Flying (13 page)

“Whatever.” I turn away as he bounds up the stairs in, like, three steps.

He touches my shoulder. “How are your scratches?”

“Healing.”

I turn around and face him, crossing my arms over my chest.

“Your hair's all wet,” he says.

“So?”

“So, your mother will kill me if you catch cold,” he says.

I blink hard. I try to focus on the promise of his words. “Do you think we'll really find her?”

“Yes. I do. We have to.”

Water drips down my spine. I really did not dry off well. “And are you going to tell me what's going on?”

“How about I tell you in the car?”

I eye him. “You have a car?”

“Of course I have a car. Actually, it's a truck.”

I think about it for a second. “Where are we going?”

“Regional headquarters.”

“Regional headquarters. So official,” I say. “Can I bring Lyle?”

He straightens up, all rigid-backed. “He's already too involved, Mana. I don't want to be responsible for him, too. You're already too much.”

I bristle.
Too much?
“You're not responsible for me.”

“Of course I am.”

“Right,” I say, totally resisting the urge to argue. My mother raised me well. Mom … “Okay. Let's go.”

We book it down the stairs and he
has
straightened up the living room a little bit. You can actually walk across the floor without stepping on coasters and cushions and books now.

“Thanks,” I say, gesturing at the floor.

“Your mom's a neat freak. Seeing that mess would drive her crazy,” he says, opening the front door. “I didn't finish cleaning the kitchen, though.”

“I will later.”

“Sure.” His eyes cloud over and he motions for me to hurry up and follow him. “Get a jacket.”

I pick up an old one, navy blue, minimally warm, but it has a cute light-blue cable-knit hat and mittens stuffed into the pockets. I eye him, standing on the porch, waiting, eyes scouting up and down the street, all wary-confident like a soldier or a cop.

“You know,” I say, pulling the coat on, “I'm probably not being very smart—trusting you like this.”

He turns to gaze at me. The early morning sunlight makes a glowing halo around his dark hair. “You trust me?”

“Well, not really.”

He straightens my hat over my ears. “Good. Trust no one, Mana. Not anymore. Okay?”

“Not even you?”

“Not even me.”

I follow him down the porch and pick up my duffel bag, because it has my cell and Mr. Penguinman, and my makeup bag and stuff. “Nice. That's a super-nice way to live.”

He stops walking and turns around, cringing. “I'm sorry for that. For the way you have to live now.”

I'm not sure what he means, but I know that I'm sorry, too.

He leads me down the driveway and around the corner, where there is a large, black pickup truck parked at the side of the road, right outside the Johnsons'.

“Yours?” I ask as he unlocks it with his key fob.

“Obviously,” he says as the truck beeps.

I climb in on my side. He jumps in and turns it on. It smells new. We start driving down the road past Lyle's house. I check to make sure my cell phone is in my duffel and transfer it to my coat pocket. I'd try to call Lyle but, knowing Mrs. Stephenson, he would get grounded just for talking to me now.

“So, are you going to ask me where we're going?” China says, turning out of the subdivision.

“You already said ‘regional headquarters,' in that nice, cryptic way of yours.”

He turns to face me. His eyes flash. “You think I'm cryptic?”

“No offense, but I'm more interested in what's going on with my mom than figuring out how you should fill out that question on matchmeup.com, okay? Or are you more of a lovemecupid.org kind of guy, or maybe hornyhotsingles.com?”

He sinks his teeth into his lip, and for a second I think that he really is pretty hot, but then he talks again and spoils it. “Fine. I told you that we hunted aliens.”

“Right.”

“With what you've seen, you're actually doubting me?” The one hand he's been casually draping across the steering wheel suddenly clenches. The knuckles whiten. He's got a temper, this guy.

I cross my legs and open the heat vent wider, hoping to inspire it to bust out some more warmth, and try to explain. “No. I believe there are aliens or … something. It's just hard to imagine my mom hunting them.”

