Flightsuit (22 page)

"You've got to get yourself under control," Ethan told him.  "You're shaking, and the suit's amplifying it.  I can't get near you." 
At least I can see him now.  If the kid had been hurt, and the suit kept him invisible it'd be impossible to find him
.

Leo was exhausted and in shock, "I
kn-know wwit.  I can'tt help it.  I don't know wh-what's happening to me.  I'm scared."

"It's going to be ok son.  We'll find a way to get this off you.  Can you lay back on the grass and put your feet up on that rock for a few minutes?"

Leo twisted his shoulders around to see the rock.  "Yes.  I can.  Wwill that help?" 

"Yes, I think it will."

When he'd settled into the grass with his feet on the rock, Leo asked, "Do you think they will die?"

Ethan paused with no idea what to tell the boy.  "I don't know," he finally admitted.  "I don't know if they will." 
No ambulance sirens yet
, he thought.  "The suit did that Leo.  That wasn't you."  He knelt close to Leo but far enough away to avoid accidentally touching the suit as he searched the boy's eyes through the helmet.  He'd only known Leo for a day and his only interaction with the world had been through the news he received from the radio and tiny television.  He'd heard many stories of increasingly violent young people.  He imagined they had little similarity to kids from his generation, or Ray.  So he was relieved when Leo spoke again.

"The suit just…it just," Leo started, breaking into tears. 

Ethan watched helplessly and waited for him to stop crying.  He heard the sirens now. 
Too late for them
, he thought. 
Too soon for us.  We've got to get moving
.

Ethan reached into the backpack and pulled out a canteen.  He drank a couple gulps and let it down into his lap, looking at Leo. 
How in the world…

"You must be getting thirsty in there.  Do you see any way to open that helmet?" 
If we can't get him out of that can, he could die of dehydration or starve in there.

"I'm not thirsty," Leo replied.  "I've been drinking from this little tube."

"What?"  Ethan leaned over, peering into the helmet.  "How did you know it wasn't poisonous?  There's no way an alien would eat or drink the same things we do.  It might make you sick."

"I know.  It was just right next to my mouth
, and I was so thirsty standing in the sun all that time that I drank from it without thinking.  It tasted fine though.  I'm pretty sure it's just water."  He sipped again from the tube as a demonstration. 

"Ok, well that's good news, at least"

The ambulance was getting louder and more sirens joined the chorus. 

"Time to get out of here.  Can you get up?  Are you feeling any better?"

"Yes.  I can get up.  I'm not shaking anymore."  The image of the cops standing with their hands blown off wanted to get his attention.  He felt jittery knowing it was there and pushed it aside, staring hard at anything else.  Leaves rustled in trees covering the mountainside.  He watched them, careful to keep his peripheral vision away from the police cars and the red spots of sand.  He'd glanced down at them once and started to breathe fast and feel sick before he turned away and thought of something else. 

Leo asked, "Where are we going?"

"I think I know of a place they won't look," Ethan told him.  "At least, I hope they won't."

"Is it far?"

"No.  We can walk there."

Leo paused a moment and asked, "Won't they follow us?"

Ethan stopped. 
Damn.  They will follow us.  They'll get dogs to trail us.  Even if they can't get a scent from the suit, they'll be able to track me and see me if they get close enough
.

"I could lead them away in the suit," Leo offered.

No better options
, Ethan decided.  "That's a good idea.  Are you sure you're up to it?"

"Yes, I can do it," Leo replied
, a little excited by the prospect and eager to get away from the river carnage. 

"Ok.  Hang on."  Ethan sat down and pulled off his boot, then the sock.  He put the boot back on and stood up, looking around.  He found a long stick.  He wrapped the sock around the bottom of it and
pulled it into a tight knot.  He handed the stick to Leo.  "Drag this along behind you when you want the dogs to follow your trail, and lift it in the air when you want to confuse them.  Lead them down along the river as far as you think you should go then throw it in the river and jump as far as you can away.  That should break their trail.  Then jump and run to get to mine #12.  Do you know which one is #12?"

