The Dark Side of Nowhere

  Ethan’s grave looked much the same as it had two months earlier. Small plugs of ivy had been evenly spaced across the mound of dirt like a cheap hair transplant. There was no headstone yet, and it looked woefully lonely.

  “Paula, this is crazy!” I insisted. “This is nuts!”

  “So put me in a padded cell in the morning—but right now this is what we have to do.” She looked at me as I held my shovel. “You start,” she said.

  The corner I was in couldn’t have been any tighter. Either I dug, or I left and she did it by herself, which I felt she might just do. Paula could achieve just about anything, whether it was grandiose or depraved. I couldn’t justify leaving her alone to do this, so I began to dig, hoping that she’d change her mind a few feet down.

  I only dug the spade in once, then flung the dirt off to the side . . . and when I looked up, I saw a moonlit fist flying in my direction.

  Bam! She threw a right hook to the jaw that practically spun my head around.

  “You lousy, stinking, lying creep!”

  There was one possible response to that.

  “Huh?”

  “If there was any chance that Ethan was really down there,” she said, “you wouldn’t have gone anywhere near that grave, and you know it! You wouldn’t even have come to the cemetery!”

  She was right. It was a trick, she got me, and now I was dead.

  “He’s alive,” she announced, “and you’ve known it all along, haven’t you?”

  “Uh . . . well . . .”

  “Forget it,” she said, taking my shovel, and her cap. “You’ve already given me your answer.” Then she stormed off, leaving me standing over the empty grave.

  I plodded my way toward Old Town. By now they were probably wondering where I was, and I’d have to come up with a good story. More lies. My breakup with Paula had not been the clean surgical procedure it was supposed to be—it had turned into a chainsaw massacre, and the more I thought about it, the worse I felt. I kept thinking about what I had done to her and about how the lies got layered so thick, I could barely breathe. It would have been bad enough if I had done this to a stranger, but I had done it to someone I truly cared about.

  The thought pulled out an intense flow of tears. Ethan had said we could just cut the thoughts and feelings out, but I wasn’t there yet, and I could not live with this.

  I doubled back, racing at full speed, till I reached the graveyard, then continued on toward Paula’s house, my superior lungs never getting tired, my superior legs never getting weak.

  I reached her house and jumped over the fence, determined to tell her the truth a million times over until she believed it—but as I crossed the yard, I was intercepted by an unexpected countermeasure. Mookie.

  The second he had smelled me, he bounded out of the doghouse. Without a single hesitation, he grabbed my leg in his powerful jaw and bit clear through my pants and into the flesh.

  I yowled in pain and reached down, prying him loose, but he lunged again. And so I kicked him—forgetting how powerful my kick would be.

  Mookie never stood a chance. He went flying over the doghouse and over the low-hanging moon, then landed in a patch of dense grass—and didn’t move.

  That’s when I looked up to see Paula watching out of her window, her eyes gaping in horror.

  I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, I wanted to say, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was a desperate, mournful wail.

  She screamed, and I bolted.

  There were so many things that were beyond salvage now, and inside my head I heard Grant, and Ethan, and everyone else saying how I should put it out of my mind. Just let it go, their voices said. It will all seem unimportant in a little while. I cursed myself for not being able to be more like them and more like my parents, who had successfully put the past behind them, no matter how hard it might have been.

  My mind was reeling—filled not only with thoughts of Paula, but of J.J., the stranger whose face I stole. And then I found myself thinking about all the strangers, in all the pin-prick road-apple towns in the world that were exactly like Billington, people with no idea of the big surprise looming on the horizon. There must have been something seriously wrong with me, because all I could think of were them, instead of my friends in Old Town.

  I looked down at my leg, which was spilling blood all over my sneaker, and suddenly a realization hit me that seemed more horrible than anything I could remember. In the dim moonlight, I couldn’t even tell what color my blood was.

  I was running with no destination, but my homing instinct brought me to my old house, the one I’d lived in when things were nice and normal. I had no key, so I kicked in the door with my good leg.

  Inside, the house was much the same, less a few chairs and mattresses—but most everything else had been abandoned there, just as everything in Old Town had been abandoned many years before. I sniffed the air. Mom and Dad had had the electricity turned off, but they hadn’t emptied the refrigerator, and the stench of putrefied food filled the stagnant air like a disease.

  I searched through the usual places for a flashlight, and when I found one, I took a deep breath and aimed it down. The blood was red. There was a lot of it, but it was red, and I could deal with that.

  I bandaged my leg in the bathroom, then went into my parents’ closet, not even knowing what I was searching for until I found it—and once I found it, I didn’t even realize what I was about to do. It was as if I were outside of myself, watching it all happen.

  I silently returned to the bathroom and pulled off my shirt. Then I turned the flashlight on my face and studied myself in the mirror. In the harsh contrasts of the light beam, I could see my change intensified. The delicate shape of my nose, the smooth cut of my cheekbones, the perfect curve of my chin, and that shimmering pelt of angel hair beginning to coat my shoulders.

  Brutally beautiful, savagely Godlike, the stunning and perfect end product of Creation—so why did I find myself wondering if there could be such a thing as a monster with the face of a god?

