Titan Base (10 page)

Everyone in Santa Blanca had to have seen it.

There was no way the adults could’ve covered it up.

That’s why everything was different—the normal, happy township had to have more rules, more authority … because
how would you even start to explain to the kids here how giant bugs had torn apart their school?

Every kid would have to be kept under tight control until they were part of the Ch’zar hive mind.

Ethan felt like throwing up.
He’d
caused this trouble.

“Good,” Emma said, climbing up front. “At least they’ve seen the truth, right? Look over there.”

She pointed to five kids at the mouth of an alley. There were no adults on the corner, and the kids were spray-painting a frowning face over a poster that read:

“
Not
so good,” Madison muttered, and looked to her right.

She slowed the truck and nodded to the end of Main Street and then down intersecting Pine Street. From either side, four adults in Neighborhood Watch jackets moved at a fast walk toward the kids, who hadn’t spotted them.

Ethan hesitated, uncertain what to do.

He had his own life-or-death mission to carry out. He couldn’t get involved in this mess, too.

But wasn’t it his fault all this was happening?

He weighed what was more important—getting Angel
the antiradiation medicine, getting back to the Seed Bank, or saving these kids here and now.

Ethan swallowed, but his throat stayed dry.

He decided.

He’d let Colonel Winter make the big strategic calls. Ethan couldn’t let these kids get caught.

“Step on it,” he ordered Madison. “Get to them before those adults can catch them.”

Madison’s lips formed a grim flat line. She stomped on the gas pedal; the back wheels spun, then grabbed, and the milk truck shot forward.

   
10
   
GRIZZLIES REUNION

THE MILK TRUCK SLID SIDEWAYS TO A HALT, ALMOST
crashing
into
the group of kids.

They stood there, dumbfounded, staring into the headlights like idiots.

Ethan couldn’t believe it. They had plenty of room to jump out of the way. They could have run down the alley or kicked open the side door to the library and escaped.

What was wrong with them?

What was wrong was that they weren’t Resisters. Weren’t used to combat conditions. In other words, they were normal.

The problem with being “normal” was that in the real
world, it could get you killed. Or, at the very least, doom you to becoming part of a mind-controlled slave race.

The kids weren’t
completely
clueless, though.

Bandannas covered their faces. They had on gloves, too, so paint wouldn’t get on their fingers.

They were sneaky, at least. That was something.

Emma opened the truck’s side door and motioned for the five to climb inside. “Hurry up,” she said. “Those adults will be here any second.”

That
got their attention. They looked up and down the street and saw the Neighborhood Watch running toward them. The five kids stumbled and pushed their way into the truck.

Madison didn’t wait for the door to shut. She slammed the accelerator and the truck screamed down the road—straight at the group of adults.

They dove into the gutter.

“Madison!” Ethan cried.

“No worries, Lieutenant,” she told him, and her crooked smile appeared. “They moved.”

Ethan turned to reassure the kids they’d rescued. His mouth dropped open, though, because—bandannas over their faces or not—Ethan recognized the Grizzlies-team letterman jacket and the curly black hair of his soccer teammate, Bobby Buckman.

Bobby’s eyes widened as he took in Ethan’s features. Ethan had dropped a few pounds and was leaner and meaner than he’d ever been at Santa Blanca.

“Ethan?” Bobby pulled off his bandanna. He turned to the other kids. “It’s him,” he whispered. “The one they said died in the Geo Transit Tunnel disaster.” He turned back to Ethan. “But you didn’t.… You got away, didn’t you?”

Madison burned rubber around the corner. She pulled under the awning of the Spitfire Hamburger drive-through. “Talk later,” she said. “We’ve got to ditch this truck and find another vehicle. Their cameras are everywhere and spotted us for sure.”

“Cameras?” Bobby asked. “What cameras?”

Ethan frowned. He’d totally forgotten about the cameras the Ch’zar had hidden all over Santa Blanca. When Coach Norman had tried to interrogate Ethan, he’d shown Ethan pictures taken of him on the streets—even inside his house.

“Is there a place we can hide?” Ethan asked Bobby.

Bobby frowned and looked back and forth among his co-conspirators. They all nodded.

“Okay,” Bobby whispered to Ethan. “I’ll take a chance and trust you.” There was a threatening edge to his words.

It was a strange thing, because Bobby Buckman had trusted Ethan his entire life. But Ethan could also understand how everything was different now. How when your whole world started tilting sideways … you didn’t know what or who to trust … even yourself.

They clambered out of the milk truck.

“This way,” Bobby said, and he sprinted into the shadows.

They hopped over a fence and cut through a backyard, darting into the apple orchard in Evergreen Park. Moonlight made long, eerie shadows as the kids wordlessly slinked under the swaying branches.

Ethan hesitated.

Just two blocks away was his old house. Was someone else living there now? It hurt to think about that.

Emma caught up to him and set her hand on his back. “Don’t,” she whispered, so softly he barely heard her. There was pain in her voice, so he knew she was feeling the same thing he was: they missed their parents.

He moved on.

Bobby ducked into a backyard. Weeds had overgrown a tomato garden, and the house was completely dark.

“This one is empty,” Bobby whispered back at Ethan. “We’ve been using it for our secret meetings.”

