“Looking for this?” asked the handsome guy mildly.
She glanced up. He was holding the pulverized remains of her cell phone in his hand, an expression of apology on his face.
Before she could speak, he said, “They know who you are, lady. And they can trace phones.”
Casey gaped at him. “Are you insane?”
The men—all except for the handsome guy—seemed to take her question literally. They shuffled embarrassedly and started casting glances at each other. Some shrugged, others raised their eyebrows.
One of them said, “Maybe.”
“A little,” amended a scruffy guy in a baseball cap, holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart to demonstrate.
Yet another of the men, a tall, bald, bearded guy, stared into space and murmured, “I dunno… probably.”
Casey narrowed her eyes, clearly uncertain whether they were making fun of her or not.
One thing she was certain of, though, was that fearsome as these men looked, they meant her no harm. If they had, she was sure she’d have known about it by now. Indeed, now that she really thought about it, the most likely scenario was that they’d rescued her from the Project: Stargazer compound and had been protecting her ever since.
Unless, of course, they were desperate prisoners and she was their hostage. But again, that didn’t really ring true. Their body language was wrong for a start.
Deciding to test her theory, she leaned the Remington against the wall and made for the door. She was reaching for the handle when the handsome guy barked, “They were gonna put a bullet in your head back there.”
Now Casey stopped and glanced back at him, torn by indecision. She’d already guessed the reason for her ex-employers’ sudden change of attitude toward her: it was either because she’d seen too much, or because of the vial she’d taken. But, ever the scientist, she couldn’t help wondering how these guys fit into the equation, and what they knew that she didn’t. She cocked an eyebrow, and the handsome guy said, “You’re expendable. Just like the rest of us.”
She breathed out slowly, glancing around at the motley crew. She couldn’t help thinking she knew the handsome guy from somewhere, but she couldn’t think where. “Expendables?” she said wryly. “More like the Seven fucking Dwarfs.”
The guy with the baseball cap grinned bashfully. Casey sighed in surrender to the insanity, grabbed her pack, which was leaning against the closet door, moved across to a plastic chair, and flopped down into it.
“Don’t you guys have… someplace to be?” she asked.
One of the men—goatee beard, bare arms covered in tattoos—shrugged and said, “VA Psych Ward? Military prison?”
Casey almost laughed. For some reason, his response—or the way he had delivered it—relaxed rather than alarmed her.
“Can I borrow a phone at least? I need someone to feed my dogs.” When all she got in response was shrugs and grimaces of apology, she fished a tiny bottle out of her pack and took a swig, then focused on the handsome man, as it suddenly came to her where she had seen his face before. “I read the file. Those men it killed… Yours?”
The guy nodded.
McKenna, Casey thought, remembering. His name is McKenna.
“They’re gonna need a patsy for that,” she said.
“You’re looking at him.”
“Yeah. I figured. Textbook fall guy. Psycho ex-sniper, PTSD, divorced… has even got a flaky kid who curls up in a ball. It’s perfect—”
McKenna’s eyes blazed with fury. He felt himself flush, felt the desire to lash out. Instead, he glared at her, silently warning her.
Casey shrugged apologetically. “I’m just telling you what’s in the file.”
The guy with the tattooed arms put a hand on McKenna’s shoulder and fixed Casey with his own imposing glare. “How about you tell us what you were doing at a secret base full of private soldiers? Mercs,” he said accusingly.
“It was a CIA cover,” said Casey.
Speaking for the first time since she had revealed to him what was in his file, McKenna said in a strangled voice, “It said ‘flaky’?”
Casey glanced at him, but continued with her explanation. “I’m an evolutionary biologist. I was on call in a case of… contact.”
McKenna paced up and down to release the tension inside him while the guys all took turns staring at each other, weighing the meaning of her words. Finally, McKenna halted, exhaling raggedly. They were all dancing around the truth, her unsure what they knew, them treating her the same way. But out there was an alien psychopath who’d murdered McKenna’s men and a whole shit-ton of Traeger’s people as well. There were people who’d known this secret for what seemed to be a long time, and who were clearly prepared to kill all of them to make sure it stayed a secret.
If Casey was in this with them now, there was no more room for secrecy. She could see that McKenna felt the same way. He was studying her face, assessing her. She wondered whether she ought to say it out loud—that she was prepared to go out on a limb and trust them. That if they wanted to stay alive they had to trust one another.
Before she could, McKenna spoke the words that were in her mind. “Look. If we want to keep breathing, we’ve gotta find this thing. Expose it. We all agreed?”
A look went around the motel room, a bonding moment. They were all exiles, the perfect scapegoats for whatever the government and their black box UFO research group decided to pin on them. Everyone nodded. They were all in.
“Good,” McKenna said, turning to Casey. “First things first. What is it?”
“The Predator? Well… it has human DNA, for one thing.”
“What the fuck?” said a guy with a brooding expression, who so far hadn’t spoken. “Human—”
“That’s not all,” Casey went on. “I was there when it escaped. I think it was looking for something.”
She saw the blood drain from McKenna’s face.
“Its equipment,” he muttered.
Suddenly, all eyes were on him. “I took it so I’d have evidence. Oh, shit…” All at once he looked antsy, as though his skin was crawling with the need to move. “I think I know where it’s going.”
He glanced at the tattooed guy, who nodded and went to the door. By the time he had opened it, McKenna had fallen in behind him. Casey could see that right outside the room, a small, tough-looking guy had set up a poker game with a bunch of bikers.
“How good’s your hand?” tattooed guy asked.
The small guy glanced around at his buddies. “It’s poker. I don’t think I’m supposed to say… but good, yeah.”
“We got Indian Scout bikes,” tattooed guy said, then pointed to the Winnebago. “We want that RV.”
“And some guns,” McKenna prompted.
“Hmm? Oh…” Tattooed guy raised his voice. “And some guns,” he echoed.
14
Rory liked candy, of course—mostly things made of chocolate. People who gave candy corn or jawbreakers simply didn’t understand the allure of trick or treat, but they weren’t the worst offenders. Folks who took it upon themselves to issue a silent condemnation of everything good about Halloween—the Stillsons, for instance, who gave out toothbrushes last year and Halloween-themed pencils the year before—were the enemy of all that was good and joyful about childhood. Rory’s neuro-diversity might make it hard for him to pick up social cues, but wandering around in spooky costumes and getting free candy had never been something he had to struggle to understand.
There were some real assholes in the neighborhood, shitheads like Tom Kelly and Dom Cortez, who would vandalize an old woman’s electric scooter if she’d just sit still long enough. Why those pricks hadn’t ever hit the Stillsons’ house with a hundred dozen eggs some Halloween night was a mystery Rory didn’t think anyone would ever solve.