Taken

Chapter One

“Hi, thanks for having me on your show, Mr. Jeffreys.”

The voice sounded familiar, and Charlie leaned forward and dialed up the volume on the Durango ’s radio, then glared at John, who sat silently on the passenger side. “What are you looking at?” he snapped.

John’s eyes shot away from him and held to the road.

“My name is Dale, and I’m from Seattle, Washington,” the caller said.

“Dale,” Lisa said. She glanced at Charlie unbelievingly. “It’s Dale. From Harriet’s group.”

Charlie nodded, then glanced into the backseat where Allie lay sleeping in Lisa’s arms.

“I’m calling about this little girl,” Dale said. “The one the Army is looking for in South Dakota. This little girl, she needs help. She and her parents are out there, all alone against the people that are trying to bring her in.”

“Isn’t this related to that toxic spill?” Jeffreys asked.

“There was no toxic spill,” Dale answered sharply.

“They want to bring this little girl in because she’s what these fifty years of all this, of people being taken, has been all about,” Dale insisted. “They want to talk to her because she is part alien.”

“I guess he thinks he’s helping,” Lisa said.

Allie moaned softly and Lisa looked at her worriedly.

“She’ll be all right,” John assured her. “She’s just done too much.”

“Can you help her?” Lisa asked him.

John said nothing.

“You want to help her, don’t you?” Lisa asked. She glanced at Charlie, who seemed to be seething, enraged that he had one of “them” in the front seat of the car.

Dale continued, his voice nearly drowned out by a sudden flurry of static. “I’m not the only one who saw what she could do. There were nine of us. We all saw it. We all saw the things she did.”

John continued to stare straight ahead.

Charlie glared at him angrily, whipped to a fury now by his silence. He felt a wave of rage wash over him, jerked the wheel to the right and brought the car to a skidding halt beside the deserted road. “Get out!” he snapped.

Allie suddenly awakened. “Charlie?” she asked softly.

“Get out!” Charlie shouted. He leaped from the car, walked to the passenger side and yanked open the door. “Get out,” he repeated furiously.

John nodded, then stepped slowly from the car.

“You’re going to talk,” Charlie said. He grabbed John and slammed him against the car. “Now! Right now! You’re going to tell me what the hell this is all about.”

“Charlie,” Allie pleaded. “Stop it.”

Charlie continued to glare into John’s face. “Why are you here? Why have you been doing this? What the hell do you want?”

John peered at Charlie softly. “We’re just trying to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Everything,” John answered. He slumped down and collapsed at Charlie’s feet. “Everything about you.”

Allie rushed from the car and took John in her arms. “Stop hurting him,” she cried. “Stop it, please!”

John’s eyes drifted up toward Charlie. “We came here to learn about your world,” he said. “We came here to learn.”

Lisa came around the other side of the car, and knelt beside John, drawing Charlie down with her, so that they formed a half circle around him.

“We’re not different from you,” John went on. “But there are things in you that we no longer recognize in ourselves.” He looked at Lisa and smiled softly. “Right from wrong. That was foreign to us. That what we were doing to you was… cruel.” His eyes drifted over to Allie. “We lost… compassion,” he said. “It is a dormant trait in you.” He touched her face. “We wanted to awaken it… to feel it again… like you do. To combine our mind with your… heart.” His gaze seemed to take all of them in suddenly, as if in a circle of light. “And so, our greatest experiment began.” A single finger moved down Allie’s face. “It was an unqualified success.”

General Beers drew Mary and Wakeman over to the side, away from the men he’d just finished interrogating. The abandoned gas station stood a few feet away, and for a moment they all watched it through the hazy smoke that still rose from the blasted truck.

“They were with somebody,” the general said.

“‘What do you mean, with somebody?’” Mary asked.

“Another man,” the general said. “The other men, the ones who shot him. They say he was in his thirties… and that his eyes turned black.”

Wakeman nodded. “They were waiting,” he said thoughtfully. “They were waiting for her to demonstrate. They see she’s got the power, bam. They’re here.”

Beers glanced first toward Mary, then back to Wakeman. “You’re saying this other guy is an… alien?” he asked.

Wakeman smiled. “You’re paying attention.”

The general stiffened. “You’re both in this thing with me,” he said hotly. “And right now, I have to go back to Washington and explain what happened out here.” He glared at Mary and Wakeman in turn. “Find that girl!” he ordered. “Her and whoever she’s with.”

