The Countdown (The Taking #3)
Kimberly Derting
DEDICATION
TO EVERYONE WHO’S EVER FELT LIKE THEY DON’T BELONG.
YOU CAN STILL BE THE HERO OF YOUR OWN STORY.
PART ONE
The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean . . .
— Carl Edward Sagan
Boy, you’re an alien
Your touch so foreign
It’s supernatural
Extraterrestrial
—Katy Perry, “E.T.”
CHAPTER ONE
Day Thirty-Five
(Three Days After the NSA Attack on Blackwater Ranch)
Somewhere in Northern Colorado
BEING AN ALIEN, OR A REPLACED MADE ENTIRELY from alien DNA . . . or whatever the heck I was supposed to be was giving me a serious complex. Five years ago I was the star pitcher on my high school softball team, headed for college, loving life. Then I was abducted by aliens. And ever since coming back just over a month ago, I’d been blindsided by one nasty surprise about myself after another. I’d gone from total hero to utter zero in the (cosmic) blink of an eye.
Not that I’d tell my dad I felt that way. He’d just pull out one of his inspirational quotes, something along the lines of: “Hang in there, baby!” or “If life hands you lemons . . .”
You get the idea; my life was sort of a mess.
Here’s the thing, though, it was my mess. I might not have understood that at first, but the message was definitely starting to sink in now that we were on the run, my dad and Tyler and me.
Still, this wasn’t the playground. There were no do-overs. No take-backsies. I didn’t get to call a time-out so I could catch my breath. It was time to pull up my big-girl panties and play the hand I’d been dealt.
That old life of mine was done. Finished. Finito.
I was on a new trajectory now, and even though it usually felt more like a derailment—a hurtling-out-of-control-train-wreck of a thing—I figured I might as well embrace it.
Grin and bear it, as my dad would say.
That didn’t mean I didn’t miss some of those things from my old life. If I said otherwise, I’d be straight-up lying. This new life meant I’d never get the chance to stand on a stage with my classmates and accept a diploma—not from high school or college. My days of playing ball with the teammates I’d known most of my life were a thing of the past. And I’d never have the luxury of doing regular girl things like staying up all night and sharing secrets with the best friend I’d grown up with, because that best friend . . . she’d deserted me . . . thrown me over for my ex, Austin.
Even my own mother had disowned me as far as I knew. Pretty much replacing me with a new family. So it was just me and Dad now. Don’t get me wrong—I was grateful to have him back—but to be fair he was almost as messed up as this new life of mine. And just because he’d turned out to be right about the whole alien thing, that didn’t make him any less weird.
Now, instead of trying to convince everyone I’d been abducted by little green men, he was focusing his obsessive nature on keeping Tyler and me safe. While we fled from campground to campground, he constantly worried we were being spied on, whether by satellites or park rangers . . . or maybe even undercover bears. Who knew?
And sometimes I couldn’t help wondering if that paranoia of his didn’t extend to me as well.
Sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t looking, I’d catch him watching me out of the corner of his eye, giving me these super long glances. Like he was checking to see if I might still be in here—the old Kyra.
I would have come out and asked him what was going on inside his head, but I was worried about what he might say and the questions he might ask, which was all kinds of wrong since my dad and I used to talk about just about everything.
When I was little, it had always been my dad I’d gone to whenever I’d had a problem, even before my mom. He’d been the one to clean up a scraped knee when I fell off my bike. He’d taught me long division when all the other kids seemed to understand it before I did.
But now there was this inexplicable barrier between us that had never been there before, not even when I’d thought he was crazy.
No, this was different. . . .
But I did mention that different was the new normal, right? And just because things were somehow off between me and my dad didn’t mean I wasn’t happy to be back with him. Or that he didn’t feel the exact same way. I knew because of his hug.
It was that simple—the way he hugged me when we were finally reunited. Simon had driven Tyler and me out to meet him from Blackwater Ranch, the secret camp where we’d been staying, after it had been attacked by Agent Truman and his Daylight Division—the NSA’s not-so-nice branch that hunted down us abductees. The second my dad had laid eyes on me, he’d nearly smothered me in his flannel embrace. And he hadn’t stopped ever since. Even though he looked at me strangely sometimes, he was always touching me—my hand, my shoulder, sometimes my cheek—asking me if I was okay or if I needed anything. Like he was silently reassuring himself I was still there.
He never asked questions about the things that made me different, even though we both knew those questions were there, right beneath the surface. He had to be curious; it was in his nature . . . his conspiracy-theory, we’re-not-alone, tinfoil-hat-wearing nature.