Children of the Earth (8 page)

11

THE NEE
DLE ON HIS GAS
gauge was pushing toward empty when Owen finally returned to Carbon County. He’d lost count of the time spent barreling down highways and climbing abandoned back roads, the blood caking dry on his clothes and his knuckles white on the steering wheel, every mile unleashing a new torrent of questions.

He’d been going well over the speed limit, but his truck still couldn’t go fast enough to staunch the waves of anger and fear broiling in his blood. Even with the windows rolled down and the wind whipping against his cheek, he felt like a lobster boiling in a pot. There was only one true release when life got this tangled, and it was a release he’d denied himself for too long.

Not bothering to change clothes or shower off the blood, he grabbed his old leather jacket and wheeled his vintage Husqvarna out of the garage. Even after months of neglect, the chrome accents winked at him in the pale beam of his porch light, an old friend welcoming him back. The bike felt warm and pliant under him as he settled into the saddle and kicked it to life, its metal frame yielding in a way that even Daphne never could, a way that whispered of being at his mercy, a minion of his will and his alone.

The cool autumn afternoon embraced him as he flew over back roads, dipping and leaping to avoid potholes. The wind tousled his hair and crackled the changing leaves, filling him with elation he hadn’t known since the town had shut down the track and he’d had to relegate his bike to the garage. As the Husqvarna gathered speed, he felt his thoughts begin to slow and untangle, the adrenaline working its way into the steady focus that had won him first place at countless races across America before Carbon County and Daphne had claimed his soul.

Within minutes he was at the drifters’ camp, maneuvering the bike around weather-beaten tents and trailers, immune to the dirty looks and dirtier words the prospectors flung his way. The gate to the track loomed before him, the rusted eye of the padlock glowering a dare.

Revving his engine, he sped toward the gate, gripping the bike between his knees. He nosed the wheels off the ground, and a moment later he was airborne, the gate’s metal arm receding beneath him as he lunged toward the stars.
I w
ish I could stay thi
s way forever
, he thought in the middle of the jump: suspended in the air, in that moment when speed overtakes gravity and time slows, when everything seems to stop.

He braced himself to land, but instead of coming down on the other side of the gate his bike rose higher into the air, past the point where gravity ought to have caught and landed it.

The earth rushed away, the pitted and unkempt motocross track smoothing to a dark ribbon below him. Thin, cold air rubbed his cheeks raw and froze his breath. The ground was so far away it looked like a map crinkled by mountains, and still he continued to rise.

I wish I
could stay this way
forever.
The words, his thoughts from just moments before, pounded in his brain.

“Get down!” he croaked, the wind coating his tongue with dust and swallowing his voice.

He pressed on the handlebars with his full weight, trying to force the bike to land. “Please,” he whispered. “Get down now.”

The bike gave a rambunctious buck. Its front wheel lowered, plunging him into free fall, the backdraft biting Owen’s cheeks as the motocross track came screaming up at him.

“No!” he cried, desperately trying to reorganize his thoughts.

He closed his eyes and tried not to think of his bike crashing and burning on the ground, his body breaking into pieces along with it. His only chance at survival was a soft landing.

“Get down
gently
!” he screamed. He pictured a parachute opening above him, dragging at the air. He imagined the needle on his speedometer plunging out of the red, his wheels dropping soft as a rabbit in the dirt, and as the image took hold and dug into the recesses of his brain he could swear he felt his velocity slacken and the rush of air slow against his face.

It was only with the soft bump of his wheels hitting the ground that he dared open his eyes. His heartbeat, suspended by fear until that moment, crashed against his rib cage and thudded in his ears, drowning out the buzz of his motor as he careened toward the track’s sharpest hairpin turn.

Reflexes and adrenaline took over, and he swooped the bike around the curve, his shoulder nearly brushing the ground. As he settled into the rhythm of the track, guiding the Husqvarna by instinct over the jumps and berms, he tried to make sense of what had just happened.

