• • •
I got back into the car right as Mom and Bo came out of the trees. Before the door closed, I told Cain one more thing. “I don’t think I could do it, what you do. I don’t have it in me.”
“You will. Out in this world long enough and you will.”
I curled up in my seat and closed my eyes, hoping that I could sleep away the blood and the skin and the sweat.
• • •
When I opened my eyes, the pitch black night startled me. I had kept my eyes closed for as long as I could and hoped that, when I opened them again, the sun would be rising and the horrible day that we had would be behind us. No such luck. The darkness was just as black as it was before, and it didn’t look like the night had plans to end anytime soon. I looked down to find Jordyn’s head lying in my lap. I brushed some of her hair off her face, noticing delicate strands being drawn to her nose as she took each breath. Amazing how it didn’t tickle.
The house where we parked for the night was stolen straight out of a southern romance novel. Mom said I was too young to read those, but back home I would sometimes sneak one off her shelf when she wasn’t looking and read it with a flashlight after I went to bed. She always said they were inappropriate. Apparently she didn’t know what I heard out of the mouths of other fifteen-year-olds every day at school. If she had, my reading a book wouldn’t have seemed like such a bad way to go.
White with pale blue shutters, the house seemed to glow in the middle of the green field where it rested. A swinging bench sat on the porch that wrapped around the whole front of the house. I imagined Jordyn sipping lemonade out of a big pink glass, floating on the swing, bare feet dangling in the hot summer breeze. In my picture, there was not a bruise to be seen, and her olive skin sparkled in the sunshine.
Despite the darkness invited by the lack of a porch light, Jordyn glided up the steps with ease. I noticed she had slipped my jacket on over her torn shirt and zipped it tight. I watched as the front door swung open.
She threw her arms around a man I learned was her father. He picked her up in a hug and swung her around, and a grin stretched across his wrinkled face. I turned away when I realized his well-intentioned hug was probably squeezing her recently bruised ribs. When I looked back, Jordyn had a smile on her face, but her eyes glistened. Her mother was next in line for a hug and Jordyn kept her smile glued on. “Dad, Mom, this is Riley,” Jordyn nodded at me. I shook her father’s hand.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Riley. Call me Joe. And this is Natalie. Welcome to our home.”
Jordyn threw her finger at Mom and Bo. I guessed she wasn’t as enthusiastic to introduce them to her parents. “Claire and Bo.”
We followed Natalie and Joe inside, and Joe locked the door behind us. This was not a simple task since the door was covered in locks, ranging from huge silver ones to a wooden slide lock. He started from the top and worked his way down, finally finishing with a solid copper contraption that looked like it could stop a rhinoceros from entering the house.
In the light of the living room, Natalie and Joe finally saw their daughter’s wounds. The jacket covered some of them, but her swollen foot and blood-crusted cheek gave her away. “Oh my gosh! Honey, what happened to you? Are you alright?”
Jordyn forced a smile again. “Don’t worry, Mom, I’m fine. Just an occupational hazard.”
Natalie threw her arms around her daughter. “Oh dear. We’re so proud that you’re a Guide and helping so many people, but I wish it wasn’t so darn dangerous.”
I thought to myself that it wasn’t the Guide part of her job that was dangerous.
Natalie’s smile returned. “Thank goodness you made it here. We’re so happy to see you!” She let her daughter sit down then darted off into the kitchen.
When Natalie emerged, she had a stack of sandwiches of all different colors, shapes, and sizes. Some were tuna with mango chutney, others were turkey and goat-cheese with little purple leaves that I didn’t recognize. That was a sure sign of people who had somehow managed to hang on to their money—eating food that didn’t look like it had been preserved from back when my mom was a kid.
