The Resisters (8 page)

“THIS WILL JUST TAKE A MINUTE, BLACKWOOD.”
Coach sat at his desk and laid out a photocopy of Ethan’s school file. He ran one hand over his silver buzz-cut hair and then leafed through the pages.

Ethan fidgeted in a metal folding chair.

The police had escorted him to Coach’s office. Every time Ethan had come here—for routine counseling or to talk soccer strategy or even if Coach was telling him he’d done a good job—Ethan had always felt awkward and small.

It was because of the Wall.

Coach’s office had a big window that looked out onto the practice field, a huge desk in the center, and a metal chair for a visitor.

When you sat in it, you had to face the wall behind his desk.

The Wall had shelves crammed with trophies from soccer matches, basketball tournaments, and track races, and gold-plated footballs. Because Coach was also guidance counselor for half the students at Northside Elementary, there were framed pictures of spelling bee finalists and scholarship recipients, too.

Hundreds of Northside champions and winners looked down at Ethan.

Ethan always felt like he was letting them down.

Today it felt worse—because for the first time in his life, he knew the truth. Those champion students hadn’t gone on to high school to study and make the world a better place, or become sports superstars or astronauts.

What did the Ch’zar do with them all?

Ethan turned and tried to smile at the two police officers guarding the door.

Their hands moved to their billy clubs.

Officer Grace, the older of the two, had a salt-and-pepper mustache. Officer Hendrix had freckles and red hair. The two had come to school once to give a lecture on fire safety. Ethan had never heard of anyone getting into enough trouble to be brought in for questioning by them … until today, that is.

He wanted to think everything Felix and Madison had told him was a lie. Or that this was all a bad dream.

Ethan was way beyond that now.

His gaze settled on Coach Norman. So how did he fit into all this?

He’d always been there for Ethan, not exactly a friend but someone who (Ethan had thought) had his well-being in mind … and had good advice for him.

Superior long-range strategy always wins over superior immediate tactics
.

What was Ethan’s long-range strategy? Surrender to aliens who’d take his mind? No way!

“Well, Blackwood,” Coach said, and looked at Ethan. “We still playing games? Or should we try the truth?”

Ethan gulped. He wasn’t sure what to say. As with his parents, Ethan wanted to believe that Coach couldn’t be part of the Ch’zar’s plans.

He whispered, “The truth, Coach.” Ethan mustered his courage and asked, “Were the soccer matches at least real?”

Coach Norman smiled. “They were real,” he said. “It’s an effective way to isolate potential leaders from the group. We keep a careful eye on leader types. They can be trouble.”

“Like me?”

“Very much like you.” Coach’s smile vanished. “I want you to tell me everything that happened last night. Start when you were abducted by the Resisters.”

Ethan’s cheeks flushed.

How did Coach know about them? Ch’zar Collective mind or not … no one had seen Ethan.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ethan said.

Coach took out photos from Ethan’s school record. He spread them on the desk.

Ethan picked one up. It was a grainy black-and-white picture. It showed Ethan and Emma outside their house right after the party last night.

The next picture was of Ethan alone, kicking a paper cup at the recycle bin. He looked angry … and it was obvious he’d missed the shot. How embarrassing.

In the next photo was the milk truck … and the one after that showed Felix and Madison getting out. Ethan noted Madison had jumped out before the truck stopped and sneaked through the shadows behind him—that was how she’d surprised him.

In the last picture, Felix shoved a blurred Ethan into the truck.

“We have more pictures of the milk truck driving through town,” Coach said. “Out on Avenue K. And then we lost it when it entered the national forest.”

Ethan’s mouth dropped open.

Who took all these pictures? Why would anyone watch
him
in the first place?

“Automatic cameras,” Coach explained. “We see everything. All the time. Even—”

He set down two more pictures.

One had Northside students on the dance floor. It was last week’s Sadie Hawkins dance … and in one corner stood Ethan, holding Mary Vincent’s hand.

He looked frightened. Well, he had been. He hadn’t realized how much he’d looked like a complete dork.

He picked up the last picture.

It was his dining room at home. This morning. Ethan stood there talking to his parents.

Ethan’s skin crawled. They were
always
watching.

Until this instant, he’d thought of Santa Blanca, his neighborhood, and most of all his home as safe places.

But that was backward.

He wasn’t safe here. Ethan and Emma and all the kids were prisoners, watched twenty-four hours a day.

He’d been an idiot! The only time he’d been really free was with Felix and Madison … and he’d blown it, panicked, and run from them.

Ethan felt something curl up inside him and die.

Now Coach and the others had him trapped.

Okay, that might be true, but Ethan wouldn’t help them. It was bad enough leaving Felix and Madison when they’d needed his help. Ethan wouldn’t
add
to his mistake.

“I’ve got nothing to tell you,” Ethan said.

“No?” Coach pulled open a drawer. He took out a finger-sized red crystal and set it on his chipped plastic desk. “Maybe we can convince you otherwise.”

He snapped shut the blinds on his window.

The crystal flickered with light, and a hologram of the Earth popped into view, hovering a foot in the air.

It was like no computer display in school, like no computer
anywhere
that Ethan had ever seen or heard about.

The globe spun around and the view zoomed in.

“Fifty-seven years ago,” Coach said, “the human race was doing its best to destroy itself in World War Four.”

Dots of lightning appeared in the clouds over the Earth, then cooled into red mushrooms of fire. Huge swaths of the Amazon rain forest smoldered. Lasers made a web around the globe and popped satellites.

“Just when it looked hopeless,” Coach whispered, “
they
came.”

