Replica (33 page)

“No one knows we were out on the marshes,” Gemma said. Her stomach squirmed, though. “No one knows what we found.”

“So you think,” Pete said. And then, in a quieter voice,
“I'm not trying to scare you. But we have to be careful.” It was amazing, Gemma thought, how nice the word
we
could sound, and she nearly put her arms around him. She nearly kissed him.

Christ. She was fantasizing about kissing Pervy Pete. April would never believe it.
If
April ever spoke to her again.

It was hotter here than it had been in April's grandparents' subdivision, despite all the shade. Gemma felt sorry for the Florida Energy guys.

“You'll like Jake,” Gemma said, partly to convince herself. The tree branches lifted and fell silently, touched by a phantom wind. She didn't know why she felt so nervous. Something about the whole place was creepy, like the set piece of an abandoned road from a horror film after the zombie apocalypse has struck.

Pete shrugged. But he still looked unhappy, or nervous, or both. “Weird are my people,” he said. “Weird is what I do.”

“He'll have a plan. You'll see,” she said, partly to reassure herself. A tabby cat was sunning itself on the grungy porch and stared insolently at them as the sound of the doorbell echoed through the house.
You shouldn't be here,
it seemed to be saying, and Gemma couldn't help but feel the same way.

For a long minute, she heard no sounds of movement.
She began to feel not just nervous but truly afraid. She jabbed a finger on the bell again and at the same time tried the knob. Locked. Finally she heard footsteps. In the window next to the door, she saw Jake twitch open the blinds, and his dark eyes peer between them. Then the sound of the lock releasing. Relief felt like something physical, like something she could lie down in.

“God,” she said, when he opened the door. “I was afraid something had happened. I was afraid . . .” But she trailed off, seeing that he had only opened the door a crack and he was angling his body so they couldn't come inside.

“What are you doing here?” He was looking at her as if he'd never seen her before in his life. He looked
furious
.

It wasn't exactly the welcome she'd been expecting. Next to her, Pete pivoted, staring back toward the street as though considering a quick getaway.

“You weren't picking up your phone,” Gemma said. “I called a dozen times.”

“Can't find my phone,” he said. “Don't know what happened to it.” His eyes swept the street behind them. “You should really go.” He started to close the door.

“Wait.” Gemma got a hand in the door. For a second he looked like he was considering closing it on her fingers, but then he thought better of it. “You don't understand. The replicas—they're gone.”

“Quiet.” Jake hushed her as though she'd cursed in church. She was close enough to see that he was sweating. Fear. Jake Witz, she realized, wasn't angry. He was terrified. “Keep your voice down.”

“We came here for your help—” Pete started to say, but Gemma cut him off. She felt wild and reckless and dizzyingly confused.

“Didn't you hear me? They're
gone
,” she said. “They must have left in the middle of the night. They took my money. Maybe they took your phone, too—”

“I heard you.” Once again, Jake's eyes went to the street. “It's not my problem. Not yours, either. Now get out of here. You shouldn't have come. I don't know you, okay?” He raised his voice. He was practically shouting. “I don't even know you.”

Once again Gemma stopped Jake from closing the door, just barely, on her fingers. She kept her hand in the doorjamb so he couldn't. She had that hard-throat feeling of trying not to cry. “What happened?” she said. “Are you in trouble with the cops?”

“The cops.” Jake let out a sound that could have been a laugh or a cough. “Not the cops.” He took a step forward, startling Gemma and forcing her to release the doorjamb. “My lights are working just fine,” he added almost angrily, leaning so close that Gemma could feel his breath on her face. Before she could ask him what he meant, he
closed the door, and the lock slid back into place.

For a second Gemma just stood there, stunned. Even with Pete standing next to her, she had never felt so alone in her life. She was too embarrassed to look at Pete. She'd dragged him all the way here, promising that Jake would help, and he hadn't even let them inside. “Something must have happened. He wasn't like this yesterday.” She thought of the way he'd looked, with sweat standing on his skin, and what he'd said to her:
My lights are working just fine.

“Gemma.” There was a warning in Pete's voice, but she was too upset to listen to it.

“Someone must have gotten to him—yesterday he was practically
begging
me for information—”

“Gemma.”
This time, Pete seized her hand, and she was surprised into silence by the sudden contact. Her palms were sweaty, but his were dry and cool and large. “Funny they need so many guys to work the wires, don't you think?” he said in a low voice, as he piloted her off the porch and back toward the van. He didn't look at the Florida Energy men a little ways down the road, but she could tell by the way he was staring straight ahead that he was
trying
not to look.

