Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments (16 page)

I want you to know that I intend to mount your head on my wall with my other trophy heads. Dreamwalking is rare, and I like the cheeky way you escaped me.

“I’m sure it’s an honor,” I say, “but I’d rather keep my head.”

Maybe I can convince you otherwise.

The lights come on, greenish rather than the familiar yellow tone, and I see other aliens enter the room. Two from the front and another from the back. They’re all small, with big power. Not as big as the Hunter’s, but big.

“Crap,” I say, too frazzled to be more inventive with my language — sorry, Mom. I try to send a warning to Catlin and Zack. I’m not sure it gets through, though. The glow of the Hunter’s power feels like it’s all around me, encircling me, smothering me.

Here’s an interesting question. Does product-that-is-not-product who dies where no one can see it ever really exist? My employers would say no. Def-in-ite-ly no. The product-that-is-not-product never existed.

“I’d like to debate that point,” I say. “In public.”

I would want Lauren right there beside me. She would kick the alien’s butt in a debate. He’d be all, “A hunter should hunt.” And she would give him like a million reasons why he was wrong in general and especially wrong when he was talking about humans.

If you give us the location of the product you’ve been hiding with, I might give you another minute or two of life. Most prey will give anything for an extra minute or two. Most of their lives have passed unnoticed by them. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, entire years in your way of measuring time. But for two minutes they will do anything. How about you?

“Can I think about it?” Some people are good at stalling, and some are not. Guess which kind I am?

Just then, Catlin, Zack, and Michael slip out from behind the bookcase. It’s a relief to see Michael. He’s real. He’s alive. He looks worn and thin, and he’s limping, but he has that unmistakable mischievous twinkle to his dark eyes. He would hate to hear me think
twinkle.
I make a note to say it to him — several times — in the unlikely event we survive.

“Damn, Tex,” he says. “You didn’t have to wake the whole house, did you?”

Zack tries to laugh, but it comes out like a squawk. His face is pale, and the skin around his small mouth is stretched tight. I’m worried he’ll faint.

“It wasn’t my plan,” I say. “Lindsey?”

“Dead. They kept me as bait. Mostly this dude here,” he says, nodding at the Hunter. “He took my memories, too.”

Borrowed,
the Hunter corrects.
I gave most of them back. But you’ve served your purpose. You’ve brought me the anomaly.

“Anomal-what?” Michael says.

“He thinks I’m special,” I explain.

“You’re special, all right,” Michael says. “Specially stupid to come back here.”

“You mean ‘especially,’” I point out.

“Shut up,” Michael says.

I smile. It’s good to have him back.

“Special,” the Hunter says, ignoring us. “Much more powerful than he should be.”

“He’s the Chosen One!” Zack says. “He has the Spirit of the Warrior in him.”

The Warrior?
the Hunter mindspeaks.
What is this?

“A god,” Zack says. “Or half god, really. His spirit is in Jesse. . . .” His voice trails off, and his cheeks color.

The Hunter mindspeaks,
You are a very strange species.

I say, “I’m not an anomaly. There are more like me. Some even stronger than me. You’re in a lot of trouble here.”

The Hunter seems even more amused.
I don’t think so. If there were others more powerful than you, we wouldn’t have been able to take over your planet in a matter of your seconds. There is nothing left for you to do but die. Do it with honor. Die well.

The Hunter flicks his finger. Nothing more. Zack screams and falls. I manage to deflect the last of whatever the Hunter has shot at Zack, but Zack hits the ground hard.

Send me a message from the land of the dead,
the Hunter mindspeaks.

Zack’s dead? Before I can check, the Hunter flicks his finger at me and something happens. Instead of dying, I stumble into dreamwalking. I can’t control it. I feel like I’m in a dream. The moment I’m in splits into a lot of different moments. I see, all at once, all these possible moments, each branching off from the one like streams from a river. And I see us die in all of them — every possible stream. Until I don’t. Until, in just one, I don’t see us die.

I’ve seen some strange things since the invasion, but this is by far the strangest.