His thoughts had power: That much was clear. At first he’d thought it was coincidence, or adrenaline—something that could be explained by biology or physics if only he looked hard enough for an answer. But it had happened too many times to be coincidence, and there were too many patterns. His mind skimmed over the time he’d unwrapped Daphne’s hands from his neck in the throes of her seizure, and the scary few moments after Trey’s death when Doug had attacked him and Owen threw Doug high into the air, seemingly by will alone.

He’d imagined oil as blood, and blood had gushed from the oil rig. He’d pictured the bolt turning under his hand, and it had. A fleeting wish to stay in a jump forever had loosened the grip of gravity and sent him skyward. And when he decided he wanted to come down, he plummeted back to the ground.

Each time, it started with a simple thought: a thought that stuck like a song in his brain and unfurled in rich detail before coming true before his eyes. Was he—could he be—somehow controlling the world around him with his mind?

The idea rippled goose bumps down his arms as he sped around the track, the bike swooping through turns like a bird of prey looking for its next meal. Things were weird enough in Carbon County without him discovering unwanted superpowers. And yet . . . he wanted more. Under his skin he sizzled with the need to experiment, to see just how much he could really do.

He had to know.

He was coming up on the old berms, deliberately sculpted mounds that had washed away when the track fell into disrepair and were now filled with rainwater several inches deep. Squinting at the puddles, he wondered if he could turn water solid, if he could give himself a smooth ride across simply by picturing the puddles turning to dirt.

Turn to dirt.
The words took shape in his mind as he focused on the puddles, and he began to feel energy gather in his skull. The water shimmered, its molecules buzzing confused circles as his bike bore down. His front wheel nosed into the berms and he braced himself, waiting for a splash.

But none came. He sped through, and only dust swirled in his wake.

Owen yanked the bike to a hard stop and turned to stare at the place where the puddle had been. Dirt gazed back at him, marred only by a thin strip of tread-mark from his tires.

It wasn’t a coincidence or an illusion: He really could control matter with his mind.

All he had to do was learn to harness his skill, to control it instead of letting it control him, and there was no telling how far it could go. He could be something more than just Owen, a confused nineteen-year-old who had just lost his job. He could be more than just the boyfriend of Daphne the Prophet, more than someone who used to win a motocross race every now and then. He could be more than human. He could be a god.

He felt strong, pumped, like he was made of stars. He laughed, and it rang out clear and high through the valley.

And then, just to see what would happen, he slowed his breath and imagined the atoms on the ground shivering back into liquid. Seconds later, a wavering reflection of his face stared up at him from the spot where the puddle had reappeared.

Owen’s laugh died in his throat. The face that stared back at him was twisted into a demonic grin. His skin was an otherworldly white, glowing moon-pale, and dark circles lurked beneath his eyes. But it was his eyes themselves that made him gasp, his eyes that made bile rise from his gut and coat the back of his throat. They were neon green and lit up like laser beams, piercing the air and illuminating everything around him in a sickly glare that hinted at other, eviler worlds: worlds beneath the earth, and under his skin.

He staggered back, away from the puddle he’d called into existence with his mind. Moaning, clutching at his face and covering his eyes, he sank to his knees on the cold dirt track.

• • •

Daphne’s eyes snapped open. The images from her vision—a great divide in the earth, separating the Children of God from the Children of the Earth; chanting and fire and demons and weapons and her on the wrong side, forced to choose—faded against the skim-milk gray of the afternoon sky, making her squint in the sudden light.

She tasted dust in her mouth and looked around. She must have fallen by the side of the road when the vision overtook her; in the background she could hear the rig clanging and the voices of her coworkers calling to one another as they went about their afternoon. Likely, nobody had been around to witness her fall or see her seizing, and she was glad for that. She didn’t want their concern right then—or, worse, another trip to the hospital. She’d been on a mission to talk to Owen after he stormed off the rig covered in blood. She had to find him and make sure he was okay.

Her head spun as she stood, trying to ignore the black spots dancing in her eyes and the dark, terrible images from her vision still raking at the corners of her mind. They clawed at her while she walked unsteadily to her car, her legs shaky beneath her, and sank into the driver’s seat.

