John drove her back from what she figured out was a motel.
He pulled up on the street outside her house and looked at it. There were police all over the place.
Max didn't want to get out, and John wasn't making any moves to get out either.
Max was looking at Mrs. Barrett who was outside talking to a police officer and crying. It took all of her will to keep from glaring at the lady she blamed Lucy's death on, somewhat irrationally. If Lucy's mother had just left her husband a long time ago, instead of ignoring all of the signs of abuse both girls had sported, then all of this wouldn't have happened. Max kept her face neutral.
John glanced back at her and noticed her stare. He followed her line of sight. "Is that Mrs. Barrett?"
Max nodded.
"She is taking this pretty hard," John said neutrally, "But she also just lost her whole family."
Max thought about that. How would she feel if she had lost her whole unit in such a violent and unexplained way?
Maybe John had something behind the whole idea that a plan isn't the most important thing if lives are at stake. If her unit was on the brink of being annihilated, she knew that she would want someone to risk it and possibly save their lives.
Max noticed commotion from the doorway. They were bringing out a stretcher with a body under a red-stained sheet.
"Tell you what, Max," John said, noticing the bodies as well. "How about I take you out for lunch. You don't need to be around here for all of this."
Max didn't feel the need to argue with him. She didn't want to be spotted by any officer that could ID her later for Lydecker. Her hair hadn't quite grown out long enough to cover up her barcode yet. She had only been out of Manticore for a few months, and there, they kept all of their hair in a military buzz.
Max just nodded her head in answer.
John put the truck in gear and drove slowly away from the scene. Both of them had their eyes on all the officers crawling all over the city-house property looking for answers. Max shifted a little down in the seat.
Lunch was a quick affair. They had McDonald's drive-through in the truck.
"Well, Max," John said ten minutes after they finished their meal. "I can take you back to the house, they are probably gone by now."
Max didn't make any movement to answer him.
"Or," he said, "If you still need some time away, I can take you somewhere."
Max looked at him at that.
"You want to go somewhere?" he asked. "Where? The park?"
"The library," Max said.
He frowned but put the truck in gear. "Okay."
Max showed him where to park. Getting the TV from Jack was always a rare occasion. Sometimes, she would get the chance to sneak out of the house and go to the library. It was her favorite place to go to. Lucy's mom had taken them there once, but she had usually been too busy working overtime. She had learned the most about the outside world through books she read. Books were something magical to a person who had only been given statistical, technical, and factual readings during her upbringing at Manticore.
John entered the library with her.
The librarian greeted Max with a warm smile. "Hello, Max. How are you today?"
"I'm good," Max said back with a small smile.
Apparently news of what had happened at Lucy's house had not yet reached her. Max was glad.
Max started to head off to the books. She knew where every title in the library was and knew exactly what she needed right now. Before she could get very far, a hand stopped her on her shoulder.
She tensed a little as she spun around.
"Hey, Max," John said. "I'm going to step outside for a little bit and make a couple of calls. I'll be back in a few minutes, okay?"
Max nodded and spun around to go to back to where she had been heading, the stairs.
She climbed to the third floor and made a sharp turn left. She counted rows as she passed them until she hit sixteen. She turned down that row and started counting bays until she reached the right one.
She preferred the Library of Congress way of organizing books to the Dewey decimal system. With Library of Congress, all of the books were sorted by category and subject rather than author. And right now, she was in the supernatural section.
She figured she had approximately twenty minutes before John finished his phone calls and started looking for her. The library had six floors, being rather large since it served a large portion of Los Angeles. It would take him probably forty minutes to search all of the floors to find her granting that he started in the basement. She had work to do.
She was most interested in demons, so she sought out the demonology books first. She skimmed through the first three books, finding as many similarities as there were differences between the three. It was frustrating to try to find out what was real and what was not.
She did deduce that the canteen that had worked so well on the demon was holy water, but she assumed the ways for killing the demon that were listed were all bogus otherwise John probably would've used his gun first instead of the holy water.
John had said something about sending the demon back to hell. She assumed he had been talking about an exorcism, and there was plenty about them but, again, she didn't know what was real or not.
As she was reading the next book about demons, there was also mention of other creatures often associated with them, such as hellhounds and devil's dogs, as well as specific types of demons like crossroads demons. There even seemed to be a hierarchy.
Max began to wonder. If demons were real, were the others real too? Did John just hunt demons or did he hunt more than just demons?
She began to read other books as well on just the supernatural in general. She was soaking in every word to her photographic memory. Her analytical mind was constantly comparing similarities and differences, systematically putting more importance on things that were common factors among numerous sources over the tidbits that were only in one source and, more often than not, seemed completely outlandish.
It had been exactly an hour and she had been through the entire supernatural section. Granted, she had been speed reading a little bit. Had she had three hours, she could have memorized every bit of those two hundred books. But she didn't want to be caught in the supernatural section.
