“Jason, you’ve gotta come back right away,” begged Ferrari.
“I’d rather have my head melted off,” I told him.
“But you have to!” he insisted. Although Ferrari didn’t have that air of arrogance most of the others had been developing, he had never looked this rabbit-scared either. “You have to, on account of Wesley,” he said.
The mention of his name brought too many mixed feelings for me to sort out just then. “What about Wesley?”
“He went totally ballistic in the middle of the night,” explained Ferrari. “Now he’s holed himself up in the—uh”—he glanced at Paula—“in the . . . storm cellar, and he shoots at anyone who tries to come near him.”
The hairs on my neck stood up so sharply, it hurt.
“Exactly which storm cellar do you mean?”
“You know . . . ,” he prompted. “The storm cellar.”
I stood up. There was no mistaking what Ferrari was talking about. What was Wesley thinking? What was he doing down there? I glanced at Paula, who was taking all this in but asking no questions.
“We’re really scared, Jason. Grant just paces and yells orders, and Billy keeps pushing people around, but nobody knows what to do.”
I could imagine them there. Only a handful of adults remained, leaving mainly us Transitionals. With Grant and Billy in charge, I dreaded to think of how it might end.
“There’s one more thing,” Ferrari said, his words catching in his throat. He glanced at Paula, and then I guess he just gave up trying to keep secrets. “It’s Ethan,” said Ferrari. “He’s dead. For real this time.”
I forced myself to take a deep breath, but it came out in tight staccato beats. My God, what had gone on there, while I slept so peacefully? I knew I couldn’t ask with Paula there.
“Has anyone contacted my father?” I asked.
Ferrari shook his head. “I heard Grant talking to Doc Fuller—they haven’t showed up in Chicago yet. I don’t think things are going the way they’re supposed to.”
I felt the sickness in my stomach again but beat it away. I didn’t dare consider what might have gone wrong. I turned to Paula, who stood a step beyond the room’s threshold, as far away as she could get. I longed to reach out to her, but I had no clue how to bridge the distance.
“Okay,” I said to Ferrari, “you go ahead. I’ll catch up with you.”
“You promise?”
“I’ll be there.”
Ferrari looked at me, worried, then left.
Paula took a step forward, but only one step. I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing that came to mind.
“I’m sorry about Mookie,” I told her.
“Me, too,” she said. “I guess if he attacked me, I would have kicked him away, too.” She started rubbing her arms as if it were cold, although it wasn’t. “I went to your house after that but couldn’t find you. Then, when we heard that everyone at Holy Circle Nondenominational had actually moved into Old Town, my parents made me stay away. I almost did sneak down there to check it out, but I got kind of scared.”
I grinned feebly. “You? Scared?”
“Well,” she said, “I figured that if it was worth lying to me about, maybe it was worth getting scared about too.” She glanced at the pictures of J.J. Pohl on the wall behind me, comparing them to my face again, then said, “You know . . . Ferrari really doesn’t look right. He looks a little too . . . healthy. I guess it’s more than just good nutrition, huh?”
No matter what, I wouldn’t lie to her again. “Do you believe in aliens?” I asked her.
She tossed back her hair, trying to pretend the question didn’t trouble her. “Should I?” she asked.
And very softly, I said, “Yeah.”
From the next room, Mrs. Pohl called out cheerily, “Priscilla, dear, would you and your little friend like blueberry pancakes, too?”
I took a few steps closer to Paula. I was glad that she didn’t back away. “Could you stay with her for a little while?” I asked. “Tell her I had to go away again, but that it was good to be here one last time. I think she’ll understand.”
Paula looked down, wringing her hands, then forced herself to look me in the eye. “Will she see you again?” she asked.
I wanted to tell her yes but couldn’t bring myself to do it. “I don’t know,” I answered.
