In the next 6 months, until school ended for Charlie and me, our lives changed dramatically in some ways but in others, life got into a rut.
Billy was committed to a mental institution to live out his remaining years, a certified nut case. The hospital told the local news reporters that when he learned of the tragic deaths of his 'family, ' he completely and irreversibly snapped. The fact that his change in behavior preceded their deaths by a few hours was a small detail conveniently left out of their report.
Investigators going through the rubble of the Jones' residence began finding strange and dangerous debris and quickly cordoned off the area. A US Army bomb disposal team was brought in to clean up the area. The civilian police units had no knowledge or experience of how to handle some of the high explosive ordinance they had discovered unexploded in the basement of the Jones' house. Not to mention they had found evidence of several fully automatic — and highly illegal military grade weapons.
Mr. Griggs officially retired from teaching to recover from his injuries. He never went back to the school to teach. Instead, he purchased an abandoned and isolated farm just outside the city. The farm had been there for almost two hundred years with many of the buildings from that era. Bill refurbished one of the old barns on the property for his 'therapy' sessions. In reality, the barn was now our Headquarters building and had every security measure known to modern man incorporated into the upgrades he made to the barn.
Mr. Griggs continued to 'date' Ms. Brisard, though she was talking about leaving teaching. It just wasn't rewarding for her anymore. Everything the lady said or did seemed to almost incriminate her, yet there was never absolute proof of her involvement. Everything we knew was circumstantial or third hand. On the bright side she was putting out for him now that they were no longer colleagues, so Bill was more relaxed than we had ever seen him. Charlie thought he really liked Ms. Brisard, but wasn't sure. I didn't give a crap, but the more I knew about her, the more I liked her as a person. I was also beginning to think it was possible that someone very clever was setting her up.
Ms. Brisard, whose first name we learned was Lisette, was the occasional visitor to the farm the day after spending the night before. No restrictions were placed on her and she was in the 'public' side of the new barn a couple of times. We studied those films intensely and she had shown no obvious interest in looking around. It was those visits that convinced Charlie that she was only after Bill, as she only had eyes for him.
Charlie and I stayed out of sight. In fact, we never went outside at the farm. Bill had constructed tunnels from building to building, so you could get from place to place without being seen. In actuality, Charlie and I rarely used the tunnels. We just teleported from place to place and Bill never got over his fascination with the ride. But when he was by himself, he would use the tunnels.
We had teleported the spheres out of the lab and into the barn as soon as the space was available. We had spent hours trying to decide how to get them out of the lab. Would they have to be dismantled, how could we get possession of them, would anyone notice they were gone? The biggest problem was their size and weight. It had taken a special moving company to get them into the school in the first place and that company was no longer active in our city.
Bill said it was too bad we couldn't just teleport them somewhere and Charlie and I just sat there and looked dumb. Duh! It was so simple. If it worked, that is. We had never tried to teleport something so massive, but in theory it should work. We disconnected the electrical connections and I grabbed hold of one of the rings of the sphere. I focused on the platform we had prepared for it in the center of the basement of the barn. And then the sphere was there.
As soon as I had blinked out with the sphere, Charlie followed with the HV generator. We both went back for the wires and other items that we thought we would need. Mr. Griggs, as part of a retirement gift to the school, donated a huge chunk of money to the school to cover the 'purchases' we had made, although said purchases were never itemized anywhere. I doubt anyone but a handful of people even knew that the rings had been there in the first place.
I also included in those items we purchased a lot of the spare parts for the high powered laser. I included enough to build two complete lasers with all of the parts I had taken. I assembled one of them on a work table in the basement of our house. When we needed to run the process, I could teleport the work table with the laser into the basement of the barn and then back again. Charlie and I made doubly sure there were no prying eyes or ears in the basement. We checked constantly and it became kind of a game to catch the devices the Major would hide in that room.
It was good practice for us, too, as he used all kinds of devices, from simple microphones and cameras to the most sophisticated digital burst transmitters currently being used by the agencies in that business. He even got a hold of some of the newest ones that were in development by the government. He was very interested in learning how we had defeated some of those, as knowing how to beat them helped the government develop defenses against them as well has designing newer and better snooping devices.
