The Fugitive

by Pittacus Lore

  Before she can respond, an explosion blows the front door in.

  Both of us duck behind the kitchen island. I’m about to tell Sarah to stay down when she grabs one of the handguns I brought from the back room and fires two shots through the kitchen window, nailing a Mog right in the forehead. It turns to ash and disappears.

  Whoa.

  “Did you bring ammo?” she asks as she fires through the front doorway while I cock the shotgun I grabbed.

  Crap. Ammo.

  “No,” I admit.

  “Can you use that?” She nods to my weapon.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then cover me,” she says.

  As gunfire and Mog blasts tear up the living room and kitchen, I pop up from my cover and start pumping rounds through the doorway and windows, firing at every possible place the Mogs could be. I wonder how screwed we are—how many Mogs were just off camera on the monitors? Sarah makes for the back room, grabbing a big butcher’s knife out of a block along the way and keeping it positioned at chest level, ready to strike.

  I can’t help but marvel at what a badass my ex-girlfriend has turned into.

  She reappears with a grocery bag overflowing with ammo. We duck behind the kitchen island again to regroup and reload. I keep my shotgun pointed at the kitchen window.

  “We could bunker down in the back,” I say. “The door’s thick.”

  “No way.” She shakes her head. “We’d be trapped.”

  “Then we have to make it to the truck.” I pat my pocket to make sure my keys are there. “If they haven’t blown it up or something.”

  We nod to each other in agreement. The messed-up thing is that we’ve been in this sort of situation together before, back at Paradise High. Only back on campus, we had superpowered aliens on our side. Now it’s just us against a bunch of Mogs.

  But then, I tend to forget that I have friends who always seem to come through for me.

  There’s a giant roar outside, like a damned dragon has suddenly appeared out of the sky.

  “Shit,” I say, imagining some kind of huge Mog creature that’s going to tear the roof off the house at any second. “We’re dead.”

  “No,” Sarah says as she reloads. Her face actually lights up. “We’re saved.”

  Most of the Mog gunfire that had been focused on the house suddenly disappears. They’re shooting at something else. The roar sounds again, but this time there’s something almost familiar about it—something I recognize. It’s not unlike a beagle’s howl.

  Bernie-fucking-Kosar is destroying the Mogs in the front yard.

  I grin.

  “Can BK hold the bastards off?” I ask.

  “For a little while,” Sarah says. “Probably.”

  “Now. Go. This is our chance.”

  We move in unison, running in a crouched position until we’re taking cover on opposite sides of the front doorway. Peeking out, I can see a bunch of piles of ash around the lawn, as well as at least a dozen shark-faces attacking BK. I actually wasn’t that far off when I thought there was a dragon in the yard. John Smith’s dog is now a huge beast, all muscle and claws and snapping teeth. One of the Mogs blasts him in the leg with a cannon, and in response BK impales him with one of two horns that have grown out of his head.

  “Holy hell,” I mutter.

  “Go!” Sarah shouts. “BK will catch up.”

  And so we run. Luckily, most of the Mogs are focused on BK, and the others we cross paths with are so distracted by the roaring of the beast and shouts of their fellow pale-faced douche bags that we catch them by surprise. A few shots and they’re nothing but dust. We’re in the truck quickly, and before any of them are the wiser, I’ve got the engine on and am gunning it down the little path that leads to the street.

  A lone Mog stands between us and the open gate to Yellowhammer Ranch. He holds a blaster out in front of him.

  “Get down,” I shout to Sarah as he fires.

  I swerve, losing control of the truck for a few seconds but missing the blasts from the Mog’s weapon. I regain control just in time to ram into him. The alien rolls over the hood and roof, landing in the bed of my truck, where he tries to get up on his feet again. Sarah leans out the window and shoots him, and I swear to God we really are the heroes in an action movie.

  “Bernie!” she shouts, her head still out the window.

