Friday, 3 a.m.

Chad Boudreau

 

“I hate pickles.”

Kevin’s hands were throbbing beacons of pain. His eyes stung. He blinked and raised a hand to wipe away the mixture of perspiration and blood, but stopped when he caught sight of his knuckles. The skin was flayed and swollen. Blood, his blood, was trickling. He made a fist, wincing as muscles screamed, joints grinded and new fissures opened in the already tattered, exposed flesh. He watched with disconnected interest as blood flowed around the remaining dark hairs on the back of his hand like flood waters slowly embracing low brush on a floodplain.

“What?” The voice came from somewhere outside Kevin’s field of vision but very close. He didn’t look up. His eyes traced the path of a bloodstream as it slid down the length of his forearm.

“Pickles. I hate them.” He was aware he was speaking, but was also cognizant that the words crossing his lips hadn’t addressed the question posed. He didn’t have an answer to that query, not yet anyway. Instead, he focused on pickles. The only thing stronger than the pain in his hands and the roar in his ears was the pungent smell of pickles.

A drop of blood hung from the underside of his elbow. He admired its perfect shape and tenacity.

His mom made pickles. She grew the cucumbers in a garden in the backyard. It was a big garden in a small yard. When it was pickling season, Kevin did his best to stay out of the house, a task that had gotten a lot easier when he was a teenager and could leave on his own accord for longer periods of time. The boiling mixture of vinegar and pickling spices filled their non-descript, squat home with a sour reek and the resulting humidity was laced with an acidity that burned his eyes if he was present. The very smell made him sweat even as his eyes ran wet and his cheeks blossomed red.

The familiar and hated acrid smell of vinegar and pickling spices tugged at his nose once again this very night as he stood amid rubble. The drop of blood let go its hold. Kevin watched its descent. It landed on a dinner plate-sized chunk of broken ceiling tile.

He imagined he heard the resulting, diminutive splash. He smiled, though the grin was little more than an upward twitch of one side of his mouth.

“Wipe that smile from your face.”
His mom hadn’t been impressed by the news. Kevin could tell because she shook

her head repeatedly as he talked. That shaking spoke volumes about her disappointment and frustration. She used a few choice words to punctuate her stance on the matter in case there was any doubt.

“It’s a waste,” she said, “A waste of your potential.” She was seated on the loveseat in the living room. It was early evening. The last light of the day streaming in through the window didn’t reach the corner in which she had settled. Her legs were curled up beneath her, a hardcover book open in her hands though she no longer paid attention to its pages. She looked up at him over the rims of her reading glasses. Not for the first time, he felt more like a student facing a stern headmaster than a young man standing before his mother. The effort of cocking her eyebrows creased her forehead in a familiar way. Those wrinkles were permanent fixtures these days, but at that time five years ago his mom had looked surprisingly young for her forty-five years, especially considering all that had happened during the previous ten.    

Eighteen years of authoritarian upbringing made Kevin want to nod, back down and change his mind. He had to dig deep to find the willpower to keep his back straight and head high. He did his best to match his mother’s piercing gaze. His confidence increased when he caught a momentary flash of surprise in her features. She settled herself in an instant and brought out the big guns in an effort to knock him from the path he had chosen.

“Your dad would be very disappointed,” she said. It was a dismissal, one that silently reaffirmed she didn’t agree with Kevin’s decision, would waste no more effort discussing the matter, and that she fully expected him to eventually see reason and abandon the silly notion.

Kevin had expected her to invoke his dad’s memory and the rightly assumed guilt that came with it. Doing so had ended many an argument in the past ten years, but he had prepared himself and was thus fortified.

“Dad’s gone,” he barked back. The words stung both he and his mom. She flinched, noticeably. He had hurt her, but it was no time for emotional weakness. He pushed onward so she had no chance to recover. Continuing with the attack was also a way to avoid the turmoil his words had caused within himself. There would be time enough to deal with that pain after this particular battle had been fought.

“All I heard when I was growing up was that I had to live up to my potential, and how much of a disappointment I was every time I didn’t.” He expected his mom to attempt to intercede on behalf of his absent father, but she kept silent. Her wordlessness caused his next words to get tangled up on his tongue. He recovered quickly but a shift in her posture showed him that she had caught the momentary shudder in his resolve.

