Just like Ethan said, Dave thought as Cheryl got behind the wheel and he climbed into the passenger side…this was going to make for an interesting and challenging future.
He wouldn’t miss it for the world.
H
Olivia and Victor Quintero were riding horses on their ranch just after ten o’clock in the morning. They had a dinner party to attend tomorrow night, a group of friends they got together with every couple of months. It was going to be at The Melting Pot on East Mountain Avenue. Olivia and Victor were talking about planning a cruise to the Greek islands in the autumn, because both of them had always wanted to see the blue Aegean and the home of the heroes.
They stopped for awhile and sat under some trees that were just about to start blooming. The world was waking up again from what had seemed like a very long winter. They had so much to look forward to. Tonight they were looking forward to lighting up the chiminea and watching the stars come out, having a glass of wine and just talking about life in the way that lovers who are also great friends do.
Simple pleasures were very often the best. Both Olivia and Victor understood that time was a gift to be cherished. And if anyone doubted that, they could always get a straight answer from the Magic Eight Ball.
H
At eighteen minutes after ten, Dr. John Douglas was doing paperwork in his office, catching up with insurance forms, when one of his nurses knocked on the door and looked in.
“Can I get you some coffee?” she asked.
“No, thanks. I’m fine. Just have this stuff to do. Oh…will you do me a big favor and call Deborah for me? Ask her if she wants me to stop by the Whole Foods and pick up some pasta for…no, check that…I’ll call her myself, in just a few minutes.”
“All right.” She frowned, and he knew something was wrong.
“What is it, Sophie?”
“Well…it’s strange. It’s on TV, on all the stations. They’re saying people are hearing these sonic booms everywhere. Like all around the world. Just sonic booms, and that’s all.”
“Hm,” JayDee said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
“I know, it’s really strange. It’s getting people freaked out.”
“Could be a meteor blowing up in the atmosphere, I guess. But that wouldn’t be all around the world, would it? I don’t know, I’m just an old doctor.”
“Do you want to come take a look? They’re playing videos people have taken, and you can hear the sounds.”
He surveyed the dreaded paperwork. Any excuse to get up and away from his desk. But…no.
“I’d better stick with this for right now. Maybe later, thank you.”
Sophie hadn’t been gone but a few minutes when the phone rang. It was Deborah, calling from home. Her younger sister in San Fransisco had just phoned with the weirdest story she’d ever heard in her life, something about spaceships and aliens and a war being fought and…it was just weird. Deborah said she thought the two hits of LSD Sissy took back at Berkeley must be showing up now, after all these years.
“I wouldn’t doubt that,” JayDee said. “Listen…I may be home early. Do you want me to stop by Whole Foods and pick up some pasta?”
Deborah said that would be great, and she was going to call Sissy back to try to settle her down.
“Good for you,” he told her. “And tell her if she’s smoking pot, to cut back on that too.” Then he said he loved her, and he hung up the phone, and there was still all that darn paperwork to get done.
H
When the ungodly blast went off in the sky almost over her head, Regina Jericho dropped the pistol in the grass and looked up.
There was nothing. Only sky, with a few slowly drifting clouds.
Jefferson sat in the blue Adirondack chair, overlooking the pasture and his kingdom of New Eden. The shadows of the big oak moved in a soft wind. He looked at the gun and then into Regina’s face, and she thought that something was different about his eyes…something…but she didn’t know what it was, because she thought she had never really known this man at all. She thought about reaching for the gun again and finishing the job. That hadn’t been the voice of God up there saving Jefferson Jericho from paying for his sins; it had just been an Air Force jet or something breaking the sound barrier.
He said quietly, “Don’t throw your life away, Regina.”
She paused with her hand outstretched to retrieve the pistol. But then she straightened up, because he was right.
“I’ll ruin you,” she said. “I’ll call every lawyer in Nashville, I’ll get the detective’s testimony, I’ll tear you to pieces. I won’t let you hurt anybody else, Jefferson. You’re done. Do you hear me? You are done.”
He gave her the faintest trace of a smile.
“All right,” he said.
“I mean it! I’m going in and make some calls and there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop me, you bastard! I know where all the skeletons are buried!”
“Yes, you do,” he agreed. When she started to pick up the pistol again, to take it back to the desk in his office because she realized killing him that way would be suicide and there were other ways to kill him, he said, “You can leave the gun where it is.”
“You’re going to be so sorry!” she promised. “So sorry you were ever born!” Without looking at him again, without soiling her eyes on his dirty presence, she turned away and walked back along the path to the English-style mansion of his dreams, in the land of his crooked rainbows, and when she was on her cell phone in the hallway she heard a small pop that might have been—must have been—a car backfiring down in New Eden, where the sunlight made the copper-accented roofs glow like heavenly gold and the Church of the High Rollers might have been made of white wax, on the verge of melting.
H
“Kevin Austin,” said Mr. Novotny. “You’re up!”
The boy stood up from his desk. His heart was beating hard. He was nervous, even after all his careful work and preparation. He picked up the model of the Visible Man and took it to the front of the classroom to begin.
Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart.
It had occurred to him, as he’d constructed the model and put the project together, that the Visible Man was lacking something very important, and it was such a vital part of a human being but it could never be shown in any science class because it was a thing intangible, unable to be weighed or measured, yet without this component Man was truly an empty shell.
That intangible thing was called a soul. When any of these organs were damaged and life was threatened, it was the power of the soul that kicked in to keep the flesh going. It was the driving force that said a person either lie down, gave up hope and died, or had the strength to live one more day…and one more…and one more again.
For some reason Kevin had had strength of purpose on his mind lately. He had been thinking about the soul, about how some people fell under hardship and some people got up dusty and bloody and kept going no matter what. His mom, for instance, after the very tough divorce. The Visible Man could show all the wonders of the human body, all the magnificent constructions and connections, but it could not reveal what made up a hero, who fought the good fight from day to day and never gave up.
He was talking about the brain, the seat of intelligence, when the door opened and Mrs. Bergeson looked in. She wore a frightened expression, which put Kevin and the entire class instantly on edge.