The Countdown (The Taking #3)(11)

Tyler wasn’t thinking the way I was. He still thought the Daylight Division had tracked us down. “How do you think they figured out where we were? Where did we go wrong?” he asked.

Ignoring Tyler, my dad reached across the table, his hand closing over mine. “I don’t think they did, kiddo. I don’t think it was that Truman guy or his jackbooted thugs.” He was hedging. For whatever reason, he didn’t want to come out and say what he thought.

I nodded. “So? What are we doing here?” I gestured to the diner around us. “If it wasn’t the Daylighters, then who were you and Nancy running from?”

He sighed again, a giving-up kind of sigh, then looked around, making sure no one was listening. And then he glanced up. Like up-up, toward the sky. “Them.”

My stomach dropped, and I wondered why I felt this way. Why I had that same sick feeling I’d had in his trailer, back when I’d first been returned. Back when he’d told me he thought I’d been abducted by aliens.

Back then the aliens had all been in his head. Make believe. Fiction. The stuff of fairy tales.

Now . . .

Now I knew better. Now he was only confirming what had already been bugging me. What I’d already been telling myself couldn’t be . . . because no way was it them. Not here. Not again.

I tried to swallow but my throat felt like it was one long inflexible steel pipe, and my breath rattled along the hollow tubing. I kept my voice low . . . super, super low so no one could hear the kind of crazy talk coming out of our mouths. “What . . . makes you say that? Why do you think it was”—I leaned closer, our heads almost touching over the top of the table—“them?”

“I think they’re trying to send a message, Kyr. I think they’re after you.”

I stayed inside the bathroom stall for way too long, surrounded by metal walls that were plastered with so much graffiti they looked like they belonged in a high school locker room rather than an all-night diner. One particularly eye-catching piece—a Sharpie collage of a nude woman riding an elephant—was not only bizarre, but so detailed I had to wonder how much time the poor woman drawing it had been trapped in here. I hoped for my dad’s sake it hadn’t been The World’s Best Pie that had done her in.

On the flipside, there were several penis sketches and one For A Good Time Call listing . . .

Seriously, you’d think grown-ups would be more mature.

I looked down to where my dad’s watch was strapped firmly to my wrist. He’d given it to me so I could always track the time, knowing the way it anchored me. Made me feel safe.

But right now, there was no solace in the steady meter of the second hand as it wound its way around the dial. My dad’s words . . . the things he’d said back there at the table haunted me.

Whoever Tyler had overheard, my dad had heard them too . . . only he hadn’t heard them the same way Tyler had. He agreed that they were talking, or at least he thought that’s what they were trying to do.

Communicate . . . but not in words.

It was Nancy who’d woken him, he’d explained. “She was growling, which put me on alert, being the middle of the night and all. So I got up to see what had her all riled.” He shrugged, his face sagging as he rubbed at the memory. “That’s when I saw them . . . two gals dressed like hikers. At first I didn’t think anything of it, except it was dark out and I didn’t know where you kids had gotten off to.” His saucer eyes fixed on me, and I couldn’t tell if it was a concerned look or that unsettling are-you-still-you? look I’d been getting from him for days. “Then one of ’em opened her mouth and this”—he winced—“this sound came out of her, like a hiss. And when she was finished, her friend opened up her mouth and did the same. They went back and forth like that, having this weird electrical conversation.”

It was Tyler who questioned my dad. Tyler who had admitted to hearing something similar by the pond—voices mixed with static. “So what makes you think they were aliens?”

My dad rubbed his temple. “I didn’t say they were aliens. I said I think the aliens are trying to send a message to you, trying to . . .” He shrugged and wrapped his hands around his coffee mug.

“So who were they then, those two ladies? If you don’t think they were aliens?”

“I can’t say who or what they were—maybe they . . .” He’d nodded toward the sky again. “Figured out how to hijack regular people, like those lady hikers. Maybe they—”

“Dad, I got it. I know who you mean,” I interrupted, letting him know the histrionics were unnecessary. “And I’m pretty sure people stopped saying things like ‘lady hikers’ with women’s lib, if anyone ever said it at all.”

A half smile tugged at his lips. “You’re probably right. All I’m saying is maybe that’s how they’re trying to reach you. All I know for sure is something’s out there, and I don’t think it’s just that Agent Truman dude we gotta watch out for anymore.”

Something was out there.

Something, not someone.

If there was something out there—something that spoke like static—then what . . . who was it? What did they want with us?

I sighed as I stepped out of the stall, feeling a little punch-drunk from everything thrown my way. I’d asked my dad if he had any idea where we’d go next, after we left this little slice of heaven—pun totally intended.