Abduction

by Rodman Philbrick

  Quentin was hot on their heels. He hadn’t gained any ground, but he hadn’t lost ground either. And they hadn’t had much of a head start.

  “He’ll never catch us,” Luke gasped. “He has no endurance.”

  Mandy couldn’t help picturing the alien machinery efficiently vacuuming bones and replacing them with something better.

  She was sure Quentin was in whatever shape he wanted to be.

  “The—chuff—skinheads’ boots—pant—are too heavy,” said Luke. “They won’t catch us.”

  Mandy saved her breath for running. They raced across the grass toward the nearest cluster of houses. The expanse of empty lawn seemed to go on forever.

  Mandy’s legs felt rubbery. Her breath was so loud in her ears she knew she’d never hear Quentin come up behind her until he grabbed her. The thought was terrifying. She glanced back.

  He was gaining!

  Mandy didn’t think she could run faster, but fear pumped her heart like rocket fuel.

  She stumbled. She caught herself and kept running, but she had lost precious distance. She could practically feel Quentin’s icy breath cold on her neck.

  But the houses were getting nearer. She summoned energy out of nothing and found a spurt of speed.

  “I know—pant, pant—this—pant—neighborhood,” Luke managed, not realizing how far back she had fallen. She could barely hear him. “We’ll—pant—lose them.”

  They reached a four-foot chain-link fence and Luke sailed over it like it wasn’t there. It looked impossibly high. Mandy heard the pound of boots behind her. She cleared the fence.

  The impact when she hit the ground was brain jarring.

  “Mandy,” Luke croaked. “Hurry!”

  Energy sparked at her heels. Behind them she heard grunts and curses as the skinheads tried to fit the reinforced toes of their boots into the fence links.

  Luke headed for another fence, and Mandy flew right over it with him.

  They zigzagged through the neighborhood, backyard to backyard, steering clear of streets.

  They lost the last of the skinheads after the third fence, but Luke didn’t slow down. Quentin was still back there somewhere.

  Mandy’s lungs ached. Her ankle throbbed where she’d banged it on a high wooden fence with no toeholds. They had taken so many twists and turns, her sense of direction was shot.

  Finally, just when she thought she was going to collapse, Luke stopped. He leaned up against a big oak in somebody’s backyard, chest heaving.

  “I don’t hear anyone, do you?” he asked between big gulping breaths.

  The blood was pounding so hard in her ears, Mandy didn’t know what she heard. She gestured to Luke and they crouched down and squeezed themselves under a thick hedge.

  No one came by.

  But they both knew that Quentin hadn’t stopped looking.

  “You know where we have to go next, don’t you?” Luke asked.

  Mandy nodded. “Quentin’s house. The last place he’ll think to look for us.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “Right,” Luke said. “Quentin’s house. There might be some clue where we can find the ship.”

  His gut clenched. He wished he had some idea what they were going to do if—no, when—they found the ship.

  “He’s such an arrogant show-off, he probably keeps a map on his bedroom wall,” Mandy observed.

  There was a smudge of dirt on her nose. Luke took out one of his extra bandanas to wipe it away.

  Mandy looked at him, her eyes searching his face. “Luke, if we find the ship, we’re not going to try to be heroes are we? We’ll go and get help, right?”

  “Sure.” An excellent idea. Luke only hoped they would get the chance to put it to work.

  They crawled out from under the hedge and picked their way carefully through a flower bed. They had trampled a lot of flowers in the course of their flight. If they got through this, a lot of angry gardeners would be calling his mother and yelling their heads off.

  Luke smiled to himself. It would be nice to be worried about something as simple as that.

  He led the way, keeping to backyards and away from the streets. They halted frequently to watch and listen. Once, a pair of skinheads came hustling by on the street. Luckily, their clomping was so loud that Luke and Mandy could tell they were coming and had time to hide.

  As they waited for their skinhead hunters to pass, Mandy fingered the little magnets in the bandana bundle around her neck.

  “The solution was so simple,” she marveled. “It must work the way a magnet messes up a compass heading.”

