Hal
Key West
Hal’s first inhalation of the twenty-first century was the most exquisite thing he’d ever experienced. The air tasted sweet, smelled of flowers and plants and trees for which he had no names. But it was the odor of the ocean that humbled him, that fragrance of salt and seaweed and wildlife that infused him with hope.
We can live here. We can flourish.
Then he promptly fell to the rocky beach on his hands and knees and threw up. “Fuck.” His pack slipped off his shoulder. His stomach heaved again and he felt like he was ridding himself of the past, of his lifetime in the dome, where he had been monitored and followed since his birth to a pair of Normals.
He finally raised up, fumbled with the buckle on his pack, dug inside for a flask of water, and gulped at it. The water dribbled down his chin. He dropped the flask on the rocks, tore off his shoes, and raced toward the irresistible ocean, a blue so blue and clear it made his heart ache.
Hal hurled himself into the splendid blue water, and started sobbing. He had never seen an ocean before or a place like this with a genuine sky above him, wisps of white clouds drifting by. The water was so clear he could see little fish swimming in and out of the sunlight.
Then he remembered he couldn’t swim, and dropped his legs, bare feet searching frantically for the bottom. His toes sank into `sand, an exhilarating sensation, the soft coolness squishing between them. He splashed the salt water on his face, ran his tongue over his lower lip to taste it. He’d never seen an ocean, except in ancient photos and movies his mother had borrowed from the dome archives.
His arms thrashed against the water, his sobs collapsed into hysterical laughter, then sobs again. He made his way back toward shore and collapsed against the beach, cheek pressed to the warm rocks, arms thrown out at his sides. In the dome, there had been no ocean, no beach, no genuine fresh air that had smelled of salt and seaweed and heat. In the dome, none of this incredible beauty had existed. Yes, there had been parks, blue skies, sunlight, but all of it was a facade, phony.
He heard a cry somewhere above him and rolled onto his back, arms thrown out at his sides, and peered upward into the afternoon sky. The sunlight was so bright, his third eyelids immediately slipped into place, protecting his vision. Much better, he thought, and watched a pair of birds wheeling through the sky. He’d seen images of these birds. Ibises? Flamingos?
No, gulls, they were seagulls. He vaguely recalled a book his mother had given him from the archives—Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Hal sat up, spellbound, watching as they made their way up the coast. The only birds he’d ever seen before were vultures outside of the dome.
“You lucky fuckers.” He spoke softly, vehemently. “You don’t know how good you have it.”
He glanced around, making sure the rocky beach was still empty, and stripped off his drenched shirt and pants. He pulled on dry clothes he dug from his pack, clothes that looked like they came from this century—khaki shorts, a tropical shirt, comfortable cloth shoes. They had been specially made by a historian in his group. Within his tribe of Crows, he could request almost anything and get it.
He was Hal, after all, named after the evil artificial intelligence in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the committee had selected him to lead because of the mythology Kubrick had created about that name. He’d seen the movie when he was a kid, one his mother had borrowed from the archives, a choppy, faded copy. But it had driven home a personal message: he’d been chosen.
Suddenly, a redheaded woman faded into view just in front of him, coughing violently, and fell to her hands and knees.
“Red!”
Hal scrambled over to her, held her head as she puked, her thick copper hair falling along the sides of her face. He pressed the flask of water into her hands. She raised it to her mouth, eyes wide with astonishment, then swallowed, coughed, sipped.
“My God… ocean… And the air, Hal, the air… And real sunlight.” She choked up, tears rolled down her cheeks. “Shit, I made it. We made it. Thank you, Jack Finney.” And she started to sob, fists pressed into her eyes.
“Take it easy, Red. Just sit for a few minutes.”
“So much…beauty.” Her hands fell away from her eyes. “How can their hearts take in all this beauty….” She started weeping again, strangled sounds torn from her heart.
Hal sat beside her, picked up one of the rocks, smooth and warm from the sun. “Feel that, Red.” He pressed it into her right hand. “That’s a piece of the twenty-first century.”
Nodding, she sniffled loudly, wiped her left hand across her eyes, then opened her fingers and stared at the rock she held. “Do you really believe the island can be ours, Hal?”
“We wouldn’t be here otherwise.” He got to his feet, held out his hand and she grasped it and he pulled her up.
“Did Wind make it?” Red asked.
