by Laura Pohl
“No. Not for now, anyway.”
“You don’t get used to it.” He smiles.
“I thought you were one of the kids raised here.”
He nods. “My parents came over four years ago and brought me along. Dad worked with Violet’s mum in the research department.” He takes a sip of coffee. “I never lost the accent. The rest is history.”
“Did you ever get used to living here?”
He shrugs again. “It was difficult. But you’ve got to admit, your father working at Area 51? That’s brilliant. Only problem is you can’t tell anyone.”
“And the kids here are unfazed.” I crack a smile.
“So unfazed.”
We sit quietly for a moment. The archive files overlap on the tablet in front of me, and I discard some of them with my finger. I don’t have time to sort through them all.
“But you did see them once,” I say carefully, and his dark eyes glow. “How did that happen?”
“Not one for small talk, are you, Clover?”
“I just really don’t see the point of talking about the weather.” I smile. “I’ll ask you another question, if you want. Do you believe in God?”
Flint smiles. I like that about him.
“I’ll take the first one. That’s a lot easier to answer.” His smile fades. “Kids were starting to get really sick from the plague. The adults were either already dead or just taking that turn for the worse, after the last expedition. So we said, ‘Hey, let’s call for a doctor.’”
He pauses and takes a deep breath. Like he’s trying to convince himself that he’s just telling a story, one that’s not about him.
“So we went. A group of ten of us, thinking that we’d find a doctor in the next town. Little did we know, everyone there was already dead.” His voice is dry. “We arrived in town and, of course, it was empty, so we started arguing about what to do next. Some of us wanted to split up to cover more ground, but others wanted to go to the hospital and try to find someone there. Voices were raised, and that was all it took. They came. None of us had seen them up close before. They started shooting. I froze.” He takes a gulp of coffee. “I mean, I didn’t know what to do. I thought for sure I was dead. So I stood there, glued to the ground. They shot all the others, and then they left. The end.”
I nod. There’s no use saying I’m sorry. He knows how I feel.
“Fun times,” Flint says with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “We go on. I guess that’s what matters.” He looks at the tablet in my hands. “Find anything interesting?”
“Nothing worthwhile.”
“Yeah.” He nods. “Just reports going back to the fifties, and they didn’t believe that aliens were real.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you that the United States government was wrong?”
Flint laughs. “Oh man, I’d like to say ten. But then again, I really wish that they’d been right.” He finishes his coffee. “You won’t find anything. I’ve had a look.”
“You have?”
He nods. “The only strange thing is that there was a blackout about twenty years ago.”
With another weary smile, he gets up and leaves. But something about the blackout that he mentioned intrigues me, and I get lost in the archives again.
Chapter 25
The next day, everyone seems to wake up with a mission. Avani, Flint, and Adam are busy digging up all the stuff that we’re going to need to knock out an alien, once we’ve captured one. Brooklyn takes our blood samples to test our invisibility theory. Andy is monitoring the computers, and Rayen is on patrol outside. Violet has shut herself inside her room, and I think she’s probably studying the plan to make sure that nothing could go wrong. We’ve given ourselves a week to prepare; I just hope it’s enough time.
Everyone looks very busy, and for a second, I feel bad for not contributing. I know too little of the facility to be of much help, and besides, my part of the plan doesn’t lie here.
So I sit down next to Andy in her computer room and continue to search through the archives for any scrap of information that we might have missed. Following up on Flint’s tip, I look through the reports from twenty years ago and find that one whole week is missing.
“Hey, Andy?” I look up from my screen. “What happened here twenty years ago?”
“I don’t know,” she answers absentmindedly. “Why?”
“There’s a week of missing reports,” I tell her, showing her my screen. “My best guess is that they got wiped somehow. Can you do anything to track them down?”
She studies my screen for a minute, then frowns. “Probably not,” she tells me. “I believe that they were digitizing all the old archives at that time. This week probably got lost in the shuffle. There’s a blackout reported and everything.” She shakes her head. “Interns, I swear.”
She returns to her various computer monitors. She’s got a movie playing on one, a game of Skyrim on another, and the security cameras on the rest. I have no idea how she can concentrate on all of them at once.
“But don’t you think this is important?” I ask her.
Andy turns to me. “Frankly, Clover, I don’t know. This could be nothing or it could be everything. But right now we also have a death plan to get through.”
I feel like she’s blaming me for all the changes. For getting them to finally move.
But we all decided this together, and we all have to find a way to be part of the plan. So I leave to check on the others.
* * *
When I get to the lab, Avani, Flint, and Adam are already there, studying some papers that are spread out on the table. Sputnik comes trotting up behind me, her tail swishing from side to side as she sees the others.
“What have we got?” I ask, leaning over the table.
Avani sighs deeply.
“All right, so, here’s a map that the government compiled of where all the spaceships landed,” Flint says, pointing to the little dots on the map. Across the whole world, almost all of the land is covered. According to a new scan Avani presented, we’re looking at a little more than five million shells. Then I notice a few empty spaces.
