Arrival

by Morgan Rice

  To Kevin, it sounded like she was skimming over a lot of stuff, but he let it go. A lot of the pauses had the feeling of gaps that hid the kind of stuff that hurt too much, as if pretending would make it all go away. He knew about that. Like if he pretended everything was fine, his illness wasn’t really there.

  “How did you survive out there?” Kevin asked.

  “I did what I had to,” Chloe said, sounding defensive, and also kind of haunted again. “Wait, you mean when everyone else changed? I was… I guess it was just luck. I was inside away from everyone when it started happening, and people said there was a gas or something, but by the time I got out, it was just those things trying to grab people and breathe on them.”

  “By the time you got out?” Kevin said.

  “This butcher locked me in his meat locker. Said I was trying to steal from him.”

  Was that somewhere that might keep the alien vapor out? Did it mean that Luna and he didn’t need their masks anymore?

  “It will be okay,” Kevin said.

  Chloe gave him another of those shrugs. “You’re the kid on TV, aren’t you? When you said your name was Kevin, I didn’t get it, but I think I recognize you. Is that why you’re here? They stashed you in a safe place because you’re the boy who knows about aliens?”

  Kevin shook his head, moving back over to her. “They didn’t put me here. Dr. Levin gave me a key to fit the bunkers they have, and told me about the one under the NASA research center, but that went wrong. Luna and I had to find this place by ourselves.”

  Chloe nodded. “Luna… is she your girlfriend?”

  People were always assuming that. Kevin couldn’t understand why. It seemed obvious to him that Luna would never be his girlfriend.

  “She’s my friend,” Kevin said. “We’re not… I mean…”

  It was weird how talking about aliens was easier than talking about exactly what he and Luna were.

  “Strange,” Chloe said. “I mean, you seem nice. I definitely wouldn’t leave you as just a friend. I wonder—”

  Kevin didn’t get to find out what she wondered, though, because a pointed cough came from the doorway. Almost as pointed as the look Luna gave them when Kevin turned around.

  “I wanted to see what was taking you both so long,” she said, and she didn’t sound happy. She looked… almost jealous, and that didn’t make sense, because nothing was happening here, and in any case, Kevin and Luna weren’t like that. Were they?

  “Hi, Luna,” Kevin said. “Chloe was just telling me about herself.”

  “I bet she was,” Luna said. “Maybe she can tell me some of it too. And maybe, while we’re doing that, we can work out what we’re all going to do next.”

  ***

  They went through to the kitchen area, because none of them had eaten breakfast yet. Kevin went to get supplies from the storeroom, not entirely sure if he should leave Luna and Chloe alone right then.

  Kevin picked out a packet that claimed to be blueberry pancakes, and took it out to them. They were quiet, which was kind of worrying in itself—Luna was almost never quiet.

  “I found blueberry pancakes,” he said.

  “That’s great,” Luna said. “I love blueberry pancakes.”

  “I like them too,” Chloe said, although Kevin got the feeling she’d only said it because Luna had.

  “Well, I don’t know how good they’ll be,” Kevin said.

  The answer to that was simple: they tasted like something that had been in a packet in a storeroom for longer than they should have been. Even so, he was hungry enough by then to eat all of his.

  “How did you hear about this place?” Kevin asked Chloe while they were eating.

  “My dad… his job meant that he… heard things,” she said, but didn’t expand on it more than that. Kevin suspected that if Luna had asked rather than him, she wouldn’t have said even that much.

  “So you trekked here, and battered on the door until someone let you in?” Luna said. She didn’t sound to Kevin as though she believed it much.

  “I had to go somewhere,” Chloe said.

  “I wonder if there are other places like this where people have managed to hide out,” Kevin said before that could turn into an argument. He wanted them to get along, if they were stuck there.

  “If there are, we can’t contact them,” Luna said. “There’s still no signal coming in through the screens, and all those communications devices are useless if we don’t know who we’re connecting to.”

  “Maybe you’re just not turning them on right,” Chloe said.

  Luna gave her a pointed look.

  “We can stay here as long as we need to, anyway,” Luna said. “We’re safe here. We talked about this yesterday, Kevin.”

  They had, and it had been a comforting thought at the time, but was that it? Were the three of them just going to stay there for the rest of their lives?

  “I might know about a place,” Chloe said, between mouthfuls of pancake.

  “You just happen to know about somewhere?” Luna said. “The same way that you heard about here?”

  To Kevin, she sounded suspicious. He wanted to give Chloe the benefit of the doubt, but Luna sounded much less like she trusted her.

  Chloe put down her fork. “I heard about it on the way here from some people I met. I figured that this was closer, and safer. But if there’s no one here…”

  “We’re here,” Luna said. “We’re safe here.”

  “Are we?” Chloe demanded, looking around at Kevin as if for confirmation. “There’s supposed to be a group toward LA who are helping refugees gather together and stay safe. They call themselves the Survivors.”

  “So you want us to go all the way to LA and look for these people?” Luna asked.

  “What’s your plan? Just sit here and wait for things to get better?”

  Kevin looked from one to the other, trying to work out the best way to keep all of this calm.

