The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister - Landon Wark (bill gates best books TXT) 📗

again she spotted the car, sitting, waiting. It evoked the image of a crouched panther... Albeit an old and decrepit panther, but one that could still cause some serious injuries. The headlights blazed to life, flooding the ramp and a section of the underpass. The horde of people shied away into the darkness. As she shielded her eyes against the glare the urge to flee back down with them welled up in her chest. By the time Carmen's brain decided exactly which direction to flee in the car had pulled up beside her, the driver's window down. A large, round face filled up the empty space.

"Hey, Carmen," she said in a voice that might have sounded familiar if Carmen's head had some of its usual clarity. "Your sister said you might be down here."

Henrietta had ratted her out to her parents a few weeks prior, as if she was somehow eager for the entire world to know that her sister was spiralling down the drain of addiction. She placed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, hoping that the pressure would blunt the rusty nail that was being driven into her brain. She thought she might know this woman from one of the college classes she had taken years ago, but it was not in her current capabilities to dig too far down into ashes of the ol' memory hole.

"What d'ya want?" she managed.

The woman in the car looked her over, obviously taken aback by the state she was in. "I—uh—I think I can give you a hand."

"If you want to give me a hand, you can drive me down three blocks," she said with a groan loud enough to let anyone in earshot know she was beyond caring this might be some kind of elaborate mugging.

"Um, sure."

Sandy Jenkins glanced to her right quickly to catch a glimpse of her latest prospect. Immediately she was struck by a twinge of regret. Riding high from her recent successes she had reached out maybe a little too far. The others had had emotional vulnerabilities, but this was something else. This was something that was running into a physical dependency. She had first met Carmen Carruthers while working in a coffee shop years ago and had an immediate non-sexual infatuation with the other woman when she had come in for the weekly reading nights. Carmen had been a persuasive speaker/writer and Sandy had managed to pick her name out of the byline on some of the posts her father had sent her over the past year. They were still good, and published in some of the larger papers in the big city, and then... After a few months off the map the other woman's name had begun popping up in places that made her a little sad. The regional stereotype about political views was not as far off as Sandy would have liked, but she found some comfort in the hope that Carmen didn't actually believe what was coming out through her keyboard.

Upon voicing this she was greeted with a sarcastic snort from her nose pressed against the car window.

"Yeah, no, I love writing about how the government is infecting immigrant kids with measles and sending them off to infect everyone."

She said nothing else and in the silence that followed Sandy surmised that they could make use of Carmen Carruthers, even if a little illegal activity came along with her.

Even with the sun touching the rolling hills of the horizon the heat from the late afternoon persisted. A lazy breeze did little to lessen the sapping effect on the lone figure pushing the loud mower around the stone boundary that delineated the precious plants of the garden. The wheels caught on one of the border stones, pushing it out of place and allowing a stream of black dirt to spill out onto the lawn.

Clayton James cursed and stopped in the relentless march around the property. Without thinking he released the push bar causing the safety to kill the engine. He cursed again and wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

"C'mon boy!" the gruff voice called from the cab of the truck. "You're gonna be out there all night at this rate."

Clayton allowed the voice to fade away into the chorus of cicadas that were thrumming in the trees on the edge of the lawn.

"I'm thirty six, old man," he muttered under his breath as he lowered the clutch and tried to wedge the askew stone back into place with his foot. More dirt spilled around the opposite end.

"Piss."

"If the client sees that stone you're gonna be in a world of—" the old man's chiding trailed off into a fit of coughs.

Looking over at his father fanning himself with an old newspaper in the truck cab Clay stooped down and removed the stone entirely. He thought momentarily of tossing it through the window of the truck but instead used his hand to scoop out the loose dirt and shoved the heavy rectangle back into place, depositing the dirt back within its boundaries. The motion had taken all of fifteen seconds, but it felt more like fifteen minutes, especially with the old man watching him. And he knew he would have to come back later with a trowel and fix the job.

The coughing from inside the truck cab continued long enough to draw Clay's attention, subsiding a moment after. The old man's recovery was slower than all hell, hardly progressing since he had caught the big plague at its height. It would progress a lot faster if he would quit smoking, something Clay had reminded him of several dozen times over the past two years, but the old man simply harrumphed in a way he seemed contractually obligated to and claimed that tobacco was killing whatever was left in his lungs.

The phone in his pocket buzzed and Clayton desperately