Untaken (25 page)

Gracie

ake?”

“He’s not gonna hear you.
I
can hardly hear you and I’m standing right next to you,” said Brandon.

“Well, I don’t feel like yelling in here,” I snapped back.

“We don’t even know for definite if he went back in,” said Brandon.

We did know, though.

It’s the only place he could have gone, searching for whatever shiny thing he’d seen back in the Mountain Post, probably. Jake was good at sticking close most of the time, but when it came to Shinys, the kid had a one-track mind.

If Brandon could’ve just waited for him to look, had a bit of patience.

We hovered just inside the access door, which we’d propped open with a trashcan. The sunlight spilling into the corridor only made the darkness inside seem blacker.

“What now?” asked Brandon.

“Why are you asking me? You’re ‘in charge!’ “

“I just meant, should we wait for him here, or go in?”

“We go in, of course.”

Brandon sighed. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to tell you guys before, but I think I saw something in there.”

“Like a bird’s shadow, or something you imagined?” I snapped.

“Jeez, I thought you
were
imagining it. Maybe I was too. It was dark.”

“Well, what are you saying, anyway, Brandon? That we should just hang out here and see if he gets eaten by some
maybe
imaginary monster?”

“No. I just figured, from a survival point of view, we could all be going around in circles, if he comes back here while we’re fooling around in there.”

“A survival point of view? He’s a little kid. Anything could happen to him in there. Even if there is nothing in there, he could fall, or get lost, or anything. We have to go find him now. Unless, from a survival point of view, we should just drive off and leave him, since he’s messing up your big plans.”

Brandon hesitated a beat too long, and I gave him a shove. “You’re a jerk.” I strode off into the darkness.

Brandon caught up with me about half a minute later, his shoulder barging into mine. In one hand, he had a flashlight; the gun was slung over his arm on a strap.

“Careful! Jeez, Brandon, tell me that thing isn’t loaded.”

“Wouldn’t be much good if it wasn’t,” he said. “The safety’s on.”

“You’re going to end up shooting someone.”

“That’s the idea,” he said with a grin.

“I meant one of us,” I said, icily.

“Are we going to find Jake, or do you want to stay here and fight with me?” We went back to the trading post first. The sun was lower in the sky, and it was darker in there than it had been just a short while ago. We searched all around the buffalo, which Jake had seemed to take a liking to, then around the benches where Jake had spotted whatever it was that caught his eye, but there was no sign of him.

Brandon was jumpy and distracted. Twice he dropped the flashlight, and we both winced at the noise.

“He’s not here. What should we do?”

Great. The second something happened that wasn’t part of Captain Lightning’s Big Plan, I was suddenly in charge.

“No point just guessing where he is and going in circles. I guess if we can’t find him soon, we go back to the car and wait.”

“Oh, sure, but when I want to wait by the car I’m a jerk!”

“When you wanted to just
leave
him it made you a jerk!” I shouted.

My voice echoed in the silence. I hadn’t meant to yell, but Brandon made me so mad.

“Oh shit,” breathed Brandon.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, “But you—”

“Holy shit.” Brandon fumbled with the strap on the gun.

“What—?” I turned to follow his gaze, freezing with my mouth still open on the word.

First one tentacle, then another, snaked in through the entrance on the west side of the store where we came in.

The Drone didn’t seem to have spotted us yet, but it must have heard me yell. Our only hope was to get the hell out before it found us.

And Brandon was going to try to shoot it. Like some dumbass gunslinger.

“Are you crazy?” I hissed at him. “It won’t work! Get
down.
”

He was bigger than me, but I managed to pull him down onto the floor behind a rack of coats. “Turn the light off,” I whispered.

He didn’t want to give me the flashlight, and I had to wrestle him for it, but I pried his fingers away long enough to flip the switch off. The glass dome in the roof gave us just enough light to see the shapes of the shelving units, but not much more. Who knew if Drones even
saw
the way people did, but the flashlight beam was too much of a beacon to risk. The tentacles fumbled and rasped against the carpeted floor, followed by the ugly black body which bobbed in through the entryway, just visible in the twilight glow of the dome. But instead of gliding through the air like a sleek underwater predator, the Drone floated lopsided, and a weary grinding noise, like a clock winding down, or the pulse of a diseased heart, emanated from its body. It was hard to credit what I was hearing. Drones didn’t break down. But with all the noise we’d been making, wouldn’t a normal Drone have gotten us already? Either way, we were pushing our luck staying here.

“Don’t shoot at it,” I whispered as Brandon fumbled with the gun again. “Stay down on the floor, and follow me.”

I summoned my courage and darted out into the open stretch of floor between the camping department and the racks of magazines where the other exit was. I didn’t look back to see if Brandon followed, and I didn’t look to see if the Drone had spotted me, I just tucked my head down and concentrated on moving as quickly and quietly as I could. I slid the last few feet where the carpeting gave way to linoleum, and landed neatly behind a shelf of magazines showing grinning men posing with various dead and bloody animals.

