to be so pissed off,” said Terry, his words slow, his voice hitching. “When they figure out what was wrong with those cops, we’re fucked.”

“They can’t know that, not even if they filmed the whole thing.”

“You really think you’re so special?” Terry asked. “You think you’re the only person to hang on to this shit past puberty? I guarantee you the FBI or ATF or CIA or somebody has a lab full of you creeps, and when they figure out what happened back there, they’re going to go apeshit. Your little trick has gotten us out of a lot of shit, but I think the house might be coming down. All they need to do is find some bender stronger than you, and we can kiss our asses good-bye.”

“That’s not going to happen,” said Darryl after a moment of silence. “There’s no lab like that, no think tank of assholes in coats studying people like me. There’s us and the road and a whole lot of pissed-off folks. Trust me, Terry, we’re going to get out of this, one way or the other.” Terry nodded, staring out the window and watching the trees zip by on the other side of it. Three more cruisers whipped past them, and Darryl said, “We just need a little bit of luck, and we’ll be fine.”