The Fellowship for Alien Detection (20 page)

“Sorry,” said Dodger.

“You—” Harry began, but his brow furrowed into a knot and he stopped.

Dodger suddenly flinched. Where was—

The shard of crystal was by his feet. Harry didn't seem to have noticed it. But he was looking at the lunch box.

“What is that?” he asked.

“It's a radio,” said Dodger. “I got it from some kids.”

“Kids?” Harry asked. “You were hanging out with some kids? Who?”

“Nobody,” said Dodger, “just people from the radio gathering. Anyway, it doesn't work.”

Dodger placed his foot gently over the crystal. “Dad, I'm sorry. I was just out here, and I swear I only meant to relax for a second.”

Harry kept looking at the radio. Then he looked back at Dodger, and then off into space near Dodger. “I was just worried,” he said. That word surprised Dodger a little. Worried? Maybe Harry had meant it like
disappointed
, but the way he'd said it was different. Could this be actual worry?

“The gathering down there is almost over,” Harry continued. “I was in there for a bit, looking for you. . . .” He breathed slowly, like he was trying to calm down. “They, those people down there, are saying they hear all kinds of stuff: aliens, spy transmissions, Elvis. . . .”

“We don't need to go there,” said Dodger. “It's kinda weird.”

Harry made a slight chuckle. “I'll say. But what about your research . . .”

“I got all the information I needed from these two kids I met,” Dodger lied. Though, in a way, he had.

“Um, okay.” Harry seemed to be weighing this. Then he shrugged. “I still can't believe you fell asleep out here.”

“Sorry.”

“You must be hungry. I can reheat the dogs and beans.” Harry turned and started out of the ruins.

“I'm starving,” said Dodger. He knelt and scooped up the crystal. It immediately began to glow, but he pressed back against it, keeping its energy at bay as he stuffed it in the back of his jeans.

He followed Harry back to the campsite, his head still fuzzy and spacey feeling.

As he walked, he thought about the broadcast he'd heard. A new detail had stood out: the bit about the 1993 model-year clearance sale . . . which meant that in Juliette, it was 1994.

How was that possible? And what did it mean? Was he hearing a broadcast from back in time? In that case, maybe he couldn't find the town because it no longer existed, like it had been abandoned sometime in the last twenty years. But then how would its radio station still be broadcasting, and why would it be broadcasting its signal from that day? Also, nobody on the station was talking about the town shutting down or closing or anything like that.

So maybe instead it meant that Juliette was still out there, but stuck in 1994. Like, repeating the same April day over and over again? Did that mean it was in some kind of time loop? And if so, did that mean that it was put
in
the time loop on that April day in 1994?

Whatever the explanation, Dodger realized that this meant something: Even though Juliette wasn't on any maps now, it might be on an older map, something from before 1994. Dodger knew that none of his maps were that old. The oldest map he had was probably from sometime in the 2000s. It would take a lot of searching online, if there was something there at all, because all the maps on Google or the other usual map sites were completely up-to-date.

A library might have something. Dodger could find one to go to tomorrow. He also knew what direction they'd head in the morning from another clue in the broadcast. The sports reporter had given a Suns score, and even though Dodger barely cared about professional sports, he at least knew that the Suns were an NBA team from Phoenix. A possible clue that Juliette was in Arizona, too, or New Mexico. They didn't have a professional basketball team either, and so might follow Phoenix. Dodger knew that, for example, people as far from Seattle as Idaho still followed the Mariners. Regardless, he at least had a general direction: southeast. And a new goal: Find an old map.

And on the way, he could continue to work on the biggest question of all:
What am I?

It was a mystery that he couldn't wait to explore.

Burns, OR, July 5, 11:14 a.m.

The next morning Dodger stood beside the librarian of the Harney County Library. He had managed to get from her a look similar to what he often inspired in Harry.

“Wait, explain that again?” the librarian asked, standing up from the shelves along the interior wall of the small, brick building. She pulled her glasses down from her black-and-gray-streaked hair and peered at Dodger like he was something written in very small print.

“I need a road atlas, or state maps, or a guidebook, of the Southwest, but I need it to be old. These are all too new.”

“You mean like historical maps? We have a few of those books of gold rush era maps, but I'm afraid they're only of local areas, the kind that people around here would be interested in.”

“They don't need to be that historical,” said Dodger, “just kinda. Like from around 1993.”

“1993. But wouldn't a new map be more up-to-date?”

“No,” said Dodger. “I mean, yes, but that's not what I'm looking for.”

The librarian squinted, like this was hurting her head. “You know, we spend a significant amount of our budget each year trying to keep our reference books current. Why would someone come to the library for a guidebook or an atlas if it was outdated? But then here you are asking for exactly that.”

“Sorry,” said Dodger. “It's for a project.”

“And it has to be from the early nineties?” she asked, as if that decade could not have been less cartographically important.

“Yeah. Or a little older, I guess. I mean, really old could be good, but that might be too old.”

The librarian gazed at her stacks again. She kept staring, and Dodger wondered if she was hoping he and his weird request would just disappear if she gave it enough time. Finally she shook her head. “I'm afraid you're going to have to try a used bookstore, though I don't know what value they'd find in keeping a not-new but also not-old atlas. Otherwise you should probably try to find yourself a map collector.” She sighed. “But even then, the nineties . . . I don't know.”

“Okay,” said Dodger, “thanks. I'll check those historical maps before I go.”

