Dark Energy (16 page)

T
he lack of motion woke me up. Rachel had pulled over on the side of the road—an interstate—and the sun was high in the sky.

I looked around and saw a motorcycle cop behind us with his lights flashing.

“Where are we?” I asked, face-to-face with Kurt, whose lap I was sitting on.

“Just outside of Colorado Springs,” Rachel said. “Sorry.”

“No worries. We have a Get Out of Jail Free card.”

The cop came up to the window and looked inside. If he was startled by Suski's stark white skin, he didn't say anything.

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

“Around a hundred?” Rachel said. “But let me explain.”

“Hang on,” he said, and peered in the back windows.
“You've got too many people in the car, too. Can I see your license and registration?”

“My license is in the trunk,” she said, and handed him the FBI badge. “But I'm supposed to show you this and have you call this number.”

The cop looked at the badge, then back at Rachel. “Is this one of your friends? They answer the phone and pretend to be the FBI?”

“No,” Rachel said.

I wished I was sitting in the driver's seat. I wanted to get out of the car, but I knew that always freaked out cops.

“Sir,” Rachel said. “Can I get my license from the trunk?”

“I suppose you'd better,” he said, and backed away from the car.

I couldn't hear them as they talked, and once she opened the trunk of the car, I couldn't even see them. The minutes seemed to drag on endlessly.

“How are you doing?” I asked Kurt.

“I remember that I used to have feet,” he said. “But it's been a while since I've felt them.”

I pretended to punch him in the stomach.

“Did I drool on you this time?”

“Not that I noticed.”

The cop came back to the open driver's window and peered inside the car. “How are y'all doing?”

“It's my car, officer,” I said. “If you want to talk to me.”

“I want to talk to this young man,” he said, pointing at Suski. “What's your name, son?”

Suski glanced back at me, and I nodded to him.
“Ho' Suski leshhina,”
he said, and then the translator said, “I am Suski.”

“Well, I'll be,” the cop said, and lifted his head out of the window. He stood there for a minute and then walked back to Rachel.

“Is this bad?” Suski asked.

“No,” I said. “I think the cop will call that number.”

“What is a cop?”

“Someone who keeps the peace,” I said. “Like a guard. Someone who makes sure people follow the rules. Rachel broke a rule by driving too fast.”

“She was driving very fast.”

We waited for what seemed like a very long time.

“Have you slept, Suski?”

“I have not,” he said. “I am enjoying the ride. I did not imagine a world could be so big—that you could go so far in one direction.”

“You ain't seen nuthin' yet,” Brynne said with a smile. “The world is a lot bigger than this.”

“How about you, Coya?” I asked. “Have you slept?”

“Yes,” she said. “Not well, though.”

Rachel closed the trunk and came back into the driver's seat. “I think everything's going to be okay.”

I could see the cop clearly, as he stood beside his motorcycle,
the FBI badge and Rachel's license in his hand as he spoke into his radio. He was talking a lot, but it was probably a big deal that he'd seen an alien all the way out here.

Finally, the cop walked back and handed the badge and license to Rachel. “Good news,” he said. “Your story checks out. Better news, I'm going to give you a police escort to the state line, and we've alerted all the cops along the way to clear the path.”

“You did what?” I asked. “We're trying to stay incognito!”

“We just want to keep you safe, ma'am,” he said.

“They traced us to Sioux Falls. Now they'll know the road we're on and the direction we're going.”

“I'm going to be going along with you,” he said. “You're going to be safe.”

I couldn't believe it. We thought that we'd thrown them off our trail—thought that we'd disappeared, and now everyone with a police scanner knew where we were.

I opened the door. “Rachel, I'm driving.”

“Please,” she said, getting out of the car.

“I'm sorry if this isn't what you wanted,” the cop said. “We're only trying to help.”

“It's too late,” I said, walking around to the driver's side of the car. “What's done is done. This had just better not make the news.”

