“John!” she yells without looking away.
“Right here.”
“Take care of the cops. Keep them away from me.”
Now I understand. I shove the Chest into Sam’s arms, who stands beside me, unsure of what to do. “Guard this with your life,” I tell him. “And stay down!” I turn to Bernie Kosar and communicate that he needs to stay with Sam in case our plan falls apart.
I sprint down the hill as another bolt of lightning, chased by a clap of thunder dark and menacing in tone, flashes across the sky. Good luck, fellas, I think, knowing full well the power of Six’s abilities. You’re going to need it.
I reach the bottom and hide behind an oak. The voices draw near, moving swiftly towards both pillars of light. Rain begins to fall, cold and heavy. I glance up through the thick drops and see both helicopters struggling against the gale-force winds, but somehow still keeping their beams steady. That won’t last for long.
The first two officers blow past me, followed closely behind by a third. I reach out with my mind when they’re fifteen feet away, grab all three in midstride, and yank them towards the thick oak. They surge backwards so fast I have to leap out of the way to keep from being hit. Two of them fall lifelessly to the ground, knocked unconscious by the tree. The third lifts his head, confused, then reaches for his gun. I tear it from its holster before his hand even touches it. The metal feels cold against my palm, and I turn to the two copters and hurl it like a bullet at the nearest. That’s when I see the eyes, doleful and black in the middle of the storm. Soon the old, withered face takes shape. The same face I saw in Ohio when Six killed the beast that wrecked the school.
“Don’t move a muscle!” I hear behind me. “Hands in the air!”
I turn to the officer. Without his gun, he aims his Taser straight at my chest.
“Which is it, hands in the air or don’t move a muscle? I can’t do both.”
He cocks the Taser. “Don’t be a smartass, kid,” he says.
Lightning cracks, followed by a roar of thunder that makes the officer jump in surprise. The officer looks towards the sound, and his eyes open wide in alarm. The face in the clouds, it’s awoken.
I rip the Taser from his hand, then punch him hard in the chest. He sails thirty feet backwards and crashes into the side of a tree. While my back is still turned, the crack of a nightstick slams against my skull. I fall face-first in the mud and sparkling fuzz fills my vision. I turn as quickly as I can, lift my hand towards the cop who hit me, and get a firm grip around him before he’s able to hit me again. He grunts, and with all of my might I throw him as hard as I can straight up in the air. He screams until he’s up so high I can no longer hear him over the copter blades and rumbling thunder. I feel the back of my head and look at my hand. It’s covered with blood. I catch the officer when he’s within five feet of dying. I let him hover a few seconds before tossing him against a tree, knocking him unconscious.
A loud explosion tears through the night, and the whir of the copters cuts off. The wind stops. The rain stops, too.
“John!” Six screams from the top of the hill; and somehow in the pleading, desperate tone of her voice, I know what she needs me to do.
The lights in my hands snap on, two glowing spotlights every bit as bright as those just extinguished. Both helicopters are wrecked and twisted, and smoke pours from them as they free fall. I don’t know what the face has done to them, but Six and I must save the people aboard.
As they torpedo down, the helicopter farthest from me jerks upwards. Six is trying to stop it. I don’t think she’ll be able to, and I know that I can’t. It’s too heavy. I close my eyes. Remember the basement in Athens, the way you captured everything inside the room to stop the speeding bullet. And that’s what I do, feeling everything inside the cockpit’s interior. The controls. The weapons. The chairs. The three men sitting in them. I grab hold of the men, and as the trees begin to snap under the weight of the falling copter, I yank all three out. The copter crashes to the ground.
Six’s copter hits the ground at the same time as mine. The explosions reach out over the treetops, two red balls of fire floating up from the twisted steel. I hold the three men in the air a safe distance from the damage, and bring them carefully to the ground. Then I race back up the hill to Six and Sam.
“Holy crap!” Sam says, his eyes wide-open.
“Did you pull them free?” I ask Six.
She nods. “Just in time.”
“Me too,” I say.
I grab the Chest from Sam and thrust it into Six’s arms. Sam picks up our bags.
“Why are you giving me this?” Six asks.
“Because we have to get the hell out of here!” I say. I grab Sam and drape him across my shoulders. “Hold on!” I yell.
We sprint away, deeper into the hills away from the river, Bernie Kosar in the lead as a hawk. Let the cops try to keep up now, I think.
It’s hard running with Sam on my shoulders, but I still keep a pace three times faster than what he could run on his own. And a far faster pace than any of the officers. Their yelling voices fade away, and after both helicopters just crashed in a heaping mess, who’s to say they’re even following?
After twenty minutes of a full-on sprint, we stop in a small valley. Sweat runs down my face. I shrug Sam off and he drops the bags. Bernie Kosar lands.
“Well, I imagine we’re going to be all over the news again after that,” Sam says.
