Night Sky (38 page)

And, hand in hand, we walked back to the car.

—

Part of me wanted to fall back to sleep again, just so that I could experience at least one delicious Milo dream without any angst or guilt.

But when Dana steered us back onto the highway, sleep was the last thing on my mind.

“We're officially in a different time zone,” Calvin announced.

Dana nodded gravely. “It's a long-ass drive to Alabama.”

“I wish we knew which part of Alabama we were heading toward. Are we there yet?” Cal asked, his voice tinged with intentional whininess.

I closed my eyes, focusing on the ever-present mental tug. “We're getting warmer,” I mumbled.

When I opened my eyes again, I looked over at Milo, who was gazing at me.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he said back.

We smiled at each other.

From the front seat, Dana made a barfing noise.

“Time zone!” Milo blurted abruptly.

All three of us jumped at his declaration. “What?” I asked.

“Time zone! Sky, don't you get it? We're an hour behind now.”

Dana frowned into the rearview mirror. “And the significance of this is…”

Milo leaned forward. “Skylar's vision inside of that room, with the big ugly man and the computer… We all assumed the vision wasn't in real time because the clock was wrong, but it was an hour behind.”

“It was an hour behind,” I repeated, “because the clock and the computer and room—and Sasha—were in a different time zone.”

“It was just after nine, our time,” Milo continued.

“Which is just after
eight
, Central time,” I concluded.

“Oh, snap,” Cal said.

Dana shook her head, pessimistic as ever. “You're reaching,” she said. But something about the look in her eyes as she glanced in the mirror made me think she wasn't entirely sure we were wrong.

Milo grabbed my hand. Immediately, a surge of energy worked its way through my bloodstream.
Let's work on what you saw.

I locked eyes with him.
Back
in
the
pet
store?

Yeah. I know you can remember it. Shoot it back to me. Let's review the images.

I winced, unsure if I was comfortable forcing such ugly visions onto somebody I admittedly really, really liked.

I
can
take
it
, he added.
I
saw
it
the
first
time
around. And I really, really like you too.

Without hesitation, I blasted back through the scene. The walls materialized first, dark red and chipped. Then, like a camera panning out to reveal more of the set, I watched the room expand and grow. Rows upon rows of dirty cots came into view, each one housing a tiny sleeping girl.

How
many
are
there?
And, try as he might, Milo couldn't mask the edgy tautness of anger that slipped through his tone as he tried to help me with the recall.

Five, ten, twelve…that's down one row…Two rows makes…shit. Twenty-four girls.

Twenty-four. Two dozen girls had been stolen from their homes and locked in some terrible, hot, smelly place, with a guard who—for some reason—scared the crap out of me.

Milo used his free hand to dig into his pocket for a piece of gum. I couldn't blame him, but the movement distracted me and the images started to fade.

But he felt me waver, and he took his hand out of his pocket and grabbed on to my arm instead.

Show
me
more.

I concentrated, and then the computer screen was back again, complete with a looping image of that movie.

Sorry
, I said as I felt Milo raise a mental eyebrow.

Classy
.

I wanted to laugh, but the idea of somebody watching sleazy movies as they guarded kidnapped little girls made me feel more sick than anything else. I wondered for a moment if Skinemax guy was the same sleazeball who had purchased the dog collars Dana had talked about.

I suddenly remembered a flash of an image: the big guard with the red shirt, his round face mottled with anger, spittle in the corner of his mouth as he brandished a baseball bat that was coated with…blood?

I recoiled from the picture, feeling my heart accelerate and my breathing grow ragged.

Still
thoughts, still thoughts…

Milo had, of course, followed my entire thought process. He squeezed my hand.
Let's stay away from him for a minute and dissect the room. Look at the room, Sky. Where are those girls? What does it look like to you?

I tried to hone in on details of the interior. I could see the peeling red paint, and the dirty floors…so dirty that they looked as though there wasn't any actual floor there—just hard-packed earth.

And hay. That was hay on the ground.

“It's a barn,” I blurted.

I opened my eyes. Dana glared at us from behind the wheel. Calvin, who had begun to nod off, jumped in his seat.

