Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments

by Brian Yansky

  “I’m me,” I say. “I was just me.”

  “Okay,” she says. “So what are you?”

  I get that question a lot, I mindspeak.

  But the truth? I still don’t have a good answer. Some crazy things have been happening to me. Being in the past and being in the future but at the same time being in the present. Almost like I was, am, and will be in two places at once, which is impossible.

  Right?

  Nothing can be in two places at once. One of the rules of the universe. But here’s the thing: when the impossible keeps becoming the possible, the rules no longer seem so reliable. One plus one always equals two? Maybe. Maybe not.

  What am I? I don’t know.

  Sam doesn’t fly much better than Catlin, who flew us out of Austin with a ship we stole but sort of wrecked it along the way. On our takeoff, we run into the top branches of a tree. Fortunately, we hit where they’re thin, and they whip harmlessly against the ship. We rise a few hundred yards into the air.

  “That was kind of close,” I can’t help pointing out.

  “I’ll tell you what I tell everyone who complains about my flying. If you think you can do better, here’s the control.”

  She takes her hand off the control, and the ship drops. My stomach drops with it. She smiles. It’s a beautiful smile, though I’m unable to fully appreciate it because — hello — we’re dropping to our deaths.

  “No,” I say, gripping my seat.

  “No what?”

  “No, I don’t want to fly.”

  We’re still dropping. In fact, we’re dropping even faster, it seems, or maybe the earth is just coming up to meet us.

  “If you’re sure . . .” she says.

  “I’m sure!” I shout.

  She puts her hand on the control, and we swoop up and away from the unforgiving earth. I keep gripping the seat. I have to consciously convince my fingers to let go. “You’re kind of crazy, aren’t you?” I say.

  “Takes one to know one,” she says. “Sit back and enjoy the ride.”

  Enjoy the ride? Not so much. We jerk up and down several times, like we’re caught in air currents. While I don’t pretend to have Lauren’s brilliant mind, I am capable of learning from my mistakes; not one word of criticism escapes from my lips.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” I ask.

  “Little place about halfway between here and camp. We stored the other ship we took from the aliens in the barn there. This gives us two. Practically an air force.”

  “Two ships is an air force?”

  “I said practically.”

  “In Austin we saw thousands of alien ships.”

  “Really?” she says. “Think they’d lend us a few?”

  “If we force them to.”

  “Now you’re thinking like someone who has the spirit of the Warrior in him. If we want ships, we should go get them. I like it.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I say.

  “Can I ask you something?” Sam says after a while.

  “Sure,” I say, expecting a question about the ships.

  “Did you hesitate?” The question catches me off-guard, but she mistakes my discomfort for confusion. “It felt like you hesitated when you and the alien faced off,” she explains.

  I want to tell her about my memory from history class about the World War I soldiers or my guilt about killing even someone as terrible as Lord Vertenomous or my feeling that the alien boy didn’t want to be there any more than I did. I don’t, though. I answer her question. “Yes.”

  What she says next she says softly, but it’s not soft. It’s not soft at all. “And two people died.”

  “He didn’t want to kill us any more than I wanted to kill him,” I say. ”I felt that.”

  “You can’t hesitate,” she says, like what I just said doesn’t matter at all. And maybe it doesn’t, or it shouldn’t. I don’t know anymore. “I get that this is hard for you,” she continues. “You’re not a soldier. You’re just a kid. I get it, but if you hesitate, more will die. You’ll let more die.”

  More will die. Because of me.

  “This is war, Jesse. Maybe you’ve got the Warrior Spirit in you, maybe not. But you can fight like they fight. It’s a talent. You have to use it.”

  Being able to kill is my talent. Why can’t I just hear really well, like Zelda? Or why can’t I be a healer, like Catlin? Help people. Save people.

  “You can save people,” Sam says, startling me. I put my shield back up. “You need to start acting like a leader, Jesse, because we need you.”

