Arrival

Put like that, it seemed like an impossible task. Kevin could barely imagine making it to the NASA institute in one piece, but they still had to.

It was the only hope the world had.

CHAPTER FIVE

“I’m tempted to say ‘are we almost there yet,’” Luna said, with a smile across at Kevin.

Kevin should have guessed that one of the biggest dangers of a road trip like this wasn’t just the risk of crashing, or being ambushed by people controlled by aliens, or anything like that. It was the possibility that Luna might get bored enough to start thinking of ways to entertain herself. He had no doubt that would mean an argument with Chloe, and since Chloe was driving, that didn’t feel like a good thing.

Lots of things didn’t, from the alien spaceship hanging moon-sized and ominous in the sky, to the silent near emptiness of the roads. All of it just reminded him how weird this whole situation was, and how much the world had changed almost overnight.

“Can’t you drive any faster?” Luna asked.

“You want faster?” Chloe said, and hit the gas.

Kevin clung on. Once they got off the mountain, the roads opened up a little, but that didn’t mean they could just go as fast as they wanted to. For one thing, Kevin doubted that Chloe had any more of an idea of how to drive than he or Luna did.

For another, there were still too many cars in the road for that.

“Slow down,” Kevin said as they blitzed their way around a Chevy parked in the middle of the freeway, its owner long gone. They barely skidded their way past a motorcycle that had been left on its side, just abandoned. “Chloe, please slow down.”

They slowed a little, and it was probably just as well they did. There were cars strewn everywhere now, mostly just left wherever their owners had been converted, but some of them were little more than twisted lumps of metal where they’d obviously crashed.

A tanker lay on its side by the edge of the freeway, gas seeping into the earth around it. One spark would have set it off, and right then, Kevin thought he understood how it felt.

“We need to work together,” he said, trying to calm things down a little. He tried to think about what his mother might have said in a situation like this, or Ted, or Dr. Levin. The only problem with that was that it hurt too much to think about all the people who had been taken from them, who might even now be on the ship that hung like a second moon in the sky.

“We’ve… everyone else is gone,” he said, choking back the hurt. “We’ve all lost people. We’ve all had bad things happen.” It didn’t seem like a big enough thing to say to contain the full horror of it. “All of us are hurting, and we can’t argue just because it’s bad. We’ll only get through this if we work together.”

The others were quiet for a little while.

“Okay,” Chloe said at last.

“Yeah, I guess,” Luna agreed.

They drove on, the ancient truck rattling and bumping its way along roads littered with the debris of people’s last moments before the aliens took them. There were abandoned fast food cartons and abandoned vehicles, pets left to wander by the side of the road, and people who lay where they’d fallen when cars had hit them, so still that it was obvious there was nothing that could be done to help them, even if Kevin had known anything about medicine.

He looked up at the sight of the alien ship in orbit above the world. Was his mom up there, or was she on one of the ships that he and Luna had seen come down from it to hover over the cities of the world? Maybe she’d been left standing around, waiting for something else, the way the hikers and the soldiers on the mountain had. Kevin wasn’t sure which of those options he should be hoping for. None of them sounded good.

“Look,” Luna said, pointing.

Kevin saw what she was pointing at right away. The big ship that had moved into place above San Francisco was still there, hovering improbably above the city while occasionally much smaller forms darted down from it. After so much stillness on the roads, that movement was almost as jarring as the fact that there was an alien spaceship just sitting there.

Almost.

“We’re actually driving towards that,” Chloe said. “This really doesn’t seem good.”

“Well, that’s one thing we can agree on,” Luna said.

It was probably about the only thing they did agree on, but they still had to go there. They had to do this, because right then, it seemed like the only hope anybody had. Kevin swallowed at that thought. It was too much pressure; far too much.

