The Dark Side of Nowhere (19 page)

“Purrs like a kitten,” he said. “You think maybe I could trade it in for a Porsche?”

I leaned closer to him. “You gotta know that this is serious, Wesley.”

He turned to me. “I didn't mean to hurt Ethan!” he shouted. “But I did, and now there's nothing I can do about it!” He looked at his glove hand in rage. “There's no safety on these things. There's not even a trigger. You barely even think of moving a finger, and the thing goes off. You try to scratch your nose, and you wind up with no head.”

“Somehow,” I said, “I don't think that the ones who made it really cared who or how many people it killed. Just as long as it killed.”

He ripped the weapon from his hand and threw it to the ground. “What are we, anyway?” he asked, looking at his own body, halfway to perfection. “I mean, what kind of screwed-up trick of evolution makes us look so incredible and then makes us the assholes of the universe?”

“I think you've figured it out,” I told him. “It
is
a trick. Think about it—can you imagine what an army would do when they first saw us coming? They'd be so
awed just by looking at us, they'd forget to be afraid. They'd start believing that they deserve to lose.”

I realized I was avoiding the heart of my mission. “Wes, why did you come down here?”

“Did you know,” he said, slapping a tear out of his eye, “that my parents didn't even stop in to see me when they left? They told Grant to tell me good-bye. Does that stink, or what?”

“It stinks. Why did you come down?”

Wes considered the console before him. He knew I wasn't going to let him change the subject again. “Don't you see, Jason—you
mean
something. You could go out there and probably win half of them over. I'll bet you could get them to hurl Grant off a cliff if you tried hard enough, and Grant knows it—that's why he had to wipe the floor with you. But I don't mean anything—not even to my parents. No one listens to me. No one ever has; no one ever will. I could never do a thing about Grant, or Billy, or the ten gazillion ships whenever they get here. And then I start thinking, Maybe I
can
do something that makes a difference. Can you imagine what'll happen if I take this ship out of here? Everyone'll see it. It'll be like skywriting across the world that we're here!”

I shook my head. “How could that make a difference?”

Wesley turned to the console with even greater resolve. “We'll just have to find out.”

I was getting more and more worried for him now. “Wes, this thing is badly damaged. If you try to start it, it'll just blow up and kill all of us!”

Wesley nodded, and moved his fingers across the face of the console. “That works too.”

The vibration became a violent rattle, and a high-pitched whine screamed in my ears. The dirt in front of the window shifted. “It's just like the simulator!” he said.

“Wesley, don't do this!”

“Too late,” he said. “I've started the launch sequence.”

I grabbed his arm. “We're getting out of here!”

“Go if you want,” he said. “I don't care.”

But I did care. I looked at my metal cast. It wasn't much of a weapon anymore, but it was still good for something. I raised it high into the air and brought the thing down on top of Wesley's head as hard as I could. In an instant he became as limp as Gleeb. Either I had killed him or knocked him out, but I couldn't worry about it now. With my good arm, I pulled him out of the seat and hoisted his dense, half-alien mass over my shoulder, racing back the way I had come, saying a silent final good-bye to Ethan as I passed him. There were strange,
blaring sounds now, and I realized that warning alarms must sound the same in any world.

With all my strength, I ran down the long corridor, into the storm cellar, and up the stairs into the unbearably bright light of day.

Grant was right there.

“What's going on? What have you done?”

“He started the launch sequence.”

The fear in Grant's face turned to panic. “And you didn't turn it off?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Wasn't in my training.”

Grant let out a defeated whine and hurled himself down into the dark hole.

The ground was shaking like an earthquake now. Everyone was scattering, racing out through the gate and scaling the fences. Not even Billy bothered to harass me—he pushed the smaller kids out of his way as he fled.

Behind me I could hear a loud crack as the ruined foundation in front of the cellar split apart. My heart leaped with terror but also powerful anticipation—because I knew that Wesley was right. Everything was about to change again, and whatever happened now, it
would
make a difference!

