Mine (4 page)

That’s when everything fell apart.

When he didn’t reach the fence by the time he thought he should have, he retraced his steps to the place where he’d stopped to listen. When he couldn’t find that, either, he officially freaked out and began hunting around for anything
familiar.

A tiny voice in the back of his mind kept reminding him of what he and his friends had been taught at camp: “If you ever get lost, stay where you are and we’ll find you.” It might have been the right thing to do, but he was too scared to stop moving.

His panicked search eventually led him past a deteriorating fence and into a meadow he had not seen before. Above him the stars blazed across the sky. If only he could use them to get home.

Wait
. He’d overheard Joel and Leah saying something about constellations, how you could connect some of the stars to find the…north star? He searched the heavens, but quickly realized he had no idea what he was looking for.

As his gaze dropped back down, he spotted a small hill at the edge of the clearing. There was something odd about it, something at its base in what appeared to be a giant cave opening. In the starlight it was hard to discern, but the shape was too regular to be anything but manmade.

A building.
Yes
! Maybe someone there could help him. With renewed hope, he raced across the meadow.

As he drew closer he realized it was more overhang than cave entrance, but he didn’t care. It
was
a building.

“Thank God!” he puffed between breaths.
Someone’s got to be there. Someone’s got to—

One moment he was running, and the next he was flying over the meadow in one direction, his flashlight in another. He hit the ground with an
oomph
and lay there stunned for a moment.

When he finally did sit up, he started to cry. He knew he shouldn’t. He was thirteen, and thirteen-year old boys didn’t cry, especially when other boys were around. Around somewhere, anyway. But he couldn’t help himself. The fall had been the last straw.

He should have stayed in his bunk and let them go without him. Now he was going to die because he’d liked the idea of having a Twix bar whenever he wanted one. Now he never wanted to see another Twix bar in his life.

He should have said no. He should have been asleep in his bed right now. He should have—

The building.
He’d momentarily forgotten about it.

There was still hope.

Wiping the tears from his eyes, he jumped to his feet and looked around for his flashlight. The beam had switched off when the device hit the ground, so he had to fumble around for it. He was almost ready to give up when his foot bumped into the casing.

When he pushed the button and it lit up, he sighed in relief. Maybe his luck was changing.

Taking better care of where he stepped, he continued toward the building. It wasn’t too long before he realized he probably wouldn’t find anyone there. Whatever the place had once housed, it looked abandoned now.

Trying to keep from spiraling back into despair, he told himself there could be a phone inside. And even if there wasn’t, the building would provide shelter until the sun came up. He could then climb the hill for a look around and hopefully figure out where he was.

The structure was creepy, though. He hoped nobody had ever died inside. He always said he didn’t believe in ghosts, but really, how could anyone be sure whether they existed or not?

He slowly approached the break in the wall, ready to run at the first sign of supernatural activity, but all remained still. In a way, that was almost worse. He could easily picture a monster standing just inside, waiting to spring its trap.

“There are no such things as monsters,” he whispered. “There are no such things.”

He half believed that.

Well, maybe a quarter.

He shined his light through the opening and was relieved when no eyes glowed back at him. From the stains on the walls and a few old desks, he confirmed the building was deserted.

He played his light across the floor and noticed footprints in the dust. Several sets.

He was no professional tracker, but the prints looked fresh.

Were his friends inside?

He tried to remember the shoes they were wearing.

Antonio had on boots. And Joel had some kind of sneakers on. Mike couldn’t remember what anyone else wore.

He aimed his light at the prints closest to the door, but they were all grouped on top of each other and he couldn’t distinguish anything. As much as he didn’t want to, he pulled himself inside and followed the prints into the room.

The first isolated set left chunky marks that he thought could have been created by boots. And there, off to the left, a diamond-pattern print that he was pretty sure came from a pair of Converses.

Yeah, that’s right. Joel is wearing Converses.
The tension eased from his shoulders.
It has to be them
.

The prints led through a doorway into another room. Since they all headed in and none back out, he guessed his friends were either still inside somewhere or had found a different exit. He listened for sounds but didn’t hear anything.

The place was already making his skin crawl, so going any farther seemed like a bad idea. What he could do was go back outside and look for that possible other exit. If there was none, he could wait in the meadow until his friends came out.

As he turned toward the hole in the wall, he finally allowed himself to fully believe everything would be all right.

That was when he heard the noise.

E
IGHT

Joel

J
OEL SHUFFLED HIS
feet forward in small increments so that when he reached the stairs, his toe tapped the riser instead of slamming into it. He and Leah had agreed that going after Courtney without their lights was a bad idea. Their plan now was to return to camp and get help.

On the ascent, they stayed to the outside where the treads were wider. At first, the wind whipped against them, forcing them to keep their pace slow to avoid falling backward, but its strength diminished as they climbed, allowing them to gradually increase their speed.

There was no warning when they finally reached ground level. Joel lifted his foot to take another step but his shoe banged down on the floor.

“Watch it,” he warned to prevent Leah from making the same mistake. “We made it.”

Holding her with one hand and keeping his other on the wall, he guided her past the elevator door and into the cold room. The space was as dark as the stairs had been. He tried to remember the layout, but misjudged the position of the bookcase that had been holding the door closed, and collided with it.

“Are you okay?” Leah asked.

