The Sovereign Era (Book 1): Brave Men Run Read online

  She steepled her hands and smiled without showing her teeth. “You missed some school last week. Pretty big day around here.”

  I knew what she meant. “Everywhere, I guess.”

  She nodded. “What do you think about all of that?”

  “About… about William Donner?”

  “Right.”

  I shrugged. “I dunno… it’s pretty hard to believe?” This wasn’t what I expected.

  “Really?” I didn’t understand the glint in her eye.

  “I guess, yeah. I mean, if he can really do all that stuff, it’s pretty… unbelievable, I guess.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” One eyebrow shot above the frames of her glasses. “It seems to me it’s best we keep an open mind, don’t you think?”

  I’m not stupid, and I knew she didn’t think I was. We were playing some kind of game. After the thing with Terrance, I wasn’t in the mood.

  “Am I in trouble, Ms. Elp? Because, I didn’t start that fight.”

  “I’m trying to figure out if you are in trouble, Nathan.” She sat back and crossed her arms. “We’ve always made certain allowances for you, and your condition.”

  “My condition?”

  “You know what I mean, Nathan. The school has accommodated you as best as we can.”

  “Accommodated me?” I didn’t usually get upset with my teachers, or staff like Ms. Elp or the principal, but my blood was still hot… maybe since Sunday, even. “How?”

  She looked at me for a moment, a slight warning in her eyes, before she spoke.

  “You’ve always dealt with the other kids very well. Handled yourself with restraint.” She leaned forward. “Dignity, I would even say.”

  “Being responsible,” I said, a little curl in my lip. I looked at the floor.

  “Yes.” She slapped the desk with her palms and sat up. “Exactly. I’ve admired your maturity… which is why I was so disappointed when I saw it was you in the middle of that little scuffle out there.”

  “Felder was waiting for me!”

  “Did you have to meet him?”

  “I had to get off the bus..!”

  She nodded once. “I’ll grant you that – but you could have kept walking. You could have ignored him. You could have acted the way you’ve acted since your first day at this school.” She picked up a pen and tapped it against her hand. “What’s different now, I wonder?”

  I finally got where she was going with this whole talk, and I could tell she knew I’d figured it out. I didn’t like her manipulating the whole conversation. I didn’t want to say what she wanted me to say, which was basically unfair, since it was exactly how I felt. It was a stupid game.

  She said, “I’m expecting an answer.”

  “Yeah.”

  She clicked the pen open and arranged some papers on her desk. “We can sit here all day, if you like. I’ve got things I can do.”

  I huffed.

  “You want me to say I think I can act differently now, now that these… Sovereign, or whatever, are out there. You think I think I don’t have to take all the… the crap people give me, ‘cause Donner, or whatever, will, like, look after me. Right?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “No! But…” I spread my arms and let them drop. “You don’t know how sick I am, letting everybody walk all over me, talk about me, make fun of me, just because I look the way I look, how I act!”

  Maybe I was coming down from the thing with Felder, maybe it was being in Elp’s office, maybe it was the last few days catching up. I have no idea why, really, but I actually started to cry. Once I realized it was happening, I was so mortified, it just made it worse.

  “Half those jerks – hell, most of ‘em – they don’t have, like, any idea what I can do, who I am, what I am. I can hear every word they say to each other! Every word!” I sniffed and ran a quick hand under my nose. I was glad my back was to the big window on the commons. “I can tell people like Terrance Felder and Byron Teslowski are coming just by the way they smell, I’m so used to their crap!

  “They think I’m just some skinny, freaky kid who stays away from everybody else, but I know I’m stronger than them, faster, smarter…”

  “Better?”

  She made me jump. I felt tight, bound up inside.

  “Yeah, damn it!”

  Ms. Elp looked at me. She stared at me for so long, her face totally unreadable, her scent masked by the awful perfume she wore, that I finally sat back in my chair and looked away. We stayed that way for a while.

  “Nathan.”

  “What.” I wiped my face on my arm.

  “The only talent you could possibly have that would matter at all in your life – the only real difference you should recognize between you and those kids who bother you – is humility.”

  “What?”

  “It must be pretty frustrating for you, always turning the other cheek while this man in Washington makes fools of so many people in a single afternoon.”

  “I… guess.” I’d never thought of it that way, and I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I had to say something.

  “You know, I saw in the paper that President Reagan is meeting with this Donner person. Do you know what this says to me?”

  I shrugged.

  “It says to me that Donner got the respect he wanted by being tough. By scaring us. He’s a bully, just like that boy who was waiting for you this morning.”

  I knew she was getting to some point. I waited.

  “The difference between him and you, Nathan, is that he seems to have some kind of supernatural powers. He can back up his talk.”

  I shrugged again. “Okay.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think you have in common, though. I would bet that William Donner is a very lonely man. He wants people to respect him, and his people, and he’s using his power to get what he thinks is respect from the whole world.

  “He’s probably talking to the President even as we speak. But I’m betting that the President doesn’t really respect him. I’m betting President Reagan is afraid of him, even though he’s the leader of the free world. He’s being bullied. That’s not respect; that’s not really what Donner wants.”