An empty house? Santa Blanca didn’t have empty houses. There was one house for every large, happy family.

Ethan wanted to ask Bobby a million questions, but before he could, Bobby and the others slipped through an open window. They skulked into the basement, and Bobby snapped on the lights.

Ethan saw that the tiny basement windows had been painted black so no one could see inside.

The other kids pulled the bandannas off their faces. Ethan knew them all from his soccer team: George, Sara, Leo, and James.

He hardly recognized them. They looked older. They looked like they’d been through a lot.

Madison crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh boy, are we going to go through this whole ‘I don’t believe the world’s been invaded’ thing, Blackwood? We’re racing the clock.”

Ethan was going to tell her to have a little sympathy for these guys, but she was right. Every minute they spent here was a minute stolen from Angel and the rest of the team, who were depending on them.

“You don’t have to spell everything out for us.” Bobby suddenly looked sick and pale. “We pieced together a few things. Our parents are … well, something is wrong with them. And those bugs …”

Ethan sat on a pile of newspapers. The other kids settled around him—except Madison, who checked that the windows were locked.

“This is going to sound nuts,” Ethan said, “even if you have a few of the pieces already.”

Ethan started with how the entire world, this place, the history they’d been taught in school—it was all a lie.

They nodded.

Ethan told them about World War IV and how humanity almost killed itself—how the Ch’zar invaded and won by mind-controlling every adult on the planet.

He cast a split-second meaningful glance at Emma and Madison as he purposely left out how Dr. Irving and a few other adults escaped by being far underground in the Seed Bank.

There were secrets … and then there were
secrets
.

“Mind-controlled adults,” Bobby said, fidgeting. “You mean our parents, too?”

“Yeah,” Ethan said.

The kids considered that a moment. Ethan could almost see them connect their parents’ weird behavior, the way all the adults seemed to act as one at times, and the new rules.

“Does that mean they don’t love us?” Leo asked.

Madison glanced at her wristwatch and made a hurry-up signal at Ethan.

Madison had parents and grandparents—all Resisters in control of their own minds. Sure, her life was no party, but at least she never had to deal with not knowing if she’d been loved or lied to all her life.

Thankfully, Emma took over the awkward moment. “We don’t know,” she told him. “Maybe the Ch’zar have feelings for us. It’s probably not like we think of normal emotions, though.”

This was harder than Ethan had thought it would be. All the feelings he had for his parents, feelings he thought he’d gotten a handle on, started to well up.

Did his parents still love him?

Tears blurred his eyes. He blinked them quickly away.

They had to. They had to be different like he and Emma were different. There was no way they were part of the Ch’zar Collective.

He clung to that belief.

But as for the other kids … there was far less hope for their parents.

It would be the hardest truth they would ever have to accept.

Ethan went on, talking about the Ch’zar—how they
used Santa Blanca to raise kids until they hit puberty, then sent them off to high school where they joined the collective mind, how the aliens were stripping the natural resources of the planet to build ships to seed the galaxy, and how they’d mutated insects into giant biomechanical fighting and flying machines called I.C.E. suits.

A long silence followed Ethan’s short history.

“It makes sense,” George said. The pain was thick in his voice.

“We’ve seen a few of them,” Bobby added, “flying over at night. Locusts, I think, but as big as trucks. It started after the school burned down. A lot of kids got sick and were shipped off to Haven Heart for treatment. None of them have come back.”

He sounded scared. Ethan didn’t blame him.

Emma and Ethan shared a glance, knowing that those kids wouldn’t ever be coming back. It was how the Ch’zar were controlling the situation. It was the reason this house was empty.

“A few of us on the team got together to share what we knew,” Bobby continued. “All of our parents started acting supernice … but then all these new rules came down, and more people started disappearing. We knew something was rotten, just not … this.”

“We can help,” Ethan said consolingly.

Madison rolled her eyes.

He knew she was right, that taking on more problems was crazy, but Ethan felt an obligation to his former teammates.

“But first we need help,” Ethan said. “We have a sick friend and need to break into the hospital to get the right medicine.”

Bobby considered, then brightened and turned toward Sara. “Your mom’s a doctor, isn’t she? What do you know about the hospital?”

Ethan exhaled. Bobby was a true buddy. He wasn’t asking who or why; he just wanted to help.

For a moment, Ethan felt like he was back on the soccer field, his old team around him, huddled together, coming up with a crazy plan to win the game.

He could almost believe they’d all get out of this in one piece.

“If you want to sneak into the hospital,” Sara explained, “the best way is the laundry service. Those guys make deliveries to every floor, and they’re always wearing surgical masks to avoid infection.”

Madison smiled so broadly her pointed face dimpled. “Perfect,” she said. “Blackwood, these guys are okay.”

Floodlights snapped on outside. They were so bright that streams of illumination shot through spots on the
window the black paint hadn’t entirely covered. Light streamed through the floorboards overhead, too.

A voice boomed over a loudspeaker:

“Kids, we know you’re in there. Come out or we’ll be forced to come and get you!”

Ethan’s blood ran cold, pure liquid nitrogen freezing cold … because that voice was Coach Norman’s.

   
11
   
TEAM MUTINY