Retrieval (13 page)

“Having seen you all, I gotta wonder what the hell you tell folks? I mean, quads back then, even now, would’ve been highly publicized, yeah? I can see by your face, that’s a question for another time maybe.” He shook his head and continued.

“Anyway, he offered my company an obscene amount of money to locate his children and bring them back to him. He told me they were in danger, and there were people who would do anything to use them as leverage against him.

“He gave me what turned out to be decent intel on your location, though he left out some pretty important information, like how you can disappear and reappear at will, or how you can give back exactly like you got or worse.” Sebastian finished with a twist to his lips.

“I don’t think even
he
is aware of exactly what we are all capable of,” Skylar mused before she continued. “General Post used to be your commanding officer when you were SEALs right? Did you know that General Post also sits on the Senate Subcommittee for Genetics Research?” Sky asked him quietly.

“No I didn’t know that. What are you saying?”

*

“I’m not intimating anything if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m simply informing you that the members of that subcommittee are directly responsible for the actions undertaken by Smythe-Ward’s company, GenTech, on behalf of the United States Government. In fact, GenTech, while a private corporation, is heavily funded by the U.S. government and depends greatly on their financial support. Your General Post is a military liaison to the subcommittee. He answers directly to Senator Cobb of Massachusetts. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting Senator Cobb?” Skylar couldn’t contain the shudder of revulsion that the man’s name sent through her.

Sebastian’s head moved from side to side. She couldn’t literally see the wheels of his mind, but she’d bet her last penny they were turning at Mach1 speed.

“No? Well, he’s not a pleasant individual. By my estimation he’s responsible for the death of over a thousand Haitian refugees in the late nineties after they attempted to seek protection within the waters off the Florida coast. Haven’t heard of that little incident either? Allow me to explain, so you know just whom you are dealing with.

“In nineteen ninety-nine, I was twelve years old. My adoptive parents, Robert and Sarah McKannon, were wonderful people who ran a mission for homeless immigrants in Savannah, Georgia. My sisters and I helped whenever we were able to. Sarah homeschooled us, though we were much more advanced than she could handle. She used to tease us that she learned more than we did during study time. I digress.”

The men were intent, their gazes hard but bright. Sebastian’s jaw tensed. She irrationally wanted to lick along it.

“Thousands of Haitians fled their homeland in whatever transportation they could find after a violent coup attempt. Rickety boats strung together with fishing line, some people even tried to float on random pieces of wood strung together with clothing. They formed large floating rafts that carried hundreds. Needless to say they didn’t make it far, but of the ones that survived the ocean and the storms that summer, some managed to make it as far north as Savannah. We took them in. I remember hearing stories from the children about men in large metal boats attacking them, shooting at them, and sometimes just running right over people floating on the board rafts. They spoke of those men as if they were demons from hell itself. They told of how some of the people, their mothers and fathers, sisters, and brothers had been gathered up and taken away on big metal boats.

“Two weeks after the first of the immigrants arrived in our mission, the National News broadcast a story of bodies floating in the Atlantic. It was a sad story. Thousands of Haitians fleeing poverty and oppression littered the waters off the coast of the richest country in the world. I remember seeing Senator Cobb. He was so suave and debonair as he was interviewed about the terrible tragedy. You see, at the time he was the ambassador to Haiti and proclaimed to feel the loss of each life as if it were a member of his own family.” She snorted indelicately as she recalled how oily the man’s appearance had seemed to her.

His words had rung hollow, and her head had buzzed at what she’d perceived as evil emanating in great rings around him. She’d even felt a spurt of fear as he looked into the camera, and she’d sworn he was looking directly into her, Skylar McKannon, age twelve in Savannah, Georgia. She shook off that memory and looked at Sebastian to see if he was still with her before she continued.

“I remember thinking he was an awful liar, and my sisters agreed. Yes, the bodies scattered in the waters of the Atlantic were horrible, but what about the ones who’d been taken? What happened to them? After hearing the smallest of the children in the mission cry out in their dreams, I took it upon my shoulders to do some research and find out.”