“They didn’t go to Antarctica?” I ask.
“Well, they’ve got a population of about two hundred during winter,” Flint explains. “All shipments stopped after the invasion, so…”
He doesn’t need to say what we all know: with no supplies, it’s likely the population didn’t survive.
“A couple of ships landed there,” Adam says. “But they’re different than the ones that landed here, like they’re prepared for the extreme cold.”
“So our hypothesis is that their bodies can’t take the freezing temperatures,” Avani adds. “We think that we can build some kind of freezing chamber with the materials that we have here. At best, the alien will essentially be sedated.”
“And at worst?” I ask.
“At worst, we’re all screwed,” Adam says, sighing. “The alien is unaffected by the cold, gets out of containment, and kills everyone.”
Avani takes a deep breath, wiping sweat off of her brow. She’s wearing a white lab coat, and her thick brown hair is piled on top of her head.
“None of this is really giving me any confidence,” she says. “We don’t know what these things are. For all we know, they’re invincible. And I’m pretty sure that they’re not just going to walk voluntarily into a cryogenic chamber.”
“They aren’t completely invulnerable,” Adam says.
We all look up at him.
He clears his throat, his cheeks blushing red. “When they came to my town, my house was being remodeled,” he explains. “The whole house was torn apart, and there were wires everywhere. When they came, I panicked. And I turned on the circuits.”
“You fried one of them?” Flint asks in disbelief.
“No, not fried,” he says. “It was more like a short circuit, of sorts. I’m guessing that those metal legs have to be wired to their bodies somehow. I managed to delay it, that’s all.”
“So with a big enough electrical current, we could disable one for long enough to get it inside the chamber,” I say. “I mean, it’s not the best plan, but it’s a plan.”
Avani breathes deeply again, fanning herself with her hands. “Am I the only one who is hot in here?”
“Yes,” Brooklyn says, grinning as she walks into the lab. “What are all you nerds up to?”
“We aren’t nerds,” Avani snaps, blushing. “Technically, we’re saving your ass. What are you doing to prepare?”
Brooklyn stops and greets Sputnik, scratching behind her ears. “I was trying to help you, but then I got distracted.”
Avani gives an exasperated sigh. “Then let us get back to work. We’re the ones getting that thing into a cryogenic chamber. We’re inventing solutions from scratch. Like real scientists.”
“Go ask Rayen if she has any stun guns,” Adam says to Brooklyn. “We need one that can create short circuits.”
“Fine. Where would you guys be without me?” Brooklyn says as she waves goodbye.
“A lot quieter, that’s for sure,” Flint replies. He turns back to us. “So, Clover draws the aliens out with an airplane. Then we short-circuit one of them until we can get it inside the chamber and study it to discover its weak points. We have one problem: How do we get them out of the spaceship?”
They all look at me.
“Both times that I flew, they tried to take me down,” I say. “Both times, they came after me in fighters. Not shells.”
Avani frowns. “What’s the difference, again?”
“The shells are the ships they arrived in,” Adam says. “They’re pear-shaped, closed up, and useless, I’m guessing. They’re still around?”
I nod. “They aren’t designed for flying. Just for landing.”
“And the fighter ships?” Flint asks.
“I think there are one or two aliens piloting each one,” I say. “They’re bigger than the shells, the size of a small plane, and highly maneuverable. Plus they’re equipped with weapons to take me down.”
Flint lets out a slow whistle.
“We could use an electromagnetic pulse,” Adam suggests. “It could work. But there’s no way to test it on their ships.”
“That means that my plane has to be fast enough to outrun the pulse, so that my electronics won’t get scrambled,” I say. “We’ve got a few in the bunker that would work.”
I look around at the others, and I already feel a bit more confident. We don’t know much, but these ideas are better than nothing. They’re better than what we had before.
And I’m willing to do whatever it takes.
Chapter 26
The next day, I head to the bunker to clean out the plane that I’ve decided to use. It’s got a powerful motor, and I check again and again that everything is working, running all the tests that Abuelo had taught me to do ever since I was a kid.
“You ready?” Adam asks as he comes through the bunker gate. Sputnik barks at him, doing her usual circles around his legs.
“Yes,” I answer, though I’m lying through my teeth. “Does anyone need me over at the lab?”
“You can’t think you’re that essential to building Avani’s machine.”
I turn to him.
“I’m kidding,” he says, putting his hands up. “You know, I never got to thank you.”
I meet his gray-blue eyes. “What for?”
“You stood up for all of us,” he says quietly. “I would’ve stayed here for a long time, not realizing that I was missing something. Not realizing that we could do this.”
He offers me a sincere smile, and it disarms me. He is so much like Noah that it almost hurts to look at him.
But he’s not Noah, I remind myself.
I step away from him.
“So, I kind of owe you a favor,” he says. “What are you doing right now?”
“Besides focusing all of my energy on this plan?”
“I could teach you how to drive.”
I laugh, despite myself. “Do you have some ulterior motives?”
