Stepping out of the trees her hopes of rescue sank, but she was encouraged by finding what was apparently a burned out cabin. Was I in a fire? Even as she thought this she realized it wasn’t likely. She didn’t seem to have any burns and the dampness of the charred remains indicated it had been a while since the fire had gone out. Her stomach sank and she nearly started crying again. She walked closer to the debris, not knowing what to do other than investigate the site. It was the closest thing she had to a clue.
On the far side of the burnt shell she stood in a grassless driveway. She could see tire tracks partially dried in the mud and she knew instinctively this site meant something to her. The floor of the cabin was half-collapsed into a basement and a tingling began in the back of her mind. Do cabins normally have basements? Cellars maybe…The tingling grew as she turned in a circle. From the cabin, to the driveway, towards what must be a road, back to the tree line. From the trees grew a feeling of hope in her chest. Relief. The shadows of memory told her something—someone—good came from those trees. “Xander,” she whispered. “Shay…”
The memory smacked her in the face so hard she finally went to her knees. Doc. The Dyian. The explosion. Hands from the darkness. It all came back to her with such force the breath was sucked from her lungs and her world turned upside down. Her vision blurred and wobbled then shrank into pinholes as she fell forward and crashed, face-first into the mud of the driveway and sank into darkness.
Xander
Xander had been driving for nearly a half hour and ET still wasn’t saying anything else. His shoulder was aching and his agitation was growing worse by the minute. He was tired and the kid next to him smelled terrible. He began to wonder if ET had him driving just to stay out of the cold. Spring was rolling in, but winter was stubborn. It was an unusually cold night and had even been spitting snow for the past couple of hours.
“Look, kid—” he growled.
“I’m not a kid,” ET snapped, sounding exactly like a kid.
“Well, you’re kind of acting like one right now,” Xander scowled at him. “Where are we going?”
ET didn’t answer for a while. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
Xander sighed. Dammit. He felt some of his anger subside when he realized the kid didn’t have a destination for a reason. “You don’t have family here?”
“No.”
“You don’t have a hotel?”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Son of a bitch…” Xander let out another exasperated breath. “Fine. But I swear on my life—if you fuck with me, I will rip your tongue out through your asshole.” Against his better judgment, he turned sharply onto the Eisenhower and headed towards his garage.
ET was quiet during the drive and Xander wondered if the kid had fallen asleep. There wasn’t much traffic out so the trip was, thankfully, quick. Taking a strange kid that could have something to do with what had happened to Sydney to his apartment was pretty dumb—but he couldn’t drive all night. Plus, he kind of felt sorry for the kid. He pulled into his parking lot and hit the button to open the bay doors with a knuckle.
“Stockton Garage?” ET muttered. “Is that your name? This is your place?”
Xander clenched his teeth, his regret growing.” “Yes.” What’s the point in lying?
ET quickly slid from the truck and looked around as if he had never seen a garage before. Xander took note of all the things he wished weren’t out in plain sight. An easel. The painting he had done of Sydney coming out of the lake. He had sat it out to dry before they all left for Wisconsin and after they got back he couldn’t bring himself to cover it up. But now he wished he had. He didn’t like the way ET was staring at it. He didn’t care that Sydney was topless in the picture, he just didn’t want ET seeing something so personal—from him or Sydney.
“Upstairs,” he barked, pointing towards the office. ET did his best to follow Xander’s orders but he still hesitated, unsure of where he was being told to go. “The door behind the desk. It goes upstairs.”
In the apartment, Xander realized the kid didn’t have any bags of any kind. “Don’t you have any stuff with you?”
“No…I lost it.”
“Where?”
“Crossing the border.”
“Jesus…” he shook his head. “Take a shower,” he nodded towards the bathroom. I’ll try to find you some stuff.” The kid looked at him with something like gratitude mixed with wariness. “If I was going to kill you would I have brought you to my home?” Finally, ET nodded and hurried into the bathroom.
Xander rummaged through his dresser looking for something that might fit the kid. ET was almost a foot shorter but probably weighed the same. Finally, he found a pair of paint stained sweats and he tossed them on the bed with a shrug. His generosity only went so far as to find a shirt to wear as well. There’s no way I’m giving him a pair of underwear too. He tossed the clothes into the bathroom and flopped on the couch.
Xander tried flexing his arm and winced, he really needed to put his sling back on but was still, stupidly, set against it. It got in the way more than anything. Instead, he pulled out his phone to see fourteen missed calls from Shay, five from Zak and seven texts from Shay. He rolled his eyes and didn’t bother reading them. He just called her back and braced himself.
“How could you ignore me all night?!” Shay yelled into the phone instead of greeting him.
“I wasn’t ignoring you,” he answer calmly.
“I’ve been calling. And texting! Zak tried calling you!”
“Did you want me to interrupt my clandestine meeting to answer your call and the thousand questions you would have?”
Shay barely paused. “Well, if you had let me go with you it wouldn’t have been an issue, would it?”
Xander leaned back into the couch and scratched at his beard. He needed to shave. He couldn’t remember when he had last taken the time. “Do you want to know what happened?”
