Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments (2 page)

I hear people thinking my name everywhere we walk, which is kind of creepy. And, yeah, maybe a tiny bit cool, too — for about a second.
Jesse, his name is Jesse. He killed an alien lord. They say the spirit fills him.

“They say.” My mother, the English teacher, hated when someone said “They say.” She wasn’t one to let linguistic imprecision pass. “They who?” she would ask, raising her eyebrows. If the president of the United States had said, “They say,” she would have stopped him cold with her raised eyebrows and said, “And just who is ‘they,’ Mr. President?” He would have answered, too. Nobody ignored my mom. Nobody.

“They” are wrong,
I mindspeak.
No spirit fills me. I never even had school spirit.

For a second, unexpectedly, I miss my high school. Not just my friends, who I’ve missed a thousand times since the invasion, but the actual building where I was forced to sit through boring lectures and take tests and eat food that was not always clearly identifiable.

We set up camp on a flat section just below a rocky ledge, a spot that Lauren picks for its privacy and levelness. I can see Catlin approves, but I’d rather be farther off, up the hill. Using her class president voice, Lauren directs us to set up our tents in a little triangle around a space where we dig a pit for a fire. We are about to head out to gather firewood when one of our neighbors — a tall, thin woman with a British accent — tells us we can’t light fires because of the alien patrol ships.

“Great,” I say. “That’s just double frickin’ great.”

Everyone, including me, is a little surprised by the anger in my voice.

“I just wanted to roast marshmallows,” I say, which, I know, sounds completely ridiculous.

Some part of me, the ridiculous part I guess, thought reaching the rebel camp meant reaching freedom. But the aliens are still here. They’re still everywhere. I’m not free.

I feel Catlin understand, hear her understand, and for a second I think she’s going to touch me on the shoulder, but she doesn’t. Lauren just looks irritated. I don’t blame her. I’m being ungrateful. Weak. Still, I’m irritated by her irritation. She reminds me of my mother when she was giving me a failing grade over some behavior. I quickly bury this thought. I’m not the smartest guy when it comes to girls, but I’m smart enough to know that getting caught comparing your girlfriend to your mother is a poor relationship move.

A bell calls us to dinner. We follow a path over to the eating area. Three women and a man ladle stew into plastic bowls, which they serve with two pieces of bread. The rebels eat at picnic tables that circle a small clearing. The tables are painted an earthy brown and are mostly back in the trees, though I worry that some of them, if the aliens fly low enough, could be seen from the air. There are probably two hundred people eating, maybe more. Some white, some Hispanic, some Native American, a few African-American, a few Asian. Rainbow crowd.

And there are little kids being little kids. Complaining. Arguing. Playing. There’s a crying baby. A baby! I shouldn’t be all that happy to hear the less-than-sweet sound of a crying infant, but I am. I am.

A little blond girl from the next table shyly looks my way and mindspeaks,
Are you here to save us?

I should tell the truth. After all we’ve all been through, we deserve the truth. But she’s so little, and the truth is so cruel:
I can’t save anyone. I don’t know why I’m here.
I don’t say it.

Instead I mindspeak,
Eat your vegetables.

She gives me a deserved look of contempt.

“Sorry,” I say.

“For what?” Lauren says.

Catlin knows, but Lauren can’t hear what’s in other minds very well and misses most of what’s gone on between the little girl and me. It’s like she’s deaf almost. I should tell her, but I’m hungry and tired and I just don’t feel like it. I tell her the last part about telling the little girl to eat her vegetables.

“You’ll make a good father,” she says.

Which just about causes me to spit my stew out. Even before the end of the world, I wasn’t ready to start thinking of myself as a father, and now . . . now I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine anyone having children in this world.

After dinner, Doc invites us to a meeting. I’m so tired, I feel like I could sleep sitting up at the table, so I sure don’t want to go to a meeting. But most people are getting up and dutifully heading in the direction Doc pointed us toward.