They reminded me of what Bo would make me for lunch when Mom had to go anywhere without me. He would sometimes stay with me when she was gone giving her speeches. Bo usually went with her, but sometimes he had other things to do at his office and couldn’t take the time. I always remembered going to school and pulling out a sandwich with fluffy white bread and thick tuna and always trying to eat it subtly so none of the people whose parents didn’t have jobs would notice. I wasn’t proud of it, but after several dirty looks, I always made sure I ate lunch at the table where all the other people with employed parents sat.
We dove into the plate of sandwiches and demolished it in ten minutes. With my belly full and happy, I promised myself to remember what a big meal felt like. Who knows how long we’d have to be eating prepackaged stuff from the packs that Cain had given us at the start of our journey after we left their house.
Cain ate his sandwiches by the window and stared out into the distance. I didn’t know how he expected to see anything out in that black night, but he kept watch anyway. Behind him, there was a fireplace covered in photos. Two large ones sat at each corner. In each one a different smiling little boy looked back at me. One had a missing front tooth but didn’t seem to mind as he grinned just as proudly as the other boy. The second one’s hair looked messy, like he had been playing outside right before the photo was taken. They looked about the same age. The size of the photos reminded me of the memorial set up for Aidan at his funeral. I’d been to seven funerals. Well, seven formal ones anyway. If you count seeing dead people, I’d be up to eleven thanks to the couple days before we had ended up in Jordyn’s living room.
“How are you on supplies?” Joe asked Jordyn.
“We’re doing pretty good, Dad. We may swipe a couple more cases of water just in case. Part of the trip may need to be on foot. We never quite know.”
“Take whatever you need. Extra blankets too.”
“Thanks.” Jordyn smiled lovingly at her father. I couldn’t remember ever looking at my father like that. Mom and Bo sat on a couch listening to Jordyn and her family while I rested against their legs on the floor. “So, how’s it been lately? Lots of people stopping?”
Natalie swallowed her last bite of sandwich. “Been pretty spaced out actually. They’re really cracking down. Last people we had stay with us were probably here a month ago.”
“You have more people stay here than just us?” I asked.
“Oh yes. We help Guides like Jordyn and Cain all the time. Our house is perfect since it’s so far out in the middle of nowhere. Very hard to track down.”
While we all talked, Joe got up to grab us something to drink out of the kitchen. He emerged a couple of minutes later with a large pitcher of ice water. “Who wants ice—?” The pitcher shattered onto the floor, sending a storm of ice chips across the living room.
I looked up, curious what had startled him so much. He was staring straight at my mother.
“It’s you…”
CHAPTER FIVE
Fluttering lashes, just a touch of white eye shadow…Mom always reminded me of an innocent God-fearing woman during her speeches, someone who you would catch baking cupcakes on Saturdays and going to church on Sundays. But the whole thing was by design. Her handlers manufactured the whole getup to make her look like the poster-child for grieving parents: dresses in light pink (probably with small flowers), gray, or brown, curled hair, flat shoes. Sometimes, she’d even wear gloves. No low necklines or heels, and definitely no short skirts. But when people from the White House started flying in most of her outfits from a special vintage store in New York (why dresses that smelled like old books and dust would need to be flown in from anywhere, I’d never know), the whole thing lost a bit of its charm. Maybe it was just me, but I liked the days of me and Mom frantically digging through her closet much better.
; The day we met Bo was one of those days—before New York, before the consultants, before things got so out of control. I stood in front of the stage and smiled up at my mother. Those were the days when she still needed a smile from her daughter to make it through the minutes that followed.
As she tucked a loose curl of blonde hair behind her ear, she began her speech. The audience stared at her up there on that podium, and as the TV cameras turned toward her, the world stopped. “I hated the way the lawyers fancied up the death of my son. They swaggered through the courtroom talking about ‘intracranial hemorrhaging’ causing ‘intracranial pressure,’ which caused ‘brain herniation.’ I didn’t know what any of it meant, just a lot of fancy words that said the same thing: my son was dead.
