The Countdown (The Taking) (7 page)

I DAMN NEAR TORE THE TRUCK’S DOOR OFF ITS HINGES before the rusted-out piece of shit had come to a complete stop. Eight hours. That’s how much time had passed since we’d gotten the call, and I’d worn a path right through the grass with all my pacing while we waited for them to get their asses here.

Had they gotten lost?

Changed their minds?

Been captured the way Kyra had?

The whole time I’d cursed them for not doing a better job watching her. Protecting her. If I’d been there, no one would’ve
touched her. She’d be safe . . . not lugged away like a lifeless sack of wheat to be tossed in the back of some murder van.

Where the hell was she, goddammit? Where the hell had they taken her?

The dog, the one Kyra had been so excited to see when I’d dropped her off to meet her dad, wiggled through the opening first, and hit the ground running. She tore around in circles, whipping between my legs like we were long-lost pals. I gave her a halfhearted pat on the mangy fur of her head . . . whatever it took to calm the beast down.

I’d never been much of a dog person.

Griffin stayed behind me, exuding a nervous energy that was atypical for her. She and I had different goals in this. She wasn’t worried about Kyra the way I was. But she was worried about appearances, so she put on her leader face and did her best to keep her shit together.

Maybe she was fooling the others, but I had her pegged. She had a thing for that Tyler kid.

I should be glad Griff wanted the boy.

Except, I wasn’t. For reasons I couldn’t even explain, not even to myself, it irked the shit out of me that he might like Griffin back. That Kyra would end up getting hurt because of her.

Stupid
, I chided. Especially since
I
wanted Kyra for myself. Wouldn’t it be better if the two of them hooked up? Gave me the opening I’d been waiting for?

Well, I’d never been accused of being a genius.

Unlike the dog, Tyler waited to jump down until Ben Agnew had legitimately parked the truck. He glanced at me, which felt
more like he was looking right through me, until his eyes landed on Griffin. “Where is everyone?”

I wanted to punch him. The first words out of his mouth should’ve been about her. About Kyra. This shouldn’t be about Blackwater or the other Returned.

I stepped into his line of sight and
made
him see me this time. “Tell me what happened.”

There was a slam, and Kyra’s dad came around the front of the truck. “We’re not sure exactly,” he said. “We stopped at this restaurant, off the interstate—”

I thought about the rules we’d had in place, the carefully drawn guidelines I’d laid out. “Why’d you stop? You weren’t supposed to be in public. No one should’ve seen you.”

Tyler answered this time. “We had to leave our campsite. Someone . . . I don’t know, some
thing,
maybe”—he shot a glance at Kyra’s dad before finishing—“found us.”

Griffin slipped in next to me. “What do you mean by
thing
?”

Tyler shook his head. “I wish I knew. Ben said they were trying to send a message to us . . . to Kyra.”

“The No-Suchers?” The idea of Agent Truman and his men getting their hands on Kyra made it hard to swallow for a second. I wanted to rip these guys’ throats out for letting her down this way.

But Tyler shook his head again.

“Who, then?” Griffin was so much calmer than I could manage. She almost sounded . . . gentle. “Did you get a good look at them? Do you know who took her?”

Ben answered. “I was trying to tell her what I heard at the
campground—hikers maybe, with strange voices like static. I said I thought the aliens might be coming for her, but she didn’t want to hear it.” His eyes were watery as he rubbed his beard. “She needed a few minutes so she went to the bathroom. That’s when we heard the explosion out back. That’s when Kyra disappeared.”

“Jesus-H,” I exhaled. “So you thought
something
might be after her and you left her alone?”

“Just for a second,” Tyler explained. His expression was bruised, dark and heavy like storm clouds before a tornado sets down. “Only for a second. We looked everywhere for her, but she was gone.” His face crumpled.

Goddammit
, I cursed in my head as I realized that whatever happened, he didn’t do it on purpose.
The kid genuinely likes her
.

