The Vanishing Game (33 page)

“Well, if I have to choose …”

He grabbed me by the hair, shoving the gun beneath my jaw and cutting my comment off midsentence. The psychotic glint in his eyes reminded me of Conner, and I knew I couldn't talk myself out of this trouble.

“Let go.” My voice was strangely calm.

He smiled with that phony confidence I'd seen at the gallery. “Sure. First tell me where it is.”

“Afraid I can't do that.”

“Where's your gratitude, Jocelyn? You owe me. If I hadn't shot that kid, he would've stabbed you.”

His cocky confession made me angry. Why was he taking credit for killing Georgie in the same way a Boy Scout would talk about doing a good deed?

“So where is it?”

I spoke slowly, like he was stupid. “I. Don't. Know.”

His face darkened with rage, and he started spewing vile names at me, telling in graphic detail what he was going to do to me. The pitch of his voice rose as his fingers twisted my hair and jerked my head back until my neck was throbbing with pain. I understood why Jack had been so frightened of him. Afraid to look at his Conner eyes, my own slid away to the walls with their peeling wallpaper and chipped plaster. They had begun to pulsate, and beneath Gerard's shrill threats I heard the low thrum of the slow-beating heart that had haunted my Seale House nightmares.

Shoving the gun harder against my throat, he threatened in the foulest language to blow my head off. I tried to keep my voice even. “Then you'll never find the password list, will you?”

He threw me to the ground and kicked me. I curled up to try and protect myself. The pain in my side was intense now, and I worried that his blow had ruptured my
appendix. In a fearful haze, I wondered if the ink oozing up through my skin was merely an omen of some infection underneath. He stomped down on my wrist and I stared at his shiny shoe, thinking that Noah would never wear something so dorky.

“I don't need to kill you.” He put his weight on my wrist until I was gasping in pain. “I'll just shoot you in the hand, for starters. How about that?”

Looking up at him, and how he towered over me, I also saw the wall behind him begin to warp and writhe. “Don't,” I pleaded.

“Too late.” He squatted down and put the gun against my palm.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I braced my body against the blast that would bring more pain and disfigurement than I could imagine. But then a hostile curse escaped Gerard, and he staggered back, freeing my wrist. My eyes flew open as his gun thudded to the floor. He swore and shook his hand. I grabbed the gun but released it immediately—it was hot!

He stumbled back against the wall, which was swelling and undulating. With a shout of alarm, he tried to step away but couldn't. The wall held him like a fly on a web, and when he struggled to pull free it surged around him like
The Blob
. He panicked as it began to suck him in. The wall slurped at him like it was starving and he was the morsel it had been waiting for.

Gerard started screaming and I did too. Jumping to my
feet, I lurched away from him and through the door. His cries of terror followed me down the hallway, where the walls shuddered with waves and spasms. The water stains twisted in fantastic and eerie designs. Horrified, I bolted into the room where I'd once stayed with the other girls. There was only a bench and beat-up dresser in here now. Tattered curtains framed two windows, and a spotted mirror hung lopsided between them.

Dark stains began to emerge from the walls in the same way the
X
on my abdomen had done. My heart was beating so fast that it seemed ready to tear itself in half, and yet I couldn't pull my gaze away. Glass from the panes of a window suddenly exploded, raining all around me as I screamed and crouched down, covering my head.

“Stop it!” I sobbed. I plugged my ears against the low, pulsing heartbeat interwoven with Gerard's distant cries.

Those next few minutes became incoherent for me until the walls finally stopped their sickening pulsations. When I looked up the room was the way it had been, except for glass shards covering the floor. And Noah was there. He knelt beside me and said something, maybe asking if I was okay. Just like that autumn afternoon years ago, when Conner had nearly killed me, I couldn't make out his words because of the buzzing in my ears.

Two other men hurried into the room, one of them Zachary Saulto. I closed my eyes, gasping at the renewed pain in my side, clutching at it with hands that became claws.

“What's wrong with her, Sam?” Noah asked from what sounded like a great distance.

