The Vestige

by Caroline George

  “That’s why…” A smirk creeps across his Jack-mouth. He tilts back on his calves and stares at me with a gleam of something close to interest in his dreary pupils. “You don’t need to be pretty.”

  “Go set up the interrogation room,” Jack says loud enough to shut up his dad. He lifts my chin and plants a strong kiss on my lips. Show off. PDA isn’t the best way to tell me I’m attractive.

  Nash and Charlie monitor the military base’s security footage from their makeshift command center in the bedroom. Tally goes outside to patrol the perimeter. Abram and I clean the counters, arrange tools on a platter, and soundproof the walls with slats of Styrofoam.

  “You will tell me what I want to know.” Jack binds his father to a wooden chair in the center of the kitchen. His jaw clenches, and his brow furrows into a single, overstated dash. “I’m not under federal jurisdiction anymore. I can do whatever I want to you.”

  “And what is it you want to know?”

  “Tell me about the dome.”

  “The dome? What’s that?” He blinks on repeat, musters an innocent smile.

  “Don’t patronize me, Dad. I found what the Feds are hiding. Why do you think my battalion and I disappeared? Did you ever wonder what happened to us? To me?”

  “I didn’t think too much about it, figured you’d done something stupid.”

  Hurt flashes across Jack’s face and then morphs into an expression hard as rock. He tips the chair onto its hind legs. “Why is the dome contracting?”

  “You’re going to prison, kid. After all this is over, you will go to prison.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “I’m not saying a word.”

  “Fine.” Jack snatches a bundle of tubes from the platter and shakes it in front of his father’s nose. “Remember these? They were your punishment of choice. When I’d disappoint you…” He doesn’t finish his statement. Instead, he grabs the pitcher from Abram’s hands. “You’re disappointing me, Dad.”

  There was once a boy roped to a chair whose father choked him with water, drilled plastic down his throat until he screeched and his eyes bulged with fear. There was once a boy with a secret abuser and scars that never completely healed. He grew into a man, but the fear and scars remained the same. Instead of existing solely as streaks on his spine and screams in the night, they manifested as something deeper, bloodier, an unforgiving lust for revenge that now turns the air cold.

  “Waterboarding?” Colonel Buchanan laughs. “During my first tour in Afghanistan, I was captured and tortured by rebels for months. Do you honestly think your amateur tactics will break me?”

  “You’ll break.”

  I turn toward the tapered window when Abram pries open the man’s mouth. Gagging. Coughing. Wailing. We’re better than this, right? Is torture a harsh reality of our situation? Maybe. But I don’t want to become callused to it. I don’t want inflicting pain to be normal.

  “Look,” Abram shouts at me. “This is what the Feds will do to us if we’re caught.”

  Jack pours the pitcher’s contents into his dad’s lungs, making the man convulse and spew water like a fountain. “What are the Feds hiding?” He rips the tube from Colonel Buchanan’s throat. “My people were massacred. I watched them die … and you know why they were killed. Tell me.” He throws punches against skin and bone, striking over and over until blood streams down the prisoner’s face. “Who caused the apocalypse, released the virus? Why is this happening? Talk.”

  “Stop!” I swallow a mouthful of bile and clutch my aching stomach. “There are other ways to make someone talk. Don’t be like him, Jack.”

  “You’re all fools.” The colonel’s laugh resonates like a chuckle in a haunted house. His smile is red with blood. “Look in the mirror, son. The truth has been with you the whole time. It is you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are one of them,” he says. “You’re not human.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

  H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

  “Not human?” Jack laughs. He leans against the kitchen counter and crosses his arms. “Enlighten me, Pops. What am I?” He frowns when Abram and I don’t laugh with him.

  “You’re half-human, half-alien.”

  “This is low … even for you.” He reaches toward me, grabs my hand, and squeezes tight. His eyes are wide and desperate. “I don’t look like an alien.”

  “And what are aliens supposed to look like?” Colonel Buchanan squirms in his chair. Crimson spit oozes from his mangled mouth. “Your girlfriend knows I’m right.”

  No. Maybe. I’m not sure. I might’ve considered the possibility of aliens one sleepless night, same as I wondered if zombies would rise from graves—if nothing is as it seems, then anything and everything is possible. So I’m not certain, but I’m also not surprised.

  Jack unravels our fingers when I don’t respond. He punches the colonel so hard, the chair cracks. “You’re insane,” he screams. Pain ripples down his back in sweaty tremors. “You’re screwing with me.”

  “Why would I lie? Test your blood. You’ll find that your genetic makeup is much different from any of ours. Look in the mirror. Haven’t you ever wondered why your eyes are brighter than most, why it’s easier for you to get what you want? You have extraterrestrial blood in your veins.”

  “Aliens aren’t real.”

  “Your mom was one of them.”

  “Shut up.” Jack clutches his head and sinks to the tile. I try to comb a hand through his hair, down his neck, but he slides away from me as if I’ve betrayed him.

  “Tell us everything,” Abram says. “Start from the beginning.”

  “That might take a while.”

  “We have all night.”

