Page 27 of Fear
Tobias was watching him again with that furrow of worry. He glanced at the park ahead of them, gripped Jake’s hand tighter, and said, “W-we could . . . walk through it. If th-that’s what you wanted to do, here. If you think—” Tobias swallowed. “That w-would be okay, with—me.”
Jake unconsciously held his breath while Tobias spoke, trying to not just hear what he was saying but really listen and not miss anything. “Only if you feel up to it, Tobias. I mean—it’s not like anyone’s going to bother you here.” Just let them try, they’ll never know what hit ’em.
“I’m okay,” Tobias said, and surely that determination was enough courage to see them through. Even with—Jake took a moment to appreciate the irony—a walk in the park.
It wasn’t so bad once they stepped onto the dirt path under the trees. Tobias wasn’t looking around as freely as he had before they were confronted by the Boulderites, but he seemed to be holding it together pretty well. Biting back the urge to start rambling, Jake swept his gaze over the walking options ahead of them and chose a clearing a little farther down as their first marker.
Joggers passed them, but Tobias only twitched closer to Jake’s side when a man wearing short shorts and headphones ran toward them with two decent-sized Dobermans in tow. Jake moved to the far side of the path, putting plenty of space between them, and the dogs passed with barely a sniff in their direction.
Tobias was mesmerized by the people, the trees, the occasional bird singing or mouse-squirrel-thing scampering around, but Jake was on the lookout for more diversions, a backup plan of keep-Tobias-smiling. Jake didn’t like his odds with the Frisbee throwers, the spandex-clad exercisers, or the stoned-looking smokers hanging out around one bench, but just as he was getting a little nervous, he saw a couple of kids. A small girl in muddy overalls licked at a chocolate ice cream cone dripping with chocolate syrup and rainbow sprinkles as she crouched near one corner of the bench, staring intensely at a line of ants. An older boy sat on the bench and swung his feet while spooning up strawberry ice cream from a small cup. He seemed to be enjoying it, but Jake guessed he was her brother by the way he always kept an eye on the little girl, even when carefully scraping drops of ice cream away from the edge. Some kind of family, at the very least.
But more important than the kids, there was ice cream, which would satisfy Jake’s desire for something cold and give Tobias the thrill of his life (so far).
“Hey there,” Jake said to the kids, as he and Tobias drifted closer. He noticed Tobias twitching when he spoke, pulling a little bit away from the children, making sure that Jake was firmly between them. Jake let him—he had no problem being Tobias’s shield—and smiled at the kids, nodding his chin at the ice cream. “Where’d you get those?”
The boy’s eyes narrowed suspiciously on Jake, abandoning even the allure of ice cream, but the girl gave him a look that made it clear he was a complete idiot. She gave the cone another lick, and then pointed with one syrupy hand at a food stall labeled Two Spoons about a hundred feet away. “Right over there.”
Jake wasn’t sure how a kid no more than six could make him feel mentally deficient. “Yeah? It’s the real deal?”
The boy set his ice cream bowl carefully on the bench and slid forward, ready to engage. “Who wants to know?”
The girl ignored him and shrugged with exaggerated nonchalance. “It’s okay.”
“Yeah, thanks.” Jake decided that discretion was the better part of valor—and ice cream was more important than getting into a fistfight with an overprotective eight-year-old—and gently steered Tobias toward the ice cream stand.
They were fifty feet away when Two Spoons got swarmed out of nowhere by what looked like half the student body of the University of Boulder. Loud, exuberant college kids. Jake realized, abruptly, that this was a prime example of a situation he should not drag Tobias into.
He stopped, hand on Tobias’s elbow as he assessed the situation. They had just reached a neat clearing with a shallow amphitheater set into the ground. Some women sat chatting on the steps opposite as a couple small children played in the middle. The Frisbee kids were on the other side of the clearing, closer to the tree line, and there were trees. Lots of benign, gently rustling trees. Everyone was minding their own business.
