Chosen One Protective Services

Lightning split the sky like a crack through gray china, and with an earthsplitting BOOM, and a rush of pattering and spattering on the tin roof, Rusty Colfax knew that the long drought was over.

Seven years. Seven years since the rain had stopped in, and what had once been gentle green pasture shriveled into baked, cracked slabs of clay. Texas Tombstones, John Grady called them. Seven years... shucks, some of the cows he was feeding now hadn't ever known rain before, and their frantic lowing and mooing worried him for a second. If they got too riled up, the clapboard and tin barn wouldn't survive for long.

But the thunder moved west, fading as it went, and the rain roiled and whipped against the roof for a few minutes, then calmed itself. And once he saw the cows weren't going to panic, he poured out the last of the feed, threw the bag on the floor, and beat feet to the house.

He wasn't the only one. Around him, he saw five of his brothers scurrying and yelling. He grinned to see them, and put on a burst of speed...

...and then he remembered that it was mail time, and he skidded to a halt, went butt over teakettle, ate dirt, and scampered up to run the other direction. Up the long drive toward the road, and the solitary mailbox that loomed out of the shining curtains of rain that picked up, as he ran harder.

“No no no no,” he said, as he saw the cardboard package sticking out of the mailbox. A package that was sogging under the raw weight of the rain, splitting, and spilling out books onto the ground.

“Ah shi... shucks!” he said, as he slowed, staring down at the soggy pile of paper that was sinking into a puddle down by the mailbox. The puddle was a brilliant slurry of red, blue, and green, and just below the surface he could see the April issue of Amazing Stories turning back into the pulp it had been made from.

There was nothing to be done for the fallen, but perhaps he could save what remained. As another magazine fell from the sogged out package, and a book started to slide free, Rusty wrapped his arms around the package, and held the last of its content in. He managed to extract it from the mailbox without too much tearing, and ran for the house again.

He burst in through the screen door, and his mother looked up from the stove with a weary grimace. “No, you can't have the day off! Just stay inside and find something to... oh shoot, Rusty. Oh no.”

“Yeah,” Rusty said, as he put the package on the table, its faded red and white checkercloth stained from countless family dinners. “I couldn't reach it in time. I shouldn't have waited.”

“It wasn't your fault, honey. Maybe it was God's will,” Mom said, taking off her oven mitts, and reaching for her Pall Malls. “He shouldn't be reading all that heathen trash. Bible's the only book he needs now.” She lit up a cigarette as Rusty sorted through the package. The flash of the lighter showed the lines and creases in her face. She used to say that she'd started smooth and added a wrinkle for every child. Which didn't add up, but he wasn't about to point that out. When Jimmy had told her she had way more than twelve wrinkles, he'd gotten a knock around the ears and dishwashing duty for a week. Which made all the rest of the boys laugh because that was girl work.

Rusty kept his head down and his tongue silent, as he fumbled out three little books. One of them was soggy but probably salvageable, and had a picture of a robot, and the name “Asimov” vaguely visible on it, and that made him smile. He liked robots. Another had a mostly-naked man on the cover holding a sword. The cover was sogged and ripped, and the title was broken. “The Return of...” was most of what he could see. He hurriedly tucked it under the first, just in case Mom saw it and got offended.

The last one was practically untouched by the rain, and it had a ring and a sinister looking eye in a circle on the cover, but Rusty didn't waste much time reading it over. It was intact, and that was what mattered.

He left the remnants of the package wrapping on the table, and headed toward the door off the kitchen, only to stop as his Mom reached out an arm and blocked him.

“Rusty. Tell him Pop didn't mean nothing by it. He was just angry.”

Rusty stared up at his Mom, feeling his throat swell up a little. There had been shouting last night. Shouting he could hear from the barn, where he slept with all his brothers who were old enough to make it into the hayloft. Shouting and harsh words, that ended like it always did, with the door slamming and the battered truck rattling to life, as Dad went to go find the kind of comfort that ran about twenty-five cents a glass down at Patman's bar.

