Arrival

by Morgan Rice

  One of them, a boy who looked a couple of years older than Kevin, kicked out the stand on his bike and then stood there, looking around.

  “Are you sure you saw something down here, Joey?” he asked another of the boys, who shrugged.

  “I told you, Leon, there was a boat coming in towards the pier. I thought I saw people on it.”

  “Then we should get to them before the controlled do,” the first boy said. “We don’t want any more ending up in the slave camps.”

  Luna had a triumphant expression. “I told you they wouldn’t be controlled people. And they came down here to help. They must be okay.”

  “Or they were going to loot the boat,” Chloe said, but it didn’t sound as though her heart was in it now.

  Kevin nodded to the street. “I think it’s worth the risk,” he said. “Maybe they can help us get to the tar pits.”

  Hoping he was making the right decision, he stood up, taking Bobby with him, and stepped out into the street. If he was wrong, he’d just killed his friends, or worse.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As Kevin and the others walked out of the abandoned store, there was a flurry of activity in front of them. The kids on the motorbikes reached into their jackets, pulling out an array of weapons that made Kevin freeze in fear just looking at them. They had everything from chains and clubs to machetes and even a few guns. Where had kids like him gotten all of that?

  More importantly, had he just led Luna and Chloe out to their deaths? That thought made Kevin edge away, his hands raised.

  “Who are you?” the lead kid, Leon, said. “Say something, now.”

  “Like what?” Luna shot back, sounding as if she might fight them all if she had to. “Do you know how hard it is to think of something to say when someone just says ‘say something’?”

  “Um… I’m Kevin,” Kevin said, guessing why the other boy was asking it. “This is Luna and Chloe. We’re not controlled by the aliens, if that’s what you’re checking. Look at our eyes.”

  “You know about the eyes?” Leon said. “You got that close to them and survived?”

  “We were lucky,” Kevin said. He didn’t explain all of it, because he wasn’t sure how these kids would react to the presence of the one who’d brought all of this down on them by telling them to open the rock.

  “We ran away a lot,” Chloe said. “Who are all of you?”

  “I’m Leon,” the boy said, but they knew that already. “The rest of us… well, they call us the Survivors.”

  “The Survivors?” Chloe said. “But I thought… I thought they’d be…”

  “Older?” Leon asked.

  “Well… yeah, I guess,” Chloe said.

  “All of the adults we knew got taken,” Leon said, “and the ones who survived… well, we didn’t know them, or what they wanted. We can’t trust them.”

  Kevin wasn’t so sure about that. He thought of Phil. “There are some we can trust.”

  “And how do we know which are which?” Leon countered. “There are gangs out there, and hunters, and worse. There are people who think that because there’s nothing left of the world, they can hurt anyone they want. Better just to have us kids here.”

  A kid waved from the roof of a nearby building.

  “We need to go,” Leon said. “That’s one of our watchers. The creatures are getting too close. You’re lucky you didn’t go deeper into LA.”

  “Lucky,” Luna said. “Look, we’re trying to get to—”

  “We can talk about where you were heading on that boat of yours once we’re safe,” Leon said. “For now, you can hop on, or you can take your chances with the creatures when they arrive.”

  Put like that, there wasn’t a lot of choice. Kevin got on a bike behind a girl who had found full racing gear from somewhere. He saw Luna mount up behind a boy on a dirt bike, and Chloe settled in on the back of a bike that looked like it had come from a museum. Even Bobby got a seat, settling down in the sidecar of a bike and sitting there with his tongue lolling.

  “Why am I taking the dog?” the rider complained.

  “Because you’re the one with a sidecar, Reed,” Leon said. “Now, is everyone set?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer before wheeling his bike around and gunning the engine.

  The city sped past as their convoy of bikes moved through it. Down side streets, Kevin glimpsed strangely synchronized groups of people who had to be controlled by the aliens. Elsewhere, he heard the sounds of gunfire and occasional screams, but those things only rang out as loud as they did because of how quiet the rest of the city was.

  They made their way through the city and out into the hills around it. That worried Kevin a little, because it seemed as though they were getting further from where they wanted to go, not closer. Even so, he held on and didn’t say anything. They had to hope that the Survivors would be able to help them, and that they would be willing to do so if they could.

  The Survivors quickly turned off the road in an area filled with grand houses, but ignored them, going to a space between the hills where a series of boulders sat in front of a canyon. Looking up, Kevin could see more kids watching out from on the side of the hills, again, with weapons ready.

  There was a cavern about halfway along, with more boulders waiting near the entrance, as if ready to be rolled into place if enemies came.

  Everywhere Kevin looked, there were kids like them. There were hundreds there, some sitting around, some looking as though they were trying to practice with the weapons they’d brought, some seeming to try to farm in the limited space they had.

  “What is all this?” Kevin asked as they stopped.

  “It’s where we live,” Leon said, getting off his bike. “We tried the houses down below, but it’s too easy for them to get to us there.”

  There was something about the way he said it that told Kevin they’d found that out the hard way.

  “So you’re safe up here?” Chloe asked, sounding as though she didn’t quite believe it. Maybe the idea of somewhere truly safe was something she found too hard to understand.

