They (2 page)

“That was the only time he got mad and hit you, though,” Andy said.

“No, it wasn’t,” Maggie said. They were approaching a sign that read BLYTHE, POPULATION 15,355; FIFTEEN MILES. Traffic on Interstate 10 was relatively light. “He’s hit me on more than one occasion. He used to do it when you weren’t around. So you wouldn’t see. When he did it that last time…when you saw it…” She looked in the rearview mirror and met his gaze. He looked like he was ready to cry. “…that was the last straw. I told myself that I would never allow him to do that to me in front of you ever again. But I think what I wanted most of all was to pull us out of…that world he created for us. One in which I wasn’t happy, you weren’t happy, and Daddy and me were always fighting and making you sad. I didn’t want that for you any more.” She glanced at him in the rearview. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “Do you understand, honey?”

He nodded, cheeks red, bottom lip quivering. His chest hitched with a sob. “I’m sorry Daddy hit you Mommy!”

“I’m sorry too, Andy,” Maggie said softly. She turned her attention to the road. They were approaching the outskirts of Blythe. She began keeping a watch for a McDonald’s or a Denny’s somewhere off the Interstate.

“I don’t want us to make Daddy feel bad if we leave him!” Andy sobbed.

“We won’t make him feel bad, honey.” Now she faced the simultaneous task of calming Andy down and finding a suitable eatery for their morning breakfast.

“Yes we
will
!” Andy cried. He sat in the back seat and cried while Maggie kept her eyes peeled for somewhere to pull off. She was already beginning to get tired.

Golden arches loomed ahead, towering over a Ford and Chevrolet sign dotting the highway. She pulled off the Interstate and looked at Andy in the rearview mirror. “You hungry, sport?”

Andy’s cries had turned to sniffles, but he nodded nonetheless. He rubbed his red-rimmed eyes.

“How’s McDonald’s grab you?”

He nodded again, the waterworks evaporating. McDonald’s had the strangest effect on kids nowadays. The place hadn’t even existed when she was his age, and even when she was in high school they were no more than roadside hamburger stands. Now they had clown mascots. What was the world coming to?

“Great!” She pulled off the road and the McDonald’s loomed ahead. She pulled into the fast food outlet’s parking lot and killed the engine. Then she turned to the backseat with a smile. “I could go for some of those pancakes and sausages. How ’bout you?”

“And a chocolate shake!”

“Two chocolate shakes!” She reached out and began playfully tickling him. That got him laughing and squirming in the backseat. Brought him back to being a normal eight-year old boy.

“Last one out’s a rotten egg!” she cried.

He squealed and fumbled for the door handle. She opened the car door and got out just as he flew out of the car, slammed the door and began running toward the entrance to the fast food restaurant. She closed her door, smiling as she trotted after him.

That McDonald’s breakfast of pancakes, sausages, and chocolate shakes was the best one they had had in a long time.

IT WASN’T UNTIL they were a good two hours past the New Mexico border that Maggie Swanson had a chance to collect her thoughts. Interstate 10 rolled in front of her like a black, lolling tongue. The desert plains were sunburned; red and glowing in the early evening sunset. She yawned. Behind her in the back seat, Andy lay stretched out napping. With the exception of one stop at a roadside rest stop two hours outside of Phoenix to pee and gas up, they had been driving ever since.

Almost ten hours.

She’d been lucky to get a car with air conditioning. It was scorching hot outside, and when they pulled into Blythe earlier that morning she could tell it was going to be a brutally hot day. She figured she could get at least five hundred dollars credit as a trade-in on the Vega, but she had plenty of cash in the briefcase. Before they left the McDonald’s she opened the briefcase, took out a couple of bundles of twenties, and put them in her purse. It was from this bundle that she paid for the car—a 1970 model Oldsmobile Cutlass. It was bigger than the Vega, but it had power steering, brakes, and air conditioning. And it had an AM/FM radio system, too. The dealer had gladly taken Maggie’s Vega as trade-in with the four thousand dollars cash, and after she signed the paperwork over they’d left. Her next plan was to hit El Paso by the next evening, cross over into Juarez, Mexico the next day and trade the Cutlass in for another vehicle—one that would be untraceable. The Oldsmobile dealership in Blythe would have the transfer paperwork at their office should Tom track her and Andy there despite her efforts to not alert the DMV to the sale of the car. She didn’t have the luxury of a fake identification. Mexico would solve that, she hoped.

