Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments (12 page)

Something feels wrong. I don’t know what it can be, and later I’ll wonder if the feeling came before the alien ship showed up or after. But I do know the ship isn’t directly above us when I feel it; the shadow of the ship moves over the bald stone top of the mountain just to the right of us. I can feel the probe, feel the alien in it searching.

“Stay very still,” I say.

“It’s close,” Lauren says, a slight quiver to her voice, but that’s all.

We’re more out in the open than we should be. We shouldn’t have left the protection of the trees. What was I thinking? I try to shield us both. Lauren tries to help, but the truth is she makes it harder when she tries to join with me: it pulls me away from what I’m trying to do.

“Don’t,” I say.

“I’m trying to help,” she says.

“You aren’t.”

She pulls back. She’s angry, but I can’t worry about that right now. I have to hide us as much as I can. I try to make the reflection off the rocks more intense so that the alien won’t see as well. I think thin, and I try to make us disappear in the light. I feel him looking and looking and maybe even for a second thinking he might see something, but he keeps going. He doesn’t see us.

“That was close,” I say.

“You should have let me help,” she says.

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t join for some reason.”

Lie. It wasn’t me who couldn’t join. I think she knows it’s a lie, but she doesn’t call me on it.

“We should probably go back close to the tree line,” I say.

“I’ve got some things to do anyway,” she says.

“We can stay up here,” I say. “Just, you know, at the tree line.”

She shakes her head. “I really don’t have time to be here right now. I’m sorry. Too many responsibilities.”

“Like what?” I ask. The word
petulant
— another Mom vocabulary word — does sort of describe my voice.

It turns out she’s volunteered to be Doc’s secretary and organize his files, which she says are totally and outrageously disorganized. She’s also organizing a group called New Bloods. She wants to start a dialogue between the New Bloods and the former house and clan members to facilitate New America. She expects my attendance. And, of course, there’s SAF. That will take a lot of her time. This is her to-do list after just one day.

“We’ll have time later,” she says.

“Right,” I say. “Another time.”

We walk down the mountain. Here’s the extent of our conversation. I slip on some loose rocks once, and she reminds me to be careful. She asks me for some water, and I pass her my water bottle.

We go our separate ways when we reach camp. We give each other a good-bye kiss, but she’s rushing away in her mind before it’s finished. Her lips bump awkwardly against mine, and she hurries off. Kind of reminds me of bumping into someone in the school hall. Something you’d mumble a quick “sorry” over before you moved on.

I can hear Michael’s voice in my head: “Dude, which one of you is the girl?”

“Sexist,” I’d say, sort of trying to sound like my mom. He’d laugh at me, and I’d laugh at me, too.

I walk back toward my tent, thinking I’ll take a nap and try to stop thinking about things for a while. Lauren would definitely be disappointed at my slacker attitude. Fortunately, she’ll be too busy to notice.

Unfortunately, there’s a crowd of about twenty people at my tent. They’re mostly sitting down in the grass like they’ve been there for a while.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

Some smart-buttocks says, “We’ve been invaded by aliens.”

“Good one. I kind of meant something more specific.”

“We’re here to be trained. Doc told some people you were going to train us to fight like you do.”

“Now?” I see my nap slipping off without me.

“You have something better to do?” a girl says.

Actually, yes,
I think, but I say, “No.”

My new students are in better shape than most new students to a program, but they’re not in great shape. They need conditioning.

I get a question along these lines from several New Americans: “Why do we have to do all these exercises? We just want to learn how to fight.”

I explain that being in good shape is necessary to being able to do the kicks and punches. I tell them that learning the physical moves is the first step. We’ll try to work from the body to the mind.

Most of the students accept this with a minimum of grumbling, but a few walk away. They thought it would be easy, like learning how to make a sandwich. We always had people like that come to one or two martial-arts classes, too. They always quit.

Finally, at the end of a pretty grueling workout, when everyone is exhausted, their clothes drenched in sweat, their faces streaked with dirt, I convert a physical move to a mental one. I try to show them how I do it, how I use a tae kwon do block to make a move in my mind that’s like that tae kwon do block.

And fail. And try and fail. And try and fail. I don’t know how to show or tell them.

I’m frustrated. They’re frustrated. A woman named Cassandra takes pity on me and says, “You’ll show us when you’re able to show us.”

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to show them. I’m going to try, though. I’m going to keep trying.

When I get to the dinner area I see that Lauren, Catlin, Zack, and Zelda are all at a table. I get a tray and some food and walk over. As I’m sitting down, Catlin whispers she’s sorry. A mind whisper. I tell her it’s okay. And it is. Between us.

Zack tells me that everyone is talking about how I killed the alien patrol in Taos. We’re sitting at one of the picnic tables back from the clearing, eating tortilla soup and bread. It’s surprisingly good. If Michael were here, he’d be going back up and trying to talk the cooks into seconds.

Zack says, “Someone finally knows how to fight them. Finally.”

“You’re getting stronger,” Catlin says to me, “aren’t you? You’re still getting stronger.”

“I think so,” I admit. “But that’s normal, right?”

Normal? That word has lost its meaning.

“No,” Catlin says. “People learn more about their talents, how to use them. This is different. Your talents are growing.”

“Maybe it’s not me,” I say, smiling.

