38
Now this was the end-of-the-world scenario Leo had had in mind.
He was running down the corridor of an alien ship he’d invaded that hopefully was about to explode. But the best part, the absolute best, was that he was running while holding the hand of the girl he liked. A lot. Okay, maybe loved.
Wow, if he was thinking love, it really must have been the end of the world.
They sprinted, and behind them, they could hear footfalls. Big footfalls. Leo looked over his shoulder to see at least ten more purple aliens bearing down on them.
Sarabeth pulled the semi-automatic she’d used on the greenies at IHOP from her waistband and took aim. Had she had that thing while they’d been kissing?
“Don’t shoot!” Leo thought adding a swarm of greenies to their escape wouldn’t be the most helpful thing right now.
Sarabeth fired, hitting one of the aliens in its leg. It fell to the floor in front of several other aliens, tripping some of them. She fired again, hitting the kneecap of another alien.
Okay, he definitely loved her.
“You’re freaking me out with the sharpshooting,” Leo said, pulling her along faster now. “We’re almost there.”
He’d had full faith in Sarabeth’s theory at the execution stage, but now he was starting to get nervous. Shouldn’t something be happening? The ship hadn’t made a peep.
As if answering his thoughts, the ship began to vibrate and hum. He felt like he was leaning against a subwoofer as his heart thrummed.
The tremors beneath them freaked him out so much, he charged forward. Sarabeth’s feet practically came off the ground as he pulled her along. He’d never run like this in his life.
He hoped Evan and the captives had made it out, and he hoped Teena was safe, because there was no turning back now.
Running down the exit ramp into the March morning, he inhaled a sharp, cold breath. He and Sarabeth looked back at the ship once. The metal structure was shaking so quickly, it was like seeing double.
“We need to get farther away!” Leo yelled over the din.
They raced over the Shoppoplex construction site and tore through the chain-link fence that separated it from Orland Ridge Mall. They turned past the doors to the Orland Ridge food court, their feet beating against the parking lot in unison. Then up ahead, Leo saw the most welcome sight.
People.
Lots of people, standing at the farthest edge of the Orland Ridge parking lot several hundred feet away. Thousands of them. They were lined up and facing the ship, watching as it started to clatter like a pile of tin cans. Leo couldn’t help but look for Teena and Evan and his father, but at the speed they were running, he couldn’t make out anything very clearly. Everything was a big blur, and he didn’t dare slow down, because he could sense that some of the aliens were still behind them.
He would not, could not, look back.
And then, the ship blew. The explosions in movies didn’t ever pull your eardrums out of your head. They didn’t make your feet lift off the ground and make your skin feel like it was being pulled away from your bones. Even Leo’s hair felt like it was being yanked by individual strands from each follicle on his head.
The crowd was still about fifty feet away. Leo dove, half on purpose, half involuntarily, pulling Sarabeth with him. He hoped his face said to the unprotected masses, “Get on the ground now!” The crowd got it. Down they went, like they were doing a full-body version of the wave.
As Leo and Sarabeth flew through the air, he pressed her head next to his, and their arms wove together as they covered each other. They hit the pavement just as the explosion rocked the ground beneath them.
He didn’t turn to look, but he could hear metal hitting pavement. The earth seemed to sink down beneath them. Smoke filled his nostrils, along with the aroma of melting asphalt. A hot whoosh of air rolled over him and Sarabeth, like an ocean wave of ash. Then the world stopped swaying, and Leo dared to lift his head and peek behind him.
“Holy shit.” What he saw brought him to his feet. The ship was burning, like a massive, self-contained bonfire. It lit the sky orange to the point he could almost believe the sun was out and had fallen to Earth. Sarabeth pulled up next to him, emitting a gasp.
Next to the burning ship was a giant hole where half of the Orland Ridge Mall had been. The food court, the movie theater, the whole water-feature wing had been taken out by the explosion, leaving behind a crater that sank deep into the earth.
“Guess I won’t be going to work tomorrow,” he said to Sarabeth.
They turned to face the cast of thousands behind them.
He barely had time to register any faces when Cameron Lewis came up and folded both him and Sarabeth into a massive bear hug. “You guys fucking did it,” Cameron said as Leo looked over his shoulder and saw his father standing right at the front of the crowd. His dad, who had never shown up for any of Leo’s string-ensemble concerts, who couldn’t even remember Leo’s birthday, was alive and smiling at Leo, like he could actually see him. Leo pulled away from Cameron with a nod of respect and made the last few steps to his dad.
“Dad, I’m glad you’re okay,” Leo said to his father, noticing the little lines that mapped his face.
“Me too, son,” Ed Starnick said, offering his hand. They shook, like strangers. But maybe they wouldn’t be for much longer.
Across from him, Sarabeth pulled out of the hug with Cameron and, still holding her brother’s hand, rushed up to a tall woman Leo assumed was their mom. And who looked an awful lot like the woman in Abe’s picture. Interesting.
“Mom!” With tears in her eyes, Sarabeth leaned into her mom, who grabbed Sarabeth tightly and stroked her hair protectively.
