Revenge of the Star Survivors

by Michael Merschel

  “It’s not perfect, but I thought it might help you find your way home,” he said.

  “I can find my street just fine, Les.”

  “I didn’t do this to show you streets,” he said. “Look at the dotted lines.”

  I squinted.

  “If you want to stay out of sight, you can roam the neighborhood along these paths,” he said.

  “Paths? You mean, like hiking trails?”

  “Not really. These are backyards that don’t have fences, or have bushes that hide you from the owners. I’ve tested them for months. The numbers here”—he pointed—“indicate where you’ll need to cross the street.

  “For example,” he continued, “if you follow this line from the mouth of our bunker, you’ll end up in the yard at 1509 Sand Creek Circle. Stay in the yards that ring the park until you get here, at 1811 Aspen Crest Lane. Cut across the yard to the street, then—look both ways first—cross between the houses at 1812 and 1814. There’s an old camper at 1812 that you can duck into if you think you’re being followed. When it’s safe, follow this line behind those houses until you get home.

  “If you run into trouble, you can backtrack and take one of these alternate routes. Just avoid going near the red letters.”

  “What are they?” I asked, trying to drink it all in.

  “The H, S and P are where Hunter, Sneeva and Pignarski live. You’ll cut down on your encounters with them if you avoid being on the direct paths between the school and their houses. Also, between their houses and any baseball diamond. Also,”—he hesitated for just a moment—“you’ll want to stay away from places like Sand Creek Lane, which has a long stretch of exposed sidewalk and a ready supply of ammo when the snow piles up. But then, you already are aware of that.”

  I looked up from the map, incredulous. “How did you know?”

  He stared at the floor. “I overheard them talking,” he said. “They made it sound like quite a party.”

  “Yeah, well, I apparently need to call up Commander Steele for a refresher course on the Omegan Fingers of Defibrillation.”

  Les looked up. “Huh?”

  I retold the encounter, how they had closed in on me, how I had pushed my way through palm-first, how the iceball had hit just as I thought I had escaped.

  “Wow,” he said. “I didn’t hear all that. I just heard about the throw, how Ty had nailed you from thirty yards out. You really tried the Omegan Fingers of Defibrillation on them? ‘K’HAHHHHHHH!’ and everything?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He spoke in awe. “That’s . . . that’s . . .” He swallowed. “That’s about the dorkiest thing I’ve ever heard.” He started to laugh.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said. And then I joined in the laughter. “Yeah, it was pretty dorky.”

  He sighed. “Survival: the first order of business.”

  I nodded in agreement with him and Maxim and studied the map awhile longer.

  “Hey, you know where I live. Want to come over? Instead of hiding in a sewer?”

  His face clouded. “I’ve told you, nobody can see us. You promised.”

  “Yeah, I did,” I said. “It’s just . . . it would be more . . . normal.”

  “For people like us, this is normal,” he said harshly. “It always will be. Get used to it.” He turned on the flashlight and blew out the candle. “I have to go. Give me five minutes so I can clear the park. I’ll let you know when I can meet again.”

  I watched his light dance down the tube. Then I sat in the darkness for a bit. I suppose I could get used to living underground. But in the distance, I imagined I could hear the echoes of our laughter. It sounded like two normal guys having a normal weekend day.

  Why did that have to be such a galactic challenge?

  6.02.02

  Back at the base, I have been investing a lot of effort in researching the effects of video games: how they speed up time and absorb the long, lonely hours; how they teach valuable skills about dealing with alien encounters. (Shoot first is a good strategy.)

  Their application to the real world is somewhat limited. For example, I have never found any equivalent to the smart bomb, a magic button that would vaporize all my enemies at once, for the real world.

  Also, although video games are good for working out frustration, they apparently can’t mask it entirely.

  I know this because my own frustration level has become critical enough that even my commanders have picked up on it. As indicated by the fact that the male commander just insisted on taking me on a trip to the hardware store.

