by Various
Once, Daddykins went white after he deciphered a message, even went as far as taking out his gun from under the seat, something I’ve only seen him do a handful of times. He said the Skylings had given him a date when they’d come for him. The date changed but sure enough the Skylings came, only not for Daddykins, cause he was prepared. They took Mommykins instead, something Daddykins could never forgive himself for.
When I got older I started to interpret the messages too, and became real good at it. This gave Daddykins more time to patrol the skies looking for craft. He taught me that too. How to tell a satellite from a star, and a star from a planet, and a planet from a Skyling vehicle. Stars twinkled. Planets were bigger and brighter than stars. Satellites moved horizontally. Skyling craft, which Daddykins said were round in shape, zigzagged and dipped, and often came close to the height of airplanes, which we saw plenty of.
Very rarely did a night pass without a shortwave message. Sometimes it would be weeks before we’d spot a Skyling craft, and when we did, Daddykins marked the map in red. When I was older, he’d let me mark the map, and I got good at that too. Daddykins said we had our very own Area 51. We called the lookout Area 54 in homage. And because it was like Area 51, Daddykins said we had to be careful of the govs showing up and confiscating our data. I made a promise to him I’d never tell a soul about our patrolling. Not even Mommykins knew to what extent we were involved.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, well after I’d fallen asleep, Daddykins would head out of Area 54 and go down to the local donut shop for coffee where he’d meet other Skyling watchers. They’re the ones that gave him the name Sky Man, even gave him a blue baseball cap for his birthday with the name sewn on.
From the truck, snuggled into my pillow with Teddy, I would watch Daddykins leaning on the front of the truck with his Skyling buddies. They’d smoke and drink from Styrofoam cups, Daddykins looked smart in his security uniform, the green jacket with the CVH patch on the arm sleeve. Daddykins shared a few of his secrets from the book with his buds—but not everything. He said Skylings could take on human shape, like the way Native Americans could switch places with animals. Bobcat Bob was the one he trusted the most. Sometimes he’d let Bobcat up to the lookout to scan the grounds with his metal detector for ground craft. They’d find shards of strange metals and sleek black materials, clearly not human-made, that they’d catalog and date. On the weekends the three of us would scout the abandoned railroad tracks and the deserted foundations of the old laboratories, places Daddykins and Bobcat said they did experiments.
It wasn’t easy to get to the foundations. First, you had to travel down the train tracks, which were up a steep hill, to a spot where the ties bunched up before a bridge, still suspended, but covered in vines and bramble. Hidden in the grove, deep in the woods, was a stairwell of 100 steps that went up vertically over two tall hills. At the top, there was a clearing in the woods, where the foundations stood, three in all.
Bobcat thought fire ravaged the facility. Daddykins agreed with the fire part, but said it wasn’t made by humans. A Skyling craft must’ve shot them from the sky. They figured that the foundations were discovered around the same time the govs started using Area 51, maybe even moved some of their experiments from CVH to there. “Mind studies,” Daddykins said. “That’s how come there are so many crazies.” Didn’t start out that way. The govs were testing out Skyling tactics on humans. Daddykins wept when he talked about the tactics, thinking about poor Mommykins being subjected to the same thing on a Skyling craft somewhere.
The night the Skylings took Mommykins was just like any other night—clear skies, a bright moon, not too many trespassers on the grounds. I remember Daddykins looked a little unsettled when we got to the lookout. Didn’t even want to take out the shortwave, but I did it for him. He kept worrying at his wedding band, claiming that it hurt to wear it, until he finally took it off and left it on the dashboard.
After midnight, when I’d fallen asleep, Daddykins skipped the donut shop and drove home instead. Half-awake out in the truck, I heard him yelling at Mommykins. He kept saying over and over: don’t you know how much I love you? Later, I thought it was almost like he’d known the future, that she was going to be taken, and that she needed to hear it so many times before they got her.
We headed back to finish the patrol, me pretending to sleep. When Daddykins’s shift was over, we went home. He carried Teddy and me to bed, kissing me on the cheek, saying, “We’ll get back to our work tomorrow night.” I fell fast asleep, but awoke soon enough to a great disturbance, like thunder, or the sound of a hundred car engines revving at the same time.