  I turned off the flashlight, and in the darkness, I plunged in the stinging hypodermic, pumping its thick pink liquid into the flesh of my half-human shoulder.

  –15–

  BAD HAIR DAY

  There was no excuse for what I had done, and no one I could tell. The shame of having taken the old serum was a burden I would live with alone—and it would weigh on me every moment of every day in the compound.

  Grant had promised there would be no more secrets between us, yet now I was the one keeping a secret. It would have been easier to live with if I had a clue as to why I had done it. Used to be, when I did things on the edge, I knew exactly why I was doing them. Most of the time it was just to be a nuisance. But this was different. I hadn’t done it to defy anyone. I hadn’t done it for the excitement, and I definitely hadn’t done it to be unique. It served no practical purpose other than to make my life miserable.

  It took a few days for me to realize what effect the shot would have. It didn’t reverse the process of change, but it did stop it. It was like pouring water on a fire, and I found myself caught in limbo of being half this and half that.

  I tried to tell myself that it was good and that it would turn out to be the best thing for me, because maybe now my troubled thoughts could catch up with the changes my body had undergone. Then the next week, Doc Fuller would give me the good stuff again, and I’d pick up where I left off, just a week behind the others.

  That’s what I told myself.

  But when Doc Fuller gave me the good stuff, I snuck right off and gave myself the old stuff once more. Two weeks, I told myself. I would only be two weeks behind the rest. Then I would be ready. But as that second week neared its end, I realized that I wasn’t any more ready than I’d been before. My parents had hoarded plenty of the old serum back at the house, in the event of a quick escape. But what did using it buy me? I was just treading water.

  And all this time, I led the others, encoura
ging them, calming their fears, telling them all about our big, bright, beautiful tomorrow, while secretly I was keeping myself from being a part of it.

  And then my parents left.

  It wasn’t just mine—the adults had been shipping out daily now, ready to fulfill their roles as obedient little cogs in the clockwork of doom. Mine were the last to go, leaving behind Doc Fuller, Grant, and a meager handful of adults I didn’t know.

  I was alone in the barracks, trying to steel myself for another day of deceit among friends, when they came in to say good-bye. As had been the way of things lately, Dad kept his distance. Even Mom didn’t get too close.

  “I suppose when we see you again,” said Mom, “we won’t even recognize you. You’ll have to tell us which one you are.”

  I could see she was holding back tears, and doing a good job of it. I’m glad, because I didn’t need melodrama—and I know this is an awful thing to say, but I wanted them gone. I didn’t want them to see me now, because if they looked too closely, they would see the shame and the lies in my face.

  But they didn’t look closely—in fact, they couldn’t make eye contact with me at all. And in a way, that was worse.

  “We’re headed for Chicago,” Dad told me. I already knew that much. The adults had been stationed pretty much around the world. Some in major cities to worm their way into computers and the economic infrastructure, whatever that was. Others went to small towns. Wesley’s parents, for instance, had left a few days earlier; their glorious mission was to travel through small towns and round up people with psycho potential, who hated the government. This from a couple who used to free flies from flypaper.

  Mom and Dad said their stilted good-byes to me. Then, just before they left, Dad turned and said something curious.

  “Someday son,” he said in his best fatherly voice, “I hope you’ll find a way to be proud of us . . . no matter what we do.”

  I thought it strange, because it seemed like something I wanted to say to him. It didn’t’ make much sense to me until much, much later.

  The day after they left, I counteracted my third set of shots, and soon after, my spinning world fell off its axis and went completely out of control.

  “It’s brilliant,” Ethan announced as he crunched on a piece of meat that was charred black—apparently the way he now liked it. “Tell them, Jason.”

  He was talking about The Plan. We were sitting in the diner at twilight, and everyone wanted to know what the big plan was. It was part of the information that was supposed to funnel through me but hadn’t been. I had sat in on enough meetings, but I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it with the others.

  Ethan sat on one side and Wesley on the other—the Trilogy of Terror reunited. But Wesley wasn’t looking sociable. In fact, he looked about as morose as I’d ever seen him, as he swatted away mosquitoes and pondered the Formica tabletop. He had been like this ever since his parents left. In fact, once our parents had started leaving, the invasion we all whispered about suddenly became very real. It hit Wesley hard.

  “Yeah, Jason,” said Wesley. “Tell us about the plan. I want to know what our parents are up to. I want to know how it’s going to happen.”

  It was the end of a brutal day—four hours of glove-craft, followed by grueling endurance exercises that seemed designed for maximum pain. I was too exhausted to resist, so I sighed and spooned it out to them by rote. “Phase one,” I said. “Cultural inflammation. We turn whole social groups against one another. Keep them hating; keep them divided. We take the worst side of human nature and use it against them.”

  One of the kids looked at me with wide blue eyes. “You mean we can do that?”

  “It’s kind of like acupuncture,” I told him. “If you tweak the right pressure point, you can make people feel anything. I guess we’ve figured out ways of making it work with whole groups of people, too.”

  “Is that where our parents are going?” asked Wesley. “To tweak pressure points?”

