I stared at the opening, stunned. Maybe that hadn’t really happened? Maybe I’m just imagining stuff? I looked back at the bed. Diesel had already curled himself into a ball and gone to sleep on top of a pile of discarded pants. Some guard dog he was.
“You left the door open.”
I jumped at the noise and whirled around so hard I almost tipped over. It took several seconds of frantic wind-milling before I caught my balance and stood up straight, and even then, my heart was beating so quickly, I could barely breathe.
“Hi, Buckner.” I tried to sound casual, but I could hear myself, and I wasn’t doing a good job of it.
Should I tell him about Shawn? The buff hottie’s confusing message spun around in my brain. What could he have been warning me about? What did he know about my dad?
And if I tell Buckner—would I ever get the chance to find out?
What if Shawn isn’t as evil as I thought?
Buckner regarded me, his green eyes glittering in a way that made me think he could see right through me. He didn’t press the issue, though. “Well . . . okay then. I guess we’d better get on our way. I’m sure you have a few questions.”
Boy, did I ever. I just wasn’t sure if I could ask them or not.
Chapter Nine
“We’ve got about twenty minutes before we get to the clean-up site. Honestly, I should have come earlier and briefed you, but things have heated up quite a bit since you got here, and I had a couple of fires to put out.” Buckner started the truck, and the rumble covered a few words, but I got the message.
“It’s about me, isn’t it?” And my dad? I didn’t ask all of what I was thinking—not until I knew better what was going on.
He shrugged. “It’s about a lot of things, most of them stupid, and we don’t have time to talk about them. You’re going to need to get your head in the game right now, kiddo, because it’s about to get real ugly. Do you think you can do that?”
Ugly? What kind of ugly? I didn’t like the way that sounded, but I mean—what choice did I have? I wasn’t going to walk away—not after the clue Shawn had just given me, vague as it was.
I gulped and looked down at my hands. “Yeah.” As far as answers went, it wasn’t slick, but I felt like I had just been flushed down a toilet. How, exactly, was I supposed to make head or tails of this—any of this? I could tell from the way he kept glancing at his mirrors, bouncing his gaze back and forth like a pinball, that something big was about to happen. Then a shadowy image leaped up in my brain—long teeth, shiny eyes—and I wasn’t sure if I wanted something to happen or not.
“Hard to get driven around, isn’t it?”
I glanced back up at Buckner. He was giving me a knowing look, the same one I’d gotten often from Malone.
“What?”
“After doing all the driving yourself. It’s hard to relinquish that control.”
I didn’t exactly know what he was getting at. I mean sure, some drivers had issues being a passenger, but I wasn’t one of those. Whatever he was talking about, it had more to do with himself than with me.
I twiddled my fingers a little bit and took a deep breath. “It’s not a . . . bubbler, is it?” Using a word that was better suited for children’s books made me want to giggle, scream, and cry, all at the same time.
“I wish but no.” He sighed and ran one hand through his grey hair. “You know, you shouldn’t even be on this mission. You don’t know anything, which isn’t your fault, but it makes things hard—and dangerous. You have zero idea what we’re up against, or even why we do it—but this Order has rules. This is my first assignment since you’ve been taken apprentice—which means you’re bound to follow me in battle. And to be honest, it might be safer for you than what’s brewing back at the compound right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just . . . there are all kinds of people in the Markers. Some are saner than others, and until I know for sure how they feel about you and what lengths they’re willing to go to, you’re safer here with me.”
Shawn’s warning sprang into my head. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
He sighed and rammed the shifter forward with a grinding noise. It was the first time I’d ever heard him miss a gear. “It’s not my fault. You can’t know yet—at least not until I figure things out. It’s for your own good. You’re my apprentice, and I’m sworn to protect you.”
He turned to face me. Months of being on the road made my stomach clench, and I couldn’t keep myself from looking at the road.
“I’m your master. I’m sworn to protect you, even at the cost of my own life. So before you start to doubt me, or freak out about what’s going on, you have to remember that. I am always going to be vigilant, and I’m always going to respond to potential threats to your safety. It’s my duty, but it’s also my honor.”
And what if you’re the threat to my safety? The thought brought bile up in the back of my throat. Buckner seemed so much like Malone—and thinking ill of him was almost like thinking ill of my departed friend. The conflict left my guts all torn up.
He turned back to face the road, and I slumped slightly in my seat. I didn’t know what to make of this. Between Shawn’s overt warning and Buckner’s implied one, this wasn’t looking good for me.
“Look, kiddo. I know you made the decision to join because you didn’t want to be shot. I get that.”
“You get that?” It was, quite possibly, the most ludicrous thing I had ever heard. And while true, it wasn’t completely true, either. This didn’t seem like the time or place to correct him, though.
He grinned. “Doesn’t matter. Listen to me—once you’re in, there’s no going out. You know that, right? You can feel it?”
I opened my mouth to protest, but the words hung in my throat. I strained to force them out, but they refused to come. And then I felt a flare of something in my stomach, a warmth that was anchored down to my very core. It quivered with life, blossoming as if aware that I was thinking about it, before spreading in pulsing waves, out from my center and through to my heart, my lungs, through the birthmark on my collarbone.
