I’d never liked the thought of hiding in a cave. You had to go deep, with ropes and flashlights, because the buzztops swept caves and subway tunnels close to the surface. While you were on your way down you just had to pray no buzztops showed up. Plus it was cold down there, and there was no food except what you brought down with you. Unless you wanted to eat bats. Definitely not my thing. Not that driving around trying to outrun them forever was my thing.
I cleared my throat. “We should head for the coast.” One direction was as good as another; why not head in the same direction as Marcus?
“We tried that,” Marie shot back.
“You have a better idea?” I asked.
Marie twisted in her seat to glare at me. “Sweetie, you can have a vote when you’re eighteen.”
“Hey,” Mom said to Marie. “Don’t talk to her like that. She has just as much right to an opinion as you.”
While Tyler sat looking out the window, the other three supposed adults in the SUV argued about whether I was a full voting member of the vehicle. The argument then drifted into where we should go. In the end we dropped Tyler off at a house with a working SUV, then headed back toward the coast, because just as I’d suspected, no one had a better plan.
* * *
“Anyone out there? Marcus, can you hear me?” I let go of the talk button and waited. Nothing.
Before the invasion, it hadn’t bothered me that I was still a virgin. A lot of my friends weren’t. Rachel wasn’t, after her family took a month-long trip to London and Rachel met a Dutch guy named Henrich there. But I hadn’t been eager to rush into the world of birth control and hoping my period came. School and swimming and life in general had seemed stressful enough. Not that, in retrospect, any of those things seemed even mildly stressful now. Now, though, I wondered how I would ever conceivably have sex. Getting naked in a bed in a house would be suicidal. The alternative was to have sex with someone in a moving vehicle, while a third person drove said vehicle. That was out of the question. There was also the question of how I might meet and get to know this guy who would be my first. How many guys around my age were even still alive?
Which got me thinking about Marcus. He might well be my last chance; the last kind, funny, interesting guy I’d meet before the buzztops got me. Or him.
I tried the walkie again. “Can anyone hear me? Marcus?”
The walkie crackled to life. “Carrie! Carrie, Carrie, Carrie!” It was Marcus. “Hey everyone, Carrie’s back!” I heard his friends cheering in the background, which made me feel incredibly good.
“I thought you were headed for Colorado.”
“We talked to someone who’d been there. Dead end.”
“I’m sorry. But honestly, also kind of glad. It’s good to hear your voice again.”
“Yours, too!” I said.
“I wish I could see you. Hey, what road are you on?”
I looked for signs out the window. I never paid attention to what road we were on. We stayed off the Interstates. When you ran into buzztops, the more directions you had to flee in, the better. “What road are we on?” I called.
“Route Twenty,” Joey said. “We just passed the turnoff for Route Seventy-Five.”
When I relayed this to Marcus, he whooped into the phone. “You’re fifteen miles behind us! We’ll slow down. See if you can get your uncle to speed up.”
“Uncle Joey?” I called.
“I heard him.” The SUV picked up speed.
I ducked below seat level, into my “room” and checked my face in the mirror taped to the seat back. I definitely needed work. I brushed my hair, reapplied the lipstick from my back pocket, my palms sweaty.
It was silly for me to be nervous. All I was going to be able to do was wave to him. Still, it was the closest thing to a date I was probably ever going to manage.
* * *
“White Lincoln Sunburst,” Uncle Joey called.
I leaped up, peered out the windshield. There it was, disappearing around a curve in the road, a few hundred yards ahead.
I grabbed the walkie. “I see you.”
“I see you, too.” The Sunburst eased partway onto the shoulder. “Pull up beside us?”
“When we catch up, pull up beside them,” I called to Uncle Joey.
“Yeah, yeah.”
My heart was in my throat as we closed ground, which was stupid, but I couldn’t help it. We pulled beside the Sunburst.
A guy with a broad face, Asian-looking eyes and the cutest smile waved from the rear window, a walkie-talkie in his hand. He brought the walkie to his face.
