Untaken (9 page)

Normally, there’d be a little patch of streetlight spilling in from outside, but tonight there wasn’t even that, just the creepy blue glow of the moon. I groped along the corridor, making my way into the kitchen by memory. My stumbling feet and my quick gulps of breath sounded far too loud. Just like there was no electric light to banish the dark, there was no roar from the nearby Pike to hide my footsteps from whatever might be crouched in the blackness, listening.

Even the crickets had given up shrilling.

I made myself walk over to the kitchen window, not wanting to look out through the miraculously unbroken pane.

The silver ships were back in the sky, as if they’d never descended at all.

There were more stars up there than I’d ever remembered seeing in my entire life. Could the whole city of Boston be dark? I slid into a chair and leaned my throbbing head on the cool kitchen table. It was covered with a thin film of grit, which stuck to my sweaty forehead. It was obvious my parents weren’t home yet. If the power had gone out downtown, there’d be no T service.

Maybe the four of them were camped out in the Aquarium? It’d be Mikey’s dream come true. Mom would have phoned Dad, and he’d have come to find them, thinking I was home safe with Gilda. Tomorrow, they’d come for me.

My stomach growled loudly, seemingly echoing more than usual in the heavy silence, and I jumped at the sound. I hadn’t realized I was starving. I was kind of mad with my body, like it should realize something major had gone down and shouldn’t be pestering me with everyday things like dinner, but my stupid stomach kept right on growling, and I decided there was no sense in being hungry on top of everything else.

Sometimes, in the winter, the snow would bring tree branches down on the power lines and we’d lose electricity for an hour or two, so I knew the drill. I opened the fridge door just long enough to grab some bread, bologna and a can of soda, then shut it quickly to keep the cold in. I found a box of smooth, yellow candles at the back of the cabinet, and used matches to melt the bottom of one of them a little so it would stand up in a saucer.

It was tempting to hide out in the closet some more, but the last thing I needed was to brush the candle flame against one of the winter coats and burn the house down.

After I fixed myself a sandwich, I carried it out to the porch to eat. I didn’t want to be out here, but if the ships fell again, I wanted to know as soon as possible. I held my candle on its saucer like Wee Willie Winkie in the nursery rhyme book my mom used to read to me when I was a baby. Liam preferred stories about trains and trucks, and of course, Mikey only liked things about turtles and whales and penguins, so last year I had taken the old nursery rhyme book from Liam’s room and put it back on my own shelf. It was kind of a baby book for a fourteen-year-old girl to have, but I liked to look at the pictures. The characters in those stories were so familiar to me, it was more like looking at old family photographs than illustrations in a story book.

Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The walls of our house had some pretty big cracks running through them and the whole thing looked lopsided, as though the house had given itself a good stretch, then settled back down to sleep again in a slightly different position. Some of the other houses on the street had holes blown out of the roofs, or entire sides fallen away, a normal bedroom or living room, the furniture still arranged just so, open and displayed to the street. It was like accidentally catching an eye full of someone with no clothes on.

I sat on my rocker and ate my sandwich. Then I remembered my tablet. Obviously there was no power right now, but the battery was usually good for a couple of hours before it needed charging.

I figured I may as well try to get myself a little information while I waited for Mom and Dad and the boys to come back.

At first, it was the same old “unable to connect to wireless network” crap, but after a while, the familiar homepage filled the screen. Facebook kept timing out, and Google was a bust, but the forum I liked best, Shriver’s Outpost, was running.

Shriver’s Outpost had started out as a fan forum dedicated to the main character of the Galactopia series, Shawn Shriver—a renegade starship Captain. They always described him as “
Renegade starship Captain, Shawn Shriver”
on the back covers of the books. It was a kind of in-joke for us Outposters.

The “off-topic” sub forums were where the Outpost really became interesting. Only n00bs still posted stuff about the Galactopia books themselves after the TV series finished and the movie got put on indefinite hold.

The off-topic threads were where the cool kids hung out, and there were some really cool kids on that forum. Some cool grown-ups, too.

I figured there was nothing like a group of Sci-Fi nerds if you wanted some truly informed opinions on an alien invasion. There was one poster in particular, “6_star” who was rumored to work for NASA. She always brought the facts when some troll criticized the tech in the Galactopia books. The Outposters required technical accuracy in their Sci-fi and considered the Galactopia books to be the best around. It was just that sort of a fandom.

6_star had all the best gossip about the Space Men. Except, on Shriver’s Outpost, we had to call it “speculation.”

The good thing and the bad thing about a site like the Outpost is that you’re never sure if you’re really talking to who you think you are, but I tended to believe what those guys said. Even if 6_star was really some chick who worked for Happy Burger and lived in her mom’s basement, after what had happened today, she’d been right about a lot of things.

More things than the TV news guys, anyway.

The Outposters weren’t too crazy about “the mass media.” They thought the TV news and even the big online sites just told everyone what they needed to hear to make them keep on trusting the government. The Outposters were more concerned with facts. So, I didn’t even look at any of the big news sites, even the BBC, who the Outposters loved like they loved anything British.

I just went right to Shriver’s Outpost to see who was online.

As it turned out, no one but me.