  Back at the home planet, he and I used to visit the hardware store a lot. He is not the handiest of guys, as the female commander likes to point out, so his purchases tended to be basic: tubes of caulk, cans of WD-40, a replacement bulb for the light inside the refrigerator, a second bulb when he realized he bought the wrong size.

  But we would always walk down the aisles together to look at the cool tools—like leveling devices that employed actual lasers. And mountains of less fantastic but still important stuff, like space-ready work gloves, one-hundred-piece mechanic’s tool sets, and way in the back, a small room devoted to model rocketry. Which my commander kept promising I could get into . . . later. For some reason, he seemed put off by all the DANGER: EXPLOSIVES signs.

  Wandering the aisles amid all that stuff was the closest I ever came to living next to a junkyard, which I still hope to do someday. According to several books I have read, kids used to have regular access to junkyards, and they made the coolest things from stuff they found. Oh, what I could have made with the material from a real junkyard: A go-kart. A catapult. A robot. A robot-driven go-kart that had a catapult on the back!

  The new hardware store is much less inspiring—just a big warehouse where everything is neat, orderly, orange and boring.

  My commander was here to pick up some duct tape. But for old times’ sake, I think, he walked me past the power tools. He stopped and reached out for a drill that was hanging off a couple of hooks. As if he knew how to use one.

  “So, Clark,” he asked me, casually examining the drill, maybe a little afraid of it. “How are things at school?”

  Aha! Just as I had expected—he was trying to lure me into neutral territory and interrogate me! It’s a good thing I had not let my guard down.

  “Fine, I guess,” I told him. I looked around at the tools, wishing to be somewhere he was not.

  “You know, if you were having any problems, I’d be happy to try to help you,” he said. He started to put the drill back on the display rack, but he missed the hooks, and it went crashing, loudly, to the counter.

  As if I needed a reminder that he was not much good at fixing anything.

  “I’m OK, Dad. Really.”

  He looked around to see whether anyone had watched him drop the drill, then walked on, with his hands thrust into the pockets of his old brown coat.

  “Well, that’s good,” he said. “Because—you know, you could tell me if something were wrong.”

  Sure, I thought. But how could I tell him that everything was wrong? The teachers, the counselor, the principal, the lunchroom, the students, my weird friend from the underground pipe? How would Mr. Can’t-Even-Hold-a-Drill fix any of that?

  “I know,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, turning the corner and looking lost, obviously disoriented in his quest for duct tape. “I’m sure this move hasn’t been all that easy for you, Clark.”

  “It’s been OK,” I lied.

  “And you’d let me know if you needed anything? Because it’s OK to ask for help. Really.”

  He had passed three clerks while he looked up and down the aisles, in vain, for the duct tape. He then walked past an entire end display full of the stuff.

  “Tape’s over here, Dad,” I said, as he kept walking.

  He turned, looked at me, confused, and then saw the shelf.

  “Oh,” he said. “Good eye.”

  As we drove home with t
he tape, the commander turned on the radio and tuned it to the all-sports station. “Hey, this reminds me,” he said, listening to some kind of noisy chatter about drafts and salary caps, “I was getting coffee with one of the sportswriters at work, and when I told him where you go to school, he said something about you having a classmate who’s already getting calls from college scouts. In eighth grade! Name was Hunker or Harper or something. Ever hear of him?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” I said, wondering if he would notice if I used a little duct tape to stop up my ears so I wouldn’t have to listen to him anymore.

  6.03.01

  Somehow still feeling isolated despite my commander’s outreach, and unable to maintain dependable communications with Les, I have redoubled my efforts to decipher Ricki Wah, who has a whole bookshelf’s worth of mysteries surrounding her.

  She is in the library every day but refuses to speak to me beyond repeating, “It’s complicated.” After class, she slips into the thick crowds and evades me. The one time I got close, she ducked into the girls’ rest room.

