Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments (23 page)

“What’s wrong?”

She looks around like she’s afraid someone might be listening. “I felt something strange when I walked by Doc’s body,” she says. “Like there was something altered in him.”

“Altered how?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “He just felt different.”

“Well, he’s, you know, dead,” I point out. I know. Snarky. Tired.

“I think we should talk to Marta. Something wasn’t right about Doc.”

“Okay,” I say. “We can talk to her. I’ve got to rest first, though.”

“Rest first,” she agrees.

We lie down in the grass, so tired we hardly manage to lay out our bags.

“Just rest our eyes,” I say. “Maybe just rest our eyes for a minute, and then we’ll talk to her.”

“Just for a minute,” she agrees.

I wake up to the sound of giggling. I open my eyes and see two girls looking down at me and Catlin. We have our arms wrapped around each other. Catlin is still asleep. The girls giggle some more when they see that I’m awake, see me become aware of how tangled my body is with Catlin’s.

“Go away,” I whisper to the girls.

That really ups the giggling. They run off.

Catlin wakes up, sleepy eyed. She almost smiles with her almost smile. She yawns prettily, stretching her thin brown arms.

“What time is it?” she asks.

Then she hears the girls giggling from a little distance.

“What’s that?” she says.

“Girls,” I say. “They saw we were sleeping tangled together.”

“Sorry,” she says, pulling away and blushing.

“No reason to be sorry,” I say, already missing her warmth.

Just then, an alien ship passes overhead. It banks and goes right, and it reminds me once again that I’m not free.

“They’re getting closer,” I say. “They know we’re near.”

We work on strengthening the cloak we put over the camp earlier. It’s not powerful enough, though. Not for the long term. And now Doc is gone. He always knew what to do. Like my father. I miss him — I miss them both. And now there’s an empty place in New America. I feel it, and everyone else feels it. And I feel something else: a lot of people are depending on me to fill it.

“They’re too close,” I say. “You know they are. They’ll find us eventually.”

“Maybe,” Catlin says.

This irritates me. Maybe? No maybe. I’m tired of pretending. Even if I do have the Warrior Spirit in me — and that’s still an “if” as far as I’m concerned — it wasn’t enough to stop them from finding us. And it won’t be enough to save the rest of us.

And Doc is dead. He held us together. What’s going to hold us together now? I’m so sick of losing people. Losing everyone.

“We can’t get far enough away, Catlin. That’s the truth. Stay or hide in caves, they’ll find us eventually. It’s all just putting off the inevitable. I don’t know why I thought the rebel camp would be any different. I was fooling myself.”

Catlin looks awake now. “What’s this all about, Jesse?”

“What do you think it’s about?” I snap.

“I don’t know,” she says reasonably. “That’s why I asked.”

“People just keep dying,” I say. “The aliens are too strong, and there are too many of them. It’s time we faced that.”

“You’re wrong.”

“We can’t win. It comes down to that.”

“You forget that we’re changing,” Catlin says. “We’re getting stronger. It means something. And you — you can do things no talented person has ever been able to do. I believe you’re chosen to get us through this. I have faith in you.”

Her cheeks are flushed with color.

“I didn’t ask for your faith,” I snap. “I don’t want it.”

She looks like I’ve just strangled her puppy. What did she expect? She’s a fool to put her faith in me. They all are.

She reaches out to touch me, and I take a step back.

“You’re stupid,” I say. “We are going to die, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Least of all me.”

She turns her back on me and walks off. Then she starts to run. I know from the shiver down her back, from the way her head bows, that she’s crying.

“Catlin!” I shout.

But she doesn’t stop.

“I didn’t mean —”

I did, though. I meant everything I just said.

I don’t run after her. I go the opposite way instead, into the thick trees and away from the trail. I climb. Just like I did that first morning in the old camp. The sun drops below a peak to the west, and the temperature starts to drop. I keep climbing.

My dad tries to talk to me. He appears on the trail in front of me. “Are you really going to run from your problems?” He sounds disappointed. I don’t let him say any more. I make him go away. I think how I don’t believe in him, not really, and as soon as I think this, he’s gone.

I don’t believe in anything. I don’t believe in the Warrior Spirit. I don’t believe we can fight and win. I don’t believe we can even survive. I’ve been pretending. I’ve just been fooling myself.

I struggle up a rocky slope. I stumble a few times on the loose rocks, but I keep going. I think I might just climb all the way to the top of this mountain. It’s the kind of useless act I’m totally used to.

It’s all useless. The end is the same no matter what we do. We die. What’s the point?

At the top of the slope, I have to rest to catch my breath. In the fading light, I see something move. It’s not small. And not alone. Two other shapes are with it. I brace myself for a fight.

I move a few steps closer and accidentally kick a rock. It clatters down the mountain in the still evening air.

Three surprised brown and black faces turn toward me. A deer and her two fawns.

They’re beautiful.

How can they be here? Fawns.

They stare at me for what seems like minutes but is probably only seconds, and then the mother turns and runs and the fawns follow.

How?

I collapse onto the loose rocks, which poke into my backside.

How is it possible they’re here? They were all killed.

But then I realize that of course it’s possible. That’s life. The aliens didn’t kill off all life. The deer found each other, and now there are fawns that will eventually have fawns of their own. It’s life doing what life does.