Instinctively, she glanced over to where the six or seven workers in their hard hats and vests were still standing—
doing nothing
—and had the sense that they had only avoided
meeting her eyes by a fraction of a second. And then she understood what Jake had said about the lights.

Not nonsense. A code.
My lights are working just fine.
Meaning: no reason for the Florida Energy truck, and the people gathered across the street with their van spiky with antennae. Although Gemma had looked away as quickly as possible, she had caught the eye of one of the men down the road: clean-shaven, hard-eyed, pale as paper. Not the complexion of someone who spent every day working outside.

Jake was being watched. Which meant: they were now being watched, too. No wonder Jake had practically shoved them off his doorstep, had shouted that he didn't know them. He'd been trying to protect them. She had the overwhelming urge to turn around, to hurtle back up to the door and pound to be let in and to thank him. But that would be beyond stupid. Instead she walked stiff-backed to the minivan and climbed in, trying to appear unconcerned, as if maybe the whole thing really had been a mistake. Maybe the men—whoever they were—would believe that they were just casual acquaintances of Jake's, there to return something or say hello.

In the car, Pete wiped his hands on his jeans before grabbing hold of the steering wheel. They didn't speak. Pete kept glancing in the rearview mirror as he backed out of the driveway.
Please don't follow us,
Gemma thought.
She pressed the desire through her fists.
Don't follow us.
But a moment later, a maroon Volvo pulled out of another hard-packed dirt driveway and crept up behind them. Could it be a coincidence? She didn't think so.

“Do you think—?” she started to ask, but Pete cut her off.

“Not now,” he said. “Need to think.” Somehow, the fact that Pete—Pete of the endless, stream-of-consciousness babble—had run out of things to say scared her even more than the car behind them.

It wasn't a coincidence: the car followed them no matter how many turns they made down shitty country roads, even after they reached downtown Little Waller, such as it was: a few bleak roads studded with tire shops, fast-food restaurants, and liquor and discount stores. The driver didn't even bother going for subtlety—and this, too, scared Gemma, and made her angry. It was the way a cat toyed with its prey, batting it around a bit, taking its time, certain already of its satisfaction.

“We need to lose them.” Gemma hardly recognized her voice when she spoke. It was as if an alien had crawled into her throat and taken over her vocal cords.

“
Lose
them?” Pete repeated. Gemma realized how tense Pete was. He was practically doubled over the steering wheel, staring hard at the road as if it might simply disappear. “Christ. You're really taking the
knight-in-shining-armor thing to the limit, you know that?” He yanked the wheel hard to the left, and Gemma was thrown against the door. But only thirty seconds later, lazily, the Volvo turned, too. It was so absurd that they were riding around in an eggplant-colored minivan. They might as well be driving a hovercraft. It wasn't exactly like they could
blend
. “Who are these guys, anyway?”

“Maybe cops,” Gemma said. She had an awful, heavy feeling in her gut, like she was trying to digest a roll of toilet paper. She'd dragged Pete into this. She'd dragged them
all
into this. “Probably military.”

“Military.” Pete repeated the word as if he'd never heard it before. His freckles were standing out ever more clearly from his skin, like even they were thinking of making a break for it. “Jesus . . .”

“You told me you wanted to help.” Gemma was squeezing her hands so tightly she was sure she'd break the skin.

Pete sighed. “I do,” he said. “I just didn't think we'd end up in a chase scene so early in the movie.” Then: “All right, look. Are you buckled in?”

Gemma nodded. She was too nervous to speak. A sign ahead pointed the way to the interstate, and here there were more cars on the road, funneling onto or off the highway. The Volvo was still following them, but at a
distance of about fifty yards.

Pete put on his blinker and moved into the far left lane, as though he was about to turn across traffic and into a shopping mall that boasted two liquor stores, a nail salon, and a pizza joint. At least one car crowded in behind them, separating them temporarily from the Volvo's view. The traffic light turned red. Pete inched forward. Gemma could hear him breathing. She felt as if she
couldn't
breathe, as if she was being squeezed between two iron plates.

“What are you . . . ?” she started to say, but then the light turned green and Pete slammed his foot on the accelerator.

