I Hope You Get This Message

by Farah Naz Rishi

  “Expelled . . . ?” Cate swallowed, her excitement dulling. “What, you mean like a Biblical expulsion? Like, the Fall?”

  Alice clapped her hands. “Exactly.”

  Adeem’s eyebrows furrowed. “But that would make Alma—”

  “Our true Creators, yes.” Alice smiled as the van engine revved. “But don’t worry, humanity will probably be reborn again somewhere. Unlike Eden, our planet is one of many viable homes, a single grain of sand on an eternally growing cosmic beach. Who knows where humanity might end up next?”

  “Unless Alma decides we truly are a failed experiment,” Ty added. He wasn’t smiling.

  Cate’s stomach gave a twist. There was something in their eager, welcoming acceptance that they might all die soon that made her . . . uneasy.

  But they might actually have food now, and water, maybe even a chance to charge their phones, even if service out here was unpredictable, to say the least.

  The conversation soon turned back to other things—like the bonfire parties and night carnivals strewn across the desert that Alice and Ty had discovered along their journey—the strange and absurd celebrations Alma’s pronouncement had summoned. As Alice described one particular party hosted by some famous business magnate who claimed to be building “escape submarines,” slowly Cate began to relax. Adeem, however, kept fiddling with his fingers.

  They had just passed Corn Creek, a crumbling, desolate town twelve hours from Roswell, when Ty pulled over, saying they would camp out in the desert.

  “Shouldn’t we keep going?” Cate urged. “We haven’t been driving long, and we really need to get to Roswell fast.” Her gut had begun to throb with cramps, and she knew it wasn’t just from hunger. She hadn’t thought to bring any extra tampons. She wasn’t supposed to be gone for this long.

  “I can drive,” Adeem offered.

  Ty shook his head. “You’ve been sitting for almost three hours. It’ll be good to stretch your legs.” He pulled open the driver’s-seat door and hopped out of the van. “The world’s not going anywhere just yet.”

  Except that it was, Cate wanted to say. But she took a deep breath. Unless she and Adeem were prepared to trek through the now chilly desert all night, they were stuck here at the whims of these two boho buzzkills.

  Alice set up a campfire while Ty built the tents, deftly and impossibly fast. Alice pulled out a few cans of food from the back of the van and cooked them in a cast-iron stew pot over the thriving flames of the campfire. Once they were ready, she offered one to Cate, who settled on a can of baked beans. Her mouth tingled with their unexpected sweetness. It was amazing how good things tasted when you were hungry.

  Adeem took one, too, and cleared away the pebbles and sharp rocks with his shoe until the ground revealed soft, beige dirt. Ty took off his green army vest and spread it on the ground for him and Alice to share.

  They were surrounded by an endless ripple of dark, flat-topped hills, but it was the sky, an enormous canopy above them, that gripped Cate’s attention.

  “The stars are incredible,” Cate whispered. And they were, truly. The view was nothing like anything she’d seen in San Francisco. She could imagine herself falling into the silk canopy of the night sky, swallowed whole, enveloped by starlight. She was so happy, she didn’t even care if most of the stars were dead. Not all of them were. She knew that now. Now that they knew for sure alien life existed, she wondered how much of it was out there. How many hundreds of billions of planets. How many hundreds of billions of lives.

  Mom had told her for so long to live life like everything was normal, but this just seemed . . . miraculous.

  Alice chuckled. “And to think, so many people have never taken the time to see the sky for what it really is. A thing to be cherished. A thing to be one with. Worshipped.”

  A small, catlike smile spread across Alice’s face. “But, of course, the real worship begins in Truth or Consequences.”

  “Until then,” said Ty, “we’re taking this chance that Alma has so graciously bestowed to see the country, before it all falls apart.” He’d barely touched his can of food, as far as Cate could tell.

  Cate swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  Alice looked surprised. “Well, you’ve seen the way things are. Mass murders and jail breaks all across the East Coast. Power outages. Shooters bursting into the Capitol. Then there was a stampede in Jerusalem. At least a thousand people died, like, instantly. You really haven’t heard?”

