Creeping Beautiful

by JA Huss

  CHAPTER TEN - INDIE

  Donovan came home a lot after that first job. I could tell everyone was concerned about something, but they wouldn’t tell me what that something was.

  Me, I presumed.

  It was always me.

  Everything around Old Home seemed to revolve around me.

  We didn’t do another job for several months. But Adam hemmed and hawed about the Company being on his ass and started taking me into New Orleans for practice jobs.

  I wasn’t supposed to know they were practice jobs, but I did. It was so obvious. They were easy things. Steal this thing. Attack this person, but do not kill him.

  That was the dead giveaway. It was always McKay I was attacking. He always had a ski mask on, but come on. Did they take me for a four-year-old? I could pick McKay out of a crowd of a thousand people just by his walk.

  But then, right after I turned thirteen and Donovan’s visits had become fewer and fewer over the past months—I guess I was making progress?—Adam called all of us in for a meeting.

  His office had been rearranged for this. That was my first clue that serious things were about to happen. He had a giant mahogany desk in that office, but on this day, he did not sit behind it. He had his desk chair, the two chairs that typically lived in front of it, and another chair from the dining room all arranged in a circular pattern in the center of the room.

  He sat in his chair, Donovan and McKay sat in the other two office chairs, and I took the dining room chair. It was summer again, but all of us were wearing jeans and t-shirts.

  McKay’s were faded to light, light blue and his t-shirt was white and sleeveless. Adam’s were some regular blue color and he had on a black tank top that showed off his muscles. He had been working out hard since the first job went wrong, and his upper arms were thick like cannons. And Donovan was wearing dark, dark jeans with a white button-down, long-sleeved shirt—sleeves rolled up—that made me uncomfortably sweaty just looking at him.

  McKay was leaning forward with his head bowed and elbows on his knees. His hands were gripping his thick, light hair and he was staring straight ahead. So still. Like he dared not move or everything might fall apart around him.

  Donovan was kicked back in his chair, one ankle propped up on one knee, shoulders open, head tilted back a little, slight smile on his face.

  Adam had the only chair with armrests. And he gripped those tightly, I remember. His back was straight and his face serious as he looked us all over.

  His eyes landed on mine.

  I smiled. Trying to play things off like Donovan was.

  “OK,” Adam finally said in his gruff voice. “It’s time. I know that first job did not go well, Indie. But Donovan is positive that he has fixed the problem and is confident you can get started again. So this weekend we’re going to San Francisco and then we’re taking a little side trip over to Colorado to watch someone.”

  I nodded at him out of habit, but inside I was stuck on the words ‘fixed the problem,’ wondering what that meant and how Donovan fit into the picture. And when I snapped back to attention, Adam had already moved on to McKay’s part in this next job. Which was the San Francisco one I wrote about earlier where Adam had to come save my ass again. Only this time I made it out OK.

  Anyway. That was when the real jobs began. Company jobs, like that San Francisco one, but also private things, like that surveillance stuff in Colorado.

  This was also when I first learned about Sasha Cherlin. She was a Company kid like me. And when I say like me, I mean almost exactly like me. She grew up with men too, and was trained to kill people, and knew lots of secrets. She was also the one who fractured the Company several years earlier with Adam’s help.

  Donovan told me that part. But I was not to tell Adam that I knew these things. It was just between us.

  Donovan told me a lot of things after our sessions when the tape was not recording. I don’t remember all of them, just some of them. He told me weird things in those after sessions. Things about himself, mostly. Which I enjoyed. I was always interested in Donovan’s life.

  But this one time I’m thinking about he was talking about Sasha Cherlin.

  I never actually met this Sasha girl. Adam said that was too dangerous. She had a lot of people watching her. Not people like us, and not for the same reasons. Protecting her, he said.

  So all we did was take notes.

  I didn’t see the big deal about this girl. She didn’t do anything unusual. She had just graduated from some fancy university in Denver and was living at home with some family before leaving for Kansas for more college.

  We stayed there for two days, but then on the second night Adam woke me up in the hotel room and said we were leaving. He was stuffing my clothes into a bag and talking in a rush. Almost like he was in a panic.

  On the jet ride home, I heard him talking to McKay on the phone. Telling him that there was a whole team of Company surveillance on Sasha Cherlin and we needed to get the fuck away from that shit.

  He never explained that to me and I didn’t ask. I was tired that night and slept the whole trip, even after we landed and were driving back to Old Home.

  And then, once I was home, I didn’t care anymore. By the time I was thirteen I didn’t care about anything but Nate. He was my whole world. And it was summer so he didn’t have to go to school every day. We loved the summers most of all. That’s when we had the most fun out in the woods.

  Donovan was there when I got home, but he debriefed me quick. He didn’t record it. And he didn’t ask me about why Adam had to come save me from that man who wanted to slit my throat in San Francisco. He just listened as I gave my report and said, “Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Mm-hm.” And then he, Adam, and McKay locked themselves up inside Adam’s office and I went out to play. Even though it was barely dawn.

  Nate didn’t care what time I came to his house. I would climb this big old cypress tree and get up on his roof, and then shimmy my way through his little attic window and wake him up.