So, after futilely trying to get his meBox to connect to the Wi-Fi, Dodger spent some time online via the library computer. A half hour of searches taught him that finding a map that was not new but also not historical was nearly impossible.

He did, however, find three map collectors that were roughly along their route toward the Southwest. Of the three, a place in the town of Lucky Springs, Nevada, seemed the most promising. Not only because of its reportedly giant collection, but also because it turned out that Lucky Springs was also a town that was mentioned on the We Are the Missing website. A handful of people there had claimed to have experienced missing time and alien abduction. A fortunate coincidence. If his map search came up empty, maybe Dodger could talk to these people or something.

It didn't occur to him to email Alex Keller with an update until he was back in the car. Oh well. He didn't know how that would help, anyway. Plus, he liked this feeling of being off exploring, his whereabouts unknown.

Lucky Springs, NV, July 5, 2:25 p.m.

“So, why are we going here again?” asked Harry as another hour of the
Surge McFarlain Show
came to a frothing close.

They'd been humming across Nevada for two hours and were now winding down a rocky canyon road.

“I told you,” Dodger mumbled, gazing out the window at the canyon walls made of gray rock that was crinkled like tinfoil. “There's a museum here that's supposed to have good maps.”

“And you need an old map,” said Harry.

“Yeah. A few of them.”

“And that's because this town that you're looking for doesn't show up on the GPS or in a normal old atlas or anything. . . .”

“Yeah.”

“And so, why is that again?” Harry had that perplexed tone again.

“Because the town is too old,” said Dodger, thinking that wasn't technically a lie.

“So, it's like a ghost town.”

“Yeah.” Dodger wondered how he would answer the obvious next question, a question so obvious in fact that Dodger was kind of amazed it hadn't come up before. Surely now would be the time for Harry to ask,
What are you expecting to find in Juliette?

But instead, Harry leaned forward and started smacking at the display behind the steering wheel. “You know,” he said, “I think that gas station back there may have gypped us. This tank is going down too fast.” He peered at the gas gauge. “Typical,” he muttered. “Small town gas station looking to stick it to the tourists.” His large hands flexed on the steering wheel. “Probably think just because we drive a nice car that we're made of money.”

Dodger shifted his body to stare more fully out his window. Not that he at all enjoyed Harry's paranoid theories, but he was glad to have avoided that question. Because what
did
Dodger expect to find in Juliette? He wasn't sure. A town stuck repeating the same day, he thought, but also a town that he was connected to by the black crystal, and the abilities he'd gotten from it.

He'd spent the drive with the shard of crystal tucked in the back of his belt, so that as mile after mile of Nevada passed by, it pressed against the lower half of his spine and made a warm humming sensation like a massage chair. He felt the power coursing through him like he was a toy with a new battery clipped into its socket. Every once in a while he felt a rush, and the faintest tinge of an orange glow would start to build at his fingertips. But he could push it back in, keep it hidden.

What was in Juliette? Dodger thought there must be more of this crystal. Otherwise, why would he hear the radio station through it? Actually, he thought there might be a lot more, perhaps even the
source
, whatever this crystal had come from.

As to why he was connected to the crystal, all he could come up with was what Sid had said the day before: because he was an alien. That couldn't make any sense, could it? Sure, he'd always felt different, and it had always seemed like life didn't fit him right, but still, he'd gotten enough scrapes and cuts in life to know that he didn't have green blood or anything like that. And hearing a radio station in his head was one thing, but he wasn't seeing spaceships or little green men.

But he had seen Juliette, or something that seemed like it, in dreams, so much so that he'd drawn a map of it, and then he'd seen it again last night in the ruins. And he didn't know what the reason might be, but he felt a strange certainty that Juliette was somehow . . . home. There was no logic to it, but it seemed right.

Could he really be from this other place? But how? After all, he looked like his parents. It wasn't like he could be some sort of alien baby that had been switched at birth or whatever. And yet, first the radio in his head, then the crystal, then his ability to control its energy. Dodger couldn't help thinking of these developments as stages . . . of what?
Of me changing, or . . . reverting
. He didn't quite know, but he wondered: What would be next? Reading minds? Flying a spaceship? Would this continue the closer he got to Juliette? He had no idea, but he found that the thought excited him.

But until he could find the town, he was pretty sure he had to keep just about
all
of this from Harry. He glanced over at the man silently gripping the steering wheel, while every now and then stealing glances over at Dodger as if he were suspicious of him. Thirteen years of Harry Lane had made Dodger pretty sure of what would happen if he found out about Dodger's radio stations and glowing crystals and fingertip lights.

It would be hurtling-back-to-Seattle time, Harry on the phone with lawyers to go after the Keller Foundation, and doctors and psych wards to deal with Dodger. It was one thing for Harry to have to put up with a kid who was a constant disappointment. It was another for Harry to have to contend with having an actual paranormal freak for a son. He did not see Harry dealing well with that at all.

Luckily, despite last night's events and the strange glances now, Harry still seemed to be on board with this trip, if for nothing more than the big payout. He reinforced this with his reaction as they crossed a small steel bridge and wound up the other side of the canyon to the town of Lucky Springs.

“Would you look at that . . .” he said, sounding as close to awestruck as Dodger had ever heard.

Lucky Springs was nestled snugly into a narrow valley just above a frothy river that cascaded through rocky chutes. Gray peaks towered high overhead like the bows of upended ships, their flanks quaking with aspen groves. The town was quaint and looked like it had been unchanged since the eighteen hundreds.

That was, except for the giant parking lot full of buses that had been built just below town.