  “As safe as anyone can be,” Leon said. “They haven’t found us yet, and when they’ve come for us in the city… we’ve stopped some of them.”

  Stopped. They’d managed to kill people taken over by the aliens. Kevin didn’t know whether to be pleased by that or horrified, because those people were still people. He had to believe that they were still in there somewhere, still able to come back. What would it have been like if it had been his mom, or Luna’s parents, or one of the kids from school?

  “How did you all survive the vapor?” Kevin asked.

  “All kinds of ways,” Leon said. “Some people were in sealed spaces when it happened; some were wearing masks; some heard about it in time to get masks. It was different for each of us. The point is that we did survive, and we started to come here, one by one.”

  “People heard about you and started to come looking for help?” Kevin guessed.

  “Kind of. Come on, come inside,” Leon said. “We’ll show you around, and you can tell us how you ended up on a boat to LA.”

  He led the way inside and the three of them followed, with Bobby walking by Kevin’s side. Inside the cavern, it seemed that everything was lit by candles, or by mirrors angled to reflect the sun’s light.

  “We can’t risk too many electronics,” Leon said. “We have a radio we use to contact other groups, but even with that, we go into the city before we use it. We can’t let them track our location.”

  Kevin looked over to where a girl was tending a series of water chutes that seemed to be irrigating plants, taping them back together with electrical tape.

  “We’re scavenging what we can from the city,” Leon said. “Maisy, is there something wrong with the plant feeder?”

  “It broke again,” the girl said. “I can get it back into place, but it’s not the same without Barnaby.”

  “I know,” Leon said. “Just do the best you can.”

>   He led the way to a small circle that had a fire set in the middle of it. There were chairs set all around it, of so many styles that it seemed obvious they’d been stolen from a dozen or more different places. There were deckchairs and garden chairs, an old armchair, and a set of mismatched dining chairs. Kevin tried to imagine the kids there getting all of it back to their encampment on the back of their motorcycles, and couldn’t picture it. If he tried to move a huge leather sofa using just a motorcycle, he knew he would almost certainly fall off.

  “Come and sit down,” Leon said. “Then you can tell us how you got here, and ask any questions you have.”

  Kevin, Chloe, and Luna sat down. A group of the others joined them, breaking off from what they were doing to stare at them, sizing them up.

  “We can’t all stop,” Leon said. “We still need to work out what we got from the last stores we scavenged, and Kieran, I’m pretty sure it’s your turn to be up on watch duty.”

  A bunch of the kids broke off from the group, hurrying back to whatever tasks they’d been performing before, but still leaving plenty behind. To Kevin, that was kind of impressive; he couldn’t imagine getting so many kids their age to work together like that.

  Luna seemed just as impressed. “So you’re the leader here?”

  “Kind of, I guess,” Leon replied. He shrugged. “People seem to listen to me. I just try to keep things together, try to keep everyone busy.”

  Busy was one way of trying to deal with things that couldn’t be dealt with. Pretend that everything was okay, and hope that if you did it hard enough, it eventually would be. Kevin had tried that for a little while when he’d first been told how ill he was. It was the kind of thing that couldn’t work forever, but it could work for now.

  “It’s hard, being responsible for everything,” Kevin said.

  “I guess,” Leon said with a shrug. One of the younger kids came up to him and whispered something. “Kayla, it’s okay, but… are you sure?”

  He stared at Kevin, and in that moment, Kevin knew that they’d worked out who he was. In a lot of ways, it was surprising that it had taken this long. Maybe he looked very different after floating at sea than he had during the press conferences on TV.

  “You’re Kevin McKenzie,” Leon said. It wasn’t even a question at that point.

  Kevin nodded, and he heard a murmur go around the group.

  “They say he found out all about the aliens,” one boy said.

  “He was in there when it happened, and he survived,” a girl murmured.

  “If he’s here, it must mean something.”

  The murmuring went on, until eventually Luna stood up. “Hey, we’re right here, you know? We can hear every word you’re saying.”

  “Sorry,” Leon said. “It’s just… the idea that you’re here, Kevin… it’s a big deal. A huge deal.”

  The older boy seemed almost in awe of him now, even though Leon was able to run this whole encampment of other teenagers.

  “And you two as well, obviously,” Leon said, nodding to Chloe and Luna. “It’s cool that you came here, but Kevin…”

  “Maybe he’s here because the antidote rumor’s true,” a girl whispered.

  A boy shook his head. “It will be about the slave camps.”

  “Maybe it’s because they keep moving the ships. Maybe he knows where they’ll be.”

  “We know where they are, stupid. There’s one of the big ones in Sedona right now.”

  Kevin shook his head. He really didn’t feel comfortable about the looks of hope he was getting from the other kids. He’d already failed the world once. “Please, I don’t know about any of this. I’m not some kind of superhero who’s going to run in and make everything better.”

  “I don’t know,” Chloe said. “Given what we’re actually here to do…”

  “Wait,” Luna said. “Someone has an antidote to what the aliens are doing?”