“Yeah,” Milo answered out loud. “I think you're right. I think we're looking at an old barn.”

“Man, y'all have the weirdest conversations,” Calvin said drowsily.

“Go back to sleep,” I replied. Milo glanced at me and then leaned forward. “Cal, before you crash, may I borrow your phone?”

Cal handed it back to him, and Milo turned it on and flipped through Cal's various apps before he found what he was looking for.

It was a drawing app in which he could use his finger as a pen. He looked up at me and smiled. “I think we should try to draw a map.”

I nodded. “Good idea,” I agreed.

Dana tilted her head up and peered into the rearview mirror to see what we were doing. “Mind explaining what you saw?”

“It was the same thing as before. There was a big room—a barn—with two rows of cots. Twenty-four beds total. All filled.”

Milo started to draw. To my surprise, he was an excellent artist. A clear picture of the interior of the barn, as I'd seen it, began to materialize on the screen.

“Where was the computer?”

I looked at Milo's picture. “There,” I said, pointing to the front right-hand corner. “And there was someone else sitting over on the other side. The big guard with the bloody…the baseball bat.”

Dana's eyes were focused on the road, but I could see her wince at my words.

“So two guards?” Milo said. I knew he was attempting to redirect my thoughts from the awful to the practical.

“Yeah,” I said. “Two that I saw. I don't know how accurate my visions are,” I added.

“So at least two guards,” Dana offered. I was pretty sure I heard her whisper
I'm gonna kill 'em
under her breath.

“And where is the entrance?” Milo persisted.

I wasn't sure. I'd been so focused on the girls and the nasty guards that I hadn't had a chance to see exactly where the doors to the room were located.

“I think there's an entrance here,” I said, pointing to the very front of the barn. “And I…I don't know. I'm pretty sure there's a back door somewhere too.”

“It's okay. You're doing great,” Milo whispered. He took my hand and squeezed it.

Thank
you
, I whispered back silently. And then I focused on the girls in the beds, all those cots in rows, metal frames planted deep into the dirt floor, chains keeping the girls locked to those frames.

I felt a fleeting thought race through Milo's mind. I almost didn't sense it; he was moving that fast.

What
are
you
thinking?
I asked.

He pointed out the window, where eerily familiar trees lined the sides of a highway that we'd both seen before. We'd finally reached the location of my dreams. Sasha had been here—I felt it stronger than ever. She'd tried to escape. She'd gotten away—but then they'd caught her. Hit her. Beaten her.

But not killed her.

I looked into Milo's eyes.
I've been thinking about that too—about all those girls in the barn. About all of the blood that was found in the back of Edmund's truck…

I looked at him, eyes wide.

Sasha
couldn't have possibly survived if she had lost all that blood at once,
Milo continued.
But…

I watched while he scratched his head with his free hand.

What
if
they
were
taking
her
blood
in
small
amounts—enough to make the drug, but never enough at one time to actually kill her?

“Like milking a cow,” I said, shuddering.

“
What?
” Dana and a now-awake Calvin both said.

Milo explained his theory to them.

Calvin sighed disgustedly. “Man, that is so effed up.”

Dana nodded. “You're probably right,” she said grimly. “But even so, taking blood from little girls, over and over and over again? It'll eventually kill 'em.”

Milo interlaced his fingers with mine as I watched him. And I knew he agreed with Dana. Eventually it would.

He was thinking about Lacey, who'd been taken all those years ago. And I knew that Dana was thinking about her sister too.

“Maybe they give special treatment to the important ones,” I offered. “Wow, that sounds terrible. What I meant to say was that maybe the people who make Destiny know which girls have a special, higher level of power, and they make a point to keep the goose with the golden egg alive. So to speak.”

“I don't think they're that smart,” Dana said.

“They're smart enough to steal dozens of girls and to frame innocent people with murder,” I countered.

“I meant farsighted,” Dana conceded. “And yes, they're plenty smart, except when it comes to long-term thinking, which ultimately makes them stupid.”

“Still,” I said, “Lacey was really powerful, right? Maybe she's still…”

“She's not,” Dana snapped.

