“Out!” China yells the word like a cop. “Out! Everyone out! Now! Hurry!”
Almost all the diners start scurrying up and toward the front door without even asking why. China has that kind of commanding presence. Purses are hoisted onto shoulders. Coats are snatched but not put on. China smashes both doors open, but people are still slow moving through them, clustering and getting stuck.
“Mana! We need to get everyone out! Now!” China yells. I’ve never seen him so urgent and it is terrifying.
I give up hoping the people will be fast enough and grab a chair and swing it forward, breaking the giant windows next to the door. They are big and easy to step through. Someone, maybe a waitress, makes a protest noise, but other people help me move the jagged glass out of the way and then everyone hops through.
“Across the street! Go across the street!” China orders, moving people along. He plucks up an elderly woman who has a cane and sprints across the street with her, depositing her a good distance away. “Keep going!”
He starts back toward me and the waitress. We’re trying to help a mom who has four kids and is limping. He hoists up the mom. This man has some serious muscles. He orders me, “Lift up the kids. Run!”
We do. I clutch twin boys, one on either side. Their pudgy hands instinctively cling to my back and arms and shoulders even though I’m a stranger. They trust me to take care of them. My stomach twists. I can’t let them down, and I hurry even though I’m not sure what I’m hurrying from. Despite his heavier load, China has sprinted way ahead of us and already deposited the mom on the ground. Her sweatshirt heaves as she screams for her babies. The waitress lags slightly behind me. Then the air seems to shove us forward. I clutch the boys harder, refusing to let go, and twist because there is no way I’m not going to fall and if I’m going to fall, I’d rather not fall on my face. The air shoves me toward the buildings across from the restaurant, toward randomly parked cars, but I fight it and turn to face the diner.
That’s when the sound comes, a bulky boom that rips through the streets like it’s announcing a war. My mouth screams the word no but the sound is lost amid the screams and car alarms. I land on my back on the hood of a Ford F-150 truck. The boys stay in my arms, silent, but gulping in the burning air. For a moment, I can’t register anything—what happened, where I am, why I’m holding blond-haired boys. Then China’s face hovers above mine. He mouths my name, but I can’t hear him. For a minute, my ears just don’t work and the world is a weird silent nothing. Grabbing the boys from me, China says something again. The boys seem okay, just a little scraped and the one who has the name BILLY written on his bright blue sweatshirt starts to tear up, but he doesn’t bawl.
China says something again, but it’s like he’s talking from a distance. Finally, I understand. He’s asking, “Are you okay?”
I give him a thumbs-up even though I’m not sure what my mental or physical state is.
“You?” I yell back at him.
He gives me an okay sign. And then he jerks his thumb backward and rushes off. He’s bending over people, helping them off the ground.
The waitress? Where is the waitress? Where are the other people? Sitting up slowly, I can finally get a full view of what’s happening. The restaurant spews black and orange, smoke and flames. Parts of the building have landed on cars, including my mom’s Subaru, which is half hidden under pieces of drywall and booths. People to the right and left are roaming around like zombies. Some have glass in their arms or bodies. The waitress is on the ground in front of me. The child she was holding is beneath her, screaming. I slide off the truck and go to them.
My hand reaches out before I can think about possible broken backs or necks, and I move the waitress sideways, rolling her off the child. The little girl keeps screaming. Her mouth is an open O, a gaping hole of anguish.
I try to cradle her in my arms.
“It’s okay,” I tell her, hunkering down. “It’s okay. It’s all over. You’re okay.”
But she just trembles against me and points over my shoulder. Every neuron inside of me is screaming not to look that way, that it’s just the restaurant on fire, which is decidedly traumatic for anyone, especially a little kid.
Don’t turn around, I think. Don’t look.
I look.
And there above the restaurant, engulfed in smoke, is a metallic ship floating in the air. There are lights all along the bottom of it, and it is easily as big as the actual restaurant. This. This is what all of us are up against. This mammoth, technologically advanced thing. We are so little, so tiny beneath it.
To the right of the saucer and the diner, on the ground, is Wharff, I’m sure of it. He covers his mouth with one hand. With the other he gestures for me to come with him. Come with him? I shake my head.
“Come help!” I yell.
He gestures again and must realize I am really not coming. He turns and runs away, down the side alley and through the smoke.
The ship hovers there for a moment as we watch. Sirens scream their approach. Then a greenish gas explodes out the bottom of it. That must be why Wharff was covering his mouth. He knew the gas would come. He was trying to tell me. I slap my hand over the girl’s mouth and order her, “Don’t breathe! Hold your breath!”
CHAPTER 7
The bright green gas or vapor or whatever plummets out of the bottom of the ship. No holes are visible. It just billows down and out and into the air, coming toward us, flowing quickly, tumbling closer and closer.
“Hold your breath,” I beg the little girl again. I’m not sure if she even hears me.
I point at the gas. I clamp my hand over my mouth and nose and then mime for her to do it, too.
She stops screaming and clamps her lips tight against one another.
