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31

  THE ASH MAN

  ALEX WHIRLED TOWARD THE fallen bodies of his parents, severed arm still in hand, to find a man standing centered between his mom and dad.

  “They were just drones, hastily assembled and clearly unfit for this mission,” the man continued, turning his gaze onto the motionless, still standing cop figure with smoke bleeding out of his ears and skull.

  He was tall and gaunt to the point of being almost skeletal, his clothes hanging over his body like an ill-fitting curtain. He reminded Alex of the equally tall man from the hospital, to the point where they could have been the same man. At first glance the figure’s skin seemed albino white, almost translucent. But now, up closer, in the flickering light shed by the lamp, it looked more gray, as if the man had rubbed ash all over his skin.

  “If you leave with me peacefully now, your parents can live,” the ash man continued. His voice had an odd twang to it, almost a harmonic echo. Sounded like it was coming from somewhere else, a broadcast of sorts, and the ash man was just mouthing the words. “Come with me, and the young woman can call an ambulance to help them. Choose, Alex, choose.”

  “Get away from them,” Alex said, straightening himself in line with the man, who cut a dark, eerie figure across the room.

  “That wasn’t one of the choices.”

  “Who are you?” Alex demanded.

  “The better question, my boy, is who are you? I’m sure you’ve been asking yourself that since the hospital.”

  “You killed my doctor!”

  “Because it needed to be done. Because he knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “About you.”

  “What about me?”

  The ash man’s eyes cast Sam a sidelong glance before returning to Alex. “This is not something to be discussed here.”

  Alex sidestepped to plant himself between the ash man and Sam, brandishing the severed arm amid the broken pieces of what the ash man had called drones.

  “You don’t need that,” the ash man told him. “I’m unarmed and have no intention of harming you.”

  “Guess your drones didn’t get the message.”

  “They wouldn’t have hurt you. Their orders were specific.”

  Alex cast his gaze downward, his father lying utterly still but his mother’s chest still rising and falling in rapid heaves. “They hurt my parents.”

  “As mandated by their mission parameters. But you’re in no danger. You see, you have something we want, something that belongs to us.”

  “Know something? I think you’ve got the wrong kid, because I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”

  “Yes, you do; you just don’t realize it.”

  Alex studied the ash man closer. He seemed almost spectral in form, more liquid than solid, the way he stood there as if the air moved through instead of around him. His head came to a peak at the top, where hair shaded with the same grayish tint rode his scalp, so even and still that it seemed painted on.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “I was here all along, Alex. You just couldn’t see me, like you couldn’t see your parents when you first got home. You only saw what we wanted you to—for your own good, to prevent exactly what ended up happening. We’ve been looking for you for a very long time. This night never should have been necessary, we should never have needed to come for you. But now we must live with the consequences and accept them.”

  “Good idea,” Alex said, pointing backward with his free hand toward the fizzling, hissing, and crackling assemblage of clumps that had been whole just minutes before.

  “This shouldn’t have been necessary,” the man repeated.

  “You said that already.”

  The ash man’s gray eyes fluttered. “There is a price for disobedience. Disobedience is what has brought us to this point. It will not be tolerated.”

  With that, he stooped down on his long stilt-like legs and slid his hand along Li Chin’s shoulder then upward, pressing a thumb into his temple like he was pressing a postage stamp into place. Li writhed, spasmed, shook, his feet twitching and pulsing.

  “No!” Alex screamed, hurdling into motion just as the man’s other thumb found his mother’s temple.

  The severed arm was in motion before he’d had time to form the thought: read and react, just like on the football field, and that’s what Alex did, unleashing a vicious overhead blow that should have fractured the ash man’s skull on contact.

  But it didn’t. It cut straight through his head instead and kept right on going, all the way through until the severed arm thudded against the wood floor, forging a nasty gash in the wood.

  The ash man separated into two equal halves, each dropping to the floor, landing next to each other without any feeling, emotion or pain, showing in his face. He seemed to fade to black in the room’s flickering light before regaining a measure of his gray tone, which continued to drift in and out. The two halves of him had landed six inches apart, but the ash man seemed not to notice, empty eyes glaring up at Alex.

  “You must come with me, Alex,” he managed, the separated sides of his mouth speaking in perfect unison, as if still whole. “You’ve evaded us for this long, but you’re ours again. We won’t stop. We’ll never stop.”

  “Go to hell, asshole,” Alex hissed, raising the severed arm overhead again.

  “You’re not one of them, Alex,” the ash man said, one side of his mouth lagging slightly behind and flickering toward black more than the other now. “You never belonged with them. You belong to us. And with continued disobedience comes punishment. We must take back what is ours.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “They entrusted it to you. It’s why you’re here and why I’ve come to take you back.”

  “Back where, exactly?”

  “Home, Alex, your real home.”

  Alex wanted to lash the severed arm downward again, but was stopped as much as anything by uncertainty over which side of the ash man to pound first. Then he heard a sound like something scratching and scampering across the floor.

  “Alex!” Sam cried out.

