13
“Story of my life,” Leo said from behind the counter of the IHOP, where he was brewing some industrial-strength coffee. “The more fucked-up my night, the more likely it is that I wind up here at some ungodly hour. Only usually, I don’t have to make my own coffee.”
They’d come here to eat, finally, and to strategize. Teena, Evan, and Sarabeth sat at a booth just outside the kitchen, not speaking but not angry anymore, either. Everyone was quiet but okay. Humbled was probably the right word for it. Leo had to hand it to Teena. It took her outburst—and okay, that thing where they were all almost fried to death—to get them to acknowledge the necessity of functioning as a team. Sarabeth’s speech helped, too. He grinned. He knew she had it in her. It was always the quiet ones.
“Janie’s got some whiskey that’ll go good with that brew,” called Abe, emerging from the men’s room at the back of the restaurant. Leo chuckled as he jogged past. He was comically fast for an old guy. With a merry wave, like some kind of demented Santa Claus, he disappeared outside.
Sarabeth looked up from the table and smiled at Leo. Something had happened between them on top of High Point. It was like, after years of occupying adjacent cello chairs and sharing the same sheet music, they were finally in tune.
“Want help?” Evan asked, getting up from the table and coming around the counter. “I could use some toast. Maybe some eggs. I’ll make them for everyone.”
“Good idea, Brighton,” Leo said, trying to help him along. “I saw a shitload of eggs in that giant fridge.” He pointed to the walk-in next to the prep counter.
At the table, Sarabeth, with a serious expression, was inspecting the purple alien jizz she’d gathered at her house, while Teena flipped idly through a Gussy Me Up catalog, still holding her gun. They’d told her to put the gun away, but she claimed it was like a security blanket and promised not to shoot any more aliens in the throat. Chicks are weird, Leo thought. Teena was Miss Killer Instinct unless she broke a nail, and Sarabeth could probably run the world but didn’t want to speak up.
But then again, maybe dudes were weird, too. Here, Evan had pummeled, like, a hundred of those greenies but lost all testicle strength when it came to talking to Teena, while he, Leo, had bagged Teena easily (emphasis on easy) but had barely bruised one of the aliens.
Evan got to work cracking eggs onto the griddle just as the big, commercial-grade coffee brewer sputtered to life. The smells of breakfast filled the air, and Leo stood back and admired their little group. They were going to be okay. Well, okay with each other, anyway.
“Do you think Abe should be back by now?” Evan asked Leo as he flipped an egg off the griddle and onto a blue-and-white plate.
“I wouldn’t worry about him. That guy will still be around when these fuckers kill us all. He’s got the ultimate plan. Stay in the Winnebago.”
“It’s not a Winnebago, remember? And anyway, I think he likes riding with us better.” Teena smiled, thumbed down the corner of a page featuring glittery red nail polish, and inhaled. “The coffee smells so good.”
She was right. It did. IHOP coffee was lucky to smell like hot, dirty water. And this coffee smelled really good. Great, in fact. Like a Kona blend or a French roast or something.
“Brighton, let’s go!” Leo shouted, and jumped over the counter, grabbing both Teena and Sarabeth by the wrists. “They’re here. They’re here.”
“I don’t see anything!” Sarabeth screamed, reaching for the container of alien goo as Leo yanked her out of the booth. Evan had traded his spatula for a bat and was right behind him.
“Dead giveaway. The coffee smells too good,” he said in a panic. They all ran past the hostess counter, knocking it to the ground. Pastel after-dinner mints rolled in a rainbow across the floor, stopping at the slimy purple feet of two aliens pushing through the narrow door, trailing slime on the glass.
“The back, go out the back,” Teena directed, barely paying attention as she unloaded a firestorm into the aliens before anyone could stop her. Bullets hit the aliens’ throats with a squishy “splurt.”
“You said you wouldn’t shoot!” Evan shouted, pulling Teena’s gun arm back as the purple aliens vomited onto the floor and the green liquid instantly sprang to vicious greenie life. A gaggle of snapping, buzzing, teeth-baring greenies was on them, swarming the restaurant and forcing them into the back of the building.
“I forgot!”
