Fiction.

“You have to tell me what you saw.”

I just shook my head. I couldn’t say anything.

Amelia sat down next to me on the ratty, tweed couch and rested her elbows on her knees. She took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure why I ended up in the living room of Amelia’s house. But there I was.

She had come for me that morning without any questions - other than, “Where are you?”

“At my aunt’s house - she lives at Grove and Boulevard.”

“Don’t move. I’m coming to get you. Do you hear me, Lauren? Do not move.” With that, she hung up.

She pulled up in front of my aunt’s house in a beat-up old Accord about 15 minutes later. I called some lame excuse to my mom about getting lunch with some friends - luckily she’s been pretty occupied with helping Aunt Carol handle the continually gruesome details of Courtney’s death, so she wasn’t really concerned about where I was going.

I shuffled out the door, down the steps, and into the passenger seat of Amelia’s car. She didn’t say anything; she just pulled away from the curb and drove. I was glad she didn’t want to talk yet. I still couldn’t wrap my head around what I saw the night before - or the fact that some of Lily’s blood was still smeared on my shoe.

After Amelia and I had parted ways outside of Grandma’s, I felt a slight buzz coming from my back pocket. I reached for my phone and flipped it open. Lily had called about 20 minutes before - I guessed I missed it with all of the commotion of trying to get into Grandma’s and then getting accosted by Amelia.

I dialed my voice mail and heard a message from Lily. It was a typical Lily voice mail: really loud and broken up by her conversations with people around her. Eventually she called out an address, saying the Tom’s friends were having people over which would be better than trying to scream over the all of the people at Grandma’s.

The building was pretty nondescript - just your standard apartment building on the corner of Stuart and Navy. I walked through the front door cautiously because both the porch light and the light in the building entrance looked like they had been smashed in. Unfortunate but not strange - this neighborhood is pretty well-known for the rowdiness of its college/post-college residents. I expected there to be a lot more noise going on, but as I walked up the stairs to apartment 2A, things seemed to get quieter.

I knocked on the door, a little pissed because I figured Lily had gotten the address wrong. But, with my first knock, the door pushed open. It was dark and eerily silent in the apartment. Everything I had ever been taught told me not to go in there, but still I stepped inside.

I fumbled around in the darkness, trying to find a light. Running my hand against the wall, I eventually made contact with a switch plate. I flipped the switch. Nothing. I kept searching along the wall, eventually bumping into what I took to be a lamp. My fingers crept down the shade and found the switch. Again, nothing. I followed the shape of the lamp down to the table it was resting on. My hand landed on what was undoubtedly a remote control. I pointed into the air, frantically pushing the buttons as the realization of how dark it really was in there started to make me panic a little.

A television in the corner of the room snapped on, the light from its screen sporadically bouncing off of the surfaces in the room. I was able to make out a couch, a table, and someone hanging from the ceiling fan about 4 feet from where I was standing.

I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Instead, at that very moment, every light in the apartment suddenly flashed back on, revealing the carnage that I had unknowingly been walking around for the last five minutes. In the living room I could see two figure, a girl and a guy (who I am assuming was Tom) slumped on the floor, each in their own pool of blood. I couldn’t help but walk towards them. Maybe one of them was still alive.

As I crossed over into the living room, I noticed that the blood on the floor wasn’t limited to the pool surrounding the two people on the floor. Tiny red splotches made a path on the hardwood floor back to the other end of the apartment. A path that looked like it belonged to someone who was trying to get away. I followed the path toward the kitchen in the back of the apartment. It continued into a closet on the other side of the room, right next to the door opening out onto the fire escape.

I opened to the door of the closet. I didn’t see her face but I recognized her red curls immediately - she always let them go loose and wild like that. Lily was curled up next to the water heater, knees to chest. Blood surrounded her, starting from a deep gash in her stomach and trickling out of the doorway where I was standing.

I couldn’t scream or run or anything. I just walked out and called the police. I didn’t give my name - I just told them that I had heard a lot of screaming coming from the apartment.

I stood at the end of the hall and waited for the police to get there. I didn’t want to talk to them, but I had to know what was going to happen. It was too dark to see them come inside, but I heard two sets of feet meander up the stairs and toward the front door of 2A. Sobs formed in my chest and throat, but I choked them back as I strained to hear what they were saying. Their conversation was muffled at first but became more clear and frantic as they discovered what I saw just a few moments before.

The following minutes were confusing. A lot of yelling and stomping up and down the stairs. Cops coming in urgent swarms and leaving in more urgent swarms a few moments later. A different pair of feet shuffling up the stairs and going into the apartment, only to be followed by what sounded like another police stampede up the fire escape. Two figures darted out the front door and down the steps as I heard the police explode into the kitchen in the back of the apartment.

“Whoa!” one of them shouted out. “We got another one in here. Up the tally to four. Man, what a nightmare!”

I took that as my cue. They had found everyone, they knew everything I knew, so I could go. I eased my way back down the hall and down the stairs. Once the air outside hit my face, I broke into a run. Tears (well, pennies) rolled off my cheeks, hitting the surfaces around me with an inappropriately pleasant pings.

What happened that night was obviously too much to share with my family - but for some reason I felt like I had to tell Amelia about it. The events of the last few days were all too bizarre not to be connected.

