The New Kid (6 page)

“We don’t need any milk and cookies,” said Will.

Rudy frowned.

“We don’t?”

 

They clomped down the basement stairs and then Will led them through his maze of black plastic and into his secret chamber where they were visibly impressed. Rudy let out a low whistle.

“Something tells me this isn’t just some science project. Whoa, your computers, your database, it’s all so . . . massive!” Rudy marveled at the bank of flat panel LCD displays and the whirring servers and modems twinkling with dozens of lights. “Hey, that’s
Demon Hunter
! But what version is it? I haven’t seen this one yet!” Rudy was just about jumping out of his skin with excitement as he stared at a game loop going on one of Will’s monitors.

“It’s an old version,” he said.

“No way, I have them all and I haven’t seen that one.” Then Rudy’s eyes went way wide with shock. “Six hundred and forty-two kills? Are you KIDDING me?”

“It’s just a glitch in the program.”

“I WANT that glitch, dude! How’d you do it? Come on, tell me!”

Sometimes not saying anything at all was the best way to deal with inquiring minds and Will just simply dumped the subject, ignoring Rudy and turning his attention to Natalie.

“Let’s have a look at that arm.” He touched Natalie’s hand gently, without thinking, and they both blushed. He ignored that and focused on her injury. Her wound was minor, just a scrape, and he knew he would have to do a little sleight of hand here so she wouldn’t freak out watching the rapid healing process. He applied some of the ointment and then looked into her eyes and asked her to do the same.

“Who do you think you are, Count Dracula? Why should I look in your eyes?”

“Because I want to check your pupils, this is very important.”

“You can be one very intense guy, you know that?” she said.

“I get that a lot. The eyes? Look into my eyes?”

Natalie obeyed him and they locked eyes. It was instinct for any animal, including the human animal, to want to examine its wounds; and Will just had to keep her distracted long enough to put a bandage over the already healing scrape. Once he’d succeeded, it finally occurred to him the position he’d put himself in. He was standing right in front of Natalie, their faces close together, as he held lightly onto her arm. His face burned again. They quickly looked away from each other.

“Keep it totally covered and don’t take the bandage off for at least three days.”

Will was so distracted he didn’t even notice Rudy picking up the boltdriver that he had set down on the workbench earlier. KABLAM! The shot rang out like a thunderbolt, which of course it was, albeit a mini one. All three of them stared at the smoking hole in the wall.

“Give me that!” Will snatched the boltdriver out of Rudy’s shaking hands.

“Whoa! That is soooo cool! Fire that sucker again!”

“I’m not going to fire anything! And please don’t ever touch anything in here again.”

“What IS that thing?” demanded Rudy.

“It’s just a little electro-magnetic voltage stimulator, a stun gun I made some minor modifications on.”

“Minor modifications?” asked Natalie, waving away the smoke from the smoldering hole in the wall. She stared hard at Will. “Hunter, isn’t it? Will Hunter?”

“Congratulations, you got my name right.”

“Well, Mister Will Hunter, who exactly are you and what are you doing in Harrisburg?”

“What do you mean? My mom got a new job, so we moved here. I’m just a guy, a junior in high school, the New Kid. That’s about it.”

Will caught an image on one of his huge plasma screens behind Natalie and Rudy, an unmarked grid of Harrisburg. A yellow glow emanated from one of the sectors. Will cleared his throat and purposefully knocked over a canister.

“Whoops!” He bent down to pick it up and secretly hit a switch for his equipment. Everything went dim and on standby. Will smiled a friendly guy smile, his best “Hey, I’m just a normal kid like you” smile, and began to herd the two snoops out of his domain. “If you don’t mind, I’m like totally slammed with homework and could use some me time.”

He escorted them out and stood watching them walk down the street, Natalie shooting wary looks back over her shoulder at him and Rudy weaving down the sidewalk, engaged in some game of chase happening entirely in his own mind. Will couldn’t help but smile. He liked the kid. Even though Rudy was roughly the same age as he was, Will couldn’t help thinking of him as a kid. He himself had been made older by experiences, few of them the kind a sixteen-year-old kid should have. He wished he’d had a different life, a life in which he could fall for a girl like Natalie and be friends with goofy
Rudy. But that just wasn’t possible. Not with the quest that awaited him each and every day of his life.

