Infestation Read online

  For Alan, who has helped dig us out of a few plot holes over the years and will undoubtedly do so again in the stories still to come. Thank you.

  PROLOGUE { THREE DAYS EARLIER }

  Blake woke to the most horrible screaming he’d ever heard. He lay frozen on his cot as it went on and on, high-pitched and awful.

  Heed the warning cry of the banshee, his grandmother used to say. They wail when someone you love is about to die. Eyes red and swollen from endless weeping, long streaming hair, and bony hands extending with nails curved and dirty. Blake could picture it perfectly.

  He hadn’t been there the night his grandmother finally passed away, but his father had told him stories about it. About the spirits that had surrounded the house, their sorrow loud and keening, and how his own father had run outside with a shovel in one hand, a cross in the other, trying to keep them away. It hadn’t worked, of course. And in the end, the banshees had taken him, too.

  Blake clutched at his thin blanket as if it might protect him. But gradually he realized it wasn’t banshees at all. The goats were shrieking.

  His uncle kept nine of them in a large pen outside his yurt, and every evening he took them out for a hike to settle them down before bed. Blake had been staying with him for the past three weeks, and they had been peacefully quiet every night before this. Why would they be so agitated now?

  “Uncle Gary?” he whispered. His uncle was lying on his own bed on the other side of the yurt. Blake could see the gleaming white of his wide-open eyes, but he didn’t answer.

  Another goat bleated, high-pitched and terrified. Blake recognized that voice: Waffles. His favorite. Every morning the goat would trot up to him and put his little goat head against Blake’s shoulder until he scratched him behind the ears.

  Blake sat up and swung his legs over the side of his cot. He couldn’t stay here and do nothing. Not if Waffles was in danger.

  “Wait,” his uncle croaked, and Blake froze, his hand on the door latch. “I can’t protect you if you go out into the night. When the sun sets, the forest belongs to them.”

  “Them, who?”

  “The other things that live here.”

  Blake’s heart pounded, his mouth dry. He thought of his nice, safe, solid house with its thick walls and firmly locked doors, and wished he’d never run away. Tomorrow he was going back home. Immediately. “What other things?” he asked.

  His uncle didn’t answer.

  Waffles shrieked once more. Blake couldn’t take it. “We have to help the goats.” He pulled open the door and slipped outside, half hoping his uncle would try to stop him again.

  But he didn’t.

  It was dark here in the middle of the Watchful Woods. His uncle didn’t like people—he barely tolerated Blake—so he’d set up his yurt as far from the streets and houses of Whispering Pines as he could. The tall pines loomed overhead, patches of brilliant starlight visible between each treetop. They gave off just enough light to see the outline of the goat pen a few yards away, but not enough to see the goats in it. Blake could hear them, though, bleating in sharp, anguished tones.

  He hesitated, the cool night wrapping around him. There were no crickets chirping, no owls hooting, nothing but the goats. It felt wrong, like the rest of the night had been artificially muted by something that didn’t belong here. An unnatural force worse than any banshee.

  Blake shivered, wishing he had grabbed a jacket and a flashlight, and maybe a weapon. He thought of his friend Jeremy and what had happened to him just weeks ago, and almost sprinted back to the yurt. But in the end, it was just a glorified tent. If there were something truly dangerous out here, he doubted its walls would protect him, no matter what deals his uncle had made. So he forced himself to walk toward the goat pen, the grass whispering against his bare feet.

  When he reached the gate, he could just make out the goats all huddled together in the nearest corner like one trembling mass.

  All except one.

  Waffles lay motionless on his side in the middle of the pen, the white star-shaped fur on the top of his head almost glowing against the dark. The night breeze picked up, and beneath the ever-present smell of goats Blake caught a whiff of fresh-turned earth and the metallic tang of blood. The scent of new death.

