WhiteSpace: Season One (Episodes 1-6 of the sci-fi horror serial) (24 page)

Jake reached into his pocket and pulled out a knife, pushing a button which popped a blade from the black handle. The knife wasn’t large, though big and sharp enough to kill.

Alex’s eyes darted between the thugs, weighing his options through the thin slivers of seconds. He didn’t want to fight, but the knife stripped him of the choice.
 

Fighting might not be enough. Alex might have to kill.

“Leave him alone!” a girl’s voice shouted, bouncing off the court walls – Katie.

“Get outta here, bitch,” Jake said, turning to Katie. Ray turned toward her, too. This was Alex’s only chance.

He ran at Jake, grabbing his right wrist with his left hand to keep him from using the knife, then Jake’s head with his right hand, shoving it backward into the concrete wall hard with a loud thud.

Jake dropped the knife and slumped to the ground.

Oh shit, I killed him!

As Alex stared in shock at Jake’s motionless body, Ray grabbed him from behind and knocked Alex to the ground, falling on top of him with a fury of punches.

Alex squirmed, trying to break free, putting his arms out in front of his face, as his arms were mercilessly battered.

“Get off of him!” Katie screamed.

As Katie ran toward them, fear coursed through Alex’s veins, terrified that Ray might turn and hurt her, or worse.

But Ray never had a chance.

Katie grabbed him from behind, lifted him from Alex, then threw him from where they were beside the left wall, all the way to the right one, where Ray slapped the wall and fell to the ground, screaming.

Alex stared at Katie in disbelief.

Did she just pick him up and throw him?

That’s impossible!

Katie grabbed Alex’s book and pen, dropped it in his backpack and tossed it to him.

“Let’s go,” she said like some kind of military commando, quick, to the point, and ready for action.

Alex stared at Jake, still motionless on the ground, then turned to Ray, who was starting to get up, in obvious agony.

“Run!” Katie said, pulling Alex from his state.

He ran, following her into the woods, wondering two things.

Had he murdered Jake?

And did Katie really do what he thought she did?

* * * *

CHAPTER 8 — Milo Anderson Part 1

Milo sat in Economics, his final class of the day, hating life in general and himself specifically. Normally his last class was with Alex, but Alex’s seat was empty.
 

It didn’t help that Milo was bored out of his mind, which he probably wouldn’t be if he could keep his mind on anything, and everything wasn’t a constant reminder of either
 
Jessica, Manny, or Alex.

Milo’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He looked around the room, though he didn’t care nearly as much as he usually would whether or not he was caught or not.
 

No, he wasn’t supposed to have his phone outside of his backpack, and yes, checking texts in class was grounds for detention, but Milo cared about whether or not he got a pink slip for detention approximately not at all.
 

He palmed the cell from his pocket, turning his thumb on the outside so he could see the caller ID.
 

The text from Jesus sent a hard lump into Milo’s soggy throat.
 

“
Manny is dead. Died in his sleep 15 minutes ago. Thought you should know.”
 

Milo had to chew his bottom lip to keep from crying, and but his face was seconds from springing a leak anyway.

Milo looked around the classroom at the mostly vacant faces, then up at Mrs. Mellakar, wondering if he should make an announcement to the rest of the students.

Would his classmates want to know that Manny was dead? Or would that only add to their misery? They would all find out eventually, so did he have to be the bearer of bad news?
 

What would Manny have wanted?
 

Jesus must have had something else to say, because Milo’s cell started buzzing inside his pocket a second after he slipped it inside. Or maybe Jesus just wanted to make sure Milo had seen the first message since he hadn’t responded.
 

It was easy enough to check a text, texting back might be pushing his luck.
 

His cell went quiet, but buzzed again a few seconds later.

Milo pulled the phone from his pocket and looked at the new text that wasn’t from Jesus.
 
It was from “Cody,” the weird guy he’d seen on the LiveLyfe message board. The text said: “
Need to talk. Now.”

Milo felt a horrible chill wondering how “Cody” had his number in the first place. Somehow, Milo felt his text had something to do with Manny.
 

“I have to go to the bathroom, Mrs. Mellakar,” Milo said, raising his hand with one arm while clutching his stomach with the other, not bothering to wait to get called on.
 

Milo wasn’t sure if it was the arm on the stomach, the look on his face, or the fact that his best friend’s dad gave two of the most important people in his life a matching set of bullets, but Mrs. Mellakar simply nodded.
 

Milo slowly rose from his seat, then walked to the door and closed it behind him. Once in the hall, he tore off toward the bathroom, locked himself inside a stall, then waited for Cody to text or call. Two minutes later, Milo felt a chill through his body as the phone buzzed in his hand.
 

“Hello?”

“It’s Cody,” the voice said. Definitely not a kid. Maybe in his 30’s, though it was hard to tell since he was obviously trying to disguise it. Milo said nothing.
 

Cody said, “Manny is dead.”

How did he know that?

Curiosity had Milo swallowing his tongue. It took him a half minute to find it before he said, “Yeah, I heard. From his brother. How about you?”

“I have my sources,” Cody said. Then, after a long pause: “
They
got him.”
 

Cody said
They
like a four-letter word it wasn’t.
 

“Who are
they
?”
 

Cody ignored him. “Who else knows you saw Heller say something to Manny? Did you tell the police? Do they know you saw?”

