Infestation

by Heidi Lang

  Even if it led to his abduction.

  “Rae…” Caden put his hand on her arm, his fingers cold and clammy. She glanced at his face and saw that he was terrified. “I know you care about that internship. But it’s not worth it.”

  Rae pulled her arm free. “This isn’t about the internship. This is about following the facts. Wherever they lead.” She had to follow in her dad’s footsteps or she would never find him. She stepped forward into the room.

  Ready or not.

  20. CADEN

  Caden knew he could turn around and go home. And then go back to the way things had been when he didn’t have any friends and didn’t have to care about anyone outside his family.

  Things had been simpler then.

  He looked at Rae standing in that small room, and at Vivienne joining her, and at Nate waiting to see what he would do.

  “If you go in there, I’m gonna have to go in too,” Nate told him.

  “I’m sorry,” Caden said.

  Nate sighed. “Yeah. I figured this would happen.” He straightened his glasses, brushed dirt off his pants, and tightened his backpack straps. “Let’s get it over with, then.”

  Caden smiled. “You know, you’re all right, Nate.”

  Nate smiled back. “Don’t let Vivienne hear you say that. She’ll totally argue.”

  “I will not,” Vivienne said.

  “See?” Nate stepped into the room.

  Caden glanced once more at the inky blackness of the tunnel and then followed him in.

  Rae pressed a button on the side and the door whooshed shut again. They all stood there, quiet, waiting.

  Nothing happened.

  “That was awfully anticlimactic,” Rae said.

  Vivienne peered at the button Rae had pushed. It glowed the same soft light as the ceiling. “What happens if we push this again?” She tried it.

  The room plummeted so fast Caden’s stomach shot up to his brain, and he staggered back against the wall. He caught a glimpse of Rae’s openmouthed silent scream, of Nate curled in a tiny whimpering ball on the floor, and of Vivienne still standing upright, one hand delicately placed against the corner for support, her whole face straining in concentration.

  Finally the downward hurtle slowed, giving Caden’s internal organs time to adjust to their new position.

  He still felt like he was going to throw up as they eased to a stop. He had no idea how far down they’d gone, but it felt like they’d been shot into the center of the earth. Whatever was hidden this deep beneath Whispering Pines had to be important if someone had put in a fancy high-speed elevator in order to more easily reach it.

  Someone like Green On!.

  Caden swallowed, his stomach gurgling.

  Ding!

  The door whooshed open.

  21. RAE

  Rae stared out that doorway at the unknown, and for a second she was back in her old house, watching the blank-faced men in their identical suits moving through the rooms, bagging her dad’s stuff, cornering her mom in the kitchen.

  Mrs. Carter? We just have a few questions. About your husband.

  She remembered how her mom had kept repeating in a tight, high-pitched voice, so unlike her normal tone: I don’t know anything. I swear, I don’t know… How her eyes had found Rae, frozen in the doorway, and pleaded with her to go. Hide, she seemed to say. Run. Don’t let them catch you. Don’t let them take you!

  Rae blinked the memory away. Anything could be outside this box of a room. Anything at all. And that was scary. But it was also exciting. A high-speed elevator hidden deep in a tunnel? It had to lead to something interesting.

  From somewhere nearby, she could hear noises: some sort of soft, rumbling vibration, people talking, the staticky burst of a walkie-talkie. She thought of the rumors about the abandoned military base, remembered all the articles she’d found in her research about people finding things they weren’t supposed to see… and then vanishing forever.

  People just like her father.

  The safest thing to do would be to go back up to the surface and forget about this. But Rae knew the question of what was down here would haunt her forever, and she already had enough ghosts. So she stepped out of the elevator and poked her head around the corner.

  A long stretch of tunnel extended outward, all of it hard cement. There was no disguising it down here with a covering of dirt. Light filtered from the end, filling the space with a predawn gloom. Rae clicked her headlamp off and looked back at the elevator.

