Adleman's Device - Chapter 1 by Jonathan Hask

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"No mom, I'm fine. Just one of those falling dreams. Woke up right before I hit the ground, like usual."

In truth he couldn't remember what distressed him so much about the dreams aside from the impending feeling of speed and importance. He could rarely remember more than those two aspects after having been awake for a minute or two.

"Well just let me know if you need to go to the doctor. I don't want you to be losing any sleep. You hardly sleep more than six hours each night anyway."

Eric felt very lucky to have such a caring mother just then. Candace Coleman was still bustling around the kitchen preparing breakfast for the rest of the family, her red-gold hair tied back in a light-blue bandana. Her round, soft-featured face had begun to show the beginnings of worry creases and other physical manifestations of her age, but most women would pay a good amount of money to have the energy and zeal for life that she had at forty-seven.

After finishing the unexpectedly satisfying breakfast, Eric grabbed his backpack from beside the front door of the house and rushed down the eight concrete steps. As strode quickly through the gate in the white fence that bordered the Coleman family's yard, Eric saw the school bus round the corner. He had a knack for getting out to the bus stop, which was located conveniently only about 20 yards from his front door, just as the bus was arriving.

Three other students were at the bus stop, each of whom had also seen the bus and was now waiting impatiently in a line to board when the bus finally arrived. As Eric began to walk toward the bus stop and the arriving bus, he noticed something else. Ricky Bunn was running late. Ricky was a short, fat young man who never seemed to quite catch up to anything. Today, he had started badly, and was now running gelatinously after the bus. The crueler students at Moorford High School had given Ricky the nickname "Sticky Buns," and in spite of the cruelty of the moniker Eric couldn't help but laugh at the truth in it just then.

There was very little chance that Ricky would catch the bus today, and realizing that, Eric was suddenly angry with himself for belittling the boy, even to himself. He wished there was something he could do for Ricky, but the chances of convincing the bus driver to wait for him were slim. The bus driver was an ex-military man who never quite lost the firm precision of action and organization that was instilled in him during his service. He was of the opinion that it was a students job to be at the bus stop on time just as much as it was his job to pick students up at the bus stop.

Still, Eric wished there was something he could do for Ricky. As the bus drew nearer, perhaps one hundred yards away now, Eric looked at the bus. He wished there was some way he could stop it, keep it from leaving his stop until Ricky had caught up. He found himself looking hard at the front tire of the bus, just beneath and in front of the folding door on the right side. He imagined it flattening. He imagined the air pressure inside the tire doubling as though a giant had put his thumb and forefinger on either side of the tire and squeezed.

Eric felt dizzy suddenly. One moment he was walking toward the bus stop and the next he was clinging precariously to the trunk of one of the small trees planted in the border between the sidewalk and the road. Looking down at the mound of bright reddish cedar chips that were mounded around the base of the tree, it felt like he were staring off the edge of a cliff into a great chasm filled with enormous wooden slabs. Eric closed his eyes and breathed deeply. In a few moments, the feeling of vertigo passed and he opened his eyes again to find that the bus was a now a block past his house and turning left toward its next stop on Clifton Street.