“Megs, I’m sorry, but I need to get going.”
Going? Now I’m wide awake.
“Where?” I sit up in the backseat, rub the sleep out of my eyes, and look at the digital clock duct-taped to the dashboard. It’s hard to focus in the dim light.
4:48 a.m.
“Why are we getting up now?”
“I know it’s early, honey. I’m sorry. But I’m in a hurry and we have to talk.”
Mom saying she’s sorry twice in the same day? That’s a record. Something is definitely wrong. I need to figure some things out. We’re in a place I don’t recognize, full of shadows. There’s lots of concrete. A blue car is parked next to us, and somewhere beyond that is a green door that reads Hotel Lobby.
“Where are we?”
“We’re in the parking garage—”
“At a hotel?”
“Yes. But I—”
“I thought we were going to sleep at the beach.”
“We ran out of gas, remember?”
It’s coming back to me in pieces. Rolling into LA after midnight. The tank on “E.” Getting lost. Finding this hotel. Mom parking in the garage, fixing her hair in the mirror, putting on lipstick, going in to get directions to the beach. Me falling back to sleep. Mom kissing me good night, smelling of cigarettes and beer.
“Why do you have to leave now? Why are you all dressed up?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I have a job interview and I need to go right now.”
“A job interview?” My heart skips a beat. “In those clothes?”
“Yes, honey. Now you need to listen.”
And the missing piece falls into place. The whispering man.
“You’re meeting him, aren’t you? The one I heard you whispering with outside the car?”
“He bought us dinner,” she says, her eyes avoiding mine.
“Buffalo wings?”
I remember them making out. He had thin gray hair and a beard.
She takes a deep breath, fusses with a link on her bracelet. I can tell she’s dying to light a cigarette. She leans forward, suddenly going from soft to hard. Her green eyes drill into mine.
“I don’t have time for this, Megs. You got that? Now be quiet and listen. You need to do exactly what I tell you.”
She pauses, letting her words sink in. I sit in my sleeping bag, stewing.
“Wait in the car. Don’t go anywhere. Keep the doors locked and don’t open them for anyone. Not anyone. Understand?”
“Not even the police?”
She blinks. This hits a nerve. The police are not our friends at the moment. “I’ll only be gone an hour,” she says.
“A whole hour! Where are you going?”
“A different hotel.”
“Why doesn’t he interview you in this hotel?”
“This hotel doesn’t have a … coffee shop.”
She’s making absolutely no sense. “A coffee shop? What kind of job is it?”
A car pulls up behind us. It’s a white Mercedes with tinted windows. I can’t see who’s driving, but I know it’s the whispering man. She grabs her purse.
“Why don’t we just go to San Diego now?” I ask, knowing I can’t stop her but needing to try. “We can just—”
“Honey, please. We don’t have any gas, remember?” She smiles. We’re back to soft. “Don’t turn on the radio, okay? You could kill the battery and God knows we don’t need that. And remember, stay … in … the … car. When I come back I’ll have some money. We can buy gas and a huge breakfast at Denny’s, okay?” I hear the Mercedes idling behind us. She leans over the seat, kisses my hair, and whispers, “And then we’ll go to the beach. I promise.” Her perfume hangs like a cloud of rose petals over my head. She checks her lips in the rearview mirror, tugs her blouse down, opens the door, and leaves.
She starts walking toward the Mercedes, the click of her high heels echoing on the concrete walls. Then she stops, turns around.
She changed her mind!
She hurries back to the car and taps the window. “Lock it,” she mouths, pointing to the button. I push it down and she smiles. Her bright red lips blow me a kiss. There’s something in her eyes, a glistening wetness, that doesn’t match her smile. Whatever this “interview” is, I know she doesn’t want the job.
Just because I’m twelve doesn’t mean I’m stupid.
I swing around to watch through the duct-taped cracks in the rear window as she walks to the Mercedes. Even in a dirty parking garage she’s beautiful. Tall, thin, like a princess—in a clingy red skirt. She opens the passenger door, says something to the driver. He has gray hair and a beard. Without looking back, she gets in. The Mercedes glides out into the early morning shadows.
