Halifax (3 page)

Rom moved to the edge of the circular room, stepping around equipment that most scientists never imagined, and to a large steel door. “And, of course, no secret hideout of ours would ever be complete without—a library!”

Rom swept his hand across a small red panel. It was a palm reader that scanned his hand. The panel turned blue and a door slid open automatically to reveal an impossibly long corridor. It stretched on so far you couldn’t see the other end. It was lined on the left and right with row after row of shelves of books.

“My library!” Farrell said with delight. “You can learn anything you need to know by reading a book.”

“I can learn anything I need to know by searching for it on the Internet,” Rom declared.

“Kids today,” Farrell said as he entered the library. “No appreciation for the simple pleasures in life.” Farrell left the others behind and disappeared into the rows of books.

Rom and Izzy left Farrell in his library and Rom pushed his sister towards one of the three main workstations set up in the Garage, one for each of them. “I’m certain you’ll finally be pleased with me when you see what I’ve done for you.”

The workstation, with its long table, bay of video screens and sensible ergonomic chair, was suspiciously pink in theme and Izzy approached it reluctantly. She wasn’t a pink kind of girl. She didn’t even like magenta. Mauve was also suspect in her book. The bright pink cloth covering the station, therefore, was not met with enthusiasm.

“I hate pink.”

“You’ll like this,” Rom told her. “Just wait until you see. Just wait.” He grabbed the edge of the cloth and paused for dramatic effect, making Izzy suffer—or at least trying to make her suffer. Finally he pulled the cloth off with a great flourish to reveal a laptop computer beneath. It was a pink laptop computer. It was a pink laptop computer emblazoned with a cartoon image famous the world over—possibly famous throughout the universe.

“I’ve made you a customized
Hello Kitty
computer!” Rom said. He was full of excitement and the anticipation of glory. The smiling face of the Japanese kitten stared up at Izzy from the top of the computer. Izzy frowned back.

“I don’t like Hello Kitty, Rom,” she said with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

Rom looked crushed. “All girls are genetically predisposed to like Hello Kitty. That’s backed up by scientific data.”

“I’m not using it.”

“Then you won’t have a computer.”

“You’ll make me another one,” Izzy told him. And she meant it.

In his library, Farrell ran his fingers along a row of books. The shelf was appropriately labeled
Science Fiction
and all the classics were there before him. They were books he had read many times. Douglas Adams’
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
, Bradbury’s
The Martian Chronicles
, H.G. Wells’
War of the World
s. Farrell pulled one well-worn book off the shelf. It was Jack Finney’s
The Body Snatchers
. It was a book he especially loved, though he loved all books. He didn’t see science fiction as being in any way a study of things he knew in his own life. They were stories. They were his escape from the dangerous, stressful life he led. Farrell could find something worthy in any book. Advice. Adventure. Instruction. Poetry. He loved all stories, but most of all he loved the stories of Earth. Earth had the best stories of all.

Farrell began to thumb through the pages of
The Body Snatchers
, ready to lose himself for a moment in words, ready to relax and forget, but his attempt to do something as simple as read a book was interrupted by the sudden, jarring sound of an alarm. It blared loudly, blasting from the Garage and echoing down the stacks of Farrell’s library. Farrell quickly stuck the book back on the shelf, back in its place, and ran out to join Rom and Izzy.

They stood before the giant screen that Rom had called the barge tracking system. There had been nothing but a map of the continents of Earth on it before but now a blinking light moved across the grid on the screen, moving east to west across the map of the United States, passing across the states at speed. Rom frantically pushed buttons on the console below the screen. He turned dials and moved levers but nothing he did seemed to accomplish whatever he was trying to do. He slammed his fist down in frustration.

“What’s going on?” Farrell asked as he quickly scanned the monitors and tried to make sense of the mayhem that had suddenly taken over the Garage.

“It’s the Reno barge,” Rom said, his eyes fixed on the screen, following the red blinking dot as it moved across Arizona and into southern California. “It’s off course. It came into the atmosphere too fast. It’s unstable.”

“Can’t you contact them?” asked Izzy.