I nod. “Staying hidden is going to be a lot harder than I thought.” I bend over at the waist, catching my breath with my hands on my knees. I smile, which quickly changes to a kind of incredulous half laugh over what just happened.
Six grins crookedly, adjusts the Chest in her arms, and begins climbing the next hill.
“Come on, guys,” she says. “We’re far from out of the woods just yet.”
Chapter Eight
WE HOP A FREIGHT TRAIN IN TENNESSEE, AND once we are settled Six tells us about her and Katarina being captured while they were in upstate New York, just a month after narrowly escaping the Mogadorians in West Texas. This second time around, after botching the first attempt, the Mogadorians had planned well; and when they stormed the room, they totaled more than thirty in number. Six and Katarina had been able to take a few down, but they were quickly bound, gagged, and drugged. When Six woke up—having no idea how much time had passed—she was alone in a cell in a hollowed-out mountain. She didn’t discover she was in West Virginia until some time later. Six learned the Mogadorians had been trailing them the entire time, observing, hoping the two might lead them to the others, because, in Six’s words, “Why kill one when the others might be near?” I shift uneasily when she says this. Maybe she is still being followed and they are waiting for the perfect time to kill us.
“They had bugged our car when we were eating in the diner in Texas, and it never once occurred to either of us to check,” she says, and then gives herself over to a long silence.
Aside from an iron door containing a sliding hatch in its center for food to be delivered through, her tiny cell was made entirely of rock, measuring eight feet on each side. She had no bed or toilet, and the cell was pitch-black. The first two days passed in total darkness and silence, without food or water (though she never felt hungry or thirsty, which, she said she later learned, was due to the charm’s effect), and she had started to believe she’d been forgotten. But her luck hadn’t been that good, and on the third day they came for her.
“When they opened the door I was huddled in the far corner. They threw a bucket of cold water on me, picked me up, blindfolded me, and pulled me away.”
After being dragged down a tunnel, they’d let her walk on her own while surrounded by ten or so Mogs. She could see nothing, but heard plenty—screams and cries from other prisoners there for who knows what reasons (when he heard this, Sam perked up and seemed about to interrupt and ask questions, but said nothing), the roars of beasts locked away in their own cells, and metallic clanking. And then she had been thrust in a room, had her wrists chained to a wall, and been gagged. They’d ripped off her blindfold, and when her eyes finally adjusted, she saw Katarina on the opposite wall, also chained and gagged and looking far worse than Six felt.
“And then he finally entered, a Mogadorian who looked no different from someone you’re likely to pass on the street. He was small, had hairy arms and a thick mustache. Almost all of them had mustaches, as though they had learned to blend in by watching movies from the early eighties. He wore a white shirt, and the top button was undone; and for some reason my eyes focused on the thick tuft of black hair poking out. I looked into his dark eyes, and he smiled at me in a way that told me he was looking forward to doing what he was about to do, and I started to cry. I slid down the wall until I dangled from the shackles around my wrists, watching through my tears as he pulled razor blades, knives, pliers, and a drill from the desk they had in the center of the room.”
When the Mogadorian had finished removing over twenty instruments, he’d gone to Six and stood inches from her face so that she could smell his sour breath.
“Do you see all of these?” he’d asked. She didn’t respond. “I intend to use each and every one of them on you and your Cêpan, unless you truthfully answer every question I ask. If you don’t, I assure you that both of you will wish you were dead.”
He picked one up—a thin razor blade with a rubbercoated handle—and caressed the side of Six’s face with it.
“I’ve been hunting you kids for a very long time,” he’d said. “We’ve killed two of you, and now we have one right here, whatever number you are. As you might imagine, I hope you are Number Three.”
Six had made no response, pushing herself against the wall as though she might disappear into it. The Mogadorian grinned, the flat end of the razor still touching her face. Then he twisted it so the blade pressed against her cheek, and while looking deep into her eyes, he jerked the razor down and made a long, thin gash along her face. Or rather he tried too, but it had been his own face that was slit open. Blood instantly poured down his cheek and he screamed in pain and anger, kicking the desk over, sending all of his tools flying, and he stormed from the room. Six and Katarina had been dragged back to their cells, kept in darkness another two days before finding themselves again gagged and chained to the walls of the room. Sitting on the desk with his cheek bandaged sat the same Mog, looking far less certain of himself than he had before.
He’d jumped from the desk and removed Six’s gag, grabbed the same razor he had tried cutting her with, and held it up in front of her face, twisting it so that the light glimmered along the blade. “I don’t know what number you are. . . .” For a second she’d thought he would try to cut her again, but he turned and crossed the room to Katarina instead. He stood at her side while looking at Six, and then he touched the blade to Katarina’s arm. “But you’re going to tell me right now.”
“No!” Six had screamed. And then very slowly the Mogadorian made an incision down Katarina’s arm just to be certain he could. His grin widened, and beside the original cut he made another, this one deeper than the first. Katarina groaned in pain while the blood ran down her arm.
