“DAD?” I SAY, just after Chief Albright shuts the door.
Dad’s sitting in the passenger seat, glasses pushed up onto his brow, squeezing the bridge of his nose with his fingers.
“Hi, little one,” he says. His voice is so tender, so fundamentally him that I almost weep. “Are you okay?”
“I … I guess,” I say, not really sure how to respond. “Dad, what are you doing here?” I glance over at Gabe. He looks just as perplexed as I feel.
“It’s kind of a long story,” Dad replies. Beside him, Chief Albright settles in behind the wheel. “But basically, we were shut out of the database at the lab. Higgins locked down all the computers and put some of her people on to monitor the logins. Our system, as you saw, is pretty outdated. As soon as they noticed someone logging in remotely with my password, they knew something was wrong. Claudia told me they were raiding the house, and I … I just thought the worst.”
Chief Albright pulls us away from Kimberly’s house quietly, letting Dad talk. He exchanges a tense glance with Gabe in the rearview mirror, then refocuses on the road.
“When they didn’t find you at the house, I needed to get to you myself. I needed to find a way to keep you out of this.” Dad turns in his seat and looks at me through the metal barrier between the front and back of the car. “I thought letting them put the tracker in you and keeping you at home while I sorted everything out from the lab was the best thing to do. But you’re too curious for your own good. Just like me.”
He grins hopefully, but I don’t have anything for him.
He goes on, undeterred. “When I ran out of places to look for you without being too conspicuous, I went to the only person in Windale I knew I could trust.”
“My dad?” Gabe asks, voicing the surprise we both have on our faces.
“The doc came asking if I could help him find Sonya,” Chief Albright explains. “And by then I’d heard from your mother that you were gone, Gabe. Not long after that, Charlie turned up missing, too. So we’ve been out looking for you three ever since. Meanwhile, the whole goddamn town is in an uproar.”
We’re all quiet.
“You’ve lied about so much, Dad,” I say. My voice is small and fragile.
He nods. “I know. I never meant to keep secrets from you, sweetheart. I just wanted to protect you.”
“Protect me by letting me go up to the place where one of your fucking anomalies is? Practically every day since we were kids?”
Chief Albright speaks up again, holding a finger in the air. “For the record, I was always against that. Don’t want to say I told you so, but—”
“Dad,” Gabe says.
The chief just shrugs and keeps driving.
“What was I supposed to say, Sonya?” Dad asks. “For all we knew, the anomaly was harmless. Sort of. We moved our facility here to research it. It never presented any danger. In fact, you and your friends always seemed to be sort of … drawn to the Hill. Like you couldn’t stay away. I thought maybe it would create some interesting data.”
“So I was a guinea pig,” I snap, folding my arms.
“No, that’s not what I meant, I…” Dad sighs. “I don’t know what the right answer is. I can explain everything I know about the anomalies, but what you need to know right now is that I love you, and I never, ever meant to put you in harm’s way. As soon as Higgins had you in her sights, I came looking for you. Your safety is more important than finding the other anomaly. The one that Higgins brought here.”
“That’s what you’ve been doing?” I loosen up a bit, softening because I can tell he’s being honest.
“Trying to, anyway.” Dad closes his eyes, shakes his head. “It hasn’t been easy with Higgins looking over my shoulder at every turn. The only reason I was finally able to get away from the lab is because you three distracted her.”
“Speaking of which,” Chief Albright says, “where’s Charlie? We assumed he’d be with you.”
“By now, with any luck, he’s waiting for us at the diner,” Gabe says.
“What did you kids find out?” the chief asks.
I’m the one who answers. “Not a lot. Kimberly saw … something coming. She drew a picture of us dead on Dagger Hill before Higgins even showed up in Windale with the Bug Man.”
“She must have picked up on some of the outbursts the anomalies were giving off just before the second one arrived here,” Dad says. “That’s what happened to Clark Webber’s herd. We believe, anyway. The cows just … lost their minds to it.”
Chief Albright scrunches his brow together, confused. “The Bug Man?”
“That’s what we’ve been calling the second anomaly. Gabe saw it take Kimberly.”
“You what?” Gabe’s dad says, looking at his son through the mirror again, eyebrows raised.
Gabe nods. “At first, I thought it was a hallucination or something. But when we found out Kimberly was actually missing, and Higgins’s men started lying about where the plane came from, I … I don’t know. Something just didn’t feel right. He looked like a man dressed in black wearing a gas mask. It has big, bug-eyed lenses and a canister that sticks out front. So … Bug Man.”
“Jesus,” the chief breathes. “Are we all hearing ourselves right now?”
“We were going to meet up with Charlie,” I tell them. “We left him at the newspaper office to see if Don Cranston had any leads on where to find the pilot of the plane.”
“Dr. G, your friend Claudia told Charlie and me that the pilot might be able to help,” Gabe says to my dad. “She said he was the only one who had any reservations about what they were doing here in the first place.”
Dad nods. “She’s right. When she told me that they had pictures of the pilot jumping from the plane and that he hadn’t been found yet, I knew he might be able to undermine whatever story Higgins was going to tell about the crash. But I never expected Claudia to put that on you kids.”
“I mean, technically, she gave us the photos to give to my dad so he could go looking for the pilot, but…” Gabe shrugs. “We kind of got sidetracked.”
“So you sent Charlie to Mr. Junior Detective?” Chief Albright asks, incredulous.
“Charlie went to Cranston himself,” I say. “He had a hunch that maybe Don would already be looking into it. I don’t know.”
“We trust Charlie,” Gabe says.
After a moment, Gabe’s dad sighs. “Okay. Then so do I. We’ll hit the diner, pick up Charlie, and go back over to the station to figure out what our next move is. While we do that, we can follow up with any leads that Charlie got from Cranston, and the doc can tell us all about the … Bug Man.”
“We can also assess the Montoya situation,” Dad says, mostly to the chief.
“The Montoya situation?” I ask.
“As in Ricky Montoya?” Gabe says. “The guy who owns the video store?”
A vague image of Ricky’s face comes together in my mind’s eye, sitting behind the counter of his video-rental store, sliding VHS tapes into their cardboard sleeves and checking them out to customers. The librarian of Hollywood entertainment in Windale.
“Yes,” Chief Albright says. “He’s dead. In a very violent way that Rebecca says was similar to what we saw at the Webber farm Friday morning.”
“This is getting worse,” I say. I can’t help but think of Kimberly, of what might be happening to her right this second and knowing that I can’t do anything to stop it.
Chief Albright steps on the gas.