Violet City

by Page Morgan

  And that’s when I see the bodies.

  Chapter Three

  I don’t want to look at them, but my eyes land and stick anyway. Four guys are sprawled out on the turf inside the basketball court, the ball still clutched in one player’s hands. And in the ball field—oh God. My stomach heaves. There’s a little boy and his mom near the pitcher’s mound. She’s lying on top of him, like she’d tried to shield him from the electric blasts the black pods had been firing.

  I take a shaking breath and press my back against the concrete door. Thank God my mom isn’t in the city. She has a shift today at the Eastham hospital, where she’s a nurse in the radiology department. I don’t know when the shift starts though. Had she been at home or at work when the ship arrived? I close my eyes. What if those black pods were sent over there, too? I look into the sky again, but there’s just the ship, dense smoke, and clouds of flittering debris, like paper or confetti. It reminds me of all the footage from the 9/11 attacks, only now, there are no police and ambulance sirens, no ferries and boats crowding the river making rescues. Just some distant shouting, wind, seagull shrieks, and a dog’s incessant bark. The silence is still somehow loud though.

  It feels like there’s a huge red marker in the center of my back as I start along the path, but I have to move. Up ahead, a footbridge will take me over the parkway and back toward Riverside Drive, and then to a cross street that leads to Broadway. But first I have to walk through the children’s playground.

  The park’s big, red-topped carousel comes into view, creaking in a slow rotation. I twist my fingers around the strap of my messenger bag and break into a run, past the carousel and onto the bridge. I can’t look. I can’t see what I know is probably there. I’ve already thought about Ollie too much in the last half hour or so, and nothing good ever comes of thinking about him.

  Up and down the parkway, traffic is at a standstill. People stream between stalled out cars and fender benders. They’re going every which way, gaping up at the sky as they run. One woman has a bicycle, and she keeps ringing the little bell on her handlebar—brring, brring, brring—as if the sound of it will clear the congested path.

  Down the parkway a bit, a rollover has pancaked the roof and windshield of a minivan, and at least a half-dozen more pile-ups litter the road north and south. Below my spot on the bridge a man is shouting at a woman.

  “What do you want me to say? I can’t call! It’s dead! There’s nothing I can do, Sheila!”

  The man slams his cell phone onto the hood of a black BMW and poor Sheila bursts into tears. I stare at the man’s cell phone. The cars aren’t working. Our phones aren’t working. There are no helicopters, no planes, no sirens. I glance down Riverside Drive. Way ahead, there’s a set of lights, but none of the circles are lit up. They aren’t even blinking. Maybe nothing is working.

  I bite the inside of my lip and look up. The ship could have hit us with an EMP. An electromagnetic pulse would wipe out all computerized stuff, though I don’t know how long something like that would last. Besides, the emergency lights in the treatment plant had come back on. It doesn’t make sense.

  Nothing does.

  I exit the bridge and turn south, every step taking me farther away from Tana, still back there on the dock. I can’t think of her as dead. She just can’t be. All of these people, that kid and mom back there in the park… My head feels the way it does after a dose of sinus decongestant; like it’s lifting up off of my shoulders. A school of black dots swirls in front of my eyes. My legs once again go numb, and the next thing I know, I’m on my knees in the middle of Riverside Drive. I can’t see anything but white. My pulse whooshes in my ears. I force myself to focus on it.

  I have a pulse.

  I’m alive.

  And I absolutely want to stay that way. Not just want—need. If I give up, if I die...my mom won’t make it through that. She barely made it through Ollie. I have to keep moving. I have to get to Eastham. To my mom. Nothing else matters.

  The sounds of people shouting and crying, and the bicycle bell that keeps ringing down on the parkway, slowly get louder. The blinding white light starts to fade, and I can see again. My hands are flat against the grit and dirt of the pavement, a crushed green soda bottle kicked into the gutter nearby.

  I get up, knees still shaky. Broadway is a few blocks in. There should be a subway station there—not that it will help if the trains aren’t working. I dart between stalled cars on Riverside and up the cross street, my bag bouncing off my hip.