And yet, while I sat on Amelia’s couch, her staring at me intently, I couldn’t find a way to begin. My eyes started to fill as a painful lump took shape in my throat. Amelia leaned forward and scooped the pennies away from my eyes. She clicked them back and forth in her hands, deep in thought, the floor lamp giving off green and yellow sparks with every breath she took.

I’m not going to lie to you. It is difficult to concentrate when Lauren is upset, what with a piggy bank’s worth of change accumulating on her lap. Maybe that’s why I lost focus in the midst of her story, as horrifying as it was. Even as she described with a shaking voice the expression on the face of her dead friend, I had to struggle to pay attention, returning instead to the admittedly much less traumatic experience of having a perfect stranger tell you about your own sexual past and then laugh about it (before vomiting on your feet). She had stopped talking, though, and was clearly waiting for my response.

“Whiskey,” I said.

“What?” she called after me as I went across the hall to the kitchen.

“I know it’s cliché, but you need a shot of whiskey right now,” I shouted to her, grabbing the bottle of Jameson from on top of the fridge.

“Weren’t you just on my case for underage drinking, like, 12 hours ago?” This was better, at least she was almost smiling.

“Yeah, well, that was more me being on your case for putting my job in jeopardy. I mixed it with ginger ale, drink up.” I thrust the drink in her hand and started pacing the room, illuminating the numbers on the face of our old grandfather clock one by one. “Did you say you were in town for a funeral?”

“Yeah, my cousin Courtney.”

“Christ, that’s a lot of death for one week.” She nodded, but the pennies had ceased. “Look, Lauren,” I said in a rush as I sat back down on the sofa. “I know you’ve got a lot going on here, but I just have to know…do you know anybody else who can…” She looked up. “…You know…”

“You mean, do I know anybody else who can do freakish things like cry pennies or…what is it exactly that you do, anyway?”

I sighed. Patience! “I just make light brighter. But yes, that’s what I mean.”

Lauren put her glass on the sidetable and pulled her knees up to her chin. “No, I don’t. But it’s not like I went around showing people those things” (she pointed at the pennies scattered over the carpet) “and asking if they could maybe sneeze some dimes out for me so I could make a phone call.”

“Yeah, that makes sense, but I’m just thinking here. If you have this power…”

“Power!” She rolled her eyes. “More like disability. Some of us don’t just glitter over here.”

“OK, fine, if you have this unnatural disability, and I have an unnatural disability, doesn’t it make sense that other people would, too?” Just saying those words made my heart leap.

“Like the X-Men or something? So we can all band together and shoot pennies at people?” Clearly it was time for another whiskey and ginger. Or maybe just whiskey. I went back into the kitchen, brought back the bottle, and filled her up. I watched her face. She wasn’t nearly as annoyed as she was letting on, so I plowed ahead.

“No, not like that,” I couldn’t stop myself from blushing. I had been a huge Wonder Woman fan as a child, and I won’t say thoughts of magic lassoes hadn’t crossed my mind. “I would just love to…I don’t know…have people to talk to about it. Ever since my mom died, I’ve been so busy taking care of my dad and me, I feel like I haven’t made one friend in eight years.”

“I seem to be losing mine by the hour,” she said, and I felt like shit. There I go again, putting my foot in my mouth, I thought. This girl just lost her best friend, stumbled upon a bunch of corpses, and is about to attend the funeral of her teenage cousin, and I’m rattling off at the mouth like I’m the first person to ever understand loneliness. But even as she raked her unruly hair in front of her face to hide what must have been some understandable intense emotions, I felt myself becoming uncontrollably thrilled for the twentieth time in twelve hours. I felt nurturing. I felt like a big sister. I wanted to take care of this poor kid whose problems I really believed, maybe ridiculously so, that only I could understand fully. The idea that there were more of us was almost too exhilarating for me to handle. I stood up to take the bottle back to the kitchen.

“How did your mom die, anyway?” She had stretched out on the couch by the time I got back and was picking at her hair.

“Oh, she had a heart attack one day while she was bringing in groceries.” I sat on the floor and flipped on the TV, hoping to catch some news about the murders. Lauren sat upright.

“Wow, that must have been awful. Were you guys really close?”

There! On Channel 12, footage of the outside of the Navy/Stuart building, with police tape and everything. “Yeah, she was great. She was my best friend.” I smiled to myself. It felt good to talk about her. “What was Lily like?”

Lauren didn’t answer. She was staring at the images of the stretchers being pulled out of the building with white sheets over them. “I should call my mom,” she whispered and stood up and walked into the kitchen.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” one of the cops on the scene was saying to the live broadcast reporter. “My thoughts and prayers are going out to the families of these kids, and I hope other kids are taking this as a…” The cop paused and I thought for a second that he was getting choked up.

But he wasn’t. He licked his lips, actually licked his lips on live television and bit his lip, making his mustache bristle. “I’m sorry, I have to go. There’s been a, um, dispatch from…” And he fled out of the frame. The cameraman panned to the reporter, clearly confused, and she rallied as quickly as she could.

“That was Officer Tahegan on the scene of this terrible tragedy.” There was an awkward pause. A man walked by the edge of the screen, and the reporter brightened. “Perhaps the neighbors have some memories to share about the victims. Sir? Are you a friend of the victims’?”

