Mothership (8 page)

The guy with the death grip on Britta is Mr. Zaino, the phys ed teacher. He’s almost to the door when I reach out with the skimmer and hook the net around his raised foot.

“Hey, dirtbag!” I holler, giving the skimmer a sharp tug.

Mr. Z’s feet fly out from under him, and as he stumbles, he loses his grip on Britta and smacks his face into the tile. Blood and teeth fall out of his mouth as he tries to rise back up. Britta wails and slumps into a ball, crying.
Holy cripes,
I want to shout at her.
Could you be more useless?

Mr. Sandinsky, our French professor, is giving me the old hairy eyeball, making me think he might drop Other Cheerleader and attempt to tackle me. But Mr. Z., still splayed out on the floor, gestures weakly at the door and squeaks out something that sounds like a foreign language. I don’t think it’s French, although in my defense, it’s sort of hard to understand someone with no front teeth. Mr. Sandinsky seems to get it, though. He gives up on the whole sinister-glare-at-Elvie thing and turns back toward the door, Other Cheerleader in tow.

Unfortunately for Monsieur Sandinsky, that’s when he comes face-to-face with Ramona, water running in rivulets off her leather skirt. She is one pissed-off
mademoiselle
. She looks down at the ruined pack of clove cigarettes in her hand and squeezes the water out of them, forming a fist.

“Conjugate this, asshole,” she tells him, then socks him square in the jaw.

As tough as Ramona is, Mr. Sandinsky has a good half meter on her, not to mention that he’s built like a truck. Her right hook has left him surprised but still standing, and his grip on Other Cheerleader doesn’t seem to be loosening anytime soon. He’s about to give Ramona the tit for her tat, arm cocked in striking position, when there’s a sizzling sound, and before my very eyes a hole burns right through his chest and he collapses to the ground.

Zapped, good and dead.

Toothless Mr. Z, still doing his best jack-o’-lantern impression on the tile floor, turns just in time to see the shot that kills him. Britta, of course, is still a helpless mess. She’s just sitting there, eyes squeezed shut, squealing like a toddler who’s wet her pants.

Man, how great would it be if she pissed herself?

I’m not sure how long the rest of the fight lasts, because, you know, time flies when you’re dodging lasers. But it does end eventually, and there isn’t a single faculty member left standing. The invaders are starting to pull the girls out of the pool, and Ramona and I jump back in as well to help. I fight the urge to tell the weepers what helpless snots they’re being.
Some
of us were chased through kingdom come before falling through a broken ceiling, for crying out loud. As the remaining girls are retrieved from the pool, the invaders usher them toward the chairs so Mr. In Charge can take a head count. I’ve pulled three girls out of the pool so far, and reach to grab the last one left. She’s just floating on her back, staring at the
shattered ceiling, all, like, catatonic or something. She doesn’t even move when I tug on her arm.

“Come on, Linda,” I say, in this sort of harsh voice because, sorry, it’s been a rough morning. “Or Lindsey. Or whatever the hell your name is. Paddle party’s over.”

I tug again, and the water around Linda—or Lindsey, or whatever—turns cloudy and red.

There’s a bitter taste rising in my throat as I slowly turn her over in the water.

Burn marks.

There are two of them, one on either side of her spine. All of her innards are oozing out into the pool.

“Linda!” I cry. “Lindsey!” I shake her, hard, which I know won’t do any good. She’s dead. But I can’t stop. And suddenly I’m shaking too. The harder I shake her, the darker the water grows.

I feel hands on my shoulders, warm and strong and holding firm.

“It’s okay, Elvie.”

It’s the gunman with the busted ankle, the one who pulled me out of the pool and stashed me behind the chairs. Gently he removes my hands from the body and turns me toward the edge of the pool. Then he lifts me out in one fluid motion, as if I didn’t weigh anything at all, and leads me back to the mess of chairs, where the other girls are huddled. I sit down next to Ramona, who looks at me out of the corner of her eye, clearly as unsure about what to do as I am.

“So, to hell with midterms, huh?” she says.

The dude taking the head count walks over and points his
finger at me. “You,” he says. “Are you injured?”

“No, I don’t think so. I—”

But he’s moved away before I can finish, barking into a little walkie-talkie-looking thing that he’s whipped out of his pocket.

“Alpha Leader, this is Tango Squad. We have neutralized all hostiles and secured the yoga class. Copy?”

There is a long crackle-gargling noise, and then, at last, a voice.
“Copy that, Tango Leader. Casualties?”

The Tango Leader dude looks over to the pool where Lindsey—no, I think it was Linda after all—is still floating.

“Minimal,” he replies, and he says it so matter-of-factly that I kinda want to shove one of those ray guns up his ass.

“Good work, Tango Leader. We’ve secured the package on our end and are heading back ourselves.”

“The package?” I whisper to Ramona. I’m doing my best to wipe the tears and chlorine and snot off my face, and I’m pretty sure I look like a drain clog right now. But no one else here would really win Miss Universe at the moment either, so I guess it’s not really an issue.

Ramona wrings about three liters of pool water out of her hair—right onto my yellow flats, I might add, which would most certainly piss me off if they weren’t already long past saving. “Must be the girls in On Your Own,” she tells me. “Over in the atrium. We were supposed to get our flour babies today. Didn’t exactly feel like showing up for
that
.”

I nod knowingly. If anyone can ever find a way to explain to me how carrying around a sack of flour with a diaper on it is supposed to prepare you for motherhood, I will personally
bake that person a chocolate cake with my practice baby’s insides.

