by Morgan Rice
She stopped short as a figure slammed into the truck, making a grab for them.
“Get us out of here,” Kevin said, and Chloe nodded.
The truck lurched forward as she drove, apparently not caring if she hit the controlled people or not. They swerved around a car, and a soldier threw himself into the truck’s path. Chloe didn’t slow it down even for a moment, and the crunch as they hit him was awful. He bounced off the hood and rolled to his feet, but by then they were already away.
Or kind of away, anyway. There was only so fast they could go on the mountain road, especially with the risk of abandoned cars in the way, left wherever people had been when the vapor converted their occupants. Chloe was weaving around them, but it still slowed them down enough that the controlled people running behind were keeping up.
“They’re not giving up,” Luna said with a glance back.
“They don’t get tired, they don’t stop,” Chloe said, and something about the way she said it suggested that she’d learned that the hard way. “Everyone hold on.”
Kevin clung to the dashboard as they sped up, the truck rolling alarmingly as it sped around the obstacles in the way. Kevin was sure they would crash at any moment, but somehow, impossibly, they didn’t. Chloe wrenched the wheel from one side to the other, and the truck lumbered along in response.
They skidded close to the edge of the road, and Kevin didn’t know which would be worse: crashing or being caught. Chloe seemed to have made up her mind, though, because they didn’t slow down. They sped down off the mountain, and now Kevin could see the controlled people falling further and further behind.
“We did it,” he said. “We survived.”
Luna hugged him. Over her shoulder, Kevin could see the look on Chloe’s face while she did it.
“Now all we have to do,” Luna said, “is go into the city, break into a place we barely got out of, and find a message from a second set of aliens without being grabbed by the first ones.”
Put like that, it seemed like an impossible task. Kevin could barely imagine making it to the NASA institute in one piece, but they still had to.
It was the only hope the world had.
CHAPTER FIVE
“I’m tempted to say ‘are we almost there yet,’” Luna said, with a smile across at Kevin.
Kevin should have guessed that one of the biggest dangers of a road trip like this wasn’t just the risk of crashing, or being ambushed by people controlled by aliens, or anything like that. It was the possibility that Luna might get bored enough to start thinking of ways to entertain herself. He had no doubt that would mean an argument with Chloe, and since Chloe was driving, that didn’t feel like a good thing.
Lots of things didn’t, from the alien spaceship hanging moon-sized and ominous in the sky, to the silent near emptiness of the roads. All of it just reminded him how weird this whole situation was, and how much the world had changed almost overnight.
“Can’t you drive any faster?” Luna asked.
“You want faster?” Chloe said, and hit the gas.
Kevin clung on. Once they got off the mountain, the roads opened up a little, but that didn’t mean they could just go as fast as they wanted to. For one thing, Kevin doubted that Chloe had any more of an idea of how to drive than he or Luna did.
For another, there were still too many cars in the road for that.
“Slow down,” Kevin said as they blitzed their way around a Chevy parked in the middle of the freeway, its owner long gone. They barely skidded their way past a motorcycle that had been left on its side, just abandoned. “Chloe, please slow down.”
They slowed a little, and it was probably just as well they did. There were cars strewn everywhere now, mostly just left wherever their owners had been converted, but some of them were little more than twisted lumps of metal where they’d obviously crashed.
A tanker lay on its side by the edge of the freeway, gas seeping into the earth around it. One spark would have set it off, and right then, Kevin thought he understood how it felt.
“We need to work together,” he said, trying to calm things down a little. He tried to think about what his mother might have said in a situation like this, or Ted, or Dr. Levin. The only problem with that was that it hurt too much to think about all the people who had been taken from them, who might even now be on the ship that hung like a second moon in the sky.
“We’ve… everyone else is gone,” he said, choking back the hurt. “We’ve all lost people. We’ve all had bad things happen.” It didn’t seem like a big enough thing to say to contain the full horror of it. “All of us are hurting, and we can’t argue just because it’s bad. We’ll only get through this if we work together.”
The others were quiet for a little while.
“Okay,” Chloe said at last.
“Yeah, I guess,” Luna agreed.
They drove on, the ancient truck rattling and bumping its way along roads littered with the debris of people’s last moments before the aliens took them. There were abandoned fast food cartons and abandoned vehicles, pets left to wander by the side of the road, and people who lay where they’d fallen when cars had hit them, so still that it was obvious there was nothing that could be done to help them, even if Kevin had known anything about medicine.
He looked up at the sight of the alien ship in orbit above the world. Was his mom up there, or was she on one of the ships that he and Luna had seen come down from it to hover over the cities of the world? Maybe she’d been left standing around, waiting for something else, the way the hikers and the soldiers on the mountain had. Kevin wasn’t sure which of those options he should be hoping for. None of them sounded good.
“Look,” Luna said, pointing.