Haven’t you ever wondered why nothing turns out for you? What if you were supposed to be doing something else all along?
And then, like a ringing bell in the background, a chorus that repeated itself, over and over. What are the chances? What are the chances?
I had thought I was confused when we started talking, but the pool I was sinking into was deeper and more turbulent than I could have guessed.
“Right,” said Buckner. He snuffled a bit and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, and gradually, the odd numbness and warmth that had overcome my body faded. He half smiled and gave me a knowing look, and I had to wonder—did he have something to do with that?
He fished out a cigarette, somehow managing to both steer and shift with just the one hand and an elbow. I fought the urge to grab the steering wheel. “Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the glitches.”
My mind sputtered on the word.
He glanced up at the ceiling, and my gaze went back to the road. Why couldn’t he watch what he was doing? And then I remembered how close to the edge of danger he lived—something like this was probably nothing. “Okay, well, they’re shadows—like ghosts, except in reverse.” He rubbed his chin again. “I guess I mean that the light can’t hit them. And they’re sort of non-corporeal—they can’t pass through walls, but they lack a physical body, which makes them almost immortal. I mean, they’re not tangible—you can’t touch ‘em.”
He sighed at the confusion I could feel showing itself on my face. “At their most basic level, glitches are nothing, a kind of void. They need to feed off of the energy of other things and places to survive. So they’re attracted to certain wavelengths of heat, electricity, and light.”
I shrugged. “That . . . doesn’t sound so bad.” Not at least, compared to wolf-monsters.
He harrumphed and hit the blinker for a l
ane change. I noticed that his needle was creeping up on the speedometer, and it didn’t look like it would be coming back down anytime soon. “It wouldn’t be, except for a key detail. While glitches will consume non-living sources of energy to survive—there was a case a few years back where a flock of them took out a power plant—they are extremely attracted to a different kind of electricity.”
My skin crawled, and a bell clanged in the back of my head. I know where this is going. “Don’t tell me. Really, don’t?”
He gave me an impish grin before continuing. “They love a living electrical source. Animals are all right, but man, give them a human brain and they go crazy. And once they get to you, you’re a goner. They suck the life right out of you.”
“That’s . . . fucking terrifying.” I mean, vampire shadows? Holy shit. “How . . . how can you fight something like that? Are they afraid of light or something?” My mind flashed back to a cheap horror flick I had seen not too long ago.
“You’ll see. I should warn you, though—you have to follow every single one of my instructions to a T, got me? Because you fuck this up, and we’re all going to die.” He finally lit the cigarette in his mouth and took a puff. “No pressure, though.”
Ha.
“Things are going to be difficult this round. This is different from what I’m used to. From the first days of the Order—all the way up until, well, you—” he grinned, “we would never apprentice someone before they finished training—but you, you haven’t even started. So you’re going to have to stay out of the way, keep your head down, and do exactly as I say, and even then, I don’t know how good our chances are. And if I was being honest, I’d say that I think some people have planned it that way. Things would be a lot easier for those people if you didn’t make it through this mission.”
I swallowed. “Oh.” Already, I’d have to say this was not looking good for me.
He chuckled low in his throat and eased off the fuel just a little, and the diesel clatter quieted as the truck went into a coast. “So, a few notes. As you may have already figured out, we find and recruit strictly from paternal bloodlines. I think you’re the first initiate we’ve taken—at least since I’ve been alive—whose parentage was not officially verified through first person accounts.”
“What is my parentage?” The question dribbled its way off of my lips before I could stop it. “I mean, is there a way to find out?” I felt my hand turn into a fist, and I took a deep breath and opened it back up.
He paused before answering, and my throat tightened. Maybe he didn’t know. Or maybe there was some sort of taboo against asking.
“I couldn’t say. I know that he’s not with the Order now. We can feel the tie between father and son—but then again, I don’t know about father and daughter. To my knowledge, a woman has never has been initiated, much less apprenticed, so I don’t know how the blood-binding would work. ” He cleared his throat, and just from the way he did it, I knew I probably wouldn’t like what he had to say next. “Chances are good he was with us and died, either in combat or of other causes. And it doesn’t matter, anyways—once you are apprenticed to a master, your loyalty changes. So in that way, maybe you’re lucky.”
He sighed, and a tremble started in his jaw, a sign of weakness I had never before seen and would not have otherwise believed. “Sometimes, when I see your face, I wonder if it was one of the ones we lost. I see traces of one man, but then the lights shifts and it’s another. You laugh, and you’re my first roommate—and then you frown and you’re Bobby, who died in the most inglorious and normal of ways. He got hit by a drunk driver.”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. Apprenticing with the Order seemed to involve a lot of death. If I was going to have any answers, I was going to have to figure out a way to deal with it and fast.
“Anyways, the point I was trying to make about bloodlines is—a lot of these kids have heard stories, right from the beginning, of the conquests of their fathers—some of them over graves. I can’t tell you how many of us were the first to throw earth over the fathers we buried. But every single son of the Order grew up thinking that he’d be a hero, with a capital ‘H’.”
