I yelped in pain and clutched my right knee. What made it worse was that I knew that behind the mirrored mask, the creep was smiling.
“You okay?” he asked in that half-familiar voice. He sounded more amused than concerned.
“You mean apart from not knowing what’s going on, losing my family and breaking my knee?” I would have run, but fleeing for one’s life requires two legs in good operating condition. I took a deep breath, tried to pull it together.
“Two of those things are your own stupid fault. I was hoping to get to you before you started Walking, but I wasn’t fast enough. Now you’ve set off every alarm in this region by crossing from plane to plane like that.”
I had no idea what he was talking about; I hadn’t been on a plane since the family saw Aunt Agatha for Easter. I rubbed my leg.
“Who are you?” I said. “Take off the mask.”
He didn’t. “You can call me Jay,” he said. Or maybe it was, “You can call me J.” He put out his hand again, as if I were meant to shake it.
I wonder if I would have shaken it or not—I never got to find out. A sudden flash of green light left me blinded and blinking, and, a moment later, a loud bang momentarily put my ears out of commission, too.
“Run!” shouted Jay. “No, not that way! Go the way you came. I’ll try to head them off.”
I didn’t run—I just stood there, staring.
There were three flying disks, silver and glittering, hovering in the air about ten feet away. Riding each disk, balancing like a surfer riding a wave, was a man wearing a gray one-piece outfit. Each of the men was holding what looked like a weighted net—like something a fisherman might have, it occurred to me, or a gladiator.
“Joseph Harker,” called one of the gladiators in a flat, almost expressionless voice. “Opposition is nonproductive. Please remain where you are.” He waved his net to emphasize his point.
The net crackled and sparked tiny blue sparks where the mesh touched. I knew two things when I saw those nets: that they were for me, and that they were going to hurt if they caught me.
Jay shoved me. “Run!”
This time, I got it. I turned and took off.
One of the men on the disks shouted in pain. I looked back momentarily: He was tumbling down to the ground while the disk hovered in the air above him. I suspected that Jay was responsible.
The other two gladiators were hanging in the air directly above me, keeping pace with me as I ran. I didn’t have to look up. I could see their shadows.
I felt like a wild beast—a lion or a tiger, maybe— on a wildlife documentary, being hunted by men with tranquilizer darts. You know that it’s going to be brought down, if it just keeps running in a straight line. So I didn’t. I dodged to the left, just as a net landed where I had been. It brushed my right hand as it fell: My hand felt numb and I could not feel my fingers.
And I moved.
I was not sure how I did it, or even what I had just done. I had a momentary impression of more fog and twinkling lights and the sounds of wind chimes, and then I was alone. The men in the sky were gone—even mysterious Mr. Jay with the mirror face was nowhere to be seen. It was a quiet October afternoon, wet leaves were sticking to the sidewalk and nothing was happening in sleepy Greenville as per usual.
My heart was thumping so hard I thought my chest was going to burst.
I walked down Maple Road, trying to catch my breath, rubbing my numb right hand with my left, trying to get a handle on what had just happened.
My house wasn’t my house any longer. The people who lived there weren’t my family. There were bad guys on flying manhole covers after me, and a guy with an armored crotch and a mirrored face.
What could I do? Go to the police? Suuure, I told myself. They hear stories like this one all the time. They send the people who tell them stories like that to the funny farm.
That left one person I could talk to. I came around the curve in the street and saw Greenville High in front of me.
I was going to talk to Mr. Dimas.
(#ulink_de206f83-bacf-577d-922c-a8ddcba36b88)
GREENVILLE HIGH SCHOOL WAS built nearly fifty years ago. The city closed it when I was a kid for a few months to remove the asbestos. There are a couple of temporary trailers out in the back that house the art rooms and the science labs, and will do until they get around to building the new extension. It’s kind of crumbling; it smells like damp and pizza and sweaty sports equipment—and if I don’t sound like I love my school, well, I guess that’s because I don’t. But I had to admit it made me feel pretty good to be there now.
I made it up the steps, keeping a wary eye on the sky for gladiators on flying disks. Nothing.
I walked inside. Nobody gave me a second glance.
It was the middle of fifth period, and there weren’t too many people in the halls. I headed for Dimas’s classroom as fast as I could without running. He’d never been my favorite teacher—those bizarre tests he came up with were hard—but he’d always impressed me as someone who wouldn’t lose his head in an emergency.
If this wasn’t an emergency, I didn’t know what was. And it was his fault, in a way, wasn’t it?
I didn’t quite run down the corridor until I got to his classroom. I looked through the glass of the door. He was sitting at his desk, marking a stack of homework papers. I knocked on the door. He didn’t look up, just said “Come!” and kept on marking.
I opened the door and went over to his desk. He kept his eyes on the papers.
“Mr. Dimas?” I tried to keep my voice from shaking. “Do you have a moment?”
He looked up, looked into my eyes, and he dropped his pen. Just dropped it, like that. I bent down, picked it up and put it back on his desk.
I said, “Is there something wrong?”
He looked pale and—it took me a few moments to recognize this—actually frightened. His jaw dropped. He shook his head in the way my dad always called “shaking out the cobwebs” and looked at me again. He held out his right hand.
Then he said, “Shake my hand.”
“Uh, Mr. Dimas . . . ?” I was suddenly seized by the fear that he was part of all this weirdness, too, and the thought frightened me so that I could barely keep standing. I needed someone to be the adult right now.
He still held his hand out. His fingers were shaking, I noticed. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” I told him.
He looked at me sharply. “That’s not funny, Joey. If you are Joey. Shake my hand.”
I put my hand in his. He squeezed it just short of painfully, feeling the flesh and the bones of it, then he let go and looked up at me. “You’re real,” he said. “You aren’t a hallucination. What does this mean? Are you Joey Harker? You certainly look like him.”
“Of course I’m Joey,” I said. I’ll admit it—I was ready to start bawling like a baby. This madness, whatever it was, couldn’t be affecting him as well. Mr. Dimas was always so sane. Well, kind of sane. When Mayor Haenkle described him in his column in the Greenville Courier as “crazy as a snowblower in June” I pretty much knew what he meant.
But I had to tell someone what was going on, and Mr. Dimas still seemed like the best choice.
“Look,” I said carefully, “today has gone . . . really weird. You’re the only person I thought could maybe handle it.”
He was still as pale as a pitcher of milk, but he nodded. Then there was a knock on the door and he said, “Come!” He sounded relieved.
It was Ted Russell. He hardly even glanced at me. “Mr. Dimas,” he said. “I got a problem. If I get an F in Social Studies it means I don’t get a car. And I figure you’re going to give me an F.”
Apparently some things even alternate realities couldn’t change; Ted was obviously still grade challenged. Mr. Dimas had looked disappointed when Ted came in; now he was annoyed. “And why exactly is this my problem, Edward?”
That was the Mr. Dimas I remembered. I felt relieved, and before I could think the better of it, I had already spoken. “He’s right, Ted. Anyway, keeping you off the road is a public service. You’re a five-car pileup waiting to happen.”
