The card Agent Walker gave me gives me absolutely no info—it’s blank other than a phone number, which goes straight to voice mail when I call it from the only pay phone I know of in Paradise. I don’t leave a message. Instead, I pull up the “Aliens Anonymous” blog on my phone and message GUARD, telling him that I’ve had a really weird run-in with the FBI and that this is the contact number they gave me. GUARD is good with computers and stuff, so maybe he can use it to find some new information or something.
When I’m walking back to my truck, I run into Kevin, an offensive lineman from school. He’s a giant of a guy, with patches of red hair all over his face that almost make it look like he’s capable of growing an actual beard. Almost. A few of the younger members on the team are with him, but they hang back, letting him lead. I briefly wonder if that’s what I looked like when I was always running around town with my own posse.
“Duuuude,” he says when he sees me. We do an elaborate series of handshakes and fist bumps. “We were grabbing burgers and saw you talking with Sarah on the corner. Looked pretty intense. What’s going on with you two—you hitting that now that Bomberman is gone?”
Fire rages in me, and I can feel my face turning red with anger.
“Look, man,” one of the younger guys says. “He’s blushing.”
“Don’t talk about Sarah like that,” I say. My jaw is clenched.
The whole pack “Oooooooo”s as if they were a studio audience.
“Sorry, man, I didn’t realize you two were a thing again.”
“We’re not,” I say, trying to smile. “But I’m working on it.”
“Must be hard being sloppy seconds to a terrorist,” Kevin says with a smirk. “Gotta make you wonder what she saw in a dude like him.”
I move before I think. In a flash I’ve got Kevin up against a brick wall, holding him by the arms of his letter jacket. He may be a giant, but I’m fast, and after years of strength training and weight lifting, I’m not exactly a lightweight.
It feels like one of my veins is going to pop out of my head. It’s been a while since I was in a fight—a real fight. Since the Mogs took over the school. And even then, I spent half the time hiding in a classroom with Sarah. Part of me wants to unleash on Kevin, just wale on him until I feel better about all the shit that’s gone down. But I don’t. He may be kind of a douche bag, but even if everything’s changed for me, nothing is different for him.
Kevin’s expression morphs from surprise, to fear, to something else—something friendlier. Something like recognition.
“Check it out, you guys,” he says, turning his head to the others, who are waiting for his instructions. “Mark James is BACK.”
My pulse slows a little, and I suddenly start to feel a little high. I smirk.
“John Smith had my sloppy seconds,” I say. “I’m just reclaiming what was mine to begin with.”
The guys laugh and jeer at me. Someone yells, “It’s Mark James, bitch!” a little too loudly, and we get disapproving looks from other people on the street.
“We’re heading back over to Alex’s to try and finish off what’s left of his keg before it goes flat. You coming or what?” Kevin asks.
“Yeah, man,” I say, not even thinking about it. It feels surprisingly good just to be standing around being bros again.
Then I feel a buzz in my pocket.
“In a little bit,” I say. “Tell Alex I’ll be over later.”
“Right on,” Kevin says, and after another elaborate series of high fives and shakes, they’re gone.
I pull my phone out. There’s a message from GUARD:
Have you ever heard of an Agent Purdy?
CHAPTER EIGHT
I SPEND THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON AT HOME on the computer, talking to the blog editors. Saturday afternoons must be a lazy day for conspiracy theorists, because GUARD and this other editor named FLYBOY are both online and wanting to talk. FLYBOY seems cool but is much more of a skeptic about the stuff that GUARD and I talk about. Which is good, I guess—sometimes I think we need a rational person to keep us from totally going off the deep end.
It turns out that GUARD called the number Agent Walker gave me and got the same voice mail but didn’t leave a message. A few minutes later, his phone rang—even though he’d purposefully blocked his number. GUARD answered because he’s not the type of dude to let a chance like that go by. The person on the other end of the line kept asking him how he got the number, but GUARD played it cool and kept saying he knew what was going on in Paradise and demanded to talk to someone in charge.
