The Dark Side of Nowhere

  By nine they had all arrived—even Billy and Roxanne were there, although they stayed in the back and said nothing to me.

  As I stood before them, Grant’s words suddenly came back to me: The kids here follow your lead, Jason. And I wondered if they knew that it was the blind leading the blind.

  “Okay, first thing,” I announced. “We . . . are . . . not . . . dying.”

  Most of them sighed an amazing breath of relief, as if my saying it made it true.

  “Do you know that for a fact?” someone challenged.

  “I know what I know,” I told them. Which was nothing.

  It was Ferrari who switched us onto the right track. He raised his hand timidly. “Jason,” he said, “do I look different to you?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, do I look different—do I look funny? Because I don’t think I look like I’m supposed to. . . .”

  To be honest, I had never looked close enough to notice. He looked kind of pale, but that was probably just from being scared. I scratched his shoulder gently. “You’re okay, Ferrari—there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “How about my eyes—how do they look?”

  I peered at them and couldn’t find anything wrong. “Blue,” I said with a shrug. “They look blue.”

  “Yeah,” said Ferrari, “but my eyes are brown.”

  The other kids began to lean around to get a good look at Ferrari’s eyes.

  “Maybe it’s just the light,” suggested Wesley.

  But no amount of light could make brown eyes do that.

  I stepped over to the mirror in the hallway and looked at my own eyes. They were blue—but then they were always blue. They looked no different to me. It was my eyebrows that didn’t quite seem right. They seemed . . . thinner. And as I brushed my finger across them again, a few more strands of eyebrow hair came loose.

  On an impulse, I pulled off my shirt. My shoulders were peeling and raw, as were my back and my neck. I already knew about that. But then I took a long look at my chest. I didn’t have many chest hairs to begin with, so it was hard to notice the difference, but I did notice something else. Those pecs that Paula had commented on earlier—they were bigger, but not just that. In some imperceptible way, they didn’t look exactly . . . right. Something in their shape or their angle was off.

  It was all enough for me to start drawing conclusions of my own, and I knew that this time the answer to the equation was right.

  “Is that why we came here, to watch him admire himself?” said Billy, still pretty sore about that afternoon.

  I wanted to fire something back at him but held down the urge. Instead, I quietly slipped my shirt back on, took a deep, deep breath, and approached the group. I stood before them, knowing what I had to say but not knowing how to say it.

  “Those shots they’re giving us,” I began. “I don’t think they’re keeping us human.” And from there, I let them start looking at their own bodies for the rest of the answer.

  The simple truth was, we were slowly becoming ourselves.

  If you’ve ever seen those movies where the marauding townsfolk head up the hill to Frankenstein’s castle with pitchforks and torches, then you can imagine what it was like when two dozen kids marched with flashlights and iron gloves toward the only house in Billington with a satellite dish pointing north.

  As we approached, I could see Grant’s silhouette in the kitchen window. I would have loved to have seen his face the moment he caught sight of us, but all I could see were shadows. He disappeared from view, and a few moments later, the garage door began to crank itself open. Grant stood there in the empty garage. If our arrival unnerved him, he didn’t show it—he kept in calm control.

  What struck me first was the garage itself. Twenty years of living human, and yet the garage was bare. There was a rake, a spade, and that was about it—no boxes of things too special to ever throw out, no old furniture—as if nothing over the past two decades had been worth holding on to.

  “To what do I owe this visit?” he asked.

  I took a step forward from the crowd. “You know why we’re here.” I maintained the same calm control over my own voice. “did you think we wouldn’t figure out what was happening to us?”

  He smiled. “I assumed you would,” he said, “but I’m impressed that you realized it so soon!”

  Seeing that smile just made me angry. I didn’t know what to do, so I raised my glove and aimed it at him. In turn, he raised his own hand, clicked his remote, and the garage door cranked down behind us.

