D.N.A.

by Jami Lynn Saunders

  “Where were you on August 18th?”

  “Why does that matter?” David asked.

  The perturbed look on the scientist’s face said he was in no mood for wisecracks. “Listen kid, we’re just trying to track down anyone who may have come in contact with the terrorist. The biological threat his body is carrying is lethal. If anyone has come in contact with him, they could be dead in as little as two weeks. That is, if the hallucinations don’t drive them to suicide first.”

  David’s heart began to race as he thought about the prick on the back of his neck. He wondered if the alien had tricked him. Maybe he was hallucinating in his dreams, as well as in school. Just as soon as the doubt entered his mind, it left. He knew Calculus class wasn’t a hallucination, nor was the starfire cube. Right now, it was easier to trust an extraterrestrial alien than his own government.

  “I went to the boardwalk with my stepbrother. We got in a fight, so I left and walked home. I sneaked in through my basement window so I wouldn’t get into trouble.” David focused on the machine, directing its movements with his mind. The lines remained calm, following his every thought.

  “Well, young man, looks like you’re telling the truth. We just need a blood sample to make sure you’re not carrying the virus.”

  David started to sweat, but knowledge began to come back to him slowly, just as the being from across the universe had said it would. Leaning forward to make eye contact with all three scientists, he said, “You’ve already taken my blood sample. You found nothing unusual.”

  “Oh, my apologies, son, looks like I’ve already taken your blood sample. There was nothing unusual.” The scientist smiled. “It’s your turn young lady,” he called to Tara.

  Tara stared at David suspiciously as he made for the exit. He knew he’d have to explain his actions to her.

  Racing through the sea of students, David sought out the Fannins. He didn’t have to look far. They were sitting against an old oak tree near the parking lot in front of their truck.

  “They check you guys yet?” David asked.

  “Yeah, all three of us,” Mikey said. “Is it really a virus?”

  “No. They’re looking for me. We need to get out of here. I’ve got to get back to the mill to see if I can finish charging the portal before they find it—or find me.”

  “Might be tough to make a break for it until they’re finished with all the students. Don’t think we can outrun cops, the FBI, and a bunch of marines with guns.”

  “We’ll just have to wait. Besides, there’s one more person coming with us.”

  “You sure about this?” Mikey asked David. “You sure you can trust her?” The Fannins stood around their truck, waiting for David’s answer.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

  Though school had been cancelled for the day, the students were being held until the last one cleared the tents. Students were spread across the parking lot, happy to be out of school but feeling like trapped rats. The testing was finally winding down, and worried parents were showing up at the school. They weren’t happy, and they didn’t care how many cops or marines were standing by, they were going to vent their anger. With a bunch of infuriated parents weighing in, David knew they’d soon be on their way.

  “Are you sure you’re sure you can trust her?” Jeremy asked.

  “She knows something is going on with me. She saw me fool the scientist. Something tells me I can trust her. I mean, it’s Tara for crying out loud. She’s not one to let things go. There she is. Just give me five.”

  Jeremy, Chris, and Mikey watched as David walked across the asphalt parking lot to catch Tara’s attention. They studied him as he placed a hand on her elbow. They waited to see a startled reaction, but after nearly five minutes of deep conversation, Tara smiled. She nodded her head, and David turned to give the Fannins the thumbs up.

  David and Tara rejoined the Fannins, and David told her the full story. He held nothing back. He even flicked a bit of electricity across his fingertips to prove it was true. She smiled. Then she kissed him.

  “Who’d ’a’ thunk being half alien would turn a girl on?” Jeremy whispered.

  “Who you kidding?” Mikey whispered back. “David has always been Tara’s boyfriend in her mind.”

  Finally, the students were released, and parents began driving off with their children. School buses were loaded, and the tents began to be dismantled. It was time to get back to work.

  Agent Jameson’s temple pulsed like a subwoofer pounding out a bass line. He held in his anger as he stared out at the sea of students. “This kid is good,” he whispered to Dr. Conley. “He must’ve known we were coming.”

  “My theory is that the alien is mentally linked to this boy and it warned him before we arrived.”

  “No matter,” Jameson said. “We’ll find him, one way or another.”

  As the mob of angry parents dealt with the local police and military, armed guards began pulling traffic duty, clearing students out of the parking lot. The band of five friends hopped into the Fannins’ truck and headed to the south end of town. Mikey weaved across the back country, choosing obscure two-lane roads to throw any snooping eyes off their trail. But Brice Cooper knew the back roads as well as Mikey, and he wasn’t far behind.

  “Wow, I can’t believe it,” Tara said as she stared at the starfire cube. David was feeding the geometrical shape with streams of electricity that lit up the basement of the old mill like a Fourth of July extravaganza. The lines of electricity flowing through the air were beautifully intertwined streams of gold and silver light unlike any light they’d ever seen. The starfire cube hummed and vibrated as the etchings soaked up energy. As the four friends stared in awe at David, so did Brice, who was filming it all on his cell phone.

  “That’s all I can handle,” David whispered, and he dropped to his knees.

  Tara put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you going to be all right?” she asked.

  David liked the feel of Tara’s hand. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s just very exhausting.”

