“The government?” Spencer repeated.
Rebecca nodded like the words hurt.
“The government took Paul Cohen?” he tried again. “Why would—”
“Paul hacked into a government branch a year ago. A secret one, one that had a base nearby,” she interrupted him, able to speak without crying or shaking. As weak as she was, her words seemed to demand attention.
“You’re serious?” Spencer said after another deadly moment of silence. Rebecca nodded.
Chapter Eight
After Donna had first changed, she felt like her world had ended. Her life had never been great to begin with. How could someone hope to move on when they were clearly a freak of life, a sign of nothingness? Now she realized, as the words all came together, that the world had never ended, it had merely stood still; held its breath, waiting to pounce on her once and for all. Paul hacked into a government branch. A secret government …
If they catch you they’ll kill you! Tell no one about this … They took Paul. Paul was taken!
Spencer cussed under his breath. “You’re sure, I mean, how can you really know that the—”
“Because he knew they were coming,” Donna interrupted him this time, her words taking her breath away. She leaned against the counter, feeling all the water she’d drank before they arrived literally evaporate in her stomach. It all was coming together and worse, make sense, a sick joke some evil riddler was spinning. Spencer seemed to look back and forth from Donna to Rebecca, still in the dark.
“How could you … ?” Rebecca stared at Donna, tears starting to come again.
“He told me today,” Donna began speaking, reliving the memory. “He told me to tell no one what I could do, that people would try to kill me.” Donna paused, now looking directly at them. Feeling like she was finally strands away from solving the puzzle that was herself. “He was just so sure. Like he knew them, my killers, he knew them personally. Knew who they were, what I was, and what they wanted. I just could tell he knew everything.” Rebecca and Donna seemed to hold a new understanding at that moment as they stared into each other’s eyes. Like they both could sense the scary monster that was coming for them all.
“Hold on. Back up! I am still so lost here. ” Spencer looked at both of them. “Rebecca, please, start again, from the beginning. I got the government hacking job, what next?”
“He, he didn’t tell me everything. He wanted to protect me. What I know is that what he hacked into he couldn’t believe; it was all on a secret government not known to us, testing operations with new kinds of soldiers. It all looked so ridiculous, but the missions the soldiers were assigned to held truth to actual events. A team, that by all logical knowledge couldn’t exist, would be sent to take out someone, or do something. The next day the person would be in the paper, dead. Paul knew there had to be another explanation, but he couldn’t pull himself away.
“The more he hacked, the more truth he found. Every mystery he dug up in the papers, it all started to tie into this government group. He became obsessed with finding them out, and the more he found out, the more he came to the conclusion, based on the evidence, that the branch was evil. The things they were doing and planned to do, were inhumane, wrong.
“The government had discovered a new science, one that clearly we were not supposed to know about.” Rebecca stopped, still seeming to have much more to say, much scarier things to say.
“And this new science, it has something to do with Donna and that day of the accident?” Spencer spoke the words right as Donna thought them. “When you said soldiers, you mean … ?”
“Me?” Donna finished for him, though she spoke so low it was hard to tell if either heard her.
“Humans with abilities to do what they wanted, without being stopped,” Rebecca answered.
“Holy … ” Spencer cussed aloud, so many profanities that he sounded more like Randy Applegate than himself. “I’m dead, right? This is hell, and I’m in it. These soldiers—” he looked back to Donna for a minute, “—took Paul?”
“Is that what I am, is that what I’m turning into?” Donna asked Rebecca, desperate yet afraid of the answer.
“It’s what he thought you were. What I thought you must have been. He found that there were others here, watching him, looking for the hacker, and others our age being trained. He didn’t think you could have escaped them, been on your own all these years under their nose.”
Donna shook, feeling the urge to cry but found her body unable to produce tears. “I-I know nothing about these people, or any of this. I was normal, till that day the car drove through me. I can’t be a soldier, I’m nothing but … ” Donna couldn’t finish. Who was she pleading with? Spencer sat lost in thought, clearly not ready to continue this sick conversation that by all standards should be imaginary. Rebecca only seemed to look worse and worse, her answers only bringing forth more questions.