  He made a small involuntary sound, his fingers trembling as he yanked back the lock on the gate and pulled it open. He stepped inside, careful to shut the gate behind him, and moved closer, still staring at that sad crumpled form lying in the starlight like one of his baby sister’s abandoned toys. Closer still, and he noticed the scuff marks in the dirt, like the goat had been dragged.

  And then something moved next to Waffles. Quick, furtive movement, like a spider scuttling out of the light, only with way too many legs—hundreds of legs—and a long body a few feet in length and thick as his waist, all of it the same color as the night-washed grass. As it crawled around the goat, it made little clicking noises like a dog’s nails against a hardwood floor.

  Terror trickled down Blake’s spine, icy and numb. He put a hand over his mouth, choking down a scream.

  The thing stopped moving abruptly, all of those legs still. Two long stalks on the top of its head trembled in the breeze, flicking forward and back and then pointing right at him.

  Blake was very aware of the beating of his heart, the hitching sound of his breath, the noise of the other goats. He could feel a lock of hair sliding against the side of his face, the rough texture of the cropped grass under his feet, his pajama bottoms, baggy and comfortable. And the absolute silence of that impossibly large insect, the weight of its full attention bearing down on him.

  Abruptly its torso bunched, and it sprang forward, all of its legs moving furiously fast as it sprinted right at him.

  Blake screamed and ran blindly across the pen, scrabbling at the gate, dragging it open.

  He wasn’t fast enough.

  It hit him in the back of the knees, knocking him sideways into the grass, its tiny legs already moving over him, pinning him down. It reared up, half its body lifting like the striking head of a cobra, and Blake glimpsed something underneath that looked almost like a face, with dark, soulless eyes and slits for a nose, and where a mouth should have been, a pair of serrated mandibles dripping some strange yellowish liquid that gleamed in the starlight.

  He realized he was still screaming but couldn’t stop, the sound of his own terror echoing in his ears, sharper and more desperate than any goat cry as that insectlike head lowered over him, those mandibles clicking, extending—

  Crack!

  The creature flew off him and landed on the ground with a sickening crunch. Blake looked up. His uncle stood over him, panting, the blade of his axe glittering. Blake swallowed. “Is it dead?”

  “I think—”

  The thing shuddered suddenly and twisted around, sinewy as a snake, those tiny legs quivering, the torso bunching.

  Uncle Gary leaped forward and brought the axe back down, cutting it in half. The legs kicked a few more times and then went still. “Now it is,” he said.

  Blake nodded, unable to look away as more of that strange yellowish liquid oozed out of the neck cavity to puddle against the ground. His stomach roiled in sickening waves, and he could still feel the scuttling of all those legs up and down his body. “Is that one of them?” he gasped. “One of the things that live in the forest?”

  His uncle pulled his axe up and wiped it on the grass. “Nope. That is something else. Something that has no business being here.” He looked past the corpse. The lines of his face trembled, then hardened, and he lifted his axe and slung it over his shoulder. “The things that live here know better than to mess with my goats.”

  Blake tore his gaze from the corpse and glanced b
ack at Waffles. He wanted to cry, but he felt too drained inside, like a wrung-out sponge.

  His uncle sighed. “We should probably tell someone about this.”

  “Like who?” Blake knew his uncle didn’t like talking to anyone who wasn’t family. And even then, he wasn’t thrilled about it.

  “I’ll have to think on that,” his uncle said at last. “But this thing, whatever it is and whatever it means, is beyond my pay grade.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, suddenly looking as exhausted as Blake felt. “I’ll have to get myself another goat too.”

  Blake felt like it wasn’t the time to talk about that. Not now, not when Waffles was still right there. He climbed to his feet and walked over to the small animal, then knelt and ran his hands down his soft, warm fur.

  The chest rose and fell beneath his trembling fingers.

  Blake caught his breath, then leaned in closer. Hope beat inside him like a second heart. “Uncle Gary? I think… I think Waffles is alive.”

  “What?” His uncle hurried over and crouched next to him. He laid the axe down and ran his hands over the goat, then looked up, surprised. “He is. He is!” He grinned, wide and triumphant.

