Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (37 page)

Only at this moment, when the question
where is Alex?
had been addressed, did Olesianna feel the tremendous thirst in her throat.  It came so suddenly that she felt as if she was choking on a toxic gas.  It was thirst beyond what the word normally describes, the kind of thirst that instantly alarms the possessor, begins to put her priorities into a very strict order, alerts her to the danger of continuing on any course other than immediate rectification, and makes everything else but quenching that thirst, secondary. 

Olesianna glanced at the hover car and saw that the top storage crate had been dislodged and was now on the hood, and a third submerged into the sand.  The large water tank was empty.  If it had been compromised and drained, any evidence would have long since evaporated.  She quickly snatched the mostly empty canteen in the front seat
with her shirt as an improvised oven mitt, and then trudged off into the desert, following Alex’s footsteps in the sand as the sun fell behind the horizon.

T
eleopolis
was usually sunny but that day it looked like a rain storm might sweep in off the coast and wet the land.  Nevertheless, Kyleonard, a local boy, was determined to get outside and play.  His father had mentioned new neighbors down the road, living in the shanty house, as it was nicknamed, and a boy around Kyle’s age was among them.  Kyleonard was desperate and so he trotted down to the rundown home. 

There in the driveway by the garage was a boy of about ten who seemed to be lost in a world of his own.  He talked softly to himself, narrating some kind of journey that took him to the furthest reaches of civilization.

“Hey.”

The boy in the drive way stood up and looked around.

“Do you wanna play?” Kyle asked.

“Sure,” the boy, Alexavier, responded.  “What do you wanna play?”

“How about ball?”

“I don’t know how to play ball,” Alex replied.

“Are you kidding?  Everyone knows how to play ball!  Come on.”

Kyle took Alex to his driveway up the street where he tried to instruct him in the basic rules of ball.  “My dad says if I practice real hard I can get into the big games where I can make more money than the governor does.  Isn’t that great?”

Alex looked down at the ball and the over at the net which was guarded by a mean looking cloth figure poised in a ready position.  Something didn’t seem right to Alex about making more money than the man who ran Teleopolis, but Kyle seemed far too happy to aspire to such wealth and fame for Alex to challenge it.  “That would be great,” Alex agreed.

They played ball for
a while and, not surprisingly, Kyle kept winning.  After each victory, Kyle did a jumping dance and made strange noises and gestures Alex didn’t understand.

“What’s the score?” Kyleonard would ask repeatedly.

“I don’t know,” Alex replied, truly indifferent to the notion.

“Well I have fifteen points…” and Kyle would trail off insinuating that Alex had accumulated none.  Later, when Alex started to understand the game and gain points at an alarming rate, Kyleonard continued bringing up the score, holding his numerical superiority over Alex until finally, Alex surpassed him.  Kyle was a boy raised on ball courts, driven by his ball playing father and surrounded by other kids like him and dad’s like his.  Unfortunately for Kyle, he was not very good at sports.  He was small and not particularly coordinated.  Being measured worthy by
his mastery of a pastime had made him quick to cheat and desperate not to fail.  It also and made him eager to win at things that weren’t really a game, such as conversations.  Now, here he was being beaten by a boy who had just started the game.  Kyle felt betrayed.  He had been working his entire young life to master the sport, and was suddenly, in a painfully plain, quantitative way, inferior.

Kyleonard quickly started to get more aggressive, adding new rules and counting points for himself when there were
none to be gained.  As a result, Alex backed off.  He let Kyle have the ball because it seemed obvious to him that Kyle wanted it far more than he did.  Pretty quickly, Alex understood, in the simple, intuitive way that a ten-year-old would, that Kyle’s sense of worth teetered very precariously on a numbered scale.  

“Let’s play something else,” Kyle offered after he had retaken a sufficient enough lead over Alex to declare himself the winner.  “What do you wanna play?  I know.  Let’s play dunomads and cavalry.”