Natalie turned and looked at him one last time before turning the corner, and he remembered. He
had
seen that face before. Only the name attached to it wasn’t Natalie.

N
atalie entered her house and went up into her room. Even though the rest of the house was pretty much style-deprived, she’d done a sweet number on her own digs. The walls were dusty rose and she’d sponged her ceiling to look like clouds. A prodigious reader, she had scads of books and had them lined up in alphabetical order on a couple of wooden bookshelves she’d rescued from the alley, sanded down, and painted teal blue. She worked at her desk doing homework for twenty minutes but her brain was elsewhere. She got up and stretched, then fell onto her bed and thought of Will.

When she’d seen him at the bus stop that morning, she couldn’t believe how hot he was. She’d spent most of the wait for the bus stealing glances at him, noticing how trim and muscular he was, how well his jeans fit, how his blue eyes caught the light. She hadn’t been sure then if she’d seen right or had hallucinated but it seemed as though one of Will’s eyes was lighter, almost crystal blue, while the other was a deep, piercing sapphire. But she’d confirmed it in his basement, staring right into them as he fixed up her arm.

She looked at the bandage on her arm and even though Will had instructed her to keep it on for—what did he say, three days?—she
was curious because she felt no more pain and peeled the bandage back. She felt like a caterpillar crawled up her spine when she saw that where the wound had been, her skin was smooth as silk. Not a trace of the injury remained. She shuddered and whatever yearning she felt for Will increased exponentially.

She didn’t like being so attracted to some new neighbor whom she hardly knew; it made her feel weak and vulnerable and the last thing she needed now was to feel more out of control than she already did. She tried not to think of him but she couldn’t because the thought of him was like something clinging to her skin. She decided to take a shower. One of the old movies her grandmother used to love to watch had a scene where some women sang, “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair,” and Natalie thought it was worth a try. She stayed in the shower a long time, washing and rinsing her long hair, and then turned off the water and toweled off. She got out and put on her pajama bottoms and a camisole and again fell onto her bed.

She closed her eyes and felt the stinging of tears, tears that came upon her suddenly. Why was this happening? She went to her night stand and picked up a picture of what looked like her with shorter hair. But it wasn’t her; it was her twin sister Emily. Same nose, same chin, same cheeks, same blonde hair only shorter, same sparkling eyes. Natalie held the framed photograph up to a mirror and positioned it next to her face.
So alike they could hardly tell us apart
, she thought.
But we were different enough, and we knew it
. Natalie watched as another tear emerged from her eye, not her tear but her sister’s; no one but a twin could ever understand.
Why are you crying?
she asked the photograph.
What have they done to you? Where have they taken you? Please tell me, Em, please?

Natalie shut her eyes again, opening all her intuition, all her channels, making herself ready for a sign, a message, any kind of communication from Emily. She received them frequently. But there was nothing tonight. By her bedside sat a scrapbook. If she’d
opened it like she had a thousand times before she would have seen the newspaper clippings about how Emily drowned while swimming in Green River, how even though her body had never been found, the police concluded that there was no foul play. Because of the drugs. Emily wasn’t a heavy user, she only experimented. She was just a chipper. Natalie had warned her dozens of times that nothing good could come from using drugs, but Emily always laughed in that little bird-like way of hers and blew her twin sister off. Natalie knew now, too late, that she should have been more proactive, she should have demanded Em stop using, even turning her in if she had to.

She remembered the night it happened like it was five minutes ago. They went on a double date with Jim Sparrow and Hal Stellini in Jim’s dad’s Range Rover. The guys and Em fired up joints and passed them around but Natalie refrained. She never saw the point of becoming impaired. She enjoyed her life
au naturale
, organic, without the use of chemical additives or
addictives
for that matter. She was already flying high. The music was fantastic, the warm night air like a blanket around them.

