WALKER TELLS ME TO LAY LOW AND THAT IF SHE sees me again, she’ll personally make sure that I’m shipped back to Paradise. Luckily, whatever she and the agents loyal to her are about to do must be more important than keeping tabs on me. Before I can try to pry any info about what’s happening out of Walker, two agents are shoving me through the half-ruined top level of the facility. I want to ask them a million questions about what’s going on and where they’re going, but the fact that I’m being released at all has stunned me into silence, as if one question might send me straight into another interrogation room.
The agents are just black specks in my rearview mirror silhouetted against the rising sun by the time I finally breathe. And then I’m screaming and shaking my steering wheel and trying to calm down about the fact that I, in all seriousness, could be being tortured in a secret prison instead of driving away. I pull GUARD’s messenger bag out from under the backseat, happy to see that Walker’s agents either didn’t care if I still had Purdy’s computer or simply didn’t have time to look through my stuff. I’m so relieved that I got out of there that I’m a good fifteen miles away by the time I start to realize what all this means. Sarah’s been rescued by John, but that doesn’t really mean she’s safe, since her boyfriend is a walking target. What are the Garde doing now? There are still a bunch of evil aliens gunning for them, not to mention the idiotic humans who’ve decided to work with the bad guys.
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
I turn to the one person who might have a clue. I text GUARD.
Me: Dulce’s a bust. FBI is abandoning it. Sarah’s gone. I think John and others got her out.
He gets back to me almost immediately.
GUARD: You got in and out and no one saw you? I’m impressed.
Me: Nah. Ran in2 agent Walker from Paradise. She let me go. I think she’s turned against the Mogs.
GUARD: That could be helpful. Where are you going now?
Me: No damn clue. Can’t go home. Bad FBI are still looking for me.
This whole time I’ve been so focused on trying to get Sarah out that I only really saw two possible outcomes: me getting locked up with her, or me rescuing her, then going on an anti-Mog campaign to help save the world. Now that she’s gone, my only real option is to try to find her. Again. I promised John when all this started that I’d keep her safe, but I’m doing this for me, not him. I want to make sure she’s okay. Plus, if she’s with the Garde, she’s the best link I have to everything that’s going on. Whatever she knows can be used on They Walk Among Us to help warn everyone about what’s happening with the Mogs and Garde. Hell, maybe I could even show photos or videos of John and his other alien friends doing crazy shit to convince people that these damned aliens I keep posting about are real.
But first I have to find Sarah.
And I don’t even know where to begin. She could be anywhere, and I have nothing to go off of.
My new phone chirps.
GUARD: If you’re still serious about fighting the Mogs, head towards Alabama. I can set up a base for you to work out of. You may have an easier time finding Sarah and John if you’re not on the road so much spending half your time driving.
GUARD: Just take the long way there and stay out of sight for a few days so I have some time to work everything out.
And there he is again: a Hail Mary pass keeping me from feeling like a completely useless human being. Giving me my next task.
I text him back.
Me: Thx man.
I stare back at the text, having one of those weird moments of clarity when I realize that I’m traveling across the country at the suggestion of some dude I’ve never met in order to help stop an alien invasion. I fire off another message.
Me: Will I meet u in Alabama?
It’s a few minutes before I get a response this time.
GUARD: I’m not certain. I have some personal business to take care of. In the meantime, you might look into switching cars if you can. The FBI will have all your info.
Sure, I’ll just drive up to the next dealership I see and buy a new one. Because that’s exactly how the world works.
I shake my head.
I drive until I find a big-looking road that goes east and take it. After a while, I’m heading more south than anything, but I don’t mind—I just want to get away before Walker decides that I really would be safer under her protection and sends some black-clad henchmen out to get me. Plus, it sounds like GUARD needs some time to get our new base or whatever set up.
After a few hours of driving, I start to feel really strange and kind of like I’m dreaming, even though I’m making it a point to keep my eyes open as wide as possible to stay awake. I finally accept the fact that I’ve got to get off the road and start to weigh the pros and cons of sleeping on the side of the highway when I see a sign that tells me I’m only twenty miles outside of Santa Fe, which, honestly, I thought was in Nevada or Arizona and not New Mexico. Geography was never one of those subjects I took much interest in. On the upside, Santa Fe’s a city I’ve actually heard of, which means that it’s got to be pretty big.
Or at least, big enough for me to stay anonymous and find a place to sleep.
Before I hit the city line, I see the sign for thirty-nine-dollar rooms and pull into a place called Desert Oasis, which is a single story of motel rooms that look like they’ve seen better days. It’s a sort of pinkish-brown stucco building with crumbling corners and long rows of flower beds outside the rooms that are filled with sticks and brown bushes that look like they’d disintegrate if I touched them.
Considering I’m a person of interest to the FBI, it seems like the perfect place to hunker down for some z’s.
The inside office is just a little waiting room with some ripped green vinyl chairs. There’s a guy with a big, brown mustache, a bad comb-over and inch-thick glasses reading a torn-up paperback at the counter.
“I’d, uh, like a room,” I say.
“Sure,” the guy responds, hardly glancing up from his book. “Name?”
“Um,” I say, because I’m feeling a little out of my mind and apparently want to make it completely obvious that I’m trying to be incognito. I think of the name the courier called me—my other identity. “Roger.”
The guy looks at me a second and then shakes his head, motioning to the book on the table in front of him. “I mean, you need to sign in there,” he says. “I’ll also need a credit card on file for incidentals and an ID to go with it.”
