Mania (11 page)

“Not among your friends—among the residents on the other side of the park. The ones near the entrance. The Dreamers, Jack. You and I both know they're easy to manipulate. I've seen Cooper at work, and the worst thing you can do is underestimate him. He can convince anyone that he can and will utterly destroy their lives in a single night if they don't do what he says.” Her eyes searched mine, begging me to believe her. “For your average Dreamer, that's a pretty strong motivation.”

I studied her expression, her eyes, her mannerisms, trying to see any hint of deception as she continued.

“You may not want me here. You can believe whatever you want about me, I don't care. I will follow you. I will find a way. And I
will
help you whether you want me to or not. I have reasons that are as strong as yours for wanting to complete this formula. Maybe even stronger.” Her words spilled out so fast now that her breath came in panting bursts and her eyes burned with determination. “You can say no, but you can't stop me unless you want to kill me yourself for something that
I did not do
. I promise you, though … that if you let me, I
will
help you get your brother back alive.”

I searched her eyes for any reason to think she would betray me again … and I knew she could. I'd been stupid to believe she couldn't. She was a Taker. Wasn't that what they always did? With them it was nearly inevitable.

When I thought of her as a Taker … I didn't want to trust her.

When I thought of her as Chloe … I really, really did.

“How can you possibly help me by staying with me?” I leaned against the van, sighing and massaging the back of my neck with my right hand.

“Have you ever had a Taker helping you before?” Chloe stepped in front of me, and that familiar wicked sparkle was back in her eyes.

“No.”

“You'll see.” She smiled wide.

Finn stepped toward us. I'd noticed him standing near the front of the van, listening, and he looked very relieved to see me fully in motion again. “So what's the plan? Rescue operation? Dark of night? Stealthy ninja attack? Whatever it is, I'm all in.”

I shook my head firmly and turned to face him. “No, Finn.” I heard Chloe give a low chuckle.

“If you keep saying no”—Finn's voice was light, but the determination in his expression was undeniable—“everyone will keep ignoring it and that might not be wise. No offense, but I think it undermines your ability to lead.”

“Finn … ”

“Parker may have been your brother for a month, Jack.” Finn turned to face me and was so close I could count the lightest freckles on his nose in an instant. “But he's been mine my whole life.
Do not tell me no again
.”

Fourteen
Parker

Cooper and Thor had only been driving about a mile before they got tired of me pounding on the windows and kicking their seats. They took my phone and put it under the front tire, then threw me in the trunk. I heard the crunch of my phone and grunted, trying to pull the bag off my face. I'd asked Cooper to take it off when they put me in the trunk, but Cooper refused with a cruel chuckle. Time had become pretty hard to track since then, but I guessed we'd been driving for a few hours minimum.

I spent much of the time trying not to puke. The bag over my face smelled like it had been filled with something rotten at some point. I tried to keep my breathing even and level because when I panicked and breathed in too fast, my lungs filled with rancid dust and I choked and coughed so hard my head ached. Besides, there was no reason to panic. I knew three things for sure.

1. The Takers were going to keep me alive for at least ten days.
   
2. Jack knew they had me, and had a somewhat unreliable track record for coming back when he promised.
   
3. All he needed to do to get me back safely was figure out the formula Dad had used to make Eclipse. The formula Dad completely destroyed, which Jack said he couldn't piece together again on his own even if he had ten
   years
   to do it.
   

Right … definitely no reason at all to panic.

The car finally stopped moving just as I started to doze off. I could tell by the chill in the air once they opened the trunk that the sun had gone down. Rough hands dragged me onto my feet. I didn't know how many of them were around me; I was guessing at least four. My hands were tied, but the rope was loose. My feet weren't bound at all, and I figured that since they probably didn't want to shoot me and risk losing their leverage, this might be my only chance.

Drawing in a shaky breath, I did something I hadn't dared even think about since Darkness and I had unified again. I reached inside of my head for a part of myself I knew was there, the part that wanted to survive more than anything. I tried to believe in that strength. I couldn't hear Darkness's voice anymore, and, thank God, he no longer had any control or power … but knowing I had that kind of dark, desperate grit inside me actually helped more than I'd realized when facing something like this.

Maybe sometimes life called for a little madness.