“And when we do?” Mary asked.

“Then you’ll find me and I’ll take it from there,” Beers answered. He whirled around and strode away.

Mary walked to her car and got in behind the wheel, then waited until Wakeman joined her.

“Where to?” she asked.

“They’re about ten hours ahead of us,” he answered. He opened his laptop and Mary hit the ignition. “The big board has been shut down. I didn’t want the general to find them. But all of that information is in here now.”

“You know where she is?” Mary asked urgently.

Wakeman’s eyes filled with a curious vulnerability. “Mary… you’ve been through a lot. First your father, then everything that Allie put you through. I just want you to know I’m here for you.”

“I know that,” Mary said. She smiled. “You said before that you thought they’d been waiting for her to demonstrate.”

“Yeah.”

“So what happens now that she has?”

“Pie,” Wakeman said.

“What?”

“My rule on any car trip. Pie every day. Let’s find a place to get some and I’ll tell you my theory of everything.”

They headed down the road and found a small coffee shop. Mary brought the car to a halt, and they went inside.

“Okay, tell me,” Mary said impatiently.

“What do we know?” Wakeman asked. “They are this whole, this energy. I believe that this energy can manifest in different ways. As the beings we’ve seen. As their crafts… as our thoughts. There’s no right or wrong about it.”

“No right or wrong?” Mary asked thoughtfully.

“I think they had no concept of cruelty or kindness… no way of seeing beyond the oneness of all that energy. It’s like the little animal brain we have in all of us. It can be awakened by some… experience.”

“Experience?”

“Something could have touched one of them,” Wakeman went on. “Something small and simple… and it awakened this sense of what was missing… something gone and half-remembered.”

Wakeman looked at her for a moment, as if trying to find the right words. “I think they want something. Maybe they had it and lost it. Or maybe they never had it, but think they can get it somehow… from us.” He searched for some glimmer that she understood him. “And whatever it is they want, it’s extremely important to them, something they can’t do without, and so they’re willing to risk everything in order to get it.” He looked at her pointedly. “Think of us, Mary. Think of mankind. The species. Not what you want for yourself. But what you would want for the species.”

She looked at him pointedly. “To take the next step.”

Wakeman smiled. “I love you, Mary.”

“I love you, too.”

Wakeman’s eyes glimmered softly. “We’ve taken it all the way together, haven’t we?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We’re going to be there when it all comes together when it finally all comes together. And we’ll know we did our part.”

“Our part?”

Wakeman took her hand in his. “They’re in the endgame,” he said, his tone now filled with a strange finality. “They have to be. By going it on our own… by keeping this all from the general, we’re helping to keep Allie safe until they can finish their work.”

“You’re fine with that, aren’t you?” Mary asked. “Them ‘finishing their work’?”

Wakeman nodded. “I can’t wait.”

Mary drew her hand from Wakeman’s grasp. “So what do you want? Just a front-row seat at the show?”

“They’re more highly evolved than we are, Mary,” Wakeman said. “And Allie’s more highly evolved than they are. It’s the way of the Dao. Nature takes its course.”

“What if it’s our nature to fight back?” Mary asked sharply.

Wakeman looked at her as if she were a small child in need of elementary instruction. “Then we lose. Evolution one oh one.”

From a short distance, Charlie and Lisa peered back at the Durango where John sat in the backseat, Allie beside him, nestled in his arm.

“He wants her to go with him,” Lisa said. “He came to take her.”

“We’re not going to let that happen,” Charlie said, his voice oddly broken for a moment, before he steeled himself again.

Lisa turned her gaze to Charlie. “There’s something more,” she said. “A feeling I’m getting.” She seemed reluctant to tell him.

“What?” he asked.

“He cares about her, Charlie. He wants to help.”

Charlie turned and headed for the Durango. “You ride up front with me,” he told John sharply, then noted the odd look he exchanged with Allie, as if to assure her that it was all right.

John did as he was told, Lisa in the backseat with Allie, John on the passenger side up front.

Charlie hit the ignition, and the radio came on, the William Jeffreys show once again blaring out of the speakers.

“Larry King wants to know why our government would cut a deal with a bunch of aliens. Technology, Larry. We need their technology. More of the things they’ve already given us. Like Velcro.”

