The Summer It Came for Us

by Rix, Dan

I smiled to myself.

  “You know, you may be onto something,” Malcolm said in a low voice so only I could hear.

  “I was kidding,” I said. “I don’t actually believe that.”

  “I know,” he said smugly, and something in his tone said, But I do.

  A chill went down my spine, and I fell into self-conscious silence next to him, the only sounds the crunch of our footsteps and our heavy breath.

  Ahead of us, our flashlight beams swept across the dry lakebed, its surface cracked like egg shells.

  “Why doesn’t anything grow here?” I said, trying to make conversation about something that wasn’t aliens.

  “Radiation from the collider would be my bet,” said Jace reasonably, nodding to himself.

  “Yeah, probably the radiation,” Zoe echoed.

  “Huh,” I said, hoping it wasn’t dangerous to us.

  “No, you dipshits,” Malcolm said. “It’s the alkali salts left over after the lake evaporates. You ever think, Jace, or do you just spit out the first dumb thing that pops in your head?”

  “And yet we’re trusting Jace’s UFO theory,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Remi, Remi, Remi,” Jace chided, “what did we say about the bullying?”

  “You’re right,” I said quickly. “That was slightly mean. I’m sorry. Malcolm, you should apologize too.”

  “When he grows a brain.”

  “Timeout, you guys don’t think we passed it, do you?” said Zoe, slowing to pan her flashlight around. “Because I don’t see anything.”

  “Yeah, shouldn’t we be there by now?” I looked behind us again, getting that same uneasy feeling.

  Though we’d been walking for almost half an hour, all we’d come across was dry lakebed.

  We shouldn’t be out this far.

  Even the few houses tucked away in the hills shone only as faint twinkles.

  “Aren’t there supposed to be lights on the supercollider?” Zoe said. “Where are all the lights?”

  “Quit being babies,” Malcolm snapped. “Both of you. We’ve gone like fifty feet.”

  “It’s after work hours,” said Jace. “The scientists and staff have gone home, I bet.”

  “There were lights the night we crashed,” said Zoe.

  “That was a Thursday . . . today’s Saturday,” Jace added.

  “Yeah, but there should be security lights or something,” she said. “It’s a really big complex.”

  Ahead of us lay pitch blackness.

  “Guys, I don’t know about this . . .” Zoe swiveled and shined her flashlight off to the side.

  Funny how, from Ridgeview Drive, it looked like such a short walk across the salt flats to the complex. A trick of perspective. In reality, it could be miles.

  At least if we missed it, we were bound to hit the fifty-four-mile accelerator ring at some point—

  Zoe screamed.

  “What?” I gasped, nearly giving myself whiplash as I spun.

  She backed into me, her flashlight wobbling in her hand. “I saw—over there—it’s over there—”

  “What—what is?” I added my beam to hers, and so did Jace, while Malcolm panned his flashlight to the sides.

  “I don’t know, a thing . . . a creature . . . it was one of them!”

  At her words, prickles surged up my arms.

  “You’re . . . you’re sure?”

  “Yes! It was just standing there. And when it saw my flashlight, it stepped to the side, and I—I—I lost it.”

  Suddenly, fear clawed at me like a wild animal. My heart thundered in my chest, my breath came in shallow, terrified gasps. This was a dry lakebed. We were out in the open, with no place to hide. There was no worse place to encounter an extraterrestrial.

  “How far?” Malcolm said, sweeping his own flashlight with a stoic hand.

  Zoe gulped. “I could barely see it, maybe . . . maybe a hundred feet.”

  I strained my eyes, searching the darkness for movement, my head jerking this way and that. Where? Where was it?

  “What did it look like?” he said.

  “Like . . . like a human shadow, but really tall.”

  My heart gave a terrible jolt. What on earth had she seen?

  Was it still out there?

  But the shaky beams of our lights illuminated nothing, just desert.

  A crunch sounded to my left, and I jerked my flashlight toward it, my heart breaking into another reckless gallop.

