Out of This World Read online

  They made him mop up the corridor and then they headed out for supplies, leaving him to fix his own breakfast. Dad had a plan to extend the assault course in the backyard, plus they needed bullets for target shooting, and more powdered food for the apocalypse shelter they were digging in the woods. Also, they had run out of milk.

  Jack crunched dry cereal at the kitchen table and stared miserably out through the patio doors. His stomach ached where his dad had whacked him, and his hair was still damp from the hose. Outside, the sun was shining and there was no breeze to stir the trees behind the assault course. It was going to be another hot day. That would make the day’s training all the more unbearable.

  He hated that assault course. There were ropes to scramble through, walls to climb over, crawl tubes. There were heavy sacks of sand that Dad would set swinging, which he had to dodge through. Wooden poles set at different heights for him to jump over. A balance beam. A muddy trench with netting over the top.

  Day after day his dad put him through his paces while Mom saw to his education. If he had been an athlete or a genius, he might have been able to keep up with their demands. They didn’t seem to realize that he was neither.

  Other parents weren’t like this. Other parents did nice things for their kids, encouraged them, gave them treats now and then. Some kids liked their parents. Some even said they loved them.

  Jack didn’t know what that was like. His parents had always seemed like strangers who just happened to be looking after him. He was supposed to love them, because they were his parents, but he never seemed to get it quite right. Sometimes he wondered if there was something broken in him, something that stopped him feeling the way he was meant to feel. He tried to please them, he wanted to make them like him, but on some deeper level, some element was missing, and it pained him.

  Maybe he was just a bad kid. He was always letting them down, after all. Perhaps they’d be nicer to him if he just tried harder.

  The doorbell rang. He raised his head, briefly interested, but he didn’t get up. He wasn’t supposed to open the door when Mom and Dad were out. It was probably just a salesperson, anyway.

  The bell rang again, but he was no longer paying attention. He was looking out at the woods behind their house. In his mind, the trees had turned into giant purple ferns, and beyond them he heard the swooshing waves of a great sea. The sea of Gallia.

  Wouldn’t it be great if it were real? If he could go there? To leave all this behind and travel to the worlds he drew in his sketchbook, to see the wonderful cities he imagined, with their gleaming spires and flying machines?

  It was nice to dream. But soon Dad would be back, and the assault course was waiting.

  A sharp knock on the patio door made him jump. His eyes bulged. Standing in the backyard, balancing a cake in one hand and wearing a huge smile, was Thomas. The sight of him made Jack choke on his cereal, and he coughed a spray of Rice Krispies across the table.

  Thomas pulled open the patio door without waiting for an invite and thumped Jack hard on the back with his free hand.

  “All right! I’m fine!” Jack cried when Thomas kept thumping him long after he’d finished coughing.

  “Saved your life!” Thomas grinned. “Nobody answered the front door, so I came around the back. Here, I brought cake!” He plonked it down on the table. “It’s lemon soufflé. I got it from the Ezy-Mart. And now for the piéce de résistance!”

  He produced a candle with a flourish and stabbed it into the top of the cake, which deflated with a lemony wheeze.

  Thomas regarded the cake proudly. “There! Now, do you have something …” A strange look passed over his face. “Something to …” His nose wrinkled and twitched. “Something to light it wi— AaaAAAA-CHOO!”

  Jack threw up his arm to cover his face as Thomas sneezed all over him, and the cake, and most of the kitchen table.

  “Sorry,” said Thomas, sniffing. “Allergies. All this pollen.” He waved a hand toward the woods. “Do you have a cat?”

  Jack, still aghast at being coated in someone else’s mucus, could only shake his head.

  “I’m allergic to cats, too. And dogs. Most animals, actually. And bees, er, well, they make me die.” He pulled an inhaler from his pocket and sucked it sharply. “Plus I got asthma,” he added with a wink, as if he was letting Jack in on a secret.

  “You … you have to go,” Jack managed at last.

  “What? No, I just got here. It’s time to get this party started!”

  “Listen, my mom and dad, they don’t let me have friends over, okay?”

  “They don’t let you have friends?”

  “No, they let me have friends, they just … don’t let me bring them back home.”

  “Why not?”

  Because the ability to form short-term social relationships is advantageous in a survival situation, but deeper emotional connections are baggage. That was what Dad had told him, the one time he’d asked. Kind of a weird response, but then most of his responses were kind of weird. Jack sometimes wondered if the real reason they kept moving was to make sure he never got to pick up any “baggage” like that.

  He caught himself. What a ridiculous thought. As if his parents would keep moving all over the United States just to stop him from making good friends! Dad’s work meant that he got relocated a lot, to be near whichever office needed him; that was all there was to it.

  “They just don’t like it,” said Jack, exasperated at having to explain something he couldn’t even explain to himself. “Anyway, they’ll be coming back soon, and if they find you here, they’ll make me do that assault course, like, twenty times at least, and after that … Wait a minute, how did you even know where I lived?”

  “Followed you home once,” Thomas said absently, investigating the kitchen cabinets. “Oooh, you’ve got a smoothie maker!”