So far the first day of the drive had gone fairly well. After leaving Blythe, Andy had sat in the front seat for a while reading his comic books, fiddling with the radio. She was glad he’d grown sleepy and retired to the back seat for a nap. If she had to hear Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” one more time she was going to scream.

If all went well by this time tomorrow they’d be in the Texas heartland. They’d be in an untraceable car, and with the cash she had they wouldn’t have to rely on the use of her driver’s license to check into motel rooms. She wouldn’t need the credit cards. Besides, she only intended to check into the most out-of-the-way motels in the most remote towns they drove through. The group may be powerful, but they surely couldn’t stretch their tentacles
that
far. Once Tom discovered she and Andy were gone, Sam Garrison would be notified immediately. He would most likely alert what representatives they had in the major cities; Chicago, Las Vegas, Seattle, New York, Washington D.C., Boston, Miami. They were still spreading, and their numbers could very well spread within the next few years. Until then, she and Andy had to stay clear of the big cities.

It was a combination of her continuing sobriety and her realization of what she had gotten herself into when she sold her soul to them that caused her to take Andy and flee. But what really clinched it was what they intended to do with Andy. Tom had brought it up to her three weeks ago. She’d been appalled, but she couldn’t let Tom see it. She’d been making dinner when he mentioned it to her. Andy had been outside with Neil Lacher playing Dinosaurs. Maggie’s back had been turned to her husband as she mixed the casserole, so he didn’t see the expression on her face. Instead, she’d quickly composed herself and said, “I think you’re right. When do you think would be a good time?”

“I was thinking we could bring him in when he reaches thirteen,” he’d said, matter-of-factly. The
Wall Street Journal
had been opened in front of him on the kitchen table. “He’s eight now and we’ve already done the necessary preparations before we entered him in kindergarten. Let’s give him a chance to be a kid for awhile.”

Maggie grimaced as she remembered that conversation. She wondered if the boy would be scarred from before, from when she was so deep into the drugs and the counter-culture scene when they were living in the Bay Area. All kinds of strange people had walked in and out of their lives, and they’d had one close call back then that she didn’t like to think about now. Of course, he’d been young when that happened, barely a toddler. But he’d been exposed nonetheless. It certainly appeared that those times hadn’t affected him. By all means he was a normal eight-year old boy. He had no bad dreams, no violent mood swings. And with the exception of the occasional temper tantrum, he rarely flew into a rage over the most trivial things the way she heard victims of psychological abuse often did. She was certain Andy was a victim of psychological abuse; it was the only term she could think of to explain what he’d been exposed to.

Depravities.

But it had been at least four years since he’d been exposed to anything. The bigger the group got, the more they relied on secrecy. Plus, as Sam explained, those early years of exposing Andy to their activities were crucial. He ordered the boy to be watched by a sitter whenever the group got together now, but he must have still suffered some form of psychological tampering. After all, from the time he was four until just recently she had been a functioning heroin addict, despite the fact that she and Gladys Robles had cut themselves off from the hippies they’d hung out with. As Tom had explained, they were quickly moving out of the underground to the mainstream. The seeds had been sown and they needed to bear fruit. Between then and now, they had to assume the mask of normalcy. With that came a promotion for Tom at General Computer Systems. Maggie had gotten a job as a secretary at a law firm.

But she still retained the lifestyle she and Tom had led. Only she’d gotten deeper. Pot and LSD had been frequent indulgences when they lived in San Francisco and were ingrained with the hippie scene, and even though they got out of that social circle she couldn’t stop doing the drugs. Despite her change of appearance—trading in her bell-bottom jeans, paisley shirts and free flowing dresses for a business suit and skirts—she couldn’t go a day without a hit of something. And with her discovery of heroin it had only gotten worse. She’d still managed to get up every day and maintain some semblance of a normal working woman, but the people she interacted with could tell something was amiss. And when she’d gone through withdrawals six hours into her self-induced cold turkey kick of the habit three years ago, she realized she was in deeper than she would have thought. It had taken her another year and a half to finally kick her habit for good. But she did it herself. And she did it slowly, so as not to alert Tom and the others. Because even though narcotics use wasn’t promoted within the group, it wasn’t discouraged either. And because she felt that others thought of her as lesser than them, the “breeder,” her drug abuse wasn’t intercepted. In fact, she had the feeling they supplied her with the smack to keep her in a permanent state of denial. Nobody would believe a drug addict.