We generated a lot of interest from agencies the Major didn't want prying into our business as we were defeating the bugs so easily and consistently. Inquiring minds want to know and bureaucratic minds want to control. These assholes were bureaucrats, so the 'game' came to a sudden halt. Bill flat out told us he was going to stop prying. Too many other people were getting accidently involved in our business.
Bill didn't like that we were holding back on the details of the process, but he understood; kind of. I really think he wanted to go through it himself. I was still afraid the process would get sold or stolen, so for the time being, Charlie and I played it close to the vest. We also kept up the same level of vigilance we had when the Major was spying on us. Now it was even more important, as any breach of security would be from an outside group, not from Bill.
Charlie and I had been working on improving our skills with our abilities and we were both able to blink into and out of reality faster than a person could see an image. The hand is faster than the eye, so to speak. It got so we could appear and disappear at the speed of thought. We had several 'games' we played to challenge each other. We were both very competitive and surprisingly evenly matched. Charlie was a superb athlete and very coordinated. I was OK, but most of the time I was no match physically for her coordination. I made up for that in two ways; first, I would play with no fear. Pain was my friend. If there were pipes or furniture on the other side of the wall, I would dive through it, blinking out of reality at the last second. Charlie always wanted to know what was on the far side of an obstacle before going through. Second, I tried to use my brain to gain any advantage I could. Trouble was, Charlie seemed to be getting smarter. She hadn't said anything about it, but I think she was developing a photographic memory — or was learning how to use my recall ability. I had 'caught' her several times remembering things in exact detail that she had only read once. If this was yet another ability as a result of the process, it would not have been that noticeable with me. Regardless, Charlie was getting smarter and I had to really struggle to keep up with her, much less beat her.
One afternoon we had a rare free period from our training. Bill was out somewhere, probably with Lisette, our schoolwork was done and our training was ahead of schedule — if there is such a thing. So Charlie and I went exploring, something we could do without getting into too much trouble. One of the games we had designed to work on our reflexes involved running at full speed at objects and see how close we could come to them before we stopped ourselves. OK, it was mostly to improve my reflexes as I was pretty clumsy on my feet. They generally did what I wanted them to, but sometimes not exactly when I needed them to do it.
We had taken one of the tunnels from our main building to another of the older barns on Bill's farm. We were in the cellar looking around at all the old and mostly broken chairs and wagons and stuff. Charlie pointed at the far wall and said 'Dare ya'.'
I took off at a dead run towards the old stone wall and just before applying my feet to stop they got tangled up in each other and I headed for the wall head first. This wasn't the first time this had happened and normally I would blink out, get a good look at some dirt and debris on the far side and then step back into the room, none the worse for the wear. Of course, if that happened, Charlie would 'win' the dare.
This time I blinked out, but I didn't stop at the wall. There was a huge open space on the far side of the wall. I walked back through the wall and called Charlie to come and see.
We walked through the wall and got our flashlights out of our processed backpacks. We flicked on the flashlights and stared at a scene that no one had viewed since the days of the Underground Railroad. We saw where the secret entry to the space had been and where it had been bricked over sometime during an earlier renovation. We were staring at history, a time capsule back to a barbaric time in our country's past.
As we looked around, I started to calculate where the room was at on the property. Apparently it had been a basement for a building that had never been built. If I remembered correctly — and I always did — there was a mound of dirt above this building. The mound was between two of the older barns and the building, had it been built, would have connected these two into an 'H'-shaped structure.
Most of the historical artifacts were along one side of the room. There were a couple fragments of cloth, dishes, large tables and chairs and eating utensils. The rest of the room was bare. More important, the space was dry.
I looked at Charlie and asked her if she thought we could use this 'Railroad Station' to store our processed items and even the laser. We had notice that Mom was getting curious about us of late and had once actually come upstairs to look in on us after we had gone to bed. We had also found evidence that she had been down in the basement where we kept the laser. Mom was well meaning and harmless for the most part, but Charlie and I both realized the importance of keeping her out of this. If she said anything to any of her drinking buddies, who knew where it would end up?