Why were these visions stalking her, and what did they mean? She knew what Pastor Ted would say: that it was because she was a prophet, blessed with messages from God. But the visions didn’t
feel
like a blessing: They felt like a puzzle made of pieces that didn’t fit together or were missing entirely, a puzzle that she’d never be able to finish or that would be too awful to look at if she did.

Yet she couldn’t let it go. Her latest vision consumed her as she drove through town, searching for answers as she scanned the streets for Owen’s truck. She had seen a crack in the earth, with Pastor Ted’s congregation, the Children of God, brandishing weapons on one side and the Children of the Earth dancing and chanting on the other. Was this the Great Divide that had been predicted in the tablet, the one it claimed would herald a great battle between good and evil that would ultimately determine the fate of the world? It seemed so far-fetched, so improbable. She would have dismissed it entirely as delusions brought on by her seizure . . . if everything else predicted by the tablet hadn’t already come true.

The Great Battle, the Great Divide: These were the events the tablet warned of. Now it seemed like her visions were synching up. But she thought that she was one of the Children of God, that she was supposed to lead them through the great battle. So why, in her vision, was she on the wrong side?

She turned, finally, into the one place in Carbon County where she least wanted to go, a place that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up and her stomach clench in nervous knots. She hadn’t been back to the old motocross track since she’d been attacked there, triggering her first seizure and, with it, her first vision. Still, she knew it was where Owen would have gone—where she should have been looking for him all along. She knew that he needed her then, even if he was too tough to admit it. And, in the wake of her vision, she needed him, too.

Sure enough, she could hear the keening whine of his dirt bike over the prospectors’ gas generators and campfires. She knew better than to cut through their camp again, so instead she took a little-used path through the woods, her feet crunching on dry branches and her heartbeat echoing in her ears.

She broke, panting, through the barrier of trees and paused on the rusting bleachers as Owen’s bike tore around a bend.

He was helmet-less, still covered in blood, his body tensed with concentration. Crows’ wings of hair flapped in his wake. Even if she’d waved and shouted, she knew he wouldn’t have noticed her. His eyes blazed. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but for a moment it seemed like there were flames dancing in his pupils.

His bike seemed to paw at the ground as he bore down on a puddle, his eyes green pinpricks of light. She winced, anticipating a splash—but it never came. Milliseconds before his wheels hit the puddle, the water transformed to solid dirt.

Daphne sat down, hard, on the bleachers.

She must be seeing things. Maybe the vision earlier had messed with her mind.

She hugged her thin shirt around her shoulders as Owen stopped the bike and dismounted. She watched him approach the depression where the puddle had been, the light from his eyes bathing the track before him in a sickly underwater green that made her stomach twist and clench. He seemed to grow taller as he regarded the dirt by his feet, his shoulders widening until it looked like he’d swallowed all the space on the track.

Daphne flashed back to her first vision, of Owen larger than life by the oil rig, holding up his hands to draw a raging fire down from the mountains. The Owen standing below her now was the same Owen she’d seen then, in those dark, terrifying moments when her eyes rolled back in her head and she hovered between two worlds. He was wholly different from the Owen she’d fallen in love with, who was kind and caring underneath his leather jacket and grim half smile. It wasn’t just that figure below her, and the one in her vision, didn’t look like Owen—he didn’t even look
human
.

He stared down at the place where the puddle had been, and a twisted grin split his face, a carnival distortion of his usual smile. He laughed: a metallic, staccato sound that filled the track and made Daphne want to throw her hands over her ears. Then the light from his eyes focused into laser beams, boring into the dirt by his feet. The earth there shimmered, rearranging itself—and suddenly, the puddle was filled with water again.

Daphne and Owen gasped at the same time as his reflection stared up at him. She watched as the smile vanished from his face and the neon light faded from his eyes. He stumbled back, falling to his knees and covering his face with his hands. So he had seen it, too. It wasn’t just her imagination, wasn’t leftover hallucinations from her vision earlier that day. Owen knew as well as she did that something was wrong.