48.
***
Lynette screamed, a final word, the word that would carry her soul to eternity.
"Kevin!" she screamed. She hoped that he would know what she was saying in this last instant of her life. Hoped that, even through the sometimes staggeringly heavy blanket of his autism, he was hearing the words "I love you" in the sound of his name.
Her boy looked at her, his eyes open and clear.
He was going to see her die. He was going to see his mother's throat cut right in front of him. And then, certainly, Mr. Gray would turn on him as well, and the last thought he would take with him into eternity would not be one of love, of the sound of his mother's voice saying his name. It would be one of fear and death, one of pain and horror. It would be the feeling of a knife sliding into his body, the fading senses as his life's blood poured out of him.
Her son's eyes looked at her in that last instant.
Her son's eyes.
And she realized something. But it was too late. Too late to be of any help.
Kevin's eyes.
She heard a sound, a noise, a shout coming from somewhere beyond the narrow confines of the car that had become her entire world in these last moments. Someone shouting "No!" at the top of his lungs.
Scott. Scott was going to see her die, too.
Her family was going to watch her die, even as she had watched Robbie die.
All these thoughts jumbled and bumped and tumbled like ball bearings in a pinball machine, slamming into one another in a confusion of thought and feeling that took place in the instant it took for Mr. Gray to swing his knife.
Then it bit into her neck.
Her eyes closed.
She was gone.
***
49.
***
Scott dropped Tina, half-throwing her down the steps that led from the porch to the ground in front of the house. It was a cruel thing to do, but in his last moments he knew that her only hope of surviving was to be out of sight - and hopefully out of mind - of her father's baleful eye after the man killed Scott.
The girl fell with a scream.
The knife flew downward, toward Scott's chest.
He could not move. He was rooted to the spot as surely as if he had been made a part of the foundations of the house and had stood motionless ever since that time, simply waiting for this inevitable moment when history would repeat itself, this time finishing the job that Mr. Gray had started almost a decade before.
The knife point entered his chest.
Kevin's eyes.
All was dark.
***
50.
***
Kevin is a good boy.
A good boy who knows what to do. He knows just like he knows that Mr. Witten was right when he wrote about M-theory, about unifying the diverse superstring theories into one cohesive theorem. He knows just like he knows about his mother; that she loves him and would die for him - is dying for him.
He knows what to do. This is the instant that he has been seeing for days, the moment he has been waiting for.
He closes his eyes.
And the world disappears.
***
51.
***
Scott felt the knife enter his chest. Felt the point rip through his clothing and prick against his skin, then break the skin and enter it in a forceful plunge that would shatter his sternum and pierce his heart.
But it didn't happen.
He felt the knife go in, but at the next nanosecond, he felt a curious shifting.
He was no longer standing.
He was sitting somewhere.
He was holding something.
Scott looked down. Tina was, impossibly, back in his arms. And he was no longer outside. He was sitting down inside something. A car?
His car? Lynette's car? He couldn't remember. He knew it was one of them, knew the other one had been destroyed by the gray man, but he could not remember which car was which, or which he had found himself in.
He looked at Tina's face. It was white with shock, though he could not be sure if that shock was born of the fact that he had thrown her down a short set of stairs, or if like his it was born of the fact that a moment ago she had been one place, and now was somewhere else.
He felt something beside him, and realized what it was.
Kevin's eyes.
The boy was sitting on the seat beside him. He looked at Scott with clear eyes, and whispered. "Witten was right." Then an instant later, he followed up that statement by saying, "Cover Tina's eyes."
Scott did so, not knowing what was happening or how he had been spared the vicious death that he had somehow escaped eight years ago but had been doomed to repeat since then, but trusting in what Kevin said implicitly.
He covered the girl's eyes.
***