Chapter I
I was sitting on the edge of the overpass on I35N halfway between Waco and Temple when the DPS cruiser hit its siren and pulled over. I slowly set my backpack down and swiveled to face them, keeping my back to the drop but mindful of my balance.
The two front doors flew open and a matched pair of officers in starched uniforms and crisp straw hats under burr cuts approached me cautiously.
“Son,” the younger male drawled in a South Texas accent that reminded me of my own. “You’re not thinking of jumping, are you?”
“Down there’s where they found her,” I told him and watched as their brows creased in confusion.
“Pink Socks. That’s where they found her body,” I returned.
He looked over the edge. “Sure enough. Down in that ditch.”
“What’s your name, son?” The other asked me and I stared briefly at their name badges. V. Striker and T. Lambrecht.
“Cale Snowdon,” I answered.
“Cale---you know the FBI has a BOLO out on you? They think you’ve been kidnapped. What in Sam’s Seven Hells are you doing out here?”
“You ever wonder what it’s like to fly?” I asked dreamily, looking over my shoulder at the hundred-foot drop.
“Don’t do anything foolish, son,” the one called Lambrecht cautioned sidling closer.
I swung my legs around awkwardly; they had only come out of the casts a week earlier. My crutches were lying in the grass nearby.
“Come on, Cale,” he soothed. “Give me your hand, let’s get in the cruiser, go back home.”
“Don’t touch me,” I cried in alarm. I hated it when anyone touched me, I saw their innermost desires, hidden shames and things they denied even to themselves.
“I want to die,” I whispered quietly but he heard me and spoke softly into his mike.
“Cale, your uncle is worried about you. Come on back, now. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”
He turned his head and muttered something to his partner who moved to flank me.
I scooted further down the railing, my jean jacket popped open and the neck of my hospital gown showed clearly stuffed into the stolen jeans that were four sizes too big and six inches too long but they were the only ones available to me when I’d rummaged through the patient closet in the room next to mine and stolen them.
“How did you get here from Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in Austin?” the older man asked.
“Hitched.”
I had; everyone wanted to stop for the lonely figure on crutches but I was particular about who I climbed in with. Some of those that stopped were sexual predators sensing an easy mark or so they thought but as soon as my hand touched the car or truck door, I knew what kind of character the driver had.
“You hitchhiked?” He was aghast. “After what happened to you and your family, you hitched? Are you nuts?”
I looked at him, in the eyes. “Yes,” I answered seriously and sadly. “I am.” And I jumped.
Of course, I didn’t get far. The other DPS officer had a lariat and roped me as soon as I pushed off and when I jumped; the noose tightened around my arms, shoulders and ribs, snugged up tight and stopped my fall some four feet over the edge. I dangled, unable to breathe as the rope compressed my lungs but he hauled me up rapidly. Both of them grabbed my jacket and hoisted me back onto the concrete apron.
I was pale, unresponsive and in shock. One of them ran back to the cruiser, dug into the trunk and came back with a blanket, which he wrapped around me.
We heard the wailing of sirens, an ambulance and more cruisers. Within minutes, a ring surrounded us of vehicles, which disgorged more uniformed personnel.
Four EMTs knelt at my side, checked me over and carefully lifted me onto a gurney.
“He tried to jump,” the DPS officer told the lead paramedic.
“Cale, how are you feeling? Any pain?”
I just stared, went away so that their touch would not affect me. I could and did wander in my own mind in a world I created to escape the horrors of the real one.
“Cale? Wake up, Cale. Someone wants to talk to you.”
Slowly, I turned my head and perused my surroundings. I was back in a hospital with cheerful cartoon characters on the walls and bright artwork everywhere.
It was not a place I remembered, though all hospitals looked generically the same. This one was not Cardinal Glennon of Austin but another in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex. I was not in a private room but a large area with several beds all housing children from four to fifteen. Most of them were awake and happily playing with toys or their visitors.
Next to my bed was my uncle, my father’s twin and a man I did not know; he wore a three-piece suit that was expensive and screamed feds.
“Cale, how are you?” My uncle’s face was compassionate but he was a stranger to me. Even though he was a twin to my father and identical, I did not know him. I did not remember any of my family. They had all been murdered by a serial killer and the only reason I was still alive was because I had lied to my parents and twin brother; taken the four wheeler out to the far pasture to goof off rather than work on the fence. Machine and I both had fallen into a brand new sinkhole that went twenty feet deep.
I fell off the ATV and hit the bottom breaking both legs, and then the vehicle landed on me, broke my arm, my nose, my pelvis and crushed my skull.
I lay in that hole for three days until a neighbor came looking for the help my dad had promised in installing a well pump and he found instead, a slaughterhouse of bodies.
Someone or something, had broken in, dropped the truck on top of my dad, Tasered, raped and butchered my mom and then did the same thing to my twin sisters and my twin brothers.
My family was unique in that way; we were all sets of twins, even my mom and dad. We lived on a ranch that had been in the family for nearly 150 years and twins went back even then.
My fall had resulted in a skull fracture, severe concussion and coma; when I woke 72 days after the accident, I remembered nothing of the last ten years. My earliest memory was of a heifer calf poking its nose into my face on a porch swing around the age of three. When the nurses told me my family was dead, murdered, I asked, “Who?”
