Socket 1-3 - The Socket Greeny Saga (73 page)

“Yeah,” he said. “I should, you know.” He
took a long look, not convinced it wouldn’t be the last time he
ever saw me, then started away. I’d wait until he was long gone
before I leaped. He stopped at the book shelf and turned.

“Thanks, Socket.”

“For what?”

“Just, you know. Glad you were here. That’s
all.”

He left before I could say anything.
Glad
to be here, Streeter.

L E G E N D

Civil Wars

A librarian had come back to make sure no
other students were around, but I had dissolved before she turned
the corner. I gathered far past Interstate 26, near Monck’s Corner
and highway 52 and sliced time to a standstill.

I walked the country roads and sometimes
went straight through the wetlands. Whenever I felt people within
my influence, I turned away. I didn’t want to be tempted to draw on
their life. I trusted myself less and less, having visions I would
leave a wasteland of bodies in my wake
.
Even the slightest
attempt to expand my awareness out like a shrimp net to locate Pike
put people into my influence and an immediate download of their
essence. Perhaps vampires did exist. We didn’t drink blood. Just
essence.

Pike was out there, I could sense him, just
couldn’t locate him. Unlike my original, my
brother;
I had
locked onto his location from 800 miles away. He was in
Tannerville, Illinois. Population, 12,132. I didn’t know his name,
but excluding some terrible accident, I assumed he looked like
me.

For much of the trip, I saw nothing and
heard only the path beneath my feet. I worked my way to the
heartland of the Midwest, up through southern Illinois to the
central part, where the hills turned flat and the grass was
replaced by rows of corn and soybeans. Enormous combine tractors
were in the fields in the midst of harvesting another season, a
cloud of dust suspended over the long mechanical teeth that would
be chopping and stripping the kernels from the cobs once I emerged
from the timeslice.

The sun slowly moved higher in the sky, not
because time was moving. I walked westerly, from the Eastern Time
Zone to Central. A trip in regular time would’ve taken months, but
I arrived on the outskirts of Tannerville at the exact moment I
left Charleston. Some twenty miles south of Springfield, I stood on
route 29, looking at a sign:
AAAA Girls Basketball State
Champions
. I walked near a car travelling sixty miles an hour
back in ordinary time; now it was standing still. The license plate
read Land of Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln, the president that freed
the slaves.

I grew up in the South where President
Lincoln was viewed as a war criminal, by some. Others refused to
call it the Civil War.
There was nothing civil about it.
It
was the War of Northern Aggression. Even had a history teacher that
refused to use the textbook because it was written by Yankees. And
here I was, in the Land of Lincoln. My original self, raised in the
North. North versus South, the Civil War; a conflict fought long
ago, but the scars still remained.

I returned to ordinary time.

I was greeted with the sounds of blackbirds
and the distant roar of tractors. Hundreds of feet below, I sensed
the coal mine and the men in hardhats and smudged faces, putting in
hard hours to pull black rock from the ground. And as they mined
the coal, I felt their essence slowly pull towards me, like metal
shavings to a magnet. I focused on being centered, but I could only
slow the draw. Eventually, I wouldn’t even be able to do that.

I couldn’t avoid people, now. I walked past
small gas stations and Wal-Mart, McDonalds and car dealers, and
onto the town square with a clock tower rising from the courthouse.
Teenagers hung out by their cars and small business owners hustled
inside the clothing stores and jewelry shops. The asphalt road
turned to bricks, a town as old as farming.

A couple miles from that, the street ended
at a two story white house. It felt like a blank in my
consciousness, like it was somehow blocked. Still, I knew he was
there.

I stopped at the curb near the mailbox that
read
Teck Family.
My stomach fluttered. An old concrete
sidewalk led straight to the wide front steps, and at the foot of
those steps a girl was doodling with sidewalk chalk. She was
singing a song, making up the words as she went. It was a story
about a monster that fell in love with a little girl. The monster
lived under the bed and he was angry she didn’t love him back.

“I don’t talk to strangers,” she said and
went back to drawing with a yellow piece of chalk.