She had to be careful when she finally weaned herself off drugs. By the time she was fully clean, they were living in Fountain Valley. Gloria and Henry Robles lived in a nice neighborhood a mile away, near Huntington Beach, with Gloria’s son Frank. A few other members were scattered around Orange County, some near the Santa Ana Mountains, but others were still situated in the Los Angeles area. Many more were still in the Bay Area. Samuel Garrison was headquartered there. Not to mention the close to one thousand members scattered across the country. But with their own local group she fared pretty well. She continued the meetings, handled some of the affairs, and worked a lot of behind-the-scenes administrative work. Tom usually worked that angle. After all, she had Andy to take care of.

That was her most important job.

The sun was almost gone now, the New Mexico sky dark and sullen. It would be dark in fifteen minutes. She looked at the map spread out next to her on the seat and noted that the next town was only ten miles away. She looked up at the road ahead of her, passing a FOOD, GAS, LODGING sign on her right. A motel. They could stay there for the night.

When she finally pulled into the parking lot of the motel—a small, weathered building consisting of a dozen cabins placed in a horseshoe around the main office—she was already beginning to feel that, despite the wrath she was sure to face from the group, she was certain she and Andy would escape. They had to. For his sake, for her sake, they had to escape undetected.

Because if they didn’t they would kill her. They’d never kill Andy, but they’d surely kill her. Without hesitation.

She sat in the car for a moment after killing the engine, listening to the ticking of the engine as it cooled down. The sound of traffic from Interstate 10 rose to her ears. If it weren’t for her getting sober, she wouldn’t have gathered her senses. Wouldn’t have suddenly found herself in the real world. Seen the insane theories and beliefs for what they were. She looked into the back seat at Andy, who was slowly beginning to stir. A normal boy by all accounts, no matter what they believed. Andrew Swanson was normal, not what they said he was, what they
claimed
he was. And it was because of the insanity of their assertions as to what Andy was, their hideous plans for him that caused Maggie to finally bolt from them in the first place. God help him if she hadn’t.

Andy sat up in the back seat and groggily rubbed his eyes. “Where are we?”

“We’re stopping for the night,” Maggie said. “We’re in New Mexico.”

“Oh.”

And as they walked to the motel lobby with their meager belongings to get a room for the night, Maggie began to look at the future for the first time with a sense of hope.

June 22, 1999,

Mission Viejo, California

VINCE WALTERS PANTED as he rounded the last stretch of his jog. The front of his tank top was soaked with perspiration. His armpits felt like hot patches as he slowed his pace. He was approaching Shadow Lane, and the trek to his home was up a slight incline through the upper middle-class neighborhood. Vince timed his pace, and then picked it up a bit as he ascended the slight grade that led up the street. He lived halfway down, left side. Almost home.

The early evening was still bright and sunny on this Tuesday afternoon. A light breeze blew in from the ocean. The breeze felt good against his sweaty skin. In another month it would be too hot to jog in this weather. He was building his system up quite well. Four months ago he wouldn’t have been able to jog two miles a night. Not that he’d been out of shape—he and Laura had had a work-out room in the house and he still owned the equipment. They’d used it regularly. But he hadn’t been much on cardiovascular activity at the time. The most he ever did was a few minutes on the treadmill every other night. Other than that it was light weight training, abdominal and pectoral exercises, and yoga. He’d been intending to take a martial arts class of some sort, but Laura’s death had interrupted those plans. He hadn’t thought about martial arts since then.

He tried to banish those thoughts. That’s what the jogging was supposed to be for, to keep him from thinking so much about Laura. But he had, and that tiny infraction, that little mention of her in relation to his past physical exercise habits, brought his thoughts back to her again. Started the whole thing over again: