“We could go back to the post,” Joey said.
Derrick turned his flashlight on him.
Joey raised his hand to block the bright beam. “Hey.”
“Sorry,” Derrick apologized. “Is that what you’ve been thinking of the last couple of days?”
Joey shrugged. “Maybe.”
Derrick shook his head. “Not me.”
“Why?”
“Nothing back there for me.”
“What about your dad?”
“No way. At least my mom was nice to me, but I didn’t really need her that much either. She was always working at the hospital, going in on her days off. Stuff like that. As long as I stayed out of trouble, she let me do what I wanted to do.”
Joey knew that wasn’t exactly how things had happened. Derrick’s mom had doted on him and had cared about him deeply. Everyone could see that, but Derrick had taken that relationship for granted and never given his mom anything back.
Realizing that he could see that in his friend’s relationship with his mother made Joey feel guilty. While he hadn’t treated his own mom as badly, Joey knew he hadn’t treated her well either. His guilt continued to swell within him, dragging him down. He hadn’t been a good son.
“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep… . C’mon, Joey, say it.”
He hadn’t been a good brother either.
“Hey,” Derrick said, pointing his light at the shop to their left. “I thought I saw a light in there.”
Adrenaline buzzed through Joey’s body as he looked at the shop. “Turn the flashlight off.” He turned off his own.
When Derrick switched off his flashlight, it became immediately apparent there was a light inside at the back of the shop. The soft blue glow was incredibly out of place.
The shop was called Eastern Treasures. Shelves filled with knick-knacks covered most of the available floor space. Dolls, paper fans, and bowls of beads shared space with Japanese swords and knives and fake jade dragons and other mythological creatures. Decorative calendar scrolls on rice paper hung on the walls with tapestries depicting epic battles between warriors and demonic creatures. Headbands with rising suns, Japanese kanji, and Chinese characters covered the checkout counter. Packages of Japanese and Chinese candies filled bowls.
“You know what that looks like?” Derrick asked, whispering now.
“No.” Joey instinctively whispered back.
“A television, man. I swear it looks like a television screen.”
“Can’t be. There’s no power.”
“It’s a small set. Maybe a battery-powered portable. Gotta be something. Let’s take a look.”
Joey’s natural curiosity pushed at him to take a look too, but he shook his head. “Let’s leave it.”
“No way. If that set’s in there and is on, maybe there’s somebody in this mall with us.”
“That’s just another reason to leave right now.” Paranoid and starting to get really creeped out, Joey glanced around. His imagination immediately rewarded him with imaginary creatures that seemed to lunge out of the shadows at him.
“Without telling Zero?” Derrick shook his head. “No way. If he gets surprised by a security guard and finds out we didn’t take a look, he’ll probably kill us.” He sipped in a quick breath. “I say we take a look and find out what’s what. Then find Zero and beat feet.”
Joey wanted to argue, but before he could say anything more Derrick was dropping and slithering under the steel chain-link security wall that had dropped down to shut the shop off from the rest of the mall. The wall was a couple feet off the ground, offering proof again that someone might be in the shop.
Unwilling to leave Derrick alone and not knowing what else to do, Joey slithered under as well.
Derrick wasted no time getting to the back of the shop. He stood poised at the door with his crowbar in both hands as he gazed at the television screen.
Joey looked around the small office. The television sat on a desk built into the wall. Papers, neatly stacked, occupied the wall space above the desk. A coffee cup and ashtray sat beside the inert computer. A man’s gray sweater hung from the back of the office chair in front of the desk.
“C’mon,” Joey whispered. “We need to get out of here.”
“Hey, man,” Derrick said, “look. Your mom’s on TV.”
The statement, so inane and unbelievable, especially under the frightening circumstances he was now part of, almost paralyzed Joey’s brain. Then he stared at the screen and saw that his mom was on television.
Megan Gander’s picture was inset into the upper two-thirds of the screen. The main feed showed a platinum-haired lady reporter standing in front of Fort Benning’s main gates. The slug line under the picture read PENNY GILLESPIE. FORT BENNING, GEORGIA. LIVE.
Oh, God, please, Joey prayed, please don’t let anything have happened to my mother. He moved into the room and found the volume control on the TV. He turned the sound up.
“—Mrs. Megan Gander’s military trial begins in the morning, friends and viewers,” Penny Gillespie said. “Mrs. Gander stands accused of dereliction of duty, a serious offense under any circumstances when dealing with a military body, and possibly even more serious in light of everything that has happened since the disappearances.”
Joey couldn’t believe it. His mom, derelect? She was the most duty-driven person breathing. But at least she wasn’t, like, dead, or anything. Thank You, God, he thought when he realized that his mother wasn’t some kind of casualty.
“Mrs. Gander was taking care of a young boy in her charge the night of the disappearances,” the reporter went on. “That boy fled from the hospital and from his father. The father, Private Boyd Fletcher, arrived in what I have confirmed through the testimony of witnesses was a totally inebriated state, and attacked two military police officers in the hospital hallway.”
“Hey, man,” Derrick said, “sounds like your mom is in some serious—”
“Shhhh,” Joey ordered, turning the TV volume up again.
“The young boy, Gerry Fletcher,” the reporter went on, “climbed to the top of an adjacent building.”
The picture behind the reporter changed from Megan Gander to a blocklike building that Joey immediately
