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  “I was thinking,” Colt said. “What if it was Trident Biotech? I mean, they had the motive and the means to create something like that, right?”

  “Possibly,” Grandpa said. He sounded distracted. “I hate to do this—especially since you’re leaving in a few days—but I need to go down to Tucson.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  Grandpa shook his head. “Not this time. I’ve arranged for you to stay over at the Romero house. You should be safe enough there until I get back. The way I hear it, they have a better security system than the White House.”

  After Grandpa left, Colt wandered back to his bedroom where weeks of dirty clothes covered every surface, hanging off the corner of the dresser, the doorknob, and the bed. He waded through the haphazard piles, trying to ignore the stench of mildew as he looked for something moderately clean to throw into his backpack so he had something for the morning. For the briefest moment he considered separating it into piles and throwing a load in the washing machine, but the thought didn’t last.

  As he packed, he grabbed his phone and a pair of earbuds before selecting a play list of country songs that reminded him of Lily Westcott. Colt had been smitten from the moment he saw her, though at first he tried to deny it. He didn’t want to come across as shallow—after all, she was the consensus pick as the most beautiful girl at Chandler High School. She had blue eyes the color of cornflowers and blond hair that hung past the middle of her back. But it was her smile more than anything that had won Colt over.

  The biggest hurdle to any kind of a relationship had been her boyfriend. Graham St. John was a walking cliché. He was tall and good looking, his parents had money, and he was an all-state quarterback who was heading to Boise State on a full-ride scholarship in the fall. He also cheated on her. But after she broke up with Graham, she and Colt never moved beyond friendship. Now that he was transferring to a military school in Virginia, they never would.

  After a long search, Colt finally found some clothes that passed the sniff test. He wadded them up and stuffed them into his backpack, threw it over his shoulder, and was heading down the hallway toward the kitchen when something moved just outside the window. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end and his heart pounded, warning him that something was wrong. He forced his legs to cooperate, willing them to walk as he made his way to the bay window in the living room. A car door slammed, and before he could get a look at its driver, a black Mercedes CLS550 Coupe disappeared down the street and around the corner.

  Colt opened the window, and there in the flowerbed were two footprints.

  :: CHAPTER 9 ::

  Oz lived with his parents in a sprawling house that looked more like a resort than a residential property. Surrounded by an iron gate with its own guardhouse, it had every amenity a person could desire, including an indoor basketball court, a movie theatre, a pool with a waterfall, and a gym that would rival any fitness club.

  Colt stayed in the casita out back next to the pool, which was almost as big as Grandpa’s house. It had a kitchen stocked with food, a dinette, two bedrooms, and an enormous living room with a projection television hooked up to just about every gaming system imaginable.

  Oz ordered thin crust sausage and mushroom pizza from Papa John’s, and the boys stayed up half the night playing Zombie Extermination Squad online with Danielle, who was back at her house lying on her bed with her dog, Wolfgang.

  They decided to take a break around two in the morning. Oz flipped through the channels looking for something to watch, but by the time Colt got back from taking the empty pizza boxes to the trash bin, his host was snoring and cradling the remote like it was a security blanket.

  Colt stumbled into the bedroom, plugged his phone in so it could charge for a few hours, washed his face, and fell into bed. The pillows were soft, like goose down, and he lay there staring at the ceiling.

  He hated this time of the day more than any other. It was too quiet, the darkness too intimate. Daylight offered distractions like homework and chores, but at night he was stuck facing his thoughts.

  Tomorrow would have been his parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary, and the entire family had planned to celebrate together in Maui. Instead, Colt was packing up his life and transferring to a military academy on the other side of the country.

  There were times it didn’t seem real. Danielle said that was normal. The first stage of grief was supposed to be denial, but lately he had slid into the second stage. Anger.

  At times he blamed God for everything that had happened, but maybe God didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe it was his mom’s fault. After all, she didn’t have to go public with her story. That’s what a journalist did, of course, but was exposing Trident Biotech’s secret mind-control program worth her life? Then there was Uriah Bloch, the guy who drove his truck into their car. There was also the doctor who implanted the chip into Bloch’s head, not to mention Aldrich Koenig and about a dozen other people who played a part.

  He thought about calling Lily, but it was too late. She had lost her parents before her second birthday and bounced around foster homes until the Westcott family adopted her. She was the only person he knew who truly understood everything he was going through. He was going to miss that when he moved to Virginia.

  Colt’s chest constricted with emotion, and he could feel the warm trail of a tear as it fell down his cheek. Angry. Sad. Frustrated, he whipped a pillow across the room. He wanted to scream or punch the wall or run and never look back. Instead he closed his eyes and fell into a fitful sleep, succumbing to his exhaustion.

  The sun was already peeking through the slats in the blinds when Colt finally woke up. He groaned and turned over to find the alarm clock. It was almost ten, which meant that he’d missed his morning run with Oz. He lay there, finding the idea of sitting up almost more than he could bear. His mouth was stale, and it felt like someone was pounding at the back of his head with a rubber mallet.

  “Are you up?” Oz called from the living room.

