Free Contact by Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant Page A

 
    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? ”
    Cameron nodded. “Nine of out twenty thousand abductees remain missing, and have been for more than a month. Meyer — your husband, your father — is one of them. And my friends in Moab feel that those people still gone are somehow significant, not just oversights or loose ends. They matter , Piper. Trevor. And so in our circles, we call them simply ‘The Nine.’”
    Again, Trevor looked at Piper before focusing on Cameron, who now had every nugget of the room’s attention. “What’s so ‘significant’ about these nine people?” he asked.
    “That,” said Cameron, “is what we’re here to find out.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

    “I don’t like it,” Raj said.  
    Lila was sitting at the kitchen table. It was a nice polished wood, surrounded by typical kitchen chairs. It seemed to have been modeled after the home they’d had a dozen years earlier, after her father had made his wealth but before he’d fully extricated himself from mediocrity. Just one more way her father had planned ahead to stave off the madness of confinement: a nice kitchen that was more familiar than luxurious. If Lila