  “If you’re going to riddle me with ball bearings, by all means go ahead. But if you don’t intend to shoot, I suggest you put your arm down.”

  No, I wasn’t going to shoot him. I slowly lowered my arm.

  “You still haven’t grasped how fortunate you are,” he told us.

  “You keep saying that,” I reminded, “but you haven’t shown anything to prove it.” I began to feel the control in my voice slipping toward rage. “Now it’s time to put up or shut up.”

  I could hear the others rumble their approval behind me. I took another step forward—not quite in his face but close. “You’re going to tell us everything,” I demanded, “and you’re going to tell us now.”

  “Or else?”

  “Or else you lose,” I told him. “You lose everything you’ve worked for. You lose our attention and our respect. You lose us.” Then I pulled the glove off of my hand and cast it down at his feet.

  Grant regarded us with the sternest face he could muster. He looked out over all the others. “Does he speak for all of you?”

  Although I had my eyes fixed on Grant, I heard the response. First one at a time, and then a clattering rush of everyone’s gloves hitting the concrete, like a sudden downpour of rain. When the silence returned, Grant looked to the back, to Billy Chambers.

  “Billy,” said Grant, “does Jason speak for you?”

  Billy, who still had his glove, took a moment to consider it. He was looking at me, not Grant. There was a lot of anger toward me in those eyes. But I suppose some things are stronger than anger.

  “Yes,” said Billy, ripping his glove off of his hand and dropping it to the grand. “Yes, he does.”

  I turned to Grant again, thinking him beaten—or at least humbled—by our defiance.

  But then he began to smile. Not coldly, not apologetically, but broadly—and then he let loose a laugh that sounded inappropriately joyful. He slapped his hand down on my itching shoulder.

  “Good!” he said. “Then you’ve proven yourselves.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” I demanded, but he didn’t answer me. Still gripping my shoulder, he turned me to face the others and addressed them, not me.

  “Jason Miller has united you all in a single purpose,” he announced boldly. “He has brought you together with one mind, one goal. You will therefore answer to him now. I will still be responsible for your care and training, but in everything else, you will answer to Jason.”

  Everyone looked at one another, trying to fathom this new spin our confrontation has taken.

  “And if we don’t?” challenged Roxanne.

  “There is no ‘if,’” answered Grant. “You will.”

  The group began to murmur. Some of them sounded pleased, others uncertain, but there were no further challenges. My nomination had been approved.

  The rage that had carried me into the garage had been doused so effectively, I could only stand there dumbfounded and limp-willed as I stared at Grant.

  “But . . . but . . .”

  “Congratulations, Jason,” Grant said, beaming. “I knew it would be you.”

  “But . . . what about this afternoon? What about . . . me and Paula?”

  Without taking his eyes off of me, he said, “Your decisions will be their decisions now. Your choices their choices. I will no longer question the decisions you make.” And that’s all he said about it. I realized that he had just officially handed me a huge scepter of p
ower, and yet I suddenly felt more powerless than I’d ever felt before.

  Grant turned again to the others. “From now on, there will be no secrets between us,” he proclaimed. “What I know, I tell to Jason, and what he knows, he tells to you.”

  It was as if Grant had harpooned me, deflating my rage. In one smooth motion, he had permanently skewered me between himself and my friends. Grant looked at me as if I should be proud to now be the Conduit of All Information, as indispensable as him in the scheme of things. It made me think of my father and that night when he took me to the ship, pouring out his confession. I wished I could have talked to him now—because now I understood what it was like to be impaled upon your mission.

  “I can tell you what you’ll look like,” Grant announced with a sparkle in his eye. The offer brought the group to silence. Suddenly you could hear the crickets.

  I didn’t know about everyone else, but my own curiosity had drowned in the flood of my new responsibility. “Maybe . . . maybe we’re not ready,” I whispered to him.

  “You’ll never be ready,” he responded, “but I’ll show you anyway. You alone, Jason—and then you can decide if the others should see.”

