Return to Paradise

CHAPTER FIVE

ALEX DAVIS TEXTS ME AFTER DINNER. HE’S A wide receiver a year younger than me who was part of my close circle at Paradise High. Apparently his parents are out of town for the weekend, and he’s managed to score a whole keg. Everyone we know is going over there. “No open flames lol,” he says. I text Sarah to ask if she wants to go, but she says no, as I expected. Inviting her is just a gesture. Neither of us is really in the mood to party lately. Pick any Friday night in the years before Mogs invaded Paradise, and I would have been out with friends—maybe out with Sarah—partying at someone’s house or in a clearing in the woods that we’d circled our cars around. But now, I just don’t see the point. There’s an alien war that could break out here at any moment. When that happens, I don’t want to be trying to recover from my third keg stand.

My friends—my teammates—bothered me about my newfound lack of social life a lot at first. Then I told Sarah’s friend Emily that I was weirded out about parties ever since my house burned down. That’s not actually true, but Emily’s kind of a gossip, and pretty soon no one was giving me shit about staying home so much. Or at least, most people weren’t.

I text Alex and say I’ll pass and he calls me a little bitch and for half a minute I think that maybe I’ll go over there to kick his ass and remind him which one of us was MVP, but then I just click my phone to silent and head upstairs.

My room at the house used to be my granddad’s office before he died. At least, everyone called it his “office.” Really it was just the spare room where my grandmother stored all his old history books and navy trunk and stuff like that. But there’s a desk and a foldout couch in there, which is all I really need.

The first thing I do when I sit at the desk is log on to this blog I’ve started following called “Aliens Anonymous.” I stumbled on it by chance, back in the first few days after the battle at the high school, and despite its dumb name, it’s turned out to be pretty interesting. One of the guys running it—a dude who goes by the name GUARD—posted a story from the local paper and wrote a bunch of stuff about how the whole destruction at the high school might be a cover-up for alien activity. At first I thought GUARD might have been from around here, but the Paradise incident was actually just one of many accidents or events he’d pegged as being somehow linked to aliens. In this case, at least, he’d guessed correctly. He’d even made the connection that the “John Smith” that everyone kept pinning stuff on was probably not exactly of this world.

Searching through the blog’s archives, I’d come across a few stories that sounded like they might have had to do with the Loric or Mogs. The site is mostly a lot of posts that look like they belong in one of those “Elvis Still Lives!” magazines at the grocery store, but some of them sound true—or at least like they could be true, given what I’ve seen. I knew I could help the blog by telling them some of what I know, and by doing that I could get them to help me search for clues as to where John and Sam and Invisible Girl might be now.

So after browsing the blog for a while, I’d contacted GUARD and told him I was from Paradise and that I thought he might be right. There were a couple of weird emails from him full of instructions that had made me wonder if I was dealing with some kind of messed-up lunatic wearing a tinfoil hat—a guide on how to hide my IP address, passwords to access restricted sections of the blog, rules on when and how I could contact him—but after a while we started to get to know one another. I guess I started to trust him, because before long I’d told him about what happened at the school that night.

GUARD doesn’t know everything, though. I’ve seen enough specials on the news to realize that I should question the identity of anyone I meet on the internet, especially now that I know the Mogs would do anything to find John and the others. I didn’t tell him my name or anything. Just that I saw things that made me a true believer. On the blog I go by the name JOLLYROGER182, which I stole from the skull-and-crossbones flags flown at the Paradise Pirates football games and some of my granddad’s old navy stuff that’s framed in the upstairs room. He was part of the Fighting 182nd in the navy. I wonder what he’d say if I told him I was gearing up to maybe have to one day fight for Earth.

There are a couple of other people who are regulars on the blog, or “editors” as we call ourselves. Usually it takes a long time to earn that title, but I must have really convinced GUARD that I was legit, because he gave me full access to the blog pretty fast. The others are fine and all, but GUARD is the de facto ringleader, and the dude who’s the most serious about everything that’s going on.

I’m happy to see he’s online. We start chatting immediately.

JOLLYROGER182: wassup man

JOLLYROGER182: anything new 2night?

GUARD: Hey, JR. Still trying to make sense of that thing in TN.

GUARD is convinced that a freak storm in Tennessee was caused by one of the Loric’s powers, but we haven’t been able to track down any evidence. The story came from a police officer who had too much whiskey one night and started yelling to everyone at a bar about how some magic kids with the power to control thunderstorms were tearing across the state, and somehow that made it into the local paper. I called to see if I could talk to the officer, pretending I was someone from the Paradise police department, but they told me the guy had been transferred to a different county and they couldn’t put me in touch with him. I have a sneaking suspicion that’s the FBI’s version of sending a dog to a nice farm upstate, which probably provides more evidence that it was John and the others than anything else.

JOLLYROGER182: want me 2 look into it some more? i can try to call around again

GUARD: No. Take a look at this. Sound familiar?

