The Enlightened (23 page)

I hear a gunshot. Then another. And a third.

I feel no pain, and I’m still in the Quiet, so I assume Kyle missed me. My ears ring as if he shot the gun directly into them.

Without meaning to, I note the big holes in the wall in front of me. One is about a foot away from where my head was about to be.

A foot away from being Inert again, a possibility I don’t even want to consider.

I shoot in Kyle’s general direction and run faster. At least four shots answer mine, and like me, he isn’t aiming, just shooting at random. I think he’s doing this to slow me down. But despite more gunshots, I don’t stop. In a berserker-like mode, I actually speed up.

As I turn the next corner, another blast sounds in my ears. This one much closer than the others. The bullet misses my shoulder by the width of a finger.

I return the shot, though Kyle is already behind a corner.

Then I push my legs to their limits.

As I sprint, I feel that strange sensation that I first experienced on the Brooklyn Bridge and a few times since—a feeling like I’m about to phase into the Quiet, but hit a mental wall that prevents it.

I shake my head to clear it and turn into the alcove area we scoped out during our recon. And that’s when I hear the sound of a thousand thunderclaps. The pain in my ears is instantly followed by a blast of agony in my right arm, as if someone took a baseball bat to it. A baseball bat made of red-hot iron. The impact causes me to drop my gun.

He shot me, part of my brain screams. A wave of nausea hits me.

With great effort, I ignore the pain in my arm and look up to see Kyle reloading his weapon.

As I look at him, my anger rekindles and turns into a wave of pure hatred. The bloodlust hits me harder than the gunshot to my arm. The thin veil of civility is gone, and I want to claw and bite the object of my fury until he’s ripped into shreds. Except I’m in no position to do anything but watch as he shoots me. I don’t accept this, though. Acting without thought, I run up to the wall. With my left hand, I grab the heavy, framed painting of wine bottles and launch it at Kyle.

As the thing flies, I hear the click of Kyle’s reloaded weapon.

I get lucky. The corner of the frame hits him right in the face. In the seconds of confusion that it buys me, I close the distance between us.

Still acting without deliberate thought, I execute a move that part of me knows is from Krav Maga. My left palm secures Kyle’s wrist, and my right palm hits the gun, sending waves of pain to my brain as it connects.

My reward is Kyle’s screams, and shortly thereafter, the metal clink of the gun hitting the floor.

I look at Kyle’s hand. His finger is so unnaturally bent that I have to assume it’s broken. It seems that the move I executed created a fulcrum point around the midsection of the gun. And that, combined with the fact that his finger was on the trigger and the physics of how fingers don’t bend to the side, caused this rather favorable development. I hope it hurts even worse than it looks.

To my shock, the injury doesn’t stop Kyle from forming a fist, an action that must hurt like a motherfucker. Like me, he must be running on pure adrenaline.

He throws a punch at my head, and I instinctively block it with my right elbow while using the left to hit Kyle in the jaw. My counter hit connects with his face, but I’m too overwhelmed with pain to rejoice. Having a shot-up right arm is not optimal for hand-to-hand combat.

Kyle recovers from my hit much too quickly and reaches for his vest. That’s where the knife is, I remember in an instant.

Instead of hitting him, I use Kyle’s momentary distraction to note the location of his fallen gun. The gun is right under my feet, but if Kyle gets that knife out, the gun may as well be a light year away.

It’s time to do something reckless.

I consciously execute a move I’ve only experienced in someone’s memories. I think it’s called a round kick. It’s a move kickboxers regularly execute, but financial analysts not so much. The biggest danger is that I’ll lose my balance.

My execution is perfect.

My foot connects with the side of Kyle’s head with a loud smack.

I don’t even lose my balance, and mentally thank Caleb for all his training.

Kyle is stunned. I capitalize on this with an uppercut, choosing to strike out with my uninjured left arm this time.

The result reminds me of what boxers often look like after a knockout blow. Kyle looks like he’s about to fall. His eyes glaze over, and he almost looks drunk.

It’s now or never. I bend over, reaching for his gun, but as I do, I remember something.

