Arrival

by Morgan Rice

  The man looked angry then. “Don’t joke about it. People are losing their lives, while you’re riding around on motorbikes you don’t even look old enough to drive.”

  “If you had any decency, you’d hand them over to us,” the woman said. “My babies have had to walk for miles.”

  Kevin shook his head. “I’m sorry. We need them to try to stop all of this.”

  “You think you’re going to stop this?” the man said in an obviously disbelieving tone. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “We’re not stupid,” Chloe said. “And we stopped because we thought we might be able to help you.”

  “Then let us have your bikes,” the woman said. “We’re just trying to get somewhere safe.”

  “There isn’t anywhere safe,” Luna said. “You might be better off staying here.”

  “Stay here?” the man said. “But there’s nothing here. No food, no water. Nothing.”

  “Here,” Kevin said. He took some of the food and water out of his own pack, tossing it over to them.

  “Is that it?” the woman said. “How long do you think we can survive on that? Henry, we need those bikes.”

  The man nodded and started forward, but stopped when Bobby growled, deep in his throat.

  “I wouldn’t,” Luna said. She started her bike and pulled away, Chloe following.

  “I wish there was more we could do for them,” Chloe said as the three of them drove off.

  That caught Kevin a little by surprise. Then he remembered that she knew better than any of them what it was like to be out on the street with nowhere to go.

  “They tried to steal our stuff,” Luna pointed out.

  “We stole it first,” Chloe said.

  “But they could have at least been grateful,” Luna said.

  “You don’t help people because they’re going to be grateful,” Chloe said. “You help them because they’re people, and they need it.”

  She stopped, the family barely in sight now, and emptied out some of her own supplies.

  “Besides, they have little kids,” she said. “We have to help them somehow.”

  “We are,” Kevin said. “If we manage to save the world, that helps everyone, including them.”

  “I guess so,” Chloe said. “It doesn’t solve everything, though. Even if the aliens all went away right now, so much would change.”

  “I think people would try to get back to normal,” Luna said.

  “They’d try,” Chloe agreed, “but so much would have changed. There would be so many people dead, even if all the ones who were converted got changed back, and everyone would have been through this big, traumatic thing…”

  “Everything can be all right again,” Luna insisted, sounding as though she needed to believe that. Kevin could guess why. If everything could be okay, then there was a world where she could be back at home with her parents, and nothing was wrong.

  “Things can be better,” Chloe said, “but there will be so many things to work out. People will have to rebuild. It will take time.”

  “And we still need to deal with the aliens,” Kevin said. He looked back toward the speck of the family. “We should get going. I think they’re getting closer.”

  They accelerated away, heading up toward Sedona.

  Around them, the landscape kept drifting by in sandy shades of brown, while the Arizona heat was starting to get to Kevin; he was sweating just sitting there in the sidecar.

  “Do you want to drive for a while?” Luna asked him.

  “Me?” Kevin said. “What if I… you know, black out?”

  “Have you done it so far?” she asked.

  Kevin shook his head.

  “Well then. The road’s as clear as it will ever be. Do you want to try?”

  Kevin nodded, and they all pulled over so that they could rearrange themselves. Luna got in the sidecar next to Kevin.

  “Okay,” she said. “That one’s the throttle, you twist it to go faster. That’s the brake. That one’s for the gears.”

  “That’s it?” Kevin said. “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  Luna shrugged. “I’m not some kind of bike expert. For advice, the best I can do is ‘try not to crash into anything.’”

  “Are you sure you want to be in the sidecar while I drive?” Kevin asked. “I mean, what if I crash?”

  “So you’d be okay with Bobby being in a crash?” Luna shot back. “I trust you. You won’t crash. Besides, the alternative is sharing a bike with Chloe, and she might have saved my life, but there are limits.”

  Kevin didn’t argue, just started up the bike… and immediately stalled it.

  “Stop laughing at me,” he said in the face of Luna’s and Chloe’s giggles. “This is harder than it looks.”

  “We both did it,” Chloe said.

  Kevin tried again, and this time managed to keep the bike running long enough to get it moving.

  “It’s working,” he said. “I’m doing it!”

  “That’s great,” Luna said. “Now maybe at something more than walking pace?”

  Kevin accelerated and pretty soon he was breezing along the highway, following Chloe’s bike and feeling the wind blowing past him. It was a lot more exciting than sitting in the sidecar had been, and a look down at Luna said that she might already be regretting her decision to give up her spot.

  “We’ll swap back the next time we stop,” Kevin suggested.

  “You’ll probably keep driving all the way to Sedona and not stop then,” Luna said.

  It was tempting to do it, because Kevin was having a lot of fun like this. He didn’t quite feel confident enough to start racing, the way the girls had before, but now the bike was speeding along at least, and the excitement of going that fast was hard to pull back from.

  Even so, riding the motorcycle like this was more of a physical effort than Kevin had thought it might be. Fighting to control the bike just reminded him of how much he had to fight to control his own body most of the time. It was probably time to pull over, especially as they were getting closer to Sedona.

  “There’s a lookout point ahead,” Chloe said. “We should be able to see where we’re going from there.”

