Shift: A Novel

Childress, TX

November 14, 1963

The arrayed faces in the filling station stared at Chandler with a combination of fear and revulsion. He stared back, unsure of what to do. He glanced at his car. It was farther away than he’d realized. Somehow he thought running would only make things worse.

“M-mister,” Emily said. “Did you do that?” She pointed to the empty air over the intersection.

Without thinking, Chandler changed his face. It was an instinct. He didn’t know where it came from. But in the fraction of a second that it took him to turn back to Emily, a stranger’s features floated up from the depths of his mind and covered his own. He couldn’t see it himself, of course. But he could see it in the eyes of everyone looking at him: the sharp chin, the tiny smirk, the eyes, amused and scared at the same time.

Melchior’s friend from the orphanage. Caspar.

Chandler pushed the image into the minds of everyone in front of him in the hope that it would erase his own face from their memories. He saw them wince, and thought he could probably do more damage if he wanted to, but he had no desire to hurt them. Leave! he told them, pushing the word into their minds as hard as he could. Go away!

Instead of leaving, Jared Steinke got out of his old Dodge pickup and opened the handmade toolbox straddling the bed. Chandler saw what Jared was going for even before he pulled it out: a double-barreled shotgun, fully loaded. Jared had been planning on getting a head start on pheasant season, which officially opened Thanksgiving Day.

“Jared,” his mother screamed from the passenger seat—he’d been taking her to the hospital in Wichita Falls to get her diabetes checked—“Jared, get back in this car right now!”

Joe Gonzalez, seeing the shotgun in Steinke’s hands, turned and trotted toward the filling station office. It might’ve looked like he was running for cover, but the pistol beneath the cash register burned brightly in his mind.

Jared Steinke raised the shotgun to his shoulder.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want—”

He was squeezing the trigger when the ravens swooped down on him and he jerked the rifle up just as it fired. The glass of the Phillips sign exploded in a shower of sparks.

Chandler hadn’t seen the new Hitchcock movie, but Emily had, and it was her mind that gave him the ravens. He made just a pair at first, but then he added a dozen, two dozen more. A cloud of birds spiraled down on Jared Steinke like an avian tornado and Jared stumbled backward but refused to drop the shotgun. The pain as the ravens’ daggerlike beaks and razor-sharp talons slashed his skin felt so real that Chandler was surprised Jared wasn’t actually bleeding.

Now Joe Gonzalez was running back out of the office, pistol in hand. He fired at the ravens attacking Jared Steinke, who was standing right next to the number three pump. On the third shot he nicked the hose and dark gas began spewing over the concrete.

“Mae,” Emily said to her sister, “if you want your baby to live to be baptized, you best drive now.”

Jared Steinke, as frightened by Joe Gonzalez’s shots as he was by the ravens, began firing wildly. The first shot caught Dan Karnovsky full in the chest as he was getting out of his Buick. The second shot blew apart the number one pump, and more gas began spewing onto the concrete. Already an area the size of a backyard swimming pool had been transformed into a black mirror, reflecting Joe and Jared and Jared’s mother ducking out the driver’s side door of Jared’s truck and scampering across the glassy surface of the gasoline like Jesus walking on the water. Chandler saw none of this. He was concentrating on the ravens, trying to drive the crowd away. His head ached with the effort, and he could feel the sweat running down his spine.

There was a cough and a backfire as the engine of Mae Watson’s Chrysler caught. Gasoline sprayed from beneath her tires as she sped toward the filling station’s exit.

“Go, sis!” Emily hissed at her sister. She had seen The Birds seventeen times. She knew how this scene ended. “Go, go, go!”

Chandler felt her panic, pushed it into everyone’s mind even as he felt his own mind wavering. It was too much. Energy was draining from him like the gas pouring from the pumps—not just the power to conjure and hold his hallucinations, but the simple strength to stand. The ravens were flickering in and out like a rolling picture on an old TV, and he knew he couldn’t keep them going for much longer. He could feel the chemicals burning up in his body like a V8 with the pedal pushed to the floor. It was a matter of seconds, not minutes, before he ran out of gas, and who knew how long after that he’d be able to stay conscious.

Janet Steinke was halfway across the parking lot when Mae Watson’s Chrysler, still spitting up a fine mist of gasoline, passed underneath the shattered Phillips sign, which was shooting out the occasional spark like a dud firecracker. A moment later the air turned orange as the mist ignited. In another moment the gas on the concrete caught, and the pool was transformed into a lake of fire.

Joe Gonzalez was just out of reach of the flames, and he turned and ran for the shelter of the office. The Steinkes weren’t so lucky. Mother and son caught fire almost instantly. Janet Steinke tripped and fell and lost consciousness, thus saved the horror of feeling the flesh burned off her bones like the charred husks of barbecued corn, but Jared was too hopped up on adrenaline to pass out. The flames engulfed his gasoline-saturated clothing, and in seconds he’d been transformed into the living manifestation of the image that Chandler had placed in the sky less than a minute before. Only then did Jared start to run.

He ran straight for Chandler, the shotgun still in his hands. When he was halfway across the burning gas the last two bullets in his gun exploded, but by then all the nerves in his skin were dead and he didn’t feel it. His lips were gone, his nose, his eyelids. His eyes had started to melt, so he couldn’t see anything. Not with his eyes. But in his mind—in what was left of it—the image of Satan’s demon burned brighter than the flames engulfing his body, and he ran straight for it.

Chandler stood there and watched him come. All he’d wanted to do was test his power, and now—now two people were dead, and a third about to join them. And him, too—he was going to die if the flaming form of Jared Steinke managed to reach him. But all he could do was stand there and watch death hurtle toward him just as BC had.

BC? Who was BC?

He was saved by the explosion. The flames seeped into the underground tanks, and a fireball blew the pumps and the four cars and the canopy that covered them fifty feet into the air. The shock wave picked up Jared Steinke’s body and threw him over Chandler like the angel of death he so resembled, and knocked Chandler ten feet back on his ass. The column of fire shot more than a hundred feet in the air, looking for all the world like a miniature atomic explosion. Red flames and black smoke etched concentric rings in the colorless Plains sky.

For a long time Chandler lay there, unsure if he was dead. The only minds he was able to feel were Joe Gonzalez’s, running more or less due east away from the station, and Wally O’Shea’s, the driver of the Ford that’d crashed into the pasture, who was hightailing it in the opposite direction.

He staggered to his feet. His head was throbbing and his body hurt almost as much. He felt like he’d just tried to stop the entire offensive line of the Yale Bulldogs, which wasn’t a particularly good football team (neither was Harvard’s when you got right down to it), but still. He was aching. He set off slowly down the road toward his car, spots dancing in front of his eyes as he struggled to keep them open. So much for the caffeine pills. He was so tired it was painful, but it was a bit of a blessing, too. Otherwise he’d have had to contemplate what he’d done.

He’d killed three people.

Not directly, maybe. But if he hadn’t been experimenting with his newfound abilities, there was no doubt they’d still be alive.

All his life he’d run in the opposite direction from his uncle’s world, his uncle’s wars, because he didn’t want anyone’s blood on his hands, and now three people were dead because of him. He was a soldier, willing or not, of the United States of America, which happened to be the enemy as well. His general was named Melchior, and so was his adversary. And Chandler was going to find him and kill him and rescue Naz, and then—

And then he was going to kill himself, and save the world—save himself—from whatever it was he’d become.