Chapter 1: Cry For Help

That summer when I was sixteen seemed like it would go on forever. The days were long and hot, and like most of my friends I had nothing to do. I’d spend the days playing video games, watching TV, and sleeping, all the while half hoping something would happen and half glad that it didn’t. Either way I was always going to be half disappointed.

I lived with my mom and my stepdad in a house my mom inherited from her parents. I don’t know my real father, but apparently he was the type that was too busy working to have time for his family. Hank, my stepdad, seems to be a good guy and he does his best to take care of us. His job at the cable company keeps us off the street, so I can’t complain.

On that particular day, it was late afternoon and I’d fallen alseep while lying on the couch and sort of watching TV.

“Hi Janet!”

I stirred, half-heartedly struggling to be fully conscious.

“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” said my mom.

With some effort, I sat up on the couch and yawned, feeling a little dizzy. “Wha?”

My mom is kind of… strange. She considers herself a housewife even though she isn’t very good at it. But then the times I can remember when she tried to get a job all seemed to end in disasters that were much worse than the tallest pile of dirty dishes we’d ever had. She doesn’t get out much, except for stuff like grocery shopping, so she wears sweats most of the time, and her graying hair doesn’t show any care beyond shampoo and a once through with a brush. I keep trying to explain to her about this whole conditioner thing, but she never keeps using it for more than a day or two.

The other thing about her is that she always has to beat around the bush whenever she has something to say that she’s uncomfortable with. She was avoiding eye contact and fidgeting as she said, “I don’t know how to say this, but… I’m an alien.”

Slowly, I raised my hand and pointed to the other side of the living room, where a smooth, silver shape was lodged in the wall. It had been there for as long as I could re-member; supposedly it was the UFO in which she’d come to Earth as a baby. “I know.” She’d been adopted and raised by the couple that had lived here. My grandparents, sort of.

“And, um, that means you’re half-alien.”

I sighed and pointed at my antennas. “I kinda noticed.” Whatever kind of alien my mother is and I’m a half-breed of, they seem to be completely human except for having metal antennas coming out of the top of the head. They’re retractable, which is convenient for mom, but probably because I’m half-human my antennas are droopy and it’s hard to make them extend or retract when I want to. I usually wear a hairband so if they come out I can pretend I have weird tastes. I keep thinking that if I ever meet other alien kids they’ll probably make fun of me for having droopy antennas. Kids are like that.

She looked even more nervous now, which meant she was probably running out of useless things to tell me.

“Mom…”

“Janet… in a week the world is going to end.”

*

Needless to say, the fact that the world exists is the kind of thing you get used to. If I didn’t know her so well I would’ve thought she was joking around, but when she jokes it’s usually really lame and obvious. She showed me this portable “planetary threat monitor” device she had. She’d left it on her nightstand for years, an inert silver… thing. Until now. It had unfolded and was showing what looked like a very big asteroid headed directly for Earth.

My mom wasn’t about to give up though; she announced that we were going to repair her UFO and escape.

“But… what about all my friends? What about Hank?”

She was silent for a long moment. “I don’t want to leave anyone behind—don’t think that for a second.” There was something new in her voice, a ferocity I’d never heard before. She put her arms around me. It wasn’t much, but it was comforting.

“Shouldn’t we tell someone?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Whoever needs to know undoubtedly does by now. People would either think we’re crazy or panic and make things worse for themselves.”

“Then what can we do?”

She swayed slightly. Was she trying to be motherly, or was she feeling weak? “Try to find someone out there in outer space that can help.”

The enormity of it all was creeping up on me. Everyone I knew, and everyone they knew, and so on until everyone anyone knew and even anyone that no one knew, was going to die. There had to be people more worthy than the two of us. But I didn’t want to die. So it was with my stomach twisting into knots of worry and regret and guilt that we started working on the UFO. We might get out into space and not find any help, or we might be stuck on earth. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.

The flying saucer had been caulked into the wall so that the room wouldn’t have the outside air coming through the cracks all the time, making it pretty hard to pull out. Once it was out it seemed impossibly light, and the two of us had no trouble carrying it to a more convenient spot on the tangle of crabgrass we call a back yard.

A lot of people have had the experience of working on something like a car or a computer or a sink with their father. I even helped Hank fix the toilet one time. Working on the UFO was like a really surreal version of that. At my mom’s touch the UFO just sort of opened up, its smooth, silvery surface parting to reveal the insides of the flying saucer. In it was a box of tools, a heavy book full of an alien script written on some kind of silvery paper, and what looked like a raygun out of a 50s sci-fi B-movie.

