Overtaken

by Mark H. Kruger

  Maya looked at me and nodded. “It’s time we take those bitches down.”

  • • •

  I didn’t bother going to school that day. I couldn’t be sure it was safe for me to walk the halls of Barrington High anymore. If Dana could get my dad to walk away, what else was she capable of? I didn’t see the situation escalating to violence, but I didn’t want to put myself in a situation where it was unavoidable. I had plenty of absences I could burn through before they would start to affect my future potential, and weighed against the possibility of Dana destroying my future, I’d choose absences time and time again.

  Maya didn’t stick around to talk. She didn’t tell me where she was off to, but after settling in, she said she’d be back later. I assumed she was snooping around town. I could only hope that she meant it when she said she’d stay away from her parents’ house. Her emotions were as fragile as they were volatile, and I was afraid she might do something regrettable if Bar Tech Security spotted her.

  But at the moment—5:19 p.m., to be precise—that was all out of my hands. I was back in my father’s office. I’d been here most of the day, going through every document and shred of paper in his files. Blackthorne came up nowhere. I couldn’t find anything about any projects—private, public, or otherwise—with that name. I even did a computer search using my high school’s account for a LexisNexis database. If the mystery were an assignment, my teachers would be proud of how thorough my research was, but I’d still flunk without evidence or a conclusion. How hard I tried was not going to win me any points in this situation.

  I tried to connect students’ social network pages to e-mail addresses and then tried common passwords on the offhand chance anyone was dumb enough to use “password123” in the year 2014. No one was. The strangest piece of all was just that Dana had no online footprint. Her name came up in relation to her disappearance, but she had no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat and no e-mail account that I could find. She was playing it smart. She knew that if someone like myself tried to link anyone to her, they’d follow the threads back to a gaping void. In Dana’s world, all roads led to nothing.

  I put my feet up on the desk and leaned back in my dad’s office chair. It squeaked ever so slightly as I swiveled back and forth, my eyes searching for an answer. I didn’t want to disappoint Maya, and I didn’t want to disappoint the mystery texter. My back was completely to a wall. It was time to come up with something, and fast. What was I missing? What path had I not yet traveled? There had to be a clue I’d missed. With a hearty shove, I sent the chair spinning in a circle. Think, Nica. The small divots and imperfections in the ceiling blended to a blur, and when I closed my eyes, I saw a flash of pink.

  I’d overlooked something. I snapped forward with a start. My brain knew it. I’d seen something and missed its significance. Pink. I stood up, my senses at the ready. I had to find it. I scoured over the desk and reopened the broken, unlocked cabinet. Didn’t see anything remotely pink. I spun back around to the computer, the monitor . . . nothing. I got up and walked around to the other side of the desk, the side I would’ve faced walking into the room. There it was.

  A pink pad of sticky notes.

  I grabbed it and expected to find something written on the top piece of paper, but it was blank. Then I looked again: No, it wasn’t. That’s why I’d overlooked it the first time. Whatever my dad had written down, he’d peeled off and taken with him—but I could read the imprint of what he’d written on the chunk of pad he’d left behind. It was faint, but the top line clearly was one word that started off “BLAC” before the press of his pen became too light to make out. This same word appeared to end with “NE.” My heart started to race. He’d discovered and written down something about Blackthorne? The next line down read . . .

  Dammit. It was so hard to tell. Definitely a number. Looked like “37.510” followed by “98.333.” What the hell did that mean? I fell back into the chair. Another wall. Maybe even completely unrelated. What if the word wasn’t “Blackthorne”? What if it was but the numbers were from something else?

  This was useless. I needed something more direct. It was Friday night. While I sat here struggling to put the most basic pieces together, there was an overnight trip for Ski Club Dana and all her friends would be gathered up on Whiteface, probably plotting against the entire town as they raced down the mountain and drank hot chocolate. As soon as I had that thought, I knew exactly what I had to do.

  I had to go straight to the source. If this all revolved around the members of Ski Club, I’d have to go back.