  “No.”

  Before Colt could so much as blink, Oz was standing in the doorway wearing the same clothes he had fallen asleep in, as he shoveled spoonfuls of Fruity Pebbles into his mouth. “You want some breakfast?”

  “Maybe later,” Colt said, pulling the comforter over his head. Most people would have taken it as a sign to go away, but Oz either didn’t get the hint or didn’t care.

  “Rise and shine,” he said, sounding far too cheerful. Colt could hear him walking through the room, opening the blinds.

  “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars to go away.”

  “What are you talking about?” Oz asked as he sat down at the end of the bed. “I already let you sleep in. What do you say we head over to the shooting range, and if you ask real nice, I might let you shoot the 9mm Heckler or the MP5.”

  “You go,” Colt said. “I’ll meet you over there.”

  “Are you sick or something?” Oz asked as he pulled the comforter off the bed so Colt couldn’t reach it. “How many people get a chance to shoot submachine guns? It’s like we’re living inside a video game.”

  “I guess.”

  “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong or not? I mean, if you’re hoping I can read your mind, I have news for you. I don’t have telekinesis.”

  Colt yawned and rubbed his burning eyes. “Today is my parents’ wedding anniversary.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “You know, when Grandma Romero died, it was real hard on my dad,” Oz said after sipping the milk from the bottom of his cereal bowl. “Don’t get me wrong, I was sad and everything, but she had been battling cancer for as long as I can remember. In a way, we all had time to say good-bye. You didn’t get that same chance with your folks.” He paused. “I don’t know what I would do if my parents were ripped out of my life like that.”

  Colt sat there, not knowing what to say. He was afraid that if he opened his mouth
he’d start sobbing, and that was the last thing he wanted to do.

  “I tell you what,” Oz said as a smile crept across his lips. “I can’t bring your parents back, but I may be able to do the next best thing.”

  :: CHAPTER 10 ::

  Colt sat in what looked like a cross between a dental chair and a medieval torture device.

  “You’re sure those are necessary?” he asked, trying not to panic as the lab technician cinched a series of straps across his arms, legs, and chest.

  “It’s just a precaution.” The technician was tall and thin, with skin the color of milk chocolate, a shaved head, and the kind of smile that could put people at ease. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working with Colt.

  As the technician checked the recording equipment, Colt wondered why he had let Oz talk him into this. CHAOS had patented an extraordinary technology that allowed them to extract human memories like a video recorder, complete with moving images and sound. Oz thought it would be a great way for Colt to capture important moments spent with his parents. That way he’d have access to them whenever he felt lonely.

  It was a nice gesture, and Colt knew that Oz meant well, but he had been through this before. Thomas Richmond, a CHAOS agent, had visited Grandpa’s house not long after Colt moved to Arizona. He was hoping that some of Colt’s memories would help identify the insider who had tipped off Colt’s mom about Trident Biotech’s mind-control program. When it was over, Colt had felt violated—like someone had recorded his innermost secrets. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go through that again.

  “I’m not trying to scare you or anything, but this is definitely going to hurt,” the technician said as he fitted Colt with a series of sensors on his temples, forehead, and the back of his neck.

  Colt closed his eyes and nodded, acknowledging that he had been fairly warned. “Do you have a name?”

  “It’s Tyreke,” the technician said. “Tyreke Davis.”

  “I’m Colt.”

  “Yeah, Oz told me,” he said, the smile never leaving his face. “So is it true? Is your granddad really the Phantom Flyer?”

  “That’s what people say.”

  “You know, I still have some of my comic books from when I was a kid.”

  “Get me out of here alive and I’ll have my grandpa sign them for you.”

  “For real? My pops won’t believe that when I tell him.” Tyreke walked over to check the heart monitor, and then a machine with a series of dials and levers. “All right,” he said. “This is your last chance to back out.”

  “I’m good,” Colt said through gritted teeth, already anticipating the pain.

  Tyreke flipped a series of switches, and the room filled with a loud buzzing sound. “Careful now. This is the worst part.” He flipped another switch, and Colt felt a series of needles pierce his flesh under the sensors. His back arched as a wave of pain swept throughout his nervous system. Then his jaw clenched, and for a moment it felt like his body had gone into spasms.

  Colt forced his eyes open to watch as a series of disjointed images flashed across a bank of monitors on the far wall. He could taste the saltiness of blood as he bit down on his tongue. Then the pain ended as quickly as it had begun, and he felt his body relax.

  “You did great,” Tyreke said as his fingers moved to unfasten the straps, but Colt noticed a shift in his mood. His smile was gone, and his eyes kept roving across the room like he was waiting for someone to jump out and grab them.

  “How long did that take?”

  “About five minutes, maybe less.” Tyreke held what looked like an external hard drive. “I have special instructions to give you the master recording. You can watch it here or back at your place. Either way, it’s yours to do with whatever you want.”

  “That thing has my actual memories?”

  “Yeah, but you have to remember something. It doesn’t mean any of it took place.”

