by Jody Wallace
Claire headed for the garage at top speed and requisitioned a snowmobile, cursing at every moment wasted. He could be out there freezing to death. Although she considered getting Ship’s help to find their errant Chosen One, she decided to wait.
She wasn’t able to escape without reinforcements, however. The night watchmen hadn’t liked their sheriff heading into potentially shade-infested territory in the middle of the night. Dix and Will, who had the late shift this week, accompanied her. They didn’t speak until they were out of earshot of the town.
“Whose footprints are we following? Did someone break out of jail?” Dixie, in the lead because of her tracking ability, grilled Claire through their sensor arrays.
“Adam’s,” she admitted. Will, bringing up the rear, didn’t have a sensor array, but he was armed to the teeth.
“What the hell is he doing out here?” Dix asked.
“Don’t know.” Claire scanned constantly with the sensor, checking for shades and life signs.
They crested a rise, the three quarter moon shining brightly on the snow. His footprints, widely spaced as if he’d been running, continued through the fields and small clusters of businesses to the east of Chanute.
When had he left and how had he not woken her? By her calculations, they’d fooled around until about one, and it was four now. He’d had three hours, tops, to get dressed—he’d been buck naked three and a half hours ago—sneak out of camp, and strike out on his own. That was assuming he’d taken off as soon as she’d fallen asleep.
If she’d returned to her own bed after they’d made love, she’d probably never have woken up. That other time she’d assumed he was in the bathroom—had he actually been gone?
His claims of nightmares about shades returned to her with a shudder.
“We’ve traveled five miles already,” Dixie commented. The buzz of the snowmobiles echoed across the silent landscape. “How far can he get on foot?”
They reached a traveled roadway and had to slow way down until Dixie picked up the trail on the other side. They used their blaster bands to laser through fences, unwilling to lose the time it would take to find gates. Hopefully they weren’t ruining anyone’s paddocks.
“Don’t know that, either,” Claire said. Nobody but she, Adam, Tracy, and Ship knew about the superstrength so far. It must include bionic legs.
The cold, clear night closed in around them, reminding Claire she should have brought her hat. Her ears felt like icicles.
“We’re near Randall’s place,” Will commented. “His family’s been going out every day to check on the chicken coops.”
Randall slept in the city when he was on duty, but his extended family, originally from Louisiana, had chosen a farm outside the walls. Claire hadn’t recognized the place in the dark.
She nodded and pulled her parka hood around her aching ears. “Looks like his footprints are headed there.”
“Do we know if that’s a potential hit site?” Dixie asked.
“I think so,” Will answered.
“Is he trying to be a hero? He doesn’t seem like a grandstander, but he used to be.”
Claire considered telling them this might have been happening nightly. If Adam had done this before, where had he gone? Why had he gone? He wasn’t familiar with the area. He wasn’t familiar with anything. Nobody even understood about hit sites before Kravitz had provided the predictive model.
Unless Adam had known…somehow.
“Maybe he’s out for a jog,” Claire said, refusing to consider it. “Nice night for it.”
“If you’re a reindeer,” Dixie retorted. They headed toward the driveway.
“Don’t see any prints,” Claire observed, though they could have been there. With Randall’s family coming and going every day, the snow was far from pristine.
Will pointed. “I was right. There’s the sensor on top of the mailbox.” The tiny black sensor to register shade activity glinted in the moonlight, glowing faintly with energy. As they watched, it emitted a cheep and starting blinking.
“I think it found something,” Dixie said. “It just came on.”
Claire’s array confirmed what the sensor had detected.
“Nearby shades, but no daemons,” she warned.
The device would send a signal to Camp Chanute, as well as to Ship. This close to town, the orders were to send a full team to seek and destroy.
“Let’s check it out.” Dixie gunned her snowmobile. Will cursed and flipped up his coat sleeves, exposing his double blaster bands. They accelerated around a curve in the driveway and confirmed what Claire had subconsciously feared.
