John regained his balance and continued to fiddle with the knobs on the jukebox. The father grabbed him from behind, one hand pulling his head back, and thrust his skull through the machine’s glass. The shatter was faint, but satisfying. The blood that immediately trickled from John’s crown and sprayed all over the records was even better. Sinatra held a long note, his angelic voice now the soundtrack to this horrific scene unfolding.
“I don’t fucking think so!” a woman from the bar yelled, hopping off her barstool and reaching behind her back, pulling out a pistol. “Get the hell out of here!”
The boy burst out of the corner like a ninja in hiding, growling as he leaped toward the woman, his mouth snarled like a rabid dog. He was on her within a second, chomping on the woman’s arm like a rack of ribs.
“Would you like some barbecue sauce with that, son?” the father shouted, only for himself to hear. He fell back against John’s body, head still stuck in the machine like an ostrich with its head in the ground, and howled manic laughter.
The woman’s pistol fell out of her grip and dropped to the ground with a heavy thud. Blood squirted from her arm, creating a red abstract splatter painting on the walls.
The song faded to silence, leaving the only sounds to be the TV and the woman screaming on the ground, squeezing her arm with her free hand, shouting, “Help me, Jesus Christ, it fucking hurts!”
Nine other people sat at the bar, seven men and two women, gawking at the woman on the ground.
“Rebecca!” one of the women shouted. “Rebecca, hang on!” She whipped out her cell phone so fast it flew across the bar, sliding across the floor and out of sight under one of the booths.
“Think you city boys are tough?!” a voice growled from behind the bar. A man, who reminded the boy of Vin Diesel due to his bald head and bulky frame, stood in the doorway that connected to the kitchen, a greasy apron draped over his monstrous body, a double-barrel shotgun clutched in his grip, pointed directly at the father’s face.
“Oh no, please don’t shoot me,” he mocked, giggling like a little girl. “Please don’t—”
The shotgun burst out its two rounds, the sound ricocheting off the walls and causing everyone at the bar to throw their hands over their ears in reflex.
The slugs caught the father directly in the throat, and he reached into the hole with a wide smile. A stream of black liquid oozed before his hand waved over the hole, new skin filling the open space, patching up like it had never happened.
“I don’t like being shot,” he said, his voice completely unaffected by the blast. “You’re all mine. The doors are locked, your tires are flat. No one is leaving here until I’m done with you all. Brian! Where did you go?”
The boy had vanished after biting Rebecca like a crazed zombie. He stood up from behind the bar, causing the large cook to jump back in fear, knocking a couple bottles of alcohol off the shelves.
The father grinned. “You people can call me Dr. Klemens; we’re going to be the best of friends. We can do this the easy way, or the hard way – just let me know. If you don’t want to end up like this poor lady over here, I suggest you remain seated and wait for me and my ‘son’ to come around. You can thank me later.”
5
Chapter 5
“We have a situation, people, and it’s not good.”
Colonel Griffins spoke to a crowded conference room at the Pentagon, six levels underground where two dozen Crew members listened to the information about the attacks in eastern Colorado. He turned on the projector to show images of the crime scene.
“The local police are trying to piece all of this together. There are no witnesses, and the one camera in the bar had been wiped clean. They don’t know what to think, but we do. We’ve seen this before. Investigators concluded there were at least ten people—that’s how many spots were occupied at the bar. Not one person remains. This was apparently a weekly routine, many regulars there for happy hour. Local authorities are contacting the families of those they believe were there, but we haven’t heard anything back yet. When this many people just disappear after a bloody scene, I think we all know what that means.”
“Has anyone checked the highway cameras to see?” a man asked from the back.
“Yes. There’s nothing. We suspect whoever carried out this attack was living close by and still does. Although there are many side roads in this rural part of the state, so they could have realistically escaped in any direction.”
“If it’s what we think, did nobody see the ETD’s going berserk last night? That many new Exalls in one location would have surely set off some alarms.”
“Nothing hit our radar. We rewound the footage and found nothing out of the ordinary.”
“So then why do we think this is an Exall attack?” a woman asked, an accusatory undertone in her voice.
“Because the victims are nowhere to be seen. We’ve seen this play out before and—”
“If we have no proof, I don’t think we can call this an attack by the Exalls.” That voice belonged to Damien Kurtz, and made Griffins’s blood boil. The two had knocked heads over just about any topic that arose within the Crew, going back the last ten years. Kurtz was the head of technical research, his group studying the advances of the Exall species. “But I may have some proof of a different possibility,” he said with a teasing grin.
Always trying to one-up me, Griffins thought, his fists subconsciously clenched.
“And that is?” Griffins asked, all eyes in the room turning to Kurtz at the middle of the table.
“We may have discovered that our friends have found a way to go undetected on our ETD’s.”
