The wooden door that marked the entrance to Logan's house was painted a bright, garish green that chipped and cracked at its edges. A small bronze knocker was bolted to its front, and Skinny reached for it. He hesitated, not wanting to disturb Logan's parents, but then remembered that they were supposed to be out of the house tonight. He knocked and waited, watching a small swarm of flies dance around a bug lamp on the porch. One bug seemed bolder than the rest—a fact that was unfortunate, given the circumstances. It flew straight into the lamp and erupted in a flash, falling down to the porch fried and motionless. The chirping of crickets continued, oblivious to the tiny tragedy that had just occurred, and a distant owl hooted in the night from a perch on high.
The door's locks clicked and then it swung open. Logan stood there with a warm smile, arms out in a wide, welcoming gesture. "Skinny! Good to see you, man. Come on in, make yourself at home," he said, exchanging a quick and casual clap of a handshake with Skinny.
Skinny walked in and looked around the place. He hadn't been over Logan's house in months, but it felt like years. "Whoa, man, I'm digging the new dining room table," he said, gesturing at a wide table of polished amber wood.
"Thanks, it's much more spacious than the last," Logan replied, running a hand along its surface.
"What'd y'all wind up doing with the old one? It was quite the piece, wasn't it? An antique?"
"Yeah, 1890's I think. My mom inherited it from her dead uncle, or something, and I tried my best to keep it up meticulously… I could keep it looking nice, but full structural repairs were a little out of my skillset."
"Well I'm sorry to hear it broke, then… age finally caught up to it?"
"Nope, but my father did," Logan said. Logan still had that warm smile on his face, but Skinny's face darkened somewhat as he realized he brushed against a topic he probably shouldn't have.
"Hey man, I'm real sorry for asking about it, then. It was never my business—"
"No, no, don't sweat it. Like I said, it's more spacious than the last," Logan said. He then removed the Empathizer from his pocket and pressed it to his side, charging a red-orange battery with a hiss. He watched Skinny's face fall even further and immediately moved to assuage his concerns. "Oh, no, don't worry about this. Its anger, yeah, but directed at my father, not you. Anyways, why don't you come on into my room and we can chew the fat for a little while, before we delve into that more serious business?"
"Sure thing," Skinny replied, allowing Logan to lead him deeper into the house. They came to Logan's room and settled down inside on a pair of beanbag chairs near the corner. The walls overhead were cluttered with creased posters to Alien, Jaws, The Godfather, and Rocky, among others. Model cars and the occasional train sat still on his desk and the bookshelves, meticulously kept and occasionally repainted using a small toolkit Logan kept nearer to his bed. Near the corner was an abandoned sketchbook, its front page covered with a few furtive doodles of mountains, a forest, and a cabin obscured by pines. The place felt warm or cozy to Skinny in a way that even his own room did not.
"Sorry about the mess," Logan said, sweeping loose scraps of paper into a wastebin and stashing a small journal into a desk drawer.
"It's all fine, man, I was just thinking how cozy the place feels. I was aboutta tell you something before we moved rooms… what was it. Oh yeah! You know who I ran into this morning?"
"Who?"
"Well, there I was, at the supermarket with my folks, when I bumped into some lady carryin' a bunch of paper towels. She drops them, but, as I'm handing them back to her, helping her up, who do you think I see browsing the meats?"
"Oh, I don't know… Krenkshaw?"
"Nope!" Skinny leans in conspiratorially. "It was the cashier. From the convenience store we saved. I swear, the man was still white as a ghost."
"Oh my God, did he recognize you?"
"He actually stared at me for a second or two and asked if we'd met, but I told him that I just knew him from the store and—"
Suddenly, with a low, whirring sound, the lights dropped out, leaving the boys in pitch-black darkness.
"What happened?" Skinny asked, beginning to feel around with a probing hand for the nearby wall.
"Ah, it's that fuse outside. It's been giving us trouble recently," Logan replied, fumbling with a lighter from his pocket. "Ever since that storm a couple days ago it's been all over the place." With a click, Logan set the lighter glowing, casting their faces and the surrounding room in a faint and flickering orange glow. "I'm gonna go fix it. You sit tight," Logan said, rising to his feet.
