The Dark at the End

by Susan Adrian

  THE DARK AT THE END

  Also by Susan Adrian

  Tunnel Vision (St. Martin's Press), 2015

  Forthcoming by Susan Adrian

  Nutcracked (Random House), 2017

  SUSAN | ADRIAN

  Copyright 2016 by Susan Adrian

  THE DARK AT THE END: A TUNNEL VISION Novel

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  Cover image by Arsgera, istockphoto.com

  ISBN-10: 0692777954

  ISBN-13: 978-0692777954

  www.susanadrian.net

  SALTO Press

  For the dedicated readers of TUNNEL VISION,

  who wanted the rest of the story

  1

  JAKE

  Vladimir by Royce

  The van rattles to a stop across from Vladimir’s house. All of us stare at it, silent except for the occasional noisy slurp of ice cream.

  The house is straight out of the 1950s: a tiny, sun-yellow box with white windows and door, a porch on one side and a shaded carport on the other jutting out like bookends. A jewel-green lawn stretches all around it, mowed to a half-inch flattop. Little bushes clump across a bed in front. Neat, precise. Like most of its neighbors on this street, like most of the houses we’ve driven past. I guess if everybody’s retired they have more time to maintain their houses. Or maybe they have really good lawn care service here.

  No, if this Vladimir guy is anything like my grandfather, Dedushka—and I bet he is, since they come from the same twisted Russian background—he does it all himself. Dedushka studies the house through binoculars, tapping one finger on his knee. He’s been dodging spies and governments all his life, since he got injected with a superpower in a Russian lab in the 50s, and successfully escaped. Vladimir was there too. They’ve kept in touch, with their dodging-spies methods, but Dedushka hasn’t seen him in person in years.

  My sister Myka sucks on her Bomb Pop, and he glares at her, briefly. I take a guilty lick of my fudge bar. It was Myk’s idea to stop at the ice cream truck a few blocks back, and she was persuasive.

  Okay, she was a pest. But she’s thirteen, and summer should still mean ice cream. Rachel and I gave in and got something too. Dedushka grunted and muttered about time, and wanting to get to the house already.

  There are two other cars and a Jeep on Vladimir’s street, but they haven't moved. There's no one in sight. But we’ll sit here and wait until Dedushka is sure it’s clear…so we might as well have treats. It could be hours, knowing him. He’s cautious, but he knows what he’s doing.

  All we need is the serum this Vladimir is hoarding, that he, Dedushka, and my grandmother made after they got to America. It wiped out Dedushka’s power. Personally, I’m aching to bust the door down, swallow it all in one gulp, and finally lose my own powers. It feels like normalcy and safety are at my fingertips, for the first time in my life. If this old guy really has the stop-power serum in there, if it works, I could be a normal person five minutes from now. If it works, I won’t be hunted anymore. My family could go back to school, work. I could have a real life, instead of running and hiding and living in a van.

  Maybe. A lot has happened. But it’s more of a chance than we have right now.

  “It looks like a dollhouse,” Myka says, at my shoulder. She peers through the window, popsicle dripping on my seat. This van has its own windows in back—I didn’t want anything that reminded me of DARPA and its windowless government vans, thank you very much—but Myk doesn’t stay back there very often. If she doesn’t have to be in the seatbelt, she isn’t.

  I poke her side. “You’re too young to remember when we were in military housing, but most of it looked exactly like that.”

  “I remember military housing,” Myk says indignantly. “I remember everything.”

  “She’s right,” Mom says from the back. “She does.”

  I look in the rearview mirror. Mom’s in her seat in the back row, feet on the floor, hands in her lap. Eyes locked on the window next to her. She’s still a little lost. Five weeks ago she thought I was dead, that Dad had been dead for two years. She didn’t know anything about my tunneling—my ability to connect to people through a personal object of theirs—or…anything. But I wasn’t dead. Just being held by a secretive government agency, DARPA, while they used me to spy on people, while they pretended to protect my family. Then on the run with Dedushka and Rachel, my sort-of-girlfriend, while DARPA and their rivals, good guys and nasty guys—like Gareth Smith—hunted us so they could use my powers too.