  My eyes shift from the sky, where the spaceship still blocks most of the sunlight, to the street ahead, where stone and brick-fronted row houses stand. A few trees have been toppled, their trunks scorched and split, the limbs having taken down power lines. One row house is on fire, smoke billowing from the roof, and people are crowded on the street and on front stoops, eyes skipping between the fire and the sky above.

  “Hey,” I call over to a couple of guys. “You have a working landline?”

  One guy points to the sky with the barrel of a handgun that I hadn’t seen before now. “You’ve gotta get inside somewhere before those little ships come out again.”

  The other teenager shakes his head and answers my question. “They’ve shut down everything.” He’s crouched behind the stoop’s low fence, as if he can hide from the spacecraft. “Trains, TVs. Phones definitely won’t work. Computers, too.”

  Crap. If trains and cars and buses all aren’t running, how am I supposed to get to the Lincoln Tunnel?

  You walk, Pen.

  I feel like crying as I move on, toward Broadway, but if one tear slips out, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop the others lined up behind it. I need to stay focused right now.

  “Just get inside somewhere,” one of the guys shouts after me again.

  The only place I want to be is inside my own home. That means getting across the Hudson, one way or another.

  So, I walk, then run, and with every step, try to push down the images of the aliens in the treatment plant and the questions that keep cropping up: What had Rowan the Alien been doing down there? It doesn’t seem likely that he would have tracked me and Lee into the basement of the treatment plant just to kill us. So that means he was probably down there for another reason.

  I turn onto Broadway. There aren’t any moving cars or buses, but there are plenty of people. They cram the sidewalks and overflow into the wide boulevard, and they’re all traveling north.

  I hold up my hand. “Excuse me,” I say to a woman who’s wearing a business pantsuit and dragging a roller suitcase. She doesn’t stop.

  “Wait, can you tell me if the trains are working? Or any landlines anywhere?” I call after her.

  “Nothing’s working,” she calls back. She keeps walking, a medical face mask covering her mouth.

  The air is thick with dust and smoke, and I notice a lot of others are also blocking their noses and mouths with cloths and handkerchiefs. I can feel the dust on my tongue, coating my teeth, and my throat is sore. I bring up the collar of my flannel shirt and tuck my nose and mouth into it, but I’m not sure it helps.

  I face south, against the tide of people. I guess going north is the general consensus, and it makes sense. There’s nothing after Wall Street and Battery Park except water. People are probably crossing the bridges over the East River into Brooklyn like herds of cattle. I’m sure I’m being a complete idiot, but I keep south on Broadway. I wish I could just call my mom’s cell to make sure she’s all right. If any news networks were still live, I could find out how many more spaceships are out there. Is it just New York City, or are other places getting invaded, too?

  My tongue is dry, my head is starting to ache, and I have something like a hundred blocks to walk. The urge to cry pulls at the bottom of my throat, but I swallow it.

  I take two more steps before the trumpeting blare from the spaceship blows down over us again. Instinct drives me into a crouch, and I clap my hands over my ears like before. My gums tingle, and my
eardrums feel like they’re being shaken around inside a box.

  The storefront window beside me, a realtor’s office with printouts of apartment listings taped to the inside, shatters. Glass rains over the sidewalk. I turn my back in time, though the shards still bite into my neck and scalp. Another window across the boulevard does the same thing, sending a cloud of glass into a woman’s face. She opens her mouth in a scream, her cheeks and nose and forehead instantly streaked with blood, but I can’t hear her. The blare from the spaceship is so deep and resounding it’s even in the ground, rising up through my feet.

  Then it’s gone, just as abruptly as it started. The people nearest to me break into a run. It’s all-out chaos as the first black pod zooms overhead, a few blocks south. They multiply, pouring out of the big ship and descending fast, firing off the same white flares in rapid succession. People drop, shivering with electricity as flares hit their marks.

