The Countdown (The Taking) (17 page)

“What about Alex Walker? When we were at Blackwater, you said you didn’t need me, because you had him?” A thick cloud of guilt twisted and churned in my stomach, becoming something dark, something stormy.

“Kid from Delta?” Agent Truman clarified. “Yeah, I thought he was like you, but I was wrong. Turns out, he was just garden-variety Returned.”

I let out a long, low breath. “What . . .
what
did you do to him?”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t
useful
. Just not as useful as you woulda been.”

Dead air filled the room. A charged kind of silence that lasted weeks. Months. Years. Time we couldn’t afford. I was powerless to change the past . . . I couldn’t keep worrying about Agent Truman and the things he’d done or we might not have a future.

We had to move forward.

“You said the message Natty sent wasn’t meant for you. Who then?” Thom asked from where he was on the bed.

“No, sir. The message was sent out for another buyer, the one your girl had waiting in the wings. When you went up for sale, we weren’t even in the running. We were just lucky enough to be monitoring the signals, and picked it up.” He looked at me. “Unfortunately, you got away.” Truman took his frustration out on Thom as he dug the end of the knife into the thin tissue of Thom’s neck. “Except I think she and Eddie Ray couldn’t agree about it. I think the transaction woulda closed sooner if Eddie Ray didn’t think he could get more money for you from someone else. He was right, you know? You . . . being what you are . . . you’re worth big money.” He gouged the tip of the blade deeper. Digging. Burrowing. He had all the finesse of a butcher with a rusty hacksaw. It gave me the creeps.

“Got it!” Agent Truman held up what looked like a miniature-sized SIM card covered in Thom’s blood.

Thom sat up, wincing as he wiped his neck. “Did it really take that much work for something that small?” The
gash in Thom’s neck was at least four times the size of the tracker Agent Truman had extracted.

Agent Truman grinned as he snapped the device in half before tossing it in the wastebasket, where it barely made a plinking sound. Then he wiped the blade of his pocketknife on his pants. “I always did enjoy my work.”

“You’re a monster.”

“We’re all monsters. You most of all.”

It stung, hearing him say it like that . . . the same way Griffin had.

What was her word? Chimera.

Didn’t matter that she called it something else, though, it still meant the same thing: monster.

Thom lifted the edge of his shirt to his wound, to try to stanch the flow of blood, even though it was probably already slowing on its own. “Maybe this is a mistake, working with him. He’s a Daylighter, after all.” His voice lowered, until it was barely a whisper. “Even if he’s Returned, what makes you think he’ll help us?” Thom asked, and Agent Truman gave me a look that said he wanted to know the answer as well—an
Enquiring Minds Want To Know
kind of look.

“Because I have a trustworthy face?” he goaded.

“Because that message said ‘The Returned must die,’ and you’ll do what you always do—save your own ass.”

“And what about you. You’re not one of us. You’re not Returned, you’re Replaced. Why should you get involved?”

I thought about the things Blondie—the dead girl—had said about me not being human. But she was wrong.

If what she’d said was true and these
beings
were coming, then where did that leave us—and I didn’t mean
us
the way Natty said it, as in
us
, the alien race. Or even
us
as in the Returned. I meant
us . . .
people. Because that’s who I was. That’s who I would always be.

A human being. A person. A part of this world.

No matter what my DNA said.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand. I might be different now, but that doesn’t mean I don’t remember who I was. I can’t just throw that part of me away. Simon, Willow, Griffin . . .” I ticked off their names, again waiting for some flicker of acknowledgment. Something that told me he’d heard his daughter’s name. But he remained blank. Dead-faced. So I said the words he’d never be capable of, “They’re my friends.”

Agent Truman settled back now and somehow made it look even less comfortable than before, like he was balancing on razor blades rather than on a bed. “They’re not mine though.” He smirked, and frustration swelled within me.

“But if these aliens really are coming for us—for the Returned—we need to stop it from happening. Don’t you feel a sense of loyalty to your old life? To protect any friends you
do
have? You’re still half human. You can’t want this to happen.”

