Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (7 page)

“What the frak?” Roland muttered as he reluctantly let go of Neeley, very reluctantly, and knelt next to the bag. He unzipped it.

There was no body inside.

It changed for Scout—now eighteen years old and almost two years past her first encounter, run-in, kerfuffle, whatever, involving the Nightstalkers—with a whiff of bacon. She’d only smelled real bacon outside the confines of her home; never inside. Inside it was always fakon, vacon, or one of the other imposters. If you gotta fake it, Scout had always reasoned ever since she was old enough to reason, which had been pretty dang young, then isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery, and one should go with the original? Her rail-thin mother, who counted each calorie as if they were mortal sins, did not see things that way.

Thus the mystery of the odor permeating the house.

For a moment Scout lie in bed, wondering if perhaps it was wafting in from the old house next door, the one with the barn where she stabled her horse, Comanche. Out of the old stone chimney. People with a barn and a stone chimney had to eat bacon.

But in this relatively new house with its fake gas fireplace, with Scout’s mother ruling the kitchen, with the aroma of honest-to-goodness real bacon filling the air, Scout questioned reality.

That’s a good trait, one the Nightstalkers had found valuable in the past and would need in the future.

If there was to be one.

But this was a new house, well insulated and sealed. She looked at the window in her bedroom over the pretty bench seat, and it was shut tight. It was late in the morning, actually past noon, so technically
early
in the afternoon, which made her feel a little better. Which further deepened the bacon mystery.

Scout had spent the evening and well into the night texting her sort-of boyfriend, Jake, a nice guy who she was sure Nada would not approve of. She wasn’t sure there was a guy Nada would approve of, but he wasn’t here in Tennessee and Jake was, so that ended that train of thought.

Bacon. How strange.

Scout got out of bed. Jake was sweet and nice and seemed to care about her and wasn’t pushing for sex, something she equated with a particularly long and troublesome root canal. They liked the same books and the same films and sometimes they wore the same T-shirts. They were as close as two people could get, Scout thought. But she’d awoken to the smell of bacon and her iPhone was still in her hand and, checking it, her last text to Jake had been
I think you’re my Heathcliff, Cathy
, and now she stared in surprise at his response:
Hu T Fk Is This????

She didn’t remember that from last night, and it puzzled her and disturbed her. Not at all like Jake. But then again she’d been gone for three months. And she’d lied to him about where she’d been, and she knew she wasn’t experienced enough in the Nightstalker world to carry off the lie to someone she was close to.

Foreign exchange had sounded good, but Jake had asked too many questions last night. She couldn’t tell him, ever tell him, where she’d really been. Training. Training. Training. Fort Bragg, Quantico, Langley, the Hangar at Lakehurst, and other places. A bewildering journey through the shadow world where instructors who knew her only as a number taught her skills, some of which she’d never known existed, never mind thought she needed.

It had been exhausting, and she’d only returned home yesterday.

The bacon worried her.

Scout carefully opened her door. It swung easily on hinges she kept oiled. She padded lightly down the hall to the stairs. She descended carefully, avoiding the one where the metal rod that went up the handrail was loose and rattled slightly every time someone hit the stair. A great early warning device up or down, but it made her question her father’s focus to not have fixed it since moving in almost a year ago.

There was, of course, the possibility that a marauding gang of breakfast makers had found their way out here to this thumb of land outside Knoxville, Tennessee, surrounded on three sides by the river of the same name.

Stranger things have happened, and Scout had personally witnessed some of them from the invasion of the Fireflies into her gated community back when they lived in North Carolina, aka
the Fun in North Carolina
, to the Portal opening just twenty miles downriver from her new home here in Tennessee at Loudoun Dam, aka
the Zombie at the Dam
.

She didn’t understand a lot of it, and Googling the events had turned up no answers. The Nightstalkers had good Cleaners coming after them, spinning cover stories, which, no matter how far-fetched, worked because they were more believable than the truth. They were much better at lying than she was, but she imagined if she had a few more years’ experience in that world, she’d become pretty good herself.

Scout paused just before the bottom of the stairs as she heard a noise, a sound she’d never heard before.

Her mother was singing. So much for the breakfast-making hooligans. Her mother was singing something about blackbirds singing in the dead of night, which seemed a bit redundant to Scout. She was sure Eagle could tell her about the song and the band and all of that, but right now it wasn’t important. This morning, check, this afternoon, was going weird in a major way.

Scout peered around the corner of the hallway into the kitchen. Her mother was at the stove. She was using tongs to pull long strips of bacon out of a frying pan and lay them on a plate covered with a paper towel. She seemed very happy, which was as odd as the bacon and the singing.

Scout put a hand over her mouth to squelch her surprise. She remained still, bathing herself in the aroma of the bacon and the surprisingly nice sound of her mother’s voice, but more than anything, enjoying the warmth of happiness emanating from her mother.

“Greer, darling,” her mother called out, surprising her. “Grab a plate.”

For once, use of her real name didn’t bother Scout in the least. How had her mother known she was watching? Another mystery to pile on the others. Scout walked into the kitchen. “Bacon, Mother? ‘A moment on the lips—’ ”

“Hush, dear,” her mother said. “Your Nana was the best cook ever. She taught me so much.”