  I stand frozen on the sidewalk as screaming people shove past. Someone steps on my foot, but I barely feel it. One alien pod is so close I can make out the golden reflective windshield, just like the fishbowl helmet Rowan the Alien had been wearing. The back end of the pod curls in on itself, like a nautilus shell. The bottom is thin and flat, and the white flares seem to shoot out from a protruding lip just underneath the wide windshield.

  “Move, move, move!” a police officer screams, waving his arm as he rushes past me.

  Another shoulder knocks into me, and I nearly fall into the shattered realtor’s office window. I could jump through and take cover in there. I definitely don’t plan on joining the crowds of hysterical people running in the street—the white flares are picking them off easily. I need shelter, and I can only press myself so flat against the exterior of a building. I’m about to maneuver myself through the blown-out window when I see a better option: The sign for a Holiday Inn Express hangs off an awning two buildings away. A hotel means more rooms. More doors. More places to hide.

  I elbow my way between two men in construction gear, and fight against the sea of people. I fling open the doors to the Holiday Inn Express and step inside a deserted lobby. The continental breakfast area is completely torn apart. It looks like people have come through and swiped every last Danish, muffin, and sugar packet. I haven’t given looting a thought until now. Who can possibly think about food when aliens are attacking?

  I head farther in, toward the door leading to the internal stairs. It crashes open before I can reach for the handle. A woman in a hotel uniform pops out and waves me toward her.

  “Hurry up!” She seizes my arm and pulls me into the stairwell, where there’s at least a half dozen other people sitting or standing on the flight of steps: chambermaids, another front desk clerk, and a guy wearing a cowboy hat. A row of small, thin windows along the back wall lets in a little light. Other than that, it’s dim.

  The woman closes the door behind us. “How many did you see out there?” she asks, her nose pressed to the rectangle of glass set in the door.

  “I don’t know. Ten? Twenty?” I answer. “But there are probably more. Like last time.”

  “Jesus and Mary. There were thousands of them last time,” the cowboy says, pacing a small strip of concrete at the base of the stairs. His voice warbles, and for a second I think he might cry. He growls, as if being driven to near tears makes him furious.

  I back up, out of his path. There’s another door beside me, and from the strong odor of chlorine, I’m guessing it leads to the pool.

  “They’re electrocuting everyone,” a chambermaid says, her breathing rapid.

  “Aliens, right? They’ve got to be aliens,” Cowboy says. “Or maybe they’re some Chinese terrorist weapon. Or Korean. They could be Koreans.”

  Koreans? Seriously?

  “They’re aliens.” I try not to roll my eyes. “I saw a few.”

  The stairwell echoes with the sound of every person shifting to look at me.

  The woman who’d pulled me through the door steps forward. She’s intense, with a high ponytail, dark lip liner, and penciled in brows. In a ray of light from the windows, her name tag shimmers. It says Cherise.

  “What do they look like?” she asks.

  I shrug. “Like us, kind of. Only…bigger.” It’s hard to explain, and I hesitate to tell them about the things Rowan said, about not having a planet, and about needing to survive. I don’t know why. However, my mom and dad have always advised me to follow my gut instinct, and right now my instinct tells me to clam up. The more I appear to know, the more they might corner me in their quest for answers. I’m already feeling claustrophobic enough.

  “Whoa. They look like us? Like, human?” Cowboy asks.

  “How did you see them?” another chambermaid asks. She stands up from where she’s been sitting on a concrete step. Her uniform is splattered with something dark. The shadows in here trick my eyes, and I don’t know if it’s blood or water. I don’t want to find out. “Did they talk to you?”

  I’ve already said too much.

  My messenger bag is getting heavy, so I slip the strap from my shoulder. “No. I just saw them,” I lie. “Really, just one of them. It’s big. Tall, I mean, and it looks human. With legs and arms and everything.”

  The other desk clerk, a thin man with spiked blond hair and way too much cologne leans over, his head between his knees. “Oh my God, oh my God, they’re going to pretend to be us. Oh my God. That’s how they’re going to kill the rest of us! Guys, I read it in a book, I swear I did.”

