Snowbound - Blake Crouch [93]
“I will.”
Messing stood and Will rose to shake his hand. “I’m guessing you’ve had a revolving door of visitors from every federal agency under the sun.”
“Yeah, it’s been taxing.”
“Then I won’t keep you. I’m glad you’ve got your family back, Mr. Innis.”
Will walked Messing out, decided as they stepped into the hallway just to go ahead and ask him.
“Tell me something,” Will said.
“Shoot.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Worried about what?”
“A visit in the middle of the night.”
Messing let out a soft sigh and studied the carpet under his dull shoes in a way that made Will nervous, like he wasn’t going to like the answer. He was half-wishing now he hadn’t even asked.
“I don’t know, Mr. Innis. It’s sketchy territory, trying to predict what the Alphas will and won’t do. I guess what it’ll probably come down to is whether or not you’re on their radar.”
“Do you think I am?”
“No way to know. I understand that’s not the piece of comfort pie you want to hear, but it’s the truth, I’m sorry to say.”
“What would you do?”
“If I was in your boots?”
“Yeah.”
Messing cracked his thick linebacker’s neck. “I’m gonna tell you something that’s gonna be both horrifying and freeing. There ain’t nothing you can do, short of move your family to some overpopulated Third World shithole and disappear. If the Alphas decide to come calling, you won’t stop them. Not with a shotgun under the bed. Not with different names. They’re just plain the nastiest motherfuckers anyone’s ever heard of. So live your life, Mr. Innis. Don’t look over your shoulder or buy a home security system or anything of the sort. Just pray you were a blip on their radar that has long since disappeared.”
SEVENTY-SIX
It had been a little over two months since they’d landed in Anchorage, weeks that had taken years to pass. For five of them, Rachael had undergone treatment and counseling at the psychiatric hospital in Denver. But these last few weeks, leading up to Christmas Eve, they’d been together, seeing if the pieces still fit in that quaint farmhouse in Mancos, Colorado. Devlin wasn’t sick, and Rachael was eight and a half months pregnant. They’d hired a midwife out of Farmington, New Mexico, to attend the home birth, expecting to have a little one in the first or second week of the new year. Will was coming to terms with the fact that the child in that enormous belly of Rachael’s didn’t possess a single chromosome of his DNA.
He remembered Devlin’s birth, sixteen years ago, could still recall the lightning that had struck when she’d come screaming into the world, still teared up thinking about it—that fierce, inexorable love that had altered everything he thought he knew about priorities. What kept him up lately, these long December nights, was the fear that he wouldn’t feel those things when this baby came, wondered how you faked a thing like that, how you raised something you didn’t feel belonged to you.
He prayed to God every night that the lightning would strike again.
It had been a cool, dry Christmas Eve, and much to the Innises’ delight, little snow had fallen so far this season in the Mancos Valley. You could see patches of it gleaming under the sun or the moon on the rim of Mesa Verde, and the La Platas were buried above ten thousand feet. But the pasture out back stood bare; the river slacked off to a trickle. No snow lingered under the spruce trees that enclosed the farmhouse. There wasn’t even a fading patch to be found in the north-facing shadows—Devlin had gone looking that afternoon.
She was thriving, out of school for Christmas vacation and spending all her time with her mother—hoisting Rachael out of chairs, cooking for her, cleaning,