Milo nodded even though Cody couldn’t see him. “Yeah, but why does that matter? Are you saying they had Manny killed? Because “they” didn’t. Manny died naturally. His brother was there when it happened, and he’s the one who told me.”

Jesus had actually texted Milo, not told him, and Milo had no idea if Jesus was actually in the room when Manny passed, but that didn’t change the truth. No one killed Manny, and whoever Cody was, he was probably just trying to scare him.
 

“They have their ways,” Cody said.
 

It wasn’t what Cody said, but how he said it that felt like a cool blade of ice slipping beneath the heat of Milo’s skin.
 

Milo gulped.
 

Cody said, “I didn’t think they’d strike now, in fact I was sure they wouldn’t. But they did, and that means they’re more worried about what Manny was going to say than I realized.” Cody paused, then dropped a ton of bricks on top of Milo.
 

“That means you’re probably next.”
 

“What?” Milo cried, curling his knees to his chest and pushing his back against the cold tile of the bathroom stall. “What do you mean?”

“They might think you know more than you’re saying, Milo. You need to get out of town. Now.”
 

“That’s crazy.
You’re
crazy. This whole thing is crazy. I can’t leave the island. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
 

As though Milo hadn’t protested at all, Cody said, “I’ll be in touch later tonight. We’ll work this out.”
 

Horror flashed through Milo’s mind.

Mr. Heller paused, looking at Manny with hollow eyes, his expression drifting from nervous and glassy to haunted. He kneeled toward Manny, lying in a pool of blood and screamed, or whispered, hard to tell which through the chaos. He stood, then pointed his gun at the word “eleven,” raised his pistol, placed the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
 

Sudden terror turned his voice to a whisper. “How do I know I can trust you?” Milo asked.

“You don’t,” Cody said. “But if you want to live, you don’t have a choice.”

The line went dead.

Milo sat on the top of the porcelain until he could calm his breathing into a steady beat. Then he lowered his feet to the tile, opened the stall, walked to the mirror and stared.
 

Milo looked worse than he had expected, and exactly like what he was: a hollow shell of the boy he had been a week and one lifetime before.

* * * *

CHAPTER 9 — Brock Houser Part 3

Houser was driving back to Whistler’s to check the woods surrounding his house while Jon and Cassidy hung out at the police station waiting to see if Whistler spilled his guts.
 

If Brady had let Houser interrogate him as requested, guts would have been spilled already. But Brady was a stickler for “rules” and wanted to be sure that whatever happened at the station didn’t help the fucker avoid prosecution. Houser couldn’t complain too much. Brady did let him walk, which he didn’t have to do. Still, Houser would have loved to have had a few minutes alone with the sick fucker. At least he could’ve gotten a feel for whether Emma was still alive.

Houser drove in silence, glancing down at Ted D. Bear, riding shotgun as always, and found his mind meandering down memory lane.

No.

Can’t think about her now.

Need to keep my head in the game.

As Houser neared Whistler’s house, his cell phone rang. Jon.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Can you meet us back where we met this morning? Vivian’s house?”

“Yeah, why? What’s up?”

“Cassidy remembered something. It’s weird, but it’s better than the nothing we’ve got.”

“So Whistler didn’t talk?”

“Not yet. He asked for a lawyer.”

“Shit,” Houser said. “OK, see ya in a few.”

**

They met in front of Vivian’s house, where Jon was sitting in a white Toyota Avalon beside Cassidy.

“Hop in,” Jon said. “We’re gonna take a ride.”

“OK,” Houser said, then ran back to his car, grabbed his gear bag and Ted D. Bear, and hopped into the back seat of the car.

Cassidy was sitting in the front passenger seat. “Um, what’s with the teddy bear?”

“Don’t ask,” Jon said, smiling.

Houser smiled, and asked, “An old friend. I don’t leave home without him. So what do we have?”

“Last night, my mom said something really weird when I got home,” Cassidy said. “She was drunk as hell, even drunker than usual, and said something about Sarah being taken by ‘men in the sky.’ When I woke up this morning, she denied it, saying she was drunk, but when I brought it up to Jon, he said he had a dream once about something happening to Sarah when we were kids. She’d been taken while we were playing hide and seek. And the weirdest thing is, I vaguely had a dream just like that. And the really weird part is that I didn’t even remember ever having the dream until Jon mentioned it. Like déjà vu.”

“OK, so you’re saying Emma was taken by . . . um, an alien or something?” Houser said, trying not to laugh.

“I don’t know what I’m saying, but when Jon mentioned the dream, and where we’d been playing in the dream, the woods by Mom’s house, I thought maybe we should try looking there.”

“It’s not near Whistler’s house, though, is it?” Houser asked.

“Well, the island isn’t that big. Everything is relatively close to everything else,” Jon said.

Houser was going to ask why they were going on a hunch, but there was something in Cassidy’s eyes, that look of guilt, that made him wonder if maybe she had something to do with the missing girl, after all. Was she leading them to the girl’s body now that they had someone to pin the crime on? He’d seen this story play out a dozen times or more on the news, and hoped to Christ this wasn’t the case this time. He had no tolerance for monsters, especially those who killed their own kids.

She didn’t feel like a murderer to him, however. But there was definitely fireworks behind her eyes
— s
omething bad she was hiding. Perhaps it was an accident and she panicked, and hid the poor girl’s body in the woods. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened, either, and certainly not the last. Cassidy looked back at Houser and their eyes met.

Yes, she’s guilty of something.

What did you do, Cassidy Hughes?