"Yes."  Leo had visited most of the mines, exploring.  Some of them no longer had signs.  People had taken them as souvenirs.  The "Mine #12" sign was rotten and wet.  No one wanted it.  "Are we going to hide in the mine?"

"Yes," Ethan told him.  "Are you ok with that?"

"Yeah, that's a great idea."

Ethan smiled at his resiliency.  "Ok, great.  The first thing we've got to do is get me away from this hilltop, break my trail.  We'll need you to jump with me as far as you can," Ethan looked around, "in that direction, maybe land near that stream if you can control it that well."

"Ok, let me lift you up."

He's a lot more eager for this than I am.  Even as scared as he is, he enjoys using the suit.  Maybe this will distract him from what happened back there.
  Ethan nearly jumped out of his skin when Leo's gloved hand reached around his back to lift him. 
It's amazing but it's also deadly and beyond our understanding.  I'll be glad to get him out of it.  Then they can have it and do whatever they want with it. 

Leo adjusted his hold, trying
not to squeeze Ethan too hard.  "Ready?"

"Just try not to make pancakes out of us."  Ethan thought for a second and added "Don't jump us into the atmosphere either."  He didn't have any feel for Leo's control of the suit, so it was pointless to give advice.  "Sorry," he added, "just use your judgment.  You're doing fine." 
Except for the cops
, Ethan thought.  He tensed, readying himself for the leap. 

Leo stared at a flat grassy spot across the little stream 200 yards away.  It was pointless to think of controlling the suit's jump the same way he would gauge the effort necessary to jump without it.  There was no comparison.  Although he was certain he'd not yet reached the limit of the suit's capability, he'd already jumped great distances.  His normal jumps without the suit might be off by inches
, and he'd never notice.  A suit-powered jump on the other hand, would be much greater and misjudging it might change his landing point by ten or twenty feet. 
In fact
, he thought,
there's no way to know how it's going to amplify it.  It might go clear over the mountain instead of just down to the stream
.  The more thought he put into the effort, the more uncertain he became.  It was becoming more unnatural as he stood there, and he had to keep mentally rehearsing what it felt like to jump as if he might forget it.  There were rocks around the further side of the little patch he wanted to land on and there were briars and small trees to the right.  The stream was the left boundary.  He didn't want to land too hard or it might hurt Ethan.  He was sure the jump wouldn't hurt him inside the suit, but he didn't think it would be as protective of Ethan.  He shook his head, frustrated and decided to just jump.

It was immediately obvious they were not going to land on the little grassy spot.  When he jumped, he'd put more effort in than he intended
, and the suit sprang forward.  The leap carried them over the soft patch.  They were still rising as they passed over it.  Leo was looking ahead trying to see where they would land.  Until the leap began to arc down, it was impossible.  They sailed over the crest of the other hillside with the suit slipping between treetops on the downslope.  It landed on a smooth grassy downslope and slid to a stop. 

"
Woohoo!"  Leo forgot about missing his intended target in his relief and the excitement of flying down to a smooth sliding landing between the trees.  "This thing is amazing!"

Ethan slid down from the suit and backed up a step.  "It is," he agreed.  "I've never seen anything like it."  Ethan knew the government would pull out all stops to acquire the suit. 
They'll never let us live to talk about it
, he thought,
let alone let him keep it.  We've got to hide and do this on our own terms, or we're dead.  Good news though, the kid's temporarily distracted from the injured cops.
 

"Ok.  So you're sure you know where to come, right?"

"Yes, mine #12.  I will meet you there."

"Jump back to the hilltop where we were and drag the sock stick behind you as you run.  Head down the river for a few miles.  That shouldn't take you very long in the suit.  Hopefully, it will camouflage itself again when you go.  That white stands out in all this green.  Anyway, you'll probably beat me to the mine entrance.  Wait for me there." 

"Don't worry, I will be fine."  He hunched down and leaped away.  Ethan watched him fly through the tree trunks and disappear over the mountaintop. 
Have to assume he made it
, he thought.  He listened for a moment for gunshots, but only heard the blaring sirens as they reached the cops.  Then he started running.

