Magic Dude Read online

  “I’m going to try to do that, too. Yesterday, I got pretty close.”

  “Yeah? You be careful on those things.” The ground underneath the swings was black tarmac. Apparently, the memo requesting they switch the landing pad for careless children from “deathtrap” to “survivable” hadn’t reached the head office.

  “When Mommy wakes up, she’ll have money for the meter, and then I can watch TV for the rest of the day.”

  Tyler nodded. He had fought enough with his electricity meter to know what the kid was talking about.

  “That sounds like fun.”

  Vegging out in front of a TV while his hangover progressed through the rainbow of pain it had in store, sounded relaxing. Soon as you’re home. Give Candy a head’s up about the stone, then you can be on your way.

  But there was no way, Tyler could do that now. Not with the little tyke sitting opposite him across the table.

  “Catch!”

  The scene suddenly popped up into Tyler’s mind. The casual toss that landed the stone in his lap and his neighborhood in a sudden load of trouble. Yeah, they’d got through it okay. Tyler had fallen on a command that worked in the nick of time to save them from crisis. Just the one shot through his hand and Gary’s grazed knees from diving behind the cinderblock grill.

  While Tyler watched Andy plow through the bowl of cereal, he thought of the cold sweat that had popped out on his forehead after it was over. He’d come close to dying. His friends could easily have taken a stray bullet if they’d stepped in the way.

  Shit!

  Candy gave a low groan, the first signal of waking up in Tyler’s experience. He stood up and moved quickly to the bed, plucking the stone out of the loose cup of her hand, where he’d left it.

  Instantly, the yellow light looped around his hand, lassoing him and then pulling tight.

  Welcome back. Tyler stared with open hatred down at his hand.

  And then he was standing in the desert, being pushed through a door. Tyler blinked in the intense sunlight, shielding his eyes with his hand as he processed the reassuring sight of Wilma and Gary.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Wilma asked, spitting her chewing gum into the sand. “It’s been hours.”

  “I… I don’t really know.” Tyler staggered a few steps forward on legs made of jelly. “There was a woman and her little boy.”

  “Yeah. Sounds fun.” Wilma’s voice was all new kinds of testy. “Do you have the book? Can we go now? I need to get into air conditioning within the next hour, or I’m gonna die.”

  A shower of pink sparks rained down on Tyler. He gave a yelp and ran forward, flicking his hand up the back of his neck in case they were as hot as they looked. When he turned, Tyler saw a new neon sign had replaced the door he’d just stepped through.

  “Congratulations!” it read. “You’ve successfully completed trial number one.”

  “I passed,” Tyler said, eyes widening in surprise. “I don’t…”

  He thought of the sad expression in Andy’s eyes, sitting at a table and talking to a stranger while his mom slept off the excesses of the night before.

  It didn’t feel like a victory.

  A new door exploded into being. Tyler raised his eyebrows and looked back at Wilma and Gary—get a load of this—but neither of them reacted. Whatever the trials were, they’d been put together solely for him.

  “I’ve completed the first trial,” he said. Wilma gave an exaggerated groan and stamped her foot in the dust.

  “How many more of these things are there?” she asked, probably knowing quite well.

  “Two more.” Tyler headed toward the second door and took a deep breath as he put his hand on the knob and opened it up. “Wish me luck!”

  “Wish you’d get a bloody move on, more like.”

  Wilma’s disgusted tone escorted Tyler through the door and into an abyss of darkness.

  Chapter Eleven

  When the beam of sunshine hit Tyler’s face, he tried to move to a different location and fall back to sleep. Each way he turned, a part of another person’s anatomy greeted him. Gary’s foot moved far closer to Tyler’s face than he’d ever wanted, and he shoved up and back, desperate to move out of foot-stink range.

  “What’s happening? Is it time to get up?”

  Tyler guessed from the high feminine tones that Wilma was in the pile of duvets and sheeting somewhere. He didn’t want to look too closely, though. Instead, he pushed his covers aside and stepped off the bedding, down onto the trailer floor.