You can't imagine how different tomorrow will be!

I burst out through the gate and tore through the
woods, hoping I could get far enough away. The pain in my gut exploded into my arms and legs as I ran with Wesley's impossibly heavy body on my back, but dropping him was not an option. Neither was slowing down. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The groan of the malfunctioning engine became a violent scream behind me. Twenty. I burst out of the trees and into a field. A flash of light, and a shock wave hit my back, knocking me down. I heard the roar above my head now, and as I looked into the sky, I could see it!

It rose huge and black against the morning sky, molting a trail of crumbling earth behind it. The ship was inelegant and cumbersome—an ugly thing nowhere near as exquisite as the creatures it once carried. I could imagine Grant in there now, at the console, trying futilely to control the thing, but as it corkscrewed into the sky, I could see that an entire engine had been crushed and a second one torn away.

Wesley, still alive, opened his eyes and caught sight of it. “Ooh!” he said weakly.

The ruined ship reached its peak half a mile up—high enough for everyone in Billington to see. Then it slowed—and stopped, hanging in the sky for an instant before it began to fall straight down, back toward Old Town.

It gained speed as it plummeted, its crippled engine
sputtering, wind whistling around it. I grabbed Wesley again, dragged him forward toward a gully, and hurled us both down into a ditch as the ship disappeared beneath the treetops.

This, I now knew, was the
real
focal point of our lives. Either it would be the most important moment we'd ever have—or it would be the last.

The sky turned white, and the blast shook the dirt of the gully down around us, covering us in layers of wet earth. Then came a second blast so powerful, it filled the gully with the shredded limbs of trees that had been a hundred yards away. Finally the ground stopped shaking, but my ears rang on for a long, long time.

Wesley looked at me, semiconscious, his eyes half open. “Did I do it?” he asked. “What happened?”

I brushed the dirt from his face and laughed, suddenly feeling freer than I'd ever felt before. “Damned if you didn't skywrite the world!”

T
he winds of change are definitely not a warm summer breeze. They're more like tornadoes. You never know when they're coming, and they tend to turn everything upside down. I'd been dragged by a powerful change all summer, but the moment that ship exploded, I knew that the tornado had died—and although a new one was swirling in to take its place, I had a feeling I'd
be able to ride this one, rather than letting it ride me.

Down in the ditch, Wesley and I were covered in Billington dust—the same red-brown dirt that clogged the treads of my sneakers and got swept to the corners of my room for my entire life. Now it coated me like a second skin, but I no longer found it a nuisance. In fact I took a deep breath, getting a full dose of its earthy aroma, before I had to cough it all back out.

As I helped Wesley out of the ditch, I turned to look behind us. Through the mangled foliage and settling dust, I could see smoldering ruins of the ship and of Old Town. From here it seemed that not a building of the compound remained.

In the fields around us, others who had hit the ground when the ship blew up were just getting to their feet. I only saw the Transitionals and wondered if the few remaining adults had been able to put enough distance between themselves and the blast. They were not graced with the same powerful stride we had all developed. Even with Wesley on my back, I had outrun them.

The Transitionals were like a school of fish now, scattered by the passage of something far mightier. Only now were they beginning to drift back together as they regained their bearings, and in spite of everything, when they saw me, they began to move in my direction, as if I were the core of what bound them together. If they
thought I could give them answers and direction, they were wrong. This was a task I could no longer perform. I had to be one of them to lead them, but I was firmly on the outside of the group now. No matter how the coming days unraveled, I knew I could never truly be one of them again.

Perhaps that's why Billy decided to kill me.

“Billy, no!” Wesley shouted, but he was still too weak to stand up and stop him.

Billy rammed into me from behind, sending me sprawling on the ground. When I looked up, I was staring at the business end of his glowing index finger. As the others saw what was about to happen, they hurried, but none were close enough to stop it.