Feigning a loss like this is Kyle’s signature move. He would beat me with this trick at least six out of ten times when we used to play Mortal Kombat or other fighting games—back when I was a kid and thought he was my uncle.

If that’s what he’s doing, I know I’m fucked. But at this point, I’m committed to picking up that gun, so I just do it.

Once I have the gun in my hand, I straighten and see that my fear was justified. Just like in all those virtual matches of the past, I fell for his ploy, but this time, the fight is real. Kyle is holding the knife by the blade and has his hand positioned for a throw.

Only he’s not releasing the knife for some reason.

Is the bastard toying with me? Is he waiting for me to raise my gun by an inch, giving me hope, before he offs me?

“Don’t,” Kyle says.

Is he trying to talk to me? This makes no sense.

Then I notice he’s not looking at me, but at something beside me. This could be a trick to distract me, but I don’t see the point.

Things begin to fall into place when I see a red laser pointer dot on his forehead. Holding my breath, I follow his gaze.

The relief I feel is overwhelming. It’s Thomas. He has a gun pointed right at Kyle’s head. My friend must’ve limped his way here while I was keeping Kyle busy. That trip must’ve hurt like hell.

“Don’t do it, Thomas,” Kyle says. “Don’t shoot. There’s something important I have to tell you.”

The look of disdain on Thomas’s usually inexpressive face is all the answer he needs to give. His right index finger tightens around the trigger.

“I’m your father, Thomas,” Kyle shouts. “You’re about to shoot your own father.”

The look of disdain vanishes from Thomas’s face. It’s replaced by one of utter confusion, the same look that must be adorning my face as well.

I so badly need some extra time to think that I feel that near-phasing-out feeling again. I’m breathing so fast I wonder if I’m hyperventilating. It reminds me of the Bellows Breath exercise Hillary taught me, only I’m not doing it on purpose.

I need to digest what Kyle just said, but time is the one thing I don’t have.

If Kyle is lying to confuse Thomas, he succeeded.

I begin raising my gun, but it’s too late. Before it’s raised even a foot, Kyle capitalizes on the confusion he created and throws the knife at me.

Instead of pain, though, something very strange happens—something I experienced a long time ago, back when I was a kid.

I’m in what my kid-self would think of as the about-to-die mode, though now I have a better term for it.

I’m about to phase in.

And, like all those years ago, the transition is not instant.

Given how close I am to Kyle, the knife should’ve reached me before I even had the chance to think, but instead, I have enough time to watch the knife as it flies toward me at a millimeter per second. It’s going to rotate in the air, I realize with wonder. The whole thing reminds me of watching one of those high-speed-camera movie clips that show you things in slow motion.

I use this time to think.

About how Thomas is half-Asian and my mom Lucy is Asian. About how Thomas, like me, was adopted. About the rape I witnessed in Lucy’s mind. About the baby she was forced to give up—Kyle’s baby.

Can it be?

Now that I think about it, some of Thomas’s mannerisms are a lot like Lucy’s. They even share the same stony expression.

Could Thomas and I be related? Could we be stepbrothers of sorts?

As I watch the knife penetrate my shirt, I realize it could be true. Kyle might be telling the truth.

As the knife pierces the top layer of skin, I focus on the horror of what’s about to happen. Once this thing reaches my heart, I’ll die in the Quiet and become Inert again. I’ll be vulnerable right when I need my power most. Not to mention that with my mom in the hospital as she is, I can’t run away to another vacation spot and hide. Nor do I want to hide. I’m through with hiding.

And then, as the pain of the stab wound slowly registers, my world goes completely black.

Chapter 22

T
he world isn’t just black. The world isn’t here.

I can’t hear anything. I can’t smell anything. I don’t have any awareness of my body, not even things like my face or the top of my head. Because of this lack of body sensation, I also can’t tell where I am in relation to anything else, nor if I’m lying down or standing up. Nothing. I can best describe this feeling as a sort of floating sensation, though that’s a crude approximation, since when you float, you know exactly where you are. You just feel weightless. Whereas the best way to describe my current state would be as nonexistent.

