Nine

by Rachelle Dekker

  “So send a team after her. By your own admission she is following orders,” Seeley said. But he could see the doubt playing in Hammon’s eyes. They weren’t sure they could control her. Because even after all they’d done, she’d still helped Zoe escape. Again Seeley couldn’t hide his pleasure.

  “We’ve lost too many good men already, and Number Nine trusts you. Zoe believes you’re a good guy. You can infiltrate them with ease, without risking countless more bodies.”

  “Why would I help you?” Seeley asked.

  “You wouldn’t by choice,” Hammon said. He turned to one of the agents standing by and held out his hand. The agent placed a thin tablet in his palm.

  Hammon turned the tablet around so Seeley could see the images. His heart sank into his gut, and fury matched with fear rose up like a wave through his chest. A black-and-white video feed of Cami and his mother danced before him. They were at the grocery store, filling the cart with items, laughing as Cami grabbed an armful of something sweet and tossed it in the cart. His mother shook her head and returned the items to the shelf.

  “This is a live surveillance stream that I had set up on Cami this morning. A team assigned to follow her and your mother so I have eyes on them at all times. At their home, at her school, when she’s with her friends.”

  Seeley couldn’t tear his eyes away from the video. The intent was clear without Hammon needing to explain more, but he continued for the cruelty of it.

  “Accidents happen to unassuming people all the time. Your daughter is bright, I hear, gets good grades, has good friends. I’d hate to see something terrible happen to her.”

  Seeley snapped. He launched himself across the room at Hammon, who anticipated his reaction and stepped back. Seeley came face-to-face with several raised rifle ends aimed directly at him. He halted, hate dripping from his expression as he bored into Hammon with an unbreakable stare.

  “If you lay a hand on her . . .” Seeley growled.

  “I won’t, as long as you return the property of this government and eliminate Zoe Johnson,” Hammon said.

  Seeley stood, chest heaving, anger running through his veins like blood. Hammon took a step forward, but Seeley knew better than to move. He still had weapons packed with bullets aimed at his head.

  “Make no mistake, Tom,” Hammon started, “you will never see your daughter again. After returning Number Nine, you will spend the rest of your life in a top-security prison for your treason against the state and the murder of eight agents. Your daughter will live, graduate high school, go to college, get a good job, have a full life. But if you fail, or if you try anything other than executing your orders precisely, she will die. And you will live the rest of your life knowing you were the one that pulled the trigger.”

  Seeley balled his hands into fists to stop the vibration under his flesh.

  Hammon took another step so that he was only inches from Seeley’s face. “Are we clear, Agent?”

  Seeley glanced back toward the sweet image of his little girl helping her grandmother load groceries into the trunk of their car and knew there was only one path forward. He looked back up at Hammon. “Yes, sir.”

  Hammon snapped the tablet shut. “Good.” He turned to leave, talking over his shoulder. “You have twenty-four hours, not a second more.”

  Two of the four agents escorted Seeley from his cell. His mind stumbled over the misery of his situation, anger still pulsing with each beat of his heart.

  They led him up to the main floor, where he was instructed to clean up. They gave him money, a weapon, and keys to a vehicle. Surrounded by armed guards at each turn, he avoided the eyes that followed him as he moved throughout the building and shut out their whispers of disapproval. He was a rogue agent now, and there was no coming back from this fall.

  The agents led Seeley outside, the cold winter air and bright sunlight a shock after being held in a dark cage. Twenty-four hours. Where was he supposed to start?

  “Any idea which way Lucy and Zoe were headed?” Seeley asked those walking him to the vehicle.

  Without looking at him, one answered, “A Jeep registered to Dave McCoy was last spotted crossing state lines into Tennessee.”

  Tennessee, Seeley thought as he opened the driver’s door and climbed inside. An idea dropped into his mind, and a theory started to take form. If he was wrong, he’d waste an entire day’s travel. So he couldn’t be wrong. He fired the car to life and pulled away from the Xerox campus.