Then, right there in front of me, were the eyes I seem to be unable to escape. I felt my mouth hanging open as James smirked confidently into the camera and said, “Why, yes, yes I am, Cindy.”

That was all I needed to see. I grabbed my car keys and yelled to Lauren to get her bag. Seeing him twice in twelve hours was a coincidence, maybe, but three times is plain scary, and I was going to find out why.

Some time in between mind controlling cops with donuts and seeing a girl I used to know with a meat cleaver sticking out of her back, the sun had risen on Richmond. This in no way made the previous twelve hours any less creepy or disturbing. In fact, the lack of people on the streets and the morning haze was freaking me out.

Luckily, by this time sobriety and I had reacquainted ourselves and were getting along smashingly.

After James gave his award winning and grief stricken performance for Channel 12 I managed to convince him we needed to get the hell out of there. We were two dudes who broke into a murder scene and also happened to have close personal connections to the victims. We did not need to be there.

We ended up at Monroe Park surrounded by the unwashed masses — literally. At least the only people to hear us chatting about, oh say, double murders would be crazy bums. Monroe Park is always full of crazy bums, and today they all seemed to be asleep. Which was a bit odd as the cops usually make them “move along” before they could get a chance to doze off.

Just as we sat down on one of the few open benches a beat up grey Honda Accord tore down Franklin St. and skidded to a stop in the middle of the road. The woman driving threw the car in reverse and hastily pulled an excellent parallel parking job — which is unusual for a woman. The blonde got out of the car, along with the passenger: a cute girl with a nice rack. The blonde’s tight jean cutoffs bounced rhythmically towards us and then I finally remembered what was causing the nagging regret I’d felt for the last couple of hours:

NAME: Amelia Montgomery
DATE: February 4, 1998
PARTNER: Ben. Ben reminded me a lot of my dad before Mom died. He was gregarious and a great person to have at a party. I didn’t know he’d turn out to be such an asshole.
SETTING: My bedroom. Dad was working his night job which meant I had the house to myself. We could have done it anywhere, but the bedroom seemed safer for some reason.
PARTING THOUGHTS: It was terrible. Not the actual “business,” but the whole experience was awful. The business part wasn’t that splendid either to be honest. We drank a bottle of wine to cut some of the tension and then had about ten minutes of brief and awkward sex before I passed out. While I was sleeping he snuck out of bed and took a handful of polaroid pictures of me posed in various positions. I guess I must have been drunker than I thought. Of course he showed the photos to all of his friends, and of course I was humiliated.

Wow, I definitely should not have told her that the possibly most embarrassing moment of her life was “classic.” Sometimes I am such a dick.

The park was dead still except for a solitary bum shuffling up one of the paths. As Amelia marched up to our bench with the younger girl in tow she began to talk at us very rapidly and almost incomprehensibly.

“I don’t know who you two are but we need to talk. If you had anything to do with those murders I’ll murder you myself! Did you know those girls? Did you kill them? Also, I don’t need new tits, for your information.”

Amelia stopped, took a deep breath, and turned to me.

“Who exactly are you? How did you know those terrible things about me? He” she waved her hands wildly at James “is an asshole which makes you guys perfect for each other. By the way, thanks for puking on my shoes. Asshole.”

Lauren mumbled and rubbed her swollen eyes. I sat, somewhat bewildered, and James said “At least Lauren’s got some tits on her.”

Lauren, awoken from her daze by James’s comment, finally spoke up. “Lily was my friend! It was terrible … ” she began to trail off. “Hanging like that … from the ceiling … so much blood.”

James sat upright. “Sounds like you were up in that apartment last night. It was pretty gory wasn’t it? Blood splattered all over the floor and such. What were you doing up there, sweet tits? Covering your tracks?”

Amelia and Lauren both stared with wide eyes at James. “How, how could you know what it was like in that place? What were you doing there? Oh my god …” stammered Lauren as a look of fear started to spread across her face. It was dawning on her that she could be standing across from a crazed murderer.

James said, catching on, “Oh don’t worry. I didn’t kill your little friend or anyone else. Kaiser here has banged half of the city, and when we heard of some trouble up on Navy Avenue we thought we’d check it out. You know, to see if it was anyone Kaiser knew.”

By now the shuffling bum had turned off of the path and was shuffling his way through the grass directly towards us. He actually seemed to be limping rather than shuffling. Long dreadlocks hung over his bulky trench coat and his eyes stared, unfocused, at some indeterminable spot behind the four of us.

“Time out.” I said, turning on James. “Don’t give me that shit, man. You knew that girl swinging from the ceiling. I know you knew her. You’ve had sex with her. Plus don’t think that just because the lights didn’t work in there I didn’t see you swipe that picture off of the fridge. I don’t know what you’re trying to hide, but you better come out with it. I’m tired of fucking around.”

At the mention of the lights Lauren swung around and looked accusingly at Amelia. “The lights … the lights. Amelia, you!” Amelia took a step backward as her mouth moved but no words came out.

The way I figured it I was the only one there who wasn’t being accused by someone of killing a couple of kids in their spare time. I was about to point this out to the group when the bum limped past me and brushed my arm. Then the weirdest thing happened: I pulled up his card.

