Author's Note: I know that I'm not updating as fast as I would like, but since this is helping me work to thaw a years-long writer's block, I'm not about to rush it and ruin the progress I'm making with it. I hope you can all bear with me, because I do know where this is going, and I WILL finish it!
To those of you who have reviewed, my deepest thanks. I appreciate each and every one of you for taking the time to comment. Now, on with the story!
Chapter Three
An unpleasant sensation of cold and wet was the first thing Blue became aware of as consciousness slowly began to seep back into his mind. The second thing that penetrated the fog was pain, a dull throbbing ache at the back of his head and a sharply burning sting in his right knee. Fortunately, neither was very bad, and the cold had soaked into him so deeply, it helped keep him from feeling the worst of it. Slowly, Blue tried to open his eyes. He blinked against the way the cloud-dimmed light from the skies made the ache in his head intensify; he also found that cold bits of something were sticking to his eyelashes. More puzzled than annoyed by them, he lifted one hand to investigate. He touched his face and the stuff stuck to his fingers; as his eyes finally adjusted to the muted brightness, he saw that his fingers were damp with wet snow. With the back of the same hand, he wiped it from his eyes.
He had no idea how much time had passed since he'd fallen and hit his head, but it had been time enough for the cold rain to thoroughly soak his clothes and then begin falling as this slushy show. It could have been a matter of minutes or hours, for all he knew. One thing, however, was certain: he needed to get up and move, to find Minion as quickly as he could, before it was too late.
Groaning, the boy pushed himself up to a sitting position. His head spun, and his hand moved to the top of his neck, where the ache was centered. Fortunately, that only resulted in a slight increase of the pain, like one might feel if gently prodding a bruise. A slight turn of his head revealed that he had hit it against a fire hydrant. By sheer luck, the warden's hat had remained on his head, and its thickly knitted cuff had provided some small protection to cushion what had luckily been a rather glancing blow. There was a little swelling, but when he lowered his hand, he saw no blood on his fingers.
His knee hadn't been quite so lucky. In the tumble down the embankment, it had encountered something sharp enough to rip the fabric of his new pants and leave a shallow gash across the skin beneath. It wasn't deep, but it had bled, and the cold air and snow both numbed it and made it sting. It looked rather messy, but Blue had gotten worse scrapes during some of the so-called "games" in the schoolyard. Enough time had passed for it to pretty much stop bleeding, so he was sure he could manage. For Minion's sake, he had to.
Using the fire hydrant to help, Blue climbed to his feet. The wooziness he experienced when he was finally upright passed quickly, and he was more confident than ever that he hadn't been hurt very badly. Of course, if that invulnerable jerk Wayne had just been enough of a real hero, he wouldn't have been hurt at all, and both he and Minion would be back on the bus, headed off for a day at the museum. After all that had happened since he and the Warden had arrived at the school that morning, Blue was fairly certain that it wouldn't have been the wonderful adventure he'd been anticipating, but at least he would've had a chance to see the museum.
Well, first things first. He needed to find Minion and make sure his little friend was all right. If he wasn't...
Blue shook his head, trying to push the thought away. He didn't want to believe it was possible that Minion was dead; he refused to believe it. He focused instead on his anger toward Wayne Scott and Jenny Osgood and Ms Driscoll, promising himself that he would someday get even with all of them for being so mean and cruel.
He looked around to see where he had ended up. With the freeway overpass arching above the area like a strange half-roof, the area around him was darker than Blue had expected, and, after the bustle and noise of the highway, strangely quiet. The rumble of the traffic above was still quite audible; for the moment, it drew his attention in that direction.
The green eyes narrowed as Blue's mind went to work. He may not have had Wayne's flashy superpowers, but he had extremely acute senses to go with his extraordinary intelligence and retentive memory, senses that encompassed more than a human's mere five. With all combined, he could estimate how much time had passed from the moment Jenny had thrown Minion from the bus, how fast the bus had been moving during that time, and how far they had travelled before he'd jumped out to rescue his friend. Given the arc of the bridge's span, the distance he would need to cover on the flat ground would be slightly less. Encouraged by this minor advantage, Blue started off, ignoring the stinging in his injured knee that was exacerbated by walking.
