Nowhere on Earth

by Nick Lake

  It was, to begin with, not entirely unlike dance. There were routines to learn, choreography. The girls were sweet too—mostly—even if some of them cared far too much about getting the best footballer boyfriend and the best yearbook photo. Still, none of what happened was on them.

  It was never quite Emily’s world—always more her mother’s. Even the posters her mother would have loved. In the locker room they were everywhere. One read: KEEP CALM AND CHEER.

  Emily thought that was a bit of a contradiction.

  No, it just wasn’t her thing, though she tried to go along with it, for the sake of trying to fit in.

  But the boys.

  The boys: it was on them, what happened.

  Her first game, cheerleading, was on a Friday afternoon, against the Wolverines. Emily’s team were the Bears.

  She was surprised by the scale of the whole thing, considering the size of the town. The stadium had seemed outsized when they first arrived, but it soon filled up. Everywhere was that festival smell of popcorn and hot dogs. The crowd was raucous: kids from the school but also their parents, and even people who had nothing to do with the school at all. Emily’s mom waved at her from the back row.

  On the sidelines, she and her cheerleading squad went through the routines. Hush of their shoes against the Astroturf. Smell of burgers and onions and fireworks. All the time, Emily was conscious that the cheerleader uniform skirt barely covered her thighs, that the Lycra shorts underneath were uncomfortably tight. Of the eyes of boys and men in the crowd, and of how that was the point, really, when you got right down to it.

  She and the other cheerleaders chanted:

  Hard as ice,

  Cold as snow,

  We’ll score high and you’ll score low.

  And they stunted: at halftime Emily was thrust upright into the cold air, balancing on Jen Dooley’s, Marsha Kitteridge’s, and Brittany Kozubek’s hands. She threw up one leg to catch her foot, pulled it behind her head, and then kicked out, and—with a push from her teammates—finally rose into the air and corkscrewed, flipped, before landing on the flexing forearms of the girls.

  “Good job!” said Brittany, and “Awesome stunting!” said Marsha, and Emily felt a warm glow.

  “Hey, Perez,” said call-me-Rachel, the coach, after the game—the Bears had lost by ten points. “You did super out there.”

  “Thanks,” she’d said.

  Then, on the way past the bleachers, through the wide concrete corridor, they’d passed a group of boys who were singing loud fight songs—and they stopped their singing and wolf-whistled and catcalled instead—and wasn’t it funny, Emily thought now as she waited for the man in white to shoot her with his rifle, how both of those words had the names of animals in them?

  One of the boys reached out, as they passed, and patted her ass.

  She turned. “Hey.”

  Three of them lifted their hands; mock surrender and apology, eyes wide and laughing. “What?” they said.

  “Touch me again and—”

  “And what?” said one of the boys. Brad. Of course it was Brad. He was a sophomore, she’d bumped into him in the library, where he’d made a comment about her top. He was that kind of guy.

  “And what?” Brad repeated.

  And nothing, it turned out. She didn’t know how to complete the sentence. And anyway, call-me-Rachel was ushering them on, toward the locker room.

  “One of those guys touched me,” Emily said as they changed out of their uniforms.

  Rachel shrugged. “Goes with the territory.”

  The hell it does, thought Emily. But she didn’t say anything. Still: rage was bubbling inside her; the uncompleted angry thought of her broken-off sentence to the guy, left inside her like a splinter, to fester.

  To bring about everything bad that had happened since.

  But then Aidan had turned up, and it was like none of that mattered anymore.

  She just had to get him to safety.

  And now the men had him—the man had him—the man with the gun, pointed at Emily.

  She stood there, with the cliff beside her, and the drop on the other side, and the rifle’s barrel huge in front of her, a hole leading to the end of the world.

  She didn’t care that she had failed—she was used to that. But she’d failed Aidan. And that was something she couldn’t forgive—even of herself.

  In her head, those four meaningless words echoed: KEEP CALM AND CHEER.