The engine whined, then yanked them forward. Gemma nearly cracked her head on the dashboard before she was pulled backward by the seat belt, smacking her head against the seat. Pete jerked the wheel to the right, cutting across two lanes of traffic. Several drivers leaned a long protest on their horns, and a Chevy screeched to a stop to avoid colliding with them.

“What the hell? What the hell?” Gemma was screaming, and more horns went off as Pete careened onto the entrance to the interstate. But then it was over. He was speeding up the on ramp. Traffic blurred past them, a solid moving mass of cars dazzled by sunlight, and then they were there, passing among them, and the Volvo was
long gone. The sky was bright and puffy with clouds. They could have been anyone, going anywhere.

“How's that for a chase scene?” Pete said. He was out of breath.

Gemma couldn't help it: all her fear transformed into the sudden desire to laugh. It practically lifted her out of her seat. She doubled forward, holding her stomach, laughing so hard it hurt. Pete started to laugh, too. Then he snorted, which just made Gemma laugh harder, until she couldn't breathe and had to lean back, gasping.

“Not bad,” she said. Her eyes were watering, blurring her vision of the highway and the featureless towns on either side of it, all of them identical, replicas of one another. “Not bad at all.”

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 12 of Lyra's story.

THEY DROVE FOR ANOTHER HOUR. Pete switched onto different freeways several times, just in case, although Gemma couldn't imagine how anyone could still be pursuing them. She was surprised to see a sign for Palm Grove—the town where Emily Huang, the nurse at Haven who'd been killed before she could talk to Mr. Witz, had lived—and equally surprised when Pete turned off the highway.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I'm starving,” he said. “I'm seriously about to self-cannibalize. And I need both hands to drive.”

“I'm hungry too,” Gemma said, before remembering that she tried never to admit to being hungry in front of other people. But of course, the fact that they'd just escaped from a military tail made her normal concerns about being overweight seem unimportant. Besides, Pete
didn't look at her that way, as if there was something wrong with her, as if she
really shouldn't
, as if she would
be pretty if only she'd slim down a bit
.

She liked how Pete looked at her.

They pulled over at a diner across from a motel called the Starlite, its parking lot empty except for a white Chevrolet and a few beat-up, dusty sedans. She didn't want to think about the kind of people who used the Starlite midday. Gemma climbed out, stretching, her body still sore from being contorted on a lawn chair all night. Once again she had that awful, full-body sensation of being watched. She whipped around, certain she saw a face peering out at her from a window of the Starlite. But it was only a trick of the light.

Still, even after they were seated and tucking into enormous burgers and a platter of fries so towering it seemed to defy physics, she kept glancing out the window. Another car pulled into the diner parking lot and her heart stopped. But it was only a dad and his two kids. And after a while, she began to relax.

“So what's the next move?” Pete had waited until they were both finished eating before leaning forward and speaking to her in a low voice. “I mean, we can't depend on Jake anymore. The replicas are gone. Are we finished here?”

Again, she liked his use of the word
we
. “I've been
thinking about that.” She'd eaten too much too quickly and now she was nauseous. “I have to talk to my parents. It's the only way.” Even saying it made her chest feel like it might collapse, but she kept talking, half hoping to convince herself. “My dad has answers. He's been miserable for years, and I think it
has
to be because of Haven.” She was surprised to realize, as soon as she said it, that this was true. “He walks around like he's got something clinging to his back. Like a giant vampire bat or something.”

Pete made a face.

“What?” she said. “You think that's a bad idea?”

“I think it's a
great
idea.” Pete sighed. He swiped a hand through his hair. It stood up again immediately. “This is big stuff. These are big, serious people. I worry . . .” He looked up at her, and something in his eyes made her breath snag. But he quickly looked away. “I was worried, that's all.” He was back to his normal self, easy and silly. “You ready to hit the road, then? I made a playlist for the drive back, you know. ‘One hundred greatest bluegrass hits of the 1970s.'”

“I'll throw you through the windshield,” Gemma said. She felt surprisingly free now that she'd made the decision—as if something had clambered off
her
back. “Meet me in the car, okay?”

In the bathroom she stood in front of the mirror and remembered the girl on the marshes, her reflection, her
other. She leaned over the sink and splashed water on her face, as though it would help wash the image from her head. The cold did her good.

She was going to confront her father and get answers, and she didn't care anymore whether he got angry, whether he ever spoke to her again, whether he ordered her out of the house.

She almost hoped he would.

She would be fine on her own. She was stronger than she'd ever thought she was. She was strong, period.