  Colt frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  “Your brain is filled with images that reflect reality the way you remember it. But let’s say you witness an old lady getting mugged, and you fill out a police report. As far as you can remember, the guy who stole her purse was wearing a Yankees hat. But here’s the thing—another witness swears it was a Red Sox hat. So who’s right?”

  “Couldn’t you extract our memories and find out?”

  “We could, but it wouldn’t matter. Your version of the memory will trump facts every time.”

  Colt’s eyes lit with understanding. “Meaning that no matter what, my recorded memory will still show the guy in a Yankees cap, even if the other witness was right.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then how will I know what’s real?”

  “The parts that make you smile? Those are real. You can go ahead and delete the rest.” Tyreke turned the hard drive over in his hands, and for a moment it looked like he was going to hand it to Colt. His smile disappeared, and he looked over his shoulder. “I only caught a glimpse of it, but one of your memories nearly sent you into cardiac arrest.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “How old are you, sixteen?”

  Colt nodded.

  “That shouldn’t happen to someone your age, which means whatever it was, it was something crazy.” He started to say something else, then stopped and slipped the hard drive into Colt’s hand. “When something like that happens, we’re supposed to log it and turn the recording over to the suits up top. But this meeting? It didn’t happen. You catch me?”

  “Not really.”

  “I did this as a favor because Oz is a cool cat—and it doesn’t hurt that he’s the director’s son. He wanted me to take care of you, and I’m going to do that. But if this blows up in my face, I don’t get fired—they send me to a labor camp in Siberia and then erase me from existence. My mom won’t even remember that she had a son.”

  “So now what?” Colt had a sudden urge to be anywhere other than the lab.

  Tyreke wrote something on a sheet of paper, folded it, and then handed it to Colt. “I know you came here hoping to capture a few memories of your folks, but you might want to start with this sequence first.” Colt sat alone in the viewing room down the hall from the lab while Oz and Danielle waited in the reception area. He wasn’t sure that he was ready for whatever Tyreke had captured with the memory recorder, but he knew that he had to watch. He unfolded the paper and found a series of numbers separated by colons, and he entered them into the playback system.

  The screen flickered to life, showing Colt when he was six years old. He was sitting on an examining table in a small room with no windows. His parents were there, and so was Grandpa. It wasn’t long before the door opened and a man wearing surgical scrubs with a CHAOS insignia over the chest walked in. He was short and a bit overweight, with thick arms covered in the same black hair that sprouted from his ears and the back of his collar.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said, shaking Grandpa’s hand. He did the same with Colt’s dad, but his mom just nodded, her eyes focused on the floor instead of the doctor. The doctor smiled as he scruffed Colt’s hair as though they had known each other for years. “So how have you been?”

  “Okay, I guess,” Colt said with a shrug.

  “Do you know why you’re here today?”

  “Because you want to stick me with more needles?”

  “Not this time,” the doctor said with a broad grin. “I don’t know how many people we’ve tested since this program began, but it’s somewhere north of ten thousand. Each test has been negative, and to be honest, I didn’t think that I’d see a match in my lifetime. In fact, I wasn’t sure we’d ever get a match. Finding the right donor for a bone marrow transplant is hard enough, and that’s between individuals who are the same species. Yet here we’ve been trying to find a human capable of hosting alien DNA. Do you know the odds for something like that to succeed? They’re practically nonexistent.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Colt’s mom said as his dad put his arm around her.
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  “Colonel,” the doctor said, turning to Grandpa, “you helped start this journey almost sixty years ago, and I’m very proud to inform you that your grandson’s DNA has successfully merged with a blood sample taken from one of the Thule. In fact, we’ve already received clearance to start the next stage of testing.”

  “He’s my son, not some lab rat!” Colt’s mom placed her hands protectively over his shoulders.

  The doctor cleared his throat. “I understand that, ma’am,” he said. “But your son? He’s a miracle—an honest-to-goodness gift from above. And if everything progresses as we think it will, he could be the one to save the planet from those lizard men.”

  :: CHAPTER 11 ::

  Colt was in a daze as he left the lab, unsure what to think. He knew that Oz and Danielle wanted to hear about the memories he recorded, but that was the last thing he wanted to talk about. He figured that they must have seen how upset he was, or maybe they didn’t. Either way, he was thankful that they left him alone.

  He sat in the backseat of the Jeep, looking at his hands as though they belonged to someone else. Was alien blood actually coursing through his body, or had the memories he watched been altered? Maybe, Colt thought, he had read about someone getting injected with alien DNA in a comic book or seen it in a movie. There had to be a logical explanation, because there was no way that the government was experimenting on kids.

  He had Oz drop him off at Grandpa’s house, where he ended up in front of the mirror, pulling at the skin on his face. As he checked his teeth and his ears, he wondered if it was some kind of mask hiding his true form underneath, but he didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.

  While he was in the bathroom, he heard the back door open up as Grandpa walked in and plopped a bag of groceries on the countertop. Colt felt an anger rise inside of him. If those memories were real, it meant that Grandpa knew all along—and that he never said a word. How could he keep a secret like that? Colt wanted to shout, to punch something, but he settled for splashing cold water over his face.