  Blake grinned back, the horrors of the night already slipping away, the details fading like a bad dream. And then he noticed movement behind his uncle, past the corpse and outside the edge of the goat pen. Something else long and insectlike scuttling quietly back into the night.

  His grin cracked, peeling away like a bad sunburn.

  “What is it?” his uncle asked.

  “I saw…” Blake blinked, but it was gone. Only trees waving gently, their branches glowing softly in the starlight. “Nothing,” he said, and he almost believed it.

  1. RAE

  Rae looked at the barbed-wire fence and the security cameras and knew she had made a huge mistake. This was exactly the kind of place she needed to avoid. The kind of place her dad used to work at, all concrete walls and secrecy. A place that would be easy to enter but almost impossible to escape.

  A large sign out front proclaimed, GREEN ON! BECAUSE IT’S NEVER TOO SOON TO THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE.

  Rae eyed the steel-reinforced doors, and the guard standing just outside them. He looked back, his face as impassive as the wall next to him. He reminded her of the men who had stormed her old house and taken all of her dad’s things. He had that same air of efficient indifference; he would do his job and do it well, and anyone who got in the way would be squashed without a second’s thought.

  Her dad was the reason she was here now, she reminded herself. All of this was for him. A year ago, he’d gone into work and never come out again. He’d been an engineer doing some kind of secret contract work on a project called Operation Gray Bird. And he’d discovered something unusual. Something he hadn’t been supposed to see. Proof of extraterrestrial life.

  Rae was sure that was the reason her dad was missing—he’d been abducted by the government and was being held somewhere now against his will. She had sworn that she would find him, but until recently, she hadn’t had any leads. Especially since her mom had moved her and her older sister across the country from their home in northern California to this strange little Connecticut town.

  But everything changed last week when Patrick, the senior consultant at Green On!, had told her who assigned her dad’s contract. He was working on a new energy source. Who do you think would be interested in something like that? Patrick had claimed he didn’t have all the details yet, but he promised that if she took part in his company’s internship program, he’d find them out.

  Rae didn’t trust Patrick, with his too-handsome face and his too-fancy suits and his tendency to show up at exactly the most convenient time. But she believed him when he said he could get her information about her dad’s involvement with Green On!. Which meant she needed to follow through on her end of the bargain, even if every instinct told her not to go into this place.

  The six other kids from her school all trotted obediently through the doors. Only the last one hesitated, a short girl with dark hair and a humongous backpack—Rae’s best friend, Vivienne. “Rae-Rae, you coming?” she called.

  Rae glanced at the camera lurking just above the open doors. The light on top of it blinked like a single bloody eye, and she imagined Patrick watching her. It was too late to back out now.

  She pasted on a shaky smile. “I’m just admiring the view.”

  Vivienne laughed. “This”—she waved her hand at the building—“looks like an ugly brick, I know. But it’s nice inside.”

  Which obviously meant Vivienne had been here before, either to visit her mom, who was the head of the nuclear division at Green On!, or…

  Or when she had started secretly working with Patrick.

  Rae didn’t like to remember that. Still, the truth stared out at her, as large and uncomfortable as Vivienne’s ever-present backpack. Her friend had been the first person in Patrick’s internship program, doing who-knew-what, and she hadn’t said a word about it to Rae until after Rae almost got herself killed by a monster from an alternate dimension. And still she was keeping most of it secret.

  But then, Rae was keeping secrets too.

  The only person she’d been completely honest with was her neighbor, Caden Price. With his dark eyes, messy black hair, and heavy silver jewelry, he was the kind of boy who stood out, even in a weird place like Whispering Pines. And just like her, he’d understood how isolating it was to know a truth that no one else was willing to accept. She’d been able to tell him her secrets, like what really happened to her dad.

  But Caden thought this internship was a terrible idea. He wanted no part of it, or anyone in it. And after Rae decided to join anyway, he had stopped talking to her.