Beyond the ringing in my ears I heard the man say, “Show her the picture.”

Noah held up the crumpled drawing of the medieval cross with Jack's writing underneath. “I found this on the stairs, Jocey. Is it from Jack?”

I nodded, my voice catching as I said, “But he's not here.”

The man knelt down in front of me. He was in his forties and had long features and washed-out gray eyes. He wore a red tie with a dark business suit, and when he looked at me I had a strange feeling of familiarity.

“Jocelyn, I'm Sam Marvin, Jack's boss. I want to help you. Do you know what he meant by this paper? Is it important?”

I ignored him and turned to Noah. “I know why you stayed with me. You're still working for ISI. How could you betray me? I thought we were in this together, for Jack.”

“We are.”

I shook my head. “How much did they offer to pay you for going through all this with me?”

“Not enough.”

As I looked away he caught my chin and turned it back to force eye contact. “There's not enough money in the world to make me go through all this crazy stuff. I only agreed to it because I care about you.”

I just stared at him, wanting to ignore the intensity in
his eyes but finding it hard. He lowered his voice so only I could hear. “I was just trying to keep you safe, Jocey.”

“You should have told me.”

“If I did, you would've left.”

There was another wave of pain in my side, and I remembered Paul Gerard's hard kick. Turning my head, I looked through the open door and out into the hallway. Had Seale House killed my attacker? “Where's Gerard?” I asked.

“Gone. We saw him run out of the house and get in his car. He was holding his arm like it was broken, and he looked scared—his eyes all wild. He peeled out fast. Did you fight him, Jocey, and break his arm somehow?”

I shook my head. I wanted to tell him the truth but was afraid to explain what the house had done.

“Jocelyn,” Sam Marvin said with a sincere gaze. “It's very important that we talk to Jack.”

An unexpected surge of anger filled me. “He doesn't trust you anymore!”

Another window in the room exploded and we all ducked for cover. There was a sting in my arm. When I looked down, I saw Zachary Saulto push in the syringe of a small hypodermic. I jerked away as Noah lunged at him, his fist smashing into Saulto's face. Sam Marvin began shouting and pried Noah off the guy, who now had a bleeding lip.

I grimaced in pain, hunched over, and grabbed my side. Noah hurried back to me. “What's wrong, Jocey?”

“It hurts.” I rocked back and forth.

“Did Gerard do this to you?”

I shook my head, another spasm worse than the first now washing through me. Sam Marvin crouched down again. “Listen to me. Jack hid something for us, and you're the only one who can get it. Tell us what you need—”

Noah said, “She needs a hospital. I'm calling an ambulance.”

“No!” I protested. “No hospital.”

I couldn't go on in such agony. Untying the drawstring on my pants, I peeled down the fabric just low enough for them to see the medieval cross atop the place where my appendix might be. “
X
marks the spot,” I whispered in a ghastly voice that didn't sound like me at all.

They stared at it until Zachary Saulto said, “It's hidden there … I can't believe it.”

Sam Marvin nodded. “Where else would be safer? Can we get it out?”

“Yes. There's a scalpel in the first-aid kit in the car.” Saulto hurried through the door.

Outraged, Noah turned on Marvin. “You're crazy! We're not cutting her open!”

“It'll only be a surface incision.”

“Get her to a hospital if you want, but you're not doing it here!”

Marvin scowled and shook his head. “You really don't know what we're dealing with, Noah. Jack put our data beneath that mark, and now he wants it taken out.”

“Jack? Are you nuts?”

“Trust me, he did.”

“I don't believe he'd do that to her.”

I reached for Noah's arm as another spasm shook me and I gasped. “Let them get it out. It's all right.”

He studied me for several seconds, our eyes locking. “Okay,” he said, sitting beside me.

Saulto entered with a first-aid kit and a laptop. He came toward me.

“Wait! Not him.” Saulto scowled at me, his sore lip making him look pouty. “I don't want that guy touching me. Noah, you do it.”

He looked grim. “Are you sure, Jocey? I mean, really sure?”

