Sole Survivor

to throb and flicker. Each tremulous brown-out reminded Joe of the pulsing lights at the Delmann house, and his skin prickled with dread.
        The owner was the tall black man who had broken into tears on the porch. He was Louis Tucker, Mahalia's brother, who had divorced Rose eighteen years ago, when she proved unable to have children. She had turned to him in her darkest hour. And after all this time, though he had a wife and children whom he loved, Louis clearly still loved Rose too.
        “If you really believe she's not dead, that she's only moved on,” Joe said coldly, “why cry for her?”
        “I'm crying for me,” said Louis. “Because she's gone from here and I'll have to wait through a lot of days to see her again.”
        Two suitcases stood in the front room, just inside the door. They contained the belongings of the child.
        She was at a window, staring out at the Ford, with sorrow pulled around her like sackcloth.
        “I'm scared,” Louis said. “Rose was going to stay up here with Nina, but I don't think it's safe now. I don't want to believe it could be true-but they might've found me before I got out of the last place with Nina. Couple times, way back, I thought the same car was behind us. Then it didn't keep up.”
        “They don't have to. With their gadgets, they can follow from miles away.”
        “And then just before you pulled into the driveway, I went out on to the porch 'cause I thought I heard a helicopter. Up in these mountains in this wind-does that make sense?”
        “You better get her out of here,” Joe agreed.
        As the wind slapped the electrical lines against the house, Louis paced to the fireplace and back, a hand pressed to his forehead as he tried to put the loss of Rose out of his mind long enough to think what to do. “I figured you and Rose… well, I thought the two of you were taking her. And if they're on to me, then won't she be safer with you?”
        “If they're on to you,” Joe said, “then none of us is safe here, now, any more. There's no way out.”
        The lines slapped the house, slapped the house, and the lights pulsed, and Louis walked to the fireplace and picked up a battery-powered, long-necked, butane match from the hearth.
        The girl turned from the window, eyes wide, and said, “ No .”
        Louis Tucker flicked the switch on the butane match, and blue flame spurted from the nozzle. Laughing, he set his own hair on fire and then his shirt.
        “Nina!” Joe cried.
        The girl ran to his side.
        The stink of burning hair spread through the room.
        Ablaze, Louis moved to block the front door.
        From the waistband of his jeans, Joe drew the pistol, aimed-but couldn't pull the trigger. This man confronting him was not really Louis Tucker now; it was the boy-thing, reaching out three thousand miles from Virginia. And there was no chance that Louis would regain control of his body and live through this night. Yet Joe hesitated to squeeze off a shot, because the moment that Louis was dead, the boy would remote someone else.
        The girl was probably untouchable, able to protect herself with her own paranormal power. So the boy would use Joe-and the gun in Joe's hand-to shoot the girl point-blank in the head.
        “This is fun ,” the boy said in Louis's voice, as flames seethed off his hair, as his ears charred and crackled, as his forehead and cheeks blistered. “ Fun ,” he said, enjoying his ride inside Louis Tucker but still blocking the exit to the porch.
        Maybe, at the instant of greatest jeopardy, Nina could send herself into that safe bright blueness as she had done just before the 747 ploughed into the meadow. Maybe the bullets fired at her would merely pass through the empty air where she had been. But there was a chance that she was still not fully recovered, that she wasn't yet able to perform such a taxing feat, or even that she could perform it but would be mortally drained by it this time.
        “Out the back!” Joe shouted. “Go, go!”
        Nina raced to the door between the front room and the kitchen at the rear of the cabin.
        Joe backed after her, keeping the pistol trained on the burning man, even though he didn't intend to use it.
        Their only hope was that the boy's love of “fun” would give them the chance to get out of the cabin, into the open, where his ability to conduct remote viewing and to engage in