“I know that now, and I’m sorry, Donna. I’m so sorry I ever doubted you,” she cried. “Paul figured it all out today, and he knew because you weren’t one of them, that we’d be safe with you.”
“Safe?” Donna spoke the words, they seemed to get more foreign by the moment. “Safe? How could any of us be safe now?” It all seemed to keep hitting her again from all directions. Paul was taken, and she was turning into something … bad, and now that they all knew the truth, more could be coming for them to. More … like her!
Ryan! Her mind screamed, calling out to the hero in her dream. She needed a hero now. I could go to him! Who cares if he wouldn’t listen! Who cares about anything! I could see him one last time before they … No, Donna! He can’t protect you! No one can protect you! The evil voice, the voice of the woman who looked like her mother covered by night in her dream, whispered to her. They’d only come after him too! Donna took a deep breath. Oh, God, I’m going crazy. But didn’t the evil voice have a point? She endangered everyone she came into contact with now. Even if Ryan could comfort her, magically turn back into the friend he’d once been, she loved him too much to be the reason to have him taken away by some evil government things.
“So if they’ve taken Paul, what happens next? Do they come for us?” Spencer asked, calling Donna back from her thoughts and fears.
“You and Donna are safe, as for me, I don’t know. Paul said I was safe. That Donna could protect me if they ever did come, but I don’t care about me. Paul is the key. He is the hero. He gave himself up tonight!” Her crying became more full of anger, of her last bit of strength, of a desperation for justice. “He wouldn’t even run so that we could be looked over! He could have found out more, a way to protect himself, and he gave it up for us! For his mother, for his family! For every innocent person in this town! We have to do something! Do something now!”
“Rebecca, hold it for a second,” Spencer said in a calming yet out of it voice, once again breaking the silence. “I-I don’t know how much of this I can buy, okay, but I know myself. I’ve lived knowing people were looking for me. People that wanted to hurt my mom or me, and the only thing that ever worked was hiding, staying put. Is that not what Paul wanted us to do?”
Donna seemed to look at her friend in a new way. Spencer seemed much more a man than he did a boy, much more an adult than her comedic friend. Had he been through all this before? Something like it anyway …
“We, I mean, I, I can run. I’ll run and hide forever. I’d like nothing more than to do just that,” Rebecca answered him, her teary self diminished. “But it has to be with him, with Paul. I love him.”
Donna felt herself turn just then. Felt her body glow transparent and bright, and knowing how much her turning would scare her little fragile friend, she willed herself with all her might back to humanity, like she had twice before. Spencer and Rebecca just stared.
“Wow! Wow! Wow!” Spencer began, following with swearing. “Wow, just when your mind says maybe this is a sick joke, fate reminds you, no, Spencer, no it isn’t. Wow … ” More cursing followed as he was up on
his feet now pacing back and forth.
“Rebecca?” Donna asked. “What is it you’re demanding right now? How am I supposed to keep you safe?” Me keep someone safe? That was a joke. Rebecca was right about everything but that. Paul must be the hero. After all, he’d saved Donna today. Skinny, brainy Paul, the hero, was taken. The boy her friend had fallen for. Time was going by so fast now.
“You have a weapon, an ability, just like the ones who took him have. I’m asking you to use it to save him.”
Both Donna’s and Spencer’s mouths dropped open in shock at her words.
“I-I can’t, I mean, I’m not. How could I?” Donna asked.
“If tonight’s taught us anything, Rebecca, it’s that underneath all of what Donna can do she’s still our Donna. She needs to be kept safe just like you do.”
“I know, and I’m so sorry to ask this of you,” Rebecca begged, ignoring Spencer, who seemed to be the voice of reason for once. “But please, please, you know what it’s like to watch people live day by day with someone gone. Please stop that from happening to me! I’ll owe you everything!”
