Return to Paradise (4 page)

I SPEND THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON AT HOME
on the computer, talking to the blog editors. Saturday afternoons must be a lazy day for conspiracy theorists, because GUARD and this other editor named FLYBOY are both online and wanting to talk. FLYBOY seems cool but is much more of a skeptic about the stuff that GUARD and I talk about. Which is good, I guess—sometimes I think we need a rational person to keep us from totally going off the deep end.

It turns out that GUARD called the number Agent Walker gave me and got the same voice mail but didn’t leave a message. A few minutes later, his phone rang—even though he’d purposefully blocked his number. GUARD answered because he’s not the type of dude to let a chance like that go by. The person on the other end of the line kept asking him how he got the number, but GUARD played it cool and kept saying he knew
what was going on in Paradise and demanded to talk to someone in charge.

Finally, he got on the line with an FBI guy named Purdy.

According to GUARD, Purdy was a huge hard-ass who sounded really annoyed and anxious to get off the phone until GUARD said he knew about the Mogs. This, apparently, got Purdy’s attention. Only then GUARD didn’t want to talk anymore, and Purdy wasn’t giving him any info about what the FBI knew or didn’t know.

FLYBOY says this doesn’t mean anything, but I think otherwise: if this Purdy guy works for the FBI and recognized what GUARD was talking about, it proves that the FBI here know what’s
really
going on.

The only question then is how much they know. And who they’re trying to help.

We chat online for a few hours as we try to dig up anything we can on Purdy, but all we find is a picture of a piggish-looking man standing in the background at some government ceremony. It’s not much to go on. Not
anything
to go on.

My phone buzzes constantly with messages from my teammates over at Alex’s. There are more and more typos in them as the hours wear on. Finally I give in and head over once my brain is so full of government conspiracies and half-formed conclusions that I feel like it might just leak out of my ears. When I tell my
dad I’m headed to Alex’s to hang out with the guys, he gets a wide grin on his face.

“Good to see you getting out of the house and being a high schooler again,” he says. “I thought you were turning into some kind of loner.”

I shrug and force a laugh, then head out before the conversation gets any deeper than that. I’m almost out the door when he yells to me.

“My truck’s parked behind yours. Just take mine, if you don’t mind.” He tosses me his keys.

“Sure,” I say. Dad’s truck—the thing he likes to drive when he’s off duty and wants to get away from the police cruiser—is a small, single cab. Kind of a piece of crap, but I’m not going far.

I keep an eye out for any cars following me, but I don’t see anyone. Plus, it’s all back roads from my grandmother’s place to Alex’s, which is about as clandestine as you can be in Paradise.

I think about calling Sarah and seeing if she wants to come, but I know she’ll say no. Especially since the FBI’s got eyes on her. (Would the FBI bother with busting a bunch of underage drinkers?) Besides, I know the guys well enough to guess that they’ll start talking about either me and her or her and John, and the last thing she needs is to be harassed by a bunch of drunk football players.

As expected, everyone at Alex’s is pretty buzzed.
Half the team is there, and for a while it feels like it could be any Saturday night out of the last few years. Still, I spend the few hours I’m there sipping on the same warm beer just in case I need to keep my wits about me. No one seems to notice that I never need a refill as long as I’ve got a red plastic cup in my hands and mime drinking every so often.

When it starts to get a little late, I sneak out the back and to my dad’s truck. I don’t bother saying good-bye to anyone—tomorrow morning no one will remember what time I left, and I’ll get a text or two talking about hangovers and asking if I got home okay. I’m about to start the truck when I realize there are extra keys on Dad’s ring. One for our old house. One for my grandmother’s. And a few more with rubber around the tops: the keys to the police station.

The hair on the back of my neck stands on end as I consider the possibilities of what this could mean.

From what my dad’s told me, the FBI is basically working on-site at the school. That means at this time of night there are only a couple of officers at the station. Maybe a few agents too. But I know my way around pretty well up there. If I were to drop by, I could probably figure out a way to sneak past the front desk and get into my dad’s office, where all kinds of files might be kept. Even if the FBI’s taken over, there must still be initial reports at the station. Whatever it was that my
dad and his officers saw when they arrived on scene that night.

If I could get my hands on some of those, maybe they could shed more light on the investigation.

I drive towards the police station before I can talk myself out of it.

TODD’S THE ONLY OFFICER ON DUTY. I THINK
I’m the luckiest guy alive until he rolls his eyes and gives me a long, drawn-out sigh as I walk in.

“Go home, Mark,” he says curtly.

“Todd, man, what are you doing here all alone?”

“Someone mentioned that I was talking to civilians while on duty yesterday, and I got switched to the graveyard shift. That’s what.”

“Oh,” I say.
Oops
.

