“That’s what some people are calling it. No offense, but ‘HECC machine’ doesn’t quite stick as well.”
If people were talking about it at the hospital, had already nicknamed the damn thing, then Ms. K had definitely heard about the machine by now. He wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable chew-out, and he was pretty sure she’d already left a message on the home phone to ask why he’d missed his last appointment.
Even with the supposed end of the world, she’d find a way to lecture him.
Jesse sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, where the sun was beating down on his skin like a big, angry eyeball. “So you really want to send a message to Alma, huh?” he asked Mari.
She nodded enthusiastically, and Jesse suddenly felt the urge to hide behind the shed like he used to when he was hiding from Dad, filled with both shame and longing. He had known his machine would attract naïve tourists and desperate locals with cash to spare, but hopeful children? With fucking cancer? Was this the kind of person he wanted to be?
“If that’s what you want,” he said. “Your wish is my command.”
The change was subtle—the smile hadn’t left Corbin’s face—but Jesse caught a flicker of something in Corbin’s expression that made him feel like he’d said something wrong.
“Here ya go.” Corbin handed Jesse a folded piece of paper, and his warm fingers grazed Jesse’s. “This is the message Mari was hoping you’d translate for her. If, by any chance, Alma does actually respond, could you, maybe, print out a copy for us to pick up?” Corbin looked at him hard, and Jesse read the meaning behind it: he wanted Jesse to make up a response. He knew Jesse was full of shit. But he was going along with it. For Mari. And maybe for Jesse, too. “Mari would really love that. I’ll bring payment when I come back, if that’s okay.”
It all made sense now. Corbin was only putting up with Jesse’s bullshit for his little sister’s sake. But the worst part of it was that Corbin was still so fucking nice about it. Nice to him, a liar and a thief. If Jesse were in his shoes, he would have punched the con artist out for taking advantage of people, circumstances be damned. And he’d deserve it, too.
After all, Jesse was a heartless piece of shit.
Just like Dad.
If Corbin would come back again, Jesse would print out fifty copies. And then print out fifty copies of the word LIAR and tape them all over himself. “Yeah, of course. If they respond, we should get it twenty-four hours after our transmission is sent. Actually, no, you know what? It’s on the house.”
“Really? Wow, thanks, man. Seriously.” Corbin seemed to mean it.
“Better yet, pay me in empanadas.”
Corbin snorted, which brought an unfamiliar swell of warmth to Jesse’s chest.
“Hey, and let’s hang out later, yeah? I don’t really know anyone around here. Maybe tonight, if you’re not too busy? I’ll come back after Mari’s settled.”
“Yeah,” Jesse replied as casually as he could. “Should be free tonight.”
Corbin grinned. “Good. Looking forward to it, Hewitt.”
Jesse couldn’t help it. He smiled, too.
He said his goodbyes and waited until they were down the street before he opened the paper. A child’s scrawl read:
Please help the world get better.
And please make Corbin feel okay if I don’t get better. I don’t want him to be sad.
Love, Mari
He’d had at least a few hundred different messages to translate in the past couple days, but this one hit him right in the chest. Mari’s wish wasn’t even about her. And somehow that made him feel all the more shitty.
But at the bottom of the page, Jesse noticed in tiny, neat letters, a phone number, followed by the initials CL.
He stared at the numbers.
Despite everything, despite outright lying to this perfectly nice brother and sister, Jesse had still gotten his wish granted.
That was the kind of world they lived in. No justice.
His mom had once told him that as soon as he’d learned to talk, he’d learned to lie. She’d laughed when she said it—at the time, she had caught eight-year-old Jesse watching cartoons way past his bedtime, and he told her he’d been doing homework. The lie had been so ridiculous, she hadn’t even gotten mad at him. She’d just shaken her head, still laughing, and waved him back to his bedroom.
But she was right. Talking and lying—they were one and the same for him.
Jesse felt the impatient glare of his customers. He forced a smile. He needed to keep the customers happy. Needed to keep them talking and tossing more money for more messages.
