by Platt, Sean
Beside Christopher, unseen, Vincent said, “Back up.”
“I don’t think we’re going to outrun it, Vincent.”
“Back up,” he repeated. Christopher glanced over and saw Vincent carefully zipping and securing his backpack, never moving his eyes from the sphere. Terrence was already halfway down the home’s length, walking backward.
“Come on, Christopher.”
“I’m coming.”
“Slowly.”
He backed up, almost tripping on Vincent. The sphere stayed where it was, silent and still as a hole in the air.
“To the woods. Get to the woods.”
“It knows what we were doing.” Christopher looked at the lone brick of explosive they’d left behind. So much for blowing up the house. They could remodel the garage, but that was about it.
“It can’t know what C-4 is,” Vincent said.
But that wasn’t what Christopher meant. He was thinking of Terrence, and how he’d said he felt watched. Terrence, who’d gone between those big, strangely forbidding stones. He didn’t mean that the ship, now that it had arrived purely by coincidence, would see the brick and cast judgment. The ship had arrived because of what they’d been doing.
The ship slowly glided as if on rails. No vibration, its motion smooth and perfectly soundless.
“You see on the news,” said Christopher, “about how they’ve leveled houses and cities with those death rays or whatever?”
“When people mess with them,” Vincent said from behind him.
“You’re right.” Christopher eyed the approaching, featureless sphere. “Clearly, it doesn’t have a problem with us.”
There was a shout. Many shouts. Followed by the tromping of what sounded like thousands of feet in stampede.
“More are coming!” Vincent shouted.
They’d reached the tree line. They’d also reached Terrence, who was halfway behind a tree, waiting with his sunglasses still on.
“It’s not more ships,” he said. “It’s them.”
“Go!” Vincent shouted.
They turned and sprinted. Into the woods, arcing around the forward-surging hippies making for the newly arrived ship. They were shouting, running, stomping, dying to be among the first to get taken. But Christopher was sure the sphere had other plans.
The thicket of people was near. The ship moved closer, pushing through and breaking branches to follow. Christopher glanced back, almost causing a tumble. The thing was fifteen or twenty feet above ground and still coming. Even with no front, Christopher felt as if it was watching them. Hunting them.
They burst into the shed, Terrence in the lead. Christopher fell to the floor, pounding on the concealed door.
“Dan! Open up!”
Vincent was still outside. Christopher looked up, saw Vincent guarding the window they’d leaped through. Watching. Waiting for the onslaught of people approaching the ship, toward them. Protecting and ensuring their safe and undetected entry.
The sphere was visible, nearing, breaking branches.
“Vincent, hurry and — !” Terrence yelled.
Something changed, something Christopher could smell before it happened. The ship seemed to open. There was a blast of heat. A flash of light. Then Christopher saw Vincent’s large form crumble into a scree of small black rocks, flash-crystallized like cauterized wood.
Christopher turned back to the door, no time for shock. His fists struck wood backed by hidden metal.
“Motherfucker, let us in right fucking now!”
Dan, audible through the concealed vents: “Working as fast as I can!”
The shack was still smoky from their distraction. As the ship powered up to strike again, the air took on the scent of burned meat. Christopher pulled his shirt over his nose.
“Open this goddamned door! Open it, Dan! Motherfucker, you let us in right this—”
A clicking sound then a ratcheting noise: metal sliding against metal.
There was a pop, and a previously concealed handle snapped up from the floor.
Christopher wrenched the door open. A huge glut of smoke billowed upward, covering them. Terrence, taking charge, shooed Christopher into the pit. He dropped in then dragged the door shut.
Dan met them at the secondary grate, now removed, holding his shirt over his face beside the now-extinguished fire. “Where’s Vincent?”
Christopher couldn’t answer.
“Where’s Vincent?” Dan repeated.
Dan’s eyes flicked behind Christopher to Terrence, ready to ask again. Trevor appeared at the vent’s end before he could, his eyes panicked. He’d probably come from the control room, where he’d been watching the monitors.
“Vincent,” Christopher said, finally finding breath. “He’s … gone.”
A sound like lightning crashing. All four looked up.
“That ship’s still up there,” Trevor said. “And it’s pissed.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The intense psychic bond between Piper and Cameron had essentially vanished, but she still found herself receiving stray images and snippets. She said nothing. Telling Cameron felt stupid and somehow wrong, like admitting to believing in ghosts. He’d been there when they’d sensed the Andreus Republic before they could see or hear them, and he’d been there when they’d talked each other through the end of that particular dicey encounter. But the subject had a tinge of unbelievability — the way even the most terrifying nightmares feel foolish at dawn.
And, strangely, there was a twinge of shame.
Piper realized, a full day after the fact, that she knew things about Cameron that she had no logical way of knowing. It felt intrusive, like peeking in on him sleeping naked.
She knew that at age thirteen, he’d fallen off his bike when the front wheel, which had a quick release, had popped off the axle. He’d landed awkwardly on the gravel and scraped a quilt patch of skin from his face. Cameron marveled that he didn’t have much of a scar, but hated the small amount he had — a blemish that Piper, looking with her real-world eyes, couldn’t even see.
