Return to Paradise (2 page)

AFTER I DROP SARAH OFF AT HER HOUSE, I
switch into detective mode.

It’s only been a little while since the whole “aliens are real and attacking your school” thing, but since then I’ve been trying to get as much information about what’s going on as possible. I’d like to say that it’s so that if Earth has to fight, I can take on the bad guys, but I think it’s mostly just because I need something to do. And because I like to be a person in the know. Preferably the one calling the shots. Maybe that’s what made me such a good quarterback. It’s surprisingly tough to go from being the guy who knows everything that’s going on in school to some dumb jock who didn’t even realize there was a war going on around him.

I can fix that. I just have to gather info.

Plus, it gives me something to talk to Sarah about other than whether or not I think John—and the others,
but mostly just John—is okay or not. Even if it does make me sound a little like nutso Sam.

I take the long way home and drive past the high school. Not that I can get anywhere close to it—the authorities have the whole area around it pretty locked down. It isn’t the police who are running the show now. If so, I could probably camp out on the school lawn if I wanted to since my dad is the sheriff. No, there are people
much
higher up running the investigation. The FBI, and I’m guessing some other three-letter government groups that we civilians aren’t even supposed to know about. There are a lot of people in black suits walking around Paradise these days, which I guess makes sense since this is some grade-A Area 51 shit. Once I’d tried to sneak over to the school through the woods that border it, but they’ve got all the surrounding areas lit up with giant floodlights at night. I couldn’t get within a few yards of the edge of the trees or else someone might have seen me.

It would have been a nice time to have that alien girl—Six—and her invisibility powers around.

Today I recognize the cop who’s posted to make sure that no one turns down the street that leads to the school. Todd is only three or four years older than me. He was a big town football star back in the day and always likes to corner me and talk stats and plays when I’m at the station. I hesitate for a second and then
decide to try my luck. I want to know what’s going on at the school. Maybe if I can get close enough to see what kind of detective work they’re doing, I can get an idea of how much they do or don’t know. Maybe I can even talk one of them into spilling a few secrets if I don’t see any pale dudes walking around.

I make a loop and come back to the school. As I’m doing so, I take off my letter jacket and toss it into the backseat, shoving my backpack on top of it.

“Hey, man,” I say, pulling up beside Todd. A couple of traffic barrels sit in front of my bumper. “How’s it going?”

“Just freezing my ass off to protect this sacred ground,” he says, shoving his hands into his pockets and nodding his head towards the school. I can’t tell if he’s joking about the sacred ground or not because he’s definitely the kind of guy who will be talking about his high school glory days until his dying breath.

“Yeah,” I say, trying my best to sound casual. “What are they doing over there, anyway? I mean, I heard the place is a mess, but Dad says they aren’t telling you much about whether they’re finding anything useful or not.”

“It’s all classified intel,” Todd says, raising his eyebrows just a little bit to make it sound really important. “You know. Homeland-security-type stuff. Apparently the government doesn’t like it too much if you try to
destroy a school.”

“I bet, man.” I nod. “Hey, so I actually left my letter jacket in the locker room back before all this shit went down and—I know this is stupid, but I feel kind of naked without it. Do you think I could just run in really fast and grab it? I mean, you probably felt the same way about yours when you were racking up touchdowns, right? It’s like a second skin.”

Something weird happens to Todd’s face. He’s quiet, and it looks like he just got a big whiff of something foul. Finally, he just shakes his head.

“No can do, buddy,” he says slowly. “The place is off-limits. I’m not even supposed to go all the way to campus.”

“Yeah, but—”

“No,” he says again. This time there’s no room for argument.

I squint my eyes and try to see as far down the street that dead-ends into campus as I can, but all I can make out is a handful of big black SUVs and a couple of moving figures dressed in dark clothes.

Todd clears his throat, and I snap back to the present.

“It’s cool,” I say. “I just thought I’d ask.” I force a grin. “But if something happens to my jacket, I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your life.”

Todd gives a little smile as I back up and head away
from the school.

They won’t even let him all the way up to campus?
I think.
What the hell are they doing there?

MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE IS AN OLDER HOME IN
the country, two stories tall and filled with so much wood paneling that it feels kind of like a cabin on the inside. It’s where my parents and I are staying for the time being since our house is basically a pile of ash. My parents were going to start looking at building something new when everything in town went crazy, so now we’re camping out with Nana—my dad’s mom—indefinitely.

I’m hardly out of my truck before Abby, our golden retriever, is on her hind legs and trying to lick my face. Dozer, our bulldog, stands up on the porch and looks for a moment like he’s going to come greet me too before he just falls back down and starts to snore.