Maybe I should step aside and let Griffin work her magic, get her hooks in the kid once and for all. Get him out of the way for me.

Then I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about his damn feelings. I could just swoop in and take his place with Kyra.

Or maybe I was a head case.

I shot a look at Griffin. Why hadn’t she told them what she knew, about the picture Jett had come across? I turned to Kyra’s dad. “What do you think happened to her?”

He looked lost. He reached down and scratched his dog’s head, seeking comfort in the one place he could still find it. “No idea. That’s when we called you. We were hoping you could help.”

Griffin stepped closer. Closer, namely, to Tyler. “Start at the beginning, at the campsite. Tell us everything you know.”

I bit my tongue through most of Ben’s explanation. Even after everything we knew . . . even knowing what we were . . . hearing him talking about those hikers and their strange voices, I had to admit he sounded like a nut job. I could see why Kyra needed to take a breather.

But that wasn’t what bugged me. I was sure I’d been called a nut job before, worse probably. Back in the day, as a recruiter for Blackwater, my role had been to explain what had happened to us—the abductions and the genetics modifications—to the newly Returned. Being called crazy was par for the course.

No, there was something else wrong with Ben’s account. Something in the way he told the story, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. My gut said Ben Agnew was lying . . .

No. Not lying . . . withholding.

I kept my eye on him, evaluating every action. Every mannerism—the way his eyes kept sliding back to us, watching us just as warily. The way he described their narrow escape, and then the diner explosion. How he talked about Kyra. I couldn’t figure it out. Couldn’t figure
him
out. He loved his daughter, I didn’t doubt that, but did he know something more?

As far as I was concerned withholding at this point was just as bad as an outright lie. I didn’t tag him on it . . . not yet anyway. I let him talk. He got to the part where he hadn’t stopped Kyra from going to the restroom all by herself, and it was all I could do to keep myself from choking the guy. The both of them.

What had they been thinking? Especially if they seriously believed they’d been sniffed out by something trying to communicate in some sort of white noise?

Goddamn it!

“So what now?” I asked Griffin, bypassing the two jackasses who’d already managed to lose Kyra once.

She pursed her lips, and I wondered if her head was even in the game, or if her brain was scrambled from being so near Tyler again.

Jesus, what the hell was wrong with everyone? Was I the only rational one left around here?

When no one answered, my impatience reached the boiling point. “Nothing?” I prodded. “Then let me break it down for you. I think one of you knows more than you’re letting on.” With supreme discipline, I managed to keep from stabbing Kyra’s dad with my critical gaze. “But this isn’t the time to hold anything back. Kyra’s in trouble and if we don’t figure this thing out, who knows what they’re gonna do to her.”

“They . . . ? But how can we get her back if they’ve taken her again?” Tyler started, and I couldn’t help thinking he was a few bricks shy of a load.

“Jesus, Griff!” I exploded, pissed we were talking about alien abductions when we knew damned well this was foul play of the human variety. “Show them the freaking picture.”

Griffin’s eyes turned to accusatory slits, and I wondered when she’d planned to share. Without explanation, she pulled out her phone and passed them the image of Kyra’s limp body being hauled through the parking lot. “Do any of these guys
look familiar?” she asked.

I knew the moment Ben recognized his daughter in the crappy photo, because his shoulders stiffened. “Kyr,” he breathed, and the way he said it redeemed him for the moment. That kind of anguish can’t be faked. But he shook his head. “I don’t know these guys.”

“Me neither,” Tyler added, his voice hollow. Then he leaned closer. “Wait a sec.” He squinted, his finger lifting to the phone and tapping it. He pointed to a fuzzy image of a girl with pale blond hair who was off to the side. “Her. She was there. She went in the bathroom right after Kyra did.”

Hope swelled inside me. A lead. Flimsy, but a lead all the same. “Jett’s gotten nowhere trying to ID the two guys. Maybe he’ll have more luck with the girl. It’s worth a shot.” I hoped to God Jett could work his magic.