She knew that at fifteen, he’d traveled to Egypt, Peru, and somewhere she couldn’t place in Central America. There had been someone with him during those trips — a man with a beard she assumed was Benjamin, Cameron’s father. His favorite thing from that trip had been the colossal stone Olmec heads. Piper, for her part, didn’t know what Olmec meant, but still found herself cherishing the memory, the way she knew Cameron did.
She knew that at eighteen, something bad had happened with Cameron’s father. A sort of breaking of ties, or estrangement. The division, in Piper’s mental field of view, was a strip with black on one side and white on the other. Cameron’s father had been his hero before whatever had happened. Afterward, things turned rancid. But strangely, Piper also knew that when Cameron thought of that turning, he felt ashamed and regretful.
He caught her looking at him when they stopped to refill their water bottles in a well spigot in the outback of a farm field.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What, Piper?”
She wondered if he got the flashes too. Did he know about Meyer’s infidelity, seen through Piper’s denying eyes? Did he know how she felt about it? Had he seen her intimate moments? The thought made her blush. Maybe his psychic remainders were more generalized. Piper had caught images that felt like Lila (something to do with her baby?), Heather (bad dreams?), and Trevor. Trevor’s were at once intrusive and bothersome. If she was really catching his thoughts — and it felt like she was, as stupid as it sounded — then there was something Trevor was keeping from even himself, the way he’d withhold a secret from someone else. Something dark and buried — so troubling even to Trevor that he’d pushed it all the way down: a vision of a shadow-draped person, maybe female, hidden in a cloud. Invisible when he was controlled, yet always threatening to fester like a sore. And there were random thoughts, too, more or less useless. Flitting images through other people’s eyes:
a man who’d been lost, a newborn baby, a shiny gold object hidden in a closet. It was like tuning an old radio, picking up transmissions too distant to clearly hear.
“Seriously,” she said, smiling slyly. “Nothing.”
“Fine. Don’t tell me.”
Piper smiled again. She might also have batted her eyelashes but hoped she was above something like that. She was a grown woman, for God’s sake.
She stooped to fill her water bottle. She was directing a controlled stream into the bottle’s mouth when a noise at her rear surprised her.
Cameron’s radio.
“ … hear me, Cameron?”
Cameron ripped the radio from his belt. They hadn’t heard from the bunker in days. Something — possibly the alien ships, who knew — seemed to be blocking the signal.
“It’s them,” said Cameron.
“How do you know?”
“Because I didn’t turn it on. This is a radio. If I want to scan for the open frequencies, I have to tune in.”
“So, what … it’s a ghost radio?”
His finger had been hovering over the talk button, about to respond, but he paused to answer Piper first. “It’s multipurpose. It works as an open-frequency radio, like citizen’s band or if you flat-out just wanted to listen to music, but it also works point to point. Like a phone.”
“But phone service is out.”
“ … hear me … ?”
The radio belched static, just a few words at a time seeping through.
Cameron put the radio to his mouth and depressed the talk button. “Dan? Is that you?”
More static. “Yes!”
He looked at Piper, visibly excited. Speaking into the radio, he said, “How the hell are you calling me?” Then without the talk button depressed, to Piper: “This shouldn’t be possible. Or at least, it wasn’t last I checked, but maybe they opened the airwaves again for some reason, who knows. But this isn’t going out on the air. Whatever’s been blocking the signal, if that’s the problem, won’t affect point-to-point, but point-to-point shouldn’t be available. This is cellular, like a phone.”
“ … Terrence. He was able to … watch.”
“‘Watch’?”
“Raj’s watch,” said Piper. “It works like a phone. Could Terrence have—”
“Terrence can do anything.” Cameron’s smile was broad, genuine, bright with life. A smile from a world where none of this was happening.
“Can you hear me okay?” he asked the radio.
“ … stal clear. Can you … me?”
“There’s a lot of static.”
Static? Piper had never heard static on a cell phone, if this was cellular.
The next time Dan spoke, the sound was perfect. “Is this better?”
“Wow, yes. Perfect.”
“Where are you guys?”
Cameron sighed. “Not as far as I’d like. But getting there.”
“We thought you might be dead. We’ve been trying to reach you forever, but you never answer.”
“Same here,” said Cameron.
“We can’t get any air signals. Once Terrence realized that, he knew it was us, not you. Something was messing up the signal. Has to do with magnets or whatever.”
Terrence’s voice, very dim, in the distance: “Magnetism. Not magnets.”
“Whatever. So we figured we were fucked. But he got around it with the watch thing Raj is always screwing with.”
“How?”
“I guess there are still analog cellular repeaters out there. Do you remember analog cellular?”
Cameron paused. Thanks to the speaker, Piper was hearing all of this, but she didn’t seem to know what Dan was talking about either.
“Fucking kids,” said Dan’s voice. “I’m not that old, am I?” Then: “Anyway, he did the MacGyver thing, got Raj’s watch to work with the analog signal somehow, something I guess they didn’t think to block, and—”
“What’s a MacGyver?”
“Fucking kids,” Dan mumbled.
“Are you okay there?”
“Well, yeah, I guess.” He paused, as if with gravity. “We got a visit, though.”