  Duck low. That was the first commandment to trailer park living these days. Tyler bent double instinctively, thanking his stars that it had been a month or more since his last drink. Attempting that move with a skull throbbing like a dying tooth would have been agony. Even now, his back protested the angle, sighing with relief when he made it to the double-walled secure spot opposite the bathroom. The only place Tyler could stand up full-length.

  How long had they been living like this now?

  Too long, the obvious answer to that one but the actual count of days had grown hazy. When each hour passed precisely like the one before, counting them ceased to be a pastime that brought any relief or joy.

  The row of bullet holes in the trailer siding above the reinforced metal scraps let enough daylight in that Tyler could see what he was doing. Just as well, without them, he would be reliant on the windows. The thick plasterboard covering them made that an exercise in futility.

  Daylight robbery. Tyler couldn’t remember where he’d heard it, but that was what they called it when the rich boarded up their windows, so they wouldn’t have to pay the window tax.

  Probably bullshit. Everything that Tyler found interesting in his education growing up always turned out to be a fabrication of some kind. Still, that was how they lived now. Robbing themselves of daylight in the hope they’d stay alive.

  He glared at the stone in his hand. Stupid, useless thing. Once upon a time, Tyler had stared at himself in a bathroom mirror and pronounced the image he saw magic. Now, the stone was just a stone. It did nothing for nobody. All it brought to their door was a steady stream of fanatics who thought it still held power.

  Tyler would throw it at their feet and let them own the power of discovering it was bullshit, but the damned stone wouldn’t grant him the option. Intent on staying glued in its current resting place, Tyler had tried a dozen separate ways to pry it out—all to no avail.

  A plink sounded on the wall behind the toilet. The extent of Tyler’s flinching was to crease up the corner of one eye. Humdrum stuff, being shot at in the morning. Who wasn’t used to that by now?

  “Do you get the coffee on yet?”

  Tyler turned and saw Wilma’s head poking out from beneath the blankets. Although the adult requests coming from the child’s body still freaked him out when he thought about it, Tyler thought so infrequently these days that it barely troubled him at all.

  “It’ll be a few minutes. Do we have any leftovers from last night?”

  “You’re the one standing in front of the fridge.” Wilma’s exasperation was the first thing to get turned on every morning. “Why don’t you open the damned door and check.”

  “Stop fighting.” Gary cracked one eye open, glared at the two of them, then closed it and commenced snoring a moment later.

  Tyler’s glance inside the fridge showed him that the Chinese they’d feasted on last night had been eaten up, every noodle. The quick look also shriveled up his stomach, so he was no longer hungry. He closed the door. Somebody should really do something about the hygiene standards of the refrigerator. At this late stage, it would mean killing entire colonies of strange life forms. Someone should do it. Tyler hoped it wouldn’t be him.

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside the trailer, and Tyler paused, one hand on the coffee pot—stealing its warmth—one on the knife always ready by the sink. He glanced over at Wilma with wide eyes. She flipped the covers up over her head and disappeared.

  No
body walked freely through the trailer park. In the past few weeks, it had descended into a war zone with few survivors hiding out amongst the wreckage of what had once been many homes.

  Bullets—yes. Footsteps—no.

  The knock on the door of the trailer catapulted Tyler’s nervous system into high-octane alert. This wasn’t the orange zone or the yellow zone, adrenaline tipped him straight into the red.

  “What the fuck?” That was the extent of Gary’s useful contribution to the situation before he fell back to sleep again.

  Knocking again. A smack as someone outside clapped hands together for warmth.

  Tyler dropped down, and duck walked over to the front siding. He placed an eye up to a bullet hole, his brain screaming at him that he was an idiot, this was just what they wanted, and the next bullet hole would be in him.

  Nobody outside was shooting, though.

  A well-dressed woman stood by the door, blowing into her clasped mitten-clad hands to heat them up. She had a clipboard under her arm, and as Tyler watched, she pulled it out and walked to the front of the trailer to check the site tag, probably not for the first time.