  I nodded my numb acceptance.

  While the others milled around the garage anxiously waiting, Grant led me inside his house. I forced myself to follow even though I knew that my brain was kind of running on fumes. He led me through his spotless, spartan home and down the narrow stairs into the dimly lit bowels of his basement.

  As bare as his home was, his basement was an unparalleled clutter. It was full of things he had obviously scavenged from the ship. I saw more training gloves, which he must have been saving for the younger kids when they came of age, but nothing else I saw made sense to me. The place was stacked with artifacts strangely shaped and unnaturally textured, and I began to wonder how I could ever learn to live in a culture whose simplest objects had me stymied.

  The basement itself seemed larger than the house above, as if it stretched out beneath the yard. We came around another stack of exotic clutter, then finally reached a door, as ordinary looking as any. Grant grasped the knob, turned to me, and said, “In your life, you’re going to have many moments of glory. But this moment will stand above all others.”

  And with that, he slowly pushed the door open.

  Years ago, there was this blind kid in our neighborhood. He had been blind from birth, and managed to get around in the land of the seeing pretty well, even for a kid. Since he didn’t mind talking about being blind, a bunch of us would sit around and explain to him what things looked like. I tried to explain to him the color blue—but the only words I could use spoke of texture, or smell, or sound, or taste.

  How can you describe something that you couldn’t imagine before you saw it? Something so wholly different that imagination itself hadn’t evolved far enough to grasp it?

  That’s the way it was when Grant led me into that room, for it wasn’t a picture he had brought me in to see. . . .

  It was one of them.

  My heart pounded out a long drumroll before I could will myself to move closer to it. The creature was both beautiful and frightening, savage yet godlike, as it lay motionless—lifeless—on a stone slab. Grant was right. Nothing could have prepared us.

  “Do you see,” said Grant, “why I couldn’t tell you?”

  As I gazed upon it, I thought about how I might describe it to the others, and realized that it simply wasn’t possible. Sure, I could talk about its humanoid shape—but its form was far more perfect than any human I’d ever seen. I could say how incredibly muscular it was, and yet, how could I explain how something so strong and dense could seem almost weightless? I could tell them that its skin looked like pure, pure peach marble, swirling with rivers of perfect color—but then they wouldn’t understand its softness, and how you could almost feel that softness against your eyes as you gazed at it. And I could try to give the others an image of its dazzling thick mane of hair, which grew not only from its head but also from its shoulders, tapering down to the small of its back, but then I’d have no words to use when I tried to describe its color. The closest I could come would be to say that its gossamer hair had no color of its own but seemed to drag the colors out of the air, looking golden blond one moment, then ice blue or flame red the next. It refracted the light with such breathtaking magnificence, you’d think it was spun from diamond thread.

  I could feel my knees growing weak as I looked at it, my brain trying to come to terms with the creature stretched out before me.

  That’s when it opened its eyes.

  I yelped and jumped back, but Grant was there to catch me.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  The creature sat up and looked at me. The features of its face were strong, yet angelic, from the smooth curves of its nose and chin to the clarity of its deep green eyes, unfettered by lashes or brows. Those eyes were hypnotic, but more than that, they were deep. Deep enough to fall into.

  As it looked at me, the corners of its mouth turned up in a smile.

  “Jason!” it said. “Oh, man, I thought I’d never see you again!”

  I’m glad Grant was still holding me up, because my legs had forgotten how. I could only gape in astonishment as the realization spun through my brain and out of my mouth in the form of a single word. A name.

  “Ethan?”

  –11–

  MAN OF THE HOUR

  I almost died,” said Ethan. “It hurt more than anything you can imagine.”

  I couldn’t look at him as he talked. I still couldn’t reconcile his overpowering image coupled with a voice that sounded almost the same—only fuller and more resonant, as if his lungs were twice as big. He was shirtless but wore a pair of Levis, which I guess was perfectly natural but somehow seemed entirely absurd—like those frogs they shellac and dress up like golfers.