I tuck her against my shoulder, hand still over her mouth and nose, and hold my own breath, too. The gas hits the people closest first, two men in flannel shirts that are part hipster and part lumberjack. They drop to the ground. Crap. A woman crumples. A child topples over. One by one, they fall.
And then the green gas wafts over the little girl and me like a wave of evil. The air gasps into something warm, but I refuse to inhale it. As the wave engulfs us, the UFO shoots straight up in the air and is gone in less than five seconds, completely disappearing into the sky, obscured by the heavy clouds.
It’s like it was never there.
The gas passes us. Regular air returns, smoky and raw. Pulling the little girl away from my shoulder, I check out her eyes. They are open and wide and terrified. Mine probably are the same. But we are still standing. I whirl around as the gas hits other survivors. One after the other, they fall. They are helpless little dominos. We think our bodies are so strong, so tough, and then … We just topple.
Only China remains standing. He meets my eye but doesn’t say anything. Then the gas is gone, just dissipated or something, and people start to stand up again. First it’s the guys in flannel. They wander aimlessly around the sidewalk as fire trucks pull up, red lights swirling and alarms blaring. It’s so tremendously loud.
And now the smoke that billows toward us is just regular smoke from the building. Burning plastic molecules sting our lungs. It smells horrible, but the air is breathable. The wind shifts again and the smoke blows up the street instead of across it. Firefighters pile out of ladder trucks and tankers. The one in control barks orders into his portable radio as others pull hoses off the trucks. They unravel into long, tan, snakelike things. One hose connects to the fire hydrant, others to a water truck. Through it all, people are aimlessly wandering around. Some bleed from explosion injuries.
The only one who seems dead is the waitress.
The waitress …
I hand the little girl to her mother and run back to the waitress to check on her. She still isn’t moving. I start waving my arms above my head and yelling, “Here! This woman needs help over here!”
Two paramedics rush toward us, a man and a woman. The woman carries some sort of firs
t aid kit. She feels for the waitress’s pulse while the guy checks her eyes.
“She breathing?” I ask.
The woman nods. “Weak pulse. Shallow breaths. We need the stretcher.”
The guy runs back to the ambulance.
“Should I help him?” I ask.
“You stay here. Tell me about the gas main. Is anyone still inside?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
The little girl’s mom comes over and starts checking out the waitress, sort of a mixture of concern and sobbing, and the girl goes, “What about the UFO?”
The paramedic cocks her head at me. “What?”
“The UFO. Above the restaurant,” the girl says.
The male paramedic has returned, and he and the woman are now lifting the waitress onto the stretcher.
“Sweetie, I think you hit your head.” Her mother makes big eyes at the paramedics.
The little girl pouts. “No … No, I didn’t. I—”
“What do you remember?” I ask the girl’s mom.
“I remember a fire alarm going off and us all evacuating the building. It blew up behind us, just a big fiery roar, right? Then the fire department arrived.” Her mom cocks her head at me as if searching for approval and confirmation.
My mouth drops open. I realize it and shut it again. “You don’t remember anything else?”
“Like what? Little green men?” She scoffs and puts her arm around her little girl’s waist gently and protectively.
Her daughter stares up at her.
“How about we bring you to those nice ambulance people so you can get looked at,” she says to the little girl, but she’s also saying it to me.
I ask, “You don’t remember the UFO, the green gas, any of that? Do you remember the big, brawny guy going into the bathroom? The waitress getting the keys?”
A man comes over and it’s obvious he’s been listening, too. He wraps an arm around my waist, just the way the woman did with the little girl.
“Let’s go sit you down,” he says.
His fingers tighten on my waist. He smells of grease and burgers and the smoke of the building. This poor man. Poor all of us. What have they done?
“I’m okay,” I insist.
He doesn’t believe me. “No. Sweetie, I really want you to go get checked out.”
“I’m really okay, but thank you for caring and—”
China’s voice interrupts my answer. “I’ll take her over.”
His arm slips around my waist, displacing the arm of the other man, who instantly lets go of me. When China goes into his in-charge mode, everyone steps in line. Except me. And Lyle. And maybe my mom.
“I’m okay,” I insist even as China presses my side against his. “This is ridiculous!”
The man has switched his attentions to the little family. Firefighters rush by, shouting directions to one another. A couple more unroll a hose, hook it into the truck.
“Just play along with me.” China’s voice finds its way into my ear. “For once do not be difficult.”
“I’m never difficult,” I mutter, but he’s kind of right. Whatever. I challenge anyone trying to deal with him on a long-term basis not to be quote-unquote difficult. However, I do play along with him, even pretending to limp as he steers me away from Mr. Worried Flannel Shirt Guy and toward the ambulances and paramedics. Doubt fills me. “You saw the UFO, right?”
“Of course. I held my breath, just like you. Good call there.”
Oddly enough, I feel sort of proud. “So was that green stuff some kind of amnesia gas?”
He takes a sharp left away from the ambulances. “Exactly. The government often uses it to repress sightings and to avoid widespread panic.”
