Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments

by Brian Yansky

“She’s alive in some moments, you know. I see her every once in a while.”

  “I’m still sorry,” I say, because I know now what it means to lose people, and I know no matter what he says, it hurts. It hurts him still after all these years.

  “Your friend was very brave,” he says.

  “Betty,” I say. “Her name was Betty.”

  Then everyone disappears and the lights dim and there’s dust on the tables and I know I’m where I was last night with the Hunter. Same place. Different time.

  “Someone very powerful is here,” Running Bird says.

  “Alien,” I say. “The Hunter.”

  “It’s not good for the hunted to be where the hunters are,” Running Bird points out.

  “You’re the guide,” I say.

  “You’re guiding now,” he says. “Why are we here? Are you lost again?”

  “I wasn’t lost this morning. I have a good sense of direction.”

  “Stay focused, Warrior Boy. This is a dangerous place.”

  Just then I hear a familiar voice. But it’s not the Hunter’s. “Tex. Is that you?” it says.

  “Who is that?” Running Bird says. I can feel his mind stretching in all directions, searching for the voice.

  “Michael?” I say.

  “About time, Tex. Where you been?”

  “But you’re dead,” I say. I turn to Running Bird. “Can we talk to the dead when we’re, you know, dreamwalking?”

  “Never have,” Running Bird says. Again I feel the darkness pulling at him. “Many things are possible in this universe, though. Maybe you’re in a moment when the boy was alive.”

  “Are you dead, Michael?” I say.

  “Hell, no, I’m not dead.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in some kind of cell. That hunter put me here. Now’s your chance to save me the way you saved your dream girl, Tex.”

  He’s talking about Catlin. Only Michael knew about the dream girl thing — Catlin, the girl from my literal dreams. It has to be him. Suddenly I hear doors slamming shut, the clicking of locks.

  “That can’t be good,” I say.

  “Welcome to my humble home,” the Hunter says.

  There’s noplace to go. Every door is locked. I know this.

  Somehow Running Bird makes a trapdoor in the floor. He pulls it open and shoves me through it and follows.

  We fall.

  We land back in the sweat lodge.

  “Go get water,” Running Bird rasps.

  I can feel that he’s weak. Making that door took a lot of power, and he’s totally drained. I fumble in the dark and finally grab a gallon of water and hand it to him. He takes a long drink. He passes it to me, and I take a drink and pass it back.

  “How much of that really happened?” I say. The heat closes around me. The ancestors feel angry, and there’s a sour smell.

  “All of it,” he says.

  “I can travel through time? That’s real, my traveling?”

  “You can be in different moments. Only the strongest dreamwalkers can be in different moments. It may happen only once or twice in a lifetime. The Warrior Spirit maybe makes it possible for you.”

  “But —”

  “More water,” he says, and I hear the weariness in his voice.

  I go out of the sweat lodge and grab another gallon jug. Running Bird follows me out and motions for me to get my own jug. I do and immediately chug half of it. I’m confused, but the coolness of the air and the water make me feel better almost right away. I’m alive. I’m lucky. Still lucky.

  Catlin watches us from a rock, her legs pulled up so that her knees are pointed at the sky, her arms wrapped around them.

  “What happened?” she says.

  “The Chosen One dreamwalked us into a trap,” Running Bird says.

  I say, “We were back at Lord Vertenomous’s. I heard Michael.”

  “You heard something,” Running Bird says, taking another long drink from a gallon jug, “but I don’t know if it was real. Neither do you.”

  “We saw him die,” Catlin says.

  Could it have been a trick — maybe the Hunter mimicking Michael’s voice and attitude? Because she’s right: we saw Michael die. I did. Saw him running across the lawn. Saw the alien. Saw him fall. Saw . . .

  “We saw them take him,” I say. “We thought he was dead, but what if they didn’t kill him? He called me Tex in the dreamwalk. No one else calls me Tex.”

  “I saw him die,” Catlin insists.

