“We have children and a doctor,” Alex said. “We landed on an airplane.”
Eleanor clutched Lyle’s leg, and he reached over and took her hand.
From inside the house, a voice said something that sounded like: “Slowly.”
“I can’t hear,” whispered Eleanor. “Damn it.”
Alex took two more steps and stopped and raised her hands higher. She said something else.
“Channelopathy,” Lyle said, almost exclaimed, with some wonder.
“What?”
“Of course, ah,” he said.
Alex took a step forward.
“We should stop her,” Lyle said. He was emerging from a trance.
“Why? What are you talking about?”
Lyle reached over and honked the horn. H-o-o-o-o-n-k.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jerry pulled Lyle back. Lyle hardly seemed to notice, so lost was he in thought. “Sodium ion channels, it’s got to have something to do with that.”
Alex took another step forward. She was talking but they couldn’t hear what was going on. Alex had lowered her hands. One of them she now held behind her back and she was twirling it in a circle, the loco sign. This guy in here is nuts.
“Draw him out,” Jerry muttered.
“No,” Lyle said. “We need him. We need—”
The front door to the house opened, slightly, and a gun barrel emerged, pointed at Alex. She made the sign behind her back again. Somewhere along the line, Jerry had opened his door and now he was moving himself outside of it. “I’m a doctor,” Jerry lied, talking in the direction of the house. He had the gun pinned to his right side trying to keep it blocked from the gunman’s view.
“You’re going to get us all killed,” Eleanor said. “Dr. Martin, why do we have to keep her out of the house?”
“I don’t know. She knows something.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know?!” Eleanor hissed.
“Tell him I’m a doctor,” Jerry said to Alex, who stood with her hands now back in the air. She said something. The person from the house pushed the door open.
Images and thoughts were colliding inside Lyle’s brain: the passenger on the tarmac, the one on the couch, their smiles, the frozen screen with The Godfather, an old man with his head bludgeoned, the girl clutching her head. The way the static electricity woke up that man. It would be about sodium channels and epilepsy. What was the connection there? It had to do with how the brain transferred electricity.
His mind’s eye searched through his mental archives while through an actual blank stare, he watched as Jerry took another step forward in front of the pickup. His hands inside his jacket hid the gun.
“Jerry, tell her to come back,” Eleanor said.
He ignored her.
Alex took another step forward, then she dropped to her knees.
“What’s going on up there?” Eleanor muttered.
The front door to the house swung open and a man stood with an automatic gun slung over his shoulder. Tall and round, but sleek in his full-length leather jacket. On his woolly head, a kerchief pulled tight like you might see on a biker.
Jerry dropped to his knees and the shooting started.
Twenty-Five
Pop-pop-pop.
It was over in under two seconds.
The man in the doorway flopped backward, his hand making a last clutch at the door frame and then he collapsed.
“That’s right. That’s what I’m talking about!” Jerry exclaimed. He sounded like a high school linebacker who had just flattened a receiver.
“Jesus,” Eleanor said.
Alex lay on the ground.
“You all stay right where you are,” Jerry said. “We need to make sure he didn’t have company.”
He kept his body low and closed in on Alex. When he got to her, he gave the thumbs-up sign to indicate she wasn’t hurt. Then, still crouching, he made his way to the porch. He pasted himself against the wall next to the front door.
“Crack shot,” Lyle said to Eleanor.
“All clear!” Jerry said. “Let’s get these kids inside where it’s warm.”
Eleanor grabbed Lyle by the sides of the face and turned him her direction.
“Are you seeing something here you recognize—medically? If so, I would really appreciate you communicating it to me.”
He switched his gaze from Eleanor to Alex, watching how she watched him—with some fascination. He needed to talk to her.
The porch lit up, presumably from Jerry flicking a switch inside the door. Now it was clear that there was another building, to the right and set back slightly from the house. Out here it might be called a carriage house or even a barn, but in the city, another living quarters, like a cottage. Out front of it sat a sedan. It had only a dusting of snow on it. The image suggested to Lyle that people were inside the small building.
“Have you ever had a seizure?” Lyle asked Eleanor.
“Yes.”
“You have?”
“Two, actually, minor, when I was young, some strange syndrome that passed.”
“You remember what they were like?”
She remembered. Like her world had locked up. “These people had seizures, or are having them?”
“It’s just seizures aren’t viral.”
“So it’s not a seizure.”
“I’m not sure. When you had a seizure, what do you remember about it?”
“I just told you; the world paused.”
“Sorry, what did you remember about what happened beforehand, like, what were you doing when it happened?”
Eleanor processed the question. She couldn’t remember a thing, that was the problem; she felt like she’d lost hours of her life, like they’d gone blank. She told Lyle. He nodded. Short-term memory loss, he said, a common side effect.
“I need you to talk to me, Dr. Martin. I’m not sure what or who to trust and I need information. I’m not trying to play captain here. I’m trying to play reasonable adult in a totally alien situation. What would we do if this were another planet?”
“I’d take you to dinner.”
“What?” She laughed, seeming both slightly irritated by and appreciative of the random nature of the comment.
“It’s been a long time since I met someone who welcomed my opinion in an adult conversation,” he said.
“Hold it together, Dr. Martin.”
“I don’t know who or what to trust at this point.”
“You can trust me,” Eleanor said.
“Yep.”
Lyle reached into the glove compartment and fumbled around. His hand returned with a pen that he used to write something on a yellow scrap of paper he’d found. He scribbled on the paper and ripped it in half. He handed half to Eleanor.
“Put this in your pocket,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A note. Put it in your pocket. For later.”
She looked at it quizzically.
“Trust me.” He caught her eyes with his own and held the look for emphasis.
Then he stuck the other half of the scrap of paper in his back pocket. Lyle looked again at Eleanor and said, “You want to know the thing that my ex-wife hated most about me?”
“Not right now.”
“The thing she hated most was that I had instincts about things that I couldn’t prove, that often seemed wildly off base but that wound up being true. Like when I realized she was pregnant with someone else’s child even though I had no real basis for knowing it was true.”
“There are children in the car.”
“This is one of those times.”
“So you handed me a piece of paper with scribbles on it?”