I Am Number Four ll-1

by Pittacus Lore

  I lift my head. Henri steps forward and hugs me. I close my eyes and bury my face in his neck. He is still shaking, his body frail and weak beneath my grip. I’m sure mine is no stronger. So this is it, I think. With our heads held high we will walk across the field to whatever awaits there. At least there is dignity in that.

  “You did damn good,” he says.

  I open my eyes. From over his shoulder I see the soldiers are near, twenty feet away now. They have stopped walking. One of them is holding a dagger that pulsates silver and gray. The soldier tosses it in the air, catches it, and hurls it at Henri’s back. I lift my hand and deflect it away and it misses by a foot. My strength leaves me almost immediately even though the pebble is only half dissolved.

  Henri takes my free arm and drapes it over his shoulders and places his right arm around my waist. We stagger forward. The beast comes into view, looming just ahead in the center of the football field. The Mogadorians follow behind us. Perhaps they are curious to see the beast in action, to see the beast kill. Each step I take becomes more of an effort than the one that preceded it. My heart thuds in my chest. Death is forthcoming and of that I am terrified. But Henri is here. And so is Bernie Kosar. I’m happy not to have to face it alone. Several soldiers stand on the other side of the beast. Even if we could get past the beast, we would then have to walk straight into the soldiers, who stand with drawn swords.

  We have no choice. We reach the field and I expect the beast to pounce at any moment. But nothing happens. When we are within fifteen feet of it we stop. We stand leaning against each other for support.

  The beast is half the size of the other but still big enough to kill us all with no great effort of its own. Pale, almost translucent skin stretched over protruding ribs and knobby joints. Various pinkish scars down its arms and sides. White, sightless eyes. It shifts it weight and lowers itself, then swings its head low over the grass to smell what its eyes fail to see. It can sense us in front of it. It lets out a low groan. I feel none of the rage and malice that the other beasts radiated, no desire for blood and death. There is a sense of fear, a sense of sadness. I open myself to it. I see images of torture and starvation. I see the beast locked up for all its life here on Earth, a damp cave where little light reaches. Shivering through the night to stay warm, always cold and wet. I see the way the Mogadorians pit the beasts against one another, force them to fight in order to train, to toughen them and make them mean.

  Henri lets go of me. I can’t hold Bernie Kosar any longer. I gently place him in the grass at my feet. I haven’t felt him move in minutes and I can’t tell if he’s still alive. I take one step forward and drop to my knees. The soldiers yell around us. I don’t understand their language but I can tell by their tones that they are impatient. One swings his sword and a dagger just misses me, a flash of white that flutters and tears the front of my shirt. I stay on my knees and I look up at the beast hovering over me. Some weapon is fired but it sails over our heads. A warning shot, meant to move the beast to action. The beast quivers. A second dagger darts through the air and hits the beast below the elbow of its left arm. It lifts its head and roars in pain.

  I am sorry, I try to tell it. I am sorry for the life you’ve been forced to live. You’ve been wronged. No living creature deserves such treatment. You’ve been forced to endure hell, plucked from your own planet to fight a war that isn’t yours. Beaten and tortured and starved. The blame for all the pain and agony you’ve experienced lies with them. You and I share a common bond. Both wronged by these monsters.

  I try with everything to pass along my own images, the things that I’ve seen and felt. The beast doesn’t look away. My thoughts, on some level, are reaching it. I show it Lorien, the vast ocean and thick forests and verdant hills teeming with life and vitality. Animals drinking from the cold blue waters. A proud people content to pass the days in harmony. I show it the hell that followed, the slaying of men, women, and children. The Mogadorians. Cold-blooded murderers. Draconian killers destroying all that lies within their path due to their own recklessness and pathetic beliefs. Destroying even their own planet. Where does it end? I show it Sarah, show it every emotion that I’ve ever felt with her. Happiness and bliss, this is how I feel with her. And this is the pain I feel in having to leave her, all because of them. Help me, I say. Help me end this death and slaughter. Let us fight together. I have so little left but if you stand with me, I’ll stand with you.