Getting electricity into the space was simple, as the older barn we had been exploring had just been wired. I ran a conduit down into the ground that looked like a ground wire for the lightning rods on the roof. I added a circuit breaker to the box, buried the wire in among the many others running to and from the breaker box and we had power for lights.
By the end of the day we had teleported all of our processed items, including the laser, to the Station, as we referred to it. It became our sanctuary, but, as I was not sure how much air we had to breathe in that space, we limited ourselves to the amount of time we spent there.
One of the most exciting discoveries we had made was that electronics could go through the process. Whatever the materials were that the various metals turned into, they still conducted electricity and, for the most part, they had the same physical characteristics after being processed. For example, most transistors still functioned in the same way after the processing as before, so simple electronics like radios and communications headsets would still work. Batteries, on the other hand, would not keep a charge. In fact, the batteries we tried to process were the only explosive episodes we had. It didn't matter if they were lithium, dry cells or car batteries, they could not be processed. It wasn't that much of a problem since, as most batteries were enclosed or encased inside the devices they powered, they were still invisible when we needed them to be.
We did need to make some adjustments to the equipment, however, to overcome the inability of sound waves and electromagnetic waves from crossing the dimensional barrier. The first was that radio waves could not leave the other dimension to reality. If we needed to speak to Bill over the headsets we were beginning to train with and use, we had to turn visible. I overcame this problem by attaching a retractable antenna to the headsets. The antenna was made from unprocessed metal. Whenever we needed to transmit, the antenna would expose itself briefly and then retract. I also modified it so that the antenna was fully automated and was only visible when we transmitted. This was after several headsets were ruined walking through walls with the antenna wire exposed.
The second major adjustment was a bit more disconcerting. The processed electronics operated at efficiencies several magnitudes higher than the original unprocessed equipment. Where an unprocessed headset had a range of several hundred yards, a processed headset was fully functional over several miles. In addition I had to step down the power out of the batteries from milliamps to microamps. Of course, at that level the batteries would last just about forever.
Flashlights were also interesting. The process would change the tungsten in the filament, but when current was run through the wire, it did not produce light in a wavelength we could detect. I had a suspicion that something was being generated, I just did not have any instruments to detect it. The newer type digital LED flashlights, however, performed like HID headlights in imported sports car. They were really bright and intense. As a test we left a digital flashlight burning in the Station and it was still bright after three months of constant use.
I had told Bill about the video spy cameras in the two labs and that these and the computers were used by Billy's group. After we discussed what to do, we decided to leave the camera in his lab running. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose if we disabled it and raised suspicions. He wasn't doing anything in the lab anyway. We did disable the one in my lab once more just before we teleported the sphere. I fixed it so that the batteries went dead again. It must have been a faulty camera, right? He was going to have someone somewhere try to back trace the downloads from the hidden computers, but now that the Jones' residence was destroyed, it was pretty pointless.
I also mentioned the mis-wired smoke alarms to Bill. He told me there weren't any smoke alarms in the science building and that the HVAC system had internal sensors to detect smoke that were much better than the models for homes. Charlie and I teleported him to my lab and showed him the smoke detector on the ceiling. I took a small camera and photographed the wiring, then re-did it the way it had been originally, so that it was set to activate only when the lights were turned on. I took a picture of that wiring as well.
Bill studied the photos of the smoke detectors and the wiring for a long time. I think he recognized the devices, and they were not smoke detectors. I could tell he was angry, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He also seemed to sag emotionally after that, as if he had been let down by someone or something he had once trusted. His eyes were sad for weeks, but one day he seemed to have come to a resolution of sorts and threw himself with renewed energy into Charlie's and my training.
His contacts had also traced the source of the funds Billy had been able to requisition and that information caused some additional excitement. In a strange turn, the money had come from a US intelligence agency account, but it had been 'stolen.' No one really believed the official story, of course, as government controllers typically released dollar bills like they had to pull them out of their asses one at a time — in other words, very reluctantly. Losing $20 million that way just wasn't a believable story.
