Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments

by Brian Yansky

  The Hunter, with the sweep of his arm, destroys all of the fake Jesses and Catlins. But we get lucky, just as I knew we would; the sweep of the Hunter’s arm that kills the fake Jesses and Catlins also pops all the lightbulbs in the room, and the room goes dark. I’m ready for this, and somehow Catlin is, too, even though she hasn’t seen how it all plays out. In the moment it takes for the hunters to turn their attention back to us, Catlin and I create more illusions, and this time we cloak ourselves — our real selves, and Michael and Zack, too. Using the fireman’s carry, I lift Zack, and Catlin and I run for the door with Michael limping along behind us.

  This is as far as I saw when I dreamwalked.

  I don’t see how we can make it to the car from here.

  We do have one small advantage, though: their physical limitations, the whole Big Bird way of moving, will allow us to put a little space between us and them once they figure out that the real “us” have left the building. They’re still able to kill from the other side of that space, but we’ll make it a little harder on them.

  When I think this through, it doesn’t sound all that encouraging. “We’ll make it a little harder for them to kill us” still has a definite bad-ending ring to it.

  Then I notice all those ships in nice, neat lines. The aliens are certainly very neat. Neat and polite. You have to give them that.

  “The ships,” I say, steering Catlin toward them. Michael’s limp is more pronounced now, but he just grimaces and hustles as fast as he can.

  The Hunter attacks as soon as he steps out the door. I’m still joined with Catlin, though, and we deflect the attack. I can feel his surprise. We try a countermove that sends out a wave against him and the other hunters. It does actually knock a few hunters back. The Hunter easily blocks it, though.

  Because we’ve stopped to fight, Michael’s the first one to the ship, despite his limp.

  “You never could run worth a damn,” Michael says as I scramble onboard with Zack and Catlin.

  “I was a little busy,” I say, dumping Zack on the floor. “And I was carrying baggage.”

  It’s crowded with four of us in the ship, but we make do. Catlin’s mind is interfacing with the ship, and she uses its power to shield us just as the Hunter and a few other hunters attack again. Even with the shield, the ship rocks back and forth like a boat in a storm. Catlin gets us off the ground.

  I work on a shield to add to the ship’s shield, but I don’t get much of one up before the Hunter’s next attack hits us. My shield breaks and all the windows in the ship shatter and the ship spins out of control and into a tree. Miraculously, Catlin is able to get us out of the branches without tearing the ship apart.

  “Can we join?” I shout at her over the sound of the wind whipping through the windows.

  “I don’t think I can do that and fly this thing!” she shouts back. “Just do whatever you can!”

  I create another shield on my own while she flies us low across the road and toward a hill. It’s not very strong. Not strong enough to block another hit from the Hunter.

  But the hit never comes. We’ve moved out of the Hunter’s range. I hear him in my head, though. He says that a hunter loves the hunt and he’ll be with me shortly.

  Take your time, I mindspeak.

  I glance down and see the hunters moving awkwardly toward their ships, but I know they won’t be awkward once they’re in them. I can hear them setting their controls. I can hear him loudest of all. He’s excited.

  “I can’t fly this thing like they’ll be able to fly their ships,” Catlin says, hearing what I’m hearing. “I’m not that good yet.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you mean, you know?” she snaps. “You don’t know.”

  “I just meant, you know, I know. I get it.”

  “It would help if you had more confidence in me,” she says.

  I’ve been drawn into these conversations before, so I should know better. I really should.

  “But you said it first.”

  “I know what I said. I was hoping you would contradict me. Show a little faith.”

  “Uh,” Michael says, “think maybe you guys could have this conversation later? Not when we have, you know, some aliens coming to kill us?”

  “Coming fast!” Catlin shouts, looking back. “If Darth Vader gets close, he’ll kill us this time. Our shield is pretty much destroyed.”

  “Darth Vader?” I ask. But now that she’s said it, I can totally see it.