Charlie’s eyes shot over to John. “Is that true?” he asked. “What this guy’s saying about Velcro?” His eyes narrowed. “Or were you too busy destroying lives to notice?”

Allie leaned forward. “Don’t talk to him like that,” she pleaded. “He’s hurt. He can’t stay human much longer.”

“He’s not human!” Charlie said desperately, his rage suddenly boiling over.

He pressed down on the accelerator and they drove on for a time in silence, Charlie staring up the deserted road while the William Jeffreys show droned on. Cynthia, another from Penzler’s group, called, backing up what Dale had said, and Charlie knew that she was like so many others, another person who seemed to know-or at least sense-that the kooks and crazies, the people who heard voices, saw visions, moved through space and time-had in fact touched, or been touched by, a vague and impossible truth. He knew that some of them were insane, drowning in black pools of madness. But the ones who weren’t, the ones who’d actually seen, he knew they had felt an anguish and loneliness that went down to the deep, deep bone. He could feel it in his own bones each time he glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the little girl he had come to love, human and not human at the same time, and yet, beyond all question, his living daughter, the one thing in life he would not let them take.

He looked at Lisa. “Your uncle should have seen the ad we put in the paper by now,” he said. “He should call the William Jeffreys talk show tonight.”

They drove on in silence for a time, all of them listening as Cynthia continued.

“I saw this same little girl heal a man who’d been shot,” Cynthia said. “And Dale, his son was killed in the Gulf War, and Allie…”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Jeffreys said. “But we’ve got Tom Clarke, the noted UFOlogist checking in.”

Charlie and Lisa exchanged excited glances.

“What do you have to tell us, Tom?” Jeffreys asked.

“I’m afraid I’ve got nothing for you but a false alarm,” Tom said. “I’m calling from the Grayback Dam in Idaho.”

“Grayback Dam,” Charlie repeated thoughtfully. He looked at Lisa. “I guess we’re going to Idaho.”

They reached Mount Grayback the next morning. Tom was waiting for them in the wide asphalt lot of the Grayback Dam, where they’d arranged to meet. Allie leaped out of the car almost before it halted and rushed into his arms.

He was in his sixties now, the long years of his struggle weighing down upon him.

“So this is Charlie,” Tom said as he brought Allie back down to the ground.

“He’s my dad,” she said brightly.

Tom smiled. “I know, honey,” he said quietly. He offered his hand. “Thanks for taking such good care of the family.”

Suddenly John came up to them. “Tom,” he said, “it’s good to see you.”

Tom’s face tightened slightly, as if he were a little boy again, facing the stranger who would change his life forever. Then he turned back to Charlie. “We’ll go into Mexico through Texas,” he said. “A friend of mine from El Paso will meet us at our old place in Lubbock. He’ll have all the documents you need to cross the border. Eventually, we’ll go to South America. I know people in Buenos Aires who’ll pick you up indefinitely.” He looked at each of them in turn, but his eyes finally settled on Lisa, the odd look he saw in her face. “What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” Lisa answered. “It’s just a feeling that all of this is going somewhere.” She shrugged. “So it’s okay, Mexico. It’s fine, Uncle Tom.”

“All right then, it’s settled,” Tom said. “Let’s go.”

Within seconds, they were on the road again, Tom at the wheel at first, then Charlie, then giving it over to Lisa as night fell, John in the passenger seat, Allie beside him, munching a granola bar while Tom and Charlie slept peacefully in the backseat.

Allie offered John a bite from the granola bar. “You eat, don’t you?” she asked.

“We eat,” John answered.

“So try it,” Allie said.

John took a bite of the bar. “It’s good,” he said with a quick smile.

Allie’s eyes were still, green pools. “I don’t want to do this,” she said.

Lisa felt her fingers tighten around the wheel. Allie was talking to John with a strange sense of equality, one alien to another, each with vast inhuman powers.

“I know,” John told her.

“At the gas station, I was going to make those men hurt each other,” Allie added. “I could have done that, too.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I almost did.”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t want to hurt people,” Allie went on. “So, how can I make this stop? I mean, if I couldn’t do any of these things-if I didn’t have these powers-then people would leave me alone, wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know, Allie,” John confessed. “I don’t know much about people.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No, nothing.”

“Will the others come for you?”