  “I felt it at first in my gut,” Ethan continued, “like I had eaten something really bad, but then it spread to my arms and legs. I felt like I was boiling on the inside. The pain got worse and worse, and then I just blacked out. My parents say that I was in a coma for two weeks and almost didn’t make it. I was all swollen and bruised . . . but bit by bit the swelling started to go away. And when I woke up, I looked like this. My parents had a lot of explaining to do.”

  He took a long look at me. For the most part, I looked pretty much the same as I did before Ethan “died.” “You’re lucky it’s happening to you slowly,” he said, “under Doc Fuller’s control.”

  Behind me, Grant reminded me that we had a garageful of anxious kids. “What do you want to do?” he asked me.

  I forced myself to look at Ethan again. A shiver of awe slid down my spine. “You look pretty damn incredible. You know that, don’t you?” I told him.

  “What can I say?” said Ethan. “I’m a stud in any gene pool.”

  I laughed at that. Then I felt my shoulders itching again. When I reached inside my shirt to scratch, I could swear I felt the faintest hint of velvety peach fuzz there. It was weird and wonderful.

  “We’ll bring him to the others,” I told Grant. “That is, if he wants to go.”

  The Ethan-thing looked down at his thin perfect fingers and wrung them nervously in his lap, then looked up to me with his riveting eyes. “Sure—got a giant cake I can pop out of?”

  We came back through the house, and I opened the door that led to the garage. By the look on my face, they all must have realized that they were in for something major. I stepped in, Grant followed, and then a moment later Ethan apprehensively crossed the threshold.

  There were gasps, and everyone backed away in silence.

  “Everybody,” I said, “I’d like to re-introduce you to a friend.”

  Ethan looked around and fixed his eyes on his sister. Then he strode toward her with powerful yet light-footed steps.

  When Amy realized that she was the target of his attention, she backed up against the wall and gripped onto Ferrari, who
was standing next to her.

  Ethan knelt down before her, looked into her eyes, and smiled. That unearthly smile had so much power that it sliced right through Amy’s fear, turning it to wonder. She slowly released her hand from the death grip she had on Ferrari, then reached out and dared to touch the face before her. When she stroked his cheek, she let out something that was a cross between a gasp and a laugh. “It’s so beautiful,” she said.

  Ethan’s smile widened, and he said gently, “So are you, Aimsie.”

  Amy withdrew her hand, and her expression changed into a bewildered shock. No one but Ethan called her Aimsie—and everyone knew that.

  A whisper shot through the garage like wind through a wheat field: “It’s Ethan, it’sEthanit’sEthanit’sEthan. . . . ”

  I could see in Amy’s face and her body language that there was a battle going on inside of her. One part of her wanted to deny it and run away, screaming, while another part of her wanted to embrace her mystically transformed brother. It was that part that finally won the battle. She threw herself into Ethan’s arms and hugged him tightly, clinging onto his soft, diamond-thread hair. She wept tears of confused emotion—and she wasn’t the only one. I could hear sniffles around the room and see the quivering chins.

  Roxanne came forward next—no runny mascara to intensify her tears.

  She reached out and touched him. Then one by one, they all moved forward and touched his skin, his hair, and his face, until he began to laugh out loud from the feel of their caresses.

  I arrived home with an entourage of kids who were in no state of mind to return alone to their homes. My parents were home when I got back that night, looking haggard and exhausted from their many weeks of tireless work. In fact, everyone’s parents had gone home that night.

  “Grant called,” my dad explained, “and told us what was happening. I felt everyone ought to be with their kids tonight.”

  And so one by one parents arrived and took their kids home, to be a human family, if only for one last night.

  When they were all gone, I went into my room. I had wanted to talk to my dad and tell him all the things burning through my head, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so we barely said anything to each other.