  Rae angrily shoved thoughts of Caden away and followed Vivienne inside, the doors closing behind them with a heavy thump like a cage door slamming shut. She paused just inside the lobby. Vivienne was right; it was nice in here, all bright lights and fancy decorations.

  To her left, the entire wall was floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the Watchful Woods, while to her right sat a long, sleek desk made of black swirling marble. Hung on the wall over it were a series of awards, framed newspaper articles, and large photographs. The floor had white and gold tiles, with several small tables and chairs set up in little clusters across it. As Rae walked farther into the lobby, she realized the shape of each of the tables was meant to represent a different element: a sun, a water droplet, swirly lines that were probably supposed to be wind, and an atom.

  A man wearing a bright green polo shirt with the Green On! logo on the front popped up from behind the desk like a clown out of a jack-in-the-box.

  Rae leaped back, almost falling over Vivienne.

  “Hello, children.” The man gave all of them a condescending smile. “Welcome to Green On! We’re all so glad you get to join us here. Not only are we a cutting-edge energy research facility, but now, also, a daycare. How fun.” He emphasized certain words, drawing them out the same way a person might draw their nails down a chalkboard.

  Rae gritted her teeth, and Vivienne shifted her weight like she wanted to tackle the guy, while the other kids muttered behind them.

  “Doctor Nguyen is in the middle of a major scientific breakthrough, but she’ll still take time out of her very busy schedule to show you around. Because nothing is more important than our little interns.” Another broad, insincere smile. “She’ll be here any minute. Until then, please, make yourselves at home.” He waved a hand at the tables and chairs, and then disappeared again beneath his desk as abruptly as he’d appeared. Rae wondered if there was a door under there or if he was just sitting on the floor, waiting for them to leave.

  “Wow,” Vivienne said. “That was the most passive-aggressive welcome I’ve ever heard.”

  “It was actually kind of impressive.” Rae rolled her shoulders back and forth, then glanced around at the others to see what they thought.

  Besides her and Vivienne
, there were two other seventh graders. One of them Rae knew pretty well: Alyssa Lockett, Vivienne’s other best friend. She stood near the desk, idly reading the awards above it and playing with a lock of her blond hair. Rae hadn’t liked Alyssa at first, but now… now she wasn’t sure how she felt about her. It was hard to dislike someone so sad. Alyssa’s on-again off-again boyfriend, Jeremy, had been found with his eyes missing and his mind zombified, and Alyssa had taken it really hard. Not that Rae could blame her for that. It was horrible and frightening.

  Jeremy had been one of the victims of the Unseeing, a monster that had escaped from an alternate dimension. It had targeted kids, killing one and claiming the eyes of eight others before Rae and Caden sent it back to the place it belonged. Now those kids were being treated by the medical staff of Green On!. For all Rae knew, they might be somewhere in this very building.

  Rae swallowed and turned away from Alyssa. The Unseeing had targeted Rae, too. It had chased her through an empty cabin and cornered her in the basement, and only luck and Caden’s timely arrival had saved her. She dreamed about the Unseeing almost every night and woke up sweating and shaking, huddled in a nest of blankets, and waited until the first hint of dawn filtered through her window so she could relax again. Until the next night.

  Before the Unseeing, she’d believed that supernatural things existed in this world. But it was one thing to believe that and quite another to experience it directly.

  Rae studied the other seventh grader, a tall, lanky boy who stood by the window, staring out at the woods. Even from here she could see the deep half circles under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept in days, and his red hair was almost as messy as Caden’s. He looked… scared. Like he could see something out there beneath the trees, something no one else had noticed.

  Vivienne caught her looking. “That’s Blake Crowley,” she whispered.

  “Are you sure he’s in our grade?” Rae asked. “I’ve never seen him before.” Even though Rae had only started attending Dana S. Middle School earlier this month, she was positive she would have remembered a boy with hair that color and a face that haunted.