  The beast lifts its head to the sky and it roars. A roar both long and deep. The Mogadorians can sense what is happening and have seen enough. Their weapons begin firing. I look over and one of the cannons is aimed right at me. It fires and the white death surges forth, but the beast drops its head in time and absorbs the shot instead. Its face twists in pain, its eyes squeeze tightly shut, but almost immediately they snap back open. This time I see the rage.

  I fall face-first in the grass. I’m grazed by something but I don’t see what it is. Henri cries out in pain behind me and he is flung thirty feet away, his body lying in the mud, face up, smoking. I have no idea what has hit him. Something big and deadly. Panic and fear hit me. Not Henri, I think. Please not Henri.

  The beast throws a hard sweeping blow that takes out several of the soldiers and quiets many of their guns. Another roar. I look up and see the beast’s eyes have turned red, ablaze with fury. Retribution. Mutiny. It looks my way once and swiftly rushes off to follow its captors. Guns blaze but many of them are quick to be silenced. Kill them all, I think. Fight nobly and honorably and may you kill them all.

  I lift my head. Bernie Kosar is motionless in the grass. Henri, thirty feet away, is motionless as well. I place a hand in the grass and pull myself forward, across the field, inch by inch, dragging myself to Henri. When I get there his eyes are open slightly; each breath is a fight. Trails of blood run from his mouth and nose. I take him into my arms and I pull him into my lap. His body is frail and weak and I can feel him dying. His eyes flutter open. He looks at me and lifts his hand and presses it to the side of my face. The second he does I begin to cry.

  “I’m here,” I say.

  He tries to smile.

  “I’m so sorry, Henri.” I say. “I’m so sorry. We should have left when you wanted to.”

  “Shh,” he says. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say between sobs.

  “You did great,” he says in a whisper. “You did so great. I always knew you would.”

  “We have to get you to the school,” I say. “Sam could be there.”

  “Listen to me, John. Everything,” he says. “Everything you need to know, it’s all in the Chest. The letter.”

  “It’s not over. We can still make it.”

  I can feel him begin to go. I shake him. His eyes reluctantly reopen. A trail of blood runs from his mouth.

  “Coming here, to Paradise, it wasn’t by chance.” I don’t know what he means. “Read the letter.”

  “Henri,” I say, and reach down and wipe the blood off his chin.

  He looks me in the eye.

  “You are Lorien’s Legacy, John. You and the others. The only hope the planet has left. The secrets,” he says, and is gripped by a fit of coughs. More blood. His eyes close again. “The Chest, John.”

  I pull him more tightly to me, squeezing him. His body is going slack. Breaths so shallow that they are hardly breaths at all.

  “We’ll make it back together, Henri. Me and you, I promise,” I say, and close my eyes.

  “Be strong,” he says, and is overtaken by slight coughs, though he tries to speak through them. “This war…Can win…Find the others…. Six…. The power of…,” he says, and trails off.

  I try to stand with him in my arms but I have nothing left, hardly enough strength to even breathe. Off in the distance I hear the beast roar. Cannons are still being fired, the sounds and lights of which reach out over the stadium bleachers, but as each minute passes less and less of them are being fired until there is only one. I
lower Henri in my arms. I place my hand to the side of his face and he opens his eyes and looks at me for what I know will be the final time. He takes a weak breath and exhales and then slowly closes his eyes.

  “I wouldn’t have missed a second of it, kiddo. Not for all of Lorien. Not for the whole damn world,” he says, and when that last word leaves his mouth I know that he is gone. I squeeze him in my arms, shaking, crying, despair and hopelessness taking hold. His hand drops lifelessly to the grass. I cup his head in my hand and hold it close to my chest, and I rock him back and forth and I cry like I’ve never cried before. The pendant around my neck glows blue, grows heavy for just a split second, and then dims to normal.