He sends me a link to a post on an online journal. It belongs to some girl named Meredith down in Miami. It starts out really sad—her parents think she’s on drugs and have had her in and out of institutions—and I can’t figure out why GUARD is interested in it. Then, after a few paragraphs, I get to what he’s talking about: the reason her parents think she’s on drugs is because she says she watched some random dude on the streets of Miami use what she describes as “mind powers” to shove her boyfriend up against the wall of a coffee shop, keeping him pinned there a few feet off the ground.

My chat window dings while I’m reading.

GUARD: What do you think? Telekinesis?

GUARD: Could this be your friend? The time stamp on the journal entry is yesterday, but she doesn’t say when the coffee shop event happened.

GUARD: Emailed to find out more info but she hasn’t gotten back to me.

JOLLYROGER182: hold on

Luckily, this girl’s listed the facility her parents had checked her into and her full name. Not exactly smart stuff to put on the internet, but great for me. I look up the hospital and call the front desk.

“Hi,” I say when a woman picks up. “I’m trying to get in contact with Meredith Harris.”

“Just one minute,” the woman says. I can hear the clacking of keys in the background for a few moments before her voice comes back again. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir, but Ms. Harris was checked out a few days ago.”

“Oh, um . . . ,” I say, trying to come up with my next question. I realize that I probably should have thought this through more before I called, but thinking before I act isn’t really my style. I go off instinct.

“Um, that can’t be right,” I continue. On my computer screen, I see the date of the journal post, and something clicks in my head: It’ll be easier to figure out if it was John in Miami if I know when this chick first got sent to the hospital. “Maybe I have the wrong number. When was your Meredith Harris checked in?”

“Well . . . ,” the woman says. I can tell she’s hesitant to give me any more info.

“Please, ma’am, this is my sister. I’m just trying to make sure I know where she’s at.”

I must have come up with the right amount of sob story, because she gives me a date—one that puts Meredith Harris going into the hospital at the same time I was trying to kick John’s ass on the hayride.

I thank the woman on the other end of the line and hang up, then turn back to GUARD.

JOLLYROGER182: no dice. i called the hospital. the girl was admitted while John Smith was here

GUARD: Maybe the actual incident occurred before he came to Paradise?

JOLLYROGER182: i don’t think his powers came until he was here

At least, that’s what John told Sarah. In all our conversations about the Loric and the Mogs, I’ve gotten to know basically everything he ever told her about himself.

GUARD: Ah. Okay. Maybe it’s another Loric then.

JOLLYROGER182: must be a dumb one begging to become Mog food.

GUARD: So much stuff happening these days. A lot of weird activity.

GUARD: I get the feeling everything must be coming to a head sometime soon. Don’t you?

I hate that I agree with him.

I poke around online a little more before calling it a night, my eyes strained too much and a headache coming on. I lie in bed and think of the same scene that’s been replayed in my head a million times since everything went crazy. It’s not even one of the weirder moments, like when a damned lizard monster attacked us or John’s dog turned into some kind of dragon. Or when alien bad guys turned into ash after being stabbed. It was when I was at John’s house.

It was when I’d found out that aliens existed.

I’d gone over to John’s house to ask about the video. That stupid video someone had shot on their phone of John flying like Superman out of my burning house, Sarah and the dogs with him. I’d ended up in the middle of a fight between him and the guy I’d thought was his father, Henri. And then weird stuff started happening. Henri stopped moving, like he was frozen in place, which I now realize meant that John was using his telekinesis. They were talking about Sarah being in trouble, and then John was just gone. Running, I guess, all the way to the school.

After he’d left, Henri was able to move again. I’d been furious that no one was answering my questions, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. He looked like he was about to break in every way possible. I’d kept asking questions, but he kept ignoring me. He ran into another room. When he came back out, he was carrying a shotgun and this locked box with all kinds of weird symbols carved into it. I could tell he was on some kind of mission as he headed to his truck. I was fast, though, and got there before him, planting myself in the passenger seat. I needed to know what was going on. Especially if Sarah was involved.

“I don’t have time to deal with you,” Henri had said as he jumped into the truck. “Out!”

What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to react to that?

“If Sarah’s in danger, you take me to her,” I said. “No matter what.” And I meant it. Suddenly that was the only thing that mattered.

Henri had looked at me long and hard before starting his truck. As we peeled out of his driveway, he shoved the locked chest into my lap.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Henri just shook his head.

“Boy, you’ve got a lot to learn in the next five minutes.”

Then everything went to hell.

Lying on my pullout bed at Nana’s, I think about this interaction, wondering why I got in the truck in the first place. I don’t know, really. Looking back on it, I should have called my dad. Or let Henri go alone. Or any number of options that wouldn’t have put me at Mog ground zero. But something had told me to go with him. I’m glad I did. I mean, I saved John that night, and probably Sarah too.

But a little part of me wishes that I’d never gotten into that truck. That Henri hadn’t told me about the war we were driving towards—a battle on Earth between two alien races.

Part of me wishes I’d just walked away. Life would have been a lot less complicated that way.