The Dark Side of Nowhere

  As I sat at my desk, I found myself gazing at the crumbling picture of J.J. Pohl again. Then Mom stepped into the room.

  “If you hate us for not telling you about Ethan, I wouldn’t blame you,” she said.

  I shrugged. “How could you tell me? If I were you, I wouldn’t tell me, either.” I tried to hide the photo from her, but she saw it anyway.

  “Are you going to keep it?” she asked.

  “Nah,” I said. After all, it was just a pointless glimpse of a lost future. I reached my hand out over the waste-basket, but try as I might, I couldn’t make my fingers release the picture into the trash. So instead I shoved it into my desk drawer.

  As I lay on my bed that night, Mom sponged down my itching back, the way she’d done all those years ago when I’d had the chicken pox. Dad peered in every once in a while but kept his distance from me. I felt closer to him than ever before, finally understanding what he must have been going through, and yet in spite of that closeness, a wall had come down between us.

  Just before I nodded off to sleep, I asked Mom what it was that kept them busy sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. This time she didn’t just give me a quick, pat answer.

  “We have to pick strategically sound landing spots,” she said. “We have to infiltrate major databases and computer networks without being noticed. We have to study different cultures and figure out how to use their weaknesses to our advantage. . . .”

  There was more, but I made myself stop listening. I knew it was her voice, I knew they were her words, but hearing them spill from her mouth was just too disturbing. When did “What would you like for dinner?” and “How was your day at school?” turn into “How do we conquer the world?” To be honest, I wish she would have just said, “You don’t want to know.”

  When she was done, she paused for a moment, considering her words, then added, “But that’s not the only reason we’ve been gone, Jason.” She put the sponge in the basin. “Where we come from, children don’t really know their parents,” she said. “They’re raised by people like Grant. By staying away, we’re trying to get back to the normal ways.” She wrung out the sponge and continued to gently pat my back. “But maybe I can still be your mom for a while.”

  I closed my eyes. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  –12–

  BALD-FACED LIES IN THE CIRCUS OF THE STARS

  “We all know what we have to do, and knowing puts us halfway there.”

  I told Paula that the reason everyone had been upset was that we’d thought one of the kids had fallen down an abandoned well—but we were mistaken. I wore dark glasses to cover my eyebrows, and I told her that my skin was looking different because I’d been getting too much sun. Then when she stopped by my house a few days later and saw me packing, I told her we were visiting a sick aunt out of state.

  Lying to Paula, I discovered, was like learning to ride a bike. At first you’re terrified, but the more you go along, the easier it gets. Although I think she suspected that I wasn’t giving her everything, I don’t think she knew how bald-faced the lies were. And so it was a long time until she had any idea that we had all picked up and moved into Old Town.

  “We’re strong and growing stronger. Each day we’re getting better.”

  Most of our parents had inherited jobs that involved working with their hands, so they were pretty well equipped for a closed society. We had masons and carpenters, a plumber, a glazier, and even a mechanic, who brought a generator large enough to power the part of Old Town we planned to use.

  We worked our way out from the diner, cleaning and repairing all the adjacent homes, until there were separate living quarters for the adults and the kids. I called them barracks, but Grant preferred to call them dormitories.

  A perimeter fence came next, then windowless wooden corridors that connected each building—so that when our change was complete, we didn’t have to risk being out in the open to get from place to place. Then only our parents, who would stay human until the ships arrived, would be seen by the outside world.

  Building was easy, and as we were growing physically stronger than our parents, we became the backbone of the construction effort. We were all so full of ourselves and what we were doing that it began to feel like one big party—like an old-fashioned Amish barn raising.

  “Isn’t it great,” Wesley said to me as we happily hammered side by side, “that we don’t have to worry about things being boring anymore?”

  “Things were boring?” I asked. To be honest, I couldn’t remember.

  “Look what we can do—it should have taken us a month to do this work, but we did it in a week!”

  An article ran in the Billington Bugle saying that we were building a retreat open to any affiliated church in the state. We didn’t mention that there were no affiliated churches. We openly invited the rest of the town to come help, but, like most towns, Billington had an age-old rivalry between local lodges and congregations. When it came to building big group projects, you didn’t help the competition. And so our invitation guaranteed us being left alone.

  When we returned to our old homes, we only went there to salvage. We took mattresses, chairs—only things that were useful—across a slipshod bridge we had built over the creek. The bridge would stand just long enough to get what we needed across, before we tore it down and isolated ourselves from the outside world. Isolation, it turns out, is not as difficult as you might think. Hidden in the oak grove, with the nearest homes almost a mile away, Old Town was out of sight and out of mind to the rest of Billington, as it had always been.

  It was there, while we labored to build our compound, that we really began to change. I’m not talking about on the outside—I mean on the inside. The way we thought, the way we felt, and the way we looked at the world outside, as if we were watching from a telescope a million miles away. The thing about living in a private world, is that you’ve got nothing to feed on but the same thoughts and ideas bouncing back at you from your friends. You sort of get locked in a feedback loop, and the things that start to sound normal and reasonable have no bearing on what’s true. There’s no ruler to measure truth, no scale to weigh right and wrong. All you have are the excited faces around you, waiting for judgment day.

