You can’t lose anyone else.
Kailyn.
The single-word thought is my own. It stumbles the mental barrage.
You lost her.
She was taken. I couldn’t stop it. But I can stop you.
A vibration sifts through my mind and body. I drop to my knees, queasy and unfocused. You have no choice! The others are dying.
You are the Others, I think. Rage fills every part of me, pushing out a portion of their control. It’s not enough to free me from their grasp or even put up a true fight. But I do manage to move an arm. Muscles twitch as my fingers slide inside my pants pocket and slip back out clutching the envelope. My weakness.
Put it down.
A spasm moves through my arm, but my fingers remain clamped down.
Fuck off.
My body shakes as I reach out with both hands and tear the envelope open.
Stop.
You don’t want to know.
The answer will tear you apart.
You won’t be able to recover.
Don’t, please God, don’t do it.
I’m about to tell my mind’s invaders to sit and spin when I realize that while the Others might be controlling my body, the thoughts fighting me now are my own.
I’m sorry, I think, willing Kailyn to hear my thoughts. For being a coward. For not being strong enough to look.
I reach into the envelope and pull a single, trembling sheet of paper from inside. It’s a photo. A print. The white on black image is strange to look at, but the shape is unmistakable.
A baby.
Kailyn was pregnant when she died. She hadn’t suffered from any of the usual warning signs and her period had been irregular since puberty thanks to polycystic ovary syndrome. Missing a few months usually meant an incredibly painful period, not pregnancy. In fact, we’d been told she couldn’t conceive, so even with warning signs, pregnancy wouldn’t have been on our radar.
It was two days of throwing up, and the baby bump that gave it away. And then an over-the-counter pregnancy test. But false positives happen, so she went in for a test. I should have gone. Should have been with her. But I’d been close to cracking a case and went in to work instead. Fucking idiot.
I knew she had the results when she died, and that this envelope contained them, but I was too afraid to look. And now that I have, I finally have no doubt.
I was a father.
I am a father.
Text lining the image’s bottom draws my attention. The first line reads: Age—18 weeks (est). My eyes shift to the next line: Due date—November 28 (est).
A thanksgiving baby.
My blurring vision focuses on the last two words: Gender—Male.
A son…
I had a son.
A name comes to mind. Kailyn’s top pick for a son. “Nathaniel.”
My heart shatters.
I’m undone, wilting on the floor, wracked by sobs. I’m not sure how long I’m there before I start thinking clearly again, but as years of raw, contained emotion overwhelms me I become aware of a different sensation.
I’m free.
30
While the voices hold no sway over me now, fended off by the shedding of my weakness, I remain locked down by emotion. My limbs shake as I attempt to pull myself up. Seeing past the tears is all but impossible. I can’t stop seeing that small eighteen-week-old body. Can’t stop wondering what five-year-old Nathaniel would have looked like. What his hair would have smelled like. If he’d have had his mother’s eyes.
My mind’s eye tortures me with visions of a child not given the chance to exist. I see him at different ages, toddling toward me, chubby arms reaching, on the ground with a skinned knee, wrestling on the bed, getting angry when I tease him about girls.
God, he would have been beautiful.
A scream cuts through my sorrow, and my mind struggles to identify it. It was high-pitched, like a girl, but not. If the kids are in the bunker below, somehow protected from the Other’s mental reach, that leaves…
I look to the ceiling, wiping my eyes.
Jacob.
Clutching the revolver, I shove myself up. The pain over what was lost five years ago is subdued by concern for what might be lost today.
Loud thumps from the second-floor fuel my sprint up the stairs. Lindo attempts to kick the door again, but fails to break through.
Wini shouts in horror from the far side, and it takes all of my experience and self-control to not simply join Lindo’s frantic assault. The doors and locks are all solid. I’ve kicked in my fair share of doors and know when brute force will work, and when a little forethought can speed things up. The lock is a simple push button number, but modified with a deadbolt to help Sheba’s clients feel more secure. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a simple way around the lock. A toothpick or paperclip would do the trick, but I’ve got neither. While Lindo takes another kick, I glance at the neighboring doors and find what I need above the frame of the door beside me.
The door cracks under Lindo’s next kick, but it doesn’t break. He steps back for another kick, but his legs seem to lose contact with his nervous system. He drops to the floor, clutching his head. “They’re in my head, man!”
I swipe the ‘key’—just a thin metal rod—and hurry for Wini’s door as glass shatters on the far side. Orange light glows around the frame as I push the key inside and miss the lock mechanism. It takes three tries before my aim is true and the lock thunks open.
I shove against the door, opening it a crack. But that’s as far as I make it before a hot burst of air slams against the far side.
Glass shatters.
Wini shouts again, this time angry. She’s saying something. I can’t make it out, but it sounds desperate.
I shove harder, screaming from the effort. The door opens just six inches, which is enough for me to see the bright orange light flooding the room, and a swirl of debris kicked up by whatever force is holding the door shut.
If not for the events of the past few days, and what Lindo has told me, I’d think the situation hopeless. But the Others aren’t gods. They’re not even the planet’s dominant species. They’re fallible, and with enough effort, or thought, they can be defeated. But there’s nothing I can do about this door.
