Wildefire (16 page)

You go down there and check, or so help me God, I’ll throw you down there myself.”

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There is a shuffling, and a flashlight beam dips through the manhole. “It smells
awful
. I can’t do this.”

“Get down there!” Dozer barks.

After a hesitation there is a splash, and Biscuit lands in the sludge. “My new shoes,” he groans.

“Move over,” Dozer orders, and there is a second splash and a simultaneous
thump
as he collides with Biscuit, then a secondary splash and a rattle of something rolling toward your feet.

“You knocked the flashlight out of my hand, idiot!”

Biscuit yells. “
You
find it!”

“Fine,” Dozer says. “You check down the other way.

If we can’t find him in five minutes, let’s just assume he went crying home and get the hell out of here.”

You hear Dozer’s wet steps coming toward you, interrupted by occasional pauses as he stops to sweep the ground for the light. Meanwhile you slip stealthily down the curved sewer wall toward him. As you do, a warmth washes over you, replacing the soul-soaking cold of the old sewer.

Your bones lengthen and creak. Your body expands, replacing your previously weak limbs with a new musculature. Your broken hand, overcome with tingling, seems to be mending itself, and you wince only slightly as the bones slip back into place.

Strangest of all, the sewer, which had previously been caged in darkness, shimmers into full view. You hold your arms out in front of you, examining yourself from top to 150

bottom and marveling at your new body in the unnatural glow of your night vision. Yet despite the sudden transformation, this somehow feels like the body you were always destined to inhabit.

Ahead you see Dozer stumbling your way, terrified and blinded. He accidentally kicks the flashlight, and curses when he hears its telltale rattle. His hands fumble on the ground until he finally places his palm on it. When he flips the switch, the beam of light lands right on your sneakers.

The light traces a path up your body until it stops on your face. For the first time in his miserable life, Dozer is looking up at you.

“R-Rolfe?” he stammers.

“Guess I’m a late bloomer,” you say. Before he can reply, you seize him by the lapel and lift him off the ground.

You open your mouth. Light pours out from between your parted lips and into his eyes. He screams, blinded by the sudden explosion of light. He claws frantically at his face.

You drop him to the slick ground so that he lands on his knees, his scream falling to a gurgle. “Snakes!” he shouts as your nightmarish visions of light flutter before his eyes, filling the empty sewer tunnel with imaginary vermin. “And bats! Oh, god. They’re everywhere!”

Ever the coward, Biscuit is back at the entrance, hanging from the manhole rim. Overcome by the terror 151

of his friend’s screams, he tries to wriggle his way up onto the street. His ever-bulging belly, however, anchors him down.

You’re on him in a second. Your hands wrap around his ankles, and with just a slight yank he drops to the sewer floor like the sack of shit that he is.

You know his ankle is twisted—he’s wailing about it already—but you punch him hard in the face for good measure.

Without further adieu you, with one bend of your knees, leap up and out of the manhole, gracefully landing on the street.

“Wait!” Biscuit pleads up at you from below. “I’ll give you anything you want. Just don’t leave me here. Please

. . .” His words trail off into the hiccupping screech of a pathetic boy crying in the sewer.

You kneel down next to the hole. “I’ve always admired that surfboard of yours.”

“It’s in the garage, next to my dad’s Beamer,” he tells you between sobs. “I . . . I’ll take you to it.”

You smile down at him. Your teeth glint white through the gloom. “No need to go to that trouble. I’ll let myself in.” And you slide the manhole cover back into place, snuffing out the sound of the screaming boy below.

RAJA NEFERET

You were there when he died. He may have been only the most recent in a long series of foster fathers, but he 152

had been your favorite, and he had been a good man. He never acted like his “real” child, his biological offspring, was more important than you, and he never looked at you funny when he’d had too much to drink. Between his regular visits to his son at the university and the brutal divorce he was embroiled in with his soon-to-be-ex-wife, James Cardone had generally left you to your own devices, exactly what you’d wanted all these years. Peace.

