“Doesn’t it worry you that she knows how to do all this?” Luna asked Kevin.
Chloe looked back over her shoulder. “Not all of us get perfect little lives, cheerleader.”
Kevin was almost grateful for the sight of a group of the controlled people advancing slowly, obviously searching.
“Quick,” he said, “in the truck!”
They got in, keeping their heads down. Chloe was in the driver’s seat working on something with the ignition. It seemed to be taking a long time.
“I thought you said you could do this,” Luna whispered.
“I’d like to see you try,” Chloe shot back.
“Just so long as you can get us to NASA,” Luna said.
Chloe shook her head. “We’re going to LA.”
“San Francisco,” Luna insisted.
“LA,” Chloe shot back.
Kevin knew he needed to intervene, because if he didn’t, they would probably still be arguing when the controlled people caught up to them.
“Please, Chloe, we need to hear this message. And… well, if it doesn’t work out, then maybe we could go to LA. Together.”
Chloe was quiet for a minute. Kevin dared a glance over the dashboard. He hoped she made a decision soon, because the group of controlled people was getting closer.
“I guess you did kind of save my life back there,” Chloe said. “Okay.”
She kept working at what she was doing with the ignition. The engine gave a cough. Kevin looked up to see every alien-controlled person there staring at them now, looking at them with the intensity of a cat that had just spotted a mouse.
“Um… Chloe?”
They started to run forward.
“Can you do this or not?” Luna said.
Chloe didn’t answer, just kept working on whatever she was doing. The engine spluttered again, then roared to life. Chloe looked up in triumph.
“See! I told you that—”
She stopped short as a figure slammed into the truck, making a grab for them.
“Get us out of here,” Kevin said, and Chloe nodded.
The truck lurched forward as she drove, apparently not caring if she hit the controlled people or not. They swerved around a car, and a soldier threw himself into the truck’s path. Chloe didn’t slow it down even for a moment, and the crunch as they hit him was awful. He bounced off the hood and rolled to his feet, but by then they were already away.
Or kind of away, anyway. There was only so fast they could go on the mountain road, especially with the risk of abandoned cars in the way, left wherever people had been when the vapor converted their occupants. Chloe was weaving around them, but it still slowed them down enough that the controlled people running behind were keeping up.
“They’re not giving up,” Luna said with a glance back.
“They don’t get tired, they don’t stop,” Chloe said, and something about the way she said it suggested that she’d learned that the hard way. “Everyone hold on.”
Kevin clung to the dashboard as they sped up, the truck rolling alarmingly as it sped around the obstacles in the way. Kevin was sure they would crash at any moment, but somehow, impossibly, they didn’t. Chloe wrenched the wheel from one side to the other, and the truck lumbered along in response.
They skidded close to the edge of the road, and Kevin didn’t know which would be worse: crashing or being caught. Chloe seemed to have made up her mind, though, because they didn’t slow down. They sped down off the mountain, and now Kevin could see the controlled people falling further and further behind.
“We did it,” he said. “We survived.”
Luna hugged him. Over her shoulder, Kevin could see the look on Chloe’s face while she did it.
“Now all we have to do,” Luna said, “is go into the city, break into a place we barely got out of, and find a message from a second set of aliens without being grabbed by the first ones.”
Put like that, it seemed like an impossible task. Kevin could barely imagine making it to the NASA institute in one piece, but they still had to.
It was the only hope the world had.
CHAPTER FIVE
“I’m tempted to say ‘are we almost there yet,’” Luna said, with a smile across at Kevin.
Kevin should have guessed that one of the biggest dangers of a road trip like this wasn’t just the risk of crashing, or being ambushed by people controlled by aliens, or anything like that. It was the possibility that Luna might get bored enough to start thinking of ways to entertain herself. He had no doubt that would mean an argument with Chloe, and since Chloe was driving, that didn’t feel like a good thing.
Lots of things didn’t, from the alien spaceship hanging moon-sized and ominous in the sky, to the silent near emptiness of the roads. All of it just reminded him how weird this whole situation was, and how much the world had changed almost overnight.
“Can’t you drive any faster?” Luna asked.
“You want faster?” Chloe said, and hit the gas.
Kevin clung on. Once they got off the mountain, the roads opened up a little, but that didn’t mean they could just go as fast as they wanted to. For one thing, Kevin doubted that Chloe had any more of an idea of how to drive than he or Luna did.
For another, there were still too many cars in the road for that.
“Slow down,” Kevin said as they blitzed their way around a Chevy parked in the middle of the freeway, its owner long gone. They barely skidded their way past a motorcycle that had been left on its side, just abandoned. “Chloe, please slow down.”
They slowed a little, and it was probably just as well they did. There were cars strewn everywhere now, mostly just left wherever their owners had been converted, but some of them were little more than twisted lumps of metal where they’d obviously crashed.
A tanker lay on its side by the edge of the freeway, gas seeping into the earth around it. One spark would have set it off, and right then, Kevin thought he understood how it felt.
“We need to work together,” he said, trying to calm things down a little. He tried to think about what his mother might have said in a situation like this, or Ted, or Dr. Levin. The only problem with that was that it hurt too much to think about all the people who had been taken from them, who might even now be on the ship that hung like a second moon in the sky.
“We’ve… everyone else is gone,” he said, choking back the hurt. “We’ve all lost people. We’ve all had bad things happen.” It didn’t seem like a big enough thing to say to contain the full horror of it. “All of us are hurting, and we can’t argue just because it’s bad. We’ll only get through this if we work together.”
The others were quiet for a little while.
“Okay,” Chloe said at last.
“Yeah, I guess,” Luna agreed.
They drove on, the ancient truck rattling and bumping its way along roads littered with the debris of people’s last moments before the aliens took them. There were abandoned fast food cartons and abandoned vehicles, pets left to wander by the side of the road, and people who lay where they’d fallen when cars had hit them, so still that it was obvious there was nothing that could be done to help them, even if Kevin had known anything about medicine.
He looked up at the sight of the alien ship in orbit above the world. Was his mom up there, or was she on one of the ships that he and Luna had seen come down from it to hover over the cities