“I'll follow right behind,” he said, obviously sorry, but I
was too upset to be nice. “Drive as fast as you safely can. I'll keep up.”

“How far is it to the border?” I asked. The faster I could make it, the sooner we'd be off the radar again. Assuming the news didn't travel to New Mexico.

“About a hundred miles. I think we're at mile marker one-oh-five.”

“Okay,” I said, and plopped down in the front seat. The backseat shuffled again. “If you've got my back, I'm going to open her up and see what she'll do.”

“I've got your back,” the cop said. “Be safe.”

Come on, 445 horses, don't fail me now.
I wanted to show off Bluebell's zero-to-sixty power, but a momentary flash of compassion kicked in and I decided not to spray the cop with gravel.

I looked in the rearview for oncoming vehicles and, seeing none, pulled off the shoulder and onto the pavement. Then I punched it. The engine purred deliciously as it guzzled fuel and rocketed forward. In five seconds we were going sixty. In thirteen seconds we'd gone a quarter mile. There was a limiter on the car that topped out the speed at one fifty-five. I'd never hit that before, but I intended to try.

As I drove I kept my hands at ten and two, just like I'd been taught in driver's ed—no point getting sloppy now. But I kept having the urge to look through the sunroof, just to
see if we were being followed by a spaceship.

They couldn't be scanning all communications everywhere, could they? They probably only found us the first time because they knew Brynne shared a room with Coya so they were targeting her phone. Or maybe they'd been targeting my car because they knew I shared a room with Coya, too. But none of that meant they were checking the police radios.

I had to keep telling myself that to stop from hyperventilating. There was nothing especially safe about Grandma's house. There was nothing at Grandma's house. The only safety came from being off the map. We had to get back off the map. Once we hit New Mexico, I'd slow to the speed limit. No more possible slipups.

I handed my phone and memory card back to Kurt. “Call my dad. Tell him where we are and ask him to get some air cover.”

“Are you serious?” he asked, putting the phone back together. “I'm calling to order fighter planes?” He found the number and dialed. “Next time we go on a date, you're planning it.”

I glanced over at Suski. He was gripping the door handle tightly. He looked almost normal in his sweatshirt and cap—like any other high school boy.

I focused on the road and listened to Kurt relay the message to my dad. In a minute he hung up.

“Why are you doing this?” Suski asked, his voice quiet even though the translator spoke at the same volume all the time.

“Driving fast? Because I'm trying to get the hell out of Colorado.”

“No,” he said. “Why are you helping us? You could have left it for the guards at the school to protect us. Or the military.”

Good questions. Stupid questions. Or maybe good questions and stupid answers.

“Because I like you guys,” I said, and it sounded lame. “From the day you first arrived, I've felt a kinship with you. Maybe it's because we're both different, or maybe it's because we're both new.”

“I don't know ‘kinship,'” he said.

“It means you feel like family. Maybe you don't know family either. It means you feel like my brother and sister.”

What was I doing?
Focus on the road, Goodwin.

“Brother and sister,” he repeated.

“Yes,” I said. “No.”

“What do you mean by ‘yes no'?”

“I mean that I'm driving,” I said. “I need to concentrate on driving.”

We crossed into New Mexico, and I immediately slowed the car down to what felt like a snail's pace. We were still on the
interstate, and a Colorado state trooper waved at us as we passed him at the border.

There was no fast way to get to my grandma's house. That was one of the problems with living on the reservation—the roads were few and far between, and the roads that I was willing to take Bluebell on were even fewer. The fastest route would be to go south through Santa Fe, but the quicker we could get off main highways, the better. So we turned west after Raton and headed into the mountains. The thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit through twists and turns of forested roads seemed harder to maintain than the blistering pace we'd been traveling at for the last day.

I glanced over at Suski and laughed a little to myself.

“What?”

“You're a little green man,” I said.

“I don't understand.”

“That's what we always thought aliens would look like,” I said. “Little green men.”

“I still don't understand.”