Lauren and Catlin stand up, and I’m about to give in when I start to choke. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like hands are around my throat, squeezing. Fingers digging in. I fight for breath but stagger helplessly. Then I’m falling. I see Lord Vertenomous. It’s like I’ve traveled back to the plaza in Taos. The brick walkway beneath me; low, crowded stucco buildings all around; the pale-blue sky gone milky. Just like then.

None of this makes any sense, but it seems so real. I hear what I heard back then. The sounds of people dying: calling to each other, screaming, crying, falling.

Then somehow I’m standing up, and I’m in that moment when I found a way to kill Lord Vertenomous and he fell, dead. But now I’m fighting another alien, too — not Lord Vertenomous, not nearly as strong as he was, but an alien all the same and in the same square — and I’m losing. More people are dying.

What is happening to me?

Then, just as quickly, I’m right back on the bench, and Lauren and Catlin are looking at me with concern. I realize then that I’ve been on the bench this whole time while also in that other place. I’m shaky. I grip the table, as if holding tight can keep me from slipping away.

“Are you all right?” Lauren says.

“Not really,” I say, but then try to smile. “Fine. I’m fine. Must be the rich food.”

What just happened? Flashback? Some kind of message? Could I have somehow fallen asleep and dreamed? Nothing makes sense so I choose what my mom would have called a typical male reaction: I try to pretend it didn’t really happen.

Catlin, Lauren, and I walk down one of the narrow paths near the supply caves. I realize that I actually like the way the woods feel. I’m a city boy, but these woods, foreign to me before the aliens came, feel less foreign now. And the cities feel more foreign. Like graveyards, empty and haunted.

I notice something as we walk. A faint hum in the trees and bushes. I feel my muscles tense.

“Do you hear that?” I whisper.

Lauren listens and looks at me with something close to that little girl’s look when I told her to eat her vegetables. “Bugs?”

“Oh, right,” I say. But then I realize that bugs mean more than just bugs. Bugs mean everything didn’t die when the aliens conquered us. Score one for the home planet. We have bugs.

“I saw a squirrel earlier,” Catlin says. “I asked someone if I’d really seen what I thought I’d seen, and they said there were some animals out here. I guess the aliens focused their killing ray on the cities. The damage doesn’t seem as complete here.”

“Killing ray?” I say, raising my eyebrow in a Spockian way. Or trying anyway. No one could raise a single eyebrow like Spock.

“What would you call it?”

Both Catlin and I like retro science-fiction movies. We’ve talked about them before. We like the good ones or the ones that are so bad they’re good. I quote from one that falls in the latter category: “Death ray.”

She thinks about it and smiles.
“Teenagers from Outer Space.”

“Exactly,” I say. “A classically bad, really bad, movie.”

I see a scene from the movie in her mind. It’s when a dog gets zapped into a skeleton by a ray gun. This telepathic power we have is totally weird, but on the plus side, we get to share a truly awful scene from
Teenagers from Outer Space.

“You shouldn’t joke about it,” Lauren says, glaring at Catlin, though she manages to save enough of the feeling to give me a quick look of disapproval.

She walks faster so she gets ahead of us. I’m surprised by her reaction. She must know we aren’t joking because we think it’s funny ha-ha. We’re joking because it’s too terrible not to joke. But then I feel bad, like I’ve laughed at a funeral or something.

“I’m sorry,” Catlin says to Lauren.

I apologize, too, but the whole thing makes me realize that Lauren and I don’t really know each other all that well. I mean, we have a connection and all. From back at Lord Vertenomous’s. And we kissed once in that abandoned grocery store in West Texas when we were traveling here. But things seem different now. Maybe I just need to try harder to understand the way she sees things.

The light is dim, almost gone. Our campsite is only a few hundred yards up from the clearing where the meeting is, but I still worry about finding it in the dark. Funny how a big, horrible worry doesn’t wipe out all the little worries. They’re like bugs. They survive no matter what.

