Reese laughed out loud and looked over at David. He gave her a quick grin, and Reese noticed that his mouth was slightly crooked when he smiled, the right side angling up more than the left.
One of the phones in her lap beeped, and she scrambled to pick it up as David asked excitedly, “Are you getting a call?”
Her brief moment of laughter was swallowed by sharp disappointment. “No. My phone battery just died.”
At least she was too tired to be freaked out about it.
CHAPTER 5
As they approached Ash Springs, trees sprang up on the side of the road, pushing back the desert. When the town came into view, it was nothing more than a trailer park followed by a Shell station and a flimsy-looking two-story building. A couple of cars were parked in front.
David pulled up to one of the four gas pumps and turned off the car. Reese opened her door, and the smell of the desert wafted inside: brush and dirt, soured slightly by the smell of gasoline. She and David got out, their doors slamming shut in two sharp cracks. The sun was setting.
“We have to pay first,” David said, reading the instructions on the pump.
“Maybe we should both go in,” Reese suggested. She didn’t like the idea of splitting up.
“I agree.”
She walked around the car and noticed with a pang that the gas cap was still hanging down from the tank. Mr. Chapman had never had a chance to screw it shut. She did so now, feeling a bit queasy. When she looked up, she saw David wince. “Let’s go,” she said, and headed inside.
Behind the counter, a bored-looking guy in a beat-up Pearl Jam T-shirt was turning the pages of a magazine. He glanced up when they entered but did not seem particularly interested in them. They wandered down the two short aisles, searching for maps. David found a road atlas that cost $16.95.
“It’s too much,” Reese whispered. “We have to buy gas.” Her stomach growled. “And some food.”
He flipped the atlas open to the page on Nevada and scrutinized the tiny lines and letters. “We’re on 93 North, right?”
“Yeah.” Reese peered over his arm at the map. “Look, there’s Ash Springs,” she said.
With his finger, he traced a line that jutted west from 93 North. “We can take this—318 to 375, then to 6 and 95 North.”
“North? Don’t we have to go west?”
“Ninety-five will get us to Reno, and then we can get onto 80 West. That goes straight to Oakland.”
She took the atlas from him and followed the white lines he pointed out. “Okay,” she agreed, memorizing the road numbers. “You want me to drive for a while? You could get some sleep.” David had the dazed expression of someone who had been trying to stay alert for too long.
“Aren’t you tired?” he asked.
“Not as tired as you are. You’ve been driving all day.” He looked skeptical, and she said, “If I get too tired I’ll pull over and go to sleep. But I think we should keep going as long as we can.”
“All right,” David relented. “Let’s go pay.”
At the counter, Reese set down two granola bars, a large bag of Doritos, a Diet Coke, and a bottle of water. “Is there a pay phone around here?” she asked the attendant.
“Yeah, but it’s broken.”
“Do you know where the nearest pay phone is?” David asked.
“You might find one in Rachel. Don’t you have a cell phone?”
“No reception,” David said.
The boy shrugged. “It’s spotty out here. You know, military presence and all.”
“What military presence?” Reese asked.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” the boy said flatly.
“We drove up from Vegas,” Reese said. “Haven’t you heard about what’s going on?”
He shrugged. “Some crazy shit with birds, right? Whatever. I still gotta work.”
David’s eyebrows rose. “Well, we’re heading to 318 West,” he said. “Do you know how to get there?”
“Sure. Everybody who comes through here wants to go there.”
“Why?” David asked.
“It’s the Extraterrestrial Highway. You know, aliens. Area 51.” The boy whistled the X-Files theme song.
“Oh. Right,” David said. “So is it far from here?”
“You can’t miss the turnoff for 318. That’ll take you to Rachel too. Just keep an eye out for the Alien Fresh Jerky sign.”
“Alien jerky,” Reese repeated in disbelief.
“Alien fresh jerky,” he corrected her. “Can’t miss it.”