“Okay.”  Alex was reluctant, but prepared himself to fight an oncoming wave of evil desert men as he hid behind a tree.

“Who’s gonna be who?”

“What?”  Alex asked.

“I’ll be the cavalry, you can be the dunomad.”

“Why don’t we both be cavalry?”

“Then who do we fight?”

“The dunomads.”  Alex made a gesture down the street at the wave of dunomads he had created in his mind.

Kyle looked perplexed.  “Oh,” he finally ascertained.  “You’re one of those kids with an
imagination
.”  He said the word as if it was a disease of character.

Alex had no idea how to react to this.  Kyle was very serious though, as if such a thing precluded him from associating with Alex.  Behind him, in a window on Kyle’s house, a man stood watching them, the curtain drawn aside.

Kyle noticed him too.  “I have to go,” he said.

“Bye.”  Alex turned and walked down the street back to his house.  “Did you win?” he heard a deep male voice ask Kyle from the porch.

“Sure did, Dad.”

“That’s my boy.”

This first meeting was enough to sufficiently summarize Kyle and Alex’s strained friendship thereafter.  Kyle was always competitive and always inferior to Alex’s natural abilities.  They were polar opposites in that Alex was naturally gifted but never tried, and Kyleonard tried but had no gift.  Still, Alex was a general outcast and so Kyle could beat him in other competitions.  Kyle could keep Alex at his side and appear the better for not being that
other
kid.  Over the course of second school, Kyle sought to make Alex’s life miserable in any way he could covertly get away with it.  Sadly, nearly no one else would talk to him and so Alex accepted the situation, thinking it even a blessing at times.

Now, trudging deliriously through the desert, and overcome with a fever and a mild head wound from the hover car crash, Alex could not recall exactly what it was that Kyle had done to him all those years ago to make him try to escape the city, but all the anguish, the humiliation and the desperation were present. 

All those years ago, it had been a long journey to the crevasse at the edge of the city, but, reliving that day, searching for an escape from the pain, Alex couldn’t manage to find it.  The streets just kept going on and on in his hallucinations.  Stumbling past the endless rows of store houses in Third Providence, Alex couldn’t reconcile why the streets were made of sand and not pavement.  As the delirium grew hotter, Alex’s illusion evolved into not just a flight from humiliation at the merciless voices of his peers, but one from monsters, the warden of his school and the police.

Finally Alex found the crevasse.  Sure enough, at the edge of the city was the great fissure, nearly one hundred yards across and an unknown depth.  The ground simply ended on an edge sharp enough to cut with, and dropped down into total darkness.  In the distance to his left, perhaps a quarter mile away, loomed the single concrete bridge.

Undaunted now as he was then, Alex stepped over the side and climbed down into the ravine.  Unlike when he was twelve however, this time, Alex made it safely to the bottom
without
slipping and falling.  Nevertheless, when he came to the bottom he lay on his back just as he had then and stared up at the sky.  He was filled with fear. 

Though he didn’t know it, Alex had wandered through the dunes close enough to the mountain edges to come across an alluvial trench.  It was a natural ravine formed over millennia from debris and rain running down surrounding mountains and into the valley.  This one was a rarity, being only the width and height of a
n average hallway. 

Lying
there, between the past and the present, both tiny in the ravine, and enormous in the trench, unable to handle living in two realities at once, Alex started to scream.  He screamed at the top of his lungs, at first short-lived, full-lung, roars.  Then he screamed as high pitched as he could, then for as long as he could make noise.  It was a release like he had never felt before to scream as hard as he could and not care who or what would hear him.  At Teleopolis, he risked jail or banishment for leaving the city boundaries, and here in the alluvial cave at the foot of a dry mountain run off, he risked the dunomads coming to find him and eat him alive.  Yet both then and now, he screamed and screamed and screamed until he felt free from everything.  And when that feeling had washed over him back at Teleopolis, Alex had gotten up and climbed out of the crevasse.  And on the other side he had discovered a very special container all but hidden in the clay, fifty feet from the edge. 