  It was impossible; it was paralysis: because the one canceled out the other.

  All she could do was stand there, entirely still.

  CHAPTER 22

  ALL OF THAT went through Emily’s mind in a second, and the gun was still pointing at her, and she was still standing, unmoving. The human mind: it was like fairyland; time passed differently there. All these thoughts, ticker-taping across the inside of her head, and only an instant had gone by.

  The man behind the gun—soldier? agent?—was wearing some kind of balaclava, so Emily could see only his brown eyes. They were flat, hard. His clothing—uniform?—was more suited to the cold than anything she was wearing. Warm ski jacket and pants, gloves.

  He looked like someone who had killed people and would not hesitate to do so again.

  “Hand over the…boy,” he said. “And you can go.”

  Emily didn’t think that was true. Then again, maybe it was. What would anyone say, after all, if she and Bob wandered into a small town somewhere in southwest Alaska and said they’d survived a plane crash with an alien boy but a man with a gun had taken him?

  People would say they were crazy—it was obvious. That they’d suffered some kind of psychosis, brought about by the crash, by the cold, by the hunger.

  So maybe the man really did intend to let them live. It was nice to think so anyway.

  To her surprise, Bob limped in front of her, between her and the gun.

  “You’ll have to go through me first,” he said to the man.

  What?

  The assault rifle remained steady. The man holding it cocked his head, as if considering.

  “OK,” he said. He raised the rifle a fraction.

  “No—” began Aidan, pushing past Emily too, but there was a flicker of movement from the cliff wall, a shadow, dark liquid rock taking form, and—

  Bear, realized Emily, and she could only watch, a spectator behind her own eyes, as the huge brown creature charged along the ledge, then up on its hind legs, paws coming down at the man-soldier-agent’s head, and he raised his hands, screaming—at least Emily thought he was screaming, it might have been someone else—and he stepped back, and his heel went over the edge of the ravine, and that was it.

  His weight toppled him backward, and he fired a volley of shots into the air—dum-dum-dum—as he flipped over, smashing his head on the rock, and then tumbling floppily down the chasm, a Ken doll turning end over end, making awful noises.

  Emily was horrified: that was the word, horrified. She knew she should have been pleased—he’d been about to shoot her, she was sure of it—but she wasn’t. It was something she had never seen before, a violence worse, somehow, than what had happened at the plane, perhaps because of the sounds and the way his body snapped and twisted. So sudden; so appalling. He was, she imagined, just doing his job, the man with the gun. And now he was bent in ways she didn’t want to look too long at, far below them.

  She wasn’t, though, so horrified that she didn’t notice, for a fraction, a scintilla of an instant, the rifle lying on the rock beside the man’s body. Or the place, a little farther down, where the snowy loam hung over the ravine, and it would be possible—just—to jump down and recover the gun. She was her father’s daughter, for better or worse.

  But right now, there was the bear.

  She turned, and the huge animal was motionless for a mom
ent, paws up, claws the size of her thumbs. It was as tall as a bungalow. Bob too was standing very still.

  Their eyes met. Hers and the bear’s. Then hers and Bob’s.

  What do we do? hers said.

  It really was amazing how much eyes could say.

  I have no fucking idea, Bob’s said.

  Bottomless blackness of instinct and hunger: that was all the bear’s eyes said.

  CHAPTER 23

  EMILY HAD READ kids’ books in which people felt all kinds of primal connections when meeting animals, but she felt no kinship or convergence with this…thing. It was just murder on paws. Elemental. Something of the mountain that intended her to end. Cold, killing snow with a pulse.

  Again, only a moment had passed.

  Then Aidan took a step forward. Bob started to say something, but Aidan raised his hand to shush him. The bear’s eyes tracked the little boy as he approached.

  Soon, Aidan was standing right in front of the bear. It was like…Emily’s mind grasped for something, some comparison, but there was none. It was like a tiny boy facing an enormous bear. He held out his hand and touched the bear’s fur.