“She's really good at it,” he says. “She's pretty much the best there is.”

I have this sudden vision of Mom all decked out in black leather with these monster-alien-killing guns holstered to her waist. It is too ludicrous. I push the image away. “Okay. Let's just pretend that I totally accept this idea and you can continue on with your little story.”

“Bitter.”

“I am having a tough twenty-four hours. And I love my mom, but I'm mad at her for keeping all this from me.”

He runs his nondriving hand through his hair. “Okay. Have you ever heard any alien conspiracy theories?”

“No.” This is kind of a lie, because Lyle talks about this stuff when we're alone, but lately I zone out and stare at his hands or quads or lips instead. It's a lot more interesting.

China lets out a big breath, disappointed. “Great. Okay, I'll start at the recent beginning. There are a lot of beginnings. In the 1930s, the United States government realized that there were aliens monitoring the earth. Some of these aliens seemed indifferent. Some seemed kind of nice. Some seemed evil.”

“Like Dakota the racist with the acid-tongue issue from last night?” I say.

“Right. So the government struck a deal with some of these aliens. They wanted to abduct a handful of humans every so often. The government agreed.”

“What?”

“I know. The government agreed, in return for technology, alien technology. The aliens promised there would be very few human abductions and only for the purpose of trying to keep humans healthy and viable. But they lied. The abductions were many, many more than the government expected. And then there were the mutilations … and experimentations…”

Like in my nightmares.

Even though there's nothing in my stomach, I feel like I am going to throw up. I must cough or gag, because China's hand lands on my arm. “Mana? You with me?”

I try not to sigh, but instead I just sort of whine, which is really no better. “I wish Lyle were here.”

“What? Why?”

“He would understand what you're talking about.”

“The boy would understand? Okay, well, the Windigos … the gray men … they're cyborgish, and they're really underlings, doing others' bidding. That's the best way I can explain it. They abduct humans. Some they return. Some they exterminate. Some they mutilate. They take eyes, genitals, and bore tiny perfect holes in people's shoulders and arms, extracting muscles.”

“Why?”

“We don't know.” He takes his hand off my shoulder and it feels to me like he does know but isn't telling.

“You don't know a lot, no offense,” I bait him, as he turns onto the highway.

“True.”

We're heading south on the highway, like we're going to Boston.

“So, since the 1930s, special portions of the government have dealt with the alien issue. We've tried to expand on the technology, which has been farmed out to multiple independent contractors. At the same time, we've tried to keep the public from finding out about the alien threat. And believe me, there's a threat. There are at least eighteen different species monitoring the earth.”

“And all of them are bad.”

“No. Not all of them.”

“So, why can't we just ask the good ones for help?”

“We have.”

I let this sink in, and I feel like there's more there that I should be asking, but I want to get to the real issue. “What does this have to do with my mom disappearing?”

He clears his throat. “For all this time, the government has kept this information from the president and his cabinet.”

“What? That makes no sense. The president is supposed to be the one protecting the country and making all these decisions.”

“The theory was that the presidents change too often. Some of them might panic and tell the public. You can never tell how levelheaded or how intelligent a president elected by the American public will be. It isn't like there's an IQ test or a stress test or any kind of freaking test that would make it easier. Anyway, Ronald Reagan came really close, back in the 1980s. He was always talking about alien threats. Nobody figured out what he meant, and he didn't even have one-tenth of the story. It could have been catastrophic if he really knew what was going on.”

“Wow. So, you and my mom…”

“We used to work for the government, but we defected, basically. Your mom did a couple years after you were born. She took up a new identity and began work for a rogue branch, the TTT, that's determined to gather enough evidence to tell the president what's really going on.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And we had all the evidence in a chip, finally,” he says. His eye twitches.

“Seriously? A chip? You couldn't come up with anything more original? Wow. So let me guess, my mother had the chip, so they took her,” I say. “Did you guys ever think of maybe making a backup?”