“There was no colorful way to paint what happened to Aidan. There was no sunshine-and-roses way to say his brain was crushed. There were no candy-coated words to convey that the blood made his brain explode through his skull. My perfect little boy’s brain exploded—all because of some stupid game.”
I tore my eyes away from her to glance at the faces around me. She held the gaze of every parent in the audience. Her words tightened around their hearts as their fingers tightened around their children’s hands.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.
“The local gang called it ‘pop and twist.’ Maybe you’ve heard of it? A gang leader gives the new prospect a gun and tells him to shoot at a tire of an oncoming car. The child then looks on as the car twists in circles, spinning its occupants over and over again.
“When Aidan and I drove down an unlucky street, the bullet sailed through our SUV, piercing the metal right before it pierced Aidan’s skull. The noise scared me into driving off the road. When the car stopped, I could have sworn I heard laughter in the distance. I said to my son, ‘How are you doing, baby? We got lucky, huh?’ I was answered with silence.
“I turned around and faced the back seat. At first glance, it only looked like he was sleeping.”
I looked at the ground. I’d heard that speech several times. Heck, I even helped her rehearse it. But a time never went by without my brother’s coffin appearing on the surface of my mind during that part, and I shuddered thinking of how close sleep was to death: removed from the world, quiet, still.
Mom held up the front page of a newspaper. There was a picture of Aidan’s killer on the cover, from the day the verdict was handed down. “The boy who killed Aidan pissed himself at sentencing. They sent eleven-year-old William Baker to jail for a decade, in a prison with rapists and pedophiles three times his age. I remember that the sleeves of his orange jumpsuit draped over his hands, and his fingertips barely peeked out from behind the fabric. When William looked into the audience, I guessed he was looking for his parents. They weren’t there. There hadn’t been a day where they bothered to show up.
“William screamed as they lead him away. That’s when I realized the killer I had created in my head was just a terrified little boy with no parents and urine-soaked pants. I realized that Aidan’s life was not the only one cut short.”
Mom always had to pause after that part: the part where over and over again we were both reminded of what Aidan could have been, and never would be. Her voice started to shake, like a cold wind had just blown by.
“Our children are angry, everyone. We have failed them. We have allowed them to go to school with other kids who have been raised by people who are not paying attention. And while no one was watching, these misguided children were forced to raise themselves in this dangerous world we call our own. We have taught our own children to turn the other cheek and ignore it when the products of absentee-parenting inevitably turn into angry, evil people. And now OUR children have paid the price.
“Allowing this horrible trend in youth violence to continue got my child shot. We have ignored the fact that people who have no business having children are having them anyway, and it’s this passive aggressive mentality that has put our own children in the line of fire. The time for being polite is over.” She slammed her fist down on the podium and it rattled on impact. No one dared take a breath.
“No one is going to save our children but us. The time to take action is now.” Mom held up a picture of Aidan, smiling in a pair of red overalls and a blue shirt, clutching his favorite stuffed duck. “Don’t let what happened to my child happen to yours. Please, sign the petition. Tell our government that you support the Parental Morality Bill. Tell them to enact the Parental Morality Bill today.” She always repeated the name of the bill as many times as she could without it sounding, well, repetitive. She had read in a book somewhere that it took someone hearing a message seven times for it to sink in.
Judging by the faces in the crowd, I doubted she’d ever have to worry about someone forgetting her bill. As my mom left the stage, the crowd saluted her with an admiration normally reserved for military members coming back from a war.
I ran up to give her a hug and noticed a man in a black suit with a yellow tie following right behind me. As I threw my arms around my mother, he spoke. “Mrs. Crane? Great speech!” Mom thanked him politely, and we started to walk away. But as we headed toward the car, he ran in front of us and blocked our path. “My name is Bo Dodson and I work for Senator Gray. He’s heard about you and thinks you may just be on to something. As you probably know, he’s running for president. He wants you to be a part of his team. And if the bill passes, he wants to name it after your son.”
