“Can you see them?” he cried out.
“Please, keep still. We’re almost finished.”
“Can you see them?”
“See what?”
How could the guy not see them? The machines were everywhere!
“Bassa, bassa, bassa—”
“Alex!”
“—bassa!”
The bulbs lining the scanner’s internal chamber burned out in a rapid series of pops and crackles that sounded like misfiring firecrackers. The stench of scorched metal flooded Alex’s nostrils and he opened his eyes to the sight of glass spraying in all directions.
“Alex!”
He felt as if his brain were outside his head, roasting. He remembered hearing at some point that the brain itself didn’t feel pain. Well, it certainly felt heat, and Alex realized he couldn’t move. Again. Just like last night on the field. Same, exact sensation that had stolen most of his breath and the rest of it now.
Pop, pop, pop!
Now the room’s overhead lights were igniting, erupting, blowing apart with not even their filaments left behind. Alex’s brain whistled in his head, a teakettle signaling it had come to a boil, when big hands grabbed hold of his legs and yanked him free of the machine.
The hands tried to restrain him once he was out, but Alex brushed them off, shaking free as easily as he dodged multiple tackles en route to the end zone. He looked down to see an orderly bigger than any lineman he’d ever faced lying on the floor, trying to push himself up.
Alex stretched a hand down to help him and ended up toppling off the table, hitting the floor hard enough to rattle his brain and send a fresh surge of pain through his head. A burst of light like a flashbulb went off in front of his eyes and he felt a pressure in both ears until one popped and then the other, leaving behind a persistent throbbing.
“Alex! Alex!”
He heard Payne’s voice and looked up to see the doctor standing between him and the giant orderly Alex had dropped like the tiniest of running backs.
“Don’t move,” Payne was saying.
“I … can’t,” Alex said fearfully, his whole body feeling like it was frozen in place.
16
HOME INVASION
“TAKE ANYTHING YOU WANT,” Li Chin said from the armchair in which the men had placed him. “Anything we have is yours—just don’t hurt us.”
The four of them had barged in as soon as Li cracked open the front door of their Millbrae home. The door had rocketed backward, slamming into Li and knocking him off his feet. An rushed from the kitchen when she heard the sounds of a struggle to find two of the men lifting her husband into a chair. Before she could scream, another of them was upon her, hand clamped over her mouth. He jerked her into the matching armchair and dragged it closer to Li’s.
“Please,” Li repeated. “Anything we have is yours.”
But the men seemed utterly disinterested in the contents of the house, their focus purely on them.
“We only want what your wife took from us,” the man standing in front of the others, in the shadows splayed by a single lamp, said. “From the laboratory eighteen years ago.”
“I took nothing!” An insisted, her voice cracking. “I was a good worker. I was promoted to supervisor!”
The man took a single step closer to the Chins, his cold, emotionless gaze bearing down on An as the lamp flickered, his face framed by the shadows it cast. “You took what is ours and we have come to get it back.”
“I was searched every day when my work was done. We all were.”
“Except one day.”
A cold dread hit An in the pit of her stomach. She tried to swallow and failed.
“You took something from the lab that day,” the man continued. “It belonged to us and we have come to take it back.”
The speaker turned to the other three men, seeming to pass some unspoken signal. The four of them looked virtually indistinguishable from one another. Not identical by any means, but in possession, eerily, of the same blank, nondescript features, hairstyles, eye color, and musculature, and carried themselves with a demeanor detached and utterly lacking in emotion. Their matching dark suits seemed stitched to their skin, so molded as to appear an extension of it.
But it was something else that both Li and An had noted they found most unnerving of all: their eyes never blinked, at least those of the three silent ones who’d centered themselves behind the speaker in a semicircle, enclosing him in their shadows, which fell over the Chins too in the light cast by the single lamp the men had left on.
“We have taken nothing, from you or anyone else,” Li Chin said, sounding more indignant than frightened.
“You took something that belonged to us eighteen years ago,” the same man said. “Where is the boy you call Alex?”
THREE
AMES
Truth makes many appeals,
not the least of which is its power to shock.
—JULES RENARD
17
INTERN