  We saw him fall. I open up my thinking to Catlin. I show her what I remember seeing.

  “Maybe,” she says. “Maybe.”

  Running Bird says, “If he is alive, then this hunter is using him as bait. He’s planning on catching you. He’ll have you mounted on his wall.”

  “He’ll have to catch me first.”

  “We were lucky this time. The great hunter underestimated his prey. He won’t be so careless twice.”

  “Michael was — is — my best friend,” I say. “I can’t leave him there.”

  “You can,” Running Bird says.

  But he’s wrong.

  Catlin and I decide not to take the path down the mountain. We cut through the dense wood, so dark in places it might be night. The silence is immense but broken by the sound of an alien ship passing overhead. We instinctively crouch, though we’re well hidden. We join without meaning to, creating a shield that the aliens can’t see through — cool, but not really necessary in the thick woods. Both our faces flush at the ease of our joining. We walk on and try to pretend it didn’t happen.

  After a while we come to a small, grassy meadow filled with purple flowers.

  “Beautiful,” Catlin says. “A good place for a talk, don’t you think?” She smiles that not-quite-smile of hers, and I wonder if the rest of her smile will ever come back or if her smile has always been this way, even before the invasion. There’s a lot I don’t know about her.

  As we walk through the meadow, I tell her everything. About the dreamwalk and the Road Runner cartoon and the Hunter.

  “What are you going to do about Michael?” Catlin says, and something in the way she asks makes me think she already knows.

  “Who says I’m going to do anything?” Sweat beads on my face and neck from the sun. The open field is much warmer than the woods. I’m surprised I have enough liquid to make sweat after Running Bird’s sweat lodge.

  “You have that look.”

  “What look?”

  “That ‘I’m going to do something stupid’ look.”

  “Oh,” I say. “That look.”

  Amazing how quickly some people learn to identify your looks, particularly ones you’d rather they didn’t.

  We finish crossing the meadow and are back in the forest, the trees less dense here.

  “You can’t go back,” she says.

  She’s walking faster now. She’s not being careful about holding the branches until I can grab them, either. In fact, it almost seems like she’s aiming some of them at me. A whip of leaves slaps my face.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “You are so stupid,” she says, and stops so abruptly that I practically run into her. Then she spins around and stomps her foot. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

  We are very close to each other. Somehow we’re leaning toward each other even. I don’t know how we got so close. Then she punches me. Hard. It’s a pretty good punch — though technically a low blow. She would be disqualified in a boxing match.

  Pain shoots through my groin, and the breath goes out of me. I lean over, hands on knees, and take deep breaths as the pain recedes.

  Stupid! she mindshouts at me as she pushes her way through the forest.

  “You’re stupid, too!” I shout. Okay, not the most mature or inspired comeback, but I am happy to hear my voice hasn’t been raised a couple of octaves.

  Once I can stand up, I think about going after her, but I don’t. I decide that I need to find Lauren. That’s who I need to
talk to. That’s who I should have told first anyway, not Catlin.

  I find Lauren in the eating area. She’s sitting at one of the picnic tables. She has a yellow notepad in front of her that’s filled with her writing, which is neat and small. She looks up and smiles at me and tells me she’s been working on what she calls our presentation, our five minutes to speak at the town meeting that night.

  “I wasn’t really thinking of it as a presentation,” I say.

  “Organization wins political campaigns,” she says. “And that’s what this is. We’ve got to get organized. We’ve got to convince people that staying and fighting is the best choice. I think we should call ourselves SAF. It’s kind of catchy, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.”

  “Come on, Jesse. Show a little enthusiasm. This is our future now. There’s no Yale or Harvard for us.”

  I’m about to tell her that there was never a Yale or Harvard for me, and I’d never wanted there to be. I don’t say that, though. I don’t tell her how little enthusiasm I have for speaking in front of people at the town meeting, either. Instead I say, “Michael’s alive.”

  “Michael?” she says. I can see it takes her a few seconds to even know who I’m talking about. “Our Michael?”

