Surrender

by J. S. Bailey

  Carly walked toward a silver Nissan just like Bobby’s, and for half a second she thought it was Bobby’s even though she knew better. She funneled every ounce of her will into trying to run the other way, but her muscles refused to respond.

  Mia held the car door open for her, pure wickedness shining in her eyes while Thane disgruntledly pushed their shopping cart over from the Aveo. “Give me your purse,” Mia said, extending a hand. Carly slid it off her shoulder and handed it to the woman, then climbed into the backseat and buckled herself in, hating her body for complying.

  She watched as Mia dug through her belongings and fished out her cell phone. She popped the cover off and pried out the battery, then gave it an overhand pitch across the parking lot. It landed with a clatter between a van and a pickup truck.

  Matt climbed into the car beside Carly, his jaw tight with frustration. He reached into his pocket but Mia saw and said, “Give me your phone, too. I’m not dumb enough to have anyone trace where you are.”

  “But you want Bobby to come after us,” Carly said as Matt passed his own phone into Mia’s hand. “You’re not making any sense.”

  Mia removed the battery from Matt’s phone and threw it in the opposite direction from Carly’s. “Don’t you listen? Thane already said he needs to get some things ready. He can’t have everything ruined by Bobby rushing in too soon. Isn’t that right?”

  Thane slammed the trunk closed, having finished unloading all of Carly’s purchases. He didn’t reply to Mia and got into the driver’s seat in silence after parking the cart in a nearby corral.

  “Don’t forget to stop at the pantry first,” Mia said once she’d nestled herself into the passenger seat with the languidness of a cat. She tossed the useless cell phones over her shoulder onto the seat between Carly and Matt. “I’ll direct you.”

  Carly’s blood was on a full simmer now. This Mia had messed with her mind but thought it would be bad to let a cart full of food go to waste. She’d never encountered anyone with such a twisted set of priorities. No doubt Mia thought she was doing good by feeding the poor, but why she cared about them in the first place was beyond Carly’s comprehension.

  Thane backed out of the parking space and threw the car into gear. Carly would have to pay close attention to where they were going in the event that she could get to a working phone and call for help.

  That is, if her perceptions were correct. Who knew what all Mia had done to her in the past few minutes? She and Thane were clearly of the same ilk. She could have ordered Carly to imagine one reality while a completely different one played out and then wiped the command from her memory.

  She tried to remember everything that had happened at the airport in northern Kentucky. She and Bobby arrived with Kaori and Matt, they bought their tickets, and waited for the correct flight. Then they’d boarded, and all was well.

  But according to these two, they had run into Thane and Mia before their flight took off. The pair would have been on a different flight since they didn’t need to pick up a car in Utah, so the encounter would have taken place early on, maybe even before they bought their tickets.

  Carly racked her brain to pinpoint the exact moment the encounter could have happened.

  She came up with nothing.

  Beside her, Matt’s expression grew increasingly sour. His fists kept clenching and unclenching, and Carly knew that the man would give more than anything to regain control of his will and throttle the occupants of the front seats.

  “Are you two comfortable back there?” Mia asked five minutes later as Thane turned into the food pantry parking lot.

  “Yeah,” Carly said. “We’re just peachy.”

  Thane parked, got out, and opened the trunk. Carly supposed she should be at least a tiny bit grateful that some good would come out of the loss of their groceries. Some deserving person would get to enjoy those frozen pizzas while Carly and Matt were barbecued or brained or otherwise tortured somewhere.

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic,” Mia said, folding her arms across her chest. “It’s not like we have anything against you.”

  “You could have fooled me,” Matt said.

  Mia shrugged. “Fine, keep thinking that way. You know so little it’s almost cute.”

  And I doubt I’d want to know more, Carly thought with a grimness she didn’t usually feel.

  Ten minutes later, Thane returned to the car and started the engine without a word. Odd how he wasn’t being so talkative now. When Carly had met him back in the summer, he’d struck her as the type in love with the sound of his own voice.