Max put the last book she had been reading back on the shelf and stood up. She headed back down the row. On her way out, she grabbed Eragon, a favorite of hers. She had read it many times.
She sat at the end of the row, her back propped against the shelf and her knees holding the book. She opened it to a spot that she knew would be a normal amount for a person to have read in an hour and began reading.
She only had to wait ten minutes before John opened the stairwell door and looked around until he spotted her. He walked over to her and crouched down.
"Good book, huh?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Do you feel better?"
She looked up this time and nodded at him.
"Alright, then," he said. "I made a few calls. The police have left your house now. Are you ready to go home?"
Max just shut the book and stood up. She placed it on the shelf again and returned to John. They headed down the stairs and out to the truck.
The whole drive back, Max thought of her plan. Even as they pulled up to the house, she was running probabilities and scenarios in her head. John parked the truck.
They sat in silence for a moment.
All of the lights in the house were on. Mrs. Barrett, or Ms. Barrett, must still be up.
Max opened her door and got out of the truck.
She looked at John for a moment. He gave her a small smile. She gave a sad one back.
"Thank you," she said.
"No, thank you, Max," John said. "You saved my life too."
Max gave a small nod and then shut the door. She started a slow walk up to her house.
The closer she got, the more pronounced the smell of rotten eggs—which she had figured out was sulfur—and blood became. It was awful.
She continued on though, heading to the front door as slow as she could, all the while, waiting and praying for the sound of the truck to start and pull away.
She reached the front door.
John's truck still hadn't started.
She stood there for a long moment. If she went in now, Ms. Barrett would see her and know she was alive. Max could hear her now in the kitchen over the sound of the TV. Right now, Ms. Barrett probably assumed she was dead, taken and killed by the person who had killed her family. It was probably what the police assumed as well. Even if they were looking for her, at best, all they had was a description of her. Max had been careful to stay out of photos. No photos and missing-assumed dead was a good standing point to leave.
If Max went inside to get John to leave, Ms. Barrett could insist on getting a photo of her, probably having felt embarrassed earlier when she was asked by police for a photo of her for an amber alert and only been able to provide a description. Max could easily slip away later on, but then Ms. Barrett would assume she had run away and would send every force she could to find her last remnants of a family she had lost.
Max didn't want to do that to her, give her hope and take it away.
Ms. Barrett would be better off without her in her life.
The truck never started to take off. Max knew she was going to have to use her backup plan.
She turned around and headed back to the truck. She got in.
"Max?"
"I have something to tell you," she said. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "My grandparents were hunters."
There was silence in the truck.
It seemed to drag on forever.
"Of animals," John supplied, but it sounded like a question.
"No, of demons," she said. And then she took a big risk, "Of the supernatural."
The silence was back in the car.
She carried on, having crafted her story to the best of her ability with only the information she had gathered. "I didn't want to tell you because my grandparents didn't want any hunters to know I was related to them. They said they had a falling out with a couple of hunters and that others might resent me for sharing their blood."
John seemed to understand this. "What were their names?"
Max paused, considering.
"I won't hold a grudge against you," John said.
The only reason he would want to know was so he could research her family and her. Would it be a good idea?
"I'm sorry," Max said. "I don't know. They never told me their last name, and I think the last name they gave me was fake."
John frowned. "Why do you say that?"
"Because," Mas said, on a roll, "I was never allowed to go to school because they couldn't produce a birth certificate for me."
"You've never been to school?" he asked.
"No," Max said. "I was only with Lucy for a short amount of time, and they tried to enroll me that winter, but the schools were too full at the time. They were going to wait on a spot to open up in the fall."
"What did your grandparents say your name was?" he asked.
"Max Guevara," she said.
John seemed to be on the edge of buying it.
"How do you think I knew how to keep that demon away with holy water?" she pressed. "Why do you think I wasn't scared? How do you think I knew how to kick out that demon when it was possessing me?"
He looked at her sharply. "Your grandparents taught you how to kick out a demon?"
Max backpedaled a little, sensing that she had erred in some way. "Kind of, it took a long time."
"Hmm," John said, looking at her, calculating.
"So why are you telling me this now?" he asked.
"Because," Max said and then paused.
Why didn't she just take off? Sure John would have followed her, but she could have lost him. She had always excelled at escape and evade at Manticore, and she had evaded a whole army after all.
Max thought long and hard. John seemed patient to wait her out, and some sort of decision seemed to be hanging on her answer.
Because she wanted to help people like John did, because she wanted to prevent the grief of other families from going through what Lucy's had to, and because she wanted someone there for her unit who would take the risks John was willing to take.
"Because, I never really got along with Lucy's mom all that well," Max started, "But I still don't think she deserved what happened to her family. Lucy didn't deserve that either."