There were a couple of unread posts in the off-topic forum, though, and I was excited to see that they were both by 6_star. The first post was some link to a Wikipedia article about “parasitoid wasps” which although awesomely gross—and still online, figures Wikipedia would be the last thing standing—didn’t seem that useful to me. The second post was a list of emergency evacuation centers. 6_star had added a line of her own text under the copy and paste job. “
Be safe & see you on Io 12.”

Io 12 was Shawn Shriver’s home planet. He spent the whole series trying to get back there. I figured if there was anywhere safe, then the places on the list 6_star had posted had to be them. The nearest center to us was in Needham.

The best thing to do, it seemed, was to wait at our house for my family so we could all go to this evacuation center together. Last year, Mom had taken Liam and Mikey and me camping, and I’d read this great book on what to do if you get lost in the woods. What I remembered from that book most of all, is that if you got separated from your buddies, you were supposed to stay put so they could come find you. Now, Newton isn’t exactly the deep woods, but I figured the advice was still good.

If my family hadn’t turned up by the time the food in the fridge ran out, I’d go to the center by myself, and leave a note so they’d know where I was. Logically thinking—like a good Outposter—the center would be the most likely place for them to go anyway, if for some reason they couldn’t make it home.

I would have loved to have stayed online longer just to see if any other Outposters logged on, but my battery had already gone down to forty-five percent, and I wanted to be able to get online later if I had to, so I shut down the tablet and went indoors.

My room looked so normal; it spooked me worse than the blown-apart houses somehow. Once I was in bed, there was only the dark of the night and the silence to show anything terrible had happened, and that I was all alone, waiting to see if real life alien invaders were going to blow me to bits as I slept. The thought got me giggling again, but I didn’t like the way my laughter echoed in the black silence of my room. I sounded like a crazy person.

Part of my mind wanted to stay alert and listen for Mom and Dad or another attack, but the other part felt like it was covered in some terrible blank fog that just wanted me to sleep and sleep until things were normal. I was in shock, I guess. That was something else the woodland book had said could happen. Every now and then, the shocked part would drag the alert part down into some confusing half-waking dream, and I’d only realize I’d slept at all when I’d jerk awake with a yell.

Once, I saw the beam of a flashlight through one of the windows, and lay still in bed, straining for the sound of dad’s keys in the door, but after a while, the flashlight moved on.

Sunlight flooded in through the open curtains. I woke up gasping and dazed, painted from head to toe with sweat from a nightmare I only half remembered. I stumbled out of bed and staggered to the window. I wanted so much for everything to be normal out there—Mr. Novak next door running his mower, my mom’s car parked in the drive, Mikey & Liam riding their bikes on the lawn—that for a second, I almost saw it that way through sheer willpower.

Then my dream faded and I was left staring out at the ruined street. I could hardly bring myself to look skyward. When I did, the ships were still there, silent and stationary. The sight of them made me feel cold all over, like I’d plunged into an icy lake, out of my depth and sinking helplessly. I couldn’t help but feel the ships were watching. Waiting.

I tried the TV, but the power was still out. I dragged the little battery operated radio out of dad’s workshop and dialed through the bands, hoping to find some news.

What I got instead was a lot of crackle and a creepy robotic voice shrilling “
Stay in your homes. Await further instruction. Seek shelter if needed.”
Then there was a list of all the local places you could go for help, including 6_star’s place in Needham.

I didn’t listen for long. In a way, I was happy there’d been no news. It was like, if I heard that anything really bad was happening
officially
then it would be true.

The only sound in the house was the tick of the clock on the wall. The clock ran on batteries as brisk and businesslike as it had yesterday, but the hour hand seemed to crawl. I knew that if I wanted to speed that clock up, I should keep busy until Mom and Dad got home, but my mind didn’t seem to want to fixate on any one thing.

I grabbed a broom and swept up some of the plaster dust and broken glass from the living room windows, then got distracted by the distant rattle of a helicopter. My ears pricked at the wail of sirens, but they didn’t come any closer, and after a while, they faded away to nothing.

When I went to the bathroom, the toilet wouldn’t flush properly and flooded the bathroom with gross pee water when I tried to flush it a second time. I needed to get a mop, to fix it before Mom got home. The toilet gurgled like it was dying and glugged out more water. I skipped back into the hall in my sodden sneakers and slammed the door shut on the whole mess. The plumbing must have been screwed up by all the explosions or something; I wouldn’t be able to fix it with just a bit of mopping. I couldn’t fix anything! I breathed in a great whoop of air, and before I knew it, I was sobbing—ugly, little kid sobbing—with streamers of snot hanging down my face and everything. It was pathetic. I was being pathetic. How was crying going to fix any of this? My mom and dad would know what to do.

It would all be okay as soon as they got home.

All through the day, I listened for the familiar sound of a car engine, or the voices of my mom and my brothers, but they didn’t come. There had to be a lot of people downtown, and surely the Police or someone was organizing rides for people. Someone would be in charge. In fact, the most likely thing, now that I thought about it properly, was that all of them had been taken to one of 6_star’s emergency centers, just waiting for the all-clear to come home again.

So really, there was no need to panic just because they hadn’t shown up the very first day.