I Am Number Four (17 page)

He nods. “Well, I’m happy you made it. Where is he now?”

“Trailing one of them. I don’t know where they went.”

The creak of a floorboard comes from above us. I stand, Henri’s hands only halfway untied.

“Did you hear that?” I whisper.

We both watch the door with our breaths held. A foot steps onto the top stair, and then a second, and all at once the large man I passed earlier, the one Sam was trailing, comes into view.

“The party’s over, fellas,” he says. He is holding a gun aimed at my face. “Now, step away.”

I hold my hands up in front of me and take a step back. I think of using my powers to pull the gun away, but what if I somehow cause it to fire by accident? I’m not confident in my abilities just yet. It’s too risky.

“They told us you might be coming. That you would look like humans. That you were the real enemy,” the man says.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“They’re delusional,” Henri says. “They think we’re the enemy.”

“Shut up!” the man screams.

He takes three steps towards me. Then he moves the gun from me and fixes it straight on Henri.

“One false move by you and he gets it. You understand?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Now, catch this,” he says. He pulls down a roll
of duct tape from the shelf beside him and throws it towards me. As it moves through the air, I stop it, suspended about eight feet off the ground, halfway between us. I start spinning it very quickly. The man stares at it, confused.

“What the…”

While he’s distracted, I move my arm towards him with a throwing motion. The roll of tape flies back and slams him in the nose. Blood starts gushing, and as he reaches for it he drops the gun, which hits the ground and goes off. I point my hand towards the bullet and I make it stop, and behind me I hear Henri laugh. I move the bullet so that it hangs in front of the man’s face.

“Hey, fat boy,” I say.

He opens his eyes and sees the bullet in the air in front of his face.

“You’re gonna need to bring more.”

I let the bullet fall to the ground at his feet. He turns to run, but I bring him back across the room and slam him against a large support pole. It knocks him out and he slumps to the floor. I grab the tape and tie him to the pole. After I’m sure he’s secured, I turn to Henri and finish freeing him.

“John, I think that’s the best surprise I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” he says in a whisper, such relief in his voice that I think tears might come next.

I smile proudly. “Thanks. It showed at dinner.”

“Sorry I missed it.”

“I told them you were tied up.”

He smiles.

“Thank God the Legacy came,” he says, and I realize that the stress of my Legacies forming—or the fear of them not forming—took a far greater toll on Henri than I imagined.

“So what happened to you?” I ask.

“I knocked on the door. All three of them were home. When I walked in one of them clubbed me in the back of the head. Then I woke up in this chair.” He shakes his head and says a long string of words in Loric that I know are curses. I finish untying him and he stands and stretches his legs.

“We need to get out of here,” he says.

“We have to find Sam.”

And then we hear him.

“John. You down there?”

EVERYTHING SLOWS. I SEE A SECOND PERSON
at the top of the stairs. Sam yelps in surprise and I turn to him, silence filling my ears with the discordant hum that comes with slow motion. The man behind him gives him a hard shove that causes his feet to leave the ground, and, when he hits, it will be at the bottom of the stairs, where the concrete floor awaits. I watch him sail through the air, flailing his arms with a look of terror on his anguished face. Without giving it a single thought, my instinct takes over and I lift my hands at the very last second and catch him, his head a mere two inches above the basement floor. I set him down gently.

“Shit,” Henri says.

Sam sits up and crawls backwards like a crab until he reaches the cinder-block wall. His eyes are wide-open, staring at the steps, his mouth moving but no
words coming out. The figure who pushed him stands at the top of the stairs trying to figure out, like Sam, what just happened. It must be the third one.

“Sam, I tried to—,” I say.

The man at the top of the stairs turns and tries to sprint away but I force him down two of the stairs. Sam looks at the man being held by an unseen force, then looks at my one arm extended towards him. He is shocked and speechless.

I grab the duct tape and lift the man in the air and carry him up to the second floor, keeping him suspended the entire way. He yells obscenities while I tape him into a chair, but I hear none of them because my mind is racing to figure out what we will say to Sam about what just happened.

“Shut up,” I say.

He unloads another string of cuss words. I decide I’ve had enough so I tape his mouth shut and walk back to the basement. Henri is standing near Sam, who is still sitting there, with the same blank stare on his face.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “What just happened?”

Henri and I look at each other. I shrug.

“Tell me what’s happening,” Sam says, his voice pleading with us, tinged with desperation to know the truth, to know that he’s not crazy and that he didn’t imagine what he just saw.

Henri sighs and shakes his head. Then he says, “What the hell’s the point?”

“The point in what?” I ask.

