At least it will be over. At least I’ll get to sit down and close my eyes. Maybe we can hide out in the sewers. Maybe—it occurred to her suddenly that it was probably down there already, wallowing in filth and runoff, feeding on the town’s rancid sewage and waiting for some idiot to pop up one of the grates and wriggle right into its grasping claws. Eaten alive with her mouth and nostrils coated in the stench of shit. She put one blistered, aching foot in front of the other. There was blood leaking through the side of her left shoe, she realized, but the thought of bending down to see what was wrong made her want to collapse and roll into the street. Let it bleed. It didn’t matter.
Savage Street. An auto repair place named Bud’s, piles of tires beside a whitewashed cinder block garage. A tow truck and a few older station wagons parked in the oil-stained lot. Jo’s heart leapt before she realized that chances were the engines were all dead, some crucial wire or cable cut. This place was like a duck blind painted to blend in among the waving reeds. Not nature, not really, but a lifeless imitation of it meant to lull the idiot prey into a false sense of security. People probably drove through every day, never noticing anything out of the ordinary.
They came to Main Street. A Chinese restaurant. A post office. Diners and shoe stores and cars parked in front of steel and plastic meters and a record shop with BLACKTOP VINYL stenciled on its storefront window. They stood on the corner for a little while, the sun in their eyes, and then Jo set off following the building numbers downward from 361. It was the longest moment of her life, going down that sidewalk, all those still, dark buildings pregnant with the threat of the things that would wake up and crawl out of whatever brackish pools they slept in to open up and make this place seem ordinary, just another no-name dump in the middle of nowhere, too small and sleepy to spare a second thought about.
She saw her mother’s gray Lincoln before she realized they’d reached the feed store. It was parked out front, Oji asleep behind the wheel. He’d changed its Jersey plates out for dirty Ohio ones that read BIRTHPLACE OF AVIATION in little red letters under the serial number.
“Is that him?” croaked Gabe. He looked like a skeleton, skin stretched tight over his cheekbones, lips peeling and flaking. He gripped her arm. His hand was feverish. “Jo, is he really there? Is this real?”
“It would really be something if it was just some other old Japanese guy,” said Malcolm, but Jo wasn’t listening. Oji must have heard them talking, because suddenly his eyes were open and with a cry he levered himself up out of the driver’s seat and hobbled toward her, arms outstretched. She ran to him and flung herself into his embrace, the last four days crashing down on her all at once like an avalanche until she was sobbing so hard into her grandfather’s shoulder she could hardly stand. “My girl, my girl,” he said, his frail voice cracking as he stroked her hair. “What did they do to you?”
It wasn’t until the town was far behind them that she told him everything.
Part II ABBY
“I keep seeing these people, all recognizing each other. Something is passing between them all. Some secret.”
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
Directed by Philip Kaufman, screenplay by W. D. Richter
1978
XVI IT’S NOT YOU
Cook Canyon, Nevada
May 29, 2011
Canned food didn’t keep as well in the car as Felix had figured it would. The heat was too much for it, which he’d discovered when he opened the trunk one day and found burst tins of beans and chickpeas soaking into the dark upholstery. Dry cereal. Granola. Nuts and raisins. It had to be fine sitting in the glove compartment for six days, or else it wasn’t worth buying. It had been a little easier when he was in North Dakota scoping out the New Day Youth Wilderness Retreat. Dry, there. Cool at night. Kids shivering in tents while counselors smoked and gossiped around dying fires or fucked each other or, sometimes, slipped into silent tents by moonlight and fucked the kids.
He’d left a sheaf of glossies in the office of the Bismarck DA after a month of skulking after hiking parties, sleeping outside, and picking ticks off himself in truck stop bathrooms. A month later, with nothing in the newspapers and trucks still coming and going from the ranch where New Day had its headquarters, he’d sent copies of everything to lawyers and reporters all over the state, along with xeroxes of his notes—his handwriting carefully neutral, smoothed into typeface by years of practice. New Day were monsters, but only the human kind.
So, New Mexico. Six months trying to track down the full extent of the Integrity Pledge, a “personal mastery program” for delinquent boys he’d heard about on one of the parenting forums where he lurked, only for it to fold while he was in the middle of mapping out its leadership and investors. A boy in the program had died of appendicitis after his counselors ignored his screams and pleading for three days. The parents, being rich idiots, sued immediately, and the whole thing fell apart inside a month. He’d tailed staff and administration long enough to write them off as anything worse than callous grifters.
So, Nevada, eating macadamia nuts and sipping lukewarm water from a Nalgene in the boiling interior of his 2006 Civic as he watched traffic rocket past his hiding place in the shadow of a sun-bleached billboard reading JESUS KNOWS in huge, faded red letters. Every few minutes he checked the short list of license plate numbers he’d scribbled on the back of a takeout menu from a Chinese place in Carson City.
