Arrival

Kevin picked out a packet that claimed to be blueberry pancakes, and took it out to them. They were quiet, which was kind of worrying in itself—Luna was almost never quiet.

“I found blueberry pancakes,” he said.

“That’s great,” Luna said. “I love blueberry pancakes.”

“I like them too,” Chloe said, although Kevin got the feeling she’d only said it because Luna had.

“Well, I don’t know how good they’ll be,” Kevin said.

The answer to that was simple: they tasted like something that had been in a packet in a storeroom for longer than they should have been. Even so, he was hungry enough by then to eat all of his.

“How did you hear about this place?” Kevin asked Chloe while they were eating.

“My dad… his job meant that he… heard things,” she said, but didn’t expand on it more than that. Kevin suspected that if Luna had asked rather than him, she wouldn’t have said even that much.

“So you trekked here, and battered on the door until someone let you in?” Luna said. She didn’t sound to Kevin as though she believed it much.

“I had to go somewhere,” Chloe said.

“I wonder if there are other places like this where people have managed to hide out,” Kevin said before that could turn into an argument. He wanted them to get along, if they were stuck there.

“If there are, we can’t contact them,” Luna said. “There’s still no signal coming in through the screens, and all those communications devices are useless if we don’t know who we’re connecting to.”

“Maybe you’re just not turning them on right,” Chloe said.

Luna gave her a pointed look.

“We can stay here as long as we need to, anyway,” Luna said. “We’re safe here. We talked about this yesterday, Kevin.”

They had, and it had been a comforting thought at the time, but was that it? Were the three of them just going to stay there for the rest of their lives?

“I might know about a place,” Chloe said, between mouthfuls of pancake.

“You just happen to know about somewhere?” Luna said. “The same way that you heard about here?”

To Kevin, she sounded suspicious. He wanted to give Chloe the benefit of the doubt, but Luna sounded much less like she trusted her.

Chloe put down her fork. “I heard about it on the way here from some people I met. I figured that this was closer, and safer. But if there’s no one here…”

“We’re here,” Luna said. “We’re safe here.”

“Are we?” Chloe demanded, looking around at Kevin as if for confirmation. “There’s supposed to be a group toward LA who are helping refugees gather together and stay safe. They call themselves the Survivors.”

“So you want us to go all the way to LA and look for these people?” Luna asked.

“What’s your plan? Just sit here and wait for things to get better?”

Kevin looked from one to the other, trying to work out the best way to keep all of this calm.

“We have enough food to last forever, and maybe we’ll get the radio working soon. We can’t just go out there when there could be anything.”

Chloe shook her head. “Things don’t get better. Trust me.”

“Trust you?” Luna said. “We don’t even know you. We’re staying here.”

Kevin knew that tone. It meant that Luna wasn’t backing down.

“Listen to the perfect little cheerleader, thinking she’s in charge,” Chloe shot back.

“You know nothing about me,” Luna insisted, in a dangerous tone of voice.

Kevin could barely work out why they were arguing. He’d been trying not to get involved, but now it seemed as though he might have to.

He stood to say something, but stopped, because pain shot through his head, along with something else, a feeling he hadn’t had in days now.

“Kevin?” Luna said. “Are you all right?”

Kevin shook his head. “I think… I think there’s another signal coming through.”

CHAPTER THREE

Numbers flashed through Kevin’s mind, bursting through it in rapid sequence, seeming almost to burn themselves onto his brain. They seemed too fast to hold onto, but Kevin knew he had to try. He grabbed for them…

Kevin woke, blinking up at the top bunk of the bed he’d chosen from the floor. His head ached like he’d been hit on it, but it wasn’t that. It was just the pain that came as his body tried to process an alien signal it couldn’t handle, trying vainly to grasp onto it. He put a hand to his nose and it came away stained by a thin stream of blood.

“Here,” Luna said, handing him a cloth.

“Thanks,” Kevin replied.

Chloe was watching him from the other side of the bunkbed, as though it was a barrier between her and Luna.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “What happened?”

“I told you what happened,” Luna said. Kevin could hear the annoyance there.

Chloe shook her head. “I want to hear it from him.”

Kevin swallowed. “I think… I think there’s a transmission.”

“I told you,” Luna said, with a certain satisfaction, then looked back to Kevin. “Wait, you think there’s one?”

Kevin could understand that uncertainty. Before, the transmissions had all been so clear.

“There weren’t any words,” Kevin said. “It was all numbers.”

“Like the first time,” Luna said.

Kevin nodded, struggling to sit up. When he blinked, he could see the numbers clearly, burning behind his eyelids, there whether he wanted to see them or not.