  “Intercourse,” I mutter.

  “Excuse me?” Sam says, with knife-blade sharpness.

  “I didn’t mean . . . I wasn’t asking you. . . . I mean . . . it’s my mom’s fault.”

  Her expression does not soften when I blame my mother.

  I tell her, the words rushing out, about my mom being an English teacher and convincing my father and me to use alternative methods of swearing rather than relying on swear words, which she said were reductive and stunted our vocabularies.

  Sam shakes her head. “You are one lame Chosen One.” She sounds so much like Michael just then that she brings him back to me, and I miss him in that sudden and hard way that loss has of filling and emptying you at the same time. Then I try not to think about him because it hurts.

  “I tried to tell you,” I say.

  “You did.”

  “Of course, some people seem to think I’m, you know, part god now,” I say. “A demigod.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you don’t know. No one knows.”

  She takes her hands off the controls again. We drop, very quickly and with increasing momentum.

  “Any god, even a part god, should be able to make one of these ships rise, right? Can you do that?”

  “No,” I say. When she doesn’t put her hand back on the control, I quickly add, “I said no. No. No. No. No.”

  She smiles and takes back control of the ship.

  “I really hate it when you do that,” I tell her.

  She doesn’t seem too worried about my displeasure — or worried at all. You’d think a possible demigod, even one who can’t stop ships from falling, would inspire a little more respect, but I decide against bringing this up. In fact, I sort of make a rule that I won’t bring up much of anything with Sam unless we’re on the ground.

  There’s a truck in the barn where the other ship is, so Sam lands and I get out and move it so Sam can take the ship in and park it next to the other ship. It’s a tight squeeze, but she manages. By the time we’re done, the rest of the search party has caught up to us, and we all drive together to the ski lodge and park the cars and trucks where we got them. Then we hike with the others up the trail to camp. We get as far as the town hall circus tent before Robert stops us and says Doc needs to be debriefed.

  “Debriefed?” I say. “What are we, spies?”

  Sam gives me a withering look.

  “We’re soldiers,” Sam says. “You’d better get used to taking orders, Chosen One.”

  Quit calling me that, I mindspeak.

  Whatever you say, Chosen One, she mindspeaks back.

  We go inside the tent, and Dylan gives Doc a full report. Afterward, Doc tells Sam and me to stay. He wants to know all about the fight, how I fought. I find it hard to put into words. I tell him that the moves seemed physical to me somehow. My mind turns them into moves I’ve done in tae kwon do and hapkido and judo.

  “They can’t be real, though,” I say. “I mean, my mind is doing something, not my body.”

  “What is real, exactly?” Doc says.

  Sam says, “When the conversation starts going all wobbly at the knees, I’m out of here. Call me when you need me.”

  Off she goes. I take a seat in one of the metal folding chairs in front of Doc’s desk.

  “A lovely girl,” Doc says.

  Lovely isn’t exactly the word I’d use, but I have to admit she’s something.

&
nbsp; “Another ship will be very helpful,” he says.

  I hesitate. Sam didn’t mention our brilliant steal-a-fleet-of-ships-from-the-alien-headquarters-in-Austin plan, which makes me wonder if she was serious about it.

  But there’s no use trying to hide my thoughts from Doc.

  “Out of the question,” he says before I’ve spoken a word. “They’ll be heavily guarded.”

  “We have to do something,” I say. “Something that makes them see us.”

  I know I’m right as soon as I say it. We have to make the aliens see us. The aliens who are not part of the company or whatever it is. Those aliens who would care that we can hear. That we can dreamwalk. Or I can, anyway. We need them to know about us.

  “It’s too risky,” Doc says.

  “We could train for it,” I say, surprising myself. “I could teach people how to fight, and Sam could teach them how to fly.”

  “They’re too strong.”

