The Intuitives(87)

“Tell me when it goes for it,” Miller said, removing the clip from his gun, making sure the chamber was empty, and then replacing the clip with a fresh one from a different pocket.

“Roger that,” Mackenzie acknowledged.

Miller took aim at the tracking device and waited. The imp, seeing that Miller wasn’t paying it any direct attention, started sneaking toward him along the observation room wall, but Sketch caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, having pressed his face right up to the glass, trying to see what it was up to.

“It’s under the window! Coming toward your right leg!” he shouted.

Miller whipped to his right and fired rapidly along the floor, starting near his own leg and swinging his arms up, sending a steady stream of bullets in a tight, controlled pattern along the floor and then up the wall, again stopping at about calf level, but as soon as Miller had begin to fire, the imp had scampered away across the room, moving back toward the far wall.

“Where is it?” Miller asked, his words clipped and urgent.

“Across from the window,” Sam said. “You missed, by the way.”

“Where, exactly, across from the window?” Miller wanted to know, switching out the clip on his pistol and then pulling something large and tubular out of the calf pocket on his left leg.

“All the way back at the wall,” Mackenzie answered him. “At your one o’clock.”

“Roger that.” Miller tossed whatever it was in that direction, aiming it to hit the floor in front of the position Mackenzie had indicated. On impact, a wave of green paint exploded toward the imp, hitting it full on.

“Paint grenade!” Sketch shouted happily, but before the words were even out of his mouth, Miller unleashed another barrage of bullets toward the small creature.

“No!” Sketch yelled, but the imp had already dropped to the floor, squishing itself impossibly thin, absorbing the paint, and slithering away beneath Miller’s gunfire.

Apparently deciding that things were getting a bit too serious, the imp chattered at Miller angrily again—this time waving both fists in the air and puffing its little chest out belligerently—and then ran across the floor to leap gracefully back into the portal, looking none the worse for wear over their encounter.





48


Bad, Bad Things


“The news is boring,” Sketch complained. He was sitting on the couch between Mackenzie and Sam, with Daniel and Kaitlyn on the floor in front of them, the coffee table having been moved behind the couch entirely.

“Just for a while, OK?” Mackenzie answered him. “I want to see… just for a while, I promise.”

Mackenzie hadn’t been able to talk to her father since she had arrived at the lodge. She had spoken with her mother after his weekly Skype call home, so at least she had gotten an update, but it wasn’t the same. She wished she could hear his voice, telling her some crazy story about how many potatoes he had peeled that day or about going on rat patrol, as if his job were really that mundane. Her time at the ICIC was bringing home to her just how not true that was.

So far, the news segments had been relatively low key—a minor flood in Louisiana and some bill proposal in the Senate—and Mackenzie was relieved not to find what she was looking for. It didn’t mean her father was safe, but knowing there wasn’t any news out of Afghanistan made her feel better all the same.

“I don’t like summoning bad things,” Sketch said, looking down at his art pad. He knew the imp was technically bad, but it had made him laugh, and everyone else had seen it too—so he had decided to put it in the light book instead of the dark one. In his drawing, the imp was tossing the tracking device high into the air, and Staff Sergeant Miller was shooting at the tracker, well over the imp’s head, while it danced with glee.

“I didn’t think it was so bad,” Kaitlyn said.

“I know,” Sketch answered her, “but he tried to shoot it.”

“Hey, Sketch,” Mackenzie said gently. “Listen, they’re probably going to need us to bring more things like that, maybe even worse things. They have to try to shoot them so they can learn how to protect people.”

Sketch didn’t say anything, continuing to add details to his drawing.

“Remember the thing on the helicopter?” Daniel added. “You wouldn’t want something like that to just run around loose, would you?”

Sketch shrugged, his expression noncommittal. It wasn’t that he thought bad things running around would be a good idea, but he saw bad things around people all the time—not usually as bad as Mr. Lockhart had been, but still. He wasn’t sure people who looked good on the outside but did really bad things were necessarily better than things that looked bad on the outside but just played tricks on people and made him laugh. It certainly didn’t seem right to shoot them for it.

In breaking news, a plane that took off from Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport this morning, bound for London, has disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic. Airline officials have not yet released a statement regarding the missing aircraft, but our sources tell us that it is no longer appearing on radar and that attempts to radio the crew have, so far, been unsuccessful.

“That’s weird,” Kaitlyn commented, but she and Daniel were both watching a game she was playing on her phone, so they didn’t see the video that flashed on the screen next.