School counselors had always pegged me as being just a little bit self-destructive, but I never thought I’d be so self-destructive as to race back to Old Town the day after I almost died there. It had to do with that problem of living with myself again. If I didn’t do something about Wesley, I knew it would haunt me for the rest of my life, however long or short that might be.
I caught up with Ferrari, and we walked through the gate together. The status of things had not changed much from what he had told me. A bruised Doc Fuller and several more adults stood in the street, and the Transitionals meandered while Grant paced. Every once in a while, someone who apparently thought they could have a rational conversation with Wesley descended the moss-covered steps of the storm cellar, only to emerge a few minutes later, looking terrified and relieved, as though they felt lucky to have escaped with their lives. This was not the Wesley I remembered. He might have been a maniac, but he’d never been homicidal.
As the others saw me approach, they all took notice, either standing straighter or turning away. When Billy saw me, he made sure to stand directly in my path.
“The traitor returns,” he said.
I wouldn’t justify him with a comment. “Tell Grant I’m here.”
But Grant had already seen me and approached. It was actually worth coming back, just to see him this powerless.
“You should know,” he said with no love in his voice, “that you brought this about. I hold you responsible for everything that happened here, and you will be dealt with accordingly.”
“Threatening me’s kind of counterproductive, Mr. Grant. Don’t you agree, Billy?”
Billy sneered, but I could tell that he was squirming.
I grinned. “Now I may have to ask both of you to get down on your knees and beg me to talk to Wesley.”
Mr. Grant just shook his head. “You’re a very disturbed boy, Jason.”
I laughed out loud at that. This show was definitely worth the price of admission. I’ll admit I was terrified. If I turned around and left, Grant lost. If I went down there and talked sense into Wesley, Grant lost. No matter what he did to me, it wouldn’t change that simple fact, and he knew it.
“Okay, I’ll make a deal with you,” I told him. “If I get Wesley out of there, you let us both leave and you pretend we never existed. If I can’t get him out, then you can ‘deal with me accordingly.’”
“Deal,” he said, far too quickly. I knew he was lying—it was obvious that honor was not valued among the “superior.” Still, I had chosen to come here, regardless of the consequences. I supposed that meant I would die with my integrity. I turned and walked down the steps of the storm cellar, into the darkness of the buried ship.
It was the first time I had been down there since that night with my father. I expected it to somehow feel different after all I had been through, but it still struck me that same way: a cold, uninviting shell that spoke of nothing familiar. I paused for a moment to look into the room where my father had reminded me of the Warrior-Fools. The places where we’d sat still remained as clean spots in the dust. I tried to imagine riding in a craft like this to a home I had never seen, with the strange and beautiful people that I would have nothing in common with but the form of my flesh. If that was my destiny, then destiny had no soul.
I pushed deeper into the ship, through the dim light that filled the gray corridors. I could hear a sound now. A faint vibration that came from far below. A throbbing hum that resonated in my throbbing stomach.
A corridor up ahead was riddled with holes like a wedge of Swiss cheese, and I saw red light coming from a room dead ahead. All of the holes except for one we
re melted in the metal of the ship. The last hole had found a different target.
Ethan’s lifeless body lay sprawled ungracefully across the floor. I could imagine him coming down here, filled with faith in his superior mind and body, so sure he was too special to die in such a sad, sorry way.
I forced my eyes forward and stepped over Ethan’s body, refusing to look at it. Ethan was right. You can push some things out of your mind when you have to.
My steel cast accidentally banged into the wall with a loud clang, and in an instant I heard holes sizzling into the walls around me.
“Wesley, don’t! It’s Jason.”
The firing stopped immediately. I didn’t dare move until I heard him speak. His voice was close, but his mind sounded far, far away.
“They caught you,” he said. “I knew they would. I knew they would.”
I ventured forward. “No,” I told him. “I came back by myself. Because I heard you went nuts. Of course, I told them it wasn’t possible—first you have to have a mind before you can lose it.”
