Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation (11 page)

He took the last step. He could reach her now. She should have run, but didn’t.
Couldn’t.
 

“You’re smiling. Why are you smiling?”
 

“I guess I remember the last bit, too.”
 

Love you.

Words he’d seldom said in his old life. Words he shouldn’t have said to Heather at all these days, dead or alive.

“What last bit?” She wanted to hear him say it. Not because she believed him or felt the same. She very much did not. If he touched her, she’d scream. Because he was dead. Because she’d begun making her peace. She’d felt the energy leave him, as he’d slumped like meat on her body. Heather had stayed with him longer than she should have. Until she heard the ruckus and an overhead shuttle shocked her into motion. She’d started running, leaping over Raj’s knocked-out body before he stirred. She hadn’t known where to go, and through her sobs, which she’d fought to keep quiet, she’d heard him calling — a second bullet, with her name on it.
 

She wanted Meyer to tell her now what he’d told her then. Not because she needed the sentiment, but because it was the only way to pop this impossible bubble.
 

She’d heard blood gurgle down in his throat.
 

She’d seen the life leave his unclosing eyes.

She’d felt his chest fall still.
 

He’d pissed himself when everything went black, for Christ’s sake.
 

He was dead, dead, dead.
 

Except that here he was, alive and well.
 

“There will be time to talk about that,” he said. “Later.”
 

“Say it.”
 

Instead of saying anything, he closed the remaining distance. Heather slid to the side, into the room, practically falling over a low table in her rush to shamble away.
 

Meyer calmly entered and closed the door behind him.
 

“Get away from me.”
 

“They got there in time, Heather.”
 

“There was no time. You were gone.
Meyer
was gone.”

“People can be revived. You know they can.”
 

“Not you.”
 

He spread his arms slightly, giving her an almost humorous expression.
And yet here I am.

“A shuttle picked me up. They’re
aliens
, Heather. When we were in Vail, they picked me up in a beam of light. They read the population’s minds. They crossed time and space. Why is it so hard to believe they can fix a bullet wound?”
 

“Show me.” She nodded at his chest.

“There’s no scar, if that’s what you’re asking.” He gave a tight-lipped, shrugging sort of smile. “Alien technology.”
 

“I don’t believe it.”
 

“I don’t know why. Come on, Heather.” His voice had slightly changed. Now he wasn’t quite as friendly. Now he was Meyer Dempsey in his prime — the man who won every argument and dominated every room. The Meyer who didn’t just defeat his opponents but made them feel stupid for ever having disagreed.
 

Heather edged the room, unwilling to get close. She thought he might grab her. She’d scream if he did.

They circled like gunfighters, his arms slightly forward as if searching for embrace. For reconciliation. But Heather kept back, her heels striking furniture.
 

“It’s okay now. It’s all over. Meyer is back, and all is well.”
 

Heather reached the door. Her hand found the knob, somehow expecting it to be locked. But it wasn’t, and of course she stepped out easily, and of course he didn’t try to chase her. They’d shared their lives, including the years after his second marriage. He’d never tried to eat her before, and wouldn’t now.
 

“Stay away from me,” Heather said.
 

And then she ran.

CHAPTER 18

“I’ve lost it.”
 

Piper looked at Cameron. He was still staring straight ahead as the RV sped down the road, hands on the wheel. The thing’s autodrive still worked, but it didn’t have satellite guidance or any other connectivity with the network outage. Cameron said that the idea of a vehicle that drove itself without being able to gather more than strictly visual information from its surroundings was terrible. Piper had told him that was exactly what any human driver would do, and Cameron had agreed. But he still drove, Piper in the right seat, the three others somewhere in back.
 

“Because you’re watching the road,” she told him. “You’d better stay focused if you want to drive this thing on manual.”
 

“Do
you
see it?”
 

Piper eyed the horizon, where road met sky. The trick was easy, now that she’d done it a few times. She blurred her eyes and immediately saw the dark shadow where she’d seen it last, running down the road beside them like a spectral cheetah with an endless supply of energy.

“Yes.”
 

“Where is it?”
 

Piper pointed. Then she relaxed her attention, and the thing seemed to vanish. She kept thinking of something her mother had told her:
Keep making that expression, and your face will freeze that way
. Maybe the same was true for defocusing your eyes. She didn’t want to see the shadow on their heels — and whatever else might be out there at the limits of her vision — forever and ever.
 

“It’s keeping up?” Cameron asked.
 

Piper nodded.
 

“I wondered. I thought we might leave it behind.”
 

But that’s not the way the strange shadow-shape struck Piper. Cameron had said the thing had been following them since before their return to Moab. But she felt different.
It
seemed to be doing the leading, and it if they risked falling behind, it would slow enough to let them catch it again.
 

“I don’t like this,” Piper said.
 

“Which part?”
 

She made an all-encompassing gesture. As she did, Piper’s surroundings struck her with an intense sense of
déjà vu
. She’d ridden shotgun with Meyer at the wheel in their Jetvan, with three kids in back. Reduce ages by a few decades and subtract a person, and they’d be more or less the same now.
 

But then again, maybe they hadn’t been running away back then, either.
 

“All of it.”
 

“Be more specific.”
 

