Contractor (13 page)

have hugged him and patted him on the head

and told him not to give up on his dreams.

She would have offered to call someone she

knew in Boston, to help him adjust when he

went off to school. She knew a surprising

number of people.

Daniel wiped his eyes with the back of

his hand. Her body was growing translucent.

Disappearing. "Mrs. Faldey," he said, "I’m sorry."

Mrs. Faldey shook her head. "I’ve

been…tired, lately. Very…"

And then she was gone.

Daniel leaned against the blackboard.

He looked to her desk. Her little nameplate

was blank. He kept staring at it, searching the

fine grains of metal for the letters telling the

world that his history teacher existed, but

they weren’t there.

The bell rang before he knew it. He

trudged to English. Mr. Griggs kept throwing

him concerned looks. He ignored his

teacher’s call for him to stay after the bell.

When school finally ended, Daniel

began to walk up the familiar sidewalk past

the woods. And then he started jogging up the

sidewalk, and then he was running, and then

sprinting past the trees, smashing through a

low branch hanging across the path. His

backpack struck his back as he pumped his

arms, faster, until he was using his power,

faster, speeding through intersections and

past all the houses that all looked the same.

For a terrifying instant, he felt totally lost,

trapped in a labyrinth made from his own

neighborhood.

He reached her house. There was a for-

sale sign in the front lawn. He charged up the

steps and kicked at the door with a glowing

foot. The door blasted off its hinges and

crashed into the front hall. He ran into the

living room.

The photos were still on the walls, but

Eliza Faldey had vanished. The group scene

looked awkward without her as the

centerpiece. Her portraits were now squares

with nothing in them. A smiling John Faldey

held his arm around air.

Daniel burst into tears. He fell on her

couch and pounded the cushions. He cried

until his throat was sore and he felt sick. He

climbed up onto the seat and bent forward,

holding his knees to his chest.

Maybe that was why Kyle had been so

desperate. On some level, he realized it—

that people were forgetting him. His only

outlet had been Daniel. What did it feel like,

to be forgotten by your friends, your own

family?

Daniel had killed hundreds of spawn,

now. He killed hundreds of creatures that

would have otherwise erased people from

the universe. If he hadn’t intervened, the next

round would have been that much worse.

Hundreds, gone. Winked out. Forgotten.

Erased.

How many towns didn’t have a

contractor to guard them? How many had

already been forgotten, how many cities

rubbed from maps, how many names and

dates and people vanished from history

books, stolen from minds? How many

children had no parents? How much of that

could the world take before it collapsed?

And this was a backwater universe. This

was the edge of the storm. Earth was an

afterthought.

Daniel stood. His hands were balled up

so tight his nails bit into his palms. Whatever

wizards the world might have were letting

this happen. They were ignoring Xik’s

warnings. They still didn’t feel desperate

enough to allow contracting. He wondered

what planet they thought they were living on.

Unless they were strong enough to take

on extractors. That was the bottleneck. The

souls were fine if the extractors were

defeated, if the spawn were left unharvested.

If the wizards were killing the extractors

every month, then they were probably

holding off the worst of it.

But Aplington didn’t have a wizard.

Aplington had Daniel. And if he killed one

extractor, more would come. He had to be

ready.

****

School was out, and with that, Daniel

had a lot of time on his hands. He couldn’t

do quite as much during the day, but just

walking around, he found plenty of Vorid.

Too many.

His first encounters with spawn had

frightened him. He felt revulsion. Disgust.

They were otherworldly, and it bothered the

hell out of him.

When he saw them now, he felt only

hatred.

His power turned the outside edge of his

hands into a blazing-white knife. He didn’t

need tools to cleave the parasites in two. He

was getting pretty good at sneaking up behind

people; they never noticed his powers.

Hitting invisible bugs with an invisible glow

was easy enough.

He relished every such opportunity. It

was his revenge, one slime-covered, putrid

little slug at a time. He killed them, and they

disintegrated into that black dust. The

remains floated into his chest, absorbed to

fuel his strength. And he immediately used it

to kill more of them, faster.

He kept a mental count of his kills as he

patrolled further and further from his home.

He hung a map of the town in his room and

crossed out blocks with a permanent marker

as he culled them of parasites. It was with a

gloating and compulsive finality that he

marked off the final intersection. 1,457

spawn and a single week later, Daniel had

cleared out the entirety of the Aplington

township.

****

His hunting grounds run dry, he came up

with a new plan. His reasoning was simple:

the big city had more people, and therefore,

more parasites. It was time to visit

Cleveland.

He excused himself as spending a night

at a friend’s house. His father took it with

pleasant surprise. Daniel didn’t really care if

James believed the story or not—it was

more to give Felix the sense that things were

normal.

He didn’t have a car, but he didn’t need

one. He could run faster through Aplington

than a car could drive. He left the isolated

suburbs behind, skirting the edge of empty

fields until he reached the exit onto 71 North.

It was after dark when he left, and

normal people couldn’t see his magic, but

Daniel kept to the woods beside the

highway. The only light he had to go by was

the glow produced by his body.