  With a nod that suggested she was satisfied, the woman crunched back on the gravel driveway to once again knock on Tyler’s door.

  “Is anybody home?”

  Tyler pulled his eye away from the hole in time to see Gary with a finger to his lips. No kidding!

  Who in their right mind would walk up to his door, ignoring the devastation all around? Even the bullet holes, including the one fresh that morning, hadn’t diverted this strange woman from her plan.

  Either the woman was a stickler for her job description at the expense of her safety, or she was yet another elaborate plan to compel the stone from its current resting place.

  “I can hear you in there, you know,” the woman called out. “I’d appreciate if you could answer the door. It’s freezing out here.”

  Given that the trailer now resembled a colander, it was freezing inside, too. Information that Tyler wasn’t about to offer up free of charge.

  Gary pulled the covers back, seeming surprised to see Wilma cowering next to him, though she slept there every night. Once her office had been firebombed, it seemed the safest of their limited options. Not ideal—even a fully-grown woman living with two men would have been uncomfortable. But, welcome to the new normal. Shit got shittier, and everyone just had to move with the times.

  “Mr. Moby?” The knocking on the door again.

  A line of goosebumps rose on the back of Tyler’s neck. The woman knew his name. That wasn’t a good sign.

  “Mr. Moby, I know you’re in there. I can see you moving through the bullet holes. Open up. If I have to come back here with the police, it won’t end well for you.”

  Gary sliced his thumb across his throat when Tyler took a step toward the doorway. Tyler stopped, shrugging instead. Well? What am I supposed to do?

  “Mr. Moby. We have good reason to believe that you’re illegally restraining a young girl in your trailer.”

  Well, that didn’t sound good.

  “If you don’t open this door immediately, then I will phone the police and the first time you get to offer up a defense will be when you’re already behind bars. Is that what you want?”

  Well, lady. Now you come to mention it, none of this is what I want.

  Gary continued to shake his head, and Wilma popped up above the covers, her face drawn with worry.

  “Who the hell would report me?” she mouthed to Tyler. He shrugged again. There were so many miscreants after them by this stage, he’d entirely lost count.

  “I can’t stand out here all day, Mr. Moby. If you don’t come out here now, I’m phoning the police. They’ll want to protect the girl as much as possible, so they’ll use tear gas to subdue everyone in the trailer. Have you experienced that before? It stings like a bastard. The only way to lessen the pain is to wash it off. If the police arrest you, that will be happening about three days from now.” The woman paused for a moment, then hammered on the door again. “What’ll it be?”

  “For fuck's sake.” Tyler crossed over and opened the door a sliver. “Who the hell sent you?”

  The woman snapped open a leather holder. “I’m from Child Protective Services. We have received a report that you’re holding a ten-year-old girl against her will who is no relation to you. Is that correct?”

  “No,” Tyler shouted. “Well, yes, but not the way you say.”

  “Open the door and step fully outside, Mr. Moby. I’ll need to investigate your living conditions.”

  Tyler tried to look in all directions at once. “I can’t come out there. Someone will start shooting at me in a few seconds.”

  “I’m not able to enter the trailer without backup,” the woman said. She spoke with the finality that came from following a well-trodden rulebook. “If you can’t come out here, then I’ll need to call the police. We’ll be back to square one.”

  They’d barely left square one, so the retreat didn’t sound as ominous to Tyler as the woman made it appear. He took one cautious step outside the trailer. A bullet hole appeared in the siding right next to where he stood.

  The woman continued to stare at him, unperturbed. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, Mr. Moby. I know that you’re worried and I’m sure that you have the girl’s safety paramount, but believe me—it’ll all go so much easier if you just step outside now.”

  “Did you not just see that?” Tyler thought for a moment that he’d stepped into an alternate reality. He pointed to the fresh bullet hole with a shaking hand. “Someone just shot at me. If I come outside, I’ll be dead.”

  The woman stared at him for a long moment, then pulled out a notebook and started to write.