"Sure thing, I'll be here," Skinny said, leaning back on his bean bag chair. As Logan left, the shadows in the room danced and leapt with the transit of the lighter. Skinny watched them stretch and wind across the film posters and model cars of the cozy space, feeling some of his worries flicker away with them. He fished for a lighter of his own from his pocket and set it alight, watching the small flame dance in the dark. He then turned his attention back to the room itself, noting the overwhelmingly organized feeling of the place. Posters were hung in perfect gridlines, instead of the canted angles and sometimes overlapping lines of other friends' rooms. The model cars were arranged in perfect rows, each one pointing to the right. The bed was neatly made, sheets folded in crisp lines. The wastebasket near his desk was emptied, save for the scraps Logan had just brushed in. Skinny was even surprised to notice that the books on his shelf were alphabetized by author name, something that Skinny could never see himself going through the effort to set up and maintain. He was mentally admiring the boy's commitment to organized space when his lighter flickered out, again returning the room to darkness. Skinny had his finger on the wheel, about to set it sparking back to light, when something unexpected caught his eye in the darkness. There, on the other side of the room, a soft, red glow seemed to emenate from beneath the closet door.
Skinny's first thought was that it was some sort of fire, but the glow was far too steady, far too red. He moved towards the glow in the darkness and pulled the closet door open. There, he saw the silhouette of hanging shirts, pants, and jackets. What caught his eye, however, was not hanging with the clothing. It was bundled up in the corner, glowing at its fringes like a curtain keeping a dark room hidden from a sunny window. Reaching for it, Skinny felt its soft fabric and confirmed that it was some sort of blanket. But over what, exactly? A lantern? His curiosity getting the better of him, he pulled the blanket back.
Someone outside the home looking at the window to Logan's room might have thought a bomb went off indoors. The bloom of red-orange light was intense, sudden, and eerily silent. The closet erupted in its bright glow and Skinny fell to his knees, dumbstruck by the sight. "My God," he whispered, reaching a hand into the box he uncovered. In it, countless hundreds—perhaps thousands—of batteries glowed their deep, violent red-orange that the gang had come to realize represented anger, rage, wrath. Scattered among the masses of red-glowing batteries was the occasional green or purple battery, but their faint glows were drowned out by the ocean of hate that surrounded them.
Skinny pored through the box, digging around with his hand to see if even the ones at the bottom were glowing. Much to his distress, they were. Whom was all this anger directed at? Himself? His father? The Gang? How could he have filled so many batteries in so little time? Where the hell did he even get so many batteries?
Before Skinny could even begin to consider answers to those questions, the lights flicked on as suddenly as they had gone out. Skinny snapped back to the present moment, realizing that Logan would be on his way back into the room any second now. He threw the blanket back over the box and started to shuffle out the closet, before turning around and darting back in to adjust the blanket again. After fiddling with it until it resembled its original configuration closely enough, he slipped out the closet, quietly shut its door, and turned around to sneak back to his beanbag chair. At that moment, with Skinny's back still to the closet door, Logan walked in.
"All fixed?" Skinny asked, doing his best to seem nonchalant about being caught out-of-place.
Logan eyed him with mild confusion but no obvious suspicion. "Yeah, all fixed," he replied. A momentary quiet settled between the two.
"The dark just made me uneasy, is all, so I started pacing around a bit," Skinny said, trying to fill the quiet with an excuse that felt a little too unnecessary and a little too guilty the moment it left his lips.
"Ah, I getcha," Logan replied, smiling casually now. "Anyways, whenever I gotta reset the breaker, the AC takes forever to kick back on. It's gonna get real uncomfortably warm in here pretty soon. What do you say we head out and walk for a bit, and we can talk? I've also got something I wanted to show you, related to all this."
