All happening a bit fast? Understatement of the decade, dude, I wanted to tell him. My house wasn’t my house, my family wasn’t my family, my girlfriend wasn’t my girlfriend—well, she hadn’t been from the start, but this was no time to get finicky. The point was that everything stable and permanent in my life had turned to Jell-O, and I was about this far from losing it completely.
Then the weirdo in the Halloween mask put his hand on my shoulder, and that closed the gap between losing and lost. I didn’t care if he was someone I knew. I jerked my knee up, hard, just as Mr. Dimas had told us all to do—boys and girls—if we ever thought we were in physical danger from a male adult. (“Don’t aim for the testicles,” said Mr. Dimas that day, just as if he were discussing the weather. “Aim for the center of his stomach, as if you’re planning to get there through the testicles. Then don’t stop to see if he’s okay or not. Just run.”)
I practically broke my kneecap. He was wearing some kind of armor under the coat.
I yelped in pain and clutched my right knee. What made it worse was that I knew that behind the mirrored mask, the creep was smiling.
“You okay?” he asked in that half-familiar voice. He sounded more amused than concerned.
“You mean apart from not knowing what’s going on, losing my family and breaking my knee?” I would have run, but fleeing for one’s life requires two legs in good operating condition. I took a deep breath, tried to pull it together.
“Two of those things are your own stupid fault. I was hoping to get to you before you started Walking, but I wasn’t fast enough. Now you’ve set off every alarm in this region by crossing from plane to plane like that.”
I had no idea what he was talking about; I hadn’t been on a plane since the family saw Aunt Agatha for Easter. I rubbed my leg.
“Who are you?” I said. “Take off the mask.”
He didn’t. “You can call me Jay,” he said. Or maybe it was, “You can call me J.” He put out his hand again, as if I were meant to shake it.
I wonder if I would have shaken it or not—I never got to find out. A sudden flash of green light left me blinded and blinking, and, a moment later, a loud bang momentarily put my ears out of commission, too.
“Run!” shouted Jay. “No, not that way! Go the way you came. I’ll try to head them off.”
I didn’t run—I just stood there, staring.
There were three flying disks, silver and glittering, hovering in the air about ten feet away. Riding each disk, balancing like a surfer riding a wave, was a man wearing a gray one-piece outfit. Each of the men was holding what looked like a weighted net—like something a fisherman might have, it occurred to me, or a gladiator.
“Joseph Harker,” called one of the gladiators in a flat, almost expressionless voice. “Opposition is nonproductive. Please remain where you are.” He waved his net to emphasize his point.
The net crackled and sparked tiny blue sparks where the mesh touched. I knew two things when I saw those nets: that they were for me, and that they were going to hurt if they caught me.
Jay shoved me. “Run!”
This time, I got it. I turned and took off.
One of the men on the disks shouted in pain. I looked back momentarily: He was tumbling down to the ground while the disk hovered in the air above him. I suspected that Jay was responsible.
The other two gladiators were hanging in the air directly above me, keeping pace with me as I ran. I didn’t have to look up. I could see their shadows.
I felt like a wild beast—a lion or a tiger, maybe—on a wildlife documentary, being hunted by men with tranquilizer darts. You know that it’s going to be brought down, if it just keeps running in a straight line. So I didn’t. I dodged to the left, just as a net landed where I had been. It brushed my right hand as it fell: My hand felt numb and I could not feel my fingers.
And I moved.
I was not sure how I did it, or even what I had just done. I had a momentary impression of more fog and twinkling lights and the sounds of wind chimes, and then I was alone. The men in the sky were gone—even mysterious Mr. Jay with the mirror face was nowhere to be seen. It was a quiet October afternoon, wet leaves were sticking to the sidewalk and nothing was happening in sleepy Greenville as per usual.
My heart was thumping so hard I thought my chest was going to burst.
I walked down Maple Road, trying to catch my breath, rubbing my numb right hand with my left, trying to get a handle on what had just happened.
My house wasn’t my house any longer. The people who lived there weren’t my family. There were bad guys on flying manhole covers after me, and a guy with an armored crotch and a mirrored face.
What could I do? Go to the police? Suuure, I told myself. They hear stories like this one all the time. They send the people who tell them stories like that to the funny farm.
That left one person I could talk to. I came around the curve in the street and saw Greenville High in front of me.
I was going to talk to Mr. Dimas.
CHAPTER FOUR