(no subject)

36.

Mickey was flying!

The ground below was slipping past as it had in cartoons. He could even see his shadow passing over the land beneath.

Wait! There was no air moving around him. He looked at his hands and there was no air flow changing the surface configuration on his skin. He had studied enough to know that if he were moving fast enough to
fly his body would show a reaction to the air pushing it back. Like a dog with its head out the window.

Suddenly he was standing with his head out a moving car’s window.

It’s a dream. Has to be a dream, he thought.

“Glad you got that,” a voice said from above.

“You God?” he yelled back, trying to be heard above the crashing wind.

“My name is Yutan, Beverly Yutan.”

Yutan? Yahweh?

“I’m a violin player from Nebraska City, Nebraska,” Yutan’s voice insisted.

“What are you doing in my dream?” Mickey shouted just as he began to pull himself back into the car. Once inside he found, not a car, but a ballroom filled with Louis XIV characters from “The Three Musketeers.”

Suddenly there was a lady in a gaudy gown, with a cup of tea in her hand, who was walking next to him.

“You are Mickey McCauley, am I correct?” The lady asked.

“Yyyees . . .” He said uncertainly.

“You have been kidnapped!” She told him, obviously trying not to get the boy upset. “But, friends are trying to find you.”

“How did you find me?”

“It is easier for me, I don’t have to work in the same world they do,” She told him, with a smile that put him at his ease, “They must search miles and miles of physical space, I only have to look for the mind that answers my call.”

He didn’t understand.

“Think of it this way,” She said as the two of them sat down at a tiny table that had muskrats playing Parchessi on the floor underneath, “All our minds, where ever they are in the physical world, live in a
single room within themselves. If I call out to someone, they only answer across the room and we can get together. When your friends asked me to find you it wasn’t so hard.”

“I’ll have to think about that,” Mickey said, as he noticed his shoes had been sinking into a pool of chocolate pudding.

“Don’t expect a lot of this to make sense,” Beverly told him, “When you fall asleep under normal circumstances your mind is completely in charge of the dreams and you can figure out what you are trying to say to yourself. But, when you get hit in the head, well, there’s a bit of a short circuit thing going on.”

Mickey was happy to hear this, and was soon able to dismiss the giant shrimp that was dancing with Buffy the Vampire Slayer across the room.

“We need to know as much as you can remember about the attack,” She told him, getting serious and wanting to get down to business.

“Throop, it was Throop!” He said, and was immediately sorry he did, since the named man now threatened him with a pipe.

The Lady who sat opposite him raised her hand and Throop vanished as quickly as he had appeared.

“We thought it was him,” Beverly Yutan mumbled as she punched a phone number into the turtle she held, and began to speak into his belly as though he were a cell.

Suddenly Dr. Thursday was standing next to him, saying, “Throop is able to cause devices, both mechanical and electrical,malfunction. We thought he might be part of the Rugglestump escape. But, since he left no physical evidence behind, we couldn’t do anything more than keep an eye on him.”

“Good ‘keeping an eye on him’-ing.” Mickey chided.

“He must have had an ally.”

“Sanna,” Mickey snapped.

“Of course, she was to watch him. She must have worked to get the assignment.”

“Throop brought us to Thunderbase, why didn’t he attack us then?” Mickey asked.

“To easy to trace,” Beverly said, “He was responsible for your safety, so he would have been the first suspect.”

“We have sent a team to retrieve you,” Thursday said.

“What about David?” Mickey demanded.

There was one of those uncomfortably long pauses.

“He is in the base ICU,” Beverly said.

“Our best people are working on him, Mickey, everything that can be done will be done.”

Mickey was truly scared, in a way young boys should never be frightened.

“What happened?” He stammered.

“He . . . was struck very hard.” Dr. Thursday said, “We never take head wounds lightly.”

There is something impossibly horrific about the words “head wound” when it concerns someone you love.

Mickey didn’t know how he would go on without his beloved brother.

David had been his friend, his hero, and his mentor as well as his sibling.

Mickey was suddenly standing in the middle of a vast wasteland, with the wind whistling a sad song of emptiness.

This was the world without David.

He stood there for a very long time.

(c) 2005 by C. Wayne Owens

(no subject)

37.

The mental fog started to lift, but nothing good came to light.

Actually there was no light to come.

