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He doesn’t stay in the city because of course he doesn’t stay in the city. He’s the prime suspect in a double homicide, after all.
Still, Jimmy sticks around the streets for a while, ducking into the shadows whenever he hears a siren. After all, it’s a bit suspicious to see a dirty teenager out on his own, nothing on him but his clothes and his backpack (still with his cheap geometry textbook and his assigned English reading stuffed into it, because they make for somewhere to lay his head that isn’t hard ground).
(He’d thought about going back to school, at first. How ridiculous is that?)
He sticks around for about a month—far longer than he wants to live on the streets, but his parents are cremated and so the funeral service isn’t urgent, and is held three weeks after their death.
Nobody notices the sallow sixteen-year-old boy loitering in the church front entrance, listening to the echoes of the eulogy. They don’t notice that he spent the last bit of his money on a white button-up from a thrift store, that he’d braved a homeless shelter to be able to shower. They don’t notice the tears that streak down his face, that he desperately tries to wipe away.
Then the loudspeaker in the entrance sparks and smokes and stops working, so Jimmy leaves.
He knows he has to get away. He’s barely been surviving nicking food from convenience stores and restock trucks. He doesn’t dare show his face at any of the homeless camps around the city, nor any of the charity food organizations. He’s certain that they’ll just turn him in.
But he doesn’t have the money to go anywhere, nor the survival skills to set up in the woods somewhere, so he does what must be the inevitable. He breaks into someone’s house and steals every valuable he can find.
The house he chooses has a lot—expensive electronics and sparkling jewelry, and he feels utterly awful about it but he decides against leaving an apology note and just runs, ignoring the way the door falls off its hinges behind him.
There’s an unforeseen issue, though: for a street rat, he doesn’t really have any connections—and he’s too much of a good kid to even know how to go about making connections. The one time he tries, he somehow ends up with three necklaces gone and a small packet of white powder in exchange. That he manages to pass off for some decent money, but he gets out of that area quickly before he ends up getting into the wrong sort of business.
From then on, he robs the nice-looking houses (he doesn’t really care about security and wears a mask and hoodie to do it, and when alarms are inevitably tripped he somehow evades capture) and only goes for cash. Eventually, he’s got enough of the stuff in his backpack to rent a place far away, a shady place he’d checked out online that’s a good thirty minute drive away from any sort of civilization (and quite far away from here) and the landlord doesn’t care that he’s paying in cash.
How to get there is the next question.
The cross-country bus doesn’t run in that direction, and even if it did the price would be over $300, so Jimmy nixes that idea pretty quickly. He can’t hitchhike, that would go poorly. He can’t steal a car—he’d never finished learning how to drive, and it would be a matter of time before a crash.
He ends up doing what he’s only seen in movies—he hitches a ride on a cargo train headed in the right direction. The trainyard at the edge of the city has very few cameras; it had been a piece of cake to sneak into one of the middle cars of what seemed to be a train full of grain and hide out between the stacks of it.
In that train, Jimmy sees the countryside for the first time in his life.
He’s never lived outside Empires City, and while he’d learned about rolling fields and corn for miles on end, he hadn’t actually believed it.
He believes it now.
It goes on for absolutely ages, field after field after field, occasionally broken up by barns or houses, but not nearly frequently enough. It’s insane. Some of the fields are for livestock—there are whole herds of cows, just roaming around out there.
It’s beautiful, but soon enough, the monotony gets to him. It’s nothing like the city, with its bright lights and forever bustle, and eye spy isn’t fun by himself. Jimmy ends up rolling up his hoodie and shoving it under his head, then lying back and falling asleep.
Somehow, the trip passes mostly uneventfully. He’d done a decent bit of research at a library computer (which had flashed error screens halfway through his scouring of train depot maps) and knows that this train will take him almost all the way to his destination, leaving him with a two day walk into town and then a day of walking to reach his rental. The walking part he’s fairly confident about, and there’s a couple of printed-off maps stuffed into his hoodie pocket to guide him. What he’d been worried about was the train.