“Can you tell from over there that I’m gawking at you like a moron? I’m hoping you can’t.”
I grinned like an idiot, unable to think of a reply. Up front, Joey muttered something about guys and their corny lines. If I hadn’t currently been using the walkie I would have thrown it at his head.
I pressed the reply button. “You gonna ask me to the prom now, or what?”
He raised his free hand where I could see it and snapped his fingers. “I forgot my tux. How about a walk on the beach?”
Uncle Joey sped up, tucked their SUV in front of the Sunburst. “Okay, that’s enough. Last thing we need is to get in a head-on collision because you want to flirt.”
I could feel myself turning red from a mix of embarrassment and rage. “I’m not flirting.” This was hell, having my relatives hear every word I spoke. It was impossible to have even one normal moment.
“Sounds good to me,” I said to Marcus. “I could use a little time away from this clown car.”
“Hey,” Marie turned in her seat. “Joey’s the one busting your chops. Don’t blame it on me.”
“I’m not busting her chops,” Joey said. “I’m just saying I don’t want to get us all killed.”
“It’s a date, then,” Marcus said over the walkie. I could just barely see his profile through the reflections of trees and buildings on the glass of the Sunburst.
I released the button and handed the walkie up to the front. “We pass a car once a day, if that. You could have driven beside them for an hour and we wouldn’t have risked an accident.”
“We’re not going to the beach,” Joey said. “Being at the beach is like backing ourselves against a wall.”
“You can drop me off and drive. I’m going.”
The thought of taking a walk on the beach with a guy my age, listening to the ocean surf and seagull cries … it was worth risking what was left of my highly abbreviated life. I couldn’t wait, and there was no way anyone was going to stop me.
Mom was contemplating telling me I couldn’t do it. I could see it in her eyes, in the way she was chewing her lower lip.
“You don’t even know this guy,” Uncle Joey said.
“I don’t know anyone.” I pounded the seat back.
The walkie talkie crackled. “Carrie? You still there?”
Mom handed the walkie back to me. “I’m here.”
“So seriously, we’re gonna do this?”
I looked right at my mom. “Yeah. We’re going to the beach. Maybe we’ll even take a swim.” Mom had a deep frown line between her eyebrows, but she didn’t say anything. She could sense how much this meant to me.
“Awesome.” He sounded as excited as I was.
“So what do you like to do when you’re not running from aliens?” Marcus asked.
I settled back against the door, pulled my green and gold (school colors) blanket to my waist and settled in for the ride.
We talked for hours. We used our otherwise useless phones to play our favorite songs for each other. I actually laughed a few times. My laugh sounded weird to me, probably because I hadn’t heard it in so long.
* * *
Marcus was an inch shorter than me, which seemed the perfect height for him to be. He introduced me to his sister Jerilea and his friend Porter, I introduced him to my family, then we set off down the beach.
As soon as we were out of sight he reached out and took my
hand. It was crazy, what we were doing. Completely insane. The odds that buzztops showed up on that stretch of beach on that afternoon weren’t too high, but if they did show up, we would die. For me that risk only added to the magic of walking in the surf, my fingers laced with Marcus’s, our shoes and socks waiting in the sand by the parking lot.
“I’m gonna think about this every day, for as many days as I have left.” Foamy sea water washed up Marcus’s ankles, wetting the ends of his rolled up pants.
“Me, too.” I squeezed his hand. A seagull cried out, gliding on the breeze. The buzztops couldn’t catch them. You found dead, emaciated birds on the ground the buzztops had stripped, because they couldn’t find anything to eat, but the buzztops couldn’t catch them.
Marcus slowed. “I hate to say it, but we better turn around.”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
We headed back, not saying much, just drinking it in. Marcus’s friends were splashing around in the water, laughing, screaming, while my family leaned up against our SUV and watched.
“I wish I was in your car.”
Marcus shrugged. “We’ve got room.”
I laughed at the idea of it. “I couldn’t leave my mom. She’d be devastated.” So would I.