Wind, her sister. The love of his life. “Not yet.”
“But we were together.”
“Don’t worry. She’ll get here.” She had to. “Everyone will.” He suddenly frowned, glanced around. The destroyed bridge to the west told him they were in Key West, not Tango Key. How had that happened? He pointed across the bay. “There’s Tango Key. Lightning did what the committee asked. The bridge is useless.”
“But she didn’t survive.”
“She knew what the risks were.”
“How come we’re in Key West and not over there?”
“I don’t know.”
Red lifted her hand, brushed the sand off of it, made a fist twice, opened it. Writing appeared against her palm. She touched it, enlarging the image. “I downloaded Jon’s most recent column before I left. There are links to videos the archives didn’t have. It sounds like Lightning lost her fucking mind when she came through. She didn’t just destroy the bridge, Hal. A whole bunch of people died.”
Hal read the column from her palm and experienced the level of alarm he often had felt in the dome. “National Guard troops? A state of emergency? A curfew? This could mean big problems for us.”
“What’s a national guard?”
“I don’t know. But troops mean soldiers. Let’s go find a car. Once we’re on the island, we’ll figure out where to stay. How many others left when you did?”
“Five. There were going to be more groups of five until no one was left. But I don’t know how many made it. The dome walls were starting to collapse, alarms were shrieking. Some of the Crows had been captured. The Normals were using them to get themselves to freedom.”
“Nothing new there. They’ve always considered us their slaves.”
“Maybe some people changed their minds after reading what the travel did to Lightning and Stoner. There was some talk, Hal, that you were using the early ones to pave the way for your own arrival.”
“That’s a lie,” he snapped. “The tribe voted on who should go first.”
Red shrugged. “Whatever. We need phones. My research says everyone has a phone. There’s so much we don’t know. Like, how’s our presence here going to impact our time? Can we prevent the domed cities from becoming a necessity? Can we prevent ice shelves from collapsing? Just how much of the past can we change?”
He and his parents and Wind had talked frequently about changing the past. Could they delay the catastrophic effects of climate change and create a different future for themselves? Could they avoid the global pandemic that was supposed to break out this spring or summer? The skeptics always sited the grandfather paradox. It basically presented a potential problem in logic—if you traveled to a time before your grandfather had children and killed him, it would make your own birth impossible. Hal considered it too simplistic. He leaned toward the Many Worlds theory, that for every choice you made, an alternate world branched off. Similar to the famous poem by Robert Frost about the road not taken.
“Maybe. Think about what Wizard could do for this time—bring rain to drought areas, restore the ice shelves…”
“I hope he makes it.”
“He will. In the meantime, we need to claim Tango Key as ours.”
Red finally said, “Do I look twenty-first century enough?”
Her jeans were faded, her shirt was black, tied at her tiny waist, and created the perfect backdrop for the tumble of her copper hair. “You look beautiful. Perfect.” Like her sister, he thought, except Wind was a brunette. “Let’s head into town and steal a car.”
“We should wait here for Wind.”
“She’ll find us, just like you found me.”
Red hesitated, a sign that told him she might move quickly forward.
On the walk into old town Key West, they didn’t talk much. Hal suspected she felt as overwhelmed as he did. Even though they had studied the archive data and photos on the Florida Keys in the twenty-first, none of it had prepared them for the reality. The fresh sea air, plants, trees, flowers, and the ever-present water—all of it struck him at such a visceral level that Hal felt like crying again. Add to this the shops, boats, restaurants, markets, vehicles of all shapes and sizes, and that people had complete freedom to move about freely. Hal suddenly hated these twenty-firsters for not appreciating everything they had.
And what was this presence of military jeeps and armed soldiers about?
They walked into an old neighborhood with cobbled streets and cars parked along every inch of the curbs. “I’d like to find something large enough to accommodate at least seven or eight of us,” he said.
“I hope we have that many, with most of us as Lethals. But I don’t feel good about the numbers, Hal. How much cash do you have?”
“Eleven thousand. And the bogus card and ID the committee created.”
“I’ve got about eight. And the card and ID. And I have a lot of nuggets.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“Is it suspicious to use them?”
“My research says people in this century love gold,” Hal said. “But it’s a cash and credit economy.”
“Let’s find the car you want, then offer to buy it with cash. I don’t like the idea of stealing. It makes us just like the Normals who stole from us for centuries.”
