by Laura Pohl
“Even if they’re DNA-oriented?” Brooklyn asks. “You know, like a biological weapon. What if we could explode a whole species at once? Attack them with a virus?”
Avani shakes her head. “That’s just a hypothesis, and practically speaking, it can’t be done. Supposing that we could build something like that—and believe me, scientists have tried for years—we’d have to get a sample of their DNA and decode it. From there, we’d have to create a virus that could take out their species—and their species only. In the end, it can’t be done anyway, so don’t bother with that idea.”
Andy fidgets in her chair. We try to get back to the archives, pretending to pay attention, but it’s obvious that we can’t concentrate anymore.
“We should be asking ourselves real questions,” Flint says. “Like how did they get here?”
“Oh yes,” Brooklyn replied. “Chatting with aliens. The perfect plan.”
Rayen snorts. “What were we supposed to say when we saw the aliens? ‘Dagot’ee, welcome to our planet. How long are you staying? Can we get you anything?’”
Adam laughs, and Violet tells us all to shut up and get back to reading. By then, it is too late.
“Enough,” says Rayen, with so much conviction that Violet doesn’t even question her. “We’re not going to get all this reading done in one sitting. Let’s be realistic and organize this.”
She gets up, retrieves a whiteboard from the corner of the room, and brings it up to the front. For a second, I’m reminded of school and realize that, if everything were normal, that’s exactly where I’d be sitting right now. It’s November—or at least, I think it is. I’ve lost count. In July, I even forgot my own birthday.
I let myself wonder what it would be like if I were in school. What classes I’d be taking. Whether I would have met with the college advisor. And on my birthday, Noah would’ve bought me cake and Abuela would’ve made tamales for dinner.
My daydream sends me into a guilt trip. I’m reminded of how kind Noah could be, when he wasn’t being an asshat. I wonder if, eventually, I would’ve fallen for him. My biggest regret isn’t that he’s dead; maybe it’s that I didn’t love him enough to mourn him. To regret living and leaving him behind.
I’m far too attached to myself for that. And it doesn’t matter anymore. They’re all dead, but I’m still here.
Rayen slaps her hand against the whiteboard, bringing me back to reality. She takes a marker and throws it at Adam, but Sputnik sees it first, grabbing it in midair. Rayen chases after her.
“Give it back!” she shouts at Sputnik, but the dog is far out of her reach. She dashes through the door and is gone in a second, the marker still in her mouth.
Rayen sighs and finds another marker, then hands it to Adam. He gives her a quizzical look.
“You have the prettiest handwriting,” she tells him, and Adam walks awkwardly to the board.
“Brainstorming time,” Rayen announces. “What do we really need to know?”
We all look at each other.
“Who are they?” Violet speaks first, and Adam dutifully writes her question on the board. The words shine in bright red marker.
Brooklyn perks up in her seat. “The Annunaki!”
Flint groans from the other end of the table.
“What?” I ask, frowning.
“Here we go again,” Rayen mutters.
“Shape-shifting reptile aliens who have been here for centuries. They ingest human blood to keep themselves alive. They came down from the heavens and took prominent positions in government organizations.”
I stare at her, mouth open.
“Just ignore her,” Flint says. “Brooklyn is obsessed with conspiracy theories.”
“Look,” Brooklyn says. “Aliens have invaded. So for the first time, the conspiracies actually make sense.”
“Except that these aliens blew humans to dust and don’t drink blood!” Avani shouts back.
That shuts Brooklyn up. We turn our attention back to the whiteboard, waiting for someone to add another question.
Avani goes next. “What do they want?” she asks.
“How did they get here?” Flint suggests.
“And how the fuck do we kick their asses back to where they came from?” Brooklyn chimes in.
Adam writes that one down in a less explicit way.
We contemplate these four questions—they’re essential. If we find out these answers, then we’ll have an advantage.
And right now, I’ll take anything I can get.
“That seems to cover it,” Rayen says. “There are smaller questions, but I guess they can be answered within these four big ones.” The room goes quiet. “Any ideas for the first one?”
Brooklyn hesitates, then says, “They’re from another planet?”
Rayen snickers and Violet knits her blond eyebrows together. But Brooklyn is, in fact, right.
Violet opens up a new folder on the screen that appears to contain files on the alien landing back in April.
“This is all the information we have here at the base,” she says. “Basically, it’s all the government knows, so it’s all we know as well.”
“Not exactly,” I point out. “When was the last time that was updated?”
Violet looks at her screen. “Almost seven months ago. When the attacks started.”
“So we have more information than that,” I say. “We’re seven months ahead. The things we’ve learned can’t be for nothing.”
“Clover is right,” Avani says.
“But how many close encounters have we had?” Violet asks.
Brooklyn frowns. “Second kind, third kind, or fourth kind?” She opens her mouth as she thinks. “Which one was Spielberg? I always get them mixed up.”
Everyone ignores her, and for a few minutes, no one speaks.
