Zero Sight (10 page)

I scratched my head. I was on a bus cruising steadily down the highway with not a single schoolhouse bully in sight. The little girl sitting next to the snoring guy giggled as Sponge Bob jumped around on the TV in front of her. Diagonal to me, a couple talked casually. I frowned. All was well in the Dieterverse. Why was my Sight firing off?

And then—as quickly as it appeared—the sensation vanished.

Weird…I sat quietly and tried focusing on my Sight—but nothing was there anymore. My Sight had gone back to sleep.

After a minute or two of waiting, I gave up.

Well, I reasoned, nothing’s reliable 100% of the time. Maybe all this traveling is whacking me out. I resolved to solve my problems with the usual remedy—I reached into the overhead and retrieved my thermos. At times of like this, there was only one thing to do: acquire coffee immediately. My Japanese designed, vacuum-sealed thermos was one of my most prized possessions. I had filled it up before I went to sleep so there were no worries. This baby laughed in the face of entropy. The coffee inside would probably stay warm for another day or so. I poured out a steaming hot cup and drew it to my nose. And what an aroma! I wasn’t a morning person. Coffee was the only reason I could tolerate them. Even before the first sip, the black goodness set to work kicking my neurons out of bed.

Rejuvenated, I stretched my bones. The bus had filled up quite a bit while I slept. The cabin was crowded. I grinned. This seat rocked. I must have been the only person with a row to himself, but with the added people, it was sure getting hot. Last night, I had thrown on a sweater because of the cold jet of air the AC had been throwing out, but now the combination of extra people and midday rays were winning out.

I took off the sweater and turned to toss it—right onto the girl sitting next to me.

I froze, coffee in one hand, sweater in the other.

Keen senses. I had them in spades. Growing up, I always got accused of cheating in Marco-Polo, and I never once lost at hide-and-seek. I was the go-to-guy when you needed a lookout. I wasn’t sure it had anything to do with my Sight, but I was certainly more cognizant of my surroundings than the other kids. You didn’t sneak up on me, you didn’t enter a room without me noticing, it just didn’t happen. Besides, people are easy to sense. Even when we aren’t talking, they’re still making plenty of noises. We do our breathing loudly, our walking loudly, and even our fidgeting loudly. We ain’t mountain lions; those cats can sneak. You might be lucky enough to spot a mountain lion, or you might be lucky enough to hear one, but never both at once. They have PhDs in stealth. They make their living off quiet. I could track a mountain lion if I put my mind to it, so it came as quite a shock that I’d been awake for over ten minutes and hadn’t even noticed the standard-issue person sitting twelve inches away from me. That sort of thing just didn’t happen.

I looked down at my legs. They were still stretching down under the seat in front of me. How the heck did she get around me without waking me up? I shook my head. It must have been that stupid burger. I swore I’d never eat another.

My curiosity piqued, I decided to investigate my new sneaky seatmate. I opted for the “I’m-just-looking-out-the-window” approach because it’s time-tested and stalker-approved. More importantly, it would help me avoid any and all conversation.

At first glance, the interloper appeared to be young and female—but that was a rough guess. An oversized black hooded sweatshirt covered most of her body. The hood was monstrous. It reached well past the brim of her baseball cap. She sat, her long legs tucked up in front of her, sleeping in a ball. Her head hung between her knees, with her arms holding the whole package together. Below her hoodie, the girl wore a loose pair of black cargo pants tucked into a pristine set of laced leather boots. I had just been forced to ditch my sweater, so I was impressed Ms. Sneakums could tolerate all that clothing with the sun beating on her through the window. It must have been pushing 90 degrees outside, but even her hands were covered by a pair of thin black gloves.

I scrunched my face in thought. This was not my area of expertise, but in my limited experience with females, I was aware there existed a subset of the gender that—regardless the ambient temperature—remained cold at all times. They were known to utter a variant of “ohmygosh, it’s freezing in here” when entering any room. They displayed an intense fear of movie theaters and lecture halls. They considered fleece and down the pillars of modern civilization. And were known to query, “That sure is a nice looking car…does it have seat heaters?” when evaluating boyfriend prospects.

