Overtaken

by Mark H. Kruger

  “I can see how it might be hard for you to understand,” Jackson started. He wasn’t defensive, but I could tell he wanted to explain. “I just had no idea what was going to happen. I hoped that Dana wouldn’t get to you, but I couldn’t know if she would. I also didn’t know if I’d be able to go on resisting her. It felt safest to compartmentalize everything, keeping my secret and feeding you what information I could. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

  Thinking about the situation from his point of view didn’t erase how he had made me feel. I had felt so alone, so lost, so separate from everyone that mattered to me, and so hurt. But those were all facts, out to bleed honestly in the open. Jackson had suffered, just as alone as I had been, but had required an all-important mask, a lie of how happy he was just to keep up appearances.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized. It wasn’t my fault, but at least I finally had someone who knew how I had felt. “Part of me just can’t believe it’s over.”

  “I’m not so sure that it is,” Jackson replied, always the pessimist. He was probably right. “This is who we are now. Who knows what’s going to happen, but what’s important is that we continue to live our lives. I’m not going to wait around for Bar Tech’s—or whoever’s—next move.” He stopped in his tracks, swinging around to face me.

  His blue-green eyes were a shock to my system. I had missed their unwavering stare and the way they still made my whole body unsteady. He took my hands, and my quivering knees silently thanked him.

  “You know what? I was wrong,” he continued. “It wasn’t keeping secrets straight that was so hard. It was pretending not to care about you, pretending like you weren’t the person that I thought about every morning when I woke up and every night when I couldn’t sleep.”

  I pulled him against me, and he kissed me like we’d never left the woods, like Dana had never come back to Barrington. But somehow it was better, more passionate. Maybe because Jackson and I had weathered so much pain and survived.

  The reunion lasted until I couldn’t feel my toes and fingers. I’d had enough cold for multiple lifetimes. The woods would always be our place, but I had to go home eventually.

  • • •

  Thankfully, home had been restored as well. In ways I could never have imagined. In those first dark days after my father’s disappearance, his house had become a husk, a bed to sleep in, without him. Fortunately, Maya had saved me just when I needed saving the most, when I was at my lowest and needed a friend. I never imagined that the frenetic, somewhat overbearing cheerleader who’d introduced me around my first day at Barrington High School would come through and have my back when I thought I had no one else. Maya had held out her hand and I’d taken it.

  All of which made me take a long, hard look at myself. Why was I always underestimating my friends and my nearest and dearest? Trust in others was not something that came easy for me. It terrified me to know how much I needed Oliver and Maya and Topher and Jackson. Where would I be without them?

  And how would I have made it this far without my parents? They were constantly surprising me.

  When I walked inside and found Lydia and Marcus together in the same room—an elusive simultaneous appearance—it filled me with so much joy that I could hardly believe it. They were making dinner together, maybe the one part of their relationship that had always been an easy collaboration. I guess they’d done a pretty good job with me, too.

  My dad wasn’t sure exactly what had happened after he’d left the house in a hurry that day, but his foggy memory had cleared not long after Dana’s defeat at Whiteface. He’d barely made it through town that day when two Bar Tech Security cars had stopped him and taken him into custody. They must have drugged my father, because the next thing he knew, he’d woken up two days later in one of Bar Tech’s secure black-ops facilities somewhere in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania. He was kept prisoner in the bunkerlike compound until all hell broke loose back in Barrington. Luckily, a sympathetic guard, with two children of his own to protect, realized that the shit was about to hit the fan when Cochran disappeared, and he released my father.

  Dad checked into a random motel somewhere outside Pittsburgh under a false name and then booked a flight back to Barrington.

  Lydia, however, had beaten him to the punch when she’d arrived in Barrington with the media brigade, eager to dig up the details of Cochran’s shady dealings. It was decidedly not a sitcom-family homecoming, but the three of us had hugged like it was.

  Dad had been bowled over by the details of what had gone on in Barrington in his absence. He remembered Dana coming to the door under the guise of selling raffle tickets for the Booster Club. He and I had both been surprised to find an actual receipt in the kitchen junk drawer. Dana Fox: a vision of school spirit until the very end.

  “You okay with me going back to being the parent around here?” Dad asked the next morning while making a mile-high stack of blueberry pancakes for my breakfast, like he used to do when I was a little kid.

  “Relieved, in fact, to hand over the reins. Besides, you keep the place a lot cleaner than I do,” I replied, so happy to be sitting across the kitchen table from him again. I watched him smile with pleasure as I smothered my pancakes with fresh Vermont maple syrup and devoured them in huge bites. “Not to mention make the best blueberry pancakes ever.”

  His eyes were moist as he tried to fight back his emotions. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me. I’m sorry I forgot you. That I nearly lost you.”

