Sal sat on the expensive sofa in front of a fireplace. He stared into the flames, watched them dance; it calmed him down. His experiences at Giant Hill had been intense.
Alien DNA?
A new species?
It was hard to take in, but he knew there was a truth to it. He just knew too little of his own origin.
Mack had mentioned Sal's grandfather and the questions he had seemed to burn a hole in the back of his head. As far as he could tell from Seth’s story, Seth had “normal” parents, DNA-wise anyway. There was something else behind it, and his head spun—it was all too science fiction for him.
He'd spent thirty minutes relaxing in the Jacuzzi, and he could've sworn he'd heard alarmed voices from far away, but he hadn't cared; the water had been massaging been his tense body. It had probably been Dante going off on Mack anyway.
Sal's clothes were in the dryer, and he was wrapped in a Versace bathrobe, crafted in absorbent cotton with printed borders—the place was over the top.
Orion had, with a single touch, healed his eye. There wasn't even a single scratch left behind. “Why aren’t you a doctor?" Sal had asked with admiration. "You could change everything.”
“I don’t think the world's ready for it,” Orion had sniffed. “Let alone the medical pharmacies. They would have me hunted down and shoot me like a dog. They don’t like competition. Medical pharmacies don’t create cures, they create customers.
“Have you ever heard the story of a guy named Rick Simpson?” Orion had asked.
Sal had shaken his head.
“Rick Simpson cured his own cancer using cannabis oil, and then he started helping others with his cannabis—or rather, Rick Simpson—oil. After his failed legal efforts to approve cannabis oil for medical purposes, Rick was a man marked by the Medical Mafia. He soon realized that the cancer industry was focused on endless treatments, until death do they part, for the highest possible profits, rather than focused on a cure, and Rick exiled himself to the Dutch city of Amsterdam for a time.”
“That’s fucked up!” Sal had said, upset.
“True, but it's an issue we’re working on,” Orion had said, patting Sal on the shoulder. He'd left without saying another word.
Currently, angry voices were sounding from somewhere in the house. Sal sneaked up to the door and opened it. The voices became clearer. Sal stepped further out into the hall.
“This is your fault, Seth," he heard. "If you hadn't been so busy flirting with the mind-hacker we wouldn’t be in this mess!” The voice belonged to Dante, and he was furious. “You're losing your focus.”
“Why do you have to be such a dick, Dante?” Seth replied coolly.
“Because I never had what you have. You just waltz through life with your money and looks. Unlike you, I had to fight for everything. You just think you can smile your way out of everything.”
“Here we go again,” Seth said annoyed. Obviously, they'd had this conversation before. “Stop it! What's done is done."
"Now we have to focus on fixing the problem,” Darwin said firmly.
“But Darwin—” Dante started, but he was cut off.
“End of discussion,” Darwin said irritated.
“Seth!” he commanded.
What followed after, Sal couldn’t hear. He did, however, hear footsteps coming up the stairs, and he hurried back inside the room with the fireplace and tried to look casual, expecting Seth to walk through the door at any moment.
Thirty seconds later, Seth was standing in the doorway, watching him with his devilish eyes. “Hey,” he said softly.
“Hey,” Sal responded without looking at him. He just kept staring into the flames.
There was something funny going on, and they needed his help. You didn’t have to be a mind-hacker to know that.
How long had he been there, staring at the fireplace?
He could feel Seth observing him as he came closer. “Are you doing okay?” Seth asked, still in that soft tone of voice.
Sal just held up this thumb. They expected too much of him. Everything was so new.
“Sal, something happened, and we need your help,” Seth said cautiously.
Sal wanted to tell Seth to save his breath, but he couldn’t.
Seth touched his eyebrow lightly, where his injury used to be, and Sal closed his eyes for a second.
“I’d do anything for you.” Sal stood up from his seat. He looked deep into Seth’s eyes and reached out to touch his face.
Seth remained still as he gazed back at Sal.
“Has Seth filled you in on the situation?” Darwin’s voice echoed from the doorway, breaking the spell.
“No, I was just about to do it.” Seth sounded like a kid caught with his hands in the cookie jar.
“Sal, a private detective followed you and Seth here to Giant Hill. He knows too much. Will you help us? Just use your trade, and we'll send him on his way.”
“Porter?”
“Yeah, you know him?”
“I’m afraid so. Get me my clothes, and I’ll see what I can do.” Sal was full of confidence which had something to do with Seth, who hadn’t moved an inch from his spot next to him.
Darwin yelled some orders and Sal’s clothes were immediately brought to him, nice and dry. The room cleared to allow him to get dressed, and Sal wondered what the hell he'd gotten himself into. For a minute, he considered climbing out the window, but he had to deal with his situation. That idiot, Porter, had come too close. He could spoil everything.
