Chapter 14. In Which The Clock Starts Ticking
11 AM
Waking up is easy. For me, at least. It's as if there's a switch, a dial, somewhere inside me that clicks from ASLEEP to AWAKE in seconds. It's the actual, physical getting up part that's hard. I've been told that this is because I am a lazy bastard, which is true, but I think it's more because I so much prefer comfort to discomfort, and sleep is almost always comfortable for me.
Almost.
Which is why, when my inner switch flipped my consciousness into vivid 3D, I nearly scared the shit out of Nurse Sarah as I jack-knifed out of bed. The sleep I'd just escaped from had not been a pleasant one, and let's just leave it at that.
Apparently, having someone kidnap and threaten to kill your… whatever Kat was to me… was bad for the nerves whether awake or asleep.
"Jesus, Reid, you shouldn't be-"
"Yeah, whatever," I interrupted, not-so-reassuringly, judging by Sarah's expression. "Where're the rest of them?" She folded her arms and glanced at the door.
"Tyler is still asl-"
"Shit, man, don't jump up like that!" At the sound of Caleb's voice, muffled as it was by the walls, I smiled as jauntily as I could.
"You were saying?" With a sigh, Sarah opened the door and led me through. We were at our Fearless Leader's house, I noted. Frowning, I glanced at my watch. How long had we been out?
Eleven. Eleven o'clock in the morning. Ah, shit.
At that moment, Tyler opened a door on my right and our eyes met.
"Oh, man," he said. I nodded. As Caleb appeared behind Tyler, I curled my toes: no shoes. I found myself wondering if Kat had shoes or not. Probably not. My toes suddenly felt cold and uncomfortable in my once-white, now-grayish socks.
"What," began Caleb in his dead-serious, you-better-be-straight-with-me-or-else voice, "the hell…" He was drawing out his words, letting me get the full impact of the anger, the accusation in them. "…did you two do?"
"Doesn't matter," I said quickly, "because-"
"Yes, it damn well does matter!" I stopped talking mainly out of shock at the look on Caleb's face. It was a look I'd only seen once before: when he was sitting by Sarah's bed in the hospital after rescuing her from Chase. It was anger, and pain, and a relief so great and so intense that I could barely even begin to quantify it. "When we found you," he continued, much quieter, "you weren't moving. Neither of you. We… I thought you were dead."
I blinked.
Well.
Hadn't quite thought of it like that before. Honestly? Hadn't even given the others, and what they would immediately think, a second thought. Briefly, before I could stop myself, I imagined walking along and finding Caleb and Pogue lying there, lifeless.
"So I want to know what the fuck you were doing that almost got you killed," Caleb said, and I saw it. Saw it bare and clean on his face. Well, not completely. He was hiding it. It's just that they forget, you know? Caleb and the others. They forget that I can read them just as well as they think they can read me.
It was fear.
More than that. It was scared-out-of-your-mind fear. The High and Mighty Ascended One was freaking terrified, and all because he thought me and Tyler… that we were…
I cleared my throat. Back to business.
"We found out where Kat is. Put a… homing beacon, or something, on her."
"How?" Ah. Time to hedge.
"Well, it wasn't easy, but we did it. And we've wasted too much time passed out. Let's go find her, already!" Good. Defensive and offensive, all in the same sentence.
"You used way too much last night, Reid. You are not going anywhere. And, I need to know exactly what you two did. What the consequences might be." Oh, shit. Consequences. I'd kind of forgotten about those… but that really was not high on my priority list just then.
"Consequences? Let me tell you about consequences. If we stand around here talking much longer, Kat will be as dead as Ty and I weren't! How's that for a consequence?" I was getting mad. Good. Anger is something I can use, something I happen to be intimately acquainted with.
"Reid, we all want to help her," Sarah tried, holding up her hands in that peaceful way she has. I backed away from her, looking from Caleb to Tyler to Sarah. Their faces were all the same: a mix of understanding, compassion and decisiveness. Well, minus the decisiveness from Tyler, but that was to be expected. Point was, none of them had the expression I was looking for: fierce determination. For now that I'd snapped at Caleb about Kat, the memories from the night before were flooding back: Kat's ragged, angry, terrified thought-voice, and that mindless, helpless scream.
"Do what you want," I said, feeling it building in me. I could see the distress and disappointment sliding across Caleb's face, and part of me, the part that swore it would stand by my brothers until the end of time, cried out. I crushed it down with a vicious sneer. "I'm going after her."
Walking fast, I pushed past them had headed for the stairs that would lead me to the front door. Caleb reached out and caught my shoulder, half-turning me.
"Don't do this, man. Not alone." I looked at him, giving him that much. In his eyes, I saw my own reflection: warped, gaunt, stretched in strange and indescribable ways across the warm brown of his irises. I saw, helpless against it, a little blond boy playing in the sand with three other toddlers, tossing whitish hair back against the wind. Then, the vision cleared and it was me again, regular, teenaged me, staring at Caleb with wildness written across my face.
I shrugged off his hand, and felt the electric shock as it slid away: the static we always used to get, the four of us. The spark. We used to call it the Ziptie, because it always happened when one of us was scared or angry, and another one would put an arm around the hurting brother, and the spark would tie us together. Together forever, the Sons of Ipswich, no matter what. I felt that spark, that Ziptie, and started jogging down the hall. Over my shoulder, because I had to, I shouted something that no one but Caleb and Tyler and Pogue, had he been there, would understand:
"Still got my Zipties, bro!"
And then I was down the stairs and gone.