Calling on that sheer will to live, I felt my body humming with adrenaline and tried to sense movement and sound in the air around me. Footsteps to my right, a shuffling of feet in front, someone murmuring to my left and a bit forward—I listened so close my ears ached with the strain. I gave myself twenty seconds as I heard Cooper talking with someone a few feet away to my right—if they finished their discussion and took me inside whatever building I assumed we were near, my chance would be lost. Behind me and to the left sounded the most vacant. I was eighty percent sure that spot was empty … and twenty percent sure the world's quietest thug had decided to hang out there.

Silently tensing the muscles in my legs without yet moving an inch, I simultaneously turned and leapt straight through that spot. Reaching up for the paper bag, I yanked it so hard it ripped and fell off behind me. I crossed my fingers that I wouldn't barrel straight into anything too pain-inducing before my eyes could adjust to the dim light. I blinked and narrowly avoided running into a pole of some sort. My captors started yelling but I was already ten feet away, sprinting as fast as my cramped up legs would take me.

All around me, bizarre shapes loomed out of the darkness. Jagged archways, dark tunnels, and shady outlines of people beside metallic lumps on the ground. My eyes searched the blurred figures as I ran, desperate to identify anything familiar. But everything felt foreign. The only thing I recognized was the sky of twinkling stars spread out above me.

Ignoring my surroundings, I tossed up a silent prayer of thanks that I'd always been an avid runner, because I easily put a decent amount of ground between myself and my captors.

Suddenly, the shouts of Cooper's men cut through the air, becoming louder, more urgent.

“No! You're heading into—”

“Stop!”

“Idiot! You'll hurt yourself!”

My toe ran into something hard and metal. Searing pain shot up my leg and my whole body vibrated with the impact. The whole world spun as I tumbled through the air, landing hard on my hip and hands. Every nerve in every limb radiated with raw pain as I skidded across gravel, hitting metal tracks that ran across the ground until I finally came to a stop. I slowly raised my eyes, following the tracks to where they entered a tunnel into what looked like a massive human head sitting on the ground twenty feet in front of me.

What kind of hell had they brought me to?

I sat there, panting, staring at it. Through the darkness I could just make out huge eyes. They glowered at me. My knees and hands bled freely as I tried to decide if I should get up and run the opposite direction.

Then huge hands wrapped around my shoulders and pulled me back up onto my feet. Cooper jogged up after the others, carrying a flashlight. The beam illuminated the giant head and I realized it was a clown … it was a huge, creepy clown face and the tracks went into its open mouth.

It was some kind of ride, I realized with a small amount of relief. Judging by the chipped paint and the piece of broken track in front of me, they'd brought me to an old, abandoned—and extremely creepy—amusement park. Cooper's flashlight brightened the clown face enough for me to see that inside, the tracks disappeared and the tunnel went into a straight drop for who knew how far. If I'd kept running …

Thor dragged me away from the giant clown face and I went willingly, panting and wiping the blood off my palms and onto my jeans. I hoped the Takers didn't see the way my legs trembled beneath me. My instinct upon catching my breath and not being eaten by a massive clown face was to say thank you, but Thor threw me so roughly back toward Cooper that the words stuck in my throat and felt as ridiculous as they would've if I said them out loud.

One of the Takers I didn't recognize grabbed my arms and held on so tightly that even taking a deep breath was painful. I was careful not to look into Cooper's eyes, but his general sentiment hovered somewhere in between bored and exhausted. “Please try not to kill yourself before we even get the chance. We're supposed to wait ten days, and if you keep doing stupid things like that, you won't last through the first one.”

“An abandoned amusement park?” I panted in confusion. “This is the new Taker camp?”

Cooper grabbed on to the rope that bound my hands together and jerked me along roughly behind him. He gestured toward a ragged sign near the place where they'd parked the car. “It was called Funtopia. I like it.”

“Of course
you
do,” I muttered. One of the Takers kicked my foot from behind and nearly sent me to the ground again.

Everywhere I looked sat rotting metal cars and rides that had long since been grown over with weeds. I shuddered … forget nightmares.
This
was where children's imaginations came to die. I forced my mind to focus on what I should be doing. I knew Jack couldn't make Eclipse like they wanted. The trade Cooper wanted was not an option … so now what? What would Jack do if he were here?

That was easy. He would find a way to escape.

And that's exactly what I would have to do.

I decided to try to keep Cooper talking. Maybe I could learn something.

“Why here? Doesn't look like there's much room for shelter,” I said.

“It's deceiving on the surface, like many things,” Cooper grunted as he led me down a path toward the entrance of a squat, rounded building with a big double door. It looked more like storage than anything.