  His grandfather was sick, sick by this time. So I probably could’ve walked through the front door and gone up the steps like a normal person and no one would’ve said boo about it. But nothing about Nate and me was normal so I didn’t bother pretending that it was.

  Thirteen was a banner year for me and Nate. We weren’t at the kissing stage. Yet. But we were making our way there. Slowly but surely, we were growing up and getting ready to do grown-up things.

  Our favorite thing to do that summer I was thirteen was to take his little fishing boat up the river and go into the little town to eat ice cream and laugh. We even had a couple friends there. And I told stories about us. Because of course, they didn’t know who we were. Nate’s school was on the other side of the river, and I didn’t go to regular school. So we could tell these kids anything we wanted.

  I did all the talking because Nate is only good for telling stories about facts. And these kids would roll their eyes at him when he started rambling on about the birds of the swamp or the moss on the trees.

  But I liked that about those kids. Especially the girls my age. I liked that they saw Nate as some backwater nobody with a weird fascination with nature. Because that meant he would stay mine and he would never look at those girls who lived in that town the way he looked at me.

  This was the summer we started to hold hands. And every time he reached for me and his fingers laced with mine, I would get a chill through my whole body. The good kind of chill. Not the kind I would get on a job that was going wrong.

  And I was doing jobs nearly every week that summer. The Company was up to lots of things that year and they called Adam and me out all the time to clean things up. That was how Donovan and I decided to describe killing. Clean-up jobs.

  I got a lot better at things that summer too. I didn’t mess up as much. And sometimes—most times, actually—Adam didn’t need to save me anymore. He just sent me off to do my thing and waited for me to come back.

  But there was this one ti
me in Miami the next year, when I ran into a problem called Nicholas Tate.

  Both Adam and Donovan knew Nicholas Tate. They had known him for years, I guess. Because they were all Untouchable Company kids and apparently that was a small group of people.

  I was teamed up with another girl like me. Her name was Wendy and I liked her a whole lot. I had never met another me. I had been told that Sasha was another me, but she was old and I didn’t work with her.

  This girl was the same age as me. She had blonde hair and blue eyes just like me. And an attitude that never ended. I was fourteen at this point and the jobs I was doing were getting more and more serious. So meeting a girl who was my age, and like me, and to be able to work with her… that was special.

  Wendy was wild. She reminded me of myself when I first came to Old Home and ran away to live in the woods. And her and I together… wow. We were a pretty good team. She knew what she was doing, and by this time, so did I. So we did quite a few jobs together that year. She was always with a man called Chek. And her job with him was mostly to watch his back when he met up with another man called Johnny. And Adam and me were also sent to watch this Johnny person too. But we were not to clean him up. We were just supposed to make sure that this meeting between Chek and Johnny went off without complications. And they did. And I learned, over time, that they were both part of another branch of the Company called the Way. Because there had been that incident in Santa Barbara eight years ago that had rearranged the Company into other, smaller, sub organizations to stay under the radar.

  I had a run-in with that Johnny the next summer and this is when I first saw Nicholas Tate in the flesh. Until then he was just this… figure. This… bad person I was not to go near. But that summer I was sent in to steal a biological sample from this island down in the Caribbean. It was a pretty important job and McKay spent weeks going over the details of what I needed to do because this was in a lab and required me to wear a special suit and use special equipment to handle the sample. It was very important that I used the suit and equipment properly and contained the sample because it was dangerous. And if that sample somehow got inside me, I would die a nasty death.

  McKay was very worried about this job and tried to talk Adam out of it. But Adam would not relent. One night, just before we left Old Home, I heard him tell McKay that this was the endgame. And if I didn’t go in and grab this sample, everything we had done would be pointless.

  Of course, the job went a little awry. It was probably above my pay grade if I’m being honest. But I did my best. I ran into that Johnny guy just as I was stealing my sample and getting ready to dart out of the facility. They took me prisoner and then I had to tell them a few truths to get out of it or I knew that Adam and McKay would show up—maybe even Wendy too. And then things would get real messy.

  But back to Nicholas Tate. Adam and I were in a parking garage where he put the car. We were driving to some town up north where the jet was waiting, and then, just as we reached the car Adam got a phone call. He looked at the screen, then at me. And told me to, ‘Stay right here, Indie. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  So I stayed. And that’s when I saw a man on the other end of the parking garage level. And I was thinking. Who is this man? How do I know his name? Because that was the first time I had ever seen Nick Tate and his name was immediately in my head. Like one minute it wasn’t there. And then it was.

  Nick Tate.

  I looked over my shoulder, trying to see if Adam saw him too, but he was just disappearing into a stairwell. For privacy, maybe. And when I looked back, Nick was walking towards me.

  I wasn’t sure if I should run, or scream, or get ready to fight him. But it didn’t matter. He stopped about half way and just looked at me.

  Then… then I couldn’t move. And my head was spinning.

  And then I blinked my eyes and he was gone.

  Just… poof. Gone.