  “You done?” Chris asked. “Is it fully charged?”

  “Not quite. I need to come back in a few hours to finish up. I just need to get something to eat to regain my strength.”

  “Pizza,” Chris said. “Nature’s perfect food. That’ll recharge your batteries. Mine, too.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” David responded with a half smile as Jeremy and Mikey helped him to his feet. “We can talk about how to get the alien out of the basement of the Allianz building while we eat.”

  “Allianz Insurance? In Chiefton?” Tara asked. “How do you know that?”

  “Forget how,” Mikey said. “Why in the world would an alien be taking out insurance?”

  “Very funny,” David said. “It’s the perfect cover for an alien autopsy facility, if you ask me.”

  As they began walking toward the basement stairs, Brice quickly and quietly backed up the metal stairs from the basement of the mill with one thought on his mind—making his way to the local sheriff to report David to the government.

  An hour after gorging themselves on pizza, the five friends were back at the mill. It didn’t take long for David to finish energizing the starfire cube. When he was done, he was surprised that he wasn’t drained. In fact, he felt more energized than he had ever felt in his life. It seemed as if the starfire cube was a living ball of energy, and David was part of it.

  “Let’s go,” David said. “Like I said at dinner, I’ll need to sleep on a plan tonight to figure out how to spring the alien. It’s going to be dangerous. None of you have to do this.”

  “We started this together, we’re finishing it together,” Jeremy said.

  “Guess we’re the fantastic five then,” David said. “I’ll have the solution in the morning. Answers seem to come to me in my dreams. Tomorrow, we’ll—”

  Harsh spotlights and the sounds of helicopters suddenly poured down into the basement of the mill. “Go, go, go!” unfamilia
r voices shouted. Soldiers burst into the basement and threw David, Jeremy, Chris, Mikey, and Tara to the ground and held machine guns to their heads.

  A tall, dark man stepped forward. It was one of the FBI agents from school that morning. “I want a team down here right now,” he said over a walkie-talkie. “We’ll need to secure the object and take it to the base.”

  “What about the children?” another agent asked the man in charge.

  “Take them to the base. We’ve found our boy. I want them all interrogated. Break them if you have to.”

  The interrogation of David’s four friends lasted throughout the night while a team of scientists pricked and prodded at David in another room. Though he was strapped to a table far from his friends, he could sense their fear. The room in which they were examining him was surreal. He was reliving the dreams of the past weeks through his own physical body. He struggled against their probing but eventually gave up, withdrawing into his own mind. When he did, he unlocked even more secrets he’d been given as a gift. “Remote viewing,” he thought, not remembering where he’d heard the term before. But that’s what he’d been doing for weeks. He wasn’t dreaming about the alien, he was leaving his own body, called to his brother from another galaxy.

  That’s when the realization struck him. He’d been chosen because he was somehow genetically connected to the alien. Was he more evolved than other humans? Had he been taken as a child? Answers eluded him. No matter, what was done was done. But he knew that this race of advanced beings was somehow linked to the humans on Earth, and he also knew that he was now part of some advanced plan to help the human race evolve. That’s why he came here, David thought. Not to pass knowledge to the government, but to pass it on to me. But what was the being from across the galaxy? The air before him lit up, and he knew the answer: It was the collective consciousness of their entire race.

  Things slowly opened in his mind as the scientists continued their tests. David clenched his eyes shut, watching as advanced forms of physics, mathematical equations, and an understanding of the universe flashed across the back of his eyelids like pictures on a movie screen. The knowledge he was soaking up and retaining was so vast that he was afraid his brain would explode. Yet even as needles pierced his skin and probes were attached and ripped from his head, David remained calm. He knew the truth, and the truth gave him a kind of tranquility. He also knew what needed to be done.

  Testing his remote viewing abilities, David left the room, exploring the underground facility. He could see the Fannins being interrogated, but the boys were strong-willed and never broke. Tara was another story.

  For a moment, the agent thought he’d have to recall his team of psychics, but the girl finally cracked, pressed by the harsh tactics and accusations of the agent. David hovered above, as he had hovered above the alien in his dreams that weren’t dreams. He watched as tears fell from Tara’s eyes. They had broken her, and she had given him up. It broke his heart, not because she told the truth, but because she was so frightened. It made him angry. He’d never punched anyone before his stepbrother or Brice. But now he planned to make the agent a punching bag first chance he got.

  David’s enhanced abilities opened a door of possibilities. He knew he could escape, and he knew the alien could escape as well. But he also understood why the alien hadn’t left on its own. The alien could not return home without passing on its DNA and giving David the knowledge to build the starfire cube. That’s when David realized that the alien never had a portal to get back home. It had come here knowing it would have to rely on David. David was constructing his own gateway to his alien homeland across the galaxy.

  As he thought about his next step, he realized it would have to be carefully planned. He couldn’t put his four friends in jeopardy. He thought of their parents. His remote viewing relocated him to the Atlantic Bay sheriff’s department. The Fannins and Downeys were there, looking worried. They had been told that their children had been infected by the hallucinogenic virus but were receiving treatment. The FBI agents had promised them that their children would be tested and returned to them soon. The Fannins and Downeys refused to be placated and were close to causing a scene.

