the kind of luck she would have.
The old man who’d spit spoke in a lisping Castillian Spanish that she automatically, though with some difficulty, translated. “Demo. His vehicle slipped. Demo’s car fell off that loco jack he made.” His voice was as lacking in emotion as his face, but creaked like the door the gas station attendant had pushed through only minutes earlier.
The gas station attendant, or possibly the owner, a short squat man of about fifty with at least three days’ growth of jet black beard, a filthy once white T-shirt, and a thick, black mustache that fully covered his upper lip, barked several curses in Spanish and broke into a run toward the side of his station. Just as he was rounding the corner, he slithered to a muddy stop and yelled at Melanie in English, “She doesn’t turn off! Close the gas, will you, señora?”
As if his words broke some sort of peculiar spell woven by the scream, the crash and the seeming indifference of the old men playing checkers, Melanie turned to “close” the gas, fumbling with the antiquated apparatus that passed as a gas tank. As she did so, she heard the attendant—owner?—yell from out of sight, again in that curiously lisping Castillian Spanish, “Abuelito, call the sheriff for an ambulance! And get me some help here. Demo’s trapped under the car!”
While one of the old men, presumably the grandfather the attendant had called to, pushed his chair back and seemingly slowly reached for the telephone—a device that looked as though it had been installed by Alexander Bell himself—Melanie heard the loud curses of the attendant from the other side of the low, dilapidated building.
Even as the older man called the sheriff, the slip-slop of many feet on the mud street told Melanie that help had arrived. Six or seven men appeared from out of the forest and the nearby adobe structures she had earlier mistaken for abandoned, or, perhaps magically, from the slick, muddy street that five minutes’ earlier had been totally devoid of people. They were followed rapidly by several women, most of them dressed in black, one carrying a small child.
Melanie didn’t feel as if she was in the United States any longer. She had stepped back in time to some mountain village in a different country.
Again Melanie glanced at Chris, willing him in vain to halt his toys’ dance. Again, her worry was in vain. No one noticed her son; all attention was focused on whatever had transpired around the side of the dilapidated garage.
“¡Uno…dos…tres!” the attendant yelled, and on the count of three the combined voices of all the men groaned in seven-part harmony. “Again! Try it again!”
Melanie told an unresponsive Chris to stay in the car, and followed the sound of the voices until she stood just around the pocked corner of the gas station. Then she averted her head in quick negation, closing her eyes sharply against the sight of a man lying too still, apparently crushed by the old Chevy that had lost its mooring on the jack and now was being held some two feet above the man by seven straining men.
“Throw it over,” the attendant yelled.
“But Demo’s Chevy—”
“Throw it over! Who cares about the car? On three…. ¡Uno…dos…tres!”
The heavy, battered classic flipped over with a groaning shudder and slithered down a muddy embankment.
“¡Madre de Dios! He’s alive!” a woman screamed.
Melanie opened her eyes again and tracked the line of the woman’s pointing finger. The mechanic, though bloodied and covered with oil and grime, was indeed feebly moving. Melanie couldn’t have said how, but he was.
“Jaime, andale! Fetch El Rayo!” the attendant yelled. Then, without looking to see if the young man he had clapped on the shoulder did his bidding, he bent over the hapless mechanic.
“But, Pablo…” the young man protested.
“Now, damn it! Fetch him!” the attendant snapped, again without looking at Jaime. The youth stood uncertainly for a moment, then bolted into the thick trees flanking the gas station to the north.
Pablo bent lightly, resting a hand on the injured man’s brow. “Demo…Demo, boy, can you hear me? You’ll be all right. Abuelito called for an ambulance.” The attendant looked upward, as though praying, then back down as he said urgently, “And he comes soon.”
Melanie held her breath. El Rayo—Rah-e-yoh—might be translated to mean The Man of Thunderbolts. Was her quest to be ended this easily? Or was the peculiar term, “El Rayo,” some odd colloquialism for doctor or even ambulance? But the attendant had said, “He comes…”
He…El Rayo.
She’d spent the last nerve-racking two weeks dodging around the country, slinking in and out of seedy hotel rooms at night, spending entire days in a paid-with-cash rental Buick, accompanied only by her unusual and telekinetic son, seeking a man who was said to destroy brick buildings by a mere wave of his hands. A man who, according to the files at the PRI, was a recluse, a barbarian and a would-be killer. A man who could literally move the earth or eradicate it with a look.
Was he the man with thunderbolts in his fingertips?
Melanie realized that until this moment, hearing the odd designation, she had nearly given up hope of finding the man she sought. She had never felt foolish in her quest, that wasn’t it. Anything she could possibly do now, any bizarre hope of saving Chris from the scientific experiments at The Psionic Research Institute was worth any investigation. But just an hour earlier, lost and tired, her back aching from the many miles behind the wheel of her car, and tired of dodging free-floating bits of tissue, food wrappers, or even the road map, she had been prepared to admit defeat.
If there was a powerful telekinetic hiding in these rugged, terrifying mountains, it was obvious he didn’t want to be found. Up to now she’d been relying on every facet of her own telepathic abilities, her own clairvoyance, and they might have led her here, but she wasn’t even sure where here was.
From the files, she’d illegally studied, she’d known he was reclusive. She’d known he’d be hiding. And dangerous? her mind offered. Yes, she’d also known that, both from the files and from her own chaotic and vague dreams in which a man named Teo Sandoval called her name as electricity flew from his very fingertips. Dreams that always left her shaking, a scream choked in her throat.
But at the same time, the very dangerousness that was inherent to the man she sought, dreamed about, was what made him her last hope of saving Chris from being taken from her. Her former husband, Tom, had already signed over his custody rights to the PRI…it hadn’t taken them long to try to secure hers. And when she’d refused, still furious with her ex-husband for even thinking he could get away with such a thing, they had made it perfectly clear how little an obstacle they considered her. If she weren’t around, they’d said, Chris would become a ward of the court. And since Chris’s own father wished them to protect his only son, no court in the world would deny their petition for full custodial rights.
She had fled the institute that night, knowing full well that the PRI scientists, privately funded and not regulated by any governmental watch committees, believed themselves above any and all laws. They had no intention of letting anything get in their way, especially not a mother who didn’t exhibit any sign of their coveted telekinesis. So, by fair or foul means, they planned to snatch Chris and harbor him at the Psionic Research Institute permanently, a captive subject to their bizarre experiments and brutal testings.
A woman holding a small child moaned and sagged, but was caught