Donna shook again. Rebecca had said it. Said the words that Donna couldn’t deny. If she’d been asked by her father to help try to save her mother, or to save her brother, could she really say no because she was afraid? Could she agree to give up because Spencer was the one person left who believed she needed to be kept safe? I can’t. How could I, Donna Young, save any of them? Could she let Rebecca take on her father’s disease of sorrow in an even worse way? Would they all stand around and wait for the monsters to come get them?
Everyone was quiet now, waiting for her to speak. “Okay,” Donna let out the word, surrendering. “I’ll do whatever you ask.”
“Ok, ok, I’m drunk right?” Spencer shouted out. “Please tell me I’m drunk, you two can’t really be thinking … How would you even know how to find them? If this is the government, how could three teenagers, even if one has some kind of comic book power, be able to stop them?”
Rebecca pulled out something that looked like a science project made from a cell phone. “They planted bugs on Paul. He rewired them, so they would work backwards, so to speak,” Rebecca spoke like she didn’t believe her own words but was on a roll, all the brilliance she contained struggling to come up with a logical plan. “Now when I turn this on we can listen to what they’re saying to him if he’s turned his bug on too. If he’s right about others training here, then their base can’t be that far away. We use what we hear to figure it out.”
Donna nodded, knowing now there was no way out.
“This is East Applegate we’re talking about. This town is smaller than a supermarket. Don’t you think we would have noticed a secret government base?” Spencer went on, refusing to go along with this.
“Yeah, I know. It makes no sense. I’ve been pondering that a lot. Even with the ‘do not go to West Applegate’ rule, it’s still logical that if it was on that side we’d all know something was up. So there is only one place, one place both sides can’t go without clearance. One place big enough, surrounded by more protection and money than any other place in our towns. Maybe even our state.”
“Holy … ” Spencer seemed to know the answer as she told it. “The power plant,” Rebecca breathed.
Donna felt her heart stop, felt her hands crave all the energy her different sight would have allowed her to see, had she not been fighting the urge to turn every moment of this conversation.
“You’re right, God help us, you’re right,” Spencer agreed, as all his accusations against the owners of the power plant, the Applegates, seemed to fit into this perfectly for him.
“No, your wrong, it can’t be.” Even as Donna denied it though, a thought she’d always had seemed to linger its way up to the surface of her mind. The power plant explosion … Maybe everyone did go crazy, maybe that’s why her brother ran away …
“I’ve looked it up, Donna, the plant is twice the size of what a normal power plant should be,” Rebecca went on with her facts. Her facts that had to be wrong …
“But we’ve been there on field trips a hundred times,” Donna said, trying to come up with an argument, but not succeeding.
“Yeah, and how much of it is off limits for the public to see?” Rebecca asked her.
“That’s because it’s dangerous,” Donna was babbling now.
“Maybe in more ways than we want to know.”
“The Applegates wouldn’t, couldn’t know, they couldn’t.” Donna thought about her godfather. He wasn’t her favorite person, but he was family.
“I’m sure they’re all rolling in it, probably use the extra money from the government for Randy’s car payments—”
“It doesn’t matter, not right now. It’s almost one in the morning. Time is running out. Donna are you going to do this? Please?”
“Yes,” Donna said weakly, unable to take the words back; picturing her father’s dread on Rebecca. But what was it they were really going to do? How could this be pulled off?
“Spencer, I—” Spencer had already stood up and headed toward Donna’s fridge. He grabbed one of her father’s cold beers and downed it, his strange behavior silencing Rebecca.
“Yep,” he started, as if the beer had made all his doubt disappear. “Ok, now I’m ready. Been running all my life, might as well help someone else run,” he laughed to himself. “You didn’t really think I’d let you girls go running toward probable death without someone at least pretending to be a man, right?”