Inside, the house smells delicious—like pot roast and mashed potatoes. It’s my dad’s favorite, which means he’s probably in a bad mood today and Nana
is trying to snap him out of it. My guess is justified, because when my grandmother peeks around the corner from the kitchen, she tells me Mom’s staying in Cleveland for another few weeks visiting her family, which, knowing my mom, is code for “I’m going crazy in this house with my mother-in-law.” She’s been acting kind of weird and distant since the whole house fire thing, but I keep telling myself things will be fine and she’ll come back to Paradise once everything’s blown over.

Dad gets home not much later than I do. I guess that’s one of the perks of being cut out of a big investigation—you get to have dinner on time every night. He tosses his dark sheriff’s hat on a table near the front door and heads to the guest room he’s staying in upstairs. Soon he’s back down in a sweatshirt and jeans, and the three of us sit down for dinner at Nana’s ancient round dining-room table that must weigh two tons.

Nana says grace and asks us about our days. I give a vague answer about school going well—as far as my family knows, there’s no difference in who I was at Paradise and who I am at Helena. My dad asks a few questions about whether or not the administration has decided if Paradise will have a baseball team this spring or if we’ll get merged with our new school, which would be worse than having no baseball at all. I shrug and dig into my dinner.

Eventually, I get to prodding about the investigation.

“I saw Todd today,” I say between bites of meat. “He told me they’re not even letting him up to the campus, even though he’s supposed to be protecting the site.”

“Officer Charleston,” Dad says, chewing through Todd’s last name, “is not supposed to be gossiping about police affairs. And certainly not about any ongoing investigations.”

“It was my fault. I stopped by when I saw he was manning the roadblock. Forced him into talking to me. Don’t worry; he wouldn’t let me step so much as a foot past him.”

Dad doesn’t say anything, just keeps on chewing with his eyes on his plate. I clear my throat a little and keep talking.

“So, uh. Have you been over to the school? What have they got going on over there? Any ideas about who or what was behind everything?”

“The Smith kid and his father were behind it,” Dad says, parroting the same thing everyone else has been saying.

I want to correct him and tell him that Henri wasn’t actually John’s father. That he was some kind of guardian who protected me and Sarah and the others—who
died
doing so. And that I watched his body burn in a ceremony behind a slummy motel close by.

But as far as Dad knows, John Smith was just a quiet
guy in some of my classes, and I was nowhere near Paradise High the night everything went down. So instead I just ask: “How can they be sure it was him, though?”

“They’re sure.” Dad’s voice is gruff, meaning he’s done talking about the subject.

“Who wants more rolls?” Nana asks.

“Yeah, but what
proof
do they have?” I ask, feeling a little bad for ignoring my grandmother. “They must have something on him if they keep telling everyone he did it.”

Dad drops his fork down on his plate and looks across the table at me.

“Do you know who the ‘they’ is you keep mentioning, Mark?”

“Uh, sort of. The FBI, for one.”

“And you’ve probably seen enough movies to know how the FBI works. And what happens to people who ask questions about top-secret investigations, right?”

“Sure,” I say. “Black bags over your head and stuff.”

“I don’t know about that, but the last thing I want is for my son to end up in trouble because he was poking around in things he should’ve let be. It’s bad enough that Sarah was involved with this boy. The last thing I want is for you to get wrapped up in it too.”

“Of course,” I say.

He picks up his fork and keeps eating, but my head spins.
Sarah was involved with this boy
. It’s not the fact
that this is true that makes my stomach drop, it’s that my dad knows. I rack my brain, trying to think of a moment I might have mentioned that Sarah and John were dating before, or even after everything happened, but I can’t think of one. Talking about a guy who kicked my ass and stole my girl is not exactly the type of thing I would bring up with my family. If Dad knows Sarah was “involved” with John, it’s from the investigation. Meaning the FBI and whoever else is in Paradise right now must know too.

“You got another letter from Ohio State today,” Nana says as she tries to force a second round of mashed potatoes on me.

The nice thing about living in a small town is that if your house burns down, the mailman can probably still find you.

“I’ll look at it later.”

“Just like the letters from other colleges you said you’d take care of, right?” Dad asks. “The ones that have piled up on your desk? I went and looked at them earlier, and half of them haven’t even been opened yet.”

“It’s just—,” I start, but he won’t have it.

“Jesus, Mark. Do you have any idea how lucky you are? Do you have any idea how many other kids would kill to have schools clawing at each other to have you attend. To have even
half
of the scholarship money some of these places are offering you just to do what
you love? To play football? How ungrateful . . .”

He keeps going, but I zone out a little bit. When I think back on how hard and boring I thought the application process was for colleges, I feel like an idiot. But it was the most important thing in my life at the time, trying to remember whether or not I’d sent off all the right transcripts and letters of recommendation. Now I realize there are much, much bigger things to worry about.