He accelerates and clears his throat again. “Of course we did.”

We start passing a convoy of National Guard trucks, all dark gray, covered in the back with some sort of rubbery tarps, full of men on missions. I wonder what they would think of our conversation, what they would think about the gray men and the boy with the acid tongue.

I wait for China to continue. He doesn't.

I prompt him, “You made a backup, and…”

“And the agent who had it was taken. Just like your mother.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” I start. “You make a
lot
of backups; everybody knows that. Even I know that. I cannot believe my mother wouldn't have made a thousand backup chips. This is the kind of woman who alphabetizes her to-do lists.”

“It's not that easy, Mana. It's encrypted stuff, high-level codes, massive programs. There are lists of every person who's ever been abducted, every person who has been infiltrated, all the companies that have alien technology—a massive trail. It's decades and decades of work.” His cheek twitches again.

“Still, it seems pretty stupid to just have two copies.” And it doesn't add up. Something doesn't seem right to me.

“We were going to make more. But it all happened so fast. We didn't have time.” His voice is higher now, agitated.

“Right,” I say.

China starts to say a word that begins with the
sh
sound, but a loud pounding noise behind both our heads cuts off his sentence. We both turn to look. I gasp. It's Lyle—Lyle knocking on the rear window of the cab. Okay? I can't figure out what he thinks he's doing. The wind blows his hair in random directions and he pounds at the window with something dark and metal. My heart speeds up, all happy to see him, even though he's in the back of the freaking truck. “Lyle? What are you doing?”

“Let me in!” he yells. “I'm freezing. Let me in!”

He pounds harder and I start to pull open the window. China switches his driving hand to his left. He stops me, swats my arm away from the window, keeping me from opening it, and does it all in a super-macho, secret-agent-in-charge way.

“He has a gun,” China mutters. “I can't believe he has a gun. I'm getting complacent.”

“Pull over!” I yell.

He doesn't listen. Instead he yanks out his own gun. He points it at Lyle. He's still driving.

Lyle's mouth drops open. He ducks.

“Jesus!” I yell, and grasp China's arm. The truck swerves only the tiniest of bits.

He snarls at me, “You'll kill us. Never touch the driver unless you are prepared to roll the motor vehicle over. I wish your mother had taught you a couple of—”

“You cannot shoot Lyle!” I interrupt.

“He's in the back of my truck with a gun, Mana. Of course I can shoot him.”

“Pull over!” I yank his gun arm. “Pull over, now!”

He sighs. “Fine. But the little bugger better have a good explanation for why he's in my truck with a gun.”

“I'm sure he does,” I say as we pull over to the side of the highway. I let go of his arm. He called Lyle a bugger? Seriously? A bugger? What kind of word even is that?

China doesn't put his gun away. “Right.”

Cars flash by us. The sky lets loose with some snowflakes. Big naked trees fill the land outside the highway.

China eyes me and gets his bossy voice on as he unbuckles and opens the door. “Wait in the truck.”

“Sure,” I say, jumping out of my side of the truck. “Absolutely.”

 

CHAPTER 9

“Put the gun down.” China fast-walks around the truck. His arm is outstretched like a cop in one of those reality law enforcement shows. He's all authority and decision and strength, and it's basically kind of scary. His finger is on the trigger of his own gun. His own gun points at Lyle.

The wind blows me off balance as I hop out of my side of the truck. I slip, hold the side of the tailgate, and start praying that Lyle isn't about to die.

But Lyle isn't wimping out here. He stands in the back of the truck like a perfect target, not even hiding behind the side or anything, which is what he should be doing. Lyle's slightly shaking arm points at China's big bulkiness.

“No,” he says, in a voice that is pretty calm and serious. “
You
put the gun down.”

Cars whiz by. An ugly gray sedan slides in the slush a little bit but makes it back to its lane.