“Stay where you are!” the Tracker ordered. “Don’t come any closer!”
Raiff didn’t hesitate, didn’t wait. He snapped his stick outward and watched it unfurl, seeming to lengthen through the air as it went, like a disembodied tentacle. It wrapped around the Tracker’s throat and Raiff dislodged the man’s hold on the woman with a simple yank that further tightened the whip-like weapon in place.
The Tracker flailed wildly, struggling to pry what must’ve felt like icy rubber from his windpipe. He sank to his knees and keeled over face-first, with his hands trying to wedge their way between it and his skin. Then Raiff lashed it sideways, catching the legs of the Tracker who’d tripped over the stool and yanking violently. The man’s feet came out from under him and the back of his skull broke his plunge to the floor.
Raiff retracted the whip back into stick form, seeing no need to kill this Tracker or the others still crumpled on the floor. The force behind them had an army committed to the destruction of the Guardians and Watchers, so killing these four would make little dent in that army’s ultimate capabilities. Sparing their lives ensured they would talk, stoke fear and hesitance into the hearts of other Trackers who would follow them into this undeclared war that had so complicated the Guardians’ plight.
Because the Guardians had two enemies to contend with, one of which was committed to the Guardians’ demise while the other sought to destroy this world as it existed today. Stopping the latter from happening formed the true mission of the Guardians, a mission that just moments earlier had reached its own level of desperation.
THE DANCER’S IN THE LIGHT
Which meant, Raiff thought as he slipped the stick back into his belt, the only real hope mankind had for its survival was in grave danger himself.
Because the real enemy must’ve found the boy at last.
Raiff stepped back to the bar and finished his drink, then stepped over three of the four Trackers he’d dropped en route to the door, needing to find Dancer before more of them did.
37
THE SCENT
“IS SOMETHING WRONG, SIR?” Rathman asked, watching Marsh turn away after reading the contents of his latest incoming message.
Marsh clipped the phone back on his belt, containing his anger over the brief message from his team in the field that minutes earlier had reported a hit. Now they were reporting mission failure with casualties.
“How do you feel about failure, Colonel?” he asked Rathman.
“It’s unacceptable under any circumstances. I don’t think about the successes very long. I never stop thinking about the failures.”
Something about those words relaxed the tension Marsh was feeling. “It would appear I’ve chosen well.”
“I haven’t accepted the job yet, sir.”
“Yes, you have, because you’ve done everything else. I’ve seen your file, Colonel, the parts of it known only to a very select few. You’ve taken on some pretty bad hombres, some of the worst anywhere, through the course of your career in special ops.”
“True enough, sir,” Rathman agreed.
“But you haven’t come up against the very worst yet, the most threatening, not by a long shot. That’s why you decided to sign on before we even met, before you even knew what we’re facing. For the challenge, a true challenge.”
“These Zarim,” the big man started, his bald head looking shiny under the harsh lighting of Marsh’s Memory Room.
“What about them?”
“I believe you said they appear exactly as we do.”
“I suggested it, yes.”
“So how do you track them down, take them out?”
“An excellent question, the answer to which was a long time coming,” Marsh explained. “Occasionally, we’ve been able to take them prisoner. Not often, and when we do they never talk about their origins, purpose, or mission. But we’ve still learned from them, learned plenty. Autopsies, and other scientific analysis have revealed them to be anatomically identical to us in all respects. We still haven’t determined if this is the Zarim’s actual appearance or a disguise they’re able to utilize in order to infiltrate our species toward eventual assimilation.”
“Assimilation?”
“A polite way of saying they’re out to conquer our world. But I digress. Getting back to your question, our researchers have managed to isolate the one primary factor that distinguishes them from us. You know all humans give off radiation.”
“I knew we gave off electricity.”
“Same thing in this case. Call it electromagnetic radiation, also known as thermal, or infrared, radiation. Thermal radiation only transports heat and indicates the temperature of its source. Different people at different times give off differing amounts of radiation. But these differences just indicate who is hotter, and not who is fatter, taller, sadder, or more saintly. Thermal images of a person captured using an infrared camera provide the temperature of the person’s skin.
“What we’ve done,” Marsh continued, getting to the point when he saw Rathman’s eyes drifting, “is take the principle of this infrared camera one step further. The Zarim, Colonel, give off electromagnetic radiation within a different, a higher bandwidth. Not very dramatic, but pronounced enough to be distinct and detectable to the cameras we’ve constructed. And they’re not so much cameras as sensing devices programmed to alert our Tracker teams in the event the presence of one is identified in the immediate proximity.”
“I’m picturing men driving in trucks with mini-satellite dishes on top.”
Marsh smiled tightly. “It sounds like you’ve seen them.”
“Have I, sir?”
“In all probability, yes. Everyone has. But our vans are always concealed in the guise of delivery, maintenance, or local cable vehicles.”
“And they just cruise the streets, what, listening?”