  They pulled in at the side of the road, and Kevin was grateful that they were doing it when they were. As much fun as the bike was, he wasn’t sure he could have ridden it much further. Getting off, he walked to the edge of the lookout point, where Chloe was already standing.

  “Sedona’s out there,” she said, pointing. “If you look, you can just see it.”

  Kevin thought that he could, away in the distance. From here, it was a thin line against the horizon, but Kevin was more interested in what sat above it. One of the city-sized ships of the aliens hung there, looking ominous, tiny ships floating down to the surface and rising back up again.

  “They’re busy there,” Kevin said.

  “There are a lot of them,” Chloe agreed. “Can we really get through all of that?”

  “We’ll find a way,” Kevin assured her.

  “We’ll do this,” Luna said, coming up to stand next to them. “I don’t care how many controlled people there are.”

  “I care a little bit,” Kevin said. “I mean, I’d prefer it if there weren’t too many.”

  “Lots of aliens is good,” Luna said. “It means we can get to them.”

  Kevin wished he shared her confidence, or maybe it was just determination. Kevin definitely had that. Whatever this took, he was going to get the virus onto that alien ship.

  “It’s hard to believe that we’re so close to ending this,” Chloe said. She turned to them. “I just wanted to say, if something goes wrong…”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Luna said.

  “You can’t know that,” Chloe said. “But either way, I wanted to say… it’s good having friends again. I like you both.”

  “We like you too,” Kevin said.

  Luna didn’t say anything, but gave Chloe a grudging nod. She held out a h
and. “Friends.”

  “Friends,” Chloe echoed, putting her hand over Luna’s.

  “Friends,” Kevin said, putting his hand over the top.

  They stood there for a moment longer, and then it was time to go down there and actually do this. They got back on the bikes and started to ride down toward Sedona, Kevin feeling the tension rising more the closer they got. There were only a couple of small towns in between them and the alien ship now, and Kevin found himself going over everything in his head, thinking about what they would need to do in order to actually get their virus onto the ship.

  He was still thinking about it when he saw the barricades ahead, blocking the road. They looked as though they’d been built from a combination of furniture and the kind of abandoned cars that seemed to be everywhere. A big sign with the words “Stay Back, Aliens Ahead” was stuck to the barricade. Aside from that, the street seemed abandoned.

  They slowed down and stopped in front of the makeshift barricade.

  “We’ll have to move some of this if we’re going to get through,” Kevin said.

  “And we’re going to have to do it quickly, before whoever built this barricade comes back,” Luna said.

  “Um…” Chloe began. “I think it might be a bit late for that.”

  Figures came out of the surrounding buildings, young and thankfully moving without the kind of dreadful synchronization that might have marked them as controlled by the aliens. If that made Kevin sigh with relief, the clubs, hammers, knives, and bottles in their hands didn’t.

  He looked back, trying to see if there was a way out of there. More of the youths came out of the buildings behind them, boxing them in, surrounding them so that even if they tried to drive back the way they’d come, they would have been in the way.

  Not knowing what else to do, Kevin got off the bike. The alien ship was so close that it looked as though he could have reached out and touched it, but right then, it might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “You’ve come to the wrong place,” a boy at the front of the group said. “We don’t like bikers here.”

  He had a folding knife in his hand that he opened and closed as he talked. Kevin would have called it a nervous habit, except that he was the one the habit was making nervous.

  “We’re not bikers,” Kevin said. “We just borrowed the bikes so that we could get somewhere.”

  “There’s nothing down this way but that,” the boy said, pointing at the ship hanging over Sedona.

  “Good thing that’s where we’re trying to go then,” Luna said. Apparently, the threat of all the weapons there didn’t intimidate her, or maybe it did, and Luna was just reacting the way Luna always reacted when someone threatened her.

  “You don’t want to make me angry,” the boy who seemed to be in charge said. “You haven’t seen the kind of things that might happen to you if you make me angry.”

  “So far,” Luna said, “I’ve seen controlled people trying to kill me, sharks trying to eat me, men with guns trying to shoot me, and a storm trying to drown me. Oh, and learning that the world is probably going to be blown up soon. What have you got compared to that?”

  “What’s she doing?” Chloe asked Kevin. “She looks like she’s picking a fight.”

  “Um… she probably is,” Kevin said. Luna wasn’t good at backing down.

  It certainly didn’t seem like the right thing to say to a gang like this. They needed to talk their way through, not pick a fight they couldn’t win here.

  “Look,” Kevin said, “we’re trying to help here. We think… we think that we might have found a way to stop all of this.”

  The gang’s leader stared at him. “And how does a kid like you know how to stop something like that?” he demanded, pointing at the alien spaceship. “What are you going to do? Shoot it with a toy ray-gun and hope it goes away?”

  “We’ve found a virus that we think the aliens won’t be prepared for,” Chloe said. “We think it might save us all.”

  The gang leader laughed. “You honestly think I’m going to believe that?” Kevin saw him looking Chloe up and down. “What are you even doing with a kid like that, girl? Why not join up with us, and I’ll show you a better time?”

