The cliffs, p.8
The Cliffs, page 8
Reed took a deep breath and looked at his exoskeleton. Focus, he told himself. Stop imagining all that stupid stuff.
Reed leaned over his project. He tried to concentrate on his exoskeleton’s joints.
But he couldn’t. Ory was having just too much fun with Pickle’s robot. Now that the boy could make the thing writhe all over the place, he was practically dancing with glee.
Pickle returned to his dad’s easy chair and picked up his book. Shelly was still lost in her own reading.
Ory started making the robot assault Shelly’s house again. Shelly glanced up, but apparently comforted by Pickle’s assurances, she placidly returned to her book.
Reed scrambled off the floor. He’d had enough.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “I have to do something.”
Ory ignored him, continuing to aim the flopping robot at the side of Shelly’s house. Pickle looked up from his book. “Where are you going?”
“I have to do something,” Reed repeated.
“What?” Pickle asked.
What could Reed say?
He couldn’t say, “I have to go to the school and free Julius,” even though that was exactly what he had to do. He had to run the three blocks to his house, get his bike, and pedal back to the school. Then he had to get in the locked school without setting off an alarm … thankfully he’d overheard a senior talking about a basement door that wasn’t wired into the school’s security system, and a key ring the janitor kept in a fake rock. Then he had to go through the darkened school without wetting his pants like a scared little kid, and then he had to unlock Julius and run for his life.
No, wait. Should he check on Julius before running?
What if his worst fears were true?
If Julius was badly injured, wouldn’t Reed have to call an ambulance?
He almost groaned out loud, but he stopped himself.
And what if Julius was dead?
“Reed?”
Reed blinked when he realized Pickle had said his name.
“What?” he said.
“You said you had to do something,” Pickle reminded him. “I asked what you had to do. Then your brain took a vacation and you turned into a weird statue.”
“Statue?” Reed was stalling.
He tried to think of a reasonable story. What would he have to do right now? Other than go save Julius from a modern-day version of the Wheel?
“Shelly?” Pickle said. “I think something’s wrong with Reed.”
Shelly looked up from her book. “Of course something’s wrong with Reed,” she said. “He doesn’t engage in enough intellection, and he lacks the appropriate nisus when it comes to schoolwork.”
Oh snap, Reed thought. Even in his agitated state, he recognized that Shelly had just used two words of the day. However, he was far too distracted to care about what they meant.
“I’m not talking about Reed’s commonplace imperfections,” Pickle said. “I’m referring to the fact that he’s currently making no sense and his body keeps forgetting how to remain animated.”
“Well, see, that’s what I like about Reed,” Shelly said.
Reed perked up, momentarily forgetting everything but finding out what Shelly liked about him.
“What’s that?” Pickle asked.
Reed was relieved he didn’t have to be the one who asked.
“He rarely makes sense. I like that. It gives me a challenge and keeps me interested.”
Reed couldn’t stop himself. He grinned like a maniac.
Thankfully, no one was looking at him. Pickle and Shelly were looking at each other. Ory’s gaze was on the little robot, whose metal limbs were now so distorted they looked elastic.
“I can see your point,” Pickle said to Shelly. “But my original question remains.” Pickle returned his attention to Reed. “What do you have to do?”
Before Reed could come up with something lame, the little robot hit the side of the miniature house again. And when it did, something large hit the outside of the Girards’ house.
Shelly looked at the French doors, then put her attention back on her book. “Wind must have come up.”
“We probably lost another branch off the big fir tree,” Pickle said.
Reed looked at the window.
In the short time since Mrs. Girard had left, night had slipped in around the house. Now blackness clung to the windows like a fungus. Reed couldn’t see anything in the framed glass of the French doors except the reflection of the room he was in. In that reflection, he watched Ory aim the robot at the house again. He watched it hit the miniature house.
In the same instant, something hit the side of the house again with a reverberating thump. Reed tensed. He looked at his friends.
Neither Pickle nor Shelly reacted to the latest sound. They were apparently satisfied with the wind-and-fallen-branch explanation for the second thump. Or, since they were reading again, they may not have even heard it.
Well, Reed heard it, and the wind explanation didn’t cut it.
He was listening intently now, and even though he’d heard those impacts against the house, what he didn’t hear was wind strong enough to blow a branch at the house that could make noise. He should’ve been hearing a whistling, whooshing sound if the wind was blowing that hard. And except for the continued crackle in the fireplace, and the sound of the robot hitting Shelly’s little house, the only other things Reed could hear were the impacts on the side of the house … every time the robotic skeleton hit the model house.
What if it was Julius out there?
What if he truly had been manipulated by Pickle’s remote all this time? By now, what condition would Julius be in?
What Reed lacked in “intellection” he made up for in imagination. He could easily envision a body covered in swelling, blackened contusions. He could see limbs as limp as rubber with bone fragments poking through the skin. He could see a battered face, a bleeding skull, and a spine warped into something sickeningly abnormal.
If, in his exoskeleton, Julius had been spun, then bashed into things over and over, and if he’d been twisted and contorted the way Pickle’s robot had been, would Julius even be human anymore? He’d be a mutilated mass of broken bones and torn flesh. What was it Shelly’s history book had said about the victims of the Wheel?