  I never see her in the cafeteria. And I can’t find her in the school directory. I asked Ms. Beacon for this mystical document, claiming I was doing research of an unspecified nature. She had a bit of a smirk as she let me peruse her copy. But there was no listing for any Wah.

  I suppose most people would have given up at this point. But one advantage to being an alien in a strange land is that you are not distracted by things such as a social life. For now, Ricki was the only hobby I had.

  This was not some gauzy soft-focus obsession, like that thing between the long-haired yeoman and Captain Maxim from Season One. This is more like Episode 27, with the Invisible Girl who could walk through walls. I just wanted to know how she did it.

  Also, what was the meaning of “It’s complicated”? Did she think I was stupid? That I couldn’t understand? I took this as a challenge. I mean, if I couldn’t establish communications with a Star Survivors fan, how would I ever establish communications with anyone?

  I was having an especially deep ponder on these matters, and was probably glaring across the room at Ricki, when Ms. Beacon called me up to her desk.

  “Mr. Sherman,” she said, “the office aide who collects attendance forms seems to have forgotten to visit our ARC this hour. I wouldn’t want Principal Denton to think I had been derelict in my duties. Would you please run these to the office?”

  I accepted the forms and grabbed the hall pass off her desk. These things were such a ridiculous waste of paper, I thought as I made my way down the hall. But somebody needed the data. So there we were. Sherman, Clark and . . .

  I looked at the form. Nobody named Wah, Ricki.

  It was Roy, Erika.

  I almost ran the rest of the way to the office. “Ms. Beacon said you needed these,” I told the receptionist. “And, um, do you have a school directory handy? She wanted me to check something.”

  She pulled out a worn, photocopied list, stapled in the corner and with several names updated and initialed.

  I flipped to the R page.

  There it was: Roy, Erika. Parents: Ana and Thierry.

  And a phone number marked home.

  Which I copied onto my hand.

  I practically skipped back to the ARC and smiled broadly at Ms. Roy-pronounced-Wah as I returned to my seat.

  At last, a key mystery of Festus was being unraveled. By me!

  6.03.02

  I have known few pleasures in this universe, but the anticipation of triumph over someone who challenged you surely has to be one of the sweetest.

  I vowed to test the number that very evening. I pondered what it would be like to talk to her, to say, “Well, I guess it wasn’t too complicated to find YOU.” Or maybe, “How’s this for uncomplicated?” No, it should be more like, “Hello, Ricki. Do you know who this is? It’s not so complicated.”

  Yes. That would work.

  I waited until my command units were busy—one folding laundry while simultaneously watching the spawn and a basketball game, the other doing something with her cameras. I slipped into my quarters. I pulled out my phone. I savored the taste of pending victory.

  I punched in the number.

  The line clicked. In the moment before I heard the ring, I thought of Mercury and Apollo astronauts and that eternal wait people on Earth went through while the capsule was reentering the atmosphere, when the mission was at its most dangerous point but nobody could tell whether everything was proceeding according to the well-rehearsed plan or simply incinerating in an explosive, flaming disaster.

  Ring! The call went through.

  Ring! It rang a second time.

  Ring! Well, maybe they weren’t—

  (Click.) “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice. “Who is this? I do not recognize this number. We are on the ‘Do Not Call’ list, you know.”

  “Um, hi. I was trying to reach—”

  “You sound like a child,” she said, her words clipped, her tone cold. “Do you children in this country not know to treat an adult with respect?”

  “Uh, yes ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. I was wondering whether Ricki—”

  “Ricki? You mean Erika? ”

  “Uh, yes. Ma’am. She and I—” As my level of nervousness grew, so did the pitch of my voice.

  “Are you one of those terrible girls who has been causing my daughter so many problems?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. The pitch was climbing toward the range that only dogs could hear. “I have a class with Ricki, and I was just hoping to say—” At that moment, my voice cracked and squealed like a delicate vase being shattered against a chalkboard floor.

