“When you gotta go, you gotta go,” Mike said. So I went behind the nearest tree, and when I came back Mike was sitting up. He unwrapped a piece of gum and carefully folded the stick into his mouth. I sat down beside him and examined the tear in my jeans. My knee was bleeding.
“Catch your breath, Al. We got five, maybe ten minutes,” Mike said around his fresh wad of gum. “They’re looking for a place to land.”
“And what happens after they land?”
“They’ll come for us on foot. They’re very determined little suckers.”
“Who are determined little suckers?”
He didn’t answer at first. He picked up a stick and commenced to jabbing it into the rocky ground.
“The Company,” he said.
“OIPEP?”
He nodded. “OIPEP.”
“Why is OIPEP trying to kill us, Mike?”
“I don’t think they’re trying to kill you, Al. It’s me they want.”
That didn’t surprise me. Mike had betrayed the knights and OIPEP, but I still didn’t understand why he had kidnapped me. Did he think I still had Excalibur?
He stood up and brushed the leaves and dirt from his butt. “Look at this! I just bought these,” he said, referring to his Dockers. “Stain-defenders!”
He turned to me. “Sorry for snatching you like that, Al, but I’m in a bad way now and like it or not, you’re the only port in this particular storm.”
“What storm? What are you talking about, Mike?”
“Well, you could say it’s all a big misunderstanding. But it’s more a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right’s doing. You ready?”
“Ready for what?”
He walked past me, deeper into the woods, without looking back.
“It’s your call, kid. Stick with me and you got a fifty-fifty chance of seeing your sixteenth birthday. Hang here and you got a hundred percent chance of having your head snatched straight through your backside.”
I followed him up the slope, and to me it sounded like we were making enough noise to wake the dead. We reached the top of the hill and now I could see the lights of the interstate about a mile to our left. To our right was the Knoxville airport. And, directly below us, the parking lot to an air freight company.
“Right where I left it,” Mike breathed. “Okay, let’s go.”
I crouched in the trees just at the edge of the little lawn that surrounded the parking lot as Mike jogged to a silver 380Z parked at the far corner of the lot. I didn’t know what the heck was going on and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know, but there was no turning back now, and I figured eventually Mike would fill me in on the details.
The Z roared to life and Mike zipped over, waving to me through the open window. I jogged out of the trees and into the lot as Mike slowed to a stop. He floored the gas as soon as my butt touched the seat.
Mike headed into the mountains, taking the Z up to eighty on the straightaways, maybe a little bit slower—but not much—on the curves.
We went through a couple of small towns in the foothills; then, right before the entrance to the national park, Mike turned onto a gravel road that seemed to wind straight up the side of a mountain. The little access road hugged the mountain on one side and a deep ravine dropped off the other. I happened to be seated on the ravine side. I closed my eyes and willed my heart not to leap out of my mouth.
Finally the car rolled to a gravel-crunching stop and I opened my eyes. We were parked in front of a log cabin sitting by itself in a clearing hacked out of the mature trees covering the mountaintop.
“Home sweet home,” Mike sang out and stepped out of the car. “We’re perfectly secure here. Nobody knows about this place, Al. Not even the Company, and the Company knows practically everything.”
He came around to my side of the car and stood there, like he was expecting me to get out. I didn’t.
“Get out of the car, Al,” he said.
“I’m not getting out of the car, Mike,” I said, “until you tell me what’s going on.”
“I think I told you. You’ve been extracted.”
“Why?”
He smiled. “Get out and I’ll tell you.”
I thought about it. The leaves were gray in the dark, and the cold wind made a rattling sound as it moved through them.
The lights were on inside the cabin, and the light looked inviting and warm.
“Why can’t you tell me now, Mike?”
“Well, basically because of the car.”
“The car?”
“It’s brand-new.” He pulled the gun from his belt and pointed it at my forehead.
“Out. Now.”
I got out. Mike took a couple of steps back and gestured toward the cabin with the Glock.
“After you, Al. March.”
As I trudged up the hill toward the bright, warm lights, the hair on the back of my neck stuck up and I realized then what a terrible mistake I had made getting out of the car. It’s brand-new, Mike had said. Why did that matter? Because he didn’t want to mess it up when he shot me.
From behind me he said, “Okay, that’s good.” We were about ten feet from the front porch. I stopped. He stopped. I shivered in the cold air.
“Don’t turn around, Al,” Mike said softly. “It’s better if you don’t turn around. Maybe you should kneel.”
To my left was the ravine, the deep gash in the side of the mountain. To the right the ground dropped off into a dense thicket of wild blackberry bushes and scrub pine.
“You know what the Company calls this, Al?”
“An extraction?”
“Right. But extraction comes in many varieties. This one we call an ‘extreme extraction.’ ”
“Can I at least know why you’re going to extremely extract me?”
“For the world, Al. The welfare of humankind.”
I heard him slide the bullet into the chamber. The wind sighed in the trees. I could see my own breath.
“I should tell you that I hate doing this, Al—you know, how I always liked you and respected you and all that, but that just isn’t true. To be frank, you’ve always annoyed the heck out of me.”
10
I waited for the bullet, but the bullet never came. Instead a gigantic white horse burst from the trees to my right, bearing a figure dressed entirely in black, down to the ski mask over its head, bending low over the horse’s back as it came straight toward me. I heard Mike cry out, the sharp pop-pop of his gun, and then the rider was between Mike and me, and an arm swooped down and yanked me off my feet. Barely off my feet, because this rider was a lot shorter and thinner than I was, so my toes dragged the ground as the horse made straight for the ravine. I grabbed on to the back of the saddle and heaved myself up behind the black-clad rider as the horse swung around and headed back for the cover of the forest.