  • • •

  This, I thought, arms wrapped around my body as I slouched my way up a slushy, icy service road, had somehow sounded much more heroic in my head. When I’d first been struck with my grand plan, I thought I’d just drive to Ski Club, go invisible, and see what I could see. In the space of a minute, I realized that wasn’t going to work. First of all—no car. Hadn’t helped my social life; wasn’t helping now. On top of that, anyone I’d be comfortable enough to borrow a car from, like Oliver or Jackson, was no longer in my corner. What was I going to do, steal Oliver’s mom’s? I honestly considered it, but it was too much trouble. I couldn’t very well bike to Whiteface, and—at almost six in the evening—the school’s buses had long since taken the kids to their destination and were probably still up there, waiting to bring them back in the morning.

  Probably.

  I couldn’t remember. Did they wait, or did they head back to the school and send a different driver to pick us up? School wasn’t too far to walk, and it wouldn’t hurt to find out. I decided that was my best play. I knew I couldn’t wear layers, since only the stuff that touched my skin would stay invisible, so I threw on some sleek Under Armour that offered the best chance of keeping me warm and headed off into the dark, cold night. The only other thing I brought was a small GoPro camera I’d picked up overseas, so that I could record whatever I saw. One way or another, I was coming back from this trip with proof.

  • • •

  Out the office door I went and off to find Bus 18. Sitting on the cold cement floor for an hour and waiting for one of the drivers to open the doors to the bus was the worst. By the time I followed him on board, I was freezing and ready to call this whole adventure off. Luckily, he was a big fan of a heated bus and cranked it up well into the seventies. Not so luckily, he also turned out to be a reggae fan who really liked singing along.

  I sat in the very back, doing my best to ignore the deluge of sharp upstrokes and lilting backbeats as I warmed up. What would I find up on Whiteface? Some horrible experiment? A plan to go to war with Barrington, using mutant teenagers as weapons? Or just a girl who was so lonely and desperate to be popular that she was willing to force her totally unaware peers into surrounding her with warmth, praise, and friendship?

  I got so lost in thought that I didn’t notice the bus had shot right past the turn it needed to take to start up the mountain. I didn’t notice anything was off until the incline increased severely and the road got jarringly bumpy. I didn’t remember this from my last trip up here. By now it was too dark to get a good look at where we were. I felt the same fear and loss of control that I’d experienced in planes jetting through rough air. All I wanted to do was get off, but that wasn’t an option. I wasn’t in a position to yell for the driver to stop. I just had to hang on and wait it out. The jolting road gave way to smoother terrain before long, though this new pavement was just as poorly lit. My neurons fired with new, unspeakable possibilities.

  What if the driver knew what I was up to? He couldn’t. What if this was a trap? Where was he taking me? It didn’t make any sense. He couldn’t know. There was no way. But the reality was that we were not on the road to Whiteface. We were headed somewhere else, much higher up the mountain. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of driving into a craggy void, the bus slowed down and came to a stop. I tried to get any view out the wi
ndow that would give me a sense of where we were. There had to be a house, a barn, something with at least a light on. There wasn’t. I was in the middle of goddamn nowhere on a mountain in the middle of a freezing January night. And the driver was standing up, turning around. My blood froze. He cracked his neck to the side and looked like he was going to open his mouth to say something—but I was the only one there to say anything to. I braced to be caught.

  “‘Noooo woman, no cry. No woman, no cry . . .’,” he crooned to no one in particular. I was so relieved I wanted to hug him. He wasn’t a villain taking me deep into the woods to be eliminated; he was just a dude who liked to sing to himself. And his voice wasn’t half bad. It still didn’t explain where the hell we were, or why we were there. He didn’t park on a desolate mountain pass to work on his Bob Marley. Then a radio chattered from the dash:

  “One-eight, one-eight. Come in, one-eight.”

  The driver picked up a handset by the wheel and held it to his face. “Ah, this is one-eight. Go for one-eight.”