  Cate couldn’t speak. Only a few days had passed since Alma’s message, and already so much had happened. How much had they missed? She hated being stranded in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, but maybe it was a blessing in disguise.

  “No,” she replied, her voice thick. “We’ve been pretty disconnected.”

  Silence fell upon them except for the crackling of the fire and Ty’s spoon as he stirred his can of creamed corn.

  “See,” he began finally, “this is what happens when you disrupt humanity’s status quo. We crack. We’re egotistical little ants.

  “Earth society has programmed us to keep our heads down and remain as these mindless drones. Everyone tells us we all have to follow the same blueprint: You gotta go to school. Graduate. Go to college, if you want the best job. Get married. Make babies. Work some more, get promoted. Then you retire. We want, and want, and want, and then we die. Then people say, Oh, what a great life that person led. But that’s not living. It’s just a way to exist.”

  Cate felt herself shrink beneath his words—wasn’t existing all she’d ever done with her life?

  “But Alma—the people on Alma never lost that spark, that streak of curiosity, that will to truly live, not just settle on mere existence. It’s why they made us: the ultimate act of benevolence. They wanted to spread their glorious way of life.”

  “You think . . . we’re Almaen?” Cate’s heart rammed in her chest.

  Ty grinned, and his white teeth gleamed. The crackling flames of the bonfire between them seemed to grow, scraping the edges of the night sky. “Not Almaen, per se. No, see, we are the aliens. An anomaly.”

  “What?” It was the first time Adeem had spoken in seemingly forever. His mouth dropped, like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

  Ty continued, undeterred. “Almaens are the true mother race, don’t you get it? The signs are all around us. They created us. Put us here to cultivate the planet, to live righteously. But we”—he tapped his chest—“we lost the spark. We’re broken. God as you know it isn’t going to save us. Just look at the state of the world! Look what we did to it!”

  Alice rested her hand on his shoulder, her nails pointed at their ends and glazed with neon green and yellow. Ty leaned back into it, and took a deep inhale.

  “So now,” he said, calmer, “we all have to accept Alma’s judgment. We deserve to be punished.”

  Cate was shaking, and not from the desert cold. She reached her hand into her pocket, clinging to her blackbird key chain. She needed something to hold on to. She needed to see her mom. To see Ivy. The scariest thing about Ty wasn’t his horrible fanaticism, but that part of her agreed with what he was saying. She couldn’t deny that she lived in a world where she had to spend her life hiding her mom’s condition. The world had taught her to be ashamed of it. And she’d gotten caught in the idiotic stigma. Worse, she’d done nothing to fight it.

  So didn’t she—didn’t humanity—deserve, on some level, to be punished?

  But Adeem put down his can.

  “Deserve?” repeated Adeem sharply. It was the first time she’d seen Adeem look angry. “How can you say that? For some people, living is enough of a punishment. Life’s hard. And, sure, humans don’t make it easy for each other, and we kind of suck as a species, but we also do a lot of good, too. No matter how shitty things get, the moment we stop seeing the good and start treating each other like ants or some kind of failed experiment—that’s when the bad guys win.”

  There was a long, tense moment of silenc
e. Cate shot Adeem a fearful look. Alice and Ty had helped them—saved them—and Adeem wasn’t exactly making friends.

  Ty smiled. But Cate could tell it was an effort. “I’m just sayin’ no one here is completely innocent, little man,” he said. “But punishment doesn’t have to be such a bad thing. Human life means so little in the grand scheme of things, don’t you think?”

  Suddenly, it dawned on Cate. Ty didn’t care if they all died. Ty wanted them all to die. What was it that Alice had said? The sky was a thing to be worshipped, a thing to be one with. What would they do once they reached their destination, then? She didn’t want to think about it.

  And she didn’t have to. Adeem stood up abruptly, and though the light from the fire was warm and bright, the smile reappearing on his face was anything but cheerful. “That, little man, is one hell of a bad take.” Without another word, he stormed toward the little red tent Alice had set aside for Cate and Adeem’s use, his radio in tow.

  The sound of a sleeping bag unzipping. Rustling. And then silence. Even the fire seemed to crackle and pop at a quieter volume.