He hadn't gone far before the street he was trying to follow turned a corner and ended, the way he wanted to go blocked by a very large and dirty building. Blue didn't know what the place was for, but at the moment, it appeared completely uninhabited. All its doors were closed, its few windows shuttered, all the lighting fixtures dark. It made absolutely no sense to Blue that it should be there, standing in his way when he so desperately needed to get beyond it, but it was plain that he would have no choice but to go around it. In this dead end, the building blocked two sides, and on the third lay more obstacles in the form of high walls and locked fences and concrete pillars that held up the roadbed of the overpass. So Blue had to retrace his steps to find a way around it, his frustration and worry mounting with each added step.
When he finally came to an alley that headed in the direction he wanted, it occurred to Blue that this was the first time he had ever gone anywhere on his own. In both the prison and at school, there were always others around; Blue could hear them even when he couldn't see them. He had had many daydreams about what it would be like to see the outside world that he had only glimpsed through pictures in books and on television. All of them made the city seem like a wonderful, beautiful, sparkling place where many fascinating things happened, especially at holiday times.
But the reality, he was finding, was nothing like that at all. This place was gloomy and dismal, the streets cluttered with litter, the buildings dirty with grime and graffiti and just plain poor maintenance. The snow that was falling more thickly now was managing to cover up some of the grime and trash, but it did nothing to hide the smell. The alley was lined with dumpsters and garbage cans, and to Blue's sharper than human nose, the smell was awful, much, much worse than anything in the prison.
The other kids sometimes told Blue that he had some kind of disgusting prison stink about him, but he was sure they said it to make fun of him. He knew that the prison was actually kept very clean, as were the prisoners, because of the high risk of disease spreading like wildfire among a confined population. Blue's alien sense of smell would have been called hyperosmia by doctors, and because of it, he was more sensitive to odors than any of his classmates. It wasn't a bad ability, in and of itself; it could make things he found pleasant, especially foods, even more appealing, and sometimes it provided him with information others would totally miss.
There were downsides, of course. He had long since gotten used to the pungent and acrid smells of the industrial workshops at the prison, the oils and solvents and acids and the stinging scent of hot metal under a blowtorch. They could be overwhelming at times, but he had learned how to ignore them or filter them out when they got to be a bit much. Foul organic scents, however, were the worst, and that particular stench in this alley made him gag. The trash receptacles were full of discarded and rotting fruits and vegetables from a produce shipper, and even though the things he could see didn't look as bad as the smell indicated, it had probably been ages since the the various cans and bins had been washed. The stink was that of many months and years of accumulated residue that most humans probably didn't even notice. If they did, exposing them to it would probably be considered an effective means of torture.
But Blue did notice. He wished that he still had the scarf to use as a filtering mask, yet he was glad for the cold, though it chilled him to the bone. In summer, the smell would have been unbearable. Covering his nose and mouth with his hands, he tried to hurry down the long alley as fast as he could. Between all the junk and the slippery pavement, it wasn't as fast as he would have liked, especially not with the ache still in his head. Worse, as he moved along, he began to hear strange scratching and squeaking noises coming from inside and behind the cans and dumpsters. Like any child, he began to imagine what might be making such sounds, and like the exceptionally intelligent child that he was, his imaginings became all the more detailed and disturbing.
He quickened his pace, wanting to escape the long and eerie alley, when suddenly, a black shadow leapt out of nowhere, right in front of him. Startled, Blue skidded back several steps. He saw that the shadow was only a dark-furred cat. He was about to sigh in relief when the cat jumped to the top of one of the large bins. It stalked nimbly along its edge, growled unpleasantly, then dove down between the trash containers and the wall. The instant response was a burst of squealing and scrabbling that was followed a second later by a massive exodus of rats, attempting to flee from the hunting cat.
Blue let out a strangled shriek at the veritable army of vermin skittering and squeaking in ratty voices all around him. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to get away from these ugly creatures and the horrible smells, so he started to run.
But he had no experience with running on damp and slushy pavement. After only a few steps, he slipped, and pitched face down onto the cracked asphalt. His scraped knee loudly protested this new assault, but it was totally forgotten when the panicked rats started running over him, their little claws scratching and poking the exposed skin of his hands and head. Some of them, he was sure, were trying to chew on him, and the sensations made his entire being shiver with horror. It was an awful feeling, and this time, Blue's shriek was full and piercing, an expression of fear and disgust as he flipped onto his back and tried to drive the creatures away with his now-flailing arms and legs.