Not alone.
The door shudders as it’s struck by someone beside me.
“I’m with you!” Young says, now pushing alongside me. He’s grunting in pain, probably under mental assault, but resisting it.
The door inches open.
“Wini!” I shout into the swirling chaos. “What’s happening?”
“They’re taking him!” she screams back, desperate.
The door shakes again as Godin slams into it, adding his muscle and weight to the effort. This time, the door doesn’t just open further, it springs open, dropping the three of us to the shag carpet inside the room.
The window is shattered. Large shards of glass cover the floor while smaller pieces swirl through the air. The twinkling debris, cast in orange, is both beautiful and dangerous.
Wini is bleeding from several cuts, but I barely notice the wounds or the blood dripping from them. She’s standing by the open window, one foot propped on the sill, her arms and aging muscles twitching from the effort of holding Jacob.
He’s halfway out the window, being tugged into the air by an invisible force—a UFO abductee cliché that pop culture, perhaps influenced by outside sources, made sure no one took seriously. Lights in the sky. Levitation. Immaterial beings. The stuff of X-Files and wild-eyed experts proclaiming that the aliens are real. A joke.
But this is no joke, and it’s very fucking real.
The hot air buffets me as I crawl forward, hands and knees poked by glass. I reach the window just as Wini loses her grip. I dive forward, clasping onto Jacob’s wrists as he’s yanked out the window. Young and Godin wrap themselves around me, anchoring me, but they’re not strong enough to pull us back inside.
“I got you!”
I shout, looking up at Jacob’s frightened eyes, and then beyond them.
An honest-to-goodness flying saucer hovers above the house. It’s a hundred feet across, metallic, and blazing with orange light from its core. Beyond that, it’s featureless. A simple machine, designed to collect people, not navigate the stars or move between dimensions.
Jacob’s fear morphs into calm resolution as he looks me in the eyes. It’s so sudden and powerful that I’m unnerved by it. He should be terrified. Should be screaming. Instead, he says, “You’re different.”
“I’m going to pull you in!” I shout.
He shakes his head, fate accepted. “You can’t. But you don’t need to.”
“The hell are you talking about?” I pull with all my strength, muscles pinging in my biceps, but the kid doesn’t budge. Eventually, my body will lose this tug of war.
“You’ll find me,” he says. “They can’t stop you now.”
“They are stopping me now,” I shout back.
“They’re just delaying the inevitable.”
I’m about to attempt another hard pull when a surge of confidence flows into me. “What are you doing?”
“Saving you,” he says. “You can’t save us if you fall from the window.”
I’m not sure how he thinks he’s saving me, but I suddenly have no doubts about my ability to track down the Others and rain down justice. “I’ll find you,” I shout.
“I know,” he says.
And then, instead of having Jacob ripped from my grasp…I let go.
Some squelched part of me thinks, What did you do?! But my confidence remains, even as Jacob is pulled up into the air. There’s no fear in his eyes. In the moment before he becomes a distorted silhouette, he gives me a smile. Then he seems to melt into the light.
The light dulls, but doesn’t fade.
Gravity tugs me down. I fold forward and slap against the side of the house, hanging upside down for a moment before Young and Godin manage to reel me back in.
We fall to the floor, the fight over.
Wini looks down at me from the bed, blood framing her face from gashes on both sides. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop them.”
“None of us could,” I tell her, “but we’re going to.”
“How the hell are you—” Godin’s reasonable statement of abject disbelief is cut short by a scream from downstairs. It’s followed by two shotgun blasts and the sound of thumping feet.
“They’re still here,” Lindo shouts from the hall, still on the floor, still clutching his head.
The Others are digging through his mind, looking for answers. And if they don’t find them with Lindo, who must be known to them, they’ll start worming their way through everyone else’s minds until they find the answer: that the rest of the kids they’re looking for are directly beneath us, shielded by a bunker with metal walls that’s acting like a Faraday cage against the Others’ telepathy.
The sound of small feet thumping on the floor below us sends a chill down my back. When Sheba screams, I spring into action. My body protests, but I’m fueled by anger and a newfound confidence that these assholes can be defeated.
I’m halfway down the stairs before I realize I’ve forgotten the revolver. I’m at the bottom by the time I realize I don’t care.
Sheba, lying on the floor, her makeup unable to hide her pale complexion, points to a Japanese themed lounge across the foyer. “In there!”
I turn to the lounge, which leads to a kitchen, and the basement door where the entrance to the bunker can be found. If the Others are running around the house, they’ve given up on searching minds and are scouring the home instead, getting their hands dirty.
They’re not the only ones, I think, and I storm into the lounge.
The room is empty, but the door at the back is still moving.
I run for the door, dodging the room’s furniture as best I can in the orange light provided by the UFO. Clanging pots reveal the cryptoterrestrial’s position. It’s still in the kitchen, still seeking out the kids I have yet to fail. Wood cracks as I slam into the door, peeling hinges from the wall. I spill into the kitchen tumbling to the hard floor, grasping a counter, and heaving myself back up.
