The Extraction List Read online

  THE EXTRACTION LIST

  RENEE N. MELAND

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2014 by Renee N. Meland

  Cover Art by Nathalia Suellen

  First Paperback Edition: June 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form without the express consent of the author.

  For more information: http://www.reneenmeland.wordpress.com

  The Extraction List

  ISBN 978-0-9960029-2-9

  For the bravest, most selfless, smartest woman I know: my mom. Without her, this book would not have been possible.

  “…from the tragic death of one, many will rise: children protected from the fallibility of man, brought up by the highest standards of governmental law.”

  -President Gray, inaugural address

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sometimes a killer can save a life. In this case, that life happened to be mine. I wish I had met him before the whole mess started. Maybe he could have saved more of us.

  Maybe he could have saved us all.

  I met the man who saved my life exactly one month after he killed his twentieth person. Of course he didn’t call it “murder,” he called it surviving. Though sometimes I thought he should try to explain the difference to the people buried in the ground. To me, one label didn’t necessarily cancel out the other.

  • • •

  One of my teachers used to say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Trust me, I knew all about it; I called that road “mother.” That teacher never mentioned what the road back was made with. I figured it was because nobody’d ever found one. Hell sort of struck me as a one-way-ticket kind of thing.

  The night the Taskforce showed up on our doorstep, my mom screamed. After my brother Aidan’s death, then Dad leaving, hearing her carrying on like a crazy person wasn’t exactly new and different. I didn’t even flinch at first. I figured maybe she was missing my dad all the way to the bottom of a tequila bottle—again.

  After a couple minutes, though, I slammed my copy of Crime and Punishment shut and left my room. I took my sweet time going downstairs to see her, hoping to hold on to the little bit of normal I’d had just seconds earlier. I stopped by the bathroom and grabbed a giant bottle of aspirin. Just in case.

  Then I decided I was kidding myself. I knew better. There was no way she wouldn’t need aspirin.

  “Riley! Get your stuff! We have to leave right now!” I ducked as Mom greeted me with a scene full of flying paper, jackets, and a few photo albums. They seemed to spin like a paper and plastic tornado, twirling through the air and landing unevenly in a giant duffel bag spread open at her feet. Even in the chaos, I paused for a second to wonder how Mom’s hair managed to stay fastened perfectly in place. The image in front of me looked almost ordinary, a beautiful blonde woman in a fitted black skirt, white blouse, and hair pinned back in a bun, with a briefcase resting just inside the door.

  Except this woman had thrown half our living room into orbit.

  “Mom, what’s going on? What happened?”

  Mom grabbed me by the shoulders and stared right into my eyes. “We need to leave right now, okay? I need you to not ask questions and just go pack a bag. You need to just trust me and do what I tell you, okay? And do NOT come downstairs until I say so.” Mom didn’t blink. I remembered the last time she didn’t blink during a whole conversation: When she told me that she and Dad needed to “work on their communication.” I found out later that was Mom-speak for “Dad’s about to abandon us and slam the door for the last time.”

  I suddenly wished for the empty tequila bottle.

  “You are my life.” Mom kissed my forehead, and I ran up the stairs. I didn’t come down again until I heard the gunshots. At fifteen, I was all too familiar with the sound. A person was never too young to know the snap of a gun anymore. But it was different coming from our house, like a firecracker going off inside my brain.

  When I got to the entryway, a pool of blood belonging to a man in a gray suit tried to hold my shoes to the floor. The sticky mess grabbed the soles of my sneakers and smelled like raw steak fresh out of the plastic wrap. I winced as I stepped through it toward my mom. A pink piece of paper rested on top of the pool, slowly flooding with the dark red liquid. Bo, my mom’s best friend, had appeared too. Pistol smoke swirled gently from the tip of his weapon.

  It wasn’t the blood, but the paper that made me scream. I felt the color drain from my cheeks, and I wondered if I looked as white as the dead man lying on our floor. “What the hell is going on? Is that pink paper what I think it is?”

  Mom ignored my question. I hated being ignored more than anything, especially by her. But since there was a dead body involved, I figured I’d make an exception.

  “Oh my GOD! You KILLED him!” Mom screamed, and in all her stick-thin glory started flailing her arms, hitting Bo with the strength of a flightless bird. Her bony fists bounced off his body as if his chest were made of rubber. If it hadn’t been a murder scene, it would have been kind of funny.

  “Are you SURE? I saw him push you and I panicked. Maybe he’s just wounded.”

  Thank God Bo didn’t panic more often.

  Mom took in a deep breath and stepped through the blood. She gently picked up the man’s hand and placed two fingers on his wrist. When she released it, her fingertips were stained red. “Yes. He’s dead. That’s what DEAD people look like! What are we going to do?”

  My hands shook, partially from fright and partially because no one would tell me why there was a dead guy in the entryway.

  Or why he had the pink slip of paper.

  Bo grabbed Mom by the shoulders and held her still. “Claire, we’re going to grab Riley and we’re going to get out of here before more people come looking for this guy. I’ll tell you the plan on the way.”