Seth peeked in through the open door. “Are you ready?” He smiled, led Sal down the stairs, and back into the dining room where all of the Giants were waiting. They paused whatever it was they'd been doing when Sal entered.
Porter had been tied to a chair and gagged with a rag. He looked frightened but also defiant at the same time. Dante stood behind him, resting a cup of coffee on his head.
“Work your magic, kid, and we’ll ship him out of here,” Darwin said determinedly. “And Dante stop using the guy as a coffee table, will ya?”
Dante giggled and went to join the others.
Sal took a step forward, studying Porter with curiosity. “I knew you were going to be trouble.”
Porter said something angry that was muffled by his gag. Sal sat down in front of him as he'd done with Vickie. He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. Sal opened his mind, and the patterns began to form in front of him. They formed the shape of a gate, a big, iron gate.
Sal took another deep breath in an attempt to grasp what was going on. Porter was a fighter, and he wasn't willing to give information up without a fight.
So, Mr. Porter, you think you can keep me out, Sal thought, as he built-up energy and focused solely on Porter's center. He pushed on, penetrated the darkness within Porter. Sal saw light, and he went for it, drilling his way through Porter’s armor. Sal searched for a happy place, and it didn’t take him long to come by it: a lovely wife and cute children, playing in a beautiful garden.
He felt Porter trying to shake him off, and he grabbed onto his subconscious mind and held on. Sal continued to hack his way through. All he had to do now was to change the codes.
Sal began to transmit: “When you met me at my house, you discovered me and my friends had nothing to do with Ted’s disappearance. You decided to leave us alone and focus your attention elsewhere.
"You never came to Giant Hill, and you don’t remember anything about us Giants. As a matter of fact, you received information after you left my house that Ted had been spotted at a local bar and you went to act on that information. Maybe it was Ted at that bar, maybe it wasn’t, but your story begins there, at the bar.
Sal took a few deep breaths and withdrew himself the way he went in. When he opened his eyes, everything was black for a minute, and he was sweaty and thirsty as hell—Porter had put up one hell of a fight.
Seth helped Sal to a chair. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Sal nodded. “I just need some water,” he said.
Walcott fetched him a bottle of water, and Sal gulped it eagerly down.
“You did it, kid," Darwin said. "You played him like a violin. He's knocked out.”
“We need to dump him at a bar near Strong Edge. He’ll pick up from there, unaware he ever met us,” Sal pointed out.
“Good.” Darwin rubbed his hands together. “Dante: get him loaded and take him to Strong Edge.”
“Why me? It was the mind-hacker and Seth that brought him here.” Dante was clearly displeased with the order he'd been given.
“Because you need to learn some manners,” Mack answered.
Dante’s black eyes appeared lethal as he seethed in anger. The situation was tense—Dante’s trade was not one to be taken lightly, but telekinesis, when mixed with Dante’s mood swings could prove a lethal cocktail.
Sal could tell that Darwin and the others were prepared for a battle, as Darwin’s muscles tightened, and he closed his fingers into a fist.
“I’ll take Porter back, Sal said, hoping it would ease the tension. "This is entirely my fault.
“I fucked up. It's on me, not Dante.” Sal scrutinized Dante carefully.
The look in Dante’s eyes changed. “See? That wasn’t so hard," he said, removing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
What the hell was wrong with that guy? Sal wondered. He was totally manic.
“Let’s go have a smoke, Dante,” Trent—the one able to breathe underwater if Sal remembered correctly—said. He had a sort of 1950s charm to him. Given his leather jacket and the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, he sort of resembled James Dean.
Darwin sighed as Dante left the room. “Poor kid," he said. "Why do you have to push his buttons like that, Mack?”
“I have work to do,” Mack answered indifferently, and he left the room.
“Please forgive us, Sal," Darwin said. "It isn’t always like that with us.”
“That's okay," Sal said, choosing his next words carefully, "but what is it with Dante? He seems so…highly flammable.”
“I suppose it's better you know.” Darwin pulled out a chair and sat across from Sal and cleared his throat. “Dante never had it easy. He’s just scared of losing his family again.”
"What do you mean, again?" Sal asked.
“Dante hasn't had an easy life. The kids at school were unkind to him because of his appearance. He was feared among the townsfolk because people knew there was something about him to watch out for. Dante's never met any sort of kindness or understanding. His only support in life was his mother who loved him unconditionally.
"Dante’s father left when he was only a year old because he didn’t believe Dante was his child. He didn’t look like any of his parents, and his father was convinced his mother had cheated on him. His father went on a rampage and pretty much smashed everything in the house.
"When he turned his rage on Dante's mother, he'd had enough. Dante’s desperate, anger combined with his growing power ended badly. Dante slammed his father against the wall and out through the closed window using telekinesis.