Another silver pod nestled in the snow in the yard of the Barber’s house.
The door was open.
Shades were pouring out of it.
And Adam stood in the middle of them, waist deep, holding out his arms as if preaching the gospel of the Chosen One.
Chapter Nineteen
Will and Dixie fired into the horde, which churned like a lethal oil slick. Claire’s cry of warning stuck in her throat at the sight of her lover trapped by the embodiment of evil.
This was not the first time she’d seen him like this.
Would it be the last?
“We have contact,” Dixie yelled into her array over the continuous hissing. “Shade horde and a pod. Chosen One under attack. Send backup.”
Claire was too numb, too stunned, to stop Dixie from describing what was happening at the farm. She’d have been unethical if she’d tried to hide Adam’s involvement just because she was sleeping with him.
She was seeing for herself what he’d tried to tell her yesterday. No more pretending. He wasn’t fully human. He was immune to shades.
“What’s he doing in there?” Dixie shouted at her. “Run, Adam!”
He remained where he was, and he didn’t crumple.
In fact, the shades around him appeared to be calming. While the edges of the horde surged in various directions like peninsulas of death, roiling and splashing, the inner circle went smooth. The moon provided enough illumination that she could see Adam’s hands sink into the surface of the shades, time and again, as if petting them.
Commanding them.
“Adam!” Will bellowed. Dixie hollered, too, shouting at him to move his ass. He couldn’t hear them over the hissing, boiling shades.
Claire couldn’t budge, couldn’t utter a sound, until Will jostled her, his shoulder bumping her to action. “Sheriff, they’re headed this way. Gotta shoot or run.”
Her horror faded beneath common sense. Claire shoved up her coat sleeve and blazed the closest edge of the horde. It swarmed around Adam in a roughly circular formation, cordoned off by the pod at the far edge. Will jogged to the left, attacking another side but keeping his distance. The crispy-carrion scent of burning shades sizzled through the air, singeing her nose hairs.
Claire kept shooting, alert for breakout clusters. She couldn’t begin to comprehend what was happening. Based on their grim expressions, Will and Dixie had come to a conclusion, but it wasn’t positive.
“Don’t shoot the pod,” she warned them, remembering the deafening noise.
Working three sides of the horde, they stemmed its forward progress. The shades gushing from the pod blended into the murky pool that surrounded Adam. Upswells at the pod’s entrance were the only signs that the shades were still incoming.
With the slightly muffled tone that indicated a private channel, Dixie’s voice came to Claire over the sensor array. “I think he’s controlling them, Claire. What if he’s the one that’s been letting them out of the pods and sending them after humans?”
She knew how to disprove that one—hopefully. “There have been shades and pods all over the buffer zone for months. He can’t be in fifty places at once.”
But something was definitely happening between him and the horde. It was growing smaller, and when it stopped swarming from the pod, its circumference grew smaller still.
Much faster than their blasters should have
been able to eliminate them.
“Holy shit.” Will lowered his arms, shaking off the pain of the heated bands, but the shades didn’t creep toward him. Claire lowered her weapon, too.
“Stop shooting,” she ordered Dixie. “Ship, you need to see what I’m seeing.”
“I am watching,” Ship said over the array. “I have been. Adam is not merely immune to the shades, Claire.”
“No kidding.” As she watched, no longer defending herself, the horde continued to shrink. It was as if it were pouring through a drain hole, and that hole was Adam.
The three stood together, bouncing on their toes, tensely waiting for the reinforcements that no longer seemed necessary.
“Is he…?” Dixie paused. “I don’t know. Dissolving them?”
“Sure as hell looks like it,” Will agreed. “I knew there was something weird about him, but not this.”
Claire had given Ship complete access to her array this time, so it analyzed the scans. “The shades are disappearing from sensors. He is consuming them. The more he consumes, the more he becomes like them.”
“Fuck,” Claire cursed. “Just…fuck.”