“I don’t have what it takes, Mom. I don’t, never did and never will. I’m nothing special, no one special. I’m just me – plain, uninteresting, unassuming me. I don’t understand why that was never enough for him. Why that isn’t enough for you.” He took a firm hold of his emotions. The truth was he wanted to run from the house and never come back, or fall to his knees, put his head in her lap and plead for the acceptance he so desperately needed. He wouldn’t know which course of action he would take unless he allowed himself to choose, and he didn’t dare do so.

Silence hung in the room like a vengeful devil. Time slowed under its power. His mom, always the more powerful of his parents in her own way, broke the spell with a simple, well-executed action. She studied him for a moment, sizing him up, taking measure of the man he was trying to become, and then, as if seeing nothing that impressed her, opened her book and looked for the words she had been reading when Kevin had entered the room only minutes ago.

“It would seem you have made up your mind, and no words from me will dissuade you.” She didn’t give him time to agree. Her words came in a steady, emotionless stream. “You are plain. You are uninteresting. You are unassuming. You are not special.” Each statement was an aimed slap in the face. “But you don’t have to be, and that is why you are a disappointment to your father and me.”

“He’s dead!” The words came out of Kevin like a fireball from an erupting volcano, full of fire and ready to inflict damage, but they shattered against the unmovable wall that was his mom. Kevin felt the full effect of the aftershock.

He and his mom never spoke of his dad as if he were dead. He had disappeared ten years ago, leaving behind a wife, a son, a legacy, and too many questions. Kevin had never even considered in his own thoughts that his dad was dead and gone, but the sudden utterance of those words meant his subconscious had considered the possibility. He felt hollow inside, and didn’t know what that meant. Was it the relief that came with acceptance or the quiet of indescribable loss? Unwilling to answer that question, Kevin ran. Air rushed to fill the void. His mom’s hair whipped forward, the book was torn from her hands, and the curtains pulled taut in their rings, extended horizontally toward the center of the room as if to reach out for the departed young man, seeking to stop him and hold him fast.

 

*  *  *

 

“Why are you smiling? Do you think this is some kind of joke, a game? Look around you, boy. I don’t see much to laugh about.”

His name was Evan. He had literally crashed into Kevin’s life only a few minutes ago. Kevin didn’t want to act on anything Evan said, so he kept his eyes lowered. There was more of his blood on the broken ceiling tile at his feet. Looking at his blood was easy. What he was not ready to gaze upon now that the adrenaline was leaving his system was the four bodies that lie broken amid the rubble. He was not ready to accept his role in those deaths.

“I don’t think those fellows are getting up, kid.” It was as if Evan was reading his thoughts, though Kevin quickly dismissed the possibility. From what little he knew, telepaths were extremely rare. Only a handful had ever been found, and each of those had been nothing more than a factory of flesh, blood and bone with a job to keep alive a brain incapable of handling the reams of data it absorbed. Each had been wide-eyed and slack-jawed, emaciated and immobile. Any personal consideration had been lost beneath tidal waves of external thought. The doctors and government officials that had used the media to unveil each of these individuals did so to assuage the public’s concern that someone was listening, seeing into their most secret places. The doctors declared a telepath had no sense of self. They were a satellite capable of receiving but not processing or transmitting signals. They were nothing more than a receptacle.

The doctors spoke. The government officials nodded reassuringly in agreement. The public found other things to fear, and the telepaths were whisked away.

“Piss on them anyway,” continued Evan. The cold disregard in his voice caused Kevin to involuntarily look up. “I’ve been hunted by these fellows and others like them for months,” Evan continued. “I had to leave everything and everyone behind. I have nothing because of these guys. Shed no tears for them, boy.”

“There will be more of them,” said Evan after a moment. “They don’t stop. I’ve certainly learned that. And now they will be looking for you, too. So, what are you going to do?”

There was that question again, the one Kevin was not yet ready to answer. So, instead, he asked why.

“Why?” repeated Evan in an incredulous voice. He spread his arms wide and spun in a slow half-circle, motioning to the wreckage that was once the 24-hour convenience store at which Kevin worked. What fluorescent lighting remained in the ceiling clung precariously to damaged fixtures, flickering irregularly with fizzles and pops. Each flash of light was a dying gasp, a cry for assistance. Somewhere, one bulb let go and hit the debris strewn floor with a gunshot snap, making Kevin flinch.

“But they are. . .” He couldn’t say the word so he tried a different approach. “How is anyone going to know?”

“It’s not your boss or even the cops that you need worry about. It’s guys like these. They look human, yes, and they can die, which you’ve just proven, but they’re not all flesh and bones like you and I. They are a mix of man and machine, a hybrid assembled for the purpose of tracking and bringing down people like you and me.