First I heard yelling and screaming, then loud noises, like the house was being tossed around—kind of the same way it felt when the big town trucks came by hauling dirt. Then came bright lights filling up my bedroom windows. I wanted to go to the window to look, but remembered Daddykins said never to let the Skylings see you. Even half-asleep in my bed, I knew enough not to even peek.
As all this commotion was going on, I hid under the bed with Teddy to wait it out, knowing Daddykins would come for me. Sure enough he did, but not until morning when the neighborhood was back to quiet. No one would’ve suspected we had a visitation. Not unless you saw the inside of the house, completely disheveled, like a box of toys someone dumped out.
Daddykins brought me to a clear spot in the living room and very somberly told me that the Skylings had taken Mommykins. He gave me a speech about being strong and to not give up on finding her. I cried for several hours, until Daddykins said he couldn’t take my weeping and that I had to stop because it wasn’t going to help get Mommykins back. We had to take action.
After the visitation Daddykins went to his underground workshop to analyze his data. It was the first time he let me down there with him. Guns of all different sizes and calibers filled one wall. The other side was laid out with surveillance maps. In the middle was a great oak table he said Grandpa had made as a wedding present before he died. We spent several days down there. It was equipped with electricity, food, water, and a bathroom. I had coloring books and Teddy, for when I wasn’t helping Daddykins find Mommykins in the night sky.
After several weeks, we intercepted a Skyling message, one that Daddykins said he was waiting on. It meant that they were coming back for us. He told me we had to act now since we had vital information. So we started to prepare for an attack or abduction, or capture. An attack was like what happened to the experiment labs, when the Skylings just blasted things they didn’t like off the Earth. Capture and abduction were altogether different things; abduction meant you’d be returned after the Skylings were done with their tests. Capture was permanent. After the first year, Daddykins upgraded Mommykins from abduction to capture. That’s when we officially mourned her, and held a mini-funeral for her in the backyard. After that we hit the road to avoid a full-on Skyling attack that Daddykins predicted was imminent.
We crisscrossed America in those early days. We started out in the Midwest, a place that made the eyes long for trees rather than cornstalks. Daddykins worked a few jobs here and there, always saving a little money, and kept up with our supplies. Then we’d move on, each time keeping one step ahead of the Skylings, which Daddykins said were closing in. “If we get lax or doze off for even a minute, they’ll catch us, Van.”
Van was Daddykins’s secret name for me. No one else called me Van. It was the only way I truly knew it was him and not a Skyling. I was given a new name for every town we stayed in. Daddykins too. I was Rebecca, Laura, Emily, Mae, Lexy, Lorna, and Addie, after the character in Paper Moon, whom Daddykins said I looked like, except I had freckles. Daddykins was Robert, Willy, Skinner, Richie, Johnny, and even Elvis once. Sometimes he played my father or an uncle, sometimes a distant cousin. It was fun to be different people, like dress-up or make-believe.
People were all kinds of nice to us. In Indiana we met a man that gave Daddykins a new tire to replace the spare we’d been using. In Arizona, a
grandmother baked us an apple and peach pie for the road and gave us a jug of milk to wash it down. In the Rockies we met some Skyling hunters that taught us how to ski and to trap squirrels. Daddykins learned to shoot a rifle and even let me shoot cans, which I always missed, unless they were real close.
As the years went on, The Kit grew. Soon we had a tent and heavy sleeping bags, a grill, flashlights, and water tablets to purify the water. We always had a four-pack of toilet paper and a lunch pail of jerky, which Daddykins said we could subsist on for a whole week if things got rough.
While we passed town to town, we never forgot why we were on the run. At night we took turns keeping watch. Sometimes the other stayed up and helped out with the Skyling messages until they fell asleep, to be woken again if a transmission came through.
I remember we were camping near Pike’s Peak in Colorado when we were almost taken. It was Daddykins on watch. I was in the tent. I heard him scream and then heard the gunfire. The bright lights of the Skyling craft made it like day inside the tent. I was nearly twelve by this time and quick on my feet. I unzipped the tent flaps and ran to our cover spot against the rocks, hovering, waiting for Daddykins, praying he hadn’t been taken.
