We crammed into a van between stacks of boxes—plastic, metal, thick cardboard—and roared off down the alley and out onto the street. Naomi drove too fast for me to keep track of where we were going. We rocked back and forth with each sharp turn and sudden slam of the brakes.
Rachel was stuffed right next to me. Mason sat next to Pelz, trying to keep his face in neutral, but I could see his eyes twitch nervously as he watched us, looking for some kind of hint that I knew what I was doing.
I didn’t.
Rachel leaned close to me. “What’s the plan, 007?”
“Get in, call the cops. Tell them it’s terrorists.”
Her head tilted in a slight nod. “You’ve had worse plans.”
They hadn’t patted us down or taken our phones. Apparently they just assumed that anyone who showed up at the Silver Blaze was on their side. Maybe the Masters hadn’t learned much about basic operational security. That’s what they call it in spy novels, I think.
We were going to the source. That’s what Naomi had said. Maybe the spot where all the Masters were gathered? I hoped so.
Although the thought of being surrounded by an army of Masters didn’t ease my nerves.
“What about Clint?”
I looked at him and tried to give a reassuring nod. He stared back without expression.
After 20 minutes Naomi yanked the wheel, and the van started hurtling downward until she hit the brakes, throwing me against Rachel. We came to a stop, and doors started opening.
Pelz grabbed a cardboard box and passed it to someone outside. Mason took two plastic storage crates, water sloshing inside, and stepped out of the van. Rachel and I each grabbed some boxes.
Outside the van, we found ourselves in what looked like an underground parking garage, still under construction. Looking up, I could see stars through a network of girders and cables stretching high into the sky. Looking around, I saw that only about half the basement was paved, the rest of it still open ground, with mounds of dirt piled across the unfinished section.
Metal lockers lined one concrete wall, and a small plywood shack stood off to one side. On the other end, next to what looked like a deep pit, stood a series of large transparent tanks like you’d see at the aquarium.
In about a foot of dirty water, in with clumps of the familiar green moss, sat dozens of Masters. Maybe hundreds, crowded together, squirming, antennae darting around, crawling over each other or burying their heads into the mass of green material.
Mason carried his two crates over to the nearest tank and opened one. Watching Pelz, he reached down and picked up two Masters, holding them away from his body. Pelz dropped a Master into the tank, and Mason copied him, letting the Masters slip from his fingers into the scummy pool.
Rachel and I carried our boxes over and started releasing the Masters inside into the tanks. One of mine dropped and rolled over, not moving. The other one scuttled away from it, leaving it to lie by itself in the shallow water.
A man next to me reached down and pulled the motionless Master out of the water. I could smell it—a foul odor, like fish after a week in the garbage. He held it close to his face, peering into its tiny eyes, then carried it over to a tall metal can and dropped it in.
It had died, apparently. Should I have known that? I didn’t waste time worrying about it—I just picked up another Master and deposited it into the tank.
We worked silently until all the Masters were in their tank. A few went into the garbage, but most joined their siblings in the water, wandering or eating or settling down to sleep, if that’s what they did.
Pelz sat down on the concrete, legs crossed, a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. The others sank down too, sitting or lying down, closing their eyes or just staring into nothing.
Other people sat on the floor too, motionless and silent. Men, women, teens, seniors, all races—their faces blank, their eyes dead.
I sat next to Rachel. Mason was with the group from the van, breathing slowly, but I could see the tension in his shoulders.
How long could we pull this off? I looked around. The only exit I could see was the ramp the van had rolled down. Was it shut tight at the top?
Other vans and cars were scattered across the garage. I wondered how organized this operation was. Did the Masters have a grand strategy for world domination? Or were they just randomly trying to infect as many people as they could?
I risked a glance at Rachel, but she kept her eyes focused on the ground in front of her. I slowly patted my pocket from my phone. One quick text—
Naomi stood over me. “You.” She pointed toward the shack. “Come.”
Now what? I forced myself not to look at Rachel as I stood. I followed Naomi, fighting to breathe normally and keep my heart from hammering too loudly with each footstep.
Inside the shack Naomi dropped into an office swivel chair next to a folding card table. It was empty except for a small desk lamp running on a battery, a copy of yesterday’s Chicago Tribune, and a handgun. Small but enough to jolt my anxiety levels even higher than before.
“Your name,” she said.
“Tom. Tom Jurgen.”
She leaned forward. “You aren’t part of us, are you, Tom Jurgen?”
Oh hell. “W-why do you think that?”
Naomi smiled. “It’s not hard. The two of you.”
Two of you. She’d caught Rachel and me looking at each other. Maybe she hadn’t noticed Mason yet. I hoped.
I glanced around the shack. No windows. The plywood wasn’t very thick, and there was only a small, flimsy bolt on the door to keep people out. No lock to keep me in. Just a dozen or more controlled humans outside who could haul me down in two seconds if I tried to run.
