Strange Days
Page 1
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Constantine Singer.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Singer, Constantine, author.
Title: Strange days / Constantine Singer.
Description: New York, NY : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2018]
Summary: “When inexplicable events begin to occur, Los Angeles native Alex Mata uses his special ability of time travel to save the world from alien invasion”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017061063 (print) | LCCN 2018006763 (ebook) ISBN 9781524740252 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524740245 (hardcover)
Subjects: | CYAC: Science fiction. | Time travel—Fiction. Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S567 (ebook)
LCC PZ7.1.S567 Ne 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061063
Jacket art © by Charis Tsevis; Cover design by Maggie Edkins
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For my wife, Ariadne, and my daughter, Kizziah.
Also for all my students like Emilio who are
always looking for something good to read.
One
The tamale lady comes around the front of the school early on Mondays, so Zeon and Big Schmo are already in line at her cart when I walk up.
Zeon nods when he sees me. Coughs, “T’sup Plugz.”
“T’sup.” I fall in line behind Schmo, watch as the lady pulls dollars out of people’s grips with one hand while grabbing tamales from her thermos box with tongs in her other. She says something in Spanish to a kid in front of me and then she smiles wide enough to show her teeth.
The kid says something back to her and then she says something else and everybody laughs, including the kid, but my Spanish sucks so I don’t get the joke.
“You get any of that?” Zeon asks me quietly.
I turn back to him, give him a small shrug. “Yeah.”
He smiles like he doesn’t believe me. “She just burned him to the ground, Pocho.”
Pocho’s not my name or anything, it’s just a word for people like me who don’t know Spanish. Zeon’s been translating for me since we were in grade school and he gets tired of it. I move my head a little. “I heard her.”
Zeon looks at me weird, but drops it when Fizzin comes up behind us, grabbing my shoulder. “You got me on this, bro?” Fizzin never has any money.
I only have a couple dollars, so I shake my head.
He turns and looks at Zeon, who nods, reaches into his pocket for some bills, and hands them to Fizzin. Zeon’s hair whips back when he turns, giving a flash of his ear. His pod doesn’t look normal—it’s small and matches the color of his skin.
Somebody’s playing a guitar nearby, picking at the strings.
“You hear that?”
Nobody says anything. Nobody else seems to notice, so I ignore it too, and point at Zeon’s ear. “You got Live-Tech?” I’ve never seen one in real life, but Tony Baez has been bumping them endlessly on his channel. The size and color-blending are giveaways.
The Tamale Lady looks at us. We tell her what we want and she collects our money before handing us our tamales. We take them and step back across the street into the shade from the big apartment building.
When we’re situated, I reach out for Zeon’s ear with my free hand so I can pull his hair back.
He lets me, tilting his head so it’s easy to see. “Gotta be prepared for Incursions.”
Incursions. I can feel my jaw go stiff, so I force myself to open my mouth and take a breath. They’ve been happening for a while and even though nobody in the government is willing to s
ay they’re real, a lot of us are convinced they are. For Beems and Zeon and Schmo and the rest of my crew, it’s a faraway thing, like a fight video with kids you don’t know—something to talk about, something to joke about—but to me they feel real.
It feels like they’re going to be the death of me, but I haven’t said that to anybody. I mentioned them to my dad, but he said I should worry more about riding my board in traffic, and that if they were really aliens then the government would’ve made sure we’d never even heard about them. Still, they scare the shit out of me because the men in my family are cursed and if an Incursion is going to get anybody around here it’ll probably be me.
I take another bite of my tamale, but my fear makes it taste bad.
“You believe that shit? You believe that thing’ll keep you safe like Jeffrey Sabazios says?” Fizzin asks as he and Schmo fall in on the other side to look. Fizzin reaches out to touch it. “Does it really read your mind?” Then: “Isn’t the government getting ready to ban those things?”
