Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments (14 page)

“Are you going to make me go to sleep if I say no?”

I shake my head. “You wouldn’t tell,” I say. “You might not go with me. You might tell me I was being a fool, but you wouldn’t start screaming.”

“She’s not wrong, you know,” Catlin says. “You are being a fool, but I guess I’m a fool, too.”

“So we’ll be fools together,” I say.

We start down the mountain on the wide path to the cars. The stars are bright in the sky. Billions. Trillions. They make me feel small and large at the same time.

We’re at the edge of camp, down by the plastic Porta-Potties, when we run into Zack. We don’t see him in time, and he reads us.

“I’m coming along,” he says.

“No, you’re not,” I say.

“Then I’m going to start screaming and tell them what you plan to do. You can’t stop me.”

I can,
I think. He thinks right back,
Not in time.
He’s stronger than Lauren. He could be right. Maybe I can’t stop him in time.

“Look,” I say, “it’s dangerous. There’s no reason for you to come. You don’t even know him.”

“I knew the others.”

“What others?” Catlin says.

“All the others they took or killed,” he says. “My parents. My friends.”

Catlin says, “It’s too dangerous, Zack.”

“If I can get one person back . . .” Zack says. His voice breaks. I hear him curse in his mind. “If I can get one person back, it will make a difference.”

How can I say no to him, even knowing how dangerous it is? We all have little holes in our hearts, and we all would give anything to fill even just one of them.

“Please,” he says. “I need to do something. I need to take something from them.”

I do a stupid thing then. I nod yes. “But you have to do exactly what I say,” I add.

“I will.”

Catlin mindspeaks to me,
Are you sure about this?

Not at all,
I mindspeak back.

I turn to Zack, already regretting my decision. “You’ll do what I say? No questions?”

“Whatever you tell me,” he promises.

As we walk down the mountain, the dark of the night in the trees, the silence all around us, I think about Michael and those first days after the invasion.

Michael and I didn’t like each other at first. He’d been a football star in high school, and he had a big ego. So there was that. Also, when we were enslaved, he acted like it was all worse for him because he was African-American and his ancestors had been slaves. Maybe it was, but it was so bad for everyone I didn’t think we should be measuring our sorrows against each other. We’d all lost everyone, or almost everyone, we’d loved. We’d all lost everything we were. We’d all become someone’s property.

We nearly got in a fight. But somehow we got past all that and became friends. He called me Tex because he was from Florida and I was from Texas. He called me a lot of other things, too, not all of them nice. It’s hard to explain. We were really different, but there was some way we were also really alike.

One night, when we were lying on our blankets about to go to sleep, I told him that I thought of him like a brother. It was a weak moment, I’ll grant you. His response? “We aren’t frickin’ girls.”

“Hence the term
brothers,
” I said. “If we were girls, we would be sisters.”

Michael as a girl — that made me laugh. He would be about the ugliest girl ever.

“Look,” he said, “we’re cool. We don’t have to get all touchy-feely.”

“I love you, man.” I put out my arms to hug him. He recoiled. It was so easy to annoy him, and I really enjoyed it.

“You are annoying,” he said.

“Brotherly love,” I said. “We all need brotherly love.”

“Yeah,” he said. “A white guy from Texas is my brother. As my mother used to say, what is the world coming to?”

“Good question,” I said, because there was no good answer to that one.

Lauren will understand why I had to do what I had to do when I get him back. She’ll see Michael, and she’ll realize she was wrong and forgive me. I tell myself this. Unfortunately, I answer myself, too.
Lauren won’t understand. And she definitely won’t forgive you. You are an idiot if you think she will.

This is a good example of why people who talk to themselves should never answer themselves.

It takes us about ten minutes to get down the mountain to the cars and trucks and motorcycles and then another fifteen to drive down the windy road to the big red barn where the ships are kept. When we park, I look back up the mountain and think of all those people asleep, of Lauren in her tent. I’m betraying them all.

“This is going to be so awesome,” Zack says. “We’re going to kick some alien butt!”

“Right,” I say.

“Should I call you the Chosen One?” he asks. “I mean, is it okay if I do?”

“No.”

“But maybe they’ve heard of you. Him. The story of him in you, I mean. Maybe it will scare the aliens.”

I look at Zack and see the way he bites his lip, and I see how frightened he is. I could put him to sleep here. I consider it but decide that he deserves to make his own choice. We all deserve that.

“Go ahead if you want,” I say, because I can tell that Zack really needs this. “Just on the mission, though. Not after.”

“Okay, Chosen One!” Zack says.

Catlin catches my eye and gives me her soft half smile. She doesn’t need to mindspeak to me for me to know that she approves.

We climb aboard the newer ship, the one Sam flew back from Taos this morning. Zack gets in first and takes shotgun, and I have to tell him to get in the back. He gives me a petulant look but does what I say. Catlin gets the ship up and going quickly.

“This one is faster,” she says.

“Faster than the others?”

Her hand presses more firmly into the hand control. The ship jerks forward.

“See? Faster.”

“That’s good, right?” I say. “We’ll get there sooner.”

“I guess,” she says. But I can tell she’s not entirely comfortable with this new ship. Or maybe with the idea of getting back to Lord Vertenomous’s palace faster.

“Go higher,” I say.

It’s a clear night. The aliens don’t like heights. My thinking is if we’re high, we’ll probably be above them. Up here I can almost imagine that the world isn’t completely changed down there. And in a way I guess it isn’t. We were the rulers of the planet just a year ago. We aren’t anymore, but the planet doesn’t know it. The planet doesn’t miss us. What’s not the same is us. Like other species that were once the rulers of the world, our time is over.