And so you stand in the funeral parlor for the wake, the social worker for your case lurking somewhere nearby, looking even more lost. You stand next to James Jr., the real son, the one you haven’t seen cry yet. His eyes just pierce off into the distance as a procession of grieving friends express their deepest sympathies to him. You occasionally get a passing sad nod from those same people, and a hug from one or two, but for the most part the gathering mourners don’t know how to respond to you.

And how can you blame them? You were just a shooting star at the end of James Cardone’s life, cut short in middle age by a surprise heart attack. With the earthen tone of your Egyptian skin, you couldn’t stick out more in this predominantly white suburb of Long Island, and you
certainly
couldn’t look any less like the true child of old Jimmy Cardone, member of the Mayflower Society and the local Italian-American chapter.

It is later that night. You excuse yourself to the bathroom when you can’t take it anymore, and curl up on the stall floor, letting the warm breath of the heating vent 153

wash over you. It is a succulent warmth that stirs within you deep-seated memories of an ancient desert. And you fall asleep.

But now you’ve awoken with a chill, with nothing but the harsh cool of the bathroom tile against your face. The heating vent has long since gone cold. You are alone.

You walk out into the foyer. Empty. The mourners have all gone home for the night, and only the parlor’s auxiliary lights have been left on. There’s no sign of Ellie, your social worker. Maybe she’s gone to search for you at the Greyhound station again. Three times in a row she’s caught you there, so you imagine that this time she didn’t panic when she noticed that you were missing. She’s in for a rude awakening when she makes it to the bus platform and you’re not there.

You know you should head home. James Jr. is probably waiting for you at the house, your temporary new

“guardian” while Ellie searches for another available foster location. The service is tomorrow morning, and your black slacks need ironing.

Instead you wander into the mourning room, taking in the aroma of fresh gardenias and monte casinos, the scent of vitality and hope to soften this overwhelming reminder of life’s frailty.

You can’t help yourself. You wander up to the casket, push the rose wreath aside. And you press your head to the mahogany coffin.
Are you in there, James?
you wonder.

Are you out there somewhere?

154

The
thud
against the inside of the coffin is so sudden that you can’t help yourself—you scream, your terror resounding through the vacant parlor.

A second thud. Then another. Instinct tells you to turn and run, to kick open the parlor doors and just keep going, to find Ellie and plead with her to find you a life, a new life, anything but here.

Curiosity overwhelms you, though, and your hands shoot out. You find the clasp that holds the coffin top shut, and with a heave and a power you didn’t know you had, you begin to lift the top open—

“Enough!” Raja shouted, and with a wave of nausea Ashline returned to the beach, the circle broken as Raja backed defensively away. “Stay out of my goddamn head.”

Serena frowned; her gray eyes, unseeing studied the Egyptian girl with sincere concern, and more than an ounce of heart. “I’m sorry. Everyone seemed so shy about sharing before, and this just seemed like a harmless way for us to understand each other.”

Raja cooled down after a few deep breaths but made no movement to rejoin the rest of the circle. “You’re all more than welcome to partake in this game of show-and-tell,” she said quietly, “but there are some memories even I’d rather not relive. At least so vividly.”

A hush fell over the group, the six overcome with a new awe for one another, feeling both intensely curious and afraid of these dark powers lurking beneath.

155

Ash felt emotionally drained just from looking at Serena; the blind girl’s eyes were brimming with tears, and Ash realized that living within these visions was probably her first opportunity to see since she’d lost her sight. As jarring as it was to enter limbo and live the world through another person’s memory, it must be an even colder splash of water to return to the visual silence of the blind.

“What about Ashline?” Lily asked. “We didn’t get to see her moment.”

All eyes settled on Ash, including Serena’s.

Ash grimaced. She always had to be different somehow—in this case different by not being different at all.

“I don’t have . . . ,” she started. Then she changed tack. “I can’t do anything, the way you guys can at least.”

Serena cocked her head to the side. “That’s impossible. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Unless your abilities haven’t blossomed yet, and that should have happened by puberty,” she added matter-of-factly.

“Nice” guys that Rolfe and Ade were, their eyes flickered unthinkingly to her breasts. Ash crossed her arms and tucked her hands under her armpits. “I’m done changing, thanks,” she muttered.

