GeneSix (2 page)

Dirk and Rance, he thought. He remembered. He had been running from them when a car struck him. But they no longer mattered to him. What now mattered was he was somehow flying about the room, somehow filling the room with his presence.

It was dark outside. Must be night, he thought. One window was open a crack, and he slipped through it and was suddenly outside. Moving. Flying. One moment he could swirl about almost like some sort of living fog, and the next he could zip across the city, moving almost as fast as thought itself.

Dirk was sitting on the back porch of his house, with Rance. Dirk had a cigarette going.

Rance was saying, “Do you think that little puke is gonna live?”

Dirk shrugged.

Rance said, “What if he dies? What if they blame it on us?”

Dirk pulled the cigarette from his mouth. “The only ones mighta seen us would be them girls.”

“What if they talk?”

“They won’t talk.”

“How do you know?”

Dirk shrugged. “Maybe I should see to it. Besides, that tall one, she’s kind’a cute.”

“Sondra?”

“Yeah. Maybe I should just pay her a visit. Let her know it would be real smart for her not to have seen us.”

“What’re you gonna do?” Rance was giving his shark grin. “Smack her around?”

Dirk shrugged. “I’m gonna let her know I mean business. That’s what I’m gonna do.”

The boy who had been in the hospital room only seconds before was now sort of hovering in front of them. They could not see him, as he was now part of the darkness just beyond the circle of light from the outdoor lamp mounted above the back door. He could not come any closer, because the light was a little too bright. It’s radiance actually seemed to hurt. And then he realized he could do something about that.

He expanded himself out to the light, and began blocking it off. First a little at a time, then more.

“Hey,” Rance said. “Is it getting darker out here?”

“Naw, man. You’re nuts.”

The boy continued to block off the light.

“Hey,” Dirk said. “It
is
getting darker out here. The wirin’ in this old place is shot. My old man’s always saying it is. Fuses blow all the time.”

Now it was much darker in the back yard, and the boy realized he could pull himself together, to almost stand on the ground in front of them.

He wondered if he could speak. He thought he would try. He said, “Don’t touch Sondra.”

His voice did not sound like his own. Like it used to. It now sounded somehow alien. It was deep, and it had resonance, almost like it filled the night. And Dirk and Rance surely heard him.

Dirk looked up suddenly. Rance was on his feet. Rance said, “Who said that?”

The boy said, “The problem with you, Dirk, is you’ll never stop. You’re the kind who will never stop hurting others, until finally someone stops you.”

“All right,” Dirk said. “Who is this? Where are you? Come on out, or I’ll pound you in the face.”

The boy said, his newfound baritone seeming to come from all around them, “I’m someone who is going to stop you.”

“I don’t know who you are, dickwad, but you can’t stop me unless you stop hiding and come out.”

The boy was standing right in front of them, but they couldn’t see him. How cool, he thought.

The boy reached out to Dirk. He reached inside of Dirk. He didn’t know how he knew he could do this, but he did it. He reached into Dirk’s mind. And he brought darkness down onto Dirk.

Dirk’s eyes suddenly opened wide, and the breath caught in his chest. His cigarette fell to the ground.

“Dirk,” Rance said. “What’s wrong?”

The boy simply increased the darkness. Turning it up a notch, then another. Darker, and then even more dark. There was no limit. Well, yes, there probably was. Some sort of absolute darkness. He didn’t know if he could reach that far, but he found he didn’t have to.

Dirk screamed, but only in his mind. Only the boy could hear it. Rance sat, staring at his friend.

“Dirk, are you all right? Dirk?”

Dirk’s eyes were wide open, and he was staring but not seeing. A little strand of spittle leaked from his mouth. He began to fall sideways, and then rolled onto the ground. He was breathing and his heart was beating, but that was about all. His mind had gone completely empty.

“Rance,” the boy in the darkness said, with his newfound baritone. “You are to hurt no one ever again, or you’re next. Do you understand?”

Rance merely nodded. And he peed himself.

The boy said, “Now, run.”

Rance ran, as fast as he could.

The boy in the darkness then wondered about Sondra. He knew where she lived, because he had followed her home once. He supposed it could be considered stalking, but when you are an outcast, when you are forever on the outside looking in, sometimes a little harmless stalking is all you have.

As quickly as he could think about it, he was at her house. Her bedroom window was open, and he was there, in her room.

She was lying on the bed, a phone to her ear. She looked beautiful, like she always did. Her hair was in a pony tail. Her front teeth weren’t quite even, but he didn’t care. All he could see when he looked at her was the living incarnation of beauty.

She was in jeans and a t-shirt, and was saying into the phone, “Yeah, like, really. Y’know?”

She paused, while the girl on the other end talked. The boy in the darkness knew it was a girl because he could bring himself close enough to the receiver to hear her voice. He could almost feel the gentle touch of Sondra’s skin.

“Yeah, so, like what’re you gonna do?” Sondra said. “I mean, if he asks you out, or something?”

The girl on the other end talked.

Sondra giggled. “No kidding. Really?”

The boy in the darkness could hear the girl on the other end say, “I don’t think he will, though.”

“Well, you never know. I see the way he looks at you.” Sondra then glanced about the room. “Weird, it’s, like, getting dark in here, or something.”

The boy knew he would never be with Sondra. He would never hold her hand. She would never look longingly into his eyes. Even before he had been hit by the car, before he became whatever it was he was now becoming, she had looked at him like he wasn’t even there. He found that, despite whatever it was that was happening to him, this hadn’t changed.

