I ask him what he means and he says, “You have to save the Earth.” And then he looks away from me.
“I’m sorry I ran away from you,” I whisper back when he’s not looking.
He says nothing, still looking away.
“Look at me, Dad?” I beg him. “Please?”
He turns and looks into my eyes. “You’ve always been scared boy, mijo, scared of who you are,” he says, shaking his head. “Strange days, mijo. Scared boy’s going to have to be brave.”
“I’m scared.”
My dad nods wisely. “Scared boy’s not too scared. Runaway boy.”
He doesn’t talk anymore. His eyes are closed and he’s the dead version of himself that I saw on the floor.
When I wake up it’s full light outside and my neighbor is looking out the window at fields. Pictures from my dream keep surfacing like dead fish. I pull out my screen and change the playlist.
After a while, I pull out the letter again and reread it.
Even though you won’t believe it, there are some things that happen no matter what and when they tell you that of all the ways things could have happened, this is the least bad way, it’s really true.
Seen time is the only truth.
My dad said in my dream that nothing could change it. They were going to die.
The letter says this is the best way.
“Bullshit.” I say it out loud. Fuck the letter and everything it says.
My seatmate looks at me.
“Sorry.”
I spend the rest of the morning staring out the window, using my music to drown out the guitars, feeling more alone than I’ve ever felt in my life.
I buy a sandwich in Redding. I feel better after food and I use the Wi-Fi in Subway to look at the news from Los Angeles on my old screen. There’s no report on my parents and for a moment I start to think that the cops went to the house and found out they were just fine. Maybe I only imagined the bug. Maybe I just imagined them being dead.
When I open my messenger, there are messages from people asking about whether I’m okay or not. Julio, Mousie, Fizzin, Schmo, everybody.
Everybody except my parents.
I message my dad anyways: Hey Dad are you ok
There’s no response.
I message again. Dad
Nothing.
I message Mom. Mom? Are you ok? Then, a few seconds later: Mom
They’re not messaging me back. They always message back.
It’s not that they’re not dead, it’s just that the cops never went by and nobody’s going to miss them until my mom doesn’t show up for her route at 5:00 on Sunday morning.
In my mind I see my mom in her driver’s seat, talking to me through the gap in the panel that separates her from her passengers. I shake off the image before it forms completely. It’s hard to breathe through the lump I get in my throat when I think about it.
They’re still lying dead on the floor of the kitchen. I should call the police again but I’d give away where I am. I’m sure they track where calls come from and I’d be calling from Redding at the time the Seattle-bound bus was in town. They’d figure it out.
Sorry, Mom. I think. “Sorry, Dad,” I say out loud because somehow it’s easier to talk to him since he was a big part of my dream this morning.
While I’m sitting there, a message comes in from my Tía: Mijo, you ok?
Eventually: It wasn’t me. Then: It was an Incursion. Then: I love you. Then: I’m scared.
She responds fast: What are you talking about?
I can’t answer her so I sign off the Wi-Fi before my head explodes.
It’s dark when we get back on the bus and I put my headphones back on. Mastodon. Seattle’s getting close and I don’t know what’s going to happen when I get there. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know I’ll do better with it all if I can sleep a little bit.
Fourteen
The edges of the highway are lined with big trees. Everything looks dark and gloomy because the clouds are low. The concrete is grayer and the cars look dirty. It all feels more serious than LA.
When the bus makes its way into the downtown Seattle station, I don’t want to get off. I’ve gotten to know the Greyhound. I feel safe on it. Even my guitars feel more manageable. Everyone else is already gone before I push past the cleaning crew. The air feels like winter and I’m cold with just my hoodie and no jacket.
There’s a Burger King attached to the station and I’m hungry, so I go there.
It’s dark inside. I order a Whopper, fries and a Sprite. When my food comes I take the tray to a corner where there aren’t many people. I listen to an old man talking on his pod while I eat. He’s upset because someone named Lydia wasn’t waiting for him when the bus arrived.
I tune him out and try and think about what I’m going to do. I check my screen. Burger King has Wi-Fi. I log on and check the news.
They’re there. It’s real.
COUPLE FOUND DEAD IN THEIR ECHO PARK HOME
by: SARAH CAMPBELL, City Desk
Police this morning responded to a request for a wellness check on a Los Angeles Metro driver who missed her route time and found both the driver and her husband dead in their home. The driver, whose name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin, has driven for Metro for over twenty years. Her husband, described by a neighbor as a contractor, was not due at work until Monday morning.
The cause of death has not been released, but detectives are classifying the case as a homicide.
Neighbors report hearing shouting late Friday night, but police are not commenting further.
The couple have a teenage son who police are asking for the public’s help in locating. He has not been seen since Friday. He is described by family members as being a popular and friendly boy who had recently become troubled.
