by Rob Vlock
Her eyes shone with tears and she turned away.
“Wait, so you’re from—”
“Chernobyl,” she said still facing away from me. “This war I’m talking about? It’s been dragging on for years in Ukraine between Synthetics and a settlement of human holdouts who didn’t acknowledge the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. That’s where I’m from. I was born there. We were the only ones who knew of the Ticks’ existence. But we couldn’t say anything to the government. We were scared they’d evict us from our homes. Or arrest us. Or . . . worse. So we fought the Ticks alone. Until . . .”
“Until what?” I asked.
She turned toward me, her mouth twisted into a pained grimace, tears streaming from her eyes. “All my people are gone. The Ticks wiped them out. And if the Ticks have their way, they’ll do the same with the rest of the human population of Earth. They’re already spreading, infiltrating cities, preparing for . . . something. I don’t know what. But I’m the only one left who can stop them.”
“So that’s why you killed Will? He was—”
“It, not he,” she hissed. “Will wasn’t human. Look.” She pointed to Will’s body. “You see that?”
I forced myself to look at the figure laid out in the grass. His T-shirt had been torn in the struggle, and some sort of birthmark peeked out from behind the fabric. A red . “Yeah, it’s a birthmark. So what?”
“It’s not a birthmark, Sven. It’s how Ticks designate different generations. This is a Xi model. An advanced one. Can’t totally pass for human, but pretty close.”
I shook my head. Something about what I saw was wrong. Something didn’t fit. But what? Then it clicked. “Will didn’t have a birthmark on his chest.”
“What do you mean? You can see he did. It’s right there,” Alicia insisted.
I shrugged. “He didn’t. His parents have a pool. I’ve gone swimming with him about a million times. I never saw that birthmark before.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” I told her.
Her lips pressed into a thin, pale line. “Has he been acting, I don’t know . . . different lately?”
“Actually, yeah.” I nodded. “For one thing, he’s never been in a fight before. And he was just acting kind of weird today. I mean, he was always weird, but then he stopped acting weird. Which, for him, was definitely weird. He wasn’t doing the sorts of things he normally did. You know, touching things. He had these little rituals. Stuff like that.”
“Wait a minute. These changes only just happened? Then they must have replaced the real Will.” She rubbed the back of her neck anxiously. “So that’s not the only one. There have to be others who made the switch,” she said quietly, with a hint of fear.
“Hold on, this Will is a fake?” I asked, a faint spark of hope flickering within my chest. “That means the real Will might still be alive, right?”
“Maybe,” she replied grimly. “But it also means the rest of us might be dead.”
• • •
Mom brought home a mushroom-and-onion pizza from Union Pizza House that night—my favorite. I ate three slices but didn’t taste a bite of it.
I was too preoccupied trying to make sense of everything that had happened.
I didn’t know what to believe anymore. A week ago, if someone told me we were in the middle of a war with some kind of artificial life-form, I would have grouped them in with the Bigfoot hunters and alien watchers and all those other conspiracy theorists. But with all the inexplicable things going on recently, who knew what was real anymore?
But what really consumed my thoughts was Will. Where was the real Will?
I bolted the rest of my dinner and mumbled good night to my parents through a mouthful of half-chewed pizza, then rushed to my room. I tried to call Will’s house but kept getting sent right through to voice mail.
So I sat down in front of my desk and flipped open my laptop. I typed “Chernobyl robot war” into Google and scanned the search results. Mostly, they were just old news articles and Wikipedia entries on the nuclear reactor meltdown. Nothing useful.
But when I clicked on images, my legs went cold with fear. About halfway down the page, my eyes locked onto a dark, grainy black-and-white photograph that looked . . . familiar. It was a shot of a man holding up a metallic box attached to a thick cable. It looked just like Fake Will’s central processor.
I swallowed down the lump in my throat and clicked through to the page the photo was from. It was a short article from an old newspaper called Chernihiv Gazeta.
The headline read: Сумасшедший Говорит Роботы Живут Среди Нас.
Great. It was in Russian. I copied part of the text from the article and pasted it into an online translator.
Crazy Says Robots Live Among Us.
Ivan Babikov, a resident of Chernobyl, said he found a dangerous race of the robots, which, he argues, escape a secret science lab. When hunting small game, he said, Babikov accidentally shot what he thought that it was a man. But when he examined the body, he found that it’s part mechanical. Authorities transferred him to the Voronstova Siberian Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he will remain until such time as he is determined not to be a threat to society. This is the eighth separate instance of the report of the robots that the Chernihiv Gazette has received this year.
No! I thought, trying to keep from hyperventilating as the meaning of what I read sank in. How can this be?
With trembling fingers, I clicked on the link in the article. Seven more articles from Chernihiv Gazeta loaded. I translated them all, one by one. The translations were awful, but they all told the same story. People were finding cyborgs in the woods around Chernobyl. And in each case, those people were sent to the Voronstova Siberian Hospital for the Criminally Insane as soon as they notified the authorities.
It was true! As much as I didn’t want to believe it, Alicia was right!