Brandon slid in next to me a few seconds later, and both of us peered around the edge of the magazine rack to see where the Drone was. It still hung in the air near the door where we’d entered, but it must have sensed we were here. The Drone moved forward into the store, tentacles probing the rug like a bloodhound following a scent.

Well,
some
of the tentacles probed at the rug… at least half of them dragged limply along the floor behind the creature.

“Hey,” whispered Brandon. “Is it me or does that thing look—?”

“Broken. Duh. Do you think we’d still be alive if it wasn’t, after you screwing around with the gun back there?”

Brandon opened his mouth to reply, but before he could start squabbling all over again, I was on my feet and sprinting toward the door that led out into the mall.

The mall was pitch black beyond the faint glow of daylight inside the Mountain Post, and as I ran, my foot snagged on something, sending me flying across the slick marble floor. I scooted backward until my shoulder hit a wall, then scrambled to my feet and started to run again, only to trip over something else, and face plant on the marble floor a second time.

I knew it was dumb to panic like that. If I’d just had long enough to think, then everything would have been okay, but my brain wouldn’t fix on anything useful—like what part of the Mall we might be in. Instead, it kept fluttering away to thoughts of Jake and Brandon and the Drone.

Footsteps echoed nearby and I saw the flicker of the flashlight.

Brandon.

The idiot had turned the light back on.

“Over here,” I called softly.

He turned at the sound of my voice and, as he did, a tentacle reached lazily through the air and flicked the flashlight out of his grasp, sending it clattering away across the floor.

Brandon and the Drone were silhouetted in the flashlight beam, the shape of the Drone seeming to grow larger and larger as its mass of tentacles billowed around it. The body drifted down until it was just feet away from Brandon’s face.

It hesitated, the greasy body shuddering slightly. A couple of tentacles reared up, twitching, but still didn’t strike. It was like it couldn’t quite remember what it was supposed to do. It would though. I knew it would, and I was too far away to do anything to help, even if there had been anything I could have done. Brandon shook all over, but he stood his ground. He lifted the gun in a hesitant “batter up” motion and waited. The Drone registered the movement and finally surged forward. Brandon brought the stock down hard on its body, with an unpleasant crunch, like someone cracking an egg open. The Drone dropped to the floor in a widening pool of shimmering black fluid, letting out a terrible keening noise which rose in pitch and volume until I thought my ears would burst. The tentacles spasmed and skittered on the floor, scoring deep gouges in the marble as the Drone tried to raise its body and failed.

Brandon skipped back, but not fast enough. One of the flailing tentacles caught him on the temple, knocking him off his feet. His head hit the floor with a meaty
thud
.

I darted forward, trying not to look at the terrible, broken Drone. It wasn’t pity I felt for it, but revulsion so profound that my skin crawled. I’d go crazy if one of those tentacles touched me. And that awful pool of alien blood, or oil, or whatever it was…

Something struggled in the goo.

Spaghetti.

It looked like spaghetti, or long white worms. My stomach twisted, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed the thought away. Not now. There wasn’t time now.

“No puking ‘til Maine,” I muttered to myself, snorting something that wasn’t quite laughter through my nose. My hands found the back of Brandon’s jacket and I pulled him across the floor, out of the range of the downed Drone’s tentacles. What a wonderful thing fear was—I couldn’t believe I’d been able to haul Brandon around like this.

The keening from the Drone faded slowly, and sounded more like a machine running down than anything alive, but the tentacles still squirmed and grasped and I didn’t want to trust that it was down for good. Crazy that it was down at all, really. Drones didn’t hesitate, and they certainly didn’t get busted by some scared teenager whacking them with a gun. It was yet another mystery I didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on right now.

No thinking ‘til Maine either.

Brandon was breathing, but he seemed to be knocked out. I tried not to panic. What was I supposed do for an unconscious person? On TV, they slapped them, or threw water on them, but I didn’t know if that was something to do in real life or not.
A medical book
, the practical part of my mind whispered. I should have picked up a medical book. I’d grabbed a medical
kit
, but that was back in the car.

I propped Brandon up against the wall and, making a large detour around the Drone, picked up the flashlight.

Brandon was awake when I got back to him, but where his face wasn’t paper white with shock and pain, it was dark with blood.

“That was a pretty smooth move, Commander Lightning,” I told him. “Are you okay? Do you think you can walk?”

He looked at me, but his eyes didn’t focus. What was I supposed to do if he was really hurt? The kind of hurt only a hospital could fix? He muttered something, but I couldn’t make it out.

Going to something?

“Going to what?” I asked, leaning in. He grimaced and flopped forward. Oh boy. Going to throw up.