“Maybe you’re just a late bloomer,” Raja suggested.

Ash pictured Eve, the weird shifts in Westchester weather whenever she was back in town. Then the rooftop with Lizzie Jacobs . . .

“My sister,” Ash started, but found herself unable 156

to speak Eve’s name. “She . . . I think she controls the weather. Snow, rain . . . lightning.” Ash shuddered. It was all too strange to finally say the things out loud that she’d suspected—no, known—for the last eight months, as if her silence could somehow keep Eve and her memory at bay, away from the Blackwood campus.

“But as for me,” Ash continued, “unless having a bad temper and forgetting to floss your teeth are supernatural in some way, I’m afraid I’m pretty vanilla.”

Serena’s face remained placid. “I wonder,” she said.

“Do you mind if we take a look? Maybe there’s a repressed memory in there somewhere?”

Ash hesitated. The last thing she needed was to relive the movie of Lizzie Jacobs’s smoldering body falling to the lawn. But there hadn’t been any indication of weird-ness specifically from Ashline on that fateful day, so it seemed safe enough.

“Okay,” Ash said, and the six beachgoers clumped together once more. “But don’t be surprised when you don’t find what you’re looking for.”

“We’ll see,” Serena said with a knowing, ironic half-smile. Her hand darted out with violent certainty and fastened itself around Ashline’s wrist.

She plummeted headlong into limbo once again.

ASHLINE WILDE

This vision is different from the rest. You’re there and seeing it through your own eyes, hearing it through 157

your own ears, smelling, tasting, feeling it. But somehow your consciousness drifts over trees and a stone fortress as if you are a fine mist descending from the steamy rain forest.

As you drift down onto the scene, the fortress below you grows in your bird’s-eye view. You see the four yellow-fruit-bearing trees, each marking a corner of the square. The top of their wide fronds barely reach over the tall crenellated walls, a mixture of local stones glued together with foreign cement.

Then the humans, three of them, all standing on top of the western wall: White Coat A, White Coat B, and, between them, Man in Suit. White Coat A leans over the parapet to speak to someone beneath them, within in the fortress. White Coat B and Man in Suit cling silently to the wall, warily watching the ground below, as if there were a tiger crouched in the grass. Or maybe a velociraptor.

Finally you see her below, boxed in by the castle walls. She is small, perhaps five or six, so short that the forest grasses rise up past her knees. Her shrewd, narrow eyes and clay-colored skin reveal her Polynesian heritage, and her obsidian hair comes almost all the way down to her waist.

She will be beautiful one day.

She is beautiful now.

As White Coat A speaks, the girl looks up blankly with her chocolate eyes. You wonder if she even understands the language. Any language.

158

“Four fruit trees,” he says, pointing in turn to each corner of the fortress. “These are your only source of food in the garden. All you have to do for us to release you is eat one of the fruits.”

The little girl cocks her head to the side. That’s it?

As White Coat A continues, Man in Suit smiles. “The trees are exactly the same except for one minor detail.

Three of the trees bear fruit that is poisonous. In smell, color, and texture, the fruit is all identical, right down to the tiny little hairs on its skin. But if you choose the wrong one, you will suffer for hours. And then the toxins will kill you.”

A quiet falls over the citadel; even the birds have stopped crowing now.

“Do you understand what you have been asked?”

White Coat A asks the little girl.

She says nothing.

But for the first time, she smiles.

When Ashline came to, she was on her hands and knees in the sand, clutching her stomach.

“Are you okay?” Rolfe knelt down beside her and offered his hand.

She gave the world another few seconds to right itself as the vertigo wore off. “I’m fine,” she said, taking his hand. “It’s just . . .” She stopped there.

It’s just that the girl in the vision wasn’t me
. It couldn’t have been. Ash had never so much as been to summer camp when she was that age, let alone participated in 159

some sort of jungle-bound experiment. And she and Eve had been inseparable during their early years, so it seemed impossible that the girl could be Eve, either. Yet the resemblance was uncanny.