Four large, armed guards stood on either side of the entrance. When I got closer, I squinted and then gaped at them. Using the word “armed” to describe them was like when doctors used to write in my file that I was a “teenager with a minor sleep disorder.”

When we went to their last base, the security guards had belts on with a gun at their hips. Apparently the Takers had learned their lesson, because these guys looked more like commandos. They had rifles over their shoulders, bullet-proof vests, grenades at their hips, knives of every size hung from their vests and belts, and each had a hilt sticking out of the side of his boots—and these were just the weapons I recognized. There were many more that looked completely foreign to me.

“I'm sorry … did you move this base into North Korea when I wasn't looking?” I tried to laugh it off, but my voice sounded shaky even to me.

Cooper looked straight at me, and I barely managed to shift my gaze away before our eyes connected. I
had
to be more careful.

“This is only the part of our security we've let you see.” He opened the door and stepped inside, and one of the Takers behind me pushed me through it. Cooper went on to say, “We don't make the same mistakes twice. And now when we have intruders, these guys shoot to kill.”

As I followed Cooper into an entry, I was surprised to find an empty room that looked as big as the size of the entire building as seen from the outside. At the back of the room was an extra-wide set of stairs going down. My captors led me down the stairs and then through hallway after hallway after hallway. The construction went from being a few years old to progressively older and older the further we went into this underground labyrinth. I'd given up on talking to Cooper. The conversation wasn't getting me anywhere anyway. Instead, I tried to pay attention to the path through this maze and any weaknesses I might find in their security.

More armed guards were roaming around in the halls, which didn't seem promising. I kept my eyes open for any other exits, but I saw zero alternate hallways that seemed to lead back toward the surface. In fact, everything only led deeper into the Earth. How was I going to get out of here?

My heart sank as I realized the better question was: how could I tell Jack where to come get me when the only entry I'd seen would get him killed?

The whole plan of avoiding eye contact with the Takers would only help if I had information that would help Jack. Right now, asking him to come for me would be like giving him a death sentence.

And I would not let my brother walk into that.

Of course, none of it would even matter if the Takers forced me to make eye contact with one of them before I could go to sleep. My chances of getting out of here without Jack making some kind of payment were getting slimmer with every armed guard we passed. Minute after minute ticked by with no end to this maze in sight, and after about the fiftieth turn, I felt hopelessly lost. Even if I'd believed Jack had a chance in hell of getting into this place without getting shot, I still wouldn't be able to tell him where to find me.

Finally, we reached a hallway that must've been the oldest one so far. The walls were made of stone, the floor of cracked cement. Fluorescent lights hummed and flickered overhead. The left wall had many doors, each spaced about eight feet apart. The doors had tiny, dusty windows in them, but before I got a chance to look inside one, I noticed the only thing in the hall that looked new.

Bright, shiny locks hung on the outside of every door.

Prison cells—the Takers had created their own little prison wing, just like the one they'd had at the old air force base. These cells were built to replace the ones they'd kept my dad and the other captives in.

Because what was a new Taker base without a good, solid place where you could lock up and torture your enemies?

Cooper led the way down to one that had extra locks on the door.

“Aww, extra locks just for me?” I tried to sound braver than I felt. “You shouldn't have.”

He opened the door and threw me inside without bothering to untie my hands. I sprawled shoulder first onto the concrete. There was no light in the room aside from what came through the tiny window in the door. The cot against the right wall must've been brought from the base because it looked nearly worn through. The fabric was so thin I was afraid it wouldn't hold my weight. The bucket in the back corner was disgusting enough that I didn't dare stare directly at it. There was a dead rat just inside the door.

I'd never thought of myself or my life as spoiled or privileged. I'd never understood how very lucky I was to have a nice home. How great my bed was—whether I actually slept while I was in it or not. How much I missed Addie, Finn, and Mia. How amazing my mom was, and how upset and scared she was going to be when I didn't come home tonight … or tomorrow night … or the night after that.

And then I just desperately wanted to go home. I tried not to let my dread of being left in here show on my face as Thor untied my hands. For an instant, I almost thought I saw a hint of sympathy in Thor's face, but just as fast, it was gone.

“Welcome home, Parker.” I could tell from Cooper's smirk as he closed the door and left me in the dark that he knew exactly how awful this was for me. And that he loved every minute of it. “I hope you enjoy your stay at our new base as much as your father enjoyed his time at our old one.”