Most important, he had to keep lying.
It was the only thing he knew how to be good at.
15
Cate
“The more I think about it,” said Adeem, kicking a pebble across the blanched desert dirt, “the more this reminds me of an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.”
“What are you talking about?” Cate’s tone came out snappier than she’d meant. She’d gotten an email from Dr. Michel assuring her that her mom was okay, but service was spotty out here, and she hadn’t been able to reply. Were they feeding her enough? Was she safe? Did she sleep well? The more questions that cropped up in her mind, the more panicked she felt. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been away from her mom this long—even if it had only been three days.
Mom, who loved old sci-fi movies, who asked too many questions about Cate’s nonexistent social life, who made the best mint chocolate chip brownies. Mom, who heard voices in the walls, and starved herself, and begged Cate to forgive her in spite of everything.
God, she missed her, all of her.
It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
After they’d explained the situation to him, the manager at the convenience store in Tonopah had been kind enough to drop them off at a nearby service station, just outside town, to buy a new car battery. Being the middle of the night, it’d been closed. Too tired to do anything else but wait for it to open again, they used some folded-up cardboard boxes they’d found behind the store as beds and slept, shivering, until the sun rose. She woke to find Adeem had taken off his shirt and draped it over her in the night for warmth; he blushed but said nothing when she handed it back to him in the morning, and they sat in silence waiting for the station to open.
But the station never opened.
So they’d walked for an hour along a two-lane road paralleled by power lines, hoping to find some kind of civilization; only, they hadn’t. There was nothing around them, it seemed, except sun-bleached plateaus and mountains, like oversized globs of dough, half melting under the newly risen sun. The pale blue sky, devoid of clouds to break up the monotony, was dizzying to look at, so Cate had to keep her tired eyes glued to the ground, which, after a while, also made her dizzy. Occasionally, she would catch a glimpse of a lizard, scurrying through dirt and dust and rock in search of shade. She was practically becoming one herself; her skin was cracked and flaking off by the minute.
At this rate, they were going to die out here. Aliens would find their bones, dig them up from the sand like they were fossils, and hang them up in an alien museum.
You’ve been out here a day, girl, she could hear Ivy chide in her head. Stop freaking out all the time. But Ivy didn’t understand. It was Cate’s fault her mom felt like she was safer in the hospital than with her own daughter. It was Cate’s fault why the real Ivy wasn’t here. By now, Ivy was probably home, or hidden away in some bunker in Arizona. She couldn’t believe the last conversation they might ever have with each other was a stupid fight. She wished she had enough service to call Ivy, even just to hear her say, I told you this mission was literally impossible.
“Oh, come on, you must have seen it,” Adeem huffed. His glasses were coated in dust. “That episode when SpongeBob and Squidward have to deliver a pizza, but then they lose their car and get stranded in the middle of the desert?” He chuckled. “For the record, you’d
be Squidward.”
Cate pushed her bangs off her sweaty forehead. “I’m really starting to regret jumping in your car.”
Adeem looked at her over his shoulder and tossed her a grin. “Exactly.”
Cate had yet to figure out how he always managed to seem so upbeat. They should have been in Roswell by now, and the thought yanked at her bones, tugging her body like a rubber band pulled taut. But ahead of her, Adeem was whistling, though his lips were either so dry, or he was so drained, that the song felt halfhearted, wrung of any real life. Even his radio, slung around his shoulder in a black carrying case, weakly crackled with static alongside him. The boy was easygoing, no doubt about that; maybe that was why he had agreed to take her all the way to Roswell, no questions asked. But she wondered how much of his cheerful disposition was a mask.
She still had no idea what to make of him.
“Is that it?” Adeem asked suddenly, and Cate looked up.
Another gas station in the distance, supposedly with an ATM, that Adeem had tracked on Google Maps before his battery began blinking red threateningly. A smaller station, but maybe the ATM . . .
Cate broke into a sprint.