"The police didn’t think that either Dante or his mother had the strength to throw his father around like that, so they looked around for a mystery perpetrator which they never found.
"Things were quiet for a while, until the catastrophe years later.
"After school one day, a sixteen-year-old Dante returned to find his mother's badly beaten body hanging from the back porch. Her jaw appeared to have been broken, and her left temple had been smashed in. She'd been stabbed before the rope had been wrapped around her neck.
"Dante cried out, and neighbors came to his aid, but it was too late. His mother was taken to the hospital but was pronounced dead a short time later.
"Inside the house, the kitchen had been stained with blood, but nothing else had been touched. A blood-covered hammer was found behind the house.
"A heartbroken Dante was placed in foster care. Four days after the murder, Dante got a letter from the killer. The sender claimed he'd murdered Jane because she was a fucking whore. Dante was convinced it was his father who had been responsible for his mother’s murder, and he ran away from his foster family and lived on the streets while he searched for his father.
"Dante eventually tracked him down.
"His father was found by the police two days later. He'd been brutally beaten to death. Luckily, I got to Dante before the cops did.”
“Fuck,” was all Sal could muster.
“How did you find him?” Sal asked.
“Well, it took me a while, but I always have feelers out for something unusual. Mack’s supercomputer can sniff out almost anything.”
“Is that how you found me?” Sal asked.
“Yeah, we heard of an exceptional talent at a high school, someone with an unusual appearance, so we began to observe you, Sal, and we weren’t disappointed."
“My run-ins with Dante were all arranged by you?”
“Yes, except it wasn’t supposed to end the way it did in the locker room, but Dante got too cocky.”
“How do you know so much about Vickie and Ted?”
Darwin took a sip of coffee before he continued. “Mack hacks the computers of women's shelters. That way we know what to keep an eye out for. We learned that Vickie called them several times.”
“What do you do with this information?”
“We help those who can’t help themselves.”
Sal was about to ask what kind of services they provided when Seth knocked over a glass of water onto Sal’s pants. “Man, I'm such an idiot," Seth said, grabbing a few napkins and placing them in Sal's lap. "I'm sorry, Sal.”
“I got it, thanks,” Sal said. He felt a rosiness spring upon his cheeks and spread to the rest of his face.
Dante, who had reappeared in the dining room alongside Trent, stopped when he saw Sal and Seth. “No, that one's too easy,” he said with a big sneer on his face.
The others at the bar giggled at Dante’s remark, but Seth just rolled his eyes as Darwin poured another cup of coffee. Logan Porter made a snoring sound which made everyone turn to stare at him. They seemed to have forgotten about him despite his obvious presence in the room.
Darwin rose from his chair. “We'd better get this fucker out of here before he wakes up.”
“Right. Just put him in my bus, and I'll take him,” Sal said.
“I got it,” Seth said, tossing the guy over his shoulder. “Keys!”
Sal threw Seth the keys to the bus, and he disappeared without another sound.
Sal got up slowly from his chair, embarrassed about his wet pants and uncertain what to do next, but Darwin came to his rescue. ”Thank you for coming, Sal." He shook his hand lightly. "You truly are remarkable.”
“Thank you for having me," he said bashfully. "I can’t believe there are more out there like me.”
Darwin looked delighted. “We're one big family here. I hope you understand that.”
Sal nodded and bit his lip. “I have to ask: do you all have 'normal' parents?”
“Yes. We're all children of the human race—we're just more evolved than our parents are,” Darwin said.
“Okay. Thank you, Darwin. Good night.” He turned to the rest of the gang. “Thank you, and goodnight. It was so nice to meet you all.”
They lifted their drinks in their hands and bid him farewell.
“See you, mind-hacker. Buckle-up and enjoy the ride,” Dante said.
Sal felt something lurking at the back of his mind. The situation felt peculiar, but these were peculiar people.
Like him.
What were they not telling him?
Sal felt his mind expand around the room. It crept in wherever it was possible, searching for cracks that might reveal information.
Thoughts flooded toward him like a spark running toward dynamite. Sal looked at Darwin yet again. “South Africa," he said. "You've been to South Africa. You almost died. You want to make the world a better place.”
Darwin didn’t speak—the expression on his face said it all; he'd been caught off-guard. “Yeah," he eventually said. "Where did that come from?”
Sal shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “I'm sorry. That wasn’t polite, but I can’t always control it. That's all I saw.”
“That’s all right,” Darwin said, still flustered.
The rest of the gang sat frozen for second but eventually went back to their drinks. Dante was the only one wearing a big smirk on his face. He was a joker, able to flip in any direction, completely unpredictable.
Sal left the house. He hadn’t told Darwin the whole truth. He had seen something else.
Rather than head straight for his bus, he switched directions and headed to the barn. Something told him he needed to examine the barn.