The Orion Plan

by Mark Alpert

  You know how. It was the snake, remember?

  Joe’s eyes closed against his will. He felt as if someone had forced his eyelids down and glued them shut. Then he saw the snake he’d dreamed about the night before. First he pictured it exactly as it had appeared in the dream, shiny and black but with Annabelle’s blue eyes. After a moment, though, it transformed into the long thin tentacle he’d glimpsed when he awoke, the tentacle that had slid toward him and jabbed his neck.

  “You’re from the sphere? The satellite?”

  It’s not a satellite. A satellite stays in orbit around a planet, Daddy, but this—

  “Stop calling me that!” He raised his voice. “You’re not my daughter!”

  “Shut the fuck up, motherfucker!”

  The shout came from one of the neighboring jail cells. Startled, Joe backed away from his cell’s door and sat down again on his cot. He still couldn’t open his eyes, and yet he seemed to be able to sense where everything was, all the objects in his cell and some things outside it too. This new ability frightened him almost as much as the voice in his head.

  “You’re not my daughter,” he repeated, whispering again. “Why are you using her voice?”

  You’re right, I’m not Annabelle. I used your memory of her to forge a bond between us.

  Now Joe pictured something from a more recent dream, the image of Annabelle lying in a private room in St. Luke’s Hospital. She sat up in bed and pointed at the fluorescent light on the ceiling. Then she opened her mouth and said, “Light.”

  You taught me how to speak. I’m grateful for that. Communication is our highest priority now.

  In his mind’s eye he saw Annabelle climb out of the bed. She wore a blue hospital gown, tied at the back. She walked barefoot out of her private room and entered the long corridor Joe had dreamed about, the hallway with the hundreds of wooden doors.

  “Where are you going?” he whispered.

  Time is running short. You should’ve reached this stage sooner, but the pathways in your mind weren’t clear. I needed several hours to restore the balance of neurotransmitters and receptors.

  It was so strange to hear these words coming from Annabelle’s mouth. Even stranger, Joe understood what she was saying. She was talking about the signaling pathways between brain cells.

  “Was it the alcohol? That’s what blocked the pathways?”

  Annabelle nodded. She was walking down the corridor, inspecting each door she passed. The doors looked identical to Joe, but she seemed to be examining something he couldn’t see.

  Yes, the alcohol caused the damage. It left you unable to control your fear, which generated the interference that you called “static.” I couldn’t clear your pathways until your fear subsided.

  She finally stopped in front of one of the doors. She stared at it for several seconds, as if she were reading something written in invisible ink on the wood. Then she smiled. Even though Joe knew this girl was an impostor, his heart leapt anyway. Annabelle’s smile was so beautiful.

  “What is it? What do you see?”

  I see a solution to our problem. It would be futile to communicate with the officials who run this jail. If we try, they’ll assume you’re suffering from psychosis. We have to make contact with the appropriate authorities in the government. They’ll be more receptive to the message we’ll deliver.

  Joe didn’t understand. “What message?”

  Annabelle was still smiling. Joe felt like she was pulling him closer. Her face was the only thing he could see, crowding out everything else in his mind.

  Don’t worry about that now, Daddy. First we need to leave Rikers Island. She tapped the door, which opened at her touch. This is how we’re going to escape.

  THIRTEEN

  Emilio sat next to Paco on the A train, speeding downtown. It was 3:00 A.M. and they were the only people in the subway car, maybe even the whole train. They wore camouflage pants, black T-shirts, and black baseball caps, and a big black duffel bag lay on the seat beside them. Although the bag was practically empty, it held everything they needed for tonight’s job.

  One on one, Paco wasn’t an easy person to spend time with. The muchacho didn’t like to talk. He stared straight ahead, his eyes fixed on the subway map on the other side of the car. Emilio glanced sideways, trying to read the guy’s face, trying to figure out if he was ready to do the job tonight or if he was going to back out. This face-reading trick had worked like magic for Emilio since he’d stumbled upon it the night before, but he was having some trouble reading Paco now. The homeboy’s face was blank and motionless.