  I sit in the grass and I hold Henri while the last cannon falls silent. The pain leaves my own body and with the cold of the night I feel my own self begin to fade. The moon and the stars shine overhead. I hear a cackle of laughter carried on the wind. My ears attune to it. I turn my head. Through the dizziness and blurry vision I see a scout fifteen feet away from me. Long trench coat, hat pulled to its eyes. It drops the coat and takes off the hat to reveal a pale and hairless head. It reaches to the back of its belt and removes a bowie knife, the blade of which is no less than twelve inches long. I close my eyes. I don’t care anymore. The scout’s raspy breathing comes my way, ten feet, then five. And then the footsteps end. The scout grunts in pain, and begins gurgling.

  I open my eyes, the scout so close that I can smell it. The bowie knife falls from its hand, and there in its chest, where I assume its heart must be, is the end of a butcher’s knife. The knife is pulled free. The scout drops to its knees, falls to its side, and explodes into a puff of ash. Behind it, holding the knife in her shaky right hand, with tears in her eyes, stands Sarah. She drops the knife and rushes over to me, wrapping her arms around me with my arms around Henri. I hold Henri as my own head falls and the world dims away into nothingness. The aftermath of war, the school destroyed, the trees fallen and heaps of ash piled in the grass of the football field and I still hold Henri. And Sarah holds me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  IMAGES FLICKER, EACH ONE BRINGING ITS own sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst an impenetrable and sightless black and at best a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.

  A warm summer day in the cool grass with the sun high in the cloudless sky. The air coming off the water, carrying the freshness of the sea. A man walks up to the house, briefcase in hand. A younger man, brown hair cut short, freshly shaven, dressed casually. A sense of nervousness by the way he switches his briefcase from one hand to the other and the thin layer of sweat glistening on his forehead. He knocks at the door. My grandfather answers, opens the door for the man to enter, then closes it behind him. I resume my romping in the yard. Hadley changing forms, flying, then dodging, then charging. Wrestling with one another and laughing until it hurts. The day passing as time only can under the reckless abandon of childhood’s invincibility, of its innocence.

  Fifteen minutes pass. Maybe less. At that age a day can last forever. The door opens and closes. I look up. My grandfather is standing with the man I had seen approach, both of them looking down at me.

  “There is somebody I would like you to meet,” he says.

  I stand from the grass and clap my hands together to knock away the dirt.

  “This is Brandon,” my grandfather says. “He is your Cêpan. Do you know what that means?”

  I shake my head. Brandon. That was his name. All these years and only now does it come back to me.

  “It means he’s going to be spending a lot of time with you from here on out. The two of you, it means you are connected. You are bound to one another. Do you understand?”

  I nod and walk to the man and I offer him my hand as I have seen done many times by grown men before. The man smiles and drops to one knee. He takes my small hand in his right and he closes his fingers around it.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” I say.

  Bright, kind eyes full of life look into mine as though offering a promise, a bond, yet I’m too young to know what that promise or bond really means.

  He nods and brings his left hand on top of his right, my tiny hand lost somewhere in the middle. He nods at me, still smiling.

  “My dear child,” he says. “The pleasure is all mine.”

  I am jolted awake. I lie on my back, my heart racing, breathing heavily as though I had been running. My eyes stay closed but I can tell the sun has just risen by the long shadows and the crispness of air in the room. Pain returns, my limbs still heavy. With the pain comes another pain, a pain far greater than any physical ailment I could ever be afflicted with: the memory of the hours before.

  I take a deep breath and exhale. A single tear rolls down the side of my face. I keep my eyes closed. An irrational hope that if I don’t find the day then the day won’t find me, that the things in the night will be nullified. My body shudders, a silent cry turning into a hard one. I shake my head and let it in. I know that Henri is dead and that all the hope in the world won’t change it.