  I nodded but couldn’t look him in the eye.

  “It’s great!” said Ethan. “They’ll be so busy fighting each other, they’ll never see us coming!” He rapped me in the arm. “Go on, tell them what’s next.”

  “Phase two,” I droned. “Foul the network. Hit every major computer system and corrupt so much information that the world economy begins to collapse.”

  “Ooh!” said a bunch of them, as though they were watching fireworks.

  “Phone systems won’t work,” added Ethan excitedly. “Banks won’t work. No one will be able to find out what’s going on.”

  “Phase three,” I said, pushing this last part out like a bad piece of meat. “Arrival. Keep them confused, keep them in the dark, and devastate them with a single blow so hard, they’ll never recover.”

  “When?” someone asked.

  “No one knows for sure,” I told them. “We’ll know when they get here.”

  “That’s why we have to be ready,” added Ethan.

  And then I heard a voice across the diner.

  “Will I have to kill anyone?” asked Ferrari. Everyone turned to look at him. “I don’t want to kill anyone.” I’m sure many others were thinking about that, too. I know I was.

  While I was figuring out how I would answer, Billy Chambers answered for me, from across the room. “No sense worrying about things like that now,” he said.

  I began to feel an adrenaline fury replacing the exhaustion in my bones. “Why shouldn’t we worry?” I turned to Ferrari, who, like so many others, had already graduated to the true weapon. “Look at that glove you’ve been wearing on your arm and wake up,” I told him, and everyone else. “That thing doesn’t have a stun setting—and if you think a weapon like that is for anything else but killing people, you’re living in dream-land.”

  Ferrari recoiled, as if I had slapped him hard across the face.

  “Grant says,” Ethan firmly pointed out, “that we shouldn’t think of them as real people, like us.”

  “It won’t be so hard,” suggested Roxanne. “If you can shoot them down on a video game, you’re already halfway there.”

  Ferrari considered this. He didn’t seem entirely convinced, but he was working on it. “I’m pretty good at video games,” he offered.

  I sat there, trying to process all of this. For the most part, these were my friends, but the things they were thinking. . . .

  “It’s like Jason says,” Ethan reminded them. “It’s our world now, and nothing else matters.”

  And I realized that whatever they were thinking, I had helped put in their heads.

  I looked to Wesley, who was looking down at the table, still picking at the peeling Formica. Did he accept all of this? Had the doubt been washed out of his mind as well? Or was he just going along because he was told to? Like me. I wondered how far along we’d be willing to go.

  “I think the plan stinks,” I announced.

  No one was expecting to hear that from me. Any other discussion in the room suddenly ground to a screeching halt. Then someone spoke up.

  “Easy for you to say,” said Billy Chambers, sneering. “You don’t even have your real glove yet.”

  Billy smiled coldly at me. His homely features had been the first to go, and with his newfound good looks came cruel arrogance.

  Wesley jumped to my aid. “He doesn’t have his real glove because he hasn’t asked for it.”

  Billy crossed his arms. “So why haven’t you asked for it?”

  “Because I don’t need to impress Roxanne,” I told him.

  Some of the other kids chuckled. I noticed that Billy was the only one in the room who actually had his glove on. It seemed that he always had it on. He moved his finger slightly, and it began to glow.

  “While I’m in charge here, no one lights up inside,” I warned him. “Turn it off, and put it away.”

  Billy glared at me but obeyed.

  That’s when Grant made his standard stealth appearance behind us, leaving me no way to know how much
he had heard.

  “Anyone up for a game of chess?”

  “Jason doesn’t like the plan,” declared Roxanne, erasing any doubt as to what kind of evening this was going to be.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “He said it stinks,” clarified Ferrari.

  Grant raised an eyebrow but didn’t miss a beat. “He’s entitled to his opinion.” Then he sat down facing me, crossing his legs like a talk-show host. “If you think you have something more effective, why don’t you share it with us. Or better yet, why don’t you get a message to your parents—I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to have your input.”

  “I don’t have anything better. I just don’t think it has to be so cruel.”

  Grant gaped at me and laughed heartily. “Cruel? Us? No, never! In fact, it’s one of the kindest things we can do!”

  Even Wesley sat up and dared to question Grant now. “You think it’s kind?”

  “You’ve all heard of the expression natural selection, haven’t you?” said Grant. “Survival of the fittest? Even here on earth, they’ve discovered that particular law of nature. All these years the people here thought they were at the top of the ladder, but soon they’ll discover us, quite a few rungs above them. It’s easy to survive when you’re the dominant species—but let’s see how well they’ll do under us!” Grant gestured with a raised palm, as if offering something of great value. “Now they’ll have the golden opportunity to adapt. They’ll have a chance to evolve and grow once more—this time into something that serves our needs.”

  “And what happens if they can’t adapt to living under us?” I asked.

  “Then the kindest thing we can do is prevent their suffering.” Grant casually pressed his thumb against his forearm, crushing a mosquito attempting to dine on him.

  “Extinction,” proclaimed Grant, “is one of the most perfect acts of justice the universe has to offer. Nothing becomes extinct that doesn’t deserve it.”