“Put the gun away,” Leo said.
“It works on greenies!” Teena said, proving it by bringing down a half dozen with just a few shots. She tossed Sarabeth the semi-automatic from the waistband of her jeans.
So it goes, Leo thought as he charged back into the kitchen, egging the little monsters on. “Come on, you want a piece of me?” he yelled. The little beasts took the bait and surged toward him. He yanked a mop out of the corner, swirled it in cooking grease, and lit it on fire with his purple Bic. Insta-torch. He shouted to the group, “Get down!” and they dove beneath booths just as he swung his flaming mop at the greenies, igniting at least twenty of them at once. Some screeched and fell to the floor. Others continued the charge.
Evan stepped in behind Leo, swatting greenies away with his bat, smashing them to putrefying bits. Teena and Sarabeth fired when they had clear shots, bringing some more down. Some of the burning greenies flew about clumsily, setting fire to the walls and the tables. The fatter, slower ones swarmed beneath the lamps over the tables like giant, evil moths.
Leo ran ahead and kicked open the back door to the alley. “Go, go, go,” he said. Teena and Evan skittered out, ducking their heads to avoid the onslaught. Sarabeth stopped right in front of him, her eyes as wide as IHOP’s oversize breakfast-platter plates. She held up her lady gun and pointed it right at Leo. What the fuck? She’d been smiling at him, and now she was going to kill him? Did these things have mind-control powers, too? She fired. The bullet whizzed so close to his head he could hear it. With a horrible high-pitched squeal, one of the greenies fell to Leo’s feet like some kind of amphibious bird. Sarabeth took his shaking hands in hers and pressed the van keys into it.
“You drive,” she said, looking deep into his eyes. He’d never felt more like a man; she was putting her life into his unsteady hands.
They raced to the van, where Evan and Teena were still fending off a seemingly never-ending supply of greenies, which clung to the van like barnacles on an ancient ship. Leo dove in and started the engine as the girls leaped into the backseat and Evan took the front passenger seat.
“What about Abe?” Sarabeth yelled in the commotion.
“He said he would be in the trailer,” Evan said.
Out of the corner of his eye, Leo saw a buzzing cluster of greenies at the edge of the IHOP parking lot. Leo’s intestines unfurled in his stomach as he realized that beneath the greenies was Abe’s reedy shape. The greenies had their teeth and claws in him, and through the mess, Leo could just make out blood dripping onto his yellowish beard. It was too late to help him. “So much for our end-of-the-world party, old man,” Leo said sadly.
“Should we leave the trailer? Lose the weight?” Teena asked. Leo could swear he saw tears in her eyes.
“No,” Leo said. “Janie stays. I’m not going to let the aliens get her.”
“You’re right,” Teena agreed, without an ounce of sarcasm.
“We’re sorry, Abe,” Evan added, sounding as dejected as Leo felt. “But we have to go.” He pointed to the greenies, which were detaching from Abe’s carcass and starting to speed toward the van.
Leo floored the gas pedal. “We need a base. We’ll use the mall until we figure out how to take them out. These fuckers are going down.”
The van didn’t handle like Leo’s usual piece of shit. It was like driving a much larger, more cumbersome piece of shit, only this time he was driving it while towing a silver motor home while under attack by vicious outer-space birds. The greenies kept launching themselves at the van, only, unlike smaller pests, most of them didn’t smash and die when they made impact with the windshield.
“I can’t see!” he yelled. Evan was already doing his best. He’d rolled down his window and was half out of the van, swatting every greenie he could. In the back, Teena and Sarabeth fastened their seat belts, swung open the doors and began firing, annihilating greenie after greenie, even though the little jerks just kept on coming. At least guns worked on greenies, though their existence could have been prevented if guns had never entered the picture.
A greenie flew up behind the driver’s-side mirror, and, keeping just his right hand on the steering wheel, Leo grabbed a handful of Gussy Me Up flyers that were stored in the door pocket. Flicking his lighter with the hand on the wheel, he held the papers to the flame, then rolled down his window and held out his newest torch. Two goblins flew right into the trap, exploding slime all over Leo’s hand. A third came at him, teeth bared, and nicked his arm before it caught fire and flew away, burning, into a billboard for the new Martin Scorsese movie. In the mirror, a barrage of greenies kept laying siege. Sarabeth, Teena, and Evan were doing their best, but the troops needed a break.