“You helped do this? Blow up the ship?” Ms. Lewis was now holding Sarabeth at arm’s length and rubbing smudges of dirt off her daughter’s face. Ms. Lewis’s brow was furrowed like a question mark above her eyes.
“Yeah. I mean, yes,” Sarabeth said, and then she took Leo’s hand and squeezed it. “With Leo.”
Ms. Lewis raised an eyebrow as high as it could go. “Interesting,” she said, directing a slightly intimidating gaze at Leo. He smiled to himself. If Ms. Lewis disapproved of him and Sarabeth, he wondered what kind of leverage the picture of her and Abe, a man who’d lived in a trailer by IHOP, would get him.
“And with Teena and Evan,” Sarabeth added, peering around. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” piped up a woman who was clearly Evan’s mother. Her hair was the same sandy-blond color, and she had the same wide blue eyes.
“Probably taking all the glory for himself somewhere,” said a man Leo recognized as Godly Jim, Evan’s stepfather. Leo watched his crazy Bible-banging show late at night when he was stoned. He always thought the guy was acting, but maybe he was just a lunatic.
Sarabeth’s face went pale in the late-afternoon glare as she urgently said to Leo, “What if they didn’t make it?”
“He went back for Teena, I think,” Cameron said, popping in next to them. He looked over his shoulder at Evan’s mom, who was scanning the crowd nervously. “He got everyone out here, but he said there was one more thing he had to do.”
Oh, no.
Leo clutched Sarabeth’s hand tightly. “We have to go back.” He remembered how easily he’d left Teena behind to go find Sarabeth. What if he had gotten both her and Evan killed?
Sarabeth nodded and started pulling him back toward what was left of the mall, and the smoking cavern and the still-burning ship, ignoring warnings from the crowd behind them. They don’t get it, Leo thought. We can’t leave them behind.
Doom settled over them as they moved closer to the massive bonfire and the adjacent crater. How could anyone have survived that? Leo bit his lip, trying to stay strong, when he spotted a figure emerging from the wreckage. Dust-covered, dirty, and glistening with what had to be man sweat came Evan, carrying Teena prone across his arms. She was unconscious, but as Leo ran closer to Evan, he could see the rise and fall of her chest. She was breathing.
Yup. Leo might have had his action-movie moment, but Evan was laying claim to the whole action-movie franchise.
“That guy better get some when all this is over,” he said, a little louder than he’d meant to, as he made his way closer to Evan. A crowd of people, including Sarabeth, their parents, and Evan’s mom, was following him, eager to help the ship’s last survivors.
Sarabeth slapped him above the elbow, and behind them, he heard her mom give a little cough. “Thankfully, it is over,” Sarabeth said.
Evan stopped in front of them, and his mom ran to him and pulled his head to her shoulder. “My boy,” she said. Looking at Leo, Evan blushed.
“We need to get her some medical help,” he said, nodding down at Teena.
“I’ll take her,” his mom said, and was joined by another woman, who helped carry Teena away.
“It’s okay, she’s a nurse,” Evan said, looking from Leo to Sarabeth, who threw her arms around him. Leo did the same.
“Most-deserved group hug ever,” Leo said, hardly believing they were all still alive and three of them were conscious.
“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” Evan asked, looking down at Teena’s pretty, peaceful face.
“I do,” Leo said, looking to a grassy median in the parking lot where Evan’s mom and several other people, probably nurses and doctors in their regular lives, were tending to Teena and a few other captives with minor wounds.
“What happened to you?” Sarabeth asked, pointing to Evan’s arm, which was covered with tiny pinpricks.
“Leo tell you about the juicer?” Evan asked. Sarabeth nodded. “They tried to drain me.”
He pulled the handle of his bat from under his arm. It was just a stump at this point, one end of it ragged and broken. “This thing saved my life, again. Broke their machine and everything.” He glanced back at the burning ship. “Well, I think you guys did that.”
“Group hug again,” Sarabeth said, going for it. “Thank God you guys are all right.”
“Forget God. Thank Evan,” Leo said.
A small smile on his lips, Evan scanned the crowd behind them, looking at the thousands of people standing there.
“This isn’t the whole town, is it?” Evan asked.
“I hate to say it, but doesn’t look like it.” Leo had been wondering the same thing.
“Yeah. If only a quarter of the town was captured, why haven’t we seen anyone else in the last two days?” Sarabeth asked, reading his mind.
“They’re at home. Asleep,” came a strong voice from behind Leo. Leo turned and saw a very upright man in a black suit with such sharp edges Leo thought he could cut himself on them.
“Who are you?” Leo asked. “And what do you mean, asleep?”
The man extended a hand and said only, “The people you’ve been waiting for.” His voice was so official, it worked better than a badge.
This guy was for real. Leo just knew. “Now the government gets here?”
“Ha. Government,” the man said. “No. We’re a private interest.”
“Not interested enough,” Leo said.
“And you still haven’t told us what you mean by asleep,” Evan said.
