by Page Morgan
“We need to go back up.” My voice bounces off the massive pipes running along the ceiling and on either side of the narrow pathway that we’re in.
Lee keeps hauling me forward. “We’ll just let whatever is happening up there happen, and then we’ll head up later. There might be an employee break room down here, maybe some food and water. If so, we could stay here for a couple days and let everything blow over.”
I dig in my heels. “Stay here for days? I don’t think so.”
He bares his teeth and lodges his fingers deeper into my skin, right into the tender, new bruises. “Listen to me—I just watched people I know get fried by aliens. I’m not going to be one of them, okay? And I’m not going to be down here all by myself.”
He tugs again, and the soles of my sneakers slip forward. He’s dragging me around because he doesn’t want to be alone?
“Lee, stop it.” I use my firm voice, the one reserved for when my cat kneads the corner of the couch. But he doesn’t let go of me the way Mister Mister retracts his claws from the leather.
I try to wrench my arm free and end up slamming my shoulder into one of the pipes. Heat sears through my flannel shirt sleeve and scalds my skin. I hiss and clutch at the burn, stumbling, my senses bright with shock. Through it, I hear Lee laugh. My stomach churns out a warning.
“Why are you laughing?”
He yanks me to a stop in front of two low, rectangular water tanks. The water looks black, and a metallic musk wafts off of it.
“I’m not,” he says, chasing it with another hair-raising giggle. Then to himself, “Killed on a field trip. The whole class.”
“We don’t know that for sure. If we go back up, we’ll probably find—”
“We’re staying here.” He wheels me to the right, down another maze of pipes.
Okay, that’s it. I’ve had enough of this crypt. And of Lee. I twist my arm. “You’re pissing me off and giving me bruises. Get your hands off.”
“No way. If I let you go, you’ll leave,” he says.
“You can’t force me to stay,” I snap.
I cannot believe this. Lee’s gone full bat guano crazy. All this because he can’t stand the idea of being left alone?
It’s getting hard to breathe, like my lungs are filling up with thick fluid. My mom once explained how her panic attacks feel, and this is how she described them. Like drowning in liquid terror.
“Back off!” I shove at Lee, but it doesn’t work, and the next few seconds are a jumble of hands and feet—my free hand slapping at his face and scratching at his neck, my feet trying to kick his shins and stomp his toes.
I’m not breathing, and an adrenaline rush isn’t making me stronger; it’s making me clumsy. I try to scream but nothing comes out. My throat goes straw thin as Lee manages to pin both of my wrists behind my back. Fear, undiluted and sharp, zings like a blow to the back of my head. Finally, the geyser of air stoppered up in my throat explodes, and I scream.
“Let. Me. Go!”
Lee laughs that crazy giggle again, and my stomach kinks. I remember my knees, and how valuable they’re supposed to be in a situation like this. I bring one up and bury it in the soft mushiness of his groin. He groans and gags, and my wrists are suddenly free again.
I fumble my first few seconds of escape, still frozen in shock. It seems to take minutes, but with a rush of fury, I break out of my trance and run back through the maze of piping, the blinking emergency lights messing up my vision. I forget the pipes are hot and press my palm against one.
I scream and cradle my hand in my stomach, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. I want to sob, but not because of my burned hand. Because of everything. It’s all breaking over me, pulling me under—and that’s when I’m tackled from behind. The collision sends my bag straight over my head and onto the floor. I land on my back and take a direct hit of Lee’s breath on my neck and face. His hands slap mine away when I try to beat him off of me.
He’s snapped. He doesn’t want to be left down here alone while aliens are up there, attacking New York, but forcing me to stay is his answer?
There is no freaking way.
His shoulder is right above my face, his Mets jersey smelling like sweat and onions doused in body spray. I open my mouth, and bite. The fabric pops as my teeth sink through, and then comes the crunch of his skin as I pierce that, too.