  I sit a few inches from Jack and place the tip of my pinkie on his thumb. He doesn’t bat it off, so I go into our tenuous third-space and think of small infinities like fireworks and cold watermelon, fountain dances, and photo booths. He’ll see them, too. He will hear me say in a figment, supernatural voice I love you and nothing said will hurt us.

  “Intermarriage was the first step in their invasion process,” Colonel Buchanan says. “Their goal was to blend races, slowly weed out the humans until all that remained were people with the alien genetic marker. My battalion and I were recruited into their marriage program. Our job was simple—we must have offspring with members of the Pureblood class. I met Lavinia at an art gala in the City. She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. We talked. She agreed to be my wife and two months later, we were married. It was shortly after our union that we had a son—you, Jack.”

  “Disgusting prick.”

  “I didn’t have much of a choice. You see, they have the power of persuasion. As long as I was ignorant, they could make me do anything. Awareness is dangerous—it makes people immune to their power. They can’t control those who know the truth,” he says. “When I finally realized the extent of their abilities, and came to my senses, Jack was already seven years old.”

  Grandpa choked on a grape after church one Sunday while relieving himself on the toilet. His decision to eat and poop at the same time has never made much sense to me, but he did eat and poop, and a grape did get lodged in his esophagus. Mom gave Jon and me the news during dinner that night. We both laughed because we thought she was joking—Grandpa couldn’t have died from something as petty as a quarter-sized fruit. Hilarious. Impossible. As unimaginable as aliens taking over the planet and toying with our minds. As novel-worthy as my boyfriend turning out to be from space.

  “How long have these aliens been on Earth?” A
bram asks.

  “Decades. They invaded slowly, secretly—it’s been a game of strategy for them. They raised their children to be influential citizens and placed them in the government and military. They caused events that led to the outbreak, World War III, the end of the world.”

  Jack slumps against his knees and without breaking from his fugue-state, he slides his hand onto my wrist. Nothing said will hurt us—it will even if we fight like hell, reject the colonel’s verbatim account and create our own softer version of the truth. We will be hurt because we’re different now in so many inconsequential and catastrophic ways. We have been changed.

  “What about the dome? What’s its purpose?” I straighten my back to an unnatural angle and press Jack’s hand deep into my skin as if to keep the old version of us from slipping away.

  “Containment,” Colonel Buchanan says. “Before the virus was released, they constructed the dome to contain a portion of the human race. Like I said before, ignorance gives them power. They created the illusion of normal life so we’d keep civilization and production alive, remain calm and obedient. They need us to be their laborers because they don’t have a large enough population to sustain themselves yet.”

  I bite my bottom lip. If I ask more questions, maybe I won’t be scared, maybe I won’t want to crawl into a hole and suffocate. “Why didn’t people become suspicious when they couldn’t travel?”

  “Commercials that use the aliens’ power of persuasion are aired in every city. The propaganda brainwashes people into staying near their homes.”

  The Jones Family remained in their American Dream paradise, a home-sweet-home concocted from meatloaves and manicured lawns, pretty things and pretty words. Has anything in my life been real?

  Abram grunts. “Why is the dome shrinking?”

  “I’m guessing they don’t need all of us anymore,” the colonel says with a shrug. “Think of the dome as a balloon, all blown up to its full size. You release the air, it shrinks, and when you blow it up again, it grows larger than before. The aliens use the dome as a measuring tool. As their population and stability increase, the dome shrinks and we decrease. Our people disappear and no one notices or makes a fuss. And one day soon, the human race will be completely replaced with a species that looks, sounds, and acts like us. They’re parasites. They absorb into the culture they’re invading. Imagine a few years into the future. People are sitting at coffeehouses, going to work, waiting in traffic, having dinner with their families, except the people aren’t human. They’re aliens who stole the lives we created.”

  “These beings … what are they called? Where are they from?”

  “They don’t title themselves or talk about their origin. In their minds, they are just a new breed of human. Those who have unmixed ancestries refer to themselves as Purebloods, but they’re usually the ones with high-ranking positions and live within the City, their hub.” Colonel Buchanan spits a wad of mucus from his mouth. When he resumes speaking, his voice is less hostile. “This isn’t some tacky Sci-Fi film, Jack. Aliens aren’t little green Martians with big heads. They’re intelligent beings who make humans seem like runts in the universe’s litter. We’re inferior, and in a few years, we’ll all be gone … except you. You’ll survive because of the DNA your mom gave you.”

  “No, you’re lying!” Jack lurches from the floor. He wrenches his dad upward. “I’ve spent the last year of my life fighting against the Feds and now, you’re telling me I am one of them, that I’m some sort of half-blood alien freak.” His eyes flicker with an electric light, and his mouth twists into an ugly grimace. “You’ve beaten, ignored, and treated me like I’m worthless. Now, I know why. I was your dammit doll. You’d get mad at the Feds and instead of practicing self-control, you’d come home and abuse your alien son, let him take the punishment for his race.” A single tear drips from his chin and when it hits the tile, his pain becomes a bone-cracking ache in my chest.

  “You are not one of them.” I place my hands on his shoulders to reassure him that we’re not facing this chaos alone, linking our lives together instead of running parallel. “You’ve never been worthless.”

