“Kids coming back from Milton,” Bobby answered breathlessly. “Two boys in the back pretty banged up. Already on their way to County. Girl’s still in the passenger seat. Looks like a spinal. We’re getting her out now.”
Jesse raced to the car and looked in. The girl was pinned into the passenger seat, a neck collar already securing her neck. He adjusted the collar slightly.
“My friends?” the girl asked.
“On the way to the hospital,” Jesse answered.
“Kevin?”
Jesse shook his head.
The young woman’s eyes went blank and began to roll upward.
She was rapidly losing consciousness.
Desperate to keep her from going under, Jesse quickly snapped a pen from his pocket. “Listen, can you do something for me?”
The girl blinked rapidly. “What?”
“Can you keep your head straight and follow my pen with your eyes?”
He moved the pen slowly right to left, watching as the young woman’s eyes labored to follow it.
“Good,” he said, pocketing the pen. “We’ll have you out of here in no time.” He smiled. “You just keep looking at where my pen was, and keep your head straight.”
He rose and moved through the wreckage, the usual scenes playing out before him, crumpled metal, gawking motorists, a landscape of flashing lights. Nothing drew his attention until he noticed Bobby standing off in a field, his shoulders hunched, head down.
“Jesus, I’m sorry, Chief,” Bobby explained when Jesse got to him. “I just…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jesse told him. “My first accident, I puked all over my chief’s shoes.” He patted Bobby’s shoulder. “And remember this, when you come upon a bad thing like this, everything you do makes it better.” He pulled out his pen and nodded toward the young woman in the car. “Keep her staring at this pen. Don’t let her look at that hole in the windshield.”
Bobby nodded softly and took the pen. “Thanks, Chief.”
Jesse rushed away, still moving quickly among the wreckage, looking for anything that might have escaped the notice of the other police and EMS workers who’d gathered at the scene.
Within minutes, the chaos of the initial response had resolved itself in an orderly arrangement of activity.
Jesse stood within the flow of cars, watching as they whizzed past, getting glimpses of the far side of the road as he paced about, cars blocking his view as they passed, then revealing it again, a cop giving directions, an EMS worker standing by an ambulance, and finally a tall, slender man, hawk-faced and leaden-eyed, smoking a cigarette beside a large truck, its sides hand-painted, TRAVELING ATTRACTIONS.
Jesse froze.
It was him. He knew it instantly. It was the same man who’d chased him down the alley when he was kid.
The carny touched his baseball cap and nodded like someone greeting an old familiar friend.
But he was not a friend, Jesse knew, not a friend at all, and so he strode toward him determinedly, cars screeching their brakes as he stepped into the traffic, moving forward in a trance until something flashed and he awakened to find himself standing in the middle of a deserted road, nothing left of the accident save the occasional small bits of broken glass, the shadows deepening all around him as night fell.
The hours of missing time were still playing darkly in Jesse’s mind the next day as he went through the routine motions of mowing his lawn. He’d not planned to mow that day, but after what had happened the day before, he felt drawn to the familiar, things he could do by rote, the safety of routine.
His nine-year-old son, Charlie, walked along beside him, his bare legs sprayed by tiny green flecks of severed grass.
“Did you know that twelve people have gone to the moon since 1969?” Charlie asked.
Jesse shook his head as he gave the mower a quick shove. “I didn’t realize it was that many.”
“My report is going to be on the first landing,” Charlie said. “It’s going to be a play.”
“I’ll be there,” Jesse said.
Charlie looked delighted. “Even if there’s an accident?”
“I’ll get someone to work my shift,” Jesse assured him.
Charlie gave Jesse a hesitant look. “That accident yesterday, are the people all right?”
“Most of them.”
“Are you all right?”
Jesse stopped moving forward with the mower and looked at his son, wondering what change in his manner had given Charlie the idea that he was… different. “I’m fine,” he said. He saw that his son didn’t believe him, that he suspected something had gone wrong, or been wrong… or was destined to go wrong. He wasn’t sure what his son sensed. He knew only that he wanted to avoid it. He unhooked the lawn mower bag and dumped the grass clippings. “Let’s get this place hosed down before your mom gets home,” he said.
He reached for the hose and turned on the water. The hose moved oddly, like something alive, a serpent wriggling in his hand. A blade of terror cut through him. He dropped the hose, and fixed his gaze on where it lay, half expecting it to rise, coil, strike.
“Jesse.”
Jesse felt his insides leap.
Amelia was standing just behind him.
“Honey, what is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
Jesse stared blankly at Amelia, then at Charlie, unable to speak, his gaze riveted upon the hose as it wriggled wildly, spewing foamy venom across the glistening lawn.
He felt a strange itch in his chest, as if something had bitten him, and headed into the house. From the bathroom, he could see Amelia and Charlie talking worriedly on the front lawn, worried about him, about something… strange.
The itch struck again, sharp and painful, like a bite.
He lifted his shirt and his eyes widened in horror and disbelief, his mind barely able to take in what he saw, not a bite mark, as he’d expected, or a rash, but the boiling mark of a four-fingered hand.
Eric sipped his morning coffee and perused the newspaper. Reagan led. in the polls, and there’d been no resolution of the hostage crisis in Iran.
“This hostage thing just shows you what happens when you let your enemy see your weakness,” he said. “We should have gone in there and gotten our people, no matter what the cost.”
His daughter Mary looked up from her cereal. “My teacher says if we’d done that, they’d have all been killed.”
“Maybe,” Eric told her. “But the Iranians would have been less likely to do it again.”
Julie sat down at the table. “Can we talk about something else?”
Eric returned to the paper. For the last few days he’d been going over reports of “flying saucer” sightings in Maine. With each new sighting, he’d felt the pull of a change, a break from the arid land he had occupied nearly all his life, the desert wastes of Nevada. Except for the Roswell incident, the West had proven of little interest to the visitors. So what was the point of remaining in an area where those he sought rarely appeared, he asked himself. If you wanted to kill a polar bear, you had to go the Arctic, and increasingly in the last few days he’d determined that if he wanted to complete his father’s work, he could not remain where his father had remained. In a sense, he decided, Owen Crawford had lived like a hunter in a duck blind, waiting for his prey to show up, rather than actively pursuing it.
The decision came like a clap of thunder. “I think we should move,” he announced.
Julie turned this idea over, considering. “To somewhere a little farther out of town?”
“No,” Eric replied. “ Maine.”
“Don’t you think this is a bit too sudden?” Julie asked, stunned by what Eric had just said.
Mary gave Eric a knowing look. “Is this ‘cause there’s flying saucers in Maine?” she asked brightly.
Eric looked at Mary, astonished by her cleverness… or was it intuition? “How did you know about that?” he asked.