Pod Read online

  Day turns into night. I try to sleep. It’s hard work with all the cramps and noises and stuff, but I finally do. That lasts two hours, seven minutes, and eight seconds. First it’s voices, then flashlights, then smashing windows, then car alarms. It turns into one big ball of noise. I’m afraid to look out the windows, so I curl up in my sleeping bag and wait for it to end. Someone shakes the driver’s door while another person pounds on the trunk. They swear and move on. I would have peed myself if I’d had any water to drink. Maybe all they saw was dirt and duct tape and figured there wasn’t anything worth taking.

  Finally they leave, but I can’t get back to sleep. The alarms keep going and going. I know they’ll eventually stop, but the sound is driving me crazy. It’s like the cars are crying for help. I wrap an old sweatshirt around my head to block out the noise and try to think of something else. Like Mom and her promise. A great big breakfast at Denny’s. I’ll pick a strawberry waffle with extra whipped cream and lots of butter melting down the sides. I’ll pour on so much syrup that the waffle floats. Mom will say, “Would you like some waffle with that syrup?” And if there’s enough money maybe I’ll even get a chocolate milkshake. Then it’s beach time.

  I’ve never been to the beach. Or at least to a beach that’s next to an ocean. The stinky mud at Thompson’s Pond that people call a beach doesn’t count. Mom said the ocean water is cold this time of year but if I wanted to swim I could. She warned me not to open my eyes because the water is salty. There might be jellyfish, too. That’s fine with me. All I want to do is jump in the waves like the kids on TV.

  Mom and me, strawberry waffles and the beach. Now that’s worth waiting for.

  DAY 3: PROSSER, WASHINGTON

  Dirty Laundry

  Today is Friday. I’m in my bedroom on top of the blankets thinking about all the should-be’s. I should be turning in an essay for American Lit and taking a midterm in Chemistry. I should be walking Lynn, my girlfriend for all of two months, to choir practice. She should be asking me to Sadie Hawkins and I should be pretending to think about it before saying yes. And on top of all this, I’m turning sixteen in four days, which means I should be taking the road test for my driver’s license in five days. Mom should be coming home from her conference the night before my birthday. We were all going out for pizza and a final practice drive in the Camry. Instead for my birthday present I get an alien invasion. Lucky me.

  But there’s no guarantee that I’ll even live until tomorrow, so why do I care? Now that we’re all stuck in our houses, we’re pretty much sitting ducks. A knock on my door keeps me from rolling with that depressing thought.

  Dad comes into the room. He’s holding a pile of crumpled clothes. “Do you have any whites that need to be washed?” he asks. “I’m doing a load.”

  I say, “The world’s about to end and you’re doing laundry?”

  He says, “I promised Mom I wouldn’t let the laundry pile up while she’s gone.”

  I’m looking at the definition of insanity. He’s in my room asking for whites. I sit up and point out the window. “Do you think they give a flying fuck whether our underwear is clean?”

  There, I did it. I dropped the F-bomb. I see it exploding inside his bald head.

  After a beat, he says, “I’d prefer it if you didn’t swear.”

  “I swear all the time at school,” I say, “just not in front of you.”

  “Find another way to express your concerns.”

  Concerns? I’m way past that. “Why?” I ask. “With all the shit that’s happening, what does it matter?”

  “It disappoints me,” he says. “And it would disappoint Mom.”

  “Then there’s a lot about me that will disappoint you.”

  He walks around my room, picking up various pieces of clothing that I will never wear again, clean or dirty. When he’s finished, he walks to the door, stops, and says, “I’m sure we’ll have plenty of opportunities to disappoint each other. Let’s just try not to start the process too soon.” Then he leaves, closing the door softly behind him.

  Dinner is ham sandwiches on stale bread with miscellaneous bruised fruits and rubbery vegetables. We dance around serious topics with inane observations, like Dad saying, “Looks like a wind is picking up,” and me saying, “I didn’t know you put salt on carrots.” It’s a truce of sorts. Most of the time the only sound is our silverware scraping against the plates while the PODs do their silent dance outside the dining room window. I feed Dutch a couple of hunks of bread off my sandwich. Dad sees this but, amazingly, doesn’t say a thing.