“I could waste you with a single finger,” he said, flooded by the power of the thought. In his own mind, he was justified—he would be ridding the ranks of a dangerous traitor. But this was different from last night—he wasn't firing at a shape in the dark; we were point-blank, looking into each other's eyes. I could tell by the look on his face the moment he had crossed the line and decided to really do it.

But I think that when he realized he had crossed that line, the last remnants of his conscience stumbled on it. The enormity of the act struck him with such astonishment that he hesitated—and in that moment of hesitation, something else struck him as well.

A rock.

It flew in from nowhere and smashed his nose like a meteor impacting on the moon.

“Strike!”
said a voice far behind me. It was Paula! Never had I been so glad to hear her voice.

Billy's whole body flinched wildly from the blow, his glowing arm suddenly firing in all directions. I jumped up, grabbed his pinky and twisted it, forcing his weapon to power down, then tore the glove from his hand. He fell to his knees, completely forgetting his role as executioner, and gripped his gushing nose, wailing in pain.

In the commotion more weapons had powered up around us—Roxanne had arrived, and the second she saw the source of Billy's pain, trained her glove on Paula. In turn, Ferrari aimed his at Roxanne, to stop her from firing. In an instant, it escalated out of control—a dozen terrified Transitionals, not even knowing where they were aiming, or why, brandished their weapons in a sort of random standoff. We were all about to be part of a massacre.

“Power down!”
someone shouted. The voice was loud. It commanded authority.

It was Wesley.

Still reeling from his blow to the head, he stood on shaky legs and proclaimed to the jittery crowd, “What are you, a bunch of idiots? Power down, and take those damned things off!”

One by one the gloves turned off and were shoved into pockets with great relief. Wesley turned to me, shaking his head. “That was so stupid!” he said. “
I've
never even been that stupid.”

Paula came up to me, offered a quick smile, then knelt down to help Roxanne attend to Billy, whose wailing had subsided into whimpering. Roxanne eyed Paula coldly but, to her credit, didn't push her away.

“You know, Billy,” said Paula. “I liked you more when you were ugly on the
outside
.” But she said it with such compassion, it gave him pause for thought. He looked at her from above his bloody nose, then at me. I think in some strange way, he was just the tiniest bit grateful that Paula had broken his nose before he could kill me. He'd probably hate us till the end of time, but at least he wouldn't have to go to sleep that night a killer.

More Transitionals came drifting in from farther away, but not a single one of the adults. Someone suggested that we go back and try to find them, but we knew it would be foolhardy and futile. Old Town was engulfed in flames, the entire compound quickly burning to the ground.

“Maybe we'd better bail, before people start showing up and asking questions,” suggested Wesley.

It was right about then that my stomachache came back. It had never completely left, but with everything
going on, I had forced myself not to deal with it. This time the dull ache exploded into searing pain that I could not ignore. It caught me by surprise and I doubled over, feeling myself go weak at the knees.

“Jason, what's wrong?” said Paula.

“Someone shot him!” I heard one of the others say.

But there was no hole. No damage. This was something else. I stumbled away, gasping for air. My mind was so fouled with pain, I couldn't think what the problem might be.

“We have to get you to a doctor,” said Paula, “both you and Billy.”

“What doctor?” asked Ferrari.

It was a question with too many ramifications. Doc Fuller hadn't made it out of Old Town, and our parents had scattered themselves around the globe. We were suddenly very much alone in the world.

I collapsed to the ground as the pain multiplied, spreading throughout my body. An indescribably agony. It felt like . . . It felt like . . .

It feels like appendicitis.

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out but a bloodcurdling scream. And then another, and another. Helpless, I could see the others over me in panic, but I couldn't hear them through my own screams. Even Billy had stood up and was looking down at me in disbelief.
If he had suggested putting me out of my misery, I would have been the first to agree. I instinctively knew that, whatever this battle was, I could not possibly win. I was dying—and nothing could stop it.