The Object: Book One (Object Series) (11 page)

A lump swelled in her throat and before she knew it she was crying.  She didn't know why.  Homesickness, maybe, though she'd never had a real home.  She missed Drake and Kate.  She even missed Cindy and Audrey, the little brats, no doubt
tucked in bed this morning
somewhere at a relative's house in one of the outer counties, where the object could be gazed upon safely from
a hilltop and the days passed without riot.

Drake and Kate had never known that kind of childhood.  Neither had Lillia.  One in which the greatest troubles
ahead of you
were the contents of
gift boxes
and
kitchen cabinets
and notes from
this month's love interest
.

The room seemed to be getting louder and louder, some people clearly in severe pain and others yet in emotional upheaval.

The crowd rocked a little as somewhere nearby one person shoved another.

That's when Lilli
a made eye contact with the police officer from yesterday, the blonde woman, the one who'd shot Mike the Stalker--or had she?  Lillia hadn't seen it.  She had already crossed through the overpass and was almost home when that gunshot rang out.

The woman cop was standing at the set of doors leading into the emergency wing, one hand on the butt of her revolver.  Next to her was the nurse's station, where an old woman in
scrubs
sat behind a glass window on the telephone.
  Several people in tattered clothing hovered around the window, occasionally tapping on the glass.

Lillia's head began to swim.  She attributed it to the sour smell.  She wanted to sit down but didn't dare ask someone to give up a chair.  The baby felt heavier and heavier.  She repositioned him and secured her arm under his bottom.

Then it happened again.

~ ~ ~ ~

It was the girl from the vacant lot by the interstate.  The girl who'd pointed out her stalker lying bleeding in the gravel, only to run away before Meredith could question her.

Lillia, that was her name.

Lillia had a baby in her arms.

And she was floating.

The room went silent for the first time since Meredith had begun standing guard here.  She'd come to check on the man she'd shot, only to f
ind he'd died, and, not knowing what to do and with no available superiors to report to, she decided to play security at the hospital.  Here maybe she could stay out of trouble, she thought.

Now a teenage girl was floating in midair, and all the homeless people watching were losing their minds.

The nurse frantically dialed a number and began to shout into the phone to a doctor, beckoning him to come and see.

People were backing away from Lillia and the floor was soon bare underneath her.  She was quite a sight to see, holding the baby, hovering with one leg drawn up a little and one pointed straight to the floor.  Even her hair and her strange dreadlocks
drifted aimlessly as though touched by an updraft.  Meredith couldn't help but notice many of the men were transfixed not by Lillia's defiance of gravity but by her red polka dot underwear.

She approached the girl, who looked frightened to death.

"Can you come down?" she asked.

Lillia looked all about the floor beneath her.  "I don't know.  I don't know how I got up here."

Meredith reached up slowly and locked her fingers around Lillia's ankle.  She pulled lightly to find that Lillia moved as easily as a balloon.  In a moment, Lillia's feet were on the ground and her weight had returned to her.

"Come with me," Meredith said.  With Lillia back on the floor, the crowd began to inch closer and closer, either to inspect Lillia or to free up elbow room.

Meredith took Lillia by the crook of the arm and led her to the double doors.  She tapped on the window and
opened her mouth to speak to the nurse but stopped when she noticed a young doctor standing in the nurse's station, mouth agape.  He slammed his hand down on the buzzer to unlock the door and made frantic gestures with his free hand ushering Meredith and Lillia inside.

~ ~ ~ ~

It took Roger twenty minutes to reach
Eastern Parkway
and another five to get to
2nd Street
.  Early on in the adventure, either Roger had taken a premature left or Sprinkles had given a premature meow.  No doubt if they could communicate openly, the two would still be debating
.

They idled beneath
the thick
canopy of trees on either side of the road
.  Old
Louisville
was
a dark
area
now with
the dust-colored object in place of the sky.  It looked like
late evening
here and everything was still.  Homes either abandoned or locked up tight with fearful tenants awaiting total devastation.
  And
too quiet.  Roger became convinced he saw people peeking at him from their windows.  As if they knew to hide from something and couldn't help but watch the idiot
on the street
who didn't know
that something
stalked him a block away
.

"Why don't you meow us the hell out of here, huh?"

Meow meow.

"You're the boss," Roger said.  "I just hope you're taking us someplace a little less creepy than this right here."

They rode on uptown, where small businesses began to crop up between the old Victorian houses and dark brick apartment buildings and finally near the downtown area.

Crossing
West Chestnut Street
, Sprinkles began to claw and hiss at the door.

"Okay, okay, chill out."

He pulled over to the right side of the road just past the intersection in front of a shaded bench.  When he opened his door, Sprinkles leapt past him and scampered off down the street.

Roger jumped out and chase
d him as far as the curb, but when he stopped and looked around he didn't see the cat anywhere.

"Sprinkles!" he called.

He heard laughter coming from up the street and he turned to see a group of men all carrying beer
,
staggering and swaying in front of the YMCA.  They were mocking him.

Roger searched about for the cat until the men were upon him.  He'd hoped they would simply pass by with no more than a drunken remark or two, but instead they stopped.
  He remembered he'd brought along a single gun, a small .22 revolver, tucked in the inside of his left boot.

"Sprinkles," a few of them hollered.

"Here Sprankles," said one.  "Sprankles, come on, boy."