  Maybe he’d finally run out of things to say.

  Carly stared at the back of Thane’s seat as he bypassed the exit for Interstate 5 and opted for a winding, rural road instead. Last summer, before she’d known who and what Thane was, he’d caused her to hallucinate some disturbing things just to rattle Bobby’s nerves. It seemed almost infantile, but Thane’s original plans to kill the Servant had gone awry, so he’d had to think of new tactics.

  And Thane had done it all because of a deal he’d made to regain the use of his broken body, but his body appeared unbroken now.

  Which meant he’d made a new kind of deal.

  “Hey, Thane,” she said.

  His irritated gaze flicked to the rearview mirror.

  “I’ve been wondering,” she went on. “You wanted to kill Bobby so you could walk again, but it seems to me you’re walking now, unless you’re making me imagine it. So what’s up with that? What happens this time if Bobby survives?”

  Thane turned toward his front seat passenger. “Mia, do you hear something behind me?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  Thane returned his focus to the road and squared his shoulders. Carly sent out a mental plea. Bobby, I know your premonitions supposedly don’t work right now, but we’re in some major trouble here. Please help us. Please.

  BOBBY WAITED another half an hour, and there was still no sign of Carly or Matt. “Can I start worrying now?” he asked Kaori.

  Her face, too, had grown concerned. “Yes, I think so.”

  “What should I do?” Bradley asked. He’d polished off the scrambled eggs and a few granola bars Bobby had found in the back of a cabinet before finally announcing that he was full, and now he’d resumed his place on the couch, resting his hands on his stomach.

  “I can leave you with Father Pres—” Bobby started to say, then felt another unseen knife twist into his heart. “Roger. I can leave you with Roger. He’s a nice guy, and he’s the one who’ll be counseling you now that you’re all better.”

  Bradley nodded. “I’ll just pack my things, then.” He winked and remained on the couch, considering the only things he had with him were the clothes on his back. “Speaking of Father Preston, I hope he understands that it wasn’t me who broke out of his house, it was the other thing. You know.”

  Bobby’s mouth went dry. “Yeah. Um, Bradley, this isn’t going to be an easy thing for you to hear, but Father Preston was shot and killed yesterday. We’re pretty sure your brother Dennis did it.”

  Bradley paused a beat. “You’re kidding me.” Then his face blanched. “Why do you think it was him?”

  “The police sketch they showed on the news looked like you, but with a scar. Since you don’t have a scar, we assumed it was someone else.”

  Bradley ran a hand over his cheek in the location of Dennis’s scar. “He—he got it in a four-wheeler accident when he was eighteen. He flipped the thing and it landed on top of him—broke about a dozen bones. Father Preston is dead?”

  “Yes.” Bobby fought to keep the tears out of his voice. “Now we’ve got to go, okay? Because if I don’t hurry, even more people might end up like him.”

  AFTER DROPPING Bradley off at the Stilgoes’ house and instructing him to keep icing his ankle, Bobby tore back across town and squealed into the Safeway lot, nearly clipping a car waiting to turn onto the road. Flurries fell from the sky in even thicker chunks—he really di
d need to be more careful now that the roads grew slicker.

  He drove up and down the rows and spotted the red Aveo, which looked more like a sugar-coated berry now that a quarter inch of snow had fallen on top of it.

  “Well, they’re here, at least,” Kaori said. “How about we go in and see what the holdup is?”

  Nodding, Bobby parked next to the Aveo and killed the engine, still feeling immense unease about this whole situation.

  A blast of warmth greeted them as they hurried into the store. Crowds of shoppers meandered every which way, and a sour-faced woman with a cart heaped so high it had almost formed a culinary avalanche nudged past them with some choice words.

  “Let’s split up,” Bobby said. “I’ll start at this end of the store, and you start at the other.”

  “Good idea.” Kaori strode past the line of checkouts, and Bobby hurried off in the other direction, glancing down each aisle as he went. Though she probably didn’t want to admit it, Bobby could tell Kaori was just as worried as he.