NAME: –
PAST: gulf war — xenophobia — violence
FUTURE: violence

This was exceedingly strange on three fronts. First, he was a dude, so I shouldn’t have been able to pull up his card at all. Second, the information seemed incomplete or missing. Third, the information on his card didn’t pertain to sex at all, and whatever it did pertain to looked like bad news.

The bum limped three steps into the middle of our heated argument when his eyes suddenly changed. Instead of staring vacantly forward his eyes now sparkled with something deeply disturbing and primal. He spun around and with a grunt reached into his trench coat. With a metallic hum he pulled out a two foot hand saw covered in either blood or ketchup.

In one quick motion — reminiscent of the move that sent James crashing onto the hood of a police cruiser the night before — the bum grabbed Lauren by her hair, pusher her on to her knees, and jammed the blade under her jaw.

Lauren looked up at me as shiny new copper pennies fell out of her eyes onto the path.

The yawn wasn’t fully yawned when I realized how it didn’t make any god damned sense. I don’t typically yawn when a crazy beggar has a saw to the neck of a nicely-titted brunette, especially one with change machines for eyeballs. But I prefer to consider myself a stone cold pimp, so I figured it was just my cockiness itself getting cocky. I’d get to busting him in the nose and rescuing that fine piece of jailbait ass, just as soon as I took a leisurely look around. Fuck, I just felt so out of it.

But even Kaiser, who had grabbed ahold of the Grandma’s waitress’s elbow even though she was in no danger of floating away, seemed a bit dozy. He looked at me dumbly. I wondered again: how can a guy with such a moronic look in his eyes always seem to know who had sex with who?

“I can sense your powers.”

I couldn’t tell if the voice was inside my head or coming from every direction at once, but the psycho killer bum’s mouth moved, plus he appeared to be the craziest guy in audible range, so let’s just attribute that quote to him. It was creepy, but it perked me up a bit because it was also ridiculously lame. If we were facing any kind of delusional arch-bum with a fetish for super-villain speeches, we might as well kill ourselves if we can’t beat his ass bloody.

Making eye-contact with the sniffly brunette with the saw pressing to her neck, I winked in a reassuring sort of way. “Look, shitcock, take your hands off the jailbait, and I won’t punch you in the balls.” I stifled another yawn. Kaiser whispered something to the waitress.

The Arch-Bum continued. “You are weak and your powers are jokes. I’ve made you too tired to even move. All I need to do now is to saw through this girl’s pretty neck . . . ”

He pushed the saw roughly under Hot Rack’s chin and went to get a better grip on her hair. I just felt so tired, or maybe I would have stopped him. Pennies fell harder now, rolling against the ground.

The bum pushed hard, and the blade bit her skin. Then it flopped down onto a chest which was incidentally not insignificant, in terms of a shelf-like storage space. Flopped right down on there like it had been turned into aluminum foil.

It had been turned into aluminum foil.

A massive crashing noise came from across the park. We looked up to find a car literally inside the Mosque. Literally. Inside.

The Arch-Bum turned to look, distracted. Instantly feeling more alive, I opened my mouth to speak, but Kaiser beat me to it, punching the bum’s nose into his skull with the heel of his hand.

“How’s that for a power, asshole?” shouted Kaiser. Dammit, Kaiser, you already picked which girl you liked. You can’t rescue all of them.

“Yeah!” I spat at the bloody figure on the ground, grabbing Shelf-Tits by the hand and taking off west. “Come on, kids, time to split.”

Some cops drawn by the crash had started to pay attention to us. “That bum has donuts!” I shouted over my shoulder as we fled the scene.

“Wait. You do what?”

“I sparkle, ok?” A slight hint of pink crept into Amelia’s cheeks as
she turned away from James.

“Like you just start spouting glitter or something? That is so lame.”
James laughed and turned to Kaiser and I for confirmation. Seeing
Amelia’s growing frustration, we just shrugged.

“It’s not any more lame then making cops want donuts,” she snapped.
“What good is that going to do?”

“A fucking lot of good considering those fat-ass cops flattened that
pyscho so we could get away.” Pleased with himself, James stretched
out his arms and clasped his hands behind his head. He looked
incredibly relaxed considering what we just been through. More
specifically what they had all witnessed me go through.

I really don’t know how I did it. I had to do something though, since
everyone I was with seemed to be ready for nap while I had a rusty
blade digging into my neck. The next thing I knew, I felt the blade
crumble, giving in from the pressure of the bum’s grip. In one move
Kaiser knocked the guy out, I was off the ground, and the four of us
were running like crazy away from Monroe Park.

We ended up at Amelia’s house, sprawled out around her living room
trying to grasp what was going on. James was taking up the couch
while Kaiser and I were huddled around the coffee table. Amelia paced
back and forth, biting her nails.

“All I’m saying, ” said James, “is that it seems like all of us can do
something useful. We all started off just be able to do weird things,
but now we’re getting control over it. Kaiser knows about people’s
pasts. Lauren can change shit around. I mean, did you see that blade
crumble like that? And I’m sure I could make somebody want something other than donuts if I gave a shit. What the hell are you gonna do next time we meet up with some nutcase? Shimmer at him?” Amelia whipped around, her face now beet red. “Listen, asshole, just because you th-” She was interrupted by a pounding on the front door.

