The Dark Side of Nowhere (11 page)

“What's the problem?” I said. “It's not like it's a ‘romantic' dinner or anything—I just thought it would be nice, to, y'know . . . eat.”

“Are your parents out of town?” she asked, always the investigator.

In town, but out to lunch
was what I wanted to say. “They're just out,” I said.

I pulled out a chair for her, figuring I might as well be a gentleman whether she liked it or not. Then I ran off into the kitchen to get the two plates I had already prepared.

There's only so much you can do with frozen dinners. True, I had scooped their steaming contents out of the little black trays and onto our good china, then sculpted it so that it presented well—but Salisbury steak is Salisbury steak.

“Home-cooked?” she questioned.

“Well, how about home-nuked?”

I watched as she moved her fork around in her potatoes. There was something so wonderful about having put that meal together and then just sitting there with her. It made all of my troubled thoughts just slink into the closet and stay there. I didn't have to think about it—I could pretend, just for a little while, that it didn't
exist, and I knew it would be like that for as long as she stayed.

But before either of us raised a fork to our mouths, the phone rang. I let the machine get it, and it turned out to be Wesley. I leaped from the table, knocking down my chair, and raced to the phone, terrified that he might blather something out loud that I'd never be able to explain to Paula.

“Yeah, yeah, I'm here,” I said as I picked up the phone and shut down the machine.

“Jason,” he said, “I think we're in trouble.” Wesley didn't sound too good.

I glanced at Paula and smiled before I returned to the conversation. “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“The worst” was his answer. “How do you feel?”

“The same as usual,” I said.

“Me too. My shoulders keep peeling like a sunburn, and my joints keep aching.”

“Yeah, so?” I knew the symptoms of the new treatment as well as he did. If I could stand it, then so could he.

“But there's something else I didn't notice before. . . .” His voice was sounding real thick now, as if he were crying. “Jason, my hair is falling out.”

“What? No! What?”

Paula looked up at me. I smiled at her again, then ducked into the kitchen.

“What are you talking about? Your hair looked fine today.”

“Not the hair on my head, but the other places—my chest, under my arms. Even those little hairs on my knuckles.”

“You gotta be kidding me!” I glanced out to Paula, who was listening to my side of the conversation, trying to fill in what Wesley might be saying. “I'm sorry, I can't talk now,” I told him.

“Then don't talk; listen. Listen to everything I say, and don't shut me up until I'm done.”

“Okay, then talk.”

He cleared his throat. “I figured there had to be a reason why our parents were leaving us alone—and I kept thinking about it and thinking about it. That's when I noticed the thing about the hair. Then I got to thinking about this whole mission of theirs. If they have to take up where they left off twenty years ago, then it means it's like we were never born. I don't think we were ever
supposed
to be born.”

I heard him breathe heavily on the other end a few times. I could feel his fear across the phone line. “Jason, I think they're killing us.”

I let his words hit me—I let them bounce around, weighed them with both fear and logic, and compared them against my own observations. And I came to the
conclusion that Wesley's little equation must have spat out the wrong answer.

“No, it can't be,” I told him. “I mean, why would Grant be spending so much time and energy training us?”

“To keep us busy?” suggested Wesley. “To keep us out of the way?”

“No, Wes, that would be—it would be
counterproductive
. They wouldn't do that.”

“Well,
we
think they might,” Wesley said.

“We?”

“I talked to some of the others when we left Old Town today, and showed them my hair problem. They were all scared like me.”

I paced back and forth, and dared to touch my own eyebrows. A few short hairs came off on my fingertips, and I tried to tell myself that it didn't mean anything. “But my father's in charge!” I whispered, trying to keep Paula from hearing. “If he's calling the shots, then nothing bad will happen to us.”

“How much do you trust your father?” Wesley asked.

That was one answer I didn't even have to think about. No matter how many lies he had told me—no matter what he had done to hide the truth, in my whole life he had never done anything to hurt me.

“Something's missing,” I told him. “You're jumping to conclusions. You'll start a panic!”

But it was too late to stop that. There was a knock on the door, and I told Wesley to hold on. It was Ford-called-Ferrari. He was a regular at my “slumber party.” In fact, there were over a dozen regulars now, every night. I don't know why they all decided to come to my house, but each night, more and more kids just showed up with their sleeping bags and pillows—although they usually didn't start showing up until later.

“Jason, I'm really scared,” he said as he barged his way in. “We gotta do something before it's too late!”

I shushed him, and when he turned to see Paula, he said, “Uh-oh.”

Paula, who must have heard fragments of my talk with Wesley, had now heard this little dramatic excerpt as well.

“What's been going on around here?”

“Church stuff, okay?” I offered.

When Paula looked around, I could tell she noticed sleeping bags that were shoved into various corners of the living room, not hidden as well as I thought. She turned to me and didn't even ask. She just waited for me to answer.

I opened my mouth, fishing for a truth I could get away with, but there was another knock on the door. It was little Amy. By the look on her face, I could tell she had been crying. As I looked out of the window, I saw
a few more kids coming. Some on bikes, some just running, and all gripping their training gloves like security blankets.

I picked up the phone again. “Wesley, how many kids did you talk to?”

“Most of them,” he answered. “All of them.”

I brushed my fingers nervously through my hair, the way my father did. “Okay, okay, I want you to find everyone and get them to my house
now!
” Although it seemed that most of them were already on their way.

The screen door opened, and more kids came in. “Hi! You remember Paula,” I said before they could open their mouths and say a word. They all just filed in silently when they saw her, trying lamely to hide their training gloves.

“Looks like the campers aren't as happy as you thought,” she said.

I started to get mad, but I refused to take it out on her.