  Jack didn’t know how to put into words how creepy that was. “Okay, you know what? Thanks for the cake, it’s super kind of you, but you really have to go—”

  “You like it?” Thomas hurried excitedly back to the table. “I knew you were a lemon soufflé kind of guy!” he cried, waving his hands around as he spoke. “The lady in the shop said carrot cake was the safe bet, but I said, ‘Oh, no! I know my friend Jack!’ And then I—”

  His flailing hands hit the cake and sent it sliding across the kitchen table to the far side. Both boys sucked in their breath as it teetered on the edge. It kept them in suspense for what seemed like an absurdly long time, then it tipped over and landed on the floor with a tired whumph.

  “Oops,” said Thomas.

  Jack didn’t mind that he’d killed the cake—he wasn’t going to eat it, anyway, after Thomas had sneezed on it—but the thought of his mom coming back and finding a mess on the floor put him in a cold sweat. He’d be doing jumping jacks for a month.

  “I have to clean that up,” he said, hurrying to find a dustpan and brush.

  “I’ll just have a look around, then,” Thomas twittered.

  “No! You need to go!”

  “Hey, this is a neat house!” Thomas called from down the corridor.

  Jack dithered with the dustpan and brush in his hand, caught between the need to clean up and the desire to get rid of Thomas. In the end, the cake seemed like the simpler task.

  “Don’t touch anything!” he shouted as he scampered across the kitchen to scoop up the ruined cake.

  “Is this your dad’s office?”

  “Stay out of there!”

  He tidied up frantically, muttering under his breath. How could one kid manage to be so annoying? He glanced at the clock, and his heart lurched. It was later than he’d imagined. Mom and Dad would be back any minute.

  He was just dumping the last of the crumbs into the garbage disposal when he heard a muffled crash from overhead. He dropped the dustpan and brush, and ran. What was Thomas doing upstairs? You couldn’t take your eyes off that kid for a minute!

  He found Thomas on the landing, standing guiltily next to
a shattered painting that was lying on the floor. It was the only picture his parents had put up in the house, a bland watercolor they’d picked up at Walmart. It wasn’t worth much, but it would still mean a whole heap of trouble for Jack. His muscles ached as he thought of how many times they’d make him run that assault course when they got home.

  “Why were you touching that?!” Jack yelled in disbelief.

  “I have an inquiring personality. Hey, what’s this?”

  “What’s what?” Jack snapped, but Thomas was already opening the small panel set into the wall that the painting had previously covered.

  “There’s a button,” said Thomas, and before Jack could say anything, he pushed it.

  There was a creak from overhead. Farther down the corridor, a hatch in the ceiling popped open, and a ladder unfolded down to the floor.

  “Cool!” Thomas said. “An automatic attic hatch!”

  “We have an attic?” Jack said.

  “Didn’t you know?”

  Jack shook his head.

  Thomas’s face lit up suddenly. “I bet that’s where they’re keeping your presents!”

  “I’m not getting any presents. I never get any presents.”

  “Nah! It’s your birthday! Everyone gets presents on their birthday!”

  “Don’t go up there!” Jack told Thomas as he started climbing the ladder.

  “I’m just gonna take a quick look,” said Thomas, disappearing through the hatch.

  Jack gave a strangled howl of frustration and followed him. When he got to the top of the ladder, he found Thomas standing there, openmouthed.

  “Whoa,” said Thomas, his eyes filling his glasses. “Check it out.”

  Jack stared. The attic was huge and dim. A narrow sunbeam slipped through a skylight, setting floating dust particles afire. Occupying the shadows were several strange devices, glittering with tiny green lights that blinked and shifted. One looked like a console of some kind, but its design was sleek and menacing. Another was a large black ball standing on five legs, which displayed a row of strange symbols that changed as they marched across its surface. Still another looked like a cluster of spikes with ghostly light shimmering along its edges. Whatever they were made of didn’t look like metal or plastic. It was as if they had been molded from liquid darkness.

  Jack had never seen anything like them.

  “You don’t find these in Best Buy,” said Thomas, awestruck.

  “What is all this?” Jack asked in amazement as he climbed off the ladder. The devices all seemed to be on, though he couldn’t see any plugs. Where were they getting their power from?

  “Are your parents, like, government agents?” Thomas asked. “Because this is some next-level tech right here.”

  Jack’s instinct was to say no. How could they be? They were just two fairly boring people in tracksuits who made him do stuff he didn’t like. But hadn’t he always wondered? Hadn’t he always had that sneaking feeling that something was off, that there was something bigger to be found, some greater purpose behind the training and constant upheavals?

  Occasionally, when he was younger, he’d made attempts to investigate, looking for some pattern in their strange behavior. He’d daydreamed that his parents were more than they seemed and that he had some great destiny that they would one day reveal. But he never found a thing, and after a while, he’d dismissed such thoughts as fantasies and stopped looking.

  Now, staring at these machines, he wondered if he just hadn’t been looking hard enough. His stomach fluttered with excitement, or fear, or both.

  Thomas had squatted down in front of the cluster of spikes and was studying it closely.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Jack warned him. “We don’t know what it does.”