  “A book, Tanner? That’s not real,” Cherise says, her eyes still darting out toward the lobby every few seconds. She turns to me. “Did you notice anything about the one you saw? Like what might hurt it?”

  “I think water might,” Tanner says, his voice muffled by his knees.

  Cherise smacks him on the shoulder. “That’s from a movie. Also not real.”

  “Guns won’t work,” I say. “The one I saw got shot, but it got right back up. The suit it was wearing is some serious armor.”

  I know the aliens can be hurt. The pale one had broken the other one’s neck. At least, that’s what it had looked like.

  “If they look like us, how are we supposed to tell the humans and the aliens apart?” Cowboy asks. He focuses on me. “Hell, she could be one of them for all we know.”

  “If I were an alien, I would have electrocuted you by now,” I say, openly rolling my eyes this time. “Listen, I’m just hiding out like the rest of you.”

  Cowboy crosses his arms. “Prove it.”

  I gape at him. “Prove what?”

  “Prove you’re human.” He gestures toward my messenger bag. “Empty it out. There could be some kind of alien weapon in there.”

  The chambermaids on the steps shift uncomfortably, their polyester uniforms scratching along the cement.

  I glare at Cowboy. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  He isn’t. I can see it in the stubborn, vacant stare he throws back at me. I look to Cherise, Tanner, and the chambermaids, but they’re all staring at me with the same doubt. Great. I should have stuck with hiding out inside the realtor’s office. At least then I wouldn’t have had to deal with a bunch of people made stupid by paranoia.

  “Fine.” I grit my teeth and tear the strap from my shoulder. Crouching down, I upend the bag. My biology textbook, a couple of composition notebooks, crumpled up pieces of paper, my wallet, and my lunch bag and water bottle all slide out onto the floor.

  Followed by a slim black, glass vial that I’ve never seen before.

  Chapter Four

  It’s the size of an ink bottle, and it’s definitely not mine. The metal cap is inlaid with a strip of red neon light.

  Cowboy scuttles back. Tanner lifts his head up from in between his legs, and his eyes land on the vial. “What is that?”

  “Alien shit,” Cowboy says.

  “Like, alien excrement?” Tanner asks.

  I sigh and reach for the vial, my mind whirling for answers. How did this thing get
into my bag, and what the heck is it? I hadn’t come within ten feet of Rowan—but my bag had been on the floor. And Rowan had been thrown back on top of it when Mr. Gainsbridge shot him. My water bottle is cracked and leaking; probably from the impact of the alien’s weight. Had he been holding this vial at the time?

  I hesitate to touch it for another second while Tanner and Cowboy bicker about his alien excrement comment. But then I pick it up. The red neon light wrapped around the cap begins to blink.

  With a chorus of screeches, the chambermaids all lunge to their feet and stampede upstairs. Cherise rips open the door to the lobby and disappears. Tanner tries to get up, jams his shoulder against the handrail, and falls down two steps to the landing. He staggers up, holding his arm, and follows Cherise into the lobby.

  Cowboy points his finger at me. “Don’t move,” he says. “It could be a bomb.”

  While this guy seems like a Grade A idiot so far, on this, I can agree. It very well could be a bomb. The glass is black, but as my hand trembles, a thick kind of liquid sloshes around inside. My pulse hammers behind my eyes. I’m still crouching beside my bag, my stuff spewed all over the floor, the alien vial blinking in my hand, when screams ring out from the lobby.

  Breaking glass and heavy footfalls come next.

  Then, the mad click of high heels toward the stairwell door.

  I shove the black vial back into my bag, along with my wallet, lunch, and water bottle, leaving everything else on the floor. The textbook is heavy, and who cares about biology anymore? By the time I stand up, Cowboy has already blown through the door leading to the pool, and the lobby door is half open, with Cherise’s high ponytail visible through the little window.

  She shrieks as a net of blue-white static wraps around her hair. She falls, her forearm flopping through the open door and smacking onto the floor. Leftover static passes between her bright, pink-painted nails.