"What the hell you lookin' for--your kitty cat?"

"Yes," Roger said.

"You got to be outta your damn mind, dude," a man said.  "Look
up at the sky.  We're all dead.  Hey, ain't you listenin'?"

The man pushed him and he fell off the curb, landing on his back in the street.

The crowd erupted in laughter.  Someone smashed a beer bottle on the sidewalk.

Then a deafening reverberation rocked him flat against the pavement.  It was like a gigantic rubber bubble had exploded nearby.  He didn't even see the men being flung in every direction, landing hard on the ground, some cracking ribs, others suffering broken noses or loosened teeth.  Their heckling was now a chorus of moaning.

Roger felt tiny footsteps on his stomach and looked down himself to find Sprinkles perched upon him.  Then just as quickly he was trotting away and meowing.

Getting to his feet took some time.  The earth was still shaking and he couldn't hear so well.
  When he had a handle on his footwork, Roger noticed the iron bench had been knocked over.  Mulch had blown out of the bed behind it.  Even his van still rocked back and forth from whatever disturbance Sprinkles had caused.  Or had Sprinkles caused it?
What exactly
had
happened just now?

Roger didn't have time to think.  Across the parking lot on the other side of
2nd Street
, Sprinkles was racing to
ward a burning building
the next block
over
.

~ ~ ~ ~

Hayden tried to watch TV but he couldn't.  The nurse had cleaned and sutured the wound on hi
s shoulder and given him a white
pill to take for pain, but he felt cold and queasy and the
stinging
hadn't subsided a bit.
  He no longer had a shirt, and the blanket they'd given him was thin and netted such that cool air from the vent wafted right through to his feverish skin.

When he heard the ruckus down the hall, he first thought it was his father coming to finish him off and no doubt scaring people along the way.  Then he heard the girl screaming. 
"Let me go!  I said let go of me!"

He sat up and shoved his feet into his sneakers, then stood and moved through the dark room to the door, which was barely cracked open.  He watched a female police officer and a male doctor dragging a pretty young girl into a room.  Two nurses fell into the room behind them and a third scooted on up the hall carrying a baby.

Hayden threw on a gown but didn't fasten it.  Shoes untied, back exposed to the cold air, he stepped out into the hall and approached the room where they'd taken the girl.  He listened through the door to gather the nature of the situation.  Nothing made sense, so he cracked the door open hoping no one would see.  Inside he found the cop and two nurses pinning the girl to a hospital bed while the doctor plunged a syringe into the rubber top of a small glass medicine bottle, which he returned to his pocket.  He nudged a splash of the clear liquid out of the needle, flicking it, and then began to pivot to face the girl, who had found Hayden in the doorway and now met him with her eyes.

He took down the cop first because she had a gun, and he knew the surprise of him wrangling the cop would stall the doctor's hand and keep the needle out of the girl.

She was easy to bring down to one knee, and when he pushed her off balance he easily snatched the service revolver out of its holster and pushed her with his foot so she fell over completely.  Then he backed up a few steps and leveled the gun at the doctor's face.

"In the throat or in the forehead, Doc," he said.  "I'll just do what feels right if you don't put down that needle."

The doctor threw up his hands, one still mounting the syringe for injection.

"Put it down," Hayden said.

"Son, this girl--well, you should have seen it," the doctor said.  "We have to run some tests on her, damn it.  We have no choice.  For all we know she hosts something from that thing up there.  An alien.  Son, she was
floating
."

Hayden stormed the doctor and smacked his chin hard with the barrel of the gun
.  Then he snatched the wrist of the syringe-wielding hand and chopped the doctor's legs out from underneath him, sending him to the floor with his arm stuck up in the air, locked by Hayden's relentless grip.

Hayden pointed the gun in the doctor's face again.  "Look at me."

The doctor squinted and wiped his eyes and finally returned Hayden's gaze.

"The girl said let her be," Hayden said, "so you're gonna let her be.  Now get your ass back out there and start helping people.  All of you."

The nurses scurried out immediately, finally letting go of the girl, who jumped to her feet on the bed.  The doctor and the lady cop began to climb to their feet at the same time.  Hayden let go of the doctor's wrist but kept the gun trained on him.  He backed away a few steps so he could keep an eye on both the doctor and the cop, and that's when the doctor dove onto the bed and stabbed the syringe into the girl's hip.

Hayden tore him away, but it was too late.  The girl wobbled, then fell off the bed.  Hayden caught her and returned her limp and unconscious body to the mattress.

~ ~ ~ ~

Sherman
directed Kate behind a parked car on the right side of the road, and there he
laid
Drake in the narrow patch of grass between the curb and the sidewalk.

"You stay here with your brother, honey," he told the little girl.  "I'll be right back."

He drew the gun and moved up the road, dashing from one parked car to the next to conceal himself as much as possible.  Up ahead, a building was on fire.  A mergers and acquisitions joint, if
Sherman
remembered correctly.  He'd heard a man screaming, which was why he elected to scout the intersection first before carrying the children into a dangerous place.

There was no time to dally.  He moved along, closer and closer to the building, so close he began to feel the heat of it.

That's when he saw what looked like a man, only black and leathery and shriveled up, emerge from the front doors of the building, flames billowing out behind him. 
Sherman
could hear faint screams in the roar of the fire.