Annex

by Rich Larson

  He was still charged with excitement as he rolled his bike inside and saw the other Lost Boys back from foraging. It faltered a little when they shot him funny looks.

  “There’s othermothers all over the downtown,” Bree said, sounding faintly accusing. “And they’re all yours. Alberto almost got nabbed by the 7-Eleven.”

  The last part was directed more toward Wyatt, who was leaning his bike up against the water-stained wall.

  “I didn’t, though,” piped up a younger boy, grinning broadly as he stacked cans on one of the cobbled-together shelves. “I didn’t get nabbed. I went in its blind spot.”

  Wyatt gave a permissive smile, then his face turned serious. “There’s going to be a lot of othermothers out hunting Bo,” he said. “Because Bo’s got something special. Bree, go get Jon for me.”

  Bo couldn’t help but grin.

  The warm proud feeling in his chest stayed there all day, and Violet must have told someone about the disappearing, because when they ate dinner together everyone sidled up to ask about it.

  “I can do it too,” said the green-eyed girl, Gilly. She was the youngest, barely eight, and she never stopped moving, usually around Bree like a satellite. She chewed the skin between her thumb and forefinger. “Violet’s the best at it, but mine’s active too. Like hers and Q and Jenna’s.”

  “You can’t shift anything bigger than a pop can,” Bree snorted, giving the smaller girl a not-unfriendly shove. “And it comes back. When he did the mother, it didn’t come back.”

  Gilly’s eyes went wide, and when Bo came back with seconds—after the warehouse, even food from cans tasted delicious—she had wormed her way in to sit by him. As the evening went on, Bo matched names to everyone else.

  Second youngest to Gilly were the two boys who’d escaped with her when their group’s whirlybird malfunctioned, named Saif and Alberto. Saif was quiet, dark-eyed, brown-skinned. He said he was nine and a half.

  Alberto was louder, cute the way kids in advertisements are cute, all ruddy cheeks and wavy hair. He was always grinning a slightly confused grin, and said he was nine and three quarters but didn’t know his months very well. There was a battered soccer ball glued to his foot, even at the table, and the only time Bo saw his grin falter was when someone pointed out that all his favorite players probably had clamps in their heads now.

  The two boys had gone to the same elementary, according to Gilly, but had never spoken except for when Alberto teased Saif about his gappy teeth. Now both of them grudgingly admitted to being best friends.

  Jenna and Quentin were eleven and twelve, both tall for their ages and pale-skinned. Bo could tell without asking that they were sister and brother, and it made his throat ache. They seemed to keep mostly to themselves, sometimes smirking to each other in a secretive way that Bree mocked whenever she could.

  Bree was twelve but seemed older with her close-cropped brown hair and acne marks on her cheeks. She talked older too. She’d been in a foster place before the ship came down, and said she beat the shit out of a whirlybird with her bare hands when she escaped.

  That made Elliot snort into his food, though he didn’t argue. Elliot was thirteen, but small, especially next to Jon, who was fifteen and big. Jon’s facial features reminded Bo of the family that ran the Nepalese restaurant near his family’s old apartment.

  Wyatt had been the first out of the warehouses, everyone agreed on that, and Quentin and Jenna had been there from nearly the beginning too. After that the order was muddled. Some kids didn’t like to talk about the warehouses at all, acting like they’d always been on the outside, always been Lost Boys.

  Others had spent a long time on their own, hiding in basements or attics, before they finally ventured out and Wyatt found them. Bo could sense that some of the kids were not quite right, in that they would stop speaking suddenly and not start again, or twitch at any unexpected sound, shy off from touch. But Bo knew he wasn’t the same as he was before the warehouses either.

  And maybe that was why they seemed to take him in so easily. There was something deeper inside the theater than being in the same class or on the same team or even good friends. There was a kind of respect that each of them had earned from the others. Everyone had gotten out of the warehouses, and even if some of them had been more lucky than brave or smart, they’d all done the other thing too. They’d all killed the othermother. They all had guts, from wide-eyed Gilly to twitchy Elliot.