Leo struggled to keep the van on LaGrange, heading toward the mall. There were tons of places to hide there, to find supplies, and to get some food and rest. He just wished they knew how to kill the purple guys without starting a greenie explosion.
His torch died out at the same time he heard a hissing pop. Looking like it was wearing a shit-eating grin, a greenie flew away from the van’s now-busted front tire. Sparks flew from the dull rim as it ground against the asphalt. They were still two miles from the mall, and Leo strained to see through the windshield. It was a Jackson Pollock painting of greenie guts. He turned on the wipers. They almost bent backward against the layer of gunk. After what felt like a million tries, they finally pushed through, trailing green slime.
When his view was somewhat clear, he discovered he couldn’t go any farther. What he saw was:
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A row of aliens stood in a line like toy soldiers from another awful dimension. Together, they formed a nearly airtight perimeter along Fordham Avenue and as far as the eye could see. They must have been protecting their spaceship, which Leo had figured was a possibility. He hadn’t thought they’d also be blocking his way to the mall. But now the four of them were stuck. If he drove through the perimeter, the aliens would be on them in seconds. If they stopped, the remaining greenies would overtake them.
The only good thing was that it didn’t appear the aliens had spotted them yet. “Roll up your windows and get down, everyone,” he ordered.
“But there are still greenies out there,” Evan protested.
“We killed enough,” Leo said. “Look up ahead.”
Evan, Sarabeth, and Teena drew inside, pulling their doors shut instantly when they saw what Leo had seen.
“Oh, crap,” Evan said.
Leo slammed on the brakes, skidded out into a U-turn and rumbled the van up onto the wide sidewalk in front of Pearl Promenade, an upscale medical building where old ladies got their Botox. He swung down the valet-parking ramp and, seeing that they were free from any greenie tails, stopped the van with a screech.
“No offense, anyone, but we’re all gonna die,” Leo said. His teeth were chattering in his head, but the rest of his body had gone all loose and drippy, like a bad batch of pizza dough at Phil’s. A look at Evan sitting next to him and at the girls in the rearview revealed instantly that they were as shell-shocked as he was. This wasn’t do or die. It was do and still die.
He leaned back in the seat and let his eyes drift to a display next to the car-park booth. A female mannequin in a short black trench coat dangled a silver key ring from one finger, like someone excited for a jaunt out of town. He closed his eyes for a solid minute and could see them driving. Well, really, he could see himself driving with Sarabeth in the passenger seat. Teena and Evan were there, but just blurry faces in the backseat. They were headed west, toward the ocean. It reminded him of his mom’s breathless message on the answering machine just after she moved out. “Leo, I’m driving west. I’m going to meet the ocean.” How she decided Reno was close enough was beyond his comprehension.
“We could just leave town,” he said hopefully, more to Sarabeth than the others. She didn’t notice, her head already bent over the slime sample again. “We can’t go up against the Purple Perimeter, can we?”
Next to him, Evan looked out the window, his face as taut as a guard’s at Buckingham Palace. Teena’s steely eyes scanned the empty parking garage.
“Why would we leave, when there’s still a chance we could stop them?” Sarabeth asked, still intensely examining the goo, which slid around the Tupperware like a mutant slug. “If I could just figure out their membrane, maybe it would give us a clue how we could destroy them.”
Leo was scum. A turd sandwich. A soy-and-bean, vegan turd sandwich. He wanted to run, while Sarabeth, Teena, and Evan wanted to fight. He’d survived an alien attack with the most battle-ready teens in Tinley Hills. So why did his own fight-or-flight response meter waver somewhere halfway between “kick ass” and “get the fuck out”? It was one thing blowing up greenies. That was almost fun. But a wall of those indestructible aliens? Come on. Anyone with half a brain knew the four of them didn’t stand a chance. And yet, he knew that his vanmates had better-than-half-brains among them, and they kept gearing up for challenge after challenge. Yup, he was a turd sandwich.