In Time

TWO

AFTER two weeks of hustling up and down the I-17, busting my ass to get my first score, I’m forced to admit that at least one thing Hutch said was true: the other skip tracers have overhunted these freaks to the point of extinction.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect to walk up to a tree, shake it, and have a few freaks come tumbling out. I got the sense years ago that the ones who dodged the rehab camp pickups were few and far between. It’s just simple statistics. When you lose 98 percent of a population and then that remaining 2 percent is divided 75 percent in camps to 25 percent on the run, you’re…working with a smaller number.

A real small number.

I slam the door to my room behind me, ignoring the dirty look I get from the old lady who runs the place. She’s outside monitoring the water meters, making sure none of us are going over our allotted amount, which isn’t that much given that we’re only paying fifty bucks a week to stay in this place. Her two middle-aged sons help her manage the riffraff that’s always blowing into and out of her joint; they collect the rent and make sure nobody’s trying to turn tricks or sell something they shouldn’t be selling at a proper business establishment. The sign outside says this place is a motel, but they’ve been running it like short-stay apartments ever since the economy crashed.

The motel was built in the 1960s and clearly hasn’t been renovated since then. It’s a two-story dirt-brown complex stripped down to the bare necessities, with a few pots of dying flowers scattered around to freshen the place up. But it’s so damn hot and dry this summer, even up in Cottonwood, these violets never stood a chance.

“You coming back to pay for your two weeks?” the old lady calls as I unlock the truck. Her name is Beverly, but she wears her dead husband’s old bowling shirt day in and day out, and his name, according to the embroidery, was Phil. So naturally my brain calls her Phyllis.

“I’ll be back tonight,” I tell her. I’ll have to be. Cottonwood is on the safer side and pretty rural, but Phyllis is so damn cutthroat about her profit that I wouldn’t put it past her to throw me out and bring another person in if she doesn’t have the cash in hand by sundown. Every once in a while I see her eyeing me, and I worry that she has some kind of freak ability of her own to tell that my wallet is getting down to nothing.

I give her a friendly wave as I pull away, then drop all but one finger as she turns back to her work.

Nice. Sticking it to the old lady.

I’m not stupid. I saved enough money to survive until I got through the first score, provided that first score came within a month or two. The thing I didn’t exactly think through was how I was going to start looking. Hutch gave me his worn FUGITIVE PSI RECOVERY AGENT manual to use, but he sold all the tech that came with it for beer money when he got back to Flagstaff. That’s the shittiest part of trying to get started: you have to find a kid and turn it in before you’re officially registered in the skip tracer system. Then they give you that tablet that’s hooked into their profile network. Then you can start earning points and moving up in the rankings. I read in the book that the more points you earn by adding sightings and good tips to the skip tracer network, the more access the government gives you to things like the Internet.

The Internet would make this about two thousand times easier, I think, turning onto the highway. My gas light is blinking, has been for days. I’ve worked out a system, though. I think I can stretch the tank at least another two outings.

I call it a system to make myself feel better about the fact that I’m hunting for clues in the most ass-backwards way imaginable. I drive to one of the nearby small towns, like Wickenburg or Sedona or Payson, and get out, leaving the truck somewhere I think people won’t be tempted to try to steal it or jack the gas from my tank. I walk through the neighborhoods, making sure to swing by the local schools. People always seem to leave the MISSING posters there, tacked up along the rattling metal fences. Maybe they think the kids are hanging around the places they used to haunt and they’ll see the flyers and think, Man, I really should go home—Mom must really miss me. I take them down one by one, collecting them so I can check them against the skip tracer system later. Once I have access to the network. Once I actually find a kid and bring it in.

One more day, I think, finish out the week. Then I’ll suck it up and use whatever money I have left to buy gas and drive down to Phoenix. More neighborhoods, more abandoned buildings, millions of families—I should have better luck there. It just stings a little, you know? I don’t like that I’m already having to compromise on my plan.

The only thing that ever seems to come easy these days is my shit luck.

I decide to take the I-17 south to Camp Verde today, for no other reason than I haven’t hit it in a week. One of the gas stations there is still in business, though the place’s real value is the steady stream of truck drivers flowing in and out of there, bringing gossip with them.