  “Or the way it erases a computer disk,” Luke said, craning his neck to see where their pursuers had gone. “Okay, they’re gone.”

  They spied two more skinhead groups and had plenty of time to evade them. “These kids have no concept of quiet,” said Mandy, almost cheerily.

  Mandy and Luke slowed as they approached Quentin’s backyard. Luke’s skin began to crawl. What if Quentin was here, waiting for his soldiers to report in?

  There were tall bushes along the property line, screening them from neighbors. But Luke felt horribly exposed as they pushed into the backyard and crossed the lawn.

  Luke knocked on the back door. “To make sure nobody’s home,” he explained. They pressed themselves against the side of the house, wishing for thicker landscaping.

  “Get ready to run if someone opens the door,” Luke whispered.

  They waited for what seemed an eternity. No one came.

  They crept back to the door. No surprise it was locked.

  “I noticed an open window,” Mandy volunteered. She pointed at a small window, about shoulder height. “Just my size,” she muttered.

  Luke bent the screen a little in order to pop it out. The noise he made was excruciating. Again they waited, pressed against the house, hearts pounding.

  Luke felt time slipping away. But when he glanced at his watch, he found that less than five minutes had passed since they had stepped onto Quentin’s property.

  “I think it’s okay,” Mandy whispered.

  Luke gave her a boost up. It was a tight fit. Mandy grunted softly as she hauled herself through. When her legs disappeared inside, Luke had a hollow moment of panic.

  But then the back door opened and Mandy, white-faced and wide-eyed, was gesturing him inside.

  The house had the silence of emptiness. Evil emptiness.

  Luke straightened the screen and replaced it in the window.

  He was already shaking. Mandy was, too. Luke wiped his sweaty palms on his shorts. They were both scared half out of their minds.

  “It feels so creepy,” Mandy whispered.

  “I know,” Luke said, equally hushed. “I suppose we should separate.” His eyes darted nervously around the kitchen and out into the hall. “It’ll go faster.”

  “No.” Mandy shook her head vehemently. “I’m not creeping around on my own. If there’s anything here, it’ll be in Quentin’s room.”

  Luke didn’t argue. He was actually relieved to have her beside him as they went down the hall and started upstairs, careful to make no sound.

  Mandy jumped when a pipe gurgled somewhere. And Luke’s heart was racing. He expected Quentin to jump out at them any moment, whipping his mutant tongue.

  At the top of the stairs, they stopped and looked around. There was a hallway with four doors off it, three of them open. The fourth was closed. A sign on it read, in big block letters:

  PRIVATE!

  KEEP OUT!

  THIS MEANS YOU!

  Luke wiped his palms again. Sweat trickled down his neck. He stepped forward and opened the door.

  Quentin’s room was surprisingly neat.

  Mandy followed him in. They gaped in silence at the walls. A huge collage, mostly pictures cut from magazines. It turned Mandy’s blood to ice.

  The pictures had all been cut up and put back together in grotesque ways. There was a pig with a man’s head. A horse with no legs. A man
with six arms and a duck’s webbed feet. A woman with two heads and no arms.

  It was sick, totally sick.

  Luke made a hoarse sound and grabbed Mandy’s arm.

  There in a corner, almost lost in a mess of other photos, was a snapshot of Mandy. She was standing in a group of X-Files aliens. Her smiling head had been cut off and stuck onto the body of an alien.

  Luke was there, too. In a picture taken from the yearbook. His face was grinning, but his arms and legs had been cut off. Behind him was another alien, its mouth yawning open, poised to swallow Luke’s head.

  There was a second picture of Luke. Just his head, this time. Quentin had pasted it to a cartoon body of a man with his heart cut out.

  Luke’s stomach twisted. “He’s even more of a psycho than I thought,” he said.

  Mandy shuddered. “Subtlety is not his strong point.” She turned away. “Let’s get this done and get out of here.”

  “Absolutely,” Luke agreed. “You take the computer. I’ll take the wall.”

  Mandy looked at him quizzically. Why bother checking out the sick images he’d pasted to the wall?