“I guess I really have to take care of this,” I said apologetically.

“Why didn't you tell me there were more of those gloves around?” she said, her suspicion climbing.

I couldn't stand her looking at me like that, so I grabbed my own glove down from the shelf and held it out to her. “Here, you want one?” I said in my frustration. “Go ahead, take it.”

But, of course, she didn't. We both knew it wasn't a glove she wanted.

“Paula,” I said, “I promise, as soon as I know what this is all about, I will tell you
everything
.” I meant what I said, and I didn't care if the other kids heard.

She reluctantly accepted my promise. “I don't like this ‘camp' of yours,” she said, then shoved a whole Salisbury steak into her mouth and left, chewing.

Once she was gone, I sat everyone down and tried to calm their fears, but as more and more arrived, the gathering began to feel like a wake. The house was filled with an oppressive air of misery and terror.

By nine they had all arrived—even Billy and Roxanne were there, although they stayed in the back and said nothing to me.

As I stood before them, Grant's words suddenly came back to me:
The kids here follow your lead, Jason
. And I wondered if they knew that it was the blind leading the blind.

“Okay, first thing,” I announced. “We . . . are . . .
not
. . . dying.”

Most of them sighed an amazing breath of relief, as if my saying it made it true.

“Do you know that for a fact?” someone challenged.

“I know what I know,” I told them. Which was nothing.

It was Ferrari who switched us onto the right track. He raised his hand timidly. “Jason,” he said, “do I look different to you?”

“Huh?”

“You know, do I look different—do I look
funny
? Because I don't think I look like I'm supposed to. . . .”

To be honest, I had never looked close enough to notice. He looked kind of pale, but that was probably just from being scared. I scratched his shoulder gently. “You're okay, Ferrari—there's nothing to worry about.”

“How about my eyes—how do they look?”

I peered at them and couldn't find anything wrong. “Blue,” I said with a shrug. “They look blue.”

“Yeah,” said Ferrari, “but my eyes are brown.”

The other kids began to lean around to get a good look at Ferrari's eyes.

“Maybe it's just the light,” suggested Wesley.

But no amount of light could make brown eyes do that.

I stepped over to the mirror in the hallway and looked at my own eyes. They were blue—but then they were always blue. They looked no different to me. It was my eyebrows that didn't quite seem right. They seemed . . . thinner. And as I brushed my finger across them again, a few more strands of eyebrow hair came loose.

On an impulse, I pulled off my shirt. My shoulders were peeling and raw, as were my back and my neck. I
already knew about that. But then I took a long look at my chest. I didn't have many chest hairs to begin with, so it was hard to notice the difference, but I did notice something else. Those pecs that Paula had commented on earlier—they were bigger, but not just that. In some imperceptible way, they didn't look exactly . . . right. Something in their shape or their angle was off.

It was all enough for me to start drawing conclusions of my own, and I knew that this time the answer to the equation was right.

“Is that why we came here, to watch him admire himself?” said Billy, still pretty sore about that afternoon.

I wanted to fire something back at him but held down the urge. Instead, I quietly slipped my shirt back on, took a deep, deep breath, and approached the group. I stood before them, knowing what I had to say but not knowing how to say it.

“Those shots they're giving us,” I began. “I don't think they're keeping us human.” And from there, I let them start looking at their own bodies for the rest of the answer.

The simple truth was, we were slowly becoming ourselves.

I
f you've ever seen those movies where the marauding townsfolk head up the hill to Frankenstein's castle with
pitchforks and torches, then you can imagine what it was like when two dozen kids marched with flashlights and iron gloves toward the only house in Billington with a satellite dish pointing north.

As we approached, I could see Grant's silhouette in the kitchen window. I would have loved to have seen his face the moment he caught sight of us, but all I could see were shadows. He disappeared from view, and a few moments later, the garage door began to crank itself open. Grant stood there in the empty garage. If our arrival unnerved him, he didn't show it—he kept in calm control.

What struck me first was the garage itself. Twenty years of living human, and yet the garage was bare. There was a rake, a spade, and that was about it—no boxes of things too special to ever throw out, no old furniture—as if nothing over the past two decades had been worth holding on to.

“To what do I owe this visit?” he asked.

I took a step forward from the crowd. “You know why we're here.” I maintained the same calm control over my own voice. “did you think we wouldn't figure out what was happening to us?”

He smiled. “I assumed you would,” he said, “but I'm impressed that you realized it so soon!”

Seeing that smile just made me angry. I didn't know
what to do, so I raised my glove and aimed it at him. In turn, he raised his own hand, clicked his remote, and the garage door cranked down behind us.

“If you're going to riddle me with ball bearings, by all means go ahead. But if you don't intend to shoot, I suggest you put your arm down.”

No, I wasn't going to shoot him. I slowly lowered my arm.

“You still haven't grasped how fortunate you are,” he told us.

“You keep saying that,” I reminded, “but you haven't shown anything to prove it.” I began to feel the control in my voice slipping toward rage. “Now it's time to put up or shut up.”

I could hear the others rumble their approval behind me. I took another step forward—not quite in his face but close. “You're going to tell us everything,” I demanded, “and you're going to tell us now.”

“Or else?”

“Or else you lose,” I told him. “You lose everything you've worked for. You lose our attention and our respect. You lose
us
.” Then I pulled the glove off of my hand and cast it down at his feet.

Grant regarded us with the sternest face he could muster. He looked out over all the others. “Does he speak for all of you?”

Although I had my eyes fixed on Grant, I heard the response. First one at a time, and then a clattering rush of everyone's gloves hitting the concrete, like a sudden downpour of rain. When the silence returned, Grant looked to the back, to Billy Chambers.