Jake turned to Tobias, keeping his hands lightly on his arm. “Hey, I’m going to go get us some ice cream, but just stay here, okay? I don’t want you to have to mess with those kids. I’ll be right over there and then back in two seconds. You’ll be able to see me the whole time. And then, man, are you in a treat of your lifetime because waffles are the best but ice cream is the second best. Does that sound okay? Because if it’s not, we can get it together or . . . skip it, for today at least.”
He could see the hint of panic creeping into Tobias’s face, but he swallowed and nodded once, and Jake was so damn proud of him. He squeezed Tobias’s arm once before walking away quickly. The quicker he went, the sooner he’d be back.
AS TOBIAS WATCHED JAKE go, he tried to suppress the feeling that the park was expanding in every direction to swallow him, dozens of other reals suddenly closer to him than Jake was. But Jake was counting on him to handle this, and Tobias had to show he could. Jake didn’t have to hold his hand every time they stepped out of the apartment. Tobias just had to do as Jake said and . . . stay where he was.
But he already knew that standing in one spot and staring at his feet was conspicuous behavior in the real world and something Jake wanted him to stop. So he took a deep breath, pushed his hands carefully into his jeans pockets, and looked around.
No one was staring yet. The three reals about Jake’s age continued throwing their disc back and forth, the women on the steps chatted on. Beyond the clearing, children shrieked in happiness as they called for pets or parents. Tobias had been immensely relieved when those dogs earlier hadn’t gone after him. Victor had once told him that all dogs knew how to run down monsters, but maybe some reals’ dogs hadn’t been trained or encountered enough freaks.
“Amy, I want a turn! Give it to me!”
Tobias turned to see two kids near the edge of the lawn—one girl maybe a couple of years younger than him, and a smaller girl beside her. The older girl was running backward, away from her, holding her hands up and watching the sky. Following his gaze, Tobias couldn’t stop his mouth from dropping open. A large birdlike creature fluttered—no, not alive, he saw a moment later, though it shivered, dipped, and swayed like a living thing—against the flawlessly blue sky, its skin a patchwork design of the brightest colors he had ever seen, the whole thing somehow hovering above the tree line, controlled from below. Tobias took a few cautious steps closer while the thing wavered and twisted under the bickering children’s haphazard control, never letting him get a good look at it.
“Hey, watch out!”
Tobias turned just in time to see an object hurtling toward his head, and he threw himself out of the way. Instinct, honed by years of surviving monster brawls and guard abuse, had him rolling when he hit the ground, twisting to get back to his feet as quickly as possible to face, assess, and deal with (or submit to) the threat before it took his head off with a second projectile.
But instinct had never had to deal with variable terrain, and when he tried to regain his balance, his foot slipped off the edge of the top step.
He fell down the stairs. For a second, he fought with the conflicting need to get away from the threat and panic at the idea of getting farther away from Jake, before the knowledge that he wasn’t going to stop until he reached the bottom made him focus on simply surviving the moment.
Hitting the stone ground hurt, but he’d had worse. Tobias focused on pushing himself to his hands and knees and breathing, cataloging damage, seeing what handicaps he’d have in whatever happened next. He kept his eyes closed—easier not to be identified as a threat if he didn’t look at reals, same as guards—and tried to catch his breath.
Distantly, he heard laughter, followed by someone yelling, “Don’t be a jackass, Andy!” but no one seemed to be chasing him down right away. Projectiles were good, sometimes—if you could survive the first one—because they provided time to recover before the enemy arrived.
Scraped hands, bruised back, one elbow throbbing from bashing it into a stair, and a pain flared in his left ankle every time he tried to move. Fuck. So much for being able to take care of himself for two minutes. When Jake realized he had moved, found out how useless Tobias was, he was going to—
When he heard footsteps approaching, he pulled his legs in to protect his stomach and tried to shift to put his back against the stairs he’d fallen down. He kept his eyes closed and his arms on the ground, hoping that the person would just keep walking and wasn’t coming to kick him. Not that that wasn’t their right—and he couldn’t so much as touch them without maybe losing a hand—but he could hope.
