Arrival

by Morgan Rice

  He went among the shelves next, seeing what was there that they could use. Kevin found a couple of plastic bags by the counter and started to fill them with things they might need. He took a couple of bottles of water, some dried beef, some candy bars…

  “This is my spot!” a voice by the counter shouted. A boom followed, and a section of wall near Kevin’s head tore up as shotgun pellets ripped into it. Kevin looked up to see a man in full camouflage gear storming in from a back room. He looked at least sixty, and there was something about his expression that was just crazy as he raised the shotgun he held for another attempt.

  Kevin threw himself flat and the shelf behind him exploded in a spray of canned food.

  “Time to leave, Bobby,” Kevin said, but it seemed that the dog had other ideas. While the older man aimed his shotgun again, Bobby leapt at him from the side, knocking him to the floor as the weapon went off and sitting on him, teeth bared. Kevin hadn’t realized quite how intimidating the dog could be until that moment. Under all that hair, it was easy to forget that there was still a big dog there, with very big teeth.

  “Sorry,” Kevin said. “I didn’t realize this was, um… your spot.”

  “Just you wait until I get up,” the man said. “I’ll kill you and your mutt both!”

  The scary thing was that he sounded as though he meant it. The best thing that Kevin could think of to do was to grab the shotgun that was now lying on the floor, taking it away as he backed toward the door as quickly as he could. As far as he could tell, the weapon was empty now, but he still didn’t feel like giving the old man a chance to reload. He opened the door and stepped out, even abandoning his stolen supplies in his rush to do it.

  “Come on, Bobby,” Kevin called, and the dog ran over to him. Kevin slammed the door shut and did his best to use the gun to wedge it shut, since the weapon wasn’t much use without shells. He didn’t think it would hold for long.

  “We need to get out of here,” he said. The girls looked around at him as if they might argue, but Kevin shook his head. “Right now.”

  Bobby leapt into Chloe’s sidecar, so Kevin grabbed Luna’s. Chloe and Luna both got on their bikes, and the three of them sped away just as the sound of gunfire came again behind them.

  “What was that all about?” Luna asked.

  “Crazy guy with a gun,” Kevin said, breathing hard. “Bobby saved me from him. I had to abandon everything I took.”

  “At least we got gas,” Luna said. “We should be able to get to Sedona easily.”

  They kept heading east, and around them, the landscape quickly turned to desert, hills and mountains stretching out in the distance beyond the highway, with no sign of anyone around almost as far as the eye could see at first.

  “It’s beautiful out here,” Chloe called over from her bike. “Kind of harsh, but it’s nothing like where I lived.”

  “Where was that?” Kevin called back.

  Chloe shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I’m never going back anyway.”

  They kept going, and Kevin tried to look at the maps Leon had given them to get a sense of where they were. It was kind of weird, having to rely on an old-fashioned paper map like this rather than on a phone, but even if that system still worked, Kevin didn’t have a phone with him, and he wouldn’t have wanted to risk the aliens knowing where he was even if he had.

  So they had to rely on the map, and thankfully, the route seemed simple enough: they headed east until they hit the off-ramp for the town of Brenda, then passed through a series of small towns, heading northeast. It was simple, and it avoided going all the way into Phoenix, where Kevin had no doubt there would be all the same dangers there had been in LA.

  “I’m bored,” Chloe said after a while. “There’s so much nothing out here.”

  “I thought you said it was beautiful,” Luna countered as they kept going.

  “It can be beautiful and boring,” Chloe shot back.

  A sign came up by the highway. At first, Kevin assumed that it would be advertising some rest stop or small town along the way. Then he saw the body tied to it, blood covering it. More blood covered up whatever the sign had originally said, replacing it with the words “Demon Hawks territory: Keep Out.”

  “I think I can live with boring,” Kevin said, swallowing back his fear at the thought that they were driving straight past the sign. They had to get to Sedona.

  “Anyone else feel like they should be creeped out more by seeing a body?” Chloe asked.

  Luna shrugged. “After everything that’s happened? After everything we’ve already seen?”

  She had a point. They both did, in their way. A few weeks ago, seeing a body like that would have terrified Kevin. It would probably have made him stop and stare, and maybe throw up. Now, though, he’d seen people hurt, and killed. He’d seen them turned into the puppets of alien masters, and somehow that seemed worse than simply dying. The man on the post was essentially a very bloody scarecrow, and there were lots of other things in the world that it was better to be scared of.

  “I still say we shouldn’t stay here long,” Kevin said.

  “Yeah,” Chloe said, looking around nervously.

  They continued along the highway, and all the time, Kevin felt as though eyes were burning into him from somewhere out in the desert beyond the road. Something told him that if they stopped on this stretch of road, if they ran out of gas or a tire blew out, then the three of them might end up like whoever had been tied to the sign. Even though he couldn’t see anyone, he was certain of it, and his heart was hammering in his chest all the way to the spot where an equally gruesome sign sat on the far side of the watchers’ territory, threatening people coming the other way.

  Even when they were past it, Kevin kept glancing back until they’d gone at least another few miles. He was starting to relax again when he saw something very different ahead.