It's nice here,
Leo thought.  They were ¼ mile underground, according to Ethan.  The mine entrance was low, and Ethan had to walk bent over.  He stopped frequently to kneel down and straighten his back.  Leo had to crawl on hands and knees to fit the bulky suit through the shaft.  The clearance was close, but adequate, while they traveled the main shaft.  It was larger to accommodate the small-gauge rail lines for the little wooden ore carts.  When Ethan turned off the main shaft, the walls closed in around them.  Leo had to wriggle his shoulders and twist himself to get past.  He felt himself beginning to panic several times.  The suit was already tight and confining.  When he jammed into a seam and felt resistance on all sides with a thick hard padding around him, it was just a terrible feeling, like he was burying himself.  He had to be careful not to panic when he became stuck because the suit might amplify his jerky attempts to free himself and bring tons of rock down on them. 

The suit broke edges off the rocks as Leo wound himself through the crawl space, making just enough room for him to press himself through. 

When he caught up to Ethan standing in front of a wall of iron bars, he'd been horrified, thinking there was no way he could actually turn himself around to crawl back out.  He saw Ethan digging through his backpack with a little flashlight.  The helmet made it easy for Leo to see in the mine's utter darkness, although everything was a different shade of blue, except where the helmet amplified Ethan's flashlight.  Before Leo could ask what they were going to do, now that they couldn't go further, Ethan pulled out a shining silver key.  He held it up for Leo to see and gave him a wide reassuring grin.  The key slid easily into the rusty old padlock and Ethan pulled it open. 

Leo followed him through the
iron gate and waited while Ethan crawled around behind him to lock it again. 

They'd squeezed through another 300 yards before coming to a large open room.  There was a wooden picnic table in the center, with four tall metal cabinets along one wall.  Ethan showed him the stores of canned food and water.  All of the cans were rusty on the outside, but Ethan claimed the food was still good inside, although it might taste odd.  A rack of breathing tanks and masks filled up the other wall.  At one end of the open room a large tunnel led to a similarly sized room.  This one had a small
table in the center, with steel-frame bunk beds.  They'd picked pieces of mattress off the steel mesh.  Rats had eaten through it.

Ethan opened one of the cans of beans from the steel cabinets and sat at the moldy gray-green picnic table eating them.  He drank water from a porcelain camp cup.   There were rusty flashlights but no batteries.  Sulfuric acid from the batteries leached out of the paper boxes.  They'd opened one but the battery casing itself fell apart in Ethan's hands. 

He'd found an old metal lamp on the bottom shelf and a rusty can of fuel oil.  The lamp seemed very bright at first.  After a few minutes, their eyes adjusted to it and Leo started to think it was a pretty cool hideout.

Ethan scraped the bottom of the can with a spoon and washed the last of the beans down.  He felt bad eating in front of Leo, but he'd started to get shaky as the adrenalin drained off
, and he needed to be thinking clearly.  He'd asked Leo if he was hungry.  After a moment, Leo told him he wasn't.  Ethan thought that possibly the suit was feeding him nutrients in some way and obliquely asked if Leo felt anything inside the suit sticking him or poking at him.  Leo couldn't feel anything, so Ethan changed the subject, setting the can away from him on the table.

"Ok.  I think we need to try getting that helmet off now Leo.  We should be safe here.  Even if they search the mines, they'll stop at the gate.  There's no reason
for them to think we'd get past it." 
Unless their spotlight shows the crawling tracks or newly-chipped rock edges.  Hopefully, they won't bring hounds near the mine entrance, either.  Too many things to worry about, that we don't have any control over anyway.  Right Ray?
 

That's right.  Nothing you can do about that.  It was a good idea to hide here.  You're smart.

Ethan smiled
.  He seems to be a good kid
. 

Ray nodded. 
He's going to be afraid later.  When he starts to remember what happened today and when he realizes he can't go home tonight, or maybe for a long time.

Ethan dragged a heavy wooden box from the wall over to the table and motioned for Leo to sit on it.  Leo settled carefully down onto it, expecting it to fall.  The suit's bulk made it seem heavy so it was easy to forget how light it was.  Ethan sat at the picnic table a couple feet away.