  It turns out not only could I see what people were seeing and hear what they’re hearing when I hold an object, which I always knew, but if pushed I could control people through that object too. I could control anyone, long-range, without their knowledge. That was too much of a temptation for any government agency or bad guy to resist.

  The kicker, the one that punched me in the gut, was that Dad was alive too, and turned out to be running his own lab trying to create powers like mine. He’d left me out of it until DARPA recruited me, but then he was happy enough to use that as an excuse to take me underground himself. To use my power, just like everyone else, to spy on people. To control and spy and run the world. But Rachel helped me get away.

  Myk told Mom all of that when they had to run away too, so they couldn’t be used as leverage…and all of a sudden she found herself hiking the Appalachian trail for three weeks, hiding out from the very government she works for.

  It’s all been a bit much. Sometimes she has that long-distance stare I’ve seen in vets when they come home. She and Myk met up with me, Dedushka, and Rachel a week or so ago, and now we’re together, hiding from DARPA and Dad and Gareth Smith, and who knows who else. But we’re here in Sarasota to finally end it.

  She looks up and I smile at her, through the mirror, fudge all over my teeth. She smiles back, thin, then looks away again, and runs a hand through her curls. She has a smudge of dirt on her cheek.

  I wish she could be home. That we all could.

  It’s getting hot in the van with the engine off, without the air conditioning constantly blasting. Our ice cream is melting fast. We’ll all be sweaty puddles by the time we go in there.

  Sarasota, Florida, July: the kind of hot where somebody’s got their fingers on the oven knob, considering how much to roast you before you’re done. With a humidifier added in to keep you moist and juicy.

  “Why aren’t we going in already?” Myk asks, rubbing her knuckles up, down, up on the vinyl seat.

  “Exactly my question,” Rachel says. She licks the rest of the vanilla off her stick, raises her eyebrows at me, and I shrug. It’s a boring Florida street, everybody in their houses watching TV away from the sun or out somewhere playing bingo. We haven’t been followed—we’ve been keeping careful watch of that—and as far as we know nobody has any idea where we are anyway. Dedushka and Vladimir are the only ones who know about the serum, as far as we know. Of course I can’t tunnel and find out. I don’t have personal objects for anybody except Dad.

  It all seems pretty benign. But I know by now to trust Dedushka with things like this.

  “Not yet,” Dedushka says, lowering the binoculars. “We wait a few more minutes. Then me and Yakob, we go in and talk to him.”

  “And me,” Rachel and Myk say at the same time.

  I look at t
hem both. Not Myk, not for a first meeting with an ancient, possibly crazy Russian dude. I don’t know what she’d say, what she’d do. She is still only thirteen, even if it’s a crazy-smart thirteen.

  Rachel, though. She sees things I don’t, thinks of things I don’t.

  “And Rachel,” I say.

  Myk groans, but Dedushka grunts agreement. I get up, ceding my sticky seat to Myk, and go back to sit with Mom for a second.

  She glances at me again, then back out the window, as intent as Dedushka.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  There’s a long pause, so long I start to wonder if she heard me. “I’m okay,” she says, her head still turned away. She pauses again, runs her finger down the glass. Then she finally turns to me. “Are you sure you should get rid of it? Your…tunneling? If it’s always been part of you.…”

  “Hell, yes.” I swallow. “Sorry. Yes. I’m sure. I can’t wait.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “Really? Just think about what you could do…”

  “It is time,” Dedushka cuts in.

  Myka groans again, and flops on the seat next to me. “Be right back.” I touch Mom on the shoulder, then tug on Myk’s hair, the dark curls flipping under her chin. “Watch the van for us.”