Dad keeps lecturing me. He’s normally a really nice guy. Good to us. Always there when I need him. The one thing he doesn’t like, though, is when he feels useless. When things get taken out of his hands or jurisdiction and he gets cut out of the loop. Then he gets cranky and starts to become a real dick at home.

I guess that’s something I must have inherited from him.

ALEX DAVIS TEXTS ME AFTER DINNER. HE’S A
wide receiver a year younger than me who was part of my close circle at Paradise High. Apparently his parents are out of town for the weekend, and he’s managed to score a whole keg. Everyone we know is going over there. “No open flames lol,” he says. I text Sarah to ask if she wants to go, but she says no, as I expected. Inviting her is just a gesture. Neither of us is really in the mood to party lately. Pick any Friday night in the years before Mogs invaded Paradise, and I would have been out with friends—maybe out with Sarah—partying at someone’s house or in a clearing in the woods that we’d circled our cars around. But now, I just don’t see the point. There’s
an alien war
that could break out here at any moment. When that happens, I don’t want to be trying to recover from my third keg stand.

My friends—my teammates—bothered me about
my newfound lack of social life a lot at first. Then I told Sarah’s friend Emily that I was weirded out about parties ever since my house burned down. That’s not actually true, but Emily’s kind of a gossip, and pretty soon no one was giving me shit about staying home so much. Or at least, most people weren’t.

I text Alex and say I’ll pass and he calls me a little bitch and for half a minute I think that maybe I’ll go over there to kick his ass and remind him which one of us was MVP, but then I just click my phone to silent and head upstairs.

My room at the house used to be my granddad’s office before he died. At least, everyone called it his “office.” Really it was just the spare room where my grandmother stored all his old history books and navy trunk and stuff like that. But there’s a desk and a foldout couch in there, which is all I really need.

The first thing I do when I sit at the desk is log on to this blog I’ve started following called “Aliens Anonymous.” I stumbled on it by chance, back in the first few days after the battle at the high school, and despite its dumb name, it’s turned out to be pretty interesting. One of the guys running it—a dude who goes by the name GUARD—posted a story from the local paper and wrote a bunch of stuff about how the whole destruction at the high school might be a cover-up for alien activity. At first I thought GUARD might have been
from around here, but the Paradise incident was actually just one of many accidents or events he’d pegged as being somehow linked to aliens. In this case, at least, he’d guessed correctly. He’d even made the connection that the “John Smith” that everyone kept pinning stuff on was probably not exactly of this world.

Searching through the blog’s archives, I’d come across a few stories that sounded like they might have had to do with the Loric or Mogs. The site is mostly a lot of posts that look like they belong in one of those “Elvis Still Lives!” magazines at the grocery store, but some of them sound true—or at least like they could be true, given what I’ve seen. I knew I could help the blog by telling them some of what I know, and by doing that I could get them to help me search for clues as to where John and Sam and Invisible Girl might be now.

So after browsing the blog for a while, I’d contacted GUARD and told him I was from Paradise and that I thought he might be right. There were a couple of weird emails from him full of instructions that had made me wonder if I was dealing with some kind of messed-up lunatic wearing a tinfoil hat—a guide on how to hide my IP address, passwords to access restricted sections of the blog, rules on when and how I could contact him—but after a while we started to get to know one another. I guess I started to trust him, because before long I’d told him about what happened at the school
that night.

GUARD doesn’t know
everything
, though. I’ve seen enough specials on the news to realize that I should question the identity of anyone I meet on the internet, especially now that I know the Mogs would do anything to find John and the others. I didn’t tell him my name or anything. Just that I saw things that made me a true believer. On the blog I go by the name JOLLYROGER182, which I stole from the skull-and-crossbones flags flown at the Paradise Pirates football games and some of my granddad’s old navy stuff that’s framed in the upstairs room. He was part of the Fighting 182nd in the navy. I wonder what he’d say if I told him I was gearing up to maybe have to one day fight for Earth.

There are a couple of other people who are regulars on the blog, or “editors” as we call ourselves. Usually it takes a long time to earn that title, but I must have really convinced GUARD that I was legit, because he gave me full access to the blog pretty fast. The others are fine and all, but GUARD is the de facto ringleader, and the dude who’s the most serious about everything that’s going on.

I’m happy to see he’s online. We start chatting immediately.

