Surrogacy

by Rob Horner

  “What do you mean ‘gone?’” I asked. “He just said they were about to try the bolt hole.”

  “That was as misleading as him saying we’d be coming back,” Fish said softly. “Anyone who got that message will spend a lot of time looking for them on the outside. April and Tina weren’t there, either. They’re in the vans with us.”

  “So, who was with him?”

  “Just Mrs. Jean,” Iz said. “That’s who boosted him. They’re the only ones left behind who knew what we were doing. Not even the guards knew.”

  You can call me stupid, if you want. Even in hindsight, I prefer the term optimistic.

  They kept saying gone. He’s gone. Not “he’s left the building” like Elvis after a concert. But gone like the King of Rock and Roll after a late-night branding by the toilet bowl.

  I couldn’t stop the hot sting of tears welling up in my eyes at the thought of the two, Dave and Mrs. Jean, dying to protect our location and destination. My head bowed, and Iz’s hand squeezed tighter on my shoulder.

  “How do you know?” I asked, surprised that my voice didn’t sound like I was crying.

  “It was their idea,” Fish said. There were other sounds coming through the communicator, soft sobbing and shortened breaths. “They came to me and Iz last night, said they knew they were welcome to come along, but they wanted to stay behind, a last line of defense in case Mandatum was attacked again.”

  Iz took over. “Mrs. Jean said someone had to mind the house while the hunters were in the forest. Then Dave told me about the number of Scotty-bombs they’d hidden in the Distilling Room.”

  All those soldiers. And the Quins!

  “Fish, I’m sorry,” Iz said.

  “It is what it is,” Fish replied. “There’s something going on with my people, an infestation deep enough that it can repopulate even after we clean it.”

  “That’s enough, Brian!” Bart said.

  “Just trying to salvage what I can,” the cop replied. “Maybe you should pull over, let me get some of our supplies in the back before it’s too late.”

  “I want everyone to hit a rest stop based on a reverse van order,” Iz said. “We’ll stop at the fourth one we see, and van two—that’s you, Austin—you hit the third one. Everyone is to take a break for fifteen minutes times your van number.”

  “That means thirty minutes for us, Austin,” Jeff said with a laugh.

  “I can do the math,” the young soldier replied testily.

  “This changes things,” Fish said.

  “It changes nothing,” Iz growled, “except our mission start time. After your break, no more stops until you arrive at the rendezvous.”

  Chapter 26

  Bring back the Mission Impossible theme music

  We arrived at the rendezvous point, a gas station on Moseman Road, a few minutes past eight, almost two hours after our planned arrival time. Traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike coupled with rush hour traffic on the George Washington Bridge, plus our own brief pause at a rest stop, all added to the delay. We were still the first to arrive, but that didn’t trouble Iz as much as the news that van three had been pulled over by state police just after they crossed into New Jersey.

  The police who pulled them were Dra’Gal, as we heard over the Port-Comms, but between Jason, Joi, and April, they were able to get away. They were compromised, though, and Fish gave us the news that their vehicle and license plate were now the subject of a “Be On the Lookout For” throughout the state.

  “We’ll lay low until you’re done up there,” a soldier named Shawn said. “Let us know where to meet up afterward.”

  April was able to imprison things or people in a clear box. The prison was shatterproof and inescapable but could be moved. Iz had been hoping, if we couldn’t find a way to destroy the resonator on site, that she could encase it and have Jeff teleport it away. Apparently, the rules which prevented him from transporting Dra’Gal and things related to them didn’t apply if April enclosed it. I wondered if that meant Tanya would be able to grab it with her power, if she wasn’t a Dra’Gal anymore.

  Jillian was one of the women in our van. She was short, barely reaching five feet, with shoulder-length brown hair and blue eyes. She could make a vortex that pulled at everything around it, sucking people and items in. She said if she really concentrated, she could make the pull so strong that it would crush a body to a pulp, but she hadn’t had a reason to do that yet.