The alien ship was high enough above the city that it took another ten minutes before the buildings below started to come into view, skyscrapers jabbing up into the air below it like fingers trying to reach up to touch it. As they got closer, the roads got busier too, with more and more abandoned cars, so that they had to slow almost to a crawl to pick their way through safely.

“At least we’re not on the other side of the road,” Luna said. She had a point. The way out of the city was so clogged with cars now that it seemed impossible that anyone might be able to drive through the chaos of it. It looked as though they’d gotten out only just in time the first time around.

“It’s going to make getting out of the city again kind of hard,” Kevin said as he thought about it. He didn’t like the idea of being trapped in there. Maybe there would be some easy way to deal with the aliens once they got to NASA and listened to the new signal, maybe they wouldn’t need to leave again before this was all okay, but looking at the sight of the alien ships, it was hard to believe it.

“It’s easy,” Chloe said. “There’s no one on the road, so we drive the wrong side.”

That would do it. It was weird, though, that, even with what looked like the end of the world, it still felt wrong even thinking about it.

“Which way?” Chloe asked.

Kevin pointed, hoping he had it right. He’d been living at NASA for so long, but it wasn’t as if he and his mom had driven there more than a few times. They headed deeper into the city, trying to follow signs that looked as though they would lead them closer to where they wanted to go.

The city was eerily quiet. There was garbage left in the streets and animals wandering about, but Kevin didn’t see any signs of people. He guessed that anyone this far into the city had walked to the spot where everyone had stood looking up at the ship that hung there. He wanted to try to ignore it, but it was impossible. Even when he did tear his eyes from it, it just meant that he looked past it to the even bigger shape hanging far out in orbit.

“Almost there,” Luna said. “We need to go right here.”

Kevin guessed that she’d been paying more attentions to the directions than he did. He was glad that one of them was certain of the way, at least. They pulled around the corner, into the Mountain View district, and Kevin saw the NASA center ahead.

Somehow, it managed to look even emptier than the rest of the city as they approached. Maybe it was just that Kevin was used to the whole place being so much busier, filled with people there to see what was going on, or there to see him, in the last few weeks. When he’d been in there relaying the messages on TV, there had been so many people waiting outside that it had seemed there was no way in or out. Now, the route to the research center was silent and still, no sign of people anywhere.

“There’s something sad about seeing it like this,” Kevin said. He thought about all the people who had been working inside when the vapor had started to come out. Would they still be in there? He hoped not.

“At least it means we’re not having to run away from people controlled by aliens,” Luna said. “I hope.”

They drove up as far as the security barrier, then Kevin and Luna got out to open it. It took both of them to move the weight of the thing, lifting it up and leaving it up so that Chloe could bring the truck through. From here, the research center looked even emptier, its size only emphasizing it. The doors all stood open, left that way by whoever had come pouring out, controlled by the aliens.

“We need to be careful,” Kevin said. “There might still be some in there.”

“There won’t be, will there?” Chloe asked. “I thought they’d all be in the ships or something by now.”

“You don’t have to come in,” Luna said.

“I didn’t say that.”

The three of them crept forward, staying quiet as they went in through the open doorway. Still, there was no sign of anyone, which managed to be both a relief and kind of creepy at the same time. All the doors inside the place were open, most of them looking as though they’d been broken open by force as the controlled people struggled to get out.

“At least it means that we’ll be able to get where we need to go,” Luna said.

“Where do we need to go?” Chloe asked, looking over to Kevin. “Which way?”

“The computer pit,” Kevin said. He’d been thinking about this most of the way up. They would need to find a way to get the computers to reorient the radio telescopes to match the numbers in his head, then listen to the feed in the room the scientists had set up for him to do just that.

He started to lead the way, through doorways that he’d never had clearance for, thinking about all the people he’d seen working there in the different labs and offices. All of them were gone now, their things left behind as if they might be back for them at any moment.

“It’s like a ghost ship,” Chloe said, echoing what he was thinking. “Or like one of those towns where everything is set for dinner, and the people are just… gone.”