“Okay,” Piper said. “Driving right down the middle of the road instead of keeping a low profile.”
 

“The Astrals know we know. They still need us, same as before, only closer to the bone on both sides. We’re playing chicken.”
 

“I also don’t like the shadow thing. It’s leading us around by the collar, and we’re letting it.”
 

“We
decided to go to Vail, not it.”
 

“The feeling we’re being used. Again. The fact that people keep dying. The fact that we’re headed to the same place we ran from not long ago. Both of us, Cam.”
 

“We know something now that we didn’t know then.”

Piper nodded. “Yes. And yet we don’t know all we need to know. You don’t know you’re right about Thor’s Hammer. You don’t know how to use that plate thing, or even for sure that it’s really a key. You don’t know how we’ll get into the city.”
 

“I didn’t know how I’d get in last time, and I managed to find a way.”
 

“Because they opened the door, needing you to take me to Benjamin to decipher that stupid stone tablet!”
 

Cameron apparently didn’t know how to respond. He remained mute. After a few seconds, Piper went on.
 

“You can’t just waltz into the Apex. You don’t know what it is, what it does, or what might protect it. The place is probably surrounded by guards. Reptars.” Piper looked out the window, their shadow long on the road as the sun set behind them. “And even if we find Thor’s Hammer,
if it even exists
, we have no idea if it
can
be deactivated. You might wind it up and set it off early.”

“All I can do is try, Piper.”
 

“We can’t call anyone. Can’t look at the satellites. Can’t — ”

“Okay, stop.
Mercy.
I see your objections.”
 

Piper watched Cameron drive. She hadn’t expected him to turn the RV around after she’d aired her grievances, but the entire conversation’s point seemed flagrantly moot. Why had he wanted her objections if it was all just FYI?

“What makes you so sure you can do any of what you think you can?” she asked, unwilling to drop the issue. She would have, in the past. She’d never put her foot down even halfway with Meyer (in New York, on the road, or in Heaven’s Veil), and for some reason at least attempting to now mattered. Not because she was sure of anything, or because she was afraid. Just because, like humanity, Piper didn’t intend to end her life on her knees.
 

Cameron sighed. He looked at her as if asking a question he couldn’t quite vocalize then followed with one he could.
 

“Remember how when you and I went to Moab the first time, we walked through a line of monoliths and could suddenly hear thoughts?”
 

“Sure.”

“And how we seemed to know things? Like how we almost walked into the Andreus group once, but we saw the path and suddenly knew that going ahead was wrong … and so we went down into the ravine?”

“I remember.”
 

“Does that feeling ever — you know — return a little? Do you ever get flashbacks?”
 

Those were two separate questions. For Piper, their psychic interlude had ended by the time they hit Utah and never recurred. But she still heard things in the dead of night while sleeping. She still saw things. They might be dreams, and Piper had always dismissed them accordingly. But seeing the ship above the ranch had stirred something inside her. Memories of being taken as Meyer had. Memories of minds that weren’t hers. Memories that she’d lost and that had only resumed their continuity once she’d disembarked in Vail. It had never seemed strange. But now it felt like a conspicuous omission — a jump cut in her mind, with a whole world missing. Except in half-seen phantasms, like the shadow pacing them on the berm.

“No,” she said, not wanting to delve. Not here. Not now.
 

“I wonder if it was the same for them in Vail — what you told me about Heather seeming to communicate with Meyer, and about Lila seeming to hear Clara inside her before she was born.”
 

“I have no idea.”
 

Cameron’s head bobbed. She could tell he wasn’t done, or didn’t want to be.
 

“Why?”
 

“Nothing.”
 

Piper felt a chill. He’d raised the issue after she’d asked what made him believe he was right about heading to Vail now.

“Why are we really heading to Vail, Cameron?”
 

“Because my dad said I knew where it was. Because he made it sound like it was all so obvious. We’d get the key from our supposed cake walk to Cottonwood Canyon, then we’d head back to where Thor’s Hammer was buried. A thing that was big enough not to move … so maybe it didn’t move far at all. Dad said the plate confirmed what he’d already suspected. Something obvious.”
 

That was Benjamin Bannister, all right. He acted like everyone should know what he knew — especially his estranged son, who’d combed the world alongside him in youth.
 

But the answer struck Piper as complete. Yes, Benjamin had been researching the Apex when he’d died, and yes, the Hammer’s location, if it was right where it should have been all along, would be amusingly obvious. But it wouldn’t just be an obvious joke to Cameron, who had much of Benjamin’s context. It’d be an obvious jest to everyone — the Astrals included.

“There are other obvious places than Vail.”

“It’s there, Piper. It’s under the Apex. I’m sure of it.”

Sure
of it? On a
hunch?
 

Piper watched Cameron, knowing he wasn’t telling her the whole truth. He was hiding a secret. But she’d have to let it go, at least for now. He had a reason, even if he wouldn’t say it. He’d tell her eventually.
 

Until then, they could drive.

They could ride the wide-open road straight down the throat of those they hoped to choke, clinging to slivers of hope that they wouldn’t be eaten after reaching Vail’s borders.

CHAPTER 19

Cameron felt another press coming. So he peeked at Piper, touched the button on the wheel with his thumb, and engaged the dumb but relatively still reliable autodrive.