“Of course I do!”
“ET is a kid from Colombia. He’s the one who wrote the blog Syd found. The one about the dig site.”
“Oh my god!”
“And he’s in my apartment.”
“The fuck?”
“I know.”
“Is he safe?”
“I think so.”
“We’re on our way.”
“Shay! No! Stay—.” But she had already hung up. “Shit.”
Xander realized the water had shut off and he got up to get a beer. It was late and he was exhausted. But as bad as his shoulder was hurting he needed something to dull the pain.
A few minutes later ET crept cautiously from the steaming bathroom. The sweats were only a little too tight and he’d had to roll the bottoms up but the shirt, at least, fit him. “Thank you,” he muttered after he finally found Xander leaning against the counter.
“I’m guessing you’re hungry,” he nodded at the sandwich fixings he had set out on the counter.
“Yes,” ET nodding, his eyes round and excited.
“Dig in.” He killed the beer and cracked open another while ET devoured two sandwiches, barely taking time to chew. By the time he had finished the second one—a little more than ten minutes after hanging up the phone—Xander heard the garage door slam open below, followed by the office door and feet pounding up the stairs. ET looked up alarmed. “I would tell you not to worry, but…well…Shay is a handful.”
Shay burst into the apartment followed by a much calmer Zak. “OK. What’s the story?”
ET looked from Shay, her curly blonde hair wild and her skirt swishing around her low-heeled boots, back to Xander who was carefully keeping a neutral face and casual lean. “Shay, Zak, meet ET. ET, meet Shay—my sister—and Zak.”
ET was too stunned to speak, or Shay didn’t give him a chance to more likely. She hurried to the counter and crowded onto Xander’s side. “What do you know?”
“Jeeze Shay, give him a second.” Zak met Xander’s look over Shay’s head.
Xander didn’t hold Shay back. She was reacting how he wanted to, but he couldn’t. One of them needed to be rational. Good cop, bad cop. “We need to hear your story,” he told ET, gently.
“Everything,” Shay insisted, narrowing her eyes at him. She picked up on their roles without needing to be told. They used to pull this on their parents when they both wanted something. The only difference was the reversal of roles. Xander didn’t know if he had ever played the good guy before.
ET took a deep breath. “You have to understand, I don’t have the whole story. I just know what happened to me and my family.”
“If you don’t know anything, why did you reach out to Xander?” Shay crossed her arms.
“I wanted to help. I still do! I think I can.”
“Start at the beginning,” Xander urged.
ET took a deep breath. “I was there when the doctors experimented on dogs. With something they found in the dig.”
“What happened to the dogs?” Shay’s bad cop slipped a little over concern for an animal.
“It died.” No one seemed surprised by ET’s revelation.
“That’s messed up,” Zak voiced the obvious.
“But it got worse than that," ET told them.
Chapter Two
This time, when Sydney woke up in the half-frozen mud, she was clear headed. Scared and angry, but not confused. She did have to admit there was also a little embarrassment too. She had passed out like a fainting, southern belle. At least her head wasn’t splitting in two, she realized, opening her eyes slowly. The migraine had diminished to a mild headache now and her fingers and toes still burned, but, all in all, she was better than before. She could feel a drip of water running down her nose and, if she had to guess, she would say she had been out for minutes at most.
Wanting out of the mud, Syd pushed herself to her knees. Slowly, she rocked to her feet waiting for the headache and nausea to return. Luckily, it didn’t. She felt far from OK, but she could function again. And she had her memory back. At least since waking up next to Lake Michigan almost five months ago. Would it have been too much to ask to get all of my memory back? Syd wondered. It seems like a small thing considering.
Groaning, Sydney pulled her sticky shirt away from her body, realized the futility, and let it go again. She carefully made her way to the rubble of the cabin. She slid multiple times, but managed to make it to what had once been the kitchen area without falling. She sat on a piece of wood that had probably been part of a cabinet or counter once and was grateful to have the wind blocked by the walls that remained standing. First, she wanted to know what had happened. She remembered the events up to and immediately after the explosion, she remembered Shay, Xander and Zak running from the trees, and then remembered the look of fear on their faces.
Then what happened? She wiped some of the mud away from her face and tucked her slimy hair behind her ear. She hadn’t been able to hear because of the explosion and was having a hard time standing. Her friends had tried to warn her about something. They had been pointing behind her and yelling. She turned. There was a black hole where there had been woods and a driveway. Greenish-white hands from the darkness had yanked her forward. Sydney’s heart slammed in her ribs.
Holy shit. Did I get abducted? She wasn’t entirely sure why it was such a terrifying realization. You would think it would be normal by this point to have crazy shit happen to you. Trying as hard as she could, Syd couldn’t remember anything between being grabbed and waking up in the woods this morning. Again, she took stock of her physical condition, expecting to find wounds, injection sites or…sore orifices. But, seemingly un-abused she was relieved—shocked and confused—but still relieved. Even the knee she had injured the day she blew up the cabin was fine.
