Chapter 14
FINE. THE ALIENS ARE REAL.
I called Sandy first and used the explosion as an excuse to skip my shift. She gave a token protest, but I didn’t care. In my six months at Oasis, I’d only called in once. And I fully believed I was entitled to a day off after a traumatic, brain-melting alien encounter.
Next, I called my mom, mostly to get ahead of the local news. She was predictably panicked, and it took a solid fifteen minutes of reassurance and promises to see her at Dustin’s this weekend before I could hang up.
Then I sat in silence.
Aliens.
I huddled in the corner of my hand-me-down couch, lifted the bottle of Moscato, and drank straight from it. I’d read somewhere you weren’t supposed to drink with a head injury, but I wasn’t convinced I had one.
And if I did…well, at least I’d go out calmer. The wine was helping.
But honestly? If aliens couldn’t kill me, fermented grapes seemed like the least of my worries.
I snorted and took another swig.
The TV played on mute. The local news showed footage of yellow, blue, green, and pink lights hovering low over a harvested cornfield. Timestamp: two nights ago. Same night I’d had my own close encounter.
Aliens.
Fear bubbled in my gut, and I tucked my bare legs beneath me, curling into a tighter ball. I’d changed into plaid shorts and a T-shirt after showering. Despite the hot water and soft clothes, the paranoia that’d followed me home hadn’t budged.
I’d closed every curtain, turned on every light in the apartment. Not a single shadow survived in my tiny space above Bob’s garage.
The place was cozy. Faux-wood floors, neutral walls, granite countertops I never used. Bob had designed it himself, right down to the stainless-steel fridge I mostly ignored in favor of peanut butter sandwiches, ramen, and scavenged leftovers from work.
Tonight, though, I’d splurged. A pepperoni and olive pizza. Half of it had disappeared in record time. So sue me. Comfort carb therapy was a thing. Now, the greasy remains sat on my cluttered coffee table.
My appetite was gone. The second those lights had bobbed and weaved across the screen, my stomach had flipped. Now, the pizza twisted into a knot and threatened a second appearance.
Not that I blamed it. Nothing was settling right. After all, I’d had two days of close encounters of the really messed-up kind.
What were aliens doing here?
Also…why hadn’t anyone else reported seeing a robot? You’d think they, more than strange lights, would’ve made for some sensational five o’clock news. Unless…
Unless my earlier suspicion was right, and nobody else had seen them. Just their lights in the sky.
I was assuming they were related, anyway. It made the most sense.
Maybe these robotic alien visitors were intentionally staying hidden.
It made sense, in a terrifying kind of way.
People didn’t usually grab their rifles over floating orbs.
But an army of evil mech-beings? The kind that could shoot laser beams, trash storage rooms, and leave six-fingered bruises on human flesh?
Yeah. People with guns would show up for that.
The pizza tried to make a reappearance, and I chugged more wine to force it back down. My phone dinged, and, gasping, I nearly launched the bottle across the room. I bobbled it, snatched it by the neck just in time, and set it next to the pizza box, sighing.
Pull it together, Rae. Text tones are not alien sounds.
No, they were more…mechanical. Garbled and warped and—
Blowing out a sharp exhale, I dug my phone out from under the pizza box. It was a text from Amelia.
You sure you don’t want company?
Then, true to form, another one came through. She never just sent one text.
I’m all done with the broadcast class for the night so I’m free.
I chewed my lip.
Having my best friend here was tempting. Very tempting. But I needed time to figure out what the hell I was dealing with before I even considered telling her the truth. And even then, would she believe me?
I’d already told her I was there during the explosion in Finke, because it was all over the news. But I hadn’t told her the real story. Not the parts I’d conveniently left out while talking to the cops.
And definitely not the ones I couldn’t explain myself. There was a good chance she’d think I’d cracked.
Which…fair. I wasn’t exactly ruling that out myself. Shaking my head, I typed out a response.
I’m good. I’m going to bed early. Still on for Sat night?
The plans to hit Crescent Club for dancing and drinks felt like something from another life. The idea of dressing up and pretending I hadn’t just been attacked by a death machine felt…surreal. Too ordinary.
Then again, maybe that was exactly what I needed. A little slice of normal. One night of pretending things were still okay. That my car accident hadn’t caused a paradigm shift I still hadn’t recovered from.
The three-dot typing bubble appeared, and I leaned back on the couch just as the TV showed a diagram of the sun. Solar flare coverage again.