Mom explained that she had been sleep-taught how to repair UFOs as an infant. I remember reading somewhere that they’d found that sleep teaching didn’t actually work, but she handled the tools deftly even though all of them where totally unrecognizable and had weird glowy pieces. She would ask me for a tool by name—a transphasic oscillator, a metaphasic neutron ram, a sonic rotator—and then remember that she had to describe what the tool looked like to me at least once. She tried to explain what it was she was doing, but it all went way over my head.

I had never been interested in my alien heritage—or my human heritage for that matter—but now that we were probably going to actually go to the home planet, I figured it was a good time to ask.

“Can you tell me about your home planet?” She almost dropped the tachyon in-terositer I was handing her.

“I don’t know very much,” she finally replied. “There are all different kinds of aliens in the galaxy, and everyone from our planet has these antennas, though there are different kinds. Members of the royal family have antennas so big they can hardly walk.”
Our planet. In a week it might be the only home I’d have. “But… what was the planet like?”

“I can barely remember… A greenish-blue sky, two moons.”

“Cities?”

“Great big cities, with flying cars everywhere. Can you hand me the photonic transcorder? The little black box?”

The box started blinking its red lights at me the moment I touched it. “Do you know why you were sent to Earth?”

“I’m not sure.”

It seemed weird that parents would abandon a newborn child to an alien planet. Based on the sci-fi movies I’ve seen it was tempting to think that they had sent her here because their planet was going to be destroyed, but maybe there was some other reason. A planet ruled by people with gigantic antennas on their heads probably would do something strange like that.

She couldn’t remember much else, so we continued without talking for a while.
She had taken out a big glowing cube from the bowels of the UFO and was applying various tools to it. “The problem,” she explained, “is mostly in here, the main antimat-ter/antigravity module.” In movies antimatter was always the most volatile substance in the universe. I wanted to edge away from it, but I figured I’d probably have to keep edging for at least a few miles—probably a lot more—for it to make any difference.

It was kind of an odd image to see my mom in her sweats, crouched over the module that we’d put on top of a worn bath towel.

“What about my father?” I asked.

She paused and looked up from her work. “Charles. Charles Jenkins. I met him in college. I was the English major with no future and he was the business major on the fast track.” She liked to write stories, but she hardly ever had the confidence to show them to people, much less submit them to be published. “We had you and we got married and he got a job. And then he got promoted, and promoted again, until it seemed like his whole life was overtime and business trips.”

“Do I ever remind you of him?”

“Sometimes,” she replied. There was something wistful in her expression. “You have his eyes, and you can apply yourself.”

I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but I suppose it’s true; I get good grades in school, partly because I can sit down and get stuff done when I need to. Mom’s credit rating is lousy because she’s really bad about getting bills paid on time.

“Anyway, if you can give me the neutron ram again, I think I’ve just about got this module re-balanced.”

She hauled it into the slot where it had come from. It seemed as though that module had weighed more than the whole UFO did, but maybe I was just more tired. After a quick touch from the tachyon interphase driver, she announced that it should be ready.
I took a deep breath. “Should I go and pack or something?”

Mom was putting away the tools in the box. “Nah. We’ll just do a quick test run and take our time getting things together tomorrow.”

With the two of us the UFO was cramped; we wouldn’t be able to fit much baggage in there at all. Mom patiently went over the controls, which seemed to consist mainly of little unmarked blinking lights. When she was satisfied, she tapped a button and the doorway closed, becoming a smooth, seamless part of the hull.

“Here goes nothing.” She tapped another button. There was a faint hum, and I felt the UFO rise. A monitor showed a view of the outside, our house being struck by what looked like spotlights. It edged higher and higher, until we could see out over the doomed neighborhood, over all the doomed houses.

“We’ll just take a quick spin around town,” she announced cheerfully.

The hum of the UFO rose in pitch. Then it stopped.

We were falling.

When stuff like that happens in movies and the actors scream, it sounds a certain way. When you really do think you’re going to die and the ground is rushing up to smack you in the face, that’s different. What came out of my mouth sounded pretty lame, but I was too busy watching my life flash in front of my eyes to really notice.

Falling gives you a feeling of weightlessness that would be pretty neat were it not for the fact that you get to think about how you’re going to land. When we landed we didn’t die, but it wasn’t an experience that I would want to repeat. We sat there for a while, trying to catch our breath.

“Mom?”

She put a hand to her chest, struggling to change a succession of gasps for air into normal breathing. Finally, she pressed a button on the control panel. Whatever it said left her looking crestfallen.

