“Someone’s here.”
“Someone? Some-human-one?”
“Yes.”
Cora held her breath, waiting for Demi to respond. “Black SUVs?”
“Stay put,” said Demi after a pause.
“Stay put?”
Demi had cut the line. Cora stood there, staring at her phone dumbly. The wave of commuters passed, and once again, Sepulveda was a wide, empty lake of asphalt. She stayed rooted in place, torn between running away from whatever was happening at her house and running toward it. But whatever was going down, what could she possibly do to stop it?
There was a nature preserve on the opposite corner to where she stood, a small wetland that had managed to fend off developers. Jaywalking laws be damned, she ran across Sepulveda and toward the marsh. On the opposite side of the marsh was the Circuit City and then the mall. Both wildernesses seemed like good places to lose anyone tracking her.
She had only made it a few hundred feet into the marsh before she discerned the sound of a distant helicopter through the noises of her own huffing and panting. Distant, but growing closer by the second. She stopped running and plastered herself against a tree, her default assumption that they were looking for her. But surely they weren’t—they must be looking for the thing that broke into their house. Why on earth would they be looking for her?
Because I am a witness.
And then she thought about what Eli Gerrard had said the government had been doing to witnesses, the giddy way he’d said it. Witnesses disappeared. When they came back, if they came back at all, their memory was gone. Sometimes permanently.
Cora felt in her pocket for the Bat-phone and started to call Demi, but stopped, remembering what Luciana had said about calling landlines. She instead used her regular cell phone. The phone rang once, twice, three times. Then someone picked up.
“Cora.” The voice belonged to Demi, but Cora could tell from her tone that there was someone else there.
“Mom?” She didn’t know what to say; they hadn’t established any kind of code for this sort of situation. “I’m safe.”
“Good,” Demi replied. Then she was silent, as though on the other end of the line there were some maniac with a gun to her head. Then Demi whispered, “Run.”
Cora froze, unsure whether she had heard her mother correctly, then threw her phone into the marsh, stumbling back into the brush, powering through the long, tall grass. A part of her wondered if she might inadvertently smack into the very thing she had been following, but her senses were tuned to things that might sound human: voices, vehicles, helicopters. Hell, especially the helicopter. She had no idea how to hide herself from a helicopter. What if it had an infrared camera?
She had to get out of the marsh.
She started back toward the direction of the Circuit City, or at least what she thought was the direction of the Circuit City, before she stumbled into the marsh part of the marsh. Her feet plunged into cold, wet clay, trapping her where she was. She tried to back out of it, only to discover that in her haste, she had surrounded herself with it. In the distance, a few egrets looked at her bemusedly before flying away. She struggled to free herself from the mud and had only just made it back onto solid ground before an unseen force pushed her back into the muck, flat on her face.
She tried to scream, but it was as though the air in her lungs had frozen solid, the muscles around her throat refusing to come together in the manner required of screaming. The more she tried to thrash, the greater the force that held her in place, as if her body were turned to plaster. She tried to cry out, but nothing came. She convulsed as though electricity were flowing through her, turning her nerves into jelly. She felt a deep pressure on her neck as though something were trying to burrow in between her vertebrae. Her brain demanded that her voice produce some noise, any noise, but her body wouldn’t obey.
6
Cora’s eyes shot open, and she released the scream she’d been trying to produce. She clapped her hand over her mouth and shot to her knees, breathing hungrily. She’d blacked out, but only for a few seconds, perhaps. She slapped her hand on the back of her neck where she’d felt the pressure, feeling a sticky, warm substance. She looked at her fingers. Blood. Not a lot, but her skin was broken.
She coughed in horror, scanning the marsh to look for where the thing had gone, seeing nothing. That thing had caught her and let her go, tagged her like an animal. Then she saw footprints in the mud—the very same she’d seen in her neighbor’s yard.
She stood up, choking on her own ragged breathing as she rose, her legs wobbling. Was it just a tag? Something benign? The seed of a pandemic, or a larva that might lead to the eruption of a face hugger? She smacked the back of her neck, now unable to shake the idea that the thing had laid eggs in it.
She stopped, remembering that she was also on the run from human parties. It was just before sunrise, and she could hear the distant traffic on either side of her, but nothing that sounded like some militarized police apparatus in hot pursuit. She tried to fling off the mud that clung to her right side and torso. Landing in grass had saved her legs, although her shoes were caked into wet bricks, and her right jaw was covered in mud. Between the flowing lavender pajamas, the Disneyland hoodie, and the filth, she couldn’t have been more conspicuous if she had been wearing clown makeup.
She whirled around, searching frantically for the creature, neither seeing nor hearing anything. Where before she had second-guessed herself, this time there had been real contact. Real, physical contact.
She wanted to run back into the arms of the Men in Black, screaming that an alien had just injected her with something and she’d give up just about any measure of civil liberties if they would please get it out. She probably would have if she didn’t have what Eli Gerrard said about the disappearances and government-induced brain damage banging about in her mind like a pinball. If all those stories were true, and if just being in the wrong place at the wrong time could get your brain fried by the government, what would actual contact net her?
If any time was the time for a Bat-phone, it was now. She flipped it out, began marching in the direction she thought the mall was, and dialed the preprogrammed number for Luciana’s burner.
Luciana didn’t answer on the first try. Or the second. There were two preprogrammed numbers for burner phones, so Cora tried the second number, and Luciana picked up on the fourth ring this time. “Hello?” grumbled her aunt. She sounded exhausted, but not groggy. It didn’t sound like she’d just woken up. “Cora?”
“Lu!” gasped Cora, struggling through the tall grass. “The thing was in our house.”
Luciana took a moment before responding. “The what now?”
“The thing, the … alien thing. It was after Nils. It was in our house!”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the marsh,” she said, at last stumbling onto a footpath. “The thing was in our house, and then it wasn’t, and then Thor was gone, and then I went to look for Thor, and then the Men in Black showed up, and then the thing, the alien thing—” Even saying those words out loud felt ridiculous. “I assume it was an alien thing, I didn’t get a good look at it, it … I don’t know, it followed me to the marsh, and it grabbed me? It—”