~~~
The War to Save the Earth began with running.
As I've said, I'd been slipping out of my bedroom at night and running around the Purchase. Now that I needed scant sleep, I began to run farther afield. On nights when I had no sleepovers or other late activities, I'd cross the Tennessee and the Cumberland, and run as far out I-24 or the Western Kentucky Turnpike as I could in an hour. The distance got longer each night.
Sometimes, too, I did off-road running. Those of you who've tried this know that it can be an adventure.
One night, at full speed, I entered a patch of black fog and ran into a tree full tilt. The tree was a pine, about twenty feet tall; I took it down. It did a number on me, too. I lay on the ground and wept for my pain and my stupidity, and especially for how much the dead Tani would hate me for ruining myself for the Work. After a while, though, my skin and my bones crawled back into place, and I was able to rise and run home. When I got there, I looked just fine.
One night, as I was running across a field, I crested a rise to find a stock pond in my path. Ignorantly, I tried to slow down, but I took several strides across the pond's surface before I ditched. As I crawled from the pond, I felt a fool. I ran from the scene of my shame as quickly as possible. As I ran, my clothes dried, and my mind began to work. I figured that, if I didn't break stride, I could run on water...
The Ohio, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Mississippi became my highways. By land or by sea, as the saying goes, I could now reach St. Louis, Louisville, Nashville, or Memphis in under an hour. I could explore them a couple of hours and still make it home in time to get all of the sleep that I needed before my clock-radio went off, and Mom called me to breakfast.
In the cities, I practiced special-forces skills. I climbed up buildings, ran across rooftops, jumped from rooftop to rooftop, peered through skylights and windows, and climbed down buildings. Kuma and Un-Thor, who've done their own share of night-time prowling, can tell the rest of you what a sense of power it gives you.
One night in Louisville, while I was in a part of town where maybe a thirteen-year-old girl shouldn't have been just then, I was crossing a rooftop when I heard blows and screams in an alley below me. Stopping to look there, I saw that a man had a woman shoved up against a brick wall. As I watched, he pressed his left forearm against her throat while with his right hand he yanked up her skirt.
As I landed, he pulled out a knife, but, before he could use it, I slapped him across the face. His eyes got big, his face went slack, and the knife clattered on concrete. I picked him up and shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. "When someone says no, it means no!" I screamed in his face.
I flung him against the brick wall, and he oozed down it to the concrete. Turning to the woman, I said, "Can you run?" When she nodded, I said, "Go get help!"
As she ran off, I began to shake. What if I killed that man? I thought. Kneeling, I felt his neck and found a pulse there. My crystal-shaping gift had turned on. It gave me a strange sense of being able to feel all of his internal organs. I gathered that his spine was intact -- amazingly so; I could easily have snapped his neck while I was shaking him -- but his right humerus was broken where I'd squeezed his arm, and I'd broken several ribs on his left side where he struck the wall.
I stood, debating whether to carry him to an emergency room, till I heard a siren coming. I clambered back to the rooftop, from which I saw the erstwhile assault victim guiding a police car into the alley.
I ran then, not stopping till I reached my own bed. There, I lay shivering till the clock-radio came on.
Dour, brooding Un-Thor laughs harshly. "You must've gotten over the shivering fits. As I've heard things, you did a lot of night-time rescues before you got caught."
"I'm getting there," I say crossly.