He laughed to himself, a single quick exhalation through the nose. “It’s something you can’t help. You’re young, and full of blood and piss and spit and fire, and then you get told your whole life that you were born, divinely selected to fight monsters and protect the world, and it makes you . . . overconfident.”
Yeah, I wouldn’t know what that was like. Overconfident? I barely had enough confidence to make it through the day.
His shoulders fell into a heavy mantle. “We always lose a quarter of the men their first year. They just never manage to get their head far enough into the game. No matter how cool you think this gig is or how much you think you understand what it’s all about, you don’t. You can’t, not until you see what we’re dealing with and how much is going to be required of you—and then everything changes. You start training like your life depends on it—and it does, only for some kids, that moment of realization comes too late.”
He tapped the dash and sighed. “At least we don’t have to teach you how to drive or park. That takes a few weeks off of your training, that’s for sure, because while we might fight monsters, we don’t mess with the DMV, so nobody gets trained on driving until they actually go to basic driver school. Now, pay attention.”
He reached out for the CB and gave me a quick wink. There was a gentle flare of static that died when he squeezed the button. “Can I get a radio check?”
A few white seconds of noise, and then a gruff voice, low and deep, “Loud and clear, driver.”
“Wha—?”
Buckner shook his head and held up a finger. I stopped talking, but I didn’t understand—had there been some indication that his radio wasn’t working? I knew some drivers checked it after they hadn’t heard any chatter for a while—but this stretch of road was mostly dead.
The voice was higher in tone than the previous growl, but it held some steel in it, steel hard enough to come through over a crackly CB radio. “Right as rain, driver.” For a moment, I thought it might be Shawn.
And why would more than one driver respond to a single radio check? I mean, I guess it wasn’t that weird, but it was unnecessary.
Still, Bucker held up his finger, and there was another answer, and one I thought I recognized—the young man from breakfast. What was his name? Chris? “Bingo.” Buckner held the mic up to his mouth. “I need a bear report.”
Really? “You’re checking for cops?” I glanced at the spedo, but his arm was over the dial on his side of the dash. By my estimate though, we were doing a nice, easy sixty-two miles an hour. You get a feel for these things after a while—although this wasn’t my truck, so I couldn’t be completely sure.
The reply held the same gruff tone as the first man to answer the radio check. “You got a smokie in the bushes, waiting for somebody to go by in the hammer lane at the forty-mile marker.”
“Keep your eyes peeled. You got another one in the curve at the forty-five.” This one was Shawn. I was sure. Hearing him, I felt no uncertain amount of loathing—but also a tiny thrill.
Stop it, Charlie. Hot or not, the man is evil, and he doesn’t deserve your interest.
Does he?
“Thank you, driver.” Buckner replaced the microphone and sat back in his seat, his relaxed pose almost melting into the upholstery.
At his content silence, I simmered. “You know,” I grumbled. “I am a driver. I mean, I don’t see why I had to pay attention to that. It wasn’t exactly something new.”
Buckner harrumphed and shook his head. “Oh yeah? Then let me ask you something—what mile marker are we at?”
I glanced up a moment, the gears in my head suddenly turning. “I don’t remember, but I’d guess around twenty?”
“We’re at fifteen.”
“Then how . . . that’s some great reception. Do you think
its skip?” I couldn’t remember what the weather conditions had to be for a CB signal to travel like that, but I peered out at the sky anyways. It looked clear and blue to me—perfect. Didn’t there need to be clouds for the signal to bounce?
“It’s not skip, kiddo. Sven—he’s one of us, and the first man that answered my calls—and Shawn have already reached the site, and they’re giving us basic details on what points of entry they think we should use. Chris isn’t there yet.”
I scowled, but once his explanation train was running, it wasn’t going to stop. “You’ve got to keep your ears peeled for that, things that don’t make sense. In the Order, we run as a team. We realized long ago we needed to find a way to communicate with each other on the road, while at the same time keeping ourselves as incognito as possible. No using special channels or any of that jazz, you understand?”
“Not really, no.”
“There are three other trucks from the order in our team. I’m point right now, so it’s my job to make sure we’re staying together—not so close as to be suspicious—but close enough that we can back each other up. I’ve also got to figure out a plan of entry—so if they get there first, then it’s smart to get information from them on how they think we should do it.”
I nodded. “You know, you could just use a cell phone.”
He snorted. “Phone records are logged and tracked. They’ve got GPS in them that make it impossible to stay off of the record.”
“But CB’s—”
“CB’s can be listened to, but we stay vague, and they’re incredibly reliable. They don’t require signal—which is important, because some of these creatures can screw up satellite communication or the view of the sky. If something happens and a radio goes on the fritz, we just pull into the next truck stop and grab another one. Sometimes, new-fangled isn’t necessarily better, understand?”
The comment hit me hard, and I sighed. “Jeff—not you, I mean . . . my old trainer—he used to say the same thing. He wasn’t against technology—he had a lot of pictures on his phone, of home and his pets and stuff, but you could always tell he was an old soul.”
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