Finally, he got on the line with an FBI guy named Purdy.
According to GUARD, Purdy was a huge hard-ass who sounded really annoyed and anxious to get off the phone until GUARD said he knew about the Mogs. This, apparently, got Purdy’s attention. Only then GUARD didn’t want to talk anymore, and Purdy wasn’t giving him any info about what the FBI knew or didn’t know.
FLYBOY says this doesn’t mean anything, but I think otherwise: if this Purdy guy works for the FBI and recognized what GUARD was talking about, it proves that the FBI here know what’s really going on.
The only question then is how much they know. And who they’re trying to help.
We chat online for a few hours as we try to dig up anything we can on Purdy, but all we find is a picture of a piggish-looking man standing in the background at some government ceremony. It’s not much to go on. Not anything to go on.
My phone buzzes constantly with messages from my teammates over at Alex’s. There are more and more typos in them as the hours wear on. Finally I give in and head over once my brain is so full of government conspiracies and half-formed conclusions that I feel like it might just leak out of my ears. When I tell my dad I’m headed to Alex’s to hang out with the guys, he gets a wide grin on his face.
“Good to see you getting out of the house and being a high schooler again,” he says. “I thought you were turning into some kind of loner.”
I shrug and force a laugh, then head out before the conversation gets any deeper than that. I’m almost out the door when he yells to me.
“My truck’s parked behind yours. Just take mine, if you don’t mind.” He tosses me his keys.
“Sure,” I say. Dad’s truck—the thing he likes to drive when he’s off duty and wants to get away from the police cruiser—is a small, single cab. Kind of a piece of crap, but I’m not going far.
I keep an eye out for any cars following me, but I don’t see anyone. Plus, it’s all back roads from my grandmother’s place to Alex’s, which is about as clandestine as you can be in Paradise.
I think about calling Sarah and seeing if she wants to come, but I know she’ll say no. Especially since the FBI’s got eyes on her. (Would the FBI bother with busting a bunch of underage drinkers?) Besides, I know the guys well enough to guess that they’ll start talking about either me and her or her and John, and the last thing she needs is to be harassed by a bunch of drunk football players.
As expected, everyone at Alex’s is pretty buzzed. Half the team is there, and for a while it feels like it could be any Saturday night out of the last few years. Still, I spend the few hours I’m there sipping on the same warm beer just in case I need to keep my wits about me. No one seems to notice that I never need a refill as long as I’ve got a red plastic cup in my hands and mime drinking every so often.
When it starts to get a little late, I sneak out the back and to my dad’s truck. I don’t bother saying good-bye to anyone—tomorrow morning no one will remember what time I left, and I’ll get a text or two talking about hangovers and asking if I got home okay. I’m about to start the truck when I realize there are extra keys on Dad’s ring. One for our old house. One for my grandmother’s. And a few more with rubber around the tops: the keys to the police station.
The hair on the back of my neck stands on end as I consider the possibilities of what this could mean.
From what my dad’s told me, the FBI is basically working on-site a
t the school. That means at this time of night there are only a couple of officers at the station. Maybe a few agents too. But I know my way around pretty well up there. If I were to drop by, I could probably figure out a way to sneak past the front desk and get into my dad’s office, where all kinds of files might be kept. Even if the FBI’s taken over, there must still be initial reports at the station. Whatever it was that my dad and his officers saw when they arrived on scene that night.
If I could get my hands on some of those, maybe they could shed more light on the investigation.
I drive towards the police station before I can talk myself out of it.
CHAPTER NINE
TODD’S THE ONLY OFFICER ON DUTY. I THINK I’m the luckiest guy alive until he rolls his eyes and gives me a long, drawn-out sigh as I walk in.
“Go home, Mark,” he says curtly.
“Todd, man, what are you doing here all alone?”
“Someone mentioned that I was talking to civilians while on duty yesterday, and I got switched to the graveyard shift. That’s what.”
“Oh,” I say. Oops.