  He wished they’d just shot him dead.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ZOE DROVE THROUGH the night, stopping only once to get gas, grateful she’d found a twenty in McCoy’s console. With the dawning of the sun she pulled off the main road onto a dirt road that began to climb up the mountainside toward Haven Valley.

  She kept her eyes forward, hands on the steering wheel, fighting off every instinct in her body that begged her to turn around. She knew the past was strong and unforgiving, but she was surprised by her visceral reaction to the proximity of their destination.

  Lucy had pretty much remained asleep in the back seat while they traveled. She came to once, only to sit up, shift her body, then lie down and fall back into slumber. When Zoe had stopped for gas, she’d redressed the wound, happy to see the bleeding had slowed. The girl had been muttering in her sleep, things Zoe didn’t understand but that seemed to be tormenting Lucy from within.

  Zoe tried to ignore the warning bells that went off in her brain every time she remembered the way Lucy had reacted back at Xerox. What if the girl she’d gone back to save wasn’t there anymore? She continued to shake off the feeling, because combined with the rising fear of returning to her childhood home, it might drown her.

  They’d have a lot to catch up on once they were safe. If they were ever safe. Zoe had been trying to formulate a plan. They couldn’t stay in Haven Valley forever. She’d call Tomac. Maybe he’d be willing to help again. They needed to get out of the country. They wouldn’t be safe until they were on foreign soil.

  She tried to let her mind wander through fixes, but with each passing tree and bump in the road, her brain dragged her back to the past. This was the same road, the same turns, she had traveled down after being loaded into an FBI van. She seemed to be two people at once: a twenty-four-year-old woman who knew the coldness of the world, and a ten-year-old who believed the world could be good.

  That had been the beginning of the end. Riding down the mountain, holding her little brother’s hand, sitting beside their mother, who had promised that whatever came they’d all be fine.

  They hadn’t been fine.

  Zoe shook the memories off and returned her focus to the drive. Within the hour she was driving up the last incline. Without ceasing, and against everything in her heart, she drove the Jeep over the ridge, and all of Haven Valley came into view. She couldn’t take her foot off the gas, because if she dared, she wasn’t sure she’d have enough strength to press on.

  The small village was abandoned, standing exactly as she remembered it. Not a thing out of place, as if it had been held in a bubble, preserved by time. One single road right down the middle of town. A collection of stores with matching architecture rose up on both sides as though they had been plucked from an old Western town.

  The surrounding woods had haunted her dreams as a child. She had been born in this strange place. Born into what the world referred to as a cult. A cult that taught her to believe that going beyond its red-rope boundaries would bring torment and suffering. Yet all the suffering a child could handle had invaded the boundaries that were supposed to keep her safe.

  Her mother had built this place on a twisted foundation of religious fear. On laws established by a god giddy for punishment. But it wasn’t really God at all. It had been the devil disguised as an angel, who deceived Zoe’s mother into believing a community of holiness could save them from the wrath of monsters. His name was Sylous, and he had deceived them all.

  Zoe now knew that what she really should have fe
ared were the adults who had led her to believe any of it was real to begin with. Demons and darkness and light and salvation. She had believed it all so fully that it had become the monster, and it had swallowed her and spat her back out.

  She pulled the Jeep down into the valley and parked it at the end of the road. She flipped the engine off and just sat there, only the sound of her heavy breathing and Lucy’s calm breathing filling the car. Zoe took a deep breath and opened her car door. She stepped out, one foot after the other coming down on familiar earth.

  More memories washed over her. The remaining community being navigated into lines as they were loaded into the black government vans. People whispering about what the world must be like now, since most of them hadn’t been beyond the Haven Valley boundaries in a decade. They’d all still had naïve excitement then.

  But the world doesn’t do nice things to people it doesn’t understand, and it had taken all of three months for each member of the Haven Valley community to be marked as a cult member, flogged daily by the media, and cast out of society. Nobody wanted them. People were afraid of them.