  Then Aidan kind of flickered.

  He went down on his hands and knees, a boy on all fours. Except that Emily didn’t think he seemed like that, looked like that, to the bear. She thought he probably looked like a cub.

  Because the next thing that happened was that the bear—it was a female, Emily suddenly understood—hunkered down gently and licked Aidan’s face. He laughed. The bear did a low growl that was somehow friendly, or at least not threatening, then rolled him onto his back—carefully, controlling its strength—and nuzzled his tummy. Aidan giggled.

  Bob looked at Emily. His eyes said:

  WTF?

  She looked back. Hers said: I give up on understanding any of this. She helped her eyes out with a shrug of her shoulders—eyes can say a lot, but they sometimes need some backup.

  Aidan was gazing at the bear’s face, and it didn’t nod, or anything cheesy like that, because it was a bear, but it did lower its body, lying on its paws, and then it curled up, in the shadow of the cliff, and Aidan lay down next to it so that it was curved around him, protecting him.

  Emily and Bob looked at each other again. Even without words, they had nothing to say about that.

  CHAPTER 24

  EMILY SHOT A look at Aidan: What now?

  He was being cuddled by a giant, incredibly strong, hungry bear. Which presumably wasn’t going to let him go in a hurry.

  Aidan nodded very slightly: Wait.

  Then his face took on an expression of deep concentration. Emily and Bob stood very still, part sheltering behind a tree that clung to the top of the ravine.

  A noise: Emily turned and saw a squirrel coming slowly out of the brush to the right. It got closer, walking strangely, occasionally pausing to sniff the air and look around, as if confused.

  She and Bob exchanged glances.

  The squirrel kept approaching, closer and closer to the bear. And the bear raised its head, muzzle twitching, nose flaring. Its eyes locked, laserlike, on the squirrel.

  The squirrel watched the bear. But it didn’t run away.

  Aidan, Emily realized. Aidan is controlling the squirrel. A tempting meal for a mother bear to feed to its cub.

  She remembered her parents, how they’d been about to go nuclear on her about the fire, and he’d made them forget. He was doing something similar to the squirrel: canceling its fear of the bear. A frisson of understanding passed through her. She imagined herself as the squirrel: all choice taken away.

  And all this time, the squirrel was getting closer, moving in its weird, stop-start, glitchy way, like there was a part of it that knew it shouldn’t be doing this, like there was an error in its programming.

  Which there was.

  Eventually it was too close: the bear pushed Aidan aside with her snout, and rose on her legs, then pounced—but suddenly, the squirrel turned and dashed back, swift as mercury, and the bear leaped after it, rushing, and then crashing into the undergrowth as the squirrel disappeared.

  “Quickly,” said Aidan, hurrying over to Emily and Bob. They headed downhill, away from the bear, away from the cliff, alongside the ravine.

  “Won’t she follow?” said Bob.

  “I hope not,” said Aidan. “Animals are pretty…basic. More intelligent than you think they are, as an aside, but still basic. She is distracted by the squirrel. I hope.”

  “You hope. Great.” Bob was casting his eyes nervously up the slope, to where bushes rustled and shook as the bear hunted for the now very fast moving squirrel—or so it seemed.

  “I hope the squirrel’s OK,” said Emily.

  Aidan smiled at her. “You care about the squirrel?” he asked.

  She blinked. “Yes.”

  “Interesting,” he said.

  Emily was thinking about something. “Why didn’t you just control the bear? Like you did the squirrel?”

  “Couldn’t,” said Aidan. “My self-protection had already kicked in; made the bear think I was her cub. I can’t override that. Unless I showed her my true form, and that would have angered her.”

  “Then the bear…if she gets the squirrel—or loses it—won’t she follow you anyway?” said Bob. “Your scent?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Aidan. “If we get far enough away, the effect will be broken. It requires a degree of proximity.”