  David watched as his mother, stepfather, and stepbrother bolted through the police department doors. His mother was screaming at the top of her lungs. Things were going to get hairy.

  “What have you learned about the device?” Agent Jameson asked Dr. Conley.

  “It seems to be made of simple materials from Earth, but the genetic structure has been modified. Our team hasn’t been able to penetrate it.”

  “Bizarre.”

  “It gets more bizarre. Since we retrieved the object, we can’t seem to keep the alien sedated. And its brain waves are off the chart. So are the boy’s. Now I’m positive that the boy and the alien are somehow linked to each other as well as to the object.”

  “What makes you think they’re linked to an inorganic object?”

  “Because the dodecahedron is showing brainwaves too.”

  “You better figure things out, pronto,” Jameson said. “A video of the object has been leaked to the Internet.”

  “That’s bad,” Conley said.

  “We’ve already had our team of programmers wipe it from the Internet. My team gets the job done—unlike yours.”

  Dr. Conley ignored the remark. “I’m assuming you downloaded the video? I’d like to see it. It may help us discover what we’re dealing with.”

  “Sure, you can see it just as soon as I beat the truth out of that boy.”

  David’s mind was whisked back to his body. When he opened his eyes, he saw the scientists and the FBI agent in deep conversation. The agent huffed before dashing angrily across the room as David settled back into his body.

  “How did you build the object?” Agent Jameson demanded, just as David’s eyes came open.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” David replied.

  Agent Jameson shook his head, then one of his partners pushed a button on a laptop. David and the scientists watched in shock as a video played of David filling the starfire cube with streams of gold and silver electricity. Dr. Conley was speechless.

  “This video originated from a house owned by Jason and Janet Cooper,” Jameson said. “Their son is the same youth that reported your whereabouts to the authorities.”

  Brice, David thought.

  “And now we not only have to explain to an angry mob of parents how their children were infected by a hallucinogen, we also have to convince them that the video was a hoax and a mere coincidence to your being here. See the trouble you’ve caused me?” The agent’s anger was building.

  “David, please tell us, what is this object?” Dr. Cooper asked. “Is it a bomb?”

  “It’s not a bomb,” David replied. “It’s simply a portal back to his own world. He came here to help us. He’s finished his mission. Now he plans to go home. And I plan to help make that happen.” As David finished his sentence, another team wheeled in a second gurney. The alien from David’s dreams lay wide-eyed on the table. David felt his heart pounding. “What are you going to do with us?”

  “Test a theory,” Jameson said. “Do it.” Another lab coat shocked the alien with a charge that would have killed an ordinary man. David’s body tensed and he screamed in pain.

  “Guess your theory was correct,” Jameson said. “Now double it. Triple it if you have to.”

  The alien stirred, but a shot of morphine calmed it.

  “This presents a problem,” Jameson said. “We don’t know how deep the alien’s control over the boy goes. That object could be a bomb for all we know. We need to get the alien, the boy, and that object as far away from each other as possible.”

  “If we separate them, we’ll lose the chance to study the connection,” Dr. Conley said. “Think of the possibilities for mankind if we can discover the secrets of tapping into mental communication and using the body as a conductor for energy.”

  “Savin
g lives is all that matters to me for now. I’ll prepare for transport while my men deal with the parents.”

  “What about the other children?”

  “If it were up to me, they’d be coming with us. But my orders are to take them to the sheriff’s department and return them to their parents. They’ve already been told that their kids were infected with minute amounts of the hallucinogenic toxin spread by the terrorist. They believe that the toxin has been neutralized but the Noble boy is still in serious condition. As soon as we’re far enough away, we’ll inform his mother to begin planning his funeral.”

  Conley stared at him. “We can’t kidnap and murder a child.”

  “Do as you’re told, Dr. Conley. Continue your experiments while I prepare a transportation team. I need to head back out and handle the parents and the release of their children.”

  David’s body ached from the pain he felt when the alien was shocked, but it revitalized him as well. He turned his head, and his eyes locked on the alien’s. A voice whispered to him to calm his pain, anger, and fear. Beautiful landscapes of blue and red sand dunes unfolded in David’s mind. Bizarre creatures, similar to birds but even more beautiful, drifted through the air. It was a glimpse of his sister homeland from across the stars. It gave David a taste of what the alien was fighting for. David would fight just as hard for it.

  Outside the room, commotion grew as people passed by. David could’ve sworn he saw the Fannins. When he locked eyes with the last passerby, he knew it was Tara. She saw him, too, and she wrestled free of the grip of the armed guard to rush to David’s side.

  “David,” she cried as she threw her arms around him. “I’m sorry.”

  Scientists and armed guards tried to pry her loose, but David’s grip was beyond human. They couldn’t pull her free. I’ll do anything for you, she thought. David sensed her words. Snapping the restraints, he brought her face to his. A flicker of gold and silver light transferred from his pupils to hers. Understanding spread across her face as a plan was etched onto her mind. She nodded her head in acknowledgement, understanding what must be done. David loosened his grip, and the armed guards pulled her back out of the room.