I narrowed my eyes. Could that be fake? Just a giant government cover-up to explain away the tech malfunctions?
God, that was a huge conspiracy.
And yet…my phone had died. And so had Faith’s battery, out of nowhere that night on the country road.
Maybe this wasn’t either-or. Maybe the flare was real, and the aliens were, too.
I pressed my hot forehead to the bottle’s cool glass and sighed. I was going to end up like Kelly. A full-blown conspiracy theory enthusiast, whispering about angry robots from outer space and stockpiling canned goods in my closet.
My phone chimed again, and I nearly fumbled it. The marks on my hand caught the light when I did. I deliberately ignored them and read Amelia’s answer instead.
You know it. Be ready at 8. I’ll pick you up and bring you to my place to get ready.
Don’t want you to get stranded with a dead battery!
She was hilarious.
Fine. See you then.
Hopefully. I hoped I’d be up for it. For anything. I hoped I could, at some point, move on.
I drew my knees to my chest, wine bottle in hand, and stared into the muted flicker of the TV. The glowing lights danced across the grainy screen.
Two days ago, I’d been staring up at one of them.
What if this panicked, jumpy feeling never went away? What if I couldn’t bounce back? I had exams to study for, work shifts to show up to. A life.
But my brain kept rewinding to the nightmarish scenes in the lab. To those terrible green eyes and the strange, ethereal purple glow of the crystal tablet. My body buzzed like it had been rewired and somebody’d connected things wrong.
“Screw it,” I muttered and took another swig of wine.
For now, this would have to do.
Later, much later, I woke with a start. A gasp lodged in my chest, and I flailed blindly. For a heartbeat, I was somewhere else. Somewhere full of glowing green eyes and hazy, acrid smoke. Luminescent shapes that meant something—
Reality slammed back. Home. I was home. Not in the lab.
I scrambled upright, falling back against my wooden headboard. White sheets tangled around my legs, and sweat glued my sleeping shirt to my skin. I clutched at my sternum and forced air into my lungs.
I’d been about to say something. There were words on the tip of my tongue. Gone now. Like the shapes. Those phantom roars. The lab.
God. I drew my knees up and rested my forehead on them.
I was awake. I was safe. In my bed.
Just a little residual panic. A touch of PTSD. That’s what this was. Reliving traumatic events was normal. It was just my brain trying to process. I pressed my lids shut, leaning my head back against the wood behind me. Nightmares were a natural response to my shitshow of a day.
But it’d felt way too real.
Hugging myself, I shivered as cold air kissed my damp skin. The bedside lamp glowed softly beneath the scarf-draped shade. I’d slept with all the lights on for the first time in…who even knew how long. Since I was a kid. Since Dad had died.
Too bad it hadn’t helped.
The last vestiges of sleep slid away, and I rubbed a shaky hand over my eyes. My marked hand. I glanced at the scars before groping for my phone.
3:08 a.m.
I’d dragged myself to bed after hours of combing alien encounter forums and late-night vlogs. The more I read and watched, the less I jumped each time the pipes creaked or the fridge hummed. The more I came to terms with what I’d seen. What I’d experienced.
Okay, some of that was the wine talking. But still. There was something comforting in the sheer number of normal-seeming folks claiming to have experienced something. And somehow, they kept going. They had jobs. Families. They moved through the world. They functioned.
Sure, a few had bunkers and stockpiles of canned beans, bullets, and vodka. But those were the outliers. Most of them were like me: regular people trying to make sense of it all. Trying to cope.
If there was one thing everyone agreed on—bunker-dwellers included—it was that something big was happening. Sightings had increased. Drastically. Some claimed an alien race had arrived. That they were here. Now. Among us. On this tiny speck of rock we called Earth.
The parts nobody agreed on were the who, what, and why.
I hadn’t found any mention of robot aliens, though I’d searched. Plenty of chatter about glowing orbs and saucers. The former struck a particularly nerve-tingling chord.
No mentions of shiny, disintegrating tablets, either.
Could The Willow University, a tiny campus in the middle of nowhere, have held the key to a freaking alien invasion?
No. Not invasion. The last vlog I watched had used a different word: infiltration. That sounded less threatening. More like a video game. More like something I could do something about.
At least the bad guys were easy to identify. They were the seven-foot-tall robot jerks with glowing green eyes and grabby six-fingered hands. A little hard to miss.