I nodded and Saulto shoved the kit into Noah's hands. He opened it, unsheathed a scalpel, and grabbed some gauze. I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath. Truthfully, I hardly felt the incision because of the biting spasms. When whatever Jack had hidden inside me slipped out, the pain stopped. Panting as if from a terrible ordeal, my body coated with sweat, I opened my eyes. Noah dabbed the incision in the middle of the tattoo.

He held up a tiny sealed packet taken from beneath my skin. Marvin used his handkerchief to take it from Noah, wiped off the blood, and opened it. He removed an IC chip. Inserting it into a flash memory stick, he handed it to Saulto, who walked over to his laptop, which was sitting on the old dresser. He plugged the flash drive into the computer's USB
port, fingered the touch pad, and studied the screen. “Okay, we've got it!”

A wave of dizziness washed through me. I started sinking down into a slow-moving haze—the injection Saulto had put in my arm was affecting me. I was on the edge of slipping into unconsciousness when Marvin crouched down and looked into my face. He smiled with relief.

“Terrific job, Jack. We owe you a lot.”

The road twisted away from us like a white-gray ribbon, the moon a lopsided orb. It had been a year since we left Seale House and Watertown. We were with our mother. During that time Jack and I had begun to rebuild a life in Vermont, but now it was all left behind in a moment of panic. We didn't even go back to our small apartment to get the few possessions we owned
.

The road seemed to disappear into the hills as we rattled along at breakneck speed. Melody muttered to herself in partial sentences while she drove, blurting out bits and pieces of regret, anger, and heartache. Sometimes she laughed with vengeful derision, other times she wept for Calvert, her first love—the only man she ever really loved
.

My brother and I, who at fourteen had already seen far too much of the world, sat close to each other. Jack was slumped against the passenger door, his head resting on the window. His breathing was shallow and his forehead red. There was a bloody, swollen spot on his brow
.

As the old pickup shuddered, I desperately wished he would wake up. Peering through the cracked windshield, recently broken by the impact from Jack's head, I stared at the red rust that corroded the hood and seemed to be inching closer. Sitting between sleeping Jack and ranting Melody, a chill went up my spine. It was now clear that the red on the hood wasn't rust alone, but also blood. The dented hood was stained from the violent impact that had killed Melody's beloved Calvert and the woman he was with
.

I trembled at the memory of what had happened only an hour before. Jack and I were waiting for our mother in the parking lot of the restaurant where she worked. When she came out, she was shaking and sobbing. As she started the truck, Jack tried to talk to her, to find out what was wrong. He was still trying to calm her when the man she identified as Calvert and a woman with long dark hair exited the place. They strolled along with their arms around each other
.

Melody revved the engine, released the brake, and stepped on the accelerator. They looked up and screamed. She screamed, too, ramming the pickup into them and smashing their bodies against the brick wall of the restaurant. I braced myself for the impact, but Jack's focus was on trying to stop our mother. His head smashed into the windshield and cracked the glass
.

During the next hour, Melody drove our pickup in a one-car chase scene through the night, safely out of Vermont and across the state line to New York. My pleas for her to turn the truck around and get Jack to the hospital back in Bennington were useless. She heard nothing but her own twisted thoughts. She talked about how Calvert never should have abandoned her at a truck stop all those years ago, making the rest of her life a wreck. Both their lives would
have been wonderful and perfect if he'd stayed with her. It was all his fault that she was forced to do what she did. After hearing so many retellings of the story of Calvert's desertion, I couldn't believe she had actually found him again and taken his life in revenge
.

In the distance we finally saw lights against the velvety black landscape, a necklace of shimmering jewels. I took Jack's limp hand in mine and told him to hang on. We would get him to a hospital soon
.

We sped our way into town, reached a small hospital, and found the emergency entrance. Melody leaped out of the pickup and screamed for help. Anxious attendants came and felt for Jack's pulse. They transferred his unconscious body onto a gurney and hurried inside. I followed them into the hospital, staring at the closed doors they took him through, tensing every time a technician raced past
.