“You tell him he ain't no burden. That we're still proud of him. And we'll figure out the money somehow.” The lines on her face split as she smiled, and for a second those brown-stained teeth flashed. “I mean, we got rain. It's a miracle. Reckon God can spare us another one. Just gotta keep going to see it.”

“Yes'm,” Rusty whispered.

His mom withdrew her arm, and went to go look out the window, watching the rain roll by as the tobacco smoke curled toward the stained ceiling. And Rusty left before she could ask him to do another thing that Dad wouldn't.

He found his way back into the farmhouse. It was an old building. It had been his grandfather's, and his grandfather's father before that, back when they owned most of the valley, back before business had started eating up their land, one bad year at a time. The house had seen a lot of Colfaxes come and go, and it creaked under his feet, and sighed as it seemed to relax, the wetness and shift of the air pressure making the old house slump and groan almost as in relief. And from the back of the hall, just before the faded, carpet-covered stairs stretched up, a staticky song played from the workroom door. Some singer whose name he couldn't remember crooned to an unseen woman, asking her to be his party doll. Rusty flushed as he heard it, then steeled himself and knocked at the edge of the doorframe as he peered in.

It was a cluttered room. Once it had been the house's library, back before Dad had sold most of the books. The shelves now held junk, and copper wires stretched in all directions, a few paper wrapped, and marked DO NOT TOUCH. A workbench sat against the wall, with long, grimy windows letting down the dim, clouded light of the fading sun, now hidden behind the mass of rain. And before the workbench was a chair, its two chrome wheels shiny and new, unlike everything else in the room.

The chair had a high backing, and for a second Rusty wasn't sure if its occupant was there. But a glance toward the corner of the room showed the mattress was empty, its sheets askew, and the piles of books around it mostly undisturbed.

And then a muscular arm, bare to the shoulder, with twisting red and black and pink patches where the flesh had regrown badly, reached out and turned the dial on the old bakelite radio, turning that singer's voice— what was his name again? Buddy something? —turning the voice into static, that hissed like a thousand angry rattlesnakes, then to silence, with a CLICK. And the only sound in the workshop was the pattering of the rain on the old roof, and the drip of water where no water should be.

“Cy?” Rusty said. “I'm sorry. The box was sticking out. The rain got to most of it.”

“Russ? Ah man, it WOULD come today. That's some bad timing. Eh, story of my life, kid, you dig?”

And the figure turned the wheelchair around, smiling.

Rusty's brother Cyrus had what his mother had called a beautiful smile.

It was about the only beautiful thing left to him.

Cyrus had gone to war, and things had gone bad, there. Rusty didn't have the full details, but from what he'd overheard, some guy named Willy Pete had done a number on him, and Cyrus' face was a mass of scar tissue. He wore spectacles and an eye patch over his right eyesocket because there was nothing left underneath, and a t-shirt and loose pair of boxers were his only clothing. The legs were the worst hit, worse than the missing eye. Once they'd been like small tree trunks, Rusty recalled. Now they were shriveled and twisted, with loose skin hanging off. They'd been spared the burns that covered most of the rest of Cy, but the tree that had pinned him down while Willy Pete had worked him over had broken his back, and that was that. No more walking for Cyrus. No more running. No more war.

But none of this slowed Cyrus down, and he grinned wide as Rusty handed him the slim paperbacks... well, two slim paperbacks and one pretty thick one. That one with the eye was big.

“Let's see what we have, huh?” Cyrus held them up, one by one. “Asimov? Pretty dry, but you always know what you get. Another Conan... yeah, sure. Why not. And oh hey, reckon this is the one Bartleby was raving about. Says it'll be bigger than A-bombs. Yeah, why don't you read this one to me first?”

“You want me to read it?” Rusty asked. “You're better, you should do it.” his brother did voices for characters when he read. Rusty liked hearing the voices, it turned whichever book Cyrus was reading into a radio play. Like those old Shadow stories. Those had gone off the air the same year Cyrus came back, and Rusty missed hearing that sinister chuckle tell him that the Shadow knew all sorts of stuff.