I got up from my desk in a stupefied trance, kicked off my sneakers, and mindlessly licked their soles, swallowing down the fine grit that coated my tongue. Then I slid into bed. I lay there between the sheets, trying to convince myself that when I woke up in the morning, everything would be normal again. I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, but I still couldn’t sleep because of the worries ricocheting around in my head.
Eventually, my eyelids closed and I fell into a restless sleep punctuated by dreams of faceless humanoid robots beating me with my own severed arm.
CHAPTER 15.0:
< value= [It’s Not My Underwear] >
I WALKED TO SCHOOL THE next morning in a paranoid haze, viewing everyone I saw with suspicion. Alicia said there were other Ticks already here who’d taken the real Will and replaced him with one of their own. Which meant they could be anywhere. Anyone. Old Mrs. McKenzie from down the street tottered by, walking Hambone, her blind Boston terrier. Could she be one of them? Could Hambone? Or there! That police officer. Did he just beep? Or was it his walkie-talkie?
I tried to shake the thoughts from my head. They were just people. Right?
“Caw caw cuhkaw!” squawked a crow that had landed on the telephone wire above me. “Caw!”
Another one fluttered down next to it.
“Caw caw thircaw,” it croaked. “Thirteen! ”
What? That crow hadn’t really just spoken, had it?
I stared up at it. It stared down at me.
“Thirteen! ” it shrieked. “Caw! Soak us slappy!”
The patch of sky above me darkened in a flurry of beating wings as twenty more crows landed on the wire. It sagged under their weight. The air was filled with the shrill calls of the birds.
“Caw! Soak us slappy! Soak us slappy! Thirteen! Caw! Caw! Cuhcaw! Soak us slappy!”
Ice-cold dread chilled my veins. What was with these birds?
I sprinted to the corner and headed right, trying to put as much distance between myself and the crows as possible. Pain stabbed at my ankle as I stepped into a pot
hole and my foot rolled over. I crashed down hard and skidded to a stop, the asphalt etching a road rash into the palm of my left hand.
A fluttering sound in front of me prompted me to open one smarting eye. A crow had landed on the pavement inches from my face. On its head, a bouquet of bright white feathers stuck up like the bristles of a brush.
It stared at me with unblinking eyes. And then . . .
“H-h-happy birthday to you! ” it screeched. “Happy birthday to you! H-h-happy birthday, dear Sven! Happy birthday to you! Thirteen! Soak us slappy! Soak us slappy! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
I had no idea what was happening. And I didn’t want to wait around to find out. I struggled to my feet and took off toward school, limping as fast as I could, the creepy bird still laughing behind me.
• • •
As soon as I got to school and pushed my way through the double glass doors, I started hearing snickers coming from pretty much everywhere. But with all the crazy thoughts of killer cyborgs and fake best friends jostling for space inside my head, I couldn’t wrap my mind around what was supposed to be so funny.
That all changed once I reached my locker.
There, taped to my locker door, hung a piece of paper.
It took me a second to understand what I was looking at. But when I did, a block of lead formed in my stomach and the skin on the back of my neck prickled with embarrassment.
Someone had taped a picture of me with my pants around my ankles standing in front of a big group of girls wearing a pair of too-tight pink underwear emblazoned with the word TRASHMOUTH. Only it wasn’t really me, of course. Whoever had hung the picture up had obviously Photoshopped my head onto someone else’s pantsless body.
I quickly tore down the paper, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it into my locker. I sighed with relief. Maybe no one else had seen it, I thought, slamming my locker door shut.
But that was when I noticed that every locker, as far as I could see all the way down the hall, had its own copy of the image. Hundreds of lockers. Hundreds of copies of the forged picture.
It didn’t take a genius to guess who was behind it all—Brandon Marks.
“We need to talk,” hissed a voice in my ear.
I turned to see Alicia standing beside me.
And just when I thought I couldn’t be any more mortified, I felt my face flush and burn with even more embarrassment.
But if she found the fake pictures of me funny, she didn’t show it. Her face was serious. A hard light glinted in her eyes.
“L-l-listen,” I spluttered. “These pictures aren’t really me. They’re fake. This never happened!”
“Well, I can fix that!” Brandon said behind me.
Instantly, my pants were yanked down to the floor.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Brandon bellowed, his mouth twisting into a cruel, crooked-toothed smile, “I give you Trashmouth Carter in all his glory! Let’s give him a big round of applause, folks!”
As I stood there, wishing I could disappear from the face of the Earth altogether, the hundreds of kids who crowded the hallway before homeroom began to clap and whistle and laugh along with the bully. In a second, I was ringed in by the jeering faces of half the school.
I’m pretty sure nobody in the history of the world ever felt as bad as I did at that moment.
Alicia turned to Brandon. “Give us some space,” she said in an icy voice.
“But the show ain’t over yet.” Brandon guffawed.
She flashed him a look that made the laughter die in his throat. A glare that radiated a dangerous, almost tangible threat. “I said get lost.”
“Uh, well, whatever,” Brandon replied uncertainly. “Later, loser.” He sneered at me and dissolved into the crowd.