“That’s a good idea.”

She was humming. I walked gently up the
sidewalk and squatted next to her. Her mind was so open and
innocent, but I wasn’t compelled to draw from her essence, as if
the compulsion halted inside a bubble around this house. A warm
peacefulness settled in my stomach, relieved I didn’t have to focus
on restraining myself from taking, that I could just be in this
moment.

“What are you drawing?” I asked.

“That’s Saucy.” She pointed at the girl with
big ears and pigtails. “And that’s Greg. He’s got big teeth.” She
drew even bigger, sharper teeth on Greg the monster next to Saucy,
his mouth open and slobbery.

“He looks mean,” I said.

“He can be.”

She colored Greg’s teeth yellow with big
drops of purple stuff dripping off them, humming as she did. She
didn’t look up, but asked, “Where’re you from?”

“Me? I’m from faaaaaar away.”

“I’m not four.” She frowned at me. “I’m
seven years old, you don’t have talk to me like a baby.”

“Sorry.”

She stared at me curiously, then I quickly
realized I might look exactly like my original, so I quickly warped
my features in her vision, as if she saw my face in a carnival
mirror.

“Are you an alien?” she asked.

“What if I am?”

“Then you look pretty normal. For an
alien.”

“What if I said I wasn’t human?”

She shrugged. “Saucy’s not human, even
though she looks like it. She’s my best friend.”

Now she was coloring her imaginary friend’s
hair green. She clapped the dust off her hands and grabbed the
thick blue sidewalk chalk and colored Saucy’s shoes and started
humming again.

“Want to know a secret?” she asked.

“Always.”

“Scott got in a fight today.”

“Who’s Scott?”

“My brother, silly.” Her rapid giggle was
contagious. “You’re here to see him.”

“I am?”

“You kind of look like him, you know.” She
squinted at me with her tongue stuck between her lips. “Well, you
do if I do this.”

She was giggling again and I couldn’t help
laughing a little. The essence of joy bubbled between us and it
made her laugh harder.

The front door jiggled. “Maddi,” her mother
called through the screen door. “Time to eat, go wash up.”

Maddi smacked her hands again and ran up the
wooden steps, past her mother holding the door open. The letter T
was in the middle of the screen door. It rattled in the frame as
she let it close. “Can I help you?” the mother asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I, uh, was just… uh.” I grabbed
the railing for support, suddenly dizzy. A powerful force surged
from her, gushing inside me. It wasn’t her essence. I don’t know
what it was. And I couldn’t read her. I knew nothing about her, not
even her name. She could sense the power exchange, and she could
sense that I was sensing her sensing me, a loop of self-generating
energy, a fusion that was disorienting us both.

“He’s here to see Scott, Mama,” Maddi
said.

Her mother rubbed Maddi’s head and whispered
for her to go clean up. “Have we met?” the mother asked.

“Um, no—no, ma’am.” I stepped lightly up the
steps. “I’m kind of new in town, I’m in Scott’s class and I, uh, he
said I could stop by if I needed help with a project.”

Her hair was short, like my mother’s, but
her hips were wide and her skin sun-baked. She stared intensely and
I quickly gathered my focus to distort the perception of my
features or she’d be staring at an exact copy of her son. Still,
there was nothing I could do about my personal energy she
experienced. I felt familiar. Like family.

“There’s a school project, ma’am,” I said.
“Scott’s my partner.”

“Okay.” She opened the door and suddenly
smiled. “Well, sure, come in. Come in.”

“Thank you.”

I stepped inside. A hallway led straight
from the front door through an entertainment room to the kitchen in
the very back where the aroma of homemade spaghetti filled the
house. To the right was a formal living room with light blue walls
and expensive, clean furniture. The staircase to the upstairs was
on the left, went up next to the wall and then turned right along
that wall so that I could see part of the upstairs. Pictures
covered the walls below the steps.

Maddi leaned against her mother’s leg.
“Would you get Scott, dear?” her mother asked.

Maddi watched me on her way to the bottom
step, then took a deep breath and shouted, “SCOTT!”

