Then he turned and headed off into the trees, leaving Allie more alone than she had ever been.
They found a diner just inside the town. Tom got out of the car, walked to a nearby phone and dialed the number. “It’s about that little girl, Bill,” he said when William Jeffreys answered.
“Is this the caller I think it is?” Jeffreys asked. “Tom Clarke from Texas, it says on my screen. Talk to me.”
“It’s about that little girl,” Tom repeated. “The one the Army is looking for. Your listeners have been calling about her.”
“We’ve been getting a lot of calls, yes,” Jeffreys said.
“The people who have been calling you are telling the truth,” Tom said. “I know this little girl, and I’m hoping your listeners will be able to help me.”
A few hours later, after they’d returned to the farmhouse, they began to see dust clouds rising from the road, then William Jeffreys’ battered old Winnebago as it lumbered forward, others behind him, car after car, the lonely army of the taken rallying in such numbers that the dust cloud of their long journey rose high enough to touch-or so it seemed-the vast, unknowable sky.
Chapter Three
From the doorway of the farmhouse, Charlie and Lisa surveyed the chaotic scene before them. The grounds of Sally Clarke’s old home place were now filled with people. In the distance, the military had established a perimeter around the grounds, soldiers everywhere, armed to the teeth, waiting for orders to march in, drive Jeffreys and the people he’d brought with him away, seize Allie and take her with them like a spoil of war.
Tom joined Charlie and Lisa on the porch. “I’ve got all the papers you need. Passports. Visas. Everything. There’s a back road that leads to Highway one seventy-seven. We ran it this morning, and came out on the other side of the perimeter.” He nodded toward the crowd. “Our people are armed, too,” he said darkly. “If the Army moves in…”
“I don’t want you to do that.”
Charlie glanced down and saw Allie standing just behind him, her eyes concentrated on the milling crowd that covered the grounds of the old farmhouse.
“I want to talk to them,” she said.
Lisa swept up behind Allie. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Everything’s ready,” Charlie said. “We have to go.”
Allie shook her head. “No. Not now. They’re scared. They need something.” She walked out onto the porch, Charlie, Lisa, and Tom following behind her.
“Hi,” she said.
The people turned to face her, their eyes on her expectantly.
“I know you’re all scared and you don’t have to be scared anymore,” Allie told them.
Lisa stepped up and knelt beside her daughter. “Honey, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do anything.”
Allie continued to face the crowd. “You have something in your heads,” she said. “It lets them know where you are. I can shut them off. When they shut off, they’ll fall out. Don’t be scared.”
The crowd began to inch forward; a thousand eyes locked on Allie.
“They won’t come for you anymore,” Allie assured them. “They won’t be able to find you. No one’s going to take you ever again.” Her eyes drifted left to right, and with each movement her gaze seemed to reach out to a single, upturned face. “I know it doesn’t seem right that they did this to you. But if you saw it from someplace else, you would understand that it was just time for this to happen.”
Allie closed her eyes, and the crowd halted its forward motion, as if at her command. Her eyes were very still beneath the closed lids, but a strange energy seemed to come from them, a thousand invisible beams, each directed at a single searching face, probing beneath the lay-ered human skin, past the bone and gristle, to where the alien device was buried, drawing it out once it was found, severing the tiny web of veins that held it, and thus letting it flow out on a warm stream of blood.
The crowd gave a low moan as the first of the devices slipped from a bloody nose and dropped soundlessly to the ground. Then a kind of shuddering release swept over them, as if a heavy chain had been broken, relieving them of their long bondage.
Some cried.
Some laughed.
But in every face was freedom.
The crowd began to move toward the house again, and beyond them, Charlie saw that the Army was moving too. He stepped forward and knelt beside Allie.
Allie remained in place. She looked first at Charlie, then at Lisa, and each saw the end in her eyes.
“You will always be my little girl,” Lisa said as much to herself as to Allie.
Charlie bolted forward and cried out to the crowd, “Listen to me. All of you. They’re not going to do anything to us here. There are too many of us. Do you want to help?”
The crowd roared back fiercely.
“All of you,” Charlie yelled. “Stay in front of the porch. Stay right here in front of Allie. If they want to take her, they’ll have to come through us.”
The crowd instantly obeyed, forming a semicircle around the porch, then turning away from Allie to face the approaching soldiers.
A loud voice swept over them: “this area is under FEDERAL CONTROL. PLEASE MAKE YOURSELVES AVAILABLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELOCATION.”
The crowd remained in place, facing the soldiers as they closed in.
The loudspeaker boomed again: “YOUR VEHICLES AND PERSONAL BELONGINGS CAN BE CLAIMED AFTER DEBRIEFING.”
The crowd remained resolutely in place.
Lisa turned Allie to her. “Are they going to come for you now?” she asked,
“John left that up to me,” Allie answered. She looked lovingly at her mother. “Do you think if we’d just been regular people, Charlie would have come and lived with us and we could have been a family?”
Lisa smiled at Allie gently. “I know that would have happened.”
“I don’t want to go,” Allie said. “I want to stay with you.”
“Then stay,” Lisa said. “We’ve got a plan. We can get out of here, right now.” She saw that this was not possible, that even as Allie had voiced her hope, she had renounced it.
“It’ll be okay,” Lisa assured her.
Allie suddenly turned from her, quickly and abruptly, her eyes fixed on the crowd, the military force beyond them. A wave of stones arced out of the crowd and fell upon the soldiers and their vehicles. From beyond the crowd, small explosions sent tear gas canisters hurtling into the night air.
Lisa drew Allie into her arms. “We better get back inside,” she said.
Allie stepped out of her embrace. “No,” she said.
Suddenly a streak of light shot through the darkness, bold and radiant, as if carried on a comet, and in whose blinding wake the texture of the sky began to change.
The crowd stared upward in silent wonder at the celestial spectacle that raged above them, light flying into light, a play of unearthly radiance against the black field of the night.
Allie’s gaze was infinitely still as she turned toward the sea of faces-the stunned and silent soldiers, Mary and General Beers, hushed and awestruck as the light intensified all around them, growing brighter and brighter, as fierce and unknowable as the dawning of a brand-new world.
About the Author
Thomas H. Cook is the author of fifteen novels, including The Chatham School Affair, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; Instruments of Night; Breakheart Hill; Mortal Memory; Sacrificial Ground and Blood Innocents, both Edgar Award nominees; and two early works about true crimes, Early Graves and Blood Echoes, which was also nominated for an Edgar Award. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod, where he is at work on his next novel, Peril.