I switch off the AC to try to preserve gas, rolling down the window to let in some fresh air and sunshine. Dad used to say that it took effort to think good, positive thoughts, but it was easy to let your mind spiral to all the terrible outcomes, to worry about things that hadn’t even come to pass yet. I see it now more than ever, because all I need to do is think about him, and I feel myself slipping. I start heading down that road of understanding why he did it. He was humiliated by losing the restaurant, I know he was, but it was more than that—it was that he knew that restaurant was the only life for him. And when the world took it from him, suddenly Dad was out of choices. He had us, and he couldn’t afford to move himself somewhere else, let alone the three of us. We trapped him there, and he took the only out he thought was left for him.

I’ve taught myself the trick that when it starts to feel that way for me, too, I need to go outside and walk it off. I need to roll down a window and let the green, earthy scent come wash out the warm stink of blood that seems to be seared into my nose forever.

A red SUV flashes in my rearview mirror, pulling me off that black, ugly road and back onto the one in front of me. I do a double take, because the bastard behind the wheel is really, truly gunning it, almost like he’s trying to escape the shadowed mountains behind him. A second later, it’s flying by me, swerving to cut in front of me. The whole truck rocks as a beige sedan blows past me, following the first car at a speed that makes me instinctively pull my car onto the shoulder, even after both other cars have long since passed. My heart is slamming against my ribs, and I’m so pissed off about the asshole drivers, I’m still so stuck on that last image of Dad facedown in the old trailer, it takes me a second to recover.

Lame. I rub a hand across my forehead. Lame, lame, lame. If those assholes wanted to race, they could have picked a side road, where there was no chance of hitting anyone. Granted, the three of us are the only cars I’ve seen since I left Cottonwood, but still. Dying as collateral damage in a high-speed car accident is definitely not part of the plan.

“Move your ass,” I muttered. “Jesus, you pansy…”

I turn on my blinker to merge back over before realizing how stupid that precaution is. I could drive down the center of the highway if I wanted to—so I do. Just to see what it feels like. And you know what? It actually feels pretty damn awesome, like I own the whole open stretch of valley in front of me, like I could—

I slam on my brakes, and my truck stops about five feet later.

The red SUV is flipped over, literally upside down, in the grassy median that separates the northbound and southbound lanes. It’s smoking and two of the wheels are still treading against the air. Parked diagonally across the lanes is the beige sedan. Two men jump out, both of them wearing those tacky-looking hunter camo jackets, rifles out in front of them. One is the taller version of the other. Both have long, stringy dark hair that’s gathered in clouds of frizz under their hats. They’re fully bearded, and full bellied, and for a second I want to laugh. But that’s when the girl appears.

She has a head of dark curls and is wearing a tank top and jeans. To her right is a short blonde, bundled up in an oversized black hoodie. Cowering behind them is an even younger girl, Asian, with long, flowing black hair. That one keeps trying to turn back to the SUV, but the blonde keeps grabbing her and pulling her in close to her side.

The guns are suddenly up and level with the men’s, and one of them fires at the SUV’s back window, shattering the glass. I can hear the girls scream and suddenly I’m out of the car, and all five of them are staring at me.

“Get the hell out of here!” one of the men shouts, his gun turned back toward me. I throw up my hands, because what the hell else am I supposed to do? None of this feels real. I’m seeing a kid and a teenager for the first time in six years, and it’s like my brain can’t understand it.

The girls bolt. Out of the corner of my eye, I see them go, cutting across the highway. The older one touches the hood of one of the cars that has been abandoned there, and its headlights flare to life—its engine roars. She makes this motion like she’s sweeping the dust off it, and without any other warning, the car is shooting across the median toward the men—the skip tracers.

Holy shit.

You hear about the things these freaks can do, but you sort of figure that some of it has to be exaggerated. There’s no way someone can blink and set a house on fire, right? And that girl, she just…she just…

The skip tracers have to dive out of the way to avoid getting hit, but whatever crazy power resuscitated the car suddenly blinks out, and it rolls to a slow stop on the opposite shoulder. I don’t think it was ever meant to hit them, only pack enough of a punch to serve as a distraction. I’m half horrified, half amazed that it works.