The walkie in Head Count’s hand is still crackling.
“Perform a final sweep for surviving hostiles and rendezvous at the extraction point. Copy?”

“I copy,” the butt munch replies, and he flicks off his communicator. He looks like he’s ready to bark out some orders, but I am totally over this being-kept-in-the-dark-while-people-shoot-me-with-ray-guns bullshit.

Plus, that idiot with the busted ankle is lazily aiming his ray gun in my direction. Again.

“What the hell is going on?” I ask him, swatting the barrel away. “Who are you guys? What do you want with us? Why were our teachers drowning the shit out of people?”

Ninja Klutz turns his head toward the pool, where two of his buddies are busy pulling Mr. Wilks’s limp body out of the water. “Your teachers?” he asks. I nod. “They weren’t really teachers.”

“What?”
Natty squeaks, before I can get the word out myself. She’s been silent up until now, probably brooding over her ruined masterpiece some more.

Ninja Klutz brings his visored face close to ours. “They were aliens,” he tells us.

Suddenly Mr. Head Count is interested in us again. “That’s enough!” he snaps, jerking his head in the other camo’s direction. “Fall in line!” And our friend the ankle buster harrumphs and stands up straighter.

Aliens?
For serious?

I peer over to where the two camos are squatted over Mr.
Wilks’s bloody corpse, checking for a pulse. He looks pretty human to me. Even pretty attractive, in a dead older hippie sort of way. I shiver. All I can think about is studying
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, and the way Mr. Wilks’s face lit up as he talked about the symbolism found in Huck and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi. It was the one time in an English class that I felt like paying attention, instead of literally staring into space. It’s hard for me to grasp that the whole time he was someone who’d be capable of murder.

But an alien? No way.

Next to me Ramona gives up on her quest to light up a soggy clove and finally tosses it into the pool. “No wonder I was failing lit,” she says.

After bellowing a bit at the guys checking out the pool area, Head Count turns his attention to Britta and Other Cheerleader. “You two!” he shouts at them, and Other Cheerleader cowers a bit at his tone, while Britta is too busy sobbing her poor pathetic guts out to do much of anything. “They weren’t trying to kill you,” he says, waving a hand in the general direction of our slaughtered teachers. Just by the way he spits his words out, I can tell that he thinks not being a target for murder is worse than cheating on your driver’s test. “In fact,” he continues, “it looked like they were trying to get you out of here.” Other Cheerleader manages a weak nod, not seeming to understand. “So tell me, then.” He takes a step closer to them. “What makes you two so special?”

“Bet you anything they’re aliens too,” I say. I mean, right? It makes sense. They’re way too evil to be human. But all I get are a couple of weird looks.

Just then one of the other camo guys shouts, “Captain!” and waves his boss over. Head Count goes off in his direction, leaving the rest of us alone with the klutz.

Who, by the way, seems to be totally staring at me. I mean, I can’t
quite
tell because of the visor on his helmet, but I swear that his head has not turned from my direction in the past several minutes. Which is a little bit freaky, if you ask me.

“What do you think you’re looking at?” I finally ask him, hands on my hips—like
that’s
going to be threatening to a dude with a ray gun. “What’s your problem, anyway?”

And that’s when he takes off his helmet. Just whips it off, the last dribbles of pool water cascading down his uniform.

And out of all the freaky moments I have had today, this one is by far the freakiest.

Dark brown hair. Perfectly sculpted eyebrows. The constellation of freckles beneath his left eye.

No shit, the klutz with the ray gun is Cole Freaking Archer.

“So what does ‘alien’ mean in this context? Elvie?”

I snap my eyes away from what I’ve been staring at, which is the back of Cole Archer’s head—namely, the soft
V
of hairs that forms at the nape of his neck—and turn my attention to Mrs. Kwan. “Huh?” I say.

Mrs. Kwan lets out a quiet sigh and does that thing where she pinches her nose right at the corners of her eyes. “Line sixty-seven,” she tells me. “Second to last stanza.”

I nod and flip to “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is hidden three windows deep on my lap-pad. Wow, long-winded much? If you ask me, this John Keats guy should have stopped sitting at home pining over some stupid songbird and gone out for, like, some soft serve once in a while. Who puts this stuff in the curriculum?

“Ummmm.” I read the line Mrs. Kwan is talking about.
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Like, weird or, um, foreign?”

Mrs. Kwan offers me a tight smile, like she’s not sure if she should be delighted that I answered the way I did or disappointed that I don’t answer like that more often. Whatevs. Poetry isn’t gonna get me to Mars. “Exactly,” she says, then moves on to brain-probe someone else.

“John Keats is talking about Ruth here,” Mrs. Kwan continues, as though a single one of us is actually paying attention. “From the Old Testament. She’s homesick and in a foreign place, but she hears the song of the nightingale and it cheers her. The song finds a path through her sad heart, as Keats puts it.” I pinch myself, realizing I’m back to staring at Cole’s neck again. I turn my eyes to my lap-pad and start doodling a hamburger–hot dog wedding ceremony to distract myself. “This bird, the very symbol of beauty and immortality, has the power to charm people, to make them almost drunk with happiness. But it brings sadness, too, since it reminds us that we ourselves are mortal.” She clears her throat, which is what she does when she wants us to know that what she’s about to say is, like, superdeep. “It’s ironic that Keats would take this theme so much to heart, actually, since he died at the tender age of twenty-five.” She stops talking momentarily, and then: “Cole?”