Bluish lights spread around the edge of the clearing, creating a glow that resembles moonlight. It’s just enough to guide me and Lauren and Catlin through the clearing without bumping into anything or anyone. Even in the dim light, I can see that a lot of people are already here. I can feel them, too, even more clearly than I can see them. They feel confused. And suspicious. And hopeful. And scared. Some of these thoughts come from the same people, one right after another like machine-gun fire. Being telepathic doesn’t exactly clear up the human psyche. In fact, there’s a lot of confusion and contradiction in most people, which is both comforting (at least I’m not the only one) and disturbing (we’re totally messed up).

Now that the sun’s down, the temperature is falling fast. A fire would be nice. A fire should be our right as human beings. Even cavemen and cavewomen sat around fires and discussed caveman and cavewoman things, like maybe the best size for a club or whether a leopard skin was better than a bear skin on cold winter nights. But here we are back in the forest, this time the hunted and not the hunters, without even a fire to keep us warm.

I hate them,
I think.
I hate them so much.

“Ouch,” Catlin says. “Careful.”

Others are looking at me.

“Your anger,” she says. “It’s like you pinched me.”

“You felt that?”

“I didn’t feel anything,” Lauren says, her earlier disapproval sneaking back into her voice. “Or not much, anyway.”

“You don’t realize how strong you are,” Catlin says. “You have to control your feelings, or block them from us at least.”

“Sorry,” I say to those sitting closest to me.

“Don’t worry about it,” one of them says. “You’ll learn.”

“It was a whisper,” Lauren says stubbornly, “if it was anything.”

This is hard for Lauren. She is used to being the smartest person in a room. She was going to be valedictorian at her school. But this telepathic kind of mind power is different from intelligence. If Albert Einstein showed up, he’d still be the smartest person alive, but he might be a telepathic moron. He’d be all, “But I discovered the theory of relativity. Ever heard of E = mc
²
?” Wouldn’t matter. That would be hard on Einstein. It’s hard on Lauren.

More people come into the clearing, including Doc and another old guy whose long white hair is tied back in a ponytail and who makes about two Docs in size. They stand on a raised platform backed up against a row of trees. The crowd gathers in front of them, filling up rows of split-log benches that form a semicircle around the platform.

Doc is small and neat, with white hair and one of those pointy white beards, like Colonel Sanders had. His real name is Lorenzo Sergio de Cabeza, so it’s not hard to understand why I’m relieved he goes by Doc. He looks like a professor, which makes sense since he was one; his nickname comes from his two PhDs.

“First, I’d like to welcome the newest members of our group to our town meeting,” Doc says. “Could the new members please come to the front?”

Lauren, the great joiner, smiles enthusiastically and leads us toward the stage. Catlin has the same pained expression I imagine on my face, but we obediently follow. Two others — a young boy and an older girl who’s about our age — step forward from Doc’s right.

As I follow Lauren up front, a buzz of inner voices says things like
New bloods
and
Not of the House of Jupiter and Clan of Wind
and
Jesse
and
The Warrior Spirit.
At least I hear a few dissenting voices. Someone thinks,
That can’t be the one with the Warrior Spirit in him. No heroic glow.

The new boy and girl look like they might be siblings. They’re both tall and thin, with huge blue eyes and short, uneven blond hair.

Doc says that before we begin we should have a moment of silence for the dead. “There’ll be a funeral service tomorrow at dawn,” Doc adds. “In the graveyard.” And then the silence. It’s the noisiest silence I’ve ever experienced. I hear everyone. I feel what others are feeling, too. It hurts. Losing someone hurts so much. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I feel like I’m drowning, like there’s no way I’ll get back to the surface. It wasn’t this way back at Lord Vertenomous’s. It was never this strong, never so everywhere at once. More pain comes at me. It’s like being stung all over by bees.