“Thanks,” David said. He turned to head back out to the gas pump, and Reese hurried to keep up with him.
“This place is crazy,” she whispered.
“No doubt,” David agreed, and pulled the gas nozzle out of the pump. He hesitated for a moment before unscrewing the cap to the tank, and Reese knew he was thinking about Mr. Chapman. She shivered, crossing her arms, and glanced nervously around the gas station. But there was nobody else there. Ash Springs was deserted except for them.
The sign advertising ALIEN FRESH JERKY appeared just as the sun dipped below the horizon. A green alien head—a pointed oval with black, almond-shaped eyes—peered out from the billboard. Near the sign was a brown shack that during the day might open into a farm stand but was now boarded shut.
Reese turned left onto 318, taking a sip of her Diet Coke. David had fallen asleep almost as soon as they had left the gas station, but the stop in Ash Springs—and the junk food—had refreshed Reese. Plus driving the well-lit streets of San Francisco was completely different from this lonely two-lane road in the middle of nowhere. The empty highway at twilight had an eerie feel, and her hands were sweaty from clinging to the wheel.
After the sun set, darkness descended quickly, and she turned on the car’s high beams. The center yellow dashes in the black road flashed past like Morse code. She heard David breathing in the passenger seat, and it felt as though the two of them were the only humans left alive in the world. She missed, fiercely, streetlights and skyscrapers and neon. There were dangers in the city, of course, but those were dangers she understood. She had no idea what was out in the middle of the desert. The blackness could be a beast that wanted only to swallow them whole.
When the road forked, she barely remembered to stay left in order to turn onto 375. She sped past a green sign that read EXTRATERRESTRIAL HIGHWAY and wondered what Julian would think about her driving down this road. He would probably be jealous. A couple of months ago he had tried to convince her to help him start a conspiracy news site called Black Mailbox, named after the object that was located off the side of the road near Area 51.
“That’s super geeky, Jules,” she said. They were in the journalism room after a deadline, drinking Diet Cokes and playing basketball with crumpled-up sheets of page proofs.
“Geeky is awesome,” he said, and emphasized his point by expertly tossing a paper ball into the trash can, which they had hooked onto the back of the door.
“The mailbox isn’t even black—you said it’s white now. If it’s going to be the name of a news site, shouldn’t it at least be accurate?” Reese crumpled up the proofs of her most recent story, “GSA Launches Anti-Bullying Awareness Week.” It banged off the edge of the trash can and fell to the floor. She groaned.
“It doesn’t matter what color it really is. It’s known as the black mailbox. And it’s not an alien mailbox—it’s just a regular mailbox where you go if you want to see UFOs over Area 51.”
“But the UFOs are alien spacecraft, aren’t they?”
“Maybe, maybe not. They could just be top-secret military fighter planes or something. Like the B-2 bomber. It was tested at Area 51. Black Mailbox is an awesome name.”
She had agreed to help him—they even discussed how she would play skeptic to Julian’s believer on their site—but shortly afterward she and David had qualified for nationals, and all her time was taken up with debate practice.
And then she had gone and messed up du
ring the semifinal round. All that work for nothing.
Reese glanced over at David. The dashboard lights didn’t illuminate much; he was mostly a shadow in the seat beside her, his head lolling against the passenger side window. In the dark bubble of the car, her thoughts drifted back to the night before semifinals. She had tried to stop herself from thinking about it too much—it wouldn’t do her any good to obsess over it—but she was all alone with David in the middle of nowhere. She couldn’t help herself.
They had won the quarterfinal round decisively. Mr. Chapman took them to dinner at a Southwestern restaurant to celebrate, and Reese remembered the blue corn enchiladas and garlicky guacamole with an audible hunger pang. After dinner they returned to the Holiday Inn, where most of the debaters were staying, and Mr. Chapman went to bed, telling them to get some sleep before the big day. But she and David were too excited to sleep. They bought sodas from the vending machine by the pool and staked out two deck chairs, spreading out their notes to quiz each other.