  “Cochran’s predicting an eight-thirty release from the lodge. Copy?” He rolled his eyes and shook his head but adjusted his attitude before he rolled off a reply.

  “Well, I ain’t goin’ nowhere else, so let ’em take their time.”

  The lodge? But we weren’t anywhere near the—

  Then it hit me. I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye: the building I’d spotted from the lift. The one that Chase told me had been shut down. Bar Tech was still using it—or at least Dana was. Suddenly “Ski Club isn’t just about skiing,” was taking on a whole new meaning. I had to get off this bus. There were two options: yank the door handle and run out the front, or open the emergency door and escape from the back. Neither option was all that smooth, and both were likely to convince the driver that the bus was haunted by a furious poltergeist, but I had no choice.

  I chose the one that seemed most cathartic and kicked open the emergency door. The alarm wailed, and the driver let out a gasp so sharp I feared for the health of his heart. There was no turning back now. I leaped into the darkness and circled the bus, looking for a way to the “lodge.” There had to be something, even if it was perilous and dark. The vehicle’s halogen headlamps illuminated a gravel path about ten feet from where we were parked that extended into the woods. It dropped off into black after just a few feet, but it was wide and straight enough that I could make out the edges with a little bit of squinting and some help from the moon. I was on my way.

  Fifteen minutes later and I was still walking, shivering in my guts, with no building in sight. Had I been hasty? No, this path had to take me to wherever that voice had broadcast from. It was the only thing that—

  CRUNCH! I stepped off the path and into six inches of snow. I yanked my foot back, but ice-cold jets of pain were shooting up my leg already.

  “Shit!”

  The path couldn’t just dead-end in the woods. As I hopped on my less-freezing cold leg and tried to swat the remaining chunks of ice and snow that clung to the other, I saw light. I looked up. The path hadn’t dead-ended; it just veered sharply to the right—and straight to the back of the concrete bunker. The “lodge.” The very same one I’d expected to see. My body tingled from excitement now instead of just the cold. Every step closer was like ripping a layer off a mystery package, and I was desperate to know what was inside. Only one thing stopped me from charging right to the door:

  Guards. Of course. Oh, but I was patient. I was a monk. I was ready to stand out in the cold on one leg until sunrise if it would reveal to me what was going on in this lodge, what was going on with Dana, and what was going on with Bar Tech’s master plan. What might’ve been a few minutes felt like a second while the guard had a smoke. When he put it out under his boot, I knew I was going to have just the smallest of windows to follow him into the facility and only if he opened the door nice and wide.

  He did.

  I kept quiet and matched his pace as he clomped inside on heavy, black treads. Knocking them against the wall to get the snow from deep in the nooks and crannies only helped disguise the sound of my wet feet squeaking gently against the linoleum floor. I ditched the shadow game and held tight to a corner, taking in my surroundings. This place was nice. High ceilings, cool, relaxing blues and purples on the walls. It didn’t even look like a lab, but more like a mix between a doctor’s office and a spa. As my heart stopped pounding, I heard soft, coffeehouse music drifting quietly from speakers above my head. I blinked to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this was downright surreal. I held close to the wall, trying to map the place in my mind as I moved deeper inside. I could hear what sounded like muffled shouting in the distance and followed it. Guards passed by, oblivious to my presence as I came to rest outside the doors of what looked like a high school gym. The sounds of a pitched battle—grunts, groans, shouts—echoed from within. What the hell was going on in there? Gladiatorial combat? I patiently waited for the doors to open so I could slip inside. It wasn’t long before two female medical technicians in white answered my prayers, throwing the door open the entire way and hurrying out.

  “The scope and reach of our patents allows biological products . . . ,” the younger woman with a pixie haircut said as she whisked by me with trays of blood samples.

  “As long as the genes are isolated from their naturally occurring states,” the older and obviously more senior of the two women added, carrying a stack of medical tests and readouts.

  Without a second thought, I slipped inside, and the door clanged shut behind me. I was so eager to get into the restricted area that I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were discussing.