My only option was to get Naomi talking. Find out as much about the Masters as I could. In case I got a chance to use any of it in the near future.
So I leaned back against the plywood wall and crossed my arms, trying my best to look like James Bond, trapped by the evil villain but not showing any sweat.
“Okay, you’ve got me.” I shrugged. Sweating. “So now what? You slap one of those things on my back and send me out to infect more people?”
Naomi sat forward, arms on the table. Up close, she looked tired. Her gray hair was tangled, and black bags hung under her eyes. Her clothes looked like she’d been sleeping in them for days.
She kept one hand near the pistol. “What are you doing here?”
I was asking myself that too right now. “I wanted to see the source. That’s what you called it. Is this your base? Underneath a half-built condo building or something?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Who else knows you’re here? Did you tell anyone?”
“No. I wish I had. Tell me, what are you? What are you doing here?” I was asking questions to keep her off balance. Keep her focused on me, so she wouldn’t think about Rachel.
Plus, I really did want to learn more about the Masters. It’s my reporter’s instinct. “Where are you from? Another planet? Another dimension?”
“So many questions.” Naomi rubbed her eyes. “We’re here. Maybe we’ve always been here, wherever this—place is.” She glanced across the walls of the shack, as if she didn’t mean where we were right now, but where in the universe she’d ended up. “We slept for . . . centuries. Maybe millennia? I don’t know.” She played with a strand of hair. “Then there was the light. Above, everywhere. We went looking for hosts. We found some, but the first few hosts died.”
She cocked her head at me. “But we found hosts who stayed alive. We started to understand them. You.” She peered into my eyes. “Your minds are—deep. So many thoughts. Memories. Instincts. Eating, elimination. Sleep. Sex.” Her lip curled in disgust. “The need to talk, to share everything. Like I’m doing now.” She gave a quiet, bitter laugh, then clenched a fist. “Shutting it off, sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes . . .”
Naomi sighed, breathing shallowly. “We do what we have to do to be alive.”
“You need hosts to survive?”
“We need hosts to exist.” She swiveled in her chair. “I lost one host. I forgot to give him food and water. He fell over and went to sleep. Not waking up. Between hosts, I was—gone. Just instinct. No idea how much time there was. Then I was here.” She touched her face. “This one is different. Different thoughts, different memories. New needs that I don’t understand yet. When she’s done, I’ll find something else and learn more. Become more.”
“You hunt people to control them.”
Naomi smiled. “We spread. It’s what we are. It’s all we know to do.”
“You’re hurting us. The host who died because you didn’t feed him? That’s your doing.” I pointed at her. “This one will die too if you don’t take care of her.”
“There are more of you.” She waved an arm across the room. “Everywhere.”
“We don’t like being controlled.” I remembered the Master we’d questioned. It didn’t seem to have any idea what it was doing to Rachel, or anyone. Maybe they didn’t understand. “Look inside Naomi’s thoughts. She doesn’t want you in there.”
“It doesn’t matter. You have your own needs. Instincts. You can’t control them. Our instinct is to join with you.” Naomi gazed into my eyes. “You just have to accept it.”
The door opened. It was the woman in the miniskirt. “Are you ready?” A Master was hanging from one hand.
“Yeah.” Naomi reached out for the pistol and pointed it at me. “Come on in, Annette.”
I tensed. I still had my stun gun, and some pepper spray. They hadn’t thought to search us. Maybe they were still figuring out basic security.
But there were dozens of them out there. All of them perfectly willing to hurt me. And Rachel.
Then I realized that the minute the Master had me, I’d tell them about Mason. And if they knew about me, they were probably already watching Rachel.
Shit. I had to give them a chance to get away somehow.
“Just relax, Tom.” Naomi held the pistol loosely in her hand, not really ready to shoot me. “You’ll be fine in just a minute.”
No. I couldn’t just sit still while Annette walked toward me. Could I get to my pepper spray before Naomi shot me?
Then, before I could make my desperate move, Rachel burst through the door. Mason was right behind her
She crashed into Annette, pushing her to the floor. The Master slipped through her fingers, scuttling toward the shadows. Rachel stomped on Annette’s wrist as she tried to grab it again. “You okay?” she asked me.
I pointed at Naomi. “She has a gun—”
Too late. The pistol cracked. Mason yelped, tumbling to the ground, but then he reared up and flipped the table. Naomi shoved her chair back as the lamp shattered, leaving us in darkness and shadows cast by the light outside the door.
Grabbing at my pockets, I jumped forward. I stumbled over Annette’s scrambling body, but pulled myself up and blasted the pepper spray toward Naomi before she could fire her pistol again.