“What if I don’t have one?” I try to say casually as I sign in with the name “Jolly Roger,” writing in cursive like I don’t normally do.
He shrugs, finally putting his book down. “Then you’d better have some other kind of collateral.”
I thumb through my wallet, keeping it below the counter so the front-desk guy can’t see it. Then I pull out a hundred and fifty dollars—over a hundred dollars more than what the room costs. I slide the bills over the counter. The guy looks back and forth between me and the cash. Then, finally, he tosses me a key.
“Room number four,” he says.
Of course.
“Thanks,” I mutter.
On my way out, he calls after me, “If you make too much noise, I’ll call the police. Damn kids come out here to drink and always end up—”
But I slam the door behind me, and I don’t hear the end of what he has to say. Besides, I’m not going to make any noise, and even if I did, I have serious doubts that the guy actually would call the police. More likely, he’d just demand another hundred bucks from me.
The room is just a bed, table and a square-tube TV with fake wood on the sides like the one Nana kept in my grandfather’s office. The place is dingy, and the faded brown bedspread is scratchy, but I’m just happy to not be sitting in my truck, or a detention cell. I’m exhausted but am still wound up by everything that’s happened in the last few hours, so after making sure the curtains are completely covering the windows and the door is bolted and chained, I fire up GUARD’s untraceable netbook. It’s fancier than any computer I’ve ever seen. There’s even a little fingerprint scanner on it. I follow instructions that pop up when the system is fully booted and set the computer to respond only to my thumbprint, then I log into my personal email account. I’m looking for something from Sarah, telling me she’s safe. That she got out and wants to make contact again because she knows I know what’s happening and that I’d be worried about her.
But there’s nothing from her. There are some spam emails, a few chains of messages from my old teammates and friends in Paradise and half a dozen from my family, all of which get filled with more and more capital letters and question marks the longer I’ve been away. I shake my head and sigh. I knew I’d be making them worry when I left Paradise in the middle of the night, but I was hoping I might be back sometime soon. Or at least that I’d be able to let them know that I was with Sarah and that we were both safe—maybe even make up a story about how we’d run away together.
But now, I don’t know what to tell them. All my earlier hopes seem stupid, like they never could have really worked out. How do I try to explain to people back in my hometown that I’m half a country away trying to track down my ex-girlfriend and a bunch of people from another planet? I start to reply to a message from my dad to tell him about the Mogs and how he needs to watch his back and probably just leave Paradise completely. But I know that if I tell him evil aliens and corrupt government officials are snooping around his town—taking up residence in his office even—he’ll look into it. He’ll start poking around and trying to play hero. And that’s dangerous. I don’t want him to get involved. And if the Mogs or FBI are intercepting my emails or something like that, one mention of them to Dad and they’ll be all over him.
I don’t want him to end up getting hurt because of something stupid I’ve done.
And so I send back a reply that’s not exactly a lie but not really the whole truth.
Dad,
Chasing after Sarah to try to bring her back to Paradise where she belongs. Lost my phone. Sorry if I scared you guys. Be home soon. Don’t worry, I’m okay.
Mark
It’s not much, but it’ll have to do. I send it off and open up a new email, one I address to Sarah. And then I just start typing. Everything that’s happened. Everything I’m worried about. In the end, after a thousand words, I tell her that if she gets this, to write back. Please.
I send that email off too, unsure if it will ever make it to her. Scared that there’s no Sarah for it to go to at all anymore. And that in the end, I’m going to be alone trying to warn people about the shark-faced aliens that might show up and destroy their lives. That I’ll just be some crazy guy who no one believes.
I know that if I just sit around waiting for a response, I’ll go insane. I need to keep my mind occupied. And so I open up the JOLLYROGER182 email account that’s connected to They Walk Among Us. This is something I can focus on. Something to occupy my time and energy when I’m not driving or trying to figure out how to contact Sarah. Plus, if I can help get the word out about the Loric and Mogs, in a way I might actually be helping. Making a difference.
There are about two hundred unread messages, tips and comments in my in-box. I make it through about fifteen—mostly crackpot tips but one about a weird-looking community in a super-rich suburb in Maryland I want to follow up on—before I pass out on the bed.
I sleep for the rest of the day and night, completely crashed. I wake up a little before noon, take a much-needed shower and then spend an hour or two trying to make sense of the electronics GUARD sent me. I plug the jump drive into Purdy’s computer and hit the power button. The computer actually starts to make noise for the first time since it died in the diner, and my pulse starts to race.
Yes, GUARD, you genius mother—
But the only thing that appears on the computer is a command screen full of what looks like a foreign language mixed with big lists of numbers. I’m scared that poking around too much will end up causing the thing to crash again, so I follow GUARD’s instructions carefully, running a series of tests or something on the machine using the jump drive. But nothing happens, just gibberish that I can’t figure out.
In the meantime, I go back to the netbook and type up the blog post I’ve been thinking about since I saw the Mog in my dad’s office and discovered that the FBI were working with the wrong aliens. I don’t have any hard proof—just a story—but I can lay out for TWAU readers all the stuff that I know is true.
The second after I post the blog, there’s a knock on the door. I jump to my feet, searching for the weird grenade GUARD sent along, when I hear a voice from outside.
“Hey, Roger,” the motel guy says. “Checkout’s in ten minutes. Unless you want to spend another night—same fee.”
I gather my shit and hit the road.