“More like recording readouts, Colonel,” Marsh told him. “It’s a methodical, painstaking process, but necessary and well worth the effort. You’d be surprised at the level of success we’ve managed, less so over the years because there’s less of them left to target. But that doesn’t make our job any less challenging or important. You know what gets me through, keeps me going?”
Rathman’s eyes beckoned him on.
“The possibility that someday, someday, we might lock onto the Zarim who killed my father. I’d like you to be the one to bring him to me, Colonel. I think you’re up to that task.”
“I need to know what’s expected of me, sir, the precise parameters of my mission.”
The walkie-talkie feature on Marsh’s phone beeped before he could answer the big man and he held a hand up to signal a pause, then turned and raised the phone to his ear. Marsh listened to the report, spoke nothing in response. He swung back around, as he fit the phone back into its belt holster.
“We’ve got a blip, Colonel.”
“A blip, sir?”
“An anomaly suggesting alien involvement. It would seem you have your first assignment. There’s a jet fueled and ready.”
“Bound for where, sir?” the big man asked, appearing even taller and broader in that moment.
“San Francisco.”
SIX
MONTER_Y MO_T_R INN
In three words I can sum up everything
I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
—ROBERT FROST
38
BLUE PLATE SPECIAL
ALEX AND SAM DROVE south through the night until the clouds covered the moonlit sky and then broke apart, avoiding the 101 in favor of the Pacific Coast Highway. Fog wafting in from the ocean made the difficult drive even more precarious. But the scenic nature of the PCH belied the fact that it also passed through areas of near-desolation and small, little-known towns all the way to Santa Cruz.
Sam drove with her fingers so tight on the Beetle’s wheel her hands began to ache, then her forearms, and finally her shoulders. She kept starting sentences, only to have no words emerge. Just air, which was fine sin
ce the drive commanded all of her attention. The road was like a winding black ribbon shifting over a coastline so close below that she could hear the waves crashing against the rocks. She welcomed the sight of her headlights reflecting off guardrails, held her breath through the most dangerous curves when there were no guardrails at all.
Every time she looked toward Alex in the passenger seat, he was staring straight ahead out the windshield as if it were a blank screen. A few times when she looked over, the angle of the streetlights bounced his reflection back off the glass. He didn’t seem to be blinking, and Sam couldn’t tell if he was even breathing.
“Should we go to the police, FBI—somebody?” she managed to ask finally, her voice trailing off to barely a whisper at the end as the road ahead blackened anew, thick blankets of fog wafting across it.
No response.
Minutes passed.
“Is there somewhere you want to go?”
Nothing.
“Someone you can call?”
Dumb question, and she felt stupid for even posing it. She understood full well Alex had only his parents, no other relatives even in China, for all she knew.
Sam gave up. Just drove in silence, no words and no destination in mind. Finally a fog bank too thick to risk driving through forced her onto a side road, black as tar, that ran perpendicular to the PCH. It seemed as if she had driven into some spooky netherworld of nothingness until she spotted an old-fashioned diner and truck stop off to the side. It looked practically deserted. Kind of place that was long past a prime lived out in an age before superhighways stitched their way in all directions.
“I’m hungry,” Alex said suddenly.
Sam aimed her Beetle toward the parking lot.
* * *
She watched him eat. A pile of bacon and eggs to go with a double order of toast, while she couldn’t even think of food right now. Sam waited for him to speak, tried again when he didn’t.
“What do we do next?”
Alex didn’t answer right away. There were only a few other customers around them, none at all resembling the drone things dressed as cops or the ash man, who was more of a shadow. Bells hung from the door jangled a few times to announce the entry of new customers, making them stiffen each time. Sam was seated with a clear view of it, and none of those coming and going seemed to even register their presence. This wasn’t the kind of place you ate to get noticed or notice anybody else.
“I need to think,” Alex said, shoveling the last of his eggs into his mouth. “That’s where we need to go, somewhere I can think.”
“You think you’re still in danger? I mean, you are still in danger.”
“We can’t go to the cops.”
“Why?”
“Because those guys were dressed as cops.”
“Sure, but…” Sam’s voice drifted off, her thought incomplete.
“Drop me somewhere,” Alex told her.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere.”
“And just leave you?”
He leaned a little forward. “I don’t want you in danger too.”
“Endangered.”
“What?”
“It’s how you should’ve said it. Hey, didn’t think you were going to get out of our tutoring session, did you?”
She thought her attempt at humor had failed miserably, but Alex smiled, a tight smile.
“And I’m already in danger,” Sam continued.
“Endangered, remember?”
“No, the way I used the phrase was proper.”
“Proper? Who uses that word anymore?”
“The people who write the SAT and ACT tests.”
“Not on my radar right now.”
“Tell me what is.”
“That,” Alex said, pointing over her shoulder out the window.
39
SLEEPOVER
THE MOTEL THEY ENDED up at wasn’t the one Alex had pointed to out the window, because that one and two more located miles from the Pacific Coast Highway had insisted on credit cards.
