Intrepid Read online

  When I landed on the other side, the parking lot gravel dug into pockets of my flesh. “Think. Think, Texi.” I pounded the palm of my hand on my forehead, but that didn’t shake thoughts into my head. I sat down on a bumper guard, and cold concrete pressed into my buttocks. I couldn’t think about how I’d gotten here because I needed to think about how I’d get away from here. Did Sully knock me out and drop me off? Why would he do that? The only thing I could remember was his hands around my throat and the room growing into nothing.

  What if this wasn’t in the realm of dreams or reality? What if I was dead? Was this what happened when you died?

  I traced my lips with my fingertips and tried not to think about how they still tingled from Sully’s kiss.

  I closed my eyes.

  I needed to think.

  I couldn’t think.

  I was about fifteen miles from home, and there were no signs of cars. There was a payphone behind the gym. No. There wasn’t a working payphone anymore. It was just a broken breeding ground for lackluster graffiti.

  There was the main drag relatively close. It was the major artery through Geronimo, connecting the stubby, two-storied skyline of an antique downtown square to the cheap department stores on the east side, and the high school was somewhere towards the middle of that line. Maybe there’d be cars on the busiest road in town, even if it was this late at night. The dance had been over for a while, but everyone had gone to that party at Gunner Proctor’s ranch. Maybe someone was coming home from that and could give me a lift.

  I just had to get there first.

  I pushed myself up and started walking towards the school. I knew the road was just on the other side of it, but my raw feet pulled out a limp that slowed me down and the cold stiffened my limbs. Each breath I took made my teeth clatter, and I didn’t know if I’d even make it to the road.

  When I finally made it past the school, I saw the orange Wataburger light up the darkness. It was the only place in town open 24 hours, and suddenly the A-framed building gave me a plan. There would be someone there… someone who could help… someone who could let me use a phone…

  The plan made me feel less afraid.

  When I got close enough, I remembered that only the drive-thru was open all night. My feet were getting that too-raw feeling as I tippy-toed my way along pavement and concrete. Headlights were nowhere in sight, not on the road nor in the drive-thru. I stomped on the black wire near the speaker and waited for a woman’s drawl to come out. “Welcome to Wataburger. How may I help you?”

  “Hi. I’m actually not in a car,” I said. I hugged my bare arms and tried to keep my teeth from chattering, but the cold in my voice could not be hidden.

  “No worries. I can still take your order.”

  “Actually. I’m a bit stranded. I was hoping to use your phone.”

  There was a pause on the other end before her voice crackled back. “Sorry, ma’am. We ain’t allowed to let anyone in the actual building after eleven.”

  My heart began to pound again. I just needed a phone. A. Phone. That was it. The muscles in my jaw tensed over my plan falling just short of expectation. I took a deep breath and paid attention to how I approached my next sentence. After all, Mrs. Ortiz always told me, “You catch more flies with sugar than vinegar, no?” It was hard not to be all vinegar when I took into consideration that I was cold, alone and scared, but that wasn’t this woman’s fault. “I understand,” I said. “Maybe if I walked up to the window, you could see I’m harmless. Maybe you can call someone for me?”

  There was another pause before she agreed, and I made my way under the awning that faced the window. The woman was not yet old, but not exactly young. Her eyebrows were thinly plucked and colored in with a dark brown pencil, and she popped bubble gum between her teeth, sucking in the noise absently as she opened the latch. She examined my bare arms, legs, and stomach, and worry flitted into her eyes. She was definitely the motherly type. “Bless your heart! You must be freezing.”

  “Just a smidge.”

  “What number can I call for you?” She held a cell phone in her hand. Her fingernails were long, fake, glittered, and hot pink, but they were eager to help.

  “Three. Six—” I began before I realized I didn’t know what number to call. How could I explain this to Ringo? Where was Ringo? What did that letter mean? The only other numbers I knew by heart were Sully’s and Lindsay’s, and I couldn’t call Sully. I could call Lindsay though. “One.”

