GABE AND SONYA sprint out of the house with blood dribbling down their arms. Some of Sonya’s speckles the folder she’s carrying, chock-full of government research that isn’t ours and could probably get us all thrown in jail for life.
The Chevelle’s engine is purring. I’m in the passenger seat with my bad leg throbbing in front of me. I can feel bones grinding around in there every time I move now, and the pain is out of this world. But I have to keep going.
“Let’s go!” I yell out the window. Up the road, the sound of engines—a caravan of them, it seems like—is getting louder, closer.
Gabe throws himself behind the wheel, and Sonya dives across the bench seat in the back. Gabe’s sneaker slams the gas pedal into the floor. The engine roars, the back tires spin, launching gravel as the ass end of the car sways. Gabe turns the wheel, aims us at the end of the driveway, and when the tires finally get purchase, we blast off at full speed. I’m shoved backward into my seat, clinging to the edge of it.
The army engines sounded like they were coming from the south end of Sonya’s street, so Gabe heads north, turning left out of the drive and rocketing for the Hill-to-Hill Bridge. I lean forward. In the rearview mirror, I see a big green Humvee take a sharp turn into Sonya’s driveway, followed by a couple of jeeps.
“Do you think they saw us?” Sonya asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
She’s watching through the back window, still holding on to her sheaf of papers like it’s a bible.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gabe says, watching the road, hands cemented around the steering wheel. There’s a tiny, ragged hole on the inside of his elbow, oozing blood that’s dripping onto his jeans. “There’s nowhere for us to go. They’ll tear this whole town apart looking for us. And anyone we have ties to…” He trails off.
“Our parents,” Sonya says quietly. “My sister.” She slumps back, finally loosening her grip on the files.
“We don’t know what they’re going to do,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “But I don’t think there’s anyone we can trust right now.”
Gabe takes a sharp, frenzied turn onto the Hill-to-Hill Bridge, his foot still pressed hard against the gas pedal, trying to get us far away from Sonya’s house as quickly as possible.
“There might be one person we can trust,” he says. He shifts, pulls the Polaroids Dr. Reed gave us out of his pocket, drops them into my lap. In one fuzzy shot, there’s another picture that Gabe took from Dagger Hill, the man dangling in the air like a marionette, the ivy-green parachute billowed out above him, the streets of Windale still a couple thousand feet below.
I flip through the shots, none of them in focus, probably taken in a hurry. It would have been hard to tell where the pilot was drifting in the original photos, but a picture of a picture is even worse.
Sonya leans forward between the front seats. “We have no idea where he would have landed. Those shots are crap. Maybe if Charlie had been the one taking the photos to begin with…”
“Hey,” Gabe says. “I was just goofing around. I didn’t think they’d be the center of a life-or-death scenario, okay?”
“Yeah, well, maybe if you took things more seriously—”
“We were supposed to be having fun! Just hanging out. And I take lots of stuff seriously, all right?”
“Like what? Your hair?”
“My…? Are you kidding?”
“Guys!” I yell, and they go quiet. “Listen. Nobody could have known. Okay? We have a lot of reasons to be afraid right now, but fighting is not going to fix any of them. And the thing we should be most afraid of is losing Kimberly.”
They glance at each other, then at me, and nod.
“You’re right, Charlie,” Sonya says. “But I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. Reed gave you guys these pictures because she thought you’d take them to Gabe’s dad and track down the pilot. After what just happened, that’ll be the first place Higgins goes.”
“Right,” Gabe agrees. “The police station would have been the safest place, but now it’s the most dangerous.”
“And there’s no way we’ll find the pilot on our own. Even if we do, who knows if he’ll be able to help us.”
On the other side of the bridge, Gabe turns us north again, away from the Triangle. A couple of blocks later, he turns left, heading west, because if we go too far north, we’ll hit the high school, where the army has set up its base of operations. Gabe’s right—there’s nowhere for us to go.
But maybe …
“I have a hunch about the pilot,” I say, leaning forward, massaging the hip above my broken leg. “But I think we should split up.”
“What? No way,” Sonya says.
“Yeah, Charlie, that’s not gonna happen. Get real. If we split up, we’re as good as dead. Not only do we have the army hunting us down, but we’ve got that … thing on our tails, too.”
“The Bug Man,” I say. “Who warned us about the army showing up. Why would it do that? Why would it take Kimberly in the first place?”
“I … don’t know,” he says, sitting back, relaxing his grip on the steering wheel.
“Think about it,” I argue. “If we’re all together, and we get caught, the rest of the town is still in danger. Higgins is going to do whatever she can to track down the Bug Man and cover up her mistake. If we split up and one of us gets caught, at least the others can keep trying to blow this thing up.” I raise one of the blurry images of the pilot floating over Windale. “I’m going to start with this. If I’m right, we might get a leg up on Higgins. Pun very much intended.” I knock on the plaster of my cast for emphasis, and it actually puts a grin on both of their faces. “I think you guys should go to Kimberly’s house.”
“Why?” Sonya asks.
“Because the Bug Man took Kimberly for a reason. She was so off on Friday, before the crash. More off than usual. Right?”
Sonya’s face tells me enough.
“Maybe she knew something,” I say. “Felt something, I don’t know.”
“It was like she saw it coming,” Gabe says.
Sonya nods, her eyes distant. “Yeah. Something was on her mind. Her parents might know something we don’t. Maybe give us some clue about where to start looking for her.”
“And if not them, then maybe Mr. Kunz at the diner?” Gabe says. “He would have been the last person to talk to her before she met up with us on Friday.”
“Okay,” I say. “Then that’s the plan. You guys drop me off first, then head to Kimberly’s house, talk to her parents. After that, we can meet back up at the diner and see what Harry Kunz knows. Good?”
Sonya dips her head once, chewing her lip.
“Good,” Gabe replies. “But where are we dropping you off?”
“The newspaper office. If anybody has seen something out of the ordinary in Windale, it’s Don Cranston.”