The train doesn’t break down, though. The most that happens is a couple of bags split open, grain spilling everywhere. Jimmy doesn’t think too hard about it, just hugs his backpack a little closer to himself. He always gets a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach when his power manifests these days.
He hopes, if Lizzie’s alive, that she’s all right.
She hadn’t been found, either. The last time she’d been seen was by some friends at band after school on that fateful day. She’d vanished off the face of the earth, much like he had.
Jimmy swallows back the tears that burn at the corners of his vision. He can’t. He can’t think about her. He can’t think about his past at all. He just has to—he has to get away from everyone so that he never hurts anyone ever again, and then everything will become okay.
He sneaks off the train at his stop (a small depot, a couple of houses spread about and a place for the train to stop), slipping and faceplanting in the dust. He stumbles back up, hikes his backpack further up on his shoulders, and starts walking, through the tiny settlement and then along the side of the freeway that cuts through it.
There’s a gas station about three hours into his walk, thank goodness. He’s been out of water for far longer than he predicted, ever since his water bottle cracked down the side five hours ago, forcing him to drink all he could until the bottle was empty. At the gas station, he purchases a six-pack of cheap water and a pre-packaged pastry.
The pastry is moldy, of course. He eats around the black spots.
A two day walk. Into town, at least. Then another day to get to his rental. And after that. . . .
Jimmy’s not really sure what’s left of his life after that. Unless he can figure out how to control his powers, he’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere forever. He’ll have to become a farmer or something, raise chickens and grow food for himself so that he never has to subject the town to his misfortune.
For the first time, Jimmy stops to think about his long-term plans.
For the first time, Jimmy wonders if he should be alive.
-
The house sucks.
The fridge doesn’t work. There’s missing shingles on the roof, and the first time it rains the ceiling leaks all over the threadbare carpet in the living room. The air conditioning won’t turn on, and two weeks into living there the ceiling fan just falls out of the ceiling, narrowly avoiding crushing him (he walks away with some smarting scratches on his legs).
There’s some technically good things, he supposes. For instance, he gets pretty good at using a screwdriver after the cabinet doors and the doorknobs repeatedly fall off. Having a bed is nicer than sleeping on the ground, as he’s been doing for quite some time now. Even if the bedframe collapses on him during his second week. And rent is cheap!
Once a week, the city bus comes by to the bus stop a couple minutes out from the house, near the water tower (most workers at the water plant ride the bus to work), and when Jimmy eventually works up the courage (and entirely runs out of food), he rides it into town.
He doesn’t have enough money to last him forever. He can maybe survive for a year out here on what he has. If he starts a garden, though, gets some chickens like he planned. . . .
Jimmy goes back to the house with an armful of groceries, ten packets of seeds, and three chickens following him. It’s just getting to gardening season, so it’s the ideal time to set something up.
The work of turning the dirt with the rusted rake he finds in the garage is hard, but feels so unbelievably good. It’s awfully nice to have something to do, something that isn’t moping around the house, trying not to destroy everything he touches. He feels like he has something of a purpose, a purpose to plant a sustaining garden and raise three chickens and make something out of the profits.
If things go well, and he becomes less dangerous, maybe he can set up at a farmer’s market. Less exposure to the outside world than an actual job, so less chance of hurting anyone. Still bringing in a bit of money, enough to hopefully keep up with his rent.
His rake strikes a rock, which flies up and hits him square between the eyes. Right. Less planning for the impossible, more cultivating a garden.
For the second time, leaning on the handle of the rake as he rubs his forehead, Jimmy wonders if he’s meant to be alive.
-
By some stroke of luck, all goes . . . well.
The garden isn’t the best garden ever. The chickens are, perhaps, a bit more scraggly than the average chicken, their eggs more often rotten than not by the time Jimmy gets to them. But he can survive off of it, and for a teenage boy, he feels pretty proud of himself.