“It’s not important,” John said. He looked at her gravely. “Allie, things are going to get hard for you for a while. You’ll be afraid, and you’ll be alone. You’re becoming even more than you already are.”

“I’m not coming with you,” Allie said determinedly. “I belong here, with my family.”

John reached into his pocket. “I brought this for you,” he said, opening his hand. The star earring glowed silently in John’s palm. “It was your great-grandmother’s. She gave it to me when I left. I can’t… do this much longer.”

Allie took the earring from his hand. “I know,” she said.

Lisa searched the road ahead, her eyes now focused on the small, roadside gas station that shone out of the night. She pulled into the station, reached for Allie’s hand and led her to the bathroom as a second car came to a halt in the gravelly drive.

Inside the bathroom Lisa said, “Give me the earring.”

Allie stretched out her hand. The earring rested on her open palm.

Lisa plucked it from Allie’s hand. “I’ll never let you go, honey,” she said. She knelt down, her face very close to Allie’s. “Listen,” she said, “my dad used to tell me that kids shouldn’t ever have to think about anything more complicated than baseball.” She smiled softly at her daughter, and ran her fingers through her long hair. “You’ll be a little girl again, I promise.” She placed the earring John had given her on her necklace, the two now hanging side by side. “There. Together again.”

Allie smiled.

“I’ll never let you go, honey,” Lisa said with a sudden, furious determination, feeling more strongly than she ever had, the deepest of all human bonds. “Never.”

The door of the bathroom shot open and Lisa turned to see Mary Crawford facing her, gun in hand.

“That looks lovely,” Mary said sarcastically. She stepped forward and pressed the pistol into the small of Lisa’s back. “I’m holding a gun on your mother,” she said to Allie. “I’m betting that, even if you wanted to do something, I could get a shot into her before you turned the gas station into a flying saucer, or a House of Pies or something.”

Lisa looked at Allie. “Don’t try to do anything, you understand,” she said desperately.

Mary smiled. “Be a good girl,” she said to Allie. “Be a good girl and listen to your mom.”

Allie looked at Mary angrily.

“Allie, when you were in that farmhouse, you saw something that scared you,” Mary said. “I think you know what they want you to do and I don’t think you want to do it.”

Allie glanced at Lisa, then back at Mary.

“I don’t want to hurt anybody.” Mary said. “I really don’t.” Her voice softened into a plea. “You’re out of options. You must have figured that out for yourself by now. I have the resources and the technology to help you. You really don’t have any other choice. It’s them or me. Don’t you see, I just want to help you.”

“You’re lying,” Lisa said icily. “You can’t help anyone.”

Mary looked as if Lisa had spit in her face. The pistol barrel jerked toward the door. “Let’s go.”

Tom was at the gas pump, removing the nozzle from the tank when they came out of the bathroom, Lisa in front, Mary behind, pressing the pistol at Lisa’s back.

Charlie watched them from the kiosk, then turned toward the car that had pulled into the station driveway minutes before. A single man sat behind the wheel, his head turned slightly, watching Lisa and Mary and Allie as they continued forward.

Wakeman! Charlie thought, then stepped out from behind the kiosk. He saw that Wakeman had suddenly noticed him, and that he was now moving frantically behind the wheel.

Instantly, the car’s engine fired, and the car lurched forward, throwing arcs of gravel behind the spinning wheels as it made a screeching turn and hurtled toward Mary and the others.

Mary yanked open the car’s back door, pushed Lisa and Allie into the backseat, then leaped in behind them.

Lisa glanced out the back window of the car as it spun away. Charlie was still running after them desperately as Tom raced to his car and leaped in behind the wheel. She turned back, and saw it, the terrible change in Allie’s face. “No,” she whispered, “no, Allie.”

But it was too late.

The explosions came one after the other, four of them as each of the tires on Wakeman’s car blasted away, so that the car ground to a halt.

Charlie was there in an instant. He jerked open the door and pulled Mary out onto the road, the pistol falling from her hand and clattering across the roadway.

“Allie, don’t do anything else,” Lisa cried as Tom pulled up.

“I didn’t,” Allie said urgently. “I didn’t do anything.”

Lisa’s eyes swept from her daughter to the backseat of Tom’s car, where John sat motiorilessly, pale and ghostly, as if the last of his human reserves had now been spent.