  Aside from Iz, Jillian, and myself, we had Gina, Angelica, Josh, Bradley, Little Jack, and Fish in the van. It didn’t seem like much. Just nine people prepared to go after the resonator hidden inside a carnival almost as big as the one in Hampton.

  But I’d attacked with only two people beside me, so our odds were better now, right?

  Listen to me, trying to psyche myself up.

  “Patching everyone in,” Fish said suddenly. “Repeat what you just said.”

  “We just passed a van like ours, abandoned on the north side of the G.W. Bridge,” Brian said.

  “Danny? Is that you?” Iz asked.

  “No, sir,” Danny replied. “We’re off the path and setting up camp on two-oh-six a ways south of Trenton.”

  “Crap! It’s gotta be Austin’s van. Did you see anything, Brian?”

  “It’s not like we could stop, you know?” Brian replied. “Always possible it wasn’t one of ours. It’s dark—”

  “And the van looked beat up,” Bart added. “Like something stove in the side.”

  “Another mixed Chosen and Dra’Gal?” Gina asked.

  “Dunno,” Iz answered. “Fish, try to raise Austin and Jeff. Beep them individually if you have to. What’s your ETA, Brian?”

  “Bart says we’re about thirty to forty out.”

  “All right. Keep it under the radar, and holler at the first sign of…anything.”

  “Will do.”

  Fish turned away, his face unreadable as always inside his helmet.

  “You think it was the other van?” Bradley asked.

  “Makes sense, time-wise,” Iz said. Then, “But how’d they disable the vehicle and get everyone out without us hearing a peep?”

  I hated questions like that, the kind where the answer could mean the difference between winning and losing, but there’s no way to learn it.

  Thirty minutes later, give or take, Brian and Bart arrived in van four. We’d started out as a small army of thirty-six, and our forces were cut in half. Worse, we’d lost our scout and our escape plan. Of course, we’d had less when the girls and I went in, but that hadn’t turned out very well.

  We didn’t know about the alphas then, either.

  “Fish, put us on our own channel. Sorry Danny.”

  “It’s done,” Fish said.

  “All right. We’re going to drive two blocks with lights off. Use your visors. Angie, you’re on full-time scan.”

  “Got it.”

  “Johnny, you have got to get to the resonator. Without April and Jeff, we can’t take it away from them. So, purge it.”

  “What about—” I started to ask.

  “We know you’ve got friends here. And we know what their powers are. Anyone sees someone levitating stuff—”

  “Or herself,” I added.

  “—or that,” Iz continued, “knock her out of the sky, knock her out, and let’s hope we can keep her down.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Danielle said. “I can make it so they can’t manifest within a certain distance of us.”

  “Which will only alert them to do other things,” Iz said. “You’re our ace in the hole. You stay quiet in the middle. If I want a sound barrier, I’ll ask for it.”

  “The sat image showed the trailer park at the north end of the carnival,” Fish said. “There’s supposed to be a way to get back there by moving between the midway and the big convention building, so that’s what we’re going to do. Understood?”

  “How will we know where the right trailer is?” Gina asked.

  “Ang
ie will be able to see it,” I answered. “It’ll glow like a red sun.”

  “Okay then,” Iz said.

  “Also,” I hurriedly added, “it exerts a pull, like it’s hypnotizing you, drawing you in.” My voice dropped. “Every bad thing you ever thought of doing, it encourages. No punishments, no restrictions.”

  “How do you fight that?” Scott asked.

  “You remember why you’re here,” I answered. “Remember everything it’s taken away from you.”

  “Watch your buddies,” Iz said. “We get close and someone starts walking like a zombie, you smack ‘em.”

  “I’ve been waiting for a reason to do that,” Michael said, cracking his knuckles in front of Scott.

  “Very funny,” the teenager said.

  “All right, helmets on and visors down,” Iz ordered. “Let’s pile in and get this done, then go find our people.”