The trick to finding these people was: first you found an IP address for a mother looking to forum support groups to assure her she was doing the right thing by sending her twelve-year-old across the country into the care of unlicensed strangers. Then you staked out the house—a split-level an hour outside Louisville, husky always barking in the fenced backyard—and when a van came (and it was always a van) you noted the license plate. You couldn’t follow them. Not really. Even an idiot gets suspicious with the same car in his rearview for a day at a time. So you run the plate—get scammed a few times on the dark web, then find someone halfway legit who tells you Cook Canyon, Nevada, and a last name, Glover, that makes you shrivel up inside, as though someone has sucked all the fluids out of your body with a straw.
All of that for the moment a white contracting van roared by doing eighty-five on the flat, shimmering stretch of road. Felix looked from paper to plate and back again. A match. He made himself wait, heart in his mouth, as the van dwindled into the distance before he turned the key in the Civic’s ignition and eased out onto the road, the engine’s hungry growl reverberating through his aching body. How long had he been sitting? Six hours? Seven? Lactic acid builds up in your muscles when you sit, his ex Tucker had told him once. If you don’t warm up before a set it can fuck with your joints.
Why think about Tucker now? He hadn’t seen the other man in years. No calamitous breakup, no big fight, just a slow, numb fading out, like it always was for him. A few tears. A few awkward phone calls.
Feels like you don’t wanna see me, man.
I’m busy. It’s not you.
No, I got that. Feels pretty much like it’s you.
Okay.
That it?
I guess.
Okay, Felix. I love you.
Goodbye.
He kept the van just in sight for close to half an hour, squinting into the sunset. It was easy to get hypnotized out in flat country like this, nothing to look at for miles in any direction and the distant shadows of the Rockies lost in the glare. Easy to lose focus and drift too close to a mark, flip the switch in their head that made them go from treating you like landscape to following your every move. Felix was careful. He didn’t even slow when they pulled off onto an unmarked service road, just blew past and waited until they were out of sight to pull a U-turn and mark the turnoff on his roadmap. He’d used GPS a few times, but he’d never quite been able to shake the feeling that if he were a parasitic hive mind slowly and stealthily spreading itself across the continent, the first place he’d want to be was wherever they monitored those satellites. He had a lot of thoughts like that.
He’s paranoid, he’d heard Mal tell John when he’d stayed with them briefly back in the winter of 2004, before the two of them split up. He’s fucking insane.
You remember that thing, John said. You remember it just the same as I do.
We don’t really know what happened. We were kids. They were feeding us drugs.
Nadine died in front of us. I remember that.
Felix had left the next morning, slipping out while his hosts had tearful makeup sex in the next room, and that was the last time he’d seen any of them since. Their little band of rejects had fallen apart, the memory of the summer that had brought them together finally eating its way through their bonds until all they wanted was to be as far from one another as they could get. It was why, in spite of everything he’d seen on the forums he trawled, he almost hadn’t gone to that house just outside Louisville, the split-level with the dog chained up and barking in the backyard, where Mark and Nancy Donovan had moved after their daughter died in a terrible accident at Camp Resolution in the summer of 1995, and where a few years later Nancy had given birth to a boy, the couple’s first, a little late-in-life trauma baby to get them through the loss of Nadine.
In 2008, Nancy had begun soliciting advice from forum dwellers on what to do with her sensitive boy, who was getting a little too old for playing dolls with his big sisters and crying when he saw dead animals in the road. In 2009 she’d caught him playing “dress-up” in her oldest daughter’s clothes, and by 2010, after his expulsion from Saint John Francis Academy for what the priests characterized as “lewd behavior” she began asking in desperate earnest for suggestions.
im at the end of my rope. i feel like i failed as a mother & now the whole nightmare is happening again. god gave me a second chance but what if i am the problem…???
A flood of support. Praise for her courage, for her steadfast love, for her willingness to sacrifice for her son. Suggestions poured in, and buried among the military schools and wilderness retreats was a place called Integrity with a website full of misspelled testimonials and pictures of smiling teenagers, and that was the program Nancy Donovan chose. Of course it was. Felix didn’t know how it had forced the issue, that disgusting thing that had haunted his nightmares for more than a decade. Maybe it lurked around families it had already fed off once. Maybe it wanted to get even. Maybe it was just taking so many kids now that it snapped this one up by chance. Somewhere off the highway Tommy Donovan, age thirteen, whose most heinous crime seemed to have been asking that her parents call her Abby, was probably getting her head shaved right now.
Felix put it out of his mind. He had it. Sixteen years of robbing vending machines and shoplifting energy drinks as he crept inland from California, sniffing after rumors and clipping newspaper articles about dead kids and tough love, and it had finally slipped up. It had gone back to the scene of one of its crimes. He had the fucking thing in his sights.