He frowned. “Look, you’re not getting it. These things . . . these
beings
are far more advanced than we are. If they wanted to destroy us, trust me, they would. You think that Chuck guy
wanted
to blow his brains out? Poor guy
had no idea what was going on inside his own brain.” He inhaled, thinking it over. “No, there’s got to be something more to it. They want something.”

“You knew them. You made deals with them way back when. What do you think they want? And why would they want the Returned dead?”

Agent Truman’s expression hardened and his jaw flexed. “We had no idea what they were up to in the beginning. We really thought we were getting the deal of the century—trading a few people for technology beyond our dreams.”

“And you believed them?”

“We had no reason not to. They’d been studying us for years. They understood us better than we understood ourselves. They knew our weaknesses,” Agent Truman explained.

“So what happened?” I asked, leaning forward now.

“We realized they were getting more out of the deal than we were. They were supposed to warn us before taking anyone, and then again when they sent them back so we could . . .” He pursed his lips, and I knew this was the part I wouldn’t like. “So we could
intercept
them.”

“So you could experiment on them, you mean? See what makes the Returned tick?” I criticized.

He shrugged, not bothering to deny it. “Then we realized they were taking people without consent . . . sending back fewer. Either that, or sending them back without notifying us. It became like a scavenger hunt, and we scoured the globe searching for people like your friends.” He said
“your friends” like it was a filthy word.

I considered what he was saying, that the aliens were the ones in charge of this so-called relationship. They’d always been the ones with all the power. “So, once you figured it out, why didn’t you say something? Try to stop them?”

“What exactly do you think we should’ve done? Gone to the police? The president? No thank you,” he said, waving the idea away. “I’ve been to those woo-woo conventions. I won’t be lumped in with one of those nut jobs passing out pamphlets about how aliens are plotting to take over the planet, even if it’s true.”

“So you’re saying some of those guys are legitimate?”

“Best minds in the world.” He said it emphatically. “But no one gives a rat’s ass because the second they opened their mouths, they punched their ticket to crazy town. Think about it, what did you think when your old man tried to tell you his theory?” I winced, reinforcing his argument. “Yeah . . . and that was your old man talking. Besides, I realized long ago I could get more accomplished working behind the scenes. The NSA had offered me the perfect hiding place. No one thought to look for a Returned right under their own noses.”

I closed my eyes. “Maybe this
is
a mistake.” I started toward the door, but Agent Truman blocked me in two long paces.

It was Thom who answered, surprising me. “It probably is, but we don’t have a choice. He’s already here, and we can’t exactly let him go. Besides, maybe he can help.”

I shook my head. “We always have a choice. This is too big. We can’t afford to make mistakes. We’ll figure it out without him.”

Agent Truman leaned forward. “Ah hell, don’t make me say it.” And when I didn’t say anything, his face fell. “Fine, goddammit, I wanna help.”

“Why?” I asked. “What happened to all this ‘they’re not my friends’ crap?”

“Because, if what you said is true, and they’re really coming for us, we could be in a shitload of trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if that message you heard is right, then we’ve done something wrong. We could be facing a war. And if that happens, no one is safe. We could be extinct within a week.”

I glanced at Thom, who looked as sick as I felt. “What do we do?” I asked Agent Truman.

“We need to stop them from coming in the first place.”

We only stayed at the motel long enough to scrub the room of signs we’d ever been there in the first place. On our way out, we slid two more fifties across the front desk to Mabel, hoping the extra hundred would work like that flashy-thing in
Men in Black
, erase her memory. Then we stopped at the nearest Walmart, where Thom and I ran in and grabbed the first things off the hangers that looked like they might fit. We changed in the car.

Thom now wore a Bob Marley T-shirt and a pair of stiff
new Dockers (khakis, of course), and I’d grabbed a Kiss Me I’m Irish tee off the clearance rack, a garden-variety navy hoodie, and a pair of black stretch pants. I kept Blondie’s boots, not just because I didn’t want to waste extra time searching for new shoes, but because they were surprisingly comfortable. I did my best to flashy-thing my own memory so I wouldn’t have to think about Blondie, and the last time I’d seen her.