I thought it might get him to laugh, but it didn’t. Grant was right; this was my fault, at least partially. With all the strange things taking root in our heads lately, I supposed I had mulched something into Wesley the night before that sort of cracked his planter. There was so much about it that made me feel awful, and yet in the midst of grief and dread, I felt a glimmer of something good as I slowly stepped into the room. Perhaps it was just a strange ricochet of shock.
I realized right away that this room was the ship’s bridge—a small, cramped place, not at all what I’d expected. There were three seats before a viewport that now viewed nothing but dirt.
Beneath the viewport, the navigational console was turned on. It was a computer screen as wide as a table-top and full of open computer windows. Each window was filled with either unreadable hieroglyphics or incongruous graphics. I wondered how anyone could hope to navigate with so much input to consider.
There were three seats in front of the console. Two of them were occupied. In one sat a skeleton, an unlucky traveler who hadn’t survived the violent landing all those years before. It occurred to me that burying the dead must have been a human extravagance. I’d have to ask my parents about it if I ever saw them again.
In the other seat was Wesley.
“So,” I said to him, “do you think Gleeb over here will mind if I sit with you guys?”
Wes glanced at the slouching skeleton. “Gleeb doesn’t mind,” he said. “I think maybe Gleeb wants to take Ethan’s place in the Trilogy of Terror.”
I felt a wave of sorrow hit me at the mention of Ethan. I tried to tell myself that I had lived through his death before, but it made no difference.
I saw down in the third seat. “What happened, Wes?”
“Did you know,” he said, “that they have this same navigational console set up inside a pair of V.R. goggles? It’s true. That’s what I do for six hours a day. I sit and trek the stars and never have to leave the little room. Sometimes I get to blow things up too.”
He reached down and, touching the screen, dragged a few of the computer windows to different places. The he touched one with his thumb. The faint vibration of the ship grew a bit louder.
“Purrs like a kitten,” he said. “You think maybe I could trade it in for a Porsche?”
I leaned closer to him. “You gotta know that this is serious, Wesley.”
He turned to me. “I didn’t mean to hurt Ethan!” he shouted. “But I did, and now there’s nothing I can do about it!” He looked at his glove hand in rage. “There’s no safety on these things. There’s not even a trigger. You barely even think of moving a finger, and the thing goes off. You try to scratch your nose, and you wind up with no head.”
“Somehow,” I said, “I don’t think that the ones who made it really cared who or how many people it killed. Just as long as it killed.”
He ripped the weapon from his hand and threw it to the ground. “What are we, anyway?” he asked, looking at his own body, halfway to perfection. “I mean, what kind of screwed-up trick of evolution makes us look so incredible and then makes us the assholes of the universe?”
“I think you’ve figured it out,” I told him. “It is a trick. Think about it—can you imagine what an army would do when they first saw us coming? They’d be so awed just by looking at us, they’d forget to be afraid. They’d start believing that they deserve to lose.”
I realized I was avoiding the heart of my mission. “Wes, why did you come down here?”
“Did you know,” he said, slapping a tear out of his eye, “that my parents didn’t even stop in to see me when they left? They told Grant to tell me good-bye. Does that stink, or what?”
“It stinks. Why did you come down?”
Wes considered the console before him. He knew I wasn’t going to let him change the subject again. “Don’t you see, Jason—you mean something. You could go out there and probably win half of them over. I’ll bet you could get them to hurl Grant off a cliff if you tried hard enough, and Grant knows it—that’s why he had to wipe the floor with you. But I don’t mean anything—not even to my parents. No one listens to me. No one ever has; no one ever will. I could never do a thing about Grant, or Billy, or the ten gazillion ships whenever they get here. And then I start thinking, Maybe I can do something that makes a difference. Can you imagine what’ll happen if I take this ship out of here? Everyone’ll see it. It’ll be like skywriting across the world that we’re here!”
I shook my head. “How could that make a difference?”