“They are wired to each other and to whoever signs their paychecks. What one says, they all hear. What one sees, they all see. Do you get it now, kid? They don’t need to report back to their masters. Those masters already know what you are.”

The only thing Kevin could think to do was shake his head in disbelief.

 

*  *  *

 

It was Thursday night. As always, he arrived at work at 10:45. He had left his apartment at ten as per usual. He walked. He always did, music piped into his ears, the evening air crisp on his face, hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket, hood up and pulled low. Light from inside the confectionary bled out through the large storefront windows to reveal the few vehicles in the parking lot. A tall sign proclaimed the store’s name and around the clock hours of operation. It was lit as well, dancing lights for a border, but the illumination wasn’t strong enough to reach the pavement.

Kevin entered, placed his late night lunch in one of the store’s large standing coolers, tucking it expertly behind a row of milk so it was out of customer view. He accepted the office keys from tall, slump-shouldered Lanis, who was anxious to end her shift and head home for a hot bath before hitting the nightclubs with her friends. Kevin unlocked the door that led to the storage room where towers of snack food filled cardboard boxes and racks of soda pop loomed, and then went into the office where he counted his till. Next, it was back to the front of the store and behind the counter to fire up his cash register. Lanis disappeared into the office, and having counted and bagged her cash, came back a few minutes later to give Kevin a quick good-bye, and then he was alone behind the counter.

He drummed his fingers along the top of the cash register like he did every night at the start of his shift. It was a few minutes after eleven. He looked out across the tops of the shelves that divided the store into four tidy, equally spaced aisles and felt, not for the first time, that this was the place for him. He worked this eight hour shift five nights a week, and had been doing so for almost two years. There were few customers after 1:00 am and before 5:00 am, but many of them were faces he had come to recognize. A smaller number of those he knew by name. It was with them that conversation went beyond the usual pleasantries that passed over the counter between customer and cashier as goods and money changed hands. Kevin hesitated to classify them as friends because he never saw them outside the convenience store, but there existed a familiarity he found comforting. They were his surrogate family, a replacement for the one he had lost.

Ever since he had barked the words at his mother in anger, Kevin thought of his father as dead. The thought still caused a flutter of emotions – anger, confusion, sadness – but it provided him with a sense of closure. He saw his mother only a handful of times since he fled the home in which he had lived most his life. For those meetings both he and she played their expected roles well, with polite questions, quick, factual updates and promises to stay in touch. Sensitive topics were avoided. There were times during a slow period at work when his only company was the tinny radio and the low hum of the coolers that he gazed out the front windows, watching for his mother’s car to pull into the parking lot. It would be a sign that the rift between them could be healed.

She never came.

Kevin divided his nightly and early morning duties evenly among the tops of the hours. He re-filled the coolers at midnight. At 1am, he stocked and straightened the chip and chocolate bar racks, which included filling the two large bins reserved for older items that were discounted two for the price of one. At 2 am, he straightened the extensive magazine rack, returning orphaned reading to its proper place among kin of similar topic. He reserved 3 am for dusting the contents of the two innermost aisles. An assortment of toiletries, cleaning supplies, and canned and bottled food items were rarely purchased but nonetheless stocked. Years worth of sunlight streaming in through the storefront windows had bleached the labels on many of the items, none more so than the pickles.

Kevin had been dusting the tops of these pickles, nose wrinkled up at a smell existing only in memory, when movement in his peripheral caught his attention. A man was walking quickly past the storefront windows. He was short and stocky, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his hooded sweater, clothes various shades of grey. There were no cars in the parking lot and no customers in the store. The radio was on, but turned low. Music and lyrics mingled and were reduced to nothing more than a hum as they crossed the distance to reach Kevin’s ears. The man flicked a look into the store as he strode by. Kevin smiled and raised the feather duster in salute. He saw the man’s shoulder automatically twitch in response, an attempt to get a hand out of a pocket to return the friendly gesture. A terrible roar and the grinding of metal on concrete, however, cut the motion short.

The car was a black monstrosity. It came out of the darkness like a beast from a nightmare. Kevin hadn’t seen it, but it had been on the road, creeping along, headlights off, searching, and having found what it was looking for, roared its engine in triumph and turned sharply to catch and bring down its prey.

The black beast’s glass eyes lit up harshly and for a moment the man that had been walking in front of the store was frozen in place. The car jumped the curb even as it accelerated, breathing a kind of fire as steel underbelly met concrete and streams of sparks cut the night. The man had little time to react, but react he did. He leapt straight into the air just as the mechanical brute was about to administer its deadly blow.