  “We have enough food to last forever, and maybe we’ll get the radio working soon. We can’t just go out there when there could be anything.”

  Chloe shook her head. “Things don’t get better. Trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Luna said. “We don’t even know you. We’re staying here.”

  Kevin knew that tone. It meant that Luna wasn’t backing down.

  “Listen to the perfect little cheerleader, thinking she’s in charge,” Chloe shot back.

  “You know nothing about me,” Luna insisted, in a dangerous tone of voice.

  Kevin could barely work out why they were arguing. He’d been trying not to get involved, but now it seemed as though he might have to.

  He stood to say something, but stopped, because pain shot through his head, along with something else, a feeling he hadn’t had in days now.

  “Kevin?” Luna said. “Are you all right?”

  Kevin shook his head. “I think… I think there’s another signal coming through.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Numbers flashed through Kevin’s mind, bursting through it in rapid sequence, seeming almost to burn themselves onto his brain. They seemed too fast to hold onto, but Kevin knew he had to try. He grabbed for them…

  Kevin woke, blinking up at the top bunk of the bed he’d chosen from the floor. His head ached like he’d been hit on it, but it wasn’t that. It was just the pain that came as his body tried to process an alien signal it couldn’t handle, trying vainly to grasp onto it. He put a hand to his nose and it came away stained by a thin stream of blood.

  “Here,” Luna said, handing him a cloth.

  “Thanks,” Kevin replied.

  Chloe was watching him from the other side of the bunkbed, as though it was a barrier between her and Luna.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “I told you what happened,” Luna said. Kevin could hear the annoyance there.

  Chloe shook her head. “I want to hear it from him.”

  Kevin swallowed. “I think… I think
there’s a transmission.”

  “I told you,” Luna said, with a certain satisfaction, then looked back to Kevin. “Wait, you think there’s one?”

  Kevin could understand that uncertainty. Before, the transmissions had all been so clear.

  “There weren’t any words,” Kevin said. “It was all numbers.”

  “Like the first time,” Luna said.

  Kevin nodded, struggling to sit up. When he blinked, he could see the numbers clearly, burning behind his eyelids, there whether he wanted to see them or not.

  “So this is how it happens?” Chloe asked, sounding almost excited about it. “You get actual transmissions into your brain?”

  “I get hints of things,” Kevin said, “but the actual transmissions come through NASA’s radio telescopes. I’m just able to translate them.”

  “That’s… amazing,” Chloe said.

  It was easy to forget that there were people out there who hadn’t seen him doing this plenty of times before.

  “It’s not something fun,” Luna said. “You can see what it does to Kevin. And all the trouble that’s come from it too… not just the aliens coming here. We’ve had people threaten us, try to kill us, people not believe Kevin. Do you know what it’s like, not being believed when you’re telling the truth? Being told that you’re crazy?”

  Chloe had been looking increasingly angry as Luna spoke, but once she said that, Chloe went quiet.

  “Yeah,” she said softly. “Yeah, I do.”

  She went and sat down on the corner of one of the other beds, and Kevin saw her fingers drumming together as though there was a lot she wanted to say, but didn’t. Kevin might have asked her what was wrong, but Luna was speaking to him again.

  “So this means that there’s another message waiting?” she asked. “Another transmission from the aliens?”

  Kevin nodded. “Not the ones who invaded, though. This felt more like the way it did with the other ones. The ones who tried to warn us.”

  “I guessed that,” Luna said. “I mean, what are the invaders going to say now? Surrender and be destroyed, puny humans? Resistance is futile? What kind of aliens gloat when they’ve already beaten you?”

  “Everyone else does,” Chloe muttered, then stood up and walked out.

  Luna made a face at her retreating back. “What’s her problem?”

  Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know. I get the feeling that something pretty bad happened before she came here.”

  “You mean worse than the world being invaded by aliens?” Luna asked. “Or worse than being grabbed by a guy with a gun at a press conference?”

  “I don’t know,” Kevin repeated. He got the feeling that he should probably go after Chloe, but he didn’t feel strong enough to do it yet, and in any case, he also had the feeling that Luna wouldn’t be happy with him if he did.

  “I figured she would have told you,” Luna said. “I mean, you looked to be having a nice talk when I showed up before.”

  It sounded almost jealous, but why would Luna be jealous? She had to know that she and Kevin would always be best friends, and nothing would come between that, right? And as for anything else… well, that would imply that Luna was interested in being more than just his friend, and Kevin couldn’t really believe that would ever happen.

  “She didn’t really say much,” Kevin said. “Just that she ran away.”

  “Looks like she’s good at that,” Luna said, with another pointed look toward the door.

  “Luna,” Kevin said. “Can you at least try to be nice to her? I mean, I don’t know why you’re even mad at her. I’d have thought you’d get along.”

  “Because we’re both girls?” Luna said.

  “No!” Kevin said hurriedly. “I mean, because you’re both…” He tried to think of the right words. Would tough be right? Chloe certainly looked it, while Luna didn’t, but Kevin knew from experience that she was.

  “We’re nothing alike,” Luna said. “She called me a cheerleader.”

  She made it sound like an insult.