Wesley turned to the console with even greater resolve. “We’ll just have to find out.”
I was getting more and more worried for him now. “Wes, this thing is badly damaged. If you try to start it, it’ll just blow up and kill all of us!”
Wesley nodded, and moved his fingers across the face of the console. “That works too.”
The vibration became a violent rattle, and a high-pitched whine screamed in my ears. The dirt in front of the window shifted. “It’s just like the simulator!” he said.
“Wesley, don’t do this!”
“Too late,” he said. “I’ve started the launch sequence.”
I grabbed his arm. “We’re getting out of here!”
“Go if you want,” he said. “I don’t care.”
But I did care. I looked at my metal cast. It wasn’t much of a weapon anymore, but it was still good for something. I raised it high into the air and brought the thing down on top of Wesley’s head as hard as I could. In an instant he became as limp as Gleeb. Either I had killed him or knocked him out, but I couldn’t worry about it now. With my good arm, I pulled him out of the seat and hoisted his dense, half-alien mass over my shoulder, racing back the way I had come, saying a silent final good-bye to Ethan as I passed him. There were strange, blaring sounds now, and I realized that warning alarms must sound the same in any world.
With all my strength, I ran down the long corridor, into the storm cellar, and up the stairs into the unbearably bright light of day.
Grant was right there.
“What’s going on? What have you done?”
“He started the launch sequence.”
The fear in Grant’s face turned to panic. “And you didn’t turn it off?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Wasn’t in my training.”
Grant let out a defeated whine and hurled himself down into the dark hole.
The ground was shaking like an earthquake now. Everyone was scattering, racing out through the gate and scaling the fences. Not even Billy bothered to harass me—he pushed the smaller kids out of his way as he fled.
Behind me I could hear a loud crack as the ruined foundation in front of the cellar split apart. My heart leaped with terror but also powerful anticipation—because I knew that Wesley was right. Everything was about to change again, and whatever happened now, it would make a difference!
You can’t imagine how different tomorrow will be!
/>
I burst out through the gate and tore through the woods, hoping I could get far enough away. The pain in my gut exploded into my arms and legs as I ran with Wesley’s impossibly heavy body on my back, but dropping him was not an option. Neither was slowing down. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The groan of the malfunctioning engine became a violent scream behind me. Twenty. I burst out of the trees and into a field. A flash of light, and a shock wave hit my back, knocking me down. I heard the roar above my head now, and as I looked into the sky, I could see it!
It rose huge and black against the morning sky, molting a trail of crumbling earth behind it. The ship was inelegant and cumbersome—an ugly thing nowhere near as exquisite as the creatures it once carried. I could imagine Grant in there now, at the console, trying futilely to control the thing, but as it corkscrewed into the sky, I could see that an entire engine had been crushed and a second one torn away.
Wesley, still alive, opened his eyes and caught sight of it. “Ooh!” he said weakly.
The ruined ship reached its peak half a mile up—high enough for everyone in Billington to see. Then it slowed—and stopped, hanging in the sky for an instant before it began to fall straight down, back toward Old Town.
It gained speed as it plummeted, its crippled engine sputtering, wind whistling around it. I grabbed Wesley again, dragged him forward toward a gully, and hurled us both down into a ditch as the ship disappeared beneath the treetops.
This, I now knew, was the real focal point of our lives. Either it would be the most important moment we’d ever have—or it would be the last.
The sky turned white, and the blast shook the dirt of the gully down around us, covering us in layers of wet earth. Then came a second blast so powerful, it filled the gully with the shredded limbs of trees that had been a hundred yards away. Finally the ground stopped shaking, but my ears rang on for a long, long time.
Wesley looked at me, semiconscious, his eyes half open. “Did I do it?” he asked. “What happened?”
I brushed the dirt from his face and laughed, suddenly feeling freer than I’d ever felt before. “Damned if you didn’t skywrite the world!”