  “A degree of proximity. Out of the mouth of a seven-year-old. Jesus.”

  Emily thought about this as they followed the ravine down toward the lake, and the cabin.

  “Does that mean our—my—parents won’t think of you as their son anymore? Because we left?”

  He nodded. “They will have forgotten me. Every night they forgot me, and I was remade in their memories the next day. At least, I think. Not that we were together for so long, me and your parents.”

  Oh, thought Emily. This was a weird thought, Aidan coming in and out of her parents’ memory, like the sun. In the context of a lot of weirdness, but still.

  They passed from the avalanche-washed valley into the woods, the low scrub.

  When they reached the overhang they had seen from higher up, Emily went over to it and lowered herself as far as she could before dropping to the rocks below. There was no way Bob could do it: he had lost even more color, was breathing audibly, the air rattling in his chest.

  She tried not to look at the contorted body of the man in the white snowsuit, instead focusing on picking up the assault rifle lying next to him. She handed it to Bob, who took it by the barrel and hoisted it up. She noticed there was an extra mag strapped to the side with tape. Smart.

  He reached a hand down for her too, but she shook her head. She examined the side of the ravine, found the place where it was lowest, and climbed up. A stone came loose at one point, and she slipped from her foothold, eating dirt, but she found purchase again, tendons stretching her skin, and scrambled up to where Bob and Aidan were waiting.

  Bob didn’t look comfortable with the gun, which surprised Emily: she’d taken him for the frontier maverick type. A hunter. Instead, he handed it to her and she carried it as they slowly descended through the trees.

  Now they could hunt.

  Now they could defend themselves.

  Emily hoped the men were all gone: injured, swept away by snow, dead. She thought that was probably wishful thinking, though. Just because they hadn’t seen the third man, the one who’d been knocked down by the exploding gas tank, didn’t mean he was dead. He might be out there somewhere, still coming for them.

  Hell, even the guy she’d shot in the leg: he could be limping down the mountain, grimly determined to carry out his mission.

  The thing they couldn’t defend themselves against, not for long anyway, was th
e temperature. It was maybe five degrees, if they were lucky. Emily could feel her hands going stiff and clumsy, could smell ice in the air. They needed to get to the cabin, or they were going to be in real trouble. Fatal trouble.

  Also, they needed food. Not as badly as water or warmth, but still. The hungrier they got, the more their concentration would slip, and the higher the chance that they would die.

  She could tell they were nearing the lake, because she heard it: heard the creaking, booming, the sound of the ice that remained, water sloshing, deep down under the frozen surface. A noise of cracking, shifting: almost tectonic. They came out from the trees and into a series of gentle rises covered in dense bracken and scrub.

  And nettles. If they had a pot and boiling water, they could gather them and cook them—pretty much the only thing worth foraging in the spring in Alaska.

  But they didn’t have those things.

  Emily’s stomach was aching with hunger, a sort of dull, constant pain. Bob, she guessed, was feeling worse. He was a big guy, would be used to a certain number of calories a day.

  The cabin was still a good distance away; in the clear, cold air it was hard to judge distance accurately. No smoke rose from the chimney, still: it seemed the place was abandoned. This wasn’t hunting season, after all. The animals seemed to know it too: as they came down the second of the low mounds, nearing the rocky beach, movement caught Emily’s eye and she looked up at the slope above them and saw three wolves, loping away from them through a thin stand of spruce trees.

  The wolves traveled long and loose, the lead one—the biggest—white with gray markings; the other two, darker in shade. They moved over the ground like their bones were connected by springs, not joints—undulating. Living liquid. Then, an instant later, they vanished: gone behind the trees. They didn’t reappear.

  Emily felt something old and primal prickle through her: a fear, wired into her brain. Stupid, really. They had a gun, and wolves didn’t kill people these days. But she caught Bob’s eye and she could see he’d noticed them too, because he gave a small nod.