• • •
“Get out.” Joe started to slowly step backward, as if my mom had suddenly come down with the plague.
Mom leaped up. “No! No, we can’t, please!”
Natalie glanced at her husband. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t you recognize her?” He threw an accusing finger toward my mom. “It’s HER.”
“Please…we have nowhere else to go! You’re a safe house. You are supposed to help my daughter. I don’t understand.”
Joe’s cheeks flushed. “Of course you don’t. It’s your fault that our sons got taken away. You started this whole mess in the first place. You wouldn’t understand, would you? Your kid died so now you had to make sure everyone else loses their children too!”
Natalie must have finally recognized her too. Her face tightened. “He’s right. You aren’t welcome in our home. Get out.”
“Mom, Dad, you can’t do this. This is our JOB.”
“Yes please don’t—”
“Shut up, Claire,” Jordyn ordered.
I ran up to my mom and squeezed her tight.
Jordyn turned back to her parents. “Remember? You started to do this for the kids. It’s not about her. It’s about HER.” She pointed at me. Everyone stared at both of us, mother and daughter glued together.
“Xander and Matthew are gone, Jordyn. Forever. Those Taskforce bastards took them from us. No one hears from their children again after that happens. You know that as well as I do. And it’s her fault.” Joe turned away, inhaling sharply, trying to suck his tears back into his eyes.
Cain, who had been silent during the whole conversation, moved closer to Jordyn’s mom. He lightly grabbed her face and pulled it close to him. “Natalie, I’m asking you. Please let us stay. We will be gone by tomorrow morning. We can even leave before you wake up if that’s what you want.”
Natalie silently broke from his grasp and went over to the pictures on the mantle. She picked up one that was sitting in the middle, holding it gently, as though, if the frame were to shatter, the memory might too. The boys were smiling with their arms around each other. Jordyn stood behind them, giving them bunny ears. The boys were younger then, probably long before they got taken away.
“You can sleep in the attic. I don’t want to see you again.” Suddenly, Natalie turned and faced Bo. Almost gliding, she stepped so close to him I imagined he could feel her breath on his face. She wrapped her hand around his cross necklace and pulled hard. I heard it snap in two and watched as she let the broken necklace dangle from
her tight fist. “And you…don’t think I didn’t notice the way you look at her. And that you wear this.” She shook it in his face, and the tip of it whipped against his chin. “You present yourself as a Godly man while you run around with her, a woman who wrecks families. You’re almost no better than she is.”
Bo went white, watching Natalie’s hand carefully. Natalie didn’t realize what she had stolen from him. “You can’t have that!” I shouted at her, ignoring the redness in her face. “That belonged to his dead wife! You can’t take it!” Bo glanced at me, probably wondering how I knew the history of his necklace.
Natalie opened her mouth to continue, but before she could, Cain asked her to come back over to him. He looked at Natalie as she turned from the group, putting his arm around her shoulder. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but by the time they finished their conversation, Bo’s necklace was lying in the palm of Cain’s hand. I wondered why he cared to get it back for him.
Then I remembered his tattoo.
I expected Cain to hand it straight back to Bo, but instead, he tucked it gently into his own pocket. Bo glanced at him expectantly, but Cain just stared him right in the eyes. I thought Bo would argue with him, but he didn’t. Instead, he slid closer to my mother.
Mom’s chin shook, but she agreed to go upstairs to the attic. Joe took a blanket and a pillow that had been sitting on the couch and threw it at her, almost knocking her backward. “Attic’s up those stairs,” he said, pointing at an almost hidden staircase in the back corner of the house.
Mom started dragging herself up them, each step heavy. I followed.
At the bottom of the stairs, Joe put his hand on my shoulder. “Dear, you don’t have to stay up there. You can stay down here if you want.”
I shoved his hand away. “I’m going with HER.”
He released me and walked toward his wife. When I took one last glance at them, he had his arms wrapped around her waist.
The Extraction List Page 6