  “We’ve got a wild future ahead of us—can’t you feel it?”

  This time it was me who kept dishing out little captions of enthusiasm to keep us all focused and on task—and the more they listened, the more I believed what I said. Grant was terribly proud of me.

  “It’s our world now—perfect like us.”

  You could get drunk talking like that all the time.

  By my own decree as Junior Fearless Leader, the “Transitionals,” as Grant had started calling us, were all free to come and go from the compound as we pleased—that is, until we got too far along in our transition. I wanted them to know that they weren’t prisoners. But none of them chose to go—not even me. Even though I wanted to see Paula, I pushed her to the very edge of my thoughts, convinced that it was the right and responsible thing to do.

  Perhaps it was because Grant had a way of making us all believe that we were important in the grand scheme of things. As Grant’s official Information Conduit, I felt especially important, because I got to sit in on some of the meetings. My parents were always there, and although they had spoken nothing but English to me all my life, in meetings they spoke the strange language of home, and Grant had to translate. There were so many layers of distance between me and my parents now, watching them was like watching strangers. But at least they still looked the same. The adults, who didn’t have to worry about bursting out of their genes the way Ethan had, could maintain their human appearance as long as they had to.

  Although I sat in on the meetings and kept up with all that was going on, I have to admit I didn’t really enjoy them. I preferred my parents dull rather than devious.

  As for the rest of our Loyal Order of Space Cadets, we started assigning them jobs that seemed steeped in si
gnificance. I say we, but it was Grant who assigned. He let me sit in and offer my opinions, but I don’t think I affected any of his decisions. Ethan had already begun his studies in topics like relativistic quantum transduction and other stuff that his newly superiorized brain could handle better than we dim-witted Transitionals.

  Wesley was being primed in navigation, which I guess was a good thing. I’d always thought that Wesley would have trouble navigating himself out of a shoe box filled with road maps, but in a few days, he was calculating complex coordinates in three dimensions, and maybe a few more I didn’t know about.

  Ferrari, Amy, and a few others got advanced training in a weird form of martial arts that involved parts of the body you never suspected could inflict damage, and Roxanne was taking an Alien-as-a-Second-Language course.

  Everyone took pride in their tasks, and the pride soon grew so dense, it would take a machete to hack through it.

  Billy Chambers’s assignment was a fairly obvious one, being that he was the first one to graduate from his training glove to the real thing. Grant presented it to him even before our first week in Old Town was out. It was a fine metal mesh as sheer as a nylon stocking, and when he slipped it on, his entire arm glowed like a hot coal. The kids all oohed and aahed—it was another spectacle in our little circus. I don’t know what fired out of its fingertips—the ammunition was invisible—but when Billy aimed his index finger at a tree, it melted a hole in the trunk the size of a baseball. Melted, not burned, as if the tree were made of plastic.

  “Cool!” Billy had said. Then he had turned to me, smiling. “I’ll bet you wish you were the first.”

  We gave Billy the job of enforcing rules for the Transitionals, and so he started to call himself Chief of Security. We also put him in charge of working with kids as they progressed from their training gloves to their real ones. For Billy, it was as good as making him the head of the National Rifle Association. He rose to the occasion, and before long we began to find holes melted in the strangest of places.

  “Our old lives can’t matter to us anymore. We have to see ourselves as we will be, not the way we used to be.”

  I dared to borrow Billy’s glove one night while most everyone was asleep. It felt cold as I slipped my fingers into its soft, fine mesh, but it warmed up to my body temperature almost instantly. So fine was its lattice of filaments that it almost vanished when I had it on my hand. A flick of my pinky turned it on, and my hand glowed bright enough to light up the entire room. It felt strange—because it felt like I was wearing no glove at all. It would be easy to forget you were wearing it and to think all of that destructive power came from your fingertips and not from the capillaries of the otherworldly device. I turned it off and put it back on Billy’s shelf. I had enough power for my tastes already. I could do without the Five Fingers of Death.

  “Remember, we’ll be the leaders when the others finally arrive, because they don’t know this world the way we do.”

  On a clear night, Grant brought out a telescope, and he trained it on a dim star to the north. Astronomers hadn’t even given the star a name, just a number. Grant told us our name for it, but it was this long thing with lots of consonants and no vowels, which I couldn’t remember if you paid me.

  With or without the telescope, the star was nothing more than a pinprick of light. It was hard to believe that something that appeared so small could have so great an impact on us.

  “If you ever have any doubts, take a good look at Ethan. Would we have been created so beautiful if we weren’t meant to have the world?”

  When we went to bed after stargazing, Wesley said something that I couldn’t get out of my head.

  “You know,” he whispered as the other kids were falling asleep, “if I had called everyone over to my house that night, it could have been me leading us over to Grant’s. I could be the one in charge now—isn’t that funny?”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  He thought about it and shrugged. “I don’t know. I should have been more like you that night.”

  He rolled over, and I could hear him snoring a few minutes later, but his thought kept me awake for a long time. What did it mean to “be like me”? I wasn’t even like me anymore.