Presently though, as Alex lay in the eight foot deep marble cave, he was unable to get up.  His body shook with an oncoming fever and the icy cold air of night, lingering in the ditch.  But his screams did not go unheard. 

A
lex woke the next morning to find himself sitting with his back between Olesianna’s legs, the back of his head against her chest as she sat propped up against the cave wall.  Sitting forward and feeling as close to death as he ever had before, Alex looked up at his stirring mother.  She winced and then squirmed to sit upright, feeling Alex’s head with her left hand.  All around them was the most beautiful formation of marble rocks, their crystal edges like walls of jagged glass and jewels.

“What happened?” he muttered.  Then suddenly he saw Olesianna’s right hand.  It was swollen around the wrist to three times its normal size.  Almost fourteen hours since the hover car crashed, Alex was dangerously dehydrated and could only mumble, with a cottony mouth.  “Your hand.”

“I think it’s broken,” Olesianna said, to which Alex managed a nod. “I fell, coming down here.  Here, drink this.”  She put their canteen to his lips and he drank the last bit of water sloshing around the bottom.  It was nearly a mouthful but at the same temperature as his body and with such a dry mouth he could barely register its presence. 

“Do you think you can move?”  Olesianna asked.

No, there was no way he could get up without passing out.  He wouldn’t be able to stand if his life depended on it.  Alex nodded yes.  With his mother’s help, he made it to his feet and fought like a tired weight-lifter under a heavy dumbbell to keep his legs extended.

Alex looked at the short distance to the top of the cave and ample foot and hand holds that offered them a way out, but even walking to the edge of the cave seemed like a task beyond his capabilities.

“Alex,” Olesianna said, seeing Alex swaying.  “Alex, we have to get back to the hover car before it gets too hot out.  Alex?  Can you hear me, hun?”

Alex squinted at her, trying to pluck each of her fluttering words out of the air.  Finally he nodded and trudged to the wall, staring at its base for several seconds.

“Just let me get out and I’ll help you to the top,” Olesianna said, but Alex put his hand out to stop her.

“I have to go first, or I won’t get out.”  Despite being too delirious to make himself clear, Olesianna seemed to understand what it was Alex meant.  If he didn’t have to get to the top for
both
their sake’s, with the need to help her once he made it to the top, he wouldn’t be able to at all.  She helped him along the easiest route they could find supporting his heavy legs until through sheer force of will and a kick of adrenaline, Alex made it to the top.

With his body beginning to shut down, water leaving his limbs and retreating to his organs to keep them alive, Alex still managed to roll over onto his stomach and take his mother’s hand, helping her reach the sandy surface.

“Come on son.  We gotta get up.  It’s time to go now, you have to get up.”

“Five more minutes,” Alex said, his face resting on the hot sand.

“Nope.  Now.  Gotta get up, son.  Alex.  Come on.”

But Alex was thoroughly convinced that he didn’t have to go to school today and wanted to just stay in the sand.

“Alex,” Olesianna said in the subtle forceful tone.  She ached, her brow was swollen from the fall and her arm throbbed cripplingly.  She had sweat out every ounce of fluid in her body and her back was bruised from sleeping against the jagged rock wall.  There wasn’t much left for her except the knowledge that her son would die at her feet if they didn’t get back to the hover car.  “On your feet mister!”  She yelled commandingly, and Alex recognized that tone.  With Olesianna pulling at him, Alex made it to his knees, fell over onto his face, then got back up to his feet.  With her head under his arm, her broken arm around his back and her good arm holding his wrist, Olesianna and Alex trudged through the sand.

“One foot in front of the other,” Olesianna said and Alex did his best to repeat it.  It was another of his mother’s catchphrases, one he recognized as the bedrock of her philosophy.  The words went so far back into his memories that in their misty origins they seemed to contain a magical quality like an invocation of physical power.