“Plus there’s been some kind of electrical fire on the outskirts of town that everyone was raring to get to.” He inhales and wrinkles his nose a bit. “Jesus. You smell like a bar.”
I’m not exactly surprised. Alex’s house smelled like it had been sprayed down with cheap beer. Still, this electrical fire is great news for me.
“I was just at a party,” I say with a shrug. “Someone must have spilled something on me. You know how it is. You’ve told me about the epic ragers you guys used to throw when you were on the team.”
Todd gets a wide grin and goes into a story I’ve heard a hundred times from him about how he drank the entire special team’s roster under the table out in the woods on his eighteenth birthday. I smile and nod and tell myself that I’m never going to be this dude when I get older. If humans aren’t the alien workforce or something by then.
Finally he’s done.
“Man, that sounds so hard-core,” I say, forcing a grin. “I’m super jealous. Anyway, I just came by to pick up some stuff my dad left for me in his office.”
Todd nods and gestures to my dad’s door, still grinning from his memories.
I unlock the office with Dad’s keys and quietly close the door behind me. The place is a mess of files strewn about the desk and seemingly random sheets of paper stacked on every surface. I start digging through the piles, but after a few minutes of searching, all I’ve come up with are weeks-old traffic violations and endless paperwork on stuff not at all related to John or the Mogs. Then I realize that of course that stuff’s not going to be lying around, and I use one of the small keys on the key ring to open the filing cabinet by my dad’s desk. After flipping through a few hanging folders, I come to the one I’m looking for: PARADISE HIGH SCHOOL.
Yes.
The first file I pull out is full of initial incident reports and nondisclosure agreements from the first responders. I toss it on the desk to come back to later. The second file’s a jackpot: full-page photos of the destruction at the school. The trenches dug through the football field and the huge divots I recognize as actually being footprints. Shotgun shells littering a classroom we holed up in for a while. The trashed auditorium. All signs that point to the fact that this was maybe something other than the work of a teenager with a vendetta against the school.
My pulse pounds as I take out my phone and start to snap photos of the pictures. I can upload them all to the blog later. GUARD and the others will flip when they see this shit. I rifle through the pictures as fast as I can, recording each one. My brain is buzzing, and I can hear my blood thumping in my ears.
Maybe that’s why I don’t hear anyone come in.
Someone yanks the back collar of my shirt and jacket, choking me. I’m swung around, and the surprise causes me to drop my phone. The file photos scatter across the floor. I expect to be staring into the face of a Mogadorian, or one of the agents.
But it’s worse.
It’s my father.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he bellows.
“Dad, I was—”
“Do you have any idea how much trouble you’d be in if someone else caught you in here? How much trouble I’d be in?”
“Dad, let me—”
“This is a matter of national security, Mark. I mean, Christ.”
He pushes me backwards with a strong shove. I stumble over my feet and hit the ground hard just as Dad’s picking up my phone. He taps on it, systematically deleting everything I’ve taken pictures of, cursing the entire time. It’s only then that I realize how weird it is that he’s here in full uniform so late. Whatever happened with the fire tonight, it must have been important enough to call him in.
When he’s done deleting things, he just stands there staring down at me for a minute.
“Go home, Mark,” he says, emphasizing every syllable he can. “And stay there.”
He starts to hand my phone to me when my text message sound goes off twice, so instead he turns the screen to see what’s on it.
That’s when his face goes white.
“What?” I ask.
He doesn’t respond, only reaches down and pulls me up to my feet, half dragging me out of the office.
“Todd!” he barks, and then Todd is standing by the front door. “Outside, now.”
“Dad, what’s going on?”
He’s still pulling me behind him. I could fight back, but I can tell he’s furious. Something’s wrong. Something bad has happened.
When we get to Todd’s police car, Dad pulls open the back driver’s-side door and shoves me inside. I manage to rip my phone out of his hands as I go in, and Dad slams the door before he realizes I’ve taken it. He yells at Todd.