  In the rearview mirror, I can see Bernie’s form start to change, and then suddenly he’s soaring through the air as an oversized golden bird. He lets out a shrill call as his giant wings beat against the wind, propelling him forward. He lands in the back of the truck, returning to his familiar dog form just before he hits the bed. Half a second passes before his wet nose is against the back windshield. He barks and pants and looks like a worried, but totally normal, floppy-eared dog as we pass through the gate to Yellowhammer Ranch.

  “Holy crap,” Sarah says. She’s breathing deeply. “Okay. We’re okay. Whoa.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.” I hand my burner over to Sarah. “Text GUARD. Tell him we just escaped the Mogs.”

  It takes her a few seconds to get the text out because her hands are shaking a little. I keep my eyes scouring the road, the fields and the sky, terrified that more Mogs are going to show up at any moment.

  “Okay, it’s—” she starts, but she’s cut off by the ringing phone.

  GUARD is calling.

  “Holy shit” is how I answer the phone.

  “How far are you and Sarah from the house?” GUARD asks. His voice is the same slightly distorted, electronic-sounding one from the night when he warned me about the FBI trap.

  I glance in the rearview mirror.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a mile? I can still see it in—”

  I’m cut off by the sound of an explosion. I hit the brakes out of sheer confusion and instinct—and so I can whip my head around and see it for myself. The ranch, barn—the entire area surrounding our safe house—has gone up in a huge ball of fire. I have to shield my eyes.

  “That should take care of any Mogs remaining on the property and thoroughly wipe our tracks,” GUARD says.

  Sarah turns to me, her mouth hanging open.

  “GUARD, dude,” I say. “Did you just blow up the safe house?” My voice starts to get louder. “Were we working on top of a bomb this whole damned time?”

  “I can guarantee that the only way that bomb was going to go off was if I wanted it to, and that would only happen in an instance like this. You were both perfectly safe.”

  I don’t know what to say. I just sit on the phone in silence, hardly breathing. Trying to wrap my head around this.

  “Get the truck moving again,” GUARD says. “The two of you are coming to my home base.”

  Suddenly, the GPS on my truck activates, plotting a course to some place outside of Atlanta.

  “I’ll see you in a few hours,” GUARD says.

  Then he hangs up.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WE PASS A FEW OTHER HOUSES AS WE SPEED away from the ranch. They’re secluded, just like Yellowhammer was, and separated by miles and miles of fields and land. All of them have little trails of smoke rising from their yards and roofs. Not completely destroyed like my base, but definitely messed up.

  The Mogs must have narrowed our location down to one area and then systematically searched for us house by house. My brain shuts down as I start to wonder who lived in these homes. Who the Mogs slaughtered in their effort to find us.

  It takes everything I have not to puke my guts out.

  We ride in silence for a while, listening to BK’s panting in the backseat. I think both of us are in shock. Finally, the quiet is broken when Sarah’s phone rings. It’s John.

  “Before you say anything,” she says when she answers, “I just want you to know that I’m okay.”

  She talks to John on the phone, and I strain to try to hear what he’s saying on his end. She tells him a little bit about what happened and where we’re going. I’m glad she doesn’t giv
e him any specifics, because I don’t know how new her burner is or how careful John and the others have been about using them.

  Safe houses won’t keep us alive, apparently. Paranoia might. Though I don’t even know if I can call any of us paranoid, since our fears are totally justified.

  “Tell John to kick some Mog ass,” I say.

  When she’s off the phone I ask her how her alien boyfriend is.

  “Fine,” she says.

  “Are you worried about him?”

  “Every second.”

  We cross the state line into Georgia around dawn. Sarah yawns a lot but doesn’t sleep. I offer her an energy drink from my stash in the backseat, but she turns her nose up at it. I down a can in one gulp.

  Not long after that my fever comes back, and I start to feel a little woozy. My arm is so sore that I can hardly use it to drive, and Sarah makes me pull off the highway and into a drugstore parking lot. She goes in with some cash and comes out a few minutes later, demanding I move to the passenger seat. I down a few Tylenol at Sarah’s insistence and despite the energy drink I’ve guzzled, I pass out.

