Monster (Gone 7)

They took a breath, then all at once piled out of the car. Cruz pulled a shovel from the back and raced to catch up to Shade, who was galloping ahead.

The ground was plowed into furrows that tripped Cruz repeatedly. And, too, there were the six-foot-tall stalks that snatched at her with Velcro talons and slapped her with heavy ears of corn. They came to a halt when they reached the first charred and broken cornstalks and advanced more slowly after that, as if sneaking up on someone. And suddenly, there it was, looking for all the world as if a rogue tractor had come through dragging a narrow plow. The rich, black earth was gouged, with a mound of ejected clods marking the spot where the rock went subterranean.

“There! Dig there!” Shade ordered.

Cr

uz dug. And dug. She uncovered a narrow tunnel like something a hefty gopher might have made. “Go that direction another ten feet,” Shade instructed, her voice ragged, in tenuous control of her emotions.

And then, as Cruz slammed the blade into the ground, they heard the metallic impact of steel shovel on rock.

They looked at each other, Shade and Cruz, and time seemed to stop.

“Okay,” Shade said at last, voice quavering. “Dig it up.”

It was gray, the color of pencil lead, not much bigger than a softball, but more oval than round, with a pitted surface. To every appearance a regular unimportant meteorite, like thousands that impact the Earth every day. Shade flicked the flashlight off, and they were rewarded by a faint but vaguely sinister glow, slightly green. Shade reached for it.

“Don’t touch it!” Cruz cried. “It’s probably hot!”

“Actually, it’s more likely to be cold. It was a long, long time in absolute zero, and it spent just seconds in the atmosphere.”

Cruz shook her head in rueful amusement: Of course Shade would have thought of that. Of course.

Shade touched the rock—touched it with the solemnity of a medieval Christian pilgrim touching a piece of the true cross. Shade ran her fingers over it, feeling its contours, gently exploring the pits and cracks, brushing dirt away almost tenderly.

“This is it,” she said. “I can’t believe . . .”

“We should probably get out of here,” Cruz said nervously. She carried the rock on the shovel blade back to the Subaru while Shade used cornstalks to obscure their tracks.

Cruz set the rock in the back of the car. Then, feeling transgressive, feeling that it wasn’t her right somehow, Cruz touched it, touched an object that had traveled an unimaginable distance. It was just a rock, really, just a faintly glowing rock. But it had a power Cruz could feel, an attraction.

Frodo and the Ring, Cruz thought, and laughed nervously at the comparison, because the thought came with an extra question: Is Shade Frodo? Or is she Gollum?

“It won’t take Sixty-Six long to get here,” Shade said, brushing dirt from the knees of her jeans and kicking the clods from her shoes. “We can’t hide the fact we beat them to it, but we can confuse the scene a little, at least.”

“Not much we can do about the tire tracks, I guess.”

“No,” Shade agreed. “But as soon as we get back to the interstate, we’re going to cut a divot into one of the tires. Just enough that if anyone ever checks, it won’t be a perfect match.”

“Have you been watching CSI reruns?”

“I may be a criminal mastermind.”

Cruz said nothing.

Shade started the engine. And then they stopped for just a moment, staring at each other with solemn expressions.

“Wow. We did it,” Cruz said.

“Well,” Shade said, “we did the first part of it.”

CHAPTER 4

Bad Start, Worse Finish

THE SUBARU DRIVEN by Shade and Cruz pulled away and the young man climbed from the cabin of the parked green John Deere combine where he’d been waiting and watching.

Justin DeVeere turned to his girlfriend, Erin O’Day, and as he gave her his hand to help her climb down—not easy in the entirely inappropriate, skintight dress she was wearing—he said, “I wonder if I should have killed them and taken it.”