  Kevin saw Chloe’s eyes narrow.

  “Not going to happen,” she said.

  “Then I guess we’ll just take everything you have instead. If you don’t fight, you even get to walk away. Who knows, maybe I’ll even sell this ‘virus’ of yours to someone, and they’ll play your game of trying to get it onto the aliens’ ship.”

  “Maybe you could sell it to the Dustside crew and get them killed trying,” another of the gang suggested.

  “Good idea,” the gang leader replied. When he turned his attention back to Kevin and the others, Kevin froze in place. There was something hard about the look he gave them that said there was no talking their way out of this. If they didn’t give up everything the gang wanted, Kevin had no doubt that they would kill the three of them without hesitating.

  Kevin got off the bike. So did the others. Even Bobby hopped down, growling low in his throat.

  “If that mutt jumps, I’ll stab it, then start on the rest of you,” the gang leader warned. Again, Kevin had the feeling that he was waiting for the opportunity, and that the only reason he didn’t do it anyway was because it was easier to do it this way.

  “Luna, hold Bobby back,” Kevin said.

  “But Kevin, we can’t let them take everything,” Luna said. “The message you heard—”

  “Kevin?” the gang leader said. “As in the kid from the TV? You said he heard a message, so it’s him, isn’t it?”

  Something about the way he said it suggested that admitting it wouldn’t give them the warm welcome that the Survivors had given them.

  “No, I’m not him,” Kevin said. “There are lots of Kevins. I’m—”

  “You’re him,” the gang leader insisted. “I saw the news, the same as everyone else. You’re the boy who sold us out and tricked us into letting the aliens in!”

  “Kevin didn’t sell anyone out,” Luna snapped back. “They tricked him, and he tried to warn people before it was too late. We just… weren’t quick enough.”

  Kevin winced at the memory of that, at what it had been like to see the first scientists transformed. There had still been a brief chance of stopping all of this then, but he’d watched it slip away. It wasn’t the only reason he winced; Luna had just confirmed that he was exactly who the gang thought he was.

  “You did this,” the gang leader said, gesturing with the hand that held the knife. “You did this to all of us. I had a brother before the aliens came; he’s gone thanks to you. They’re all gone because of you.”

  “That’s not fair,” Chloe said. “It’s the aliens’ fault. We’re trying to stop them.”

  “To try to make up for what you did?” the gang’s leader demanded. “Or is it worse than that? Maybe the real reason that you’re trying to get to the ship is because you want to help them more. Maybe you’re going to do something that will finish off the rest of us.”

  “No, we’re trying to help,” Kevin said, starting to back away and holding up his hands.

  “I don’t believe you,” the gang leader said. “This is your fault, and you’re going to die for it!”

  He lunged forward, and Kevin pushed him away as hard as he could.

  “Run!” he yelled to the others, and ran into the nearest of the buildings. Luna, Chloe, and Bobby ran alongside him, forcing their way through what looked like an abandoned store, dodging in and out of aisles that had already been stripped bare by looters. Kevin could hear the sound of the gang chasing after them.

  There was a fire door ahead and Kevin hit it at a run, knocking it open with the others following him. They were at one end of an alley and set off down there as fast as they could. When they reached a crossroads, Kevin pointed to the left.

  “Go that way!” he yelled to C
hloe and Luna.

  The others turned and started to run that way, but Kevin didn’t. He ran to the right instead, splitting off from them. It was him that the gang hated, him that they wanted. If they followed him, then at least the others would be safe. If he could hide from them too, then that would be great, but if he couldn’t… if he couldn’t, then wasn’t it better if he was the only one who got hurt?

  Kevin ran into a maze of other alleys that crisscrossed and wove around one another. Behind him, Kevin could hear the gang yelling.

  “Find him! Split up! I want that kid dead!”

  Kevin tried to use the sounds of the voices to work out where they were around him, trying to guess where each of the gang members was. He tried to aim for the spaces between them, looking for a way to get to safety. Maybe he could double back the bikes if he could lead them far enough away.

  “Come on,” Kevin said to himself. “You’ve avoided aliens. Everything else should be easy.”

  It wasn’t easy, though, because this was a space that the gang clearly knew and he didn’t. Kevin didn’t know which alleys might turn out to be blind ones, and which routes led back toward the bikes the best way. He just had to keep going, working by trial and error, hoping all the while that Chloe and Luna had taken the opportunity to get away.

  “There he is!” the gang leader shouted as he rounded a corner a little way away and stared at Kevin. He seemed to be alone for the moment, but Kevin wasn’t going to wait around for the others to show up. He set off running again, the other boy behind him all the time.

  He took turnings at random now, not even trying to work out where he was. Kevin found himself running down small alleys, hopping over low fences into yards, and keeping going. He came out onto the main street again and found himself back by the barricade. That blocked the way, and now Kevin was getting too tired to keep running.

  “Where are you going to go now?” the other boy demanded as Kevin turned to him. “You going to keep running?”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Kevin said as the gang’s leader started to advance on him.

  “I want to do this,” he said. “You deserve this after all you’ve done.”