  He swung around to find severed pieces of what the ash man had called drones moving toward Sam en masse, the broken bodies from which they’d been shed lagging a bit behind.

  “Punishment, Alex,” the ash man said, his dual voice echoing in a tinny, hollow fashion. “Punishment for disobedience.”

  Alex launched himself across the floor, yanking the tire iron from the head of a drone thing en route to Sam. She was back-crawling desperately across the floor from the hard wood of the living room to the tile of the kitchen, kicking at the chunks of plastic, metal, and wire that were converging on her to ward them off.

  Alex began slashing and hammering at them as if they were an angry swarm of rodents. Tile cracked, pieces sent flying airborne with each successive thrust and blow. Nothing at all left recognizable when he crushed the last creepy-crawly drone chunk just before it reached Sam.

  “Alex…”

  He thought it was Sam’s voice, then realized it wasn’t.

  “Alex…”

  He spun back around. Because it was his mother calling to him, her eyes weak as they struggled to regard him. The ash man was gone, both pieces, leaving behind what looked like a dark shadow where the twin halves of him had landed.

  “Alex…”

  He rushed to An Chin through the flickering light, half expecting the ash man to reappear at any moment.

  32

  GOODBYES

  “MOM!”

  Alex took his mother in his arms. “Lie still. We’ll get help.”

  “No,” An cried.

  “Yes!” Alex insisted.

  Alex cradled his mother’s head, supporting it gently. Her lips quivered. The terror in her eyes bled off, replaced briefly by relief until An suddenly dug her fingers into his arm, the nails biting against his skin.

  “Go, please! Before they come back.”

  “I’m staying here with you.”
<
br />   She dug her fingers in deeper. “No. Too late.…” She shook her head. “But not for you.”

  “I’m going to the police.”

  “No!” she said, the hand holding his arm starting to shake. “Police can’t help you. No one can help you. You must go far away, must disappear like you never were because … you weren’t.”

  “What?”

  “Trust Meng Po. Meng Po has the answers you seek.”

  Jibberish, making no sense.

  “Take her. For me. Take Meng Po and never part with her. She will guide you.”

  Tears streamed down his face, the flickering lamplight catching his father’s face frozen in agony.

  Death coming into his eyes.

  Across the room, a still-dazed Sam had managed to get her phone out, desperately trying to reach 911.

  “I can’t get a signal!” she wailed. “Like before!”

  Alex felt his mother’s hand stretch past him into the air and then toward the kitchen. “Meng Po! Please!”

  “Mom, please don’t—”

  “Bring her to me!”

  “Mom, I’m sorry! What, what I said in the hospital, I didn’t mean it, I…” Alex felt the rest of his words choked off by the clog in his throat.

  “I know,” his mother said, in the same reassuring voice he’d known all his life.

  She tried to smile, failed.

  “You were right,” Alex heard himself say, rewinding time back a day. “I should do that fifth year.…”

  “Alex…”

  “… get smarter. Go to a better college.”

  “Meng Po, Alex. Please.”

  Alex snapped alert, time fast-forwarding back to the present. The reality, the pain …

  “Alex,” he heard his mother mutter again, her voice barely audible now. Alex …

  He heard his name, but this time her lips didn’t move, his mother’s eyes meeting his as his name sounded again.

  Alex …

  In his mind. Her thoughts speaking to his.

  What was happening to him?

  He let himself believe it wasn’t real, just some horrible nightmare induced by the concussion the CT scan must have spotted. He squeezed his eyes closed, willing himself to wake up from this trance, the same way he did to find fresh pages filled in his sketchbook. When he opened them again, though, it was all still the same, only worse.

  Because it was real. All of it.

  Alex forced himself to look back toward Sam, who was still frantically pressing keys on her phone. “Sam…”

  No response.

  “Sam!”

  She finally looked at him; she was standing now, leaning against the wall for support.

  “Grab my mother’s keys.”

  “What? Huh?” she responded dimly.

  “My mother’s keys. Get them.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In the kitchen. Check the hooks by the refrigerator. Or the table.”

  She moved tentatively that way, seeming to feel her way through the air.

  “Got them,” Sam called, and Alex heard jangling as she made her way through the living room toward him, careful to skirt the remnants of what the now-vanished image of a spectral figure colored ash gray had called “drones.”

  She kept her distance while extending the keys downward, keeping an eye on the still standing, and smoking, drone thing in case it showed any signs of life. An Chin grabbed them out of the air, closing her hand on the statuette of Meng Po. Then she pressed it into her son’s hand so the keys dangled over the edge of his palm.

  “Take,” she said, struggling for air now. “Take. Yours now. For luck, luck you’re going to need. Promise me, Alex. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” he managed, choking up again, although he wasn’t exactly sure what he was promising.

  “I’m sorry,” his mother said, eyes starting to fade now.

  “Sorry? No!”

  “We lied to you. All these years, we lied. This is our fault. Should have told, should have—”

  The next words caught in her throat and An heaved for breath, just managing to find her voice again. “Others will come. It will never stop, now that it has begun. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sor—”

  She stopped, just like that.