“Plus there’s been some kind of electrical fire on the outskirts of town that everyone was raring to get to.” He inhales and wrinkles his nose a bit. “Jesus. You smell like a bar.”

I’m not exactly surprised. Alex’s house smelled like it had been sprayed down with cheap beer. Still, this electrical fire is great news for me.

“I was just at a party,” I say with a shrug. “Someone
must have spilled something on me. You know how it is. You’ve told me about the epic ragers you guys used to throw when you were on the team.”

Todd gets a wide grin and goes into a story I’ve heard a hundred times from him about how he drank the entire special team’s roster under the table out in the woods on his eighteenth birthday. I smile and nod and tell myself that I’m never going to be this dude when I get older. If humans aren’t the alien workforce or something by then.

Finally he’s done.

“Man, that sounds so hard-core,” I say, forcing a grin. “I’m super jealous. Anyway, I just came by to pick up some stuff my dad left for me in his office.”

Todd nods and gestures to my dad’s door, still grinning from his memories.

I unlock the office with Dad’s keys and quietly close the door behind me. The place is a mess of files strewn about the desk and seemingly random sheets of paper stacked on every surface. I start digging through the piles, but after a few minutes of searching, all I’ve come up with are weeks-old traffic violations and endless paperwork on stuff not at all related to John or the Mogs. Then I realize that
of course
that stuff’s not going to be lying around, and I use one of the small keys on the key ring to open the filing cabinet by my dad’s desk. After flipping through a few hanging folders, I come to
the one I’m looking for:
PARADISE HIGH SCHOOL
.

Yes
.

The first file I pull out is full of initial incident reports and nondisclosure agreements from the first responders. I toss it on the desk to come back to later. The second file’s a jackpot: full-page photos of the destruction at the school. The trenches dug through the football field and the huge divots I recognize as actually being footprints. Shotgun shells littering a classroom we holed up in for a while. The trashed auditorium. All signs that point to the fact that this was maybe something
other
than the work of a teenager with a vendetta against the school.

My pulse pounds as I take out my phone and start to snap photos of the pictures. I can upload them all to the blog later. GUARD and the others will flip when they see this shit. I rifle through the pictures as fast as I can, recording each one. My brain is buzzing, and I can hear my blood thumping in my ears.

Maybe that’s why I don’t hear anyone come in.

Someone yanks the back collar of my shirt and jacket, choking me. I’m swung around, and the surprise causes me to drop my phone. The file photos scatter across the floor. I expect to be staring into the face of a Mogadorian, or one of the agents.

But it’s worse.

It’s my father.

“What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” he bellows.

“Dad, I was—”

“Do you have any idea how much trouble you’d be in if someone else caught you in here? How much trouble
I’d
be in?”

“Dad, let me—”

“This is a matter of national security, Mark. I mean,
Christ
.”

He pushes me backwards with a strong shove. I stumble over my feet and hit the ground hard just as Dad’s picking up my phone. He taps on it, systematically deleting everything I’ve taken pictures of, cursing the entire time. It’s only then that I realize how weird it is that he’s here in full uniform so late. Whatever happened with the fire tonight, it must have been important enough to call him in.

When he’s done deleting things, he just stands there staring down at me for a minute.

“Go home, Mark,” he says, emphasizing every syllable he can. “And stay there.”

He starts to hand my phone to me when my text message sound goes off twice, so instead he turns the screen to see what’s on it.

That’s when his face goes white.

“What?” I ask.

He doesn’t respond, only reaches down and pulls me
up to my feet, half dragging me out of the office.

“Todd!” he barks, and then Todd is standing by the front door. “Outside, now.”

“Dad, what’s going on?”

He’s still pulling me behind him. I could fight back, but I can tell he’s furious. Something’s wrong. Something bad has happened.

When we get to Todd’s police car, Dad pulls open the back driver’s-side door and shoves me inside. I manage to rip my phone out of his hands as I go in, and Dad slams the door before he realizes I’ve taken it. He yells at Todd.

“You take him straight back to my mother’s house. If he puts up any fight, arrest him.”

Todd looks at me, shaking his head as my dad runs to his patrol car, yelling something into his radio.

It’s only then that I look down at my phone. There are two texts from Sarah.

Shit
.

My mind starts to race as I figure out what to do next. I call Sarah immediately. When she doesn’t answer, I text:

And then I realize what this means. Dad’s calling in the FBI, the police—hell, the fire department. Everyone’s about to converge on Sarah’s house, and she doesn’t know. She’s probably making out with a fucking alien, and the FBI and weirdo Agent Walker are going to find her.

I start banging my fist against the metal separating the front and back seats in Todd’s car, shouting as he gets in.

“NO! We have to go to her. Todd, man, take me to Sarah’s. You have to take me to Sarah’s right now. Go, go, go.”

“The only place I’m taking you is home.”