Zeon shrugs. “Fuck if I know, man. They’re legit cool, though.” He slides his screen out of his pocket—it’s smaller than most screens, but then it starts to unfold and ends up twice the size of mine. He holds it up in front of us. It brightens from black, scrambles for a moment, then I’m looking at a picture of us looking at his screen.
“Oh shit!” Schmo yells, dancing backward and then jumping back into the circle, pushing Fizzin out of the way. “You did that with your mind? Controlled the screen? You didn’t even say anything. That’s . . .” He shakes his head. “Do it again.”
Zeon’s screen brightens again, but this time instead of a picture of us, it’s showing something else. “Called your girl, Plugz,” he says.
I freeze. He called Mousie. I don’t want to talk with Mousie in front of everybody—I don’t know what we’d say to each other that wouldn’t be weird and embarrassing.
Too late. She’s on the screen now. She looks confused. “Who’s this?” Her voice isn’t going to his earpod—it sounds like it’s coming from the screen, so I lean in and shake my head. I can’t stop my mind from playing out all the dumb things I say in front of her when we’re alone that she might repeat in front of everybody. “Hey.” Lame. “Zeon’s got Live-Tech.”
“Really?” She’s not looking directly at me—she’s scanning the heads falling in behind mine. “That’s cool.”
“Yeah.” I reach out behind me, shove Fizzin and Schmo out of the picture. Something rings in my ear, a sustain, like a whispered chord on a distant guitar. I turn to look for the instrument, but there’s nothing to see.
“Are you gonna be here?”
Whatever it was, it’s gone. I turn back to look at Mousie on Zeon’s screen. “Huh?”
“School?”
“What time is it?” I dig into my pocket for my screen.
“Eight.”
“No shit.” I look down at my tamale. Then: “Yeah. I’ll see you at break.”
“See you.”
Zeon’s screen goes blank.
By the time we’re ready to walk, we’re already ten minutes late, but that’s okay. We move slow and eat our tamales as we go. First period is chemistry, and no matter what Mr. Wakefield says, I’m not going to pass it even if I’m there from the beginning of class.
On the way, Fizzin says something about Incursions again. Everybody else laughs, but I can’t do more than smile.
Two
Ever since talk about incursions started, my Tía Juana is the only person I know who’s freaked out by them like me. They haven’t happened in America, but she doesn’t even like me walking home from school—she thinks it’s too dangerous to be outside alone. Her son Alex died before I was born, and because I’m named after him, she takes special care of me.
She messages me right before the end of school saying that she’s coming to get me. I can’t say my message back to her because I’m in class, so I have to unfold my screen to type her a message telling her she shouldn’t because I’m going to hang with Mousie, but she says she’s already here.
My hair falls over my face as I look at the screen in my lap, making it hard to see, so I have to readjust myself and my screen. My aunt says for me to meet her down at Beverly so she doesn’t get stuck in school traffic.
I text Mousie to tell her that I can’t hang, even though I don’t want to.
Meet me later? she sends back.
Where?
The lake
The teacher’s saying something, she’s looking right at me, talking.
I want to text Mousie back, but I can’t because the teacher’s pinned me with her eyes. I’m supposed to be doing something, but I don’t know what, so I lean forward and bring my arm up with my stylus like I’m going to write because that’s what everybody else is doing, but there aren’t even instructions on my desk’s screen and the response window where I’d input my work is grayed out, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
“Mr. Mata? Do you have any thoughts?”
“About what?” It comes out with a laugh that I don’t mean to do, but I can’t stop it.
She sighs, gives me a smile that says she’s tired of me. “Why people voted for Eugene Debs even though he was in prison?”
She’s still staring at me and now my face is getting hot because I can feel everybody else staring at me, too. I think I sort of know the answer. We were just learning about how he was a socialist who wanted the working people to be in charge of things, and how that was what a lot of people wanted.
But I’m not sure I’m right, so I shrug and shake my head.
“No thoughts?”
“Nah.” My screen lights up in my lap. Mousie again.