  “Yes.”

  “How? He’s here?”

  She looks around. She starts to smile. She has a pretty smile. It’s never tentative or half a smile. Well, she has two kinds of smiles. This one, which I love. And another that’s like a public smile, a “vote for me” smile, which I don’t love.

  I say, “Running Bird and I dreamwalked back to Lord Vertenomous’s house. I heard him. He’s there. And he’s alive.”

  “He spoke to you?” she says, and sets down her pencil. I can tell she doesn’t believe me. She can’t shield well. I try to stay out of her mind, but sometimes it’s hard.

  “I heard him,” I repeat stubbornly. “He sensed me, and he spoke. He called me Tex. No one else calls me that. It was Michael.”

  “Was Lindsey with him?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t hear her, but that doesn’t mean she’s not there, too.”

  “She never missed a chance to talk,” Lauren says. “If she could have said something to you, she would have.”

  She sighs and starts tapping her pencil against her notepad. “So let me get this straight. You and Running Bird dreamwalked — or whatever it’s called when you do it during the day, while you’re awake — and wound up back at Lord Vertenomous’s palace. Together. And you heard — but didn’t see — someone who sounded like Michael, and now you’re convinced he’s alive?”

  When I hear her say it that way, I have to admit that it does sound pretty crazy. I figure it’s probably best if I leave out the parts about the Road Runner cartoon and traveling back in time.

  “I know what I heard,” I say. “And Running Bird heard it, too. He led me at first, but then I was leading. Look, I don’t know where the talent comes from, but I was able to make us dreamwalk when we were awake. Running Bird was pretty surprised.”

  “So now he’s convinced you’re this Warrior Spirit, or you have it in you, or whatever?” she asks.

  I’d been so distracted by thoughts of Michael that I’d forgotten that Running Bird asked me to sweat with him mostly to test me for Warrior Spirit possession.

  “We didn’t discuss it directly,” I say.

  Her eyebrows arch like the backs of angry cats. “Of course you didn’t,” she says, and sighs again. “Look, we can all talk this over later, you and Catlin and I. In the meantime, take this.”

  “What is it?”

  “What you’ll say at the meeting tonight. Memorize it if you can.”

  “Should I eat it after I’m finished?”

  “What?”

  “Like a secret message,” I say weakly.

  “This is serious,” she says.

  “What’s it say?”

  “It’s just a convincing argument for why we should stay and fight. Don’t worry,” she says before I can interrupt. “It doesn’t mention the smuggler or your dream. But we need to try to recruit members to SAF as soon as possible. Dylan has already been campaigning for the run-and-hide strategy. We have a lot of ground to make up.”

  “Captain of the debate team,” I say, “weren’t you?”

  “It’s a good thing I was,” she says defensively.

  So Lauren doesn’t really believe Michael’s alive, and Catlin might believe it but is angry with me because I want to do something about it. Neither response is exactly what I’d hoped for. But what if I’m wrong? About Michael. About everything. I’m frustrated and feeling lost. And going back to my tent to memorize my speech isn’t going to fix anything.

  I say, “Do you remember how, back when we were slaves at Lord Vertenomous’s house, you once told me you wished you’d taken more time to just be?”

  She looks suspicious. “Yeah. So?”

  “So,” I say, “let’s go be.”

  At first she looks like she’s going to resist, like she’s organizing arguments that will attack my blasphemous “let’s go be.” But she surprises me, and maybe herself, too, by standing up.

  “You know what? You’re right.” These aren’t words I’ve heard very often from Lauren. I can’t help enjoying them.

  We take the main path up the mountain. After a long walk, some of it steep, both of us panting and sweating, we move above the tree line. Not long afterward, we come to a huge crater with a lake. We stop and catch our breath, then find a place to sit close to the water. The sun is more intense up here and reflects brightly off the white rocks. The air is warm.

  “Feels like the top of the world,” I say.