Realizing she was, for what she could tell, physically healthy despite the threat of frostbite, she needed to figure out what was next. She needed a plan. She had to find her way back to civilization and get cleaned up. She was also in desperate need of a change of clothes and food. Her stomach growled loudly to emphasize the point. How the hell can I be hungry at a time like this?
Her first instinct was to get back to Xander and Shay as quickly as possible, but a tiny voice interjected. Wouldn’t it be better to leave them alone? Keep them out of this mess? But Syd didn’t know if they were actually out of the mess. She had no idea what had happened to them after she was taken. A vise squeezed her heart. She wanted nothing more than to see her friends and know they were OK. She would give up any hope of ever getting her memory back if she could know they were alive and safe.
But she also really, really just wanted a group hug at the moment. She was cold, tired, hungry, scared and mad, and the only thing that could make it better would be her family—even Zak. She wanted to tell them everything that had happened. She wanted to know what had happened to them and how the mysterious “they” had finally found her. She wanted to sit with them and figure out what to do next. Her hands were shaking and it wasn’t just from the cold. She was lost and she had no place to go other than to her friends.
I don’t even have a way to get there, she let out a shaky breath and stood up. A quick survey of the rubble told her searching for anything useful would be pointless. She wouldn’t find a coat or a phone that wasn’t burnt to a crisp. Not knowing what else to do, Syd started walking. She made her way out of the remains of the cabin and hurried down the driveway. Her toes eventually thawed into spikes of needle-like pricks but her fingers continued to sting and burn so she stuck them into her armpits again. Less than a quarter mile later the drive turned into a single lane road and using logic, she headed down off the mountain and towards, hopefully, a town or neighborhood.
***
With squishing shoes, stiff clothes, and aching fingers—Syd was beyond the ability to shiver. She was grateful that the day was warming as the sun climbed higher, but it wasn’t enough to improve her situation much so she pushed on. She had been walking maybe a half hour when the trees broke and she found a two-lane road intersecting the mountain drive. She stood at the shoulder looking in both directions wishing she had a compass, a sign, a map, or anything that would give her an idea of which direction she should go. The other side of the road was no help, it was just more trees and bushes. Taking a deep breath, she stepped into the middle of the road, turned in a circle, then decided on a direction. She only hoped she wasn’t taking herself further away from help. Reason told her she would have to find people eventually. This day in age, near Lake Michigan, it would be impossible to not find someone sooner or later.
Syd’s theory proved correct when after walking for less than an hour she found another entrance to a drive. The walk had helped her regain feeling in her toes, but her finger tips still throbbed. This one had a mailbox with a name painted on the side. Hodgkin. She debated her choices. She could keep walking or ask for help. For months, she hid from anyone and everyone hoping to avoid being found by the nameless entities she had warned herself about. But what good did that do? Realizing the smartest choice was to ask for help, she turned and climbed the long steep driveway to the small house she could see peeking through the trees.
The house was a small, cozy cottage. The wooden porch had two rocking chairs and there was a freshly dug flower garden waiting for the right weather to plant. Sydney relaxed a little. This didn’t look like the house of murdering scientists. But, she was going to have to come up with quite a story to explain her appearance and she took a deep breath before knocking.
The door was answered quickly by a small, wilted looking elderly lady with a kind smile. “Yes?” she asked in a papery thin voice.
“Hi! I’m so sorry to bother you,” Syd began. She held her hands out, indicating her filthy state. “I’ve had a bit of an accident,” she grimaced and did her best to look sheepish.
“Oh, my! Are you OK?” The lady held the door open a little wider.
“Yeah, mostly. Just a headache, a wounded pride and really cold. And, I'm stuck out here all
alone.” She didn't have to struggle to sound dispirited.
“You don’t have a phone?”
“I did…before it landed in a mud puddle,” Sydney laughed and shrugged.
“Oh, that’s just terrible.” The woman glanced over her shoulder, her fingers fiddling with the frame of the door.
“Can I call someone for you?”
“That would be great! But I don’t know the number by memory…” Sydney knew she was considering the wisdom of letting a strange woman into her house. “I really hate to be a bother. Do you have the internet? I can look up the number to my friend’s shop so she can come get me?”
“I suppose so…”
“Thank you so much!” Sydney was genuinely grateful.
Inside the door, she pulled off her shoes and socks so as not to track dirt and mud all through the nice lady’s house. The small cottage smelled like coffee and it made Sydney’s stomach rumble again.
Getting a better look at Syd, the woman gasped. “What in the world happened to you?”
“I’m sorry! I’m making a mess!”
“Don’t be silly. Are you sure you are alright?’
“Yeah. I just feel stupid. And like I’m being a bother.”
“Not at all,” she waved off Syd’s apologies.
She followed the tiny woman deeper into the house and was led to a small, warm kitchen. “Have a seat, I’ll get you some coffee.”
“That would be wonderful.” Sydney eased onto a wooden stool promising herself she would clean it up afterwards. She smiled at the woman fussing about the kitchen. She had bright red hair that was clearly a home dye job. But, all in all, she was adorable.
Show No Fear Page 2