* * *
Paul
Paul felt his head throb with pain, his body was bound, and he felt tired and vulnerable. He tried to open his eyes, but just like a moment ago, the room was dancing around him, and all shapes were a blur. He closed his eyes again, counting backwards from a million. After the few minutes it took him to reach nine hundred thousand he opened them. The blurred room wasn’t dancing, so he wasn’t dizzy anymore at least, though the feeling of nausea hadn’t quite been relieved.
He concentrated, counting backwards further with his eyes now open. 899,999. 899,998, 899,997 … The blurred grayness settled into the walls around him. The darkness in the corner of the room seemed to turn into a great hallway leading to places Paul would rather not think about. He looked up, now fully able to see. The ceiling was black, with a big, bright light shining down on him, making him sweat.
He looked down, only for a second before his glasses started to slide off his face. He held his head high to keep them on. With his hands and feet cuffed, there would be no pushing them back now. He seemed to be on a tall chair alone in the room, though he wasn’t really dumb enough to think he wasn’t being watched. He wondered to himself if he was in the power plant or if they’d taken him somewhere else to kill him, or something much worse.
The things these people were responsible for doing, and what they had in store for the future … One day they’d have to be stopped. After Paul was gone. Thanks to his computer skills, maybe they would be. At least he would die knowing there was a chance he’d made a difference.
He thought about Rebecca and his mom. Even his dad was on his mind. He hoped they’d be safe, that Donna could protect them until the truth came out. Rebecca … Would the biggest threat this town, maybe even this country had, be the one to come after them? The biomax soldier who was created to be unstoppable was the one who’d taken him tonight. Or was it last night? Paul had no idea how much time had passed. Had it been hours or days? He couldn’t tell.
He’d left behind clues for Rebecca and Donna. Would it be enough to prepare them? The sound of voices seemed to pull him away from his thoughts. He twisted his head back toward the hallway and spied a husky man in a suit coming toward him. The man was about his height and looked like a bodyguard outside a Vegas casino. The kind that beat you up if you won too much money.
Paul turned his head back around and stared straight ahead, trying not to show fear. The man walked slowly around Paul’s chair. Finally, after a long second, t
he man and Paul were facing one another, giving Paul no choice but to look straight up at him. The man’s eyes held mystery and something else Paul couldn’t put his finger on. He looked Paul up and down, as if disappointed by Paul’s lack of physical strength. Then he bent down, his husky figure moving in an unexpected, almost feminine manner, as he unlocked the cuffs on Paul’s feet and hands.
“He’ll see you now,” he told Paul after a moment and motioned Paul to follow him. Paul stood up slowly, almost tripping over his feet, which had fallen asleep sometime during his imprisonment. He followed the man. The words he’d used were unnerving to Paul. He’ll see you now. As if he’d gone to a doctor’s appointment and the nurse had summoned him. The new casualness about the whole thing made Paul feel like a mouse being played with by a mountain lion.
* * *
Donna
Donna walked with Spencer and Rebecca through the woods. It was about 2:30 in the morning and very dark out. The sky had no stars in it. Donna couldn’t even see the moon. They only had a few flashlights, which Donna didn’t even touch, for fear they’d lose their power due to her … situation.
“So, at the end of the woods, we have three small houses closest to the plant,” Spencer rambled on, saying things they all already knew. “Then miles of field until we’re behind the plant, which is surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Anything in your bag of tricks, Rebecca, that’s going to help us with that?” Spencer was referring to the bag Rebecca had snuck back into her house to get before they started through the woods.
“I don’t know yet,” her voice filled with unease. “I’ll think of something.”
Donna knew what she could say, but could she really say it? Was she really going to use her new abilities, that before today had only seemed good for her gymnastics, to break Paul out of her town’s power plant, evidently being used by a government agency? What if they were wrong? What if they got there and it was too late for Paul? Would she be relieved that her godfather, Ryan’s and Randy’s father, was in the clear?
“I-I can probably get through it.” Donna’s words were full of self-doubt.