  “What’s that? What’re you writing down?”

  Tyler craned his neck out, trying to read the words upside-down. Reading wasn’t his forte though. Even the right-side up, words sometimes caused him trouble.

  “I’m making a note that the suspect is being uncooperative.” The woman glanced at her watch and then noted down the time. She snapped her notebook shut. “If I don’t mind standing out here, Mr. Moby, then I can’t imagine it would pose any undue difficulty to you. I’ll ask you one last time.”

  Wilma crowded into the doorway. Her move from the bed to the door had been so stealthy that Tyler hadn’t even heard her move.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  The woman pulled out the leather holder again and opened it to reveal the badge inside. Wilma reached out and grabbed it from her.

  “Mrs. Evans. In charge of child abduction and suspected sex trafficking.” Wilma snapped the holder shut and returned it to Mrs. Evans’ waiting hand. “That’s a lot of dubious information to be putting on a badge.”

  “When did CPS start having badges?” Gary asked loudly from the safety of the bed. “Last time I looked, you were a bunch of bloody childminders, not law enforcement.”

  “It’s a relatively new arrangement,” Mrs. Evans said.

  She popped the notebook back into her handbag, and Tyler stiffened. He held out the hand with the stone embedded and said, “Why don’t you just hold it there?”

  Her eyes flicked to the stone, and a look of greed crowded onto her face.

  “Incoming,” Tyler yelled, slamming the door and throwing the bolt. He backed up, almost tripping over Wilma who was still beside him. She dropped down to her hands and knees, crawling back to the bed. Gary was already at work, flipping up the mattress as an extra layer of protection and to reveal the treasure trove of weaponry hidden beneath.

  Gary threw a semi-automatic at Tyler, who caught it with one hand while fiddling with the lock on their new back door. Under siege for so long, they’d built easy routes to evacuation through the trailers. Parked close together, they could quickly flee the length of the trailer park without stepping more than a couple of times outside.

  “Ready?” Gary asked Wilma, who nodded back to him. He glanced at Tyle
r, eyebrows raised, and Tyler tipped his head in return. Gary shucked the cartridge into his weapon and turned to the front door of the trailer. “Let’s do this, then. I’ll join you once the first line is down.”

  The first line was always just a couple of people. The attackers weren’t stupid. Well, they were, but not as dumb at fighting as they were at figuring out that the stone they sought was useless.

  “Go-go-go!”

  Tyler flung open the back hatch and took one running step, opening the next trailer door in the line. From there, he didn’t need to worry. The front and back doors were all propped ajar. Each one backed with reinforcements from the trailers so severely damaged they were scrap. A bullet could cause a dent, but not much else. All along the line, pockmarks told the tale of old battles, fought and won.

  Behind them, Gary opened fire. Along with the weapon in his hand, he’d set another on a tripod, with a strip of shells feeding into it on the side. Once the gun in his hand was empty, Tyler knew that he’d flick the automatic on and let it rip while he reloaded and backed up to follow. This was a well-rehearsed and well-practiced line. They could do it in their sleep.

  Out the last trailer and Wilma and Tyler ran for the safety of the reinforced concrete bunker that had once been the lavatory block. The sinks inside had shattered long ago, spreading shards of porcelain across the floor. Even with his thick-soled shoes, Tyler could feel the poke and prod as pieces embedded themselves and dug out a new home. If today went according to plan, he’d pick them out later and add them to his trophy shelf.

  “Fuck!” Wilma shouted. “They’ve got reinforcements already here!”

  Quicker than usual, which meant the attackers were learning. Tyler wondered what the state system that labeled his entire family with learning difficulties would think of that.

  “Do you want to try for the far side?”

  Well beyond the ablutions block was another structure. This one an old grain shed, lines with metal, reinforced with concrete. The strength in its empty hull was enormous. Equal to holding twenty tons of grain, it offered the best protection if the siege was going to last more than a few minutes. With the supplies stacked inside, Tyler, Wilma, and Gary could safely stay within its walls for days.