Then why have I never had any of it?
Scout thought.
Before now
, she amended, looking at the crisp strips of bacon. Her mother hadn’t been any different when Scout was dropped off at the front door last night. A perfunctory “How was Europe?” and that was that.

Her mother was expertly breaking eggs into a bowl with one hand while retrieving the last of the bacon with her other. Scout did not recall working at a Waffle House listed on her mother’s résumé.

Scout sat at the counter, on the opposite side from where her mother was working. She had her iPhone out, hidden underneath the marble ledge, and began writing a text, her fingers flying over the tiny keyboard with the experience of an eighteen-year-old. It didn’t take long to write, but she paused with her finger over the key.

She wasn’t texting Jake.

“What’s the deal, Mother?” Scout asked.

Her mother turned from the stove, looking truly puzzled. “Why food is love, Greer. And I love you so much and I am
so
glad you’re home!”

That caused Scout to hit the send button on the text.

The Loop on which she’d sent the last message to Nada after the
Clusterfrak at the Gateway
was no longer working, having been compromised during the
Zombie at the Dam
incident. With the blessing of Moms, Nada had given Scout his private cell phone number so they could communicate directly if something out of the ordinary happened, if need be.

The need be now.

And then Scout got a plate. Just because reality had taken a bit of a lurch didn’t mean she was going to miss the first real breakfast her mother had ever made.

It changed for Nada, team sergeant of the Nightstalkers, the most experienced member of the group, a man who’d stared death in the eyes and French kissed the Grim Reaper (figuratively, although stranger things have happened on Nightstalker missions), with irritating voices singing “It’s a Small World,” the whiny tune echoing in his head as his niece Zoey tried to spin their teacup faster and faster.

Definitely down a rabbit hole of dubious merit.

They’d gone from hell to a deeper hell, was Nada’s estimation, walking from It’s a Small World to The Mad Tea Party. He was not the type of person Disneyland had been designed for, and he was a bit disappointed Zoey was attacking each new ride with such zest. Of course she was just a kid, but still. He expected better of someone who shared his bloodline.

As they spun about, Nada wondered, how small was the world really?

And why did Disneyland bother him so much and on a deeper level than irritating songs?

Little did he know, he was about to find out the answers to both.

And the answers were not good.

But he was trying to pretend.
Fake it until you make it
, Eagle had advised when Nada was due two days off and was going to use it to visit his niece and mentioned that a trek to Disneyland was part of the festivities. The team had begun taking bets on how long it would be until Nada pulled his MK23 Special Ops pistol and shot Mickey and Minnie. Roland had put his money on Goofy going down first with a double-tap right between his big eyes, but had added he would be very upset if Nada shot Goofy. Mac had asked he not shoot Snow White, since Mac had a thing for her, but then again Mac apparently had a thing for anyone in a skirt.

The team didn’t seem to have much faith in Nada’s ability to suffer.

But there are many different kinds of suffering, and everyone has a vulnerable spot. Nada should have remembered that from SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance & Escape) Training, where participants learned everyone had a breaking point. It was just a matter of time.

But isn’t everything?

The teacup twirled about, Zoey putting all her energy into spinning the wheel, but they stayed relative to all the other cups twirling about.

Nada didn’t get it. Bumper cars he could understand. But there were no crashes here, no movement other than the spin, which wasn’t dictated by the person on the ride. And most of the other adults had their phones and cameras out, recording the event. That was beyond comprehension to Nada: It was bad enough being here. Who’d want to watch a recording of being here? And if you were recording it, perhaps you weren’t altogether here to start with? A sort of remembered present?

Nada glanced at his younger brother, dutifully recording the teacup adventure from the safety of the fence with his cell phone. His brother, Zoey’s dad, was smiling, either at Zoey having fun or Nada’s misery. If he’d been a betting man, Nada would have put his money on the latter.

But then he noticed the woman in the next teacup. She didn’t have her hands on the center wheel. She held a baby in her arms. She had long, dark hair, flowing over the baby whom she was staring down at. Her skin was dark, exactly like Nada’s, except while his face was pockmarked, hers was smooth. And when she glanced up and saw Nada staring at her, he felt a lurch deep inside, as if a hand had clenched his heart and given it a tough squeeze. He quickly averted his gaze, but not before everything seemed to flicker for a second, as if the power that drove the universe had suffered a momentary short.

A volcano erupted in Nada’s mind. It was the only way he could describe it. Memories poured forth, hot and scalding with the utter desolation of the awareness of the loss.

He remembered a wife and a child.

Here. Years ago.

His wife and child.

Nada cried out, the sound masked by the music piped in via speakers overhead and unnoticed in Zoey’s determination to spin their teacup ever faster. His breath was gone, and he forgot how to breathe.

Discipline was a cornerstone of Nada’s life and he gathered himself, especially as his phone began ringing, a distinctive tone, Warren Zevon singing about “Keep Me in Your Heart,” a song the performer had written after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Nada had always thought his whole Warren Zevon thing had centered around “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” because it had been the unofficial dirge of the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) when he was a member, but now he knew how special and personal that other Zevon song had been to him.