“One,” Avani says, breaking the silence. “They…” She swallows. “I hid.”
We look at each other, shifting uncomfortably. Andy has her head down, probably pretending that she can’t hear us.
“Have you…” I begin. “Have you never talked about this?”
The silence that fills the room is damning.
“We avoid all alien-related subjects, all right?” Flint says eventually. “It’s not like we enjoy talking about this over tea.”
“This is ridiculous,” I say. “Not talking about it doesn’t mean that it never happened.”
Avani looks at me sadly. “Not all of us like to talk about our feelings.”
“This is not about your feelings!” I slam my hand on the table and my voice rises. “This is not about anyone’s feelings. Literally no one cares about how you feel. Everyone who cared is dead now.”
I breathe hard. Wide eyes stare back at me, but I don’t care. I’m not finished.
“People have died. More people will die, if there’s anyone left out there. And the thing is, this is not about you. Frankly, it’s not about any of us. But as Brooklyn puts it, we’re the Last Teenagers on Earth. So we either suck it up and put the past behind us, or we’re dead. Dead like the rest of them.”
The room is quiet when I finish. I don’t need them to be moping right now—I need them to be wide awake. I need them to understand what’s at stake.
“Once,” Brooklyn says finally. “When they came out of their spaceships. I ran and didn’t look back.”
“One time,” Adam says, nodding. He doesn’t add more.
“One time,” Flint echoes.
Violet shakes her head. We all know what that means. To my surprise, Andy also shakes her head. I had assumed that a run-in with the aliens was the reason behind all her fear.
“Twice,” says Rayen, and the others nod their heads respectfully. I nod too. I know what it feels like. “First when they got my family. Second time when I was on the run.”
Now there’s only one person left, and they all turn to me.
“Four times,” I say, my throat dry.
“Four?” Brooklyn says in horror. “Four times? And you escaped?”
I nod, numbly.
“You are indeed one lucky leaf, Clover.”
“It wasn’t luck,” I mutter, and they all turn to me again. It’s now or never. The moment of truth. “It was something else.”
Brooklyn raises her eyebrows expectantly, and I go on. “The first time, I was with my ex-boyfriend. They were chasing us. They caught up to Noah, and they shot him.” I pause. “But they ignored me. And it was like…”
“You weren’t even there.”
I look up sharply to see Avani with her dark eyes fixed on me.
“How did you know?”
She doesn’t hesitate. “Because that’s exactly the same thing that happened to me.”
Chapter 23
The whole room is stunned, and I can’t bring myself to speak. Brooklyn spins in her chair so fast that, for a second, I think she might fall.
“You never told me this.”
“Well, I didn’t want to sound like a complete freak of nature,” Avani says defensively. “Why would I tell you?”
“Oh, hell,” Brooklyn exclaims. “Because it’s the exact same reason I survived.”
Adam throws the marker on the table. “Yeah. I mean, I ran through my town when they attacked. They shot everything that moved…except me. It occurred to me later that it must have been because I was somehow invisible.”
We all nod—we’ve all reached the same conclusion.
“So we are all freaks,” Rayen says, and I can’t wrap my head around the fact that they’ve been through the same things I’ve gone through. “Good to know.”
Violet is quiet. Andy doesn’t move.
That’s when it hits me. They don’t know if they’re immune.
“We’re all weirdos,” Brooklyn concludes. “But what makes us weirdos? Was it our clothes?”
I shake my head. “I was wearing different stuff at each encounter. It’s definitely something else.”
“I could run some tests,” says Avani. “Take blood samples and run them through the lab to see if I can find anything.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Andy speaks up.
“Can’t hurt. Besides, I guess we know our advantage now.”
“Bloody things can’t see us coming.” Flint grins and fist-bumps Brooklyn.
Violet shifts in her seat. “That would be an advantage, if we knew how to destroy them. Which we don’t. We don’t know anything about them, and all these archives are useless.” She sighs deeply, and I can see that she’s frustrated. “We don’t know where they’re from, we don’t know what they want, we don’t know how to break their armor. We don’t know how their technology works or how they stay alive. We’re shooting in the dark.”
“My egg idea is still up for grabs,” Brooklyn offers. No one finds this worth an actual response.
Adam gets up and picks up the marker. He walks back to the whiteboard.
“We don’t know a lot,” he says. “But we do know some things.”
He starts by writing down “excellent sight/hearing,” then moves on to “impervious to bullets.” Those are the things that he knows, and I wonder if Adam, who looks like the star player of the football team, had the same idea I did of shooting them.
Suddenly we’re all shouting things out.
“Six stable legs.”
“Their guns beep before they fire,” says Rayen, and I’m glad that I’m not the only one who noticed that.
“Incredibly fast.”
“Always in twos.”
“No verbal communication,” says Brooklyn, which is an interesting point.
Adam dutifully writes down all of our observations.
“They come out at night,” I point out. “Their guns wipe out all human matter.”
“These are all valid points, but we’re not getting anywhere,” Violet says. “Maybe it’d help if we actually thought about the other questions. What do they want?”
