Alex sidestepped to plant himself between the ash man and Sam, brandishing the severed arm amid the broken pieces of what the ash man had called drones.
“You don’t need that,” the ash man told him. “I’m unarmed and have no intention of harming you.”
“Guess your drones didn’t get the message.”
“They wouldn’t have hurt you. Their orders were specific.”
Alex cast his gaze downward, his father lying utterly still but his mother’s chest still rising and falling in rapid heaves. “They hurt my parents.”
“As mandated by their mission parameters. But you’re in no danger. You see, you have something we want, something that belongs to us.”
“Know something? I think you’ve got the wrong kid, because I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”
“Yes, you do; you just don’t realize it.”
Alex studied the ash man closer. He seemed almost spectral in form, more liquid than solid, the way he stood there as if the air moved through instead of around him. His head came to a peak at the top, where hair shaded with the same grayish tint rode his scalp, so even and still that it seemed painted on.
“Where’d you come from?”
“I was here all along, Alex. You just couldn’t see me, like you couldn’t see your parents when you first got home. You only saw what we wanted you to—for your own good, to prevent exactly what ended up happening. We’ve been looking for you for a very long time. This night never should have been necessary, we should never have needed to come for you. But now we must live with the consequences and accept them.”
“Good idea,” Alex said, pointing backward with his free hand toward the fizzling, hissing, and crackling assemblage of clumps that had been whole just minutes before.
“This shouldn’t have been necessary,” the man repeated.
“You said that already.”
The ash man’s gray eyes fluttered. “There is a price for disobedience. Disobedience is what has brought us to this point. It will not be tolerated.”
With that, he stooped down on his long stilt-like legs and slid his hand along Li Chin’s shoulder then upward, pressing a thumb into his temple like he was pressing a postage stamp into place. Li writhed, spasmed, shook, his feet twitching and pulsing.
“No!” Alex screamed, hurdling into motion just as the man’s other thumb found his mother’s temple.
The severed arm was in motion before he’d had time to form the thought: read and react, just like on the football field, and that’s what Alex did, unleashing a vicious overhead blow that should have fractured the ash man’s skull on contact.
But it didn’t. It cut straight through his head instead and kept right on going, all the way through until the severed arm thudded against the wood floor, forging a nasty gash in the wood.
The ash man separated into two equal halves, each dropping to the floor, landing next to each other without any feeling, emotion or pain, showing in his face. He seemed to fade to black in the room’s flickering light before regaining a measure of his gray tone, which continued to drift in and out. The two halves of him had landed six inches apart, but the ash man seemed not to notice, empty eyes glaring up at Alex.
“You must come with me, Alex,” he managed, the separated sides of his mouth speaking in perfect unison, as if still whole. “You’ve evaded us for this long, but you’re ours again. We won’t stop. We’ll never stop.”
“Go to hell, asshole,” Alex hissed, raising the severed arm overhead again.
“You’re not one of them, Alex,” the ash man said, one side of his mouth lagging slightly behind and flickering toward black more than the other now. “You never belonged with them. You belong to us. And with continued disobedience comes punishment. We must take back what is ours.”
“I don’t have it.”
“They entrusted it to you. It’s why you’re here and why I’ve come to take you back.”
“Back where, exactly?”
“Home, Alex, your real home.”
Alex wanted to lash the severed arm downward again, but was stopped as much as anything by uncertainty over which side of the ash man to pound first. Then he heard a sound like something scratching and scampering across the floor.
“Alex!” Sam cried out.
He swung around to find severed pieces of what the ash man had called drones moving toward Sam en masse, the broken bodies from which they’d been shed lagging a bit behind.
“Punishment, Alex,” the ash man said, his dual voice echoing in a tinny, hollow fashion. “Punishment for disobedience.”
Alex launched himself across the floor, yanking the tire iron from the head of a drone thing en route to Sam. She was back-crawling desperately across the floor from the hard wood of the living room to the tile of the kitchen, kicking at the chunks of plastic, metal, and wire that were converging on her to ward them off.