  Maybe more guts than Bo had—the thought gnawed at him again. He hadn’t had to feel the bone, or whatever was inside the othermother’s rubbery body, give way under the rock. He’d done it clean, and maybe easy.

  He wondered what Lia would have done. Lia was tough. She’d gotten into five fights, which was two and a half more than Bo. But up on the parkade hadn’t been like a fight. It had been more like when he was little, back in Niamey, and Lia had found him and the neighbor boy crouched in the sand jabbing at an injured grasshopper with twigs.

  That’s not funny, Bo, she’d said, with a catch in her voice. What if some big bug did that to you?

  He’d stomped on it then, feeling ashamed, even though he knew there were no bugs big enough to do that to him. He figured Lia would have used the rock on the othermother, but only to put it out of its misery.

  Later on, when the sky outside was dark and Bo was playing cards with Quentin and Bree and the younger kids, Wyatt came over to the circle. He’d been speaking with Jon and Violet again, all three of them off in the corner.

  “Come up on the roof, Bo,” he said. “Show you something.”

  Gilly and Alberto and Saif all watched with wide-eyed awe as Bo got to his feet. Even Quentin had something like envy on his thin lips. Bree just swiped his cards up and shuffled them back into the stack. Bo looked over on instinct to where Violet was sitting, but she only gave him a distracted nod. Her face seemed a bit pale.

  Just him and Wyatt, then. He couldn’t help but feel another swell of pride.

  He followed the older boy up through a cramped back stairwell that had a sticky-looking puddle of what looked like orange Fanta in the corner. He took a long step to clear it and his hamstring ached a good ache, the kind he hadn’t had in a long time, from the running away and then the bike ride to the end of the world. Wyatt pushed through a rusty metal door with a broken lock and they were outside. There was only a small wedge of flat roof, with an electrical box and a metal pipe Bo thought must be some kind of chimney, or air intake, or something. The surface was pebbly under his new shoes’ treads.

  Above them, filling up a whole corner of the dark sky, was the huge jagged shape of the alien ship. Sometimes it looked so big Bo thought it was the size of the city itself, a reflection floating up there in the gloom.

  “It opens up every night at 10:17,” Wyatt said. He pulled a silvery watch out of his pocket and peered at it. “Got a few minutes.”

  Bo stared up at the dark ship. He imagined vanishing it, balling up the static inside his Parasite until his whole body was trembling, then letting it tear up into the sky like a tsunami. But the ship was far away, and the ship was big. Too big. He knew the Parasite had limits, the way he knew his own arms and legs had limits.

  “You think we’ve seen them yet, Bo?” Wyatt asked.

  “Seen what?” Bo said.

  “The aliens,” Wyatt said, waving an arm upward. “The actual aliens. Think about it. What were the whirlybirds like, back at the warehouse? Were they smart?”

  “No,” Bo said. He paused. “They’d run into each other, sometimes. Sometimes get caught on things. Glitches, we said.”

  “And what about the othermothers?” Wyatt asked. “How are they?”

  “Stupid,” Bo said.

  “Stupid as shit,” Wyatt agreed. “They don’t really talk. They repeat. They repeat things they know we’ve heard.” He narrowed his eyes. “I think they scanned our brains when we were sleeping, right? They pulled out our dreams. That’s how they know what the mothers should look like, what t
hey should say. Or at least, they think they know.”

  “They’re just drones,” Bo said. “The othermothers and the whirlybirds. They’re all drones.”

  It wasn’t a new thought. Some of the Lost Boys had talked about it over dinner, said that either the flesh-and-mech machines were being piloted by someone up in the ship or else had crude AI of their own. Elliot used to build his own camera drones, back before the invasion. He seemed to know what he was talking about.

  “Yeah,” Wyatt said. “They don’t even see each other. They’re like wasters.”

  He pointed up to the ship. On cue, the harsh black surface started to peel open, exposing luminous yellow conduits that looped and crisscrossed each other. The whale-things that circled the warehouses started to ascend, drawn to it like moths.

  “The pods, though,” Wyatt said, peering up at them. “They’re different, right? Listen. They speak to each other.”