  And before I could make sense of that—before I could ask myself if I had just made him up or if he just decided to walk away—Adam was back. Telling me to, “Get in the car, Indie. We’ve got to go.”

  I had a hard time making sense of that afternoon. The whole way up to the airfield where Adam and I were catching a plane I wanted to ask Adam about Nick. Tell him what I thought I saw.

  But there was another voice inside my head during that ride. One that told me to, Hush. Be still and quiet. Say nothing.

  So that’s what I did.

  I said nothing.

  After that job was over Donovan said he was proud of me. I think that was the first time he ever said that. He told me, “You made an executive decision, Indie. And it was the right thing to do.” Because I had not only talked Johnny into letting me go without giving up any information about Adam, McKay, or Donovan, I had brought the sample back too.

  And I didn’t die.

  So I did the whole thing right. I put the suit on right, I got the sample off the island and contained properly, and I got away as clean as one could expect after being caught and held prisoner on a superyacht for nearly twenty-four hours.

  I felt good about that. I felt like… I was on my way. Things were going really well with the jobs and I was definitely very good at them by this time.

  But the very best thing about my life back then was Nate.

  Even though I wasn’t allowed to tell Nate what I was doing when Adam and I left, I was allowed to tell him approximately how long I would be gone.

  There was a lot of discussion about this right about the time I was turning fourteen. Adam didn’t want me to say anything to Nate. Adam didn’t like Nate. McKay didn’t like Nate either, but I was starting to get the feeling that Adam kinda hated Nate.

  But McKay said, “She has to tell him something. Whether you like it or not, they’re close friends. You don’t wanna see him lurking in the woods when she’s gone, just waiting for her to come back. And that kid will be a problem if she keeps too many secrets from him.”

  Adam countered with, “That kid is nobody. And his grandfather is on death’s door.”

  Then they saw me spying on them and Adam pushed his office door closed and I didn’t hear anything else after that. But that was OK. Because I was picturing Nate lurking in the woods around Old Home, just waiting for me to come back.

  He probably did do that and McKay just didn’t see him. Nathan St. James had more up his sleeve than even I knew about. He was some kind of superhero out in those woods. Nothing could touch him.

  So I had already decided, before I went to do that job on that island, that I was gonna have my very first kiss with Nathan St. James when I got back.

  He didn’t know it yet. It was a secret plan. But I didn’t think he’d mind. I knew because he was my boy next door. And I had already read that paperback book too many times to count so this was just how things were supposed to be.

  Nate and I were fate.

  I made a whole plan for how I was gonna entice Nathan St. James to kiss me. Of course, I could’ve just kissed him all on my own, but that’s not how the story went in the book.

  In the book the boy did all the preparing. He planned the whole thing from top to bottom and beginning to end. And by the time that kiss happened, the girl in the story had been swept right off her feet from all the romance.

  So I planted ideas in Nate’s head.

  My birthday is in May, and on the night I turned fourteen Nate took me by the hand out into the woods. We were careful not to trip over any snakes as we made our way over to the river and down on the sandy part that always showed up when the water was a little low. It was spring, and the water was really low that year, but we didn’t care because that just meant in the summer there would be a lot of beach to wander on.

  But he took me by the hand. And he didn’t have any plans to kiss me back then. He just said, “There’s a full moon tonight, Indie. Do you wanna go look at it with me down by the river?”

  I never said no to Nathan. Ever. I was up for everything. So we went moon-watch
ing that night. And there were fireflies out. Tons of them. And I made a big deal about those fireflies. I let him know that I loved the way they lit up the night and I told him that I wished the night was thick with them. So thick that they would light up the woods and make magic.

  That was the first hint about how I wanted my first kiss to go down.

  The next hint was a few weeks later. Nate had asked me to go up to the river town with him to grab some supplies for his grandfather. And while we were in the drug store we got ice cream, like we always did. Only this time I said, “I wish I could eat an ice cream cone at night in the woods with you. Wouldn’t that just be so refreshing, Nate?”

  He agreed. But there was no way to take ice cream cones home on the boat. It took almost an hour to motor back down the river to our little beach where he hid his boat in the trees. And even then, we’d have to walk a good way on to get to our familiar woods where we liked to hang out.

  But this was just an idea for planting, not an idea for doing that day.

  Adam always had supermarket ice cream in our freezer because he liked to eat it at night too. On the porch or out under the pavilion, though. And in a bowl. Not out in the woods in a waffle cone. But I didn’t want to eat Adam’s grocery store ice cream in the woods out of a bowl. I wanted to eat drug store ice cream from a waffle cone.

  The next hint I dropped was about the mosquitoes.

  Now, these little critters were just a way of life in the swamp. We had mosquito netting hanging down over a pavilion on the Old Home grounds. This was in the fancy garden between the house and the duck lake. This pavilion was McKay’s favorite place. And even though it was hot and sticky in the summers, more often than not—and weather permitting—this is where you could find McKay when he was not training me, or building things, or talking to Adam about plans.

  McKay built the pavilion that first summer I came to live with them. In fact, he was in the middle of the project when I arrived. And by the time my life as a runaway in the woods was over, he was almost done with it.