Ever Hayes - Redemption

“Call if you need anything.” I hugged him.

“Don’t worry about me, Ryan,” Dad said. “I can shoot better than you.”

Kate kissed him on the cheek and playfully punched my arm. “Fortunately, we all can.”

“Don’t you have to pee again? It’s been ten minutes.”

Even if the smiles were short-lived we all needed those light moments.

On the way to the Hexagon, I asked Axel what it was he wanted to show Danny. He wouldn’t say and my twenty questions stalled—each yielding the same generic response. “If I find out anything important, I’ll tell you.”

By six, we were gathered in the Area 52 wing of the Hexagon—something that never would have been allowed if it hadn’t been Danny’s sister missing. I was trying to listen to Nicole’s instructions on how to operate the zoom features and controls on the satellite cameras, but I was rather overwhelmed by our electronic surroundings. What is this place? It’s like a Buffalo Wild Wings with no food. We were each given a screen to watch—covering a two-square-mile sector of the part of Kauai that had been blacked out—and told to look for anything even the least bit unusual. We watched six hours of recorded feed, from the time the blackout ended to roughly 6:00 a.m., but no one found anything. By then it was after midnight and we were all exhausted. Danny pointed out the bedrooms and suggested we get some sleep.

Most of the others stood up and followed his directions, but Tara didn’t move. I saw Danny kneel down beside her and say something. She put her head on his shoulder, and he rested a hand on her arm. When she finally stood up, Tara had tears streaming down her face. It was clear she didn’t want to stop looking for Emily, but she walked away from the computers anyway—directly toward me. We walked in silence down the hall to a room full of bunk beds. She didn’t tell me what Danny had said to her, and I didn’t push it. I wanted to lie beside her and hold her, but she didn’t seem the least bit interested in sharing the bottom bunk. She whispered goodnight and slid under the covers, clothes and boots still on. I stood there for a minute, not quite sure how to feel, before climbing up to the top bunk. As I lay there in the darkness, listening to Danny and the Pack talk out at the computers, I finally heard her whisper something. “He said it’s not your fault, Ryan.”

I felt a lump form in my throat, but I didn’t move—and I didn’t say anything back. That Danny had to try to convince her otherwise told me exactly how she felt. She obviously blamed me for Emily being gone. I covered my face with my hands and bit back an exasperated sigh. I understood blaming me was a lot easier than blaming herself—and I could take it for now—but… Please, God, keep Emily safe. Please… keep them all—the rest of them anyway—alive . I couldn’t imagine Tara’s response toward me if Emily wasn’t brought home safely. And I didn’t know how I’d handle Hayley not coming back. I was determined not to think about it—but losing that fight every waking minute.

Around five in the morning I heard some shouting and banging down the hall. I swung my head over and looked at the bunk beneath mine. Tara was gone. I climbed out of bed and hurried into the surveillance lab, where almost everyone else was looking up at a giant overhead screen. I could see a small black circle at the end of a long dirt driveway.

“What is that?” I asked Jenna.

“A house, we think. But we can’t see it. That black circle is blocking all our camera angles, even infrared.”

“And that’s—”

“Definitely not normal.” She finished my question as a statement. “When the rest of the blackout lifted off Kauai, this spot remained. They think it’s intentional. Someone there is doing this.”

I could feel my heart accelerating. Finally. Hope . Nicole zoomed in on a set of fresh mud tracks going around the black circle and into a smaller building—a shed or something. We could see the back end of a mud-covered van sticking out of the shed. Nicole brought up the feed of the front gate of the compound and rewound the recording the full forty hours it could go back before the blackout. Not once did that van appear on the screen, even though it definitely had been driven recently. It had to have come down the driveway during the blackout. This really could be something . I could see that same hope in Tara’s eyes. Combine the van and satellite scramblers with the fact the house seemed to be in a remote gated compound, and it was the ideal location to hold hostages.

“How did they not find that last night?” I whispered to Jenna.

“From what I’ve seen on the screen, someone had covered the entry with brush. It was really well covered.”

Nicole and Keena were working frantically to reverse the blackout currently blotting out the house—technology versus our master technicians. It took about twenty minutes. “Whose sector was that in?” I wanted to know who had missed this earlier.

“It wasn’t,” was Danny’s surprising reply. “The gate was at the edge of the blacked-out area, but the house was outside the blackout zone. It’s almost like that was part of the plan—to make us think they were hiding in the blackout zone.”

No wonder we missed that black circle. We wouldn’t have been looking for other blackout areas. The kidnappers wanted to travel with cover, but when the cover was lifted and that area was searched, they didn’t want to be in it. Pretty smart actually .

“Wait,” Jenna said out loud suddenly. Everyone turned to look at her. “Shouldn’t we be able to see the van drive down the driveway?”

“No,” Nicole answered. “It’s blacked—”

“No, she’s right,” Keena chimed in. “The blackout zone went to the gate, but not more than a dozen or so feet past it. We watched all the feed before and after the blackout there. And we gave up on the feed of the house because it was always blacked out, but—”

“Not the driveway,” Danny finished her thought. “That’s a half mile of open space, at least.”

“Right.” Jenna nodded. “We need to rewind the feed of the zone just past the gate, before it gets to the blacked-out circle.”

Nicole was already doing it.

“Look where the tire marks initially cut off the driveway and head around the house,” Danny said, pointing at another screen. The live daylight feed on that screen—zoomed in—revealed the tracks were definitely fresh. Danny stood over Nicole’s shoulder as she hammered in numbers and spun the dials. His attention was back on the big screen she was operating. “Run the feed from the beginning of the blackout to the end.”

Less than half an hour after the blackout began, we spotted headlights from what we assumed was the van. We watched it cut off the driveway and drive around the black dot to the shed. As it neared the shed a motion detector light came on. A minute later I heard several gasps around me as two men on the screen—dressed in black with masks—pulled Reagan, Emily, and Abbey out of the back of the van. They stepped briefly into the light then walked them into the shed.

“That was Hayley and the girls, right?”

“No, Dad. It was Reagan.”

“But that was Hayley’s neon yellow Under Armour hoodie.”

“I know. Trust me, it was Reagan.”

“Can you rewind it?” I wasn’t convinced.

Nicole looked at Danny and he nodded. She spun it back.

“Zoom in.” There wasn’t a lot of light, so it was blurry, but the military’s digital technology was amazing—and that definitely wasn’t Hayley. My shoulders slumped and I sat back in my chair. There were no I told you so’s to go with the sympathetic looks I got. Jenna squeezed my shoulder. I sighed. At least they’re still alive .