  “Hey, Tex, this plan of yours for saving me . . .” Michael says. “I think the escape part needs a little work.”

  “And I think —” but I don’t finish my thought because I feel the Hunter closing in on us. His ship is faster than the others — and definitely faster than our busted one.

  “The river,” I say. “Go to the river. Go toward where we parked our ship.”

  “Which way?” she says because she is seriously directionally challenged. She has one of those senses of direction that has no sense. I point, because she’s also left- and right-challenged. She makes a sharp turn that throws us up against the left side of the ship. Her hand slips out of the control, and we drop. Fall might be more accurate.

  Above us some kind of beam passes right where we were. The death rays.

  “Good move,” Michael says to Catlin.

  Catlin gets her hand back in the control. She manages to get us leveled out just above some very solid-looking cedar trees.

  The death rays change things. There’s no way we have time to land the ship in the park.

  “Get the ship higher, and aim north toward Dallas,” I say, pointing north for her. “Set a course.”

  “I thought you wanted to head toward the park.”

  “Just do it.”

  I see what I think is the park as we come around the bend in the river. We’ve only got a few seconds before the other ships come around the bend, too.

  “You guys can swim, right?” I ask.

  “Of course we can swim,” Catlin says testily. Michael doesn’t answer. He just stares down at the river far below. I turn around and pull Zack, who is still unconscious, toward me.

  “Why?” Catlin asks suspiciously.

  “When I open the door, I want you both to jump,” I say.

  “Are you crazy?” Michael says. “I can’t even see the river.”

  “That black inky stuff right below us? That’s water.”

  “No way,” Michael says.

  “We don’t have a choice!” I shout, wrestling Zack to the door. I fling it open. “Three, two, one . . . jump!”

  Michael calls me several names. Rescued prisoners are definitely more grateful in movies. In a second we’re all falling and there’s no time for more names, no time for anything but fear and the intake of a breath.

  I can feel the ship shoot up before we splash into the river. We hit the water hard but feetfirst, and the shock of the impact rouses Zack to semiconsciousness. We hit the bottom because the lake is so shallow, and I push off it back toward the surface. As we rise, Zack thrashes and pulls away from me. It occurs to me as we surface that we might have come up too soon. I half expect the alien ships to be hovering over us, the Hunter smiling in a satisfied way, but they aren’t and he isn’t. Catlin helps me with Zack, who is ineffectively splashing. Michael dog paddles alongside us, coughing and grunting.

  The ships must have followed our ship because they’re out of sight.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” I say.

  Michael finally gets a word out. It is not a nice one, but the effect is weakened as he coughs up another mouthful of water.

  “Maybe you can run,” I say to Michael, “but you aren’t much of a swimmer.”

  “You noticed,” he says.

  As soon as we get to shore, Catlin works on Zack. I can’t see what she does exactly. She moves in his mind. I can hear her, but his mind is a confused tangle to me. How she can find her way in there when she can’t even tell north from south is a myste
ry.

  “But you’re from Florida,” I say, standing over Michael. “You should be a good swimmer.”

  “Tallahassee, Tex. You ever heard of Tallahassee? What, you think all cities in Florida are on the coast?”

  There’s my poor geography putting me at risk for ridicule again.

  “You could have said you couldn’t swim instead of cursing me.”

  “They were going to kill us. Might as well drown as be blown up.”

  “Really?” I say. “I think being blown up would be way better. You’d go in an instant. Now, drowning, fighting for breath as water fills your lungs, that’s worse to me. Way worse.”

  “Shut up,” he says.

  I smile. He’s so easy to upset. I realize how much I’ve missed upsetting him.

  “They say it’s like going to sleep,” I continue, “but who goes to sleep that way? Being slowly strangled by water.”

  “You should have just left me back there,” he says. “The torture was nothing compared to this.”

  “I missed you, too,” I say.

  “Right.”

  “And I thought about it,” I say. “I thought about leaving you there.”

  I can see his smile in the moonlight. “No, you didn’t.”