GUARD is convinced that a freak storm in Tennessee was caused by one of the Loric’s powers, but we haven’t been able to track down any evidence. The story came from a police officer who had too much whiskey one night and started yelling to everyone at a bar about how some magic kids with the power to control thunderstorms were tearing across the state, and somehow that made it into the local paper. I called to see if I could talk to the officer, pretending I was someone from the Paradise police department, but they told me the guy had been transferred to a different county and they couldn’t put me in touch with him. I have a sneaking suspicion that’s the FBI’s version of sending a dog to a nice farm upstate, which probably provides more evidence that it was John and the others than anything else.

He sends me a link to a post on an online journal. It belongs to some girl named Meredith down in Miami. It starts out really sad—her parents think she’s on drugs
and have had her in and out of institutions—and I can’t figure out why GUARD is interested in it. Then, after a few paragraphs, I get to what he’s talking about: the reason her parents think she’s on drugs is because she says she watched some random dude on the streets of Miami use what she describes as “mind powers” to shove her boyfriend up against the wall of a coffee shop, keeping him pinned there a few feet off the ground.

My chat window dings while I’m reading.

Luckily, this girl’s listed the facility her parents had checked her into
and
her full name. Not exactly smart stuff to put on the internet, but great for me. I look up the hospital and call the front desk.

“Hi,” I say when a woman picks up. “I’m trying to get in contact with Meredith Harris.”

“Just one minute,” the woman says. I can hear the clacking of keys in the background for a few moments before her voice comes back again. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir,
but Ms. Harris was checked out a few days ago.”

“Oh, um . . . ,” I say, trying to come up with my next question. I realize that I probably should have thought this through more before I called, but thinking before I act isn’t really my style. I go off instinct.

“Um, that can’t be right,” I continue. On my computer screen, I see the date of the journal post, and something clicks in my head:
It’ll be easier to figure out if it was John in Miami if I know when this chick first got sent to the hospital
. “Maybe I have the wrong number. When was your Meredith Harris checked in?”

“Well . . . ,” the woman says. I can tell she’s hesitant to give me any more info.

“Please, ma’am, this is my sister. I’m just trying to make sure I know where she’s at.”

I must have come up with the right amount of sob story, because she gives me a date—one that puts Meredith Harris going into the hospital at the same time I was trying to kick John’s ass on the hayride.

I thank the woman on the other end of the line and hang up, then turn back to GUARD.

At least, that’s what John told Sarah. In all our conversations about the Loric and the Mogs, I’ve gotten to know basically everything he ever told her about himself.

I hate that I agree with him.

I poke around online a little more before calling it a night, my eyes strained too much and a headache coming on. I lie in bed and think of the same scene that’s been replayed in my head a million times since everything went crazy. It’s not even one of the weirder moments, like when a damned lizard monster attacked us or John’s dog turned into some kind of dragon. Or when alien bad guys turned into
ash
after being stabbed. It was when I was at John’s house.

It was when I’d found out that aliens existed.

I’d gone over to John’s house to ask about the video.
That
stupid
video someone had shot on their phone of John flying like Superman out of my burning house, Sarah and the dogs with him. I’d ended up in the middle of a fight between him and the guy I’d thought was his father, Henri. And then weird stuff started happening. Henri stopped moving, like he was frozen in place, which I now realize meant that John was using his telekinesis. They were talking about Sarah being in trouble, and then John was just gone. Running, I guess, all the way to the school.

After he’d left, Henri was able to move again. I’d been furious that no one was answering my questions, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. He looked like he was about to break in every way possible. I’d kept asking questions, but he kept ignoring me. He ran into another room. When he came back out, he was carrying a shotgun and this locked box with all kinds of weird symbols carved into it. I could tell he was on some kind of mission as he headed to his truck. I was fast, though, and got there before him, planting myself in the passenger seat. I needed to know what was going on. Especially if Sarah was involved.

“I don’t have time to deal with you,” Henri had said as he jumped into the truck. “Out!”

What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to react to that?

“If Sarah’s in danger, you take me to her,” I said. “No
matter what.” And I meant it. Suddenly that was the only thing that mattered.

Henri had looked at me long and hard before starting his truck. As we peeled out of his driveway, he shoved the locked chest into my lap.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Henri just shook his head.

“Boy, you’ve got a lot to learn in the next five minutes.”

Then everything went to hell.

Lying on my pullout bed at Nana’s, I think about this interaction, wondering why I got in the truck in the first place. I don’t know, really. Looking back on it, I should have called my dad. Or let Henri go alone. Or any number of options that wouldn’t have put me at Mog ground zero. But something had told me to go with him. I’m glad I did. I mean, I saved John that night, and probably Sarah too.

But a little part of me wishes that I’d never gotten into that truck. That Henri hadn’t told me about the war we were driving towards—a battle on Earth between two alien races.

Part of me wishes I’d just walked away. Life would have been a lot less complicated that way.