Mothership (22 page)

“Know what?” Kate asks. She’s examining her “lover” a little more closely now, eyes squinted. “Pookums, what do they know?”

“Babyface . . .,” Des begins. He reaches a hand out to touch her, but Kate is on guard now and shies away. He clears his throat, as if he’s about to lay down some pretty bad news. Which, of course, he is. “Well, I probably should have told you this a long time ago, but . . . I just love you so much. I wanted to keep you safe. I’m . . . not exactly human.”

Kate just sits there, eyes glazed over. She doesn’t move a muscle, and for a few moments I think she might have gone
catatonic. The rest of us have already absorbed the invaders-from-the-great-beyond info, so a lot of the girls are fidgeting impatiently, waiting to get things moving again.

At last Kate pipes up.

“Well, that’s just great,” she says flatly. “And my dad was upset when my sister married a Catholic.”

There are tears in Desi’s eyes now, real tears, and he’s looking at Kate in this way that, like, if he weren’t a crazed alien who’d posed as a teacher to kidnap a bunch of pregnant girls, might be hells romantic. “Kate,” he says, “I love you more than anything. You have to believe me. I would do anything to protect you.”

Kate doesn’t respond, just pushes her glasses farther up on her nose. She’s the only person I’ve ever seen wear the things besides my dad. She actually told me gleefully, our first week on board, that she didn’t even need them, because, like the other 95 percent of the population, she’d had corrective eye surgery as soon as she’d hit puberty, but she thought they made her look “nerd-awesome.”

Bob’s trigger finger is itching, I can see it from here. “Why were you in the closet?” he asks Desi. There is not a trace of sympathy in his voice.

“I . . .” Desi is definitely shaking now, close to panic. “I had to save her. When I saw your ship, I . . . I knew what would happen to Kate, since she hadn’t been processed yet. My superiors don’t like to leave loose ends.”

“Processed?” I ask.

But Desi doesn’t get a chance to respond. Because at that moment the ship rocks violently, and from behind us
the sounds of buckling metal and exploding circuitry let us know, if we didn’t know it already, that there is truly no going back.

“The ship is listing into the planet’s gravity faster than I’d anticipated,” Bob spits out. “The hull could be breached. We’ve got to get away from that hangar.
Now.
” And without waiting for any argument, he leans down and hoists Desi up by the armpit, his gun pressing into Desi’s neck, and races down the corridor. The rest of us follow hot on his heels.

The moaning of the ship’s frame takes on an ever more distressing timbre as we make our way to the Health and Wellness Center. We’re almost to the automatic sliding glass doors when I notice the cool breeze on my face. It takes me a second to realize that it’s not the AC kicking in; it’s the air in the room being sucked around me, toward an unseen vacuum that must have opened up behind us, most likely in the hangar.

“We’ve got to get on the other side of those doors,” I say, charging ahead of the pack to lead the way. Only, when I get there, the doors don’t open. I run into them, Almiri baby bump first, before momentum sends my forehead into the glass with a thunk and I fall back on my butt.

Cue the blooper reel.

Cole has scooped me up before I can even register that I’m on the floor yet again. “You heard her. Get those doors open!” he barks. Ramona is trying to dig her fingers in between the two doors and pry them apart, while Bob, still gripping Desi tightly by the arm, looks around the area for something we can use. The other girls are hovering together.

“Um, is, like, the air getting sucked out?” Chewie asks. “’Cause I
cannot
hold my breath again.”

“Y’know, someone could help me here!” Ramona shouts back at us all.

Natty has wandered over in my direction and is currently inspecting the newly raised bump on my noggin.

“I think it’s going to be purple
and
orange,” she coos.

“Gnat!” Ramona hollers at her. “Try to focus for once, will you?”

Natty looks over her shoulder at Ramona. “You know what would work great on that is a palette knife.”

“Well, unfortunately,” Ramona replies, still tugging at the gap in the door with her nails, “I didn’t think to
bring
my arts and crafts kit with me for our getaw—” Ramona stops cold when she sees Natty nonchalantly wave the small, sturdy tool in her direction.