  “And wish you luck?” she says, sulkily. “Fine, good luck. Get the serum, so we can get out of here. I’d like to get back home before school starts.”

  You and me both, kiddo.

  Dedushka and Rachel and I hop out. The heat slaps me in the face. I don’t know how people live here.

  We cross the street, and Rach and I hang back while Dedushka knocks on the front door. They’re the old friends. Vladimir’s expecting us. But Dedushka has to take the lead, make it a reunion.

  Nobody answers.

  Dedushka stares at the door, frowning. He knocks again. Rachel slips her hand into mine. It’s damp—everything’s damp. I can feel the sweat dripping down my back. But I squeeze.

  We wait, listening for the sound of footsteps coming towards us. It suddenly reminds me of Halloween, standing on a porch with Myka holding my hand, both of us in ridiculously complex costumes courtesy of Mom. Waiting for footsteps to bring us candy.

  This is a different kind of candy, but I still want it.

  I step forward and try the door. Locked. I glance at Dedushka.

  “Perhaps he waits for us inside.” He scratches at his beard. “We try the back.”

  He strides down the steps, around the carport side. We follow, slower. Looking everywhere.

  “Yakob.” Dedushka’s voice is spiked with urgency. When we get to the back, Dedushka stands there holding the door open, looking in. “It is wrong,” he says. “Be careful.” He goes in, stepping lightly. I go up, see what he means, and let go of Rachel’s hand.

  Shit.

  It’s trashed. Unless Vladimir is a really messy housekeeper, someone’s been here before us. The door opens into a kitchen, and every surface, almost every inch of the floor, is covered with silverware, shards of glass, scraps of paper. The drawers and cupboards are open. Even the refrigerator is open, pumping cold air uselessly into the room. I close it, then follow Dedushka. Rachel follows me.

  There’s a bathroom on the left, the light on. Not as bad, but still rifled through. It smells sharply of mouthwash, a green puddle on the floor. The living room is thrashed too. There are papers on the floor, on the battered green sofa, and a whole bookcase knocked over, books spilling out. But there wasn’t as much to go through in here.

  They were looking for the serum. They had to be, with everything searched through like this. Jesus, how did they know about the old man and the serum?

  Dedushka keeps moving forward, slowly. I move too, even though every cell in my body wants to stop and run away like my legs are on fire. They might still be here. They might take me again, shove me underground again. End everything.

  Rachel is silent behind me.

  I keep walking. Dedushka looks in a front bedroom, left off a short hall. He moves on, to the last room. I poke my head in the front one too. It’s a trophy room, or it was before it all got turned over. Baseball stuff, bats and balls and gloves and tickets, hundreds of tickets. I can see spaces on the wall where frames must’ve hung, but now they’re on the floor with everything else, shattered.

  Dedushka makes a strangled noise from the back bedroom, and I jump for the door. I stop short when I see, Rachel at my shoulder. She screams, small, before she cuts it off.

  Vladimir is sprawled on his back across the bed, a gunshot hole in the middle of his forehead.

  Dedushka puts two fingers to Vladimir’s neck, but even I can tell it’s useless. The guy is dead. I’ve seen exactly one dead body before—Eric, a government agent who had been my friend before he turned on me—and he looked the same. Empty.

  “Cool, but not stiff,” Dedushka says. He kneels by Vladimir’s side, takes his hand. “It has not been long.”

  Rachel’s breathing fast behind me, panic-breathing, and I turn, move her gently back into the hall. She’s seen zero dead bodies before. Her eyes are wide, wild, her fists clenched.

  “It’s okay,” I say, even though it isn’t. At all. If someone came here and trashed the place, they know about the serum. They know about us. They’re not far ahead of us. And they killed Vladimir. If they went through the house after they killed him, they could still be nearby. We could have missed them. They could’ve been watching us….

  Fucking hell. Mom and Myka, sitting outside in the van. Alone.