  Vivienne, Nate, and Caden all stared back at her, eyes wide.

  “Let’s go,” Rae whispered. She crept down the tunnel, the sound of all of their breathing and footsteps loud in the muted quiet. The tunnel continued on straight for a good twenty feet before veering sharply to the left. Rae stopped and glanced at the others. Wait, she mouthed at them. Then she cautiously peeked around the corner.

  The tunnel opened into a huge cavern, so massive Rae couldn’t see the top, the whole thing lit up by floodlights wired around the walls. She had an impression of people in bright green hazmat suits standing in front of a large gleaming metal wall before she ducked back around the corner.

  “What?” Caden whispered.

  “There are people.”

  “Doing what?” Nate asked.

  “I need to look again.” Rae took a deep breath, getting her heart rate under control before sidling back.

  “I want to see too,” Vivienne whispered behind her.

  “This isn’t a good idea,” Nate moaned.

  “Shh,” Caden hissed. Rae heard a gasp and a muttered curse as the three of them inched behind her, but she ignored them, trying to take in all the details as quickly as possible. It was hard, though; she couldn’t figure out what, exactly, she was looking at.

  The metal wall reached up as high as Rae could see. It was made of some weird silver-blue material, the whole thing smooth and rounded, almost like it had been melted and then frozen solid again, all the edges softened away. Like a giant spoon.

  There was a small plastic barrier around that wall keeping people two feet away from it. Spaced around it were a handful of guards, none of them in hazmat suits. Instead, they wore face masks and rested large, scary-looking weapons against their shoulders. They stood facing the metal wall, their backs to Rae and the others, but she imagined they’d be able to turn and point their weapons very quickly.

  Despite the guards and their obvious danger, Rae couldn’t stop looking at that curve of metal behind them. It drew her eyes to it, and now she saw that the floodlights didn’t reflect off its surface. Instead, the wall seemed to drink in their light and disperse it in beads, like little water droplets. It was the oddest thing.

  The closest guard shifted.

  Rae ducked back, tripping over Vivienne and crashing into Nate before Caden caught her. The inside of her head felt weird, like she’d been concentrating on a brightly lit screen inside a dark room.

  “You okay?” Caden whispered.

  “I… don’t know.” There was something about that wall… some detail she wasn’t quite grasping. She pressed the palms of her hands against the cool rock of the tunnel. What if… what if it wasn’t a wall at all? It had curved at the top, almost like… “Like a disk,” she whispered.

  “A what?” Caden asked.

  “We should go,” Nate said.

  Rae thought of the project her dad had been working on before he disappeared: Operation Gray Bird. It had been top secret, but he’d mentioned that he was in charge of reverse engineering a fuel source from some kind of craft. Rae had asked him if it was a spaceship, and he’d laughed and stopped answering questions about it.

  But later, after he vanished, she’d found that photograph he’d hidden of an alien…

  Rae swallowed. Patrick had promised to look into her dad’s disappearance, to see if it was actually connected to Green On!. But Caden didn’t trust Patrick, and honestly, neither did she. What if his company had an alien craft in its possession? Maybe
even the same one her dad had been working on?

  It was madness. There was no way.

  She needed to look at it again.

  “I’m sure they have guards making rounds in this area,” Caden whispered. “It’s a miracle we haven’t been caught already.”

  Rae ignored him, sticking her head back around the corner and staring again at that impossible thing. Now that she’d thought the word—spaceship—she couldn’t see it as anything else.

  Dimly she heard a burst of walkie-talkie noise, and a voice saying something about movement in the tunnel.

  Caden grabbed her by the arm and yanked her back. “Rae,” he hissed. “We need to go. It would be very bad if they found us here.”

  This time Rae let him tug her back down the hall and around the corner.

  They crowded into the elevator and Vivienne hit the button, the door whooshing closed. “Ready?” she asked.

  Rae widened her stance and put her back against the wall, then nodded. Vivienne pressed the button again, and they shot up. The skin on Rae’s face sagged with the force of their velocity, and she closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, waiting for it to be over.