Outside, she saw Pete sitting very still with both hands on the wheel, staring at her with the strangest expression. He must be far more freaked out than he was letting on. His eyes looked enormous, like they might simply roll out of his head, and she felt a burst of gratitude for him. He was trying, for her sake, to act normal.

“All right, Rogers.” She was speaking even as she yanked open the door. “Passenger gets DJ privileges, so hands off the radio—” All her breath left her body at once.

There was a man sitting directly behind Pete, holding a gun to his head. She knew him instantly: it was the man who'd grabbed her outside the gas station. The same long, greasy hair, the same gray stubble and wild look.

“Get in the car and shut the door,” he said. His eyes went left, right, left, right. She wanted to move, but she was
frozen. Even the air had turned leaden. She was drowning where she stood. “In the car,” he said again, practically spitting. She saw the gun trembling in his hand and realized he was panicking. She nearly tripped getting into the car. She felt as if her whole body was coming apart.

“Okay,” she managed to say. She got the door shut and held up both hands.
Think, think.
Her phone was in her pocket. If she could somehow dial 9-1-1 . . . “Okay, listen. Just calm down, okay? Let's everyone stay calm. You can have my wallet. You can have anything you want.”

“I didn't come for money,” the man said. He nudged Pete with the gun. Pete had gone so pale Gemma could see a vein, blue and fragile-looking, stretching across his temple. “Drive.” She was amazed that Pete managed to get out of the parking lot without hitting anything. She was amazed by Pete, period. She'd never been so scared in her life. Her stomach was cramping, and she was worried she might go to the bathroom right there.

“Please,” she said. Her voice came out in a whisper. “Please. What do you want?”

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he said. But he didn't sound as if he meant it. Gemma could smell him sweating in his old camouflage jacket.
Rick Harliss.
The name came back to her from the article she had read about Emily Huang and her involvement with the Home Foundation. He'd once worked for her father. He'd lost a daughter,
Brandy-Nicole, when he went to jail. “I just want to talk, okay? That's all I want. That's all I ever wanted. Someone to listen. No one fucking listens, no one believes. . . .”

He was getting agitated. His hand was shaking again. She was worried he might accidentally discharge the gun.

“We'll listen,” she said. “We'll listen all you want. Isn't that right, Pete?”

“Sure,” he said. His voice cracked. He licked his lips. “Of course we will.”

“Keep going,” Rick Harliss said, giving Pete a nudge in the neck again when he started to slow down at a yellow light. Instead Pete sped through it. “Highway,” Harliss said, when they came up on signs for I-27, and a sour taste flooded Gemma's mouth. Somehow getting on the highway made everything seem irreversible. Not like she would have rolled out of the car at a red light, but still.

She closed her eyes. She needed to focus. “Okay, you want to talk. So let's talk, okay?” She'd heard once that in abduction situations it was important to share personal information, to get chatty, to humanize yourself. “Let's start with names, okay? This is my friend Pete. Pete has terrible taste in music—”

“Shut up,” Harliss said. “I'm trying to think.”

“—but he's a decent guy, all around, really. Probably the most decent guy I've ever met.” Gemma realized, even as she said it, how true it was. Poor Pete and the
mess she'd dragged him into. And he'd never complained, not once. If they made it through without getting shot or butchered, she was going to buy him a lifetime supply of gummy bears.

She was going to kiss him.

“Gemma,” Pete said softly, and his voice held a warning, but she didn't care.

“And my name is Gemma Ives,” she said. “Germ Ives. At least that's what the girls in my grade always called me, because I was sick a lot as a kid—”

“I know who you are.” Harliss's voice cracked. “Jesus. Stop talking, okay? You're making my head hurt.”

Gemma pressed her hands hard into her thighs, digging with her fingernails, letting the pain focus her. She was scared to anger him further. But she had to make him see that she understood, that she knew him. That she was on his side. She had to buy them time. “I know who you are, too, Mr. Harliss.”

Pete sucked in a sharp breath. For a split second the silence in the car was electric, and she worried she'd made a mistake. She was in too deep to stop now. She had to keep talking.

“You used to work for my dad, didn't you? I must have been just a little kid. But still. That day at the gas station. My dog recognized you. After all these years, he knew your smell.”

“What did your dad tell you about me?” Harliss asked. He sounded like he was talking through a mouth full of nails.