  “Do you see that?” he asked, pointing. “I think we need to turn off here. I think that’s a mall.”

  It sat gleaming off the highway, presumably on the outskirts of some small town. Looking at it, Kevin had the feeling that it was probably almost as big as the rest of the town, maybe there to catch the eye of people passing on the main highway. It had certainly caught his.

  “There could be anything there,” Luna pointed out. “There could be aliens.”

  “There could be supplies, too,” Kevin said. He was only too aware that he hadn’t managed to get any at the gas station.

  “I’m hungry,” Chloe said.

  Bobby barked in agreement.

  “And we’ll need to camp out,” Kevin said, “so we’ll need… I don’t know, tents and stuff.”

  “I guess so,” Luna said.

  “It will be fine,” Kevin said. He wasn’t sure if he was trying to reassure her or himself. “We’ll be careful.”

  They pulled off the highway, heading for the mall. It shone against the dusty tones of its surroundings, the parking lot spread out in front and filled with cars that had presumably been there since the moment the aliens arrived.

  “Let’s hope there’s no one in there,” Chloe said.

  Kevin hoped so too, because this looked like the kind of space that people might claim if they were trying to survive, and the kind of place that they might try to defend if people came looking to steal from it. If the three of them had just been looking for a space to hide out, Kevin might even have suggested it, but they had to get to Sedona, and the ship that he hoped was still hovering over it.

  “Careful,” Luna said as they started to go inside. “Look.”

  There were the remains of a tripwire by the entrance, and scorch marks suggesting it had been connected to something dangerous. Inside, Kevin saw a bear trap that had already sprung shut, blood on its spikes.

  “I don’t like this,” Chloe said. “Who laid all these traps?”

  “I don’t know,” Kevin said, “but I don’t think they’re still here. Wouldn’t they reset the bear trap if they were?”


  “I hope they’re not here,” Luna said. “I think they were a lot more dangerous than one old guy.”

  Kevin nodded. Whoever had done this looked as though they’d been ready to keep out the world. As they moved into the mall, there were broken tripwires everywhere he looked, and the twisted remains of guns that looked as though they’d been rigged to fire at anyone breaking through those tripwires. There were scorch marks and sections of broken walls that seemed like there had been explosions, while almost all the store windows that Kevin could see were shattered, the safety glass broken into pieces so small that it looked as if the floor were strewn with diamonds.

  “It looks as though there was a battle here,” Luna said. “Like someone tried to keep out the controlled people, or someone else, all alone.”

  “I don’t think they succeeded though,” Kevin said, looking at the wreckage. “It looks as though whoever was trying to get in just kept coming.”

  “This place is weird,” Chloe said. “Where are all the bodies?”

  That was a good question. After a battle like this, there should have been bodies. It wasn’t that Kevin wanted to see them, but it was strange.

  “I don’t think we should stay any longer than we need to,” he suggested. “Let’s grab what we need and get out of here.”

  Luna nodded. “That’s fine by me. This place is starting to creep me out.”

  They started to search through the mall, looking for supplies. They found an outdoor goods store and grabbed backpacks and sleeping bags, tents, water filters, and a camping stove, trying to ignore the way the space around the gun cabinets was now a blackened mess. Kevin went over to a pet store and grabbed some canned food for Bobby, then headed over to a food store to grab supplies for the three of them.

  Chloe was already in there, her nose wrinkled slightly at the odor.

  “Smells like a trash can in here,” she said.

  “I guess it’s been a few days since any freezers were on,” Kevin said. He thought about all the food that would be rotting around the country, and the world. Soon, the only food left would be whatever was canned, or whatever people could hunt or grow for themselves.

  They grabbed cans of food, stuffing them into their backpacks alongside bottles of water. At least now they had enough to live on for days, if not weeks. Given what they were traveling to Sedona to do, that would be more than enough to either save the world, or… no, Kevin didn’t want to think about the alternative.

  “Do we have everything we want?” Luna asked. She looked as though she’d been busy stealing half of the contents of a hardware store to add to her pack. Kevin nodded. “Then I think we should get going again before anyone else shows up.”

  That made sense. Even if there wasn’t anyone here now, a place like this would probably attract anyone who was passing, and there was no guarantee that they would be friendly.

  The three of them went back to the bikes, setting off along the road again.

  “I don’t think we’ll make it to Sedona before dark,” Kevin said. “Do we drive through the night, or…”

  “I vote that we camp out,” Luna said.

  “I’ve slept outside enough times before,” Chloe said. She didn’t sound as happy about it as Luna, but she didn’t seem to mind. “We need to find somewhere while it’s still light.”

  ***

  They continued along the road for a while, but most of the landscape seemed to have the same arid feel to it. Eventually, the only thing to do was just pick a spot where there were at least a few trees to make it harder for anyone to see them, pull off the road, and start to set up a camp.

  They set the bikes up facing the road so that it would be easy to drive out of there in a hurry if they had to, then set up the tents with the camping stove in between them as it slowly started to get dark.

