Untaken (44 page)

Gracie took my hand and gave it a squeeze, but she looked about as scared as I felt. The figure was vaguely human-shaped, but the resemblance ended there. It wore a robe made from strange pale webbing. Its skin was yellow, and its face a terrible wrinkled pucker.

“What in the hell?” one of the marines breathed.

“What is that? Is that one of them? Holy shit!”

“Leave him alone,” Jake whispered. “Leave him be. You said you’d let them go if I came out.”

“Get it on the truck,” said General. “Christ, is it still alive?”

“Yes Sir,” said one of the soldiers who was holding the creature. From the careful way he held the skinny arm, I got the feeling he wasn’t too thrilled to be up close and personal with it. “Don’t look like it’ll stay alive much longer, but it’s still breathing. That’s why we hauled it out instead of leaving it for Tech. At least I think it’s breathing. Did you ever see one like this? I thought they looked like us.”

“Get it on the truck,” ordered the General. “And stay with it. You’ll have to report to quarantine as soon as we get back on base.” The two soldiers exchanged uneasy glances.

“No!” cried Jake. “You promised!”

“Take this one, too,” said the General.

“What about the kids?”

“Shoot them.” The General shrugged.

Gracie’s gaze met mine. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. You told me, and now I’m telling you. It’s them. It’s the fault of those fuckers who think that the world is theirs to take.”

The marine carrying Jake gave a shout of pain, and I twisted my head around in time to see Jake sinking his teeth into the flesh of his hand. Jake squirmed free and ran to where we lay. We reached out to pull him close.

“You should have gone,” Gracie told him. “I’m sorry, Jake, I should just have let you go before.”

“Just shoot all three of them,” said the General. “Our orders were to bring back one live specimen and one hostile vessel, and we’ve got that, and how…just make sure you don’t damage the ship.”

“Why didn’t you leave?” I asked Jake. I hugged him tight.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s going to be okay. I did it!”

I didn’t have the heart to tell the kid that we ran out of “okay” a long time ago. Why make it harder for him? I pulled Gracie in tight with one arm and Jake with the other. The three of us together one last time.

I hoped I wouldn’t be able to feel it.

Boots scuffed in the dirt by my head.

“Stand clear. Aim. Fire!”

A glaring white light penetrated my eyelids, and I wondered if this was what it was like to die.

I didn’t hear the guns, or feel any pain. It was quick, then.

I hoped it had been quick for the others.

A warm wind whipped up around me, sending my hair flying. Jake’s side was still pressed against me there on my left, Gracie wrapped tightly under my right arm. The hot smell of scorched sugar filled the air and a huge sound that was almost, but not quite, music deafened me. I blinked my smarting eyes, and as they adjusted to the blinding light, I realized I was still in the forest. Still alive.

A huge silver ship descended, dwarfing the tiny craft in the clearing, blotting out the darkening sky. The earth thrummed and vibrated. Jake pulled away from me and sat up. I squinted at him, shielding my eyes against the light. His hands were raised to the sky and he was laughing. I sat up too, brushing leaves off my clothes.

Gracie stared around her, eyes wide. “What is it?” she mouthed to me. Her hand slid into mine.

Figures swam out of the light. They glided forward, to stand around the three of us in a protective circle. Some looked human, but some were tall, like the creature the soldiers pulled from the ship, and there were others, too, squatter and broader. They may have looked different, but now I understood that somehow, they were all the same.

Beyond the bodies of the Space Men, the soldiers ran this way and that. One man fell close by, and a shimmering Drone swooped in to claim him.
The General screamed orders, but his voice was cut off by a tentacle which wrapped almost lovingly round his neck and drew him in to the body of a Drone. There was an occasional burst of gunfire, but the Drones were swift and sure.

Finally, the screams were silenced, and the ring of beings around the three of us stepped away. Two of the Space Men stood before us, supporting the one from the ship between them. It reached out a hand to Jake.

“No,” said Jake. “I told you, I’m not going.”

Gracie climbed stiffly to her feet.

“Jake, I’m so sorry. I really am. I just wanted to keep you safe.”

