by Morgan Rice
“Is he okay?” Leon asked Barnaby.
Barnaby shrugged. “I’m really not a doctor, Leon.”
“But you were going to be, they had you in UCLA.”
“Just freshman year,” Barnaby insisted, as if it weren’t still massively impressive that a kid their age was going to college already. “And not that kind of doctor. I was going to be a scientist.”
“And you couldn’t decide what kind, so you were doing three majors at once,” Leon pointed out. “Come on, Barnaby, if anyone’s clever enough to work this out, it’s you.”
“Look, I think he’s probably okay. Kevin, do you remember what was happening when you blacked out?”
“One of the controlled people grabbed me,” Kevin said. “We rolled down the hill. What happened then?”
“We managed to get you out of there,” Luna said. “We had to ride with you in the sidecar. I had to carry Bobby.”
The dog barked, as if to confirm it.
“You’ve been unconscious for hours,” Chloe said, her concern obvious.
“I’m fine,” Kevin said, although he didn’t really feel fine. He was still shaky and weak, but he didn’t want any of them to worry. “What happened while I was asleep?”
“Barnaby was telling us about the slave pits,” Luna said. “But you don’t need to worry about that now.”
Kevin shook his head. “I want to know.”
Barnaby looked over to Leon, and Kevin saw him shrug.
“They were testing us,” Barnaby said. “They used us for the mining, but every moment, they would test us. They would make us run, or lift things, or they would give us problems to solve. It was like they were looking for the best of us, the ones with talents they could use.”
“So they could take their DNA,” Kevin guessed.
“Exactly,” Barnaby said. “The ones who failed the tests… those were the ones they converted.”
Kevin couldn’t imagine what that must have been like, having to pass test after test, with the fear of becoming one of the controlled people pushing him on.
Then again, maybe he could imagine it.
“I’m pretty sure Kevin should probably stay in bed for a while and rest,” Barnaby said.
Kevin would have really liked that, but he shook his head anyway.
“I can’t,” he said. “We need to get to the tar pits.”
“It can wait a while,” Leon insisted.
Kevin shook his head again. “This isn’t going to get better, and every moment we wait, there are more people being taken by the aliens. What if I’m still resting and they decide to destroy the world because they’re done with it?”
Leon went quiet at that, the full horror of it obviously sinking in. “They wouldn’t…”
Barnaby seemed almost calm about it, like it was some problem to be unpicked. “I suppose it makes a kind of sense that they would. They could strip the atmosphere for gasses, then maybe blow open the planet if they wanted to collect deep minerals…”
He made it sound so logical and so obvious, and the terror of that was enough to propel Kevin out of bed. Of course, both Chloe and Luna had to steady him a moment later.
“We have to do this,” Kevin said.
Luna nodded. “I know. I just hate that we do.”
“You said you’d get us to the tar pits if we helped,” Chloe said. “Barnaby’s here. It’s your turn.”
“Okay,” Leon said, with a nod. “I said I would. Do you have a plan once we get there?”
“We find something old enough to maybe have a virus in it,” Kevin said. “We… I don’t know, test it?”
“If we can find the equipment, I might be able to isolate any virus,” Barnaby said, “but what makes you think that there will be one? Even if we find ancient living material, there’s no guarantee.”
“The aliens, the good aliens, wouldn’t have sent the message if there wasn’t a chance,” Kevin insisted. “We have to at least try.”
Leon nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Come on. We’ll take a group. That way, if we run into trouble, we’ll be able to push through.”
He led the way out to the bikes. Kevin had to lean on Chloe and Luna for most of the walk over to them, but by the end, it felt as though he’d recovered enough strength to at least do that on his own.
A dozen or more of the kids went with them. Even Barnaby hopped on a bike.
“You don’t think I’m going to miss this, do you?” he said. They found another motorbike with a sidecar, and Kevin got to sit in that rather than having to cling on behind someone. It at least meant that he got to rest while they started their drive down into LA. Maybe that was the point.
The bikes wove their way around stationary cars and trucks, picking their way into the city. They moved fast, not slowing down long enough for any controlled people to catch up with them, so that for Kevin the city seemed to pass by in a blur of stores and houses, abandoned spaces that looked almost ghostly without people in them.
“The tar pits should be just ahead,” Leon called back to them. “Watch out for controlled people. There are a lot, the deeper you go into the city.”
In spite of Leon’s warning, the space around the tar pits seemed empty of all signs of life. The museum buildings of the La Brea Tar Pits were dark and dead, while the gates stood open, abandoned and moving gently in the breeze.
They went in with the bikes, stopping in one of the parking lots. Leon looked over to Kevin.
“What now?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Kevin admitted. “We’re trying to find something that might have ancient living material, I guess.”
“Unless you want to go fishing in the pits, that means the research digs or the museums,” Barnaby said.
“We’ll try the digs first,” Kevin suggested.
They made their way through the park, past the statues of mammoths and other Ice Age creatures, past the bubbling pools of tar that seemed as though they barely belonged on this planet. It was a world that seemed as strange as any alien one, separated from them by time rather than light years of distance.