They drove with the windows down and then pulled in and parked by Old Mill Restaurant next to the river. The moon bathed the riverbank in a silver band of silk and they cranked up the stereo and danced. Natalie felt free as a nightbird. She loved watching her sister, who always danced like there was no tomorrow. Emily danced so hard and so fast that she was soon soaked in sweat and she kissed Jim and he whispered something into her ear. Shrieking, Emily ran into a thicket of trees, peeling off her clothes, and Jim followed. Natalie was blushing and feeling awkward because she knew Hal would be entreating her to do the same and there was just no way that was going to happen, even though Hal was cute and played guitar like Ben Harper. They just danced, and when the music slowed, they slowed down with it. Hal tried to kiss her but she didn’t feel that way about him. She felt bad because he was such a nice guy and
she hated to hurt people’s feelings. So she let him kiss her on the cheek and he seemed for the moment satisfied.

When the sudden cloud cover blacked out the opal moon they hardly noticed. When the rain began to fall it was so warm that they laughed but when the trees shook and the river began to rise, Natalie became worried. She heard her sister shriek and her heart started hammering in her chest.

“Emily? Em?”

She ran into the thicket where Emily had disappeared. In her peripheral vision she saw the earth moving. Not the whole landscape, just patches of the damp, leaf-strewn earth—shapes, ugly, awful shapes that rose up too swift for the eye to see and then disappeared down again. Then in the distance through foliage she saw sets of eyes in the river, each with one green glowing eye and one yellow. The eyes blinked as the creatures in the river moved rapidly about, then disappeared. Natalie thought that surely she was hallucinating. Maybe she’d inhaled some of the weed and it was laced with something. Whatever it was, her head was spinning, and she heard things, too. Low, guttural sounds, the kinds of sounds animals make. She ran toward the river.

“EMILY?”

Natalie burst out of the thicket, onto the riverbank, and found Jim lying on his side moaning, his scalp bleeding.

“What happened?”

Jim just moaned again and felt his head.

“Where’s Emily? Jim, where’s my sister?” she demanded.

“Hey, take it easy on him, can’t you see he’s been hurt?”

Hal had arrived and was holding Natalie back as he leaned down to examine Jim, handing him his clothes, which Jim began to slowly pull back on.

“Jim, did you slip and fall?”

“No, they . . . hit me.”

“WHO hit you?” Natalie screamed.

“I . . . I don’t know . . . I didn’t really see them.”

Natalie’s eyes frantically scanned the riverbank, both sides, and the river itself. Her nostrils stung with an astringent smell, a strong chemical odor. It was so potent for a moment it burned her eyes. Then she saw the mismatched eyes in the river again; sets of eyes: yellow and green, those horrible, horrible eyes! She took one look at Emily’s clothes strewn on the rocks and then splashed into the river, screaming her sister’s name, her throat going hot and raw with the pain of dreadful possibility. What if, what if. . . . Her mind racing, heart banging in her chest, her eyes bled tears as she called for Emily again and again, then turned on Jim like a feral creature and bore into him with accusing eyes.

“Where is she, Jim? Where did she go?”

“She . . . she was right here, and then it got dark, and. . . .”

“What, Jim, WHAT?”

“And then I don’t remember.” Jim held his head and Natalie hated him in that moment for being so pathetic, so clueless. He should have protected her sister, not just let her
disappear
. Tearing her eyes from the river, Natalie looked back at the dark woods and ran upriver.

“Emily!”

She raced through thick brush and stinging nettles and blackberry bushes with stalks thick as her wrist. Thorns tore at her skin, and still she ran, crying out, her feet slipping in her wet shoes. But there was no sign, no sound, of Emily. Natalie staggered back down to the riverbank where the boys were huddled.

Hal tried to reassure her, “Don’t worry Natalie, she’s probably just downriver, they’ll find her. They will,” but voices whispered to her in the night wind, tiny evil voices like bones being crushed.
No, they won’t.
Natalie shook her head and the voices became the sound of the river. Had they spoken, or was it just in her head? The pain she felt was like a thick narcotic, slowing time as it coursed through her veins, her brain now sluggish, energy spent. Natalie looked up at the moon, the smiling face now a nasty grimace.