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  © 2014 J.E. Anckorn

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  ISBN 978-1-62007-622-4 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-62007-623-1 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-62007-624-8 (hardcover)

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  For my mum, Christine who taught me to love books, and for Eo McNeil, who gave me a place to write one.

  Gracie

  f you’d seen the three of us picking our way along the edge of the busted up highway, you’d likely have thought we were family. Brandon, fifteen and the oldest, was rocking the “moody teen” look and stalking alone way off in front. He scowled back every now and then at Jake, whose little kid legs would have been too short to match Brandon’s pace even if he’d tried.

  And then there was me, Gracie, a year younger than Brandon, and stuck between the two of them.

  Brandon wasn’t my big brother. Jake wasn’t my little brother.

  My real brothers and my mom and dad were taken by the Space Men. We called them “the extraterrestrials” at first, which sounded more scientific than “Space Men”, but the wise guys on the WBZ evening news started calling them the “Space Men” and it kind of stuck.

  That was after the first panic of them arriving, but before everything ended. When it was still something people could joke about a little.

  Jake’s mom and dad were taken, too, I guess, but Brandon’s dad was dead. For sure dead, not just maybe-dead like the people who were taken. Brandon’s mom was dead too, but that happened when he was a baby, and had nothing to do with the Space Men, although it was still tough luck for Brandon.

  Brandon said we had to form a unit for survival purposes. He’d often says things like “form a unit for survival purposes” when anyone normal would just say “Hey, let’s be friends and try and help each other.” Like, when we found somewhere to sleep at night? We weren’t looking for a place with a roof to keep the rain out and a door that shut so we wouldn’t freeze our butts off, we were looking for a “defensible position.”

  Brandon thought he was a grown-up, but he was just a kid too, even though he talked like an army guy and acted all tough.

  What we were defending against, were Drones.

  If we spotted a Drone, we either had to get out of there as quick as we could or, better yet, smash it up so it couldn’t let the Space Men know our location. Or worse. That’s what Brandon said anyway. I didn’t know if we could smash up a drone—they were probably made of some special Space Men metal like their ships were. The army guys couldn’t shoot those ships down and they were real army guys with jets and missiles and stuff, not just some skinny kid who watched too many action movies.

  Brandon said that Drones were “the primary threat.”

  At first, there’d been many Drones around, and we had to be super sneaky—sorry, Brandon—covert. We hadn’t seen any for weeks now, though, which was good, but also scary. Sometimes it’s best if you can see the bad stuff right in front of you, because when you don’t know where it is… it could be anywhere.

  That was another reason we stayed away from big towns, or just tried to get past them as quickly as we could, sticking instead to the highways that breezed on by.

  I hated towns because they were frightening somehow, even without Drones. I hated how sometimes I’d see a store, and half of it was all fresh and new looking, and maybe there were still posters up for Slushies or lottery tickets, or “SPECIAL ONE DAY ONLY SALES!”, and then the other part was burst open and black, and all the good things from inside the store were spilled out onto the road. There was no one around to pick them up and set them back into their places, no one to care about “SPECIAL ONE DAY ONLY SALES!”

  The registers were still filled with money, and at first, we’d filled up our pockets with twenties and tens—there was so much money that we didn’t even bother with the ones and fives—but now, we didn’t bother with money at all. Things like money weren’t so important these days.

  There were dead people, too.

  People like Brandon’s dad, who wasn’t taken. Seeing those people still laying where they’d fallen was getting worse now than it had been at the beginning, because the bodies had begun to go bad. They didn’t look so much like real people anymore, which was good, but they stank and were all swollen and squishy and, as Brandon said, a “potential disease hazard.”

  Jake didn’t like towns either. He didn’t care about the dead people, which you’d think he would, being a really little kid, but he hated going inside buildings. Even at night, when we had to find a “defensible position,” he’d sneak out after Brandon was asleep, and curl up outside the door like a puppy. Brandon got mad at him sometimes and told him he had to “man up,” but the kid was five at most! Who expects a five-year-old to “man up?”

  Then, the next night, out Jake would creep again, so Brandon may as well have saved his breath.

  I didn’t think Jake was any safer sleeping inside than he was outside, honestly. Lots of people tried to hide in their houses when the Space Men came, but it didn’t make any difference. In some places, especially places where the invaders fought with the army, those big silver ships blew the roofs right off the houses, and sometimes even blew the whole house down, like the Big Bad Wolf in the story books.

  And, of course there were the Drones, who seemed to be specially made for sneaking inside and grabbing people right inside their own homes.

  Sometimes, we still saw the Space Men ships fly over, but now it was the small speedy ones, not the huge ones that had taken people away, and even the small ones didn’t land any more. I guess they’d taken almost everyone left to take, and any survivors had found themselves a good hiding place, so the Space Men had about given up looking.

  That was what we were going to do next—finding a hiding place was Stage Two of Brandon’s Big Plan. It was actually a pretty good plan, although I didn’t like to tell him that. He was a Mr. Know-It-All anyway, and didn’t need encouraging.