“That was a little too close,” Tom said as Charlie, Lisa, and Allie all rushed into the car.

He stomped the accelerator and the car sped away. “How did they find us?” he asked after a moment.

Charlie looked at Allie in the rearview mirror. “Honey, I want to ask you something.”

“Sure,” Allie said.

“Those people from the government, when you went with them from Dr. Penzler’s, they put something over your head.”

“Right,” Allie said. “I heard them say it was to block a signal I have in my head.”

Charlie looked at Tom. “Lisa would have it too,” he said.

Tom nodded.

“If the people who took Allie know enough to block that signal, then they know how to read it. To track it.”

“That’s how they found us,” Lisa said.

Charlie shook his head. “Not much point in getting fake papers and going to Buenos Aires, is there? No matter where we go, they’d find us.” He faced John squarely. “You can turn her off, can’t you?” he asked.

John said nothing.

“You can do something so they won’t be able to read her signal… or mine…” Lisa said. “If you can do it, then do it. You owe us that much.”

John shook his head. “No, I’m too weak. But Allie can.”

He looked at Allie. “Find it inside you,” he said.

Allie closed her eyes.

“Do you feel it?” John asked.

Allie’s eyes remained closed for a moment, then they opened suddenly.

John peered into them. “She won’t register now,” he said. He touched her face softly. “You’re on your own, Allie.”

She nodded, and stretched her hand to his, but by the time she touched it, the hand had faded, simply guttered out like a candle, five fingers now only four, each with a double joint. She drew her gaze up his body, human skin now vanished, all human features resolved into a smooth, metallic gray.

Chapter Two

The interior of the motel was dingy, but Mary gave no notice of it. She was busy at her laptop. “They’re not registering, Chet,” she said.

Wakeman lay on the bed, his hand behind his head, feet stretched out before him. “I know,” he said.

Mary looked at him, astonished. “You know?”

“Shut off. No signal.”

“And you didn’t bother to tell me?”

“I was getting there.”

“How about their friend in the backseat?” Mary asked.

“Probably shut off too.” Wakeman pulled himself up and opened his own laptop. “Look at this,” he said, motioning Mary to his side. “The sightings are starting again. Lights in the sky. Centered over Idaho and Nebraska.”

Mary stared at the screen. “Then we’d better get ready.”

Wakeman shook his head. “You can’t do anything, Mary.” He seemed to recall the way she’d looked at the gas station, the pistol she’d leveled so firmly at Allie’s head. “You would have shot Allie, wouldn’t you?”

“I would have stopped her anyway I could,” Mary admitted.

“You’re not going to let it go, are you?”

“I can’t.”

He gazed at her sadly, as if she were already lost to him. “Do you know the story of Medusa?”

“If you look at her, you turn to stone,” Mary said.

“Unless you know the secret, in which case, you can kill her,” Wakeman said.

“Is this going somewhere, Chet?” Mary asked impatiently.

“I used to think we could do something together. New science, maybe, or just get the better of them somehow. But, Mary, we’re not ready to be anything but spectators in this. If we try for more, we’ll-well-we’ll turn to stone.”

Mary shook her head firmly. “I’m not giving up, Chet. I’m going to find that little girl, and I’m going to be more than a witness to this.”

“But, Mary…”

She turned away and watched the screen of her laptop, where scores of new reports were coming in, strange lights appearing everywhere. “Maybe they don’t know where she is either,” she said.

“That’s a thought, isn’t it,” Wakeman said.

She looked at him. “Will you help me or not?”

Wakeman nodded. “All right, let’s think about it then. Suppose they don’t know where she is because her signal is turned off.”

“But how would they have lost her? She’s with one of them.”

“That’s a very good question,” Wakeman admitted. “What are you thinking?”

Mary considered this a moment, then said, “The man who was driving the car back at the station. That was Tom Clarke. Lisa’s uncle.”

“I thought I recognized him. He’s getting a little long in the tooth.”

“I had the office upload all my grandfather’s files, everything we had on Tom Clarke. You know my grandfather went to Texas once.”

“And got the bejesus scared out of him by Jacob Clarke.”

“Tom Clarke still owns his mother’s farmhouse. The place where my grandfather went to get Jacob.”

“You think that’s where they’ve gone?”

“I’m all for taking a look.”

“What if they’re there?” Wakeman asked. “Then what?”