THE HOLOGRAPHIC EARTH SHRANK AND
Ethan saw the moon. A planetoid one-eighth the size of the moon emerged from its shadow.

Only this planetoid was artificial, with spikes and warts, vast plains of hexagonal patterns like part of a giant insect eye, and swarms of smaller satellites that circled it.

Ethan felt awe at the size of this spaceship … and every instinct he had made him scoot as far back as he could in the metal chair.

“They stopped the war,” Coach told him. “Do you know how?”

“They conquered us?”

Coach laughed. “No. The only thing they did was let us speak to each other for the first time in history. Men and women, those from the east and the west, the north and
the south, all races, all colors, all religions—we finally
understood
one another.”

Coach Norman leaned in so close, his face glowed from the holographic moonlight. “In an instant, all the misunderstanding and hatred melted away. We became brothers and sisters.”

He waved his hands in frustration, trying to explain something that Ethan guessed couldn’t be explained but could only be experienced.

That had to be the Ch’zar Collective mind control.

Hadn’t Madison said it gave them all some sort of telepathy, too?

“
What
are they?” Ethan whispered, his curiosity temporarily winning out over how weird and scary this situation was. “The Ch’zar, I mean. Are they giant insects?”

Coach chuckled. “No human has seen them. They live in the mothership in orbit.” He tapped the side of his head. “Only if you join can you see them and understand what they are.”

So … Coach must no longer think he was human. That was creepy.

“But it’s not mental domination,” Coach said. “I bet that’s what the Resisters told you. Almost everyone on the planet
willingly
joined and worked together for the common good.”

“I’ve seen what ‘working together for the common good’ looks like,” Ethan said. “Building-sized robots strip-mining the planet!”

“You saw one of our most productive titanium fields. A necessary operation.”

On Coach’s desk appeared holographic forests and fields of wildflowers in full bloom.

“But the Collective has also restored the rain forests,” Coach told him, “neutralized radiation across the world, and made the Sahara Desert a lush grassland preserve.”

Ethan was confused now.

He knew what he’d seen on the mountaintop with Felix and Madison … but that didn’t mean this other side of the Ch’zar story couldn’t be true too.

“We’ve built things humanity could never have done alone,” Coach said. “Elevators that reach orbit altitude and spaceship probes that we’ve sent to explore the nearby stars.”

The holographic images morphed into the alien mothership. Also in orbit about the moon were three other, incomplete copies of that original ship.

“And soon we’ll all go to the stars,” Coach explained. “The Ch’zar Collective has fourteen other alien species who joined before they found us. We work together for the good of each other in harmony—for peaceful purposes.”

“So you’re all about peace?” Ethan asked, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Then why were you trying to
kill us
on top of that mountain?”

Coach waved his hands as if to brush Ethan’s argument aside. “Even though the Resisters have caused untold damage and threaten everything we’ve built … we’re just
trying to capture them. All life is precious to us. Even our enemies’ lives.”

“You were shooting stingers at us the size of my arm!” Ethan protested.

“Oh, I’ll admit they look scary. But if they’d hit you, they would have pumped you full of a tranquilizer and put you to sleep. That’s it.”

It was true that the Ch’zar had only started firing lasers at them once they were in the fighting suits. Could they have just been trying to capture them?

“What about the robots that tore the mountain apart to get us? One of them almost smashed me flat.”

Coach snorted. “A direct hit inside one of those fighting suits would have barely knocked you down.”

Ethan recalled how easily he’d caught the fist of one of those monster robots—and how easily he’d tossed it aside.

“I know you’re confused, son,” Coach said. He stood and came around to Ethan’s side of the desk. “But we’re the good guys here. You’ve got to tell us … where did you hide the fighting suit?”

The good guys? Ethan almost laughed.

He was a long, long way from trusting anything Coach said … and yet pieces of his story seemed to fit.

Could
some
of it be the truth?

One thing
didn’t
make sense, though.

“I thought you guys had cameras everywhere,” Ethan said. “Didn’t you
see
the wasp suit?” He made a fumbling
gesture at the closed window and the soccer field beyond. “And my crash landing?”

“We tracked your trajectory into the valley,” Coach said, and sat on his desk, distorting the hologram. “But getting an
exact
position with radar was impossible because the suit has an active stealth technology we don’t yet understand.”

How could Madison and Felix have technology
more
advanced than the Ch’zar? There was an important piece of the human-Ch’zar story still missing.

“Then your ‘wasp,’ as you call it,” Coach continued, “dropped low into Santa Blanca, and its antielectronic systems jammed every camera within a mile of the school.”

“That must have been inconvenient,” Ethan said.

His sarcasm was a shock. Ethan had been raised never to talk back to adults. This once, though, it kind of felt good.

Coach’s rugged face froze for a split second, and then he frowned.

Then it sank in what Coach had just told him … and what it meant.

They
didn’t
have the fighting suit.

If Ethan could somehow get to it, he could fly out of here—to where, he wasn’t sure, but it would give him time to think and come up with a plan.

“What’s so important about that suit?” Ethan asked. “They said they stole it from
you
—maybe they added a
few things—that antielectronic whatsit. But the mighty Ch’zar Collective, fourteen alien races all working peacefully together for the common good … you guys have to have better technology than two kids. Don’t you?”

More sarcasm. And this time Ethan was certain it felt good.

Coach’s jaw set, and he ground his teeth. He leaned closer, his face an inch from Ethan’s, and whispered, “Just tell us where the suit is, son.” He leaned back and exhaled. “Do the right thing. Help us bring these criminals to justice.”