The Countdown (The Taking) (16 page)

I wasn’t the one with an implant in my neck. Thom was right, I could escape unscathed.

I heard footsteps coming on the cement walkway outside the motel room door. Agent Truman wasn’t even trying to be stealthy. He wasn’t even remotely afraid of us.

For some reason, knowing how little he thought of us . . . of Thom and me . . . well, it pissed me off.

Suddenly the gun in my hand was vibrating. No, the gun wasn’t vibrating, my fingertips were. I didn’t think I’d be able to hold it steady enough to shoot. But then again, I had a better weapon now.

Outside the bathroom, on the other side of the flimsy hollow-core door I was hiding behind, I heard the doorknob to the motel room jiggle, and I could imagine Agent
Truman out there, testing the lock. I imagined Thom, too, waiting and feeling guilty because he was the reason Agent Truman was here. Blaming himself all over again.

A storm blew through me. A hot wind coiled, twisting and snarling when I heard the bright red metal door bang against the wall as Agent Truman let himself inside.

What a jerk!

This was what I needed, to be angry. Enraged.

It would give me the upper hand, and then the gun would be unnecessary. I held my breath, waiting for the right time.

I counted his steps.

Then, I heard his voice. “Hello again.” He said it like he had everything under control, and something inside me unleashed.

The door to the bathroom flew wide—I didn’t even touch it . . . it just . . .
happened
.

I was ready for it; Agent Truman never saw it coming.

He had his gun drawn on Thom—not at his head, which was a true kill shot, but at his chest. I wondered if a bullet through his heart would heal, or if that was as fatal.

Either way, Agent Truman never had the chance to shoot. I saw surprise register on his face at the moment I launched the bedside phone at him simply by looking at it.

The old rotary dial was heavy . . . clunky, but it was also still attached to the cord in the wall. The cord only seized for a second before detaching with a sharp snap, and then it hurtled at his head.

Agent Truman was forced to lift his arm—and the gun
in his hand—to shield himself from the phone. Thom used the split-second distraction to slam his shoulder into Agent Truman’s midsection.

Agent Truman went down hard, with a gusty
Oomph!
His gun slid somewhere across the shag carpeting, maybe beneath one of the twin beds. But he wasn’t giving up that easily, and from out of nowhere he had a pen, a cheap ballpoint. He jammed it into Thom’s thigh.

“Son of a—” Thom howled.

Then Agent Truman rolled him over and was shoving his face down into the carpet.

I don’t know why, but I became fixated on the blood. It was everywhere, Thom’s blood. All over his pants, on the shag carpeting, and on Agent Truman.

Agent Truman punched Thom in the jaw then, and I tightened my grip around my gun. But before I could squeeze the trigger, I hesitated. What if I missed Agent Truman and hit Thom instead? What if I accidentally shot him in the head and there was no coming back from it?

The door to the outside was open, and maybe it shouldn’t matter but I kept thinking,
What if someone walked past and saw what was happening in here? What if they were exposed to Thom’s blood and died because of what we were doing?

If I had better control over my abilities, I would have used them to close the door. But when I concentrated nothing happened, so I hurled myself at it instead. Agent Truman grabbed my ankle as I ran by, and I tripped just as the fingertips of my outstretched hand brushed the edge of it.

I kicked out, trying to dislodge his grip on me, and the heel of my boot connected with something solid. I hoped desperately I’d struck bone—jaw or nose or skull. Nothing in this world would make me happier.

Whatever I’d hit, the impact had been enough to loosen his grip on my ankle, and I was able to move those last few inches to reach the door. I shoved it closed with a solid, satisfying bang.

I rolled over, collapsing onto my back, at the same time Agent Truman, with blood streaming from his nose—blood that was also poisonous—swept his arm underneath the bed. When he came back up onto his knees, I saw the gun.

My heart bloated with fear. This time, he pointed it directly where it would do maximum damage: directly at Thom’s head.

“Don’t,” I begged. I still had a gun in one hand and a supernatural ability I tried to call on, but it was useless. He had me right where he wanted me—I couldn’t risk Thom’s life. I was lying on the floor, on my back, and I raised
my
hands over my head to show I gave up.