Mickey was aware that his hands were tied to the arms of a chair, and there was something restraining his chest. He knew there was rope of some kind around his wrists by the amount of “give” he could feel. These were things he knew from researching “escape artists” from those days he wanted to be a superhero.

He also knew that his eyes were not covered, since he could see the vaguest outline of other things in the room. He knew there was a tiny shaft of light escaping into the room under what he assumed was the door.

His ankles were wrapped in something. He thought it might be rope also, since it gave in the same way as what was around his arms, and it was not wide like duct tape.

In many stories the hero could escape being tied to a wooden chair by smashing the chair into a wall and breaking it up.

His fingers told him this was a metal chair.

His movement relinquished more information. The chair had casters or wheels of some kind. It was some sort of office chair.

He began pushing with his joined feet to move the chair around the room. He was successful, but he ran into something that caused a thump, and then something came crashing down to the floor.

He didn’t hear anything break, but the sound was big.

He heard movement from the next room, and so he pretended to be “out.”

Through his eyelids he perceived light blazing into the room from an open door.

He recognized Throop’s voice, saying, “Probably just a muscle spasm or something. He’s still out. You hit him with a lot of juice.”

The door closed, but Mickey kept his eyes closed, just in case it was a trick. After a few minutes he decided that it wasn’t, and opened his eyes again.

He heard a slight bit of talking in the next room, but couldn’t really make it out.

Within the room it was very dark. The boy was grateful for that slash of light that kept him from being in total blindness. He was not a great fan of lack of light. He wasn’t scared of the dark, but he would rather have some light, somewhere.

In the room of shadows where he sat, Mickey could see a couch or table across from him. There was, maybe, a hat rack of some kind between the door and the table/couch and the door. On the other side of the door he thought he saw the edge of a bookcase of some sort.

He tried to move the chair just a bit, and realized that it was somehow secured to something. When he had made things fall, it was because those things were on the table or whatever he was tied to.

So he sat quietly.

He became fixated on that slice of light at the bottom of the door.

It is amazing how much you can depend on something when it gives you something you need so badly.

He searched the inside of his head trying to get hold of David, but was sure he was too far away to find his brother.

And, it was kind of dark and he, way back in the back of his head, wondered if there might be something else in the room besides himself.

He just sat, silent, and stared at that little bit of bright.

What was going to happen to him?

What was going to happen to David?

“Just cool it, kid,” came an answer in his head.

“David?” He thought.

“I’m not going to be able to keep this up for long, but, yeah. How’re you?”

Mickey smiled in the dark.

“I thought I was going to lose you,” Mickey told his brother.

“No way, it was close for a while,” The voice in his head told him, “But I’m okay now.”

There was something wrong. David would have called him “Kiddo.” He could feel an ever so slight variance in the voice.

“I couldn’t lose you,” He told the voice.

“You’re not gonna, bro.,” Came the answer.

This wasn’t David. “Bro,” was not in his vocabulary.

“He knows,” Came a voice from the other room.

The room was an explosion of light as the door was thrown open. Throop held the doorknob, Sanna was standing with him along with a man without any facial features at all. This was the source of the fake voice.

The voice in his head said, “How did you know?”

He knew that he shouldn’t give the enemy any more help than he had too.

“I watch ’24,’ I don’t trust anybody!” He said in absolute truth.

Sanna looked to Throop and said, “What is ’24?’”

Throop gritted his teeth and slammed the door.

Mickey felt just a little triumphant. They had tried to trick him and he had been up to it.

He was only a kid and they couldn’t beat him if he kept himself together.

He heard some discussion on the other side of the door as he was focusing on the pool of light on the floor. And then, the terrible thing happened.

There was a click and the light vanished.

He heard a distant door slam.

They had left the room next to his, and turned off the light in that room.

Now he was really alone, and in total darkness.

(c) 2005 by C. Wayne Owens

(no subject)

Today is a good day. I am 1/2 way through the "I Knew That! Trivia Quiz Book" e-book, I am 2/3 of the way through "No Tights or Capes Needed" (the SF novel here on LJ which will be available along with my other books and CDs eventually on my CafePress page at:
http://www.cafepress.com/seymoure
And they just told me that my copy of "44 years of the Fantastic Four" DVD (550 issues as PDFs) is shipping early next week! (tee hee tee hee)If I enjoy it half as much as I love my "40 Years of Spider-Man" set, it will be wonderful.