  Catlin is still working on Zack, but I tell her we have to go. We pile into the ship, and Catlin flies up the river. We rise into the night sky, flying higher than the aliens like to. I’m sure the Hunter knows by now that the ship he’s been following (or has destroyed) doesn’t have anyone in it, but Dallas is north and we’re traveling west; we’ve got a good head start. But just to add whatever help I can, I try cloaking us.

  I don’t have the ability Catlin and I have together, but I can still make it harder for them to find us. I make us a shadow in the night sky.

  After everything that’s happened, it’s still the same night as it was when we left Taos. The sky above us still has all those stars dotting it, all those points of light. It seems kind of silly now to think we ever believed we were the only beings in the universe.

  After ten or fifteen minutes, Catlin sets the ship course for Taos and then gets back to working on Zack. He still doesn’t wake up, but at least he seems a little more stable, a little more comfortable, than he was.

  Then Catlin turns her attention to Michael, who puts up a weak protest but quickly lets her do her healer thing. He’s pretty beat up, and I know I can’t even see the worst of it. I’m sure Michael didn’t give his memories up easily.

  I can see some of those memories as Catlin works on him. He remembers being killed, then waking and realizing he wasn’t killed. He remembers Lindsey dying. He remembers me and Catlin and Lauren and some of our days as slaves. He doesn’t remember escaping, though. And he can’t remember whole sections of his life before he was a slave, either. All of that is gone.

  He remembers the Hunter questioning him, getting inside him.

  “He was too strong for me to keep out,” Michael says. “But I couldn’t tell him what he really wanted to know, which was where you’d gone.”

  His expression darkens, and he starts asking us where his mother’s gone. His mother? I’m confused, and then I realize he’s the one who’s confused. He knows he should know this. He can’t remember. He gets agitated, and he struggles to get up, rocking the ship.

  Catlin does something that calms him. She sends me a message asking me to put him to sleep. I touch his brow. He slumps in his chair.

  “What just happened?” I ask.

  “When they ‘borrowed’ his memories, they weren’t careful about returning them. They did some damage.”

  “But you can fix him, right?”

  “Maybe,” she says. “I have to see how extensive the damage is.”

  “And Zack?”

  “I don’t know,” she says again. “We’ll see when we get back. Maybe with Running Bird’s help . . .”

  Her attention fractures, and at first I think it’s because she’s upset about Zack, but then I feel it, too — what’s taken her attention — headed right toward us. We weren’t being careful enough. And now it’s too late.

  I tell Catlin to go higher and see if we can get above the ship, but she says it’s no use. They’ve already locked onto us.

  I swear (sorry, Mom) and try to join with Catlin to create a shield. But a voice interrupts us. I expect it to say, We’re sorry for your loss. Instead it says, You’re in big trouble, Chosen One. Land your frickin’ ship.

  We land, and the other ship lands, and Sam rushes over. She tells us we’re idiots. She lists our shortcomings: stupid, selfish, reckless, foolish — and did she mention selfish?

  Catlin interrupts the lecture to say that we need to get back to camp ASAP. “Zack is with us, and he’s hurt, and we still have a long flight home.”

  But Sam says that Zack will have to wait. She says Catlin can work on him in the ship, but we’re going to complete the mission. She didn’t come all this way for nothing.

  Catlin looks panicked. I’m not sure whether it’s because of Zack or because she really, really doesn’t want to head back to Lord Vertenomous’s. Again.

  “I can fly Zack and Michael back,” she says. “You and Jesse can take your ship and go to Austin.”

  “No way,” Sam says. “We need your ship, and we need you in case something happens.”

  “Why is it so important now?”

  “You stirred them up, right? You had to fight to get your boy out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’ll be on alert everywhere after tonight, but they won’t expect us now. We need to build on what you did. We need to get their attention, let them know this invasion isn’t over with yet, make them think twice. You two made a choice. Now I’m making one.”