Her mother winced. “Maddi?”

Maddi looked back and rolled her eyes. She
walked up the stairs, one step at a time, sliding her hand on the
polished railing and watching me as she went.

“If you’ll excuse me,” the mother said.
“Scott will be right down.”

Hard music leaked from upstairs when a door
opened. Maddi’s voice was lost in the beat and a deeper voice
responded. They were bickering about something other than the
stranger downstairs waiting for him. Maybe Maddi forgot why she
went up.

I went to the wall and the wooden floor
creaked. The pictures were randomly framed and placed. The last
twenty years were captured in photos, starting with a wedding
picture, followed by babies and grandparents holding a baby and
mother at a baseball game and kids swimming in a pool and someone
blowing out candles. The frames were dusty and the glass cracked on
a particular one. The picture was somewhat recent.

It was the mother and father standing at the
top of the Grand Canyon. The father was holding Maddi when she was
only two years old, her hair lighter and curlier, sucking her
thumb. The mother had her hands on the shoulders of their son; he
was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. They were smiling, but
not the smile one gives when someone counts to three and they all
shout cheese. No, it was like someone said something really, really
funny and the smiles came from way down deep.

I touched the glass, dragging a track
through the dust, as if I could plug into the joy emanating from a
moment captured in time.

The steps thumped like a bowling ball was
bouncing down and Maddi went running past, grabbing the post at the
bottom and sling-shooting past me toward the kitchen, moaning out
the word, “Mooooom.”

The music cut off and a door shut upstairs.
The steps groaned differently, this time. One at a time. I stepped
back toward the door. Scott slid his hand as he took each step
deliberately, turning the corner midway and looking at me.

A magnetic force pulled at my stomach. And
the closer he got, the stronger it became. It vibrated from my
core, chattering in my teeth and under my tongue. The force grew
stronger as he reached the bottom step, gushing inside like I was
drinking from a fire hydrant. I bumped into the door behind me,
grabbed the knob.

It’s me.

Every detail. The dour expression. The
slight bend in his nose. The relaxed demeanor of his eyes, it was
all me. Except for the hair. He had normal brown hair.

He stopped at the bottom step. I held onto
the door, afraid I’d be pulled against him.
Is this what it
feels like to have the essence sucked out you?

Shock suddenly opened his eyes a bit wider.
He was looking at himself standing in the foyer. I looked down,
centered my focus, drew on whatever power I could find to project
the illusion of different features. I had to stay focused, or all
of them would be looking at Scott’s identical twin. When I looked
up, the tension eased on his face. He blinked, reset himself, still
not sure what was happening. I couldn’t tell if he was experiencing
what I was feeling. I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t see his
thoughts or motivation or memories. He was completely unknown, and
yet his presence was overwhelming me.

“Hey, uh, Scott.” I squeezed the doorknob
tighter. “You remember… in class, sociology class, we got paired up
to do the, uh…” I swallowed. “The project?”

I projected a thought in his direction,
hoping it would plant in his mind like a memory, of me sitting
behind him in a class that felt like sociology. I couldn’t feel his
mind, where it began or ended, I could only throw out the
suggestion like slinging a dart through the dark, hoping to hit the
bull’s-eye.

He blinked. “Um…”

“Good, sure. Well, I was wondering if, you
know, you had some time to get it out of the way because I’ve got…”
I pointed my thumb behind me, gestured like there were things to
do.

He looked down, working hard to recall the
project and school, like a dream that begged to be remembered but
wasn’t really sure if it happened or not. I worked harder at
projecting that thought, attempting to make it solid and real. He
was getting it, but not believing it.

“Scott, time to eat.” His mother stepped
between us. Scott stared at her, trying to wake up.

“Scott?” she said. “Are you all right?”

He looked at her, back to me. I was losing
him. He was scattered, trying to make sense out of his thoughts and
the new ones trying to convince him of a new reality. In one last
effort, I threw all my energy into the new reality.
I’m a new
student, I sit behind you. We’re working on a project. I look
nothing like you. I am not you.