Daddykins told me daily that if anything ever happened to him I was to go back home to find Bobcat, he’d know what to do. Daddykins kept a metal suitcase, locked and hidden under the passenger seat of the truck. I wore the key around my neck. The box contained our most important possessions, like our IDs, most of them aliases, reserve cash, the deed to the old house, bullets for the gun, and instructions of what to do if Daddykins was taken.
That night on the ridge, I waited hours for Daddykins, and was in tears, talking myself down, trying to be brave and face the fact I was on my own, but then I heard a rustle in the trees, and the slide of shoes on gravel. Daddykins was out-of-breath, cut up from running in the woods, but he was safe. We hid until morning and left Colorado for good.
Part II
Around the time of my thirteenth birthday, we took refuge on a farm in Oklahoma. It was owned by a Cherokee man we named Little Big, because he had a nose like Dustin Hoffman from the movie Little Big Man. Little Big gave us a place to live on the farm in exchange for work. Daddykins became a handyman of sorts, from milking cows, to shearing sheep, to planting crops, to building or repairing fences. Daddykins said it was the first place he’d ever been that the shortwave grew quiet.
I started public school as Summer Rain, Little Big’s niece. I dyed my hair to match his sleek black mane and wore it in a fat braid. I took to reading books and kept one in my back pocket, like Tom Sawyer or Light in the Forest, the one Little Big read to me after dinner, since he didn’t have a TV. The farm was the first place that felt like home in a long time, a real break from living outdoors or having to leave just when we got friendly with folks. I made a few friends at school, was liked by my teachers, and was a volunteer at the library. I even won first place at the county fair for my photograph of the old red barn.
At least two or three years passed. I started high school around fifteen, where I studied Shakespeare, Geography, Algebra, Biology, and French. It was October, when the leaves died off the trees and the ground turned brown and frozen, a time when the shortwave worked best. The look in Daddykins’s eyes that had been gone for so long returned, and with it came regular surveillance of the night sky. He didn’t ask for my help at first, since he didn’t think there was much concern. But then one night he came and plucked me from bed. He scared me so much I took Teddy along.
“The Skyling messages have changed,” he said. It was a different language than we were used to. “We need to decode it,” he told me. “We need to know what they’re saying.” When the sky was dark, the shortwave was hot. What started out as a few hours deciphering code after school turned into entire missed days, and then eventually I just stopped going altogether, and worked night to morning on the code. By spring, when the ground turned to mud and the baby sheep were born, we had broken the code. The message was clear—they were coming for Daddykins.
Every day thereafter we practiced our getaway plan. The truck was always gassed up, parked facing the road, the key secretly hidden under the dashboard for easy access. I was a few months from having my driver’s license, but knew how to drive real well, another part of our planning. We were always packed. Emergency food and water stored and refilled weekly. I lived in constant agitation that Daddykins might return from work telling me it was time to go.
Little Big wasn’t privy to our plans. When he asked about our drills, Daddykins told him we were survivalists and wanted to be prepared if ever there was a nuclear attack, which from the newspapers sounded like it might be at least as imminent as a Skyling abduction. Little Big liked the idea of survival and taught us new skills, like tracking and hunting with a bow. He taught me to be still long enough to let a bird eat from my hand. He taught us to make applesauce from the orchard’s apples. Butter from milk. How to make a fire without matches, and build a shelter from what he called “the tools of the Earth.”
Little Big had a way of making the Skyling threat something in the distance, like mountains or clouds, things you knew were there but didn’t regard at all times. He told me that if anything happened to Daddykins he’d take care of me. He was like an uncle to me, but Daddykins said that if something happened to him while we were at the farm then it was on account of Little Big really being a Skyling in disguise, and that he couldn’t be trusted.