  “It’s just the kind of stupid-clever thing Quentin would do,” Luke explained. “Like those TV aliens. Hide a clue right out where everybody can see it.”

  “Right,” Mandy agreed. Luke could see she was glad to take the computer. Not that it was any picnic. Most of Quentin’s CD-ROMs were video games. The bloodier the better.

  Luke went over the collage carefully, looking for a pattern. But the only thing the images seemed to have in common was their grotesque hideousness.

  Nowhere did he find a whole human. All of the people were mutilated.

  “Luke, look at this.” Mandy sounded excited.

  He joined her at the computer, desperate for some hope.

  Mandy clicked on a file labeled UFO. Luke watched anxiously as Mandy paged through it, his eyes racing down the screen. But it was nothing more than a lot of downloaded junk from the Internet. Stuff from looney Web sites, none of which seemed to have a clue about what was really going on.

  Mandy slogged through the whole file and they didn’t learn a thing.

  A car went by. Luke’s heart skipped. A lot of time had passed. His pulse began to trip with anxiety.

  “I haven’t found a thing,” Mandy griped, her voice tight.

  “Me neither,” Luke said. His eyes moved desperately around the room. “I know he’s got something hidden here. I know it.”

  Luke started opening drawers. Mandy turned to the desk and grabbed a sheaf of papers.

  A floorboard creaked somewhere. Their eyes jumped together, reflecting fear.

  Luke turned back to the bureau, working feverishly. He hated touching Quentin’s clothes. His skin crawled as though the contact was contaminating him.

  Mandy made a small bleating noise. Luke whirled, adrenaline pumping.

  Mandy leaned against the desk, her face pasty. A pile of pictures slipped from her nerveless fingers. Luke stooped to gather them up.

  His throat closed at the sights which met his eyes. Mutilated animals. Strange deformities. Shaved dogs hooked to electroshock machines. He shoved the pictures in a drawer and got to his feet.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said gruffly. “There’s nothing.”

  Mandy swallowed. “He must have given up on looking for us now,” she said. Her voice was breathy, almost shrill. “He could be back any second.”

  “I was so sure we’d find something,” Luke said dejectedly as they shut the door behind them. Evil seemed to leak out, even through the closed door.

  They headed downstairs. Contradictory emotions bubbled through Luke’s veins. Disappointment and horror, disgust and fear. But worst of all was the relief. He wanted to get out of the house, even though they hadn’t found anything.

  Mandy was about to open the back door when Luke stopped her.

  He was staring at another closed door. Every nerve in his body was screaming to get out of this house. “The basement,” he said, forcing the words out.

  The dismay in Mandy’s face echoed the dread curdling heavy in Luke’s stomach.

  But the basement was their last chance. They had to check it out.

  With Mandy close on his heels, Luke opened the door to a black hole. The light switch at the top of the stairs didn’t work. He started down, feeling his way. The stairs creaked loudly in protest.

  Mandy followed, her breath sounding fragile.

  Cold sweat broke out on his forehead. His chest felt tight.

  Luke could feel the weight of the house closing in over his head.

  He found a light switch at the bottom. A dim bulb illuminated an ordinary basement divided in half. One half was a workshop and laundry. They barely glanced at that.

  The door to the other half was closed. On it was another sign:

  PRIVATE!

  KEEP OUT!

  THIS MEANS YOU!

  “Gotcha,” Luke said softly. The door was locked.

  “No problem,” he told Mandy, pretending confidence. “It’s just a button lock. My brother used to lock himself in the bathroom when he was little. I’m an expert at these.”

  He took out his pocketknife and fiddled with it. Sweat dripped in his eyes. He kept hearing noises from upstairs. Car doors. Footsteps.

  “Luke. Listen!” Mandy had her ear pressed to the door.

  Keeping his small blade in place, he leaned in closer. Faint noises came from the other side of the locked door.

  Scratching sounds. Quiet, furtive noises.

  Waiting. Eager.

  The lock snapped.

  Luke stared at the door. Fear whistled through him. Silently, on oiled hinges, the door swung inward into darkness.