“I can't, my man. I'm almost to a breakthrough, I know it.” Cyrus reached back to the workbench, and showed him something that had started life as a telescope. It was wrapped up with copper wire, and had another lens over the one on the wide end, stuck on with screws and duct tape. “This puppy is gonna revolutionize artillery. Just need to make sure the vacuum tube gets locked in properly before the gel sets. Then we'll be able to shell commie bastards all night long, without mistakes. Without collateral.”

Cy's voice broke on that last word, and Rusty studied him for a second, worried.

Then Mom's words came back to him. “Hey. Mom uh, she said. She said don't worry. Dad's sorry.”

“Sorry is right,” Cy said. “He's a sorry sack of flesh, and I'm worth two of him, even in this chair. He blames our woes on everyone else except for him, and all he does is knock up mom, make her take care of one kid after another, and drink the crop subsidy profits away at that damn bar. And now he's sending you, instead of coming here like a man to apologize for himself? Jackass. Grandpa should've tanned his hide better.”

“Mom sent me,” Rusty whispered.

Cy shook his head. “Ah, shitfire. Sorry. You didn't deserve none of that. Won't matter much anyway. Listen, long and short of it is my path don't end here, and we both know it. I got too big to stay around this little farm. I've seen the world, and I've got to get back out in it. And this sight is my way to it. If I can perfect this, talk to a few of my old squad, I can get in good with Uncle Sam again. And if I do it fast, I can get this improvement up there before the next war.”

“What next war? I thought we were at peace, now?” Rusty stared up at his big brother.

“Russ, daddy-o,” Cy reached out and mussed his hair, skewed up the rain-soaked ginger curls into spiky barbs as Russ backpedaled, and glared. “Peace never lasts, Russ. There's always somebody to fight. The world needs good guys. There's always another bad guy, trying to kill good people. And if I finish this up fast, I'll get to help stop those guys. Even if I can't hump a ruck anymore, there's something I can do, and the pay will be even better than my old billet. You dig?”

Russ looked down. “Will you go away again?” he asked, and he tried not to, but his voice wobbled and broke on the last couple of words.

“Yeah.” Cy said. “I have to. The world's so much bigger than this place. I had an adventure, Russ. There were people who needed me, and I helped them... tried to help them. Wish to God we'd won, straight up, but that armistice will have to do. But I got free of here, and now my dreams are too big for home. Besides, Mom has enough mouths to feed. Shit, maybe she can even swing college for you and a couple of others, if I can bring in enough dough.”

Russ swallowed, hard. He was old enough to know that a lot of this sounded like dreams, like fantasies even farther distant than that book with the nearly-naked muscle guy on the cover. But he knew that his brother had to keep on believing them. Or else he might start believing that Dad was right. And then where would he go? What would he do? Russ didn't think it would end too well, and it SHOULD end well. Cy was a HERO. Heroes deserved good endings.

So as his brother turned back to the workbench, and started fiddling with the converted telescope, and the wires, Russ cracked open that last, thickest book that had survived the sogged package, and started to read.

“When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special mag...mag..”

“Magnificence, I'm guessing,” Cyrus said, smiling as the rain slowed.

“Yeah, that. Uh, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton...”

*****

Maybe it was the wonder that book awoke in Rusty's dreams.

Maybe it was the day, the most humid in June, but the only dry one. He'd woken up feeling jumpy, feeling full of energy, feeling restless.

Maybe it was the fact Cyrus was on the right track, cheerful and laughing whenever his electric night sight made all the lights in the house flicker.

Or maybe it was his father's big argument with Mom, and him yelling about how the kids were eating them out of house and home, an argument that made Rusty stay awake long into the night, long after his younger brothers had gone to sleep, snoring and farting and muttering into the hay of the loft, as the now ever-present rain pattered on the tin roof.

Maybe it was some combination of all of these things, that made Rusty stand his ground when the wizard arrived.