“Look, right before she . . . well, whatever happened to her.” Tyler hesitated, took a deep breath, then continued. “Kyra and I were talking. I was telling her about something . . . a dream I’d had about her.”

I scowled at him. This wasn’t the time and I really didn’t want to hear about them . . . not about them talking and especially not about dreams he’d had about her. Frankly, if Kyra wasn’t in trouble, I wouldn’t be sitting here listening to him at all. Ever.

When I glanced Griffin’s way, I saw the same thing in her expression. While I had a knot in my stomach, hers was smack in the middle of her forehead, in the pinched crease between her eyebrows.

Oblivious, because he was Tyler and “oblivious” should have been his middle name if you asked me, the kid kept going. “I told her I think there’s someplace we’re supposed to be . . . maybe go. I keep dreaming about these . . . maps.” He made a face, like this was supposed to be tough on him too—a stupid dream. “But the thing was, she already knew about it.”

Griffin leaned forward, more interested than I could pretend to be. “Maps?” she asked, her eyebrows screwed up in a different way now—less worried and more curious. “What kinds of maps?”

“That’s what was weird about it. Not ordinary maps, of roads or anything. Just a bunch of”—he shrugged—“I don’t know . . . scribbles mostly.”

Scribbles? Kyra was out there, and he was blathering on about scribbles?

“Can you show them to us?” Griffin asked.

Tyler looked uncertainly from me to Ben and then to Griffin. “I can try.”

He reached down in front of him and used his hand to clear a spot in the ground, brushing the dirt so it was smooth and flat. Then he picked up a stick and began to scratch out shapes. There were lines, both straight and curved. Loops that intersected other loops. Complete spheres, partial crescents, and sharp points with acute and obtuse angles.

Scribbles. The whole thing looked like complete garbage. A total waste of time.

I stood up, tired of doing nothing. I’d find Jett and together we’d figure out a way to get a lead on the blond girl in the
image. We’d find Kyra with or without these useless lumps.

I was about to say as much when I glanced one more time at the second-rate sand sketches Tyler had drawn.

“Holy . . . ,” I started. “That’s no map. I mean it is, but it isn’t, not really.”

“What is it then?” Tyler asked.

Griffin figured it out too, as she got to her feet and stood beside me. She turned her head to the side, giving me a look that asked what it meant, and then looked back at the ground, a smile tugging at her lips. “He’s right. It’s a star chart.”

Tyler’s shoulders fell as his voice became distant. “A star chart? No. That doesn’t make sense. How can that help us find Kyra? What does it mean?”

Ben chimed in for the first time in what seemed like too long considering this was his daughter we were talking about. “I’m not sure what it means, but I think I’ve seen something like this before. It’s not just a star chart, it’s a
reverse
star chart.”

Griffin snapped a picture of the map using the disposable phone.

“There’s something else,” Tyler added, meeting my eyes, and I braced myself. “Kyra told me she heard me say something. In my sleep.”

“What was that?”

Tyler swallowed, his expression guilty. “The Returned must die.”

ALERTNESS HIT ME LIKE A DOUBLE WHAMMY.

An intense, white-hot pain—a pickax trying to gore my insides apart.

Followed by the sudden-searing-
terrifying
awareness I had absolutely no clue where I was or how I’d gotten here.

I wasn’t sure which was worse, but at that moment my stomach convulsed in a way that forced me to swallow back a scream ripping at my throat. With stark clarity, it hit me:

Daybreak
.

Somewhere, even though I couldn’t see it, even though I couldn’t see anything, the sun was rising.

Abruptly, my body curled up at the cramps that wracked me, trying to wrap around itself. But even before I’d moved an inch . . . a centimeter . . . the restraints stopped me. They were at my wrists and my ankles, even my neck and chest.