“I tried. They’re not answering. It’s going down!”

“Take over the controls from here,” Izzy told him.

“I can’t!” Rom yelled at her. “Their system is locked down. It’s going to crash!”

“Where is it going to crash, Rom?” Farrell said calmly as Rom continued pushing every combination of buttons possible on the console, working to no avail. “Rom?” Farrell said again as he grabbed his brother by the shoulders and turned him towards him. “
Where is it going to crash
?”

Rom’s eyes were wide with excitement and more than a little panic. “Six blocks away,” he blurted out. “Six blocks away!”

A set of skid marks stretched from the ten to the fifty yard lines on a school football field. The sod was churned up and dirt was pushed aside along a path that led to a large crater in the center of the field. Smoke filled the night air. It wafted through the dimly lit klieg lights that hung on towers above the bleachers in the small stadium. There were skid marks, a crater and smoke, but no signs of what had obviously crashed right where the coin toss usually took place before a football game.

Farrell, Izzy and Rom stood on the sidelines examining the scene. Rom took his penguin backpack off his shoulders. Its friendly penguin face smiled at him and two googly eyes bounced in circles as he rummaged through its contents and pulled out a red children’s Etch-A-Sketch. It had a grey monitor and two white dials at the bottom that Rom began to twist and turn until the monitor lit up.

This Etch-A-Sketch wasn’t for drawing. It was an electronic scanner. Rom held it up and pointed it at the football field. He used the dials to adjust it and an image appeared, fuzzy at first, and then focusing to reveal the outline of some kind of space ship on the monitor. To the naked eye, there was nothing there. Through the Etch-A-Sketch, however, the unmistakable lines of a large, boxy vehicle were at the end of the skid marks. It was half buried in the crater at the fifty-yard line.

“There it is,” Rom said.

“Deactivate its screen,” Farrell told him as Izzy looked over Rom’s shoulder at the monitor.

Rom turned the white dials again and there was a flash on the football field as a shield of light appeared around the crater and then slowly peeled away, opening like a curtain, to reveal a smoking, crumpled space ship. It was streaked with burn marks across its sides and its front end was buried in the turf of the football field. It had no windows, but did have one large door on the side. The door was half open and was bent back and mangled at the edges.

The Halifax siblings approached the ship with caution, looking backward as much as forward as they slowly walked towards the wreckage and reached the open door. A light from within the ship was flashing off and on and sparks poured from broken wires in the ceiling. They all peered in and all three instantly pulled back, disgusted by whatever it was they had seen within. Izzy even covered her mouth with her hand, trying to keep from being sick.

“That’s a good reminder to always wear your seat belt,” Farrell told the others. He tried to shake off the horror of the carnage within and turned to his little brother. “Go in and check it out, Rom. Get a body count.”

“Me?” asked Rom, distressed at the very thought.

“You’re the youngest. You can bounce back from psychological trauma much easier than we can.”

Rom looked up at Farrell with the saddest puppy dog eyes he could muster, but Farrell shrugged him off. There was no saying no to Farrell. Rom pulled his backpack tightly around his shoulders and reluctantly climbed into the space ship. He stepped gingerly over the threshold and disappeared into the smoke filled cabin.

Izzy examined the door jam of the ship, running her fingers around the jagged, ripped metal and over a sticky dark substance dripping along its edges. She wiped the liquid on her fingers, rubbing it in circles on her fingertips. She smelled it and suddenly turned away from the ship and looked across the field into the darkness. Almost in a trance she began to walk across the field, breathing in the air, following a very specific path that only she could see.

Farrell glanced back at Izzy as she walked away, but quickly turned his attention back to the ship when Rom called out from somewhere within.

“Okay,” Rom yelled. “We’ve got two pilots and eight prisoners. All dead.”

“Eight prisoners?” Farrell said with concern. “There should be ten.”

“Wait, no, it’s eight and half,” Rom informed him. “Oh, disgusting! Make that nine.”

“One’s missing,” Farrell said.

“He or she or—it—is probably in there somewhere. Under—something,” Rom said as he climbed back out of the wreckage. He took a deep breath of the clean night air.