  Carly and Matt were not in the dairy section. They were not in the pet food or cosmetic aisles, or near the pharmacy. He uttered a mental curse. Why was he at this end of the store anyway? His friends had no reason to be over here.

  Five minutes later, he met up with Kaori at the center of the store. Her lips were drawn tight, and her face had gone a shade paler. “You didn’t see them, did you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh, where could they be?” Kaori tightened her hands into fists, looking like she wanted to punch something.

  “I know. How about we have them paged? That way we’ll know for sure if they’re here or not.” Bobby knew it was a long shot—he simply didn’t see how they could have overlooked their friends.

  They nudged their way through the crowd toward the Customer Service counter. No doubt everyone in town had come to stock up prior to the larger snowstorm due to hit in a few days.

  Bobby told the woman at the counter what he needed her to say. Nodding, she plucked up a telephone, hit a button, and said, “Carly and Matt, please come to the customer service desk. Carly and Matt, please come to the customer service desk.” The PA system broadcast her voice throughout the store.

  He and Kaori stood off to the side for the next ten minutes monitoring the crowd. At last Bobby said, “They’re not coming. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” Kaori asked when they emerged from the store into an even thicker swirl of snow.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere that isn’t here.”

  The Aveo still sat in its spot in the parking lot. Bobby brushed snow off one of its windows and peered into it. Neither Carly nor Matt nor the groceries they were supposed to pick up were inside.

  “Thane must have them,” Bobby said. “There’s no other explanation.”

  “Shouldn’t you have had a premonition if he’s taken them?”

  Bobby ran a hand over his windblown hair. “Yeah, I should have, but I didn’t. I know! We can go back to Randy’s place and see what he thinks we should do.”

  A DISTANT sound stirred Phil into consciousness, yet the dull lighting inside the cave did not reveal the time of day.

  There had to be something significant about the cave. Perhaps something secret was kept here that Vance didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands.

  Vance is a fiction. He never existed.

  Phil groaned and tried to shift his legs. He’d been tied into sitting position with his hands behind him. He figured the Vance-thing must have left him here to starve, because it felt like it had been days since he first blundered onto the Bagdasarian estate like a blind fool. His lips were cracked, and his tongue and throat felt like sandpaper. His clouded mind tried to remember how many days a person could go without water. He didn’t think it was very many.

  A light flared before him, and a blurry figure that could only be Vance in human form appeared holding a lantern. He set it on the cave floor and then sat beside it cross-legged.

  “How are we feeling today?” Vance asked. Phil thought the man might have smiled.

  Phil coughed. “Water…”

  “Yes, I figured you might be thirsty. In fact, that’s just what I came to talk about.”

  Phil did not have a good feeling about this.

  Vance went on.

  “I know you’re uncomfortable right now—I don’t feel the least bit sorry for you, by the way—but I thought I’d offer you a deal if it makes you feel better. I even warmed it up in here for you so you have time to decide before you freeze to death.”

  “Let’s hear it, then,” Phil rasped, knowing full well he’d never accept any deals offered by Vance’s kind.

  “I let you go. You get to eat, drink, and be merry like the pathetic human you are.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “You let one of us inside you. It really isn’t as uncomfortable as you might think.”

  “Sorry,” Phil said, “but no.”

  “Don’t you know what happens to people dying of dehydration? They become delirious, fevered, and sink into unconsciousness before dying. I’ve heard that none of these things are pleasant.”

  “I’d rather endure that than have one of you nesting inside my head.”

  Vance shook his head. “I figured you’d continue to be stubborn. This thing you call possession—it’s a gift. You’re not just one person anymore. Everything is enhanced. You’re stronger, smarter, healthier than you ever were before.”

  “I’m sure that’s why Bradley Scholl took it upon himself to attempt suicide by train.”

  “Yes, well, you’re not Bradley, are you? You could have it all—perfect health, a happy wife and daughter.”

