Argent Glass

Chapter 19 - Scale - Andrew

"It's possible she just ran away."

"And it's possible she was abducted by the government for reproduction if that's your only reasoning," Evan replied with a roll of his eyes. "Look, people disappear at a rate of something like 3,000 people a day, most of them kids and teenagers."

"She wasn't a teenager," Andrew muttered.

"No, she was a twenty-something scientist. My point is, it wouldn't be that hard for the government to cash in on all the disappearances."

"Her parents told the police she'd done this before. She went off to Italy without telling anyone."

"I know. Can we just drop Katie Scott for a minute? She's a high profile case because she comes from a small southwestern town, won that big-time fellowship award, and came back to her same small town as a know-it-all scientist. First one in the family to earn a degree and blah blah blah. She probably wasn't abducted by the government. Or aliens. I can agree with that."

"Then what's your point?"

"What's my point? Have you been listening to me at all? My point is that all these teenagers going missing might have been kidnapped for science being conducted by the government."

"All of them?" Andrew stopped and uncapped his water. The bottle was getting low. Evan kept walking. "You should have a drink of water."

"I'm fine." He stalked on ahead while Andrew dropped his pack in the shade of a boulder and sat down. He wouldn't go far. He was probably already turning around.

Alerted by feet running from the direction they had just come, Andrew pulled his pack behind the rock. Another hiker rounded the bend. Holding his hat on his head, the hiker wildly searched for something but suddenly slowed to an ambling walk. Andrew looked for Evan, but he had passed an outcropping of rocks.

A moment later, a soldier on an ATV rode up behind the hiker and parked. Andrew strained to hear what was being said by the two men. Only the words "restricted area" carried to him, but he could see the tense bearing of the soldier and he sensed the calm demeanor of the hiker was feigned by the overly casual way he stood after having been running.

Andrew watched the hiker hold something out to the soldier and suddenly they were wrestling. The soldier put the man in a chokehold, his muscles straining against the fabric of his shirt until the other man's face took on an ugly purple hue. The hiker swung the soldier's knife and wrenched the gun from the ATV. A fraction of a second later, a shot rang out and the man dropped to the ground.

Andrew couldn't breathe. The butterflies in his stomach metamorphosed into hornets as shock turned to horror. His heart pounded so hard against his shirt, it was deafening. Pulling back out of sight, he closed his eyes and clasped his head between his shaking hands. His breathing returned in fits and gasps, and his hands flew to his mouth to silence his gulps of air.

"Move," he commanded himself. He took a quick look to see what was happening in the canyon. The soldier was doing something in the storage compartment on the back of the ATV.

Keeping low to the ground, he crawled through the canyon away from the two men, all the while waiting for a bullet to pierce his body. Passing the bend, he stood up and took wider steps to put distance between himself and the man with the gun. He moved as silently as he could to keep his footsteps from being heard.

Evan was running back toward him. "Was that a gunshot?"

Andrew spun him around. "Run!"

Together they sprinted toward the mouth of the canyon. Evan had the advantage of longer legs, but Andrew was in better shape from all the hiking he had done with his mom over the summer, so they kept pace until they reached the open area outside the canyon. They sprinted for the next rocky crag, scrambling to a halt and balancing at the edge of a sudden eight-foot drop. Andrew caught Evan's arm and hauled him back from the edge.