“You can keep it,” Natty tells her, handing it over. “I have two more.”

Ramona takes the knife and jams it between the doors. Everyone is nervously looking back and forth between Ramona and the path behind us, dreading an assumed approaching doom. Ramona scrunches up her face as she strains with the doors.

“I can help,” Desi offers.

But Bob just squeezes his arm tighter and turns to Ramona. “Is it giving?” he asks. She doesn’t answer, choosing instead to bully the door with a series of colorful metaphors that make even Cole blush.

“Just break the glass, idiot!” Britta yells. She never does disappoint. But if her brainless suggestion didn’t surprise, the voice of reason certainly does.

“How’s that gonna help us get away from the leak, dummy?” Natty says. “Really, Britta, sometimes I think you aren’t paying attention at all.”

Ramona gives one last tug on the palette knife, and the doors spring open. As soon as we’re through, the doors slide closed behind us—not a perfect seal, but it will still buy us some time. The floor is vibrating underfoot, but the violent rocking seems to have passed, at least for the moment, and so we press on.

“How’s the bump, Elvs?” Cole asks.

For a moment I think he’s asking about the Goober, but then it hits me that he must mean the damage to my head. Which probably would have occurred to me right away, if not for the damage to my head.

Irony, or something.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “Takes more than a door to put me down for long.”

“I always knew you were headstrong,” he says with a smirk. Really?
That’s
the joke you go with, Cole? Epic fail.

So how come I’m giggling?

Embarrassed for myself and for the state of comedy in general, I have no choice but to wallop Cole in the arm, which just makes his smile broaden.

Bob glances over my way as we walk. “So where to now, Miss Nara?” he asks. He’s digging the barrel of his gun hard into Desi’s neck, but the schlub is sweating so profusely, I’m
afraid it might slip off. Poor Desi. Even with the chiseled good looks he shares with the rest of his cohorts, I cannot think of a less sexy dude.

“The fastest way from here is through the gym,” I reply. “That will let us skip past all the medical suites and give us a straight shot to the gym showers. There’s a dumbwaiter in the changing area, to send dirty towels to the laundry. But it also goes down to the aft crew quarters. So from there we’ll be almost home free.”

“The showers?” Other Cheerleader begins with a sneer. But even I notice that it lacks her usual level of disdain. “God, Elvie, if I wanted to see your dirty laundry, I would’ve . . .” Her face is red, and she’s sweating like crazy. “You’re so . . .” It’s clear that all this running around has started to get to her. All of the girls look pretty run down, actually. I guess I probably am too. But I don’t let myself stop to think about how sore my ankles are, or how badly my back aches, or how that lump on my forehead actually
does
hurt like a mother, ’cause if I let all the pain seep in and slow me down, I’m done for.

“Your face is ugly,” she finally finishes.

“Point taken,” I reply. “Regardless, that’s going to be our best bet.”

Bob nods at that. “Right. To the gym, then.”

As we approach the big doors that open into the gym, a cacophony of noise on the other side makes the Goober inside me kick with worry.

“It’s probably just the machinery malfunctioning,” Ramona offers.

Um, yeah, you could say.

The gym is a
nightmare
. Like, an actual nightmare I had once where exercise equipment came to life and forced me to do Jazzercise in front of all the boys at Lower Merion until it was time for the Algebra 2 test I hadn’t studied for. Normally three to five of the Treadtracks will be active at once, usually on one side of the room or the other. But now they
all
are, meaning that the entire floor is moving at high speeds back and forth in different directions, like a fun house designed by the Marquis de Sade. Most of the equipment that had been resting on stationary Treadtracks has been flung into the walls, and the friction from the tracks whirring away is generating large plumes of noxious dark smoke that fills the room. It’s this smoke that makes me momentarily mistake what I see next as an illusion. But as I blink against the stinging, I realize it’s no trick of the eyes.