Skinny offered what he hoped was a reassuring smile, but the doubt and worry was beginning to stir in his mind stronger than ever before. He knew it was only a matter of time before it began to show, despite his best efforts. "Yeah, sure thing. Lead the way," he said, gesturing for Logan to leave the room first. As Logan walked past, Skinny reached into his pocket and discreetly angled the Thought-Enunciator at Logan.
Skinny would've been fine hearing mental chantings of hatred, rage against Logan's situation or those around him. Skinny would've been fine hearing the ramblings of envy or jealousy, perhaps intent to take the others' devices. Skinny would've been fine hearing plans of violence, some sort of outlet for that rage. In fact, he'd have been fine hearing anything at all, as at least he'd have some ability to defuse the situation or plan to work through it or seek outside help. But Skinny would be afforded no such options. While he listened, his heart sank only deeper and his frustrations mounted as just that disquieting static returned. And behind it, he felt that stomach-churning sensation of void, of a profound emptiness like a hole in the human soul. With a rising feeling of dread, Skinny trudged after his friend out of the quiet home. The night was balmy, and though he couldn't see the darkened sky, it again carried the feeling of gathering stormclouds high overhead.
* * *
The wind rustled the canopy of trees as Skinny and Logan walked through the emptied, orange-lit winding streets of Boone. Insects buzzed about the streetlights in small swarms. The occasional car meandered by, but the streets were largely empty. So empty, in fact, that Skinny and Logan walked down the very center of the residential roads, Logan with his arms outstretched to feel the gusting wind. In one hand, Logan held a lantern he'd taken from his home.
"So, where is it we're going again?" Skinny asked, checking his mental map for points of interest on the road ahead. He could think of none.
"You know how Superman had that Fortress of Solitude? I like to think of this place as my one spot I can get away from everything," Logan replied.
"Is this where you kept disappearing to when we were in, what, 6th grade?"
"Mmm-hmm. After my dad's worst nights, I'd always run off to the shack and sometimes spend the night there. Almost nobody knew it even existed," he said, pointing to the woods just off the side of the road. "It's this way," he said, leading the two off the road and into the woods beyond. He turned the gas valve on his lantern and lit it to a mild glow as they stepped into the woods. Immediately Skinny felt the temperature drop significantly as they entered air that was damp and still. The leaves rustled overhead, but little wind made it through the cover of the canopy above.
"You said almost nobody knew?" Skinny asked.
"One day, a couple years back, Parker trailed me while I was walking here. Said the townsfolk were getting pretty concerned for my 'emotional wellbeing' and whatnot. I explained to him how this place was the only thing keeping my emotional wellbeing intact, and he seemed to understand."
"Wait, so Parker's known about you and your pops?"
"No, I didn't tell him everything, but enough for him to know this place was important. He swore to take its secret to the grave, and I'm pretty sure he's kept true to his word."
"Where is it, exactly?"
"It'll just be another couple minutes this way. It might look like we're in the middle of nowhere, but I got pretty good at finding this place in the dark."
"I think I got a decent idea of where we are," Skinny said, trying to find his bearings in the dark. "If we headed out that-a-ways for a short while, we'd hit…"
"New Creek, the small spot we helped Wade with his Lord of the Flies project."
"I still remember that damn beer bottle we called the conch shell," Skinny reminisced. "Of course Wade kept tossing it over Shaun's head and then would tease him when he complained, saying—"
"You can't complain unless you have the speaking conch," Logan said in his best Wade impression. The two shared a laugh in the dark woods.
"I still think back on that every now and again," Skinny said. "We had some good times overall."
"That we did," Logan agreed.
A thoughtful silence slipped between the two. Skinny felt a compulsion to break that silence.
"So, the things we got. Alien artifacts? Secret government Men in Black tools? What are your theories?"
Logan rubbed at his chin with his free hand, thinking. "You know, I haven't really thought on it for all that long. The way I see it, the origin isn't all that important… we got 'em now, and that's that," he said.
"Except you gotta consider the chance that wherever they came from, someone's missing them right now, and probably searching up and down the state to find 'em," Skinny replied. "I'd imagine there are some dangerous people in search of these things."
