The Dark Side of Nowhere

  “The school janitor,” I barked at him. “His name is Grant.”

  “I know who he is!” Dad shouted. Then he ripped the thing from my arms and flung it across the room. It hit the coffee table, bounced against the wall, and spilled its load of ball bearings all over the floor.

  “You are to go to the garage, and you are to destroy it—do you understand me?”

  “Not until you tell me why.”

  I thought he would hit me then. I actually thought he would haul off and belt me until I couldn’t ask any more questions, but even in his feral parental state, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He backed off, and the phone began to ring.

  Mom thought to let it go to voice mail, but on the third ring, picked it up.

  “Hello.”

  I heard a faint voice on the other end but only for a moment. She hung up quickly and loudly, then turned to Dad. “It was Grant,” she said.

  The little vomit-ride in my head started to spin in the other direction.

  “Speak of the devil,” I said.

  My father ignored me. “What did he say?”

  “He said if you don’t call a meeting right now, he’ll do it himself.”

  “Fine,” snapped my father. “Let him call his own meeting.” He zipped open the suitcase he had just brought in and continued packing, as if the issue was closed.

  I put my fingers in my mouth and let loose an ear-splitting whistle. “Hey! If you don’t tell me what’s going on here,” I threatened, “I’ll—I’ll do something worse than anything I’ve ever done before!” Although for the life of me, I didn’t know what that could possibly be.

  Dad looked at me, in the way fathers do when they can’t translate a generation down.

  “You say Grant gave you the glove,” he said. “What do you know about Grant?”

  I shrugged. To be honest, there was only one thing I knew about Grant. “His satellite dish points in the wrong direction,” I said.

  The significance of that, which was lost on me, hit my father like a shock wave. He paced, and dragged his fingers nervously through his graying hair. “What has he told you? Has he said anything to you that sounded unusual?”

  “Everything he says sounds unusual,” I told them, realizing that I was giving information but still not getting any in return. “He said that you’ve forgotten, and it’s up to us to remind you.”

  “Us?”

  “There’s about thirty of us,” I told him. “The kids from our church.” And then I added, “They’ve all got gloves like mine.”

  Whatever wind was filling my parents’ sails seemed to die when I told them that. Dad stalked away and got himself a beer from the refrigerator.

  “We’ll finish packing,” he announced. “Then we’ll call some of the others to let them know we’re leaving. If they want to follow, it will be up to them.”

  I felt like screaming, but I knew that wouldn’t get me anything. So instead, I searched a rational, sensible corner of my mind and said, very calmly, “Mom, Dad, listen, I know that you’re trying to protect me, but you can’t. I’m not five years old, and I wish you’d respect me enough to tell me the truth.”

  They looked at each other, cornered by my sudden display of maturity and reason.

  Dad turned to me, opened his mouth to say something, but closed it again. It was Mom who broke the silence.

  “We’re not . . . from here, Jason,” she said.

  Dad drew a deep breath and tried awfully hard not to look at me.

  “What do you mean ‘not from here’?” I sputtered. “You grew up here—I’ve seen pictures of you as kids—Grandma and Grandpa are buried in the town graveyard!”

  “Yes and no,” my father said.

  Yes and no. Okay, I thought. This is fine. My life hasn’t necessarily been a lie; it’s just been a huge half truth. “So where are we from?” I asked. “Another state? Another country?”

  Dad put down his empty beer bottle. “Think bigger, son.”

  I saw tears building in his eyes. I turned to my mother, and she couldn’t even look me in the face. She turned and pulled the suitcase off the sofa, but she had never zipped it closed, and its contents clattered onto the floor—it was full of little glass vials, each filled with a thick pink liquid.

  A lifetime’s worth of our monthly shots.

  I nodded. Okay, I said to myself. Okay. All right. I can deal with this. But the truth was, I couldn’t. Instead, I let all of this information pile in my head like a stack of dirty clothes that would eventually need a washer, and I sat there in silence, watching Mom carefully pick up the vials.

  I don’t think Mom and Dad said a word to each other for the rest of that night. I don’t even think they finished packing. By ten Mom had dropped into a restless sleep on the sofa, and then about an hour later I saw my father walking into the backyard alone. I slipped out the back door and followed.

  It was a clear night, and the moon was high. Following him was easy. He held something in his hand, but it was a long time till I got a good look at what it was. When my eyes had fully adjusted to the light, I could tell that it was a handgun.

  He walked a steady pace from one field to another, to another, until I could see where he was going. Our little church was on the hill up ahead. The lights were on in there, and the lot was full of cars. I didn’t even know he owned a gun.

  He walked up the hill, striding toward the church, and I started to get more scared than I ever remembered being. I was about to call out to him—to let him know that I was there, and maybe that would shatter whatever plan he had—but he stopped halfway up the hill and just stared at the building.

  I could hear voices inside—angry voices, troubled voices—but the voice coming from the pulpit was not Pastor Bob’s. It was Grant’s.

  My father stood there a good ten minutes, then he made a course change, down off the hill, and toward the woods.

  I followed him on to Old Town.