The pool area was crowded with other high school students. Some were swimming, but most were debaters like them, cramming in last-minute research before the big event. It was only the Holiday Inn—thoroughly and efficiently pedestrian in its decor—but Reese remembered the pool as if it had been decorated for a glittering party. She remembered lights hung in delicate strands around the perimeter, reflected in the water as hundreds of wavering stars. She remembered David leaning toward her, watching her with smiling eyes while she shuffled through notes and charts.
When the pool closed and all the students were forced to head upstairs, David walked her back to her room on the sixth floor even though he was on the fifth. The hallway carpet had a pattern of tiny, brownish-gold diamonds on a background of dark red, probably designed to withstand heavy foot traffic and spills, and Reese found herself staring at it intently as they neared her room. At the door, she shifted her backpack to one shoulder so that she could dig out her keycard, and David reached out to grab the bag before it slipped to the floor.
“Thanks,” she said. She had to open the front pocket of the backpack, and for some reason David didn’t let go of it. She looked up at him, and it was as if some kind of invisible switch inside her flipped. Her skin went hot, and her brain went blank. Her heartbeat accelerated. David’s straight black eyelashes were like the bristles of a fine paintbrush. His cheeks were tinged light pink.
The elevator at the end of the hall dinged open, and a crowd of debaters surged into the corridor. One of them called out, “Just kiss her already!”
The other students snickered, and Reese’s face burned with mortification. David jerked away from her, letting go of her backpack so suddenly, it banged sharply against her knee.
Reese spun around and slammed the keycard into the lock. She burst into the room and shoved the door closed just as she heard David call her name. Laughter ricocheted down the hallway. One of the kids called out, “She’s playing hard to get!”
Reese backed away from the door and sat down on the edge of the bed, dropping her backpack onto the floor. Her whole body shook. For months—ever since he broke up with his girlfriend back in November—her feelings for David had been building up. She had tried to ignore them, because they scared the living daylights out of her—she did not want to like someone. She did not want to be thinking about David when she was supposed to be doing something else. Maybe other girls liked that nervous, fluttery feeling in their stomachs, but she hated it. It made her feel out of control.
She had promised herself a long time ago, after overhearing one too many fights between her parents, that she wasn’t going to get involved in anything romantic. It wasn’t worth it. Her parents had divorced when she was nine, but for years afterward they would reconcile and then split up again. Every time things went south—which they inevitably did—Reese saw the way it wrecked her mother. Reese didn’t want to be like that. And that meant she wasn’t going to date anyone, and she definitely wasn’t going to like anyone.
She had never factored in the possibility that someone might like her. That the pull of that person might overrule her intellectual decision to deny her feelings.
David was knocking on the door, calling out, “Reese? Reese, let me talk to you.”
“Leave me alone,” she said, her voice hitching into a sob.
“Reese?”
“Leave me alone!” she yelled, and finally David went away. She should have been relieved—now he would definitely never be interested in her since she had overreacted like a freak—but instead she felt as if a dragging weight had been chained to her feet. She stared at her hands as hot tears fell onto her palms, and told herself to get over it. It was better this way. Safer.
The next day, she screwed up royally during semifinals. She could barely look at David, much less concentrate on the debate topic. No wonder they had lost.
She was still stuck in that memory, sinking lower and lower, when a shape flew directly into the headlights.
It was a bird, its wings flapping seemingly in slow motion, two pinpricks of yellow glowing where its eyes should be. “Shit!” Reese screamed.
She slammed on the brakes. The car, moving at sixty-five miles per hour, skidded forcefully down the asphalt. She flew forward, and then the seat belt jerked her back, contracting painfully across her chest. She heard David shouting. The brakes emitted a long, unending shriek.