  After a while Emilio gave up and looked at the subway map instead. The train was at 125th Street, six stops from the museum station at 81st. As he stared at the colored subway lines crisscrossing the city he remembered taking this same trip ten years ago, back when he was an eight-year-old at P.S. 98. His third-grade teacher, Mrs. Cohen, had arranged a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in the hope that it would get her students excited about science. And that was precisely the effect it had on Emilio, who liked science a lot better than the other shit Mrs. Cohen tried to teach them. He gawked at the museum’s dinosaur fossils and the giant model of the blue whale. He stared in awe at the stuffed elephants in the Hall of African Mammals. But he got a little too excited in the Hall of Gems and Minerals, running around the display cases of sparkling rocks, and that bitch Cohen yanked him by the arm and made him stand in the corner for half an hour while the other kids gaped at the crystals.

  Emilio learned two valuable lessons that day. One was obvious: school would never be fun. But the other lesson was subtle, and he didn’t fully grasp it until much later. Most of the students in Emilio’s class were Dominican, but there were a few white kids too, and although they ran around the museum just as much as Emilio did, Mrs. Cohen didn’t yank them away from the display cases. She let them get away with it because she thought they were smart. She wanted to encourage them, not punish them. But she had no great hopes for the Dominican kids, so she didn’t bother giving them any encouragement.

  Emilio’s fourth-grade and fifth-grade teachers weren’t any different. They didn’t expect much from him, so he didn’t try very hard. In middle school and high school he avoided his classes altogether, preferring to hang out with his uncles and cousins in the Trinitarios. His grandmother yelled at him every day, but she was too old and tired to stop him, and in the end he became exactly what his teachers had expected: another Dominican dropout, a gangbanger, a thug.

  Still, as bad as his situation was, Emilio was luckier than Paco, who was two years younger. Paco was un hijo de crianza, a foster kid. He had no grandmother to take care of him, no uncles or cousins to defend him, so he learned very young to be a badass. By the age of nine he was thrashing his classmates and threatening his teachers. Everyone told stories about him: how he broke someone’s arm and stole sneakers from Foot Locker and had sex with his foster mom. He was suspended from school a dozen times before they finally expelled him. The cops arrested him a couple of times and he spent a few months in juvenile detention, but after he turned sixteen everyone in the neighborhood expected the worst. Sooner or later, everyone said, Paco was going to kill someone. Or get himself killed.

  But now Emilio was going to prove them all wrong. He and Paco were going to pull off a job so big it would be on CNN and Fox News tomorrow. He smiled, imagining how Mrs. Cohen would react when she saw the news on TV. Maybe he should leave a note for her at the museum, just a couple of sentences to explain why he did it. Dear Mrs. Cohen, You and all the other white people in New York are in big trouble now. You didn’t expect this from us, did you?

  The train roared into the 116th Street station and jolted to a stop. As the doors slid open Emilio glanced at Paco again and saw him turn his head slightly, taking his eyes off the subway map. He seemed to be gazing at the deserted platform next to the tracks, even though nobody got on or off the train. Emilio wondered for a moment what the hell he was looking at. T
hen he noticed that the boy was actually looking past the platform at one of the big advertisements on the station’s wall. It was a poster for the newest Fast & Furious movie, showing a shirtless Vin Diesel leaning against the hood of a red sports car. Paco opened his mouth as he stared at the picture. His face seemed to relax a little.

  Emilio saw an opportunity to start a conversation. He pointed at the car in the poster. “That’s a Dodge Viper, right? One of the new ones?”

  Paco nodded but didn’t say anything. The subway doors closed and he returned his attention to the map. A second later the train started moving again.

  But Emilio was determined. He kept pointing at the poster as it slipped from view. “Coño! I’m gonna get me one of those cars. That’s the first thing I’m gonna do with my share of the money.”

  Paco frowned. He turned to Emilio and gave him a dismissive look. “I don’t think so. You know how much a Viper costs?”

  “About eighty-five thousand dollars, right?” Emilio had no idea if that number was correct. It had just popped into his head. But it felt right.

  Paco raised his eyebrows. “So you already went on the Internet to check the price? On the Dodge Viper Web site?”