Near the end, Daddykins and Little Big started arguing about little things. He told me not to worry. They’d spend time apart—Daddykins went to the hills and Little Big went to the Brass Pony bar. I kept watch for Daddykins to return by the back door, staring out to the hilly crest for his figure, his high boots and flannel, like a type of Charles Ingalls. He usually came home before sundown and joined me on the porch with a glass of hard cider and the shortwave.
It was late April and Little Big had gone to the bar and Daddykins to the hills, and me on the porch. I didn’t get much sleep the previous night and dozed off waiting for him to come home. I awoke to the shutters rattling, and bright lights sweeping over the farm, like a helicopter, almost, but louder and noisier. A strange wind kicked dirt into mini spirals, throwing them at the house. I hid under the table, shortwave in hand. I understood the message with little deciphering. We have the prisoner. A sick feeling passed through me. I knew Daddykins was in trouble. I headed outside, the lights blinded me; the wind forced me first to the ground and then back into the house.
I waited until morning, but Daddykins never came home. Two days passed and still nothing. The shortwave remained silent. In the afternoon on the third day, I went out to the hills and searched for him. Near a whole bunch of strange footprints in the mud, I found Daddykins’s hat. I assumed the worst, hoping for abduction over capture. I was older now and understood what I had to do, seeing as I’d been drilled my whole life for a moment like this.
When I returned to the farm, Little Big told me Daddykins was a no-good drunk and that he’d run off and left me. I knew then and there I couldn’t trust the Indian no more. I put the plan into action, rolling the pickup out of the driveway after dark, putting distance between Oklahoma and me for good.
I followed the back roads along the Arkansas River into Kansas, camping during the morning, driving at night. I bathed in the river and boiled it to drink, and kept my stocks up. Halfway through Kansas, I opened up the silver box, scared to do so, feeling it was like opening a coffin. It made the fact Daddykins was gone all the more real.
I cried reading his letter, which had been written when we’d first settled in Oklahoma. It updated a previous one, also attached, written when we’d first left home. I found seven letters altogether. Keep your guard up. Don’t let anyone get too close. And more than anything, remember to keep the Skyling data safe from the govs. The box also contained cash and some gold, which he said to use only in an emergency. He included my birth certificate and a fake ID, and
a letter I couldn’t open until I was eighteen and officially an adult. My name going forward was Clara Van Winter. Clara for Clairborn. Van my pet name. And winter to remind me when the shortwave worked best. Daddykins always had a way with names.
My instructions were to return to Bobcat Bob in New England. He owned a small orchard in Western Connecticut not far from where I grew up. Daddykins said Bobcat would keep me safe, and that he was mostly certain he wasn’t a Skyling. I drove the car east, following the Mississippi River out of Topeka, straight into Kentucky and headed northeast. It was May when I drove down the long driveway littered with old farm equipment and rusted cars, a garbage heap or two, and trees that were downed in a storm, but never cleared.
I parked the car and waited beside the truck to see if anyone came out of the beat-up house in need of a new roof. Behind me a young guy, maybe seventeen, shirtless with a tan, carrying a shotgun at his waist, asked me if I needed something. I was startled at first, but blushed when our eyes met. Something about the way he smiled at me, like a new toy, one I hadn’t expected. I told him I was looking for Bobcat. “He’s my father,” he said.
The boy’s name was Daniel, but I called him Danny. He said it was a sissy name and didn’t like it, but that if he could call me Van, I could call him Danny. It was a deal. He took me to the garage where Bobcat was fixing a tractor. He was covered in grease and smelled a little like whiskey. He’d aged from the days I remembered him at the donut shop. Now he was balding, with greasy hair that he combed over the shiny spot. He was fuller in the face, and had a missing finger, which he said he’d lost in a card game. Danny told me he lost it holding a firecracker too long.
It was just the two of them. I handed over Daddykins’s letter which stated the obvious, that he’d been abducted, possibly captured, and that I needed looking after until I was of age to take care of myself—though I figured I did all right on my own. Bobcat laid down some ground rules. I had to attend school, do my homework, and get good grades. “You’ll be responsible for the cooking and cleaning, and you’ll have to go to church on Sunday.” I told him the Skylings made me sort of an atheist and he let it slide, saying, “I never go either. But it seems like all the good people do.”