It also seemed like the kind of place that would have been cool to visit with his mom, and that thought just hurt. Kevin wasn’t sure he would ever get used to the idea that she wasn’t there.
“The active digs should be this way,” Barnaby said, leading the way up to where a pit stood surrounded by tables with what looked like fishing gear on them. There were nets on long poles, and grabbers, even a small, flat-bottomed boat. There were gouges in the earth around it, with abandoned digging tools and papers that looked like drawings of whatever they’d pulled out. People had abandoned what looked like their lunchboxes by the side of the spaces they’d been working, giving the whole place the feeling of somewhere that they’d only stepped away from for a moment or two.
“It smells like someone’s sock drawer,” Luna said, wrinkling her nose.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Chloe asked. “Fish in the tar until we find something?”
“I guess we can try,” Kevin said, but it had been exactly what he’d been hoping to avoid. The idea that they’d find what they needed just sitting in the tar seemed far too unlikely.
Even so, he took one of the long nets and started to dredge the tar pit with it. The weight of it was tricky with how weak he still felt. The thick tar made it hard to drag the net through it, and Kevin had to jerk it as it stuck. He felt the end of the pole connect with something on one of the tables, and looked back in time to see one of the lunchboxes fall to the ground, coming open as it hit.
What fell out wasn’t someone’s sandwiches, though. Instead, Kevin saw fragments of flint and preserved bone, so small it was only a step away from being powder.
“These boxes must be for the things they found,” Kevin said. “We should search them. Maybe they found something we can use.”
“It seems more likely than fishing something out of the tar,” Luna agreed.
They started to work through the fin
ds boxes of the people there, and the main thing that Kevin realized was how little they found on a normal day. Many of the boxes were empty, while the ones that weren’t mostly only contained small pieces of things that didn’t look as though they could be any use at all.
There was a bone in one, and Kevin took out the device that Phil had given them, pressing its syringe into the center of it. The small screen flashed red. It wasn’t what they were looking for.
They kept looking through the finds, and whenever anything looked even vaguely organic, Kevin pressed the device to it. Again and again, it flashed red.
“Hey, everyone, I think you need to look at this,” Chloe said. She was staring into one of the boxes with an expression of amazement.
Luna went over to stand beside her. “Okay, that is pretty cool.”
“What have you found?” Kevin asked, and went to look. When he stepped up beside the two girls, he stopped too.
Inside the box was a piece of perfectly preserved amber that must have been tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of years old. Inside was a mantis-like insect, poised in the act of striking at prey and looking as perfect now as it must have been so long ago that Kevin could barely imagine it.
He took the piece of amber out, holding it up as he pressed the device to it. The pause that followed stretched out until Kevin started to wonder if he might have broken it somehow. Then green filled the small screen, and he dared to breathe again.
“Barnaby,” Kevin said, “do you think this might work?”
The other boy nodded. “That’s… it’s more than we could have hoped for. We need to examine it and work out how to extract the DNA we need.”
“Where?” Leon asked.
Barnaby nodded to the museum. “This place is designed to study this kind of thing. If anywhere has the tools to do what we need, it’s here.”
Their small group clustered together, moving toward the museum. The doors were open, but the building seemed like a shell. There was nothing living within, only the fossils and the statues of long dead creatures.
“We need to find a lab,” Barnaby said.
“This way,” Luna replied, pointing to a section with a big “Authorized Personnel Only” sign in front of it. There was a locked door there, but Luna quickly grabbed a fire ax from an emergency station and hit it until it broke open.
“She can be pretty direct,” Leon said.
“You have no idea,” Kevin assured him. It was just a part of what made Luna such an amazing person to be around.
A series of offices and labs sat behind the doors, some half filled with the materials the researchers had been working on, some containing only plans for the next series of tours, or what looked to Kevin like the remains of an unfinished meeting. One contained stacks of old bones, and Bobby sat staring at it hopefully until Luna called him to her.
They found an empty lab and went in, taking the piece of amber with them. Barnaby took it cautiously.
“I’ll do my best,” he said. “You have to understand though… I’m smart, but that doesn’t mean I know how to do everything. I’ll try to sample the mantis in the amber, see if there are bacteria or viruses, and try to make a sample from them that might be more useable, but…”
“Do what you can,” Kevin said. “Something tells me that you’ll do a better job than I could. Maybe you should have been the one to hear all the messages, and then we wouldn’t be in this trouble.”
“Or maybe it would be worse,” Barnaby suggested. “I’m not good at running around trying to solve things. The most I can do is stuff like this.”
“With any luck, it’s all we need you to do,” Kevin said. “Do you need any help?”
Barnaby shook his head. “I’ve got this.”
Kevin and the others went outside, keeping a watch for any sign of controlled people coming. Bobby went and sat in front of one of the mammoth statues, staring up at it and then barking as if expecting it to do something. Given everything that had happened so far in the world, a part of Kevin watched nervously just in case it did.
“Don’t worry,” Leon said. “Barnaby will do it. He’s smarter than even he thinks he is, and that’s pretty smart.”