  Nothing there.

  Pumping adrenaline, my veins buzzed like high-voltage power lines.

  My instincts, and every twitching muscle fiber in my body, told me to run. But how far was it back to the car?

  A mile? Two?

  We’d never make it.

  For a split-second, something flashed in Malcolm’s beam.

  No, just an swirl of dust, kicked up by the breeze.

  Or by a moving creature?

  “You’re sure you saw something?” said Jace.

  Zoe stammered, “Yes—I mean—I think . . .”

  “Could it have been one of our shadows?” Jace said in a bored voice. “Like this. Did it look like this?”

  He stepped away from me and swept his flashlight across my body, projecting my shadow out into the dusty haze. From where we were standing, it looked like a figure moving just beyond the light.

  “It . . . it might have been that,” Zoe said softly. “Actually, yeah, I think it was that.”

  I began to relax. She’d merely seen one of our shadows.

  “You guys wait here,” said Malcolm. “I’ll go check it out.”

  “No!” I grabbed his arm. “We’re not splitting up. That’s stupid. That’s what they always do in movies, and then they get picked off one by one.”

  I could already see it. He’d vanish into the night, and then we’d hear his scream, and an instant later the sound of his bones being crunched to bits.

  “Then come with me,” he said.

  “Guys, there’s nothing out there,” said Jace.

  “Yeah, how about we just don’t?” I said, and added hopefully, “In fact, maybe we should go home.”

  Malcolm gave me a pointed look. “Then you will always fear the unknown.” With that, he strode off into the darkness, leaving me at a loss for words.

  “Malcolm, wait!” I ran after him, Jace and Zoe right on my heels.

  We were insane.

  We were all insane.

  I stayed at Malcolm’s back, swinging my flashlight in panicky jerks, ready to duck behind him the moment something lashed out at us.

  After a distance, Zoe said, “It was standing right around here, I think.”

  “See, nothing here,” said Jace. “Now can we keep moving?”

  But Malcolm didn’t budge.

  With furrowed eyebrows, he swept his flashlight over the ground, moving in wider and wider circles until his beam stopped abruptly.

  I leaned closer, squinting at the ground in bewilderment. “What is that?”

  The pattern of tiny, windswept dust ridges had been disturbed, reformed into dozens of concentric rings that sparkled under the light.

  He traced the rings with his flashlight. The lines arced out a few feet and rejoined in another cluster a few feet away, the pattern superimposed on the fine dust, as if drawn by a feather.

  It looked almost like . . . a fingerprint.

  Except too symmetrical, and two meters wide.

  Impressive that he’d even caught it.

  Me, I would have stomped right over them and ruined the evidence, oblivious.

  He knelt and pinched the dust between his fingers, rubbing it together, while we all waited for his verdict.

  “They’re iron filings,” he said. “They’re all over this lakebed, mixed in with the sand . . . looks like something pulled them to the surface.”

  Jace said, “Uh . . .”

  “Iron is ferromagnetic,” Malcolm continued. “They get magnetized around a magnetic field, and then they all line up in the sam
e direction. That pattern you see, those are magnetic field lines.”

  “Some effect from the collider?” Jace offered.

  “Possibly.” Malcolm let the dust fall from his fingers and stood. “But you can see they’re centered right here . . . and the pattern’s recent. Look—”

  A soft breeze swept over us, swishing my hair and giving me goosebumps.

  As we stared, a whole section of the pattern dissolved before our eyes, the rings eroding away, dust re-merging with dust.

  Malcolm was right.

  This wouldn’t last five minutes out here.

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  Jace still didn’t get it.

  “Meaning,” Malcolm said, “that something putting off a powerful magnetic field was just here.”

  Chapter 12

  “I’m telling you guys,” said Jace excitedly, leading the way farther out across the lake bed, “this place is just like Area 51.”

  “I wanna go home,” Zoe whined, now on the verge of tears.

  I squeezed her hand tighter in silent agreement, too terrified to speak.