  “So?”

  She frowned. “Do I really have to spell it out for you, Nathan? You’re brighter than that.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She pursed her lips. “The point is that people respect those who handle themselves respectfully. Not grandstanding. Not bullying. By knowing their own strength, and standing on that. Not pushing it on others.”

  I nodded. I agreed with her, but I was still mad. “Are you going to give this same speech to Terrance Felder? He might know a little bit about being a bully, y’know?”

  She narrowed her eyes. I was pretty well conditioned to respond to authority figures. I shrank a little in my chair.

  “Here’s the bottom line, Mister Charters. I want you to know that I will not tolerate anything like the showing off I saw from you this morning. You want to act like that, you want to show everyone how much stronger and faster you are, I’ll be right there with the detentions, and parent conferences, and suspensions, and eventually I’ll see you expelled. I will not have you disrupting this school. Learn to deal with yourself, be an adult, or get out of this school. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded again. I knew she was right, but it seemed pretty damn unfair to me. If I was really a Sovereign, was that good for anything, or not?

  The first period bell rang. Ms. Elp wasn’t quite done.

  “You know more than you did before last Thursday. There’s no excuse.”

  She scrawled on a hall pass and handed it over to me. “Get to class. I don’t want to have this discussion with you again.”

  I took the hall pass and stood up.

  “Thanks.”

  She tilted her head to the door. “Tell Terrance to come in here on your way out.”

  Felder stood up when he saw me come out. He glared at me and balled up his fists
. I glared right back at him, but I hoped he couldn’t tell I’d been crying.

  “Don’t fuck with me again, Felder.” I said it just loud enough for him to hear.

  His eyes widened.

  I liked that. I wanted to shock him. I wanted to shock everyone. I hoped word of our fight would spread around the whole school. If it did, maybe I wouldn’t have to do anything that would land me back in Ms. Elp’s office.

  From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty Two

  Every teacher worked the Donner Declaration into the lesson that day. My third period Civics teacher, Mr. Pfalger, actually made us watch a video of the whole deal, like we hadn’t seen it fifty million times already. He might have been filling class time; we all knew he did that sometimes.

  When it was over and Pfalger switched the lights back on, my pupils contracted to slivers. I blinked until they adjusted to almost normal, their slightly oval shape almost unnoticeable. It was an automatic thing to not want people to notice another thing different about me, and as soon as I did it, I wished I could let it go. It was time for people to get used to this stuff.

  Pfalger leaned against the edge of his desk and crossed his arms. We knew it was his lecture pose, so we put down our pens.

  “So.” He had a small smile on his lips. “What’s everybody think? Is it the story of the century? Is it the end of the world? Is it just a big hoax?” He looked around the room. “Mister Helfinger – what’s going on with this?”

  Vinnie Helfinger shrugged. “I dunno.”

  Pfalger grinned. “That’s obvious from your grades, Mister Helfinger, but take a stab anyway. What does the Donner Declaration make you think about? How does it make you feel?”

  Vinnie’s considerable brow furrowed like he actually was thinking about it. “I guess… I guess it’s pretty cool.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, like, this Donner dude can do whatever he wants, right? That’s pretty cool.”

  “Okay, sure. So that’s what Donner himself makes you feel. What about this declaration of his? What do you think?”

  The class was quiet. There was an uneasy tightness in my stomach. I felt a little like when people talk about you in the third person and you’re standing right there.

  Sandra Banuelos spoke up. “He… he thinks he’s above the law.”

  Pfalger pointed at her with both hands and bounced into a pace. “That’s an interesting phrase: ‘above the law.’ It implies some superiority, doesn’t it? But that’s not really what Donner said, is it? Remember, he declared that he… and everyone like him, and that’s a whole other issue… is sovereign. What does that mean? What is a sovereign?”

  This kid named Ken something or other put up his hand and said, “It’s like the king, right? Like sovereign ruler.”

  “Not bad… close.” Pfalger stopped pacing and clasped his hands together. “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the countries of Europe were trying to figure out how to deal with a secular, instead of religious, justification for their authority. Before then, you were king because God said you were, or in some cases, you were related to God, or maybe even a god yourself.” He smiled. “Not unlike my own vast authority here in this classroom, right?”

  I laughed along with a few others. Pfalger was tough on all of us, but he was fun.

  “So it was determined, essentially – and I’m skipping a whole lot, here, since this isn’t really the point of today’s class – that every country was equal in stature to every other. That a country had a right to govern its own affairs.” He paused and started pacing again, back and forth in front of his desk.

  “Name a sovereign nation today.”

  Most folks said the United States, including me. Jeff Ford said, “All of ‘em, right?”

  Pfalger stopped dead. “All of them? Really? Even, say, Taiwan? Tibet? Romania? Yugoslavia? Are those countries equal in stature to other nations? Are they equal to, for example, China and the Soviet Union? For that matter, do they have a right to govern their own affairs?”

  An uneven chorus of “no” carried across the room.

  “Not so much, eh? So you can see, it’s more of an ideal than a reality. What makes one nation, say, more equal than others?”