"Obviously, I'm not going to touch it.  I hate to think what it might do if I tried to take the helmet off," Ethan said.  "It has to be you."

"Yeah.  I think so too.  I'm pretty nervous about what's going to happen to me if I try to take it off and it won't
come off, so I was afraid to try it before."

"It's going to be ok.  Don't worry, I think it will let you take it off."

Leo watched Ethan's face in the lamplight.  It was easy to believe Ethan.  Leo's adult acquaintances were few, his mother and teachers.  He'd rarely spoken with an adult about anything other than "How's school?" (fine) or "Are you eager for High School?" (maybe, leave me alone).  There wasn't usually any reason to talk with them. 

This was the first time that he was trying to do something that an adult also wanted to do.  It was strange to be on the same level as a grown up, where they faced a problem and they didn't know what to expect either.  Leo thought that it should scare him that Ethan didn't know what was going to happen, but it didn't.  Instead, he felt a closeness, a partnership as if Ethan was another kid.  A really capable, and patient one. 
That's another thing that's different about him
, Leo realized. 
He's not in a hurry to get somewhere or do something else.  When you say something, he listens to every word, like he's interested in whatever is happening
.  Leo smiled at Ethan and reached both hands up to the helmet. 

As his gloved fingers touched the helmet, they heard a small "
thwock".  Leo lifted the helmet off, smiling broadly as his eyes adjusted to the unamplified lamplight. 

"All right!"

Thank you God
, Ethan thought. 
Thank you.
  "Yes!  Great!"

Leo set the helmet carefully on the table.  Ethan was careful not to touch it.

"Do you think it will let me take the rest of it off, now?"

"Give it a try," Ethan suggested.

Leo took hold of the suit's left wrist and pulled.  Nothing happened at first, and he felt the first flow of fear.  Then a blue phosphor traced a previously invisible seal between the shoulder and the suit's chest.  He tugged again, and the sleeve slid off easily.  Within minutes, the suit made a shining white pile on the floor. 

Leo asked, "What is this place?"

"The miners met here to rest so they didn't have to go all the way back out to the surface.  When the company left, I kept a copy of the key.  I had this silver one made so it wouldn't corrode, because of my…well so it wouldn't corrode."  Ethan wasn't ready to talk about the entropy field that he generated yet. 
Kid's trapped down here with me.  Don't want him worrying that I'm some dangerous freak
.  He'd been tightening and relaxing his newfound control of the field since he'd inadvertently discovered the controlling thought pattern in the clearing.  Tighten it down, and he could pull it deep inside him, where it had no effect on anything around him.  Release it, and everything aged at an accelerated rate.  He'd practiced as he walked from the river, and his control increased.  While Leo was in the break area, he'd piled the rat-chewed mattress pieces in a corner and opened up on the pile.  The mattress pieces faded to a uniform gray, then into a smaller and smaller pile of dust.  When he'd stopped, all that remained was a thin powdery dust.  He reined it tightly back inside him when he was near Leo.  Out of habit, he constantly checked to see if Leo showed any sign of exposure to the field, but the boy had surprisingly good energy and spirits, in spite of the paces he'd been put through. 
Resilient kid
.

When he'd come back into the break area, Leo was pulling stacks of money from the duffle bag.   Without the suit, Leo couldn't move the bag, so he carried the stacks to the table in armloads.  He counted off as he stacked them, finishing with "$4 million,
2 hundred and 70 thousand!"  Wide-eyed, he looked at Ethan and laughed.  "There's four million dollars!"

Ethan asked, "Where did he get all of this?"

"The alien was in his mind for years before he figured it out.  All that time he thought he was just really smart and able to tap into other people's brains to get even smarter.  He could only do it with people who were nearby, and when they left, he'd lose all of their brain power.  That's why he wrote down instructions to himself in," Leo reached over and held up the journal, "this book."

"T. Taylor – Timeshare Checklists," Ethan read from the cover. 

"That's what he called it, when he connected to other people's brain, 'Timesharing'."  Leo handed the journal to Ethan.