Juana Perez, the sister of one of the victims, has told us that the son has been in contact with her since the tragedy and that he says he’s innocent and that the couple was killed by an alien “Incursion,” of the sort being reported on the internet in recent months.
Police dismissed the claim, saying that there is no evidence that Incursions are real and that the weapons used in the attack were of purely “terrestrial origin.”
Police are not naming the son as a suspect, saying that they are following several strong leads, but they do consider him a person of interest and are encouraging him to come forward.
* * *
• • •
A popular and friendly boy. Recently troubled. Police dismissed the claim.
“You don’t need to read that.”
I don’t look up because I think she’s just in my head, but then a shadow falls over me. There’s a girl standing over my table. She’s black and dark with a thick tight afro cut close to her head.
“What? What do you mean?”
She rolls her eyes like I’m being dense. “I mean you don’t need to read that stuff. I’m seriously really sorry about what happened, but I think you know they weren’t going to believe you. Reading about it’ll just make you feel worse.”
I shake my head like she’s got the wrong guy or the wrong idea. She waves it off and sits down on the swivel chair across from me, swinging her legs around to one side and crossing them in one smooth gesture. I fight my urge to look at them more closely. Focus on what’s important.
“Look.” She leans into me. “I wish we could change things, but we can’t. Seen time and all that.” She smiles and leans forward to pick at my French fries. I start to get ridiculously upset about her stealing a French fry but I’m able to put it all into perspective before I throw a fit.
“What the fuck do you know about what happened? Who are you?”
She sighs, looks seriously at me, a little sad. “I promise that you’ll understand
everything really soon, but you’ve got to come with me first.” She smiles. She’s pretty. “My name’s Corina.” She steals another fry. “I’m here to pick you up.” She reaches into her back pocket. “Here.” She pulls out a folded piece of paper. “You wrote this tonight and we sent it back for me to give to you because evidently you were a hot mess when I came to get you.”
I don’t understand what she just said, but I take the paper she’s pushing at me. It’s another letter. This one’s not in an envelope, it’s just folded up. It’s short:
Hey Alex,
This is Corina. She was sent here to get you. She’s cool. Go with her.
—Plugzer
It’s in my handwriting again. I look up at her and she nods like she understands. “It’s a lot to deal with, but it’ll all make sense when we get to the compound.”
“Compound?” I ask, because even though I want to know how she has a letter from me telling me to go with her when I know for a fact that I have never written one—or been to Seattle—plus I don’t know her, I can’t get the words out.
She sighs. “Just come with me, Alex.” She picks up the note and points to the last part. “‘She’s cool,’” she reads. “‘Go with her.’”
“I don’t even know you.” I shake my head. “Why would I go with you?” I point at the note on the table. “That? That’s just . . .” But I don’t know what to say, so I lean back instead, look away.
She takes another fry. “You have a better offer, Alex, you should take it.” Then she stands up and walks to the exit. She stops at the door, calls back to me: “You coming?”
“You better go, runaway boy. Nowhere else to go.”
I scramble up and knock my backpack onto the floor. She rolls her eyes and waits for me.
When I reach the parking lot, she’s already getting into a car that looks way too nice for someone who isn’t old enough to be driving.
She waves me over.
“Nice car,” I say when I get in. I can see the vague definition of the dashboard reflected on the windshield even though it doesn’t block the view at all. “This is cool.”
Corina smiles and shrugs. “I don’t know squat about cars,” she says as the car pulls out of the parking space, “but when you work for Sabazios, these are what’s available.”
Jeffrey Sabazios has been a name in my life for as long as I can remember. He used to be just a big technology guy, but then he developed Live-Tech and some people say he’s gone too far with things that read minds. Then he started talking about Incursions and how Live-Tech could protect us, and a lot of people stopped taking him seriously, especially when the president started saying that Live-Tech is bad. But now I have proof that he was right, because of what happened to me. “Live-Tech saved my life.”
“I know.” Corina nods but she’s not really paying attention. I’m about to give up on getting more details, but when the car pulls out into traffic, she taps me on the shoulder. “You can tell him all about it because you’ll be working for him, too.”
I start to ask more questions but she just shakes her head. “I’ll explain when we get to the compound.”
We move to a freeway, then a tunnel, then a bridge right on the water, and then another freeway before she pulls us off onto surface streets and winds her way up and down some hills on roads that get smaller and smaller.
I don’t know what I was expecting, since she just called it the compound, but we pull through a motorized gate into a driveway that goes in a big circle around a fountain. There’s a whole set of buildings on one side of the drive, but they don’t look like normal buildings. They’re just big bumps that are covered in the same grass and trees that cover the rest of the ground.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Sabazios’s compound.”
“You were serious?”
She gets out of the car without replying. I watch as she walks away. She’s just wearing jeans and a shirt, but the weather doesn’t seem to bother her. I get out, too, try to walk tall like her, but end up tightening my hoodie because I’m cold.