"Eh, you and Shaun read too many comic books or watch too many bad movies. I think we already know who owned these things… we found their body out in the woods, and they're not in much condition to be hunting us down. If someone else were after the devices, they'd have found us by now," Logan reasoned.
"I'm just saying, word travels slow sometimes. Maybe it'll take some time, but as soon as somebody hears about a robbery with an invisible boy and a kid who got shot and walked it off… it might bring in the wrong kind of attention, is all," Skinny said. "I was thinking about bringing it up with the group tomorrow… maybe we need to be even quieter with these things. I know we've barely done anything, but I feel like it's the wrong kind of invitation. It's like waving your arms around and yelling in the middle of the jungle when you're not even sure if there's any hungry tigers nearby," he added, before looking around uneasily at the dark woods. "Poor spot for that metaphor, I guess."
Returning his eyes to the trail ahead, he saw the outline of a structure take shape in the dark. "That it?" he asked Logan.
"Yeah, that's the place," Logan answered, holding up the lantern so that it could better illuminate the side. The small, squat shack stood alone in the woods, dilapidated but not totally beyond function… its roof still seemed to hold, and the windows and doors were still intact. Logan pulled a key from his pocket and slotted it into a padlock on the door. After disengaging the lock, he handed the lantern to Skinny and gestured in. "Take this and go inside; I'll go start up the generator."
Skinny walked into the shack's single room and whistled, impressed with the space. Though the floor was still dirt, the whole thing being more a set of walls with a roof than an enclosed, sealed living space, there was a certain sophistication to the way it was furnished. He surveyed the odd decor by lantern light: posters of musicians of every genre littered the walls and the occasional antique stood proudly. A gently rusted fire ax sat on pegs drilled to the wall as though it were a sacred relic, while a first aid supply kit and emergency matches were placed just below it. Overall, it felt lived-in. An engine sputtered to life beyond the walls and overhead lights buzzed to life, illuminating the place with an earthy, pale orange.
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"And God said, let there be light!" Logan called from outside the cabin, appearing in the doorway moments later.
"I gotta say, I'm pretty impressed. When I was imagining a shack in the woods, I wasn't expecting electric lighting and a place this comfy."
"Speaking of, want anything to drink?" Logan opened a dilapidated and clearly broken fridge, the hinges squeaking and squawking as it opened. Inside stood a number of unopened bottles of soda and a large jug of water.
"Don't mind if I do," Skinny said, reaching for one with a bright label he didn't recognize. Logan passed him a bottle opener, which Skinny used to pop the bottle open and took a swig. The warm temperature did it no favors. It was borderline saccharine, its flavor nearly reminding him of Lucky Charms. That was a cereal he'd never thought he'd needed to drink.
"Hits the spot," Skinny lied, taking another swig. "This place is surprisingly well-kept… how long has it been since you were here?"
"Well, it had been years since I was here, but then when we found these things… I came out here with it to experiment, I guess you could say. Journaled all the stuff I was able to figure out."
"What kinda stuff didja find?"
"For starters, it works on animals. See this?" Logan raised his hand and showed a small, mostly-healed red gash on his arm. "Hamster did this after I hit him with some red. I managed to pin down the little wolverine and got it with a yellow, and it instantly returned to its happy, playful self. Mellowed it right down in no time."
"Logan Kessler, Animal Control," Skinny teased, eyeing the bitemarks. "That still looks painful."
"You've got no idea," Logan replied.
"Well, hey, get this: my gramma's cat, Frosty… you put a bowl of tuna down in front of her, and there's no happier cat on this planet. Do you think you could use animals to charge those things with happy emotions? Animals are a lot easier to please than humans," Skinny said.
"Oh, I tried. As It'd turn out, though, the charges I get from a hamster were hardly enough to feel. You couldn't hardly even tell the difference between a charged battery and an empty one," Logan said.
"Maybe it don't work so well through fur?"
"Or maybe some things feel less than others," Logan replied, before a momentary stillness fell again across the duo. Logan let it hang there a moment, and then broke it. "He escaped the small cage I set up during one of my trips home."