  I wake up to Sarah poking the side of my face. We’re almost there. The landscape looks eerily similar to what it did at the ranch house. GUARD definitely has a knack for finding secluded hideouts. We come to a gate among a bunch of trees, and the GPS beeps that we’ve reached our destination. I can just make out a few structures through a dense thicket of incredibly green trees. Old signage says something about the place being a peach-and-pecan orchard.

  That must be the place. GUARD’s base.

  “I can’t believe I’m finally going to meet the man himself,” I say as we start up an old trail that cuts through rows of thin, dead trees. I’m feeling groggy and drained, but knowing GUARD must be just a couple of yards away fills me with adrenaline.

  “You sure this is where your friend is?” Sarah asks. I can hear the skepticism in her voice.

  “He’s the one who inputted it into the GPS,” I say.

  “It just seems so . . . ordinary.”

  I can see a few flashes of silver throughout the branches—cameras. Naturally. I point them out to Sarah and tell her that I’d thought the same thing about the ranch house before I went inside. I’m guessing cameras are up all over the place, just like in Alabama. Possibly even some remote-operated weapons too. I wouldn’t put it past GUARD.

  Eventually, the trees all give way to big, open lawns around a white farmhouse and a gigantic steel building behind it that looks like it used to be some kind of small mill or factory or something.

  “He’s here,” I say, more to myself than to Sarah. He has to be here. Everything is going to work out. We’re going to meet up with GUARD and figure out what we can do to bring down these Mogadorian bastards.

  I jump out of the truck when we park in front of the house and am a little wobbly on my feet. My fever’s getting worse. BK stares up at me with wet-looking eyes as if he’s actually worried about me or something, but I man up and keep going. There’s a note on the front door of the house that just says “Out Back,” scrawled in messy handwriting. So we wander around the house to the big metal building. We walk through the front door and must trip some kind of invisible alarm, because suddenly the door locks behind us and there are four guns mounted on robotic arms trained on us.

  “Shit!” I yell as I try to pull the door open.

  “Mark,” Sarah says quietly, but I can tell that she’s freaking out.

  I start to move forward but the guns stay on me, keeping their aim with every step I take. So instead, I take a few steps to the right and plant myself in front of Sarah. At our feet, BK starts to growl. The edges of his body begin to contort, as if he’s just about to transform into a monster.

  “I wouldn’t go any farther than that if you don’t want to end up full of holes,” a muffled voice says.

  There’s a figure standing in front of us that’s tall—taller than me—and wearing loose-fitting coveralls and a shiny, robotic-looking helmet. Something about it is familiar, but I don’t know why. My head is fuzzy from the fever. A bunch of tools hang from a belt around the person’s waist, but I’m more concerned about what’s in their hands, which, based on what I can remember about the weapons in my dad’s old office, is a semiautomatic combat shotgun.

  Dozens of scenarios flash through my mind, none of which end well for us. My loudest thought screams that I’ve been duped again. That I’ve been a huge dumbass and somehow ended up communicating with another fake GUARD. Or maybe GUARD was never on our side to begin with. There’s no mystery grenade to save me this time, though. With all the security stuff everywhere, I’m guessing even if we did make it outside, we’d still be goners.

  Behind me, Sarah’s breathing is heavy, and my entire body shudders with regret for bringing her into this.

  I’m relieved when the figure lowers the shotgun, but that feeling is quickly replaced by confusion when the weird helmet comes off. The person in front of us is a black woman with strong, slightly masculine features. Her hair’s shaved on the sides but fades into a short, flat Mohawk on the top of her head. A sheen of sweat shines on her face. She looks like a badass warrior, but she’s also totally hot.

  She stares at BK and mutters something in a language I’ve never heard. Her voice is commanding. Suddenly, BK heels.

  So much for that line of defense.

  “A Chimæra. Wonderful,” she says. She turns her attention to me. “Mark James. You look even worse than the last time I saw you.”

  That’s when I realize why the helmet looked familiar. I’ve seen this person before. In New Mexico.

  She’s the courier who delivered the first package to me.

  “Wait . . . ,” I say. “You’re GUARD?”