If I had a Live-Tech pod, I’d be able to message Mousie with my mind and still look like I was working.
My auntie gets me things sometimes. I showed her some stuff about Live-Tech a while ago, but she was totally against it. She doesn’t trust things that play with your mind, and like a lot of people she’s sure Jeffrey Sabazios is out to get us.
Maybe I’ll ask again.
* * *
• • •
I bring it up when I get in the car. “Jesse’s got Live-Tech.”
My aunt squints at me. She still has a car that you drive, so she’s got her hands on the steering wheel as she pulls away from the curb, moving slow to keep from hitting the other cars picking up kids. “He shouldn’t have that,” she tells me. “Jeffrey Sabazios’s gonna know all his thoughts—even the president says so.”
I shrug. “Sabazios says it’ll protect him from Incursions.”
“That’s crazy, mijo.” She shakes her head like she’s disappointed in my thinking. “He’s using the Incursions to get people to give him their minds, and your mind is something you should never give up to anyone but God. You think it’s coincidence Jeffrey Sabazios ‘comes up’”—she makes air quotes with her hand still on the steering wheel—“with his mind-control stuff right when the Incursions begin and that suddenly it’s going to save you? Use your brain, Alex. He’s conning you. You want to stay safe from the aliens, you stick with me.”
This is hopeless. “Maybe, but it means Jesse never needs to worry about getting his screen jacked.” The Live-Tech pods and their screens only work for the person they’ve been mated with. She knows that. “He won’t have to worry so much walking alone home from school.”
She clucks, shakes her head. “Not about criminals, maybe, but he won’t be any safer from an Incursion no matter what Sabazios says.” She turns to put her eyes on me. “Sabazios is playing people for fools—trying to earn his money off your fear, scaring people into giving him control of their minds.” She bugs her eyes at me. “That’s why no serious people are buying his Live-Tech stuff and why President Castle’s trying to get it banned.” She looks across at me like I’m a baby. “Those are the fa
cts, no matter what you see on your channels.”
I reach up to fiddle with my pod. It’s new, but it’s a little too big for my ear and it hurts after a while, plus the sound pass-thru which they said was going to be 100 percent isn’t anywhere near that good. “People are buying it,” I say, sounding whiny, which I hate. “Lots of people. It’s already everywhere.”
“It’s not everywhere, and it’s not going to be in your ear, mijo.”
I don’t really hear her, though. There’s other noise, sounding like a strummed guitar again. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” she asks, eyes fixed on the road.
“That sound, like a guitar?”
She cocks her head, brushes some of the hair away from her ear, listens, then: “You play that thing too much, now you hear it everywhere. I don’t hear anything.”
“Yeah.” I’m not sure I do, either, anymore.
Three
My mom is clipping her roses in the front of the house when my Tía drops me off. She smiles when she sees us, walks out the gate to talk. Her smile’s not the good smile.
“You didn’t need to pick him up, Juana,” my mom says when I roll down the window. “He’s old enough to walk.”
My auntie doesn’t smile back. “There was another Incursion today,” she says, leaning over me to get closer to my mom. “People are saying they just appeared and took two kids in Peru, right off the street.”
My mom rolls her eyes. “How do they know that even happened? It’s always in places like that and there’s never any video. People are trying to scare each other, that’s all.”
I see an opportunity. “Live-Tech is supposed to keep people safe from the Incursions.”
They both look at me.
Tía Juana pulls herself back into the driver’s seat and examines me. “You don’t quit, do you? I told you that stuff is the devil’s business, Alex. Jeffrey Sabazios is making slaves out of people and you want to just sign right up.”
I shrug. My mom hasn’t said anything yet, so I look to her. “If the Incursions are real and the Live-Tech does what they say it does, you’d want me to have it.”
She looks over at my auntie, then me, then opens my car door. “Don’t you have enough stuff already, Alex? We just got you that new pod, but now you want something else. You’re never satisfied, are you?”