  Mom scoffed at him with wide eyes. “Plan? I don’t need your plan. I’m going to go straight to President Gray about this and he’s going to fix it. He has to.”

  A twinge of hope rose inside me, working its way up from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. Maybe we wouldn’t have to leave our home after all. Maybe our little visit was just a really complicated, really messy misunderstanding. “Yeah, Mom’s right. I’m sure he’ll fix this. I can’t actually be on the extraction list, right, Mom?”

  “Of course not. There’s no way.”

  Mom started toward the door, but Bo stepped in front of her.

  “Claire, you saw the paperwork with your own eyes. Gray knows all about this. His signature is there.” He pointed to the guy on the floor. “This guy was going to grab your daughter. We need to go right now.” Bo took Mom by the hand and dragged her out the door.

  I hesitated, frozen in the growing pool of red. Sweat broke out on my forehead, and it wasn’t because of the crippling D.C. heat. If I was on the extraction list, I was supposed to end up like all those other people from my class, the ones who the Taskforce grabbed right from their desks. Those were the ones who disappeared. Since Mom had written the law that the Taskforce was responsible for enforcing, I never thought that I would ever be a target. Politics was all about protecting its stars, and there was
no bigger star than my mother.

  But that little pink piece of paper could only mean one thing. I forced myself to look down at it. I searched the document, eyes falling on the bottom right corner. It was faded, stretched by the blood into an unnatural shape, but it was there—the President of the United States’ signature.

  I grabbed the bag Mom had been trying to pack and zipped it shut. I swung my own bag over my shoulder and followed Mom and Bo out of our house, hoping that I would someday be able to come back. But deep down, I knew we were about to drive away forever.

  • • •

  I slid into the back seat of the Bo’s van and took a deep breath. I told myself it wasn’t the time to panic, but panicking seemed to be the only thing that made any sense. One question played over and over in my mind: Why’d she have to write that damn bill in the first place?

  I kept my mouth shut for as long as I could, but after about ten minutes of silence, I couldn’t take the waiting anymore. I popped up between the driver and passenger seat in the van. “Care to tell me where we’re going, Bo?”

  Before Bo could open his mouth, Mom started her own conversation with him. “This is my fault. Totally my fault. I did this to other parents and now it’s coming back to haunt me.”

  As raging pissed as I was that we had to leave our home—our whole lives for that matter—I didn’t want Mom to feel bad. After all, I was sure she wasn’t any more excited about being fugitives than I was. And after seeing her barely put herself back together after my brother died, I knew if I didn’t keep her together she would end up right back where she started. A guilt complex was the last thing she needed. “No, Mom, that’s not true. Yeah, the pink paper said ‘divorce,’ but you and Dad split quite a while ago. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I’ll tell you the reason, Riley… Karma. It’s Karma at its finest.”

  “Mom, don’t say that. I…”

  “It’s true, Riley. I wrote the original law. Sure, they made it harsher than I thought they would, but I was there.” She pounded her fist on the dash. “I was there and I let it happen.”

  Even I couldn’t argue with that. I sighed with relief when Bo shifted the conversation. “It’s okay.” He grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze. When he released it, he pointed to the glove box. When Mom opened it, a thick manila folder was staring back at her. She sat it across her lap and opened it. “There’s a compound for refugees from America on the shores of Cuba where we’ll be safe.”

  I peeked over Mom’s shoulder so I could look at the file too. The first picture looked like it had been taken without the subject’s knowledge. The man in the photo was walking down the street in a dark-colored t-shirt and jeans. He didn’t look much older than I was. Even in black and white I could tell there was a sparkle in his eye.

  “His name is Cain Foley. Twenty-one years old. Family immigrated from Ireland generations ago but he still managed to keep the accent. He’s the best Guide in the city…made seven successful transfers in the last six months, and those are just the ones we know about.” Bo reached across to Mom’s lap and turned some of the pages in the file until he got to another photograph. “This is his partner, Jordyn Dailey. She’s been with him for the past three years as far as we can tell. Nineteen years old. We’ll be meeting with both of them tonight.” Mom and I stared at the other photograph. A woman with huge brown eyes and long brown hair stared back at us. To me, she looked about as dangerous as an ant sitting innocently under a hovering shoe. Mom shuddered.

  “She looks…wholesome. How did she end up with HIM?”

  Bo chuckled. “Um, wholesome she is not.”

  My muscles tensed. Mom was not going to like that answer.

  “Do I even want to know?” She kept her eyes on the road.

  “Probably not.”

  Cain Foley. I had heard that name before. Or read it somewhere. The name hung on the edge of my brain. Wherever I’d heard it from, a chill ran down my spine. I couldn’t be sure if it was in a good way or a bad way, but he had definitely made an impression.

  Mom shook her head. “Wait, what’s a Guide? And what about a compound? And how do you know about them? I don’t understand any of this.”