We all scrambled to our feet, our eyes wide and darting from person to
person. My heart jumped into my throat. Suddenly the door burst open
to reveal a familiar figure in an even more familiar trench coat.

“All right, Lite Brite, ” hissed James. “Get ready to glow.”

I had seen the guy who was currently trespassing on my property several times on my way home from work. Even if I hadn’t just seen him hold a saw to Lauren’s throat, I’d be able to tell you just from looking at his eyes that he wasn’t quite right in the head.

He stood in the doorway, one hand on the doorframe and the other in the pocket of his filthy coat. He let out a low growl, and suddenly I felt the energy drain from my limbs just as it had an hour earlier in the park. Yeah, I was tired, but I was also tired of wondering what was going on, tired of James’s incessant insults, and definitely, without a doubt, tired of bums. I saw the others around me nodding off or drooping even as they stood, but I fought it.

“Get…out…of…my…HOUSE!!” I picked up my leaden arms and planted them right in his chest. He was surprisingly little under all those layers as I pushed him backwards into the hall.

He laughed and grabbed my wrists, but it seemed I had distracted him enough to cause whatever effect he had on us to wear off a little, because a fist came out of nowhere over my left shoulder and before I knew it, Kaiser had tackled the bum to the ground, face down, and was straddling him, holding his hands behind his back.

I watched, stupefied, and Lauren knelt motionless on the floor, clutching the place where the saw had bit into her flesh earlier. “James,” rasped Kaiser, placing a knee on the back of the bum’s head. “Get the cops.”

“James, get the cops, James.” We could barely hear the bum through his matted dreads. “Get ‘em. Hang a donut outside the window and see how fast they come.” His voice was gravelly.

I looked over at James. His fists were clenched and he was biting his lip. Then, in a flash, he was on the floor in the hallway, pulling up the bum’s head by his dreadlocks. “What was that, motherfucker? What did you just say to me?”

The bum coughed, and Kaiser looked uneasy. “Dude, just get the cops. This guy is dangerous, seriously.”

“And how do you know that, Kaiser? Looking into my past a little, are you?” He laughed and then coughed so violently I thought for sure he was going to throw up.

“Yeah, asshole, I AM looking into your past,” Kaiser said, twisting his arm further. “And what I’m seeing there isn’t pretty.” So THAT’s how he knew about Ben. I saw him glance at me, apologetically, before he went on. “Seems like you’ve seen some shit in, what is that, the Gulf War? How old is that kid that I’m seeing you kill? Ten?”

The bum’s rocky voice was getting louder now. “Oh, you’re seeing images now too? Can you see where I was last night? Can you see the look on that little bitch’s face she saw I was making a noose for her?” James yanked his head back with renewed energy but he kept talking. “What about how hard it was to stuff that girl in the closet?”

Lauren let out an animalian scream from behind me, and that’s when the pennies that had been scattered on the floor earlier started to rattle. As we watched, each one changed from a flat copper disk to a shiny silver ball. She jumped up and ran past the bum into the kitchen and returned with a frying pan.

“You freak monster!” she yelled and held the pan in the air. It thickened from cheap tin into cast iron, until I could tell she was struggling to hold it up.

“Lauren, wait!” I said and knelt down among the pennies that were starting to fall by the bum’s head. “What are you doing here?” I asked him, and he sneered even as James pulled back on his hair in a way that could not have been comfortable. “What do you want from us?”

“I think you know,” he sneered. I felt myself getting tired again, this time so tired I could barely move, and I could see that Kaiser had relaxed his grip on the bum’s wrists. Lauren slumped against the wall, and the pan dropped to the floor with a heavy thud. Helpless, we watched him easily brush off Kaiser and James and stand up. I used every bit of energy I had left to push myself up, grabbing the knob of the open front door to steady myself.

The bum stepped close to me. His smell was overpowering, but I couldn’t move away. “They’ll all be next,” he whispered. “You’ll see. Everyone will see.”

He stepped back and looked around at our paralyzed forms. “You kids are pathetic. Privileged, pathetic, and soft. You make it too easy,” he spat. He curled his lips back so we could see the horror that was his set of teeth.

At that moment, a wavering voice called from the top of the stairs. “Amelia?”

The bum whipped his head around at me, with a look of fear in his eyes. I couldn’t speak. “Do not come down here, Dad,” I thought with all my strength. But without another word, the bum ran from the house.

“Amelia, honey?” called the voice, louder.

In the bum’s absence, we awoke from our half-sleeps, and everyone was beginning to shake themselves out of their respective stupors.

“Yeah, Dad, what do you need?” I yelled back, motioning to Kaiser to help out Lauren, who had run outside, wild with emotion. James looked at me, leaned back against the wall, and crossed his arms.

“Amelia, all the lights are on in the house. I can’t get any of them to shut off. Can you check the fuses?”

I hadn’t even noticed. “OK, Dad, I’ll take care of it!” I shouted. James shook his head in disgust, and walked out onto the front stoop, where Kaiser had his arm around a shaking Lauren. All three looked over as I came out and closed the door behind me.

“Why did you stop me? Didn’t you hear him? He killed Lily! He killed all of them!” Lauren shot her words at me.

“And that’s not even the half of it,” Kaiser shuddered. “I wish I could wipe what I saw from my mind.”

“I wonder why he took off like that,” I said. “I mean if he’s after us, why run away? Why not just stab us or saw us or whatever… right then and there?”

“Who cares!” Lauren cried and started walking down the steps. “I’m going to find him with or without you guys.”

We watched the iron railings turn to gold behind her.

I watched Lauren stomp off into the night as porch railings turned to gold, acorns popped into soap bubbles, and oak leaves puffed into sand and fell to the ground. Amelia sighed as if too tired to deal with any new drama. James pointed after Lauren and began thrusting in her general direction. Both of them seemed OK with letting her wander off, by herself, with a crazed lunatic sleep inducing bum/supervillain out to get us.

I shot a frustrated glance at the two of them and took off after Lauren. As I grabbed her elbow images flooded into my mind.

Something about my power had leveled up a notch during the most recent encounter with our mysterious, yet smelly, adversary. The first time I encountered him I was able to see some incomplete information about his past. During the second encounter I vividly saw some gruesome torture sessions he participated in during the Gulf War … and something even more terrifying.

Lauren’s images weren’t terrifying or gruesome. A picture of her gluing macaroni onto some paper with her mother whizzed past followed by Lauren crying while Amelia tried to comfort her. Then I saw a hazy image of Lauren, neck extended and lips parted, reaching up to kiss … me!?

“HELLO? Hey asshole, are you just going to stare at me, or did you have something to say?”

Like, whoa? I was pretty sure I’d never made out with this chick before. “Um, yeah. Hey! Don’t go.” I stuttered as I shook the sand out of my hair. Lauren flushed.

“We’ll I’m going. Someone’s got to do something!” she said.

“Lauren, look. You aren’t going to stop this guy by yourself. We’ve got to work together. God that sounds cheesy, I know. But it’s true. Without the rest of us you’d just be some severed head at this point.” Lauren grimaced and rubbed the nasty red mark on her neck.

“Come back to the house,” I suggested, “we can come up with a plan.”

She sighed resignedly. “I just want to do something. I’ve never done anything my whole entire boring life. Here is a chance for me to really do something that has meaning, and I’m going to do it.” She turned to head back to the house.

I put my arm around her shoulder as we walked back.

“Get your arm off of me.” She paused. “Asshole.”

Back in the house James and Amelia were on the couch watching a local news anchor drone on about a chemical plant explosion in Hopewell: twenty-two dead. Could things get any worse around here?

“So Tits, you’ve decided to come back to us?” James said as he eyed Lauren’s chest. “We are so glad to have you and your rack on our side again.”

Amelia gave James a quick kick in the shin and stood up. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do now. We certainly can’t stay here now that that guy has been here. Maybe we should …”

I interrupted her “I think we need to go to Diana’s house. Like right now.”

“Who?” asked Amelia.

“His whiny bitch of a sister.” answered James.

“I saw him … ” I staggered — just now fully remembering what I had seen — and grabbed the back of the couch for support. “I saw him killing Diana. But it was hazy, not like the other stuff I saw. I don’t know what’s going on but we need to get over there.”

Even James looked concerned for a second before he started scratching his balls. “Well, lets go then.” He stood up and walked out the door. “OK, we go then!” said Amelia.

The ride to Diana’s was long. It didn’t help that Amelia, while she could pull a mean parking job, was probably the worst driver in the world. It didn’t matter though. I couldn’t stop replaying what I had seen: Diana laying tied to a bed with her legs sawed off above the knee.

I rushed up the stairs to Diana’s apartment and banged on the door. “Diana? Diana! ARE YOU THERE? It’s Kaiser! Open up. PLEASE!”

The door swung open to reveal a very much bipedal, yet thoroughly bedraggled, Diana. “Oh god you are here. And you can walk!” I rushed in, picked her up in my arms, and swung her around. My mind was filled with images of our childhood together: playing in a sandbox on West Avenue, jumping off of the pedestrian bridge at Belle Isle into the River, and eating lunch together on the capitol lawn.

“Kaiser, what in the world are you doing here. It is the middle of the night! You can’t just bust in here after you’ve had too much to drink. You need to leave. Right now before you wake up Dan.”

“Dee, I haven’t been drinking … today. I swear. Listen.”

She looked over my should at James, Amelia, and Lauren and shook her head. “Leave. Now. Take your friends with you.”

James stepped into the apartment and faced Diana. His eyes closed briefly. “Diana is it? Listen, we were staying at my place but the power is out. We’ve got no air conditioning and it is hot as hell out there. Kaiser said you might be able to offer us a place to stay, just for the night?”

“Oh … air conditioner … sure. Sure. Come on in.” mumbled my sister as she shuffled back into her bedroom and shut the door.

I looked at James and he smiled.

I half-closed my eyes, then looked over at Lauren, sitting on the floor of the room Kaiser was staying in. “It’s so hot outside. You’re sweaty. Why don’t you just take off your shirt?” I winked at Kaiser. Honestly, I had no idea if it was going to work. This was significantly more of a stretch than making cops want donuts, but you didn’t need a special mind-power to want to get that shirt off.