  “Texi!” I looked towards the sound in the parking lot, but was only blinded by the headlights as they pulled in next to the drive-thru.

  “You know him?” the woman asked.

  “Texi!” The voice got closer as the vehicle rolled to a stop and straddled several parking spaces so that I was trapped between a white truck and the window.

  “Iago?”

  “Get in. I’ll get you home.”

  The woman’s fingernail still hovered over the barely entered phone number, and concern radiated from her. I could tell she didn’t like the idea of sending me off with a teenage boy in the middle of the night. “I can still call someone for you.”

  “It’s okay. He’s an old family friend. He’s harmless,” I said, but even I was skeptical. What was Iago doing here?

  “Okay. Be careful, hon,” she finally said, and closed the window. Her eyes followed me as I climbed up into the truck as if she was taking in every detail so she could tell the cops in case she saw I’d gone missing on the news.

  The heater was on full blast, and without explaining, I picked up my feet, placed them on each vent, and let the thaw begin. Iago shifted his truck into gear, then reached into the stubby backseat to hand me a jacket. I draped it over my torso and nuzzled into it like a blanket, but I couldn’t get warm enough.

  “That looks real classy.” Iago nodded to my tattered feet on the vents.

  “Eat shit.” I tried to keep the shake out of my voice, but my teeth kept connecting in the most painful ways.

  “Polite much?”

  “How’d you find me?”

  Iago turned off the radio that was crackling softly under the heater vents. “I followed the signal from your tracker.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Football games are a good example. The Energy there.” Iago tried again. He’d spent the last ten minutes talking about the Multiverse and something called the Big Whisper, but the only thing that made sense to me was the fact that Iago was going nutso.

  The idiot still thought I was following along and understanding what he was saying. He just kept going: “Did you ever close your eyes and feel something tugging at you? The charge of the crowd and how alive it felt? Or if you’re at a concert and everyone is singing along to a song? It almost lifts your body so that you’re floating above yourself. It’s because you lose your connection to the self and tether it to the crowd.”

  I hugged my arms closer to my body and realized I was shivering from something that went beyond cold. I was finally able to admit fear. I thought I knew what fear was until now, but too much was happening too quickly. It injected adrenaline into my bloodstream. So I wasn’t dreaming after all. I had a damn tumor. I was going to have to go to the hospital, undergo surgery, and remove a chunk of my mind just to survive. It really pissed me off.

  “That’s Collective Energy,” he continued. “And we are programmed to crave it. Do you ever wonder why humans need other humans to survive? The Multiverse evolved us this way, because it is our Collective Energy that keeps things in motion.”

  I felt my eyes glazing over as he drove the truck down Country Road 223. He wasn’t taking me home, and to top it off, he was going crazy. Cra-Zy.

  Or I was crazy. Maybe there wasn’t something growing in the wrinkles of my brain. Was schizophrenia a possibility? But was there such a thing as a self-aware Schizophrenic?

  My throat was dry and my mouth was stale, and where headaches once ruled, fear had settled in to roost. “Stop the truck, Iago. I want to go h
ome.”

  “You can’t. You can never go home.”

  I choked on the breath I just took. What did he mean, I could never go home? I had to get out of the truck. Slowly my fingers journeyed to the seatbelt button, and I was hyperaware of how loud the click felt as the buckle slid from its trap. I sighed with relief when Iago didn’t notice.

  I tried to ignore the way the white lines of the road zoomed past us like stars at light speed as I reached over to the door handle. I felt the wind rush into the truck when I pushed the door against the momentum of air. I shifted my body to jump out, but before I could, Iago slammed on the brakes. “Are you crazy? Are you seriously going to jump from a moving truck? What the hell is wrong with you? I knew we should have told you from the beginning and that keeping you in the dark was the stupidest plan ever. But nooooooooo, Ringo always knows better. Stupid! Stupid!”