Then, without giving him time to gloat over the fact that he’d managed to capture us, I whispered, “
Ochmeel abayal dai
,” because those words were maybe our only hope at this point.

He was one of us, like it or not.

I’d tried to make them sound the way Tyler had, giving them the same inflection, but like before, they sounded
strange coming out of my mouth—a foreigner testing the feel of a new and unfamiliar language.

Because it
was
a new language
, I reminded myself.
These were not words I was ever meant to speak.

Thom didn’t flinch. My hands trembled as I forced myself to stay focused on him.

When Agent Truman finally reacted, it wasn’t at all like I’d expected, although how
was
one supposed to behave when they heard an alien language?

Maybe
not
by reaching down and waving his hand back and forth in front of my face.

“
What . . .
are you doing?” I asked.

“Just making sure you’re still in there.” It wasn’t a question, he was simply stating a fact, and I knew what he meant: that my body—
this
body—hadn’t been hacked into the way Chuck’s had.

“It’s still me.”

Bonelessly, like this was all suddenly way too much, he fell to his knees, his gun dropping to the floor with a dull thud. He ran his hands through his hair.

I stayed where I was, my eyes darting to Thom, while Agent Truman processed it all.

Finally, he asked, “What about
them
?” Only he, unlike everyone else I’d ever talked to, didn’t look upward. “Are they here yet?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so, not yet anyway. But I think they’re close.”

He nodded, as if pulling himself together at last. “We better get a move on then.”

Agent Truman locked the motel room’s door, then slid the security chain in place, and wedged the back of one of the metal chairs beneath the knob, testing it twice before he was sure it would hold.

And I thought my dad was paranoid.

“We’ll have to work fast,” he said while he pointed at one of the twin beds. “You lay down there,” he told Thom. “We need to get that GPS chip outta you, before they realize I’m not comin’ back and decide to send someone else after the signal.”

Thom reached up and rubbed the side of his neck, eyeing Agent Truman anxiously. “Why are you trusting him?” he asked me. And then to Agent Truman, “Why are you helping us?”

Agent Truman pulled out his keys and unhooked a small pocketknife from the ring. He inspected two of the blades, as if he were deciding between them, and then nodded, snapping one back in place. “I’m not. I assume you know what the message meant, that
Ochmeel abayal dai
garbage?”

I nodded. “The Returned must die.”

Thom jolted. “That’s what Chuck said. Right before . . .” He halted. “Right before the
accident
.”

“Chuck?” Agent Truman didn’t know about Chuck yet.

“We both know that was no accident,” I said, then turned to fill Agent Truman in. “Nice trucker. Gave us a lift and
then blew his brains out, right after he delivered that message. He also said: ‘Time is running out.’” I pictured Chuck the way I’d last seen him alive, with his eyes glowing as he reached out and slammed my head against the window. That hadn’t been him, not really.

“Trucker, huh?” Truman said to Thom. “We wondered what happened. When we couldn’t get them on the horn, we thought they must’ve put you back on the auction block and sold you off to a higher bidder, so we activated your GPS to safeguard our investment. Had no idea we’d find you all the way out here.” He almost cracked a smile. “How the hell’d you get away from them anyhow? They guaranteed us their facility was locked down tight as a tick.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer him, but I couldn’t think of a reason to lie. “They’re dead.”

If I expected a reaction from Agent Truman, I didn’t get it. “I guess that explains the silence on their end.”

I frowned. “If he has a GPS tracker, how come I don’t?”

Agent Truman regarded me. “How do you know you don’t?” He lifted his shoulders. “If you do, it’s not one we were given access to.”

A tracker
. If whoever bought me knew where I was that would change everything. My stomach convulsed.

I hated asking, but I needed to know. “Can you tell if I . . . if they . . . put one in me too?”

Agent Truman rolled his eyes. “Relax. The one in him is ours. We supplied it to them. And unless the folks who paid for you have access to highly classified government
technology, like the device we put in your friend here, then you’re free and clear.”

He didn’t exactly set my mind at ease, but he had a point. What were the odds there were two government agencies bidding on hybrid alien teens?

I slipped closer to Thom, inspecting his neck. The skin was so smooth . . . as it would be, I supposed. He’d already healed around whatever they’d done to him. “So there’s something in there? And they put it there, Eddie Ray and Natty?”