  After dinner Megaphone Man starts up with his Day of Reckoning announcement. Rather than listen to him, I decide to break the truce and ask Dad a question that is bugging me. I find him in the living room doing a very worthwhile project—folding laundry. The clothes are separated into two piles, his and mine.

  “Do you think the PODs are everywhere,” I ask, picking up a pair of jeans from my pile and folding it, “or just here?”

  “What do you mean by ‘just here’?”

  “Over the United States.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Maybe they’re not from space. Maybe we’re being invaded by another country.”

  He’s shaking his head. I don’t know where this idea came from. It’s something I thought up just now, but I’m liking it. If nothing else, it rattles his chain.

  “No, really,” I say. “Maybe it’s the Chinese, or South Korea—”

  “North Korea.”

  “Yeah, whatever. One of those communist countries.”

  Dad looks at me. “What are they teaching you in school these days?”

  “I’m serious. What’s wrong with my theory?”

  He picks up a shirt, shakes it, puts it on the coffee table, smoothes it out. Starts folding one side, then the other. My dad, the folding machine. “This technology is way beyond anything man-made,” he says. “Somehow they figured out a way to cancel gravity. And then there are the weapons—the head-exploding screech that targets only humans, the frequency jamming, those beams of light.”

  “The ones that killed Jamie right outside our door? But before I could help her because someone grabbed me from behind. You mean those beams?”

  This stops the folding machine, but only for a second. “It’s alien technology, Josh. Nothing else makes sense.”

  I drop the subject. He’s right and we both know it. I also know he’s not finished making his point. I pick up a shirt from my stack and wait. He watches my technique. The folded shirt is uneven and lumpy, not the symmetrical objects of art that he has piled up neatly in front of him. I know he wants to show me the right way to do it. The thought of all those wrinkles is torturing him. Somehow he resists.

  Finally he says, “They can’t cover the whole planet. There’d have to be millions of them. I think they’re just over the major population centers—and strategic sites.”

  “Then why are they here, over us? We’re just some shi—I mean, crappy little town.”

  It’s true. We only have one high school. One broken-down theater showing movies that came out on video two months ago. There’s a bunch of used-car lots selling overpriced rust buckets, no decent mall, and a river that’s too flooded to fish in in the spring and too slow to raft on in the summer. Once you hit the interstate, we’re talking tumbleweeds and orchards for thirty miles in any direction. Dad loves it. Mom, too. I can’t wait to leave.

  “We’re close to a nuclear power plant,” he says.

  “That’s sixty miles away.”

  “When you travel billions of miles, what’s another sixty?”

  “Okay, then. If you travel billions of miles, you don’t make a trip like that unless you plan to stay awhile.”

  He chews on that one in silence. Score one for me.

  His folding is done. His stuff is in three stacks: shirts, pants, socks and underwear. The display looks like it should be on a shelf at L.L. Bean. Even the socks are tidy—paired and rolled into
little sock balls. He eyes my work but says nothing.

  “So how long are they staying, Dad?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “To do what?” I’m not folding clothes anymore. I’m wadding them up.

  “Accomplish their plan.”

  “And that plan would be?”

  His eyes, blue and suddenly watery, lock onto mine. After a moment, he takes one of my fabric balls, a T-shirt, and folds it the right way. He says, “That’s the million-dollar question, Josh. Let me know when you figure it out.” He carefully combines his stacks and heads for the stairs. “Good luck with the folding.”

  The dead space he leaves behind fills up with Megaphone Man droning on about the end of the world. I’m sick of Armageddon this and End of Time that. I run to the door, open it, and yell at him to shut the hell up.

  I wish the rest of the neighborhood would yell at him, too. But no one’s saying anything. I figure they’re either too dead or too scared. We’re all bugs on a sidewalk, waiting for the boot to fall. But when that finally happens, one thing is for sure.