I stop dead still. “The government? That was a flying saucer thing, China. It wasn’t the government.”
“No. It was. It was a military craft, actually. The U.S. military has about five of them. It was part of a trade program with one of the alien races.”
I am not sure what I am supposed to think about this, and a sort of nauseated feeling spreads through me as I connect the dots. The government had control of that UFO. That means the government blew up the diner. That means the government hurt those people. Our government. Isn’t our own government supposed to protect us? Keep us safe? No wonder my mom and China stopped working for them. And why? Why would the government hurt its own people? Why do they have those ships anyway? Or maybe I am completely jumping ahead in my thought process and it wasn’t the government at all?
“A trade program? What did we trade?”
“Silence. Secrecy.”
“About what? About them existing?”
“No. About the abductions.”
Someone is yelling directions to someone else, words like contain and safe and pressure, so I’m assuming the shouter is a firefighter.
A cop comes running up, pauses when he reaches us, and says, “Are you two all right?”
“We’re good,” China answers.
The cop assesses us and then runs toward the fire. His run is military efficient. I envy that. I also envy his ignorance about what actually just happened. All the stuff I’ve witnessed swirls around in my head, the concepts and facts and faces clashing against each other in a confusing mess.
“Why would the government want to explode the diner? Wharff? Because he was there? Why would they care about him? There are a ton of abductees out there,” I say, answering my own question. “Or was it just to keep it secret? But what secret? Nobody even would have thought of aliens until that saucer showed up.”
“Maybe.” China searches the area before moving us forward again. “We’ll talk about it later, Mana Trent.”
He used my full name. He never uses my full name. He must be serious.
“I want to talk about it now.”
“Wharff might not have been the target.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you might have been the target, or me.” He keeps moving. “Wharff might have been the lure.”
“But?”
“We need to focus on getting away right now, not on what happened.” He shuts off all communication about this and I resent it.
We turn down another street, away from where my mom’s car was parked. We can’t get to it now. There’s debris on it and the entire area is blocked off by emergency personnel. So, I ask, “How are we going to get home?”
“Walk.”
“Walk?” I stutter the word out. “It’s like three miles.”
“Unless you want to call a friend.”
I don’t want to call Lyle or Seppie, not after what just happened at school.
“Okay. We walk. Wait, what about a taxi? Could we get a taxi?” I offer.
“That’s lazy.” He laughs. “Close your mouth, Mana. You’re gaping at me.”
I probably am. So I close my mouth for a second, breathe in, and will myself to be calm. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but please explain to me where Wharff went and what just happened, okay?”
“I don’t know where Wharff went. We both saw him enter the bathroom. The door was locked from the inside. He was not there. What was in there instead was a bomb. The smell tipped me off. It’s alien technology and well known to some of us. The most obvious scenario is that they were trying to cover up whatever happened to Wharff and keep him from telling us something important about his abduction.”
“I thought I saw him outside, though.”
“What?”
“Right before the explosion. It looked like he was beckoning me. And then after, right before the saucer came. I saw him cover his mouth and run away.”
“You’re sure it was him?”
“It was him or one of those shifter aliens.”
For a second, China is silent. The world smells less of burning, but we, ourselves, reek. A woman asks us if we are okay and what happened, and China quickly tells her we are fine and there was an explosion at a diner. People pass by, checking
on us, which is kind. Humans can be so kind.
Once they are gone I say, “Forgetting the confusion about Wharff, explain what you think happened next, okay?”
“Okay, once the building exploded, our government was alerted via sensors that send a high-alert transmission when that sort of explosion occurs. It senses the chemicals involved. They immediately dispatched the Northeast Saucer and tried to eradicate the memory of the event from everyone’s brain.”
“So, it wasn’t the actual government that blew up the diner.”
“It might have been, but I don’t think so. I’m not a hundred percent sure. I don’t exactly trust the United States government to deal with the alien threat, but blowing up a diner seems a bit extreme. Even for them.”
This makes me feel a bit better, actually. But at the same time, I’m not cool with eradicating memories or not knowing what happened to Wharff. Then a phrase that China just used jars me.
“Wait. Northeast Saucer. Explain.”
“It covers the eastern seaboard and interior New England from Virginia north.”
“But people didn’t forget the explosion. They forgot the gas and the saucer and Wharff.”
“Exactly. That’s the most telling part. They wanted us to forget Wharff, too, which means that Wharff is important to the government or those aliens or both.”
“But why?”
“That’s the central question. Why?” He picks up his pace a little bit, but I keep up and he says, “I was meeting with him because we thought he might have some information, new information, on what the aliens were planning. Abductions are a dime a dozen. Some real. Some fake. The people in charge of the agency wanted me to meet with him, so I did. They told me to ask about crystals.” He pauses. “Did your mother ever talk to you about aliens at all? Even as a fairy tale? Or a made-up story?”
“No.” She talked to me about white chocolate–covered pretzels and grades and mom stuff. Not aliens. Never aliens. Never crystals, like the one in my pocket.