  “We’ve got to make them see us,” I repeat. “We’ve got to do it before they start landing more settlers. The company knows we’re not product and they don’t care, but from what the smuggler told me, some of the other Sans would care. They wouldn’t settle here if they knew.”

  “That’s assuming that these settlers are, indeed, coming,” Doc says.

  I start to protest, but he holds up a hand. “I’ll think about it,” he says. “In the meantime, I would like you to do something for me.”

  “Sure,” I say without thinking. I know better. Saying “sure” without thinking can lead to bad places.

  “I want you to sweat with Running Bird,” says Doc. “He is ready.”

  “Sweat with him?”

  “In his sweat lodge.”

  “I don’t really need to sweat. I’ve been sweating a lot.”

  “Running Bird believes you have the Warrior Spirit in you. He’s a powerful priest in the House of Jupiter, and if he believes it, then it’s probably true. But I need to know. I need to know what you are, Jesse.”

  I’d like to know what I am, I think.

  “Good man,” he says. “Follow the path you took this morning, but take the very narrow path to the right just before that cliff you foolishly climbed. It will lead you to Running Bird’s sweat lodge.”

  Someone else comes in, a guy about my age or a little older. He speaks to Doc in Spanish, and Doc rattles off Spanish back. Doc waves as I leave. I’m halfway to the path before I wonder how he knows I climbed that cliff. Maybe he read it in my mind even though I wasn’t thinking about it. Or maybe he has someone watching me.

  I do a quick search with my mind. No one. I’m probably just being paranoid. Still, as I pass through camp and beyond it up the mountain, I keep looking around just to make sure no one is following. As my dad used to say, it’s only paranoia if it’s not true.

  I’m so fixated on the task that when the memory comes I nearly slip, because it’s like I walk right into it. Physically I’m standing on the path just a few yards from Running Bird’s sweat lodge — I think. But mentally, I’m pulled back to the circus. It’s like I’m in two places at once again.

  I felt bad for the animals because they were locked in cages. The cats were especially disturbing because of the way they paced back and forth and back and forth. You could see they longed to run. You could see how their bodies were made to run somewhere, but the best they could do was pace, and that best wasn’t enough. Anyone could see that. Not near enough.

  They weren’t the only ones who looked like they longed to be free, though. The monkeys swung restlessly around in their cages. The elephants stomped their mammoth legs, which were chained to each other.

  I wanted to swing open the doors and unlock the chains and set them all free. I wanted to do something to help them.

  “And where would they go?” a man next to me said. He was tall with long white hair tied back in a ponytail and very blue eyes. My parents were nearby, maybe over at a shooting booth, where my dad would be winning every stuffed animal he wanted, but I couldn’t see them.

  “Anywhere,” I said, almost a whisper, because I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, and if this man wasn’t a stranger, I didn’t know who was.

  Those eyes seemed to look right through me. He was three or four feet away, but he still seemed too close. He was like fire, radiating something that required distance to feel comfortable.

  “They’ve been in these cages for a long time,” he said. “They’re used to them. That’s what happens, you know. They get used to them. What good would it do if you or I went around and opened those cages?”

  I was surprised that he was taking me seriously. I found myself feeling less scared of him.

  “They would be free,” I said.

  “Perhaps. But for how long? What do you think would happen — what would really happen — to these animals if they were released right now?”

  I understood what he was saying, but the injustice of it all made me stubborn. “They shouldn’t be there.”

  He nodded sadly. “It’s one of those problems that can’t be solved by two people at a circus.”

  People? I was just a kid. No one had ever called me people before.

  Once again, the man seemed to know what I was thinking. “Even many people couldn’t solve this problem,” he said. “Some problems grow so big it takes something just as big to solve them. You’ll understand that someday. You’ll have to.”

  The man contemplated the cages for a while in silence. “But maybe we can open just one cage.”

  They had these sheepdogs they used to begin a show, seven of them. Their long, moppy hair hung over their eyes, and they had these funny expressions, as if they had a joke to tell you. They were locked in a cage, too, just like all the other animals. The man walked over to that cage, and the lock came undone at his touch. The cage door swung open.