The smoothness of the highway abruptly ended. The tires struck desert, and she felt the jarring impact right down into her bones. Loose rocks rumbled beneath the car; dust flew up into the high beams. The car had gone off the road, and now it was rolling downhill. Reese pumped frantically at the brakes, but it didn’t seem to make a difference.
There was a jolt so big, her head struck the roof, and the car banged down, hard, into an unseen ditch. It flipped, and her stomach flipped with it. The high beams bounced crazily over the desert. She saw the ground lit by the unnaturally bright lights; rocks smashed against the windshield. Something smashed into her head.
Everything went black.
CHAPTER 6
Reese heard a strange gurgling sound, like liquid being forced through a pipe. She tried to move, and it sent a shock of pain through her—pain so intense that she screamed and screamed—and then realized that the gurgling sound was the sound of her breath. Was she drowning? Panic erupted in her. She tried to swim, but her body was pinned beneath something hard and sharp, something that cut into her abdomen. The scream in her throat broke into a sob.
The darkness returned.
Next came the light, bright as the full moon, startling as a lightning flash. As it advanced, the ground rumbled, and she wondered if she had been in an earthquake. She thought: All those stories are true. I’m going toward the light.
The shriek of metal being torn apart exploded in her ears. The entire world rattled. She blinked; all she could see was blinding white light.
A machine groaned, and she heard voices she could not understand. She was suffocating in a haze of pain. She whimpered. Something was wrong with her—with all of her. Her whole body felt distorted, as if she were in a real-life fun-house mirror, and parts of her were swollen monstrously out of proportion. Was she dead? A screeching, metallic roar invaded all of her senses, blotting out thought.
All the pressure that had been holding her body immobile suddenly released. She fell out into the night air. It was cool and dry.
The smell of the desert. Hands beneath her body. Fingers pressed into her stomach, and she cried out. The gurgling sound returned.
She couldn’t breathe.
She felt motion beneath her, around her, but her body was so still. She could not move. She tried to wriggle her toes, but she did not know if she succeeded. Terror engulfed her. She tried to speak, but her mouth would not open. She heard a low beeping sound, like a heart monitor. Someone touched her hand, and she felt a pressure on her wrist. Something cool slid into her, and the world went blank.
A door slammed. W
heels rattled along a tile floor. A fan hummed on. Wind swept over her skin. When she opened her eyes, she could see—but she could not understand what she was seeing.
She was in a yellow sphere. It reminded her of a planetarium, except it was much, much smaller—only big enough for one person. The walls of the sphere undulated in and out as if they were breathing. Was she hallucinating? She could not feel her body. There was no more pain. She felt entirely disconnected, as if her consciousness were the sole part of her that existed. The only sound was the whisper of the wind: a gentle inhalation in the background.
Red cracks began to appear in the soft, rippling walls, arising from nothing and branching out like veins across the surface of an egg yolk. She stared at them in amazement. She spun around and realized that she could spin around. She was suspended in the center of this yellow bubble with its red rivers snaking across curved, luminescent walls.
Gradually she became aware of another sound. It was strangely distant, as if it were coming at her through a wall of water. It reminded her of documentaries about deep-sea divers: this sound of half-swallowed, echoing ringing.
The red veins were moving faster. They spread and spread like a time-lapse video of red coral growing, and as the red covered the yellow, she felt heavier and heavier, and the golden glow of the sphere’s walls dimmed and dimmed until all there was, was nothing.
Twenty-seven days later
CHAPTER 7
Reese opened her eyes and saw a grid of grayish-white ceiling tiles above. She blinked a few times, inhaling shallowly. The room smelled antiseptic, like a hospital. She turned her head to the right; there was a window not far away, but the blinds were closed. Daylight glowed from behind them. To her left was a computer and monitor on a cart, along with some kind of medical machine. Several tubes emerged from it, connected to an IV drip hanging above her head. Another tube ran from that drip to her left arm.