Then I’m back in the main moment, no longer dreamwalking. It feels like I’ve been taken to some other place and brought back. Places. Some other places. I was more than myself, like I was somehow all the possible mes at once. And now I’m back.

And while I was gone, the Hunter’s death ray completely missed me.

The Hunter looks perplexed, like he knows something just happened but he doesn’t know what, and that hesitation gives me enough time to do the one thing that will lead to the moment in which we aren’t killed. The one moment.

I join with Catlin. My dad, soldier and real warrior, used to say there was no weapon stronger than surprise. And the Hunter is definitely surprised.

Catlin and I create a whole room of the two of us — way more than the lousy dozen Hunters he produced earlier. Some of us run at the aliens and some of us run for the doors and some of us just stand there and make faces at the aliens. Stick out our tongues. Pull our mouths wide with our fingers. Laugh at them. It may be a little childish, but it’s totally satisfying. Our power is awesome and it’s different. I’m not sure how, but it is different from their power.

The Hunter, with the sweep of his arm, destroys all of the fake Jesses and Catlins. But we get lucky, just as I knew we would; the sweep of the Hunter’s arm that kills the fake Jesses and Catlins also pops all the lightbulbs in the room, and the room goes dark. I’m ready for this, and somehow Catlin is, too, even though she hasn’t seen how it all plays out. In the moment it takes for the hunters to turn their attention back to us, Catlin and I create more illusions, and this time we cloak ourselves — our real selves, and Michael and Zack, too. Using the fireman’s carry, I lift Zack, and Catlin and I run for the door with Michael limping along behind us.

This is as far as I saw when I dreamwalked.

I don’t see how we can make it to the car from here.

We do have one small advantage, though: their physical limitations, the whole Big Bird way of moving, will allow us to put a little space between us and them once they figure out that the real “us” have left the building. They’re still able to kill from the other side of that space, but we’ll make it a little harder on them.

When I think this through, it doesn’t sound all that encouraging. “We’ll make it a little harder for them to kill us” still has a definite bad-ending ring to it.

Then I notice all those ships in nice, neat lines. The aliens are certainly very neat. Neat and polite. You have to give them that.

“The ships,” I say, steering Catlin toward them. Michael’s limp is more pronounced now, but he just grimaces and hustles as fast as he can.

The Hunter attacks as soon as he steps out the door. I’m still joined with Catlin, though, and we deflect the attack. I can feel his surprise. We try a countermove that sends out a wave against him and the other hunters. It does actually knock a few hunters back.
The
Hunter easily blocks it, though.

Because we’ve stopped to fight, Michael’s the first one to the ship, despite his limp.

“You never could run worth a damn,” Michael says as I scramble onboard with Zack and Catlin.

“I was a little busy,” I say, dumping Zack on the floor. “And I was carrying baggage.”

It’s crowded with four of us in the ship, but we make do. Catlin’s mind is interfacing with the ship, and she uses its power to shield us just as the Hunter and a few other hunters attack again. Even with the shield, the ship rocks back and forth like a boat in a storm. Catlin gets us off the ground.

I work on a shield to add to the ship’s shield, but I don’t get much of one up before the Hunter’s next attack hits us. My shield breaks and all the windows in the ship shatter and the ship spins out of control and into a tree. Miraculously, Catlin is able to get us out of the branches without tearing the ship apart.

“Can we join?” I shout at her over the sound of the wind whipping through the windows.

“I don’t think I can do that
and
fly this thing!” she shouts back. “Just do whatever you can!”

I create another shield on my own while she flies us low across the road and toward a hill. It’s not very strong. Not strong enough to block another hit from the Hunter.

But the hit never comes. We’ve moved out of the Hunter’s range. I hear him in my head, though. He says that a hunter loves the hunt and he’ll be with me shortly.

Take your time,
I mindspeak.

I glance down and see the hunters moving awkwardly toward their ships, but I know they won’t be awkward once they’re in them. I can hear them setting their controls. I can hear
him
loudest of all. He’s excited.

“I can’t fly this thing like they’ll be able to fly their ships,” Catlin says, hearing what I’m hearing. “I’m not that good yet.”

“I know.”