The fourth one had a clerk who couldn’t have cared less, probably as much as he did about the sign that had so many bulbs burned out it was hard to read. The Monterey Motor Inn was one of those places that looked grown out of the landscape instead of built upon it. So old it might well have been held together by the weeds and dead brush that surrounded the U-shaped assemblage of buildings enclosing a crumbling parking lot with ancient asphalt bleached near-white in the sunniest spots. The office was on the right as Sam pulled into the parking lot, the sign flashing amid a nest of bulbs that spelled out only a portion of the letters.
The clerk had Coke-bottle glasses that made his eyes look huge, but he squinted as he looked up from a comic book when they entered. Then looked away again, back at the page, just as fast. Sam and Alex approached the counter to be met with him raising a hand into the air like a stop sign until he finished the page he was on.
“Cash only.”
“Fine by us,” Alex said.
He noticed a cheap ceramic figurine sporting a boner below the sign KNOCK WOOD and spun it around so Sam wouldn’t see it. She forked over the forty-dollar nightly rate, bemused by his gentlemanly gesture.
The clerk took the bills in a hand that was shiny with oil, smirking as he regarded them. A couple of horny teenagers looking to do what horny teenagers did. Cash was the order of the night because credit cards could be traced too easily.
“We’re not in Monterey,” Sam noted.
“Hey,” said the clerk, “you’re a smart one, aren’t you?”
“So why’s this place called the Monterey Motor Inn?”
“Hey, I don’t even know why it’s called a motor inn at all.” The clerk shrugged. “Phones in the rooms don’t work and the cable’s busted,” he added, handing an old-fashioned key with a massive plastic fob shaped like California across the counter, stained with what looked like chocolate. “I called the guy.”
Sam didn’t care that the phones didn’t work; she had her own, but was afraid to use it.
Because what if they knew who she was, were waiting for her to turn her phone on so they could track it? She imagined switching it on and seeing a dozen messages and missed calls from her parents, wondering where she was, why she hadn’t come home.
Unless something had happened to them. Unless more drone things had showed up at her house too.
The thought gave her chills, made her shudder. And what would she have told her parents anyway, that these things had killed Alex’s parents, that they wanted to take him with them?
It would sound like she’d been raiding the weed stash they grew for purely medicinal reasons, distributed among a number of marijuana dispensaries, thanks to their legal status as registered growers. No, not easy at all to explain drone things that refused to die and a spectral being who spoke out of both sides of his mouth after being separated in half.
What do you think of that, Mom and Dad?
Once registered, they climbed back into the Beetle and drove to their room, easing into a parking slot directly before it, each of the rooms boasting their own separate entrance. Sam counted five other cars for the sixty rooms spread over two twin levels.
The room was just what she expected: old and worn, but good enough. A single bar of soap cloaked in an unmarked white wrapper and a pair of plastic cups stacked one inside the other atop the counter. The toilet bowl was stained and the seat wobbly, thanks to a missing bracket. Sam switched the dull bathroom light off, then back on again. Alex was sitting on one of the double beds, staring at the nineteen-inch tube television screen like something was showing other than his own reflection.
Vending machines lined the walkway on the side their room was located, the steady whir of the soda machine and regular thunk of the ice dispenser slipping through the walls in the quiet. The motel marquee’s stubborn bulbs flickered and flashed, sending an alternating wave of red and blue light pouring through the flimsy window blinds, which were to
rn at the bottom.
Sam sat down on the edge of her bed, staying there until Alex finally laid down atop the bedcovers, clutching the tiny wooden statue of Meng Po as if it were a teddy bear.
“I want you to leave,” he said, breaking the tense silence. “I don’t want anybody else I care about getting hurt.”
“We’ve been over this, Alex.”
“So we’re going over it again,” he said, without looking at her. “You got me this far. That’s enough. Go home, please.”
“My answer’s still the same.”
“It wasn’t a question.”
“Would you leave me?”
He looked at her finally.
“You wouldn’t, would you?” Sam continued. “No more than you’d leave that kid who was about to get smashed last night.”
“He was my teammate. It’s what we do.”
“Well,” Sam said, lying back on the second bed, “this is what I do.”
40
JANUS
“I BELIEVE WE’RE READY now, Doctor,” Donati heard the disembodied voice say and slid his chair closer to his computer.
Six hours had passed since Donati called for an alert, that much time taken to assemble the Janus team—no small challenge given two of the five were in truly remote regions and had to be transported to where service was available. Even with that, one remained out of touch, leaving only four boxes on his computer with bar grids that danced in accordance with which one of the participants was speaking. No names had been exchanged and, for all Donati knew, the voices had been scrambled for security purposes as well.
“We’ve all had a chance to review your classified report from eighteen years ago on the explosion and its aftermath,” the voice, associated with the top left-hand square on Donati’s screen, continued, “along with the addendum material filed in the wake of your call for an alert earlier today.”
The Rising Page 12