  Stage One was getting supplies, and once we had our supplies, we were heading to Maine, where Brandon’s Uncle Bob had a hunting cabin. Brandon said it was out in the middle of nowhere so it’d be safe to spend winter there—no other survivors around to mess with us or take our stuff, and no towns big enough that the Space Men might still be hanging around.

  Was there a Stage Three to Brandon’s Big Plan? After the winter, if we didn’t freeze to death or run out of food, or get munched on by bears or something? Did he still think we were going to get rescued by the army guys?

  I didn’t know.

  Sometimes, I’d try to think of what it might be like. The army guys would fly down in a big helicopter—after they’d figured out how to bust through that special Space Man metal—and they’d chase the creeps back into space, never to return! All the people, our friends and our moms and our dads and everyone else, wouldn’t be dead at all, just captured. And, of course, the army guys would set them free.

  Maybe the Space Men would just die without the army guys having to do anything. I’d seen a movie once where Space Men came, and in the end, they just died of the flu! “Achoo, Achoo, we all fall down.”

  I didn’t like to think about things like that much, though.

  At first, thinking about being rescu
ed made me feel better, but now, imagining the future was something I tried not to do.

  Because, another thing that might happen? We’d live in the woods and get old out there waiting for someone to come save us, and when the three of us died, there would be nobody left at all.

  Gracie

  he only thing on TV was the news, and the only thing on the news was the invasion.

  Who needs the news, I thought to myself as I padded through the house, when you can walk right out the back door and see it for yourself?

  The wood boards of the porch were hot beneath my bare feet, and it took my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the sun’s glare. Sure enough, when I squinted up at the blue summer sky, all those big, silver ships still hung there, like clouds that never moved. The sun reflected off the metal, causing a shimmer that was too bright to look at for long—not that I wanted to. When I rubbed my eyes, the shapes of the craft still floated within the blackness inside my head, like they’d invaded my own mind the same way they’d invaded the skies.

  Even though it was another blistering day, goose bumps covered my skin, and I rubbed my arms as my gaze drifted back to the more reassuring sight of the orderly wooden houses and lawns of my neighborhood.

  No one had seen the ships coming; they just showed up one day. At first, no one went to work. They all wanted to stay home to see what would happen, even though the TV guys said we had to carry on as normal. People rushed to the grocery store and bought up all the milk and the bread. “Just like when there’s a winter storm,” dad had grumbled. “They planning on fixing our alien overlords a PB&J?”

  In our neighborhood, all the houses have these big porches, but people rarely sat on them. Why have a big porch if you’re not going to sit outside? That’s what I always thought. Our own porch had a rocker made of scratchy wicker, and a little table beside it, just big enough for a can of soda and my tablet, and that was where I planned to spend today.

  The familiar clatter of Gilda loading the dishwasher rang out from the kitchen, so I scooted down an inch so she wouldn’t see the top of my head over the back of the chair.

  Last week, I’d pulled a patio chair out onto the lawn to try and get a tan while I read, but I’d fallen asleep in the chair and woke up burned red like a clam shack special, and the goofy wicker pattern of the chair back pressed into my face.

  Mom had gone crazy. “Do you want to get skin cancer?” she’d yelled at me. “Not to mention ruin your complexion. You only get one face, you know. Why do your father and I work ourselves ragged looking after you kids when you never take the least bit of care of yourselves?”

  I knew that if Gilda saw me she’d tell me to come inside. She was even more scared of mom yelling than I was. I guess that’s fair. It’s not like Mom could fire her kid, but Gilda didn’t have that security.

  Safe under the porch’s shade, I rocked myself slowly to and fro, picking at one of the peeling spots on my arm, the dead skin coming off like tissue paper on the world’s worst birthday gift.

  The chair had been painted white and I liked to pick the paint off that, too. On days I sat outside on the deck, paint chips would litter the floor in a circle around where I sat: my own private summer snow storm. I used my foot to sweep the latest flurry off into the begonias, along with the skin, so Mom wouldn’t see the mess when she came home.

  It was bad enough I was risking death by instant skin cancer going outside again when she’d said I had to stay indoors, but she’d be doubly mad if she saw I’d plucked a new bare spot on the chair—which was a valuable antique, according to her—and triply mad if she guessed I’d spent all day online again.

  She’d seen some TV program about “the dangers of the internet” a couple of months back, and ever since then, she’d keep coming over to see what I was doing every time I opened my tablet.

  I could just imagine her now. “You waste an awful lot of time on that computer, Gracie. A girl your age should be out making friends. I think I’ll have a word with Ashley Ellis’s mother, see if we can get you on the summer swim team with her.”

  I basically hated Ashley Ellis, and had no interest in busting a lung swimming laps at the sport center all summer, but she was the sort of kid my mum approved of. Good grades, polite, popular… no “after school special” internet addiction for her.

  Mom didn’t need to worry anyway. I wasn’t planning to hack into the Pentagon: just liked to play games and chat with other nerds like me. I knew Mom wanted me to go out and spend time with the kids from my school—the kids from the nice families, at least—but they wanted nothing to do with me. I couldn’t figure out what it was I’d done wrong, and I tried not to let it bother me that much, but it does get to a person. When groups of girls who’d been to my sleepover parties and trips to the Cape since I was five years old suddenly formed into giggling, whispering huddles when I walked by, well… I guessed all the girls in my class were starting to get crazy over boys and parties and stuff that I wasn’t interested in.