“What do you mean, you know?” she snaps. “You don’t know.”

“I just meant, you know, I know. I get it.”

“It would help if you had more confidence in me,” she says.

I’ve been drawn into these conversations before, so I should know better. I really should.

“But you said it first.”

“I know what I said. I was hoping you would contradict me. Show a little faith.”

“Uh,” Michael says, “think maybe you guys could have this conversation later? Not when we have, you know, some aliens coming to kill us?”

“Coming fast!” Catlin shouts, looking back. “If Darth Vader gets close, he’ll kill us this time. Our shield is pretty much destroyed.”

“Darth Vader?” I ask. But now that she’s said it, I can totally see it.

“Hey, Tex, this plan of yours for saving me . . .” Michael says. “I think the escape part needs a little work.”

“And I think —” but I don’t finish my thought because I feel the Hunter closing in on us. His ship is faster than the others — and definitely faster than our busted one.

“The river,” I say. “Go to the river. Go toward where we parked our ship.”

“Which way?” she says because she is seriously directionally challenged. She has one of those senses of direction that has no sense. I point, because she’s also left- and right-challenged. She makes a sharp turn that throws us up against the left side of the ship. Her hand slips out of the control, and we drop.
Fall
might be more accurate.

Above us some kind of beam passes right where we were. The death rays.

“Good move,” Michael says to Catlin.

Catlin gets her hand back in the control. She manages to get us leveled out just above some very solid-looking cedar trees.

The death rays change things. There’s no way we have time to land the ship in the park.

“Get the ship higher, and aim north toward Dallas,” I say, pointing north for her. “Set a course.”

“I thought you wanted to head toward the park.”

“Just do it.”

I see what I think is the park as we come around the bend in the river. We’ve only got a few seconds before the other ships come around the bend, too.

“You guys can swim, right?” I ask.

“Of course we can swim,” Catlin says testily. Michael doesn’t answer. He just stares down at the river far below. I turn around and pull Zack, who is still unconscious, toward me.

“Why?” Catlin asks suspiciously.

“When I open the door, I want you both to jump,” I say.

“Are you crazy?” Michael says. “I can’t even see the river.”

“That black inky stuff right below us? That’s water.”

“No way,” Michael says.

“We don’t have a choice!” I shout, wrestling Zack to the door. I fling it open. “Three, two, one . . . jump!”

Michael calls me several names. Rescued prisoners are definitely more grateful in movies. In a second we’re all falling and there’s no time for more names, no time for anything but fear and the intake of a breath.

I can feel the ship shoot up before we splash into the river. We hit the water hard but feetfirst, and the shock of the impact rouses Zack to semiconsciousness. We hit the bottom because the lake is so shallow, and I push off it back toward the surface. As we rise, Zack thrashes and pulls away from me. It occurs to me as we surface that we might have come up too soon. I half expect the alien ships to be hovering over us, the Hunter smiling in a satisfied way, but they aren’t and he isn’t. Catlin helps me with Zack, who is ineffectively splashing. Michael dog paddles alongside us, coughing and grunting.

The ships must have followed our ship because they’re out of sight.

“I can’t believe that worked,” I say.

Michael finally gets a word out. It is not a nice one, but the effect is weakened as he coughs up another mouthful of water.

“Maybe you can run,” I say to Michael, “but you aren’t much of a swimmer.”

“You noticed,” he says.

As soon as we get to shore, Catlin works on Zack. I can’t see what she does exactly. She moves in his mind. I can hear her, but his mind is a confused tangle to me. How she can find her way in there when she can’t even tell north from south is a mystery.

“But you’re from Florida,” I say, standing over Michael. “You should be a good swimmer.”

“Tallahassee, Tex. You ever heard of Tallahassee? What, you think all cities in Florida are on the coast?”

There’s my poor geography putting me at risk for ridicule again.

“You could have said you couldn’t swim instead of cursing me.”

“They were going to kill us. Might as well drown as be blown up.”

“Really?” I say. “I think being blown up would be way better. You’d go in an instant. Now, drowning, fighting for breath as water fills your lungs, that’s worse to me. Way worse.”