He had a vague memory of seeing him fall through the flapping curtain of the cabin, before their boat was flung to shore. Michael quickly climbed up the buckled deck, and flung himself into the cabin.
All was not well down below.
The fiberglass hull had crushed down to half its size, and there was the twisted, gold-plated grille of a luxury car, where the bed should have been. The driver tried to catch his breath . . . while steam spewed from his ruined radiator, into Drew’s half-open eyes. His body had been crushed against the bulkhead, pinned between the remains of the car and the boat. His chest had collapsed like the shell of an egg, and the life had been pressed out of him in an instant.
The image kept hitting Michael’s brain and then bouncing right out, his mind refusing to accept it.
“Noooo!” he screamed. It came out more like a squeal—the kind of awful sound Drew himself might have made if he had the chance.
Lourdes began to warble something in incoherent Spanish when she saw him, paling and turning away.
“Lourdes, help me! Help me!” screamed Michael.
Together they wrenched Drew free from the grille of the car. “He’s breathing!” shouted Michael. “He’s . . .” But it wasn’t air bubbling out of his nose; it was blood. And even that flow quickly stopped, making it all too clear that there was no heart pumping. His chest was little more than a concave crater in his torso.
There were other voices now—motorists who had left their cars to inspect the wreckage. They tried to peer in through the gap where the Lexus had shattered the hull.
“We have to get out of here!” Lourdes tried to pull him away, but he violently shrugged her off.
“I can’t just leave him!” Michael knew he was responsible for this. He had brought swift judgment on Drew, and had executed that judgment in a blink of an eye. Thanks to Michael, Drew had been crushed with the same unforgiving brutality of an old-fashioned stoning.
As he held Drew, Michael began to weep, and the heavens answered with a silent rain, lamenting all the things that were lost in the span of ninety seconds.
8. Book Of Wisdom
“You move like one unaccustomed to his own limbs,” Okoya told Winston. “I was wondering why.”
“I thought Tory already gave you the story.” Winston brushed the sweat from his brow, and looked around. “We’re not getting anywhere.” The three of them had left the train more than a day ago, and had since given up on hitchhiking, for the rural roads they traveled only zigzagged in pointless directions. They had taken off on foot, certain that Dillon was just a few miles west, across the bushy hills of central California; but it was more than just a few miles. They were met by endless wastelands where tumbleweeds gathered against neglected barbed-wire fences. They hiked for a good part of the night, and yet the morning landscape seemed no different from the scenery they saw at sundown.
They had come across a stream a few hundred yards back, where Tory had insisted on bathing, and so Winston and Okoya went on ahead, scouting out the next hill. Winston was not looking forward to the view, because he was sure of what, it would show them: more hills, and mountains for as far as the eye could see. No Dillon. No anything.
Halfway up the hill, he decided to rest. His legs ached. In truth, they always ached from growing pains as his muscles and tendons fought to match the puce of his bone growth.
“I’d still like to hear your side of the story,” said Okoya.
“I don’t know why I should tell you anything.”
Okoya sat down on a boulder and pulled out a book from his back pocket. A thin, maroon volume, hardbound, but small, like an address book. “Then don’t.” He flipped it open, and gave it his attention. Winston found his indifference more irritating than his nosiness.
“A year ago I was the size of a six-year-old, and growing backward,” Winston told Okoya. “My touch couId numb you—paralyze you. And Tory—she was a human petri dish, covered with open sores that could probably spread every disease there is. That’s what we were like when we found each other.”
“And then you both destroyed your titans,” prompted Okoya. “Tory told me about it.”
“Whatever you want to call them; yes, we killed them. And now there’s a whole new problem.”
“Problem?”
“Yes. You saw our campsite this morning, didn’t you?”
Okoya laughed, but Winston failed to find the humor. They had gone to bed on an open plain, and awoke in a forest of weeds that had grown so high you couldn’t see the color of the sky. Winston’s bedroll had been snared, and it took both Tory and Okoya to pull him free. What amazed Winston was that Okoya had taken the event in stride—as if he had already come to accept their powers at surface value. If there was one thing about Okoya that Winston liked, it was his refreshing lack of awe.
Winston glanced down at the little book Okoya held. “So, you going to write all this down?”
Okoya shook his head. “It’s not a book for writing, it’s one for reading.”
“Hualapai Wisdom?”
“There’s only one kind of wisdom,” answered Okoya.
“Can’t fit much in a book so thin.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Winston thought Okoya might give him a glance at it, but instead Okoya just slipped it into a back pocket. Winston grabbed his ankle and pulled his foot up behind him, in a hurdler’s stretch. The stitching at the tips of his sneakers popped open. Winston sighed, wondering what size his feet now were.
“How much more do you think you’ll grow?” Okoya asked.
“I’ll be six foot one, according to the doctors, and they’re usually pretty accurate.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Winston let his foot go, and sat down on a boulder a few feet away, studying Okoya.
“Intellectually, you’ve moved beyond most of the people in your life, haven’t you?” Okoya continued. “Tory must bore you to tears—you’re way out of her league.”
Winston had to laugh at that. “I’ll tell you something, Okoya,” he said. “When I was in sixth grade, I had the word ‘sycophant’ in a spelling bee. Couldn’t spell it worth a damn then. But now I could spell it, define it, give you its etymology, and its usage in classic literature. So you might say I’m a little too smart to be won over by flattery.”
But Okoya only grinned. “Are you telling me you read the dictionary?”
“Only when I can’t sleep.”
“You’re right, Winston. That’s not impressive, it’s just strange.” And then Okoya became serious, taking a long, invasive look at Winston. “A flatterer thrives on telling lies,” Okoya said, “but I observe the truth. So what does that make me?”
Winston thought about the question. Wasn’t truth what he quested in everything he read, in all the things he learned? And was it true that he had outgrown Tory, and perhaps all the other shards as well?”
“Dangerous,” he answered. “It makes you dangerous.”
“Truth is never dangerous in the right hands,” Okoya said.
They both turned at the sound of skittering pebbles.
Tory, still buttoning her blouse, hurried toward them, her pocket radio in hand.
“You have to hear this,” she said, turning up the volume.
“Bad news?” asked Winston.
“Just listen.”
The radio spat forth a strange news report between bursts of static: BZZZ BZZZ. . . “freak tornado hurled the cabin cruiser” . . . BZZZ BZZZ. . . “multiple injuries” . . . BZZZ BZZZ . . . “Pacific Coast Highway” . . . BZZZ BZZZ . . . “closed in both directions.”