  –7–

  THE WARRIOR-FOOLS

  Like so many things in Billington, the Old Town storm cellar, where Paula had almost dropped my glove, turned out to be more than it appeared.

  My father disappeared down the cellar, and I followed far behind. At the bottom of the steps, a false wall opened up to reveal a metal hatch on heavy hinges, and beyond the open hatch was a narrow, curving corridor. I ventured forward into a dim light that seemed to have no source.

  It was a tight, self-contained place, like a submarine. Everything was a gunmetal gray, with valves and conduits winding around one another, down curved walls, and for an instant, I had the strangest impression that I was walking on the inside of my own glove. I shuddered.

  Empty, dark chambers loomed on either side of me, but finally I came to one that was slightly brighter. It was a space not much larger than my bedroom, with dark walls and a rough steel floor. It was empty—it seemed that whatever had been in this place had been pulled out, scavenged for other purposes.

  My father sat in there on a steel bench, looking forward at nothing. He still held the revolver in his hand, with the safety off. I stepped into the room.

  “Dad?”

  He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “I’m sorry I pushed you against the wall,” he said, “but when I saw your training glove, I went a little crazy.”

  Training glove? I thought, but didn’t dare to question him about it now.

  I sat down on a bench across from him, not sure how to feel—I was still sort of piling up the laundry. I could tell what this place was but didn’t dare ask about that, either. All I could do was watch my father’s every move, every blink, and stare at the gun that rested in his lap.

  He looked around. “Not much left of it, I’m afraid,” he said. “We all agreed we’d dismantle as much as we could, then bury it. We couldn’t do anything about the engines, but I doubt it will ever fly again.”

  “Dad, tell me who we are . . . who I am.”

  My father looked at me, then to the gun, then back to me,
but still said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said to him. “Tell me the truth, and if it really sucks, you can give me the gun and I’ll shoot you myself.”

  He laughed at that. I knew he would. Still, he kept the gun tightly in his grasp.

  “I have told you, Jason,” said my father. “I’ve told you hundreds of times.”

  But I just shook my head, not understanding.

  “You would ask me to tell it every night,” he continued. “Then one day you said you were too old to hear it anymore.”

  It came to me then in a flash of memory—something I hadn’t thought about for years. I gasped, and my gasp echoed in the lonely chamber. “The Warrior-Fools!”

  My father nodded. “Do you still remember it?”

  I searched my memory. Yes, I did remember! There are some things that you don’t think of for years, but the second you do, they burst forth—every word, every image. That’s how deeply it had been ingrained in my mind. That’s how carefully my father had put it there. I could still hear my father’s tone of voice as he told it. Always the same. He would tell it with passion and tenderness. It wasn’t so much the story but the way he told it that made me want to hear it so many times, all those years ago. Now I tried to tell it back to him in the same way.

  “Once upon a time,” I began, “there sailed a ship of fools who fancied themselves warriors. . . .”

  My father smiled. I continued: “They were strange of face and strong of mind, with powerful bodies and arms of fire. Monsters all, who believed themselves beautiful. On a voyage of conquest they sailed, but their arrogance grew into a tornado that cast them on the shores of the new land. Their shattered ship spilled poison that destroyed the good, fragile people of the land they would conquer.” I looked up at my father incredulously. “Old Town?”

  “It wasn’t Old Town when we arrived,” he said.

  I closed my eyes, piecing together the rest of the story word by word. “With each rising of the sun, the Warrior-Fools stared at the horizon, waiting for the thousand ships they would lead into battle—but the ships didn’t come, and the sunrises became too many to count. So they worked the land, lived the lives, and walked the ways of the fragile people, until their hearts filled with a joy and a peace they had never known as Warriors and Fools. Then, one day, they rose from their labors and looked at themselves. The mirror no longer showed them the monsters that they had been, for now they had become the very people they had destroyed, from the top of their heads to the bottom of their souls. And no one mourned that the Warrior-Fools were no more.”

  In the silence that followed, I went over the story again and again in my mind, finally knowing what it said. What it meant.

  My father finally spoke.

  “We came from a race of conquerors, sent to prepare for an invasion that never came,” he explained. “We couldn’t do anything for the people dying in Old Town. We had ruptured a fuel cell in the storm, and there was just too much radiation.” He began to rub his eyes as he thought about it. “We took care of them, and took samples of their genetic structure. Some of the samples we saved; other samples we wrapped around our own, masking ourselves on a molecular level. As they lay dying, they watched as we became them. It must have been horrible for them.”

  As I listened, I tried to imagine it from both sides, but the two different points of view wouldn’t mesh in my mind.

  “So . . . we’re body snatchers?” I said, letting out a nauseated little chuckle.

  “It’s not that cut and dry,” he said. “Their DNA was all we had to mask ourselves.”

  Then something occurred to me. The very thought of what I was about to ask made my mouth dry, and my voice hissed out in a jagged whisper: “Why did we need to mask ourselves?” I asked. “What do we look like?”

  But he wouldn’t answer that one.