The Major's super secret agency dug deeper into the 'theft' and discovered that a computer programmer had placed certain over-rides and backdoors in certain routines hidden deep in the machine language of the computer. Of course, that programmer was now talking only with God or the Devil, so asking him or her questions was out of the question. Someone, however, was still using the commands to release funds without the normal authorization. Because the commands were buried so deeply in the machine, it was difficult, if not impossible to determine the person or persons releasing the funds.
I decided to 'help' the investigation and sent another request for more funds from Billy, using his codes. The response that request got was like licking your finger and sticking it in an electrical outlet; immediate, exciting and shocking to see who and what agencies were involved. While everyone else was trying to find out how Billy was getting out communications from the loony bin, I back-tracked my second message to a small anonymous government office in Alexandria, VA. Knowing their location, I tapped into the mainframe computer via another route — they had shut down the secure website, finally — and browsed for a while. I found out what they had in their bank accounts and emptied them. Then I wiped out their mainframe by overloading the circuits and shutting down their cooling system one night. To say their system was fried would be an understatement. Of course, the loss of their data was assumed to be a result of that incident and not because a hacker (me!) had copied and then wiped their discs clean.
I gave a copy of the purloined data to the Major, minus the fiduciary information, of course. I also informed him that our 'investments' were doing very well and had, in fact, quadrupled in value almost overnight. We now had over $100 million in funding and hadn't even really started operations. Bill looked at me strangely for a long minute, but never asked about the 'missing' funds on the disc or the coincidental windfall in our own accounts.
Charlie and I were allowed to be home schooled for the remainder of our senior year. Of course, Mom didn't have a clue that was happening. She thought we were still attending school. Charlie and I left every morning at the same time and as soon as we were out the door, we would teleport to the barn. We spend hours each day in physical exercise, martial arts, endurance training, swimming (yes, there was a long and narrow pool designed for laps), learning a bunch of stuff Bill called 'tradecraft' and a number of other things. We learned how to disable people without killing them or disrupting their ability to talk. Bill also taught us how to kill efficiently with almost anything at hand. He couldn't teach us how to deal with it emotionally, though. Charlie had more difficulty with that part of the training than I did. I had been beat up and tormented all my life. Getting mine back was not going to cause me to lose any sleep.
Mostly, however, we learned how to survive in bad situations. Bill was aware that we could just 'disappear' and could probably get out of most every mess we got ourselves into. He also knew that if we did that and were observed, our secret would be out. Either that or we would have to try to kill all witnesses, both physical and digital. As a result of this part of our training, Charlie and I became regular Houdinis, surpassing and surprising Bill with our ability to escape without using our abilities. Of course, we were cheating, but we didn't tell Bill.
Bill also wanted to know what, if anything, could affect our new abilities. He used every form of restraint on us he could think of and it did not affect our ability to escape. He had tried the usual physical forms of restraint, of course, but he also tried high powered electrical fields, lasers, magnetic fields, lead-lined boxes and even radioactivity. Charlie and I could simple blink out and the restraints would fall off or we could teleport out of any confinement. In his role as the Major he arranged several 'field trips' for us to some super secret installations to be tested. Twice we went out to Lawrence Livermore Labs in California to use their high power lasers and once they locked us in an old, but 'hot' nuclear reactor in Hanford, Washington. Nothing seemed to 'block' or limit our new abilities and I could see that Bill seemed to be more comfortable with Charlie's and my odds of surviving. I think he was really beginning to care about us.
Whether it was the training or if it was just my genetics, I began to grow up and out. We had a big celebration the week when I weighed in at 100 lbs and another when I matched Charlie's height of 5'6". I think it relieved Bill's mind that I wasn't going to stay a little kid. By the time we graduated, I was 3 inches taller than Charlie and about 155 lbs. Not a muscle man by any reckoning, but a very deadly package. For that matter, both of us were.
The other major change in our lives happened kind of by accident. Charlie and I had taken to sleeping in our invisible state. We discussed it and, as the Major was pounding security and safety into us every day, we just started doing it every night. After a couple of nights, it just seemed natural. We also started spending as much time of everyday as we could in the other dimension. Both of us felt a serenity being there; it was peaceful and safe.