A victim of the wheel ended up looking like a moaning monster with bloody tentacles.
Yep. That’s what Julius would have become if everything Ory had done to Pickle’s robot had also been done to Julius’s exoskeleton.
Ory rammed the churning robot into the miniature house again. And again, outside, something hit the real house with similar force.
Reed couldn’t believe Shelly and her brothers were ignoring the sounds. How could they not hear them?
“You never said where you’re going,” Pickle said.
Another robot impact on the model house. Another whump outside.
Pickle didn’t mention the mimicking sound.
Reed’s legs gave out, and he dropped to the ground. He wasn’t so eager to go outside anymore. No. He now wanted more than anything to stay inside … maybe forever.
He looked around. Were all the windows and doors locked?
What if they weren’t?
No, of course they were. Mrs. Girard wouldn’t forget to lock up. She was as fanatical about safety as she was about keeping her children well fed.
“Reed?”
Reed looked at Pickle. “Oh, I forgot what I was thinking of.”
“You forgot you wanted to leave a few seconds ago?” Pickle asked.
Reed nodded. “I think I ate too much. My brain is drowning in buffalo sauce.”
Pickle came up with a partial smile. “Mom does make great chicken wings.” He leaned forward. “Hey, I wonder if there are more. Or more of those popper things.” He looked at his sister. “Hey, Shel, do you know if Mom put away any extra chicken wings or those popper things?”
Shelly looked up from her book. “Huh?”
“Chicken wings. Poppers.”
“Oh, no. They’re all gone,” Shelly said. “And you can’t be hungry already! How is it fair you get to eat so much and stay so skinny? My life would be paradisiacal if I could eat like you with no consequences.”
Like paradise, Reed thought, in spite of himself.
Ory had stopped plowing the robot into the miniature house. Now he was circling the robot around the house at a dizzying speed.
“I can’t help it if I’m hungry,” Pickle told his sister.
“Well, you can’t be hungry. Maybe you’re just thirsty.”
“I want a soda,” Ory called out. It was the first thing he’d said since he’d returned to playing with Pickle’s robot.
“Hey, that sounds good,” Pickle said.
“We don’t have any,” Shelly said.
“Why?” Pickle asked.
“Remember? Mom read some article about the combination of carbonation and sugar? She discovered that our bodies process the mixture as if it was a poison in the system.”
“Right. I do remember that.” Pickle sighed. “We shouldn’t let her read. All she seems to read are things that make our lives suck.”
Reed, who by now had wound himself tighter than Pickle’s grasp of basic math, blurted, “Your lives don’t suck!”
Pickle, with an open mouth, turned to look at Reed.
“Sorry,” Reed said. “Sorry.”
Pickle said nothing, but Shelly put down her book and looked at Reed with one eyebrow raised.
Reed shrugged. “It’s just that you’re so lucky to live in this nice house and have a mother who always makes good food for you and loves you and …” He stopped because he felt like he was going to cry. And he did not want to do that.
It was the stress. He was making himself crazy with his panic.
The little robot started climbing up the side of Shelly’s miniature house. It looked like it had somehow grown suction cups on its legs. It scaled the side of the toy house as if it was a spider.
For a moment, Reed was mesmerized by the robot’s functionality, but then he realized he was hearing something outside the Girards’ house. Something new. Something majorly disturbing.
Something was crawling up the outside wall of the family room.
No, that couldn’t be. Could it?
Reed tried to block out the sound of the little robot’s clicks and drone. He listened hard beyond that. Wasn’t that distant shuffling sound something on the house?
Yes. There. He could hear a sort of scrabbling, similar to what it sounded like when he once saw a raccoon climb up the side of his own house.
Maybe it was a raccoon out there now.
Maybe he was literally going insane and he was imagining all of this.
He had to be going insane. What he was hearing wasn’t possible.
But then, why would he suddenly be going loopy? Was it guilt?
Was he such an unadulterated wuss that the second he did something a little gutsy, his brain lost its grip on reality? Was he going crazy just because he’d locked Julius into the exoskeleton?
“You’re right,” Pickle said.
Reed almost jumped out of his skin. “What?!”
Pickle cocked his head at Reed’s peculiar behavior. “I said, you’re right. We are lucky. It was illogical of me to have allowed that to escape my awareness. Perhaps my blood sugar is low. If I had a soda—”
“We don’t have any,” Shelly repeated.
“I want a soda,” Ory said again.
He must not have wanted one badly because he was still playing with the robotic skeleton. He’d gotten it to climb up to the second-floor of the small house.
Reed jumped up and headed toward the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Pickle asked.
Reed stopped.
Good question. He didn’t normally wander around the Girards’ house as if he lived there. He’d been upstairs, of course, to both of the twins’ bedrooms, and even in Ory’s bedroom. But he’d only been in their rooms when they were in the rooms. What reason did he have to go upstairs now? What reason … besides his uncontrollable need to know if something was clutching onto the exterior walls of the house by the second-floor windows?
“Uh, sorry. I just thought of a book I need to borrow. I was going to go get it. I should have asked first.”