I cleared my throat. I knew I was risking Dana's ire. Still, I couldn't bring myself to give up hope. “Or maybe she escaped.”

“Then where is she?” Dana's voice was harsh and bitter. “If Lacey escaped, then why didn't she come looking for me?” I watched her grip the steering wheel like she was wringing a neck. “It's been years, Sky.
Years
.”

I glanced at Milo, who told me,
It
does
seem
unlikely
.

“When you've lost someone,” Dana blasted me, “literally
lost
someone—for
years
—check back in with me. Until then, keep your Pollyanna shit to yourself.”

I sniffed quietly and gazed out the window.

But then I jumped. “Hey! Exit. Now. Here.”

The barn loomed large and quiet in the moonlight.

The magnetic pull had gotten so bad that it was all I could do not to leap out of Cal's car and start running straight to the building—straight to Sasha. She was down there; I could feel her.

“It's bigger than I thought it would be,” Dana said quietly.

There were also two buildings instead of one.

We were parked on a tiny country road overlooking the small valley where the barn was tucked near a creek. We were waiting, our hearts in our throats—or at least mine was—for Milo to return to the car.

He'd gone out to do something Dana called a “sneak and peek.” Basically that meant he was going to take a stroll in the dark near those two buildings—not one but two—where there were at least two guards, one very large and in possession of a baseball bat that he'd used before as a very deadly weapon.

Dana had used her two-rats-lurking-in-the-corner G-T skills to tell us that there were twenty-six people in the main structure—the barn—and six in the smaller Quonset hut that sat nearby.

Her theory—and Milo's—was that the smaller building was a lab where they cooked the enzymes and other elements from the blood that they stole from those two dozen girls chained to their beds. Cooked it into the drug known as Destiny.

What we were looking at was a “Destiny farm.” And the fact that the men who ran it kept those little girls alive—whether for a day or a week or a month—was a surprise to Dana.

Who had to be thinking about Lacey.

“You okay?” I whispered to her.

She looked at me and her eyes were silver in the moonlight. “I want to kill them.”

“Ditto,” Calvin said. “But really, what we need to do now, as responsible citizens, is to call the police.”

Dana laughed humorlessly. “Not happening, Scoot.”

“Why not? I mean, worst-case scenario it's a false alarm and they don't find anything. But if you're right, y'all with your crazy visions and your psychic infrared, heat-seeker abilities or however the hell it is you know exactly how many people are in there…? If there
are
dangerous people in that barn, the police are going to have a few things we don't. Like, I don't know,
guns
, for instance?”

“For all we know, the local cops are dirty and taking a weekly percentage from these assholes,” Dana countered. “You willing to take that chance? That when they show up, they hand us over to the bad guys, who kill us and bury us in the back forty?”

“You're just a ray of sunshine,” Cal grumbled.

“I'm a realist,” Dana corrected him.

“I still think this is too dangerous for us to pull off alone. We need help.”

“We
have
help.” Dana pointed to me, and then to herself.

There was a tap on the glass. I let out a yelp and then, realizing it was Milo, leaned across the backseat to unlock the door.

“God, you scared me,” I exclaimed breathily.

“Sorry,” he said as he climbed back in.

“How's it looking?” Dana asked.

Milo's face was grim. “It's bad,” he said.

“Bad how?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to hear the answer.

“Well, it looks exactly like your vision,” Milo told me. “Twenty-four girls and two guards are in the main barn. I was able to peek in through some air vents, over on the side, under the eaves.”

“Did you see Sasha?” I asked eagerly.

Milo bit his lip. “I'm sorry. I didn't get close enough, and even if I had…” Even though he took my hands, he kept talking so that Calvin and Dana would hear what he had to say. “They've shaved the girls' heads. I don't know if it's a problem with lice or if they do it to intimidate or depersonalize them, but…they all look kinda the same. And they're all chained to their beds.”

Nausea lingered in my throat.

“I'm gonna kill those scumbags. I'm gonna make them suffer.” Dana's face darkened as she said what I was thinking.