He spoke the words slowly and let them hang in the air. This was their biggest fear, a disturbing possibility that no one ever spoke out loud due to fear of it coming true.
“Major Kurtz, I don’t think this is the time or place to bring this matter up,” Griffins said.
“With all due respect, Colonel, I think it is. We have the heads of every department here and a crisis that we cannot yet say with confidence happened due to a breakdown in our technology.”
The others around the table whispered to each other in shock.
“Very well. Please share what you have learned.”
Kurtz stood, brushing his salt and pepper hair with stubby fingers before adjusting his glasses. “Our suspicion arose two months ago. We started to see a decrease in the Exall population all around the world. I reached out to some of our international department heads to check that it wasn’t just faulty information on our side, but they confirmed to see the same thing.”
“And you didn’t think this information should be shared?” Griffins asked, his arms now crossed as he leaned against the wall at the front of the room.
“We didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. And it’s not as if there was an increase in the Exall population. We showed it going down. We did let the intelligence department know of the trend, and they have also been looking into the matter.”
“Grady?” Griffins asked.
A young African-American man sitting across the table from Kurtz stood up. “Yes, sir, we have been looking into it and have not found any evidence of Exalls leaving Earth. It practically confirms that they have fallen off our radar, but further missions are being carried out to verify this.”
“Why was I not informed?” Griffins asked. “Actually, never mind that right now. What are we doing about this?”
“Our technology team is examining our coding to make sure we haven’t missed anything,” Brandon Grady continued. “Remember, Jonathon Browne had screwed with all the coding in our system years ago. We did our best to patch things back together, but every now and then we find something that is still off.”
A woman stood up next to Grady. This was Felicia Lewis, head of the Crew’s technology department that overlooked the Exall Tracking Devices. “Colonel, we have been hard at work as Major Kurtz mentioned. I have a crew working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, comb
ing through our coding. It’s the equivalent of an 8,000-page textbook, and we can only have the same team working on it to avoid any confusion. It’s a slow process, and we should be wrapping up in another month.”
“Jesus Christ, people. We can’t have any more secrets, especially if this attack is real. Are we clear?”
Everyone nodded around the table.
“Lewis, if this is indeed confirmed, is there a plan in place to fix it, or are we out of luck?”
“I already have a different team looking into this, just in case. It may be early, but I believe it’s true they have found a way to avoid our radar. Some of them, that is. Intelligence hasn’t reported a decrease in population in a couple weeks now, but that doesn’t mean it won’t continue at some point. The Exalls may just be learning this and are trying to find a way to implement it across their population. Our preliminary theory is that they have found a way to elevate their internal temperatures. We don’t think they’ve interfered with our technology, and instead have once again improved themselves to circumvent our capabilities.”
“Grady, did we ever track those two from the 2016 attacks in Colorado?”
“No, sir. We believe they were part of the population who fell off the radar.”
Griffins sat down at the head of the table and crossed his hands, staring at his thumbs. Sure, he was frustrated, but he had the best minds in the world working on this issue, and so far, there was nothing too far out of the ordinary. Exalls came and went all the time, and there had been a handful of coding issues since the incident with Jonathon Browne. But something about this entire situation in Stratton felt off, especially once combined with this new information.
“I’ve been following the Susan Wells disappearance very closely since it happened,” Griffins said. “I think there is something bigger at play. They took her, people. They took her right from us, and I’ve always believed they did it to study us. Never anything malicious. I saw the video – they took great care of her body, like it was a fragile piece of china. They wanted to study us, and now they have. Here we are, four years later, and they’re back with their newfound knowledge.”
“Colonel, we’ve looked into that incident from every angle. There’s nothing left to study.”
“You didn’t know Wells like I did. I worked by her side for more than thirty years. Half of you in this room are barely thirty years old, so don’t tell me this nonsense. She had more information in her brain about the Exalls than anyone who ever existed. She should have been in my position, but she refused it, wanting to stay in Denver with her family and protect them. Which is why I think there is something about the Wells boy. She went out of her way to protect him, more than even her own son.”
“Are we going to get him under our protection?” Grady asked.
“Protection? He’s going to be part of our team. He’ll probably be in this conference room in the next five years if he decides to join us, which I think he will. I promised his parents the world if they helped nudge him our way, and I also warned them the danger he would be in if he stays on his normal life track. All the Exalls would have to do is wait until Wells gets drunk for the first time at some high school party, and they’ll easily take him away. We have eyes on his family’s houses and school, but we can’t follow him everywhere he goes.”
“If this is true,” Grady said. “We need to get him. We can use him as bait.”
“I’ve already thought about it, and yes we can. But I’m not going to do that without telling him. I’d never send a Crew member into danger without him understanding the risks. I’d never sleep again if something went wrong. But yes, we can lay a perfect trap to capture some of these bastards, and just maybe get one of them alive. That’s actually what Wells was working on before they took her. I told her she didn’t have the proper team to execute it, but she insisted on trying to ambush them. Now we’ll be ready next time, and no one will go missing.”