Light dances around the room, beaming through the long window that normally looks out on the Nevada desert, and reflecting off the hanging pots and pans.
In the ethereal glow, I see it.
And it sees me.
The crypto stands just five feet tall. Its body is thin and clothed in a form-fitting matte gray jumpsuit. It looks almost frail, but the humanoid body of a thin preteen combined with the large, egg-shaped head and sinister, unblinking, black, avocado-sized eyes is unnerving. My instincts are screaming at me to get away, to run away from the monster, and I’m pretty sure some of that fear is genetic, like most people’s natural fear of spiders or snakes. History has taught us which creatures to avoid, and though I’ve never seen a cryptoterrestrial, mind and body shout out together: Get the fuck out!
But my soul, and whatever Jacob infused me with, protests.
I’m not backing down.
“Not today, you son-of-a-bitch.” I take a step forward, fists clenched, and feel a gentle slapping against my face as the thing levels a menacing glare at me.
It’s trying to get in my head.
And it’s failing.
“Like I said,” I say, stomping forward. “Not to-fucking-day.”
There’s a moment of surprise in the thing’s jet black eyes, and then my right hook collides with the side of its head. There’s a satisfying crunch that sends the thing sprawling left, directly into the path of my left swing. I connect hard again. The creature topples back, but I catch it by its soda-can thick neck, and keep it upright.
I look into the black eyes and say, “I’m coming for every last one of you.”
My fist cocks back.
“Wait! Stop!” Some part of my mind registers Lindo’s warning, but the rest of it thinks, ‘Screw off,’ and then I throw the punch, putting every ounce of anger, sadness, and retribution burning inside me behind it.
My knuckles connect with the creature’s smooth skin, the skeletal structure beneath, and then with a wet slurp, the brain matter contained within.
Realizing what happened, I reel back and let the body fall to the floor, a hole punched into the front of its big head, just above and between its eyes, which look no more dead or alive than before.
I punched through its skull?!
The orange light blinks out.
The dull rumbling falls silent.
I can’t see it, but I know the UFO is gone, chased away by the death of one of their own.
Good, I think, and then the lights come back on, revealing Lindo, who’s now standing beside me, staring down at the dead cryptoterrestrial.
“Holy shit… Damnit…” He redirects his wide eyes to me and says, “You just started a war.”
31
“Wasn’t me who started it.” Something sluices off my fist and slaps against the floor. My knuckles are coated in what can best be described as purple, crystalized gel. If it wasn’t wet and jiggly, it would resemble the crystals of an amethyst geode. A flick of the wrist frees most of it from my skin. The chunky goo strikes a cabinet door and rolls down the vertical surface. It reminds me of one of those kid’s toys, the little sticking octopuses that climb down walls.
What it doesn’t remind me of is brain matter. I don’t care that the Others aren’t human. If they evolved on Earth alongside the billions of other species that have come and gone on this planet, some of which I’m assuming they evolved from, then they should have brains.
I crouch by the body, looking into the hole created by my hand. Purple gel and a shard of bone fill the cavity. My fingers push against the flesh around the wound. It’s still firm, supported by a skull, but there’s a little give to it, like the punch cracked the skull all the way around.
I reach into the cavity.
“Don’t do that,” Lindo says. H
e’s uncomfortable with this. If I knew everything he does, maybe I would be, too, but I don’t, so fuck it.
All I care about is recovering the children I’ve promised to recover: Isabella, whose role in all this now seems insignificant but still a guiding force, and Jacob, who I’ve only just met, but I feel connected to. Maybe because he represents the son I never got to have, or because he’s manipulated my emotions by projecting his own into me.
Of course, protecting them—really protecting them—means putting a stop to the people and non-people who pose a threat.
I pinch down on the curved section of skull and pull it free.
“Seriously, dude,” Lindo says. “Not a good idea. Killing one of them is bad enough. Desecrating one—”
“Desecrating?” I shoot Lindo a gaze that closes his mouth. “How many people have they experimented on? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? You don’t know the answer. You don’t want to know the answer. Because as soon as you see the truth and then take a good look at yourself, you’re going to realize what side you’ve been fighting for all this time.”
I lift the three-inch, triangular bone fragment, give it a quick look-see, and then whack it against a countertop. The fragment shatters, sending chunks, grit and powder falling to the floor.
“Dude…”
“Have you not seen one of these before?”
“Not dead. Tech is the only thing I’ve ever been able to collect.”
“It’s not dead,” I say.
Lindo looks horrified by my statement, like the crypto might suddenly lunge up and strangle him.
“Help me put it on the island.” I grasp the body beneath its arms. When Lindo hesitates, I fill him in. “It’s not dead, because it was never alive.”
Lindo’s expression makes a slow journey from horror, to confusion, to understanding. “These…”
“Aren’t the Others,” I say.
“Then what are they?”
“Let’s find out,” I say, and I motion to the thing’s feet.
Lindo picks up the feet and we hoist the small body atop the stainless-steel island.
“Oh my God.” A wild-eyed Sheba stands in the doorway, shotgun in hand.
The Others Page 19