“I know,” said Jake. He took her hand, then reached for mine, so that the three of us stood in a circle of our own, shutting out the ship, the invaders, all of it.

“I should have stayed with you and Brandon, and…Dog.” His voice broke and tears swam in his eyes. “I wanted to come to you before, but he said no. He said we had to leave, but the Bad Men killed Dog. And they were going to kill you. He said you were the same as the Bad Men, but I know you’re not. I love you, and I love Brandon and I love Dog, but—”

“But you have to go,” I said.

Jake shook his head. “I should stay here.”

“Jake, it’s okay. If you want to go with them, then you should. We love you, too. That’s why we want you to do what you feel is right. If you love people, you let them be happy, even if that happy makes you sad,” I told him.

“I don’t want you to be sad.”

I smiled, although it hurt like hell to do it. “Well, we’re gonna be real sad if you’re just telling us what you think we want to hear.”

Jake tried to smile back. “I tried to be like you.”

“You are like us. You’re a good kid. You’re a brave kid. But you belong with them.”

He nodded. A tear slid down his nose.

“The Herd is leaving,” he said. His voice sounded older somehow. “I can feel them up there, they’re moving on.”

“Then you should go. Don’t get left behind again, kid.”

The Space Men in the clearing were moving on too. One by one, they walked into the place where the light was at its greatest intensity, and vanished. The light moved forward to consume Jake’s ship, the surrounding trees groaning and snapping as it moved up through the forest.

The Drones went last, dragging the bodies of the soldiers.

The General’s thick hands still clutched at the air between the tentacles of one of them and I shuddered. Was it still him in there, or the new creature he would become?

Then it was just the three of us.

“Will we see you again?” asked Gracie.

Jake shook his head.

“Then it’s been a pleasure, you crazy little fuck,” I said, pulling Jake into a tight hug.

Gracie threw her arm around the both of us, and I breathed in the warm scent of Jake’s hair for the last time.

“Dog…” gulped Jake.

“We’ll take care of Dog,” I told him.

Jake nodded through his tears, then put his hand in his pocket. “Take care of this, too!” He had to shout to be heard over the rising song of the spaceship’s engines. He pressed something into my hand.

“What is it?” I asked him

“A special thing. A together thing. For you and Gracie. And for me. And for Dog,” And then he, too, was swallowed by the light, and Gracie and I were alone in the twilight of the forest.

When I opened my hand, the Massachusetts quarter winked up at me.

Gracie

e buried Dog behind the cabin, where Jake’s miraculous sunflowers grew so tall it looked as though they would snag on the clouds and pull them down from the sky.

It turned out that a furry tail sweeping things off tables, and a soggy nose shoved into your face, was something you missed as soon as it was gone.

There would be another dog. It might even get a proper name this time. Brandon liked the name “Jake.”

The things from Jake’s room went into the small grave, his collection of oddments, the stack of his drawings, and, lastly, the Massachusetts quarter.

I kind of understood the way Jake buried all those Shinys now.

A grave is not a place to forget someone.

It’s a place where you can go to remember all the good things about them.

As well as the quarter, we put in the sleeve of the album my dad used to play. And the photograph Brandon found of his dad, very young, with his arm around a lady who had Brandon’s eyes.

This grave was for them, too.

For our families, who we hadn’t given up hope of finding some day. Mom and Dad, Liam and Mikey.

It was for the people who were lost. For Mona and Stephie. For the Novaks. For Mrs. Ostrinsky, and Jean and Frank and Lou, and all the others at the Center we never had time to learn the names of. It was for the soldiers, too. The ones who died in woods and became something new. It was for Doc and for Terry.

Even them.

Most of all, it was for us. The three of us.

For Jake, off beyond the edge of the world, learning how to be his own true self.

And for Brandon and I, because what we had here wasn’t an ending. It was a whole world waiting to be rebuilt. We just had to be brave enough to remember how.

J.E. Anckorn
has been an artist and writer ever since she began to surreptitiously doodle on school supplies instead of learning about practical things, like osmosis and mathematics. After barely surviving a freak mathematical osmosis disaster, she set out to travel the world, living in New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong before returning to her native Britain- just in time to marry an American and leave for the U.S.A.