  It was like magic. Like something out of Harry Potter. That’s what I thought at the time.

  “Go have some fun, my pets!” he shouted.

  Sheepdogs, as I’d learn later when our family got one, are naturally gregarious. They didn’t need a second invitation. They bounded from their cage and out into the crowd, where they greeted and knocked over almost everyone and everything they came in contact with. They had a wonderful time.

  The man looked at me but didn’t speak. I mean, his mouth didn’t move. You will forget me. You will think I was a dream, but I’m a traveler. I’m from another moment many moments away from this one. I’ve seen you fighting gods when you are older, so I’m glad to be in this moment and see you as a boy. One day you’ll wake. And you will fight gods. And you will travel. And you will be the one to make the great choice to end or begin all choices for your kind. This I see. This is my prophecy and also my memory.

  My mom and dad came over as the dogs ran off farther into the crowd, my mom carrying a large stuffed bear.

  “Did you see those dogs?” my mom asked.

  I nodded. “The man set them loose.”

  “What man?” my father said.

  I pointed where the man had been, but he wasn’t there anymore. No one was.

  The man was right. A day, a week later, I thought that he must have been a dream. People didn’t talk without voices. Everyone knew that. And who fights gods? I mean, outside of stories. It was too strange. I decided before long that I’d fallen asleep and dreamed. Then I forgot him. I forgot him just like he said I would.

  I’m back to being in one place, on the path again. But I remember him now. The man from the circus. Where did he come from? And when?

  I think of what Running Bird said before, about everything happening simultaneously or whatever. Does that mean that right now the moment at the circus is happening somewhere — or somewhen — else?

  Fighting gods? A traveler from where and when? And what did/does he mean, I will be the one who will make the choice to begin or end all choices? I would like to blame the memory on Running Bird, who, I know, is nearby. But it’s my memory. It h
appened long ago. The traveler said one day I would wake. Is this what he meant?

  “You lost again?” Running Bird says as the path disappears in a rocky slope. He’s above me, where the slope levels before a second, steeper slope.

  “I wasn’t lost the first time.”

  Running Bird smiles. His smile reminds me of the Road Runner’s — a big birdie smile. It’s like he is always laughing at some private joke. When Running Bird looks at me that way, I feel like I’m the joke.

  “So you’ve come to sweat.”

  “And you’ve come to tell me if I’m a god or not.”

  “Demigod,” Running Bird says without a trace of sarcasm.

  I don’t hear her coming up behind me, but I sense her. She reaches me just as I make it to the lodge. I turn around to greet her but am surprised when she jumps up and wraps her arms around my neck. I forget how small she is. In my mind there’s something that makes her large, but she’s light, easy to hold in my arms.

  “I was so worried about you,” Catlin says. “At first we didn’t know who’d been killed in town. We just heard it was a boy.”

  “And two girls,” I say because they’re on my mind. My fault.

  I remember the first time I saw Catlin, in a dream. She was sitting on that bed in the room where Lord Vertenomous kept her. A very pretty girl — delicate, I thought. Long blond hair, small face, long neck, arms, legs. Michael called her my dream girl. She wasn’t, of course. She’s real. She’s right here.

  “I’m okay,” I say, unhooking her arms and setting her down on the flat rock.

  “Sorry,” she says, and blushes. “I was just worried.”

  I’m about to ask how she found me when Running Bird says, “Time to sweat, Warrior Boy. You come, too, little girl. This boy may need medical attention. We’re going extreme with our sweat.”

  “I’m not a little girl, old man,” Catlin says. She glares at him. She only looks delicate.

  “You want to come or not?” he asks.

  “Okay,” she says, “but don’t call me little girl.”

  “Guess I can’t go naked if you come,” he says.

  “Please.” I turn to Catlin. “Come.”