  I’ll be wearing clean underwear.

  DAY 3: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  Soup and a Sandwich

  A man is trying to break into the trunk of the blue sedan next to ours. I think he’s a looter because the owner got zapped on the first day. I watch from the shadows of the backseat as he leans into a tool I can’t see. It scrapes against metal. I haven’t seen him before. He’s short and round with thin, curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses that keep sliding down his nose. He looks around, pushes up his glasses, leans again. The tool slips. He swears under his breath. I bet he’s never broken into anything other than a refrigerator.

  The green door opens. Two men head straight for him, walking fast. One I recognize right away. He’s wearing the same Hooters sweatshirt he had on when he tossed Speed-Bump Guy into the street. The hood shades half his face, making the one eye I can see look small and dark. The other man is huge, like a bear, with a thick black beard and long black hair tied in a ponytail. He’s a few steps behind Hoodie, his face unreadable behind all that hair, but his eyes are steady on the smaller man in front of him. Of the two, I think Hoodie is the man to watch.

  Hoodie yells, “Hey, my friend! You heard the orders—no one allowed in the Forbidden Zone.”

  Round Guy jumps at the noise. He sees them, stands up, and says, “But … but this is my car.”

  Hoodie walks up to him. “So you’re bustin’ into your own trunk?”

  Round Guy says, “It’s my car. You have no right—”

  Hoodie says to Black Beard, “You think this is his car?”

  Black Beard says, “Nope.” His voice is soft but very deep. More like a rumble from the bottom of his chest.

  Hoodie says, “It’s a con-sensus, then. You look more like a BMW man. No way your ride’s a piece-a-crap rental like this.”

  Round Guy looks at one, then the other. He wipes sweat from his forehead, slides his glasses up.

  Hoodie says, “This your car then where’s the keys?”

  Round Guy says, “My, uh, my wife lost them.”

  Hoodie, smiling, says, “That a fact? Your wife? In all the chaos and pan-de-monium?”

  Round Guy nods. But it’s a careful nod, like he’s not sure whether to agree or not.

  Hoodie says to Black Beard, “You believe him?”

  Black Beard says, “Nope.”

  Hoodie is focused on Round Guy, but Black Beard is scanning the lot. His eyes settle on this car. I freeze, hoping the shadows make me invisible. He lingers a moment, then moves on.

  Hoodie says to Round Guy, “Here’s the deal, my friend. You describe the con-tents of this trunk. Then we’ll open it. If you’re right, all we got is the problem of you being where you’re not supposed to be. No one gets hurt—at least not much. On the other hand …”

  There’s a soft click. It reminds me of Zack snapping a chicken bone. The curved steel of a switchblade appears in Hoodie’s right hand. He spins it twice on his finger like an old-time gunslinger. Then he does some tricky thing where the blade weaves between his fingers, almost like it’s alive. After a few seconds he stops, examines the tip, uses it to dig at a fingernail. Black Beard isn’t looking around anymore. His attention is on Hoodie, dark eyes glued to that blade.

  Round Guy’s glistening face is the color of bread dough.

  Hoodie says, “On the other hand, if you can’t describe the con-tents of this trunk, which I believe to be the case, well then …”

  Hoodie flicks his wrist and the blade disappears. He holds his hands out like a magician who just made a rabbit disappear, smiles slow, and says, “Then we got us a bona fide sit-u-ation.”

  Round Guy gulps like a beached whale. “Look, I don’t want any trouble—”

  Hoodie says, “Oh, you already got trouble, my chubby little friend. The question is what kind.”

  Round Guy slides up his glasses. Licks his lips. His mouth opens but nothing trickles out.

  Hoodie says, “See, like maybe you got drugs in there? Some illegal con-tra-band?”

  Round Guy puts his hands up and out like everything’s cool. “Hey, I can do this some other time. I mean I can—”

  Hoodie takes a step toward Round Guy, saying, “You can’t do this some other time, my friend. Cause there ain’t gonna be another time.”