I’m the stupid one. I’m letting them take my life now without a fight. I’m giving up. I won’t do that. I won’t give them my life. They will have to fight me for it.

I hurry down the mountain. I’ve walked a long way, though, and while it’s easier going down, it’s still not easy. There’s no trail. I slip and fall once and skin my hand and arm. The twilight gives way to darkness as I get to the tree line. Then it’s trees and bushes and undergrowth. I worry that I might be lost, but I tell myself I’m not. I keep going. Eventually I find a narrow trail that twists its way to the main trail, which leads to a place they’ve set up for eating. One of the cooks is gathering little packages of chips that I recognize from our raid on Taos.

“Have you seen Catlin?” I ask.

“Town meeting,” he says. “Down the path a little ways. Deciding whether we stay or go. I say it don’t matter either way.”

“You’re wrong,” I say. “It does matter.”

“It does?” He looks at me uncertainly.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he says. “You better get down there, then.”

I hurry to the little clearing they’re using to meet. I see Catlin in the crowd next to Zelda and Zack and Sam and Michael, feel her more than see her. Can she see me? I try to send her a telepathic message, just her, a wall-to-wall type message:
I’m sorry I’m so stupid.

Several rebels look up, so I guess I didn’t do a very good job of making it one-to-one. Then I think maybe that’s not so bad because I owe everyone an apology. I think it again, and this time I don’t try to limit it to Catlin and I hear it like a loud shout that spreads out over the valley, like an echo.
I’m sorry I’m so stupid!
Confused faces turn toward me.

“We can live,” I say to the man and woman next to me. He is tall, and she is short.

“I thought we
were
living,” she says.

“I’ve always been under that impression,” the man says.

“No, I mean
live
live.”

“What did I mean?” the short woman asks the tall man.

“Darned if I know what the difference is between live and live live. You look alive to me, honey.”

“Thank you, sweetie,” she says.

“You have something to say?” Running Bird says to me from up front.

“Just that you’re right, Catlin. I didn’t see it, but you are totally right. We can live.”

“That’s right,” Dylan says, standing. “We can live. If we go to the caves right now, we can live.”

“We can’t hide in the caves,” I say. “I’ve seen the future.”

Dylan smiles in a condescending way. “You’ve been hanging with Running Bird too long. You’re beginning to sound like him.”

He gets a few more laughs than I’d like.

“I admit I don’t know for sure what we need to do next, but I do know you’re not the right choice.”

His smile fades. “The people have decided I am. I’m going to lead them to Mexico. You’re not invited.”

“This has not been decided,” Running Bird says.

I can see that Dylan’s friends are spread out in the crowd, talking to people. They’re calling in favors. They’re saying it was Doc’s last wish that Dylan lead. They’re using everything they can so that when they call the vote Dylan will win. Maybe he will. That will be that.

But I can’t let that be that.

“You’re going to keep people safe?” I say. “Like you had Marta keep Doc safe?”

It’s a guess, but not a wild one. I remember what I saw my first day in camp — Dylan whispering over Doc — and how Marta wouldn’t let Catlin see Doc and how Dylan was performing at the funeral and how much he wants to be in charge, and each thing by itself maybe isn’t much but all together they mean something. What they mean is almost too awful to believe, but I do.

Everyone looks at Marta, who is up front near Running Bird and Dylan and next to Lauren and some of Dylan’s friends. Her daughter is next to her.

“I don’t know what he means,” she says.

I can feel her pulse quicken, see the way she looks beyond everyone, and I know.

“Yes, you do,” Catlin says.

“Crazy talk,” Marta says to everyone. “I don’t know anything.”

She sounds convincing. She really does. Then Marta’s daughter mindspeaks,
You need to tell them, Mom.
I think she says this just to Marta, but I can hear it.

Shut up, girl,
Marta says.
You shut your mouth.

“I won’t shut up,” the girl says out loud. “I’ve shut up for too long.”

“Take Marta and her daughter out of here,” Dylan says to one of his friends. “When New Bloods turn mothers and daughters against each other, we’ve got to do something.”

“Mom,” the girl says, “tell them what he made you do!”

One of Dylan’s friends grabs the daughter by the wrist. “Come on, girl.”

“Let go of her!” Marta shouts. She turns back toward Dylan, and she looks scared. She looks like she would run if she could, but the crowd has closed around her.

“He talked me into it,” Marta says. “It was just supposed to make Doc sick long enough for Dylan to get what he wanted. I believed him. We need to hide. I want my daughter to be safe. We’ll never be safe here. But Dylan increased the dosage after the last town meeting. He couldn’t risk Doc’s getting better.”

People look at Dylan. I go into the past, which was the future the first time I saw the image — Dylan looking down at Doc on the cot. He’s trying to pretend he’s sad, but actually he’s happy. Dylan forces something down Doc’s throat. He says, “Good-bye, old man.”

“She’s lying,” Dylan says now. “Can’t you see? They’re both lying. They’re in with the New Bloods.”

“I should have been stronger,” Marta says with a sob.

The crowd is silent. None of their usual murmuring and chattering. Shock, I guess. But something is building. I can feel it.

“Stupid,” Dylan says, and a protective shield goes up around him as he pulls a gun. The element of surprise. Dylan has it.

He swings the gun around and orders his friends to follow him. Then he backs away from the crowd and orders one of his friends to bring the healer.