  “My daughter has no time for boys.”

  I started to think that this was not going well.

  “And if you don’t respect me, then perhaps you will listen to Erika’s father. THIERRY! THIERRY! COME GET THIS BOY OFF THE PHONE.”

  I did not feel disrespect. What I felt was . . . horrified. But I kept hanging on, as if I were a mere observer, wondering what would happen next.

  What happened next is that I heard some shouting in the background, and then a voice that made me think of the bad guy in the first Indiana Jones movie.

  “This is Erika’s father, OK? And you will not call, OK?”

  “Uh, yes sir.”

  He sighed.

  There was some rustling on the line, and then the woman’s voice again.

  “And now, to show you that Erika has manners, I will allow her to tell you farewell herself.”

  More rustling.

  A brief silence.

  Ricki’s voice, shaky: “With whom am I speaking?”

  “It’s me, Ricki. I mean, Clark. I mean—”

  Her voice turned hoarse.

  “I told you, it’s complicated. Please do not call again. Thank you, and have a nice day.”

  Click.

  She was right. It was complicated.

  I envisioned a Mercury capsule making a fiery plunge into the sea, the scalded metal hissing as it sinks into the black and merciless depths where it would lie in dark solitude until the end of time.

  I wished I had it so easy.

  EXPEDITION LOG

  ENTRY 7.01.01

  Ricki was not in the ARC today.

  7.02.01

  Or today.

  7.03.01

  Or today. But neither was I, mostly. Because at the start of the hour, I was summoned by Principal Denton.

  My walk down the hall should have come with a sound track—something with a lot of low brass and timpani. Music like that always plays before you meet a dark lord.

  When I arrived in his office, he was rearranging things on his shelves.

  “Ah, Sherman. I’ve been expecting you. Here, would you mind holding this for me, son? I’m just doing a little tidying up.”

  He handed me the framed case of his ribbons, dog tag and medals. In the middle was an engraved piece of metal that said GEORGE DENTON—SEMPER FI. That’s when I remembere
d—we were supposed to be on the same team.

  “So, how are things going, son?” he asked casually. He had his back turned to me as he ran a cloth along his shelf. I stood there, forced to stare down at his awards, while I pondered the possible responses to his question. The most honest would have been, “Considering I’m often being pursued by sadistic morons, that my only friend is too paranoid to acknowledge my existence, and I apparently just drove a girl into the Phantom Zone, I would say that things really stink for me. You?”

  Instead I said, “As well as could be expected, sir.”

  “Good,” he said, slowly circling back toward his seat. “Have there been any . . . problems in your Independent Study class?”

  “None that I am aware of, sir.” I kept holding the case, wondering what I was supposed to do with it.

  “Are you sure?” he said, taking a seat and locking eyes with me. “Because I recently received a phone call from a disturbed parent. She’s under the impression that her daughter is being picked on in that very class.”

  My mouth went dry as moon dust. And my hands must have started shaking, because I fumbled the case in a way that made the backing slip out, and everything rattled to the floor.

  Denton’s eyes flared with anger as I scrambled to pick up the pins that read RIFLE SHARPSHOOTER and PISTOL EXPERT and the dog tag stamped with his name.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Denton, I was—OUCH!” I yelled as I felt a stabbing pain in my finger. I looked down and saw a tiny bead of blood oozing out where I had pricked myself on the bronze medal with the red, white and blue ribbon. I read the words SOLDIER’S MEDAL FOR VALOR on the back.

  He rose halfway out of his chair and his forehead grew red as I hurriedly set everything on his desk, but he said nothing, just scooped it all into a desk drawer. Then he sat back down, exhaled and forced a smile.

  “It’s OK, son. That case was pretty old. And I’ve dealt with this particular parent before. She’s a pretty high-strung . . . foreigner. Besides, I told you that you and I were a team. Semper fi, foxhole buddies—remember?”