  “Well, you were on the—”

  “That’s not the point,” Luna said, but then stopped. “Okay, though. I’ll be nice. I guess if we’re all stuck in a bunker together, we’ll have to get along. But I’m doing this for you, not for her.”

  “Thanks,” Kevin said.

  “Of course, if there’s some new signal, then we’re not going to be able to stay in the bunker, are we?” Luna said, sounding as though it was all pretty obvious. Maybe it was to her. Luna had always been good at coming up with plans for things. Quite often, they’d been plans for getting into more trouble.

  Kevin hadn’t thought it through yet, but Luna was probably right. If there was a new signal, then they had to find out what it meant, and there was only one place they could do that.

  “I think we have to go back to the research institute,” Kevin said.

  “Even though we barely got out of there the first time?” Luna said. “And we don’t know what’s on the message, and we don’t know if it will do any good when the aliens have already taken our world. It could just be ‘sorry, we tried to warn you.’”

  “What if it’s not, though?” Kevin countered. “I mean, do you really believe they’d send a message all the way across space for that?”

  “No, I guess not,” Luna said, looking more serious now.

  “What if they found a way to beat the aliens, or force them out of controlling people’s bodies?” Kevin said. “What if they give us some way to make this better? We have to go back. Well… I do. I mean, you might be safer if—”

  “Finish that thought and I’ll punch you,” Luna said. “Of course I’m going to come.”

  “But I thought that—”

  “You thought you’d leave me behind while you had an adventure by yourself?” Luna demanded.

  Kevin shook his head. “I thought that we’d finally gotten somewhere safe. I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to give that up. I have to be there to translate the message, but no one else—ow!”

  He rubbed his arm where Luna’s fist had connected with it.

  “I told you I would,” she said with a broad smile that suggested she wasn’t remotely sorry. “I’m coming with you, because someone has to keep you from getting grabbed by controlled people. Besides, if there’s anything there that will let us turn around and kick their asses for what they did, I want to know about it.”

  That was part of what was so incredible about Luna. She didn’t give up, even when everything said that it was the sensible thing to do. She’d fight anything, up to and including an alien invasion.

  “Did I ever tell you how amazing you are?” Kevin asked.

  “You don’t need to tell me,” Luna said with another grin. “I just know. Frankly, you’re lucky you get to be my friend.”

  “True,” Kevin said. He turned serious for a moment. “We need a plan if we’re going to go back.”

  “We’ll need supplies,” Luna said, starting to check items off on her fingers. “We’ll need food, maybe tools to get inside, masks…”

  “Chloe said that the vapor was gone,” Kevin pointed out.

  “And how does she know?” Luna countered. “Okay, maybe, but I’d rather have one with me just in case. You can have the job of telling her that we’re going.”

  “Maybe she’ll want to come with us,” Kevin said.

  Luna made a face. “I guess it’s better than leaving her here and wondering if she’ll let us back in again. I’ll get started getting supplies together. You go and talk to her.”

  ***

  Kevin made his way through the underground complex, looking for Chloe. It took a while to find her in the tangled corridors and storerooms, but eventually he heard her ahead. She seemed to be talking to herself.

  “I can’t do it… I can’t do it…”

  Kevin cautiously looked through a doorway to find Chloe sitting on the floor of a storeroom. There were things scattered around in a spread that didn’t lo
ok accidental. It looked as though she’d swept her arm along one of the shelves, knocking everything to the floor. She had her head in her hands and seemed to be crying.

  “Chloe?”

  She looked up as Kevin approached, wiping away her tears as if afraid they might be used against her.

  “I’m fine,” she said, before Kevin could even ask if she was okay. “I’m fine.”

  “I used to say I was fine when people asked me about my illness,” Kevin said, moving to sit down beside her. “It mostly meant I wasn’t.”

  “I just get… upset… sometimes,” Chloe said, and Kevin guessed she’d picked that word carefully out of all the ones that had come to her. “I do stuff without really thinking. It’s part of why people said I was crazy.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy,” Kevin said.

  Chloe sighed. “You don’t know me yet. Did you just come here to see how badly I was messing up?”

  “No, of course not,” Kevin said. “We… I… think that we need to go back to the NASA research institute. With what I saw, there might be a message, and it might be important.”

  “You want to go into the middle of the city, to a place that might be full of them?” Chloe replied. “That’s…that doesn’t make any sense. We could go anywhere. There are the Survivors in LA, or my cousin up north…”

  “We need to do this,” Kevin said. “Luna’s collecting supplies, and we’ll work out a plan for getting there safely. You could stay here if you want, though. You don’t have to come with us if you don’t think it would be safe enough.”

  “You don’t want me to come with you?” Chloe said, and now she sounded as upset as she’d looked before.

  “That’s not what I said,” Kevin said.

  “It’s what you meant, though, isn’t it?” Chloe shot back.

  “No,” Kevin replied. “I just thought you might not want to come. You said yourself it might be dangerous.”

  Chloe shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Chloe,” Kevin said. “I don’t want to—”

  “Whatever,” Chloe repeated, in a dull tone. “Do what you want. I don’t care. Go off and make your stupid preparations.”