Davey squeezed his eyes still tighter, reached out with The Chill as far as his mind would let him. A jackhammer went off in his head as he let it go. It poured out of him with enough force to slam him back against the wall, and Davey thought if he looked in the mirror he would see his head expanded to maybe three times its normal size. Then his ears were gripped by a dreadful ringing, and it took an instant for him to realize it was coming from outside, not in.
Every fire alarm on the block had been triggered, on every floor and in every room. Then burglar alarms joined the crazed chorus and continued despite the determined attempts of their befuddled owners to shut them off.
People spilled into the street, hordes of them, mixing with the already busy pedestrian traffic to form a mass so tight those in it had difficulty breathing.
Trench, who had started into the hotel when the alarms sounded, now found himself shoved back by an escaping throng, and he became separated from the Twin Bears. COBRA personnel screamed futilely into their walkie-talkies, hearing nothing through the wailing alarms and knowing that their words similarly reached no one. Cut off from a central command, they had no idea how to proceed, so they held their ground in the mindless hope that the boy whose photograph they held might walk right into them.
Davey Phelps joined the flow of people leaving the hotel, passing close enough to the cold man to smell his after-shave. The throng pushed into the street amid halted traffic, and then across it to better view the screaming fire engines drawing closer with each blast of their horns.
By this time Davey had stripped off his jacket, because most of the people forced from the surrounding buildings hadn’t bothered to grab theirs. Mixing with the crowd, he eventually slid behind a fire engine that had just screeched to a halt, and joined a large mass of high school students taking in the festivities, his escape virtually complete.
A bus squealed to a halt just across the block. Davey rushed to it, dodging between the snarled traffic, knowing once he was on board he was as good as gone. He had climbed three of the bus’s steps and was digging in his jeans for the right change when his balance wavered. He grabbed the handrail.
“Hey, kid,” the driver blurted, “in or out, okay?”
But Davey didn’t hear him. The Vibes had struck.
The bus felt hot to him, hot with panic and desperation. He heard screams, saw twisted metal, smelled something burning, saw … blood.
“Kid?”
Davey pushed himself backward, found the cement but didn’t feel it.
“Jesus Christ,” from the bus driver and the door hissed closed.
Davey’s legs felt wobbly. He leaned against a No-Parking sign to steady himself and followed the bus’s progress.
The driver sped up to make it through a yellow light across Avenue of the Americas. There were so many alarms and sirens still blaring that he never heard the one meant to warn him.
The ladder truck struck the bus broadside at forty miles per hour, shoving it across the road with a maddening shriek. The bus buckled, spun, and toppled over on its side, sliding onto the sidewalk and crushing two unfortunate bystanders against a building.
Davey’s ears were filled with screams now, instead of sirens. The relief the crowd felt upon realizing there were no fires was soon replaced by true panic. Just as hundreds of alarms were finally turned off, the screams reached a crescendo to take their place.
Davey staggered away. His head felt crunched on the inside, as if somebody were tightening a vise on his brain. But he swallowed the pain down and kept walking, pressing ahead.
Sometime later he found himself on Seventh Avenue with no memory of how he got there. He was sweating cold bullets under his leather jacket, and could still feel his fingers trembling and teeth clicking together.
Davey passed a sidewalk fortuneteller, a minor crowd enclosing him.
“The future lies in the cards,” the fortuneteller announced, pulling a deck from his baggy jacket pocket. “Who is brave enough to learn what the cards hold for him, what the future holds?” Deftly he separated the deck before him.
Davey joined the crowd.
“Need a volunteer, need a volunteer.” His eyes locked with Davey’s. He spread the cards out in a fan shape. “How ’bout you, young—”
The fortuneteller’s face went white. The fan of cards started to collapse, then broke apart flying everywhere. People booed, laughed, applauded. The fortuneteller staggered backward against a building.
Davey turned away and then glanced behind him. What had happened? What had the fortuneteller seen in his eyes? He continued on.
“The time has come for all God’s children to be saved! You hear me, brothers, the time has come to be saved!”
The blaring voice froze Davey in his tracks. For an instant he thought it was directed only at him. Then he saw a black man with white hair holding a cheap wireless microphone as he stood over a yard-high amplifier.
“Give yourself up to God, brothers!” he droned on. “Rebirth! I’m offering you a chance to give in to the power of the Lord!”
Davey moved closer, stopped.
“You won’t worry about your boss or your wife or your husband. All your problems will vanish before the Lord because He is all that matters and He will take care of you. Learn a new and better life. Give yourself up to Him, be reborn, let yourself go into His court and see the only truth, the only love!”
Davey moved a bit closer.
“Brothers, I—”
The amplifier whined crazily — feedback. The black preacher threw his hands over his ears.
“Brothers—”
There was more feedback, worse this time. The crowd backed away. The black preacher tossed the cheap microphone dramatically aside.
“This is the work of the devil, brothers. He is among us even now.” The black man’s eyes scanned the crowd. “He walks the streets in clothes hiding his scales in the guise of a man”—his eyes stopped at Davey—“… or a boy.” The preacher’s mouth dropped. His lips trembled. “Lord have mercy, the devil is here among us! It’s you, boy, you’re the devil!” He thrust a stubby finger forward, started toward Davey, and stopped suddenly as though blocked by a brick wall. “The devil! That boy is Satan himself! God help us, help us all!”
The black preacher collapsed to his knees. A number of eyes turned curiously toward the boy.
Davey had already moved away, across the street.
First the fortuneteller, then the preacher.
What had they seen? What did they know? What had they felt? …
Davey quickened his pace although he had nowhere to go. He wondered if he had something even worse than the Men to fear.
“Have you got the boy, Trench?” Colonel Chilgers’ voice filled the car.
“I’m afraid not.”
“What?”
Chilgers listened in somber silence to Trench’s report, a part of him clearly excited. “I find much of that difficult to believe,” he said at the end.
“So did I. But this makes three separate incidents. First, your man in the airport claimed the boy just wasn’t there anymore; then, the matter of the five dollar bill yesterday; and now this. I should have suspected something earlier.”
“You should have reported the bill incident to me last night.”
“Perhaps.”
“In any case, if your suspicions are correct, this boy seems to have picked up some rather interesting abilities which he didn’t possess until Flight 22 landed in New York. Most interesting….”
“It will no longer be a simple task to recover him,” Trench said.
“But it’s all the more important now that we do. The homing beacon’s worn out, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll have to find an alternate means of tracking him down.”