She’d actually thought she’d be able to do something.

“You have to understand. At twelve, I had about six years of fully understanding that I was different, and that I had special—well, we’ll just say powers for lack of a better term. When I talked with people I had this uncanny ability to ferret out the truth from a lie. You wouldn’t believe how many people will lie to a youngster just to get them to be quiet. I first asked Mama Sarah if she could find out anything about anyone being saved from the ocean. She patted me on the head and said, ‘Of course some were saved. There living in the mission below us now, child.’ I gave up on her right away; she had so much to do, and she wasn’t listening to what I was really asking her.

Then I went to the library and looked up everything I could in the papers from Miami all the way up the coast to Washington. I found nothing. Nothing. I couldn’t believe that the children I heard crying were all just emotionally distressed at what they’d been through. I mean, yes, they were emotionally distressed, of course, but their cries. It hurt to hear them. Physically hurt my heart and brought me to tears every single time”

She paused for a moment and took a deep breath. She tried to overcome that memory as Bleak asked her a question.

“You said the mission was below your house? How could you hear children crying from another floor?” His tone indicated his disbelief already, and she hadn’t even gotten to the really good stuff yet.

“The mission was below us in the way that our house was situated on a hill, and the building housing the mission was about a mile down the road. ‘Below’ is a relative positional term.”

“Oh, well, that makes it even more bizarre. How could you hear them from a distance that far away?”

Bleak was persistent, she’d give him that.

“I have exceptional hearing. You could literally be over two miles away from me, and I can hear everything you say, assuming there is no interference. And please,” Sky said as she lifted her hand to stop the question Bleak was about to voice, “Don’t ask me what type of interference. I don’t know you quite well enough to divulge all my secrets.” She smiled to lessen the sting of her refusal, but the message came through loud and clear: Don’t ask questions they knew she wasn’t prepared to answer.

“You’re bullshitting me. No way can you physically hear that far away,” Morrissey said in a rush. He looked at Sebastian but cut him off when Sebastian would have stopped his tirade. “No, Sebastian. She’s either honest with us, or I’m out.”

“Shut up, New York. Let the
petite fille
speak, and then make your decisions,” Rover said interrupting what looked to become a physical confrontation if Sebastian’s darkening face was read correctly.

“Yeah, Morrissey. Shut the fuck up for a minute. Listen to her before you go ape shit.” Bleak added his support in an effort to deescalate the situation.

She ignored all of them, took a deep breath, and forged on.

“So there I was, calling all types of Washington higher-ups, pretending to be a concerned constituent of whatever locality they were representing. I tried to find out any information on what I was slowly coming to realize was a cover-up of massive proportions. They all lied. I could hear it in their voices over the phone lines.

“The number of bodies pulled from the Atlantic ranged anywhere from five to six hundred. Assuming there were two hundred plus that would remain forever unaccounted for, and the ones who had made it to American land numbered around a hundred, which left four hundred people gone. Vanished. I looked inside the eyes of those children at the mission, and I
knew
their memories. What they cried out about was true. It happened. Those four hundred Haitians had been taken in the big metal boats, and nobody had any idea what had happened to them.

“Hell … they refused to even look into the matter to see if something could have happened to them. I gave up about a month into my search. I didn’t know what else to do except try to comfort the remaining children. I was able to help some, but many held on too tightly to their memories. I guess bad memories are better than none at all. I tried to heal them, but I couldn’t.”

The air grew heavy, and a draft blew through the living room, ruffling the drapes. She tried to cap off her emotions as the men looked at each other. Sebastian’s fist clenched and unclenched, muscles bunching under his shirt.
Calm down and finish the story before you get them all riled up or wreck the place
.