Wincing, Joel rolled his shoulder up and down. It stung but the pain wasn’t that bad. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

He felt his way around the bookcase into the next room. There they finally saw dim light coming from the opposite door. Since they’d been in pitch black for so long, it was more than enough for them to see where they had to go.

Joel squeezed Leah’s hand.

They were safe.

N
INE

Mike

T
HE
LOUD BANG
echoed through the open door behind Mike.

He turned toward it, but then—with visions of razor-toothed monsters and deranged ghosts spinning through his head—just as quickly twisted back toward the hole and ran.

He successfully hopped over the lip but landed awkwardly and tumbled to the ground.

He thought he heard a voice, but that might have been the panicked blood rushing past his ears.

When he pushed himself up, however, he heard another noise.

But it was
not
a voice.

T
EN

Joel

A
S JOEL MOVED
into the last room, he saw someone leap out through the rip in the wall. Though he couldn’t see the person’s face, he recognized the shape.

“Hey, Mike. It’s me,” he yelled.

He ran toward the hole in the wall and opened his mouth to shout again.

But before the words had even formed in his throat, an intense high-pitched hum he could both hear and
feel
slammed into him.

He slapped his hands over his ears, but the noise was so overpowering that his knees buckled and he fell to the floor. Twisting around, he looked for Leah and saw that she too had been knocked from her feet and had her palms against her ears.

He tried to yell that they needed to get outside, but he couldn’t even hear himself over the hum.

He stretched as far as he could and tapped her elbow with his foot. When she looked at him, eyes squinting in pain, he nodded toward the hole and then struggled onto his knees and elbows to crawl out.

That was as far as he got before a pulse of energy shot through every cell in his body and turned his entire world white.

E
LEVEN

The Reclaimer

T
HE DECISION OF
who should serve her on the outside was an easy one. Data from previous events indicated those farthest from the beam’s epicenter stood the least chance of being permanently damaged. True to form, brain scans of the three chosen revealed this to be the case. As for those who had been closer, she had other uses for them.

Requirements satisfied, she moved on to stage two.

The fact that she had three subjects pleased her. If one were lost in the preparation phase, it would not endanger the project. And if all three made it through, then her timetable could be moved up.

Though the creatures were primitive compared to the Originators, their minds did contain some complexity so the procedure would take a delicate touch.

One by one she worked through the three, adjusting their minds to suit her needs, creating pathways that never would have existed on their own, and adding the bits of code that would fine-tune the subjects and build the bridges of communication.

From previous tests, she knew there would be a high probability of side effects due to her tinkering, the transferences of traits possessed by her creators via the embedded code. But none of that mattered. It was the data that was important. Nothing else.

When she finished the last of the procedures, she noted in her logs that all three subjects continued to be viable. She then assigned each creature the tasks most suitable for it, and sent the trio back into the world.

Soon the information would flow.

T
WELVE

Joel

J
OEL GRADUALLY BECAME
aware
of the sun. From its angle, it was probably a couple of hours either side of noon. He noted the paved road to his right, and the dirt shoulder below him. He wasn’t lying on it, or sitting, or even standing still.

He was walking. One foot in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the other.

Sounds followed him. Footsteps. One set…no, two.

He looked over his shoulder and saw Leah and Mike trailing him, their faces expressionless. Somewhere deep inside, he knew something wasn’t right, but it was another minute before the fog encasing his mind pulled away enough for him to order his feet to stop.

“Joel?” Leah said uncertainly.

He turned and saw she had also “woken.” Mike, however, appeared to still be in a trance.

Joel grabbed his friend’s shoulders as Mike started to walk past him. “Whoa. Are you okay?”

While Mike’s feet stopped moving, he made no indication he’d heard anything.

“What’s going on?” Leah asked. “Where are we?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“How did we get here?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

What was the last thing he remembered?

The woods
. They had gone on a…on a…secret night hike. He and Leah and Mike…and…and…

He looked around again. “Where are the others?”

Leah scrunched her nose. “What others?”

When he tried to answer, he couldn’t remember their names. “The
others
. There were others with us, weren’t there?”

“With us where?”

“We went on a hike. Dooley…”

That’s right, Dooley. He was one of the others. Whatever Joel was going to say about him, though, was instantly forgotten when a deep, elongated whisper filled his mind.

Learn. Transmit. Mine.

He twisted around, looking for whoever had spoken, but no one was there except the three of them.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Leah asked.

“That voice.”

Her brow furrowed. “What voice?”

Again the answer to her question eluded him. He knew he’d just asked her about it, but he didn’t know why.

A few seconds later, she asked, “Is this the road back to camp?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are we doing here?”

“I-I don’t know.”

T
HIRTEEN

Deputy Ness

R
OUNDING THE CORNER
in his sheriff’s car, Deputy William Ness took another sip of his coffee, hoping the caffeine would kick in soon. As lead investigator of the team searching for the missing teenagers, he hadn’t slept much.

So when he came out of a dip in the road and saw three kids walking along the shoulder ahead, he at first thought his mind was playing tricks on him. After several blinks, though, they were still there.

He stopped on the shoulder about twenty feet in front of them. On the seat next to him were pictures of the missing campers, but he didn’t need to look at them. He’d memorized all seven faces and the teens in his rearview mirror were part of the group.