Lee screams as he struggles to get up and away. I can’t move. I’m still on the floor, my vision swimming when a blurred line of white light races over my head. It hits Lee, taking him clean off his feet and throwing him against one of the hot pipes. Electrostatic shivers over his body, his legs and arms flailing.
And then Lee slumps down and goes still.
I force myself up onto an elbow, twist around, and my entire body goes numb.
They’ve found us.
Chapter Two
An alien stands directly in front of me, between the stacks of pipes.
Or maybe it’s a robot.
It’s wearing a black, mechanical looking suit, its arms and legs—two each—bulked up by gleaming armor. A narrow-mirrored visor is set into the center of its helmet, and it seems to be looking right at me.
I can’t move from the floor. I just stare at it, and more specifically, at its right arm, raised and pointed directly at me. There’s a ridge along the forearm of its suit, right above the wrist. It has to be the laser gun thing that just shot Lee.
I twist back around and find him lying in a lump. He’s not moving, and I know, without a doubt, that he’s dead. My stomach lurches in a mix of relief and shock. I turn back toward the alien, open my mouth, and say the first words that come to mind: “Thanks for stopping him, but…”
I seal my lips and feel a sickening rush of guilt. I just thanked an alien for killing Lee. He’d been freaking out, attacking me, trying to make me stay here with him, but eventually he would have calmed down. Right?
“But I…I don’t think he was going to...to really hurt me or anything, but...” I shut my mouth again. It’s a freaking alien. It can’t understand a word I’m saying.
The weapon on its arm is still aimed at me. I squeeze my eyes shut and think of the time I accidentally touched an electric fence with my thigh at a horse farm. It had been raining, the grass wet, and the current had traveled through my leg, up my body, and out through my hand. The crack of electricity had been like a gunshot, and I’d screamed so loud the horse I’d been trying to pet had reared back and galloped away. My fingers and thigh had tingled for an hour after.
This is going to do way more than tingle.
“Can you just do it?” I ask, scrunching up my face. “Make it fast?”
I keep my eyes closed and try to imagine myself somewhere else. Like on Long Island Sound, where my grandmother had a beach house when she was still alive. We’d go out every morning and collect shells, and when the tide went out, we could walk for forever, and the water would still only reach to our shins. The shallow water was warm, and there were crabs, their shells a spotty pink, red, and brown. I’d help Ollie collect them in a bucket, and we’d watch them crawl around before setting them free again at high tide.
“Mom, Dad, Ollie, Gram, Tana.” I murmur the names of the people I love. “Mister Mister,” I add because I do love my cat—when he isn’t scratching the couch or my legs.
The static doesn’t hit me. At least I don’t think I’m dead.
I open one eye. The black-suited alien has lowered its hulking arm to its side. I slide my feet against the concrete floor and try to push myself upright. My knees are rubbish though. I can’t do anything but stare.
The alien lifts its black-gloved hand to the underside of its helmet. I hear a few hisses, the sound reminding me of an airlock decompressing, something I’ve only ever heard in space movies.
And then it takes off its helmet.
I brace myself. I’ve seen Star Wars countless times, and when Darth Vader’s helmet comes off, revealing his pasty and pitted face, my dad alwa
ys cracks the same joke: “Dude could really use some sun.”
But this thing isn’t Vader.
The second the helmet is off I know the situation has just gotten way more complicated.
It’s a guy. A guy, with brown hair that reaches almost to his ears. There’s a stylish wave to it, like he might actually have stopped to comb through it before he got dressed in his robotic suit and started up his space pod to come attack my city.
He has eyes. Just two of them, thank goodness, and they’re normal size—not huge dinner plates like the green aliens I’ve seen on TV all my life. He has lips, a chin, and smooth cheeks. Ears, too. The only weird thing about him, the only feature that stands out as non-human, is a band of silver metal around his neck. It’s not a collar that looks like it can be snapped on and off. The metal is woven into his skin the way the flat reeds of baskets are woven together. Metal, then skin, then metal again, and in the center of his throat, a small front panel with several small blue, backlit buttons.
I stare, my jaw loose, as he opens his mouth.