  He went on to tell me how the forty of them cleaned the crash site and buried the ship. How they hid the truth from the rest of the town, by becoming the humans who had died, down to every last detail of their lives. “We took over their jobs, their friendships, their habits, and beliefs,” he told me. “We replaced them, and for the ones who died that we couldn’t replace, we invented the epidemic. The act we put on was so convincing, the rest of Billington believed us.”

  He kept pouring forth in his grand confession, and the more he spoke, the easier it flowed. Soon his voice had slipped into that tone of simple conversation that made everything he said sound reasonable, as if he were talking about last month’s fishing trip.

  “We moved out of Old Town a family at a time and just disappeared into other neighborhoods. It was easy after that.”

  It’s funny, but in spite of how limited my own life experience had been, accepting the truth had become remarkably easy. My father could have told me that we were made of pipe cleaners and pie filling, and I would have nodded and asked him what flavor.

  “We gathered information,” he continued, “studying the strengths and weaknesses of humans from the inside out, looking for ways to exploit them. We became students of nature. And then something happened that we never expected.”

  I thought back to the old bedtime story. “You liked it here?” I said in disbelief. The concept of actually liking Billington was way too far-fetched for me.

  “Not just here,” he said. “We liked everything. The change of the seasons, the taste of the food, the smell of the air. But most of all, we liked who we were and the way we lived.” He took a look at the gun, then finally put it down and pushed it out of reach. “They never contacted us. No ships ever came. And we abandoned the mission when the first of us had a child. That was Ethan.”

  Hearing Ethan’s name made my heart seize for a painful beat. I wanted to ask what he really died of but wasn’t sure I was ready for the answer.

  “Ethan was the first child born,” said my father. “You were the second.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while, and in the silence, the numbness I felt settled deeper into my bones. I guess you would call it shock, but it wasn’t what I’d expect shock to feel like. It felt more like being in a cocoon.

  “There’s something I need to show you,” my father said—but I could tell by the way he said it that it wasn’t something he wanted to show me. He needed to show me. It was something I suddenly had the right to know.

  Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a photograph and handed it to me. It was a Polaroid of a man in his forties. A pleasant but unremarkable-looking man. Thinning brown hair. Ordinary features. His smile seemed familiar.

  “His name was J.J. Pohl,” explained my father. “He was a town hero here. Fought in Vietnam, then took over his father’s hardware store in Old Town.” Again he rubbed his eyes from the sting of the memory. “Your mother and I took care of him as he lay dying, a few weeks after our arrival. We had already taken on the forms of the people we were to be. There were only forty of us, but more than seventy died—leaving more people than we could replace. J.J. was one of those.

  “Just before he died, he made me promise him something: that no matter how many of us came, no matter how powerful our forces were, something human would be saved. I didn’t know how I’d ever have the power to keep such a promise, but I promised him anyway. He was a good man, who didn’t deserve the kind of death we had brought him.”

  Dad looked down, rubbing his feet across the dusty metal floor. “Anyway, we took a sample of his DNA before he died. And seven years later, we used it to wrap around the genes of our own son. We gave him to you.”

  It took a few moments for the significance of that to wind its way home. I looked to the picture again, and when I did, my hand shook. The smile was mine. The eyes were mine. This ordinary man with a forgettable face was me. I thought of the other kids who were part of this. Wesley, Billy Chambers, and almost thirty others. Was there an old picture of a dead townie who looked like Wes, just as there was one for Billy Chambers and me? Is this all we were? To find out that your life is a lie
is one thing, but to find out that your own face doesn’t even belong to you—

  I wanted to take my hands and gouge my face until it was gone, but it wasn’t like peeling off a latex mask. This living disguise went down to the bone. Down to every single cell of my counterfeit body. The numbness I had felt was gone. Whatever weird metal cocoon had held me through these revelations now burst apart. I couldn’t tell what was emerging from it.

  “How could you do it? How could you give me this—this small-town nobody,” I said, waving the picture at him, “when I came from this?” And I raised my hand to the ship around me.

  “We chose to be human,” he insisted. “And we never regretted the choice!”

  “I had no choice,” I shouted. “You made me live this lie!”

  “We never gave you a lie,” he said, his voice booming in the metal chamber. “We gave you a new truth. A better truth.”

  “A better truth, huh? Well, you know what you can do with your ‘better truth.’” With that I stood and stormed toward the door. I didn’t know where I would go, but I knew that I couldn’t stay there with him, gun or not. Then he said something that stopped me in my tracks.

  “The story’s not over.”

  I turned back to him slowly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “There’s a new chapter to the Warrior-Fools.”

  He stood up, and although he was a big man, he seemed diminished in the dim light of the black steel room.

  “Many years later,” he began, “the last of the Warrior-Fools stared at the horizon, his satellite dish pointing in the wrong direction. And one day a message fell upon his ears: ‘The thousand ships are on their way. ’”

  Far away I could hear the wind breathing across the mouth of the storm cellar, and the cold chambers of the buried ship resonated with a lonely moan. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out who that last Warrior-Fool was. And why he had secretly given all the kids training gloves.

  “When?” I asked.

  My father shook his head. “The message was garbled,” he said. “We know they’re coming, but we don’t know when. Grant has known about it for months but just told us today. I suppose he was waiting until he got his hands on every last kid.”