Return to Paradise

CHAPTER NINE

TODD’S THE ONLY OFFICER ON DUTY. I THINK I’m the luckiest guy alive until he rolls his eyes and gives me a long, drawn-out sigh as I walk in.

“Go home, Mark,” he says curtly.

“Todd, man, what are you doing here all alone?”

“Someone mentioned that I was talking to civilians while on duty yesterday, and I got switched to the graveyard shift. That’s what.”

“Oh,” I say. Oops.

“Plus there’s been some kind of electrical fire on the outskirts of town that everyone was raring to get to.” He inhales and wrinkles his nose a bit. “Jesus. You smell like a bar.”

I’m not exactly surprised. Alex’s house smelled like it had been sprayed down with cheap beer. Still, this electrical fire is great news for me.

“I was just at a party,” I say with a shrug. “Someone must have spilled something on me. You know how it is. You’ve told me about the epic ragers you guys used to throw when you were on the team.”

Todd gets a wide grin and goes into a story I’ve heard a hundred times from him about how he drank the entire special team’s roster under the table out in the woods on his eighteenth birthday. I smile and nod and tell myself that I’m never going to be this dude when I get older. If humans aren’t the alien workforce or something by then.

Finally he’s done.

“Man, that sounds so hard-core,” I say, forcing a grin. “I’m super jealous. Anyway, I just came by to pick up some stuff my dad left for me in his office.”

Todd nods and gestures to my dad’s door, still grinning from his memories.

I unlock the office with Dad’s keys and quietly close the door behind me. The place is a mess of files strewn about the desk and seemingly random sheets of paper stacked on every surface. I start digging through the piles, but after a few minutes of searching, all I’ve come up with are weeks-old traffic violations and endless paperwork on stuff not at all related to John or the Mogs. Then I realize that of course that stuff’s not going to be lying around, and I use one of the small keys on the key ring to open the filing cabinet by my dad’s desk. After flipping through a few hanging folders, I come to the one I’m looking for: PARADISE HIGH SCHOOL.

Yes.

The first file I pull out is full of initial incident reports and nondisclosure agreements from the first responders. I toss it on the desk to come back to later. The second file’s a jackpot: full-page photos of the destruction at the school. The trenches dug through the football field and the huge divots I recognize as actually being footprints. Shotgun shells littering a classroom we holed up in for a while. The trashed auditorium. All signs that point to the fact that this was maybe something other than the work of a teenager with a vendetta against the school.

My pulse pounds as I take out my phone and start to snap photos of the pictures. I can upload them all to the blog later. GUARD and the others will flip when they see this shit. I rifle through the pictures as fast as I can, recording each one. My brain is buzzing, and I can hear my blood thumping in my ears.

Maybe that’s why I don’t hear anyone come in.

Someone yanks the back collar of my shirt and jacket, choking me. I’m swung around, and the surprise causes me to drop my phone. The file photos scatter across the floor. I expect to be staring into the face of a Mogadorian, or one of the agents.

But it’s worse.

It’s my father.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he bellows.

“Dad, I was—”

“Do you have any idea how much trouble you’d be in if someone else caught you in here? How much trouble I’d be in?”

“Dad, let me—”

“This is a matter of national security, Mark. I mean, Christ.”

He pushes me backwards with a strong shove. I stumble over my feet and hit the ground hard just as Dad’s picking up my phone. He taps on it, systematically deleting everything I’ve taken pictures of, cursing the entire time. It’s only then that I realize how weird it is that he’s here in full uniform so late. Whatever happened with the fire tonight, it must have been important enough to call him in.

When he’s done deleting things, he just stands there staring down at me for a minute.

“Go home, Mark,” he says, emphasizing every syllable he can. “And stay there.”

He starts to hand my phone to me when my text message sound goes off twice, so instead he turns the screen to see what’s on it.

That’s when his face goes white.

“What?” I ask.

He doesn’t respond, only reaches down and pulls me up to my feet, half dragging me out of the office.

“Todd!” he barks, and then Todd is standing by the front door. “Outside, now.”

“Dad, what’s going on?”

He’s still pulling me behind him. I could fight back, but I can tell he’s furious. Something’s wrong. Something bad has happened.

When we get to Todd’s police car, Dad pulls open the back driver’s-side door and shoves me inside. I manage to rip my phone out of his hands as I go in, and Dad slams the door before he realizes I’ve taken it. He yells at Todd.

“You take him straight back to my mother’s house. If he puts up any fight, arrest him.”

Todd looks at me, shaking his head as my dad runs to his patrol car, yelling something into his radio.

It’s only then that I look down at my phone. There are two texts from Sarah.

OMG John is here.

Don’t come but if something weird happens I’ll txt u.

Shit.

My mind starts to race as I figure out what to do next. I call Sarah immediately. When she doesn’t answer, I text:

DAD SAW THIS. HE’S COMING 4 JOHN. GET OUT.

And then I realize what this means. Dad’s calling in the FBI, the police—hell, the fire department. Everyone’s about to converge on Sarah’s house, and she doesn’t know. She’s probably making out with a fucking alien, and the FBI and weirdo Agent Walker are going to find her.

I start banging my fist against the metal separating the front and back seats in Todd’s car, shouting as he gets in.

“NO! We have to go to her. Todd, man, take me to Sarah’s. You have to take me to Sarah’s right now. Go, go, go.”

“The only place I’m taking you is home.”

I keep beating on the metal until blood starts to trickle from my knuckles and Todd slams his own fist against the grate, yelling at me to shut up, then muttering profanities to himself. I’m frantically texting Sarah as he says: “And I thought the explosion at the Goodes’ place was going to be the highlight of the night.”

The Goodes’ place. Explosion.

My head tries to put everything together, ignoring the pain in my hand and the blood beating in my brain.

John’s here. He’s in Paradise, probably with Sam and Six. There was an explosion at Sam’s house. All the cops were called out to it. If there was an explosion, that must mean there was fighting. And the only people John would be fighting . . .

The Mogs.

The Mogs are here. They’re after John. And John’s with Sarah.