Now what?
I’m wide awake. I have to pee but my orders are to stay … in … the … car. That’s just great. If I’m going to make it I need a distraction. Some kind of game. I’m good at keeping track of time in my head. I can look at a clock once and then know exactly when fifteen minutes has passed, give or take five seconds. My best friend, Jessica, says it’s almost creepy the way I always know what time it is. She calls it my “brain clock.” It’s the closest thing I have to a superpower. I decide to count down each minute until she gets back. That’s fifty-nine starting … now.
4:58.
I look around our ratty old car, a ’78 Nova with thumb-sized cracks in the dashboard. The ashtray overflows with smashed-up Marlboros with red lipstick on them. Three days’ worth of empty Jalapeño Doritos bags are crumpled on the floor. I’m in a sleeping bag that hasn’t been washed since who knows when. Mom just sleeps under a thin yellow blanket with cigarette holes. Actually, I wonder if she sleeps at all.
4:59.
I try to remember where we slept two nights ago.
Oh yeah, a truck stop just over the California state line. Smelled diesel fumes all night. But it wasn’t as scary as this place. There were more lights. Here there are lots of cars and lots of dark shadowy places between them. I notice a big black SUV in the corner, two rows over. It’s so big it makes the car beside it look like a toy. I wish we had a car like that. There’d be so much room …
5:00.
A thousand screaming demons explode in my head.
It finally stops. My whole body is shaking. The car feels like it’s spinning and my ears hurt. I don’t know what to do, so I bury my head in my sleeping bag and hope that it doesn’t happen again. Where’s Mom? Why me? Am I sick? All these questions are flooding my brain—when there’s another noise.
Sirens.
Not just a couple. Hundreds. I sit up and look around. There are flashes of light, like lightning only without the thunder. Even though Mom said not to, I turn on the radio. It’s just static, no matter what button I push. Then people start running into the parking garage.
First one or two, then a wide-eyed flood. Men in pajamas, women in nightshirts dragging their sobbing kids. A guy wearing only a T-shirt and boxers unlocks the blue car next to ours. He comes out with a gun, sprints to the exit ramp, and starts shooting at the sky. He disappears in a flash of light. Cars start, engines roar. People are trying to leave and other people are trying to stop them. A mom with her two young kids, a boy and girl, run toward the SUV. The little girl drops her stuffed rabbit. She tries to go back, but her mother picks her up and throws her crying into the SUV.
Horns mix with the sirens.
A man trips and falls to the ground.
Cars drive over him like he’s a speed bump. I yell at them to stop, but no one hears me. Then the sound of breaking glass, tearing metal—more people screaming. Cars screech down from the upper levels and ram into cars on the ground floor. The SUV is trying to back out of its parking spot. A speeding truck clips the rear fender, crashing it sideways into another car. Now it’s trapped. Moments later the mom and her kids spill out the passenger side. Blood is streaming down the little girl’s forehead. The mom looks toward the exit. Cars drive out, one after another, and di
sappear in flashes of light. A red BMW slams on its brakes. It skids halfway into the street and disappears. The mom picks up the girl and they run for the lobby door. The boy stops and turns like he forgot something, but his mom grabs his arm and pulls him away. His face is twisted in a scream.
I smell burning rubber, engine exhaust, gasoline—and then I feel something.
A warm wetness spreads inside my sleeping bag.
Tears stream down my face, they smear on the glass. I feel like I can’t breathe. The sounds outside swallow up everything, even the air. I curl up into a ball on the back- seat and close my eyes so tight they hurt. But I still see it—cars driving over the fallen man. And those awful blinding flashes.
DAY 2: PROSSER, WASHINGTON
Megaphone Man
I call them PODs, short for Pearls of Death. They’re pearls because they remind me of a pair of dangly earrings I bought Mom for Christmas last year. Each earring had a single pearl—round, smooth, and inky black. They weren’t very big, but if you looked at them just right they seemed to shine with a mysterious, translucent light. The PODs, if you look at them long enough with a pair of binoculars, seem to have something going on inside them, too. I see shadowy shapes. Dad says there’s nothing to see but space metal.