I had noticed almost at once that Charlie had a 'glow' around her when I looked at her and we were both invisible. Then I started to notice that other objects also had that aura when they were in the other dimension. The existence of the aura made it easy to determine what was hidden from what we started calling 'reality, ' meaning reality for everybody else. Charlie's and my reality was different, of course, but the name stuck. Reality was the visible world and more often than not, reality sucked.
One night shortly before our graduation, I heard unusual noises coming from Charlie's room. The doors to the connecting bathroom had remained open since that first night and we had become accustomed to seeing each other, more often naked as not. We had also become accustomed to hearing each other relieve the sexual tensions that are normal in teenagers. As a guy, I was amazed at how often Charlie needed relief. I mean, I knew guys could whack off four to ten times a day, but I wasn't prepared for Charlie's frequency to match mine.
I investigated the odd noises, walking through the open door. I was in my invisible state and once again, I was not prepared for what I saw. At first I thought that Charlie had been attacked and raped; her torn and tattered clothing revealed more than it covered and her hands and legs were tied in a spread-eagled position. The ropes that bound her limbs were coarse and thick. She was writhing and moaning, trying to get off, but without any tactile stimulus to her erogenous parts, she was just getting frustrated.
I quickly realized she was holding the ropes in her hands. She was not tied at all. This was a fantasy. If I had thought about it, I probably wouldn't have done what I did next, but I blinked into reality and tightly tied one of the ropes she was holding around her wrist. I don't know if she even realized what was happening, she was so into her fantasy. I quickly tied her other wrist and stood up. Looking down at her I remembered the image of her tied up this way from the images we had seen in Billy's mind. Apparently it had made more of an impression on her than it had on me.
I took her panties I found lying on the floor and got her wide belt from her robe. I stuffed the panties in her mouth as a gag and wrapped the wide belt around her eyes as a blindfold. I wanted to add to her feelings of helplessness.
My own hormones were boiling over and I couldn't help it. I touched one of her diamond-hard nipples, first softly, then with increasing pressure. It had to have hurt with me squeezing it that hard, yet she just kept lifting it into my hand. I took the other nipple between my other forefinger and thumb and was soon twisting them both like dials on an old AM radio.
I saw her body arch up and stiffen, a muffled scream coming from behind the panties. I then tentatively slapped one of her marvelous tits. I caught the bottom of the left one with a sharp slap and it lifted up and then settled back down, jiggling deliciously. I could barely see the outline of my fingers on the pale skin. Charlie froze for a second then started cumming like crazy. She shuddered and flopped in her bonds non-stop for about three minutes. As she slowed down, I swatted at her right tit, with similar results.
This time I did not wait for her to come down, but gave her a 1-2 treatment, sharply slapping first the left tit and then the right one in rapid succession. They were harder slaps this time, still nowhere near full strength but very much harder than the soft caresses with which I had imagined touching these glorious orbs.
Charlie was literally vibrating with lust and was breathing erratically. I got on the bed between her legs and felt for her clit. It was erect and hard. I flicked it suddenly with my finger. Charlie's response was to drench my hand with her spend, squirting it out from her engorged cunt by several inches. Then she fainted.
I was gently licking her lower lips when she regained consciousness. I heard her moan and then catch her breath as she realized what she was feeling was real and not imaginary. Her hips came up to meet my mouth and I devoured her juices as she spent again.
It took a while, but finally her moans turned to faint whines. She was exhausted and so was I; rough sex took a lot of effort and she had wanted it rough that night. I crawled up next to her and lay beside her, her breast cupped in my hand as we drifted off to sleep.
By then going invisible was natural for us as we fell asleep and both of us blinked out of sight as we nodded off. It was even better sleeping beside Charlie and I slept like a dead man. I woke up to the most marvelous sensations I had ever imagined. I look down and saw Charlie with my prick in her mouth. She grinned up at me and then focused on sucking me off. At 15 years old and a virgin, it didn't take very long, believe me.
"You really have grown up, Dougie," she said as she moved back up to lay beside me. "That's a respectable weapon you have down there." She looked up at me and grinned.
Seeing my stunned look, she misunderstood. "Do you think I'm a slut, Dougie?" she pouted.
"N-n-no," I stammered. "That was just incredible, really. I-, uh, I never imagined doing that."