"A brave little hamster journeying out into the big, bad woods. Hope you don't miss him too much…"
"I don't have to, actually. I find more uses for the Empathizer every day," Logan replied, shrugging casually.
Skinny frowned at that, the high spirits of the moment evaporating away to leave only that deeper unease. "Well, I guess now we've arrived to all that heavy stuff I wanted to talk to you about. Doesn't anything about what you just said strike you as wrong?"
"How do you mean?"
"Pain, loss, sadness… we don't like those feelings, sure, but they're important feelings, too. They remind us what's important, they keep us in check. Don't you realize how unhealthy it's gotta be, just pulling every sad thought out of your head?"
"Normal people compartmentalize, with or without this," Logan replied, now eyeing the Empathizer.
"That's different and you know it," Skinny replied, shaking his head.
"Look, I'm sorry I'm just being a little defensive and argumentative. Deep down, I think I agree with you," Logan replied, turning the device in his hands.
"Don't just agree to defuse the argument," Skinny said, noting the sudden change.
"No, really, not just acquiescing. I think, deep down, that I agree with you. That this isn't emotionally healthy."
Skinny was caught off-guard. "You—you do?" he stammered, uncertain. "If you know I'm right, why keep using the dang thing so heavily?"
Logan blinked several times in rapid succession. A tic? Fighting back tears? Something in his eye? Before Skinny could reach any satisfying analysis, Logan abruptly spoke up.
"Did you ever go to that trip to the beach—Topsail, wasn't it—with practically all of our 5th grade class the week after school ended?"
Skinny was caught off-guard by the apparent non sequitur. "Yeah, I was there. Why?"
"Well, you may not remember, but I refused to get in the water," Logan began. "Hated the feeling of it as it dried. Hated the entire beach for that exact reason, and had only gone like three times, total. Anyways, me and Lyndon, we decided to dig in the sand instead," Logan began, eyes flickering left and right in the cabin as though someplace else entirely.
The seagulls cawed as the waves pulled and roared in a ceaseless rhythm. With every crash, a gentle seabreeze picked up droplets of water and carried it to the small ridge of sand where a younger Logan stood, bringing with the damp that scent of salt and seaweed, brine and just the slightest undernote of the rotten, fishy stench of low tide. Logan held a small shovel in one hand, surveying the ground with Lyndon for a suitable spot.
"Yeah, I remember that… you guys dug a gigantic hole," Skinny said from the cabin. To Logan, it was a disembodied voice from a place far off and away, somewhere that had no connection to the beach at hand.
Logan timed his strokes to be in the opposite phase as Lyndon's. Shovels bit into sand with a crackling rasp, the kind that reminded him of all the unpleasantness of holding a mouthful of sand between his teeth. The hard, dampened wood stung where blisters were beginning to form on the pads of his hands, but Logan tuned out the pain. Each scoop deposited to the side bought them an extra few inches of depth.
"I don't know if I'd call it gigantic," Logan heard his own voice answer. "But we did get a few feet down in the ground. After a certain point, though, we hit some trouble."
The dry scraping of the shovels suddenly became a wet sloshing sound that dribbled and splattered with every scoop back up to the surface.
"We started to take on water. It just started coming in out of nowhere, slowing our progress."
Logan and Lyndon started scooping at the slush near the hole's bottom. It looked like sand, yet it flowed like water. At first it seemed a mere neat addition to their excavation, but it eventually became problematic. As they tried to excavate deeper, they soon found that their hole developed a small layer of semi-clear seawater a few inches deep. Logan watched the water's gentle lapping cause small clumps of sand to drop in, and those clumps let fall even larger clumps above, until the perimeter of the hole slowly began to slide and collapse inwards on the water like a miniature mudslide.
"I've been there before," Skinny said, remembering some of his own days building sandcastles. He took another gulp of the soda and listened.
"Well anyways, the water was ruining our hole, so I got out a bucket and started shoveling the water out. But, every time I did that, more water rushed in from the sides."