“They’re running,” I yell at the men, throwing my arm out in their direction. The girls are trying for the shelter of the Tonto National Forest.

The men chase after them on foot, shooting me these looks like it’s my fault. I don’t know, maybe it is. Maybe I should be running after the freaks, too, see if I can swipe one of them for myself. There’s nothing in the handbook that says you can’t, or that you get docked points. It seems like it could be dangerous business to find yourself suddenly being hunted by the same people you just stole from.

But they could have other stuff I need.

I’m not proud of it, okay? But I go and look anyway, peering through the sun’s glare on the driver-side window to see if they left anything valuable lying out. There’s a small wad of money in one of the drink holders, but I don’t see any of their tech. Figures.

The door is unlocked, which pretty much makes the decision for me. I slide the money into my back pocket, giving a salute in their direction. They won’t miss it, I tell myself. They’re going to have thirty grand coming their way if they nab those girls. Those things.

The handbook tells you not to think of them like they’re actual humans. That’s easier after watching the psychic ninja jump-start that car and send it flying, but I still don’t know that I can follow the advice. One of the skip tracers they quoted said that he likes to think of them as dogs—puppies, really. Living creatures that aren’t like us but still have needs. I’ll start there. Puppies—no, puppies are too cute. I’ll stick with freaks.

And it’s the strangest thing, because as I walk by the flipped SUV, I swear I can hear a dog whimpering nearby. I tell myself to keep walking, to get the hell out of here before the beards make it back and notice what’s missing, but my eyes slide toward the dark figure in the SUV’s driver’s seat. With the glass blown out of the windshield, I can see the unnatural angle of the kid’s neck. His long dreads fall around the place where his head is jammed against the car’s roof, but they don’t cover the jagged shards of glass embedded in his throat. Blood is still spilling down over his chin, gliding over his dark skin, into his open, unblinking eyes.

Not even cold yet.

The body. The kid…the thing.

I remember being ten, bumming around behind Dad’s restaurant after school with two of my friends. One afternoon we pushed all the garbage cans onto their sides because one of us had the genius idea of jumping over them with our bikes like the guys we’d seen on MTV—one of those stupid shows. Only, when we turned the first one over, there was a dead cat behind it. I will never in my life forget that damn cat. The way its gray fur was matted, coated with blood, the back half of its body broken by what I’d guess was a car. The three of us, we just sat there staring at it, taking turns trying to get close to it without puking. For hours.

And that cat was the first thing I thought of later that night when I found Dad’s body.

What is it about horrible, violent things that capture us? I’d never seen a dead thing before that moment, but years later, it would be one funeral after another and everyone would want to know every detail about each one. The twenty-four-hour news stream would stop pretending like there were other stories to report. And all of us, we were hooked to the coverage of the hundreds, thousands, millions of deaths like junkies, waiting to see how bad it would get, drowning in it. And when the D.C. bombings happened, forget it. I stayed home from work for two weeks, overdosing on CNN.

There’s a second of silence before the pounding starts and a small, pale hand begins slamming against the back passenger window. I feel my legs moving, running, bringing me around to the other side of the SUV, where the doors are hanging open.

There’s a girl, maybe eleven years old at most, in the seat directly behind the driver, peering at me through the wreckage, her face streaked with blood. She’s hanging upside down, struggling with her seat belt. The driver’s seat looks almost broken in half, bowing back so that the small kid is pinned in place. For a second, I doubt my first impression and I think I’m looking at a boy. Her black hair is spiked out around her head like a pixie’s, and it takes me a moment longer than it probably should to realize she—it—is wearing a bright pink dress.

The seat belt’s jammed, I think. I’m dimly aware of my hand’s reaching toward her—it, dammit—and all of a sudden I’m gripping the strap myself, trying to rip out the buckle by force. I climb inside to go at it from a better angle, and her look of relief turns to one of irritation—like, Hey, asshole, if that was ever going to work, would I still be sitting here?