  She nods, raising one eyebrow as if she thinks I should have somehow figured this out already. As if I had any reason to guess that the person I’d been in contact with all this time wasn’t a conspiracy-obsessed hacker shut-in but a woman who looks like she’d be equally comfortable on a magazine cover or a battlefield.

  “You can call me Lexa. That was my name on Lorien.”

  Lorien?

  My head pounds as my brain tries to make sense of the fact that GUARD is not only a chick, but an alien.

  What the hell is going on?

  “Mark,” Sarah says, breathless. Her eyes are wide and staring at something farther back in the giant metal building, behind the woman.

  And then I see what’s got her attention.

  “Welcome to the hangar,” Lexa says. “It looks like we need to get you fixed up. I hope you’re good with tools. I’m trying to get this thing to run off the primitive fuel systems available on this planet.”

  She turns away from us and walks towards the beat-up silver spaceship parked in the back of the hangar.

  Excerpt from The Revenge of Seven

  DON’T MISS BOOK FIVE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING I AM NUMBER FOUR SERIES

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE NIGHTMARE IS OVER. WHEN I OPEN MY EYES, there’s nothing but darkness.

  I’m in a bed, that much I can tell, and it’s not my own. The mattress is enormous, somehow contoured perfectly to my body, and for a moment I wonder if my friends moved me to one of the bigger beds in Nine’s penthouse. I stretch my legs and arms out as far as they’ll go and can’t find the edges. The sheet draped over me is more slippery than soft, almost like a piece of plastic, and it is radiating heat. Not just heat, I realize, but also a steady vibration that soothes my sore muscles.

  How long have I been asleep, and where the heck am I?

  I try to remember what happened to me, but all I can think of is my last vision. It felt like I was in that nightmare for days. I can still smell the burned-rubber stench of Washington, D.C. Smog clouds lingered over the city, a reminder of the battle fought there. Or the battle that will be fought there, if my vision actually comes true.

  The visions. Are they part of a new Legacy? None of the others have Leg
acies that leave them traumatized in the morning. Are they prophecies? Threats sent by Setrákus Ra, like the dreams John and Eight used to have? Are they warnings?

  Whatever they are, I wish they’d stop happening.

  I take a few deep breaths to clean the smell of Washington out of my nostrils, even though I know it’s all in my head. What’s worse than the smell is that I can remember every little detail, right down to the horrified look on John’s face when he saw me on that stage with Setrákus Ra, condemning Six to death. He was trapped in the vision, too, just like I was. I was powerless up there, stuck between Setrákus Ra, self-appointed ruler of Earth, and . . .

  Five. He’s working for the Mogadorians! I have to warn the others. I sit bolt upright and my head swims—too fast, too soon—rust-colored blobs floating through my vision. I blink them away, my eyes feeling gummy, my mouth dry and throat sore.

  This definitely isn’t the penthouse.

  My movement must trigger some nearby sensor, because the room’s lights slowly grow brighter. They come on gradually, the room eventually bathed in a pale red glow. I look around for the source of the light and discover it pulsing from veins interwoven through the chrome-paneled walls. A chill goes through me at how precise the room looks, how severe, lacking any decoration at all. The heat from the blanket increases, almost as if it wants me to curl back up beneath it. I shove it away.

  This is a Mogadorian place.

  I crawl across the mammoth bed—it’s bigger than an SUV, big enough for a ten-foot-tall Mogadorian dictator to comfortably relax in—until my bare feet dangle over the metal floor. I’m wearing a long gray nightgown embroidered with thorny black vines. I shudder, thinking about them putting me into this gown and leaving me here to rest. They could’ve just killed me, but instead they put me in pajamas? In my vision, I was sitting alongside Setrákus Ra. He called me his heir. What does that even mean? Is that why I’m still alive?

  It doesn’t matter. The simple fact is: I’ve been captured. I know this. Now what am I going to do about it?

  I figure the Mogs must have moved me to one of their bases. Except this room isn’t like the horrific and tiny cells that Nine and Six described from when they were captured. No, this must be the Mogadorians’ twisted idea of hospitality. They’re trying to take care of me.