“The fucking Normals were never normal. And we were never abnormal or any of the other names they gave us. And this White Crow shit… like we’re rarities. They just called us that to make us feel like freaks.”
“Hey, I’d rather be called a White Crow than an Abnormal, the way it used to be.”
He wondered if she’d ever read the William James quote about white crows. His mother had introduced him to James around the same time the government started calling them White Crows. She had laughed about the new name. They’re always looking for names for you guys, Hal. Abnormals was too offensive to some of the parents. Freaks was just as bad. He shook off these thoughts of the past.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave a trail of nuggets. It might make it too easy to track us,” he said.
“It’s stupid to steal a car that can be tracked,” she argued. “And we’re not ready yet to confront these twenty-first century people. You and I can’t do it by ourselves.” She stopped, nodded at a shop on their left. “Look. They sell phones. We need phones.”
“Let’s get a car first.”
“I’m going inside to buy a phone.”
He caught her arm as she started to move toward the shop. “I said, our priority is to find a car.”
Red jerked her arm away, her fury evident. “Let’s get something straight, Hal. You’re not my boss or my leader. We’re not in the dome anymore. I won’t be told what to do or not do by a wannabe dictator. Clear?”
“I still lead the Crows.”
“Yeah? Says who? You see a bunch of us here, dude?” She threw her arms out to her sides. “You don’t lead me. No wonder Wind got fed up with you.”
“I’m not a wannabe dictator. And Wind loved me. She didn’t get fed up with me. She got too possessive.”
“For shit’s sake, you’re delusional.”
She flicked her wrist so her fingers pointed at his feet and flames leaped out and scorched the tips of his shoes. He jumped back. “What the fuck, Red. I could liquify you in seconds.”
She exploded with laughter. “And I could sure as hell fry you before I melted completely. And then one of us would be here alone or neither of us would be here. I’m buying phones. You coming in or not?”
Hal didn’t want to give in to her, but he didn’t intend to stand out here waiting for her, either.
2
Inside the shop, two customers studied different walls of displayed phones in a variety of colors, shapes, prices. Red went up to the male clerk at the front desk and Hal could see how taken back the man was by her astounding good looks.
“Excuse me, sir. What cell phone would you recommend that I can buy minutes for?”
“Just calling minutes?”
“No. Internet and text minutes, too.”
It surprised Hal that she sounded like she knew what she was talking about. But then, she’d always been an excellent researcher. The clerk came out from behind the desk and went over to the north wall. “Well, uh, any of these phones. They’re refurbished iPhones. The service is with Grasshopper, the minutes are inexpensive. But, full disclosure here, the coverage isn’t that good with this service.”
“Does it work in the Keys?” Hal asked.
“Sure. But it’s spotty in other parts of Florida.”
“And how do you buy the minutes?” Red asked.
“Credit or debit. I’d recommend credit. Putting your debit card on the Internet is too risky these days.”
Hal needed a couple of answers. “It’s easy to do?”
“Self-explanatory. Just follow the directions.”
“Can you show us?” Hal asked.
“Sure. Once you buy the phones, I’ll set them up for you.”
Red handed over her card, the man charged them, the sale went through. He then proceeded to set them up with minutes and unlimited texts and fifty gigs of data. Hal watched closely. And when the two people who’d been looking at phones left, he said, “Thanks so much for your help.” Then he rapped his knuckles against the man’s forehead. “Go to sleep now and forget you ever saw us.”
The clerk immediately slumped to the counter and Red caught him before he slipped off and hit the floor. She set him down carefully. “What the hell did you do that for, Hal?”
“We need phones for everyone else.”
“We don’t have any idea how many will make it.”
“Let’s take six for now. We can always come back for more.” He hurried around the shop, selecting phones from different display cases, and dropped them into his pack.
Red stared at the snoozing clerk. “We should leave him something, Hal.”
“You already paid him.”
“With a bogus card.” She set three gold nuggets on the counter.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Hal cautioned.
“No, you wouldn’t. But I just did.”
“Let’s get out of here and find a car.”
3
The blue Subaru was the perfect vehicle. Hal liked the name, the way it rolled off his tongue in three tidy syllables. Since there was about an hour left of sunlight, it would be easier and more efficient to steal it. But he now held a grudging admiration for the way Red had handled things in the phone shop and decided to buy the car from the owner.