Marcus went on holding my hand as we approached. It felt good that he didn’t let go as soon as we were in sight of his people.
“What if we went on caravanning for a while, and I rode with you?” I asked.
Marcus grinned. “That would be fantastic.”
“Your friends would be okay with that?”
“They’d be thrilled. We’re kind of sick of each other—they’d love to hear a new voice for a change.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“I’ll have to ask them, but they’ll say yes.”
“I don’t know if my mother will.”
He looked toward the SUV. “That, I can’t help you with.”
As we walked, I tried to think of a way to ask. She had to let me do this.
No. I shouldn’t ask, I should tell her. Back when you could count on having another seventy years of life once you turned eighteen, you could tolerate being told what to do until then. But there was no way I was going to make it to eighteen.
They were standing around the SUV, Uncle Joey with his arms folded like he had some important meeting I was keeping him from. As I approached he rolled off the bumper and headed for the door. “Let’s go.”
“Hang on.” I swallowed. “I’m going to ride with them for a while. We’ll stick close.”
Mom’s eyes got huge. “What? No. Absolutely not.” She studied my face, like I had a smudge on it or something. “We’re family. We stick together.” She pointed at Marcus, who was huddled close to his shivering friends, talking. “Would they die for you? Anyone in this vehicle would die for you like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“I don’t know if they’d die for me. Right now I’m not thinking about dying, for the first time in four months. I’m thinking about living for a change.”
His head down, Uncle Joey came over to me. He grabbed my elbow. “Let’s go. Get in.”
I yanked my arm free. “No.”
Suddenly Mom was beside me. She locked both hands around my arm. Aunt Marie grabbed the back of my sweatshirt and pulled.
I struggled as Uncle Joey opened the back door. “Let go.”
Marcus ran to block the door, his friends right behind him. “Hey. Let her go.” Uncle Joey tried to shove Marcus out of the way.
“Get off me.” Marcus shoved Joey right back, hard, making him backpedal a few steps.
“Stay out of this,” Mom said. “It’s none of your business.”
“If you’re dragging her into your car against her will, it is our business,” a woman said, probably Marcus’s big sister.
A second guy sidled up to Marcus, forming a wall in front of the door.
Marcus looked at me. “It’s your decision. If you want to go with them, I’ll move.”
“No. I want to ride with you for a while.” I looked to Mom. She was crying quietly, her whole face shaking. “It’s no big deal. I have a chance to make some friends. Maybe my last chance. We’ll stay right with you, and I’ll switch back in a couple of days.”
“Swear to me you will,” Mom said.
“I swear.” Is that what she was afraid of? That I’d like my new friends so much I’d just drive off and never see her again? “Mom, I wouldn’t just leave you.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at me, head tilted, like I was someone she’d met a long time ago, and she was trying to remember who I was.
“One day. You come back at dusk,” she finally said. “After that, we’ll see how it goes.”
I hugged her fiercely. We both knew she wasn’t so much giving me permission as accepting what I’d already decided, but I was glad to be leaving with things less ugly than they’d been a minute before. I took Marcus’s hand and ran to his vehicle, my hair blowing in the sea breeze.
Pork Belly came blaring out of the stereo as Marcus’s sister started up the Sunburst. The wheels kicked up sand as we followed my family’s SUV.
With Marcus’s arm across my shoulders I lowered the window and whooped at the blue sky. The rest of them whooped in reply as we fishtailed onto the main drag, the ocean at our backs.
Marcus handed me a travel cup, and before I even brought it to my lips I knew it wouldn’t be fruit juice. Rum flavored with a splash of Coke burned its way to my stomach. I leaned over and kissed Marcus, surprising him, but after a second he wrapped his arms around me and kissed me back.
In the rear view I could see Jerilea watching us, grinning, no doubt happy to see Marcus find a little joy in this fucked up world.
“Hey, I’m sixteen,” I said to Jerilea. “Can you teach me how to drive?”