  I hugged him, so relieved to have him remember he was my father. “Does this mean you’ll let me take my road test?” Okay, maybe it wasn’t the best time, but I was a town hero. At least secretly. How could he say no?

  “Can you parallel park yet?”

  “I’m . . . working on it.”

  “Go ahead and schedule it. We’ll practice next week. By the way, that’s the reason I failed my driving test the first time. My parallel parking sucked.”

  “You failed something? That’s a first.”

  And just like that, my father and I were laughing again.

  Next week. Just the very concept gave me pause. What else would next week bring? What was Barrington going to be like free of its Bar Tech Security and the curfew? It wasn’t like Bar Tech was gone forever. Richard Cochran was out there somewhere, licking his wounds but planning, reformulating. Control of Bar Tech had been taken over by the Department of Defense until they could conduct a thorough investigation of every department and all their research. No doubt the company would rise again, if under a new face and a new name. Reinvention is the backbone of American business after all. The official story as reported, of course, told it a little differently.

  The version that was reported by the media explained that Bar Tech’s headquarters were being moved as a result of the nearly catastrophic avalanche. Blame for any misconduct was placed squarely on Richard Cochran’s shoulders. The technology being developed by Bar Tech was far too valuable to be housed in a town that was so vulnerable to natural disasters. If the avalanche had powered all of the way to Bar Tech’s headquarters, billions could’ve been lost. And why hadn’t it? The story was light on those details

  I’d had a recurring nightmare as a child about drowning in a tsunami. Frozen in fear, I’d watched the wall of water tower over me, taller than the Empire State Building or Mount Kilimanjaro or any of the very tall things I’d seen in my short time on earth . . . and then break, rushing down at impossible speeds and burying me in stories upon stories of deep blue water. I’d swim up, kicking as hard as I could, but the light at the surface would be fathoms too far to make it without refilling my lungs. But then I would wake up, gasping first for air and then shrieking for my mother as soon the fear had quelled enough to force words from my mouth. The wall of snow barreling down Whiteface had been my nightmare come to wintery life, but the differences were stark.

&nb
sp; For one, it was thunderous. And it grew louder and louder, almost deafening as it tumbled down the face of earth and rock. But for the first time in my nightmare, I wasn’t alone. My friends were with me, staring down the white monster together. Our words were drowned out and unlike the wave, where the water hovered over me at its peak for what felt like forever, the snow came far too fast. When the snow hit, barreling through us like the end of the world, there was no swimming. The snow was real and unkind, and it swallowed Maya whole just like her power swallowed it. Two creations of equally matched mass and force pitted against each other, ending both in a violent flash.

  Our astral bodies had been knocked back to Whiteface a split second after impact. It had taken a few moments, disoriented by my sudden return, for the tears to come. Maya had saved my life—our lives. She’d saved the whole town, but she was buried under an endless depth of snow. Fear had turned to grief as I realized that the white wave hadn’t been my tsunami at all. It had been Maya’s nightmare, and she wouldn’t be waking up.

  I still couldn’t believe she was gone. So little time had passed between watching her get her heart torn out at her own memorial service and her self-sacrifice to save all of Barrington. Maya, too, had been a force of nature, unable to harness her great power, able only to point it in a direction. Regardless, I was racked with guilt. I’d asked her to stay. I’d asked her to help. What if I’d been able to stop Cochran before he’d set off the detonations? Would Maya be with us now?

  That “us” was growing in size, too. Not only had Lydia joined my dad and me, but our house had felt a bit like an orphanage for my friends these past few days. I hadn’t told them much about my dad’s job, his real job for the Department of Defense, but they did know that he had been working the inside of Bar Tech and knew about all of our powers. Lydia, obviously, had learned when Topher and I had projected to Antarctica, but she was catching up very quickly. It was a huge change for Jackson, Topher, and Oliver. Loving, caring adults they could talk to.

  As part of the attempt to help all of us get back on our feet and settled back into our everyday lives, everyone had been invited over for dinner. Jackson arrived first, while my parents were cooking and laughing in the kitchen, and even though it had been only an hour or so since our walk had ended, I was incredibly glad to have him back at my side. Topher and Oliver arrived about fifteen minutes later, and I was surprised to see Chase in tow. I was a deer in the headlights, my fingers still intertwined with Jackson’s, but none of us said a word. Regardless, I pulled my hand free of Jackson’s. There was no need to rub it in Chase’s face.

  While the guys were arguing with my father about college football team rankings, which I had less than zero interest in, I wandered outside to get a breath of fresh air. I stared up at the glittering night sky. I certainly wasn’t one to get philosophical all about life, but sticking around in Barrington for more than a few months seemed kind of awesome to me. Who knew what the future would bring for any of us? I certainly had no clue. About the only thing I knew was that I wanted my future to be in Barrington—at least until I graduated high school.