“You thanked me. Why?”
I suck in a breath. He speaks English? Maybe he is a robot, or a cyborg, like the Terminator.
I lick my lips and try to think of a good answer. He’s completely expressionless. He could be staring at one of the cement walls down here for all the interest he’s showing. But for the time being, he’s lowered his ray gun thingamajiggy, and I want to keep it that way.
“Because you...I guess you helped me. But you didn’t have to kill him.”
His eyes shift toward Lee. They look black when the strobing emergency lights pulse red. But in the blinks of white light they’re a strange concoction of hazel and blue. They stand out against the golden bronze cast of his skin. I wish the lights would stop revolving; it’s making me queasy.
“I did have to kill him,” the alien replies. “Those are our orders.”
Oh. Okay. So, I guess he hadn’t intended to help me. He’d just seen Lee and shot him, and now he probably has to kill me, too. A spate of anger and fear lances my stomach. He could even be the one who shot Tana from his little black pod.
What’s stopping him? The fact that I’d thanked him?
“Why are you here?” It’s something I’d really like to know before I’m dead. “Why are you killing us?”
He returns his attention to me, and in the bright flashes of light, those weird eyes of his, a swirled confection of ice and summer grass, fix on my face.
“Survival.”
“What about our survival?”
“Your species is weaker than ours. It is the nature of things.”
“But this is our planet. You can’t just fly in here and take it!”
“Yes, we can,” he says with that same blank expression of his.
“You’re killing innocent people. How would you feel if we came to your planet and started killing your innocent people?”
Really wise, Penelope. Chastise an alien who’s wearing a deadly stun gun on his arm.
Having an argument with an alien hadn’t been on my agenda this morning, but it seems I can adapt. If he’s going to shoot me, I’m not going down without telling him exactly how I feel.
He makes his first expression, furrowing his eyebrows in confusion. “I do not have a planet for you to come to. It was destroyed. That is why we are here.”
Oh.
“Listen, I’m sorry about that.” I think about it for a second and realize I actually am sorry. “But you must be upset that you don’t have a planet, right? How do you think we’re going to feel?”
He frowns again. Blinks twice. “We cannot worry about how you feel.”
Okay. This is going nowhere, fast. If he really doesn’t care how we feel—how I feel—then what can I possibly say to stop him from shooting me with his jacked up taser gun and walking away to conquer the rest of the city?
I stand still, bite my lower lip, and then release it. I don’t want to look timid when he finally raises his arm and kills me. Death. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about over the last two years. I wasn’t there when Ollie died. The driver of the car had been texting and swerved without even knowing it. The doctors told us Ollie didn’t suffer. That he was gone instantly. Sometimes I wonder if they tell everyone that, to try to give the people left behind a bit of peace. As if there can be any peace when an eight-year-old is alive one second and dead the next.
I lift my chin and exhale.
“Fine. Do it then. You’re a coward though, shooting unarmed people as they’re running from you.”
Apparently, impending death makes me mouthy.
He quirks his head. There’s a slim, gray rectangle etched into the hard suit over his left pectoral, like a nametag. At this distance, the slanted letters look like they read Rowan. I narrow my eyes and realize they aren’t letters after all. They’re strange symbols, like hieroglyphics.
“The rules of battle are different in this situation,” he says.
“This isn’t battle, this is genocide.”
He raises the barrel-shaped device strapped to his forearm.
“My name is Penelope,” I say quickly, my eyes sticking to the device and then flicking up to meet his again. “Just so you know it. Penelope Simmons. And that was Lee. And he might have been an asshole, but he didn’t deserve to die. Neither did my friend Tana, who you killed up there near the river.”
I can feel my time running out. My heart gasps with each beat. One here, another there, like it knows it should wind down.
“Penelope?” Another voice hammers through the pipe tunnel. Mr. Gainsbridge? “Oh my god, it’s one of them. Penelope, don’t move.”