Marcus took the travel cup from me. “None of this if you’re gonna drive.” As he set the cup in a holder, my last doubt about Marcus and his friends vanished. It wasn’t just luck that they were still alive. They were smart, and careful.
* * *
I needed both of my hands, but Marcus kept one of his on my knee. We’d been connected by touch almost continuously from the moment I jumped into their SUV. I think we both recognized that we didn’t have time to take it slow.
“So Carrie, what did you want to be when you grew up?” Marcus asked.
“No talking to the student driver. She needs to concentrate,” Jerilea said. It wasn’t that hard; all I had to do was follow the bumper of my family’s SUV.
“A film director. You?”
“Psychologist.”
“Five more minutes, then we’ll switch out,” Jerilea said. “Nice first lesson, Carrie. You earned a second.” She lifted the walkie talkie, to tell my mom we were going to pull over and do another quick switch.
There was a bright flash ahead of us and to our left. I jolted. The SUV swiveled, but I straightened it out.
Suddenly everyone was shouting at once.
“Go.”
“Turn around. Fast as you can.”
“Turn. Turn.”
It filled the landscape, crushing buildings as it surged toward us like an ocean liner, huge, gunmetal gray. A whale. A gate had opened right on top of us.
As I turned around, I saw Uncle Joey trying to do the same, only the buzztops were already on top of them. I bumped over the curb as Mom came on the walkie talkie.
“Run, Carrie. Run. I love you. Love you so much.” In the background, Uncle Joey was screaming.
“I love you too, Mom,” I cried. “So much.”
The walkie cut out as I floored the SUV.
“Look out,” Marcus shouted.
I jerked us hard left as buzztops surged out from behind a strip mall to the right. They’d gotten in front of us in the time it took to turn around.
Only, there was no road going left, only entrances to parking lots. I made a U-turn, hoping we’d hit a crossing street before we reached the oncoming buzztops
, but there was no way that was going to work. Everyone was screaming. I’d imagined this moment so many times.
The whale thundered by, not a hundred yards away, spitting buzztops. It would go back through the gate once it had discharged its cargo, back to that strange and beautiful world with its endless forest.
That world where there were no marauding buzztops, where a few people just might be lucky enough to disappear into the forest without being seen.
I jerked the wheel to the left and headed right at the whale.
“What are you doing?” Marcus screamed.
We bounced over the curb, into the parking lot of a Wendy’s. Buzztops closed from both sides, releasing smaller ones to come inside and get us. We flew over another curb, crashed through the wooden fence surrounding the Wendy’s, went up an incline, over railroad tracks, back down and into the wake of the whale. I turned right, away from the whale, and floored it as Jerilea screamed, as Porter screamed, as Marcus screamed and buzztops closed from all sides. We were in a shopping center parking lot, heading right for the side of a supermarket, but the wall was hazy, like there was something between us and it.
There was a blinding flash, and suddenly I was hurtling through the air. My ears popped as the air went from warm to cool, the sky from powder blue to turquoise.
I hit the ground, landed hard, bounced and rolled across vegetation. When I finally came to a stop, I was sure I’d broken every bone in my body. I couldn’t breathe.
My lungs relaxed all at once, and I inhaled a rush of weird, mint, and pepper-scented air.
I struggled to my hands and knees. There was no one around except us, although the vegetation was dead and flattened as if this was a high-activity area. The air was cool, the sky blue-green and brilliantly clear. The SUV was gone. Of course it was: no metal or plastic could get through the gate.
My family was gone as well. I heard their screams, squeezed my eyes shut. Mom was gone. I’d lost so many people, but I’d never expected to lose her. I always figured we die together.
Marcus was lying ten feet away in thick black-purple weeds.
I struggled to my feet, relieved to discover none of my bones were broken. We were in a clearing, the black city maybe a quarter mile away, the seamless buildings towering high overhead. The din of an army of whales and buzztops was just a few hundred yards to our right. My arms and legs were scraped and bleeding, my side throbbing, blood seeping through my t-shirt.
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