  “It is beautiful,” she says grudgingly, like she’s admitting a rival has a good point. Lauren struggles with “just being.” “Up here everything feels clean. Not like the lake I grew up by.”

  “Which lake is that?”

  She frowns.

  “That would be Lake Michigan,” she says, a little more sarcastically than necessary, in my opinion.

  “Oh, right.”

  Geography, when it comes to the Midwest, isn’t my strong point. Lots of small square states.

  “You have heard of the Great Lakes, right?” she asks. “Big lakes. No salt water.”

  “Of course,” I say. “They’re great.”

  “Used to be, maybe. Now they’re gigantic cesspits, polluted by mills and refineries and exhaust and every kind of waste humans make. They say it isn’t as bad as it used to be, but that’s like saying somebody being poisoned isn’t being given as much poison as they were before. They’re still dying.”

  She is fighting a ghost war now. Her enemies, like her allies, are dead. Maybe, though, we can’t give up on what we were even if what we were is mostly gone. So I listen to her talk about old causes. I listen until she pauses long enough for me to kiss her. She kisses me back. Then we’re just a boy and a girl lying by a lake in the sun, kissing.

  Something feels wrong. I don’t know what it can be, and later I’ll wonder if the feeling came before the alien ship showed up or after. But I do know the ship isn’t directly above us when I feel it; the shadow of the ship moves over the bald stone top of the mountain just to the right of us. I can feel the probe, feel the alien in it searching.

  “Stay very still,” I say.

  “It’s close,” Lauren says, a slight quiver to her voice, but that’s all.

  We’re more out in the open than we should be. We shouldn’t have left the protection of the trees. What was I thinking? I try to shield us both. Lauren tries to help, but the truth is she makes it harder when she tries to join with me: it pulls me away from what I’m trying to do.

  “Don’t,” I say.

  “I’m trying to help,” she says.

  “You aren’t.”

  She pulls back. She’s angry, but I can’t worry about that right now. I have to hide us as much as I can. I try to make the reflection off the rocks more intense
so that the alien won’t see as well. I think thin, and I try to make us disappear in the light. I feel him looking and looking and maybe even for a second thinking he might see something, but he keeps going. He doesn’t see us.

  “That was close,” I say.

  “You should have let me help,” she says.

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t join for some reason.”

  Lie. It wasn’t me who couldn’t join. I think she knows it’s a lie, but she doesn’t call me on it.

  “We should probably go back close to the tree line,” I say.

  “I’ve got some things to do anyway,” she says.

  “We can stay up here,” I say. “Just, you know, at the tree line.”

  She shakes her head. “I really don’t have time to be here right now. I’m sorry. Too many responsibilities.”

  “Like what?” I ask. The word petulant — another Mom vocabulary word — does sort of describe my voice.

  It turns out she’s volunteered to be Doc’s secretary and organize his files, which she says are totally and outrageously disorganized. She’s also organizing a group called New Bloods. She wants to start a dialogue between the New Bloods and the former house and clan members to facilitate New America. She expects my attendance. And, of course, there’s SAF. That will take a lot of her time. This is her to-do list after just one day.

  “We’ll have time later,” she says.

  “Right,” I say. “Another time.”

  We walk down the mountain. Here’s the extent of our conversation. I slip on some loose rocks once, and she reminds me to be careful. She asks me for some water, and I pass her my water bottle.

  We go our separate ways when we reach camp. We give each other a good-bye kiss, but she’s rushing away in her mind before it’s finished. Her lips bump awkwardly against mine, and she hurries off. Kind of reminds me of bumping into someone in the school hall. Something you’d mumble a quick “sorry” over before you moved on.

  I can hear Michael’s voice in my head: “Dude, which one of you is the girl?”

  “Sexist,” I’d say, sort of trying to sound like my mom. He’d laugh at me, and I’d laugh at me, too.

  I walk back toward my tent, thinking I’ll take a nap and try to stop thinking about things for a while. Lauren would definitely be disappointed at my slacker attitude. Fortunately, she’ll be too busy to notice.