“That’s the car.” Hal pointed at the Subaru.
“Do you, uh, know how to drive?”
“Learned on the simulator, same as you.”
“The real thing may be totally different than the simulator, Hal.”
“Maybe. But you don’t have to do anything. I’ll negotiate with the owner. I’ll drive.”
“Go buy the car. I’ll get our phones lined up.”
“Been thinking, Red. We should agree to never turn on each other.”
She was fiddling with one of the phones and looked up at him. “And why’s that, Hal? Because I could fry you before you melted me? Done that, been there.”
“In this century, they say, been there, done that. But you may actually have a point about being… nice.” From his pack, Hal removed a wad of cash and six gold nuggets that he pocketed. “So I’m buying us a car. I’m Mr. Nice Guy.” He turned toward the apartment building.
But as he started up the sidewalk, panic fluttered in the pit of his stomach. He quelled it with a breathing exercise Lightning had taught him months ago, when she was selected by their committee to blow up the bridge. Three deep breaths, hold for three seconds, exhale for three seconds, and repeat three times. He wondered how often she’d used that technique when she’d been on the bridge. Once he and his Crows were in full possession of the island, he intended to honor Lightning and Stoner in some way—statues, plaques with their names on it, a park named after them. Something.
By the time he reached the front door, he felt a little calmer. He stepped into the building, rapped at the door on the right.
No answer. He knocked at the door on the left. The young woman who opened it looked harried, and held a grouchy, teary toddler on her right hip. “Please don’t complain to me about her crying, okay? She’s got a fever, she’s cutting teeth, and I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with…”
“No, no, I’m not here to complain,” Hal said quickly. “Do you own the blue Subaru out front?”
She laughed. “My ex gave it to me so he doesn’t have to pay child support and…” She stopped, ran a hand over her face. “Shit, sorry to rant. Am I blocking you in or something?”
“I’d like to buy the car from you. What’s your price?”
“My price? I… uh, I have no idea. It’s a 2014. I can Google it. I…”
The little girl in her arms started wailing. The woman put her in a gizmo on the floor, a little chair with wheels, and she moved it around with her feet, but continued fussing. Hal leaned toward her. “You need a nap, cutie. A bit of sleep.”
The child looked at him, yawned, then her head promptly dropped to her folded arms and she went to sleep.
“Wow! How’d you do that?” the woman exclaimed.
“It’s all in the voice. Take care of her. Where I come from, people are sterilized. Sometimes they miss a few, but not often.”
“Jesus, that’s barbaric. Where’re you from?”
“A country you wouldn’t recognize. Will this do for payment on the car?” He gave her a handful of gold nuggets and a wad of cash. He had no idea how much.
“What the hell?” She stared at the gold, the cash she clutched, looked at him. “This is a scam, right? You go around offering to buy people’s cars and there’s a catch of some kind.”
“No catch. I just like your car. It’s what I’m looking for.”
She sat on the floor now, counting the cash, studying the nuggets. “I used to be a jeweler.” She bit into one of the nuggets. “And I think this is real gold, dude. You overpaid me. I’ve got, like, six grand in cash here and if this is real gold, then even more than that. The car needs a lot of work. It’s got more than a hundred thousand miles on it. Needs new brakes. New tires. A general overhaul.”
“That’s fine,” Hal said.
“My God.” She shook her head, got up and went over to a worn couch. She dug around inside her handbag, brought back keys, pressed them into his hand. “The registration is tucked into the visor. I think you’ve just freed me. Thank you, whoever you are.”
“Hal. The name’s Hal.”
His fingers closed over the keys and as he turned to leave the building, she called out, “Hey, Hal, in case you haven’t heard, a nine p.m. curfew has been imposed here in the keys. Because of the terrorist attack on the bridge. It was supposed to be dusk to dawn, but they’ve lengthened it to so the evening ferry can bring in supplies to Tango.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
Hal hurried out of the building, eager to get inside his new car and to the ferry.
“It’s ours,” he said to Red.
“I hope you didn’t melt the owner.”
“I know how to restrain myself, Red.” She really pissed him off at times. “She seemed really happy with what I paid her.”
“And don’t you feel good about being nice, Hal?”
He shrugged. “Stealing it would’ve been faster.”
She slapped a cell into his hand. “It’s set up.”