The jump wasn’t high enough.

The man’s shins connected with the monster’s chrome teeth, the grille. The force snapped the man sharply downward, his chest and face slamming onto the hood.

The car was still accelerating when it came crashing through the storefront windows.

The detonative cacophony of exploding glass, shrieking metal and bellowing engine slammed into Kevin like the slap of a giant’s hand. He staggered back, turning ever so slightly, hands rising to cover his head in a vain protective gesture against the storm of glass that flew past and bit into him. He couldn’t hear his own scream over the noise.

The car all but annihilated the counter that separated employee from customer and the long rack of potato chips, candy bars and other assorted snacks immediately in front of it. The cash register bounced across the body of the man pinned against the windshield like some giant bug, spilling out its paper and coin guts during its pirouettes. The money mingled with flying wooden shards of destroyed countertop and sailing, spinning snacks. The driver hit the breaks hard just as the vehicle struck the two discount bins. The man shot off the hood as if fired from a slingshot. He smashed into one of the coolers a fraction of a second after the chocolate bars expelled from the bins, the thick glass shattering as his back struck with tremendous force.

A jagged piece of window glass had embedded itself in Kevin’s forearm. Another cut a bloody path across his brow. Nerves sent signals of pain to his brain but they were not consciously perceived. The more primitive parts of Kevin’s brain, the system with the job to keep him alive, had taken over. It flooded his body with adrenaline. His heart quickened, pounding at his ribs like the drums of war. Oxygen and glucose rushed into his muscles. Non-vital bodily functions were suppressed. Pupils dilated, allowing maximum light, increasing visual acuity. Kevin was on the cusp of fight or flight. The choice would not be a conscious one.

Space between bottles of pickles on the top shelf allowed him a view. The car’s doors flew open. Four men quickly emerged, belched out of the belly of the beast that had borne them. They were chiseled specimens, dark suits stretched over bodybuilder-like musculature, faces of sharp angles, dark eyes set deep into skulls capped by heavy, protective brows. The two in Kevin’s line of sight were armed; the driver with a handgun of considerable weight, and the other with something that looked like a shotgun with its twin barrels sawed short, but with a grip much like a pistol. As Kevin watched, the man reached into the backseat and emerged with a bandolier of shells. He slung its length over one shoulder and then expertly snapped the metallic split-link belt onto the shotgun. As he did so, the driver pulled back on his handgun’s slide and released it. Similar clicks and clatters from the opposite side of the car meant the other two men were readying their own weaponry. The car’s engine idled, a deep purr of satisfaction and menace.

The four advanced toward the man slumped on the floor in front of the cooler. With the majority of his bones shattered, he sat sprawled like a scarecrow fallen off its standing pole. His body looked squishy.

A wet gurgle escaped from in between the man’s lips. Kevin sucked back a breath in surprise, and that’s when the guns erupted.

The shotgun roared to life. The top shelf of pickles was turned into a haze of broken glass, sour juice and fleshy, green fragments. Kevin had ducked in a flash and thus escaped harm but before the pickled rain could start its descent the shotgun spoke again and again, the shelving and its contents bucking and exploding. Kevin ran on instinct, the debris and pickle juice twisting into a swirl.

The store’s windows were all but gone. Kevin would have had an easy escape, but the primitive parts of his mind had not chosen flight. He would fight. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but sometimes decisions aren’t ours to make. He simply reacted. It was in his genetic make-up, after all, the speed; but, he had spent his years keeping those instincts in check, never putting himself in a situation where his abilities would be an asset, never allowing himself the opportunity to explore and control his speed, never wanting to test his parents’ theories about his potential. It was the one thing that would have made them proud, but there was a chance he would fail and he didn’t want to fail them in that. It was better to focus his efforts on living what he felt was a life of normalcy.

His first dash got him clear of the automatic shotgun that was tearing baseball-sized holes in the shelves he had been hiding behind. His reflexes brought him to a sliding halt inches away from the newspaper racks just inside the front door of the store. The shotgun wielder must have seen Kevin appear because he turned on his heel lightening quick, never once easing up on the trigger. The bandolier disintegrated as it fed shells into the weapon. The hammers on the twin barrels fell once every half-second, expelling buckshot that shredded everything in its path. Shelves and packaged food erupted and danced as the man swung his weapon to bear.