Agent Truman scoffed. “Natty? I heard that was what she was goin’ by now. Cute.” He used the knife’s tip to point at the bed, indicating it was time to get started. Thom reluctantly settled down.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?”

His eyes slid coolly, calmly, to the knife in his hand. “Haven’t you heard, sport? I’m a doctor.”

Thom closed his eyes as Agent Truman began probing his fingers over the surface of his neck, presumably searching for whatever had been planted inside. I shuddered—he may have been a doctor once, but he had a terrible bedside manner. To distract myself, I pushed for more information. “So you knew Natty?”

“I know . . .
knew of
her. She had an impressive reputation, that one. She and that partner of hers, Eddie Ray, worked the black market for years. Made a killing. No pun intended.” He winked, making it clear the pun was totally intended. Also, making it clear he had a cold, dead heart. He
glanced up at me. “I never really trusted her.” His lips pursed. “Eddie Ray I got—his loyalty was all about the almighty dollar. Whoever had the deepest pockets, you know what I mean.” He pressed his finger over something and Thom grimaced. He seemed to have found whatever it was he was searching for.

Then he got the knife ready.

I spoke up before there was no going back. “Aren’t you at least gonna sterilize that or something?”

“He’ll be fine. That’s the beauty of healing at super-speed. It works to fight off bacteria too. Right, sport?”

Thom opened his eyes and gave me a he’s-not-wrong shrug. I couldn’t exactly argue. If Thom wasn’t freaking out, how could I?

“About this black market you mentioned, what’s that all about? How does that even work? What would anyone even do once they got us?”

Agent Truman gave me a quick but critical glance. “You’re not that naive, are you? You can’t tell me you’d be surprised to know how valuable you—
we
”—he corrected, because we all knew he was a Returned as well—“are on the open market. People pay big money for crazy shit. My division alone ponied up a crap ton for ol’ Tommy Boy here, all in the name of science.” He leaned over Thom and leered into his face, reminding me why I always thought of him as a shark.

“You’re the worst.”

“I doubt that. There are some sick SOBs out there,
people who like to . . .” He jammed the tip of his knife into Thom’s throat, making Thom flinch. He didn’t actually cut him open or anything, but it left a nasty mark. “. . . experiment,” he finished.

“Like you?”

“You can’t have progress without sacrifice.” He shrugged as if it made no difference to him one way or the other, and I wondered if this indifferent attitude was all hot air—an act he put on to make me believe he didn’t give a crap. Or if he was really as cold and as unfeeling as he made it seem.

“There are some who just like to ‘collect’ us, like freaks in a zoo. Create their own little museums.” Another who-cares shrug. “And others who like to use our blood for sport. Stick some poor sap in a sealed container and expose them to it. Then they sit back and watch.”

“Until what?” But I had the sinking feeling I already knew the answer.

Agent Truman didn’t hesitate to fill in the blank. “The Code Red.”

My stomach rolled as I thought of Tyler—the way he’d suffered before I’d decided to take him to Devil’s Hole.

“What about me? If you were buying Thom, how come you didn’t buy me too?”

“Your friend ‘Natty’ never told me she had you. I mean, I knew they had a Replaced, that was why we attacked Blackwater in the first place—we intercepted that message she sent out.”

So the message Natty sent hadn’t been to the NSA.

He glanced down at Thom. “As much as I like my experiments . . . and I do like my experiments, kids like you . . . well, you’re chump change in the grand scheme of things.” He grinned. “No offense.” He offered it like it somehow absolved his vileness. Turning back to me, he explained, “Getting my hands on you would have changed everything.”

I felt dirty. To my very core I felt sick and dirty and like I was the real traitor.
I
was the one who’d gotten Blackwater attacked, not Natty . . . not really. I turned to glare at Agent Truman. How had I ever thought he could be trusted? How had I thought this was a good idea, asking him to side with us? “And now? Is that what this is—your big chance to capture me?”

“Jesus, girl, if I’d have wanted to haul you in, I’d’a done so by now.” There was an undercurrent of irritation in his voice, and I wondered if I’d struck a nerve. “If this is your way of thanking me for saving your friend here, then you’re welcome.”