  When we were little, it didn’t matter if I was a brain in class, and had frizzy mouse-colored hair and didn’t know which bands were cool, but now that we were getting older—“becoming young ladies,” my mom would say—stuff like that was important.

  Online, I had a whole bunch of people right there who I could talk with on any topic I could think of.

  It was the internet that provided the best news about the Space Men, too. That’s where I’d first heard about there being a million more ships out in space, beyond the ones you could actually see in the sky.

  You can believe the TV news didn’t tell us that.

  People were freaked out enough as it was.

  The first few weeks after the Space Men came, everyone was out on their porches, staring up into the sky and drinking iced-tea, with their TVs turned up loud so they didn’t miss anything, and all the cool indoor air leaking out the open front windows, so the air conditioning units roared and dribbled and blew fuses.

  Today, I had the street to myself again. Somewhere far away, a dog barked, but it was so hot that even the birds and darting dragonflies had abandoned the huge sweeps of lawn and overflowing flower beds. Most of the grownups had gone back to work, and the other kids were at the beach or the pool or the kind of summer camp my mom was always trying to make me go to, which cost five hundred dollars a day and made a kid “well-rounded.” Whatever that meant.

  My eyelids kept sliding shut. I was determined not to fall asleep and waste another afternoon having weird nightmares. It was bad enough when I was awake; the whole summer so far had seemed like a dream, what with the Space Men arriving and the endless, heavy heat laying over everything like a blanket.

  I was just dropping off in spite of myself when a crew of landscapers, with bright bandanas tied round their heads to keep the sweat out of their eyes, pulled their truck up outside the Novaks and started hauling mowers out onto the road.

  One of them—the youngest one—grinned at me and said something to the other two in Spanish. I hunched down behind my computer, feeling goofy, pretending like I was reading something important, when I hadn’t even turned it on yet. Even something as simple as turning on my tablet seemed hard in this syrupy heat.

  The landscapers didn’t seem to care though.

  They probably thought I was a snob, sitting here on my big porch while they dragged bags of lawn food about in the sun. I was fuzzy-headed with heat just looking at them.

  The grass clippings stuck in their sweat and made me want to scratch in sympathy.

  The younger guy was showing off, hefting two big sacks at a time onto his shoulders, and after a while, the older guys leaned on the truck, passing a cigarette back and forth, watching him.

  Every now and then, they’d glance at the sky, but they didn’t look scared. They frowned at those ships the same way they frowned at the parched lawn: another annoying fact of life we just had to deal with.

  The stiffness in my shoulders relaxed. If grownup guys like the landscapers though
t it was safe to be out here, it surely was. Maybe those ships were just watching us the same way we were watching them. If they wanted to mess with us, wouldn’t they have done it by now?

  The Space Men couldn’t or didn’t want to talk to us, although the Scientists tried and tried to make them. They’d just hung there in the sky all through April, May, and now June.

  Dad had been working from home to start with, but yesterday he’d gone back to his office. That was another sign things were still okay. If Dad returned to work, surely nothing bad was happening.

  “Gotta keep you kids in allowance money,” he’d said as mom watched him scoop the rat’s nest of papers off the kitchen table where he’d been working all summer. She hadn’t said a thing, just scrubbed at the halos of coffee mug rings that marked the edge of where dad’s encampment had been, with a tight little frown making her pretty face look sour. It was scary when Mom yelled, but even worse when she was silent.

  She’d still been in a bad mood this morning, and I’d hidden out in my room until she’d left, Mikey whining again because she was making him walk to the T station instead of taking the car.

  I kind of agreed with how mom felt. I didn’t see why Dad couldn’t keep working from home, either. I knew it didn’t make sense. I mean, if anything did happen, it would happen whether Dad was here or in Boston, but I just felt calmer knowing he was there at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and leaning his chair back on its two rear legs like we weren’t allowed to do.

  “It’ll be the weekend before you know it,” he’d told me as I hugged him goodbye this morning. He put on this phony French accent that made me squirm with embarrassment and grin in spite of it. “End what does Madam want me to cook up for ‘er on Saturday?”

  “ ‘Samedi’ is Saturday in French.” I rolled my eyes. Dad always cooked the Saturday meal.

  “Madam is busting my balls,” he’d said, still in his phony accent.

  “A roast,” I’d told him, hoping Mom hadn’t heard him swearing. I knew a roast would make the house hotter than it already was, but I didn’t care. Dad made the best roasts ever, with garlic stuffed right into the meat. When he cooked, he put on his favorite album, an oldie by this dude, David Bowie, and he’d dance around the room to it, with me standing on his feet. Mom would tell him to turn it down, but he’d always inch the dial back up again as soon as she left the room. She didn’t care much for what she called “modern music,” and in a way, I felt glad. Those Saturdays were our time, mine and Dad’s.