  When Iz said to keep our visors down, my first thought was to question how that could help. Then I did what he said and found I could see in the dark. Not like there was actual light, but like something took every bit of available light and turned up the contrast, so what should have been a dark mound on the side of the road became a bush with the branches outlined in a light purple. I couldn’t make out the individual leaves—those were just blobs of a darker purple—but it still beat wandering around completely blind.

  We parked the vans as near to the fairground entrance as possible, then climbed out and formed up. We were a loose ball of bodies with soldiers on the outside, rifles bristling like the spines on a porcupine.

  “Two red forms guarding the entrance,” Angie whispered into her helmet.

  “Paul. Zack. Go,” Iz said. “The rest of you keep moving. Angie, watch through the fence.”

  “Okay.”

  The area was surrounded by ten-foot high chain link, through which the dark and brooding forms of some of the carnival rides could be seen. Squinting, I looked ahead, and thought I could see two forms standing side by side, until two other forms detached themselves from the darkness and merged with the first two.

  “They’re down,” Zack reported. “They were in human form.”

  “They would be, out here,” Fish said. “I suspect we won’t be so lucky once we’re inside.”

  We reached the entrance, where the forms of two carnies lay face down in the darkness. Paul and Zack stood nearby, two purple-lined people ready to melt back into the night.

  “All right, Johnny, do your thing.”

  “It makes a lot of light,” I said.

  “Plus, the…I don’t know…alpha…won’t it know if two of its people disappear?” Danielle asked.

  “I got this,” Little Jack said, but Iz stopped him with a hand on his rifle.

  “If purging them might alert the hive, then trapping them in their bodies when they regain consciousness definitely will,” the old soldier said. “Go ahead and purge them, Johnny. I think it’s safer to take away two and risk alerting them instead of guaranteeing they’ll be alerted.”

  Stepping forward, I touched the faces of both guards. Light flashed twice, and a few people swore.

  “Forgot to close my eyes first,” Gina grumbled.

  And just like that, we were inside the fairgrounds. More dark shapes appeared on the right, rides and food trucks and games, with their board-like paneling enclosing the outsides and protecting the prizes within, though anyone foolish enough to try to steal from this carnival at night would lose much more than their freedom.

  To the left began the long, low building which housed stalls rented out by vendors hoping to spread the word about their products, sell a service, or turn a profit off the masses who would be there the next day for the carnival rides and the horse racing. From my dreams, I knew there was a large circular track on the other side, and beyond that must be the stables, though I couldn’t hear any whickering or neighing. Maybe the horses weren’t brought in until the day of the races, but I doubted it. I’d read that horses were intelligent. Maybe they knew what surrounded them and fear kept them silent.

  My nerves were wound tight and I craned my head left and right as we moved forward, straining to see in the purple-lined darkness and to understand what I saw. Things that were too distant at first for the helmet visor to outline would go from nebulous blobs to freaky purple-lined shapes in an instant, from nothing to fully realized, like it popped out of the ground in front of us. Each time it happened my heartbeat quickened further, my nerves alive and ready to respond.

  The distance meant nothing to Angelica’s power, which I remembered from a car ride with Crystal in the passenger seat, pointing out red shapes so far away they appeared as ants. Only a physical barrier would bar her sight.

  “Two to the right,” Angie said, and a couple of our soldiers slunk away, merging with the shadows around the rides, far enough that my visor could no longer track them. The muted flash of one of the soldier’s rifles was the only indication that something had happened.

  Twenty feet in, following a half-dirt and half-concrete driveway that separated the carnival from the long warehouse, and still we hadn’t raised an alarm. I didn’t know if the Dra’Gal needed sleep. The Quins did, but not as much as a human. Why hadn’t I bothered to learn more about our enemy? It seemed a gross oversight then, with nothing to focus on but the adrenaline tightening my muscles and the fear driving it.

  My mind worried at the problem. The Quins might not need as much sleep as a human, but there weren’t possessing a human form. Wouldn’t the Dra’Gal need as much sleep as a regular person simply because the host-body needed to rest?