I nodded sagely. This particular specimen must have been a member of their inner circle.

It also occurred to me that I should stop staring.

I grabbed
Ulysses
and began another torture session. I read the first paragraph three times over before giving into the urge to glance over at her again.

She hadn’t budged.

I tried it myself. I lifted up my knees, wrapped my arms around my legs, and bundled up into a man-ball. I could barely fit my feet on the seat and could only last thirty-seconds before everything below my waist went numb. Untangling myself, I shrugged. To each her own, I guess. Sure, it was strange, but what did I expect? I was traveling across the U.S. on a long-haul bus. There was bound to be plenty of weirdoes. I should have been counting my blessings that I hadn’t run into a band of cannibals yet…I frowned.
Yet
.

I turned back to
Ulysses
. It was time for Dieter Resnick to get back to doing what a Dieter Resnick did best: mind his own business. After all, this foray was just another attempt to dodge my summer reading assignment. With new determination (and coffee) I marathoned into the early evening. It was a tough push. If it weren’t for my self-imposed personal challenge, I would have set the thing on fire. I wasn’t even sure who was who anymore, and I was almost certain that the main character died two chapters ago. (This was confusing, because there were still a few hundred pages to go.)

When we arrived in Cleveland, the sun was finishing up its shift in the sky. I got off the bus, made a deposit, and grabbed some dinner. Twenty-four hours on the bus had done a number on my butt. In fact, my whole body was tight, so after I grabbed some snacks I went back outside to stretch out a bit. Paranoid it would sneak off without me, I stayed right next to the bus. (My puny bank account couldn’t take many more hits before it was out for the count.) The sun was setting, and the heat was beginning to back off. It was the perfect time for Dieter Resnick’s Keister Resuscitating Callisthenic Routine—patent pending. I swung into motion, pumping my arms and stretching my legs. It was good to move again, and I really liked the smell of the air around here. If you ignored the diesel fumes, the vague septic stench, and the giant dumpster behind me, there where all sorts of cool scents to sample: grasses, flowers, and trees—the smells of life. It was like standing in the supermarket fridge with all those bouquets.

I was thinking that living in the woods wasn’t going to be so bad when I felt the slightest prick on the side of my neck. Instinctually I swatted. I caught the little bloodsucker in the act. The insect’s wrecked body stuck to my hand. Judging by the blood, the fella must have gotten caught mid-slurp. I shook my head. A mosquito. A mosquito had bit me—yet another first for the day. I was in the middle of wiping the mess off on my jeans when my Sight hiccupped to life.

“
Not again,” I grumbled, “You’re supposed to be reliable, Mr. Sight.” It was another nonsensical sensation: a cold tingle on the back of my neck, nothing threatening, and certainly nothing like I felt with Tyrone. I was busy wishing it would go away when the memory hit me full-force. Tyrone…I’d been sloppy and forgotten to distract myself. A bout of nausea roiled my stomach. Dizziness challenged my balance. The food I’d just eaten tried to come back up. That damn name…I had been trying hard to avoid it. Once my mind started down that road it was already too late. A cold sweat broke out on my brow. I grabbed the side of the bus for support.

“
Steady breathing,” I told myself. “Stop looking back there.” I was familiar with the attacks now. I could even stop from passing out now. The trick was to focus on the present. That broke the cycle. I stared at the bus’ giant tire and forced myself to count the lug nuts. I calculated the square of their sum, found the closest prime to the square, squared the prime…and my heart rate started to return to normal. My balance steadied.

With my body back under control, I returned my attention to my Sight. Something wasn’t right here. Before my fight with Tyrone, my Sight had only functioned as a sort of early warning system for things like flying objects. Once an object was committed to a trajectory, I could predict its direction based on the waves of color that preceded it. But in those last moments with Tyrone, my Sight had shown me something different. Whatever that
thing
was, it wasn’t a kinetic force. No matter how much I thought about it, the only explanation I could think of was that the blanket of blades was a manifestation of his intent to kill.