“What’s it say?”

She took off her glasses and started wiping them on her sweatshirt. “The gravitron module has decayed too much. This thing won’t ever fly again.”

*

My mom may be weird and lazy, but I love her all the same. Seeing her like that, about ready to give up completely, was more depressing than the end of the world.
She’d taken some pain reliever and was lying on the couch. She had explained that the materials necessary to repair the UFO simply didn’t exist on Earth. There was no way around it at all.

The house seemed oddly quiet. Outside it looked like a perfectly normal evening. Doomed cars were driven too fast by doomed drivers down the doomed street outside, and our doomed neighbors played their doomed music too doomed loud. But inside neither of us wanted to even turn on the TV (which was doomed too by the way). Mom just flopped onto her bed and closed her eyes, though I could tell she wasn’t sleeping. I did about the same on the couch. Every time I looked up at the clock, it seemed like the eternity I’d felt had been only a few minutes.

Finally, I got up, went to the back yard, looking up at the stars.

I heard the back door slide open and mom stepped out onto the grass. “I was thinking,” she said. “If… if there’s only a week left, maybe we could go out and do some of the things we always wanted to do before it’s all over. DisneyLand or something.”

“Isn’t there something else we could try?” I asked. It was too soon to give up. It had to be. “Like calling for help?”

She looked up at me, eyes wide. She smiled in wonder, wanting to laugh but afraid to. “Why didn’t I think of it before?” She reached inside picked up the toolbox. “Janet, I’m going to need the long extension cord and Hank’s electrical toolbox from the basement.”

“We can call for help?”

“My UFO has a distress beacon. We’ll need to power it ourselves, but it should work!”
She immediately set to work. I can truthfully say I’ve never seen her so industrous before. And this time I actually understood what most of the tools were, since she was working on the house’s fuse box.

“So what are you doing exactly?”

She smiled, her glasses catching the light of a yellowish full moon that hung above us. “I’m rewiring it so all the power from the house will go directly into the distress beacon from the power lines.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Very.”

Probably because I was getting so worried and stuff, she handed me a twenty and sent me around the corner to 7-11. Like the rest of the world, the turbaned man behind the counter—a Sikh, from somewhere in India—was unaware of his impending doom. Instead he was relaxing, insofar as a convenience store clerk can ever relax, and listening to what I could only assume was the pop music of his doomed homeland. I really needed to stop thinking about stuff being doomed. He smiled as he saw me come in, probably because I was a regular, trustworthy customer.

I stopped short when I saw Fred. As I came around the corner of the aisle, I saw Janice and Max there too, getting slurpees. Punk Guy, Goth Chick, and Geek Boy, respectively. I felt kind of generic when they were around.

Fred waved. “Hey Janet! How’s it going?”

Oh you know, trying to escape the planet before it gets destroyed by a giant asteroid. Oh, and my mom’s probably about to knock out all the power in the whole neighborhood.

“Just grabbing some stuff for my mom.” I was tempted to tell them the truth; then we could be Punk Guy, Goth Chick, Geek Boy, and UFO Girl.

“Cool.” Janice took a sip of kiwi-strawberry slurpee. “Are you busy then? We were going to call you to see if we could come over…”

With a week left for the world… What the hell. “Sure.”

When we got back, my mom was walking a cable over to the UFO. She turned, lifting some heavy goggles from her eyes, and grinned. “Hello! Come to see the fireworks, huh?”

I hadn’t expected her to be mad, but for her to be joking like that wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined either.

My friends took in the scene and exchanged glances. Max was the first to speak. “Fireworks? The Fourth of July is already over…”

She nodded, apparently attaching that cable to something. “Fireworks. Not literally, but it should be something to see.”

Janice sighed. “Janet, is there something you’re not telling us?”

What was I supposed to say to that? “Well, first there’s the fact that my mom’s a—”

There was a shower of sparks as my mom fell backwards from the UFO. A sort of antenna popped out of the top of it, and from the tip of the antenna a scintillating beam of light shot straight up into the sky. It was painful to look at, like a long blue-white strip of sun, etching its shape into our eyelids. It just seemed to go on and on, an incessant whining ma-chine noise filling the air around us, making the ground vibrate just slightly.

And then there was another shower of sparks, and it stopped. I was glad there was a full moon out because not a single electric light was on as far as we could see. Houses, streetlamps, traffic signals—everything was dark except for the dim stars and a moon the color of beeswax. A flashlight suddenly started spilling its radiance everywhere; it was my mom, with the lantern flashlight. It didn’t help much since our eyes were still covered with spots from the beam thing.