  Bo sighed. “Claire, my division has been researching Guides for months. There’s a system of people who are very good at escaping the Taskforce and getting people over the border. They’re calling it the New Underground Railroad. It’s been my job to figure out who they are and how they work.” Suddenly, Bo pulled to the side of the road and took Mom’s hand. I held my breath, pretty sure that their conversation was not heading in a happy direction.

  Boy, was I right.

  “Claire, I’ve known about this for a while. I tried to convince them to leave Riley alone, but they insisted that they were going to take her. So I decided to stay on and learn the best way to get you both out safely.”

  I gasped as Mom raised her hand and slapped Bo across the face. “And you waited ‘til tonight to tell me? Why the hell didn’t you tell me sooner?” Mom’s cheeks always flushed when she was angry, but at that moment, they looked as red as a sunburn. I’d never seen her so much as kill a bug, let alone hit someone before.

  Bo gently stroked his cheek. The skin rose under his fingers. “Because I knew you’d panic. You’d either a) go to Gray and get caught, or b) take Riley and run…and get caught.”

  “Fuck you, Bo.”

  I grabbed Mom’s shoulder. “Come on, Mom, you know he’s right. That’s exactly what you would have done. And no offense, but I don’t have any interest in ending up like Olivia.” I sucked in my breath at the last part and wished desperately that I could take it back. So much for helping Mom avoid a guilt complex.

  Mom sat silently for a moment, but conceded. “You’re right. You’re both right.” She messed with a strand of her hair that didn’t look like it needed to be messed with. Smiling weakly, she said, “Let’s get on with it then.”

  Bo pulled back onto the road.

  I took a moment to glance out the window as the city passed by me. As we drove to wherever it was we were going, the streetlights pointed at young women guarding the intersections. Some looked like they could have been sitting next to me in school. They were wrapped in fishnet stockings and fake fur coats. Their costumes almost hid the dirt on their faces. The majority of America was broke, but people were always able to find money for sex. I knew all about selling yourself. Not from personal experience, but I had seen enough of it for ten lifetimes. A girl who sat next to me in geometry got hepatitis from doing that after school. Her birthday was after mine.

  Bo parked the van in a back alley behind a bar. Bo, Mom, and I found ourselves surrounded on three sides by brick walls, and garbage cans spewed their contents beneath the stones. It was the kind of alley I wouldn’t want to be caught in alone late at night. I shuddered to myself and bet those walls had some stories that I never wanted to hear.

  Mom said she didn’t know whether leaving me in the car or taking me inside would be considered worse parenting, so she opted to take me in with them. She squeezed my hand as we walked inside behind Bo. He carried a duffel bag full of cash, which he was going to use to buy us safe passage out of America. As expected, smuggling people out of the country wasn’t cheap, and his arm sank under the weight of the bag. As we passed through the door, Mom whispered, “THIS is where these Guide people wanted to meet? Lovely.”

  “Stay behind me and keep quiet.”

  Blackness covered the bar from top to bottom: black walls, black furniture. The only color came from the faces of the sweaty, shiny patrons who looked like they had seen better days. They didn’t seem to mind being surrounded by darkness. Most of them just stared at their beer mugs anyway, so I guessed the décor didn’t make much difference. The paint on the walls dangled off in flakes like fingernail polish, and I fought off the urge to go pick at it.

  I kept my eyes straight ahead as we made our way toward the bartender. His head had a big gap in the middle where hair sh
ould be, and the hair that remained on the sides overlapped the top of his ears. His shirt had once been white, but streaks of yellow lined the armpits and stretched downward, much like his skin: overused and under-cared-for.

  Bo set his bag on an empty barstool and waited for the bartender to turn around. His back was to us, but I could see that he was drying a glass over and over again. Mom waved at him. “Excuse me, where can we find a man named Cain?”

  I was facing away from the bar’s customers, but I could swear I felt them staring at us after Mom spoke, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The bartender set his glass down hard. He turned his greasy face toward us. And laughed.

  “Haha, lady…you’re in waaay over your head. If Cain wants to find you, he’ll find you. Lookin’ like he already did.” His eyes moved toward the barstool where the bag of money had been. The stool sat empty.

  “Oh my God! Where’d it go? Bo!” Mom’s head swirled around. Bo glared at the bartender.

  “Don’t look at me, man, I didn’t take it. SHE did.” He pointed toward a doorway at the back of the bar. The beautiful, dark haired woman from the picture stood there, letting the bag dangle gracefully from her long fingers. She smiled.

  “Misplace something?” She let the bag fall from her grasp, and Bo jetted over to grab it. When he was bending over to get it, Jordyn shoved it away with her foot and made him chase it a couple times before she gave in. The bartender found himself laughing at us once again. “Follow me.”

  The doorway Jordyn had been standing in front of lead to a staircase. We formed a line behind her and followed her down into the darkness. Though there were no lights, Jordyn hit every step. I tried hard not to stumble but managed to snag my toe more than once.

  Jordyn lectured us: “Did you see how easy that was? The three of you are going to have to be more careful if you’re gonna make this trip. I can give you clothes, shoes, and a route, but I can’t give you plain old common sense. Even Cain can’t give that to you.”