They got into the Subaru. It smelled of leather and spilled juice. Cookie crumbs powdered the floor and seats. The tray of the child’s car seat in the back held a nearly empty box of animal crackers. It would do, Hal decided, and eyed the dashboard. He remembered from his simulator training that the object with the knob was a radio, the thing to the right of it was the lid to a glove compartment, and the instruments directly in from of him were the odometer, gas tank indicator, lights that would come on when there was a problem of some sort. There was also a gadget on the wiper arm that protruded from the steering column that turned the headlights on and off. The basics.
Hal started the car, gave it too much gas, and it jerked away from the curb. “Seat belt,” Red said, and snapped hers into place. “I thought you said that driving wouldn’t be a problem.”
“It’ll be fine. I just need a little practice.” The Subaru moved in erratic burps over the bumpy cobblestones to the corner. “Where’s the ferry? Does the phone tell us?”
“Yup. I’ve got yours and mine set up. The GPS is good. Take a right. Go half a mile, the ferry docks will come up on the left. I already used the card to pay for an Airbnb apartment on Tango. It’s in the hills.”
“What’s Airbnb?”
“A website for booking homes, apartments, rooms.”
“How do you know about it, Red?”
“All those long days in the dome, I read a lot. Researched until I could almost taste the air here.”
Like him, though his focus had been different. “How large is the apartment?”
“Three bedrooms.”
“Not big enough.”
“It’ll do. Look, Hal, we’re going to need real food. We’ve been eating plant-based shit for too long now. We need something else, native foods. There’re several markets on this island. It’s how you build your immune system.”
“It’s on my list.”
The ferry depot appeared on his left, just a short line waiting to drive on, mostly huge supply trucks and gasoline tankers. While they waited, Hal picked up the phone Red had prepared for him, navigated to Siri, the AI voice. “Siri, what’s the home address for Mira Morales?”
Siri replied: “Checking, Hal.”
“Why do you want to know that?” Red asked.
“Because Jon’s articles indicate she’s a seer.”
“So you’re going to introduce yourself?”
It would be interesting, he thought. If she was as good as Jon’s columns implied, maybe he could recruit her. “It’s always good to know where the seers live, Red.”
“The address for Mira Morales is 918 Pirate’s Cove Road,” Siri said.
“And the address for One World Books?”
“One World Books is located at 111 Tango Boulevard, Hal.”
“Thanks, Siri.”
“You’re welcome, Hal.”
He turned Siri off. “I love her voice.”
Red rolled her eyes. “C’mon. She’s a basic AI.”
“I’d love to walk through a real bookstore,” Hal said.
“Me, too. But not tonight. We need to get ready for the arrival of the others. And that means real food first.”
He turned the knob for the headlights. “We’ll play that by ear.”
“You’re getting bossy and dictatorial again.”
Her remark irritated him. “I’m just telling you what I would like to do.”
“Kinda sounded to me like you were giving orders, Hal.”
“Kinda sounds to me like you’re misinterpreting what I said.” It wouldn’t take much to dislike her.
Hal finally was waved onto the ferry. Four armed soldiers directed cars into parking spaces and he nosed the Subaru into a spot on the open upper deck. Passengers stood at the railings as vehicles continued to drive onto the ferry. He didn’t feel like waiting in the car, so he and Red got out and made their way to the closest railing.
Blend in. Act like you belong.
A breeze blew in off the water, carrying such intoxicating scents that Hal briefly shut his eyes and filled his lungs with all of it.
Sometimes, when they’d been preparing for this trip, they’d gotten—or remembered—data that had contradicted what they currently had known about the twenty-first and Tango Key. He remembered, for instance, that when he was in his teens, his mother had told him that once they were ready to leave the dome, they would have to choose a year other than the early 2020s because a pandemic would be raging. But no one had mentioned pandemic in the subsequent years and clearly, no pandemic raged here now.
Not long before his mother was killed by the Normals, he’d asked her about that pandemic in the early 2020s. She’d looked at him, frowning. What pandemic, Hal?
He’d started to tell her about what she’d told him when he was in his teens, but knew she wouldn’t remember because for her that conversation never had happened. Hal later learned about the Mandela Effect, where some people remembered something in a particular way, but it was incorrect. The name of the theory came about because so many people remember Nelson Mandela dying while he was still in prison back in the 1980s. Yet, his actual death occurred on Dec. 5, 2013. For Hal, this confirmed the Many Worlds theory.