“Maybe.” He laughs, breaking that grin that makes his eyes sparkle. “I mean it, Clover. You can’t keep crashing cars.”
“It’s the end of the world. I can do whatever I want.”
“Yeah. But what if you die in a car crash? What will we put on your tombstone? ‘Clover…’” He waits for an answer.
“Martinez.”
“‘Clover Martinez. One of the Last Teenagers on Earth. Fought aliens. Died in a car crash, though.’”
The way he says it makes me want to laugh—it does sound absolutely ridiculous. “Strangely enough, there’s a bigger chance of getting killed by aliens than of dying in a car accident these days.”
Adam smiles again. “You owe your tombstone to humanity. It should say, ‘Died fighting aliens.’ Or something epic.”
“I’d rather sit through a root canal.”
“Come on, Clover. Be a good sport.”
“I hate sports.”
But somehow, Adam convinces me. He pulls a truck over to where I’m standing, near the entrance gate, and points out that there’s only one way I can go, in a straight line down the runway to the opposite end of the bunker, where there’s an empty space that’s barely visible from here. Five minutes later, I’m sitting in the driver’s seat with Adam riding shotgun, my hands gripping the steering wheel. Sputnik sits in the back, a seat belt over her fur.
“Okay,” I say, when I think I’m ready to go. The truck is military-grade, so it’s a lot bigger than any other car I’ve driven, which feels weird, like I have a bear in my control, instead of a small dog. It also has a manual transmission, and I’m used to automatics. “Are you sure about this?”
“Look at it this way,” Adam says. “You’ve never crashed an army truck, so your record is clean.”
My lips are set in a thin line. Driving this truck feels like a worse idea than taking the plane out for a ride.
“You’ve got this,” Adam says, and it feels strange to be trusted. I have crashed thirteen cars, and this guy sits here and tells me that he still has faith in me. “Now push the clutch pedal all the way down, start the engine, and put it in first gear.”
The problem isn’t the driving itself. It’s that five seconds after we start, I’m already thinking about something else. My brain seems to have completely forgotten that I’m supposed to be concentrating on driving.
At Adam’s instruction, I release the brake, press the gas pedal with my right foot, and, feeling the clutch engage, slowly lift my left foot up. The truck starts rolling forward. Adam seems delighted by this, and I wonder how long it’s going to last.
It never felt like a bad thing that I couldn’t drive, or that there was something that I wasn’t really good at. Plenty of people are bad at plenty of different things. You don’t usually go around telling them that they should do it anyway.
Unconsciously, I shift the truck into second gear. It starts going faster, but of course, we’re still inside the bunker. We’re not supposed to go fast. Up ahead, I see a solid wall.
Or at least, I see something that looks like a solid wall. It’s similar to the others, but somehow, from this angle, it doesn’t quite line up right.
“Are you seeing this?” I ask, pointing to the wall.
Adam frowns. “Clover, maybe you should stop.”
Now I notice a slight crack in the wall. And the closer I get, the more visible the crack gets.
I’ve looked at the blueprints of this compound a dozen times. I’ve memorized them by now. Right there, there’s supposed to be an exterior wall and nothing more. The biggest bunker in Area
51 ends here.
But my instincts are screaming that something is wrong. I check Adam’s seat belt and I check mine, and before he can tell me to stop, I shift into third gear and accelerate down the last stretch of the runway.
The front of the truck hits brick and a cloud of dust rises up into the air.
I grab the key from the ignition. There’s rubble in front of us, but there’s also something else. Something shiny and metallic.
I take off my seat belt, and Adam scrambles to release his and Sputnik’s. I jump out of the truck to investigate. The dust from the crash starts to settle, and a room beyond the wall takes shape.
Adam strides angrily to my side, but he stops ranting when he sees what I’ve hit.
Beyond a false wall, sitting right in front of us, is a spaceship.
Chapter 27
“Are you kidding me?” Adam asks in disbelief. “There’s a spaceship in our basement!”
Sputnik is the first to go through the hole I’ve made. She runs through the debris happily, padding her paws over the dust and barking.
“Jesus,” Adam says, gasping again. “This changes—”
“Look, you can’t tell the others,” I say, stepping in front of him. “If Violet finds out, she’ll cancel the mission. We can forget about fighting, and we’ll be stuck wasting our lives away in here.”
Adam looks reluctant but doesn’t say anything. I move forward, stepping over the debris so I can get a better look, and he follows me.
This ship is different from the shells that landed all over the world. I’ve only seen spaceships similar to this twice—on the day I flew to Malmstrom and the day I got the Blackbird to fly.
But this ship isn’t a pursuer. The fighters that tailed me were small, sleek, and fast. This one is bigger. It’s made from the same type of metal, though, and I can see our reflections in its hull. Sputnik steps forward and, before I can stop her, she licks it.
“Sputnik!” I shout, running toward her. I open her mouth, but there’s nothing there besides her terrible breath. “You silly dog. Do you have to lick everything you find?”