  “What the hell are you playing at, Iago? This is the worst prank in the history of the universe!” I interrupted his rant.

  But Iago kept going. “He saw how I reacted when he told me, and I was thirteen. I had time to adjust. You?… You have no idea the danger you’re in! You never had. And we don’t have time for this.” The anger in his eyes grew wide into the whites around his irises, and for the first time in my life, I was absolutely afraid of the boy. “Stay here. Just stay here.”

  He got out of the truck, but before he’d gotten too far away, he stomped back to the truck and yanked the keys out of the ignition. I cringed as he slammed his door shut. The headlights cast light-shadows on the black pavement, and the heater being jolted off added a new edge of cold to the air from the door I still held ajar. He stepped back about ten feet so I could see his entire body: from his boots, to his brown jacket, to his tousled hair. He stood in the light looking at his wrist watch.

  Then he was gone.

  Just…

  Gone.

  It wasn’t as if he disappeared between blinks of an eye. There were no flashing lights or fanfare. In fact, had I not been paying attention, I may have wondered if he’d ever been there at all. I leaned in so my nose nearly touched the cold glass of the window, and I moved my eyes across the horizon, trying to find traces of him in the dark. Yet nothing but night existed beyond the headlights.

  “Will you listen to me now?” Iago asked from the driver’s seat—the same one that had been empty seconds before but was now filled with his bulky shape.

  “Ahhhhhhh!” I hit my head on the windshield and had to rub my forehead before I leaned back into the seat.

  “Look, Texi. I know this is scary. There’s a lot you don’t understand, and there’s a lot you won’t understand unless you start opening your mind—oh, I don’t know—about an hour ago! I shouldn’t have left you earlier, but I wanted to give you a little bit of time after what happened at the dance. It was my mistake. I was on my way back to walk you through all this, but before I got back, your tracker went off.”

  “Tracker?” There was that word again.

  “You have to start listening because things are already being set in motion, and you don’t have time for disbelief. You’re in danger.”

  “Danger…” I repeated.

  “I want you to think back and remember who I am and remember that you can trust me.”

  Trust. The word triggered a different memory. “Trust S.O,” I whispered. I was supposed to trust Sully, and he tried to kill me. Why would Ringo tell me to trust someone who wanted me dead?

  Iago nodded. “That’s right, Tex. What’s my name?”

  It was a face-palm moment. Of course there were other S.O.s in the world, and I answered, “Santiago Ortiz.”

  As a kid, some moron tried to nickname him Santi, but he thought it was too close to Satan. Iago was always good about anticipating ways kids could tease him, so he redirected any nicknaming efforts towards Iago. By the time he was introduced to Shakespeare in high school, and he learned that Iago was nearly as bad as Satan, it was too late to go back to Santiago.

  “Good. Now that we have that settled, we have to go,” he said and grabbed my hand. He pinched my leather bracelet that used to be my mother’s between his thumb and forefinger. “This is called a Planck Activation Bracelet.” The words felt funny in my ears. I took a deep breath, but there was not enough air in existence for me. He examined the bracelet and frowned. “It’s not activated? How did—? Impossible.”

  Trust S.O.

  I had to keep thinking it. I tried to consider the possibility that I wasn’t imagining things. That I wasn’t dreaming. That I didn’t have a tumor. That I wasn’t dead. But I still couldn’t wrap my head around the possibility that everything happening was real. Maybe there was no time for denial, and I had to come to terms with the fact that I was simply entering into a new living nightmare where everything was chaotic and everyone was crazy, including Iago.

  Iago looked up at me and said, “This is important. Did you Hop?”

  “Hop?”

  “Did you disappear from one place then reappear into another?”

  I closed my eyes and saw Sully in front of me with his hands on my throat. I felt his mouth against mine and his fingers squeezing me into the field with its cold, damp grass under my spine. It wasn’t a dream, and Sully’d tried to kill me.