  Vinnie Helfinger had this one. “Power.”

  Pfalger’s eyebrows went up and he smiled at Vinnie. “Nice one, Mister Helfinger. But it’s obvious, right? It’s the same on every level. China keeps Tibet under its thumb because China is much, much more powerful. We haven’t been invaded by Mexico, recently, because we’re much, much more powerful. Right?”

  He didn’t wait for our response. “So what happens when a person speaks up and says that he’s a sovereign power all on his own – and he seems to be much, much more powerful than any other single person?”

  We thought about it. Nobody knew. I sure didn’t know. I said as much.

  Pfalger pointed at me. “That’s the whole drama right now, isn’t it? That’s why it’s such a big deal. Not because the ubermensch is alive and well and capable of damn near anything – it’s because the balance of power has been threatened, pretty brazenly, by one guy… and he’s still out there! He hasn’t been thrown in prison, or shot in the street, or disappeared… and why not?”

  Sandra said, “We don’t do that to people.”

  Pfalger shrugged. “Don’t we? Donner’s made some claims, hasn’t he, about what this country has already done to other people like him – it’s the whole reason he made his declaration, right?”

  Sandra wasn’t convinced. “But maybe he’s just saying that.”

  Pfalger shrugged, smiled. “Maybe. Put yourself in the government’s shoes. Let’s say you find out that some members of the population have… powers, abilities, whatever they’re calling them… that give them an advantage over the norm. How would it make you feel?”

  I thought about my mother’s assumptions about the government. “Nervous,” I said.

  “Sure! Nervous… or, to put it another way: insecure.” He emphasized the word with a fist into his open palm. “It would be a matter of national security, wouldn’t it? Because order has to be maintained, right?”

  He had us all thinking.

  “So let’s say, for sake of argument, that Donner’s correct, and the government has known about these so-called Sovereign people for a while now, and yet for some reason their existence isn’t common knowledge. Now this guy, who is apparently the most powerful of all these people, comes forward and says, essentially, “don’t tread on me,” right? What happens now?”

  "Isn’t Donner meeting with the President today?” I said.

  “Yep. Cool to be a fly on that wall, eh?” Some chuckles in the class. “I want you to really think this through: why would Reagan, who supposedly already knows about the Sovereign people and is maybe, just maybe keeping them under control somehow… why would he bother to meet with this self-proclaimed leader who essentially threatened the whole country on the President’s front lawn?”

  We all gave it some thought. I wasn’t sure, myself. Up to then, I’d been thinking about what the whole thing meant to me, how it meant that I wasn’t so much of a freak anymore… or at least, I was part of a group of freaks, which was a little better. But what did it mean in a bigger sense?

  Pfalger said, “What happens when all these little Donners suddenly feel like it’s okay to come out of the woodwork? What’s it mean if the government can’t get away with keeping this whole thing secret anymore? What if tomorrow it’s not just Donner and this flying guy in New York – what if tomorrow it’s your neighbor?”

  I wanted to slouch in my chair, just a little. I snuck a look at my classmates. Some looked thoughtful. Some looked flat-out worried.

  A few glanced at me, then looked away.

  “Intriguing, isn’t it?” Pfalger clapped his hands. “It’s also your homework assignment. I want a five hundred work essay on what the Donner Declaration means to you and your place in the world.” He looked right at me for a moment,
just long enough to convey that his expectations for my paper were somehow different, or higher. I tried to keep my expression blank.

  “Think about it carefully. Due Wednesday. That’s it.”

  The bell rang.

  From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty Three

  After spending so much quality time in her company that morning, I didn’t really feel like eating lunch in my usual spot beneath Ms. Elp’s office window. I found a low wall near the main entrance of the school, far from the nearest kids, and settled into my sack lunch.

  Nobody came near me. No one noticed me. It felt like the first moment of peace I’d had the whole day. There was just too much attention on the whole Sovereign thing. Nobody came flat out and called me one, even though Elp and Pfalger came pretty close.

  Still, I could feel the difference in the way people looked at me. There wasn’t simple mockery, or derision. Pitiful as it sounds, I was used to that, and I could ignore it. This was different. Curiosity. Fear, maybe even.

  I had thought I was ready to announce myself to the world, and to hell with anyone who had a problem with it. Even without my own little declaration, it was turning into a really long day.

  I was almost through with lunch when I caught Teslowski’s scent. He came around the corner, following the light breeze, a moment later.

  We looked at each other. It was a little weird to realize I didn’t feel any anxiety about him any more. I put down my food and inclined my head.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.” He swung a leg over the wall and sat down, facing me. “Sorry about Terry.”

  I shrugged. “It’s cool. You… all right, or whatever?”

  He touched his stomach. “Yeah. I heal up real fast.”

  “Oh.” That figured. I did, too. I wondered if it was a Sovereign thing.

  We looked around. I didn’t know what to say. It was awkward. Finally Teslowski said, “Listen, Charters, those guys aren’t gonna hassle you anymore, okay? Me neither.”

  I felt such a strong, automatic rush of relief, it was embarrassing. Six years of shit from this guy was over? It was too good to be true.