Whether it was a result of his scream, his frantic swatting, or just pure luck, the rats soon scurried off, disappearing into their hidey holes in the shadows and sewers. When they were gone, Blue scrambled to his feet faster than he'd thought he could, and heedless of the slips and stumbles his new shoes made on the slush-covered pavement, he ran toward the other end of the alley, away from its creepy sounds and revolting smells and ugly creatures.
He was panting by the time he reached the next street, his heart pounding and his entire thin body trembling from the unexpectedly horrible experience. He took a moment to pull himself together, leaning against a corner of the nearest building and gasping to clear his lungs and nose of the dreadful stink. Some of it had gotten onto his clothes when he'd fallen, but it wasn't too bad, though his knee was hurting more than ever. He looked up to see if this new street was a nicer place than the other — and the alley, especially the alley.
Blue was disappointed. The light was only a little brighter here than in the alley, and most of the buildings were just as dark and dirty, their signs proclaiming them as warehouse and shipping firms. He didn't understand. Where were all the bright lights and beautiful buildings and happy people he saw shown so often on the television back at the prison? Blue was quite young, and had lived a strangely sheltered existence, yet he knew that the whole world wasn't a perfectly beautiful and exciting place. Still, all he had seen of Metro City was so wonderful, he had thought that maybe he had been sent here on purpose just because it was so exceptionally perfect. His prison "uncles" had told him otherwise often enough, but until he had seen it for himself, Blue had naively refused to believe it.
Now, he knew they were right. Across the street, he saw a small place that had brightly lit signs in the windows and many people inside. The blare of music and television and rough laughter poured from it, along with smells that to Blue's nose were worse than the garbage, strange smells, a mixture of stale smoke and sharp solvent-like fumes that made his head throb and his stomach turn queasy. Even the laughter had an odd edge to it, like the laughter he heard from some of the inmates when they were trying to be happy even though they were not. It hurt to listen to it, as it hurt whenever he listened to the other children at school laughing and having fun when he was not allowed to be a part of it. Blue felt tears pricking at his eyes, brought on by the jumble of feelings churning through him, his physical discomfort, his sense of being lost and alone in a world that didn't want him, his fear that he would never see Minion again.
That last thought stopped the tears before they could fall. It wouldn't help Minion if he let himself be a cry-baby; it would only make things worse by wasting time Minion might not have. For a second, he wondered if he could go over to the place across the street — the sign over the door called it "The Office," though it didn't look or sound or smell like any office Blue had ever seen — to ask for help. Somebody who knew the area better might be able to tell him how to get where he needed to go.
It took only another second for Blue to decide against it. Offices, even strange ones, were not a place for kids, unless they were being disciplined. Besides, he was pretty sure he knew what would happen once they got a look at his strangely-colored face. At best, they would call for the police, who would certainly take him back to the prison, and he was not going home until he found Minion. Miserable but resolute, Blue pushed away from the wall and started following this new road back toward the overpass.
Rather than feel sorry for himself as he walked down the street, half-limping from his hurt knee and an ankle that had gotten a little achey after his slip-and-fall in the alley, Blue focused his thoughts on Minion, who might be much worse off and in need of his help. Even if his sphere wasn't damaged, his little friend might have been badly shaken by the fall from the bridge, and he was just as lost and alone here as Blue. Probably worse, since he didn't look the least bit human, and tended to freak out people if he tried to talk. Minion needed him, and that was all that mattered.
After he had gone a few blocks without any new obstacles, walking in the clearest part of the road, halfway to its center, Blue began to feel somewhat encouraged, for this new street was definitely taking him the way he wanted to go. The pavement here was less slippery than in the alley, as something had been scattered across it that appeared to be melting the falling snow. Blue's sharp nose caught the scent of salt, mixed with some other chemicals. Nothing that would hurt him, although if Minion's globe had broken and he was lying in a patch of this stuff, it could easily burn the fish's more delicate skin.
The boy's worry ramped up another notch, and he hurried all the more. He tried to run, but his hurt knee and aching ankle very quickly let him know that they were having none of it, so he dropped back to the fastest walk he could manage. He was so focused on the need to get to Minion as fast as he could, he didn't notice the truck speeding up behind him him until the blare of its horn was screaming in his ears.