  I think again about the man at the circus who may have been more than a man and his talk about choices. Could he have meant my choice to save Michael would cause Zack’s death? But he said the beginning or end of choices. This isn’t that. There’s something up ahead (though Running Bird would say it’s behind and beside at the same time) that will be a difficult and probably terrible choice. Great, I think, another thing to worry about.

  Catlin isn’t happy about going back, but it’s pretty clear Sam is determined, so she walks back to the ship to try to make Zack as comfortable as possible. Michael steps out of the ship at the same time and stretches. I’m relieved to see him awake.

  “What’s the holdup?” he asks, eyeing Sam.

  “This your friend?” Sam asks. “The one you risked all of New America for?”

  “That’s him,” I say.

  “Doesn’t look like much.”

  “I grow on you,” Michael says, an old, familiar grin splitting his face.

  “Okay, Jesse’s friend, come on, then. The least you can do is die for your new country. We’re going to blow up some alien ships now.”

  “Awesome,” Michael says.

  “We’ll see,” she says.

  “I always liked the Fourth of July,” Michael says.

  Am I seeing right? Is Sam actually smiling at Michael?

  “It’s not the Fourth of July,” I say.

  “Could be for all we know,” Michael says, still smiling at Sam.

  “Nope.” I pull Betty’s calendar out of my pocket. “It’s not even the right month.” I show them the marked-off days.

  They both look at me like I’ve just spoken in tongues or something.

  “You kept that?” Michael says. I can tell he remembers the day I got it. I wish for his sake that that was one of the memories the Hunter hadn’t given back.

  “That’s strange,” Sam says, looking at me through narrowed eyes.

  “What?”

  “One of the names for the Warrior is the Keeper of Days.”

  “It’s just a homemade calendar,” I say. “Besides, it was somebody else’s before it was mine.”

  “Still,” she says. “Strange coincidence.”

  “Whatever,” I say.

  “
There are too many coincidences when you’re around,” she says. “Now, let’s go blow some things up.”

  Sam has Michael fly with her. I fly with Catlin. We fly in a tight formation, side by side. Catlin tries to instruct me on how to help Zack sleep and fight the injury. I’m clumsy, but I do my best.

  When we get close to Austin, Michael sends a message that Sam is worried about us being seen. He asks if Catlin and I can cloak. We cloak our ship and theirs.

  I can hear Sam thinking, This is unbelievable. But there it is again. The unbelievable is just one step from the believable.

  My boy can’t run worth a damn, but he’s good at the alien stuff, Michael mindspeaks.

  I run better than you can swim, I respond.

  How do you do it? Sam mindspeaks.

  They’re like the ultimate power couple, Michael mindspeaks.

  We aren’t a couple, Catlin and I mindspeak together.

  We land a few blocks away from the ships. Catlin and I stay joined and keep a cloak over us. The lot doesn’t appear to be guarded. Everyone except Zack piles out of the ships.

  We don’t have any problem setting up the explosives. It becomes clear pretty fast that no one is guarding the ships. Who would attack them? The aliens are already back inside the palace, asleep.

  We’re safely back in our ships and hovering well above the parking lot when Sam detonates the explosives. They fire in a chain reaction, just like out of a movie. It’s pretty awesome — lots of noise and fire and smoke. I keep expecting something bad to happen, the aliens to surround us or something, but this time everything is perfect. And it really is almost like the Fourth of July.

  I fly back with Catlin, and we join and make a strong shield. It isn’t long before we’re out in the empty land of West Texas. The enormous night is all around us. Then Michael starts to snore. I swear I can hear it all the way from inside the other ship. The old snorer guy back in New America will have an ally in his “Give me the right to snore or give me death!” campaign.

  A few hours later, we reach the mountains. The sky is lightening, and the landscape is starting to take shape. By the time the sun shows itself, a bright orange orb rising in the east, we’re passing over the adobe buildings of downtown Taos and the empty, narrow streets. We follow the windy highway up into the mountains toward the barn where we park the ships. Our whole trip has taken one night.