I text him back.
Me: Thx man.
I stare back at the text, having one of those weird moments of clarity when I realize that I’m traveling across the country at the suggestion of some dude I’ve never met in order to help stop an alien invasion. I fire off another message.
Me: Will I meet u in Alabama?
It’s a few minutes before I get a response this time.
GUARD: I’m not certain. I have some personal business to take care of. In the meantime, you might look into switching cars if you can. The FBI will have all your info.
Sure, I’ll just drive up to the next dealership I see and buy a new one. Because that’s exactly how the world works.
I shake my head.
I drive until I find a big-looking road that goes east and take it. After a while, I’m heading more south than anything, but I don’t mind—I just want to get away before Walker decides that I really would be safer under her protection and sends some black-clad henchmen out to get me. Plus, it sounds like GUARD needs some time to get our new base or whatever set up.
After a few hours of driving, I start to feel really strange and kind of like I’m dreaming, even though I’m making it a point to keep my eyes open as wide as possible to stay awake. I finally accept the fact that I’ve got to get off the road and start to weigh the pros and cons of sleeping on the side of the highway when I see a sign that tells me I’m only twenty miles outside of Santa Fe, which, honestly, I thought was in Nevada or Arizona and not New Mexico. Geography was never one of those subjects I took much interest in. On the upside, Santa Fe’s a city I’ve actually heard of, which means that it’s got to be pretty big.
Or at least, big enough for me to stay anonymous and find a place to sleep.
Before I hit the city line, I see the sign for thirty-nine-dollar rooms and pull into a place called Desert Oasis, which is a single story of motel rooms that look like they’ve seen better days. It’s a sort of pinkish-brown stucco building with crumbling corners and long rows of flower beds outside the rooms that are filled with sticks and brown bushes that look like they’d disintegrate if I touched them.
Considering I’m a person of interest to the FBI, it seems like the perfect place to hunker down for some z’s.
The inside office is just a little waiting room with some ripped green vinyl chairs. There’s a guy with a big, brown mustache, a bad comb-over and inch-thick glasses reading a torn-up paperback at the counter.
“I’d, uh, like a room,” I say.
“Sure,” the guy responds, hardly glancing up from his book. “Name?”
“Um,” I say, because I’m feeling a little out of my mind and apparently want to make it completely obvious that I’m trying to be incognito. I think of the name the courier called me—my other identity. “Roger.”
The guy looks at me a second and then shakes his head, motioning to the book on the table in front of him. “I mean, you need to sign in there,” he says. “I’ll also need a credit card on file for incidentals and an ID to go with it.”
“What if I don’t have one?” I try to say casually as I sign in with the name “Jolly Roger,” writing in cursive like I don’t normally do.
He shrugs, finally putting his book down. “Then you’d better have some other kind of collateral.”
I thumb through my wallet, keeping it below the counter so the front-desk guy can’t see it. Then I pull out a hundred and fifty dollars—over a hundred dollars more than what the room costs. I slide the bills over the counter. The guy looks back and forth between me and the cash. Then, finally, he tosses me a key.
“Room number four,” he says.
Of course.
“Thanks,” I mutter.
On my way out, he calls after me, “If you make too much noise, I’ll call the police. Damn kids come out here to drink and always end up—”
But I slam the door behind me, and I don’t hear the end of what he has to say. Besides, I’m not going to make any noise, and even if I did, I have serious doubts that the guy actually would call the police. More likely, he’d just demand another hundred bucks from me.
The room is just a bed, table and a square-tube TV with fake wood on the sides like the one Nana kept in my grandfather’s office. The place is dingy, and the faded brown bedspread is scratchy, but I’m just happy to not be sitting in my truck, or a detention cell. I’m exhausted but am still wound up by everything that’s happened in the last few hours, so after making sure the curtains are completely covering the windows and the door is bolted and chained, I fire up GUARD’s untraceable netbook. It’s fancier than any computer I’ve ever seen. There’s even a little fingerprint scanner on it. I follow instructions that pop up when the system is fully booted and set the computer to respond only to my thumbprint, then I log into my personal email account. I’m looking for something from Sarah, telling me she’s safe. That she got out and wants to make contact again because she knows I know what’s happening and that I’d be worried about her.
But there’s nothing from her. There are some spam emails, a few chains of messages from my old teammates and friends in Paradise and half a dozen from my family, all of which get filled with more and more capital letters and question marks the longer I’ve been away. I shake my head and sigh. I knew I’d be making them worry when I left Paradise in the middle of the night, but I was hoping I might be back sometime soon. Or at least that I’d be able to let them know that I was with Sarah and that we were both safe—maybe even make up a story about how we’d run away together.
But now, I don’t know what to tell them. All my earlier hopes seem stupid, like they never could have really worked out. How do I try to explain to people back in my hometown that I’m half a country away trying to track down my ex-girlfriend and a bunch of people from another planet? I start to reply to a message from my dad to tell him about the Mogs and how he needs to watch his back and probably just leave Paradise completely. But I know that if I tell him evil aliens and corrupt government officials are snooping around his town—taking up residence in his office even—he’ll look into it. He’ll start poking around and trying to play hero. And that’s dangerous. I don’t want him to get involved. And if the Mogs or FBI are intercepting my emails or something like that, one mention of them to Dad and they’ll be all over him.