“That's okay,” I said.

Brynne spoke up. “She means you look sick. Drink more Mountain Dew. It'll settle your stomach.”

“Is that true?” Rachel asked.

“I don't know,” Brynne said with a simple shrug. “I've heard that before—that carbonation settles your stomach.”

“No one is allowed to puke in my car,” I said. “And,
Brynne, aren't you supposed to be a doctor or something?”

“I'm seventeen,” she said. “Don't trust me.”

We stopped for gas again in a little resort town called Eagle Nest. It was amazing how much warmer it was here than in Minnesota. We were in the mountains, but it was easily in the fifties, if not pushing sixty. I decided that I was going to find a new boarding school somewhere in New Mexico.

After filling up, I went in the store and tried to snoop, wondering if anyone would recognize Bluebell from any descriptions on the news or police scanners. There was nothing in the flimsy local paper, but it didn't publish every day. I struck up a conversation with the woman behind the counter—just idle chat about the weather and the big lake that was across the valley. She seemed disinterested, which was what I wanted. Disinterest. Boredom. No panic or curiosity. As far as she could tell, we were just a bunch of regular teenagers on a regular road trip.

Finally, I asked her specifically if she'd heard anything about the aliens, and she said that someone else had come in and told her that four fighter jets from Kirtland Air Force Base had shot down an alien ship in Colorado just a couple hours ago. She didn't have more details than that, but that was enough for me. For now, at least.

I bought Suski a baseball cap for Philmont Scout Ranch and an Eagle Nest T-shirt. He switched it in the parking lot, and I tried not to lose all feeling in my extremities when I
saw his abs as I stuffed the Sioux Falls gear into the trunk. I explained what the writing on his new clothes meant and then we got back into the car.

It was stupid. I knew that the Masters knew we'd been in Sioux Falls, so I wanted to hide anything that said Sioux Falls. They wouldn't be trying to identify Suski by the writing on his hat, but still, it was something I could do, and I wanted to do everything I could, no matter how small.

The next city we drove through was Taos, but the highway didn't take us near Taos Pueblo—probably the most famous pueblo in the world. It was gorgeous and had been photographed and painted and drawn by every artist who had passed through here for a hundred fifty years. I told Coya and Suski about it, though. “It's like your ship, kind of. It's a place where people have lived in the same buildings for a long time—I don't know how long, but I want to say it's something like a thousand years.”

“I still have trouble understanding years,” Coya said.

“You're somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years old,” I said to her. “I'm guessing. So imagine a building that's been there for a thousand years—Rachel, how many lifetimes is that?”

“Fifty or sixty,” she said, almost without thinking.

“We don't know how long we were on the ship,” Suski said. “It may be longer than that. Or less. There are stories of
a time we didn't live on the ship. My father told them to me. Times when my people were happy.”

“You'll be happy again,” I said.

“Not with the Masters here. No one will be happy again.”

“What if there aren't many Masters here?” I asked. “What if it's only a couple of ships? What if they're scouts? We've been able to successfully fight them off—the National Guard killed two of the ships just at the school. And a few more have been successfully shot down, one at the White House, and another one at the tent city. So, scouting ships.”

Suski pointed to the Boy Scout logo on his hat, which I'd just spent five minutes explaining to him.

“No,” I said with a laugh. “Not like that. I mean, what if they were sent ahead to find out what happened to all of you.”

“Then the others will follow.”

“You don't know that,” I said. “This has never happened before. You've never been off the ship.”

“They need us,” Coya said. “For breeding. They need bodies to host the parasite.”

Kurt spoke up. “That doesn't seem to be their mission. They're out for revenge. That little ship they have can't abduct many humans—it's too small.”

“Then others will follow,” Suski said again. He seemed so certain of it. But he had lived a life of fear and slavery—of course he'd be certain of it. It would be impossible to believe a world where these monsters didn't control everything.
It made me wonder if he always knew they'd be followed. Maybe that was why he never smiled.