As for the death part—all I have to do is close my eyes. I see Jamie’s face, eyes open wide, mouth frozen in a silent scream. She was there, then she wasn’t. Like she was deleted.
We counted the PODs today after breakfast. I got one hundred twenty-eight. Dad got one hundred twenty-two. He wears glasses and I don’t, so there’s part of your margin for error. Another variable is, a cloud moves on the horizon and, by golly, there’s another POD. They don’t seem to change their position, so that helps. We agree to split the difference. Dad writes it down in a notebook: May 15 / 8:55 a.m. – 125 PODs.
I shake my head. We’re sitting at the breakfast table, the you-know-whats spinning silently outside the window. Dutch is inside, dozing by the patio door.
“How long are we doing this counting?” I ask.
“Every day.”
“And the point of this exercise is?”
“Track the changes.”
“Why?”
“Maybe figure something out.”
“Like what?”
He’s drawing an X and a Y axis, labeling them Days and PODs. He writes 125 at the bottom of the vertical axis.
“Like what?” I ask again.
“Their next move.”
“Their next move? C’mon, Dad!” I slap the breakfast table with my hand, rattling plates and tipping over a saltshaker. White granules spill onto the table. “I’ll save you some time, okay? Their next move is to crush us like, like freaking bugs.” I almost dropped the F-bomb. It was right there, on the tip of my tongue. But he never swears, so I resist the urge in front of him.
“We don’t know that,” he says.
“Right. They came here to hang out, enjoy the view. Maybe pick up a couple of cars.”
He blinks behind his glasses but says nothing.
“Will this graph of yours help you figure out the odds of Mom being alive or dead?”
I wish I could snatch the words and stuff them back in my mouth. But they’re out there now, bouncing around in his brain. He puts down the pencil, takes off his glasses, closes the notebook. The table is still littered with the remnants of breakfast. Clumps of congealed eggs sit on plates, cold, rubbery, and yellow. Dad rights the saltshaker but leaves the granules where they are. On a normal day he wouldn’t stand for this. As soon as the meal is over, or there’s a spill or whatever, he’s in instant clean-up mode. Mom says engineers crave order. He can’t help himself.
“We’ve been over this already,” he finally says. “But it’s a subject worth revisiting. There’s no point in worrying about something outside our sphere of influence. We have to assume she’s okay and trying to reach us.”
There are many Dad-isms that really get to me, but his Sphere of Influence speech—that’s got to be right near the top. It’s his logical adult brain torturing my freewheeling, irresponsible teenager brain.
Like yesterday.
Once it looked like the PODs weren’t going to attack the houses (yet), I spent the day trying to reach Mom. After a couple of hours Dad said it was a waste of time, they were jamming all the frequencies. It was frustrating. We have electricity and running water, but anything that has to do with communication either flat-out doesn’t work or is filled with that alien space spam. But I kept surfing the channels anyway until Dad pulled the plug. “CNN is canceled,” is all he said.
Later, after dinner, I asked him why he didn’t seem more worried about Mom. That’s when I got his fifteen-minute Sphere of Influence speech. Boiled down to one sentence, it goes like this: We can’t do anything about her situation, so let’s focus on ours.
Now he’s plotting his little graph and I have to call it what it is: total BS.
“Dad, the PODs deleted every car, truck, and freaking airplane. We’re all stuck in our houses until they decide to delete those, too. They conquered our little planet without breaking a sweat. I’d say they’re way beyond our sphere of influence.”
“We have the Camry.”
He cracks me up. He really does. Our street used to be choked with rusty RVs, broken-down trucks, and old Camaros with bad paint jobs up on blocks. Gone. Dad’s VW Rabbit—deleted. All that’s left is the oil stain in the driveway. But Mom’s car is still in the garage, ready to go. Where are the cruise missiles? The F-16s? The nukes? That’s what I want to know.
“So that’s your secret weapon? A 1997 Camry with a hundred thirty-two thousand miles and a broken radio?”
He stands up, starts stacking plates. “Josh, if you don’t want to count the PODs, fine. I’m not going to make you.”