  “Mom.”

  Alex shook her lightly with no result.

  “Mom?”

  An Chin’s expression had frozen in mid-thought, mid-sentence, fooling Alex into thinking she was just pausing. But her eyes didn’t blink, just continued to gaze up at him blankly, Alex afraid to let go of their grasp for fear he’d lose his mother forever if he did.

  But she was already lost, her final breath crackling from her lips before fading off to nothing.

  “We need to go, Alex,” Sam was saying, suddenly hovering over him, having recovered her senses. “You heard what she said.”

  Alex glanced up at her, still holding fast to his mother.

  “Alex, please,” Sam begged.

  She stooped low by An Chin’s body, having noticed the strange bracelet wrapped around An’s wrist. Then she glanced toward Li Chin’s wrist and saw an identical one fastened to his wrist as well. Sam leaned closer to him and started to peel it back.

  “What are you doing?” Alex asked her, his own senses sharpening again.

  “This looks like an old-fashioned slap bracelet. Not the kind of thing your father would be wearing, and your mother’s wearing one too.”

  Alex followed Sam’s gaze to the black piece of fabric jewelry, which looked shiny as steel. She had straightened out the one she’d unfurled from his father’s wrist.

  “See?” she whispered.

  But then it snapped back into place with a whapping sound.

  Alex took it from her grasp and slid the thing that looked like a slap bracelet into his pocket. He lingered over his mother for what seemed like a very long time, before pressing her eyes closed, sobbing and sniffling loudly.

  “Alex,” Sam said from above him.

  “I know,” he managed, rising stiffly but still unable to take his eyes off his murdered parents, who lay adjacent to each other.

  “I’m sorry, Alex, I’m so sorry,” she said, easing a hand to his shoulder, which felt hot and as hard as banded steel.

  Alex realized he was still clutching Meng Po. “You’ve got to get out of here.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she corrected. “You heard your mother.”

  “She wasn’t making sense.”

  Sam looked back toward the pulverized remains of the drones littering the floor like children’s toys or the parts of some massive, unassembled model. “None of this makes sense.”

  Alex smelled the noxious stench of burned wires and scorched metal searing the air now.

  “I can’t leave them,” he said, looking back down at his parents. “You go.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without you. And you heard your mother—more will be coming. This is just the beginning.”

  “Beginning of what, Sam, beginning of what?”

  Sam saw the shock and sadness in his wet eyes, wished there was something she could say to make him feel better.

  “We have to do what your mother said,” she reminded him instead, thinking of the severed arm spewing wires instead of veins, and skulls that dented like car fenders. “Now, Alex,” she continued. “Please, we need to go.”

  “Where, Sam, where are we supposed to go?”

  She swallowed hard. “I have no idea.”

  FIVE

  TRACKERS

  The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.

  —ALEXANDRE DUMAS

  33

  THE BUNKER

  LANGSTON MARSH STUDIED THE scroll on his computer as he did every morning and whenever time allowed. Hours spent in darkness broken only by the light of the screen, absorbing incident report after incident report into his psyche until he found what he was looking for. In a few minutes, the new man would be ushered into his office, located in
the sprawling bunker he almost never left.

  There was a war coming, and he needed to be ready for it at all costs. The new man, who came highly recommended, was extremely well versed in military matters, a worthy addition to the army, and the cadre at its top, Marsh was building.

  The beautifully furnished office in which he was working offered a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean through its expansive window-wall of glass. The scene was even more beautiful to him at night, the way the moonlight reflected over the currents lopping over the shoreline and filling the room with the steady crash of cascading waves. Other than the spill of moonlight and a single standing floor lamp, the room’s only illumination sprang from the glow off the computer screen through which he continued to scroll.

  The complex software constantly scanned the Web sites of every newspaper and television station in the country in search of stories containing several preprogrammed key words and phrases, prioritizing those with the highest concentrations. The software left the most mundane stories in black, ones of some note in green, and those of the highest interest in red, which were accompanied by a pinging sound when his computer received one.

  The stories pulled were confined mostly to accidents, crime, and particularly murder, the vast majority of which were mundane and easily dismissed. Disappearances interested Marsh the most, along with sightings of strange lights, machines acting up in inexplicable ways, animals behaving strangely, and other unexplained phenomena. The software organized the most notable among these incident reports by region in search of geographical patterns. Other data banks were searched for patterns as well, including large migrations from some areas and influxes into others.

  Marsh knew what he was looking for; he just didn’t know how exactly to find it. This war was his life’s work, something that had driven him to amass the vast fortune he had for the power that came with it. Power he intended to use to fight an enemy the rest of the world refused to acknowledge. Why should they? After all, that enemy hadn’t yet struck at them, as it had at Langston Marsh, changing his life inalterably and setting him down this path when he was a mere child.

  A buzz emitted from an unseen speaker built into his desk.

  “Colonel Rathman is here, sir,” the voice of his assistant followed.