The alien swivels sideways to see my biology teacher, who has somehow, somewhere, found a freaking handgun. He looks ten kinds of wrong holding it, but at least he’s aiming right at Rowan the Alien.
Rowan turns his back to me and faces Mr. Gainsbridge fully.
“Don’t move,” my professor says again.
The alien steps forward, and a second later, a gunshot cracks through the air. I drop into a crouch, my hands clapping over my ears. Rowan stumbles back. He’s been hit. His heels trip, tangling in the strap of my fallen messenger bag. He goes down, landing on his back, on top of my bag, his arm flinging out. His bulky suit makes a series of whirring, mechanical hisses, and then he’s on his feet again within a half-breath.
I don’t wait—I grab my bag and hurdle over Lee’s body. I run down the tunnel of pipes toward the water cisterns I’d seen earlier. Behind me, there’s the static sound of the alien’s electric gun and the warbling cry of my biology teacher. Rowan the Alien has electrocuted him just like he had Lee. Just like he’d intended to electrocute me.
So…why had he hesitated?
I hitch a right and take another short corridor, this one walled by thinner pipes throwing off cold instead of heat. Running footsteps sound behind me, and I slide down another tunnel, then take a right, and stumble to a stop. The metal staircase is right in front of me. I have absolutely no idea what I’ll find once I reach the top, but right now, it’s more promising than what’s tracking me down here.
I make a run for it, too scared to look over my shoulder and see if he’s there, his gun arm aimed at me. My feet are on the metal steps, and I’m crashing up them like a grizzly, but it’s hard to hear anything beyond the pulse of my own heart in my ears.
And then it happens: the pathetic trip up the steps, where my toe catches and my shin slams into the next step. I feel the pain of the instant bruise and swear at myself for being such an oaf. But then I seal my lips. With my hands braced on the dirty, grated metal step, I can see through to the complex network of pipe tunnels below.
Two more aliens are in another steamy pipe corridor, visible from the staircase. Both are male, like Rowan, with hair and ears and all the other disturbingly human features. They stand close together, their helmets removed, discussing something quietly. I start to stand, glacially so they won’t catch sight of me
, when one of them, with short, white blond hair and deathly pale skin, moves—fast. He attacks the other alien, wrapping him in a chokehold and twisting his head. The motion is decisive and abrupt, and I watch in horror as the other alien slumps onto the concrete floor. His head flops to the side, the angle all wrong. My stomach churns, and I can’t breathe. He’s dead. The white-haired alien has just killed one of his own.
I shouldn’t care. I don’t care. I just need to get out of here without the pale alien seeing or hearing me.
I push myself up. The second I move though, the metal steps rattle, and the pale alien’s eyes lock on me.
His irises are milky, like he doesn’t have pupils at all. They drain all feeling in my arms and legs, but even with my flimsy muscles, I launch myself up, two steps at a time. I’m through the door and bounding up the interior stairwell of concrete steps within seconds. My thighs burn, and I can barely breathe, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop. They’re dead. Tana. Lee. Mr. Gainsbridge. Whoever that other alien guy was. Freaking Greenly and Brandon and Mitchell, and God knows how many other people from my class. Not just my class, but people everywhere.
Survival, Rowan had said. That’s why they’re here. But what about us?
I take the steps, getting dizzy as I turn and run from landing to landing, until there isn’t another turn in the stairwell. Just a door. It’s primer gray and there’s a small, reinforced glass window that shows daylight outside. I push the long metal bar and the door swings wide, a rush of cool October air breathing all over me. It whips my hair into a frenzy and reaches through the buttoned panels of my plaid shirt and the cotton tank underneath.
My knees go weak. I cling to the door, my elbow braced on the metal push bar. Billowing black smoke spirals up from Harlem’s rooflines, toward the belly of the spaceship. It’s still there, looming overhead, though the smaller spacecrafts aren’t clogging up the sky any longer. It’s a small blessing, but I’ll take it.
I let go of the door, and it slams behind me. I’m in the park above the treatment plant, between basketball courts and a baseball field.