I did not remember any of them.
I spent the next three weeks in the pediatric wing. When I became somewhat mobile on crutches, I escaped one night by stealing clothes, some money and the crutches. No one came out to stop me as I hobbled down the hallways to the exits and out onto Fifth Street.
It took me several hours to reach 35S but it was more of a case of needing to rest frequently; my health was precarious after surgeries on all my breaks. I could not move fast on my own. I had made it all of 75 miles up the interstate and been compelled to stop at the lonely overpass where the murdered girl wearing only pink socks had been found.
Her violent death and lingering emotions had been overwhelming and triggered the despair I was already feeling from my own situation.
“Cale,” my uncle’s voice had the unique ability to draw me back from wherever my mind had skittered.
I looked at him from out of the corner of my eye; I did not like to see anyone full on, it made me nervous to have him or her stare at my eyes.
My family was known for their luminous, oddly colored deep violet eyes and their strange psychic powers, or so they told me. I knew that when someone touched me, I knew what they had done that they didn’t want anyone to know.
If you raped your daughter, I saw it when you put me in the wheelchair. If you stole drugs from the med cabinet to feed your habit, I felt it when you stuck the needle in my arm.
When you held the stethoscope to my chest and listened to my heartbeat, I saw you steal your way through med school and perform illegal abortions that killed a young girl.
“Cale, look at me.”
I could only obey that insistent voice and both sets of violet eyes looked into each other. I sighed in relief. Nothing came across from his mind to mine but love, compassion and fear. Fear for me.
“What were you thinking, Cale?” Jamison Tucker Snowdon asked quietly. “Your aunt and I have been frantic with worry. We thought he had come back and taken you from the hospital. We called the FBI. This is Dr. Jedidiah Deleon.”
“Hello, Cale,” the agent said and I heard Boston in his accent. He made no move to touch me; his face was narrow with dark brows, electric blue eyes and was more than a generic clone. He wore his hair short but it was styled rather than just cut; he had creases at the corners of his eyes and a frown line between his brows.
“What do you want?” I asked wearily, wanting only to go back to sleep where the constant bombardment of psychic impressions did not follow me.
“We want to make sure you’re safe, Cale. Safe from whoever did that to your family and safe from yourself. Will you tell me what you’re feeling?”
“Nothing. I feel nothing,” I said with a depressed sigh. “Just whatever everyone else is feeling. It’s like I have no emotions of my own, anymore.”
“So it wasn’t your idea to jump?”
I laughed shortly. “Oh, that was my idea. I thought if I jumped, I could just fly away from everything that haunts me.”
“You know you can’t fly, Cale? You would have smashed head first onto the concrete and died.”
“There is no death,” I muttered.
There was a knock on the door and a nurse with Hispanic features poked her head in.
“Time for your pills, hon,” she said cheerily and I scooted back in the bed up against the wall so that cold Sheetrock touched me.
The FBI agent held his hand out and she looked startled. “He doesn’t want contact with your body,” Deleon explained. “Ever hear of psychometry?” The nurse shook her head, asked with a lifted eyebrow.
He explained. “It’s a genuine psychic sense where the person holds an object and can read off it the last person’s emotions or actions that held it. So, if you’ve screamed at your husband, beat your child or done something you’re ashamed of, he knows it.”
She handed him the cup of pills. He looked through it.
“Tegretol, Pen VK, Zoloft, Xanax, Tylenol 3. Seizure meds, antibiotics, anti-anxiety and anti-depressants,” he recited. “Have to be careful of the anti-depressants. He’s still only a child, just fourteen. They can make him more depressed.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“Yes. And a Special Agent with the FBI,” he showed her his badge and ID. She left my cubicle, pulling the curtain around us.
I was just thirteen. My birthday had been only a month after the massacre. One of the first things I had seen when I came out of my coma in the ICU were balloons and gifts with ‘Happy Birthday, Cale’ in big letters emblazoned everywhere.
“We have a lady coming to talk to you, Cale. She’s a counselor, very nice. Very intuitive,” my uncle told me.
“You mean she’s a shrink.”
“Yes. She’s that, too. She’ll shrink your problems down to a manageable size.”
“Why didn’t you let me die?” I asked. “Why didn’t I die with the rest of them?”
“We’re not going to let that happen, Cale,” Deleon interrupted. “You’re alive for a reason. Whether you believe in God or whatever, there is a reason for your existence, why you survived. Hold on to that.” He handed me the pills with a glass of water and a straw.
Cautiously, I took them, sensing nothing from his touch but a calm blankness. “I can’t feel you,” I said in wonder, as if I’d found a safe harbor in a storm. I reached out the weaker arm that had both bones shattered and still wore the soft cast but it was my left and dominant hand. I grasped his forearm in the blue suit with the crisp blue shirt and sighed.
Nothing. He emanated nothing but a bland shell of still waters. “Uncle Jamesy,” I sighed and he started as I called him the name I’d last used when I was three. “I’m going to sleep.”
“That’s okay, Cale. We’ll be here when you wake up. In fact, you won’t be left alone for the next 78 hours.”
I yawned as the pills took effect, rolled over and pulled the sheets over my head.