  Fifty feet in, and Angie called out three forms on the left. Looking in that direction, I saw only a yawning maw of darkness in the side of the metal building, what must be a garage door rolled up. The door being open didn’t make much sense; wouldn’t the vendors expect the building to be shuttered as tightly as possible at night? Maybe they hadn’t set up anything yet.

  I saw the lighted forms of three of ours moving in two directions, intending to come in at the door in a pincer movement.

  But there weren’t any other forms to see.

  “Where are they?” Little Jack asked softly.

  “Coming straight at us,” Angie said. “Just inside the building.”

  “Come back to us,” I whispered fiercely. Alarm bells rang in my head, memories of invisible demons stalking us down the midway. “Hurry back now before they see you.”

  Then everything happened at once.

  A form appeared out of nowhere, outlined arms reaching for one of the soldiers, grappling for the rifle. The shape was wrong, twisted.

  “Crap, one’s on Paul,” Jack said, then he grunted as a second form became visible, reaching high and driving forward, knocking the big soldier onto his back.

  “Danielle, don’t let them—” I said.

  “On it,” she replied, rushing forward.

  “Duck!” Angie yelled, and everyone complied. It was funny, in a way. Eighteen people dropping to a crouch though only one person needed to. The third form became visible as his arm swished through the air where Danielle’s head had been a moment before.

  Then she was between them, and she began to hum. I didn’t remember hearing anything when she held the hundred or so people trapped in their human forms in Mandatum or during the attack on the police station. Maybe it had to ramp up. She had a pleasant voice, mellow, like a blues singer.

  I rushed up to the third form as her power reached it. Hands with too-long fingers went to the sides of its horned head, like her singing was the worst thing it had ever heard. Even with the darkness, I could see its features changing, horns shrinking back into its head, skin coming out to cover the scaly arms. It shrank into itself, losing a foot of height. The body stretching the fabric of the polo shirt withered inside, making the clothing suddenly loose.

  And just as quickly as that, I was staring at the face of the kid from a couple weeks’ before, the one who could turn people invisible.r />
  Without stopping to think, wanting only to fix what I’d screwed up the last time, I reached out and touched his face.

  Light flashed, blinding, brighter than ever before. A dozen voices uttered curses and oaths in my ears.

  “You gotta warn us man,” Jack complained. “The visors magnify available light.”

  “Sorry,” I whispered. Purple spots swam in my eyes like bruises, but through them I could make out the form of the kid unconscious on the ground.

  “What about these?” Paul asked. He held his attacker in a full Nelson, arms rising from under the man’s arms and hands laced behind his head. A few feet away Little Jack has his man down as well.

  “Might as well,” Iz said. “Pennies and pounds, you know?”

  I hurried forward and purged both men, keeping my eyes closed and head turned away so the flashes didn’t blind me again.

  “Now what?” Danielle asked, stopping her singing.

  I didn’t know what to say, or what to suggest. The last time I saw this kid was in Hampton. Tanya lifted him and set his unconscious body to the side of the midway, but we didn’t hide him well enough. The Dra’Gal found him and converted him a second time, using his power to good effect. His ability to make others invisible contributed heavily to the routing of the Mandatum forces.

  “Jack, come with me,” Caitlin said. “Keep me company.”

  “What do you—?” Jack started to ask. Caitlin stepped up to the unconscious kid and hoisted him onto her shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

  “Hope you got the keys to one of the vans,” she said walking quickly back toward the entrance. Jack hurried to catch up, their forms disappearing into the darkness.

  “Everyone else, huddle up,” Iz said. “I don’t know if Danielle was right and we just sent up a signal flare by curing three more of them, or if the light was enough, but we need to be ready for anything.”

  We grouped up, rifles again pointing out like cactus spines, while we searched the darkness.

  Nothing happened.

  “I don’t like it,” Scott whispered more than once, until Michael finally shushed him. That didn’t stop Bradley from trying to lighten the mood.