He ignores me, and instead turns to Sam. He purses his lips together, looks at the man slumped in the chair to make sure he is still out, and then at Sam. “We aren’t who you think we are,” he says, and pauses. Sam stays silent, staring at Henri. I can’t read his face, and I have no idea what Henri is about to tell him—if he will again make up some elaborate story or, for once, tell him the truth—and it’s this latter that I’m truly hoping for. He looks at me and I nod my head in agreement.

“We came to Earth ten years ago from a planet named Lorien. We came because it was destroyed by the inhabitants of another planet named Mogadore. They destroyed Lorien for its resources because they had turned their own planet into a cesspool of decay. We came here to hide until we could return to Lorien, which we will one day do. But we were followed by the Mogadorians. They are here hunting us. And I believe they are here to take over Earth, and that is why I came here today, to find out a little more.”

Sam says nothing. Had it been me who told him as much, I’m sure that he wouldn’t believe me, that he might become angry, but it is Henri who has told him, and there is a certain integrity within Henri that I have
always felt, and I have no doubt that Sam feels it also. He looks over at me.

“I was right: you’re an alien. You weren’t joking when you admitted it,” Sam says to me.

“Yes, you were right.”

He looks back at Henri. “And those stories you told me on Halloween?”

“No. Those were just that,” Henri says. “Ridiculous stories that made me smile when I stumbled across them on the internet, nothing more. But what I told you now is the honest truth.”

“Well…,” Sam says, and trails off, grasping for words. “What happened just now?”

Henri nods to me. “John is in the process of developing certain powers. Telekinesis is one of them. When you were pushed, John saved you.”

Sam still smiles beside me, watching me. When I look at him he nods his head.

“I knew you were different,” he says.

“Needless to say,” Henri says to Sam, “you’re going to have to be quiet about this.” Then he looks over at me. “We need information and we need to get out of here. They’re probably nearby.”

“The guys upstairs might still be conscious.”

“Let’s go talk to them.”

Henri walks over and picks the gun up from the floor and pulls the clip. It’s full. He removes all the
bullets and sets them on a nearby shelf, then snaps the clip back in and tucks the gun in the waistband of his jeans. I help Sam to his feet and we all go upstairs to the second floor. The man I brought up with my telekinesis is still struggling. The other one is sitting still. Henri walks over to him.

“You were warned,” Henri says.

The man nods.

“Now you’re going to talk,” Henri says, and he pulls the tape from the man’s mouth. “And if you don’t…” He pulls the slide back on the gun and aims it at the man’s chest. “Who visited you?”

“There were three of them,” he says.

“Well, there are three of us. Who cares? Keep talking.”

“They told me if you showed up and I said anything, they’d kill me,” the man says. “I won’t tell you anything more.”

Henri presses the barrel of the gun against the man’s forehead. For some reason it makes me uncomfortable. I reach out and move the gun down so it points only at the floor. Henri looks at me curiously.

“There are other ways,” I say.

Henri shrugs and sets the gun down. “The floor is yours,” he says.

I stand five feet in front of the man. He looks at me with fear. He is heavy, but after catching Sam as he sailed through the air, I know that I can lift him. I
hold my arms out, my body straining in concentration. Nothing at first, and then very slowly he begins to rise off the floor. The man struggles but he is taped to the chair and there is nothing he can do. I concentrate with everything I have, and yet in my peripheral vision I can see that Henri is smiling proudly, and that Sam is, too. Yesterday I couldn’t lift a tennis ball; now I’m lifting a chair with a two-hundred-pound man sitting in it. How quickly the Legacy has developed.

When I have raised him to face level, I flip the chair over and he hangs upside down.

“Come on!” he yells.

“Start talking.”

“No!” he yells. “They said they’d kill me.”

I let go of the chair and it falls. The man screams but I catch him before he hits the ground. I raise him back up.

“There were three of them!” he yells, talking fast. “They showed up the same day we sent out the magazines. They showed up that night.”

“What did they look like?” Henri asks.

“Like ghosts. They were pale, almost like albinos. They wore sunglasses, but when we wouldn’t talk one of them took the sunglasses off. They had black eyes and pointy teeth, but they didn’t look natural like an animal’s would. Theirs looked as though they had been broken and chiseled. They all wore long coats and hats
like some shit out of an old spy movie. What the hell more do you want?”

“Why did they come?”

“They wanted to know our source for the story. We told them. A man had called, said he had an exclusive for us, starting raging about a group of aliens that wanted to destroy our civilization. But he called on the day we were printing, so instead of writing the full story, we put in a small quip and said more to follow next month. He talked so fast that we hardly grasped what he was saying. We were planning on calling him the next night, only that didn’t happen, because the Mogadorians showed up instead.”

“How did you know they were Mogadorians?”