  “I’m not gonna touch it; I just want to look,” said Thomas. “That looks like something you should press,” he said, pointing.

  “Don’t—”

  Thomas pressed. The device began to hum loudly, and the eerie light flickering around the spikes became brighter and turned a sinister bloodred.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Thomas observed.

  “Will. You. Stop. Touching. Things,” Jack said through gritted teeth.

  “I just want to get it back to how it was before. Maybe this button?”

  Jack lunged at him to wrestle him away from the machine, but he wasn’t fast enough to stop Thomas from pressing it. Thomas tripped with a yelp as Jack grabbed him, and the pair of them tumbled to the floor.

  The hum became a shrill whine, getting higher and higher, the sound of power building.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Jack cried. “It could be a bomb or something!” The fact that it wasn’t out of the question that his parents had a bomb in the attic made him realize just how little he really knew of them.

  “Let me press something else!” Thomas begged, pawing the air in his desperation to mess with it further.

  “You’ve pressed enough buttons for one day!” Jack said, holding him back.

  The colors of the spikes shimmered and shifted, bathing the attic in strange hues that made Jack feel slightly ill. His skin crawled with the energy that filled the air. The whine became a squeal, then a shriek, until Jack and Thomas had to clamp their hands over their ears. Small objects began to skitter about the attic, little screws and bits of metal that leaped up in the air and spun around as if caught in a twisting wind. Still the noise grew, until Jack didn’t think he could bear it anymore, and then suddenly—

  Silence. The tension went out of the air. The screws and bits of metal fell to the ground and rolled away.

  Jack and Thomas raised their heads. The device was glowing a pure, bright green. A beam of light, the same color, projected directly upward from the cluster of spikes.

  Thomas squirmed away from Jack and hurried over to the skylight, where he could see out. “It goes through the roof!” he said. “Right up into the sky!”

  A moment later the device went dark. The light and the beam disappeared. Thomas’s face fell.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Jack picked himself up, staring at the device. “What, er … happened?”

  “It made a beam of green light shoot up into the sky,” said Thomas.

  Jack was kind of put out by that. After all that noise, he’d expected more than a glorified spotlight.

  “Let’s do it again!” said Thomas, heading back toward the spikes.

  Jack intercepted him. “Noooooo, no. We’re not messing with anything else up here.”

  “What about that one?”

  “Thomas,” said Jack, his face serious. “Let’s say my parents are government agents. What do you think they’ll do to us when they find us up here?”

  Thomas thought about that for a moment. “Shoot us?” he ventured at last.

  “I would think they’d start by shooting us. God knows what they’d do after that.”

  Thomas swallowed uneasily. “Yeah, maybe we should get out of this attic.”

  “Right.”

  “I might go home, actually.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.”

  They closed up the attic and went out front so Thomas could get his bike. Jack scanned the street for his parents’ car, but there was no sign of them yet.

  “Sorry about the cake,” said Thomas.

  “No problem,” said Jack. He was struck by an unexpectedly touching thought, which took the edge off his annoyance a little. “Hey, you know, that was my first birthday cake ever.”

  Thomas grinned. “See you on Monday,” he said, then wheeled his bike around and wobbled off down the road.

  Only when Thomas was out of sight did Jack allow himself a sigh of relief. Just being near that kid stressed him out. He was a walking disaster zone. Jack was going to get it for that smashed picture. His birthday would be one long day on the assault course in the punishing heat, because of Thomas.

  But as he went back into the house to hang the broken picture back on the wall, he couldn’
t stop thinking about what he’d seen in the attic.

  Mom? Dad? Who are you?

  Jack thought he’d get in trouble when his parents found out about the broken picture, but they seemed more concerned with how it had happened. He told them he’d tripped against it.

  “And did the picture fall off the wall?” Dad asked. He and Mom exchanged a glance that they thought he didn’t see. “Is that how the glass broke?”

  “No,” said Jack innocently. “I just hit it with my elbow. Sorry.”

  They seemed uneasy for a moment. Then, as one, they broke into broad smiles.

  “No harm done,” said Mom. “As long as you’re not hurt.”

  By the afternoon, the picture had been replaced with a different one, even blander than the first. They didn’t even punish him. Jack was slightly frightened by that.

  In the week that followed, Jack looked for any opportunity to get back into the attic. He needed to find out more about those weird machines and what his parents were doing with them. But his parents never went out together, except for a supply run every few weeks. Even when he wasn’t being trained or taught, there was always someone nearby.

  Frustrating as it was, Jack told himself to bide his time and watch. Now that his suspicions were raised, he looked at his parents with new eyes.

  “I mean, I just thought they were a bit weird, right?” he told Thomas at recess. “Like, I’ve just got weird parents. But this is more than weird.”

  Thomas sucked on a Slurpee, slobbering up the last few drops with a noise like a congested walrus. They were sitting on a wall in a remote corner of the schoolyard where nobody ever went. Jack didn’t much want to be seen with Thomas, but he had no one else to talk to about what had happened, and Thomas was the only one who would believe him, anyway. It was a depressing state of affairs, all in all.

  “They’ve never been sick a day in their lives. Can you believe that? I can’t remember one single day they were ill.”