Deputy Ruby took another step toward Alpha, spit a gob of tobacco to the side, and placed his hand on his holster. “Who are you?” he asked.

“It doesn’t—ah—matter,” Alpha said, and with a quick movement of his bony finger, he touched the cop’s temple lightly.

Deputy Ruby collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been snipped, and the back of his head banged onto the pavement. His eyes remained wide open, never again to blink.

“Motherf—” Suzanne exclaimed, starting to charge him, but Tico, calling on his defensive-back instincts, tackled her from behind several feet short of Alpha, whose exposed teeth gave the impression of a perpetual sick grin. He extended his lethal finger toward Suzanne on the ground but then turned toward me.

“H-how did you do that to Deputy Ruby?” I stammered.

“He—ah—belongs to Ishango,” Alpha explained with all the excitement of a too-long-tenured history professor. “A Phase II specimen with—ah—controls implanted that I can activate.”

Jordan and I shot each other a quick glance. So Ishango was implanting humans with the kinds of controls that she’d put into animals.

“What do you want?” Jordan demanded. “What does Ishango want?”

“You,” he said. “Your implant was dislodged. We must bring you back under authority.”

Jordan looked at me and then his friends and Jessica. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

Alpha smiled, his long teeth showing grotesquely through his cheek.

“We already did.”

CHAPTER 42

Jordan

BY NOW THE rest of Jessica’s family had come out of her house, and others in the neighborhood were approaching as well. This was not good. On one hand, more witnesses would be helpful—everyone needed to know what was going on. On the other, there was no guarantee that any of these people would survive Alpha. I kept my eyes focused on the disfigured scientist but saw two familiar figures approaching from my right: Luke Bowman, hobbling on crutches, and Troy Cameron, his jaw still wired shut. Luke smirk-nodded at me, and he flipped me a subtle bird with his hand by his waist, but his expression turned stony when he saw glass-eyed Deputy Ruby lying in the road.

“Maggie, everyone, leave,” I said without losing eye contact with Alpha.

No one moved. If anything, they closed in even more.

Everything got quiet, so quiet that the car doors’ click was extra loud. The two men in suits—the one with the chin scar and the one with the gold ring—emerged from the black SUV’s back seats and stepped up to flank Alpha.

“Nice to see you again, gentlemen,” I said, then shot a glance over at Luke. “Your ‘recruiters.’”

He looked befuddled.

Alpha and the suits took a couple of menacing steps toward me.

“Everyone, go!” I ordered. “Maggie, go get help!”

Alpha let out a wheezy laugh. “There’s no—ah—help for her to get, Rho. Don’t you understand?”

What I understood was that I needed to get these innocent people away from these psychos. I crouched low in a ready stance, thinking I could keep them occupied while Maggie and everyone else fled.