Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Yes?” I said calmly.

“I need you to come with me.” He gestured toward his car.

“Did Fish send you?” I asked, my initial fear having washed away.

“Yes.” He fidgeted with the gun in his hand. “Come with me, outside.”

“No,” I said.

“Come. With. ME!” Each word came out louder than the last. He was shaking. This guy was not a cop; he was not used to holding a gun.

“No, you have to go right now,” I said, my voice steady.

And then he raised his gun up to point it at me and said, “Oh god, I’m so sorry …” He closed his eyes, and suddenly I realized he wasn’t here to abduct me. Still my panic wouldn’t come. I yelled, “MAYA, GET DOWN.”

A fuzzy blur streaked out of the darkness and onto the man’s face, screaming high-pitched and inhuman. The gun popped, but I didn’t feel anything. I reached out and grabbed his wrist with my left hand and squeezed. He screamed. The bone under my pinky went first, and then the one cradled in the pad between my thumb and forefinger cracked. His arm felt like Play-Doh in my hand.

He dropped to his knees as I let go.

“What the fuck! What the fuck!” Maya was yelling behind me.

“It’s OK,” I said.

“Maya has been shot.” Carl’s voice came out of a smartwatch that the monkey was wearing like a collar.

I turned around in time to see monkey Carl arrive at Maya’s side, but she pushed them away. “No!” she said in terror and anger. I felt like I was floating, like I was seeing from outside of my body.

She made a noise, just a long low vowel sound.

“Maya …” I was suddenly on my knees next to her. I didn’t remember getting there. I finally broke eye contact and looked at her. She coughed. Blood came out of her mouth.

“Maya!” I shouted. I didn’t know what else to say. I looked down at her body and didn’t even see where she had been hit. The black folding fabric of her hoodie was obscuring what had happened. I lifted it up and saw, under her right breast, a black hole.

“No. No no no no!” I realized it was my voice. Apply pressure. You have to apply pressure.

“CALL SOMEONE!” I said to Carl. They were a monkey, but they had to know how to get help. “CALL SOMEONE!” I pushed my hands onto the wound. The blood came up through my fingers. Maya was crying, awake, in pain, her breathing coming in small, rapid gasps.

“No NO NO!” I heard myself screaming. A mantra now. Whatever dam had kept my emotions at bay had broken. The force of them now eroded everything inside of me until I was nothing but the fear.

And then my left hand began to … change. The stony fingers merged with each other until it was not a hand at all. I was pushing on her ribs, but now I could feel that my hand was not solid. It was melting. I could feel it trickling down through the fingers of my right hand and into the hole in her chest.

Her eyes squeezed shut and she gasped. “AHHHH! What is … what is happening?” she asked.

“I don’t know!” I said in my own panic. I wanted to pull away, but I could not imagine leaving her. Suddenly, my oozing hand began to retract into itself and re-form where it had been. I pulled my hands back from her and saw that the spot where the hole had been was now a writhing, pulsing mass of the white stuff. As I watched, from its center rose a small lump of yellow metal. The bullet.

I looked down at my left hand; it was noticeably smaller than the right and had no pinky finger.

“She will be all right,” Carl said in my ear. “We have to go.”

I shot up from Maya’s side and ran toward the door. The man had stood up from where he’d dropped when I broke him, and was stumbling back toward a small gray car. Time flashed forward, and suddenly I was shoving him with both hands. He flew forward, crunching against the hood of his car. Another gap in my memory. Now I was standing over him, his back on the hood of his gray Honda. I reached up, pulling my now thinner, four-fingered left hand back. His eyes were big and wide and weak. In my mind, I envisioned what was about to happen. When I punch him , I thought, the hand will go through his head and into the metal of his car . I don’t think I wanted to kill him—I just wanted to put my hand through his head. And then everything went black.

MAYA

I didn’t feel like I was dying anymore, but I also did not feel good. My chest felt like a professional had punched it with brass knuckles. With every wet, bloody breath, my chest shouted like I’d breathed in a handful of thumbtacks. As I stood, I felt light-headed, like I might pass out. I looked down and saw thick smears of blood on the floor and almost fainted but managed to hold it together.

April had just run outside, and I needed to see her. When I got to the doorway, I saw taillights trailing away, and outlined on the edge of the porch light’s reach was a body lying on the ground. I ran to her.

“APRIL!”

She didn’t move.

“Maya,” a soft, careful voice came behind me. I didn’t want to turn because I knew what I’d seen. That thing, that little furry thing that had come to me after I got shot. But what else was I going to do? I turned to look. It was a monkey, barely more than a foot tall, with tawny fur, a pink face, and golden eyes. It was wearing a smartwatch around its neck like a choker.

Its lips didn’t move as it said, “She’s OK. I had to make her unconscious because I was worried that she was going to kill that man.”

I dropped down to my knees. I looked at its eyes. They looked … concerned. Careful.

“What is going on?”

“I am Carl,” the monkey said, reaching a hand out to me like I would shake it. I didn’t.

“I will explain everything,” the monkey continued, “but we have to go now. That man won’t be the last one he sends.”

“The last one who sends?” I gasped out, lowering my head down into a child’s pose to combat my light-headedness. My chest screamed.

“I really do want to explain,” Carl said. “But not now. Please, let’s go pack. We can leave April here for now. She won’t wake up for a while.”

And so I slowly climbed back on my feet and went inside. I threw all of our stuff into bags and threw the bags into the truck.

Somehow, while I was inside, the tiny monkey had gotten April into the passenger seat of the truck.

“Are you OK to drive?” the monkey asked me.

“I mean, you’re not going to,” I said.

“No. But I could have April do it.”

“She’s unconscious.”

“I could inhabit her body. I don’t like doing it, but I will if we need to.”

I didn’t really know what this meant, but thinking about watching April’s body being driven around by a space alien made me queasy.

“No, no, I think I’m fine. I can drive. Where are we going?”

I didn’t like any of this. I didn’t want to be with Carl; I wanted to be with April.

“We’re going someplace unpredictable. I can block them from tracking you, but I cannot block them from predicting where you will go. You need to be much less predictable.”

“How is going to the middle-of-nowhere Vermont predictable!?”

“I was able to predict that you would read a book left under a wet, moldy carpet in the trash heap behind a motel. Humans are, to us, very predictable.”

“You put the book there?” I asked, and then immediately followed up with “What do you mean, ‘us’?!” I was not handling any of this well. Then again, I had been shot. April was unconscious. There was a talking monkey. And it was Carl.

“I am going to explain everything, but we make our location extremely improbable as quickly as possible—turn here.”

We turned onto what seemed to be a larger road.