My pulse skyrocketed as a layer of cold sweat chilled my skin and the trembling set in, and somewhere inside my head the number fifteen repeated like some kind of misfire.

Fifteen, fifteen . . .
fifteen
. . .

I was desperate to open my eyes, but each eyelid weighed a million pounds, making the task monumental. Willing myself to focus on one thing at a time, I concentrated on my breathing, exhaling slowly, evenly, through my nose, until eventually the tremors began to subside. My thoughts were a sticky jumble. Disjointed and disconnected, clumping together and making them hard to sort.

Voices . . .

I remembered that much at least. Hearing voices somewhere . . . sometime before this. And now, here, I was sure I heard voices again.

No, wait . . . not voices. Voices
and
sound . . .

Familiar yet somehow not at the same time . . . like . . . what was that?

It was fuzzy and faraway.

I swallowed hard, thinking, concentrating.
Concentrating
.

My throat was raw, my tongue thick and dry.

The word seeped into my awareness like molasses, slow and gummy:
music.
The sound with the voices was music . . .

It was significant, that victory, as if I’d crossed some sort of invisible line that divided the imaginary from the real. Dreams from consciousness.

You are now entering life. Population: everyone but you.

It was like being reborn.

I focused on the music, something you’d hear in an elevator or a doctor’s office—a crooner from some bygone era. From even before my dad’s time, which was practically prehistoric.

There was a smell too. Definitely-certainly-
absolutely
nothing I’d ever smelled before. It went beyond musty and past decayed. I tried to put a name to it, but it wasn’t any one thing. It made me think of corroding metal and decomposing leather and rotting documents or papers all at once. Whatever it was, it was definitely old, ancient, and it singed my nose hairs all the way to my brain.

“She’s awake,” someone said. A girl.

An image flashed through my head, fleeting and incomplete, but it was her—the blonde from the diner bathroom. “
Do I know you?
” she’d asked. And now I wondered if she had, even though I most surely hadn’t known her.

“Watch.” The girl’s voice again, and I wondered what they were watching because I wasn’t giving them anything to look at. My eyes were sealed tight, and at this point, I was barely even breathing.

Then came a guy’s voice. “There it is! Go get Ed. Tell him the girl’s heart rate’s spiking. Ask if he wants us to shut her down again.”

Monitors. They must have me hooked up to some sort of monitors.

I wished I had control over my heart rate the way I did my breathing.
Stupid heart!

Guess there was no point playing dead. Might as well get a look around.

This time when I tried to open my eyes, they felt less heavy, but still gooey, like someone had glued them shut. The effort was crazy, and it took me several tries before light clashed against my retinas, stinging them all the way to the core.

“Hey there,” the girl said, only this time I was sure she wasn’t talking to someone else.

She swam into focus and then I could see her and it was most definitely the blond girl, standing directly in front of me, her blue eyes migrating over me. “You were dead to the world for a while there. Took a helluva lot to knock you out though.”

Knock me out
. I turned her words over.

My last truly conscious memory was the flash of her pale-colored hair, followed by a sharp burn in the side of my neck.

That must have been it, the burn. No wonder I’d been so hazy. She’d jabbed me with something, a needle probably—drugged me.

Right after I’d been returned my parents had taken me to the hospital. One of the lab techs had stuck a needle in my arm to draw blood and my skin had healed so rapidly the
needle had gotten stuck. I wondered if that had happened this time too.

It made me wonder about the blond girl and whoever she’d been talking to, because when the lab tech had exposed himself to my blood—something the NSA called a Code Red—he’d gotten sick, the same way Tyler had. Only that guy had died.

I studied the girl. Had she been exposed too? Would she die? That’s what I’d call karma.

I tried to lift my hand, to check my neck for a needle or punctures or injuries, but it jerked to a stop. Some sort of cuff, brittle leather, kept me bound in place.

Right, the restraints.

My eyes scanned downward.