“You take him straight back to my mother’s house. If he puts up any fight, arrest him.”
Todd looks at me, shaking his head as my dad runs to his patrol car, yelling something into his radio.
It’s only then that I look down at my phone. There are two texts from Sarah.
OMG John is here.
Don’t come but if something weird happens I’ll txt u.
Shit.
My mind starts to race as I figure out what to do next. I call Sarah immediately. When she doesn’t answer, I text:
DAD SAW THIS. HE’S COMING 4 JOHN. GET OUT.
And then I realize what this means. Dad’s calling in the FBI, the police—hell, the fire department. Everyone’s about to converge on Sarah’s house, and she doesn’t know. She’s probably making out with a fucking alien, and the FBI and weirdo Agent Walker are going to find her.
I start banging my fist against the metal separating the front and back seats in Todd’s car, shouting as he gets in.
“NO! We have to go to her. Todd, man, take me to Sarah’s. You have to take me to Sarah’s right now. Go, go, go.”
“The only place I’m taking you is home.”
I keep beating on the metal until blood starts to trickle from my knuckles and Todd slams his own fist against the grate, yelling at me to shut up, then muttering profanities to himself. I’m frantically texting Sarah as he says: “And I thought the explosion at the Goodes’ place was going to be the highlight of the night.”
The Goodes’ place. Explosion.
My head tries to put everything together, ignoring the pain in my hand and the blood beating in my brain.
John’s here. He’s in Paradise, probably with Sam and Six. There was an explosion at Sam’s house. All the cops were called out to it. If there was an explosion, that must mean there was fighting. And the only people John would be fighting . . .
The Mogs.
The Mogs are here. They’re after John. And John’s with Sarah.
CHAPTER TEN
I STAY HOME FOR THE REST OF THE NIGHT. I don’t really have a choice. Nana sits in a chair at the bottom of the stairs, with one eye on my door and another on my truck outside—Dad’s personal s
entry. I have no doubt that if I take one step outside the house, there’ll be an officer ready to pick me up before I even make it to the street. The last thing I need is to get thrown into a holding cell—even though it’s possible that would actually put me closer to Sarah.
Sarah. She’s all I can think about. In the upstairs office, I drive myself crazy pacing back and forth, hoping that she’s all right and that if things got bad, John at least was able to keep her safe. As much as I hate it, I have to believe that no matter what, he’d protect her. I text GUARD and tell him that shit’s going down in Paradise, but he doesn’t text me back. Of course this is the one night he’s not glued to one of his screens.
I text Dad about a thousand times, at first apologizing and then asking what’s happened. He doesn’t respond, until finally I ask him just to tell me that Sarah is okay and he replies with a single magic word: “yes.”
At least there’s that.
As I pace, I listen to my dad’s old police scanner, which I grabbed from his room. There’s so much yelling and chatter that I can barely make anything out. There’s something about a suspect being in custody, then a lot of static. I hear Sarah’s name and someone mention the Paradise station, and then someone says something about a “Dumont” facility. After that all the messages stop. Radio silence.
Someone must have realized that the police radios weren’t secure enough. I imagine Agent Walker pulling a giant plug that disables the entire radio system, even though I know that’s not how any of this actually works.
An internet search of “Dumont facility FBI” brings up some articles about some huge, strictly off-limits FBI compound in Dumont, Ohio, about two hours away.
If Sarah has been taken in, I have to believe that she is being detained in the station jail and not being shipped out to some secret FBI prison. And so at dawn I take a chance and head downstairs and out into the front yard. Nana’s no longer at her post, so I guess her orders were just to make sure I stayed in through the night. I jump in my truck and head into town. Dad’s phone’s going straight to voice mail by now. I park across from the station, watching, trying to get a look at Sarah or anyone else coming in or out. Every time the front door swings open, my chest pounds, only to be disappointed when someone other than Sarah walks out. Each time this happens, I get a little more worried.
[Lorien Legacies 04.94] The Lost Files: Return to Paradise Page 4