… seeking…
Sometimes he could sense only a little, sometimes a lot. T time he had
to be successful, or this room was going to be dead end in his search
for the meaning of the dummy’s pow Seeking…
He received a name. Clint.
Clint had sat in Derek’s chair sometime during the afternoon, paging
through this odd collection Of pictures.
When he tried to see where Clint had gone, after leaving the room, he
saw a Chevy that Clint was driving on the freeway then a place called
Dakota & Dakota. Then the Chevy again on a freeway at night, and then a
small house in a place call Placentia.
The approaching sirens were very close now, probably coming up the
driveway into the Cielo Vista parking lot.
Candy threw the book down. He was ready to go.
He had only one more thing to do before he teleported When he had
discovered that Thomas was a dummy, and who he had realized that Cielo
Vista was a place full of them, had been angered and offended by the
home’s existence.
He held his hands two feet apart, palm facing palm. Sky-blue light
glowed between them.
He remembered how neighbors and other people had talked about his
sisters-and also about him when, as a boy, he had been kept out of
school because of his problems. Violet an Verbina looked and acted
mentally deficient, and they probably did not care if people called them
retards. Ignorant people labeled him retarded, too, because they
thought he was excused from school for being as learning disabled and
strange as his sisters. (Only Frank attended classes like a normal
child.) The light began to coalesce into a ball. As more power poured
out of his hands and into the ball, it acquired a deeper shade of blue
and seemed to take on substance, as if it were a solid object floating
in the air.
Candy had been bright, with no learning disabilities at all. His mother
taught him to read, write, and do math; so he got angry when he
overheard people say he was a deadhead. He had been excused from school
for other reasons, of course, mainly because of the sex thing. When he
got older and bigger, nobody called him retarded or made jokes about
him, at least not within his hearing.
The sapphire-blue sphere looked almost as solid as a genuine sapphire,
but as big as a basketball. It was nearly ready.
Having been unjustly tagged with the retarded label, Candy had not grown
up with sympathy for the genuinely disabled, but with an intense
loathing for them that he hoped would make it clear to even ignorant
people that he definitely was not-and never had been-one of them. To
think such a thing of him-or of his sisters, for that matter-was an
insult to his sainted mother, who was incapable of bringing a moron into
the world.
He cut off the flow of power and took his hands away from the sphere.
For a moment he stared at it, smiling, thinking about what it would do
to this offensive place.
Through the missing window and the partially shattered walls, the wail
of the sirens became deafening, then suddenly subsided from a
high-pitched shriek to a low growl that spiraled toward silence.
“Help’s here, Thomas,” he said, and laughed.
He put one hand against the sap hire sphere and gave it a shove. It
shot across the room as if it were a ballistic missile fired from its
silo. It smashed through the wall behind Derek’s bed, leaving a ragged
hole as big as anything a cannonball could have made, through the wall
beyond that, and through every additional wall that stood before it,
spewing flames as it went, setting fire to everything along its path.
Candy heard people screaming and a hard explosion, as he did a fadeout
on his way to the house in Placentia.
BOBBY STOOD at the side of the freeway, holding on to the open car door,
gasping for breath. He had been sure he was going to throw up, but the
urge had passed.
“Are you all right?” Julie asked anxiously.
“I… think so. Traffic shot past. Each vehicle was trailed by a wake