Bucket after bucket of water was hoisted up to the surface and splashed over the growing sand mound a few feet from the hole. Much to younger Logan's dismay, the reservoir seemed self-refilling. After four or five buckets, he couldn't tell if the water level was any lower, or if it had somehow gotten even deeper in the interim. What's worse, the turbulent sloshing of the water and the inward flow had compromised the hole's walls even further, with an entire large section of sand near Lyndon collapsing in. It fell and released a pathetic, sloshing splash that struck Logan's right eye and set it stinging. His hands were too sandy to wipe at it, and his beach towel was nowhere near. All he could do was kneel near the failing, floundering hole, and blink as fast as he could until the pain subsided. It was a disheartening, losing battle, and what had started as a nice circle shape now resembled an angry inkblot. Every desperate bucketful only seemed to accelerate the hole's erosion and collapse.
Skinny spoke up. "Well, yeah, there's this thing called the water table, and it—"
Logan cut him off with a stern look, unamused. "I know what a water table is, and that's not the point. The important bit, here, is that the hole and the water is the closest analogy I can find for this thing."
Skinny's brow furrowed, not quite connecting the dots yet. "I'm not following?"
"I can empty the hole, Skinny, and flush out the water," Logan said with a pained look. There was a soft hiss at his side as he charged a battery with the Empathizer, one that glowed with a sickly brown Skinny didn't recognize. Logan swapped out the battery and loaded in a battery already glowing yellow in that smooth, practiced reload that bespoke a lot of experience using the Empathizer in the few short days he'd owned it. "But more water always pours in from the sides."
Logan's expression began to sour to the border of hysteria. "When my dad beats me, I can make the hurt go away and pull out all the negative. But the hole, I've emptied it over and over again, and it keeps filling back up." Tears welled at Logan's eyes. "And every time, the water is muddier and muddier."
Skinny squirmed in his seat, torn between reaching out to put a hand on Logan's shoulder or recoiling backwards and fleeing the shed. First the red batteries, now this… it was clear Logan was not well. Caught between forwards and backwards, Skinny remained still, chewing at his lip in transparent worry. His heart broke for Logan, but he wasn't sure how the hell he was supposed to help with any of this. He was no therapist, no professional… he wasn't even sure if those people would know what to do in a case like this. Would anyone?
Logan's composure returned suddenly and completely as the cartridge in his side discharged, losing its warm, yellow color and returning to the metallic silvery neutral of a standard battery. He wiped at tears in the corners of his eyes with the back of his hand as his face held a mellow and chillingly-warm smile. "I'm running low on these, and I worry for what might happen when I run out. I scoured garbage cans in our neighborhood for used batteries… did you know that? Then I got two boxes of them, and I can't even explain how it is I got them, because I'm not even sure I know."
Skinny raised his eyebrows at this point, but Logan continued.
"I'm slowly accumulating the negative colors and losing my grasp on the good colors… I can't even remember what genuine joy feels like. The injected flash of happy is gone in seconds… I know they're just emotions, but I'm not strong enough to face them."
Skinny found his voice and spoke up. "Alright, hey, man, you know I want to help. It sounds to me like that thing of yours ain't doing you any good no more."
"No, it's not," Logan agreed, pressing the thumbswitch on the Empathizer. It loaded a pink-purple charge into the battery, a color that Skinny recognized as fear. "Not by itself."
"Hey, I know that color… that one's fear. What are you afraid of, Logan? I can help, if you let me."
"Afraid of what I've got to do—and, in a way, already did. The box of batteries I mentioned? In the first one, right at the top, there was something else—something that belonged to my dad—still belongs to him, since I saw at home he's still got it. But now I got it too, a copy from the future… a gift to myself, maybe?"
"What was it?"
Logan reached to his rear waistband and pulled out the steel revolver—Dad's revolver. Before Skinny could even fully react, Logan cocked the hammer back and leveled the gun at Skinny's chest. Skinny's heart dropped. Logan certainly hadn't been wearing the gun before, as Skinny would've seen it on the walk over, but he quickly realized that Logan could've had it stashed near the generator. His hands reflexively raised upwards, palms out in a placating gesture, trying to project an air of calm, but Skinny's internal demeanor was far from it.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, what the hell are you doing with that thing?"