The look in Mary’s eyes gave him the only answer he needed.

When Mary entered the shower, Wakeman picked up the receiver and dialed information. “For Austin, Texas. Tom Clarke.” He dialed Tom’s number, but got only the answering machine.

By the time he began to leave his message, the bullet had struck, and the phone was dropping from his hand.

Mary stood above his fallen body, her eyes glistening. She knew that no one would ever love her as he had loved her, and the fact that she could put such love aside had now sealed her fate.

She placed the gun on the small table beside the bed, picked the phone off the floor and dialed the number.

“General Beers’ office.”

“I’d like to speak to General Beers,” Mary said. “Tell him Mary Crawford is calling.”

Moments later, the general arrived. He glanced at Wakeman’s body, then at Mary.

There was no need to conceal anything, and so she told it all in a wild rush, everything that had happened to her, to Wakeman, everything they’d learned and everything they had surmised, down to Wakeman himself, how he’d changed, gone over to the “visitors,” so that she’d had no choice but…

“Dear God,” Beers breathed. “You are one cold and nasty bitch, Mary.”

“Will you help me?”

The general peered at her darkly. “When we’re through with all this, I’m going to see that you’re held accountable for what you’ve done,” he said.

Mary made no protest, and because of that, understood that she was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. “Do you want to know how we can find Allie?” she asked matter-of-factly.

“Yes,” Beers said sharply. “Tell me.”

“You’ve been monitoring the reports from the northwest?” Mary asked. “The lights?”

“So far that’s all they’ve been.”

“Dr. Wakeman believed that this is it. They’re coming for Allie.”

“Why don’t they just take her then?”

“Because right at this moment, they don’t know where she is.”

“But she’s with one of them, the one from the gas station.”

“Maybe he’s the one who shut her off. Maybe he’s the one who’s protecting her.”

“Why would he be doing that?”

“Remorse?” Mary asked.

The general considered this silently for a moment, then said, “Go on.”

“I came after Allie in a parking lot,” Mary said. “She got away from me in a car with the help of that alien. She’s spent, General. And she’s also alone. At least until… they find her.”

“You want to get her before they do,” the general said.

“I want to finish what we started,” Mary said grimly. “Right now you need someone who understands what you might be dealing with. Right now, you need me with you.”

General Beers studied her a moment. “I want you to know that it disgusts me that I have to work with you,” he said finally.

Mary smiled thinly. “I can understand that,” she said.

Tom and Charlie stood outside the farmhouse, staring silently into the surrounding fields. After a time, Lisa came out to join them.

“How’s Allie?” Tom asked.

“The same,” Lisa answered. “You think they’re coming? Mary and the…”

Charlie nodded. “It’s just a matter of time.”

“There’s no point in running unless you’ve got some place to run,” Tom added.

Charlie considered this a moment, then said, “Something like this… the government can only do what they do because nobody’s watching.” He smiled. “I have an idea.” He looked at Tom. “How far do you have to go to make a phone call?”

Allie lay sleeping in her bed, breathing softly, John watching her silently, his form human again, complete with downy hair on the arms, five fingers on each hand. He touched her softly, and her eyes opened.

“I thought if I looked human again, it might be easier to say good-bye,” John told her. His smile was sad and gentle. “I can’t stay with you anymore, Allie. If I do, sooner or later, you’ll be found.”

“How?” Allie asked.

“Because the thing in your head, when it went off, it wasn’t just people who lost track of you. But once I’m gone, no one will know where you are, and so you’ll have a chance to be a little girl again.” He touched her hair. “If things get too hard, if you feel that you can’t stay here, you can find us again. You can find the part of you that is us. We’ll know where you are… and we’ll come for you. But that will be your choice, Allie. It won’t be because we’ve… taken you.”

He rose and walked out of the room, and for a time, Allie waited in her bed. Then the urge overtook her, a need, strange but vibrant, to see John again. She leaped from her bed and ran out of the house and along a deserted road until she saw him up ahead, his human form now shed, so that he stood, smooth and gleaming, in the dark night air.

“Can I walk with you a minute?” she asked.

“Just to the edge of the woods.”

They walked down the road together, and at last came to the woods. “This is as far as you can go,” John told her.

She saw that his wide, almond-shaped eyes were filled with something new and wondrous… emotion.

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.