I keep beating on the metal until blood starts to trickle from my knuckles and Todd slams his own fist against the grate, yelling at me to shut up, then muttering profanities to himself. I’m frantically texting Sarah as he says: “And I thought the explosion at the Goodes’ place was going to be the highlight of the night.”

The Goodes’ place. Explosion.

My head tries to put everything together, ignoring the pain in my hand and the blood beating in my brain.

John’s here. He’s in Paradise, probably with Sam and Six. There was an explosion at Sam’s house. All the cops were called out to it. If there was an explosion,
that must mean there was fighting. And the only people John would be fighting . . .

The Mogs.

The Mogs are here. They’re after John. And John’s with Sarah.

I STAY HOME FOR THE REST OF THE NIGHT. I
don’t really have a choice. Nana sits in a chair at the bottom of the stairs, with one eye on my door and another on my truck outside—Dad’s personal sentry. I have no doubt that if I take one step outside the house, there’ll be an officer ready to pick me up before I even make it to the street. The last thing I need is to get thrown into a holding cell—even though it’s possible that would actually put me
closer
to Sarah.

Sarah. She’s all I can think about. In the upstairs office, I drive myself crazy pacing back and forth, hoping that she’s all right and that if things got bad, John at least was able to keep her safe. As much as I hate it, I have to believe that no matter what, he’d protect her. I text GUARD and tell him that shit’s going down in Paradise, but he doesn’t text me back. Of course this is the one night he’s not glued to one of his screens.

I text Dad about a thousand times, at first apologizing and then asking what’s happened. He doesn’t respond, until finally I ask him just to tell me that Sarah is okay and he replies with a single magic word: “yes.”

At least there’s that.

As I pace, I listen to my dad’s old police scanner, which I grabbed from his room. There’s so much yelling and chatter that I can barely make anything out. There’s something about a suspect being in custody, then a lot of static. I hear Sarah’s name and someone mention the Paradise station, and then someone says something about a “Dumont” facility. After that all the messages stop. Radio silence.

Someone must have realized that the police radios weren’t secure enough. I imagine Agent Walker pulling a giant plug that disables the entire radio system, even though I know that’s not how any of this actually works.

An internet search of “Dumont facility FBI” brings up some articles about some huge, strictly off-limits FBI compound in Dumont, Ohio, about two hours away.

If Sarah has been taken in, I have to believe that she is being detained in the station jail and not being shipped out to some secret FBI prison. And so at dawn I take a chance and head downstairs and out into the front yard. Nana’s no longer at her post, so I guess her orders were just to make sure I stayed in through the night. I
jump in my truck and head into town. Dad’s phone’s going straight to voice mail by now. I park across from the station, watching, trying to get a look at Sarah or anyone else coming in or out. Every time the front door swings open, my chest pounds, only to be disappointed when someone other than Sarah walks out. Each time this happens, I get a little more worried.

It’s a little past 8 a.m. when Sarah comes outside, and I feel so supercharged with happiness and relief. She’s still here. They’ve let her go. Maybe this will end up all right after all.

Sarah looks a little scared, and it’s my first instinct to jump out and sprint straight to her. Instead, I drive along beside her as she walks down the street.

“Sarah,” I say as I pull up to the curb. The whites of her eyes are red, like she’s been crying recently. “Get in.”

“My parents are coming,” she says. “They came to the station when they realized I wasn’t at home and stuff was going crazy outside, but the agents at the front desk made them go back home—threatened to have them arrested if they stayed around asking questions about what happened. I told them to pick me up at the grocery store down the street so they wouldn’t have to come back in. They’re going to have so many questions.”

“Tell them I’m taking you home.”

“My cell phone’s gone.”

“You can use my mine,” I say, leaning over and opening the passenger-side door.

After a short phone call—lots of “I’ll explain in five minutes when I’m home”—she hands me back my phone and lowers her head into her hands.

“What are you going to tell them?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I’ll figure something out. Maybe I can tell them I need some sleep before we talk.”

“Are you okay?”

“No,” she says through her fingers. “John came back. I got super emotional and weird with him because I was feeling so crappy about everything before he just magically showed up, and then the FBI tackled me. I don’t know where John is now, and I am officially pegged as a person who is somehow connected to all this. I’ve been sitting in an interrogation room for the last three hours.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“Nothing,” she says. “It was that Walker agent and a few other people. Noto. And some guy named Purdy.”

I note the name—the agent GUARD talked to on the phone. Is he the one in charge of everything going on in town?

Sarah continues.

“They wanted to know why John came to see me, and I told them it was because we made out a few times
before he went crazy and he probably thought that I’d do it again if he showed up and threw pebbles at my window like we were in some kind of rom-com. I just pretended to be dumb.”

“And they believed that?”

“No, I don’t think so. But they let me go, at least. They have John. I think that’s all they really cared about. They just told me to make sure I didn’t leave town or there’d be trouble.” She shakes her head. “I’m on a freaking
no fly
list they said, as if I’d try to skip the country or something.”