Adam didn’t so much as glance in their direction. His arms remained spread, his head thrown back as if in ecstasy. As she’d recently seen him in ecstasy, the expression was eerily similar.
“I know how to wake him up.” Dixie lifted her blaster arm.
Claire slapped her arm down. “You can’t shoot him. He’s still one of us.”
“I’m not going to kill him, just zap him a little.”
As they argued, Will plugged Adam in the chest with a stun beam.
Claire smacked him in the head, but was too late. Adam stumbled back, his cry of pain loud enough that they could hear it over the shades. He raised his head and met Claire’s eyes across the expanse of black. “What are you doing here?”
Then his gaze fell to the shades around him. Comprehension washed over him so visibly that Dixie grabbed Claire’s arm. “Shit, he’s going to freak out.”
His mouth opened and closed, and his eyes, even from here, exuded panic. He’d been sleepwalking. Enchanted. Hypnotized. Drawn to the shades, like he’d told her.
Now he wasn’t.
“They’re not hurting you,” Claire yelled encouragingly. “Just…walk away, Adam. Walk out of them.”
He clamped his hands on his head and stumbled forward, but the shades clung to him. No matter which way he lurched, the shades adapted to keep him at their center. Claire, Will, and Dixie jumped out of the way as the shades rotated around Adam’s shifting form.
As Adam tried to escape, the entities lost their quiescence. The edges rippled, and a blotch popped off and headed toward Claire, Will, and Dixie.
The three of them shot it at the same time.
“If they aren’t harming him, he must not have a soul,” Will said as they watched for more shades to peel off from the horde. “Ship already ruled him out as being a robot or android.”
At least, one based on technology known to the Shipborn.
“That is correct,” Ship said. “His body is human, except for the wavelength instability that matches the entities. It is increasing as he absorbs the shades.”
Dixie stared at Claire. “What instability that matches the entities?”
“The one that the scientists detected,” Ship answered. “I believe we now know why he possesses that similarity. I am relaying the information to them.”
The voice of one of her deputies crackled over Claire’s headset next—the reinforcements Dixie had summoned. “We’re three minutes out, Sheriff. We got the monitor ping right before Dixie contacted us. Is everyone accounted for?”
“We’re handling it,” Claire answered as another shade popped out of the horde and oozed toward them. “The horde isn’t that big.”
Slowly, his expression a mixture of pain and regret, Adam lowered his hands into the shades around him.
They immediately quieted, no longer breaking off to chase the sentient creatures in the vicinity. The resignation in every line of his face and body, the fluctuation of the horde, confirmed that the shades were disappearing into him. He was absorbing them, devouring them, the same way they devoured humans.
Only there were no corpses left to prove the shades had existed. Adam was ingesting them completely.
This was why his pod had been empty.
This was how he’d saved her yesterday.
This was why he was dangerous.
“We need to get rid of the shades ASAP,” Claire ordered. “Shoot them.”
Between the three of them and Adam, they finished right as the reinforcements arrived. Two Humvees and a Jeep with a mounted Shipborn rifle skidded up the driveway to the house.
The only thing left for the reinforcements to see was the pod and four stunned people. Three humans and one…something else. Adam locked gazes with Claire across heavily trafficked snow that had been covered by shades five minutes ago. Shades he’d devoured.
“I would say it’s not what you guys think, but it is.” Agony and weariness contorted Adam’s handsome features. “I did this. I’ve done this before. I remember now.”
He’d regained his memories? All of them or just recent ones? “What exactly do you—”
Deputies and armed townsfolk piled out of the vehicles, interrupting her. To Claire’s displeasure, Kravitz was among them. “Where’s the horde, Dixie? We came to torch some monsters. We’ve had pings all over the territory tonight.”
Claire opened her mouth to lie about what had happened, but Dixie beat her to it.
To speaking—not to lying.
“Adam killed them.” She edged away from Claire as if aware that what she was about to say was going to piss her off. “But not with a blaster.”
“He exorcised them or something.” Will stared at Adam like he was the monster, when Adam had eliminated the monsters that would have eaten them.