Piper didn’t like the sound of that. She looked at Cameron.
“What kind of visit?”
“Vincent, Terrence, and Christopher went topside to … well, that part’s not important. Point is, while they were out there, one of them … a ship … it showed up out of nowhere.”
Piper put her hand over her mouth, big eyes wide.
Dan sighed. “It chased the guys back inside. But before they all got in, it …” He trailed off, leaving the sentence hanging.
“It what?”
Before Dan could answer, the radio beeped. Whatever Terrence had done to make the call, it didn’t appear to be permanent. The beep and accompanying display icon were prelude to a fading signal.
“I’m about to lose you, Dan.”
“Yeah, we thought that might happen. They seem to be watching us now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look. Call drops, we’ll call you back. Not right away, though. I don’t understand it, but I’ve learned to believe this dodgy motherfucker about computers and stuff. Terrence says it’s like poking holes. Eventually, someone can spot the signal and shut it down, but then, if he watches, he can jab another hole. Just doesn’t know when or for how long it’ll be before that happens. And we have to call you; you can’t call us. So if we—”
“DAN?”
“No, I’m still here. Sorry. Raj was asking for his watch back. You believe it?” Then, apparently to Raj: “Yeah, I’m talking to you, Chuckles.” Then back to Cameron: “Raj is on Terrence to try and call his folks. But it doesn’t work like that, like with normal phones. Radio/radio, over analog cellular … shit, I don’t know or care.”
“What did the ship do?”
“Pardon?”
“You said that before they all got back inside, it did something.”
Heavy sigh. “It got Vincent, kiddo.”
Piper’s hand returned to her mouth.
“What do you mean it ‘got’ him, Dan?”
“I mean he’s dead, kiddo. It got him. It just … well, let’s just say he’s gone. A bunch of those people camping up top, too. Did this big ray thing. Not the kind of thing you can get out of your head. I’d guess maybe a dozen people dead, burned a bunch of their shit. Like it was trying to make a point or was mad or something.”
“Is anyone else h — ?” The radio beeped again. Twice, this time. “Signal’s going, Dan.”
Dan sighed again. The mood there must be terrible. Piper hadn’t been close with Vincent, but she found herself wanting to cry. “If it cuts out, we’ll call you back in a bit,” he said.
“Is anyone else hurt?” Cameron repeated.
“No, kiddo. The rest of us are okay. Scared shitless, but okay.”
The radio beeped twice more.
“It’s really going now. I’ll keep the radio on me.”
“Yeah, and with batteries. But here’s the thing, Cam. Have you seen any of those ships while you’ve been on the trail? Big or little?”
The spigot was at the corner of a field. The field was wide open. Piper looked up, feeling exposed, suddenly sure she’d see an approaching armada.
“No. Nothing.”
“Well you watch your ass, okay, kiddo? Stay under trees if you can.” Then he swallowed audibly. “You know how the movie aliens always say, ‘We come in peace’?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, these ones don’t.”
Cameron looked at Piper then at the radio.
Piper whispered, “Ask about Lila.”
“Dan?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s Lila? How’s she doing, with her baby and all? Piper wants to know.”
“Oh, right,” said Dan. “Shit, really glad you asked. I almost forgot. Tell Piper that—”
Dan stopped midsentence. Cameron held the radio to his ear then shook it. He
slapped it like a busted TV set.
The signal was gone, and they were alone.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The radio didn’t crackle again for days.
Piper’s nerves, which had been soothed by Dan’s report, were now more jangled than ever. Before that first call had come through, a part of her mind had thought the bunker might have been decimated and everyone dead, but a much larger, more sensible part of her mind knew the idea was paranoid lunacy. Meyer had seemed to predict the alien invasion somehow, so it made sense that his bunker would be built well enough to hide them. And besides, she’d been getting snippets of thought from Lila, Heather, and maybe Trevor, thanks presumably to their encounter with the massive magnetic stones. The part of her mind that accepted those flashes knew the truth.
But now, days distant from the line of stone monoliths, the psychic bolus she’d felt had mostly disappeared. Piper could still occasionally gather Cameron’s thoughts but only the loudest, and presumably because he was right there beside her. Random visions from people she didn’t know were either gone or had faded into the background miasma of ordinary thoughts. There was nothing clear from Lila, Heather, Trevor, or anyone else.
She didn’t like the way Dan had been cut off midsentence, even though they’d known the signal could fail at any second. She didn’t like his hanging thought: “Tell Piper that—” Tell her what? He’d said that right after Cameron had asked about Lila and her baby. Was there a connection, or had Dan’s memory simply been jogged about something else?
Tell Piper that Lila says hello.
Tell Piper that Lila lost the baby.
Tell Piper that Lila got prepartum depression and killed herself.
She fretted whenever their traveling twosome fell silent — which was often, since they had days of travel and only so much to talk about. Strangely, Cameron was still guarded. Despite all that time, she still didn’t know much of his history. He hadn’t yet hit on any of the memories she’d pulled from his mind, especially those of his father. Did he know Piper had seen all those thoughts? Or did he think that by saying nothing, he was hiding them well?