Lauren looked back at me, her eyes almost empty. “It is very hot out. But I don’t know, I think my shirt ought to just stay on.” I thought about bonfires. House fires. Uncontrollable conflagrations that consumed forests. That one sweaty, steamy night in that girl’s dorm room when the AC broke, and the burning sensation when I peed during following weeks. Lauren blinked. “I really don’t see why I’m wearing these sweaty jeans, though.” Down went the zipper, and she started wriggling out of them. Holy shit, I thought. I’m going to conquer the fucking world.

There was a bright flash from a desk lamp next to me, then Lauren’s entire body was plunged into darkness. I turned around to see Amelia watching my little game from the doorway.

“James! Stop it. Lauren.” She snapped her fingers. “Lauren, you need to keep your pants on.” Kaiser shifted uncomfortably from his bed.

“Aw, come on, Amelia,” I said, hardly able to keep my laughter under control. “Kid was hot. What do you want her to do? Suffer? Poor girl.”

Lauren was suddenly visible again, properly clothed and adjusted. “Fuck you, James.”

“Look, I don’t know how we’re going to defeat our ol’ friend Tom Snooze if we’re not supposed to practice our powers.”

“Yeah, but we shouldn’t use them on each other.” Kaiser’s eyes flicked over to Lauren as he said it, and then back to me. “We need to work like a team.”

“Okay, geez, lay off.”

Amelia wasn’t satisfied. “And I think you owe Lauren an apology.”

“Fine. Lauren, I’m sorry I almost made you take your pants off, even though I think we all enjoyed it, except for Amelia who is just jealous that I wasn’t interested in her.”

Lauren appeared uncomfortable, which meant I was doing it right. “‘Sokay.”

My eyelids drooped a bit. “And these aren’t the droids you are looking for.”

“You’re right. These aren’t the . . hey! Dammit James!” Lauren hopped up and stomped off to the kitchen.

“James! Quit it!” It sounded stereophonic, coming from Amelia and Kaiser at once.

Okay, so it doesn’t always work flawlessly, I thought. Do I need to just be concentrating harder? Is it easier to resist my little suggestions if you know it can work on you? Does it have to have some element of reasonableness to it for it to work? If so, is Lauren a huge slut but we don’t know it yet?

I sighed. “Fine. So, kids. What’s your grand scheme for defeating our crazy bum friend, Lindsay Dozehan?”

But I never heard any brilliant ideas. Just then Lauren called out something that turned Kaiser’s face to the approximate pasty white color of my balls:

“Where’s Diana?”

“He’s taking her. He’s taking her through a back door.” Kaiser’s voice
caught in his throat and his breath quickened. He charged into Diana’s
room and ripped the covers off of Dan.

“Where did he take her??!?!!”

Nothing.

Kaiser grabbed Dan’s shoulders and flipped him over on his back. Dan’s
mouth hung open but his eyes were squeezed shut.

“Dan! What the fuck is wrong with you?!?!? She’s gone! Wake up,
asshole!” Kaiser slammed Dan back down on the bed. He tried to peel
his eyes open, but they wouldn’t budge. Kaiser placed to fingers on
Dan’s neck, although I’m not sure why. We’d all had considerable
experience with dead bodies by now, you’d think Kaiser would know one
when he saw it.

“We have to go. We have to get her. I can’t let him…I can’t let him
do what I saw him do.” Kaiser scrambled for his shoes and made his way
to the door.

“Wait, hold on, Kaiser, ” said James, in a voice kinder than I ever
thought him capable of. “Just stop for a minute.”

“Stop?!? I can’t stop! He’s going to kill her!”

“James is right,” said Amelia. “We’re not going to be able to help her
at all if we don’t know where we’re going.”

Kaiser stopped in his tracks and turned to her.

“You said you saw him taking her through a back door. Look harder, do
you know where they might be? What does it look like”

Kaiser bent at the knees and shoved his fingers through his hair.

“He was walking her through a parking deck. At least I think it was a
parking deck. They looked like they were outside but there was a
ceiling, a low ceiling. He was dragging her. Her eyes are closed, but
I don’t know if she’s asleep or - whoa wait..wait a second.”

He was looking at me, but not looking at me at the same time. It was
more like he was looking through me, using my face as a physical focal
point so his mind could go somewhere else. He jumped.

“He’s pulling her up an aisle. It looks really old. There are all
these chairs and a huge chandalier,” Kaiser mumbled. Then recognition
flashed across his face. “Wait a second, I would know that carpet
anywhere. I’ve done like 10 chicks in that spot.”

“Where?” I asked, trying to ignore the 10 chicks comment. “What spot?”

“They’re at the Byrd. I know it. We need to get there, now. I now he
hasn’t hurt her yet, but I can’t tell when he’s going to.”

“He took her to a fucking landmark. Well, I’d say that makes a
statement,” said James. “Ok, Tits, Lite Brite. Shall we?” as he
followed a sprinting Kaiser out the door. Amelia and I looked at each
other.

“What do we do about Dan? I mean, should we just leave him here?” I asked.

“Not a hell of a whole lot we can do for him now,” she answered. “If
we hurry, we might be able to keep tonight’s death toll down to just
one.” She took me by the arm and lead me after the guys.