No one smiles back. Catlin, Zelda, and Zack look thoughtful. Lauren looks scornful.

“That was a joke,” I say, but as often happens when you have to point out that you’re joking, no one finds it any funnier than before.

Zack changes the subject. “I’m totally bummed I missed your training session today. I didn’t know about it. Nobody told me.”

“I didn’t, either,” I admit. I tell him I’m going to have one every afternoon now.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he promises. “I’ll be an hour early.”

“Just be on time, and you should be fine,” I say. “I have a feeling there’ll be plenty of room.”

Zelda and Catlin say they’ll come tomorrow, too.

Lauren frowns. “I’ll come, too, of course,” she says somewhat grudgingly. “But I’ll have to rearrange my afternoon. You should have told me before you set the time. We should make a schedule of events.”

Catlin changes the subject: “Zelda was just telling us she has more than one talent,” she says. “It’s rare to have more than one.”

Zelda looks at me shyly. “I’m a good listener. You already know that. My strongest talent, though, is forecasting the weather. I can tell you, with a hundred percent accuracy, what the weather will be tomorrow. I mean, where I am, not everywhere. Tomorrow it’s going to be sunny, no rain, high eighty-one, low forty-nine, by the way.”

“So you’re like Storm from
X-Men,
” Lauren says. I think she says this for my sake, maybe to prove that we have movies in common, too. I appreciate the effort, even if she’s a little confused about the details.

“I wish I could control the weather like Storm,” Zelda says. “I’m more like a totally awesome meteorologist.”

“My talent is going to be fighting,” Zack says again, as though saying it enough times will make it so.

“The gods will decide,” Zelda says. “You shouldn’t really talk about it.”

Doc comes up to our table and asks us how we’re doing and how the food is. We all say it’s good. It almost feels like I’m back in school and the principal is visiting our table. Every once in a while my old life pushes into my new one, but it feels more and more like a stranger.

Doc asks me how the training went. He heard I worked everyone pretty hard. I admit that I did. Then I tell him how I’m struggling to show people how to fight like I do.

“Just teach people martial arts,” he says. “The rest will come.”

“I’ll try,” I say. “I’m not really a teacher.”

“Everyone is a student and a teacher,” he says.

Spoken like a teacher.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I tell the others I’ll see them at the meeting. I head to the Porta-Potties. Whoever came up with that name for plastic outdoor toilets must be, like, three years old. There are six in a row downstream from the main camp. Sometimes there’s a line, but I’m in luck today and don’t have to wait.

When I step out, someone is waiting. She’s leaning against a tree with her arms folded.

“So you talked to Doc about having me train a bunch of pilots for this suicide mission of yours. Thanks so much,” Sam says.

“I wouldn’t say I talked to him, exactly,” I say, unable to gauge how she feels about it.

We start walking toward the town meeting, joining others who are heading that way.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’m ready as long as we have the right leader.”

“And who would that be?”

“The obvious choice is me.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘obvious.’”

“Former sergeant in the Rangers. Elite soldier. Me.”

“I’m the one with the Warrior Spirit.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in that nonsense.”

“I’m coming around. Anyway, it’s my idea.”

“An idea that you have no idea how to execute. Have you ever led a mission? I’ve led many,
and
I’ve been in combat situations. You’ve been in high school.”

She has a point.

“Okay,” I say, and I smile a little because I know I’ve got her. “Fine. You lead if it means so much to you.”

We’re at a narrow part of the path, and she shoves me off it. I have to catch myself on a branch.

“You’re kind of childish for a combat leader,” I say.

“You’re kind of annoying for a Chosen One. And you need to work on your balance.”

“You can call me Jesse. You don’t think I’m a god anyway.”

“Not even half,” she says. “So,
Jesse,
any bright ideas on where I’m going to find these potential pilots we’re going to need? You don’t usually get a lot of volunteers for suicide missions.”

“It’s not a suicide mission. And I already know of one other pilot: Catlin.”

I know I shouldn’t put Catlin in danger, but I want her along. We’ve fought together before. Anyway, she’s a healer, a good one. We might need her.

“Okay,” she says. “What about your other girlfriend?”

“I only have one girlfriend. Lauren is my girlfriend.”

“Really?” she says.

“Really.”

“If you say so,” she says.

“Anyway,” I say, “Lauren wouldn’t be good for this.”

“Why not?”

“Lauren isn’t talented. Or she has a little talent but not much.” Saying this feels like a betrayal. But not saying it would be wrong, too.

“Oh,” she says. “Okay. No Lauren.”

“We can probably take only six people total anyway,” I say. “Three is a full ship. They should all be pilots, right? Except me.”

“That’s why I’m the planner,” Sam says. “We’ll have a truck drive out with a unit. Maybe ten or so soldiers. They can leave just before dark and be there before it’s light. They can fly back with us. We’ll be a squadron then.”

“That’s actually a good idea,” I admit.

We reach the town meeting, which is packed with people. I’m shielding the cacophony of voices without even realizing it. I search the crowd for Lauren’s face, or Catlin’s.

You really think this can make a difference?
Sam mindspeaks.
Stealing ships. Blowing them up.

“I don’t know,” I admit.

She rolls her eyes. Then, as if she’s been testing me and I’ve just failed, she says, “Try to be a little more positive with the recruits, okay?”