6
Chapter 6
June 14th arrived and Kyle lay in bed on Sunday morning in his mom’s house. Colonel Griffins had sent him an e-mail confirming Sunday as the deadline for a decision. His mind had been made up since last Monday, but he wanted to wait until the deadline before finalizing anything, in case he realized a reason to stay.
After plenty of reflection, Kyle decided his life in Larkwood was over for the time being. His grandmother was gone, Brian was still missing, his relationship with Jessica was too new, and his parents were well into their new lives as single people.
Kyle had met with psychiatrists following the drama at his grandmother’s house, mental health services provided courtesy of The Crew. Some people, they said, had a spontaneous combustion of the mind after learning about the Exalls and witnessing their wrath up close. Aside from a bout of heavy grief following Susan’s death, they deemed Kyle perfectly fine. Too fine, in fact. They questioned his parents, wondering if Kyle had shown any signs of post-traumatic stress or paranoia at home, but they had nothing different to report.
Thinking back to that time, Kyle wondered if that was when The Crew had decided he’d make a good fit to join them. Colonel Griffins had stayed in touch, checking in with him every few months, bringing small talk of how school was going and the patterns of Colorado weather. It always struck Kyle as strange for him to reach out, but it all made sense now. This plan had been four years in the making.
Kyle sent a text message to Travis, asking him to come over to his mom’s house. His dad responded that he’d be over in five minutes. His parents had fortunately remained cordial in front of Kyle, especially over the last week while he debated this life-changing decision.
He rolled out of bed and got dressed. It was almost ten o’clock, but he’d been awake since six after a long night of tossing and turning, terrified of what the future held. He had so many questions about life as a Crew member, but none whose answer would change his mind. Would there be other kids his age there, or would he be the youngest by far? Even if there were only older people, had any of them gone through the same experience in leaving their teenage years behind to pursue this new life? Would they mentor him, or was he expected to learn things on his own? Just how grueling was the training program? His grandmother made it sound out of this world in her journal, but that had also been over forty years ago. Surely the program had undergone changes since then. And what was he supposed to tell his friends? And Jessica? His closest friends, Mikey and Jimmy, at least knew about The Crew, while Jessica had been left completely in the dark.
There wasn’t an explanation for a student to leave before his senior year, moving across the country without his parents. He couldn’t even lie and say he was joining the military because everyone knew the minimum age for that was eighteen. Except for The Crew.
He also wanted to know how much free time he’d have, and where he’d live. He understood this new life required an unwavering dedication, where The Crew’s needs came before his own, but surely they had to let people out into the real world to blow off some steam.
A knock on the front door broke him out of his thoughts.
“Mom!” Kyle called from his room, his mother’s room only two doors down the hallway. “Dad’s here. I need to talk to you both.”
“Be right out,” Lori called back, so Kyle rushed down the hallway into the living room and pulled the door open for his father.
“Good morning, Ky,” he greeted, stepping in and examining the house for any changes that had been made since he was last inside. The previous meetings with the three of them had either been at Travis’s house or at public locations.
“Morning,” Kyle said. “Let’s sit down, please.”
Kyle’s mom came from her bedroom, dressed and ready for the day with her makeup and hair ritual complete.
“Hello,” she said, joining them at the kitchen table. “So, have you made your decision?”
It was no secret what this discussion was about; they also knew about the Sunday deadline.
“I have,
” Kyle said, his voice trembling, and his stomach churning into tight knots. “I’m going.”
He said those two words, leaving a long pause, expecting his mother to cry. But she never did. She only stared at him blankly while Travis nodded quietly to himself.
“Are you going to say anything?” Kyle asked.
Travis and Lori locked eyes for a brief moment before Travis spoke first. “We kind of thought you might go—can’t say we’re surprised.”
Kyle looked to his mother, her eyes now welling with tears. “We saw all the signs, Ky,” she said. “It’s like this life was… made for you. They’re going to take care of you. They assured us that we can come visit, and that one day you’ll be relocated back here. They still haven’t filled your grandmother’s spot because they expect you to take it over.”
“From the day you were born,” Travis said. “Grandma always told me you were special. She had that sort of ability, you know, to read people’s souls. It’s like she put her hands on you and saw your entire future play out in her head. ‘He’s the one,’ she told me. And I knew what she meant.”
“What do you mean by special? I’m just a regular kid.” Kyle shifted in his seat, uncomfortable knowing his parents had kept a secret hidden from him all this time.
“These people in Washington claim there are people in this world who are destined for this sort of life. They have a sort of sixth sense, I guess you could say. A level of awareness that goes beyond what your eyes can see. And these people can supposedly sense it in each other. That’s how your grandmother knew way before you could even speak a word.”
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