I don’t want him to end up getting hurt because of something stupid I’ve done.
And so I send back a reply that’s not exactly a lie but not really the whole truth.
Dad,
Chasing after Sarah to try to bring her back to Paradise where she belongs. Lost my phone. Sorry if I scared you guys. Be home soon. Don’t worry, I’m okay.
Mark
It’s not much, but it’ll have to do. I send it off and open up a new email, one I address to Sarah. And then I just start typing. Everything that’s happened. Everything I’m worried about. In the end, after a thousand words, I tell her that if she gets this, to write back. Please.
I send that email off too, unsure if it will ever make it to her. Scared that there’s no Sarah for it to go to at all anymore. And that in the end, I’m going to be alone trying to warn people about the shark-faced aliens that might show up and destroy their lives. That I’ll just be some crazy guy who no one believes.
I know that if I just sit around waiting for a response, I’ll go insane. I need to keep my mind occupied. And so I open up the JOLLYROGER182 email account that’s connected to They Walk Among Us. This is something I can focus on. Something to occupy my time and energy when I’m not driving or trying to figure out how to contact Sarah. Plus, if I can help get the word out about the Loric and Mogs, in a way I might actually be helping. Making a difference.
There are about two hundred unread messages, tips and comments in my in-box. I make it through about fifteen—mostly crackpot tips but one about a weird-looking community in a super-rich suburb in Maryland I want to follow up on—before I pass out on the bed.
I sleep for the rest of t
he day and night, completely crashed. I wake up a little before noon, take a much-needed shower and then spend an hour or two trying to make sense of the electronics GUARD sent me. I plug the jump drive into Purdy’s computer and hit the power button. The computer actually starts to make noise for the first time since it died in the diner, and my pulse starts to race.
Yes, GUARD, you genius mother—
But the only thing that appears on the computer is a command screen full of what looks like a foreign language mixed with big lists of numbers. I’m scared that poking around too much will end up causing the thing to crash again, so I follow GUARD’s instructions carefully, running a series of tests or something on the machine using the jump drive. But nothing happens, just gibberish that I can’t figure out.
In the meantime, I go back to the netbook and type up the blog post I’ve been thinking about since I saw the Mog in my dad’s office and discovered that the FBI were working with the wrong aliens. I don’t have any hard proof—just a story—but I can lay out for TWAU readers all the stuff that I know is true.
The second after I post the blog, there’s a knock on the door. I jump to my feet, searching for the weird grenade GUARD sent along, when I hear a voice from outside.
“Hey, Roger,” the motel guy says. “Checkout’s in ten minutes. Unless you want to spend another night—same fee.”
I gather my shit and hit the road.
CHAPTER FIVE
I TRAVEL FOR A FEW DAYS, FORMING A SORT OF routine. In El Paso, I swap my license plates out for a pair of Texas ones when I see a truck similar to mine in a McDonald’s parking lot. I pick up supplies—a toothbrush, a case of energy drinks, some dark clothes in case I end up sneaking around at night again—at a drugstore in some Podunk town near the border. Motels become my new home, because the people there don’t ask questions or seem to care that I sometimes check in at weird hours. Also, cash has been pretty good at buying my anonymity with them. I drive towards Alabama, trying to avoid going into big cities or anywhere that I think FBI agents might be posted. I keep my radio tuned to twenty-four-hour news stations, listening for anything that could possibly be Mog related. When I’m not driving, I try to get info off Purdy’s computer, but none of the systems running on GUARD’s jump drive have been able to get the damned thing functional yet. Every night before I go to sleep, I email Sarah.
She hasn’t responded.
When I’m on the road, I’ve got one eye in my rearview mirror, because no matter how stealthy I think I’m being or how good I know GUARD’s gadgets are, I can’t help but feel like I’m being followed. I spend a lot of time telling myself that I’m being delusional. Sometimes I miss just being a dumb quarterback who had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world, or even my own backyard. At least then I wasn’t holding my breath every time anyone passed me on the highway for fear that they were Mogs or FBI agents trying to run me off the road.
I spend a lot of time wandering around Texas, texting GUARD on occasion to update him on where I am. He arranges for another care package to get sent to me—or to Jolly Roger, more specifically—and I retrieve it from the front desk of a motel outside of Abilene. Enough to keep me fed and sheltered for a little while longer. Other than that, he’s pretty much been on radio silence, responding to texts or emails at odd times, if at all. Whatever he’s got going on, his life must be pretty hectic. I just hope he can get the base set up soon so we can start doing some real work.
And so I can learn who he is.
It sucks being stuck in my truck or a musty motel room all the time, so I hop between coffee shops and diners for a few hours in the afternoons so I can pretend to have some sort of a normal life, and even then I’ll only stop at places that are empty and have secluded tables open in the back. Half a week or so after starting my trek towards Alabama, I camp out at a truck stop an hour outside of Dallas—the kind of place with barstools up against a counter and a dozen different types of pie on display. In a corner booth, I multitask by watching the muted TV mounted over the counter and tuned to a news station, responding to TWAU emails on my netbook and keeping an eye on one of GUARD’s systems running on Purdy’s laptop. I’m not sure what all GUARD had installed on the USB drive he sent me, but the stolen laptop screen keeps blinking with lines of code that mean nothing to me. Hopefully that means the programs are working and I’ll be able to use the computer again soon so I can mine it for info.