  Leon shook his head. “It’s just a rumor. They say there’s some lab working on it, or some scientist moving from place to place, the details change every time we hear it.”

  “It might be real,” Chloe said. “Kevin, you said you were immune to them, so maybe there’s a way to make that happen for other people?”

  “Wait,” Leon said. “You’re immune?”

  Kevin nodded reluctantly. “I think so.”

  “Maybe there is an antidote then,” Leon said. “I want to believe it’s real, but…”

  “Who did you lose?” Luna asked.

  Kevin knew the answer to that. “Everyone, Luna. We all lost everyone.”

  That was a terrifying feeling: that there wouldn’t be any kid left on Earth who hadn’t lost their family, any parent who didn’t know the pain of losing their kids. The aliens came and they took everyone, everything. There was nothing left.

  “I keep losing people,” Leon said. “That’s the hard part about being a leader. Maybe you know that, Kevin.”

  Kevin heard Luna snort.

  “Kevin’s my friend, not my leader.”

  Chloe nodded. “I don’t like people telling me what to do.”

  “I was thinking about the part where he got the whole world to believe,” Leon said. “I’m losing fewer people, but it still hurts. Sometimes the people they’ve converted grab more. Sometimes they run into gangs. There are slave camps in the mountains, with so many people. One of our kids, Barnaby, got taken the other day. We thought that there was no way to get him back, but if you’re here…”

  Kevin shook his head hurriedly. “Leon, I’m really nothing special.”

  “You’re immune to what they can do. And you can hear messages from them.”

  “It doesn’t help here,” Kevin said. They needed some kind of soldier, or ninja, or something, not him. They needed someone like Ted, but Ted was gone with everyone else.

  “You don’t know that,” Leon insisted.

  “We have our own thing to do,” Kevin said.

  “We have a mission,” Luna agreed.

  Leon frowned at that. “What kind of mission?”

  “We’re going to the tar pits,” Chloe said. “Kevin heard a new message.”

  “From the aliens?” Leon said.

  Kevin did his best to explain. “From the good aliens, not the bad ones. From the ones who tried to warn us. They think that if we find something old enough, it will have viruses in it that the aliens won’t know about. If we can get it onto their ship, it might stop them.”

  “So you’re going to the tar pits,” Leon said. “And then you’re going to Sedona?”

  Kevin shrugged. He hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  “Sedona is the only place we know there’s one of the carrier ships near enough to get to,” Leon said. “They keep moving about. They stay for a few days, gather up people, take them to the world ship, and then they go somewhere else.”

  “Just stripping away everything that’s there,” Chloe said. She sounded like she hated them then. “Like locusts.”

  “You won’t make it to the tar pits without our help,” Leon said, seeming to come to a decision. “And you definitely won’t make it to Sedona.”

  “So help us,” Luna said. “We’re trying to save the world here.”

  “And I’m trying to save my friend. This thing with the virus and the rest of it might work, but it might not, and whatever happens, everyone here needs Barnaby. He’s clever. He knows how to work things. I’m supposed to keep people safe, and I need his help to do it.”

  “So you’re saying we have to help you get him back or you won’t help us?” Kevin said.

  He saw Leon nod, and that hurt.

  “That’s blackmail!” Luna snapped.

  “Technically, I think it’s extortion,” Chloe said, “but I agree with Luna for once. You can’t make us do something like this. We’re already doing enough stupidly dangerous things.”

  “Whatever,” Luna said. “I mean, we don’t know anything about these slave pits, we don’t have any kind of plan…”


  “We’ll make preparations, obviously,” Leon said. “We’ll help as much as we can. There are spots near the slave camp where we can get a good look at it and work out a proper plan.”

  “I still say this sounds stupid,” Luna said.

  “What do you say, Kevin?” Leon asked.

  Kevin sat there, trying to think. He guessed that Leon was serious about not helping if he refused, and worse, he was pretty sure that they wouldn’t make it to the tar pits without help. Both of those were pretty strong reasons to do what the other boy wanted, but there was another, bigger one: it was the right thing to do.

  “If we help you get your friend back, you’ll help us?” Kevin asked.

  Leon nodded.

  “Even if we go and he’s not there; they’ve taken him up there, or something?” Kevin pointed to the moon-sized ship still hanging in the sky.

  “Okay,” Leon said.

  Kevin looked around at the others. “I think we should do it,” he said. “I think it’s the only way that we can get to the tar pits, and we need to do that to save the world.”

  Chloe hesitated for a few seconds, obviously not liking it, then nodded. “Okay, if there’s no other way, I guess we have to.” She glared at Leon. “I really hate being made to do stuff.”

  Kevin looked over to Luna. She nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. “And I want to make one thing clear: if this gets us all killed, I’m blaming you, but that still doesn’t make you the leader, okay?”

  “Okay,” Kevin said.

  He tried not to think about just how likely it was that this would kill them all. It seemed far too likely right then.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Kevin held on tight as they rode their bikes up into the mountains, unsure what to expect once they got to their destination. It was one thing agreeing to help the Survivors to get their friend back, but Kevin wasn’t sure how exactly he was going to even begin to do it.