I don’t know, and I haven’t figured out their strategy. They came in a massive invading force and started wiping us out. But not with bombs. One by one, like they wanted to look each person in the face before killing them. I can’t see any plan behind their attack.
“Food?” Avani suggests.
“Electricity?”
“Resources?”
“To colonize our planet?”
“To destroy Earth so they can build an intergalactic highway?” offers Andy, and we all glare at her. “Sorry.”
“I’m out of ideas,” says Brooklyn. “I mean, why would they want to come here?”
“There must be something about Earth,” Violet muses.
Brooklyn cocks an eyebrow, looking around the room. “A bunch of losers? No offense, but that’s all we have available at the moment.”
We fall silent.
“For how many movies I’ve seen, you’d think I’d be able to come up with an answer,” Brooklyn says, sighing.
“I hear you,” says Flint. “This is the end-of-the-world scenario, and we haven’t even got Will Smith.”
I smile. For a second, I can almost believe that we’re just a bunch of kids discussing alien movies. The kind I liked to watch with Abuelo, before my life turned out to be like one.
“There aren’t all that many possibilities,” says Rayen.
“We’ve been through the main ones,” Andy says. “War of the Worlds, Arrival, Alien, Independence Day, Battlefield Earth, Pacific Rim…”
“My God, woman, how many alien movies have you seen?” Flint asks, turning to her.
“Some.” Andy looks guilty for a moment. “Enough.” She looks down. “Okay, maybe all of them. Don’t judge me.”
“Guys,” Violet says loudly. “We need to take this seriously. Forget the movies. Forget about everything else and concentrate. We need to figure this out.”
We go silent, staring intently at the whiteboard. It doesn’t have the answers, though, and they’re not going to magically pop up anytime soon.
“We use the airplane,” I say. “Lure them out of hiding.”
“Are you sure that they would come after you?” Violet asks, concern written all over her face.
I nod. “They will. We just have to find a way to bring down their ship.”
“So what you’re saying is…” Brooklyn starts.
“We use the plane as bait,” I say. “We capture one of them. And then we learn exactly what our enemy is searching for.”
Chapter 24
We discuss all our ideas at length: how to lure them out, how to capture them, how to react if this or that were to happen. We come up with at least ten backup plans, but the real problem is that our main plan might not work, even if everything goes perfectly.
Eventually, the others decide to go to bed. There’s been enough discussion for one day, not to mention a hundred ideas floating around for what we’ll need to do to prepare.
There’s one thing that I want most of all. I want to be able to go up in the sky again without being hurled out of it. Ever since the aliens arrived, that’s the only thing I’ve wanted. To go back to the place where I belong, where I feel like I’m complete. Maybe then, I’d find that I still have something to live for, even if everything else is gone. I could still honor the Martinez legacy.
I stay up in the kitchen. I’m unable to sleep, even though I know I’m safe. My body is completely exhausted, yet I can’t close my eyes without seeing memories flash by. Sputnik has no problem sleeping, lying down in the middle of the kitchen floor and snoring as I try to read the most recent archives.
They aren’t very useful. They mostly contain the same information that we already know, with one maj
or exception: the government had figured out that something was coming two months before it hit Earth. They’d written tons of reports about the astonishing number of spaceships directed at our planet, and how it seemed impossible to stop them.
They had explored ideas—atmospheric shields, atomic bombs, and so on—but none of them were viable. When the aliens landed, they tried everything, but nothing had worked.
They’d been able to capture and study one spaceship, but they still couldn’t find answers. Their ships are made of a metal not found on Earth, a smooth, thin, malleable metal that, once shaped, becomes so dense that nothing can get through. They tried moving it, but it proved impossible.
Mainly, though, the government had focused on dealing with peoples’ reactions—subduing the rising panic, suppressing alarmists and weird alien cults, reassuring the public that there was nothing to be worried about. But in the end, it didn’t matter. The aliens sent out forces that were too strong, too fast, too efficient. There wasn’t one big spaceship to attack, but a million little ones. Their strength was in their numbers, and we had nothing to fight that. So we perished.
The government estimated a force of fifty million invaders. Fifty million indestructible invaders who, in a matter of days, broke us in half. They destroyed our air bases first, so that we couldn’t fight them in the sky. Once people started turning to dust, and other people started breathing it in, they started dying, too. Blackened lungs and blackened bodies, like I’d seen on the road. And then there was no one left to tell the tale.
“Can’t sleep?” comes a voice from the doorway, and I turn to see Flint standing there.
I shake my head. “Not really.”
He walks over to the coffee maker on the counter and presses a button. The drink comes pouring out. He fills two cups and brings one over to me.
“Should we really drink coffee at this hour?” I ask.
“You’re not going to sleep, so what difference does it make?” he replies, shrugging as he sits down.
I thank him with a nod. The coffee tastes good.
“It never goes away, does it?” Flint examines me. “That sensation that you have to stay awake.”