We made good time over to the theater, even though we were all
struggling to keep up with Kaiser the whole way there. Who knew a
drunk frat boy could run so fast?

He quickly found the door that he’d seen Diana dragged through. We
exchanged worried glances before we walked in. There hadn’t really
been time to discuss a plan. But, there was no going back at
that point.

Kaiser walked in first, followed by James, Amelia, then me. I think he
was still seeing several steps of what was happening in real time, but
his quickening pace showed me that he was getting more anxious. We
made our way to the entrance to the lower level of the theater. Kaiser
opened the door and we were greeted by a flood of complete darkness.

“Amelia!” James whispered. “Do your stuff!”

I heard her feet shuffle along the carpet. Slowly, the room was filled
with a gentle glow. I quickly noticed it was coming from the
chandelier suspended from the ceiling.

Peeking over Kaiser’s shoulder, I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the
growing light. We saw it at the same time. Diana was sprawled out at
the top of the aisle, her face relaxed and her breathing rhythmic as
if she were stretched out on her own sofa taking a Sunday nap. He
stood over her, brandishing his saw blade.

Kaiser turned to me, “Do something! Now!” he pleaded desperately.

I felt my breath stop in my throat. I looked back at the saw and felt
my body fill with a certain prickly feeling I’d become accustomed to
over the last day. The blade started to warp slightly when the room
was filled with a deafening pop.

Sparks showered down from the ceiling with a downpour of shattered, gleaming crystals.

I picked out the ashes from Lauren’s curls as we stood atop the roof of an apartment building on Boulevard and watched Richmond’s oldest movie theater burn to the ground.

Kaiser paced back and forth, looking as if he’d trade clairvoyance a hundred times over for a power that instead made him flame-retardant. I suspected his sister was dead. I think we all did, but no one wanted to tell him. Well, Lauren and I opted to keep quiet, anyway. James had long since departed in the vague direction of Devil’s Triangle. He had said he was going to get Slurpees, and the iciness that this comment produced in Kaiser was most likely the cause for the delay in his return. I’m not an unfeeling person. I know what it’s like to lose a loved one, but the heat and the smoke and the running made Slurpees seem a pretty genius idea.

I hadn’t meant to start a fire at the Byrd Theater. I had meant to throw a little more light from the chandeliers onto the situation at hand, since, from my own vantage point at least, I couldn’t quite tell what was going on with that saw. I’d gathered that my own particular brand of freak had been augmented, just like everyone else’s seemed to be, in the past day or so, but I hadn’t had much time to experiment. So when I nervously added what I thought would be a touch more brightness to the light inside the theater, I was in no way expected for an explosion of sparks so elaborate that Roy Hobbs would have been hard-pressed to match it.

Lauren, with startling presence of mind, kept her eye on that saw. The bum snarled as he found himself holding a swatch of delicate gold filigree as sparks and glass rained down into his matted hair. I yanked Lauren down between two rows of seats in a desperate attempt to save her from the red-hot shrapnel I had inadvertently created, but she never looked away from her target.

“His head!” Kaiser shouted over the din. “He has a metal plate in his head! And another one in his leg – no!” He corrected himself. “A bullet in his leg, that’s it!” I believe only I saw Lauren smile a little smile as the bum then clutched his scalp and howled in the double agony that is caused when your hair has caught on fire at the exact same time that some unidentified metallic horror has begun to take shape within the confines of your skull.

The air was beginning to get thick with smoke, and I could hear the crack of various historic beams giving way. “Come on!” I screamed. “We have to get out of here! Let’s go!”

It took James and I a minute to realize that we were the only ones escaping. Kaiser, of course, was attempting to crawl on all fours through smoke, sparks, debris, and crazy bums in order to pull his sister to safety. Lauren was still at work, and the shrieks of the bum were clearly audible.

“Christ, Sweet Tits is a little too into torture for me,” James yelled to me in the lobby.

And then it came to me. “Get them out of there!”

He looked at me incredulously. “You get them out of there!” He shouted. “What do I look like, an armored tank? The whole place is coming down! Her tits aren’t that great; it’s a death trap in there!”

“No, fuckface, make them want to get out! Do your mind control thing!” For the first time, I saw him look at me with genuine surprise and even a little respect. Then he closed his eyes and clenched his fists. In a moment, Kaiser and Lauren finally emerged from the theater, the latter dragging the former by the back of his orange shirt. Without a word, we pushed them out the door and legged it east down Cary Street as sirens got louder and louder.

A few blocks later, Kaiser looked at James and his face hardened. “I could have gotten her out, James. That was a shitty trick to pull.”

Lauren looked up.  “Wait, that was you? Jeez, you couldn’t have made it a little easier for me? Kaiser almost yanked my shoulder out of my socket when I was pulling him out.”

James stopped running and leaned against a street sign to catch his breath. “It’s not that simple, OK? Not like trying to get a teenage girl to take her shirt off. His desire to save his sister was a little more urgent than your desire to remain chaste.”

“You asshole,” Lauren and I said at the same time.

“Either way, dude,” said James to Kaiser. “You’re not going back there until they put that fire out. No sense in your entire family dying in one night.”

“Fuck off,” said Kaiser. He began to climb the fire escape of the house nearest us. The rest of us followed. What the hell else were we going to do?