“About two months later, Mama Sarah came to me and asked me if I’d noticed anyone hanging around the mission that maybe wasn’t supposed to be there. I told her no, but it was a lie. I was observant, even then. To this day, I know certain things about my surroundings without having to actually see them, so I knew when someone was new to my environment. Someone had been following me specifically for a couple of weeks, but I couldn’t get the courage to approach him about it. No way, though, was I going to tell her about him. I thought she’d think I was nuts. I think I also knew what he represented, and I didn’t want to bring that into my world. In my naïveté I didn’t realize it was already there, and nothing I did would prevent what was coming at that point.”

She stopped for a moment, took a sip of her wine, and stared out the big window now exposed by her wind. It was dark, and for her there was comfort to be found in the blackness of night. It was a balm to her frayed nerves.

“Who was it, Sky?” Sebastian asked in that husky, deep voice that sent shivers of an altogether inappropriate type down her spine.

“It was evil. Evil has many names, but this particular brand’s name was Warren Goolsby.”

“Why was Warren Goolsby following you?” Sebastian gently nudged her in the direction she’d been heading before thoughts of the devil interrupted her.

She took a deep breath, struggled to get her lungs to work. That night in Savannah hadn’t been her first run-in with Goolsby. There’d been another time she’d been exposed to him, though he hadn’t known it. She shuddered and pushed that memory deeper. She couldn’t bring it to the light, not now.

“He was looking for my sisters and me. I had no idea that my questions had been monitored or reported. Why would they send someone after me you ask? Why would they care if a twelve-year-old from Savannah, Georgia was asking questions about Haitian immigrants who were supposed to have died at sea? I found out later why, but you better believe they cared. Some of the congressmen I had contacted about the Haitians reported my questions because I seemed to have knowledge that they didn’t want me to have. Apparently, Smythe-Ward and GenTech, as well as Senator Cobb from the Subcommittee for Genetic Research, got wind of my questions. Their cronies in crime were vigilant about protecting their interests. Nobody was supposed to have known about the ones who were taken away. They wanted to know how I knew, and whom I had told.

“I’ll never forget,” Skylar reminisced sadly, “it was a Thursday, and the girls and I were looking forward to eating some of the peach cobbler I’d made the night before. We were walking home from the mission after we’d finished our chores. It was thundering and raining, but I didn’t see any lightning. We ran as fast as we could. We were little girls who didn’t like to get wet—I mean, sugar melts, yeah? So we were running, and I heard a
ping
, like a rock off a coke can. I looked behind me, and then I felt a sharp pain in my thigh. There was something sticking out of my leg.

“I yelled at my sisters to run home, not to look back. Then he was there. He was smaller than I’d originally thought, not overly muscled, but his eyes were pure hate. He came up on me pretty quick. By this time the medicine in the dart had begun to permeate my system. He bent down as I dropped to one knee in shock, not because I was drugged as he’d expected. I could feel the drug coursing through my blood, but the effects were negated by the adrenaline pouring through my veins.

“I pulled the dart out of my leg, and when he reached for me I stuck it in his neck. He screamed and tried to hit me, but I backed away. My hand was still on the dart and I pulled it, slicing through more of his neck as I backed away. He was bleeding everywhere—gushing, shooting streams of bright red blood. I must have struck his carotid, and he finally fell. But then I heard my sisters. They were screaming too you see, and by the time I turned around to see what the problem was, they were back with me,” she finished in a whisper. Tears burned her eyes.

*

Silence reigned for a good five minutes as the men in the room gave her time to get a grip. Sebastian noticed that her skin was pale again, and he ached as he heard the pain in her voice as she remembered these things. But he needed the information. As much as he hated jogging down her shitty memory lane, it had to happen.

King had placed his head on her shoulder, and Sebastian wanted to move the dog out of the way and pull her into his arms. But he sensed that she needed to purge at least this memory before the rest of the story could come out.

*

“I was so young and yet already so old, but I had no idea the things I was about to unlock within myself. Looking back, if it hadn’t been for this one incident I may have remained blissfully unaware of all of my, um, abilities. I don’t know now if that would be a good or bad thing, and either way I don’t guess it matters much.” She took a shuddering breath and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.