Did the knife kill me?
What I feel is
how a disembodied ghost might feel, if such a being existed. But that’s silly. I couldn’t have died from the knife wound. That’s not how getting killed in the Quiet works. After getting killed, I’m supposed to return to my body in the real world, albeit regrettably Inert.

This is not that. The knife didn’t even get far enough into my body to kill me before whatever this is happened. This must have something to do with the world slowing down around me, and the near-panic attack I was having at the threat of becoming Inert again.

Getting progressively more anxious, I try to feel something physical again. I picture having eyes, ears, a nose, and the rest of it. Hell, I’ll even settle for feeling my left big toe.

Suddenly, though I still don’t possess any of my senses, I’m aware of lights.

Awareness is the best word for it, because I’m not really
seeing
those lights. The word ‘seeing’ is the only term I have for it. It’s like if I could suddenly experience echolocation like a bat and wanted to explain it to, say, Bert, who doesn’t have echolocation, I’d tell him, “Dude, it’s as though I can
see
in the pitch dark.” And this is similar. I’m aware of the lights, though definitely not via my vision.

I’m distracted from worrying about how to define my experience when the lights grow brighter. Or to be a stickler, when my awareness of the lights gets stronger.

Are these stars?

No, stars are always above you, and though I don’t have any idea where up or down is, I have a contradictory certainty that these lights are not above me, but rather near me. I can’t explain this nearness, though. It’s mere intuition that if I needed to, I could reach the lights. And I can’t reach the stars.

I exercise this ‘seeing’ sense by squinting my metaphysical eyes. The lights are actually broken into three largish clouds, like three galaxies, only as I said, I’m sure these aren’t stars.

The lights are connected by spindly pathways comprised of fainter light. If I had to prove that these aren’t stars, these connections would cinch the deal, since stars aren’t connected by strings of fainter light. Or are they? One thing I’m not is an expert in astronomy.

These spherical clouds remind me of something. The thing they remind me of is almost there in my mind, as if it’s on the tip of my tongue.

A sense of anxiety threatens to overwhelm me as a simple explanation about what’s happening surfaces in my consciousness.

For the first time since I met Mira in Atlantic City, I wonder whether I’m crazy after all. Insanity would explain pretty much everything.

Worse than insanity are the other plausible explanations. What if I’m having some sort of medical episode? Something like an epileptic seizure or a brain aneurysm? What if I’m just a naked brain floating in a vat of chemicals, and the lights are electrodes they’re about to hook up to my neurons?

“Nothing like that is happening to you,” a foreign thought states. I don’t know how, but I know with absolute certainty that this voice isn’t mine.

The imaginary voice in my head garners support for the ‘I’m crazy’ theory.

“No, you’re not,” the foreign thought states. “You’re not imagining this. You’re not schizophrenic. And I am real.”

These thoughts aren’t spoken by a voice in my head at all. Strictly speaking, no words are being spoken. The meaning of these words is simply appearing to me in my consciousness.

“Right you are,” the voice thinks into my mind. “These thoughts are mine, and I’m projecting them onto you.” A slight sense of warmth and camaraderie arrives along with the thoughts, like an extra texture layered on top of the meaning of the words
.

“Who are you?” I try to explicitly think back. To myself, I think,
Wouldn’t an imaginary friend always say they’re real?

“I am Mimir,” the thought comes. “We met yesterday. At that time, you thought I was imaginary also, but I assure you I am as real now as I was then.”

“Oh,” I think. “You’re the manifestation of the mind merge between me and the Enlightened? The very good-looking guy who was floating in the air?”

To myself, I think,
He wasn’t all that real when I ‘saw’ him last.
Yet
,
despite my skepticism, I still feel a sense of relief at having someone—or something—familiar in this strange place.

“That’s how you perceived me, yes,” the thought appears. “And you’re also correct in how you describe the way I came to exist. It was as a result of the Joining. And I did state that I am as real as when we last met, not more. Your definition of my realness at that time is another matter.”

“Thank you for your warning, by the way,” I think at him. “My mom would be dead if it weren’t for you.”

“You’re welcome. I’m truly glad you were able to save her.”

“What is this place? Where are you? And what the hell is going on?”