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“So we
can
go.” She looked at the others: Lila, Meyer’s son, Trevor, and … he didn’t know who the Indian kid was, but he’d find out soon enough. And, yes, the slippery son of a bitch really had brought his ex-wife to share the bunker with his current one. There was no question that was Heather Hawthorne in the corner. And to think: he’d laughed when Benjamin had said Cameron and his crew might run into her. Apparently, Meyer had giant balls outside the boardroom, too.
 

“Of course. But there’s no need to. This is your house, not ours.”
 

Piper blinked. He may as well have been speaking Chinese.
 

Cameron sighed. “Christopher, give her a wet towel or something. Lila too.”

Christopher, duly chastised, entered the kitchen. The faucet ran. Good news; if the water was running as hard as it sounded, that meant the pump was probably running. Maybe there really
hadn
’
t
been too much damage. He hadn’t been entirely comfortable with the “gasoline and cherry bomb” plan, but Terrence had assured him that any bunker worth its salt would have a door between a gas generator and its supply and the rest of the living space … and that because it was so critical, it would have a good fire suppression system that would run even with the power on reserve. Cameron hadn’t been in a position to argue. He’d been pretending to be a crazy, violent kid for Morgan’s benefit — Morgan, who’d already staked his claim on the place and made himself feared prior to Cameron’s arrival.
 

Christopher returned with two towels. He handed one to Piper and the other to Lila, who snatched hers like a nervous animal. Piper accepted hers with a smile and a grateful nod. If not for all the Morgan-gore on her face, neck, and clothes, she would have looked adorably shy.
 

“How do you know our names?” Piper asked.
 

“Have a seat. Please.” Cameron gestured toward the couch and looked around at his crew. “And you guys — put the guns down and take five. You look like a goon squad.”
 

Vincent shrugged then sat. Under his impressive body and demeanor, the small wooden chair looked miniature. Christopher didn’t seem willing to go far enough to grab a chair and half sat on a cabinet against the wall. Dan remained standing because Dan — though Cameron loved him like a father — was a son of a bitch. Terrence had already crossed his arms and leaned back, doing his best James Dean.
 

Piper waited for Cameron to sit in the living room’s least comfortable chair before nodding an okay to the others. The kids flanked her, staring hard at Cameron. Heather sat on the couch’s arm. The Indian kid seemed put-out as he came to the couch and found himself excluded. Pouting, he sat on the love seat alone.
 

“I know your names because we came here to find you. Morgan … ”
 
Cameron stopped, looking down at the floor’s bleeding meat, wondering if they could all ignore it for now or if someone should drag it away — or at least put down a few paper towels. “Morgan was here to take the bunker, and he’d already established himself when we showed up, so it was either fight him outright or pretend to ally with him and double-cross him later. We took the coward’s way out, but the one least likely to get anyone killed — other than Morgan anyway. But he wasn’t here because of Meyer or because of you. He wanted what was in the bunker, and you were in the way.”
 

“How did you even know it was here?” Piper asked.

“Me? I assumed there had to be something below ground. Well … ” Cameron shifted. That wasn’t actually true. “I was
told
,” he corrected, “because
someone
else
assumed. We found the house empty, and it didn’t make sense that Meyer would have come alone then lived in an open house without even boarding windows. But you didn’t fool Morgan for a second. He knew right away that there was more to this house than others were seeing. This house had no basement, no crawlspace … but it did have all sorts of strange, survivalist preparations in place. Windmills on the hill. A solar farm. He had everyone out there scared of him.”

“Not everyone,” Christopher said.

Cameron scratched his cheek, nodding in agreement.

“Christopher was with Morgan when we arrived, but
he
came to Vincent. Said he didn’t trust Morgan. They joined up on the road, but then Morgan started to get crazier. Threatening.”
 

“You were looking for us,” Piper said.

Cameron nodded.
 

“And that’s supposed to make us trust you. To
not
think you might be worth being afraid of.”
 

“We don’t want to hurt you.”
 

“But you know all about us. You know who this house belonged to. You knew enough about Meyer that you ‘assumed’ there’d be a bunker here. You didn’t come to take what we had, but still the best way to get in was to team up with … with
him
.” Piper looked at Morgan’s body, clearly disgusted.
 

“I understand that this has been rough.” Whether Cameron meant today’s events or the totality of their stay in the bunker, he wasn’t sure.

“All I know,” Piper said, “is that you broke through my front door. That you blew up our generator and started a fire. And that I’m supposed to
trust
you just because you shot a man in the middle of my living room.”

Cameron looked helplessly up at Dan.
 

“Tell her about The Nine,” Dan suggested.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Trevor watched the man who’d killed the group’s leader:
Christopher
. Even wedged between his mother and Piper (and holy shit was
that
uncomfortable; her boob was pressed into his arm to the nipple, and even after a siege he’d managed to pop a boner), Trevor was weighing his chances. If needed, could he squeeze himself out of his tit-pressed position, leap for someone’s gun, and gain an advantage?
 

Probably not. But he didn’t trust these men any more than Piper seemed to. It was awesome how obviously she wasn’t buying into a word of their bullshit. Maybe they really
were
the good guys, and maybe they weren’t. But after seeing one man’s brains darken the far wall, it was the kind of claim anyone would be stupid to take on faith.

“Morgan was right. Your husband was taken into one of the ships,” Cameron said.

“But how could you possibly know that?” Piper asked.
 

