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“Wow, really?” I shake my head, thoroughly impressed. Except I’m totally lost.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about.” He crumples the wrapper in his fist. He glances around at the garbage littering every square inch of Urbana, then slips the wrapper into his pocket. “There’s something that’s been bugging me, Sarge.”
He turns to me. His exposed eye is wide with anxiety. “So, way before their ship showed up, they downloaded themselves into babies and didn’t ‘wake up’ inside them until they were teenagers.”
I nod. “That’s what Walker said.”
“My birthday was last week. I’m thirteen.”
“For real? Damn it, Dumbo, why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve baked you a cake.”
He doesn’t smile. “What if I got one inside me, Sarge? What if one of them is about to wake up in my brain and take over?”
“You’re not serious, right? Come on, Private, that’s crazy talk.”
“How do you know? I mean, how do you know, Zombie? And then it happens and I waste you and I go back to the house and waste all of them . . .”
He’s losing it. I grab his arm and make him look at me.
“Listen to me, you big-eared son of a bitch, you go Dorothy on me now and I’m gonna kick your ass from here to Dubuque.”
“Please,” he whines. “Please stop bringing up Dubuque.”
“There’s no alien asleep inside you, Dumbo.”
“Okay, but if you’re wrong, you’ll take care of it, right?”
I know what he means, but I go, “Huh?”
“Take care of it, Zombie.” Pleading with me. “Kill the mother-fucker.”
Well, happy frigging birthday, Dumbo. This conversation has given me the heebie-jeebies.
“It’s a deal,” I tell him. “An alien wakes up inside you, I’ll blow your brains out.”
Relieved, he sighs. “Thanks, Sarge.”
I stand up, hold out my hand, and help him to his feet. His arm swings around and shoves me to one side. His rifle comes up. He’s aiming at the car dealership half a block down. I lift my weapon, close my right eye, and squint through the eyepiece. Nothing.
Dumbo shakes his head. “Thought I saw something,” he whispers. “Guess not.”
We hold for a minute. It’s so damn quiet. You’d think the town would be overrun with packs of wild dogs barking and feral cats howling or even a damn owl hooting, but there’s nothing. Is it all in my head, this feeling of being watched? That there’s something out there I can’t see but can sure as hell see me? I glance at Dumbo, who’s clearly just as spooked.
We move out, not on the quick now but sidestepping to the opposite side of the street, where we slide along the wall of the consignment store facing the dealership (SPRING INTO SAVINGS THIS MEMORIAL DAY!). We don’t stop until we reach the next intersection. Check right, check left, then straight ahead toward downtown, three blocks away, the buildings’ big boxy shadows silhouetted against the starry sky.
We trot across the intersection, then stop again on the other side, pressing our backs against the wall and waiting—for what, I’m not sure. We scoot past busted-out doors and shattered windows, the sound of glass crunching under our boots louder than sonic booms, another block, then repeating the drill, left around the corner, right across Main, then zipping to the relative safety of the next building on the opposite corner.
We make it another fifty yards and then Dumbo tugs on my sleeve, leading me through a broken glass door and into the near dark of a shop. Brown pebbles crunch underfoot. No, not pebbles. The smell is faint, barely discernible beneath the familiar rot of sewage and the spoiled-milk odor of plague, but we both pick it up, and there’s a little ache of nostalgia when we do. Coffee.
Dumbo eases down in front of the counter, facing the doorway, and I give him a look: What’s up?
“I loved Starbucks,” he sighs. Like that makes everything perfectly clear.
I sit beside him. I don’t know, maybe he needs a break. We don’t talk. The minutes drag out. Finally, I say, “We gotta be the hell out of this town by sunrise.”
Dumbo nods. He doesn’t move. “There’s someone out there,” he says.
“You saw them?”
