The Dark Side of Nowhere (7 page)

My father smiled. I continued: “They were strange of face and strong of mind, with powerful bodies and arms of fire. Monsters all, who believed themselves beautiful. On a voyage of conquest they sailed, but their arrogance grew into a tornado that cast them on the shores of the new land. Their shattered ship spilled poison that destroyed the good, fragile people of the land they would conquer.” I looked up at my father incredulously. “Old Town?”

“It wasn't Old Town when we arrived,” he said.

I closed my eyes, piecing together the rest of the story word by word. “With each rising of the sun, the Warrior-Fools stared at the horizon, waiting for the thousand ships they would lead into battle—but the ships didn't come, and the sunrises became too many to count. So they worked the land, lived the lives, and walked the ways of the fragile people, until their hearts filled with a joy and a peace they had never known as Warriors and Fools. Then, one day, they rose from their labors and looked at themselves. The mirror no longer showed them the monsters that they had been, for now they had become the very people they had destroyed, from the top of their heads to the bottom of their souls. And no one mourned that the Warrior-Fools were no more.”

In the silence that followed, I went over the story
again and again in my mind, finally knowing what it said. What it meant.

My father finally spoke.

“We came from a race of conquerors, sent to prepare for an invasion that never came,” he explained. “We couldn't do anything for the people dying in Old Town. We had ruptured a fuel cell in the storm, and there was just too much radiation.” He began to rub his eyes as he thought about it. “We took care of them, and took samples of their genetic structure. Some of the samples we saved; other samples we wrapped around our own, masking ourselves on a molecular level. As they lay dying, they watched as we became them. It must have been horrible for them.”

As I listened, I tried to imagine it from both sides, but the two different points of view wouldn't mesh in my mind.

“So . . . we're body snatchers?” I said, letting out a nauseated little chuckle.

“It's not that cut and dry,” he said. “Their DNA was all we had to mask ourselves.”

Then something occurred to me. The very thought of what I was about to ask made my mouth dry, and my voice hissed out in a jagged whisper: “Why did we need to mask ourselves?” I asked. “What do we look like?”

But he wouldn't answer that one.

He went on to tell me how the forty of them cleaned
the crash site and buried the ship. How they hid the truth from the rest of the town, by becoming the humans who had died, down to every last detail of their lives. “We took over their jobs, their friendships, their habits, and beliefs,” he told me. “We replaced them, and for the ones who died that we couldn't replace, we invented the epidemic. The act we put on was so convincing, the rest of Billington believed us.”

He kept pouring forth in his grand confession, and the more he spoke, the easier it flowed. Soon his voice had slipped into that tone of simple conversation that made everything he said sound reasonable, as if he were talking about last month's fishing trip.

“We moved out of Old Town a family at a time and just disappeared into other neighborhoods. It was easy after that.”

It's funny, but in spite of how limited my own life experience had been, accepting the truth had become remarkably easy. My father could have told me that we were made of pipe cleaners and pie filling, and I would have nodded and asked him what flavor.

“We gathered information,” he continued, “studying the strengths and weaknesses of humans from the inside out, looking for ways to exploit them. We became students of nature. And then something happened that we never expected.”

I thought back to the old bedtime story. “You liked it here?” I said in disbelief. The concept of actually
liking
Billington was way too far-fetched for me.

“Not just
here
,” he said. “We liked everything. The change of the seasons, the taste of the food, the smell of the air. But most of all, we liked who we were and the way we lived.” He took a look at the gun, then finally put it down and pushed it out of reach. “They never contacted us. No ships ever came. And we abandoned the mission when the first of us had a child. That was Ethan.”

Hearing Ethan's name made my heart seize for a painful beat. I wanted to ask what he really died of but wasn't sure I was ready for the answer.

“Ethan was the first child born,” said my father. “You were the second.”

Neither of us spoke for a while, and in the silence, the numbness I felt settled deeper into my bones. I guess you would call it shock, but it wasn't what I'd expect shock to feel like. It felt more like being in a cocoon.

“There's something I need to show you,” my father said—but I could tell by the way he said it that it wasn't something he wanted to show me. He
needed
to show me. It was something I suddenly had the right to know.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a photograph and handed it to me. It was a Polaroid of a man in his
forties. A pleasant but unremarkable-looking man. Thinning brown hair. Ordinary features. His smile seemed familiar.

“His name was J.J. Pohl,” explained my father. “He was a town hero here. Fought in Vietnam, then took over his father's hardware store in Old Town.” Again he rubbed his eyes from the sting of the memory. “Your mother and I took care of him as he lay dying, a few weeks after our arrival. We had already taken on the forms of the people we were to be. There were only forty of us, but more than seventy died—leaving more people than we could replace. J.J. was one of those.

“Just before he died, he made me promise him something: that no matter how many of us came, no matter how powerful our forces were, something human would be saved. I didn't know how I'd ever have the power to keep such a promise, but I promised him anyway. He was a good man, who didn't deserve the kind of death we had brought him.”

Dad looked down, rubbing his feet across the dusty metal floor. “Anyway, we took a sample of his DNA before he died. And seven years later, we used it to wrap around the genes of our own son. We gave him to you.”

It took a few moments for the significance of that to wind its way home. I looked to the picture again, and when I did, my hand shook. The smile was mine. The
eyes were mine. This ordinary man with a forgettable face was me. I thought of the other kids who were part of this. Wesley, Billy Chambers, and almost thirty others. Was there an old picture of a dead townie who looked like Wes, just as there was one for Billy Chambers and me? Is this all we were? To find out that your life is a lie is one thing, but to find out that your own face doesn't even belong to you—

I wanted to take my hands and gouge my face until it was gone, but it wasn't like peeling off a latex mask. This living disguise went down to the bone. Down to every single cell of my counterfeit body. The numbness I had felt was gone. Whatever weird metal cocoon had held me through these revelations now burst apart. I couldn't tell what was emerging from it.