So, I wondered, was this new sensation a form of intent too?

If my theory was right, then there was a way to find out. Intent required a source—a source that I might be able to find if I concentrated. Since the incident, concentrating on my Sight had had the nasty habit of bringing me back to that day behind Ted Binion High, so up until this point I had avoided it, but I was feeling bold. I’d just beaten back one of those panic attacks, and my Sight seemed to be working without the need for adrenalin. Now was as good of a time as ever. I was willing to give it a shot.

I ignored my other senses, shutting them down one-by-one. I steadied my breathing and held my hands to my sides. As my focus increased, it was like my Sight reached out. It was the sixth-sense equivalent of switching from a wide-angle lens to a telephoto. The rest was simple. I just let it guide me where it wanted. I focused in on the tingling, reaching out towards the origin…but the sensation began to fade. Soon, only a delicate tickle remained.

I was puzzled. Nothing had ever
responded
to my Sight before.

“
What’s going on?” I muttered. I had always considered my Sight to be a passive organ, a sense like hearing or vision that received data but never projected it, but that strange tingling had vanished when I focused my Sight. Could that mean my extra sense was more like sonar, a sense that broadcasted a steady stream of noise and relied on the rebound to gather up the data?

I went cold.

If so…I had just given myself away.

I opened my eyes and swept the area. The lot was mostly empty. In front of me a group of men from my bus stood chatting while they smoking their cigarettes. Across the lot, a driver was fueling his bus. A few bugs buzzed around me, nothing else. Where could it be coming from? Was I just overanalyzing it? Was my Sight just misfiring as I had thought at first?

As I scrambled for clues, the gentle tickle returned. It crawled up and down my neck. I strummed my thigh in agitation.

“
Fuck,” I muttered. It was like I was being played with. “Why the
back
of my neck?” Like a dog chasing his own tail, I spun around to look behind me. Big Blue sat there idling, indifferent to my quandary. I frowned and swatted at the air in front of me. Now that the sun was down, the bugs were going nuts. I’d never had to deal with bugs before. It kinda sucked.

Swatting bugs himself, the bus driver hopped aboard and turned on the running lights. Fluorescent rays poured down from the windows above. I glanced up into the light—and right into the eyes of the girl in the black hoodie. She looked down at me groggily, the flush of her red lips in sharp contrast to her pale complexion.

I stood motionless in the brash light. Sights and sounds melted away away. A fine nose that buttoned lazily at the end. Skin smooth as marble. A thin and graceful neck. None of it held my interest. My attention was reserved for her eyes. Blue-grey orbs as cold as the worst winter night, they were as deep as the ocean and as dead as the moon.

Still matching my stare, one of the girl’s eyebrows raised slightly.

With a surge of embarrassment, I remembered staring was actually considered rather rude. I turned away, pretending something else had caught my attention. It was only then I noticed that the pace of my breathing had shifted into overdrive, my heart was beating fiercely, and the lights around me were too bright. I squinted my eyes against the glare, unclenched my fists, and massaged out my forearms. I looked down at my hands. If I hadn’t just cut my fingernails, I would have drawn blood from my palms.

Sweat running down my brow, I stood there shaking. Why was I re-experiencing the same sensations I had while fighting Tyrone? There’d been no danger, just a sleepy chick amused at my goofy exercise routine. Since the fight with Tyrone, I’d first had the nightmares and then the panic attacks. They weren’t fun, but I could manage them. But now my Sight was misfiring and triggering flashbacks. If there was one thing I thought I could trust, it was my Sight. My Sight was my security blanket—and now it was just shooting off at random? I knew I was developing a case of PTSD, but I had never imagined my Sight could be affected. My Sight was an honest broker, something I could totally rely on. How was I going to filter out what was bogus? Was I going to be jumping at shadows?