CHAPTER 7

Mike Donovan snorted with disgust as he rose from his seat in the rebel headquarters' mess hall. He was watching the television along with a number of his fellow resistance fighters.

On the screen was John, looking resplendent and exuding that air of kind authority he was so masterful at projecting. He was speaking the same words Donovan and the rest of his companions heard in person the night before at the hospital. The Visitor was smiling, his voice magnanimous and benevolent, and whenever he paused and the cameras panned to the audience, everyone applauded with an enthusiasm that echoed within the hospital lobby.

To his trained eye, everything looked like the perfect, idealized version of what the previous night's Visitor broadcast was supposed to be. There was not a solitary sign of the mayhem his group of resistance fighters caused to be seen onscreen.

Then his mother appeared on the screen, and with every word she spoke Donovan's urge to vomit became harder to resist.

"This is bullshit," he muttered as he gathered up his brown leather coat.

"Can you believe they're trying to pull off this fake as the real thing?" asked Robert Maxwell as he gathered up several pieces of metal kitchenware.

"America will buy it too," Caleb Taylor answered. He was wrapping up dinner plates in protective paper and passing them to his son Elias.

Elias agreed, taking the wrapped plates his father handed off to him and putting them in a padded cardboard box. "We sure will. And the world, too. I mean, who would believe lizards could invent a cure for cancer?"

Caleb sighed. "This moving's a waste of time. Julie will never talk."

"If they can cure cancer, they can extract information," said Donovan. His mind flashed to the time when he was briefly the Visitors' prisoner. His mind's eye saw the small yet ominous room dominated by the chair with the restraints at the wrists and ankles. He remembered the tray of instruments that looked like they all could inflict unspeakable pain, and, the sight his imagination could never allow him to forget, that thing that reminded him of a blowtorch with its tongue of flame burning away just inches from one the chair's armrests.

He remembered watching some poor man getting strapped into that chair before, mercifully, a door came down and spared him the sight of seeing any more.

He thanked the heavens yet again that he himself had never been placed in that chair. But the thought of Julie being forced to sit in it, to endure torment he couldn't even imagine in any concrete terms, tightened the knots forming in Donovan's stomach even more.

He inserted his captured Visitor sidearm into the rear of his jeans, then put his arms through the sleeves of his coat. As he smoothed the fit of the jacket over his torso he started walking out of the mess hall. "Make sure you guys are ready to move out in two hours tops."

"Where are you going?" Robert asked.

"We need a new hideout." His eyes were dark with pain when he looked at his fellow resistance fighters. "You know what Julie said: Everyone should think about possible new hideouts just in case something like this ever happens, and to not tell anybody else of the place they thought of."

"You don't know that we need a new HQ for sure," said Robert.

"We can't take any chances. We've waited long enough for her."

"I know the Bernsteins still haven't heard from her, but maybe one of the others – " Robert said.

"Maybe we should give her a little bit more time?" said Caleb.

Donovan sighed, then scratched his brow. "The longer we wait, the more danger we're in. Julie's told us all herself: No one person is bigger than the group and our cause." He looked at everyone in the room. "I hate to even think this, but it's time to assume that either the lizards got her, or that she's – "

"Don't say it, man," Elias interrupted. "Please, don't say it."

Donovan looked at him, understanding. He wondered if anyone could see the unhappiness he felt with the burden he was now choosing to bear in Julie's absence.

A current of despair was threatening to drown his soul, but he wanted to swim against it and cling to the slight pull of hope that he could still feel.

"If you hear from her, tell her to stay where she is until we can pick her up. I'll be back as soon as I can."