  Hoodie’s fist slams into Round Guy’s stomach, once. I hear the rush of air leave his lungs. Something metal drops out of Round Guy’s hand, clanks on the cement. He sinks to the ground like a balloon deflating. I can’t see him now, but I hear the squeaks of him trying to breathe. Black Beard turns to face the green door, his hands clenched into fists.

  Hoodie, smiling down on Round Guy, says, “You gotta work your abs, my friend. Otherwise you’re gonna have some serious back problems.” Then, to Black Beard: “Like punching a feather pillow, man. I think I bruised my knuckles on his spine. Never, ever let your body get that soft.”

  Black Beard stares at him. He says something to Hoodie, but I can’t hear what. I think it’s in Spanish.

  Hoodie shrugs and says, “Desperate times, desperate measures.” He heads for the green door.

  Black Beard lifts Round Guy to his feet. His legs are all floppy like they don’t have any bone. He slings him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and follows Hoodie across the lot. They disappear inside. The green door clicks behind them.

  I wait ninety-three seconds.

  I slide out of the car. Round Guy’s glasses are on the ground. I pick them up, start to put them in my pocket, then decide to leave them where they are. I look for that metal tool. It’s under the blue car next to a rear tire—a six-inch flathead screwdriver. Not a tire iron, but it’ll do.

  It takes me sixteen minutes and lots of prying, but eventually there’s a click. The trunk of our car pops open. I’m so thirsty my tongue feels like it’s glued to the top of my mouth. I lift out the cooler along with some extra clothes that might come in handy. While I’m doing that I see the clothes Mom wore the night we pulled into LA. They’re folded and tucked into a corner next to the spare tire. It’s her favorite jeans and the Red Sox sweatshirt I bought her for Mother’s Day. My throat gets lumpy. She must have changed into her “interview outfit” in the car while I was sleeping. That was what, a million years ago? The sweatshirt would come in handy against the cold at night, but I think no, when she comes back, she’ll need it more than me. That outfit didn’t cover much skin.

  I lug the cooler back into the car and open it up. There are lots of treasures, but my first move is to twist open the only bottle of water. I drink it so fast it spills out the sides and soaks my T-shirt. Half the bottle is gone before I think maybe I should save some. I cap it, then look at what I’ve got. Four cans of beer, one can of Mountain Dew, a half-gone package of pepper-jack bologna we stole from a Safeway in Bakersfield, eight soggy hot-dog buns, a handful of mustard packages, and some stinky yellow cheese sealed in a Ziploc bag. Ther
e used to be ice, but it’s all melted so the mishmash is floating around in a brownish, lumpy glop. It looks like soup to me. I figure the beer will last the longest, so that means it’s bologna and cheese and Mountain Dew now. There’s an empty water bottle on the floor of the car. I fill it with the soup. Squeeze some mustard on the bologna. Wrap it around a piece of stinky cheese. I’ll have a hot-dog bun later. Call it dessert.

  Mom would be proud, wherever she is. I fixed lunch all by myself.

  DAY 4: PROSSER, WASHINGTON

  Taking out the Trash

  I’m having a dream about Mom. She’s making her famous oat-bran pancakes and telling me about a game she played as a kid, something about hiding from monsters. As long as she was very, very quiet, she could hide anywhere and the monsters would never catch her. She says now it’s time for me to play. I ask her why. She puts a finger to her lips and whispers, “Because they’re here,” and then she starts counting, one, two, three … I tell her she needs to hide, too, but she doesn’t listen. The front door starts shaking, then blows open. An intense blue light fills the entryway. A big shadow writhing like a ball of snakes stretches across the floor. Mom keeps flipping pancakes and counting, ten, eleven, twelve … I scream. All that comes out of my mouth is a cloud of blue vapor.

  That’s when I wake up. There’s a huge wind. It’s like an invisible hand pressing against the walls and glass. I hear shingles peeling off the roof. My mind is too full of the dream to let me go back to sleep. I stay in bed and wait for Dad to get up while the hand shakes our house like a toy.