Kapitel 10: 10
'All right, Sport, empty your pockets!' Jack watched with wry ire as the little blonde alien girl retrieved her booty from the pockets of the light jacket she'd got from the mall. As the pile on the table grew, Carly and Jason watched with frank astonishment. Kiko didn't seem surprised that Yelina had stolen- it seemed that she was more impressed than anything by the sheer quantity of misappropriated merchandise. Jack had to restrain himself from chuckling out loud, amused by the girl's lack of repentance, if not her determination to keep her ill-gotten gains.
'No wonder she wanted a jacket with so many pockets!' Carly intoned. 'Look at all this stuff!'
When Yelina stopped and looked up at Jack enquiringly, he cleared his throat and made a "continue" motion with his hand. She took the hint with such a big sigh of reluctance that he couldn't help but chuckle aloud.
'You little imp!' he said, shaking his head as she began emptying more pockets. 'You're as bad as a magpie!' He turned to Kiko. 'What about you?'
Looking caught, Kiko flushed scarlet, reached into a pocket, and retrieved an object which she placed on the table. Then, she burst into tears.
Jack stared, and gave it back to her. 'For pity's sake! You're all repentant for picking a plastic barrette up off the floor when your friend here is the real klepto.' He considered the two, and sighed. Yelina had picked up the kitten off the floor and was holding it to her cheek, watching him apprehensively. 'I know I shouldn't let you get away with this, because I know you know you stole this stuff . . .' He pulled out his wallet, handed Jason some money. 'Would you mind going to the store before it closes? We'll need cat food and kitty-litter. In the meantime, I'll cut the bottom out of a cardboard box and line it with a plastic bag.'
'You're not mad?' Jason asked him, disbelieving. Unspoken were the words, "My dad . . ."
Sensing this, Jack said quietly, 'I'm not big on the "big person doesn't like what little person is doing, so big person hits little person" thing. Yelina didn't really hurt anything or anyone. What she did was wrong, but there was no malice involved. If there had been,' he directed at her, hoping she would get the gist from his tone of voice, 'then she'd be over my knee right now!' He gave her a light swat on the derriere for emphasis. 'Bad Yelina!'
She turned a comically appealing look up at him, as though she hoped, in a manipulative way, for clemency.
'You,' he said, wagging a finger, 'are a little devil, and you don't fool me one little bit.'
It did not go unnoticed by him that her eyes strayed to Kiko's, and that, for a fleeting instant, she appeared both abashed and caught. But he tousled the kitten's head to show her that he wasn't about to take it away from her.'
With an odd, reluctant sort of feeling, Jack went next door to tell Jason's and Carly's mother that they would be staying over for dinner. He never felt comfortable speaking to Donna Whyte; she always seemed a bit vague, somehow lost and baffled in a world that wasn't what she'd been brought up to believe and expect. "Carl's handiwork," Jack often called it, though he wasn't certain this were entirely true.
Jack endured the stench of cigarette smoke, her battered, bathrobe-clad demeanor, the smell of booze on her breath, her tired whispering voice, with passive forbearance. He tried not to feel guilty as he disengaged himself from her clinging, lonely presence, left her aching on the front porch like the unanswered appeal of a child abandoned so long ago that even her name was forgotten . . .
With a wry expression, Jack took the video game away from Yelina as the young people sat at the dining-room table. 'Not at the table,' he told her, knowing she couldn't understand his words, but suspecting that she otherwise well understood the situation. He put the game over on the buffet in plain sight so she would realise that it hadn't been confiscated permanently. He smiled as she pouted, fidgeting, and gazed longingly at her new toy from a distance. He shook his head. 'Just a few days on our world, and already we've managed to corrupt her . . .' a movement in her shirt got his attention. 'All right, no kitties at the table, either.' He held out his hand. With great reluctance, she handed over the little grey tabby. He placed it on the floor, opened up a package containing assorted jingle balls, rolled one across the floor, and grinned as the little ball of energy went pelting after in hot pursuit. Along with the litter-box and cat food, at Jack's suggestion Jason had picked up an assortment of cat toys.
'Can I turn the stereo on?' Carly asked him.
Jack kept his expression carefully neutral. 'Only if you keep it down to a dull roar.' There was a coded subtext between them that said that she could indulge her taste in popular music only so long as it was kept to a near-inaudible level. Jack's taste in music began at the sixties and ended at the eighties.
With alacrity, Carly made her way to Jack's stereo. She was in awe of the powerful old leviathan, and adjusted its controls with a naive reverence. Within moments, she found what she was looking for- what to Jack's ears sounded like "Boom, boom, boom, boom," with a lot of sequencers and electronic percussion going, an electronic keyboard bass grinding along, and very little smacking of humanity.
He smiled ruefully at Yelina's enthusiastic response.
'Boom!'
'Yeah, lots of boom,' Carly grinned.
'Boom-boom-kitty,' Yelina said as the kitten stopped in front of one huge speaker and stared as though trying to comprehend the odd noises emanating from it.
Jack laughed at that, shook his head, and began serving supper- a bowl of borscht with sour cream and rye bread, perogies and cabbage-rolls and good kolbassa sausage.
'Kiko and Yelina really like music,' Jason told him.
'Yeah, you should have heard them at that store that sells all those keyboards,' Carly blurted excitedly. 'They were playing some really cool stuff!'
Jack looked to Jason for explanation.
'They were, like, playing drum stuff on these two keyboards.' He shrugged. 'It sounded really neat.'
'Drum stuff, eh?' Jack said, almost to himself. 'H'm. Anyway, you did good in the clothes department. Next time, make sure Carly gets some new runners, okay? By the way, did you run into any trouble along the way? I mean, besides the little shoplifting incident?'
'I don't know for sure,' Jason told him directly, 'but a cop car passed us when we left, heading for the mall. Then we saw a bunch more when we were stopped on the highway, waiting for the storm to let up. Might've just been heading to an accident somewhere, but . . .' he shrugged.
'But-?' Jack prompted.
'I'm not sure . . . but, well, I thought they might have been setting up a roadblock up ahead, so I turned off and took the grid roads instead. Looked to me like it was more than just shoplifting they were interested in.'
Jack digested this in silence for several long moments. At last, he said, 'Well, if they're looking for someone or something, then they probably only have a very general idea of what they're looking for, otherwise they'd be kicking the door down. But the big question is, if they are looking, what are they looking for? There's been nothing on the news- not that that's surprising. But it does make me wonder if maybe there were other survivors, or if someone figured out that they're minus two bodies.'
'What'll happen if they come looking?' Jason asked him seriously.
Jack considered the two alien girls a long moment. Yelina was watching as Kiko stirred a dollop of sour cream into her borscht, turning it into a swirl of blood-red, pink and white. For a fleeting instant the sight reminded him poignantly of mangled flesh, blood and bandages.
Wöchentlicher Energiestatus
-- Power-
Rangliste 
-- Power-
Stein