novelraw Chapter 98: Marked
Chapter 98: Marked
"We’ve got company," Lachlan grunted, cutting the Hummer’s headlights across a banked corner before the beam swung back to the road.
Sera looked up. In the rearview: a black SUV easing out from a side street, settling behind them at a courteous distance. It was too close to be random, and too far to be friendly. It might have worked if there were more people on the streets, but with only the two vehicles, everything was all that much more obvious.
The creature inside her stood up and pressed its nose to her ribs.
"How long?" Zubair asked, already rolling the route in his head.
"Since we left the wholesaler," Lachlan said. His hands were loose on the wheel, but his shoulders had that fighter’s readiness.
Elias angled his head just enough to get the angle he wanted through the back glass. "Two in front. Rear cargo area blacked out. Can’t see movement."
"Wolves?" Alexei rumbled, his eyes narrowing on the road in front of them, trying to see an off shoot that they could go.
Sera didn’t answer. The creature inside of her continued to pace back and forth, the talons of her nails flicking in and out as she tried to maintain control.
Lachlan signaled right and didn’t take it just to see if the SUV would twitch or swerve in that direction.
It didn’t.
He took the next left without signaling, coasted a block under stripped billboards, then hooked another left that looked like a mistake. The Hummer’s weight bit into the ice; its tires skidding for just a moment before getting its traction back again.
The SUV followed, casual as a shadow.
"They’re playing polite," Zubair said, eyes on mirrors, windows, rooftops.
"Polite is for church and funerals," Lachlan murmured. "Hold on."
He stitched a pattern through the grid—three turns that would look like wandering to anyone who didn’t know better, then a sudden hook down a lane so narrow the drifts kissed both doors. The Hummer shouldered through like a bull. The SUV hesitated at the mouth and vanished behind snow-blind glass.
"Hard right in two," Elias said softly, already seeing the map he kept in his head.
Lachlan took it. The Hummer slid, caught, straightened. A streetlight stuttered overhead; the bulb hummed and went dead. At the next T-junction he nosed left behind a row of delivery vans gone to sleep under crusted white and idled in their shadow long enough to count twenty heartbeats.
Silence.
"They peeled off," Alexei said, not convinced.
"Gas is currency," Lachlan answered, easing them out. "Maybe they decided we’re expensive."
The creature bent an ear back, unconvinced. Sera watched the mirror until the road behind them settled into a long, empty strip of nothing. The SUV did not reappear.
But then again, none of them had seen the gloved hand that had slipped under the Hummer’s bumper while they were deep inside the wholesaler, palming a coin-sized disc against cold metal until the adhesive took.
They didn’t need to follow them in order to know where they were going. They just had to wait for the Hummer to get there first.
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By the time they rolled into the driveway, the sun had completely disappeared. Clouds full of snow drifted across the sky, blocking out the moon and the stars, but that was fine. Most of the men there didn’t need the light to see anymore. They just weren’t admitting it.
They unloaded fast because it was habit.
Zubair directed traffic in a low voice, positioning sacks and crates where they would make the most sense later. Elias made stacks that would still be neat if someone hit them with a shoulder. Alexei carried with a theatrical sigh and a muttered, "I joined the army to avoid deadlifts," which earned him exactly zero sympathy.
Lachlan, on the other hand, took enough weight that should have needed two men to carry and made it look like gravity worked different for him. Sera shuttled smaller boxes, set out the obviously-found things on the counter (two tins of cocoa, a box of stuffed cookies), and kept the rest of her haul to herself. She couldn’t help but smirk as she thought back to the feeling of the impossible warm of the dark pocket of her space.
The fireplace on the main wall still held the glowing coals from that morning. Lachlan raked them, fed in split birch until the flames stood up bright. Heat lifted into the room in slow, velvet waves; the cold retreated to the windows. Over the hearth, one of Alexei’s ridiculous candleholders—a metal raven he’d declared "morale infrastructure"—caught the light and pretended it was art.
Dinner happened because it always did: sizzling bear steak in cast iron, the fat snapping and fragrant; potatoes sliced thin and fried until their edges curled; onions thrown in at the end to glass and sweeten. They ate at the table with the overhead on because they could, and with the fire licking the edge off the room so it felt like a place that belonged to people instead of just to weather.
The talk was light even before they decided to keep it that way. It always drifted there after a day that had too much sharpness in it.
"Remember City K in that unmentionable country?" Alexei asked around a mouthful of meat, "when Lieutenant Fails-Upward insisted we stack sandbags inside the window because he’d seen it in a movie?"
Zubair breathed a laugh. "And the sand leaked for five days. Every time you stood up, it sounded like you’d brought the beach."
"I still find sand in places there shouldn’t be," Elias muttered under his breath, so quietly it almost wasn’t a joke, which somehow made it funnier.
They let the quiet wrap them after that, not heavy, just present. The fire moved; it always did: collapse, flare, settle. The house breathed with it.
After plates were washed and left to dry by the sink, Alexei dug into a cabinet and came out with an armful of DVD cases like a magician’s ridiculous bouquet. He threw them onto the couch one by one. "Movies," he declared. "Pick your poison."
Sera thumbed past wilderness dramas and a rom-com with a dog on the cover until a cracked case with a split spine looked back at her: Alien vs. Predator. She held it up.
"This is art," Alexei nodded solemnly.
Everyone got comfortable. Elias took his usual corner of the couch, his boots off, and his socks in perfect alignment with the edge of the rug.
Zubair claimed the chair nearest the fire and leaned back as if posture were just another discipline to do well.
Alexei stretched full length and commandeered a throw pillow while Lachlan sat close enough to Sera that their shoulders touched when either of them breathed too deep.
The opening credits flickered, tinny surround pretending at theater. Snow hissed against the chimney and slid off the roof in a slow, soft thump.
"Question," Lachlan said as the first ancient temple loomed out of CGI fog. "You two really think aliens are a thing?"
Alexei pointed at the screen. "I think this is a documentary."
Elias scoffed without heat. "The probability of intelligent life is one problem; contact is another. Interstellar distances are punishing, speeds are capped, energy budgets are obscene, and we have zero credible evidence. No artifacts, no signals, no biosignatures that survive scrutiny. Statistically, the Fermi paradox is not a paradox; it’s selection bias and wishful thinking."
"So that’s a no," Lachlan translated, lips crooked.
"That is a no," Elias said, because sometimes one-syllable answers were a gift.
"What about microbes under the ice somewhere?" Sera asked, curious to hear him wind the thread out.
"That is more plausible," Elias conceded. "But microbes don’t build spaceships, and spaceships don’t sneak, not across that kind of vacuum. If anything gets here, we’ll see the bill long before the arrival."
"Romantic," Alexei murmured. "You should write poetry."
"I’m attempting to watch our documentary," Elias returned, so dry it cracked.
As if in agreement, the five of them let the movie carry them away. The fire cast a soft and golden glow as outside; the wind scuffed snow across the porch and laid it down again. Sera felt the day’s scrape sand off inside her chest, leaving something smooth.
Suddenly, and without warning, boots thumped once on the porch. The sound didn’t match house-settling; it had a rhythm—weight, intent, the thud of rubber against old wood. The creature stopped purring so fast the silence rang.
The front door blew inward on the first hit, snow spiraling in on a blade of cold air as three men surged through the gap, rifles up, hoods shadowing their faces.
"Where’s the food?" the lead man barked. "We want it. All of it."