Running in the forest was like running

through a dark tunnel. The soft white

illuminated the trees in a blur of brown and

green as he sprinted ahead. The tree trunks

and leaves blended together in a stream, and

the wind whipped his hair. Even if he

decided not to dodge a particular branch, it

just snapped across him without hurting

anyway. The power turned his skin into

Kevlar, and the thick brush was trampled by

his sheer momentum. He could react to

sudden drops and rises in the ground faster

than they came up on him.

It was a rush. He pushed his feet harder,

churned his legs with more force, and the

tunnel of leaves turned into a high-speed rail

track. And if he focused, he could still see it

all, even running like this, the ripples of

cracked bark, the slightly dark veins of

leaves only just visible by the light of his

magic.

Faster than he could have imagined, the

forest peeled away in favor of buildings and

suburbs. Cleveland loomed in the distance, a

nest of flickering skyscrapers prodding at the

purple nighttime clouds.

Daniel checked his watch. His face

paled. He’d just run an hour car ride in 20

minutes. He wasn’t as nearly as tired as he

should be.

Cars. Gas mileage. Was his magic like

that? It took a lot of fuel to get up to speed,

and stop-and-go traffic burned gas, too. But

he’d sort of entered a sort of cruise control

state with his power, putting in just enough

strength to keep going. He hadn’t really

thought about trying to be efficient with how

he used his magic, but maybe there was

something to that.

Without the woodland cover, he had to

slow up. They might not see the glow of

magic, but a person running across the

ground faster than a car would definitely

draw attention.

Going house by house was boring, slow,

and exactly what he was fed up with.

Cleveland’s urban area was filled with

Vorid spawn—he could feel it—and he

didn’t run all the way there to flit around the

edges. He went straight downtown.

His kill count skyrocketed on the

crowded streets—easy pickings. He found

that if he moved close and pulsed his power

briefly, he could frighten the spawn into

abandoning their hosts, and the civilians

were none the wiser. Their attempts to

escape were no problem; before, they were

darting little rats, slippery as soap. To his

improved senses, they were sluggish and

vulnerable. He stomped them down before

they could get more than a few feet.

There were a few other places that

caught his attention—towering apartment

blocks seemed like juicy targets. And then

there were bars, and nightclubs, crammed

with drinkers and dancers. He debated trying

to sneak into one, then just decided to stick to

the streets. There were plenty of Vorid to go

around. He barely had to concentrate his

senses before another black splotch nicked at

his attention.

Daniel cut a line through the city,

attacking whatever was within easy reach.

He wound through the alleys and bright

streets all the way down to a lonely avenue

on the edge of Lake Erie. The cool wind off

the water made him look up. He was right in

the middle of North Coast Harbor.

The road was grey brick pavement. A

few parked cars were his only company. On

his left was the massive Cleveland Browns

stadium; past that, a curved steel and

concrete construct with big signs declaring it

the Great Lakes Science Center. He

remembered going there with his parents. He

hadn’t been in a long time.

Next on his little tour was the Rock and

Roll Hall of Fame. The glass triangles that

capped the building jutted straight from the

street. Now those were good memories.

He hadn’t really been into music until…

James brought him there. It had been just the

two of them. No mom, no baby Felix.

And then across the street—a brick

compound with high fencing, complete with

barbed wire. Angry white and red signs

declared that none should tread upon the

ground of the U.S. Army Engineers. Funny

that an outpost of The Man was set facing a

monument for rock legends.

He wondered if the government knew

about the Vorid. If they did, they had pretty

much decided to keep everyone in the dark.

Maybe it was the memories, but

suddenly, he was tired. He was tired of

killing Vorid, tired of chipping away at a

problem a hundred thousand times bigger

than he was.

His feet carried him to the very end of

the street. A few stone pylons connected by

heavy iron chains marked where manmade

things ended and the water began. He placed

his hands on the metal. The lights of the city

made a blurry reflection in the dark lake, and

then, a few hundred feet out, dwindled down

to nothing. Past that there was only black on

black, and above, red-grey clouds hazy with

the light of the city. It was like standing at the

brink of nothingness.

Cleveland had over 300,000 people. If

his senses were right, combined with the

suburbs, there were tens of thousands of

Vorid. He was a hell of a lot faster, but it

had still taken him more than a week to clear

out Aplington.

How many Eliza Faldeys were sitting in

their homes, oblivious to the creature

suckered onto their back? How many of them

had husbands, children, grandchildren? How

did you live after forgetting your

grandmother…after forgetting your mother?

The iron links of the chains were cold

and hard under his hands. He swallowed

hard.

If he spent all of his available time just

hunting Vorid in Cleveland, stopping only to

eat and piss, he might be able to clear out the

city before more extractors came. But what

then? What would happen when they did

come, and see that every spawn had vanished

without a trace? What about the hundred

other towns in Ohio that were left

untouched?

It was too much. He couldn’t do it. His

shoulders sagged.

Something flared in his senses.

As if flinching, he jerked into the scry-

world. He didn’t float away from his body;

he didn’t have to. He turned.

In the distance, high in a building, a few

points of power flickered and danced. He

thought he could make out nasty black dots