"Why not? You've done it to me," she said
"Well, yeah, but that's different. You're beautiful and gorgeous. I wanted to do it and make you happy."
Charlie blushed. "Well, I guess I should thank you for the compliment, but you aren't so bad yourself. If you would look in the mirror you would see that you're not a little boy anymore. Especially down here," she said, caressing my reviving cock.
I tolerated her touching me for about 15 seconds and then blew another wad of jism all over her hand and belly. Charlie giggled and softly said, "Cool."
"Uh, Charlie? What was with the ropes and all that? Were you really turned on by that?" I was afraid to ask her if I had hurt her. I had tried to monitor her responses, but with her gagged, the only thing I could read was her body language and her grunts and moans.
Charlie tucked her head onto my chest. I could sense her indecision but she finally spoke up. "I didn't even know stuff like that existed until we went into Billy's mind. At first I was shocked when I saw images of myself in his imagination tied up like that, but I just couldn't shake them. I didn't like the ones where I was disfigured and where he had cut me or slit my throat, but the ones where I was tied up kept coming back to me whenever I jilled myself. They made me hot.
"Then Bill did a couple of things with both of us in training and it was so hard not to scream in orgasm every time. He used ropes on us once and I had to change my pants afterwards I got so wet. So I decided to try it myself. I took some of the ropes from the barn and tied myself up. For the last week I've been imagining myself like that and I get hotter every time. Usually I wait for you to go to sleep but last night I couldn't wait."
Charlie looked up at me. "I'm sorry I didn't do that earlier." She paused. "Do you think I'm weird or anything?"
"I think the term is 'kinky' and 'no' I don't think you're weird," I answered.
"You're just being nice because I sucked your cock," she protested.
"Would it help if I fucked you? Would you believe me then?" I joshed back at her.
Charlie was very still for several seconds. I held my breath. I had just mentioned the elephant in the room. We were very close to committing incest. Hell, we already had according to most pre-Clintonian definitions. Thank God for liberals! If it wasn't for them we would have just committed a series of sins.
"That's where we're headed, isn't it?" she asked, more of a statement than a question.
"Don't ask me," I said. "I'm a guy. I'm going to want to fuck a cantaloupe when I get horny, Charlie. And you are so much more than a piece of fruit." I paused. "Yeah, I want to fuck you. I want to make love to you. I want to do everything with and to you, even things I haven't thought of. Now, how much of that is hormones and how much of that is love — well, I have no fucking idea."
"So you're leaving it up to me if we have sex? Thanks for nothing, you, you male!" she spouted, slapping my chest.
"So let's talk about it," I said. "Do you want to do it? Do you want to forbid it? Do you want to just keep going and see what happens?"
"Talking about this makes it sound so dirty," she said. "It kind of turns me on, though, too."
"All I need to do is think about you — or any part of you — and I get turned on," I said back.
She looked up at me. "Would you mind terribly if we didn't do it? At least, for a while? I'm still a virgin and I wanted to stay one at least through high school. I- uh, I guess anything else would be OK, if that's OK with you," she offered.
"Let me see, I get to touch your tits, feel your ass, lick your pussy, you're going to let me tie you up and in return you're going to give me hand and blow jobs. Is that about right?" I asked, laughing.
"Yep, and I can see you're just devastated at the prospect, too," she laughed back.
She snuggled in under my arm and we rested quietly until it was time to get up and go to school. From that night on, we slept together. It wasn't exactly platonic, as there was a lot of fluid swapping, and I did penetrate her ass on more than one occasion. She especially liked it that way after I had spanked her ass with a ping pong paddle, but she remained a vaginal virgin until graduation. I guess I did, too.
Complacency is an insidious enemy, sneaking up on the vigilant, using the very ordinariness and dreariness of routine events of every day to wear you down, to blindside the watchful. We were careful. We were watchful. We were stupid. We had stuck our stick in the proverbial hornet's nest and won. The hornets had flown away and we remained, victorious and sting-free.
The hornets, however, were not dead and they were mad; furious that something unexpected had somehow messed up the plan to kill the target. Worse, we were rank amateurs.