I should help clear the table, but I don’t feel like it. I should tell him that I’ll count the PODs, but I don’t feel like doing that either. So I sit and force myself to look out the window while he crams plates and glasses into the dishwasher. A cat is prowling the backyard, looking for mice. Dutch watches from the patio, too lazy to move. I know exactly how he feels. In the distance a flock of geese head for some unseen pond. This would be an ordinary spring morning except for the alien spaceships floating over the muddy landscape.
And then, as if the day couldn’t get any better, Megaphone Man starts up.
The first time we heard him was yesterday afternoon. Right after the PODs’ arrival, there were lots of sirens. A half hour later and that was done. Then people started shouting from their windows, calling out names of people who should be home but weren’t, mixed in with the occasional profanity aimed at our uninvited guests. And of course there were guns—it sounded like a war zone for a while. That set off Dutch more than an army of squirrels. Then things quieted down. A resigned silence settled over the neighborhood.
And then it started.
Some guy with a megaphone, calling out, “The Shepherd has returned for His flock! Armageddon is here! Repent, all ye sinners, and embrace the Word of the Lord!”
He kept it up for hours. Sometimes he’d mix in Bible verses, sometimes he’d sing parts of a hymn. But most of the time it was the Shepherd Returning message, over and over. People yelled at him to shut up, others said, “Amen.” I went to sleep with a pillow over my ears.
And now he’s back at it. Megaphone Man.
Dad is wiping down the counter. The table is clear, a gleaming testimony to cleanliness. I ask him, “Do you believe what he’s saying?”
Dad says, “When Jesus comes, it won’t be in a spaceship.”
I say, “Maybe Jesus sent the spaceships.”
He stops wiping. Looks at me and says, “Whatever they are, it has nothing to do with God, Jesus, or Armageddon.”
Maybe he’s right, maybe he isn’t. Either way, for the first time in my life I find myself wishing for something I never knew I wanted.
A megaphone.
Then I could exp
ress my opinions, see what the neighborhood thinks of that.
DAY 2: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
A Long, Dark Smear
I’m all cried out. I’m still alone. The sky is full of giant spinning black balls that kill anyone stupid enough to go outside. I’ve been out of the car only twice—once to pee and once to look at the sky. That one look was enough for me. Now I sit alone in the car, staring out the window like a rat in a cage. But I don’t have anyone to look at. The parking garage is empty, except for twisted-up cars, broken glass, and the smell of leaking gasoline.
And Speed-Bump Guy.
All I see from here are legs twisted at some crazy angle. I was too afraid to check on him when I left the car. I try not to look over there, but sometimes I do it anyway.
My stomach is growling like an angry dog. I dig up the empty Doritos bags in the backseat. That’s good for a few crumbs and a handful of salty jalapeño dust. I’m still insanely hungry, so I lick the insides of the bags. Bad idea. It just makes me thirstier and all the water bottles are empty.
What’s driving me nuts is there’s a cooler in the trunk with some food and drinks (mostly beer, I think), but I don’t know how to get to it. Mom took the keys, and the trunk-release thing inside the car is busted. I know how to break into trunks with a tire iron—I’ve seen Mom’s idiot boyfriend, -ex-boyfriend, Zack, do it a couple of times. But I don’t have a tire iron, and even if I did, it would ruin the trunk and get Mom screaming mad. She said she’d be back, so I’ll wait. But for how long? If she’s not back by tomorrow morning, then I’m going to break into the other cars and find something to eat. I could go into the hotel, but what’s the point? I don’t have any money.
In the afternoon two men, a short, thick guy in a blue hooded sweatshirt that says HOOTERS on the front and a tall, bony man with long tattooed arms and a shiny head, argue about what to do with Speed-Bump Guy. The tall man says forget about it. The short man, whose face I can’t quite see because of the hood, says throw the carcass outside. They do rock-paper-scissors and the short man wins. They drag the body to the exit, lift him by the arms and legs, swing one-two-three, and heave him into the street. Speed-Bump Guy doesn’t touch the ground. There’s a flash from the sky and all that’s left of him is a dried-up pool of blood and a long, dark smear. After that I’m not hungry.
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