Agent Truman said he knew a guy, which I assumed meant someone who might be willing to help us. Thom didn’t ask, and neither did I. Mostly because I was so totally focused on that other thing he’d said, back at the motel. You know, the one about a war coming to Earth.

Even if I’d had other questions, which I was sure I did—things like where were my dad and Tyler and the rest of the Returned right now?—our impending doom was enough to shut me up. To consume me. To eat me alive.

War.

Coming to Earth.

And if it did, humans would become extinct.

Was it possible he’d been exaggerating that last part?

I sneaked a sideways glance at the agent who sat stiffly behind the wheel, hands at ten and two. Nothing about this guy struck me as the exaggerating type.

So if he wasn’t exaggerating, what did that mean for us?

How would they do it? Would they invade in waves, destroying everyone and everything that stood in their way? Would innocent people be sacrificed because they were
incapable of fending for themselves? I imagined my mom and my little brother, ravaged by the perils of war. I imagined starvation, untreated diseases, festering injuries, and people turning on each other just to survive.

Or would the aliens just end it all at once? Destroy everything, the entire planet in one fell swoop?

That would be simpler, it seemed. More efficient.

My eyes slid downward to the watch dangling loosely around my wrist. Even fastened at the shortest notch, Chuck’s beefy arms had been giant-sized compared to mine, but that didn’t stop its rhythm from settling my rattled nerves.

Blinking about a million times, I tried to focus on the city whirring past in the dark—businesses of all shapes and sizes, some packed together in neat little strip malls and some freestanding with drive-throughs or giant parking lots. We’d driven all day and now neon signs flashed, and billboards and streetlights glared, all backed by hillsides dotted with houses and churches and more businesses, some lit and some not.

Whenever a car pulled alongside us, I’d dropped my head, keeping my chin low so whoever was in the other vehicle wouldn’t see me. The last thing we needed was for someone to notice my eyes—eyes that glowed in the dark and could probably be seen even from behind the tinted glass.

It wasn’t right to be here, with Agent Truman, when I’d been avoiding this . . . running from him for so long.

We’d stopped once so he could call “his guy” in private. His guy put him in touch with the next guy who knew how to reach a group that was not only unlisted, but was even
deeper underground than the Daylight Division.

It didn’t surprise me that clandestine was a language Agent Truman was fluent in. But whoever he’d gotten in contact with seemed willing to help.

It was that same willingness that made me uneasy. That and the secrecy. If it weren’t for the whole brink of extinction thing, I’d be worried Agent Truman had another agenda . . . maybe planning an auction of his own so he could sell me off and spend the rest of his days on the beaches of Bali sipping mai tais.

But, so far he hadn’t taken us into custody, and I couldn’t help thinking he was genuinely concerned over the possibility we were facing an alien invasion. I mean, of course he was concerned, right?

Still, every time we asked where we were headed, Agent Truman said our destination was on a need-to-know basis, deeming that neither Thom nor I had that kind of clearance.

He was such a jerk.

I’d tracked our progress anyway . . . as we’d traveled through Oregon into California. I’d noted the names of cities on road signs along the way—places like Portland, Eugene, Medford, then Sacramento. I felt feverish, my limbs trembling, as the number in my head had rolled from eleven to ten somewhere just past Redding.

Now the midmorning sun was high as we veered onto the more isolated roads that led into the California hills.

Ten.

If we were counting down days, did that mean there were only ten left? Just over a week?

I was reluctant to share what I suspected, because what if I was wrong? What if it was something else, this crazy obsession with numbers? What if it had nothing at all to do with a possible impending war?

Being cramped in the car with these two for the past sixteen hours hadn’t gone far to getting us better acquainted.

Unlike Simon, Thom had always been the more silent type. He still didn’t trust Agent Truman, and I didn’t entirely blame him. But there was more to it than that. I figured he was probably still licking his wounds over the whole Natty situation.