Fifteen
I examine the “compound” a little more carefully. There are two main sets of hills. They’re big and they’re covered in trees, so I can’t see what’s behind them. The one on the left is much taller than the one on the right, and it’s got an entrance burrowed into its side that looks like it was cut with an enormous hole punch. The door is round, and as big as three normal doors put together. There’s a doorway into the hill on the right, too. This one is average sized, and it’s the one Corina’s walking to.
She’s almost there when she sees I haven’t left the car. She turns to wait for me. “Jesus. C’mon.”
I jog to catch up.
I haven’t showered or changed my clothes in three days. I sniff at my armpit and cringe at how I must’ve smelled in the car next to Corina.
“You’re fine,” she tells me when I catch up. “Nobody’s getting their noses up in you until you’ve had a chance to take a shower.”
I nod, ready to move on. “This is the door?” I ask as we step up to it. “We’re going into the hill?”
“Not a hill,” she corrects me. “A house that’s built like a hill.”
“Jeffrey Sabazios lives in a hill?”
She turns to look at me, her face suddenly serious. “Alex, Jeffrey Sabazios is a vampire. He can’t live aboveground.”
I don’t know if I should laugh or not. It’s obviously a joke, but with everything else that’s happened . . .
I test out a smile to see if she laughs.
She doesn’t.
“You’re serious?”
Then she laughs. “No.” She gestures up at the hills. “Sabazios is into sustainability and security and he says that this is the best way to live in a large place that doesn’t suck up energy, doesn’t kill the environment, and is nearly impossible to spy on.”
“So he lives in a hill.”
“Yes,” she says. “He does, and so do I.” She opens the door and steps into the hill. “And now, so do you.”
I follow her through the door and stop, facing a long hallway that slopes slightly downward. Corina stops, turns to look at me.
There aren’t any doors or windows.
The light seems to come directly from the bare white walls. The ground is covered by hardwood, with a thin line of carpet running down the middle.
“This is a long hallway,” I comment for lack of anything else to say, buying time to steel myself for moving forward.
“And we call it the Long Hall. Appropriate. Just wait, though,” she says, and as she continues walking, things start to change. The walls on either side of us brighten up and then fade into photographs. At first they just look like people doing regular people things, but then one stops me cold. A young guy just a little older than me, wearing desert fatigues, is standing in a parking lot surrounded by lots of other people. There’s a bus in the background.
The guy in the photo is my brother Pete.
I know the scene—it was the day he shipped out for the first time, but it’s not a picture we took that day—my mom’s hands were shaking so bad that none of the pictures came out. He looks happy, and he looks like he’s looking right at me.
Like he sees me.
Like he loves me.
“What the . . .” I stop walking to stare at it.
“You get used to it. It’s a new use for Live-Tech—connects to your mind just like that pod you’ve got in your ear but without the contact—like Bluetooth.” She motions from my wrist to a photo of a black woman watching us from across a bumpy brick road. “That’s my mom. We were at the riverfront in Portland and I was chasing birds. I was like four or something.”
I shake my head. “That picture of my brother can’t be real.”
“The wall reads our memories.” She points to P
ete. “He’s your brother?”
I nod.
She studies me. “Did something happen to him?”
“Yeah.”
She shakes her head. “Sorry. That’s why this version isn’t being sold yet—it’s supposed to only grab happy memories, but a lot of times stronger and more complicated memories get picked up.”
I don’t say anything and I don’t move. I just look at Pete.
She looks from Pete to me. “You’ve been through a lot. I’m really sorry, Alex.” She reaches her hand out to me. Her moves are awkward and tentative, like she’s approaching a strange dog, but when she touches my arm, I lean into it. It’s the first time I’ve been touched since I said goodbye to Mousie, the first contact since I found my parents.
Maybe it’s because of the picture of my brother or just the fact that she’s reaching out to me, but I start losing control a little. I shake my head to try and clear it.
Corina starts to walk again. I stare at Pete for a long moment. Seeing him look at me like that makes me feel small, scared, and lonely.
I walk the rest of the distance trying hard not to look at the walls, focusing instead on the guitars.
The Long Hall ends at another door, which opens up onto an outdoor patio cut out of the back side of one of the hills. It’s huge—maybe half the size of a soccer field—and it’s lined with plants in pots. There’s a fire pit on one side that’s surrounded by chairs and benches. There’s a volleyball net and a workout station, too.
The far edge of the patio has a glass wall that’s taller than me by quite a bit. There’s a beautiful view of water and hills on the other side of it, with just the tops of the buildings of downtown Seattle visible in the distance. “Is that the ocean?” I ask.
She tells me that it’s not, that it’s a lake.
She leads me toward a set of glass doors built into a wall on the far side of the patio.
“It’s not cold here.”
She shakes her head. “We’re inside.” She points to the glass wall. “No sense in a big outdoor patio in Seattle. Follow the curve—it goes all the way over.”
Strange Days Page 6