Pickle studied Reed for a few seconds, and then he shrugged. “Sure. Go ahead. You don’t need to ask. You’re family.”
This, for some reason, made Reed choke and cough, as if the words created an emotional hairball in his throat. But he knew it wasn’t the words that were choking him. It was his guilt. No one in the Girard family would have done what he did to Julius, even if Julius was still just locked into his metal skeleton in the robotics classroom. They sure wouldn’t have let Julius get tortured, possibly to death, by Pickle’s remote. The second they even had an inkling that it might be happening, they would have gone to check.
What Reed lacked was initiative. Motivation. Impetus.
Aha! Nisus. An effort to attain a goal.
Reed shook his head. His brain was weird. Here he was in a total freak-out because he was pretty sure he’d tortured someone who was now climbing up the outside of the Girards’ house in a giant robotic exoskeleton, and his brain was defining words of the day.
Maybe if Reed had had more nisus this evening, he could have saved Julius before Julius started crawling up the side of the house.
Stop it! Reed screamed in his head. Julius is not on the side of the house!
Oh, how Reed hoped he was out of his mind. He had a very, very, very bad feeling, though, that he was as sane as anyone. For some reason, he’d just become clairvoyant. Or was it omniscient?
Or maybe it was just observant and sensory-aware. Because he could still hear something that was definitely not tree limbs crawling against the house.
Reed realized that Pickle had given him permission to go upstairs, and Reed was still standing here. What was wrong with him?
He shook himself and strode to the stairs. Then he ran up the stairs two at a time.
On the landing, Reed stopped and looked around. Now that he was here, what was he going to do?
If he looked out a window and actually saw what he was afraid he’d see, what was he going to do about it?
How could he get rid of Julius and his exosuit without his friends knowing? Heck, for that matter, how could he get rid of Julius, period?
Reed looked up and down the hall in complete indecision. What now?
Shelly’s tidy white-and-green room was to the right. Shelly loved white and green. “The colors of purity and life,” she once told Reed.
Pickle’s cluttered, black-walled room was to the left. Ory’s race-car motif bedroom was across from Pickle’s room. A small pale yellow half bath was straight ahead of Reed.
Light suddenly shined through a window in the bathroom … from outside. Reed gulped.
He remembered that the Girards had motion-sensor lights in the backyard. One of them had just come on.
Reed stared at the window intently. But nothing else happened. Except for the light, he didn’t see anything. Nothing appeared in the window—no shadows, no movement.
He couldn’t hear anything moving anymore, either. He strained to listen. Nothing.
Remembering he was supposed to be up here looking for a book, he figured he should head to Pickle’s room and find something that he could come up with some plausible explanation for wanting. He ignored the prickly sensation on the back of his neck as he took a step in the dark hallway.
Images of Julius’s bloody, maimed body jumped into the forefront of Reed’s mind, and he had to swallow down a scream. It’s just my out-of-control imagination, he thought.
Flipping a switch just inside the doorway of Pickle’s room, Reed gratefully left the dark hall and entered his friend’s domain. Stuffed with books, CDs, and scientific equipment, Pickle’s room more resembled a laboratory than a bedroom. Only the twin bed with its constellations bedspread suggested the room belonged to a boy just into his teens. The rest of the space screamed, “Genius.”
Reed crossed to Pickle’s wall-to-wall bookshelf. He went to the section where he knew Pickle kept fiction. Pickle read more nonfiction than fiction, but he did have a selection of sci-fi books he claimed were as educational as many of his science books. Reed plucked one of those books from the shelf without looking at it. After he had the book, he stepped over to the window and looked out past Pickle’s gray curtains. Unfortunately, the light in the room gave him a view of little more than his own reflection. He hadn’t thought that through, obviously. You don’t try to see outside at night from a well-lit room.
But even with the reflection of the room in the way, Reed could see enough to tell that nothing was outside the window. Clutching the book he’d taken from the shelf, he turned toward the door. He spotted bloody tissues on Pickle’s nightstand. Pickle’s nose. Reed was supposed to remind him to ice his nose. He’d do that when he went back downstairs.
If he got to go back downstairs.
What if Julius, in his probably ruined state, was lurking outside one of the windows up here just waiting for Reed to appear so he could crash through the glass and get revenge? Why was Reed even up here? He should’ve been hiding far away from where he thought Julius and his exoskeleton was. Who went toward danger instead of away from it?
Someone who wasn’t a hundred percent sure the danger was real.
Reed had to know whether his thoughts were right or crazy.
He made himself return to the hallway so he could continue his search for whatever was—or wasn’t—out there.
It was still dark throughout the upstairs. And it was still silent.
Reed crept across the hall into Ory’s bedroom. At the threshold, he tripped over something and caught himself by the doorjamb. His heart rate sped up. He’d heard a metallic clink when his foot made contact with whatever it was. What if it was an exoskeleton? He quickly turned on the light, almost afraid to see what was on the floor.
It was just a toy firetruck.
Reed exhaled.
He looked around Ory’s chaotic mess. He couldn’t remember seeing so many toy cars in one place, not even in a toy store.