Her face is pink with the blood rushing to it, but she managed to get her right leg free. She strains, stretching it out as far as it’ll go, using her toe to point at the dead kid in the front seat. At the knife strapped to his hip. Damn, I think. Why don’t I have a knife? And because she clearly thinks I’m an idiot, she makes a sawing motion with her hands against the part of the seat belt over her hips.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I mutter. I’m trying to ignore that voice in the back of my head, the one that sounds suspiciously like my dad. He’s asking, What are you doing? He’s pointing out, Stealing money is one thing, but if you think those are the kind of guys to let you get away with this…

Isn’t three enough for them, though? They have to be greedy and take four freaks in? I just need one. Just one to get this operation going. Aren’t they stupid for not checking to see if this freak was alive before they ran after the other ones? It seems like I was supposed to find her—it—like this one was meant for me. Somewhere deep inside, I know I’m right. I know I’m never going to have it this easy again. It’s a gift, and it’s meant for me, and I’m going to take it.

Those guys wouldn’t hesitate to take her from me. Of course, I can’t know either way, but who’s to say they wouldn’t just shoot me in the back and step over my corpse to get to her? Yeah.

I need this freak. I need food and gas and money to pay Phyllis so she can start hounding some other poor schmuck for his rent.

I’m going at the seat belt with everything I’ve got, and I still haven’t cut through it. The strap did a number on the girl; I can see the red welt forming where it locked across her neck as she was thrown forward.

“Stay still!” I snap, because she’s twisting and squirming like a fish in hand trying to get back to the water. Finally, the fabric frays and snaps altogether. The girl is slight enough to slide down from under the strap across her chest, falling onto the SUV’s crushed roof. She has to crawl through the broken section of the driver’s seat. I see her eyes start to drift toward the body there, and I don’t know, I don’t know why, but I don’t want her to see it.

“Come on, come on!” I hold both hands out to her and she practically slides right into them. She weighs next to nothing; she’s all fine, delicate bones and sweat and blood-slicked skin. I haul her out of the SUV, trying to crane my neck away from where she has her arms locked around it, almost like she’s going in for a big hug.

“Jesus, kid, stop—I’m not rescuing you!” I say. “Are you that stupid? Stop it!”

I try to force the image of her face out of my mind, to kill the corner of my heart where sympathy comes home to roost. Think of them like stray dogs, the handbook said. They have to be brought in, or put down if they exhibit too much fight.

The first kick to my crotch makes me see stars. The little feet in those stupid-ass pink tennis shoes are all of a sudden flying, beating against my chest and legs. I stumble forward, throwing both of us down onto the warm asphalt. She’s up and on her feet while I’m rolling around on the ground, holding my crotch, trying not to cry.

Shit—I need to get up, I need to get up, I need to—

I push myself onto my knees and try to lunge for her, but the freak is so damn pint-sized all she has to do is duck and my arms are cutting through air. I go lurching after her, thinking she’s going to try to lose me down the road, disappearing into the low, dry brush that dots the green valley.

Instead, she crashes into the skip tracers’ beige sedan, throwing both hands out against the hood. The whole car makes this low, whining sound, the way my middle school violin used to sound when it wasn’t tuned and I tried to drag the bow across it. I snag her around the waist, swinging her away. This time, I don’t make the same mistake. I throw her over my shoulder and she knows better than to fight back.

“Hey!” A shout slices through the silence, echoing down the open road. I spin around, searching for the source. One of the beards is running for us. There’s a flash of silver, like the light is giving me a wink. That’s where my brain goes. Not that it’s a gun, not that I should drop that kid and book it for my car, but Oh, look! A sparkle!

“Drop it!” he hollers.

The bullet slams into the warped frame of the SUV, making me jump. I’ve seen them—guns, I mean—before on TV, and in movies, and in games. But real guns, they’re loud. Angrier.

I can’t move. Physically cannot put one foot in front of the other. I can feel my brain racing in circles around the realization of what’s going to happen if I don’t get my ass in gear. Why don’t I have a gun? Why didn’t I save enough to buy one before I left?

It makes me feel stupid, like I’m some elementary school kid who shows up for varsity tryouts.