  I really, really hoped that pattern was caused by the supercollider.

  It’s possible, Malcolm had said.

  He’d explained it to us. Kind of like a big gust of wind could produce little eddies of turbulence, a big magnetic field could sometimes produce stray eddies of magnetism, like what we’d seen.

  And the supercollider, no doubt, produced a big magnetic field.

  I didn’t even want to think of the alternative, that something else had made that pattern.

  Something that had been following us.

  “They’re probably doing all sorts of research on UFOs and extraterrestrials,” Jace continued, clearly preferring that explanation. “Guys, this is amazing.”

  How Jace managed to be excited about that, I had no idea.

  At least Malcolm seemed bothered by what we’d seen, though now he was even more grimly determined to seek out the truth.

  Since they’d refused to go back, and Zoe and I were too chicken to head back alone, we’d been forced to go on with them, and by now fear was so thick in my veins I’d actually started to feel paralyzed.

  Jace went on, “They probably had one in a cell somewhere, and it got out—bet that’s what all those soldiers were for . . . they were looking for it.”

  “Jace, shut your trap,” Malcolm barked, jerking his flashlight all around us.

  “Guys, seriously, this is stupid,” I murmured. “This is so stupid.”

  Ahead of us, something flashed in Malcolm’s beam, and I flinched before I saw it was just a reflective sign.

  “Bingo.” Malcolm rushed forward.

  We’d come to a chain link fence topped with loops of razor wire. In big red letters, the sign read:

  Restricted Area

  no trespassing beyond this point

  photography strictly prohibited

  Jace whistled. “I’m telling you, Area 51.”

  The sign itself was crusted with brown rust, its edges warped and corroded, and riddled with bullet holes—like someone had used it for target practice.

  Beyond the fence, the silhouettes of gigantic industrial buildings stood out against the night sky, their windows all dark.

  We’d reached the Shasta-Trinity Supercollider complex.

  “There’s a fence, guys,” I said, relieved we wouldn’t be able to get closer. “Can we please go home now?”

  “Didn’t you break any rules as a kid?” Malcolm shrugged off his leather jacket and tossed it over the razor wire.

  I watched him, chewing on my lip. “Um . . .”

  “Unless you’d rather dig.”

  “What if it’s electrified?” I asked.

  “Then this’ll hurt like a bitch.” Malcolm reached for the fence.

  “No, don’t—”

  Before I could stop him, he grabbed on, kicked off the ground as he hoisted himself up, and swung a leg over the top of the fence to perch on his leather jacket.

  He stared down at us. “Any questions?”

  I stuck my tongue out at him.

  Then he jumped down on the other side, landing in a crouch.

  “Guys, we could get in so much trouble,” Zoe whispered, biting her fingernails.

  “Then wait there,” Malcolm said. “I’m just going to poke around.”

  I threw a wary glance behind us, half expecting a lizardlike alien to lope out of the blackness and charge at us across the dry lakebed.

  Considering that thing was outside the fence, inside the fence seemed a lot safer at the moment. “I’m not friends with you guys anymore,” I muttered, threading my fingers through the chain links and finding a toehold.

  “Here, I’ll give you a boost,” Jace offered.

  “I can do it myself,” I snapped.

  Five minutes, and a shit ton of scrapes later, I landed on the other side, promptly lost my balance, and fell into Malcolm’s arms.

  Up close, his spicy smell hit me like a drug, and suddenly the flutters in my stomach weren’t because I’d just broken the law.

  I quickly let go of him, grateful he couldn’t see my reddening cheeks.

  Zoe came next, landing with a shriek.

  Turning toward the complex, I tensed up. I stood at the edge of an empty parking lot. Any second now a search light would come on, sirens would scream, and some amplified voice would boom out that we were under arrest. Just like in the movies.

  But nothing happened.

  All was dark inside the complex, nothing stirred.

  Maybe they all really had gone home, like Jace said.

  But not even a security guard?

  Not even a stray desk lamp glowing inside an office?