“I don’t think so,” Farrell told him.

“Why not?”

“Because this door was opened—from the inside. Go back and look some more.”

“For what?” Rom asked. He was about to throw a temper tantrum.

“For anything unusual.”

“It’s
all
unusual, Farrell!”

There was no use arguing. Rom held his nose and climbed back into the ship as Farrell turned and followed Izzy’s path across the field. He found her standing before an impressive iron gate. Izzy held on to the gate, pushing it back and forth on its hinges, so lost in thought that she was startled when Farrell spoke.

“Something escaped,” he said as he gently lifted her hand off the gate and pulled the gate shut.

“I know.”

“Any thoughts?”

“I don’t know what it is,” Izzy said, not looking at Farrell or anywhere else in particular. Her eyes were blank, like she was watching a movie in her head, lost in another place. “It’s…confused. Or I’m confused. It’s like there are two of them…but I don’t think so. Unless there’s an accomplice here. I don’t know. I’m getting conflicting emotions. Fear. Excitement. Anger. Elation. For some reason I can’t get a clear picture. But whatever it is, it wants to be here. Something here is very important to it.”

Rom ran up to them. He was out of breath and filled with news. “The coordinates on the barge were changed! It crashed here on purpose.”

Farrell looked off towards the steaming space ship. There was little doubt the football team would notice it at their next practice. “We need to get rid of that barge before someone sees it,” he said as he looked down at his brother. “Torch it, Rom.”

“Really?” Rom said with excitement. “Cool!” He reached into his backpack and pulled out a blonde-haired Barbie doll. She was wearing a tiny, form-fitting, white space suit. She was astronaut Barbie! Rom pushed an unseen button on her back and her hair caught on fire and a flame raged out the top of her head. Rom had changed her into an instant torch. He ran off gleefully towards the ship with the flaming Barbie raised before him.

Farrell took Izzy by the hand. She was still caught in a trance and it was a state that made her vulnerable. Her emotions were raw and all her senses were heightened.

“We better get back to the Garage,” Farrell told her. “Looks like we have school tomorrow.”

Farrell led Izzy away from the gate and the sign carved in stone next to it. Etched there, very formally, were the words
Lexham Preparatory Academy. Est. 1968
. The space ship had crashed on a high school football field and some prisoner, some creature, had passed through the gate and into the campus where it was waiting for some thing or some one. It wouldn’t be long before classes would begin. Before it
all
would begin.

Principal Al Whitaker sat behind his impressive desk in his equally impressive wood-paneled office. He was a very brown man. He wore brown reading glasses and an ill-fitting brown suit. His hair was even brown—at least what was left of it. He was principal of Lexham Preparatory Academy, a private school that cost a lot of money to go to but wasn’t quite as prestigious as other schools in the city. It was filled with students whose grades weren’t good enough for them to go to better schools but whose families could afford to keep them out of the rat infested, crumbling public schools. It was a school for the future bureaucrats of the world.

Principal Whitaker studied a stack of papers on his desk. “I have to say, I’m very impressed with your transcripts. It must have been so interesting going to school in Uruguay.” He looked up from his papers and peered out from behind his glasses. Peered out at Farrell, Izzy and Rom.

“Si, Senor Whitaker,” Farrell said, using his best Spanish accent. “Era muy interesante.”

The kids were each wearing the blue and red school uniform of Lexham Academy, but each wearing it in their own way. Farrell wore his with ease. The red and green tartan tie hung loosely around his neck and his blue blazer fit so perfectly it was if it had been custom tailored on Savile Row in London.

Izzy’s formerly long brown hair was now shoulder length and an orange streak ran down the right side of her head and past the many new piercings in her ears. She wore her uniform like a rebel. The plaid skirt was cut a little too short and the tie was worn like a noose around her neck. She even slouched down in her chair. She was all the image of the radical teen.

Rom had the mad professor look down pat. He wore his tie untied and half the buttons on his un-tucked shirt were undone. His short hair was sticking straight up on one side of his head as if he had forgotten to comb that half. And he probably had.