  Bo listened. As the pods drifted into the light, there were bursts of a mournful droning noise that reminded him of bagpipes. He’d heard it some nights in the warehouses but had never known what it was. He observed as one pod would make a noise, and then a different pod, and then the first again. Wyatt was right. They were speaking.

  “You think the real aliens are inside them?” Bo asked, watching the hulking shapes cluster around the light, silhouetted. The droning sound put his teeth on edge.

  “No,” Wyatt said. “I think those are their bodies. Machine and meat all mixed up, same way the othermothers and the whirlybirds are. But I know the pods are smart, Bo. If they weren’t, why would they get close to each other to talk?”

  Bo remembered the pod that had chased him through the alley, up to the wormy wall. He remembered how it had stopped and hovered when he tore through to the other side, seeming so surprised, and how it waited only a second before it pumped out what he knew now had been his first othermother. The pod had already known who he was when it was chasing him.

  “We haven’t been sitting on our asses out here,” Wyatt said. “We’ve been learning. You should always know your enemy, Bo, so you know how to hurt them better. We can’t just keep fucking with their tools.” Wyatt’s voice was calm, matter-of-fact. “We have to catch a pod. That’s what I’ve been working toward.”

  “How?” Bo asked, remembering what Violet had said. Wyatt would have a plan. He always had one.

  “We’re going to set a trap,” Wyatt said. “And now we have the perfect bait for it. That’s you, Bo. They want you back. They pumped out a dozen new mothers today just to look for you.”

  Bo stared up at the pods, watching their small fins shutter up and down, watching how they brushed up against each other. He’d been hating the aliens so much without really knowing what to hate. Fantasizing about smashing whirlybirds back in the warehouse. Getting that sick kind of rage when he remembered the ugly parody of his mom stalking around on its metal insect legs.

  Now he knew what to hate, and it was the thing that had taken him and Lia away from their blazing house in the first place. Sometimes he still dreamed about being inside the pod, the smell of smoke cut away suddenly by ammonia, feeling the suffocating grit and slime pressing at his mouth, his nose. He always woke up grasping for his sister’s slippery hand.

  “Are we going to kill it when we catch it?” Bo asked before he could stop himself.

  Wyatt’s movie-star grin gleamed in the dark. “When we’re done with it, yeah.”

  About a block away from the pharmacy, Violet ducked over an iron-grilled trash can and threw up. Nobody put bags in them anymore, so the splatter came out the bottom and caught her shoes, steaming a bit in the cold morning air. Violet grimaced, holding onto the rim as the nausea hit again. Her Parasite flexed, her ribs heaved, and she got only drool.

  She’d known starting out that self-medication had its risks, but up until now everything had gone smoothly. She’d been careful. After a year of trawling forums she had all the brands and dosages cemented in her head, and she’d always had a knack for chemistry besides. It was the one class she’d liked at school. Seeing things react, seeing things change. She’d never had more than a few bouts of mild nausea.

  But now she’d just vomited all night and all morning, and felt absolutely miserable. Violet crouched down, keeping a hand on the trash can to steady herself, and thumbed puke off the toes of her sneakers while she contemplated the situation. Maybe she’d somehow lost track of dosages and taken too much. Maybe it was food poisoning that everyone else had somehow avoided.

  Or maybe it was the Parasite’s fault. Violet rose wobbly to her feet, sucking in a deep breath. She didn’t know how having an alien creature in her gut might change her body chemistry, but she was sure it did, and lately she felt, in a crazy paranoid way, like the Parasite knew what she was doing. Knew, and didn’t like it. Maybe they’d promised it a male host with only traces of estrogen and an incoming spike of androgen and testosterone.

  She drew her finger along the curve of her stomach, pretending it was the tip of a knife and trying to imagine how it must have felt for Wyatt. He’d told her about it only once, how there had still been a few working gas lines when he got out and he’d boiled everything in a pot to sterilize it. How he’d packed ice around his hips and belly and sharpened the Cutco knife until it was scalpel sharp.