  I feel movement beside me. I tense myself, try to remain motionless so as not to be detected. A hand reaches up and touches the side of my face. A delicate touch done with love. My eyes come open, adjusting to the postdawn light until the ceiling of a foreign room comes into focus. I have no idea where I am, nor how I could have gotten here. Sarah is sitting next to me. She brings her hand to the side of my face and traces my brow with her thumb. She leans down and kisses me, a soft lingering kiss that I wish I could bottle and save for all time. She pulls away and I take a deep breath and close my eyes and kiss her on the forehead.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “A hotel thirty miles from Paradise.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “Sam drove us,” she says.

  “I mean from the school. What happened? I remember that you were with me last night, but I don’t remember a thing after,” I say. “It almost seems like a dream.”

  “I waited on the field with you until Mark arrived and he carried you to Sam’s truck. I couldn’t stay hidden any longer. Being in the school without knowing what was happening out there was killing me. And I felt like I could help somehow.”

  “You certainly helped,” I say. “You saved my life.”

  “I killed an alien,” she says, as though the fact still hasn’t settled in.

  She wraps her arms around me, her hand resting on the back of my head. I try to sit up. I make it halfway on my own and then Sarah helps me the rest of the way, pushing on my back but being careful not to touch the wound left by the knife. I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and reach down and feel the scars around my ankle, counting them with the tips of my fingers. Still only three, and in this way I know that Six has survived. I had already accepted the fate of the rest of my days being spent alone, an itinerant wanderer with no place to go. But I won’t be alone. Six is still here, still with me, my tie to a past world.

  “Is Six okay?”

  “Yes,” she says. “She’s been stabbed and shot but she seems to be doing okay now. I don’t think she would have survived had Sam not carried her to the truck.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In the room next door, with Sam and Mark.”

  I stand. My muscles and joints ache in protest, everything stiff and sore. I am wearing a clean T-shirt, a pair of mesh shorts. My skin is fresh with the smell of soap. The cuts have been cleaned and bandaged, a few of them stitched.

  “Did you do all of this?” I ask.

  “Most of it. The stitches were hard. We only had the ones Henri put in your head to go on as an example. Sam helped with them.”

  I look at Sarah sitt
ing on the bed, her legs pulled underneath her. Something else catches my eye, a small mass that has shifted beneath the blanket at the foot of the bed. I tense, and immediately my mind returns to the weasels that sped across the gym. Sarah sees what I am looking at and smiles. She crawls to the bottom of the bed on her hands and knees.

  “There’s somebody here who wants to say hello,” she says, then takes the corner of the blanket and gently peels it back to reveal Bernie Kosar, sleeping away. A metal splint goes the length of his front leg, and his body is covered with cuts and gashes that, like mine, have been cleaned and are already beginning to heal. His eyes slowly open and adjust, eyes rimmed with red, full of exhaustion. He keeps his head on the bed but his tail gives a subtle wag, softly thumping against the mattress.

  “Bernie,” I say, and drop to my knees before him. I place my hand softly on his head. I can’t stop smiling and tears of joy surface. His small body is curled into a ball, head resting on his front paws, his eyes taking me in, battle scarred and wounded but still here to tell the tale.

  “Bernie Kosar, you made it through. I owe my life to you,” I say, and kiss the top of his head.

  Sarah runs her hand down the length of his back.

  “I carried him to the truck while Mark carried you.”

  “Mark. I’m sorry I ever doubted him,” I say.

  She lifts one of Bernie Kosar’s ears. He turns and sniffs at her hand and then licks it. “So, is it true what Mark said, that Bernie Kosar grew to thirty feet tall and killed a beast almost double his size?”

  I smile. “A beast triple his size.”

  Bernie Kosar looks at me. Liar, he says. I look down and wink at him. I stand back up and look at Sarah.

  “All of this,” I say. “All of this has happened so fast. How are you handling it?”

  She nods. “Handling what? The fact that I’ve fallen in love with an alien, which I only found out about three days ago, and then just happened to walk headlong into the middle of a war? Yeah, I’m handling that okay.”