It’s a gaggle of fit-bots, once the unrelenting taskmasters of our love handles, now charging toward us with a glint in their mechanical eyes that I assume passes for crazy in the robot world.

“Feel the burn!”
one threatens, in the trademark cheerful female voice shared by all the fit-bots. The mechanical monstrosity lifts a sparking StairMaster over its head and wields it like a giant club.

Another bot is flinging dumbbells of various weights and sizes at us as it charges.
“No pain, no gain!”
it buzzes, its voice box seemingly on the fritz, and then a more mechanical gender-neutral voice kicks in.
“Load exercise platitude number fourteen.”

We get the doors shut tight just as the first incoming dumbbell slams into it, creating a sizeable dent. There’s a large vending machine on the opposite wall filled with sports drinks and protein powders. Cole lifts it away from the wall with a surprising display of strength and plunks it down in front of the doors, blocking our would-be robot fitness assassins inside.

“So . . .,” Ramona muses. “Go around?”

A little extra walking never hurt anybody.

We’re already well on our way through the medical corridor before I realize that we’re missing my two favorite bloated blondes.

Now, okay, I’m not going to lie. It does, in fact, occur to me that I am the only person to notice Britta and Other Cheerleader’s absence. And I do not, as it happens, like them very much. I could take their disappearance as a sudden burst of their karmic comeuppance and leave them behind.

But goddammit if I’m not just full of moral fiber or something.

“Cole,” I say, yanking on his arm. We’re near the back of the group, scuttling the long way around toward the showers. Kate’s still wailing at Captain Bob to get his dirty hands off her “lover,” and quite frankly I think it’s making everyone just a little nauseous. No wonder two of our own got left behind. “Britta’s missing. And Other Cheer—her friend, too.”

I know Britta’s been giving Cole the cold shoulder for the past hour or so—ever since she found out his true identity—and there’s a little part of me that almost hopes he’ll be indifferent to their disappearance. But doggone it, he wouldn’t be Cole then, would he?

“Sir!” Cole calls ahead to Captain Bob. Bob turns, his gun still expertly trained on Desi. “We have to go back. There’s still two girls near the gym.”

And just as quickly as we scurried down the hall, we scurry back.

Britta and Other Cheerleader aren’t hard to find. They’re sitting, slumped on the floor against the wall where the vending machine used to be. We can still hear the fit-bots pounding on the doors from inside. Britta is cradling her friend in this awkward sort of headlock, and let’s just say Other Cheerleader should be glad today’s not senior photo day, because she has looked better. Her cheeks are as red as apples and are puffed out enough that she could be stashing a few in her mouth for good measure, and, most distressing, she’s holding her big fat pregnant stomach in a way that can mean only one thing.

“Oh,
shit
,” Ramona says, echoing what I’m sure every single one of us girls is thinking. After all, you don’t get knocked up without being fairly clear about what comes at the end of the pregnant rainbow. “You are not seriously planning on having your alien baby right
now
, are you? That has got to be, like, some terrible timing.”

Other Cheerleader does not even bother to answer that. She just grits her teeth and lets out this, like, seriously freakish feral scream. Natty wails and hides behind Ramona in fear, as though she’s afraid Other Cheerleader’s contractions might send her into labor too. And Heather mutters under her breath, “I’m positive that wasn’t a complete sentence.”

Britta, for her part, shoots eye daggers up at Cole and
snaps, “You planning on
doing
something, nimrod? Or are you just going to stand there?”

Actually, it seems like Cole just plans on standing there. Captain Bob sighs, like he’s cursing himself for having signed up for this mission. His grip still tight on Desi, he jerks his chin in Britta’s direction. “When did the contractions start?” he asks her.

“I . . . I don’t know,” Britta says. She seems a little freaked out. And, okay, the girl sucks, but it’s hard to blame her. Based on the preggers time line, Britta should have been the first to blow. She’s farther along than any of us. So if Other Cheerleader’s huffing and puffing, it only stands to reason that any minute she will be too. “Her due date’s not for eight more days. I think the fit-bots freaked her out. She started shaking and . . .”