  Emilio was about to say no, but then something strange happened. Although he’d never visited that particular Web site, he could suddenly picture it with incredible clarity and detail, as if it had magically appeared on a screen inside his head. All at once, a stream of images from the site flashed behind his eyes: photographs of red, blue, and silver Vipers, on the highway and the racetrack and the streets of Los Angeles. He also saw all the performance specifications for the Viper’s ten-cylinder engine. The images and numbers flooded his mind.

  It was so jarring he wondered if he was going crazy. After a couple of seconds, though, the stream of images began to slow. The pictures and numbers became fuzzier, more like ordinary memories, things he’d seen and half-forgotten. Maybe he had visited the Dodge Viper Web site after all. There was no computer in his grandmother’s apartment, but sometimes he went on the Internet at Carlos’s place, using the boy’s laptop to check out all the stupid stuff on the Web. That might explain why he saw all those pictures in his head.

  He turned away from Paco. He didn’t want his homeboy to suspect that something was wrong. Emilio took a deep breath and put a casual look on his face. “Yeah, that car kicks ass. Six hundred forty-five horsepower. Goes from zero to sixty in three seconds.”

  “Jesus, you’re a fucking expert.”

  Emilio had taken the numbers from the dwindling stream in his head. He had to admit, the information was useful. “Fuck yeah, I’m getting ready. Everyone’s gonna piss in their pants when they see me rolling down Dyckman Street in that thing.” He pointed at Paco. “And you can get a Viper too, amigo. Shit, you’ll have enough cash to buy three of them. This job is gonna make us rich.”

  The left corner of Paco’s lip turned upward. It was only a half smile, though, and it didn’t last long. After a moment he frowned again and shook his head. “Nah, that’s bullshit. No one’s gonna pay us that kind of money. Not for a damn rock.”

  “I told you, it’s not a rock. It’s a crystal. A very fucking valuable crystal.”

  “Rock, crystal, whatever. We’ll get maybe a few hundred dollars for it, that’s all.”

  Emilio waved a finger at him. “Just wait and see, amigo. Wait and see.”

  They fell silent as the train pulled into the 110th Street station. Although their conversation had been brief, Emilio was pleased. Now he knew Paco was ready. The boy didn’t expect much of a payout, but because he had no cash at all right now he was willing to work hard for a few hundred dollars.

  As for Emilio, he wasn’t interested in the money. He’d pretended to lust after sports cars only because he knew Paco wouldn’t understand his real goal. Emilio himself didn’t entirely understand it—his plan was still cloudy in his mind, still half-formed, a work in progress. But he knew he’d been chosen to do something astounding. He was going to fight the good fight and defend his people and right the wrongs and beat the devil. He was going to make history.

  Ten minutes later they arrived at the museum station and got off the train. Emilio carried the duffel bag as they walked west on 81st Street, then turned south on Columbus Avenue. This was the Upper West Side, one of the richest parts of the city. You could smell the money in the air, even at three o’clock in the morning. Across the street from the museum was a row of expensive restaurants, all closed now. Above them were the fancy apartment buildings where the rich white people slept.

  Emilio felt a sly satisfaction as he looked up at their windows. The white folks were proud and happy, but soon that would change. He wasn’t sure yet what would happen to them—that was one of the cloudiest parts of his plan—but he knew they would suffer for their sins. That much was certain.

  He and Paco strolled down the sidewalk, neither too fast nor too slow. The museum was like a castle, an enormous stone building surrounded by trees and gardens. Running between the gardens were asphalt paths with benches and drinking fountains. The boys turned left and walked down one of those paths until they reached an antique-looking iron fence. They stopped there to look around and make sure no one was in sight. Then they climbed over the fence and ran across the grass to the museum’s southwestern corner.

  This was the route Emilio had scoped out twelve hours ago when he’d come here to do his reconnaissance. There was a surveillance camera a couple of hundred feet away but it couldn’t view them if they stayed under the trees. One of the trees had a thick crooked bough that slanted toward the museum, coming close to a window on the second floor. When Emilio had spotted that particular window during his reconnaissance mission he’d noticed a computer screen on the other side of the glass, so he’d assumed it was an office for one of the museum’s workers. He’d also noticed that the window wasn’t fully closed—there was a two-inch-wide slit above the sill. And now he smiled as he looked at the window again in the murky light, because the slit was still there.

