The Rising(40)

“Endangered.”

“What?”

“It’s how you should’ve said it. Hey, didn’t think you were going to get out of our tutoring session, did you?”

She thought her attempt at humor had failed miserably, but Alex smiled, a tight smile.

“And I’m already in danger,” Sam continued.

“Endangered, remember?”

“No, the way I used the phrase was proper.”

“Proper? Who uses that word anymore?”

“The people who write the SAT and ACT tests.”

“Not on my radar right now.”

“Tell me what is.”

“That,” Alex said, pointing over her shoulder out the window.





39

SLEEPOVER

THE MOTEL THEY ENDED up at wasn’t the one Alex had pointed to out the window, because that one and two more located miles from the Pacific Coast Highway had insisted on credit cards.

The fourth one had a clerk who couldn’t have cared less, probably as much as he did about the sign that had so many bulbs burned out it was hard to read. The Monterey Motor Inn was one of those places that looked grown out of the landscape instead of built upon it. So old it might well have been held together by the weeds and dead brush that surrounded the U-shaped assemblage of buildings enclosing a crumbling parking lot with ancient asphalt bleached near-white in the sunniest spots. The office was on the right as Sam pulled into the parking lot, the sign flashing amid a nest of bulbs that spelled out only a portion of the letters.

The clerk had Coke-bottle glasses that made his eyes look huge, but he squinted as he looked up from a comic book when they entered. Then looked away again, back at the page, just as fast. Sam and Alex approached the counter to be met with him raising a hand into the air like a stop sign until he finished the page he was on.

“Cash only.”

“Fine by us,” Alex said.

He noticed a cheap ceramic figurine sporting a boner below the sign KNOCK WOOD and spun it around so Sam wouldn’t see it. She forked over the forty-dollar nightly rate, bemused by his gentlemanly gesture.

The clerk took the bills in a hand that was shiny with oil, smirking as he regarded them. A couple of horny teenagers looking to do what horny teenagers did. Cash was the order of the night because credit cards could be traced too easily.

“We’re not in Monterey,” Sam noted.

“Hey,” said the clerk, “you’re a smart one, aren’t you?”

“So why’s this place called the Monterey Motor Inn?”

“Hey, I don’t even know why it’s called a motor inn at all.” The clerk shrugged. “Phones in the rooms don’t work and the cable’s busted,” he added, handing an old-fashioned key with a massive plastic fob shaped like California across the counter, stained with what looked like chocolate. “I called the guy.”

Sam didn’t care that the phones didn’t work; she had her own, but was afraid to use it.

Because what if they knew who she was, were waiting for her to turn her phone on so they could track it? She imagined switching it on and seeing a dozen messages and missed calls from her parents, wondering where she was, why she hadn’t come home.

Unless something had happened to them. Unless more drone things had showed up at her house too.

The thought gave her chills, made her shudder. And what would she have told her parents anyway, that these things had killed Alex’s parents, that they wanted to take him with them?

It would sound like she’d been raiding the weed stash they grew for purely medicinal reasons, distributed among a number of marijuana dispensaries, thanks to their legal status as registered growers. No, not easy at all to explain drone things that refused to die and a spectral being who spoke out of both sides of his mouth after being separated in half.

What do you think of that, Mom and Dad?

Once registered, they climbed back into the Beetle and drove to their room, easing into a parking slot directly before it, each of the rooms boasting their own separate entrance. Sam counted five other cars for the sixty rooms spread over two twin levels.

The room was just what she expected: old and worn, but good enough. A single bar of soap cloaked in an unmarked white wrapper and a pair of plastic cups stacked one inside the other atop the counter. The toilet bowl was stained and the seat wobbly, thanks to a missing bracket. Sam switched the dull bathroom light off, then back on again. Alex was sitting on one of the double beds, staring at the nineteen-inch tube television screen like something was showing other than his own reflection.

Vending machines lined the walkway on the side their room was located, the steady whir of the soda machine and regular thunk of the ice dispenser slipping through the walls in the quiet. The motel marquee’s stubborn bulbs flickered and flashed, sending an alternating wave of red and blue light pouring through the flimsy window blinds, which were torn at the bottom.

Sam sat down on the edge of her bed, staying there until Alex finally laid down atop the bedcovers, clutching the tiny wooden statue of Meng Po as if it were a teddy bear.

“I want you to leave,” he said, breaking the tense silence. “I don’t want anybody else I care about getting hurt.”

“We’ve been over this, Alex.”

“So we’re going over it again,” he said, without looking at her. “You got me this far. That’s enough. Go home, please.”