  Still, I had to wonder . . . Were there other kids out in the world beyond Barrington with powers? Had the pulses affected others in ways we might not know for years to come? Or were we the only ones with enhanced abilities? And would we pass on those powers to our children? Or would those genes die out in some kind of genetic drift? I chuckled to myself. I’d actually learned something from Bluni’s research.

  “See those three stars, all in a row?”

  I turned around to see Oliver. “That’s Orion’s Belt,” he said, pointing to the constellation. “The three major stars across are called Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. The other two—Betelgeuse and Rigel—make up his shoulder and his foot. And up there, in that arrow shape?” He pointed near Orion. “Those are the seven sisters. They’re named after Atlas’s daughters, who were said to be the objects of Orion’s affections.”

  “You may be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but you’re still kind of a really big nerd,” I said with a glib smile.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Don’t ever change,” I quipped.

  “Dinner’s ready,” my mother called out as she opened the sliding-glass door to the kitchen. The fragrant aroma of curry, basil, coriander, and other Thai spices wafted out, beckoning us back.

  Oliver and I set the table while my parents lined the food up buffet-style. When we were all seated, it felt like we were gathered for a special occasion, a birthday or Thanksgiving or at least the kind of dinner where someone would make a toast.

  But it was just a Thursday-night dinner. That was special enough.

  Oliver had already started stuffing his face, but he paused mid-chew when I stood up, water glass in hand. A sweeping gesture. Everyone looked surprised. It was very unlike me, which I was reminded of as soon my mouth went cotton-dry.

  “Um, I just wanted to say something,” I began. “We’ve all been through a lot this year, and I guess I wanted to say thank you. Thank you for taking care of me, watching over me, listening to my problems, and”—I smiled slyly at Oliver—“calling me on my shit.”

  Oliver shrugged and grinned back. “Anytime.”

  “I’m just really glad you’re all here.” Maya weighed in the back of my mind again as soon as I’d said it. As I sat back down, I silently wished that she were here, too. I figured everyone else was having the same thought; there was no reason to say it out loud.

  Dinner was nice, even if I found myself occasionally wincing at its cloying Hallmark Channel charm. I rested my hand on Jackson’s thigh, under the table and outside of anyone’s sight. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught his surprised smile before he could temper it. It was just nice to touch him—to know he wanted to be there with me. And so what if I got a little thrill that he and I were the only ones to know?

  An interruption came with the loud ringing of a cell phone. For a moment no one recognized it as their own, looking around only to see who would silence the rude disturbance. Then my dad stood up from the table. He looked a little nervous as I watched him, putting the pieces together. I hadn’t recognized it as his ringtone—it had been a jazzy version of the Top Gun theme, and incredibly embarrassing, as long as I’d known him—but I watched him move across the dining room and kitchen to a cell phone nonetheless.

  At first I was a little sad that he had finally given in to to my desperate pleas to join the twenty-first century, but added his confusion and delay together with the look of concern and realized his devotion to 1980s Tom Cruise had not wavered: The ringing was, in fact, a second cell phone—his Batphone, a direct and private line to the Department of Defense. And now they were calling.

  He answered, ducking out of the room in a gesture of politeness but what I knew was really a move for privacy. I couldn’t help getting up to follow him. I walked out of the kitchen and turned left like I was headed for the bathroom, but doubled back toward the stairs. From the faint sound of my dad’s voice, I could tell he’d padded upstairs to his office. Instinct told me to follow, but we’d been over this so many times. We trusted each other, and everything was out in the open now, at least among our immediate family.

  I forced myself to sit down at the base of the stairs. I could wait a few minutes for him to tell me himself. Maybe it was nothing—or maybe it was an update about Bar Tech or even a new assignment. Or perhaps they’d located Cochran, found something to charge him with. That was probably a long shot, but who said it had to be bad news?

  At least I wasn’t alone.

  Also by Mark H. Kruger

  Overpowered

  About the Author

  Mark H. Kruger is a screen and TV writer specializing in edge-of-your-seat thrillers and supernatural suspense. He has contributed to many television series and movies, but is best known for having written and produced for The 4400,
Necessary Roughness, and the upcoming Damien, and for working with filmmakers Wes Craven and Clive Barker. Mark lives in Los Angeles and is the author of Overpowered and Overtaken.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Mark H. Kruger

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  Interior design by Hilary Zarycky

  The text for this book is set in Janson.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kruger, Mark H.

  Overtaken / Mark H. Kruger.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Sequel to: Overpowered.

  Summary: “After the mysterious pulses changed Nica Ashley’s life forever, she was sure things could only get worse when Dana Fox returned. Her reappearance after having gone missing for months surely meant losing her friendship with Jackson but also that something more ominous is simmering under the surface of quiet Barrington”—Provided by publisher.