Time to go, he thought.
Bye
,
Sondra
.

And he was gone. Back to the hospital room. His mother was still sitting by the bed. He had been gone only minutes.

The bed was empty. The hospital gown he had been wearing was spread out on the bed. It had collapsed when he started becoming whatever it was he was becoming. Energy. Somehow, he knew it was some sort of darkness energy. The bandage that had been on his head was on his pillow, like some sort of empty helmet.

“Mother,” he said, in his new voice. “I am back.”

She nodded. “I could tell. I could feel you. And the room just got a little darker.”

“What’s happening to me?”

She sighed. “It’s a long story. Something I probably should have told you, long ago. There are some of us, in our family and some others, too, who seem to have unusual abilities. Your grandfather could turn into animals. A
shape-shifter
, he called it. He was sometimes incorrigible. He would turn into a giant wolf for Halloween.” She smiled at the memory. “Your aunt, my sister, could communicate with animals. And me, I’m a healer. I knew something was happening to you, that you had some sort of ability and it was becoming activated, when I tried to heal you here in the hospital room but found my power had no affect on you. I knew you were changing into something different than you were. Something my power could no longer affect.”

“So, I can, like, what? Become the darkness?”

“I don’t know yet. Can you bring yourself back to your normal self?”

He tried. He tried to pull himself together, to go from a sort of dark fog hovering about the room, to become once again a flesh-and-blood boy. But it didn’t work.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think I’m stuck like this.”

She said nothing. Maybe she didn’t know what to say. A tear began rolling down her face.

“Don’t cry, Mother. I think it will be all right. After all, I never really had any kind of life before. Not really. But now, I seem to have a sort of freedom like I have never known.”

“You had a life with me,” she said quietly.

“And that will never change. Maybe it has on the surface, but that’s all. It’s not like I’m going anywhere. You’re still my mother. I’m still your son.”

She nodded. “That will never change. You can count on that.”

One year blended into another, and the boy learned how to control the darkness. He learned his limits, which were few. As long as it was night and there were shadows for him to zip through, he could travel from the city he and his mother called home, which was Boston, all the way to New York with the speed of thought. He came to call it the Speed of Darkness.

He knew his mother was sad for him. After all, he would never have anything even resembling a normal life. He would never marry, never have children. Never have a house or a mortgage. He would never mow the lawn on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe his mother blamed herself, because she also had an extraordinary ability and apparently passed the gene down to him. But he doubted he would ever have had a normal life, anyway. Not a kid who was such a dork, who was always on the outside looking in. A kid girls like Sondra Schwartz looked past, not at.

He had to decide what his place in the world would be, and he decided it would be
protector
. He had a lot of time on his hands, because he would never have a career or a family, and he found he didn’t need to eat or even sleep. So he decided to protect people from the Dirks of the world.

He eventually learned he could move objects about by focusing his energy. As such, he could throw a violent attacker around like he was a leaf in the wind. A mugger hauled a woman into an alley one night and pulled a knife on her. The Darkness, as he was coming to think of himself, simply threw the man against the wall, knocking him unconscious. The woman was scared witless, but she escaped the mugging unharmed.

He also learned if he could dim the lights in a room enough, he could then take a sort of partially corporeal human shape for a short time. And he could touch things. Like, he could sometimes give his mother a brief hug. This was as close to being human as he figured he would ever be.

He found streetlights caused him discomfort, and the light of the sun caused him out outright shearing pain. He was strong enough to block out the streetlights, effectively dropping a street corner into a pocket of darkness, but he couldn’t hold back the sun. During daylight, he often hid in the shadows – there were always shadows. Inside a basement or a darkened room. Though he had no need to sleep, he would sometimes fall into a sort of semi-conscious trance while he waited out the day. And then at night he would roam freely. Through the night skies, through darkened alleys.

Through all of this, Sondra was never far from his thoughts. After a few years, he decided to visit her one night. A visit she would never be aware of.

She was now maybe twenty. Her front teeth had been fixed, and her hair had been colored to a lighter shade of brown and was streaked with blonde highlights. It was summer, and she was in a tank top and a floral-printed skirt. A guy was with her, maybe a little older, but not much. He was taller than she was, and had a square jaw and hair combed into a wave that fell across his forehead.

She was holding her left hand out, and on one finger was a diamond.

“Oh, Dean, it’s so beautiful,” she said, in the cooing way a woman has when she’s admiring a diamond on her finger.

The man was smiling. “I’m glad you like it. And I’m even more glad you said yes.”

“Come on in.” She snatched his hand. “We have to show Mom.”

He held back. “But she hates me.”

“No she doesn’t.”

He nodded with a smile. “Yes, she does.”

“She doesn’t know you, that’s all. Come on in. Let’s tell her together.”

She was happy, the Darkness saw. And it made him happy. She would never smile like that at him, but he had long since accepted what he had become, and what the limitations were. It seemed to him you could not truly appreciate the benefits of a situation if you could not accept the limitations.

The truly ironic thing, he thought, is that he was really no more invisible to her now than he had been back when he was human.

And so he left Sondra and the man who was making her happy. He intended to stop by every so often, in his nightly travelings, and the guy with the square jaw had better make sure he continued to make her happy.

More years passed, and he continued to check in on Sondra every so often.

He saw her and Dean move into their first house. After a while, he saw a FOR SALE sign go on the lawn, as they left this place and moved into a larger one, a couple miles outside of Boston.