“He didn't tell me anything,” Gemma said. She didn't dare risk turning around. “I read about you. I read about you and about your girl—Brandy-Nicole. She disappeared when she was just a baby.” Harliss whimpered. “I know you think that the Home Foundation had something to do with it. But I'm telling you, Pete and I don't know anything. We're just as confused as you are—”

“Bullshit.” The word was an explosion. Pete winced and Gemma bit her lip, trying not to cry. “Your dad was in it up to his neck. Don't tell me you don't know. It was all because of Haven. It was his fault they needed money. It was his fault they started grabbing kids in the first place. Your dad knew. He fucking knew all about it.” Rick Harliss took the gun from Pete's head for just a second, just long enough to wipe his nose on his sleeve. Before Gemma could do anything, or even contemplate doing anything, it was back. “They took her from me.”

“Please,” Gemma said. “We can help you. We'll get people to listen to you. But please just let us go. . . .”

He shook his head. “I'm sorry,” he said. He did sound sorry. They were coming up on an exit for Randolph. He gestured to it with the gun. “Pull off here. This is far enough.”

He directed them to a Super 8 motel. They climbed out of the car. Gemma first, carefully, conscious of the gun angling in her direction as if it were a live thing, a dog snapping at its tether, trying to get loose. Pete and Rick Harliss left the car together. Rick kept his gun, now concealed inside his sweatshirt pocket, trained on Pete's back. He herded Pete and Gemma together, forcing them to walk side by side directly in front of him, so they shuffled awkwardly toward the lobby together, bumping elbows. Rick Harliss kept stepping on Gemma's heel. It would have been funny if it weren't so awful.

“Some knight I am,” Pete said quietly. He found Gemma's hand and squeezed. When he tried to let go, she interlaced their fingers instead. “I'm sorry, Gemma.”

She almost couldn't speak. “
You're
sorry?” She shook her head. “This is all
my
fault.”

“Quiet,” Harliss said as they jostled together through the door. Gemma felt like a Ping-Pong ball bouncing around a tiny space. She was sure the receptionist would notice something was wrong—she was desperately hoping for it—and kept trying to telegraph desperation through her eyes.
He's got a gun. He's got a gun.

But the receptionist was flipping through a magazine and barely even glanced up at them.

“Can I help you?” She had long pink nails with faded
decals on them. Sunflowers.

“We need a room.” Harliss pulled out some crumpled twenties and placed them on the counter.

“One or two?”

“Just one.”

The receptionist briefly lifted her eyes but they only went to the money before dropping back to the magazine, seemingly exhausted. “Room's forty-five a night.”

“It says forty out front.”

“Rates went up.”

“Don't you think you should change the sign, then?”

There was a plastic fern in the corner, cheap blue wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor, a gun at their backs. Gemma felt the same way she did when she was dreaming—so much was true and familiar and then there was always some weird element distorted or inserted, a talking bird, the ability to fly. Finally Harliss forked over another five-dollar bill—Gemma caught herself nearly offering to pay before remembering that Harliss was kidnapping them—and they went bumping and jostling again back into the sunshine. Room 33 was on the second floor, up a narrow flight of cement stairs covered in graffiti, at the far end of the open-air corridor. Not that they could have shouted or banged on a wall, anyway. They appeared to be the only guests at the Super 8.

The room reeked of stale cigarettes. Once they were
inside, Rick Harliss bolted and chain-locked the door and drew the blinds. For several long seconds, it was dark enough that Gemma saw bursts of color and patterns blooming in the blackness of her vision. Then Harliss turned on the lamp, its shade yellowed and torn. He sat down on the bed. He removed his gun from his pocket and Gemma drew in a breath. But to her surprise he placed it in the bedside table, on top of the Bible, and closed the drawer.

“I told you,” he said. “I don't want to hurt you. Sit.” He gestured to the second twin bed. “Come on, sit,” he said again, raking his fingers through his thinning hair, so it stood up. Gemma remembered that he'd been handsome at one point. Strange that time could do that to a person, just work like a hacksaw on them.

Gemma and Pete moved to the bed together, as if they were tethered by an invisible cord. Once they were sitting, they were separated from Harliss by only a few feet of space, and Gemma noticed the cheapness of his jacket and oiliness of his skin and the way his fingernails were picked raw, and found herself feeling not scared of him anymore but just
sorry
for him. She realized in that second she actually believed he didn't want to hurt them. She was sure he wouldn't even be able to if he tried.