In some alternate version of reality, Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s and had never become president of South Africa. How many other events like that had divided time? Maybe in one version of events, a pandemic was sweeping across the globe and hundreds of thousands were dying. If so, then in that reality, the planet was resetting itself so that up the line, life in a dome might not happen. In this reality, Hal thought, the Crows taking over Tango Key would reset the planet. He wasn’t sure exactly how that would happen, but if enough of them arrived, he felt sure it would happen.
A sudden burst of wind snapped him out of his reverie and Squirt appeared between him and Red, fell to his hands and knees, alternately choking and gasping for air, his pack sliding off his shoulder. Hal quickly slung his arm around the kid and hoped no one around them had noticed his abrupt appearance. Red hugged Squirt.
“Breathe, Squirt,” she said. “Breathe deeply. I know you feel unsteady, but we’ve got you. You’ll feel better in a few minutes.”
The short, plump kid of thirteen took a deep, shuddering breath, fixed the strap of his pack hanging from his shoulder, grabbed onto the railing to steady himself. His third eyelids slid into place. “My glasses, where’re my glasses?”
Hal spotted the glasses on the deck, scooped them up, handed them to Squirt. He put them on, the glasses lopsided on his face. He looked at Hal, at Red, and then out at the sea, and burst out crying.
“I’m… here. I made it. My God… it’s so… awesome. Look at those… waves. Smell the salt in the air? The green of everything? The…”
“It’s wonderful to see you, Squirt,” Red said.
“You too. Both you guys. I kept searching for the color of your hair, Red.” He paused, frowned, glanced around. “Why’re we on a ferry?”
“We’re headed to Tango Key,” Hal said.
“Are you guys the only two?”
“For right now,” Hal replied.
“Who were you with?” Red asked.
“The ones who were left. Maybe thirty or forty of us. I’m not sure of the exact number.” He poked at his glasses, pushing them farther up on the bridge of his nose. “We had trouble holding the past in place, it was hard to concentrate… so much noise around us, the dome falling apart, Normals running around, freaked out…”
He started crying again and Red slipped her arm around his shoulders. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re here with us.”
The ferry finally started moving. Squirt calmed down and gestured at the ruined bridge. “Lightning’s work?”
Hal nodded.
“Awesome.”
His favorite word, Hal thought.
“Not awesome at all,” Red said. “Lightning died and so did a lot of other people. They aren’t going to welcome us here, that’s for sure.”
Squirt frowned. “But that was never the point, was it?”
Hal chuckled. “Smart kid.” He gave Red a look that made it clear Squirt had the right attitude.
4
The ferry approached Tango Key in the gathering dusk. It looked lush and inviting, Hal thought, an emerald floating in a mysterious sea. He was eager to drive off the ferry and onto the island. Tango Key had obsessed him for most of his thirty-eight years, ever since his mother had shown him archived clips of the Florida Keys before they’d been submerged by rising oceans.
He was five at the time, his ability evident but subdued by a time-release drug that his embedded chip controlled. Even though his mother had been a Normal, she refused to follow dome protocol where he was concerned. She got away with it because she was the president’s half-sister and her parents had money. And as the dome archivist, his mother had access to the vast collection of material from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, most of it digitalized.
But there were also collections of things the early climate change refugees, those fleeing the coasts, had carried with them—books, clothing, cellphones, batteries, blankets, photographs, family albums, candles, flashlights, stuff. They had been preserved and could be seen in the historical museum. Some of these items had been used as prototypes to create twenty-second century facsimiles.
Few Crows had enjoyed his advantages or had Normal parents who encouraged the development of the very ability that made them freaks. His mother’s belief was that abundant love and encouragement would keep Hal from inflicting injury on anyone and that he and others could be integrated into dome life. She provided him with an antidote for the drug that suppressed his ability and he never violated her trust.
Until Wind.
More than a decade ago, he’d witnessed a pair of soldiers preparing to hang a young Crow in a private courtyard. It had triggered such rage in him that he’d liquified both men and had taken the girl home with him. His parents had taken her in. That girl had been Wind, Red’s younger sister.