Blue turned on his heel so fast, he almost fell, but the terrifying sight of the huge brown truck barreling toward him set off his most primitive instincts in time to get out of its way. His frantic dive ended with him face down once again on the slushy wet pavement. He landed a split-second before the truck roared past him like some angry beast ready to flatten anything that got in its way. Then it was gone, the stink of its exhaust a grimy cloud in its wake. When the sound of it was now a muffled growl in the distance, Blue pulled himself together again and started another painful climb to his feet.
Was this the way the whole world really was? Did even trucks bully people, pushing them around and threatening their lives so they could do whatever they wanted? If that was true, Blue thought that maybe he was better off in the prison. Its walls and security measures kept him in, true, but they also kept other nasty things out.
As he stood up, the boy felt cold wetness atop his head. He reached up with one hand to see why, and found that the warden's new cap had somehow come off when he'd dived for his life. Mindful of his promise to take good care of it, he searched the ground in front of him, panicked when it wasn't where he'd thought it should be, then aghast when he spotted it behind him. The sudden movement of his jump to save his life must have flung it back off his head, and it now lay in the road, dirty and wet from being crushed beneath the tires of the truck.
Gingerly, Blue picked up the poor thing. It was thoroughly soaked, with black tread marks on one side. He tried to shake off the dirt and squeeze out as much of the wet as he could, but to little avail. The cap needed to be washed, and given the oily smell of the dark tire tracks, he was pretty sure even that wouldn't save it. The hat was pretty much ruined, and after he had promised, very sincerely, to take care of it. Blue tried putting it back on his head, but soaked as it was, it only made his head feel colder.
He grimaced. "This just isn't fair!" he muttered. He had been trying so hard to be good. Why was everything going so wrong?
He had no answer, of course — at least, no answer that he wanted to think about, that he was willing to accept. So he tried to push those thoughts aside as well, and decided to stuff the hat into his jacket pocket. Maybe someone in the prison laundry would know of a way to get it clean and fix it—
A new thought popped into Blue's head, one that he hadn't yet considered. What if he never got back to the prison? What if he was too lost to be found, or Ms Driscoll told them he had run away? Would they come looking for him? Would they take him back only to lock him away forever? Or would they just forget about him, and leave him to fend for himself in a world that he didn't really know, where people usually took one look at him and hated him?
Blue shivered, not from the cold or the wet snow. There were worse things than being the odd man out, he realized. He could wind up abandoned completely. How could someone like him, a blue alien child, survive without shelter, without food, without... anything?
He couldn't, and Blue knew it. His need to find Minion soared higher than ever. His mother had told him that Minion would take care of him, and he had, in ways that most people didn't recognize. Minion would know what to do, he was sure of it. Minion would help him find a way to make things right again...
...if Minion could. The full awfulness of what he would lose if he lost his only friend hit Blue hard, and made him start moving again. He had to find Minion, and he had to be all right, he just had to...
A strange sick feeling rose up in Blue's throat, not the kind of sick one gets after eating something their stomach doesn't like, but the kind of sick one gets from trying to swallow a horrible truth.
What if he was already too late?
The idea of life without his companion, his best friend, made Blue feel sicker than the nauseating smells in the alley, than the ache in his knee, the soreness in his ankle, the throb at the back of his head. It felt like—
No. He wouldn't think it, couldn't think it. He would find Minion. He would.
A kind of raw determination settled into Blue's gut, pushing out the sick queasiness and refusing to let it back in. No matter what others might say of him, he was not a quitter. He didn't give up when others told him something was impossible, and he wasn't about to start giving up by telling it to himself. His little face settled into a look that went beyond mere stubbornness. He trudged on, being careful to stay near the curb, to avoid any more near-collisions with the trucks that occasionally rumbled by.
Another block ahead, the street bent to the left and intersected another road. In the middle of the intersection, three large black birds were pecking at something that looked both flat and furry, squabbling over it. Blue looked a little more closely and saw that the furry thing was a dead rat that had plainly been flattened under the wheels of one of the heavy trucks. The sight made him shudder, remembering the pricking and gnawing feelings from the rats that had crawled over him back in the alley. Would the birds have started eating the rat if it wasn't already dead? He didn't know, but he couldn't stop the image of these nasty-looking creatures pecking at Minion from popping into his thoughts. He also felt a sudden need to protect his own hairless head, afraid that it might be an appealing sight to some stupid bird with a wickedly sharp beak. He pulled the still wet cap out of his pocket and put it on, preferring the clammy feeling against his skin to the sensation of vulnerable nakedness. He looked away from the eating birds and hurried on.