Within seconds, the rest of the kids took Brandon’s lead and their laughter faded into silence. Soon, Alicia and I stood alone in the hallway.
I quickly pulled up my pants. “I—I—I . . . I’m—I’m . . .” I couldn’t make any coherent words come out of my mouth.
For a moment, the hardness in Alicia’s eyes seemed to soften. “Kids can be jerks,” she said quietly.
Then, in an instant, her gaze was cold and steely again. “We need to talk,” she repeated. Grabbing my wrist, she led me through the empty cafeteria and outside to the courtyard. It was completely deserted. Everyone would be settling into their seats for homeroom by now.
She dragged me over to where Will’s Synthetic copy had exploded the day before. Other than a little patch of trampled grass, there was no sign that anything unusual had happened.
“What’s going on?” I asked as she stared at me in silence. She seemed jumpy and kept shifting her weight from foot to foot.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” she told me.
I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. “Um, okay. Actually, I didn’t sleep well either. Bad dreams.”
She took a step closer to me. “You want to know why I couldn’t sleep?”
“I guess. If you want to tell me.” I had a bad feeling that I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Something was really bugging me. I just couldn’t stop thinking about what was on that memory card yesterday. What was so important that your Tick friend wanted to kill me over it? So I came back here last night with a flashlight and spent some time searching. It took a while, but I found it.” She held up the memory card from Will’s broken phone. “Know what’s on here?”
My eyes widened. “Nothing. Just me wiping out on my bike. It’s private. I can take that back.” I snatched the card from her hand and started to walk away.
“You’re one of them,” she said quietly.
I froze.
“Turn around!”
I turned to face her.
She pointed the Tick popper right at my head. My knees gave out under me.
I looked up at Alicia from the grass. “What are you—”
“Shut up!” she barked, holding the weapon inches from my face. “I knew something wasn’t right about you and that magnet in science class Tuesday. Now I have proof!”
I opened my mouth to say something, but no sound came out. I was too terrified to speak.
She yanked the sleeve of my T-shirt up, exposing my shoulder.
“You’re a Tick!” she snarled.
“What are you talking about? I’m a kid,” I pleaded, finding my voice. “I’m just a regular kid.”
“Oh, yeah?” she sneered. “A regular kid, huh? Your arm came off and now you don’t even have a scar. How do you explain that?”
“I . . . I can’t explain it.”
Alicia glared at me. “Well, I can. It was your emergency repair system kicking in. Which you have because you’re a Tick!”
“Emergency repair system? I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Now stop pretending you’re too dumb to understand me,” she barked. “It’s something all Ticks have to keep them from going into system failure when they’re damaged. It’s what healed your arm.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense.” I held out my left hand. The road rash from my earlier fall was raw and oozing. “Look! This didn’t heal. How could I have this if I was a Tick? It’s bleeding. It didn’t get repaired by some emergency-whatever-you-called-it.”
“That’s because it only happens when you get messed up bad. Like losing an arm. A little boo-boo like that isn’t bad enough to trigger it. Don’t try to deny it. You and I both know you’re just a filthy Tick!”
Could she be right? Was I a Tick? Memories of the incredibly bizarre events that had taken place over the last few days paraded through my mind—my arm coming off, my best friend being replaced, the talking crows, the electromagnet.
The truth of what she was saying detonated in my brain like a bomb, shattering any possibility of rational argument. Everything I thought I knew about myself was wrong. I wasn’t a real person at all.
Yet the terror welling up from my stomach and my shallow, raspy breathing felt all t
oo real. How could I be a Tick? How could this be happening to me?
I had no answers. But I had to say something or Alicia was going to kill me right then and there.
“Wait! I can explain,” I cried in desperation. “It was all just—”
“I don’t want your explanations,” she growled, staring down at me coldly as she pressed the Tick popper to my forehead. “I want your head.”
CHAPTER 16.0:
< value= [I Want My Mommy] >
OKAY, I TOLD MYSELF. OKAY. Be cool. If you have to go out, at least go out with dignity. No sniveling. No begging. Just be like James Bond or Superman. Dignity, Sven. Dignity.
And that’s when I started to cry. Or, to be more specific, I melted down into a pathetic puddle of tears, wails, and hysterical, high-pitched sobbing.
“I—I—I—I—” I stuttered. “I—I . . . Please don’t kill me! Please! I’m not a bad kid! Please! I’m begging you, please! I want to go home!”
Through a blurry film of tears, I saw Alicia lower the gun just a bit.
“Stop that,” she demanded. “Jeez, will you stop crying?”
“Okay,” I bleated between snot-drenched eruptions.
“That’s not stopping,” she said. “That’s crying more. And it’s not going to help you. You’re just like your friend I deactivated yesterday. You’d kill me the second you had the chance.”
“That’s—that’s not true.”
“Yeah, right,” she snarled.
“You . . . you’d be dead,” I said through my sobs.
“What?” she barked. “What are you talking about?”
“H-h-he was going to kill you. I saved your life. Why would I do that if I wanted to kill you?”