Over time, as the Normals increased their attacks on Crows, there had been many other rescues under similar conditions, attempted private hangings, murders, rapes. His father eventually moved the rescued Crows to a warehouse he owned on the dome’s east side and rebuilt the inside of it to accommodate them. All were provided with the antidote to the drug that suppressed their abilities. Eventually, as the rescued recruited more of their kind, Hal’s group had grown into the hundreds.
When it was discovered what his parents had done, they were put to death, and Hal and his army unleashed their fury on the dome. The president was killed, his brother assumed power, some of the Crows were caught, drugged, tortured, killed. The rest went underground and planned their escape. What they hadn’t counted on was the rapid deterioration of the dome walls.
As the ferry moved in to dock, he, Red and Squirt got into the car, their excitement palpable until Hal noticed soldiers going from car to car, asking for ID. “Shit, this is like the dome.”
“We’ve got IDs,” Red said quickly, and snapped her fingers. “Squirt, have your ID handy.”
“Just so you know,” Squirt said quickly, “… the committee wasn’t sure if the IDs would work.”
Typical, Hal thought. The committee had never been sure about anything they replicated.
A soldier stopped at Hal’s window. “Evening, sir. ID for you and your passengers, please.”
“Here’s mine,” Red said cheerfully, and handed it to Hal.
“And mine.” Squirt passed his ID forward.
Hal handed over his ID first. The soldier slid it through an electronic gizmo in his hand that suddenly beeped loudly. “Please get out of the car, sir.”
He left Red’s and Squirt’s IDs on the console and hoped it was a clear indication this wasn’t unfolding as they’d hoped. “What’s the problem?”
The soldier drew his weapon and stepped back. “I said, Get. Out. Of. The. Car.”
“Okay, getting out.”
“Arms raised,” the soldier snapped.
Hal raised his arms and heard the hum of the back window as Squirt lowered it. “Sir?”
“You, too, son,” the soldier said to Squirt. “You and your mom get out of the car.”
More soldiers ran over, weapons drawn.
Hal swung his legs to the ground. Red’s door opened. And Squirt’s.
`“Fuck this shit,” Hal muttered, and the beast inside him leaped at the soldier.
The man’s weapon started melting and before he had a chance to drop it or scream, his legs turned to water and down he went, the rest of him liquifying so quickly that he was a pool of blood and water within seconds. Red threw her arms into the air and the next two soldiers went up in flames. The fourth soldier backpedaled as he fired. Hal melted the bullets, then his gun, and Squirt flipped something at him—a disk, a Frisbee, a blade, Hal couldn’t tell for sure. The object moved too fast. Whatever it was struck the fourth soldier at the throat with such speed and power that it severed his head.
It rolled across the deck.
Screams and shrieks filled the air, people stampeded for the ramp, cars swerved out of line, Red and Squirt leaped back into the Subaru. Hal gunned the accelerator and slammed into cars that stood between him and the exit ramp. As soon as the tires touched land, he tore right on the closest road and raced uphill until the headlights illuminated a turnoff into trees. He swung left and followed a maze of dirt roads through the woods, turning wildly in one direction after another until he found a safe spot deep in the trees. The screech of sirens seemed more distant here.
He slammed on the brakes, killed the headlights, shut off the engine, leaped out.
“Fuck, fuck, we need to get rid of this car, find another. Get your stuff out. C’mon, people, c’mon, out. Fast.”
“We may have a ways to walk to find another car,” Red said.
“Wonderful!” Squirt exclaimed. “We’ll be walking around in real trees, in real darkness. Shit, melt the car, Hal, and let’s get moving.”
“The curfew will be in effect,” Hal said.
“So we keep to the trees,” Red said. “Make our way to the Airbnb.”
“What’d you throw at that soldier, Squirt?” Hal asked.
“A picture book I found tucked in the netting on the back of the driver’s seat. Anything will do.”
“Well, we were hoping for more Lethals,” Red said. “And you’re definitely that, Squirt.”
“Yeah,” the kid said. “Think about all the names they’ve given us over the years. Aberrants, Abnormals, Divergents, Freaks, Outliers, Abnormals, White Crows. Each name was supposed to make us feel worse about ourselves. But with every name, I only felt stronger. Because really, what we are is alchemists.”
Red grinned. “Oh, I love that idea.”
Squirt now stood to Hal’s left, Red on his right, packs over their shoulders. Hal placed his palms on the hood of the Subaru. It saddened him to liquify this car. He liked it. But as the hood started melting, he assured himself they would find another, better vehicle.