Finally, after walking another two blocks and enduring a few splashes of cold slush-water from passing trucks, Blue came to a smaller road that went toward and under the overpass. His senses told him that this was near the place where Jenny had thrown Minion from the bus. The side street had a yellow road sign at the intersection proclaiming it a "dead end," which Blue hoped would mean little or no traffic, so he could be free to search the area without taking the risk of getting run over by another careless truck driver. As he moved down the currently empty street, he peered up at the overpass and saw what he had expected: the straps of Minion's carrier dangling from the top of the guard wall, fluttering slightly in the light winds. Encouraged, he hurried on, impatient to see his lost friend.
But when he reached the place where the globe should have been, Blue saw nothing. No snow had been falling when Minion had slipped off the rail, so he didn't expect to find any tracks his ball might have left as he rolled away. Minion wasn't stupid; if there had been any sign of danger from vehicles driving down the street, he would have moved to where it was safe. Blue glanced around quickly and saw nothing that looked like his friend's sphere, although he saw plenty of dirty tire tracks in the slush, all of which were already beginning to fill with fresh snow.
Even though he had never been free to wander the streets like an ordinary child, Blue's quick mind figured correctly that any businesses along this drive had closed for the day, as the snowy tracks showed that no new traffic had recently passed through. But if it had been as busy as the number of tracks indicated, it wouldn't have been a safe place for Minion to stay. Blue didn't think his friend would have gone too far unless he had no other choice, because he surely must have known that his young master would try to come for him as soon as he could. With that in mind, the boy started toward one curb, searching for a likely place where Minion might have hidden for his own safety.
Before he gone more than a few steps, his foot came down on something that crunched under his shoe with a distressingly glass-like sound. Afraid to move and almost more afraid to look down for fear of what he might see, Blue screwed up his courage and held perfectly still while he did the latter. His foot had come down in the middle of a wide tire track. In it and around it were shards of what looked to be clear glass, many too small to have a shape beyond being sharply pointed, but some large enough to show a definite ball-like curve. All around the spot, the snow was melting down into a small puddle that lay between it and the pavement.
The awful possibility of what this might mean was suddenly made even more awful when Blue noticed marks on the snow less deep than those made by the trucks, an uneven scraggly trail leading off toward the side of the road. Blue hoped that this might mean that Minion had somehow survived being run over to make his way to a bigger and still liquid puddle near the curb. His eyes followed the trail, and his surge of hope was crushed when he saw several large rats in the gutter, chewing on something they had dragged from the place where Blue stood.
"STOP!" the young alien screamed, horrified by the sight. Galvanized into immediate action, he charged the rodents to drive them away from their prey. But instead of running off and leaving it behind, they fled and dragged it with them, scurrying into a sewer grate and disappearing before Blue could reach them.
"No! MINION!" he shrieked as he leapt for the grate, trying to stop the awful, ugly creatures from taking his friend beyond his reach. But he was too late even before he hit the ground. "Minion!" he cried again, yelling down into the darkness, hoping the fish would hear him and call back.
But the only reply was the echo of his own voice.
Blue scrambled back to his knees. "No, no, no, no, no!" he chanted to himself while his fingers searched for some means of opening the grate. It was one solid piece of heavy iron, firmly set into the strong concrete of the curb. Wherever the rats had gone, Blue could not follow.
Shocked, he looked all around, calling out his friend's name, searching for any sign to tell him that he was wrong, that he had made a mistake and Minion was alive and well, and was just now coming out of his hiding place, having heard his master calling. There was no movement but the falling snow and the flickering shadows from the overpass, no sound but the traffic on the highway above and the rumble and brassy horn of another truck driving by on the outer street. Blue didn't want to believe it, but he had run out of ideas. Faced with evidence he hadn't wanted to see, he had to admit the truth.
Minion was gone. He'd come too late to save his only friend.
Defeated, Blue's tired mind and battered body finally ran out of strength even as his heart ran out of hope. He sank back onto his heels, then sagged all the way down to the ground, curled up in the cold gutter, and wept.
TBC...