I was bound to some sort of chair. It reminded me of a dentist’s chair, except it was really,
really
old. I could feel the metal at my back, and not of the spotless stainless steel variety. I could only see part of it at my sides, but where I could it was like a grimy, rusted-out stretcher. Cold and unforgiving.

Above me there was an enormous box light attached to an equally rusted pole. The bulb wasn’t on, but the way the lamp was directed, aimed right at me, made it clear it had been positioned there for me.

Beyond the light and all around me—around
us
—were crumbling and decayed brick, and the smells suddenly made sense.

The building was in shambles. Everything . . . other than
the monitors and machines connected to me, the electrodes and wires that slipped beneath the blue-green gown I was wearing, was rotting.

There were two faces watching me—the blonde and some guy. I continued to ignore them. I wanted to get a feel for my surroundings before deciding the best way to handle them, whoever they were.

“Fifteen?” the girl asked, licking her lips intently. “What does it mean?”

Her question caught me off guard, but I managed to swallow my surprise. I gave her an I-have-no-idea-what-you-mean stare, even though I knew exactly what she meant. I must have been mumbling in my sleep, before I’d come to.

A boy came racing into the room then. “Ed says keep her awake. He’ll be here soon.”

I started a mental file, compiling a list of the things I knew:

This Ed guy the boy mentioned must be in charge.

They’d drugged me at least once, and for whatever reason, it hadn’t been easy.

It was morning—something I knew because of the sharp stabs that had awakened me earlier. (Which day, I had no clue.)

And finally (and this was the biggie in my book), there were no fewer than four of them—one girl and three guys.

My guess: they were Returned, because none of them were sick from whatever needle they’d shoved in my neck—the whole drugging thing. If I was more heartless, more of a soldier like Griffin or Willow, I’d test that theory by biting
my own tongue and exposing them to a Code Red. But I wasn’t a soldier, and even if Blondie and the others were holding me hostage, I couldn’t stomach the idea of watching someone else get sick the way Tyler had.

Not without knowing why they were holding me in the first place.

“Where am I?” I prodded, hoping to add to my list of facts. My voice came out a croak.

The girl tilted her head and her blond hair draped over one eye as she deliberated. “An old asylum,” she answered decisively. “No one’ll ever come looking for you here.” She smirked then, the corner of her mouth ticking up slightly. “The exact ‘where’ doesn’t matter.”

An old asylum. Made sense considering the condition of the place. It also explained the creepy hospital vibe it had going for it. Wherever it was, it must’ve been deserted years ago.

A guy appeared then. Marched in, was more like it. His presence filled the corroded space and made even the grubby air we breathed seem somehow antiseptic . . . sterile.

Blondie snapped away from me like a tightly strung rubber band. She threw her shoulders back and her chin shot toward the ceiling.

It wasn’t hard to deduce this was Ed I was laying eyes on, even through my drug-addled fog.

Acting as if I didn’t exist at all, their conversation went like this:

Ed: “How long’s she been conscious?”

Blondie: “Not long, sir. We sent word soon as we realized.” She almost, but stopped herself short of, saluting him. Yeah, this was definitely the guy in charge.

Ed (Looking me over): “She say anything?”

Blondie: “Nothing important. Just wanted to know where we were.”

Buzz. Wrong answer!

Ed jerked his head to glare at the girl.

Short temper
, duly noted. No wonder she’d gotten so tense the second he arrived.

Then he snapped, “I’ll decide what’s important.” To which she nodded, a silent but obedient,
Yes, sir
.

His I-could-break-you-like-a-twig stance relaxed, but only by a hair. “You answer her?” he asked, turning back to me.

The way he assessed me gave me the creeps. He didn’t touch me or get too close, only eyeballed me, turning his head from side to side. His eyebrows lowered from time to time. It reminded me of the way people walked through the reptile exhibit at the zoo, crouching and squinting as they tried to glimpse the most venomous predators where they coiled beneath logs or in dark crevices behind the thick sheets of glass. They were fascinated and horrified all at the same time.