He sighed as if deciding to omit a complicated piece of the story. “I know people who have studied this stuff all their lives. There’s a lab I’ll tell you about later, still very operational. And they have … well …
resources
.” Cameron looked again at the broad man with the curly hair and bad skin:
Dan
. “Anyway, you know about the big wave of abductions that came right after the ships arrived, right?”
 

“That was our favorite TV show,” interrupted Trevor’s mother, her wiseass quips still intact after the quarrel. “Except for the part where they fucked up Moscow. That was clearly the network suits interfering with the artistry to please viewers.”

Cameron turned from Piper. “Heather, right?”
 

“Dickhead, right?” Heather answered.
 

“Mom … ” Trevor said.
 

“We know there were abductions,” Cameron turned to Piper, ignoring Trevor and his mother. “At first, they were just rumors, then they — the people I mentioned — started to receive footage from all over the world from a network of sources. But they never knew for sure about Meyer.”
 

“We figure he’ll be back any minute,” Heather said. “He ran out for some smokes.”
 

Cameron gave Trevor’s mother more of a smiling acknowledgement than she probably deserved then spoke to Piper.
 

“According to our stats, there have been just shy of twenty thousand worldwide abductions. Some of that is government information accessed through leaked channels, some is NASA, again through leaked channels. Plenty is via an informal network of nerds that have managed to keep a primitive version of their own private Internet up and running. But there’s good reason to believe the figures are accurate, down to the person, excepting very recent activity and unreported or unobserved phenomena. But that last bit is hard to say because communications have been spotty at best, and even harder to keep an eye on since we joined Morgan and had to start playing our parts. It’s been weeks since I’ve managed to raise anything reliable about the overall state of the nation.”
 

“‘Raise’?” Piper said.
 

Cameron nodded. “There are still a few open communication frequencies. I can’t take credit for that; Terrence found them.” He tipped his head toward the cool black man still leaning against the wall.
 

“The open frequencies are mostly noise,” Cameron went on, “but we’ve also heard what sounds like military chatter.”
 

“Military!” Trevor didn’t like drawing attention to himself, but the word left him almost involuntarily. He’d forgotten about the military. In movies (even a few of his father’s films, come to think of it), the army always managed to shoot down the big, bad alien ships. The fact that they were still around and scheming felt strangely encouraging.
 

Cameron nodded. “It’s highly encoded. I can’t even guess at the encryption or what they’re saying. Might not even
be
military. Point is, the specificity of the open frequencies tells us it’s probably intentional. The fact that most frequencies are blocked and only a few are open, I mean.”
 

“‘Blocked’?” said Piper.

“By the ships,” said Terrence. Trevor looked him over. The man was dressed in fitting jeans, boots, and a black leather vest.
 

“But why would a few channels be open?”
 

“If I had to guess,” said Terrence in his deep, syrupy voice, “it’s to create a bottleneck. A way to force communication into a few channels so they can easily monitor it.”
 

“The government?”
 

“The other guys,” Terrence corrected, pointing up.
 

Cameron looked at the TV. “When did your news stop broadcasting here?”
 

“About six weeks ago,” Piper said.
 

Cameron nodded. “Black Tuesday. It happened everywhere on the same day. But at that time, people who’d been taken were being returned, right?”
 

Trevor remembered that quite plainly. That had given them hope. There had always been the possibility that Dad had walked away, that he’d fallen into a hole and died, or that he’d been killed by bandits. But there was an equal possibility that he’d been taken, and when the first abductees had begun appearing back at home — altered somehow, strange, maybe a little frightening — that had made them all think Dad might return.
 

“Yes,” Piper said.

“What you may not know is that abductee returns have slowed over time. At first, it was thousands of people coming back per week, worldwide. Then hundreds then dozens. Finally, just single digits. As far as we can tell, it slowed further after Black Tuesday. Kind of like listening for your microwave popcorn to finish popping.”
 

Trevor said, “What’s a microwave?”
 

Heather rolled her eyes. “Kids these days.”
 

“My dad had one.” Cameron smiled at Trevor, and Trevor had to remind himself that these men had yet to prove they could be trusted. “They used to be a popular way to cook food. We used to make popcorn in ours, before we watched movies. You’d put this flat bag in and set the timer for a minute. At first, the popcorn kernels would pop really fast, but eventually they’d slow down, and you’d hear a cluster of new pops, then just one or two every other second. The returning abductees were like that. Right up until three weeks ago.”
 

“What happened three weeks ago?” said Piper.
 

“Three weeks ago, I was on my way to Moab, Utah. Me and Dan. To the facility I told you about. A lab. I had one of the communication channels open to Moab — well, not ‘
to Moab
’
;
you can’t connect point to point anymore, so far as we can tell — but we’d agreed to use the same public frequency, knowing everyone could hear us and being careful what we said. I got this message, telling me to meet up with Vincent and Terrence and come here, to a private residence in Vail instead.”
 

“But the abductions … ”
 

“That’s when they stopped. That’s why I came here.”
 

Piper shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
 

“Mrs. Dempsey—”

“Piper.”
 

“
Piper,
” Cameron said, “it’s been three weeks since the last abductee was returned. But as it turns out, it’s not just
most
of them who’ve come home. As of the day I’m talking about — and this still true today, unless something has changed in the last handful of hours —
all
of them had been returned. All but nine.”

Trevor looked from Cameron to Piper. He said, “
Nine?
”