The waitress comes by.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asks.
“I’ll take a refill,” I say, nodding towards my cup of coffee but keeping my eyes on the screen.
“You sure about that?” she asks.
I pause and look up at her. She’s old enough to be my mom, and her eyebrows are scrunched together.
“It’s just, that’s your fifth cup and . . .” She trails off, but her eyes land on my fingers. They rest on my keyboard, but they’re twitching from the caffeine. I can feel my blood pulse behind my eyeballs.
“I have a lot of work to do,” I say. “I’ll take another.”
She shrugs and leaves, and I rub my eyes. I probably look like a crazy person, or some kind of junkie who’s wandered in off the streets. I’ve been staying up at night until I literally can’t keep my eyes open any longer, then waking up to dreams of Mogs and FBI agents raiding my motel room after only a few hours of sleep.
I start to go back to the computer when I notice a breaking news report on the TV. Some building in Chicago called the John Hancock Center is on fire. I almost ignore the whole thing to keep working on TWAU blog stuff. And then I see it, in the bottom corner of the frame. Sitting on the roof of the burning building as plain as day to anyone who’s seen one before: a Mogadorian gun. The kind that looks like a cannon and wreaks havoc on an Ohio high school.
This is no accidental fire. The Mogs are responsible for whatever’s happening in Chicago.
That can only mean one of two things: either the Mogs were using the building as a base, or their enemies were. Meaning, the Garde were. Meaning Sarah could have been there.
“Turn that up,” I say to no one in particular. When nobody responds, I talk again, louder. “Can someone turn this up?”
The handful of people sitting at the counter look at me like I’m some kind of idiot.
“This is an emergency!”
“Hey, kid,” a big guy wearing a trucker hat says. He looks like a stand-in for Larry the Cable Guy. He nods to my booth. “Why don’t you just read about it on one of your computers over there and let us enjoy our afternoons.”
Anger surges through me, and for the briefest second, I think about jumping out of my booth and yelling at the guy, but there are more important things going on now.
And besides, he’s got a good point.
My fingers fly over the keys as I scan developing news stories about what’s happening in Chicago. There’s little actual info, though. Eventually, I find a live stream and plug in my headphones in the hope that some of the talking heads will have more details about the situation. The stream shows helicopter footage of smoke billowing out of the building again, and I wish I knew how to record video from my screen. What I do know how to do is take a screen grab, so when the Mog weapon comes into view again, I save a bunch of photos before the video cuts back to some woman in a studio talking about how initial reports suggest the fire is the result of an electrical issue.
Right. That definitely explains why there’s an alien gun on the roof.
I have to tell my readers the truth. The world needs to know. If the Mogs are ballsy enough to attack a building in the middle of Chicago, who knows what they might have in store for us next?
I log on to They Walk Among Us, and I write up what is probably a completely typo-riddled post about what’s going on in Chicago—or at least what I can gather based on what the media is saying and the footage I’ve seen. I include a few screen grabs of the Mog gun, pointing out that it’s obvious this whole thing was more than just an electri
cal malfunction or something. At the end of the post, I ask anyone who’s reading to be careful and to start looking for suspicious activity in their own towns and cities. Because this could be the beginning of a full-scale invasion for all I know. Then I upload the post with a title that I hope will get people’s attention: “Mog Attack in Chicago: Is This the Zero Hour?”
The second after I hit Publish, someone taps on my shoulder. I’m so in the zone that I didn’t even realize anyone was beside me, and I jump so much that my legs bang against the table. My coffee cup rattles, and some silverware falls to the floor. The waitress takes a few steps away from me before slowly setting my check down.
I realize that a few other people in the diner are looking at me. Maybe because I just jumped. Maybe because I was shouting for people to turn up the TV volume earlier.
Jesus, Mark, chill and get the hell out of here before you cause a scene.
I take a deep breath and start to gather up my things, throwing some cash down on the table. As I leave the diner, I text GUARD, telling him to check out what I’ve just posted—that shit’s going down. It’s only after I’ve sent him the message that my adrenaline starts to die down and is replaced by a different feeling—the fear that Sarah may have been in Chicago. She may have even been in that battle.
Back in my truck, I open up my netbook again and send off a quick email.
Sarah, please, just find some way to let me know you’re safe.
CHAPTER SIX
THE CHICAGO STORY GETS BIG OVER THE COURSE of a few hours. The Comments section explodes. Some guy out in Oregon posts side-by-side screen grabs of the original news footage and the more recent airings that have the Mog weapon digitally removed, as if no one would notice that they edited the footage. But the followers of TWAU noticed. And as view counts on the article continue to rise, the word gets out. The word “cover-up” start getting thrown around, and people start questioning why the media would edit the footage. All because of the blog post.