  I run. Down the short hall, through the living room. I grab the door handle, yank. I forgot, it’s locked. I fumble for the lock button, find it, throw the door open. Launch myself down the steps.

  The van is gone. There’s nothing but an empty street, no one moving.

  Mom and Myka. Gone.

  2

  JAKE

  Kidnapped, North by Northwest original score

  I pound across the street and stand where the van was. Where I left them alone, unprotected. I spin in a circle, like it will make them reappear. There’s nothing. Not even an ice cream stick.

  Rachel stands on the front steps, her face stark white.

  I stare vacantly at the steaming black pavement. They can’t be gone. They have to be close. We were only in there a few minutes….

  I take off running, north. Maybe they’re just ahead of us, around the corner. Maybe I can still catch them, see which way they went.

  It had to be Gareth Smith. The man is a complete psychopath, an ex-DARPA agent who went rogue and started selling information freelance. The first time I met him—Rachel and I together—was at gunpoint, when he decided to scoop me off the street and sell me to the highest bidder. I still can see him laughing while his men sliced Rachel’s cheek with a knife, just to get me to talk. Who else would kill an old man like that, heartless? Who else would steal my family like that? If it was the government they would’ve just charged into the house and taken me, not them. I don’t even understand why Smith would’ve taken them.

  To hurt me? To make me turn myself in? He likes to play games.

  “Stop!”

  It’s Rachel, running behind me. But I’m almost at the corner. I at least have to get to the corner, see if I can see them.

  “Jake, stop!”

  I get to the corner and finally stop, look both ways. One car, far, heading away from us. A little blue car. Not the van. Not my mother and baby sister.

  Rachel catches up to me, panting. I look towards her, not even seeing her. I only see Myka’s face, trusting me. Wanting to come with me. I should’ve brought her inside. I shouldn’t have left her. My fault.

  “I can’t tunnel to them.” I look up the street again, down, in case I missed something. “I don’t even have any objects of theirs. It was all in the van. I can’t…” I feel off-balance, like I might fall down. “I was supposed to protect them.”

  “I know,” she says, so quiet. “But you couldn’t stop this. There was no way to—”


  “I could’ve not left them alone in the fucking van.”

  She shakes her head, but I see it in her eyes. She knows I’m right. It was a mistake. It would’ve been safer to stay together, in an unknown situation. I want to hit something. Smash something, anything, into tiny unfixable pieces. I clench my fists, but it doesn’t help.

  “I need to find them.” My voice breaks. Damn it. “It’s Smith. It has to be.”

  She opens her arms to hug me, but I push her away. If I hadn’t agreed for her to come, she’d be gone too, vanished. I stride down the street east, turn, west. Nothing. Loop back. I stare down at the yellow house, and where the van was, fists still clenched. Dedushka’s there, out on the sidewalk. He gives a quick glance around, then disappears back inside again.

  “If it’s Smith, he won’t kill them,” Rachel says. “He wants them for something. Bait.”

  “Maybe. But he might hurt them. Jesus. Remember…” That knife, pressing into Rachel’s cheek, when I could do nothing. There’s still a little mark there, a white ghost of a line on her cheek. I close my eyes, breathe, press my tongue against the roof of my mouth hard. I always think it will help. It never does.

  She touches my shoulder, like I just did with my mother. Moments ago. And now I don’t know where she is.

  “We need to go back and help Dedushka search the house,” she says. “There may be clues to where they are. And Vladimir might have left something about the serum. This may be our only chance.”

  Screw the serum, I think, but I don’t say it. I still need it if I want to end all this mess, take away the reason this happened. And she’s right. There may be clues about where Smith was going, what he’s doing. If I’m really lucky Smith’s people left something I can tunnel with. Find out where the hell they are. It feels like giving up to go back, but we walk down the street. Not as fast. The Jeep is gone too, I realize. Not that that means anything. Not that it matters. The van is gone, and that’s all I care about.