Renegades Read Online Free PDF

higher-powered deals, or glared at one another while deposing white-collar criminals.  To one side of it, a long coffee table ran along the wall.  Beyond that, a couch sat along a back wall, underneath a square that could be a flat screen TV or framed art.  Impossible to tell, because everything was covered in the same sticky gobs of black and gray threads.
    The monstrous excretions made everything look dirty and foul.  Even the light: they covered the windows on the far wall in thick drapery-like sheets, shrouding the room in a depressed twilight that weighed on the eyes and on the mind.
    Derek was on the conference table.
    At first Ken was sure that his son was hurt.  Nearly every inch of his skin was covered in webbing, but his face was still open to the air.  Still uncovered.  His eyes glistened with barely-contained terror.
    “Mommy,” said the boy.  “Save Mommy, save Hope, save Liz!”  He started crying, tears that he had clearly been containing – perhaps for hours – spilling out over his cheeks.
    The depth of the boy’s pain nearly brought Ken up short.  So did the realization that Derek probably wasn’t hurt at all.  That the pain Ken had heard in his son’s voice wasn’t his own, but merely the pain he felt for his loved ones.  Derek had always been that way.  Had always been more apt to cry for others than for himself.
    One time Derek accidentally knocked Hope into a tree while the two were riding their bikes.  Hope cried.  Derek screamed , terrified he had hurt her.  And even when she stopped crying, he went into the house and couldn’t be coaxed back onto his bike for days.
    “They won’t move,” he whimpered now.  “They won’t move, they won’t move!”
    Ken looked at his son.  Followed Derek’s gaze.
    Ken’s breath caught in his throat.  He saw Maggie’s face, her eyes closed.  Her form pinned against what looked like a filing cabinet, anchored there by millions upon millions of silken strands.  Liz’s face seemed to sprout from Maggie’s chest, like she was giving birth to the two-year-old in a particularly gruesome way.  But it was just an illusion, the little girl glued directly to her mother’s chest by the same webbing that covered everything else.
    Hope was next to them.  Another caterpillar.  Her beautiful, dark hair stark against her too-pale skin.  Hope had always been tan.  She had inherited her coloring from Ken’s dad.  But now she looked like a ghost of herself.  A specter.
    Was she dead?
    “Daddy,” whimpered Derek.  “Daddy, wake them up.”
    Ken looked at the others.  Everyone else had crammed into the doorway of the office, as though leery to join him in this strange place.  As though peering into a mass grave.
    He locked eyes with Christopher, the only member of their party who still had use of both hands.  “Can you get this crap off my son?” he said.
    Christopher nodded.  He stepped into the office, and Aaron and Dorcas stepped in with him as though afraid to be too far away from the rest of the group.
    Ken thought he saw movement outside the office.  But he didn’t have time to stop and digest that fact.
    He turned to the still-unmoving forms of Maggie, Hope, and little Liz.
    He reached out for them.
    A sound stopped him.  Stopped all of them.
    “What about us ?”
    The voice was nasally.  Old.  The voice of someone who was not only accustomed to complaining, but who enjoyed it.  Perhaps reveled in it.  Ken turned quickly.  On the other side of the table, laying under the windows, he saw two more cocoons.  Adult-sized, a man and an old woman.  The woman – the clear owner of the voice – was staring at him angrily, as though all this was Ken’s fault.
    “You going to help us ?” she demanded.  “My son and me’ve been laying here for hours.  Just laying here, mind you.  Not saying anything, not making any trouble.  Just laying here.  But I guess we’re not good enough to help.”
    The man beside her –