“Shit.”

“I know.” Sarah pulls the edge of her gray sweater over her fingertips. “I feel so stupid. This is my fault.”

“No, it’s mine. My dad saw the text you sent. I shouldn’t have let that happen.”

She looks surprised about this for a second—even happy that what happened last night might not have been her fault. Then her face falls.

“They were probably watching me anyway. I should have told him, but instead I just ran outside. I was so happy to see him.”

“You don’t know that they had eyes on you.”

“I don’t know what they’ve done with him,” she says. Her voice is about to crack. “John . . .”

“I think he’s in Dumont. There’s some kind of FBI facility near the state border.”

“What?!” she practically shouts, jumping in her seat and straining against the seat belt. “We have to go. I have to talk to him. I have to explain to him that I didn’t—”

“No way, Sarah. You were just held and interrogated for being caught with him. You may not realize this now, but they could have arrested you for helping a criminal. The dude is on the
most-wanted
list, Sarah. I’m not taking you to an FBI prison so you can get yourself in more trouble. It’s not what he would want.”

The words come spilling out of me. Suddenly I’m hearing John’s voice in my head. That I have to make sure she’s kept safe. And right now, that means keeping her as far away from the Loric and the Mogs as I can.

“Besides,” I say, softening up a little. “He has superpowers. Do you really think he’s going to stay locked up for long?”

“I guess you’re right. Sam was with him, but Six wasn’t. She’ll track them down if he’s in trouble, I bet.”

“I’m sure. She’s one girl I’d hate to have mad at me.”

Sarah scowls a little, but I can’t decipher what the expression means.

“I’ve got to buy a new phone,” she says. “Or try to get mine back from the FBI.” She gets quieter. “Like that’ll ever happen.”

“You should buy a burner phone.”

“A what?”

“You know,” I say. “Like they have in shows about drug dealers and stuff. A prepaid cell phone. You know the FBI’s going to be tracking every text message and call you get on your old number.”

“God. Are we like drug dealers now?” she asks, staring out the window of my truck like I’ve watched her do a thousand times. “How is this our lives?”

“Don’t blame me,” I say. “Blame the impending war for our planet between the humanoid aliens and shark-faced bastards with magical swords.”

When I drop her off, her parents are waiting on the front porch. I watch as their expressions run the gamut from worried, to relieved, to furious, then some weird mixture of all of them. I stay in the truck, but her dad makes sure to shoot me a glare that tells me in no subtle way that he’s blaming me for whatever happened to his daughter. After all, I’m the party-loving ex they had to pry her away from over the summer to begin with. My chest falls a little. Maybe dropping her off wasn’t the best idea. Her cell phone’s gone. If I’m lucky, she’ll be able to keep her computer for “study purposes.” Otherwise, there’s no way the Harts are letting me see or talk to their daughter.

It’s late in the afternoon when I finally hear back from Dad, who’s been at work since he caught me in his office. He calls while I’m deep into researching a series
of crop circles a few counties west of us, though I’m pretty sure that they’re just hoaxes and have nothing to do with actual aliens.

“Hi,” I say when I answer the phone. I’m not sure whether to expect to be yelled at or apologized to. Probably the first one.

Instead, I hear a long sigh on the other end of the line.

“Oh, thank God,” Dad says.

He sounds so relieved—what did he think had happened to me?

“What is it?” I ask.

“Where are you?”

“At home.”

“Good. Have you talked to Sarah?”

“Not since this morning.”

“Listen.” He pauses for a moment and then starts talking quieter. “Stay where you are. You can’t leave the house. I assume the agents took Sarah’s phone away from her for evidence, but if you can, get her a message telling her to stay put too. She’s a good girl. I always liked her. She shouldn’t be wrapped up in all this.”

“Dad, what’s going on?” My imagination is suddenly going wild and picturing Mogadorian ships landing all over Paradise—though I have no idea what they would even look like.

“I can’t really say. But something’s happened that’s
causing the FBI to go crazy. It’s possible there might be one or two people we recently detained who are now unaccounted for. Seems like some weird stuff is going on over in Dumont where they were taken. I just want to make sure neither of you kids got any bright ideas of running away with your classmates if they wandered back through town.”

John and Sam. They’ve escaped.

That didn’t take long.

“I’ll stay here, Dad.”

Even as I say my good-byes, I’m on my computer, emailing Sarah.

Her response is an entire page of exclamation marks.

GUARD is the next person I contact. I’ve told him that one of my friends was brought in for questioning and that one of the Loric has been taken into custody. He’s happy to hear that John has escaped.

I lean back in my chair. He’s right. Of course he’s right. If the FBI took John into custody and interrogated Sarah after the fact, they definitely aren’t working on our side.