Kevin was already on the move. Newspapers were sucked off the stands as air rushed to fill the vacuum he left in his wake. His hand whipped out and snatched a broken piece of wood off what little remained of the front counter. All of his movements could be fast. In the short distance he needed to cover, he raised the wood over his head, readying it like bat, and brought it down on the man’s arms in an effort to make him drop the shotgun.

Kevin had never hit anyone before. He had always backed down from schoolyard

bullies, trying his hardest to let their stinging words bounce off the emotional armor he so desperately tried to construct for himself. When he couldn’t get clear and words progressed to fists and feet, he balled himself up on the ground and took it all, with whimpers and sniffles leaking out from behind the arms he had wrapped around his head.  

The wood exploded, splinters spinning wildly off in all directions, little wooden missiles. Bones snapped loudly like hoary tree limbs breaking in a summer storm. The force of the impact rattled Kevin’s whole body. Numbing pain raced up his arms, jolting his conscious mind awake. He felt ill. He felt angry. He felt confused. He felt scared. All of these emotions washed over him in the time it took him to blink blood out of his eye, his blood, blood that was leaking from the wound on his forehead. When that blink was finished and his sight clear he saw the other three men bringing their guns around.

Kevin made himself run.

Machine guns as black as the grave lit up with muzzle flashes, the two men spraying the store in an effort to catch the barely discernable blur that was Kevin. No longer under the control of his survival instincts, he was less graceful, less sure. He had never taken the time to explore or learn how to control his speed. Any experience he had with it had occurred when he was very young and still thought his parents infallible and all-knowing, or had been involuntary, such as at the age of fifteen when he got drunk for the first time. He had stolen liquor from his parents’ personal stock on a dare from high school peers. Having taken it to the appointed rendezvous in a neighborhood park only to realize after twenty minutes that no one else was going to show, he drank the flask quickly, puked and found himself moving at high speeds without a sense of direction. He had ploughed through a tall hedge, branches tearing his clothes and skin, and came to a tumbling halt in a backyard, wiping out a set of patio chairs in the process. The awful clatter woke the house, but Kevin managed to escape at a staggering gallop before the homeowners spilled into the backyard to see what had occurred.

The convenience store wasn’t the wide outdoors. There was little room for high-speed maneuvering. His first turn took him too close to the magazine racks that lined the wall. He careened into them, scraping his shoulder, clipping the side of his leg, rattling bones and gouging skin beneath his clothes. Falling magazines got caught in his wake and raced after him. It was something like this that the man with the handgun had been waiting for. He took careful aim just ahead of the flying glossy pages and opened fire.

The remaining storefront window shattered just in front of Kevin. Startled, he dodged back down the aisle he had been hiding in only a moment ago, racing toward the back of the store. Everything in his field of vision was a blur. Recognizing different stretched shapes and colors was the only way to discern one object from another. Sound worked differently at high speeds too, but gunfire was still a terrible noise that drowned out all others.

Kevin hit a patch of floor slick with pickle juice. He lost his footing, desperately tried to regain his feet, and did so mainly due to his momentum. His arms had snapped out for balance, fingers grasping to find a hold. His left had found nothing solid but his right had snatched a surviving canned ham off the remains of a shelf.

He threw it in the direction of the muzzle flashes.

Lunch meat encased in tin hit one of the machine gunners in the throat at a speed greater than the fastest train in the world could achieve. The man buckled, but as he choked to death on his own broken trachea his hands clenched and thus the machine gun never quit. Bullets ripped a dotted line across the hood of the car and down the back of the man on the opposite side. He had been clutching his broken arms to his chest and gritting his teeth.

Kevin turned the corner and launched himself at one of the remaining standing dark shapes. He flew underneath bullets from the handgun, his shoulder with all his weight and velocity behind it hitting the man low in the ribs. The bones bowed and snapped, puncturing vitals. Blood speckled air rushed out of his mouth. He and Kevin bowled into the remaining machine gunner. The three of them slid across the floor in a pile of limbs and came crashing to a halt against the wall.

Kevin’s body was stationary but his limbs were a blur, flailing arms and legs trying to get clear of the pile, fists striking, fingers raking, knees and feet connecting with parts both soft and hard. He was aware of a squirming mass of heaviness both on top and under him, could hear grunts, groans and gasps mingling with his own animal sounds, could feel hands grasping. The more he fought the more desperate he became. It reached a fever pitch when a shot rang out suddenly. He saw with eyes half-blinded with blood and sweat a shape that had reached out to grasp the fallen handgun, the finger on the trigger that had caused the shot to discharge. Kevin flung himself on top of the dark mass and rained his fists down on it. There were no more shots fired, and in short order the yelps of pain were reduced to groans and then to wet gasps and then nothing.