"Alone, this thing is close to overpowering me. But think, if one person controlled all six, how powerful they could be."
"Come on, man. You're not making any sense, and you know it. What you need is help, some real professional help, not… this."
"This is my help, don't you see? My whole life, I've felt powerless. Powerless to stand up for myself against my dad. Powerless to change the way I feel about myself and my situation. Even on the day we all find these incredible artifacts, I'm left with the impotent one. Powerless to make myself feel permanently happy, even when I got the one that's supposed to control emotions. Do I look like my emotions are under control? Do I look like I have a modicum of power or control?"
"There's no need—"
"Answer it!" Logan shouted, thrusting the gun forwards in threat.
"No, you don't look like you're in control," Skinny admitted.
"No control," Logan repeated, distress rising on his face. His voice began to take on a manic, sing-song quality that sent a new wave of chills down Skinny's back. "I've got the controller, and no control. None at all. Well you know what, Skinny? I'm taking control. I'm taking power for the first God-damned time in my life… I'm tired of sitting by and letting my dad—no, the world—treat me like its punching bag. I'm tired of being passive, of doing nothing. The world fucking owes me this, all things considered."
"I know you don't mean that," Skinny said meekly, tears beginning to well in his eyes.
"You're the mind-reader here. Take your device out, and why don't—"
"C'mon, man, you and I know that's not necessary—"
"Take it out!" Logan shouted, again thrusting the gun forwards to lend his words the authority granted by intimidation. Suddenly, Logan understood Dad's love of the thing… wave it around, and people did what he wanted. What a rush that was…
Skinny squared his jaw for a moment, considering what he could say to de-escalate things. He saw genuine desparation on Logan's face, a certain wildness to the eyes that he worried couldn't be talked down. Finding nothing to say, Skinny reached for the Thought-Enunciator still stashed in his pocket.
"Point it at me!" Logan commanded.
"It doesn't work on you!" Skinny shouted, his voice cracking.
"Withdrawing your emotions gives you a solid grasp on your thoughts, so I could keep them quiet when I needed to. Point it at me; you'll hear plenty now."
Skinny's own voice sounded pathetic to his ears. "Please, Logan, you're not thinking properly here."
"Am I?"
By now, the full grip of hysteria was upon Skinny. "Look, man, this… thing you're doing—trying to do," Skinny stammered, still trying to shrink away from the gun, "you couldn't even get away with it. Parker—he's got the Time Watch—Timepiece—and he'll go back—undo anything you try."
"Oh, that's the best part. Point it at my head right now and see what I've got planned. Now, damn it!"
Skinny complied, pointing the small, satellite-like end at Logan and listened. His face was already red-hot and streaked with tears, but it quickly began contorting through expressions of terror, of misery, of deep, disbelieving pain. Skinny's voice was reduced to nearly a whimper now. "I know my friend isn't capable of doing this."
Logan offered a wan smile. "You're right. You're right, I'm not. But with this thing, I don't have to be your friend anymore. I don't have to imagine regret, or sadness, and hold myself back. Unbound by emotional or moral constraints, I can do anything I decide to."
He leveled the gun again towards Skinny's chest and prepared to fire, finger tightening around the trigger. Logan remembered standing on a certain diving platform at the Boone Community Center pool, giving advice to a scared child: "just close your eyes and make the jump before you can even be scared by it. Just leap."
Skinny squeezed shut his eyes and raised his hands to block his face, shrinking backwards into the chair. His Thought-Enunciator clattered to his feet, giving Skinny an idea. "The devices… you can have them! We'll just give them to you. I can get the boys to come around, you know I can… all the power you want, and nobody's gotta get hurt over it."
Logan's hands were steady. His outstretched finger tested the resistance of that small sliver of metal, the pulling of which would end an entire human life. It flexed it back and forth at the very beginning of its range of motion, feeling the pull against his force. There, vacillating against the trigger, Logan's hand paused.