  Alice reached toward Cate with another can of baked beans. She was smiling. “Still hungry?” she asked.

  16

  Jesse

  “Seriously? Alien Zone?”

  Of all the places in Roswell Jesse and Corbin could have gone together that night—okay, of the few options they had—Jesse would have picked Alien Zone as the last. At best, Alien Zone had the charming quality of a UFO-themed haunted house built by a bunch of stoned high schoolers back in the ’70s, and like most Roswell attractions, had never been updated since. The place was decrepit and dusty, filled with life-sized dioramas of gray-skinned aliens posed in human settings: barbecuing, lounging on ripped couches, shitting in an outhouse. It smelled of rubber and mothballs, coating your lungs the moment you walked inside, and Jesse felt sick when he breathed it in; thankfully, he hadn’t been there since his mom forced him to go to Andrea Roos’s birthday party in fourth grade, and barely anyone showed up, so Andrea cried. He had hoped to never come back. After the place closed down a few months ago due to lack of customers, he’d been certain he never would.

  “What’s wrong with Alien Zone?” Corbin asked.

  Everything, Jesse almost answered. Hadn’t Corbin had enough of fake aliens by now? But instead, he shrugged. “Just thought you’d want to explore Main Street, maybe check out Stellar Coffee. Like a normal person.”

  Corbin threw him a crescent moon smile. “Well, sorry, but I haven’t been to Alien Zone yet.”

  “Okay, but why would you want to go?” If Jesse believed the world was ending in less than four days, he’d rather nap. Or rob a bank.

  “Because unlike you, I haven’t seen everything this town has to offer.”

  The thing Corbin clearly didn’t understand was that there wasn’t much to offer; Second and South Main Streets, where Jesse and Corbin stood now, was the closest thing to a downtown Roswell had—but really, it was nothing more than crumbling rows of tourist-centric alien-themed shops, bookended by the International UFO Museum and the occasional normal store that seemed wildly out of place, like the Calico Cow Quilt Shop and Radio Amigo. Jesse had never seen more than two or three families of tourists at a time ambling down the sidewalks, donning the stupid green alien stickers all customers to the UFO Museum were forced to wear. And the tourists never stayed for more than a day, disappearing faster than dust clouds that ripped through the edge of the desert around them. Not that Jesse blamed them. For as long as he could remember, here, tumbleweeds had outnumbered people.

  Then again, thanks to Alma, things were changing: like the woman who’d come all the way from Ohio in her RV to see Jesse’s machine, currently camped down the street from Jesse’s house, and the lines of customers—tourists—the machine was slowly pulling in. Even now, across the street, uniform-clad students from the New Mexico Military Institute were lined in formation, patrolling the town. More and more locals—beyond the Frank Gottlieb types who lurked in Stellar Coffee and ranted about abductions—were actually beginning to believe in aliens; that was the weirdest thing.

  The wind was picking up, and the dust in the air was settling on Jesse’s cheeks. The lamppost by the side entrance, furnished with black alien eyes on the glass bulb, flickered on to a dull glow. As Jesse and Corbin approached the beige Alien Zone building, a crow, like a black wisp perched on the roof, regarded Jesse with a glint of amusement in its beady stare.

  That was when they noticed the thin slabs of plywood covering the front entrance and windows of the Zone.

  KEEP CALM AND SHOOT ALIENS, someone had spray-painted in black over the plywood.

  “That’s . . . one way to welcome tourists,” said Corbin.

  “That’s Roswell’s rustic hospitality for you.”

  Corbin paced the length of the entrance. “I thought this place would be bigger,” he observed. “And not, you know, closed.”

  Jesse snorted. “Even in normal circumstances, Alien Zone’s never been popular with locals.”

  Across the street, the Military Institute students marched toward Third. With their crisp white shirts and dark pants, they almost looked like soldiers. It made Jesse feel uneasy.

  The wind carried the faint howl of dogs. No, wolves. Jesse hoped they were faring better than he was. Hearing them made the uneasiness wedge deep inside him, and he wasn’t sure why. Like the world really was changing, slower than he’d realized—stretching and stretching, becoming so thin it was bound to break any day. It was just a matter of how.