Kevin saw what she was pointing at right away. The big ship that had moved into place above San Francisco was still there, hovering improbably above the city while occasionally much smaller forms darted down from it. After so much stillness on the roads, that movement was almost as jarring as the fact that there was an alien spaceship just sitting there.
Almost.
“We’re actually driving towards that,” Chloe said. “This really doesn’t seem good.”
“Well, that’s one thing we can agree on,” Luna said.
It was probably about the only thing they did agree on, but they still had to go there. They had to do this, because right then, it seemed like the only hope anybody had. Kevin swallowed at that thought. It was too much pressure; far too much.
The alien ship was high enough above the city that it took another ten minutes before the buildings below started to come into view, skyscrapers jabbing up into the air below it like fingers trying to reach up to touch it. As they got closer, the roads got busier too, with more and more abandoned cars, so that they had to slow almost to a crawl to pick their way through safely.
“At least we’re not on the other side of the road,” Luna said. She had a point. The way out of the city was so clogged with cars now that it seemed impossible that anyone might be able to drive through the chaos of it. It looked as though they’d gotten out only just in time the first time around.
“It’s going to make getting out of the city again kind of hard,” Kevin said as he thought about it. He didn’t like the idea of being trapped in there. Maybe there would be some easy way to deal with the aliens once they got to NASA and listened to the new signal, maybe they wouldn’t need to leave again before this was all okay, but looking at the sight of the alien ships, it was hard to believe it.
“It’s easy,” Chloe said. “There’s no one on the road, so we drive the wrong side.”
That would do it. It was weird, though, that, even with what looked like the end of the world, it still felt wrong even thinking about it.
“Which way?” Chloe asked.
Kevin pointed, hoping he had it right. He’d been living at NASA for so long, but it wasn’t as if he and his mom had driven there more than a few times. They headed deeper into the city, trying to follow
signs that looked as though they would lead them closer to where they wanted to go.
The city was eerily quiet. There was garbage left in the streets and animals wandering about, but Kevin didn’t see any signs of people. He guessed that anyone this far into the city had walked to the spot where everyone had stood looking up at the ship that hung there. He wanted to try to ignore it, but it was impossible. Even when he did tear his eyes from it, it just meant that he looked past it to the even bigger shape hanging far out in orbit.
“Almost there,” Luna said. “We need to go right here.”
Kevin guessed that she’d been paying more attentions to the directions than he did. He was glad that one of them was certain of the way, at least. They pulled around the corner, into the Mountain View district, and Kevin saw the NASA center ahead.
Somehow, it managed to look even emptier than the rest of the city as they approached. Maybe it was just that Kevin was used to the whole place being so much busier, filled with people there to see what was going on, or there to see him, in the last few weeks. When he’d been in there relaying the messages on TV, there had been so many people waiting outside that it had seemed there was no way in or out. Now, the route to the research center was silent and still, no sign of people anywhere.
“There’s something sad about seeing it like this,” Kevin said. He thought about all the people who had been working inside when the vapor had started to come out. Would they still be in there? He hoped not.
“At least it means we’re not having to run away from people controlled by aliens,” Luna said. “I hope.”
They drove up as far as the security barrier, then Kevin and Luna got out to open it. It took both of them to move the weight of the thing, lifting it up and leaving it up so that Chloe could bring the truck through. From here, the research center looked even emptier, its size only emphasizing it. The doors all stood open, left that way by whoever had come pouring out, controlled by the aliens.
“We need to be careful,” Kevin said. “There might still be some in there.”
“There won’t be, will there?” Chloe asked. “I thought they’d all be in the ships or something by now.”
“You don’t have to come in,” Luna said.
“I didn’t say that.”
The three of them crept forward, staying quiet as they went in through the open doorway. Still, there was no sign of anyone, which managed to be both a relief and kind of creepy at the same time. All the doors inside the place were open, most of them looking as though they’d been broken open by force as the controlled people struggled to get out.
“At least it means that we’ll be able to get where we need to go,” Luna said.
“Where do we need to go?” Chloe asked, looking over to Kevin. “Which way?”
“The computer pit,” Kevin said. He’d been thinking about this most of the way up. They would need to find a way to get the computers to reorient the radio telescopes to match the numbers in his head, then listen to the feed in the room the scientists had set up for him to do just that.
He started to lead the way, through doorways that he’d never had clearance for, thinking about all the people he’d seen working there in the different labs and offices. All of them were gone now, their things left behind as if they might be back for them at any moment.
“It’s like a ghost ship,” Chloe said, echoing what he was thinking. “Or like one of those towns where everything is set for dinner, and the people are just… gone.”
It was definitely a weird feeling, but Kevin did his best to ignore it as he led the way down to where they stored the supercomputers that the research center had been working on. He had no doubt that one of them would be able to let them hear the signal, even if he wasn’t quite sure how they would do it. They’d have to work that part out as they went.