Even Claire wasn’t sure how she felt now that she’d seen for herself how very other Adam was. It was one thing to speculate about it, hear the scientists babble about it, and get pissed when Elizabeth insinuated all matter of conspiracies. It was another to see it.
Absorbing shades was a bit different from bending an iron poker in half.
Adam walked toward them, but Dixie flashed her palm—the one with the blaster band. “Stay right there, Adam. Stay back.”
He held up his hands in the classic surrender. “I’m not going to hurt anybody.”
“You’ve got fifteen guns aimed at you, pretty boy.” Kravitz swaggered to the front of the group—most of whom were his people, not Claire’s—and took the lead. “What’s this about you killing shades without blasters? Did you get one of those bombs the Shipborn won’t let us touch? You been holding out on us?”
“He absorbed them. When he touches them, they disappear. Ship confirmed it.” Dixie’s sensor array glowed as she communicated with the AI. “Ship, we need to tell General Nikolas what’s going on immediately.”
“Belay that,” Claire ordered. “I’ll talk to Niko.”
“Sorry, Claire. I don’t think you’ll present unbiased information.” Dixie cupped a hand over her ear. Communications through an array were relayed directly to the auditory nerves, but blocking off outside sounds cut down on distractions. “You could put him in cuffs, though.”
“Yah,” Will agreed. The guy had been one of Adam’s biggest champions. If this turned him into one of Adam’s biggest critics, Claire would personally kick his ass. “I’m not touching him.”
Adam nodded bleakly. “Elizabeth was right. I’m too much of an unknown. You’re going to have to lock me up, Claire.”
“No.” The more the others mistrusted Adam, the more Claire defended him—even from himself. He was the same person, wasn’t he? “You didn’t hurt anyone in all this time, and you could have.”
“We have to isolate him.” Will tossed her his multipurp to convert into cuffs. She’d left in such a hurry to find Adam
that she’d only slid on her blaster. “Don’t let him touch anybody.”
“Ship and General Nikolas concur,” Dixie added. “We’re to place him in a cell and hand him over to the scientists in the morning.”
Adam walked slowly toward Claire, where she stood frozen with indecision. She’d just seen her lover consume monsters. Shades. Like the entities, he could steal life with a simple touch. She thought of all the times they’d touched—everywhere—and swallowed. Hard.
“Take me to jail.” The moonlight reflecting off the snow drained everything into grey hues, so his pale eyes gleamed like a wolf. “This is what makes sense. I don’t intend to hurt anyone, but this will help people feel safer.”
With his superstrength, he could break out of jail. She knew that. Still, she balked. “A private room with a guard will be sufficient.”
“Jail,” he repeated. “If you don’t put me there, I’ll go myself.”
“Even the Hollywood loser has better sense than Lawson. That’s what happens when you start sleeping with somebody,” Kravitz lectured his men. Did everyone know about Adam and her? “You go soft. That’s why you boys get to be celibate.”
“Like you are,” a big man grumbled at Kravitz. “You and that Ellen chick in Chicago—”
“Shut the hell up about Ellen before I knock out the rest of your teeth,” Kravitz barked. “Get the Chosen One loaded in the back of the Humvee. Ward, you and Pecos keep your guns on him. Lawson. Lawson, wake up. You’re the only one willing to touch him. You cuff him.”
When Adam reached her, everyone tensed, aiming their weapons, waiting to see what he would do. He gave her a long look, turned his back on her, and placed his wrists behind him, ducking his head like a dog caught killing the chickens.
Hands trembling, she affixed the multipurp around his arms, careful not to brush his skin. How many times and how many places had they touched four hours ago? Had he really had amnesia about his sleepwalking? About yesterday, when he’d saved her life?
Had he known what he could do all along and bided his time, hoping he wouldn’t get caught?
This blew the mystery that surrounded him into insurmountable proportions. Adam’s transformation from Chosen One to Public Enemy Number One seemed complete.