“You're going to take a deep breath,” Milo replied even as he sent me a
Still
thoughts
. “You're going to be calm—because we need to stay logical and figure out how to best execute this rescue mission.”

“So if we can't call the cops,” Calvin said. “Isn't there someone, somewhere that we
can
call?”

Dana looked at him. “Like Batman?”

“Well, I don't know,” Calvin said, before admitting, “yeah.”

“I'm Batman,” Dana told him flatly, which shut him up.

Milo spoke. “There are really only two organizations that I would trust to help out in a situation like this one. One's up in Boston—it's called the Obermeyer Institute.”

“They're fast,” Dana agreed. “They would get here as quickly as superhumanly possible. But they're just too far away. Calling them for help has us sitting on our asses, watching and waiting for about twelve hours. And I'm not willing to do that. If we wait, some of those girls'll die.”

“Where's the other?” Calvin asked.

“It's out in California,” Milo said. “Geographically, I think it's slightly closer, but it's not run the same way as OI, and it'll take them longer to go wheels up and to reach us.”

Cal sighed.

“If this is too much for you, Scooter,” Dana said, “let me know now.”

Cal frowned, channeling all his nervous energy and turning it into determination. “Hell no.” He looked at Dana. “Remember? I got your back.”

Dana nodded. “Good,” she said. She didn't smile, but I could tell that made her happy.

“Did you get a look at the second building?” I asked Milo, even as I peered down the hillside toward that prefab structure with the rounded metal roof. From this vantage point, we could see both buildings, the field and path between them, and the gravel parking lot that was on the far side of the barn. There were about a half-dozen cars parked there, along with what looked like a medium-sized truck.

“It's definitely a lab,” Milo reported. “It's climate controlled. There's a huge AC unit outside. And there's a generator that was running when I went past. I'm pretty sure the building holds some kind of living quarters or barracks for the guards and lab techs too.”

“Anything else?” Dana asked.

“There are six cars in the lot and—get this,” Milo said. “The truck down there? It belongs to Doggy Doo Good. The company logo is all over it.”

“Doggy Doo Good!” I exclaimed.

“Yeah. So, Sky, for what it's worth, you haven't been leading us on a wild-goose chase. I think the pet store's trucks are being used to covertly ship promising little girls all across the country to farms like these, where they bleed 'em dry.”

I thought about the vision I'd had of little kids bouncing around in the back of a truck filled with leashes and dog food.

Dana let out a stream of curses, then growled, “I have a plan to get those girls out of there, but I flipping hate it.”

Milo smiled briefly. “Does it involve me hot-wiring that Doggy Doo Good truck?”

“It does,” she said. “We'll have to get some paint to cover up the logo. I mean, after we get those girls out of here.” She punctuated her sentence with another f-bomb.

Cal cleared his throat. “I'm sorry, but I think I missed the part that happens between us sitting up here on this hillside and us painting that truck. And I think what you left out might be the most important part, because it involves freeing twenty-four helpless little girls from eight guards and lab techs who will probably object to our walking in, saying howdy, and unchaining them.”

Dana sighed heavily, clearly frustrated. “What I
want
to do is rip their throats out, one by one. There's not a single person who works here, torturing and killing those girls for profit, who doesn't
completely
deserve to die a terrible, horrible, painful death.”

“But what you're going to do instead is…?” Milo started for her, even as he squeezed my hand.

“I'm going to mind-control them,” Dana said, in the same tone that she might've used to announce that she'd stepped into dog crap. She sighed again. “I'm going to get them out of here, because ripping their throats out might put those little girls into danger. Instead, all eight of them are going to be filled with an overwhelming desire to rush home. I'm going to make them believe that it's okay, that the girls'll be fine left alone here, chained to their beds.”

“That's brilliant,” I breathed. “Then we just walk in—”

“And get the girls out of there,” Milo finished for me. “Dana can use her telekinetic skills to break all the chains.”

“Then all we have to do is load the girls into the truck.”

“And buy paint to hide the logo,” Dana repeated. She sighed again. “Okay, let's fricking do this.”