  “So, then, what does anyone do for fun here?” Corbin’s voice gently coaxed him from his thoughts.

  “Shoot stuff,” Jesse offered with a lazy shrug. “Chase stray cats. Drive around in pickup trucks. Or . . .”

  He looked behind to make sure the patrol of Military Institute students was out of view. The front windowpanes were far too big to shatter without making a racket; he would need a few pillows, a blanket, things to muffle the sound. And the lock was big, shiny, practically sparkling. Though the front door wasn’t boarded, breaking into a new commercial lock would be a pain in the ass. But the back door . . .

  Jesse led Corbin to the corner, past the new tiny garden on Third and Main, which was nothing more than a glorified bench and a couple of trees, and into the alleyway leading to the back of Alien Zone. Just as he suspected: the windowless door where they received deliveries, like the greasy pizzas from Peter Piper Pizza for Andrea Roos’s birthday party, was free of plywood. And the lock? Built into an ancient, rusted old doorknob barely clinging to the wood.

  He peeled off his leather jacket, wrapped it around the doorknob until it was secure, and pulled it taut, gripping it for balance. “What are you—” Corbin began to ask, but stopped when Jesse kicked the knob once, twice—then broke it free, the sound muffled by his jacket. The door, now adorned by a crooked hole, creaked open.

  Jesse casually plucked the busted knob from the inside of his oversized jacket and tossed it into a nearby bush.

  Corbin froze. “But the alarm . . . ?”

  “Have you seen this dump?” replied Jesse, slinking his arms back into his jacket. “Think about it. It’ll be a miracle if it still has power.”

  Corbin grinned, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Huh. Full of surprises, aren’t you, Hewitt?”

  He wasn’t sure it was a compliment, but a warm bloom of satisfaction nestled in Jesse’s chest.

  The inside of Alien Zone was cloaked in inky darkness when Jesse closed the door behind them. Corbin pulled out his phone, and a small burst of harsh light illuminated black shelves that carried ancient merchandise: key chains and mugs and shot glasses and the like. On the left, against a black backdrop, some of the life-sized alien models wore kitschy T-shirts with neon designs that glowed in the dark, giving the room a dim lime-green and pink and blue gleam. Someone must have gone a little overboard with the glow-in-the-dark paint.

  Jesse found the front desk and went t
o switch on the main lights, but as he guessed, the power was out.

  Corbin pocketed his phone. “I kind of like it like this. Good mood lighting, don’t you think?”

  He was right: instead of the pale gray-blue walls, Alien Zone was space itself, splattered with drops of neon like stars against the pool of darkness. In the silent void, Jesse felt, if only for a moment, untouchable by the world outside. “I gotta thank you,” Corbin said. As Jesse’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he could make out Corbin, leaning against one wall, watching him so earnestly.

  “For?”

  “Coming out with me. Here. On such late notice. I can’t imagine how stressful it must be, working that machine all day.” Corbin’s words were like a deep hum. “I mean, I could barely wrap my head around the science of it all. I got lost just trying to understand octal intermediary and the basics of binary.” He shook his head. “It’s just, you know, amazing what you’re trying to do. For people. For everyone. I can barely last a shift helping Grandma with her bakery, and here you are, changing the world.”

  Jesse tugged on his leather cuff. “It’s not all that special.”

  Corbin took a step toward Jesse. “You sure have me fooled.”

  His blood pounded. Did Jesse have him fooled? Was Corbin really that gullible? Or was Corbin the kind of person who would believe what he wanted to believe?

  The warmth fizzled out inside Jesse just as quickly as it’d sparked, leaving him cold and hollow. Being with Corbin was walking right into a mistake. He could feel it. Everything Jesse did was supposed to be about getting them out of the eternal hole they lived in. About money, money that he and Mom needed. Or at the very least, passing the time between making money—nothing more, nothing less, and definitely nothing personal. So what the hell was he doing with someone like Corbin?

  He shouldn’t have come out tonight. Good people like Corbin were supposed to be off-limits. He had no reason to invest in whatever the hell this was supposed to be. Plus, once Corbin figured out who Jesse really was, he’d leave. Just like Ian. Like all of them.