  A rank smell of rot—and something worse—rushed out.

  Luke and Mandy staggered back, gagging. The noises were increasing in intensity.

  Scrabbling. Crackling. Gnawing.

  Fighting nausea, they knew they had to go in. Mandy held her nose, her eyes watering. Luke stepped inside, feeling for a light switch.

  He snapped on the light.

  At first he just stood rigid, shocked, struck dumb.

  With a gargling noise, Mandy stuck her fists in her mouth to stifle her screams.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The walls of Quentin’s basement hideaway were alive with rats and roaches.

  The creatures were in aquarium tanks, lined up on shelves. The shelves were stacked all the way to the ceiling.

  There were hundreds of sleek black rats. Millions of large, fat cockroaches, some more than an inch long.

  The rats were crowded, climbing over one another, scrabbling with their little claws at the glass walls. In the corners of the glass tanks, some lay still—probably dead.

  The roaches covered the floors, walls, and ceilings of their tanks, a quivering mass of moving insect parts.

  There was nothing else in the room aside from a bucket marked RAT FOOD and another marked ROACH FOOD.

  Mandy took in little whimpering breaths, trying not to breathe too much. The stench was overpowering. Apparently, Quentin didn’t bother cleaning out the tanks much.

  Beside her, Luke had seemingly turned to stone.

  Once she got her stomach under control and the waves of revulsion stopped shuddering through her body, Mandy realized how disappointed she was.

  But what had she been expecting? A clearly marked map tacked up on the wall? This way to the spaceship. Yeah, right.

  A car stopped in the street outside. Luke gripped her arm. Mandy’s heart seemed to stop.

  Her eyes darted around the room, searching for a way out. But the only window was boarded over.

  There was no sound of the front door opening. Maybe it was a neighbor.

  Were the windows in the other half of the basement boarded up, too? She couldn’t remember. Trying to picture what she’d seen in their quick look around, Mandy suddenly had an idea.

  “Luke,” she whispered.
She cocked her head as if it was too dangerous to speak. Luke followed her out.

  They stopped at the foot of the stairs and listened. There was still no sound upstairs. Mandy gestured at Luke to follow her into the workroom in the other half of the basement. She sucked in her breath, a faint hope flickering inside her.

  Luke pointed at the windows. There were two, and neither was covered with boards. “We can get out that way if we have to,” he whispered.

  Mandy nodded. Then she pulled him over to a shelf crammed with lawn-and-yard chemicals. “Look at this,” she said eagerly, forgetting to whisper. She took down a large box and read the label.

  “It’s slow-acting rat poison. ‘Guaranteed,’” she read. “‘Acts slowly, forcing mice and rats to leave your house in search of water.’ We could add it to the rat food.”

  Luke’s eyes showed a glimmer of excitement. “Yes! Maybe the aliens will eat the rats before they die. It probably won’t kill them but it will certainly make them sick and slow them down.”

  “Even if the rats die first,” Mandy said, “it will reduce the aliens’ food supply.”

  Luke scanned the shelf. “Here’s another,” he said excitedly, reading the label, “‘Ants and roaches swallow the bait and take it home to the colony.’ Perfect!”

  “We’ve got nothing to lose anyway,” Mandy pointed out.

  They took the poisons back and hurriedly mixed them in with the food Quentin had ready.

  It was more essential than ever to get out without Quentin knowing they had been here.

  “Now what?” Mandy asked when they were done and Luke was relocking the door. “We still don’t know where the ship is.”

  “We could kidnap Quentin and force him to tell us,” Luke suggested halfheartedly as they hurried upstairs, both yearning mightily to get out of the house.

  As frightening as the thought was, Mandy considered it. Then she shook her head. “These magnets work great. But I don’t think we should risk getting that close to him. He might figure a way to beat the magnetic force if we gave him half a chance.”

  “I wasn’t really serious,” Luke admitted. “I don’t think we could make him talk anyway. We don’t have the right stomach for it.”

  They shut the basement door behind them. At that instant, a key turned in the lock of the front door.