“The people who aren’t here are asleep in their homes. The Veoisans have a technology—a gas—that allows them to bring on temporary paralysis in both humans and Veoisans,” the suited man said, looking from Evan to Leo to Sarabeth. “You probably saw it active in its more portable, short-term form.”
Evan nodded. “Yeah, they used it on Leo and Teena.”
“Interesting, we’ll need to look into that.” Mr. Private Interest checked the fact off in his head. “The Veoisans used their gas in all the homes with chimneys, where they could easily pipe it in. As those people slept, the Veosians captured all the people in their cars or houses without chimneys. The Veoisans were going to drain the people they had, then go back for the others.”
“But why drain people?” Leo asked, piecing things together as the man spoke.
“Our bodies are a natural source of fluids that can keep their ecosystem healthy,” Mr. Private Interest said. “They would have used our fluids to feed their planet.”
“Ew,” Sarabeth said. “And why stack the cars like that?” She pointed to the car towers off in the distance.
“A flair for the dramatic coupled with a slight fear of human technology,” Mr. Private Interest said.
“Ah, that explains why our remote-control cars worked so well,” Leo said, enjoying the agent’s puzzled face. “So they stopped people from coming into town?”
“No,” the man said. “We were keeping people out of the town while it was occupied by the aliens. But now there should be paramedics here, to help you.”
Evan gave the man a dirty look. “Seriously? We could have had help all this time? What kind of assholes are you?”
“Yeah, why not help? And why keep people out of our town? And why did the Veoisans attack?” Leo asked.
“One question at a time. We knew. We just knew too late,” the man said. “We’ve had cutbacks ourselves and failed to make our delivery for the last two months. The Veoisans—their planet isn’t part of our galaxy—are normally a peaceful race. But when their planet began to dry out, they got desperate.”
“What’s this delivery? What do they need that we have?” Leo asked.
“Our group makes a special erythritol-based compound we supply them with to help keep their planet moist. The compound mimics the enzymes and moisture found in the human body, which is why they were harvesting people as a replacement.”
“But what do you get out of these deliveries? Besides them not coming here to kill us all,” Sarabeth asked.
“Let’s just say they have resources equally valuable to us,” the man said. “It’s in our interest—our business interest—to be good intergalactic neighbors. That’s actually in our mission statement at Intergalactic Hospitality for Other Planets.”
“Wait … IHOP?” Leo squinted.
Mr. Private Interest nodded, seeming annoyed.
“For real? IHOP has something to do with this?” Leo sputtered.
“Yes,” Mr. Private Interest said. “That’s all I can say.”
“So, explain to me again why you didn’t help,” Leo said, kind of annoyed. This guy was unreadable. It was like he was wearing dark sunglasses, even though his eyes were clearly visible.
“IHOP has agreements. Like I said, it’s just business,” he said. “Plus, once we realized most of the damage was done and several teenagers were controlling the threat, it became of interest to us to see how you would fare.”
Leo felt his fists clench. “Even though we could have died?”
“Even though we didn’t even know what we were up against?” Sarabeth asked, sounding equally pissed.
“Even though there were only four of us, and they’re almost indestructible?” Evan was gripping what was left of his bat so tightly, it was shaking.
The man shrugged. “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“Barely.” Leo wanted to send this tool back to wherever he came from.
“Mr. Starnick, you in particular caught our attention,” Mr. Private Interest said, handing him an IHOP business card. All it contained was a logo and a three-digit number, 888. “You predicted that aliens would choose Tinley Hills, and you were right.”
Leo squinted at the guy. “Maybe.”
The man pulled a folded piece of paper from inside his suit jacket. “You posted on an online forum called Dangerous Skies last year that, quote, when aliens decide to make the journey cross-galaxy or whatever, Tinley Hills will be the number-one target, end quote.”
“Dude, do you know how high I was when I wrote that?”
Sarabeth and Evan chortled.
“Our company doesn’t care how you arrive at the answers, just that you arrive at them,” Mr. Private Interest said, his impenetrable dark eyes lacking any humor whatsoever. “And, when you think about it, it makes sense. Plenty of people in a dry town means pure specimens.”
“Clearly, they don’t know my dad,” Leo said. “Or Abe.”
“Ah, they know Abe,” Mr. Private Interest said, his jaw setting into a frown. “He used to work with IHOP, long ago.”
Sarabeth’s eyes widened. “Wait, are you talking about the same Abe who we met?” she asked. “Lived in a mobile home by the … IHOP?”
Mr. Private Interest nodded.
Leo remembered something. “He had squirt guns, filled with alcohol, just like us,” he said, more to Sarabeth than to Mr. Private Interest. “They weren’t just for drinking.”
“That’s kind of disappointing,” Evan said jokingly.
“Yes, Abe made a few enemies in his day,” Mr. Private Interest said, clearly not in on the joke. Then he morphed his serious expression into a salesman’s smile and asked Leo, “Ever care to see Area Fifty-One, the world? Other worlds? We’re looking for people like you.”
Leo grinned and reached out for Sarabeth’s hand.
“It’s an interesting offer, and I’ll keep it in mind,” he said, flicking Mr. IHOP’s card. “But for now, I’ve got a prom to catch.”