GeneSix Read Free Page B

deposited them on an end table beside the couch.
    Sondra was going through her purse for the third time, hoping to find the glasses in there. Lisa glanced casually at the end table, and said, “Mom, they’re right here on the table.”
    Sondra shook her head and chuckled. “For goodness sake. Right there in plain sight all along. How could I not have seen them?”
    Lisa returned to her book, then glanced up. “Hey, Mom, is it getting darker in here?”
    Sondra said, “It does that, once in a while. It always has. Your father has had the wiring checked more than once. We put in circuit breakers a couple years ago, and it still keeps happening.”
    Time to leave.
    The years passed. D.J. joined the Army. Lisa went to college and met a guy and got pregnant and split up with the guy. She returned home and had the baby, then went to community college at night and worked a part-time job by day, and eventually met another guy and got married.
    The Darkness continued to patrol the city at night. There were others like him about, those who developed extraordinary abilities due to some sort of mutated gene. He kept them safe. He also did his best to stop abusers and violent offenders. And he did this always from secret, so no one would know he was there. Whenever he stepped in, it was deemed somehow unexplainable. A coincidence. Something we’ll never quite understand.
    Sondra turned sixty. And she turned seventy. Dean died, and Sondra turned eighty. Lisa was divorced, but had gone to school to become an accountant and made halfway decent money. Lisa had a daughter Emma who had, like her mother, gone off to college and come back pregnant, and was now living with Lisa. Emma was working a job by day, and taking classes at night.
    Bush became president and then was gone, and half of the country thought a nightmare had ended, and Obama became president and the other half of the country thought a bad dream was starting. There was violence in the Middle East (when was there not?), and violence in the street (when was there not?).
    Emma graduated from college, and got a position as a paralegal, and her daughter Kaylie turned four and then five. The Darkness watched over them all.
    One cool thing about what he was, the Darkness thought, was his ability to feel a person’s energy. He popped into Sondra’s house one night, and found it deserted. It had been a few months since his last visit. But he was able to find her easily just by reaching out for her energy. He found it within seconds, and followed it in less time than it took to talk about it, and found she had moved in with Lisa and Emma.
    And then, something happened to Sondra’s family. Something really bad. Something so bad that when the Darkness stepped in, he was no longer able to keep his presence a secret. But when it came to the safety of Sondra and her family, the Darkness pulled out all the stops.
    Emma’s daughter, Sondra’s great-granddaughter, had disappeared from the daycare center.
     

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    The Darkness zipped into the house Lisa owned just outside of Plymouth, and found an unmarked police car in the driveway. He found a detective in the house, taking notes as Emma tearfully told about how little Kaylie had been dropped off at daycare that morning, but had been picked up early in the afternoon by a man claiming to be the grandfather.
    Lisa, now with a little gray in her hair, was standing beside Emma, her arm about her shoulders. Sondra was in a rocker not far away. Her hair was now white, and her face severely lined. Her jowls sagged, and her shoulders were rounded. She was eighty-six, which amazed the hell out of the Darkness when he thought about it, because to him, she had been fourteen not long ago, wearing her slacks too tight and wiggling her but as she walked through the school hallways.
    The detective explained how a man maybe sixty had shown up at school claiming to be Dean Chambers, and had a driver’s license as identification.
    “Dean