They went down into the computer pit and it was as quiet as the rest of the building. The lights that had blinked on every surface before were dark now, the former hum and whir of power banks and fans only noticeable now that it was gone. Kevin hadn’t been expecting this; a part of him had just assumed that everything would be turned on, left as it was before the staff had been converted by the vapor.
“Can we switch it back on?” Luna asked, going around to the computers as if looking for a power switch.
Kevin tried too, picking out the computers closest to him and pressing whatever he could find. Nothing happened in response at first, but then the machines started to come to life, lights flickering across their surfaces. Kevin went over to one of the screens that he’d seen the scientists working on, trying to remember what they’d done the first time he’d been here, when they’d altered the positioning of their telescopes to match the first signal. They’d been over here, working at… this computer, he was sure of it.
He looked at the screen, trying to find a way to get it to do what he wanted, then felt the hope drain out of him. Everything was locked off, and the screen was demanding a password.
“What’s wrong?” Chloe asked.
“I can’t get into it,” Kevin said. “I don’t have access.”
Chloe frowned. “You don’t have a password for it?”
Kevin shook his head. “They didn’t give me one. They didn’t even give me my own pass card for the doors.”
“So you were like a prisoner?” Chloe said.
“There has to be a way,” Luna interrupted. “My mom’s always writing her passwords down because she keeps… at least, she did.”
Kevin could hear the deep strand of sadness beneath the surface, and he wished he could make things better. Maybe once they got the alien message, they would be able to. Of course, to do that, they needed to get into the system.
“We’ll look around for a password,” Kevin said. “We should—”
“Don’t say that we should split up,” Luna said. “Have you watched TV?”
“Little miss cheerleader is right,” Chloe said. “If we split up, what’s to stop them from grabbing us and transforming us without the others knowing?”
“All right,” Kevin agreed. “We’ll search together.”
They started to go through the building, room by room. It was a weird feeling, searching through whatever the scientists had left behind at their desks and in their lockers, especially when there were pictures of families, or mementos from vacations; things that only served as reminders of everything the world had lost.
“I don’t know if I can just root through people’s things,” Kevin admitted after a while.
“We have to,” Luna said. “If there’s a chance that it can get people back, then looking at their stuff is nothing.”
Even so, she was being pretty gentle about sorting through the stuff, unlike Chloe, who was going through it with all the speed and lack of care that she might have used if she’d been burgling it.
It didn’t matter what approach they took, because it all seemed to lead to the same conclusion.
“There’s nothing here,” Kevin said when they’d been through every office they could find and come back to the lobby. “No one wrote down their password.”
“I guess they have plenty of reasons to be more serious about security,” Luna said.
“But without a password, we can’t get into the system,” Kevin said, feeling his heart start to sink, “and if we can’t get into the system, we can’t hear the message.”
Which meant that whatever hope they’d had when they came there was gone. Kevin had been so sure that if they could just get back to the Institute, then it would give them a chance to do something about the aliens, but here they were, stuck on the edge of it, not able to listen to the one thing that might let them help. It was more than frustrating; it was hopeless.
Hopeless. They wouldn’t be able to undo any of what had happened. Why had they even thought they might be able to? Their families, their friends, everyone was gone.
Kevin was still thinking that when he saw the lights on the lobby’s elevator blink into
brightness, the display showing the elevator rising from the basement level.
“Someone’s here,” he said. “Someone’s coming up.”
“What if it’s one of them?” Chloe asked, looking around as if trying to find somewhere to hide.
“We need to get out of here,” Luna said.
“But if we go, we’ll never get the message,” Kevin insisted.
“There’s nothing left here, Kevin,” Luna said. “We can’t get to the signal if the controlled people get us first.”
Kevin looked around, trying to find a way to keep the three of them safe. But it was too late for that. Kevin held his breath. There was no time to run, and nowhere obvious to hide as the elevator pinged, signaling the arrival of whoever, whatever, was within.
CHAPTER SIX
Without anywhere to run or hide, Kevin looked around for something to use as a weapon. Luna had already grabbed a chair, holding it as if she might use it like a club. Chloe just looked ready to run, maybe hoping that whatever came through the opening elevator doors, they would be so busy attacking Luna that she’d be able to escape.
A rotund figure in a brightly colored shirt came out of the elevator, bellowing at the top of his voice, a golf club in his hands. Luna shouted back, starting forward with her chair.
“Wait, it’s you, Kevin?” Phil said, jumping back just in time to avoid a swipe of the chair.
“Phil?” Kevin said. The controlled people didn’t normally talk, but even so, he was feeling pretty cautious.
So was Luna, it seemed.
“Show me your eyes,” she yelled.
“You show me your eyes,” Phil said. “For all I know this is just some trick to get me to lean in close so you can breathe on me.”
“Well, maybe you’re trying to trick us,” Luna countered, although it sounded as if her heart wasn’t in it.
Kevin got around the problem by just moving close when Phil was busy with his standoff with Luna, and looking into what proved to be ordinary-looking black pupils.
“He’s normal,” Kevin declared.