Chapter 32
They found Jonas in an open pasture with his eyes locked on the particle analyzer that looked a lot like a smartphone. Wind swirled, blowing a light dusting of snow around them.
“How long is this going to take?” Colt asked as he looked at the clock in his heads-up display. It was fast approaching one in the morning.
“Let me talk to him, okay?” Danielle said. She walked across the frozen grass with a slow, steady pace as though she were approaching someone with a hundred sticks of dynamite taped to his chest.
“I wondered if it was going to work in the cold,” Colt heard her say.
“It should work up to negative thirty-five centigrade,” Jonas said, though he didn’t bother to turn around and look at her.
“Wow. That’s amazing.”
“You don’t have to pretend you’re my friend,” he said. “Trust me, I’m used to it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know everyone thinks I’m a freak—that I have something to hide.”
“But I am your friend,” Danielle said. “We all are.” She hesitated, as though weighing her words before she spoke them. “Look, I’m not going to say that you haven’t been acting a little strange since you told us about Sanctuary—and yeah, I wish you would have told me about the new data. But that doesn’t mean I think you’re a freak. You’re just under a lot of stress.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“You could tell me,” she said.
Jonas turned and stared at her.
“I mean, only if you think it would help,” she said. “It’s no big deal.”
“There’s a reason Sanctuary has been a secret for so long,” Jonas said. “And trust me, if you guys knew the truth, you wouldn’t want to be my friends.”
“Whatever it is, I’m sure you didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I wish that were true.”
“Everything okay?” Colt asked as Oz loomed behind them with the .50-caliber machine gun resting across his shoulder.
Danielle nodded. “Yeah, we’re fine.”
“How much longer?”
She sighed and turned back to Jonas. “Well?”
“I’m done.”
“And?”
“They were right. This is where the gateway is going to open. Right here on my grandpa’s farm.”
“That’s great,” Danielle said as Jonas looked at her with disbelief. “I mean, not that it’s your grandpa’s property—but that we found the gateway.”
Jonas took a deep breath. “And now the whole world is going to know about Sanctuary, and it’s all my fault.”
She placed her hand on his shoulder. “Jonas, if we can find a way to stop it from opening up, you’re going to get a Nobel Peace Prize for not only saving this town but the whole world.”
He sighed. “I hope you’re right.”
There was a blur of motion as something dropped from a tree and landed on Ethan’s back. Another silhouette fell on Grey, pulling him to the ground, and yet another jumped on Stacy, who screamed as she fell.
Oz was the first to react, dropping his gun as he ran to help her. Two more figures leapt, each of them landing nimbly on its feet and grabbing one of Oz’s forearms. “Get off me!” he shouted, pulling them together so they smashed into one another.
“Thule!” Pierce yelled as more figures rushed out from the shadows. He opened fire, bursts of orange flaring from the muzzle of his assault rifle as bullets tore into tree trunks, dirt, and the figures that were attacking them.
“Watch it!” Oz yelled as a bullet ricocheted off his armor, but Pierce didn’t listen. He screamed as he continued to pull the trigger as dozens of six-armed aliens surrounded Phantom Squad.
“No,” Jonas said, shaking his head. “This can’t be happening.”
“Get your helmet on,” Danielle said as she pulled the handgun from her hip holster and took aim at the nearest Thule.
“Wait!” Jonas grabbed her wrists and the gun discharged, tearing into the frozen ground. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They’re just scared.”
“Who?”
Colt felt a dark voice calling from within as adrenaline raged in his body. His breathing was shallow, and his skin started to itch as madness raged around him. He watched as Oz used his machine gun as a club and Glyph simply sidestepped each attack, using each Thule’s momentum to misdirect it and send it to the ground. But something was off. These Thule weren’t like the others he had seen. They were smaller, and he could tell from the reflection of the moonlight that some of their scales were gold and others blue. What was going on?
“Look out!” Danielle shouted.
Time seemed to slow, and Colt watched as the bullet erupted from the barrel of her gun. He could see the revolutions as it spun through air mere inches from his helmet before it caught one of the Thule in the shoulder. He turned and saw the alien as it writhed on the ground, kicking and moaning.
“Where are these things coming from?” Oz shouted.
“Doesn’t matter, as long as we exterminate them,” Pierce said. “You know what they say—the only good alien is a dead alien.”
“I told you never to say that again,” Colt said, watching for Glyph’s reaction from the corner of his eye.
“Whatever.”
Please, tell them to stop shooting.
It was Jonas, and somehow he was using mindspeak. Are you a . . . Colt couldn’t even finish the sentence. Had Jonas been a Thule all this time, or had a shapeshifter killed the real Jonas and replaced him?
They aren’t the enemy, they’re just frightened, Jonas said.
A claw with razor talons raked across his mask, and Colt lashed out with the butt of his rifle, catching the alien on the side of the head. It fell in a motionless heap, green blood issuing from its earhole.
A swarm of Thule brought Glyph to the ground, and angry claws fought to remove his armor. One of the aliens grabbed Ethan’s assault rifle and snapped it in half. Stacy was backed against a tree as three Thule closed in, their mouths agape and forked tongues licking the air.
Pierce stood over one of the Thule, his boot on its neck and the barrel of his gun pointed at its head. “You’re even uglier up close than you are in pictures,” Pierce said as the alien writhed, all six hands lashing against his armor.
“No!” Colt shouted.
Pierce turned his head to look at Colt, and the Thule’s tail wrapped around his rifle before it ripped it out of Pierce’s hands and flung it into the trees.
“I’m going to kill you!” Pierce pulled out his handgun as the alien morphed into a boy who couldn’t have been much older than eight years old.
“Please, mister. Don’t shoot me.”
As Jonas watched, his face contorted with rage. His skin bubbled like water on a stove. Bones cracked. His eyes turned gold and his teeth became pointed. His armor broke at the seams, falling away as his chest expanded and his shoulders widened. The boy they knew was gone and all that remained was a Thule.
Jonas threw his head back and screamed, the sound echoing across the frozen landscape as he charged at Pierce. His tail undulated and his hands flexed as he raised his arms to strike. Pierce fired his gun, but the bullets bounced off Jonas’s scaled hide as though they were nothing more than beanbags.
“I always knew you were a freak!”
Jonas knocked the gun from his hand and wrapped his fingers around Pierce’s neck. With a cry he lifted Pierce off the ground, his eyes filled with madness as Pierce kicked and scrapped, trying to break free.
“That’s just about enough of that.” A tall man wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a brown jacket with a gold star stepped out from the tree line. His voice was calm, but he was carrying a shotgun with blue sparks dancing across the barrel like miniature bolts of lightning.
“I’m not going to tell you again, Jonas.”
As Jonas turned to look at the man, his top lip curled back in a snarl. “But, Sheriff, he was going to kill Ezekiel.”
“He didn’t, though, so why don’t you do as I say? Put the boy down and let’s talk.”
“Jonas . . . is that you?” A second man emerged from the shadows, this one short and heavyset.
“Dad?”