  –13–

  SAYONARA, SEÑORITA

  If it weren’t for Paula’s cap, things might have gone a little bit diffently—but the fact was, I still had it, and it was still on my mind way too often. I didn’t dare wear it anymore—if I did, Billy Chambers, our local Security God, wouldn’t have made my life unlivable. Can I help it if she hadn’t given it to him? No, I would wear it, but I kept it under my pillow, and seeing it every night just before I went to bed turned it into a powerful ingredient in my nightmares.

  My back had stopped itching by now, and the peach fuzz was becoming a velvet sheen. I was bursting out of my shirt with muscles, and while it all should have been a reason for rejoicing, I didn’t feel too festive about it.

  I was up late one night, comforting one of the little kids. There were only a half dozen of them, none younger than six, so it was finally decreed that they be spilled into our ranks as well. Of course they were duly terrified of Grant, and of Ethan, and of the fact that their little baby-toothed world had, in a way, taken on fangs. Everything seemed threatening to them, from the growth of the compound to their changing bodies—for they, too, were put into the transition like the rest of us. And with our parents all forcing the distance between us, the littler kids cried themselves to sleep at night.

  It became a part of my job to comfort them. I would tell them a revamped version of the Warrior-Fools, but called them Warrior-Kings instead, and rather than becoming like the fragile people, my Warrior-Kings settled in to rule them. On this particular night, I was able to help the little kids to sleep, but my story didn’t work for me, so I grabbed Paula’s cap for comfort and ventured into the kitchen of our remodeled little house. Ethan, who only seemed to need several microseconds of sleep each night, was in his usual position at the table, studying. Tonight he pored over a history book in an incomprehensible language. He was like an older brother who had gone off to college and suddenly had nothing in common with me.

  “It says here that we’ve been tooling around out there since Earth was in its Dark Ages,” he told me. “You wouldn’t believe some of the real estate we control.”

  I heard him but found myself not listening.

  “You should read this stuff,” he suggested.

  I shrugged. “Sorry, I took Spanish.”

  He returned to his book, reading faster than I could turn pages.

  “Ethan, when you first saw yourself,” I asked, “how did you feel about it?”

  Ethan dropped his brain out of light speed and looked at me. “I thought I was dead,” he told me. “I thought I was an angel. Pretty stupid, huh?”

  I looked at him closely. He was still spectacular to behold, but the image didn’t fill me with awe the way it had when I first saw him. After a while, having him around just became . . . normal. It’s kind of amazing the things we let become commonplace.

  “Were you scared?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? I was terrified! If I hadn’t thought I was already dead, I would have died of a coronary. But my parents were there to clue me in, so after a while I was okay.”

  “Do you . . . miss it?” I asked. “Do you miss the way you were?”

  “I don’t think about it,” he answered. “We can do that, you know. Make ourselves not think about things, or feel things that are . . . well . . .”

  “Counterproductive?” I suggested.

  “Yeah.”

  He looked down at the pages before him, figuring I was probably done, but I knew I still hadn’t found what I really wanted to ask. I wasn’t exactly the Great Communicator—in fact, when it came to putting thoughts and feelings into words, I was on par with Wesley. Still, I knew that if I beat around the bush long enough, I’d scare up the way to say it. It only took a minute or two until
it finally came to me.

  “But—you’re still you!” I said. “You look different, but it’s still you!”

  He stared at me with his piercing eyes, as if I had no clue. “Yeah, so? Why shouldn’t I be me?”

  “Because it’s human.”

  He glared at me, taking it as an insult. “Not even close,” he said.

  I could have pushed it, but I realize he’d already shut the thought out and bolted his mind behind it.

  I looked down at Paula’s cap, which I was fiddling with like rosary beads. Ethan noticed.

  “I know what you’re problem is,” he said. “You’ve still got curveballs on the brain.”

  “Did your superior mind figure that one out?”

  Ethan, I suppose, was the right person to be talking to when it came to girls. He’d been dating since the rest of us just whispered about girls behind their backs. Of course, Ethan was more known for his spectacular breakups than for actually going out with girls. Even here in the compound, he was up to his old tricks. Now that he was alive again, Roxanne had tried to pick up their relationship where they had left off, but Ethan snipped that fuse real quick. It hit her particularly hard, since it was probably the first time she had ever tried to date a nonhuman. She cried all the way back to the barracks and then went out to melt holes in things. Billy Chambers, of course, swooped in like a vulture, and the rest was history.

  Ethan regarded me for a few moments, then smiled slyly. A sly smile on that strange face seemed doubly diabolical.

  “You know, we could probably make Paula look like us,” he said.

  It caught me off guard. “Huh?”

  “Sure we can—if they made us look human, I’ll bet it works both ways. Get Doc Fuller to whip up a serum that wraps our DNA around hers, and voilá—problem solved.”

  Problem solved? What Ethan was suggesting was probably possible, and yet I knew it was wrong. Even if, by some stroke of amazing luck, Paula consented to it, it would still be wrong. No, it wasn’t the solution—it was just a clever way of hiding the problem.