  Zoe closed her eyes and forced breaths through the collecting emotions in her chest. Other memories flooded her mind. Happy ones. Her and her brothers playing. People she knew and loved walking from place to place. Living, growing, falling in love, having children. They were all human. Just delusional.

  She cleared her throat and shut the Jeep door. She looked to her right and walked to the sidewalk, then three buildings down to where the medical clinic had been. She pushed on the door and walked inside. The small bell overhead still rang out. The inside was dimly lit with only the sunlight streaming in through the front window. She approached the counter. Dust had settled over everything in thick layers. She opened the drawers. They were filled with vials, syringes, Band-Aids, gauze—all the things Zoe would have expected to find ten years ago but not today.

  She continued through the simple wood door that sealed off the entry room from the patients’ hallway. The rooms beyond were untouched as well. Zoe was stunned. She assumed everything would have been looted, but it really had been left completely untouched.

  Was every building the same? Would her home look as it had? Her bedroom? Would her books still be stacked next to her bed, the white lace curtains still hanging from her window? Suddenly she had to know.

  She went back out the way she came, into the street and up toward the neighborhood at the back of the valley. Houses in rows, simple, similar. Zoe was walking, then running, past the first row and the second, until her house came into view. She pulled up to a hard stop.

  There it stood: two stories, paneled white wood, the front porch simple and clean. Weathered some with time, but just as she remembered it. Staring at it now, she couldn’t breathe. She could still see her father sitting on the porch, his three children at his feet, his wife standing by his side, as he read daily Scripture and they sang approved gospel songs.

  The memory struck her so hard, tears sprang to her eyes. She had known joy in those moments.

  Something shuffled to her right and Zoe jumped, half expecting to see a monster emerge from the darkness of her imagination. There was nothing. For every moment of joy she’d had in Haven Valley, ten were filled with crippling fear.

  She took the steps two at a time until she was at her front door and then inside. Much like the clinic, it was covered in a decade of dust and dirt, and she flinched as a rodent scurried into a hidden corner.

  Zoe carefully walked into the living room. All the familiar furniture sat precisely where her mother had placed it. The kitchen was filled with all the things she knew. The table in the dining room where they ate every meal was still set for the last meal they never ate. The whole house would be the same, yet still she was surprised to see each room the way she remembered it.

  She moved upstairs to the bedrooms. The master, the single room her brothers shared, and hers at the hall’s end. The door was still ajar, and she walked the dark hallway, put her fingers on the wood, and pushed it open wide.

  A vibrant memory filled the space. Her beautiful mother sat on the bed, red hair tied up in a perfect bun, clear soft skin, delicate features, simple gray dress draped over her trim figure. The room was brightly lit and clean and smelled like fresh lilies.

  Her mother glanced up at her as she entered the room. “Evelyn, what are you doing up here? Who’s watching your brothers?”

  “Father is home.” Her voice was small and childlike as she skipped across the room to be close to the woman she loved more than life itself. “May I help you?”

  Her mother smiled, holding out the mending she was working on. “When did you learn to work a needle and thread?” she asked suspiciously.

  Evelyn shrugged her tiny shoulders. “I haven’t learned yet, but I’m ready.”

  “Are you, my darling?” Her mother extended her hand for Evelyn to grasp. “Well, then, I suppose I should teach you,” she said with a smile.

  “Will you teach me many things?” Evelyn asked.

  “I will teach you everything I know, my dear girl, and then one day you will teach your daughter, and she will take those lessons and teach hers.”

  Zoe gasped as the memory flickered out, and she found herself standing alone in her dingy room, tears streaming down her face. Evelyn had never stood a chance. She’d been taught to be this way, without a say, and Zoe had been trying to change it ever since. But maybe people couldn’t change. Maybe each was born into a predetermined system, and the only choice was to live or die.