  The elevator slowed and then stopped. The door whooshed open and Rae stumbled out first, the darkness of the tunnel almost a relief.

  “I wonder where else this tunnel connects?” Nate said.

  “What?” Rae blinked. The glow of the elevator outlined Nate’s face, his eyes worried behind the sheen of his glasses.

  “This tunnel extends farther that way.” He pointed in the direction away from them. “I’m assuming it leads to Green On!’s headquarters. Otherwise why would they need an elevator right here?”

  Rae squinted down the tunnel as if she could see what lay at the other end. Did tunnels crisscross beneath all of Whispering Pines? It was a disturbing thought. “You all saw that thing they were guarding, right?” she said.

  “Yeah, we saw it,” Vivienne said. “It was super weird.”

  “Do you… know what it was?” Rae asked.

  “Besides super weird?” Vivienne frowned. “No idea.”

  Rae took a deep breath. “I think it’s a spaceship.”

  Nate nodded.

  “You agree?” Rae almost fell over.

  “Those bugs we found had to come from somewhere. And it wasn’t here.”

  “You think those are alien bugs?” Caden sounded strangely eager. “As in, from outer space?”

  “I’m not about to make any conclusive statements yet,” Nate said. “But I think it’s a strong possibility. As bizarre as it sounds.”

  “How would the bugs have gotten out?” Vivienne demanded. “They have that ship sealed up. Or did you not notice?”

  “Of course we noticed,” Caden said. “But do you really think they’re just guarding it? Obviously they’ll have opened it at some point. How could they not?”

  “You don’t know that,” Vivienne said.

  “I know they have a habit of messing with things that they should leave well enough alone.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like everything!” Caden said. “All of this ‘alternative energy’ they talk about. What do you think it is?”

  “They are trying to save the planet. Or don’t you care about that?”

  “Yes, I care, but is that really what they’re doing?” Caden asked.

  “You just want some proof that Green On! is the bad guy your family always thought they were!” Vivienne had her hands balled into fists.

  “And you just want to go on pretending that they are the good guys that you always thought they were,” Caden fired back.

  “Hey now, Green On! is a large company,” Rae said. “I’m sure that there’s both good and bad in it. Most groups are not just one thing.”

  “Yeah, what she said,” Nate said. “Now can we stop arguing and go home?”

  “We’re not arguing,” Vivienne snapped. “I mean, he’s arguing.” She jabbed a finger at Caden. “I am merely defending the company my mom works for, that she’s devoted her whole life to, because it’s a good company full of good people who are trying to do good things. They’re not unleashing killer alien insects on the population of Whispering Pines, okay?”

  “It might have been accidental,” Caden said quietly. He would know about things like that; the Unseeing had slipped from the Other Place and into their town before Caden managed to seal the rift behind his brother.

  Rae was suddenly exhausted. “Let’s go home. We can talk this over when we’re not buried deep in the heart of the earth.”

  “We haven’t found any weird bugs yet,” Vivienne said sulkily. “I thought that was our goal here?”

  “I took a couple of soil samples.” Nate patted his backpack.

  “Oh, yeah, ’cause that’ll be super helpfu—” Vivienne stopped. She turned and cocked her head to the side. It was such a sudden, strange movement that it reminded Rae of the Unseeing. The way it had stared at her, all traces of humanity leaking from its face like water from a cracked pot.

  Rae shivered. “Vivi?”

  “I heard something.” Vivienne peered intently down the tunnel.

  “What?” Caden asked.

  Vivienne clicked on her headlamp, its light washing over her face. “I’m pretty sure it was the soft, desperate bleating of a goat.”

  22. CADEN

  It didn’t take them long to find the small crevice in the side of the tunnel. It was just a slit in the rock, barely wide enough for them to get through, and then only if they turned sideways. But now that they were close to it, Caden could hear the bleating of the goat too.