Ethan opened the journal.  It was filled with Taylor's notes.  Each page had a title with numbered instructions written below.  Some of the pages continued from the previous with "Page 3 of 4" in the top right line.  The writing was neat and careful with the exception of a few pages where he had, for some reason, written over and over on the same page without flipping to a new sheet.  The writing on those pages was so thick on the page that it was impossible to make out most of the words. 

The checklist titles ranged from obvious financial plans, "Generate $400k from these investments" to "Get sex from Samantha".  Ethan blushed at the instructions on the latter and flipped past without comment.  He turned around to sit on the picnic table.  Leo shoved some of the stacks over, and sat next to him.  There were fifty or more pages that were profit schemes.  Ethan had no way to know how many Taylor had already used to earn the money in the duffle.   The money itself was proof that his plans worked at least some of the time. 
Why was the alien helping him?  When did it stop working on his goals and change to its own?

Ethan flipped to the end and read from there.  He read the instructions for Taylor to drive a stolen artifact to the riverside and wait.  He flipped back through the previous pages and wondered how a man who planned everything so meticulously had been convinced to work himself into a corner with no way out. 
All these plans, so careful, but once he delivered the alien to the suit, nothing.  Your plans stop here.  The alien was a good partner to you for years, giving you money and women, and it was only at the end that you must have realized that the plans benefitted
him
and not
you
.  In the end, there was no future for you, and all you'd gathered for yourself was left behind for someone else.
 

Ethan set the journal aside.  Leo picked it up.  "Let's put that away for a bit and get some rest, ok?"

Leo looked concerned at the idea, "Here?"

"I think we need to rest here for a few hours at least.  We might try sneaking up to my cabin for some blankets later, but I don't want to get out there yet.  They are probably looking everywhere for us."

After a few hours, Leo was shivering with cold.  He looked over at Ethan.  He seemed to be sleeping just fine on the metal mesh of the bed rack.  Leo just couldn't lay there one more minute, he was freezing cold.  He slow-rolled out of the rusty metal rack watching Ethan to make sure he didn't wake him.  He walked into the break room where Ethan had left the lantern burning so they weren't in complete darkness.  He half-considered putting some of the money in a small bucket he'd seen in the cabinet and making an expensive fire, but there'd be no place for the smoke to go.  If it did go to the surface, the police and government people might see it.

He looked at the flightsuit. 
It let me take it off.  No reason it wouldn't let me take it off again.  I can't sleep down here without it.  It's freezing
.  Leo stood over the suit considering his options.  It didn't take long to realize there weren't any.  He pulled the wooden box over to the suit and sat down to pull on the white boots.  They didn't feel warmer at first, but he expected the suit would heat up once he had all of it on.  Even if it didn't provide any heat of its own, it would contain his body heat.  The suit didn't take over like it had when he'd first worn it, but it was continuing to move on its own.  As he slid his arm into the sleeve, the sleeve rim glowed a light blue.  He felt it rotate slightly, aligning itself to the shoulder cuff, and as he drew it closer, it closed the gap without his assistance, sealing with the "thwock" sound.  Leo craned his head to see around the corner.  Ethan was still soundly asleep. 
He doesn't roll around at all when he sleeps.  At least he doesn't snore though.  Can't tell that he's breathing at all really.  He's a tough guy to sleep down here with no cover and not even curl himself up for warmth
.

It was already warmer with the suit on. 
I can't tell if it's warming up because it's sealed around me or if it has turned some heat on for me
.  The change was gradual, Leo didn't feel any concentrated areas of heat, but during the time he'd been putting the suit on, he'd begun to feel comfortably warm.  He left the helmet on the picnic table and walked quietly into the back room.  The suit interpreted his movements and activated its stealth procedures.  Without the helmet to outline his body, he couldn't see it himself.  It made climbing into the steel bed frame challenging.  He'd forgotten that he'd need a pillow. 
I should have taken my shirt off and rolled it around my shoes
.  It wasn't worth getting back up he decided and rolled over on his side to lay his head on his invisible arm.  Exhaustion took over, and he was asleep within minutes.