  Zoe suddenly felt claustrophobic, her lungs tightening and her throat closing up. She turned and rushed from her room, back down the stairs, nearly tripping. The railing had weakened with time, and when she grabbed it for support, it snapped under her weight. She tumbled downward for six steps, rolled to the wood floor below, and knocked her head against the base step.

  Pain exploded like stars across her vision, and she clenched her eyes shut, cursing loudly at the empty house. She rubbed the spot on her forehead as she pushed up with the other arm to a kneeling position. The wood floor groaned, and Zoe turned to see that Lucy was standing there, staring down at her.

  Zoe gasped. “Lucy, you scared me.”

  Lucy didn’t respond. She just bored into Zoe with a dark stare, a stare that sent a chill up her spine.

  “Lucy—” Zoe began, but a roundhouse kick connected with the left side of her jaw and sent her sprawling. Pain coursed through her face as her mind began to register what was happening. Lucy was attacking her, and Lucy attacked with only one purpose in mind.

  To kill.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  LUCY YANKED ZOE from the floor and tossed her into the living room behind them. Zoe hit the floor hard, the crack of her weight echoing off the old wood panels. The wind left her lungs, and she couldn’t catch a breath. She wanted to scream out to Lucy, but she couldn’t, and her brain snapped into survival mode. She had to get away.

  Zoe rolled toward the couch and pulled herself under the coffee table. Lucy reached down for Zoe’s ankle and yanked her back out.

  Zoe finally caught a breath and sucked it in deep, using its momentum to push words from her lips. “Lucy, stop! Please.”

  But Lucy was in a rage. Again she yanked Zoe from the floor and hurled her against the built-in bookshelves. Zoe slammed against the rows of book spines and heard wood crack and split behind her. She toppled to the ground, hard books falling on her, as she used her arms to block her face.

  She grabbed for the books and slung them at Lucy, who ducked each one without even trying.

  “Lucy—” Zoe tried again.

  “Stop calling me that!” Lucy cried back.

  A light dinged in the back of Zoe’s mind. “Number Nine, stop! Number Nine!”

  Lucy paused for just a moment, and Zoe used it to push herself to her feet. She bolted down the hallway, past the basement door, and slammed out the back door.

  Zoe raced down the back steps and dared
to glance back to see that Lucy was upon her. She grabbed Zoe’s shoulders, yanking her backward. Zoe punched her fists out over her head as she headed toward the ground. They slammed into Lucy’s chest, causing the girl to huff and release hold of Zoe.

  The ground came hard. Ignoring the pain, her adrenaline charging, Zoe rolled three times to her chest, pressed up, and bolted around the corner of her house back toward the main street.

  Through the rows of houses, she cut across to the right. She knew this place inside and out. Lucy didn’t. That would be Zoe’s only advantage.

  She pressed faster, weaving in and out of the line of homes. Then she raced up the back steps of another home, through the living room, and out the front, which put her a couple of yards from the main street.

  Zoe forced her legs to pump faster, cutting across the open space between the house and the storefronts, and then behind the buildings where she’d parked the Jeep. She busted through a rear door and found herself in the general store. It was dark at the back of the building with no lighting, only the sunlight from the large glass windows at the front shining in. She took a momentary pause and listened.

  She could not hear Lucy but knew she couldn’t stop. Her chest heaving like an excited dog, Zoe rushed down the backside of the store, passing the tall shelving units where canned food still sat, and glanced out the front windows for her pursuer. She reached the back right corner and opened the door that stood there. It led into a small hallway with ascending stairs, and Zoe took them two at a time. At the top she found another door and pushed it open to the roof.

  They had never been allowed to play up on the roofs because it was far too dangerous, but she knew what was up here. The roofs of each building were nearly connected, separated by only two or three feet.

  Zoe moved in a crouched position, keeping herself as low as possible. Lucy couldn’t get her up here, but she could still spot her. Zoe rushed to the edge and clumsily crossed the gap to the next building. Across and breathing heavily, she dropped to a squat and scanned the street.