“He’ll need to be for this,” Kevin said. After all the resources of the NASA institute, it seemed strange to be relying on one super-smart kid and a lab in a museum.
“We need to talk about what you do next,” Leon said.
“We need to get whatever Barnaby can extract onto the main alien ship,” Kevin said.
“Which means getting it onto one of the city-sized ships when it goes back to deliver the next batch of people,” Leon said.
Kevin nodded. “You’re thinking about the one in Sedona.”
Leon reached into his pockets, pulling out a map and a couple of sets of keys. “The two bikes with the sidecars are yours,” he said.
“Really?”
“We can scavenge more,” Leon assured him. “Besides, this sounds like it might be our only hope.”
“Thanks,” Kevin said, taking the keys. He took them over to Chloe and Luna.
“Oh, cool,” Luna said as she took one of the keys.
“I’m driving, not sitting in a sidecar,” Chloe insisted.
“That’s fine,” Kevin assured her. He wasn’t sure if he’d be a good choice to drive now anyway, given his condition. What if he collapsed or had another seizure while he was trying to drive?
It felt as though they waited forever, and Kevin was only too aware of how vulnerable they were there. He could feel every moment passing, feel the heat of the sun while they waited. Leon might have his watchers out, but that didn’t stop Kevin from worrying that the controlled people might be closing in, stalking closer with every minute that passed.
He was still thinking about that when Barnaby came out of the museum. The older boy looked exhausted, sweat dripping from his brow. He was holding a vial of clear liquid in his hand.
“I think… I think I’ve done it.”
Kevin took it gently.
“Be very careful with this,” Barnaby said. “I took a couple of samples from the amber, and looking at them, I think there might be some kind of virus in there.”
“The alien message was right,” Chloe said.
“But I don’t know exactly what it is,” Barnaby said, “and you probably don’t want to break that vial to find out. Ordinarily, you’d grow something like this in a petri dish for days, but I figure it will have time to grow on your way to deliver it.”
“Thanks, Barnaby,” Luna said.
“Thank you for everything,” Kevin said, looking over at Barnaby and Leon. “We couldn’t have done this without you.”
“Well, we wouldn’t have Barnaby back without you,” Leon said. “I’m not sure we can thank you enough for that.”
“You thanked us when you gave us the vial,” Kevin said.
Luna looked at the vial almost hungrily. “We’ve done it. We finally have something that can kill them.”
Kevin stared at the vial, trying to see some of the deadliness that lay within. It looked so clear to him, so pure, that it was almost hard to believe that Barnaby had done anything with the amber-trapped mantis they’d found. He had to trust it though; the aliens had promised him that this would work.
“Now,” Kevin said, “we just have to get it to where we can use it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They set out on the two motorcycles to drive to Sedona, with Kevin in the sidecar of Chloe’s bike and Bobby in Luna’s. Sitting like that, Kevin could feel every jolt of Highway 10 as they headed east along it, working their way past the abandoned cars and the trucks that had been left in the middle of the street, the occasional wrecks and the pieces of rubble that had spilled out onto the road.
“How is LA traffic still a thing when there are no people here?” Chloe demanded.
“Maybe it’s just built into the city,” Kevin suggested, which made Chloe smile. That was good. It seemed that most of the time rece
ntly, she’d been anything but happy.
Of course, they all knew the reason for the abandoned cars, and it was anything but happy. The most they could do was weave in and out of them, treating them like obstacles to be dodged in some kind of game.
Eventually, the cars thinned out a little and the road opened up.
“Race you,” Luna called out to Chloe, and then accelerated hard.
“No fair!” Chloe said, and then hurried to keep up.
The wind whipped in Kevin’s face, making him feel like they were going about a million miles an hour. He could see that, in the sidecar of Luna’s bike, Bobby seemed perfectly happy with it, his tongue lolling as he panted.
The two bikes rode almost neck and neck, effortlessly weaving around the few cars that were still out there. Kevin wasn’t sure who was winning, and he suspected both of the girls would claim they had in the end.
“Gas station,” Luna called out, slowing down and waving them over to one side of the highway. Sure enough, there was a gas station ahead, the pumps deserted. “We should fill up the bikes.”
“And grab what supplies we can,” Chloe said. “Also, I won.”
“You did not,” Luna shot back. “I only slowed down for the gas station.”
“Your slowing down first means I won,” Chloe said, with a satisfied look.
They pulled into the gas station anyway, leaving the bikes by the gas pumps and lifting the nozzles. Nothing happened that Kevin could see.
“Maybe there’s a switch to turn the pumps on?” Luna suggested.
“I’ll go and check,” Kevin said. “Come on, Bobby. Maybe there will be some food for you in there, too.”
They went inside, leaving Luna and Chloe out by the bikes. Inside, the gas station was half-gutted, as if people had been there before them. Even so, there was food on some of the shelves, while over the counter, Kevin saw a series of switches with pump numbers on them. Looking out, he checked the numbers of the pumps, then flicked the switches, hearing the faint rumble of the system starting up.