Except that I won’t accept that. I can’t.

The Hunter waits for me. He’s not going to just give me Michael and wish me a nice day. I have a feeling he knows I’m coming. I have a feeling he has planned a welcome that isn’t particularly welcoming.

“Maybe I should go low and slow,” she says nervously. “Low and slow is good.”

“We have a better chance of not being caught high and fast.”

“Wait,” she says, as though she’s listening to something else. She’s interacting with the ship. She says she’s found some presets in the control panel. She picks one.

We go higher. It’s kind of like when you’re in a plane; it’s hard to tell just how fast we’re moving from so high. Fast, though, I think. In just a couple of hours we’re in the hill country west of Austin. It’s still dark, still night, but the moon hangs in the same place in the sky and casts its somber blue light over the hills.

When we get close, Catlin says, “Now what?”

“Slow down,” I say, “and maybe fly a bit lower so we can see where we are.”

We pass over Lake Travis and a fat cement dam and down what becomes a river again below it. I’m pretty sure I can see Lord Vertenomous’s palace on one of the hills to the east. The rich person who built the palace actually chopped off the top of a hill so he’d have space for his pools and gardens. He must have had a ridiculous amount of money. Doesn’t matter now, of course. He could have been the richest person in the world, and it wouldn’t matter now.

We follow the river. Cliffs rise along the north side. Then the land flattens out, and a grassy park spreads back from the shore. I remember coming to this park one Easter with my uncle and dad and mom. City Park. We grilled fajitas and went up and down the lake in my uncle’s boat.

“Let’s land down there,” I say, nodding toward the park.

“Why? I can land us a few hundred yards away from the palace. Isn’t it a good idea to have the ship close? They will be trying to, you know, kill us.”

You don’t have to be the Chosen One to know that. But I’m worried they’ll have some way of detecting an incoming ship. They won’t expect a car, which I’m hoping to find at one of the houses just up from the park. We argue this point. Either way might be right. Either way might be wrong.

“I vote to land in the park,” Zack says.

Catlin says he’s just trying to get in good with the Warrior Spirit, but she steers the ship over to the park and makes a perfect landing.

“You’re getting good at that,” I say.

“Obvious flattery because you got your way,” she says, “but I’ll take it.”

We start walking up the hill. It’s hotter here in Austin than in the mountains around Taos. It’s quieter, too. No insects or other animals here. The only sounds are our sounds: our breathing, our shoes on the blacktop road.

Being back here in Austin, walking past the empty houses, reminds me of a conversation I had one time with this friend of mine from high school, Kevin Wayne. We were talking about the end of the world. Not because the aliens had just landed or anything like that. No, this was back when the end of the world was impossible. It was back when the thought of it was a game.

We were sitting on the front steps of our high school on a lazy spring afternoon.

Kevin said, “What would you do today if you knew the world was going to end tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It seemed like one of those ridiculous questions a teacher asks to get a class talking. It was impossible to imagine.

He offered me a cigarette. Though Kevin was a wrestler, he was also a smoker. He claimed they offset each other. I declined, as always, which didn’t stop him from asking every day.

“I know what I’d do,” he said. “I would go to the Save Yourself for Marriage Girls and say, ‘Listen up, girls. It’s no use. There’s no time for marriage. I will help you experience carnal pleasures in these, our last hours. I’ll give myself to you.’”

Kevin was obsessed with the Save Yourself for Marriage Girls — or the hot ones, anyway. He called them misguided. He was always saying he wanted to help them go beyond their limitations. I wasn’t totally surprised that he thought he’d spend the last hours of his life with the Save Yourself for Marriage Girls.

But I know now that he was wrong. He would not spend his last hours with people he didn’t know. He’d spend them with people he cared about, people he loved.

You don’t realize how much the people you love matter until you don’t have them. How stupid is that? I wasted so much time before the invasion. If I’d just paid more attention, if I’d just lived the day I was in instead of always thinking of the day I hadn’t gotten to yet . . . It seems so obvious now, but I never quite believed it.

“Look over there,” Catlin says, pulling me out of the memory.

She points at a driveway with a car in it. As I hoped, the demolition crews haven’t made it out here yet. If they had, every car would be destroyed.

“Let’s see if we can find the keys,” I say.

Fortunately, the front door of the house is unlocked. We go in. It’s one of those big stucco houses with high ceilings and tall windows.

As soon as we step from the entryway into the living room, the smell hits us.

“Gods,” Zack says, his hand covering his mouth as he gags.

Two bodies are lying on the floor, just visible in the moonlight.

“They missed a couple,” Catlin says.

After the invasion, the aliens collected the bodies: people, animals, everything that was once alive that they’d put to sleep — permanent sleep, it turned out. All those bodies scattered everywhere were gone in days. We don’t know where or how they were taken, but the aliens cleaned things up with super speed.

“I’m sorry I said that,” Catlin says. “You see so many people die, and you start getting used to it. That’s not right.”

We spread out and search for the keys, which takes longer than we’d like because of how dark it is. Just as I’m starting to think that maybe we’d be better off searching another house — one without bodies rotting in the next room — Catlin finds a bunch of keys in a bowl on the kitchen counter. She grabs them all, and we hurry outside, careful not to look at the decaying bodies again.

The first set of keys doesn’t work, and I toss them into the bushes. The next set does. I get in the driver’s seat, and Catlin, complaining that she knows how to drive, has her learner’s permit anyway, and needs practice, reluctantly gets in the passenger side. Zack gets in back again.

I try to drive in the dark without the lights at first, but the road winds through the hills and there’s a steep drop off the gravel shoulder in places. Catlin says we should join to do a cloaking.

“I’ve never joined,” Zack says.