And he starts to settle in.
Maybe he can make this work. He can . . . he can just be a recluse, maybe work some sort of online job to pay the bills, survive off of his own garden and animals. If he saves up, he could maybe get a goat or two. Goats give milk, right? Edible milk? Having some milk would be nice.
It’s that autumn, of course, when things start to go wrong.
He’s heading into town for the first time in over a month, hungering for something other than bitter lettuce and tomatoes and eggs and Malt O’ Meal (his last box had run out that morning). Maybe he can spare some money on a frozen pizza (he knows he won’t—he’d already made a list for bread ingredients, a cookbook, and plenty of peanut butter and jelly).
The town feels . . . empty. He doesn’t pass anyone out walking or kids playing in yards, houses shuttered and doors closed. There are only three cars in the grocery store’s parking lot, and one of them is an employee.
The groceries are overpriced, but Jimmy doesn’t have any other choices. He’s thirsty, too, and stops for a bottle of water before heading to the single employee for checking out, but the shelves for bottled drinks are bare.
The cashier checks him out with an apology—
“Sorry, we’ll be getting more water on Tuesday, when the shipment comes in. If you can’t hold out until then, I’ve heard that our Belton location has some. Stay safe.”
And that, more than anything else, really worries Jimmy.
The library’s closed (it must be a holiday, or a weekend, or something), but there’s a newspaper box at the bus stop. It cracks open at his touch, so he takes a paper without paying and reads while he waits for the bus, hoping that it’s recent enough to have some news about what’s with the water.
As it turns out, it’s on the first page.
Hundreds ill. Contaminated water. Reports from analyzing labs that indicate that any water from the tap is deadly—as soon as it enters the water tower it becomes contaminated, but they’ve tried disinfecting the tower or gathering rainwater or taking it straight from the treatment plant, but nothing works. Anyone who drinks any water gets sick.
And Jimmy knows, instinctively, that it’s because of him.
After all, he lives within walking distance of the treatment plant.
It’s there, waiting for the bus, that Jimmy decides that he can’t stay here. He’d always known, deep down, that it wouldn’t work out. He’d hoped, of course. He’d hoped that the creaky old house could have contained him, held him there. That maybe he wouldn’t be dangerous if all he could hurt was himself.
Clearly, nowhere is far enough away. Even when he separates himself from civilization as much as possible, he can’t escape hurting people. He can’t escape himself.
He doesn’t move away immediately, though he’s so disgusted with himself (he can see the water tower through his window, and the now-frequent workers trying to fix it) that he wishes he could. Instead, he spends a week harvesting what he can—a few limp handfuls of lettuce and about a dozen tomatoes—and fixes what he can on the house.
When the time comes to leave, he doesn’t take the bus. He walks, his chickens following along behind, until he reaches the town.
Jimmy lifts the chickens one by one into someone’s backyard, leaving them a couple of tomatoes to eat until their new owner finds them.
He feels lucky that he hadn’t managed to kill his chickens. He really did come to love them—he had built the shoddiest of coops out of spare wood from his shed, and he’d petted each of them on the head every day, and frequently carried one around when he was too lonely to do anything. They can’t come back to the city with him, though—he’s sure that they wouldn’t survive the trip.
For back to the city is where Jimmy is headed. He’d considered just wandering, a vagrant, but he doesn’t exactly have the skills for that. He doesn’t know anything about scavenging or hunting, he hates stealing from people who aren’t already well-off, and he’s been feeling unwell for the past couple of days. He can’t survive wandering the country.
And in the city, there’s . . . well, there are more people to hurt, but there are more people to fix his problems. More places for people to go for help.
And maybe he can do some good instead of just isolating himself, get a job where he can be helpful. Balance out some of his karma.
Or maybe the train he hitchhikes on will crash and burn and he’ll die.
Jimmy’s not sure which would be preferable.