She seemed delighted with herself. “It worked!”

“What worked?” asked Fred.

“The distress beacon in my flying saucer.”

“Care to run that by me again?”

I cut in and explained the whole alien and end of the world thing to them. They didn’t seem to want to believe a word of it—and who could blame them?—but we had entirely too much proof sitting around the house.

“So… aliens are real and the world’s going to end,” concluded Fred.

I nodded. “I’m pretty sure my mom’s real so… yeah. That about sums it up.”

“And we can’t ride in that flying saucer?” asked Max.

“We tried that. Its power source thingy went bad.”

Mom opened her bottle of Dr. Pepper. “It should be better this way since we can probably take you all along. My saucer can barely fit two.” She sat on the grass and opened up a bag of tortilla chips. “All that’s left now, though, is to wait. Someone will come, I’m sure of it.”

I didn’t mention that that someone might be the police.

Finally, we all sat down and had some snacks. If we were going to go into outer space we might as well not do it on an empty stomach. Or maybe we just wanted something to distract ourselves from the end of the world.

The night sky seemed brighter than usual. That was probably because there was no glare of streetlights within about a 5-mile radius. The only constellation I could remember was Orion’s belt, those three bright stars in a row. The rest were just pretty dots to me, twinkling away in the night. I’d never thought that one of them might be my new home.
Usually when it looked like a star was moving it was actually the lights of an airplane; I’ve never actually seen a falling star before. But this time I saw something for real. It glowed blue and it flitted through the night sky.

“What the hell is that?” Fred was pointing. Only he was pointing somewhere else. Following where he pointed, I saw a green dot opposite the blue one, moving through the sky in a more sinuous path. Both kept coming closer, growing larger.

“Two UFOs?” mused mom. “It must be our lucky day!”

Somehow I wasn’t so sure.

Predictably, the UFOs were both flying saucers, but much bigger than mom’s. They both hovered over our back yard, sending down beams of light and fierce winds. Finally, they landed, each unfolding landing struts and gently touching down on the grass. Both had a door open out of what had looked like a smooth metal surface, and both spewed white light that made silhouettes out of tall, spindly humanoid figures.

We were suddenly surrounded on two sides by aliens. Not aliens like my mom, but alien aliens. I saw my mom slowly putting the raygun into one of her pockets.

On our left were what I assumed were the “Grays” that UFO enthusiasts were always babbling about. Tall and thin, with (you guessed it) gray skin and huge, glossy black eyes, six of them stood there, unclothed and silent.

On the right were creatures that were altogether very similar, but they were shorter, with mottled bluish skin.

The silence that followed lasted a long time. Maybe aliens really did go around ab-ducting people. If so, what was the etiquette for when they both wanted to abduct the same people?

The two groups of aliens kept staring at each other. They all looked angry. My antennas bobbed around—I hadn’t noticed that they were out—and suddenly I was able to hear voices.

“We will take them for a polyphasic scan!”

“You will do no such thing! We were here first!”

“That is untrue!”

“We arrived at the same time!”

“Silence, Subordinate!”

“This scan is vital to our research on the Earthlings!”

“Do not lie! You simply wish to investigate their rectums!”

“Why are you always shouting at me, Leader!”

“Silence! I have not even begun to shout at you!”

“Why can’t we compromise!”

“Because our two races have been enemies for eons!”

“What the hell is an eon anyway?”

“Silence!”

“Do you wish to have a piece of me! If so then just bring it!”

“Very well! I shall!”

“Halt! We have no time to quarrel! A compromise is acceptable!”

Finally, I used my hands to force my antennas back in. Whatever they were, no amount of listening was going to help much. Not when they just babbled and argued.

“What’s going on?” whispered Janice. To them it was still deathly quiet.

“I think they’re arguing over who gets to abduct us.”

“Abduct us?” squeaked Max. “I thought you were calling for help!”

Mom sighed. “Someone else answered. And besides, being adbucted will get you off the planet at least.”

“Dude! Who knows what they’ll do to us!” Max was starting to panic.

I let out a heavy sigh. “Do you think it’ll be something worse than getting pulverized by a giant killer asteroid?”

He halted, and hung his head. “Point taken.”

My mom, who had her antennas extended, announced, “It looks like they’ve decided. Fred, Max, Janice, good luck.”

“What do you…?”

“They decided to divide us up. The Grays want me and Janet.”

We did our best to say our goodbyes as we were led into different flying saucers.