  “The night sky is kind of cool when you’re this far from anywhere,” Luna said.

  That was true. Without the bright lights of a city around him, Kevin could see every star there, twinkling in constellations that made him wonder just how many other worlds there were out there. There were at least two worlds that held aliens, so why couldn’t there be hundreds? Maybe they wouldn’t all be invaders, set on looting planets for all they were worth…

  Inevitably, Kevin found his eye drawn back to where the aliens’ main ship hung in the sky like a second moon. In the darkness, he could see the flicker of lights as their other ships flitted back and forth to it, bringing people or stolen resources, slowly stripping the Earth of everything it had.

  “We’ll stop this,” Chloe said beside him, looking up at it. “We have to.”

  “We have the virus now,” Luna said. “The other aliens said that if we found something old enough, that could stop them, and we did. We can do this.”

  Kevin nodded. He had to believe that they could do this. They had a weapon that could potentially stop the invaders in their tracks. They had a location for one of the big transport ships that would carry the virus back, and tomorrow, they would reach it. After all they’d been through to get here, after all the world had suffered, Kevin needed to believe that this would work.

  They would succeed, because if they didn’t, what hope did the world have?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Kevin woke early the next day, fed Bobby, and took him for a brief walk out in the desert. The dog spent most of his time running about trying to catch something small and furry that disappeared down a burrow before Kevin could get a good look at it.

  “You’re probably not finding all of this driving about very much fun,” Kevin said to the dog. “I’m kind of glad you’re here, though.”

  The dog nuzzled against his leg and they went back to the camp. The others were just waking up, Luna stretching out like a boxer warming up to fight someone, Chloe coming out of her tent cautiously, as if expecting danger to be waiting for her.

  Kevin grabbed a can out of his bag for breakfast, although since the label had come off in his bag, he had no way of telling what it might be until he opened it. Right then, he guessed it didn’t matter too much. It turned out to be canned fruit. They drank some water, packed away their camp, and got ready to get on their way.

  “We should make it to Sedona today,” Kevin said, checking their maps.

  “Then this can be over,” Chloe said.

  “We can beat them,” Luna added. “What are you going to do once the aliens are gone, Kevin?”

  She made it sound so easy, like they’d all just shrivel up in the face of the virus Kevin carried, and it would all be done in an instant. Like Kevin’s illness would be gone in the same moment. Even so, he went along with it. They needed hope today.

  “I guess I’m going to see my mom,” he said. The prospect that he might get his mother back when all of this was done was enough to keep him going, whatever else happened.

  “I want to find my parents too,” Luna said, “I just want things to be normal. Just home, life, school… I never thought I’d miss school. What about you, Chloe?”

  Chloe shrugged, and Kevin realized that she probably didn’t have a lot in the old world that she wanted to go back to.

  “It will be a chance to build a new life,” Kevin suggested to her.

  “Maybe,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced. “It sounds like you’re going to go back to everything, and I’m… not.”

  “We’re not abandoning you, Chloe,” Kevin said. “We wouldn’t do that.”

  “People abandon people,” Chloe said. “It’s what happens.”

  She sounded so bleak about the prospect, right at the moment when they would need all the hope they could get to see them through today.

  “No one’s abandoning anyone,” Luna said. “We’re your friends.”

  Chloe laughed. “You don’t even like me most of the time.”

  Luna shrugged. “That doesn’t make a difference. We’re doing this, and we’re doing it together.”

  “Okay,” Chloe said, with a small no
d.

  They got their stuff together and settled into place on the bikes, setting off along the highway once more. Since they were off Highway 10 now, they started to pass through small, abandoned towns, some of them looking so broken down that they could have been that way for years.

  “It’s hard to tell what’s because of the aliens and what’s just people moving away,” Kevin said.

  Luna nodded to a building where the wooden walls had rotted, so that it seemed that they might fall down at any moment. “Maybe this was a ghost town anyway.”

  Kevin kind of hoped so, because at least that would mean that this town hadn’t seen all the people in it pulled out by the aliens’ control, or driven out by those people who saw violence as the only way to survive what came next.

  Then he saw the family, making their way along the road, looking around as if searching for somewhere to hide. There were two parents who looked to be in their thirties, along with a girl and boy who were both just little kids really, walking along with their hands in their parents’. They started to move back toward one of the houses as Kevin and the others approached, but Kevin waved to them.

  “Hey, it’s all right. We’re not going to hurt you.”

  The family still looked pretty frightened, the father pushing his children behind him while the mother hefted a hiking stick as though it would make a good weapon.

  “Stay back,” the man said, and then frowned. “Hey, wait, you’re just kids…”

  “They might still be like them, Henry,” the woman said. “They might still be aliens.”

  “The alien-controlled people don’t talk,” Kevin pointed out. “And you can look in our eyes if you want.”

  “For what?” the man said.

  Kevin glanced over at Luna, surprised the people really didn’t know. She shrugged.

  “When people are controlled, their pupils turn white,” Kevin explained.

  “Plus the not speaking, and the whole chasing after people and trying to convert them thing are kind of giveaways,” Luna said.