If John noticed her lack of sympathy for Jack, he didn't mention it.
"I want more people out there who would be willing to take the risks that you are willing to take in order to stop more families from suffering what Lucy's did."
"It's not all about risk either, Max," John warned.
"No," she agreed, "But I have training, so I would be an asset."
John was quiet. Max wondered what was going through his mind.
It was hard to tell with him.
"I'm not gonna lie, short-stop," he said. "I don't have room for another person on my hunts."
Max immediately nodded, even as she tried to fight back tears. She hadn't known how much she wanted to go with him and help people until he had forced her to explain it. It had originally just been a temporary plan. But his rejection stung too much for it to have been a means to an end.
"But," John said, looking out the front windshield, "I do know someone who could use someone like you around."
Max looked up immediately, feeling hope for possibly the first time since she met Lucy building a snowman.
"Really?" Max asked, not daring to let herself get too excited.
John let out a small laugh. "Yeah, really."
He turned the key to start the truck and pulled away from the curb into the quiet street.
"You better buckle up, short-stop. We have a long drive ahead of us."
Max immediately buckled up. "Where are we heading to?"
"Sioux Falls," he said.
Max recalled the atlas they had been forced to memorize at Manticore. It didn't have Sioux Falls on it, so it must not be a very big city.
"Where's that?" she asked.
"South Dakota."
South Dakota was at least a 20 hour drive from here, without stopping. Depending on where Sioux Falls was in South Dakota, it could take more than that as well.
"That's a long drive," Max said slowly, wondering why he was going so far out of his way.
"You get used to it," John said back.
Max stayed silent.
John glanced over at her and seemed to understand. "Don't worry too much. I was heading this way anyway. There are a few hunts along the way that we can check out."
Max nodded, glancing at the clock. It read, 1900 hours. Max usually kept herself on the same sleep regime that she had been given at Manticore, which was 0500 until lights out at 0100. At least, for those transgenic super-soldiers that had shark DNA in their blood. For the rest of her unit, it was 0600 to 2400. That was how Max had been so naturally paired with her sister, Jondy. They both were the only ones in their unit with shark DNA. And even four hours of sleep a night was sometimes too much, so they would talk to each other in sign language to pass the time. Usually though, Manticore worked them hard enough that they needed every bit of those four hours of sleep.
Max didn't know what the plan was though, so even though it was only seven in the evening, she leaned her head back and tried to make herself fall asleep. She didn't know if John always hunted in the day like he did back at Lucy's, but it would be better to be prepared.
She started to think about Lucy again, trying to make sense of what had happened. She had a question that had been burning into her mind since she had found out that Jack had been possessed, but she didn't want to ask John and make him figure out that she actually hadn't been raised by hunters.
She thought on it another hour or so, but the question was too important to her.
"John," she asked.
"Yeah?"
She waited a moment. "How…how long was Jack possessed for?"
She held her breath and waited.
John's hands tightened on the steering wheel a little. "I don't know for sure, short-stop. I was on his tail, but it's hard to give an exact amount."
Max frowned, but pressed on. "Well, if you had to give a maximum amount of time that he could have been possessed, what would you say?"
John let out a sigh and rubbed a hand over his face. Instead of answering her, he looked at her and caught her eye. "Why do you ask?"
Max just shrugged, evasive.
John looked back to the road. "If I had to guess, I would say he couldn't have been possessed more than three days, max."
Three days max.
Max was relieved in a way. She had thought for a second that maybe Jack had been possessed the whole time she had been with them and felt maybe a little guilty that they had shot him. But they hadn't. Jack had been a mean drunkard of his own will well before the demon showed up.
"That answer your question?" John asked.
Max nodded and went back to staring out at the bland scenery. It was dark, but she could see clearly as long as there was at least a little light.
She leaned her head back again.
She thought of all that she had read about again, micro-organizing information and trying to understand all that she had absorbed. It was all in an effort to avoid thinking about her lost sister.
Her sister that had been killed by a demon.
Max wondered what kind of luck her other siblings were having.
It was 2400 now.
The stars were, without a doubt, the most interesting thing to look at in the middle of a barren dessert.
She tried to count them, but gave up.
She used her telescopic vision to zoom in on the moon. It wasn't quite full, but it was big and beautiful.
John played rock music from a cassette player. It was strangely soothing.
Max shivered a little, surprised that the desert could be so cold at night. It wasn't anything she couldn't handle. It had been winter when her unit broke out from Manticore, dressed in nightgowns and socks. She had even fallen through a frozen-over lake into the water. It was what saved her. She had held her breath in the frigid water for five minutes, watching through the ice as soldiers marched right over the top of her, searching for her unit.
Max wondered if Jondy was looking up at the same sky at this moment, plagued by her shark DNA, unable to fall asleep.
It was Max's last waking thought.