Ed was both fascinated and horrified by me.

He ran his hand over the side of his jaw. “Might as well get started. Hand me Lucy, will ya?”

Blondie passed him something I couldn’t quite see, a
stick or wand of some sort and I tried to figure out what, exactly, we were “starting.”

He leaned closer, and even his breath was sterile, almost to the point of being caustic. “Let’s start with something easy,” he said, this time most definitely talking to me. “Where are they? How much longer do we have?”

I frowned, searching the room to see if anyone else knew what the hell this guy was talking about. “Where are who . . . ? How much longer to what?” I gave an uncertain shake of my head, wishing he’d get out of my face. “I have no idea what you mean.”

He lifted the thing in his hand, showing it to me. “Know what this is? This is ten thousand volts of truth serum. Answer me, or you’ll know the true meaning of hotshot.” He spoke slowly this time, enunciating each syllable. “Now, tell me what you know.”

I shook my head, still clueless. But he had that short temper thing I’d already noted, and before I could even open my mouth to ask, he jammed the end of whatever that thing was against my bare thigh.

My entire body jolted, wracked by a sudden surge of electrical current. The straps made it impossible to escape, but my wrists and ankles and chest all strained against them nonetheless as my muscles seized involuntarily. The skin where the thing jammed into me burned.

After a few excruciating seconds, he pulled it away and grinned like the sick bastard I was starting to realize he was. “We call her Lucifer. Lucy for short. Best damn cattle prod
on the market. Better’n a stun gun ’cause you stay alert.” He was proud of himself, and he smacked a now inert Lucy against the open palm of his other hand. “Your tongue feelin’ a little looser yet?”

If I had better control over it, this would be the perfect time to use that telekinesis ability of mine. And I tried, the way Simon and I had practiced . . . to get mad . . . really,
really
pissed off, because I was. I was genuinely pissed that Ed had just jolted me with an effing cattle prod. One that he’d named no less.

But nothing happened. Maybe I was still numbed by the drugs, or maybe the electricity had short-circuited my brain. Either way, I couldn’t manage to throw one of those bricks that were lying all around us at Ed’s head.

Damn!

“Fine,” he stated, clearly taking my silence as a challenge. “We can definitely do this the hard way.” And I wondered when, in all this craziness, we’d been doing things the easy way. He lifted the pronged end of Lucy up so I could see it, and I swore I could smell my own flesh burning on it. “Tell me why you’re so damned important? Why is it we got someone so eager to get their hands on you? What makes you so special?”

I blinked, but this time didn’t hesitate. I didn’t want Lucy to find her way into my skin again.

“Me?” I rasped. Could I tell them I’d been abducted? And even if they were Returned, was it safe to admit I was a Replaced? Was that even what he was getting at? “I have no idea . . .”

“Don’t play dumb with me!” He was yelling now, getting right in my face.

He didn’t elaborate, just shoved the prod against my shoulder. Crashing against the metal chair behind me, my body went crazy stiff as pain jolted through me. Without meaning to, my teeth clamped on to my own tongue, even as I screamed at myself to release it.

By the time it was over, blood filled my mouth, and I could feel where my upper teeth met my lower ones. I’d bitten completely through my own tongue and suddenly the whole exposing them to a Code Red thing wasn’t something I had any control over. Blood was dribbling out of my mouth. I’d heal. Already the wound was sealing closed, repairing itself. If they got sick they’d only have themselves to blame.

But I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.

Ed was relentless. And ruthless. “Tell me, and it ends. When will they be here?”

“Please”—I choked on the blood—“I don’t . . . know . . .”

Wrong answer
.

He hit me with Lucy again. Only this time he didn’t just zap me once, he waited until I’d finished convulsing the first time, and then added one more for good measure. Two jolts for the price of one.