Skinny, feeling the pause grind between them like a massive glacier, allowed himself a hopeful peek between his fingers over his face. He watched as Logan set the gun on the table, the dread knot in his stomach finally beginning to unwind. As he racked his mind for the right words to continue the deescalation, he watched as Logan ejected a pink-purple battery from the Empathizer and loaded in a fresh blank one.
"I'll meet with them first thing in the morning… we'll collect these things up, all of them, and then," Skinny stammered, watching Logan.
Logan toggled the thumbswitch on the Empathizer. The device hissed. It charged the battery a deep, pale cyan, a color not unlike the waters of the idyllic Caribbean on a cloudy afternoon. It was a new color, and its glow momentarily mesmerized both he and Skinny.
"Huh, I guess that one's compassion," Logan remarked, staring at it. Without looking away, he reached for the gun.
The quiet of the night deep in the woods was shattered by the staccato report of a revolver's firing that roared and spread out across the wooded valley, sending birds flying and critters scurrying for cover in its wake. Five more quick blasts sounded, and then the thick drape of silence rematerialized. The sad echoes of the gunfire returned as the only indictment, before even those, too, fell silent before the chirping insects.
In the cabin, there were four sounds to be heard, no fewer and no more. The first was a persistent buzzing. It was a buzzing of the overhead light, and it was also the buzzing ring deep in Logan's ears. The lamp was speckled with two droplets of fresh blood, around which buzzed a small swarm of gnats who could never know the horror that just unfolded below.
The second sound was the rattling. It was the rattling breath of a boy breathing through perforated lungs drenched with blood, and the shaking exhales of a boy unwounded but trembling with adrenaline and with self-hatred, with determination and with fear.
The third sound was a pattering noise, the wet sound of dribbling damp on soft ground. It was the trickle of blood from open wounds, the slow drip-drip of droplets on the ceiling that eventually acquiesced and allowed gravity to again take charge. They fell back to the dirt from which man was made, joining the slow dribble off a table that sourced from a glass bottle of Moxie now on its side.
The fourth and final sound, a rhythmic clicking not unlike a clock's, took Logan several seconds to identify. It was the sound a revolver made when the trigger was repeatedly pulled long after the chambers of the cylinder had emptied. Click, click, click, the gun continued, Logan's finger still toggling the trigger as though it were some sort of murderous automaton.
Together, the sounds formed an orchestra in four parts, a horrid, twisted fugue that would keep Logan awake for many nights to come. With great mental strain, he stilled the twitching finger and lowered the gun, setting it on the table. Then, and only then, did the body tremors begin. It started in his fingers and hands, but soon it swept over the whole of his body, shaking him in violent fits of adrenaline. As he regained control, he deliberately refused to look at the slumped form before him, knowing that Skinny would not yet be dead and also knowing he would be utterly unable to meet the boy's gaze. Logan wouldn't hold him while he went or try to offer any words to ease his passing… after all, what would be the point?
He bent down and scooped up the Thought-Enunciator, pocketing it. He then glanced at the small clock in the corner of the room, noting the time. 9:50.
"I'm late," he muttered to himself, reaching back for the gun. Remembering then that the cylinder was empty, he set it back down on the table and began to move through the shed, searching. He found the fire ax hanging on the wall and gripped its handle, hefting its weight about in the air. Finding it satisfactory, he moved to the door and pushed it open with the ax's handle, pausing for a moment at the threshold. Should I look back? Is there anything at all I can say? Before his mind could answer, his feet were in motion. He stepped out into the cool night and shut the door behind him, locking the grisly scene away. He set his back against the door and tried to catch his breath, feeling a rising dread at what work he knew waited ahead. He felt the momentary doubt of someone who's already taken the plunge and was now in free-fall. No point resisting at this point… best to just let gravity and momentum take over. Follow the plan. Setting away from the door, he staggered for a moment, wiping at his eye. The tears stung. The dark swirled. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, as though a terrible beast lie waiting just out in the dark, watching him with a predator's wide-eyed gaze. He swallowed those fears down as he resumed his brisk pace, ax in hand. He had a very specific appointment to make.