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mornings. And on Saturdays, when he held meetings and got people to work—painting, fencing, generally improving his property for God, and that part bugged me. But still…“Go on.”
    “When Reverend Bob talked to the cops, they listened. A couple of them knelt right in front of them, and he touched their heads as if he were blessing them. And once, when one of the twitching people they brought in looked like she was going to get away—this was by a weird crab-walk because she was tied up, but the tranquilizer didn’t seem to be doing anything to stop her—he just went over to her, raised his right hand, and talked for a bit. I swear, she quieted right down.”
    Tim stopped talking, and we sat in silence for a few moments.
    “Doctor Sullivan?” Robbie asked. “Did you figure it out? Do you know what it means? Is it terrorists like the police said?”
    Tim gave a short laugh. “No. Well, maybe. But…you guys have heard the stories about mothers who lift vehicles off their children, that kind of thing? What I think is, it’s like that. Mostly we think we’re only so strong, or we can only do so much, and we’re right. Because our brains limit us. So one person might be several times stronger than another, but their muscle tissue is nearly identical. One of their brains just…believes…it can do more. It recruits more muscle fibers. And so that person is stronger, but there’s no physical test to prove it, other than watching to see what they can do. I think, whatever’s happening, it’s like that. Something is, technically speaking, knocking our expectations out of whack.” He sagged, a little. “But I have no idea how or why.”
    “Hard to believe,” I said. “That this is all mental. What about the hairy guys, with fangs?”
    “Just people,” Tim said. “People who…started to believe something different. Like you, with your barefoot running. I can’t do that.”
    “You could learn how if you tried,” I told him. “It’s just practice that does it.”
    It was, too, but I didn’t think Tim would ever believe me. Or have the patience to work himself up to it.
    For years I hadn’t been able to run more than a quarter of a mile without hurting. But I’d read a few things about barefoot running, and figured I didn’t have anything to lose—so I tried it, only to discover my feet were so conditioned by years in what I now called foot-splints that they couldn’t so much as walk for an hour without pain. Lots of pain. Which…pissed me off.
    So I’d slowly built up my feet’s capacity to, for God’s sake, walk without shoes. Hell of a thing to forget how to do. And then, eventually, I learned to run. Now, for the first time in over ten years I was able to patter along the roads without knee and hip pain. For which doctors had on several occasions prescribed orthotics for my expensive built-up foot-cradling shoes, and cortisone shots, and oh by the way, they’d gently hinted, maybe at thirty-five I was just slightly too old to be pounding my legs and feet into the ground anyway….
    Don’t get me wrong: I was grateful to be able to play in the street again. But I hated thinking of all the years I’d wasted following expert advice. And buying shoes from companies with no evidence backing up their claims.
    “No,” Tim told me. “I’ll never be able to do what you do. Because I don’t believe in it. I know too much about exactly how you’re stressing your feet. I’d never be able to pull it off. If you had the first clue about anatomy? You couldn’t do it either.”
    I looked at Rebecca. Her frown showed her to be at least as skeptical as I was. “You heard the police asking for you?” I asked Tim.
    “Yeah. I don’t know if they actually want me as a doctor, or if they saw me out there last night. Either way, I can’t be a part of whatever they’re doing.”
    Robbie jumped up, took Rachel’s hand, and spoke. “So we can’t stay here in the house,” he told us all. “It’s