A sharp pain shoots through my lower back. The little girl jams her bony elbow against my kidney again. It hurts like a bitch, but I stumble forward, and once I’m moving, I don’t stop, not for anything. I can’t. The beard is right there. As I reach the truck, I see him stop and brace himself, and I know what that means even before he raises his arms and aims. I practically throw the girl into the truck’s cab and dive in after her. One-two-three bangs—Jesus, this guy is trying to kill me.

I’m trying to keep myself from shaking. I’m trying to keep from thinking about the freak thing buckling herself into the seat next to me. I’m trying to remember which pedal is gas and which is the brake, and all of a sudden we’re flying backward instead of forward. Bullets ping against the tailgate. In the rearview mirror, the beard has to dive to avoid being crushed under my wheels. Reality comes back like a blow to the head, and suddenly, I’m whipping the car around, shifting the gears. The truck squeals and moans at the pressure I’m putting on the gas, but it gets the job done. I watch the other beard run out of the charred trees, waving his arms through the air. The first one snags the rifle off his shoulder and brings it up to eye level, but we’re too far away. I finally let my eyes drop from the mirror and realize I’m driving down the middle of the road again.

We’re out of there.

I don’t know why the relief comes out as a laugh. This is zero percent funny. Zero percent. The gas light is glowing like a red demon and those guys have a car that’s about twenty years younger than mine, but as the minutes tick on, I realize they’re not following. They would have caught me by now.

Then I remember.

I glance to my right, at the kid—the freak sitting next to me staring out the window. There’s something almost…I don’t want to say that she looks broken, because I know she is. They all are; otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. It’s more that her face has gone completely blank, and she’s staring at the passing forest but not seeing it. The reflection I see in her window, with the blood caked beneath her nose and across her forehead, makes me feel like she’s kicking me all over again.

It is kicking me all over again. I can’t even get that part right. It is not human. It is a living creature with needs, but it is not one of us.

“Did you do something to their car?” I ask, surprised at how rough my voice sounds. I worry for a second I was somehow screaming without hearing or feeling it.

She nods.

“That makes you what?” I almost don’t want to know, because I know the answer is not going to be Green. My luck is never, ever that good. I can barely keep the stupid color system straight. They tried to model it after the old terrorist warning scale. That whole threat level is orange, so you should feel above-average levels of fear that someone is going to blow up your plane. That system. I think Red is when the kid can explode things or start fires, Blue means they can move shit around, Yellow is…

Shit. Yellow is messing with electricity. Like frying cars. Holy shit.

“You’re Yellow?” I ask.

It’s only when she nods that I realize I haven’t heard a single word out of her.

“What? You too good to talk to me?”

She looks at me like, Give me a break, her dark eyebrows drawing sharply down.

“You can’t?” I press. “Won’t?”

She doesn’t answer and I have to tell myself to stop. This whole not-talking thing works for me. It’s easier to think of her as a freak if she can’t or won’t whine about being hungry or start screaming until her lungs burst. And anyway, I don’t care. I definitely do not care. Ten grand, sitting next to me.

“Any chance those guys can come after us?” I ask, because, in the end, that’s really all that matters.

Nope. I see the answer in her face. There’s a bit of pride there, too.

It takes five full miles for me to realize that whatever she did to the skip tracers’ car, she can just as easily do to mine. If I’m remembering right, the handbook says that they can manipulate electricity only through touch, so I just need to keep her hands in one place and her mind convinced she won’t be able to escape. I jerk the car onto the shoulder and throw the parking brake on. My “supplies kit” is nothing more than an NAU duffel bag full of whatever crap I could buy off the policemen who got let go in the economic crash. Handcuffs. Some zip ties. A Taser that doesn’t work but I feel could be a pretty good threat.

My hands are still shaking, and it’s embarrassing and awful, and it makes the fact that I can’t figure out how to use the zip ties that much worse when the girl has to do it herself. I feel her silently judging me as she slides the flat end through the end with the nub. She puts her hands through and then tightens the loop by taking the flat end between her tiny pearls of teeth and pulling. When she finishes, the kid puts her hands delicately back in her lap and looks at me, all expectant. Like, What’s next?

“I’m not saving you,” I remind her. But something makes me wonder if she even wants me to.