Two nights before graduation Charlie and I had gone to bed, fooled around a little and drifted off to sleep. There was no warning. No one had been stalking or skulking around the house. There had been nothing to raise our level of awareness.
I woke to the strange sensation of falling — more like drifting — downwards. Charlie was still asleep by my side. As I became more aware I noticed it was very bright outside. But that wasn't quite right. It was still dark out across the street. It was just bright in our house; a yellowish-white light that flickered and danced on the leaves of the tree outside my window.
Damn! I grabbed on to Charlie and teleported to the sidewalk across the street. She awoke as she suddenly felt the movement and gave a small scream as she saw what I had just realized was happening. Our house, the house of our childhood, was a bright torch in the night sky; all of our memories going up in smoke.
Our first thoughts were for Mom. We looked around outside among the gathering neighbors and spectators who had been wakened by the sirens of the late-arriving fire department. The house was a total loss. Their job now was to prevent the fire from spreading to the neighbor's homes.
I belatedly realized that the fire had not damaged either Charlie or I, although we had been engulfed in the inferno for quite some time. I hadn't seen Mom outside with the spectators. I told Charlie I was going back in to see if I could find Mom. She said she was going in with me. I was going to object, but something in her voice told me it would be futile. I told her to be careful not to blink into reality as the heat inside was likely to be intense and even a momentary lapse could be fatal to us in reality.
We walked back into the building which was rapidly becoming unstable. We found Mom's body face up on the sofa where she usually slept. That was odd by itself because Mom always slept on her stomach. Charlie noticed that the ashes of the fabric of Mom's skirt were bunched up around her waist and that her wool sweater, which wasn't burning, was bunched up under her neck. She had obviously been raped. I had noticed that Mom's head was at a funny angle and then saw her throat had been slashed, almost severing her head.
Charlie and I stood there, tears running down our cheeks, mourning the loss of our last parent. Mom hadn't been a classic mother in the vein of June Cleaver, but she did care for us in her own way. She had been our only link to our past. We had no aunts or uncles, no Grandparents and Father was gone.
We knelt down side by side, saying our goodbyes. When we walked out of that house, we knew it was a new world. The person that had done this to our innocent mother would pay. A line had been crossed. We had not crossed that line voluntarily; we had been pushed across and not by choice. Our earlier dithering about ethics now seemed so juvenile. This was the real world. This was reality.
We walked across the street, clear of the other spectators. We stood there, holding on to each other and watched the walls of the wooden structure collapse in upon themselves and fall into the basement. Someone had called Bill. He wasn't just standing there; he was frantic, running from person to person trying to find out any information on the survivors. The fire chief finally told him that there were none. This type of fire at this time of the early morning generally meant no survivors. With the intense heat, they would be lucky to even find bodies. They generally identified the missing persons when they didn't show up for work or school and by asking the neighbors how many people had been living in the house.
The pain of loss was evident on Bill's face as I went over to where he was standing. I touched his hand.
"Major, sir. Charlie and I are alright, but our Mom is dead. She was raped and murdered. The fire was probably set to cover up that crime." I addressed him with his rank. It just felt right, given the situation
To his credit, the Major did not show any signs of recognition that he had heard me.
"I wonder who did this," he said out loud, as if to himself.
"I don't know. I'd really like to know that myself."
I was extremely angry and emotional. I don't know if that had anything to do with what happened next or not, but I suddenly saw everything moving in reverse, slowly at first then faster and faster. The fire was burning lower and then the house re-constructed itself. The sparks and the smoke appeared as if they were being sucked down into the house as it re-formed. The firemen walked backwards to their trucks, the hoses rolling back up onto the spools and the fire engines backed away and high speed. Time was scrolling backwards.
It was totally silent around me. Charlie wasn't with me. I wasn't in the other dimension with her or in reality. I was somewhere else. I stood watching the flames shrink and then disappear altogether, the sudden darkness indicative of the initial explosion that had started the conflagration. There must have been a lot of accelerant used to start the fire.
Just before the light from the fire disappeared I noticed a dark figure sneak backwards out of the darkness and stand there watching the house. As he turned from coming out of the house, I saw his face. My blood ran cold as I recognized the man who had murdered our Mom.
Billy had regained his mind and was back.