“How could you do it? How could you give me this—this small-town nobody,” I said, waving the picture at him, “when I came from
this
?” And I raised my hand to the ship around me.

“We chose to be human,” he insisted. “And we never regretted the choice!”

“I had no choice,” I shouted. “You made me live this lie!”

“We never gave you a lie,” he said, his voice booming in the metal chamber. “We gave you a new truth. A
better
truth.”

“A better truth, huh? Well, you know what you can do with your ‘better truth.'” With that I stood and stormed toward the door. I didn't know where I would go, but I knew that I couldn't stay there with him, gun or not. Then he said something that stopped me in my tracks.

“The story's not over.”

I turned back to him slowly. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“There's a new chapter to the Warrior-Fools.”

He stood up, and although he was a big man, he seemed diminished in the dim light of the black steel room.

“Many years later,” he began, “the last of the Warrior-Fools stared at the horizon, his satellite dish pointing in the wrong direction. And one day a message fell upon his ears:
‘The thousand ships are on their way
.
'”

Far away I could hear the wind breathing across the mouth of the storm cellar, and the cold chambers of the buried ship resonated with a lonely moan. It didn't take a brain surgeon to figure out who that last Warrior-Fool was. And why he had secretly given all the kids training gloves.

“When?” I asked.

My father shook his head. “The message was garbled,” he said. “We know they're coming, but we don't know
when. Grant has known about it for months but just told us today. I suppose he was waiting until he got his hands on every last kid.”

And I must have been that last kid. My eyes began to sting—maybe from suddenly being opened so completely. I began to rub them, and realized that they weren't my eyes at all. They were J.J. Pohl's.

W
e climbed out of the dead ship, then up the moss-covered steps of the storm cellar, into the cool night. The trees swayed with the breeze, as they always did. The stars were the same, and yet it was hard to believe that this was the same world I had climbed down from just a short time ago. There were probably a million things to say to each other, but neither of us seemed to know what those things could be. Dad looked down at the gun he was holding, then flipped open the barrel and pulled out the bullets, one by one. Then he handed me the unloaded weapon.

“I want you to bring this home,” he told me, “and tell your mother I've gone to the meeting. Tell her to meet me there.”

“What are you going to do?”

My father, who always seemed to have a definite mind on everything, just looked at me and said, “I have no idea. What do you think I should do?”

It was the first time I could ever remember my father
asking my advice on anything. I could sense the power I had in the moment.

“I think maybe you should do what Grant says,” I told him. “I mean, wasn't he your Fearless Leader?”

But my father shook his head. “No, Jason,” he said. “I was the leader.”

And with that, he turned and left.

I stood there alone in the weed-choked darkness, gripping the picture of J.J. Pohl in my hand. It was as if I had to teach myself to walk and breathe and think all over again. I looked down at the picture. In the darkness, I couldn't see the face anymore. Just as well.

This picture isn't me, I told myself. I might have his body, and his birthmarks, and his B.O., but it's not me, not anymore.

I slipped the picture into my pocket and began lifting my feet, one after another, until I was out of Old Town and on my way home. And with each step, my sense of resolve grew. I didn't know what my parents were going to do, but things were beginning to fall into place for me.

I now felt an electrified sense of purpose. The unimpressive, unimportant life I had led before had died—I felt no remorse about that. What lay ahead was a lifetime of unexplored terrain, and I was more than ready to explore it and to find out who and what I was.

T
he sun burst upon a clear day that was just like any other, and yet like none other. Grant was right about that. When I woke up, I felt strange about the whole thing, like when you make an idiot of yourself at a party but don't realize it until after you get home.

My parents hadn't returned from the meeting. I imagined they would be gone for most of the day taking care of strange business. So I sat around alone, looking at J.J. Pohl's teenage reflection in the mirror. Then I paced around the house, trying to find something appropriate to do under the circumstances. What do you do the morning after you find out you're an extraterrestrial? I had some Wheaties, then went off to school.

I
had been the last one to be brought into Grant's little legion of space cadets, but the first one to know the truth about who we were.

The others found out soon enough, though.

None of them were in school that day—apparently the other parents had all decided it was better to hear the truth from them, rather than from other kids. Kind of like sex education.

From the stories I heard, each kid took it differently. Wesley cried for six hours straight, then went out to get a burger. Roxanne sat in front of her vanity, spreading bizarre shades of makeup all over her face, trying to figure out what she might really look like. Billy Chambers went out to practice his pitching, figuring now he
really
had an edge over Paula. And everyone thought of Ethan. We all wondered what he would have said about it.

I stood at my locker, just beginning to realize that Wesley and the others were being given their dehumanization presentations by their parents that morning, so none of them were going to show. But Paula was there, and she was the only one that could momentarily take my mind away from the other events laying claim to my brain. She made a straight line to me through the crowded hallway. I had to smile. Other girls and guys, they play games with each other. They pretend they “just happen to be wandering by” when they suddenly notice each other, as if they hadn't planned the whole thing. Paula was above all that.

As she came closer, I noticed that her hair had a silky
sheen to it, as if she had brushed it half a million times or so. She was wearing a baseball cap, so I had to look close to tell. Which I did.

“Hi,” I said. “You look nice.”

She smiled, seeming pleased that I was really looking. “Thanks. I wish I could say the same for you, though.”