  It sounded like a person screaming. And even though he did not want to slide into that hole in the rock, he knew he couldn’t leave the goat there. He wondered if it was the goat Gary had been missing the other day. And then he wondered if Gary was in there too…

  Caden thought of that unmade bed and felt sick. But Gary had seemed very capable. He kept his axes sharp, and he’d lived in the Watchful Woods for as long as Caden could remember. They hadn’t found any sign of him down here yet either. He had probably just decided to move his remaining goats somewhere safer.

  “What should we do?” Vivienne asked, her face white in the flickering light of her headlamp.

  “Um, Vivienne?” Nate said. “Your light.”

  “What?” Vivienne tapped her light. It went brighter for a second and then winked out, the tunnel abruptly filling with more darkness like a bucket filling with ink. Only Rae’s headlamp shone in the gloom.

  “Uh-oh,” Vivienne said. “It might need to be recharged. Sorry about that.” She pulled the headlamp off and shook it, but nothing happened. Sighing, she stuffed it into her backpack. “At least we still have your light,” she told Rae.

  “Do you want it?” Rae asked. “Since it’s technically yours.”

  “No, you keep it.”

  “Thanks,” Rae said, obviously relieved.

  The goat screamed again, long and pitiful. Caden flinched. Aiden had always accused him of being too tenderhearted—having the ability to feel the emotions of others did that to a person—but Caden knew he couldn’t leave behind something that was in that much pain.

  “I’ll lead,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Rae said. “Since I have the light, I should go first.” And she slid into the crevice without looking back, leaving the rest of them in sudden darkness.

  “Hey, since you have the light, you should go last!” Nate yelled after her, but she was already gone.

  Caden shuffled sideways into the crevice after her. The ceiling was barely taller than his head, and he had to stay turned, moving his left foot and then sliding his right to meet it. The rock scraped against his back, damp and cold. A little farther in and it pressed against his stomach as well.

  Rae’s breathing turned into rough gasps ahead of him, terror rolling off her in waves, threatening to drown him. Behind him, he heard Nate stumbling closer. The feeling of being trapped—rock
in front and back, people on either side—pulled Caden into one of his worst memories.

  He was in a therapist’s basement, staring at a rip in reality. A torn space bleeding a garish greenish-yellow light. And his brother stood in front of that rip screaming as hungry tentacles wrapped around him.

  Caden had two choices: he could try to pull his brother free and risk all the horrors of the Other Place coming with him, or he could push Aiden farther in and seal that rift.

  Caden had hesitated. But not for long.

  And once his brother had vanished and he’d yanked the rift shut as tightly as a zipper closes a jacket, Caden had stood there, stunned and blank, staring through the doorway into Doctor Anderson’s storage room at a bunch of boxes and stacked books. He’d been hot and cold at the same time, his hands shaking, mouth dry and bitter, stomach full of roiling acid.

  That wasn’t the worst part, though.

  His parents had rushed down the stairs moments later, and Caden had turned to see their concerned faces. And he’d known he’d have to tell them what he’d done, known they would never forgive him. That was the worst part.

  Because Aiden was the favorite son.

  Hard on the heels of that thought came the same bitter, roiling resentment. Maybe if he were as powerful as Aiden, he’d be the favorite.

  Caden shook away the memory and the dark feelings attached to it. His brother was back, his parents were getting help, and right now, Rae needed him. “I’m here, Rae,” he whispered. “I’m right behind you. You’re okay.” He reached for the feeling of calm purpose, picturing it as a fluffy cloud the cheerful blue of a summer sky, and imagined it wrapping around Rae. He had no idea if that would help, but after a few seconds her breathing evened out.

  Moments later he burst from the narrow space and into a wider cavern, almost running into Rae. She stood frozen, her face tilted up, the headlamp spilling across her features—wide, terrified eyes, open mouth, one hand clutched at her chest.

  Caden slowly, slowly followed her gaze up. To the thing bathed in her beam of light.