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

bottle of flat soda inside. He read the label and, satisfied with the caffeine content, took a drink straight from the bottle.

Bouncing his foot on his chair he gave up waiting for Sandy to show up to deliver new supplies. He took a look around the cabin and at the papers and books that lay impotently around the room. He pursed his lips, took a look outside to the rain clouds that were threatening on the far horizon. A thought that some bland physical activity might loosen some of the gummed up gears that were holding him back seized him.

He grabbed the key to the small shack and locked the door, taking the dirt path towards the house before veering off into the sparse woods surrounding the house.

Carmen Carruthers pulled a sweatshirt over her head. It was far too hot for that choice of garment, but the black, collapsing veins over her forearms gave her little choice. As she adjusted her bra, having shifted as she put on the shirt she was momentarily distracted by a figure walking up the path below her second storey window.

As the figure turned off towards the woods she breathed a sigh of relief.

Jonah McAllister was still an enigma to most of the inhabitants of the house. The one encounter they had had with the (kid? man?) had not gone very well, especially for her. She had felt like there was a giant magnifying glass over her ever since. Every time she had to lock herself in the bathroom with a syringe there seemed to be a pair of eyes leering in at her.

She paused. Had he been able to see her getting dressed through the window?

Probably not.

Carmen frowned and shook her head. She was trying to pull her weight. She was trying to do something to mitigate the risks they were taking in having her on board, but writing something to try and get some kind of consensus out of a bunch of aspiring... wizards(?) was more difficult than she had imagined. When the doors of possibility had swung open for them people had a way of scattering off in all different directions. Paul was insistent on his Jesusing. Clay was the opposite, which was probably in line with what the founder thought, but Clay had no tact to speak of. Jenny seemed to be on board with Paul, but would likely change her mind depending on who was in the room. Ezra was reluctant to take a stand on anything. For the moment the solidarity of the group held, but Carmen was familiar enough with wedge issues to know that religion was king among them.

She opened the door to her room, wincing in the sunlight streaming in from the East. The sound downstairs of plates and glasses clattering around almost immediately caused her stomach to growl ferociously.

Her ligaments complained as she stepped down the curling stairway into the main hallway of the house and towards the kitchen. The rest of her body froze in mid stride as a trio of white shapes flickered on the edge of her peripheral vision. Three cars made the final turn from the lane onto the house lawn, twin swirls of dust blowing out from behind them. The word "Sheriff" was emblazoned along the doors of the side visible to her.

"Fuck!"

An instinct, drilled into her since the first day she had gone out into the city to search for a way to end the terrifying malaise that had gripped her when her prescription had run out, took over and a spike of adrenaline hit her. She swayed, uncertain of which direction to go, deciding on rushing back up the stairs. Her complaining feet pounded up to the second floor, reaching her room as a pounding knock hit the door. Her shoulder bumped into the doorjamb of her room, the pain little more than a glimmer as she yanked open the drawer of her nightstand.

Her hand scooped out the large package of yellowish powder and trio of syringes inside. One of the long cylinders fell from her grasp and slid a short way under the bed. She lost a precious second retrieving it and then running out of the room, banging the opposite shoulder into the doorjamb.

The sound of Sandy walking to the front entrance spurred her on as she slid into the bathroom, slamming the door shut. The powder was easily flushed. The syringes were another matter. She thought for a moment of claiming she had diabetes, but that seemed problematic at best.

As the sound of booted footfalls on the stairs told her that time had run out. She placed the syringes in the sink and did what she could to call up how to do what it was she wanted to do. She wasn't as proficient at the work as Jenny or even Ezra, but she had been paying attention and her memory was reasonably sharp when her brain had its required amount of dopamine.

"Burn baby, burn," she muttered.

As she stumbled through the incantation a strange creeping urgency filled the air along with the cresting of the stairs by the boots of whoever was invading their house. Carmen was mentally preparing for disposing of the metal tips when an orb of white light encompassed the inner bowl of the sink. She shouted and covered her eyes as a blinding wave of light force brushed over her skin.

Blinking in confusion Carmen lowered her hand from her face and found herself staring at what looked like an almost spherical cutout of the ceramic of the sink bowl, almost three inches in diameter. She could see through the hole created in the enamel down to the floor below as a tiny piece of plastic, all that remained of the syringes fell into it. Even a small section of the spout had been sheared clean off, the clean metal underneath glinting at her