“What the hell else could they have been? We wrote a story about the Mogadorian race of aliens and lo and behold a group of aliens shows up on our doorstep the same day wanting to know where we got the story. It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

The man is heavy and I’m having trouble holding him. My forehead is beaded with sweat and it’s a struggle to breathe. I flip him back over, begin to lower him. When he is within a foot of the floor I drop him the rest of the way and he lands with an
Oomphf
. I bend over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath.

“What the hell, man? I’m answering your questions,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re too heavy.”

“And that’s the only time they came?” says Henri.

The man shakes his head. “They came back.”

“Why?”

“To make sure we didn’t print anything else. I don’t think they trusted us, but the man who called us never answered his phone again, so we had nothing else to print.”

“What happened to him?”

“What do you think happened?” the man asks.

Henri nods. “So they knew where he lived?”

“They had the phone number we were supposed to call him back on. I’m sure they could have figured it out.”

“Did they threaten you?”

“Hell, yes. They trashed our office. They screwed with my mind. I haven’t been the same since.”

“What’d they do to your mind?”

He closes his eyes and takes another deep breath.

“They didn’t even look real,” he says. “I mean, here are these three men standing in front of us talking in deep, raspy voices, all in trench coats and hats and sunglasses even though it was nighttime. It looked like they were dressed up for a Halloween party or something. They looked funny and out of place, so at first I laughed at them….,” he says, his voice trailing off.

“But the second I laughed I knew I had made a mistake. The other two Mogadorians started towards me with
their sunglasses off. I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. Those eyes. I had to look, as though something was pulling me there. It was like seeing death. My own death, and the deaths of all the people I know and love. Things weren’t so funny anymore. Not only did I have to witness the deaths, but I could feel them, too. The uncertainty. The pain. The complete and utter terror. I wasn’t in that room anymore. And then came things I’ve always feared as a kid. Images of stuffed animals that came to life, with sharp teeth as mouths, razor blades for claws. The usual stuff all kids are afraid of. Werewolves. Demonic clowns. Giant spiders. I viewed them all through the eyes of a child, and they absolutely terrified me. And every time one of those things bit into me, I could feel its teeth rip the flesh from my body, I could feel the blood pour from the wounds. I couldn’t stop screaming.”

“Did you try to fight back at all?”

“They had two of these little weasel-looking things, fat, with short legs. No bigger than a dog. They were frothing at the mouth. One of the men was holding them on a leash, but you could tell they were hungry for us. They said they would turn them loose if we resisted. I’m telling you, man, these things weren’t from Earth. If they were dogs, big deal, we would have fought back. But I think those things would have eaten us whole despite our size. And they were pulling against the leash, growling, trying to get to us.”

“So you talked?”

“Yes.”

“When did they come back?”

“The night before the next magazine went out, a little over a week ago.”

Henri gives me a concerned look. Only one week ago the Mogadorians were within a hundred miles of where we live. They could still be here somewhere, maybe monitoring the paper. Perhaps that is why Henri has felt their presence of late. Sam stands beside me, taking everything in.

“Why didn’t they just kill you like they did your source?”

“How the hell do I know? Maybe because we publish a respectable paper.”

“How did the man who called know about the Mogadorians?”

“He said he had captured one of them and tortured it.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. His phone number was from the area code near Columbus. So north of here. Maybe sixty or eighty miles north.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Yeah. And I wasn’t sure if he was crazy or not, but we had heard rumors about something like this before. He started talking about them wanting to wipe out civilization as we know it, and sometimes he talked
so fast that it was hard to make sense of anything he said. One thing he kept repeating was that they were here hunting something, or somebody. Then he started spouting numbers.”

My eyes open wide. “What numbers? What did they mean?”

“I have no idea. Like I said, he was talking so fast that it was all we could do to write it all down.”

“You wrote while he talked?” Henri says.

“Of course we did. We’re journalists,” he says incredulously. “Do you think we make up the stories we write?”

“Yeah, I do,” says Henri.

“Do you still have the notes that you wrote?” I say.

He looks at me and nods. “I’m telling you, they’re worthless. Most of what I wrote are scribbles on their plan to destroy the human race.”

“I need to see them,” I nearly bellow. “Where, where are they?”

He motions towards a desk against one of the walls.

“On the desk. On sticky notes.”

I walk over to the desk, which is covered with papers, and start looking through the sticky notes. I find some very vague notes on the Mogadorians’ hope to conquer Earth. Nothing concrete, no plans or details, just a few indistinct words:

“Overpopulation”

“Earth’s resources”

“Biological warfare?”

“The Planet Mogadore.”

I come to the note I’m looking for. I read it carefully three or four times.

“Why is there a question mark after the number 4?” I ask.

“Because he said something about it but he talked too fast and I didn’t get it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me?”

He shakes his head. I sigh.
Just my luck,
I think.
The one thing said about me is the one thing that wasn’t written.