Naomi shrieked, twisting in her chair, and dropped the handgun to claw at her eyes. I sprang toward her, reaching down to snatch it up, and pushed her chair over, sending her to the ground hard. “Get the door! Clint, are you all right?”
Mason was holding his shoulder, grunting. Blood dripped through his fingers. “I don’t—think—it’s bad.” He dropped to his knees. “Okay, maybe it’s bad.”
Rachel scrambled to her feet and slammed the door, throwing the bolt. “This won’t hold long.” She shook her head. “We’re screwed.”
“Call somebody. You still got your phone?” I looked at the pistol in my hand. I own a handgun, and I’ve fired them before. I could handle this one.
But I really didn’t want to shoot anybody. Especially since everyone outside was being controlled by Masters. They weren’t responsible for anything they were doing.
“I texted Sharpe.” Rachel held up her phone in her free hand. “They weren’t watching me, even after you left. Stay down!” She kicked Annette in the shoulder. “I told her we’re in a hostage situation with other civilians. Hopefully they won’t come in shooting.”
Anita Sharpe was a detective with the Chicago Police. We’d worked together on vampire cases, so she knew I wasn’t crazy. Well, too crazy. But she likes Rachel more than me, so she’d believe her.
“I’ll call.” I found Sharpe’s number on my phone.
“Jurgen, what the hell?” It was her standard greeting, but she sounded more urgent this time. “I got this text from Rachel—”
“We’re being invaded by mind controlling parasites.” Someone started pounding on the door. Rachel braced her legs and leaned her shoulder against it, but it wouldn’t hold up more than a few minutes.
“Of course you are.” Sharpe sounded as if she were already running. “Good thing I heard from Rachel first. I got your location from her phone’s GPS. I don’t know what I’m going to tell them—”
The pounding on the door got louder and harder. Rachel grunted, her feet sliding as she tried to hold it shut.
“We’ve got wounded,” I told Sharpe. “Hurry.”
I joined Rachel at the door. The walls began to shake as the people outside tried pounding at the plywood.
Mason rolled over and pushed himself up. “I think—she just got my shirt, mostly.” He wiped his hand on his jeans. “You got the cavalry coming?”
“Get out!” Naomi’s shout was almost as loud as the pounding from outside. “Get away! They’ve got the police coming! Take as many as you can! Keep spreading!”
She was still in her overturned chair, glaring at us, tears streaming from her eyes from the pepper spray.
“Should we shut her up?” Mason took a step toward her. His left arm hung limp, but his other arm looked healthy enough to slap her into silence.
“Wait.” Yeah, if the Masters escaped, they’d go out and possess more people. Tracking them all down would be hard. Maybe impossible.
But if they were running, trying to save themselves, they wouldn’t crash in here and take us. Maybe I was being a coward, but right now I was okay with the trade-off.
“Let them go.” I leaned against the door next to Rachel, but already the pressure was slacking off. “As long as they leave a few behind we can show the cops.”
My phone buzzed. Pelz.
I showed the name to Rachel. Her eyebrows rose as it buzzed a second time. “Answer it.”
“Yeah?” I tried to peer through the crack in the door, but all I could make out was scattered, shadowy movement back and forth across the garage.
“You can’t stop us.” His voice was flat. “We’ll spread. We’ll keep spreading. There’ll be too many for you to kill us all.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that.” I shoved Naomi’s little pistol into my jacket. “We can figure something out between us. You just can’t keep using people and discarding them like cheap toys. We don’t like it. But there doesn’t have to be a war.”
Would the thing listen? Did they have any way to share information without hosts? And was I just being naive? If they looked into human history, they wouldn’t find a lot of reason to believe in our capacity for tolerance.
“We are what we are,” Pelz said. “You can’t change that. Goodbye.”
“Wait!” This whole thing had started with Pelz. I couldn’t just let him go without asking one last question.
“Well?”
I took a breath. “What should I tell your family?”
For a long moment I thought the Master wasn’t going to let him answer. Finally he said, “Tell them I’m fine. I’ll see them. Someday.”
“I hope so.”
Pelz hung up. I looked at Rachel and shrugged. “Maybe he’ll listen.”
She snorted. “Yeah, right.”
Annette sat up with a groan, rubbing her head. “What—uh, what happened? Oh, God.” She looked at Mason, then Rachel and me. “Are they gone?”
A Master skittered away from her, burrowing under the darkness in the corner where the other one had fled.
No one was shoving at the door. Rachel put her ear to the crack, then opened the bolt.
I peeked out. The half-built parking garage was empty. About half the boxes were gone, but at least a dozen or more Masters had been abandoned in the big tanks. Some, on the ground, were slowly making their way toward the shadows. Some had been stomped on and died.
Then a loud bang erupted from the far side of the garage. “Police! Freeze! Hands where we can see them!”
I looked at Rachel. “The cavalry has arrived.”
She sighed. “Yay. Now what?”
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