  “General Ford knew about you, Jack. I told him myself. How else would you have risen ranks so quickly? You were his secret weapon.” Colonel Buchanan puffs out his chest and grins in a degrading, self-impressed sort of way. “Remember. Everyone is a liar. We all do what’s in our best interest.”

  “What’s wrong with you? Are you incapable of showing decency?” I shout. “Jack is your son. He has your DNA, too. Be a man for once in your pathetic life and treat your kid with respect.” My eyelid twitches. Sweat springs from my pores and drenches my clothes in minutes.

  The truth was supposed to rescue us, act as leverage and save my parents. I thought life would be better after today, not worse. Not hanging by a fraying thread. Not begging to pluck the last love from my side. Until this moment, I’ve never wished to lose the thing I wanted most.

  Jack slides from my hands and then kicks the chair sideways. He leaves the kitchen, and a quiet voice within my thoughts says I’ll never get him back, at least, not all of him, not the coffeehouse stranger and my brother’s best friend, not the man who’d steal daffodils and write on my skin. He must know I still choose him. He must know I love him—I’ve shown it more than said it because love is deeper than three words.

  “From now on, the only person you’ll speak to is me.” I lean toward the colonel until our noses are inches apart. “You’ve hurt Jack enough and if he’s allowed to question you again, he will kill you. Everyone in the Vestige would love to put a bullet in your chest, including me … but I have decent self-control. You won’t die under my watch. That said, I offer you protection in return for information. Help me formulate a plan of attack, and I’ll keep you alive.”

  “You’re not a soldier. How can you insure I won’t be murdered in my sleep?”

  “I’ll keep you alive. You have my word.”

  “She’s a fighter,” Abram says. “She’ll keep you safe.”

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.” Colonel Buchanan glowers like an angry toddler. “The Feds, as you call them, won’t react kindly to your uprising. Their invasion has taken a lifetime to complete. You’ll have to sacrifice everything…”

  “I already have,” I say. “Almost everything.”

  ****

  Passing headlights illuminate the RV’s interior like strikes of lightning in a storm-fogged sky. Flash. Charlie tosses his broken radio onto the stained couch. Flash. Abram’s bald head glistens. Flash. Tally and Nash become spectral silhouettes in the front seats. They whisper, but their words carry less discretion and more gossip, more worry, more prejudice.

  I tilt my head over the lounge chair’s armrest—Colonel Buchanan lies on the floorboard, bound and gagged. He squirms and groans, squints his eyes into a poisonous stare. Levi lies next to him, which seems unfair because the dog doesn’t deserve to share the plot of linoleum with such a horrid man.

  “Do you think Jack’s all right?” Charlie stumbles across the walkway and squeezes his bony frame into the space next to me. “We shouldn’t have let him travel alone. It’s not safe.”

  “He needs time to think.” I lean my head against Charlie’s razor-sharp shoulder—the kid really needs to eat more food. “Right now, he’s confused and hurt … but he’ll be okay … eventually.”

  “Do you think it’s weird?”

  “What?”

  “That he’s an alien?” Charlie lifts my jacket from the floor and balls it into a pillow. He tucks it beneath my head to cushion the space between my skull and his shoulder.

  “Jack hasn’t changed.” Lie. Of course he’s changed. Of course the fact he’s half-alien is weird, but why would I choose not to love someone because their blood is different from mine?

  “Yeah, but he’s an alien. There are aliens on Earth.”

  “Crazy.” I blink as if wiping my
vision will somehow get rid of the spaceships and ray guns that keep popping up in my imagination. “Why should it matter, though? He’s not a Fed. He’s one of us.”

  “You know that. I know that. But does Jack know that?”

  “We have to make him know,” I say, “every day.”

  Charlie sighs and sinks into the chair. “I don’t understand how we missed seeing an alien invasion. We’ve been fantasizing about one for long enough. You’d think we would’ve been prepared.”

  “We don’t look for things we believe could never exist. We’re stupid like that, I guess. The world is always as we see it and nothing more.” I swallow the brick-size lump in my throat and swivel to face him. A familiar numbness pricks my mind, but I fight it for the first time. I fight to keep the hurt because it’s one of the few normal things I have left. “Sometimes life really sucks … but you just have to keep holding out for the moments that don’t suck.”

  “They’ll come around eventually.”

  Dawn is a faint glimmer on the horizon when we arrive at the old relocation destination—a foreclosed farmhouse on multiple acres of property with a working generator and well. The bank that owns the estate is trapped beyond the dome, probably reduced to a pile of looted rubble. No one has touched the three-bedroom, gently dilapidated home in a decade. It’s something forgotten in a place it should be remembered, something dead in a world created to look alive. Isn’t that who we are now, though—the forgotten ghosts in a gasping civilization?

  By noon, we’ve unpacked the RV and set up the Command Center. Everyone disperses throughout the property. I lock Colonel Buchanan in the cellar. Charlie builds an antenna and manages to get the television working. People huddle in the living room to watch a rerun of I Love Lucy, and I take a shower and change clothes.