  Iago wove his fingers into mine, like he was tethering my bones into place before they drifted off into oblivion and left my body a sack of skin containing nothing. I felt his callouses traipsing along his thumb as it rubbed circles on the instep of my palm, and it calmed me. I opened my eyes and focused on his.

  “I think—I think so…”

  “So it happened without the activation? That should be impossible,” he whispered to himself. There was a mixture of fear and awe in his expression as he added: “At least it was just a Hop and not a Jump. How did it—” but he stopped as if he remembered something else. He twisted my wrist and pressed the edge of the bracelet so that a neon-green screen hovered over it. He did the same thing to the leather-banded watch on his wrist, and his fingers twittered over both screens until his transplanted on top of mine and they bled into one.

  “How did you…? What is this?” I whispered. The colors were vibrant and beautiful as they hovered. I couldn’t figure out how it projected from the small bracelet on my wrist to form the screen hovering just above it.

  He started entering numbers and letters that made no sense to me. “The headaches. How often did you get them today? Every hour? Every twenty minutes?”

  Again with the headache question. “I guess every twenty or so,” I said.

  “Good. To force your body before it’s ready could kill you, but then again, you did it on your own already.”

  “Force what?”

  “I’ll explain this part later, but we have to get somewhere safe first.”

  “What?”

  “It’s okay. You’ll feel nothing.”

  “Nothing?” I hated how my questions had devolved into one-worded vessels of nonsense. It was as if I could only take in one of Iago’s words at a time, and not even the ones I fixated on contained meaning. Yet they were the only words my mouth wanted to form, as if repetition was the boa constrictor of understanding.

  Iago cupped my chin in his hand and forced me to look at him and not the screen hovering between us. It reminded me of something Mrs. Ortiz did when she wanted us to really, really listen to something. “I’ve really screwed the pooch in explaining all this to you. I’ve had years to practice, and I did! Mami coached me through how to say these things, but now that it’s all here, all that practice has gone out the window. What you did… Hopping like that? It really threw me off. But this moment? I remember word for word what I’ve always meant to say.”

  I tried to consider the truth of everything, and if all this was real, Iago was the person to trust. All my petty anger and inability to forgive him had to go, because when it came down to it, he was a constant—someone who’d always been there even when I didn’t want him there.

 
“I stole this theory from Ringo,” he said, and the reference to my father soothed me. Trust S.O. The note was in Ringo’s handwriting, and Iago hadn’t tried to strangle me like Sully had. I fell into the rhythm of his voice, and I actively tried to understand.

  He kept going with this explanation: “Remember how I tried to explain the Big Whisper? Well, here, we call it the Big Bang, but it’s a misnomer. Think about it. You know the way a gun sounds when it fires? If there’s someone there to hear it, that person would describe it as loud and they would use the word Bang. But when the Origin of Creation occurred, there were no ears around to hear it. You see, there was absolutely Nothing before there was Something. Creation is so subtle that most of the time we have no idea of its intentions or that it’s even happening. It simply whispers change into existence. Everything we know, see, feel, touch, experience—all of it—was born out of this Nothing. It is a space that hovers out of existence until atoms re-collide back into matter like a conversion chamber for Energy to convert from one thing to the next. Ringo believes we go to this space momentarily when we Jump. For a brief moment, we become Nothing.”

  “Jump?” The words were still a drowsy slur of nonsense, but as I held his hand, it was firm and strong and real. Ringo’d always said to understand before I believed, but Iago was asking me to believe before I understood. If these were things Ringo’d told him, then I had to believe in Ringo if I believed in nothing else.

  Iago dropped my chin then looked out over the dashboard. He rubbed the steering wheel and whispered to his truck, “I’m going to miss you, Bertha. You’ve been a good truck, and I hope whoever gets you next knows that.” He put the keys on the dashboard. The metal teeth of each key fanned out in ridged freedom, and he looked back in my direction.