Arrival

***

Kevin made his way through the underground complex, looking for Chloe. It took a while to find her in the tangled corridors and storerooms, but eventually he heard her ahead. She seemed to be talking to herself.

“I can’t do it… I can’t do it…”

Kevin cautiously looked through a doorway to find Chloe sitting on the floor of a storeroom. There were things scattered around in a spread that didn’t look accidental. It looked as though she’d swept her arm along one of the shelves, knocking everything to the floor. She had her head in her hands and seemed to be crying.

“Chloe?”

She looked up as Kevin approached, wiping away her tears as if afraid they might be used against her.

“I’m fine,” she said, before Kevin could even ask if she was okay. “I’m fine.”

“I used to say I was fine when people asked me about my illness,” Kevin said, moving to sit down beside her. “It mostly meant I wasn’t.”

“I just get… upset… sometimes,” Chloe said, and Kevin guessed she’d picked that word carefully out of all the ones that had come to her. “I do stuff without really thinking. It’s part of why people said I was crazy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Kevin said.

Chloe sighed. “You don’t know me yet. Did you just come here to see how badly I was messing up?”

“No, of course not,” Kevin said. “We… I… think that we need to go back to the NASA research institute. With what I saw, there might be a message, and it might be important.”

“You want to go into the middle of the city, to a place that might be full of them?” Chloe replied. “That’s…that doesn’t make any sense. We could go anywhere. There are the Survivors in LA, or my cousin up north…”

“We need to do this,” Kevin said. “Luna’s collecting supplies, and we’ll work out a plan for getting there safely. You could stay here if you want, though. You don’t have to come with us if you don’t think it would be safe enough.”

“You don’t want me to come with you?” Chloe said, and now she sounded as upset as she’d looked before.

“That’s not what I said,” Kevin said.

“It’s what you meant, though, isn’t it?” Chloe shot back.

“No,” Kevin replied. “I just thought you might not want to come. You said yourself it might be dangerous.”

Chloe shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Chloe,” Kevin said. “I don’t want to—”

“Whatever,” Chloe repeated, in a dull tone. “Do what you want. I don’t care. Go off and make your stupid preparations.”

“Chloe—”

“Go!” she snapped.

Kevin went, hoping that if he left Chloe alone for a while, they might be able to talk about it again later or something. That was what people did, wasn’t it? They talked about things and made up?

For now, he knew he should probably help Luna find supplies for their journey. They would need all kinds of things, from gas for the car that they’d left waiting outside to clothes, to maps. He passed a door with the word “Armory” printed above it and tried the handle, but it was locked. Maybe that was just as well. He doubted that he and Luna could fight their way through a horde of controlled people no matter how many weapons they had. Besides, just the thought of it made him picture his mother running toward him, or the scientists from the Institute, or Luna’s parents. He didn’t think he would be able to hurt any of them.

He was still thinking about it when he heard alarms going off in the direction of the control room.

Kevin ran there, hoping it would all just be some false alarm or minor fault, but in his heart, he knew it wouldn’t be. He knew exactly who would be responsible for that alarm, and he didn’t want to think about what she might be doing.

He saw Chloe as he ran into the control room. She was pressing buttons on the computers through a haze of tears, stabbing at them with her fingers as if pressing them harder would make them work better.

“Chloe, what are you doing?” Kevin demanded.

“I don’t have to do what you say. I don’t have to do what anyone says,” she said, in a determined tone. “You can’t keep me here. I need to get out!”

“No one’s trying to—”

“I thought you liked me. I thought you might be my friend, but you’re like all the others. I’m going. You can’t stop me!”

She pressed something else, and the tone of the alarms changed. Computer-generated words blared over the speakers.

“Emergency Evacuation Procedure begun. Opening doors. Please exit the base in an orderly fashion.”

“What?” Kevin said. “Chloe, what have you done?”

“What’s she doing now?” Luna asked, as she ran into the room. She had a backpack over one shoulder that she’d obviously been using to collect supplies, still half open because of the hurry to get there. She didn’t look happy.

Not as unhappy as Chloe did, though. “You were going to leave me behind here like some kind of… of prisoner,” she said, and her tone was frantic, angry, and scared all at once. “You’re not going to keep me here. I’m going to my cousin. I’m going to find out what happened to him. Then I’m going to the Survivors.”

Behind her, the great door to the airlock was swinging open. To Kevin’s shock, so was the outer door, both of them opening at once in a clear path to the outside. Kevin could see the mountain road outside, and the trees. Worse, he could see figures moving out there, turning toward the sound almost in unison.

Pretty much as soon as the way was clear, Chloe darted through the doorway, out onto the mountain. Kevin was too shocked by it all to try to stop her, and Luna was pulling on her gas mask in a hurry, obviously still unsure about whether to trust the air outside or not.

“The door, Kevin!” Luna yelled as she hurried to put it in place. “We need to close the door.”

Kevin nodded. “I’ve got it.”

He hoped he had it, at least. He could see the people outside advancing toward the door, more of them than he could have believed given that the aliens were supposed to have taken the people. There were soldiers and hikers, whole families moving in a kind of stilted, silent coordination.

Kevin pressed buttons on the computer, hoping to undo whatever had been done. Nothing seemed to have any effect. It didn’t help that he didn’t have a clue how the computer system here worked. It wasn’t as if everything was labeled for anyone who wanted to try using it. Besides, he suspected that an emergency door opening like this wasn’t supposed to be easy to undo, in case people got trapped inside. He mashed at the computer’s keys, hoping to find some combination that might do something.

None of it worked. The doors stayed open, a clear path standing to the outside, and now, along that path, the people controlled by the aliens were stalking forward.

They were coming.

And if they reached the bunker, Kevin was terrified of what would happen next.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Run!” Kevin yelled as the people the aliens had converted closed in on the bunker. Luna already seemed to be taking his advice, running back into the confusing depths of the place, so fast that Kevin had to push to keep up.

They’d always been good at running away. Whenever they got into trouble for being somewhere they shouldn’t be, they always managed to keep ahead of whoever was following them. Well, most of the time. Well, at least better than half. This time, though, Kevin suspected they would get something a lot worse than a stern warning if the creatures behind them caught up.

He could hear the thud of their feet on the bunker’s floor as they followed, the sound of their pursuit silent except for the clatter of boots against concrete. They didn’t call out in their pursuit, didn’t screech or scream or demand that Kevin and Luna stop. Somehow, that made it all scarier.