  Nothing could’ve prepared me for what I saw.

  There were two teenagers with individual powers being put through a battery of tests. Although I didn’t know their names, I recognized them by sight as kids from school. The petite girl with a perky ponytail was wired with electrodes. She was bending and melting steel rods of varying thickness with her bare hands. The tall guy with the blue-dyed emo haircut, also wired, was freezing objects with the slightest touch. A platoon of a dozen intense scientists and medical personnel with clipboards and iPads observed and noted every detail. They had drawn vials of blood, which were being analyzed and processed in centrifuges along with high-tech PET scans and EKG and EEG readouts.

  Chief among the scientists was my biology teacher—Mr. Bluni.

  I reeled. I’d never imagined anything like this in my worst nightmares. I was aiding and abetting Mr. Bluni with his genetic research paper. Which wasn’t just any research paper or project. It was for Bar Tech.

  Suddenly that brief conversation I’d overheard on my way in took on a whole other meaning. Those women were talking about biological patents. My brain scanned through the many genetic studies and articles I’d read for Bluni. I recalled reading about how adrenaline and insulin and other various genes had been patented. Bluni had been interested in how genetic traits were inherited and passed along from generation to generation. Then I thought about all those blood samples they’d had my father draw from the kids at school. Maybe Bar Tech didn’t want to sell those of us with powers as weapons. Maybe they wanted to isolate the specific genes that gave us our ability and patent them. If Bar Tech could extract these genes, they could do that. They would own us. Our unique biology. And then they could transfer those genes to others. In a matter of time, Bar Tech would be able to grow its own army—or sell the technology for billions of dollars.

  As I struggled to keep my breathing steady and my invisibility up, one nagging thought pounded to the core of my very being:

  Could I have just found Blackthorne?

  I wasn’t the only one watching. High above the fray, I could just make out Richard Cochran surveying the horde from his position in a pristine glass office. This, of course, wasn’t surprising in the least, but the person right at h
is side hit me like an old-school fist to the kidneys. It was Oliver. It was so painful to see my best friend becoming complicit in the work of the very person looking to control us—or worse. I couldn’t know now how much of his determination to join Cochran was his own or created by Dana’s influence, but either way the paternal draw was undeniably strong.

  At the same time, my own father’s departure had left me with a still-gaping heart. What was Dana hoping that would accomplish—force me to join their group? I was beginning to doubt my own ability to not follow directly in Oliver’s path. Not ready to submit to defeat quite yet, I decided if I could find my way to Cochran’s war room, maybe I could piece together another part of the puzzle.

  The facility was a labyrinth unkind to those who did not know its geography inside and out. I found myself moving farther and farther from my destination, but as my mother always said, sometimes the scenic route pays off. In this case, she was right, but in a bitterly unexpected kind of way.

  I had noticed that Jackson wasn’t a part of the display in the large training hangar, but I hadn’t stopped to consider why. Now, with him right in front of me, I knew. The secluded hallway I’d found myself in featured a large Plexiglas window that peered into a slightly smaller training space. Jackson was alone. It reminded me of the movie moment when a formidable villain would show off his or her prowess, letting the hero know the only possible outcome was a crushing defeat. However, in this scenario, Jackson had no idea he even had an audience to show off to.

  I watched as he powered through a series of exercises and was floored by how much his powers had advanced since the last time I’d seen them on display. There was a gigantic board rigged with hundreds of small lights that he was able to control by calling up different patterns, like lighting up every other bulb or creating patterns—an assortment of shapes and stripes. Then I watched as Jackson powered up an electric grid—the same kind that was usually surrounded by chain-link fence and HIGH VOLTAGE—STAY OUT—and calmly placed his hands directly on top of it. Jackson closed his eyes; he was as calm and collected as I was terrified and panicking. As the grid grew to a whir, Jackson’s skin began to tint an icy blue like what I had witnessed the night of Dana’s homecoming party. But instead of losing consciousness or control, Jackson continued to absorb the raw power—and then wielded it as his own.