  When he got to the tree he crouched beside its trunk and signaled Paco to do the same. Emilio looked up at the branches and leaves overhead and the jutting knots in the tree’s bark. He slipped both arms through the straps of the duffel bag so he could carry it like a backpack and free up his hands. Then he grasped one of the knots in the tree trunk and started climbing.

  It wasn’t easy. Emilio had never done any serious climbing before and didn’t have a lot of upper-body strength. He was about to lose his grip and slide down the trunk when another stream of Internet images flashed through his head. Their sudden appearance didn’t frighten him as much as it had the last time, maybe because he was getting used to it. Now the screen in his mind showed a how-to video, like something you’d find on YouTube. It featured a scruffy, bearded back-to-nature guy who was demonstrating how to climb an oak tree. The guy clasped his hands around the trunk and wrapped his thighs around it too and pushed his feet against the bark, wriggling upward like a caterpillar. It looked ridiculous but Emilio tried it anyway, and instead of sliding down the tree he started moving upward.

  After a few seconds he reached the crooked, slanting bough and pulled himself up to where it branched off the trunk. He sat there, straddling the bough, catching his breath. A night breeze blew against the tree, making the branches swing back and forth, and Emilo glimpsed the security camera through the rustling leaves. This was bad—if he could see the camera, it could see him too, and one of the museum’s guards might spot him on a video monitor. He needed to move quickly.

  Wrapping his arms and legs around the bough, he scrabbled up its slanting length toward the second-floor window. The tree limb sagged and swayed as he crawled away from the trunk, but he kept pulling himself forward, hand over hand. Near the museum’s stone façade the limb angled upward, pointing straight at the night sky. This allowed Emilio to clamber to his feet. He stood on the slanting lower part of the bough and held the vertical upper part for ba
lance. Now he could step from the tree limb to the window, but he got worried when he saw the yawning gap between the two. The limb didn’t come as close to the building as he’d thought. There was at least a yard of empty space between the bough and the windowsill.

  Emilio hesitated. He muttered “Coño!” in frustration, cursing his bad luck. But he couldn’t just stand there; the security camera could see him. He took his left foot off the tree and stretched it toward the window. Then he found a toehold on the sill and leaped across the gap.

  The breeze pushed him sideways but he managed to grab the window frame and keep his balance on the sill. He bent over, slipped his fingers into the slit and yanked the window upward. As soon as it opened he jumped into the office and tumbled to the floor.

  Emilio lay there for a moment, panting. Then he stood up, leaned out the window and gave Paco the thumbs-up signal. The boy scrambled up the tree, climbing much faster than Emilio had. Although Paco couldn’t view any how-to videos in his head, he was in great shape and insanely competitive. Within seconds he vaulted from the tree limb to the window and came inside.

  The room was dark but soon their eyes adjusted. It was a small office with a messy desk. The junk on the desk included an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes, which explained why the window had been left open. Emilio sidled toward the door, opened it quietly and peeked down the corridor. There were some cubicles and a coffee machine to the left. To the right was a second door, a really solid thing made of steel. The door had a crash bar for pushing it open, and above the bar was a sign that said TO THE EXHIBITION HALLS.

  He looked over his shoulder at Paco. “Stay close,” he whispered. “And keep an eye out for the guards.”

  Then he approached the steel door and pushed the crash bar. He thought an alarm might go off, but everything was silent. He held the door open for Paco, then stuck his baseball cap between the door and the jamb to stop it from locking behind them.

  They stood in the Hall of Mexico and Central America, facing a monstrous stone head that was at least nine feet tall. During his reconnaissance mission Emilio had walked across the museum’s floors to see where all the security cameras were, and he’d noticed the giant head. He’d even read the label for the exhibit, which said it was a monument sculpted by the Olmec people. Now, using the head as a landmark, he figured out the best route to the Hall of Gems and Minerals. First, he and Paco needed to go one flight down to the ground floor. There was a stairway a hundred feet ahead, but they couldn’t use it—a surveillance camera was mounted near the steps. They would have to detour around it and go through the Hall of Asian Peoples to another stairway near the museum shop. That area was also monitored by a security camera, but Emilio had noticed it was poorly positioned. If he and Paco stayed on the left side of the stairway, they wouldn’t be seen on the video monitor.