  Phil tensed at the mention of Allison and Ashley, and Vance laughed. “I can have them killed if you don’t comply,” Vance said. “Accidents are always waiting to happen.”

  “Don’t you think Bobby would notice if I suddenly came around wearing an aura?”

  “Not if he’s dead, which I expect should be happening soon.”

  Phil tugged against his restraints. “You can’t.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to kill him. Thane has had his heart set on that for months; I’d hate to deny him the pleasure.” Vance stood and picked up the lantern. “I’ll give you some time to think about it. In the meantime, I’m going to get ready to watch a long-overdue execution.”

  Vance and the lantern bobbed out of sight. Phil stared after him, his mind spinning at far too slow a speed.

  We’ll let you out if you comply with us, a voice whispered. We won’t even hurt you. You’ll just be our vessel, that’s all.

  “I—I can’t,” Phil whispered. “I would never…”

  He suddenly envisioned Allison and Ashley standing beside an open casket that revealed his own, stone-cold face plastered with lumpy makeup by an unskilled mortician. His body looked skeletal as if he’d lost twenty pounds or more before death, and both Allison and Ashley wore hollow, unseeing expressions, like they’d become living ghosts.

  Then, as if he were watching a film on fast forward, he saw Ashley grow taller as she aged into a teen, and saw her at a party with kids unfamiliar to Phil. He watched as she lifted her sleeve and jammed a syringe into her arm, and then as she passed out on a floor, her blonde hair fanning around her head like a wispy halo.

  Next he saw another casket, this one lowering into the ground while a much-older Allison stood nearby, all alone with a solemn pastor Phil didn’t recognize, and last of all, he watched as Allison went home and hung herself in the closet. Her body spasmed in violent jerks before falling still.

  “No,” Phil said, his voice all but gone. “Allison, don’t…”

  The cave reappeared around him, but the visions lingered in his mind.

  This is what will happen if you refuse us.

  Phil’s eyes burned, and his heart was burning, too. How could he let himself die, if it meant his family would die, too? Wouldn’t it be less selfish of him to comply with the like
s of Vance so his family could live safe and unharmed?

  Then, in a distant corner of his mind, he remembered the peace and joy he’d felt the moment his predecessor, Martin, had passed the mantle of Servitude upon him so many years ago now, though the thought faded the moment it occurred to him, leaving him in the cold gloom once more.

  He was so weak he felt like he was already dying. God, help me, he prayed. Please, please help me.

  “I’M NOT so sure this is going to work out,” Kaori said as Bobby pulled into Randy’s long driveway. Snow completely coated the gravel, and Bobby felt grateful that Randy had had all the potholes filled in prior to the arrival of winter.

  “We’ll find Carly and Matt,” Bobby said. “We have to.”

  “I don’t mean that. I’m talking about asking your friend here for advice. He didn’t seem to feel too warmly toward me last night.”

  “No, that was Frankie. Randy hardly said anything.”

  “I remember which one of them is which. If Randy had trusted that we were telling everyone the truth, he would have come to my defense.”

  Well, that was true enough.

  Bobby parked in front of the ramshackle garage, sending up a prayer of thanks that Frankie’s car did not occupy the driveway. Later he’d have to find a way to make the man forgive him, but Bobby had more pressing matters to worry about now.

  Snowflakes blew into Bobby’s eyes as he and Kaori strode up to the concrete porch. He raised a hand to rap on the door, but it opened before he had the chance to knock.

  “Get in here, Roberto,” Randy said, holding the door open for them. He gazed past them at the darkening sky for a moment, then followed them inside.

  A fire crackled in the hearth. Lupe sat on a couch with Ashley Mason, a stack of children’s books piled beside them. The sight of the child minus her parents sent a pang of sorrow through Bobby’s heart. He couldn’t forget that Phil was missing, too, in addition to the others.

  “What’s going on now?” Randy asked in a low voice, reading Bobby’s face.