“Wait!” Adeem called after her, but Cate could not. They should have been back on the road, like, yesterday. No, actually yesterday. She would move her sore, burning legs for Mom alone in the hospital, and for her dad, who didn’t even know she existed.
She ignored the stabbing of pebbles in her dusted-up shoes and slowed when she saw the ATM, covered in Sharpied graffiti and band stickers, leaning against the side of the shuttered station building. But the screen, missing a few pixels, dashed her hope faster than she could catch her breath.
“It’s busted.” Cate pounded on the ATM with her fist. Someone had drawn an arrow pointing to the card slot and written INSERT HOPE HERE. A cruel joke.
Adeem came up from behind, his breathing ragged, and peered over her shoulder to look at the screen. “The network must be down.”
Cate lifted her head. She still wasn’t used to how tall he was. “You think?”
They’d already tried calling four different towing companies in the morning, but none of them picked up—that is, until the fifth, which demanded three hundred dollars up front. With no other options, the plan had been for the both of them to take out cash and pay off the greedy tow truck driver needed for Adeem’s car to drive them south. So much for that.
He patted his black bag. “We’re not totally screwed yet. My radio’s still on, searching for signals. There’s a chance I can catch another HAM nearby . . .” Seeing her expression, he added, “It’s amateur radio. If you’re a HAM, you can use special frequency bands for long-distance communication. And if someone’s listening in through a receiver, if their timing’s right, they could catch my message. It means I can get someone to send help.”
Cate didn’t understand half of what Adeem said, but she knew that finding someone using a radio would take time they didn’t have.
They had no time. No water. No car. No money.
No hope.
“No.” Whether she was rejecting Adeem’s plan or their dwindling prospects of safety or everything, she didn’t even know. “No, no, no.”
For so long, Cate had felt like she was drowning in the stress of her life, and it was all she could do to cling to a piece of driftwood floating by, a piece of stability—getting a job at Lickity Split Creamery, hanging out with Ivy. And then she’d hate herself—because what right did she have to feel overwhelmed when it was her mom who was the one struggling more than anyone?
“Don’t hate on my baby.” Adeem yanked his radio out of his bag. “Oh, shit.”
“What now?”
“It’s low on battery.”
He looked at her hesitatingly, as though afraid to see how she’d react. But this time, Cate threw her head back and laughed. They were so screwed. It was all so ridiculous.
“Quick,” she said, closing her eyes to stop the tears from flowing—from laughing or crying, she wasn’t sure. “Gimme another reason.”
“Another reason?” Adeem asked cautiously.
“Like before, when you said humans domesticated dogs. Give me another reason why Alma won’t kill us. Why we won’t die.” Here and now.
“Mmm . . .” He scrunched his mouth in thought. He didn’t even question her, didn’t pry.
She swallowed, her throat painfully dry and her cheeks painfully wet as she waited for his answer.
Waited for him to throw her a line.
“Pizza,” he said finally, stone-faced, before amending: “Pineapple pizza.”
There it was again, that deadpan expression as he’d said something ludicrous. Of all the reasons in the universe to hold on, of all the pieces of driftwood he could have tossed her, he’d chosen food.
Cate laughed, a sound so loud she thought she’d burst her ribs.
“Oh no, Cate cracked!” she heard Adeem say, but she didn’t care.
She clutched her aching stomach and laughed until it hurt. And the more she thought about it, the funnier it all was: she was in the middle of the desert with a strange boy, thousands of miles from home, trying to find her dad before aliens wiped them all out. She’d been scared for so long, but now, the absurdity of her situation made her feel freer than she’d ever felt in her life. Delivering a letter on foot, even with how bad things were, almost felt easy compared to her day-to-day life. She didn’t have to stress over Mom refusing to take her medication. Didn’t have to cook dinner for the two of them or hear Ivy talk about all the cool things she got to do during the weekend. No school, no classes, no teachers or school counselors asking her, Are you sure you’re okay? as though she were a porcelain doll, as though she couldn’t handle it.