  It seemed . . . too quiet.

  The whole place gave me the willies.

  Once we’d all hopped the fence, we set out across the parking lot, heading toward what looked like the main building.

  Weeds sprouted from cracks in the asphalt, their thorns gleaming under our flashlights. Bits of trash and tumbleweeds stirred in the breeze, gathering in piles.

  Like out in the desert, ridges of windswept dust had gathered against the curbs.

  This lot didn’t look used.

  A flower bed sat at the edge of the parking lot, but it was full of dirt and leaves and dead stalks.

  We entered the complex, walking the building’s perimeter in search of a door.

  More weeds jutted up between the cement slabs, some reaching three and four feet high.

  “This place is a ghost town,” Jace murmured, sweeping his light around a small courtyard.

  Our reflection flashed in a window. Jace stepped up to the smudged glass, scraping away an area to look through.

  “What do you see?” Malcolm asked.

  “An office, I think . . . everything’s covered in spiderwebs.”

  I rubbed my shoulders, fighting a rising chill.

  The place was abandoned.

  How could it be abandoned?

  “Guys, I think we should go,” Zoe said softly. “This place feels haunted.”

  Malcolm lifted two fingers to silence her, his eyes alert.

  We trudged on in silence, and at last reached a main entrance.

  The glass in one of the double doors was broken. On the steps, shards of it crunched under our feet. Zoe and I shared a worried look.

  To the other door was taped a notification, its edges peeling, its lettering long since faded.

  Malcolm stepped up to read it.

  A moment later, he blew out a low whistle.

  “What?” I asked, trying to read over his shoulder. “What’s it say?”

  “According to this,” he announced, rapping his knuckles on the poster as he straightened up to peer through the glass, “this place was shut down a decade ago.”

  To my relief, Malcolm’s stepdad’s pickup truck wasn’t in his driveway when I got there the next morning before sunrise, which meant the man was probably out on a
hunting trip, but then I had a whole new reason to panic.

  I had hoped for an excuse to ride right past.

  I climbed off my bike and trudged to the porch, my stomach gripped by nerves all over again.

  I didn’t want to see Malcolm. I didn’t want to hang out with him alone, in his house, without Zoe or Vincent or Jace.

  But I had to talk to him.

  I’d left a note so my parents wouldn’t freak out.

  Watching sunrise with friends. –Love, Remi.

  After Malcolm had dropped me off last night, I’d stayed up until dawn, gaping out through a sliver between my blankets, convinced there was something out there watching me.

  The thing that made that pattern.

  The supercollider was closed, which meant it couldn’t have been responsible for whatever we’d seen out there.

  Who knew a faint dusting of rings on the ground could be so terrifying?

  The pattern made me think of crop circles.

  It was easy to be brave around Jace and Malcolm. They didn’t even know the word fear. But alone . . . alone was a different story.

  Alone, the terror crept in.

  As a group, we could be stupid sometimes. We got into this groupthink kind of thing, where we all postured and tried to impress each other, and came up with psychotic ideas like, oh, let’s sneak into a high-security complex in the middle the night, that’ll be fun.

  If we kept working as a group, we would end up getting abducted ourselves and never figure out what happened to Vincent.

  I needed to talk to Malcolm, alone.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Jace or Zoe—I did—it was that Malcolm actually took this seriously. He was just as worried about Vincent as I was.

  No, it was more than that.

  I felt safe around him, like he knew what to do no matter what.

  I trusted his judgment.

  Even if he made me insanely self-conscious.

  I swallowed the tightness in my throat, tried one last time to smooth the helmet marks out of my hair, and rang the doorbell.

  Nothing happened.

  Because his doorbell didn’t work.

  After another deep breath, while my heart clanged in my ears, I knocked quietly.

  Why was I so nervous?

  It wasn’t like I hadn’t hung out with Malcolm alone before.

  There’d been that one time when Zoe and Jace were on family vacations and Vincent was grounded. Having nothing better to do, Malcolm and I went to a movie together.