Kevin crawled away and puked. His head swooned as he wiped at his mouth, and then his eyes, not that either motion had any cleansing affect. He could barely see through the wetness in his eyes, and his mouth still tasted like the late night lunch he had eaten just before he started straightening shelves. His stomach rumbled and his limbs shook. Hunger like he had never felt before took hold of him. The pain knocked him flat, down into his own vomit. His eyes wandered half-blind and fixated on the confectionary strewn across the floor. He reached out, grabbed a chocolate bar and tore into it with his teeth, ingesting the paper as well as the food. He was aware now that his body was very hot. He was sweating profusely. His heart was racing, his ears ringing. He removed the wrapper before he ate the next candy bar. Two more followed that one down his throat just as quickly.

He puked again, and then ate some more, forcing himself to eat more slowly. He looked about, found a spitting can of soda and sucked on its spewing holes. He chased that with a bottle of water and then poured another over his head. The coolness shocked gasps out of him. Then, he lay on his back and did his best to not look around. The lights directly above were surprisingly intact. He thought of nothing. Only seconds had passed since the car had crashed into the store.

“I owe you a debt of gratitude, kid,” said a voice.

It was little more than a breathy wheeze. Kevin snapped to a sitting position and yelled as the broken mess of the man that had been hit by the car picked itself off the floor. It was as if an unseen puppeteer had attached strings to its appendages and now made it plod awkwardly and limply toward Kevin. With each step, however, the limbs straightened with a series of pops and grinds so that by the time he was in front of Kevin, the man was upright with all bones at the correct angles with the exception of the fingers of his left hand which were still standing out brokenly in all directions, but were even now sliding slowly back into place. The man’s face was riddled with wounds. Kevin could see glass that had been embedded being forced slowly outward as the flesh and skin knitted back together. A little shower of fragments hit the floor with a tinkle.

“My name is Evan,” said the man, extending a hand, his mouth wide in a smile. Kevin saw new teeth growing to replace ones that had been knocked out or broken against the hood of the car. He didn’t shake the offered hand. “I saw some of what happened from where I lay, despite my sorry state, and I must say it was amazing, and I’m a guy that has seen many an amazing thing in recent months.”

Kevin had nothing to say so Evan continued. “I’m not sure what is required to keep me down permanently but those guys were intending to find out. I’m standing again thanks to you.”

Evan looked around at the destruction and whistled. Wounds along the man’s hairline were healing. The sound was like ants chewing. “You’ve got a decision to make, kid. You come with me or you go on your own, but either way your life as you know it is over. They’re going to be looking for you now, too. What’s it going to be?”

Kevin then became aware of a terrible pain in his hands. A fraction of a second later the pungent smell of pickles filled his nostrils and his nose wrinkled in response. “I hate pickles,” he said.

 

*  *  *

 

The house sat back fifty feet from the road, perched on a small natural rise of land. It was one of many such homes in a neighborhood that lay on the outskirts of the city.  The waning crescent moon was a thin sliver heralding the approaching sunrise. The early morning air was calm and cool. The hum of streetlights was the only sound.  

The near silence was disrupted by a rush of air that stopped abruptly at the foot of the home’s driveway.

Kevin stayed in the darkness. The domicile’s interior was darker than the early morning in which he stood. He wanted to move closer but thought better of it. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the window at the far left of the house. Again, he considered getting closer. He could see in his mind’s eye his hand knocking on the door. He could hear the deadbolt sliding back. He could see her face.

But then what? What would be said by either of them? What could be said by either of them? Kevin didn’t know.

He sighed and left. A bush at the edge of the driveway shook angrily.

His hands still hurt. His body still ached. His mind was numb with all that had happened and from all the terrifying unknowns the future now held. He could feel a wave of mixed emotions rising within. He did his best to outrun them.

He broke the sound barrier halfway down the street on which he had grown up.

The resulting boom woke up everyone on that road. Lights flicked on. Families babbled among themselves and neighbors speculated to one another as they stood in their driveways, still in their nightclothes.

One woman was still looking out her bedroom window long after everyone else had put the strange, loud sound out of their minds and had either gone back to bed or started getting ready for the approaching day. Tears ran down her cheeks but she choked back the sobs that wanted to be heard. There was, at one point, a glimmer of a smile but she didn’t acknowledge it either.