Kimberly Derting - The Taking

“Quarantined?”

It was Simon who answered me. “They’re probably searching for evidence as well as contaminants. I wasn’t lying when I said they’d do anything to get their hands on you.”

“Assholes,” Willow growled, reminding me that we had an enemy in common.

“What about my dad? Has anyone heard from him? Did they get to him too?”

Jett went to work on the keyboard. “We’ve been following the online chatter—his message boards and chat rooms, all the places he usually frequents. So far he hasn’t made an appearance. But we also haven’t heard anything on the police or No-Suchers’ frequencies to make us think he’s been taken in for questioning either. He seems to have gone off the grid for now.” A satellite picture of my dad’s trailer popped up, and it was like looking at my mom’s house. It, too, had been quarantined, tented in plastic sheeting and enclosed by a chain-link barricade.

This time I could read the signs that were hung on the fencing: WARNING: RESTRICTED AREA

And at the bottom of the sign, in bold red letters: USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.

The whole thing—the signs, the fencing, the quarantine—it was all insane.

“So, I never asked this, but when we were at the bookstore, Tyler and me, there was an agent who . . .” I stopped because it was hard to find a way to put the words together just right.

But I didn’t have to finish my thought, because Jett turned around to look at Simon—another silent exchange. They already understood what I wanted to know.

“He killed himself,” Willow answered before either of the two boys had a chance. “Shot himself. That’s how we knew you were in trouble; their frequencies blew up with word of an agent being exposed to a Code Red and offing himself.”

Code Red. So that’s what he’d meant.

I turned to Willow, who didn’t seem to have any qualms about answering my questions. “And Jackson?”

“Was that the other guy’s name?” She shrugged, and again I was struck by how easily they accepted all this. “They got him. He was exposed, too, I guess. Must’ve been fresh blood still on the floor when he came in to see what happened.”

I shifted on my feet. “How do you know he was exposed?”

Simon and Jett exchanged a look again, and again it was Willow who didn’t mince words. “We already got confirmation that he died.”

“Died? How?” I asked, ignoring both boys and turning all my attention to her now.

“How do you think?” she answered as if I were dense.

My voice cracked. “Already?”

Simon pushed past Willow to stand in front of me. “He probably touched it—the blood. If it made contact with his skin, it would have reacted more quickly.”

But that didn’t make sense. “It was on my clothes,” I explained. “Tyler . . . he touched me after I saw you. He should’ve—”

Simon interrupted. “It wasn’t fresh then. There’s only about a sixty-second window when contact makes a difference. Airborne’s bad, but skin contact’s worse.”

I don’t know if that was supposed to make me feel better, that Tyler would outlive Jackson because he hadn’t touched my blood within that sixty-second window, but it didn’t. Dead is dead.

I shook my head, not wanting to be like them. Not wanting to be okay with all this, to accept death so willingly. Already, though, I could feel the hollowness consuming me, and I wondered if this was how it started. The carving out of your emotions. If I would soon be empty, a shell. “There has to be a way,” I murmured, collapsing bonelessly into one of the chairs.

And then it was Jett—Jett who’d only been twelve when he’d been taken but was now sixty-four years old. Jett who looked at me with those confusing, kaleidoscope eyes when he said the words that gave me back some of myself. “Maybe there is a way.”

I shot to my feet. “Wh—what are you talking about? What are you saying?”

Simon looked as confused as I felt, and behind me, Willow was silent.

Jett blinked rapidly and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “What if . . .” He rubbed his hands on his pants. “What if he could be one of the returned?”

It was as if Jett had poured gasoline on an open flame.

“What you’re suggesting is crazy!” Simon shouted, waving his hands as he spoke. “No one’s ever done that. Not on purpose. Even if we wanted to, there’s no way of even knowing where or when one of these ‘takings’ might occur.”

“Besides,” Willow added, a million times more subdued than Simon was but just as convinced. “There’s no guarantee he’d even come back. Most don’t.”

I didn’t know that. I knew some didn’t, but not most . It didn’t matter, though. What Jett was suggesting, it was crazy. Beyond crazy.

It was as good as murder as far as I was concerned.

It was taking a normal, living, breathing human and turning him into something . . . less than human .

I’d be sentencing Tyler to a life where he would no longer be normal. Where he’d be a walking time bomb because his blood was toxic to everyone around him. And where he’d never age like other people, so he’d be forced to give up all his friends and family in order to keep his secret.

He’d be a freak, like me.

“Think about it,” Jett went on. “What if we can figure it out? What if we can pinpoint a location and take him there?”

“How?” Simon interrupted. “Where?”

Encouraged by Simon’s questions, Jett sprang into action. He went to one of the walls where he’d already hung the mostly decimated map I’d taken from my dad’s place. He tapped it, looking at me. “I enhanced the map we got from you. . . .” He went to the nearest workstation and pulled up an exact replica of the map, only this one was easier to read, the smudged lines clearer and more legible. “I also tried the USB, but it’s too damaged. I couldn’t get anything off it.”

Impatient, Willow chimed in. “Will you please just get to the point?”

“The CDs were another matter,” Jett continued, oblivious to Willow’s short temper. He grinned like a kid on Christmas morning. “Those were your dad’s backup files for the past five years, and your dad is one righteous record keeper. Most of what he had on those discs we already knew: names, dates, locations—that kind of thing.”

“So?” Simon interrupted. “What’s your point?”

“The point is, there’s one place that comes up in his files numerous times as a taking site. One place that’s shown up again and again and again and again in the past five years that we’ve never been able to pinpoint.”

Jett jumped up from his chair and tapped a spot on the map with the tip of a pen. “And it’s not that far from us.”

I stared at the distorted map of Washington State. “Where is it?” I asked, because even if I wasn’t willing to entertain the idea of letting Tyler become like me— like us —I needed to hear Jett out.

“It’s called Devil’s Hole.” Jett breathed the name, filling it with as much wonder as he could manage.

“Devil’s? Hole?” The skepticism in Willow’s voice was obvious.

Again Jett didn’t seem at all discouraged by her cynicism. “It’s here, not too far north of the Oregon border,” he explained as he traced a path from where we presumably were—in an abandoned nuclear bunker below the ground—all the way to the place where Jett believed Tyler had a chance of being taken.

“There’s been a lot of talk about it being just an Indian legend. In fact, there was this Native American shaman named Red Elk who once told reporters that his father had first taken him to see the hole back in 1961. He claimed that not only was the hole ‘endless’ but that strange things happened whenever he went near it. He never really said what those strange things were, but there were others who swore that animals refused to go anywhere near the giant crater. Some have said it’s the gateway to hell.” He flashed a crooked smile.