  Even thinking about the story made her shudder. She started to walk toward the pharmacy again, spitting the vomit taste out of her mouth every few meters. She would never be able to cut out her Parasite. She would never be able to change other things either. There weren’t plastic surgeons anymore. Sometimes knowing that made her want to scream.

  The aliens coming had been like a fairy tale at first. A twisted scary dark one, but that was the best kind anyway. She’d escaped from the warehouses in the first month, when everything was still chaos, and she’d hidden in a gas station overnight. When she crawled out the next morning, it was a brand-new world. Her father couldn’t hit her; her mother couldn’t cry. She didn’t have to be an invisible boy. She could be an invisible girl instead.

  After a few heady days of freedom and shoplifting, she’d even found a prince. Wyatt, with his beautiful gray eyes and perfect fucking bone structure. It had been terrifying and elating to introduce herself as Violet for the first time. He’d accepted it without so much as blinking. He’d asked if she was brave, and if she wanted to join the Lost Boys. He didn’t care what was between her legs. She’d gotten herself out of the warehouse, she was quick and smart and she had guts, and that was enough. Before, Wyatt had trusted her more than any of the other kids.

  But now she was supposed to be showing Bo the ropes, and instead she was throwing up on her shoes. Yesterday’s stunt with the trailer had cemented Bo’s role in the plan. She only had three days to get him up to speed before they went after the pod, and Wyatt thought she’d be best at it, said Lost Boys always liked whoever brought them in first the best. She’d countered that Bo wasn’t a fucking baby bird, which made Wyatt laugh but not change his mind.

  Violet yanked the pharmacy door open and stepped inside. She was hoping it was a bad reaction to the Estrofem that was causing the problem, and that a brand switch would fix it. As a temporary measure, she needed Tums. She grabbed it on her way past the line, noticing there were only two wasters in it now. She wondered, grimly, if the third one had died.

  “Probably died,” she said aloud. “Right, Dillon?”

  The pharmacist was still smiling blandly, searching up a prescription on a dead screen. Violet let herself through the little door, not feeling up to bouncing over the counter, and went to the birth control. She glanced over her shoulder while she rummaged.

  “Long time no see,” she said. “So, are you always smiling like that? Or just when I come in?”

  The pharmacist didn’t respond.

  Violet dumped out her remaining Estrofem and plucked the Estrace out of the cupboard instead. For the first time she took notice of the small printed numbers showing its expi
ration date. Ages away, but she still felt a lump in her throat. She’d known, in the back of her mind, that all medications expired. Even if she scoured every pharmacy in the city and raided houses to go through medicine cabinets, on a long enough timeline all of it would turn useless anyway. No surgeons, no drug manufacturers. Eventually the testosterone would come back.

  And if Bo really was the next best thing to a savior, if they somehow did manage to beat back the aliens and maybe even free the wasters, what then? She would have to go back to reality. Go back to having a mother and father who wanted a son. She would lose Wyatt, obviously—there would be pretty girls lining up for him. He would be the one who saved everybody. Him and Bo.

  “Dennis,” she said, catching sight of the name tag again. “Sorry. Look, you’re the lucky one, Dennis. You have the chillest workday of your life, over and over. I have real shit to worry about.”

  The nausea hit fast, and before she could make a run for the bathroom, or uncap the Tums, she threw up again right in front of him. In any other universe, it would have been mortifying. The pharmacist kept smiling, and Violet left without cleaning up.

  For the next three days, while the other Lost Boys worked on the pod trap, Bo learned everything he could from Violet about the aliens. One of the first lessons was how othermothers’ one blind spot was right underneath them, between their clicking insect legs. When Bree claimed that they had a kind of stinger tucked up there like a big needly cock, the tips of Violet’s ears went red and she told her to shut the fuck up.

  “That’s a myth,” she elaborated. On their next scouting trip she demonstrated, distracting an othermother with a hurled bottle and then sliding underneath. Bo had joined her, darting out from behind a dumpster, and then they crouched there for a full ten-count, grinning adrenal grins at each other while the othermother swiveled and chirped and swiveled again. He confirmed for Bree later that there was no stinger, just smooth blue-pigmented flesh.