Cal stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Hey. As long as you're using what Sky so delicately calls your Jedi mind-screw, why don't you fill them with a burning desire to take a sample of Destiny and then add an equally insatiable urge for them to go straight to the police, to confess their criminal behavior? It's not the same as ripping out their throats, I know, and maybe the local police are crooked, but…maybe they're not. At least this way there's a chance they'll spend the rest of their lives in jail.”

“Ha!” Dana smiled. “Scooter, I really like the way you think.”

Milo's laughter was warm in the darkness. “And, as long as you're at it, Dane, let's make it even easier. Tell whoever has the keys to the Doggy Doo Good truck to leave them right in the ignition.”

Dana nodded. “I'm likin' this plan better all the time.” She took a deep breath and a cleansing exhale. “All right. Here's the deal in detail. Sky, you stay here in the car with Cal and keep an asshole count. Let's make sure they really all go before we walk into that barn. Milo, I want you around the back of the building, eyes on the back door.”

“Just one thing before you go,” Cal said.

Dana raised an eyebrow. “What's that, Scoot?”

“Can you, er, switch seats with me?” Cal wanted his wheelchair back, but he wouldn't be able to get into it without Dana's help.

Dana looked at him for a moment, her eyes squinting with suspicion. “You promise you won't pull some stunt and leave the car before I give the all clear?”

“I thought we were giving the all clear, since we're keeping count of the assholes,” Cal countered.

Dana stared at him for a few more moments. “Fine,” she said, making sure the inside light was switched off before opening the door and getting out of the car. And then, with not a lot of grace, she used her telekinetic powers to transfer Cal back into his chair—and into the driver's seat.

“Thank you.” He smiled sweetly up at her.

“Whatever,” Dana grumbled. She stood outside the car, waiting for Milo to get his butt in gear.

Milo looked at me.

“Please be careful,” I whispered.

He smiled. “I will. And please keep the car locked while you and Calvin are out here. Okay?”

“Okay.” I nodded. We'd parked off the road behind a thicket of brush. Even if someone drove up the hill instead of down into town, they wouldn't see us. Unless, of course, they were looking.

But why would they be looking?

Milo took another moment to gaze at me before wrapping his arms around me.
See
you
soon.

I'll see you soon.

Calvin and I watched them disappear down the dark hillside.

“Come sit up here,” he finally said.

I climbed up and over, into the front passenger seat, and sighed.

“I hope this works,” Cal whispered.

“I hope so too.”

We waited in silence.

“Look!” Cal exclaimed after a few moments. “Do you see that?”

Sure enough, several bright lights had clicked on, illuminating both the barn and a section of the metal building next to it. Then a group of men, dressed in everything from a white lab coat and medical scrubs, to jeans and a do-rag, to really dorky-looking plaid pajamas, headed purposefully around the side of the barn, toward the parking lot. Two men joined them, coming out of the barn.

“They're leaving!” I whispered excitedly. “Dana's mind-control is working!”

“This is effin' awesome!” Cal said as one of the men opened the door to the Doggy Doo Good truck and put something inside. The keys? I hoped so. “She's effin' awesome!”

“She is,” I agreed. Without Dana, we wouldn't have had a fighting chance to pull this off.

One by one, the cars all pulled away, some of the men carpooling and leaving together. The headlights traveled up the driveway and then turned into taillights as the cars took a right, away from us, down the hill.

“Wait a minute, whose car is that?” Calvin asked. He pointed to the dark shape of a very large vehicle still parked a few slots down from the Doggy Doo Good truck.

Eight men had come out on the drive. Had one of them left his car behind?

But no, then I saw him—one last, lone man, standing outside the barn, almost absentmindedly swinging something—a stick or a rake or a cane—next to his leg.

He was an oak tree of a man dressed in a red button-down shirt and grimy, stained blue jeans. He stood staring after the last of those taillights, looking confused and annoyed, just swinging that stick, just swinging it, swinging…

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“What?” Cal asked. “What's wrong?”

Baseball bat. It wasn't a rake or a cane or a stick; it was a baseball bat.

It was the man from my visions.

And he wasn't walking toward his car.

Something had gone wrong. Dana's mind-control didn't seem to work on him.