She was tired and hungry and dehydrated, and her belly cramped like hell.
But for once, she was free to do what she wanted.
She turned away from the useless ATM and made her way back to the main road. She still had a bucket list to complete. A whole life yet she hadn’t begun to live.
“What are you doing?” asked Adeem, trailing behind her.
“What does it look like?” Cate trained her eyes on the horizon. She stuck out her thumb. Hitchhiking wasn’t on the bucket list Ivy had made for her, but now was as good a time as any to add it.
“I love random encounters as much as the next person,” said Adeem, sliding his glasses up the bridge of his nose, “but, uh, normally I’m equipped with a Poké Ball. Or a sword. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure this is how we get on a true crime podcast, if aliens have that sort of thing.”
“Not all strangers are serial killers. I trusted you, didn’t I?”
“Not everyone you meet is going to be like me.”
Cate snickered. “You can say that again.”
They’d just have to hope a car would come along soon.
It took another half hour and a pool of sweat before Cate heard the road rumble. She squinted her eyes at the edge where the road met sky, praying for movement.
It wasn’t a car that emerged, but a van, as blue as a fallen piece of the sky, rolling right toward them.
“Stop, please!” Cate yelled. She nearly jumped into the road to block it off.
Thankfully, the van slowed to a halt, its engine wheezing as a small smoke plume leaked from its backside. Cate noticed only after it stopped the swirl of psychedelic graffiti overlying the paint job, including a shoddy painting of a lime-green alien head, complete with bug-like black eyes. Underneath it, in pink spray-painted letters, were the words: STAR VOYEURS. Cate could practically hear her mom yelling at her in her head about not trusting strangers—but she’d already trusted Adeem.
Besides, she was pretty sure that normal rules didn’t apply when the world was ending.
The van door slid open.
“Ayy, fellow pilgrims!” A girl popped her head out. She was probably in her early twenties. Her long bubblegum-pink hair reached past her suntanned shoulders, and she wore a
tiny crop top that revealed a diamond piercing on her belly button. She could have been on her way to Coachella, not bunkering down for the end of times. “Where’s your final destination?”
“Roswell.”
The woman beamed. “Hop on in. We’re going south to Truth or Consequences. Should take you almost within spitting distance.”
Cate wasn’t sure if that was the name of a town or some kind of weird festival, but if it brought her closer to Roswell, or any place with water, she was in.
“Cate . . .” Adeem spoke quietly. “Are you sure we can trust them?”
“Plans one through four failed. What choice do we have?”
“I just feel the need to point out that you’re telling me to get into a stranger’s van.”
Cate shrugged.
“Right. Safety’s for squares. Who needs it? Not us,” Adeem mumbled as he finally clambered into the van, maybe partially persuaded by the sight of a cooler and the beckoning blast of air-conditioning. Inside, Cate let out a sigh of relief. Sweat had pooled at her lower back and neck, and whenever she swallowed, she tasted only salt. Being able to sit, even on upholstery that smelled faintly of wet dog, felt like heaven. And she didn’t see any axes or weapons or dead bodies, so that was a plus.
“You can call me Alice,” the woman with pink hair explained. “Our driver with the blue hair is Ty.” She giggled. “My partner in crime.”
“Yo,” said Ty. He wore a green army vest covered in pins; his arms were half slumped over the steering wheel, revealing an incredible array of vivid tattoos on every spare inch of skin.
“Nice to meet you,” Cate said. “I’m Cate, and this is my . . .” She paused and glanced over at Adeem, who still looked nervous. “This is my friend Adeem. Thanks again for picking us up.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Alice. “Ty wanted to keep going, but I told him, Children of the Anthropocene have to look out for one another.”
Cate glanced at Adeem. “Children of what?”
“The Anthropocene,” Alice repeated. “You know, the current epoch we live in. The final epoch. Before humanity is expelled once more.”
I Hope You Get This Message Page 13
