The Rising(62)

Dancer managed a nod, still gasping for breath. The red had started to wash from his face, but the bruises left on his neck by the android’s grasp were already turning black.

“Can you move, can you walk?”

Dancer opened his mouth to answer but no words emerged, so he just nodded again. His knees buckled as he moved from the truck and Raiff caught him, held him upright while steering for the truck’s cab.

“Come on,” he said, jerking the passenger-side door open with his free hand, “let’s get you inside.”

Then Raiff turned his gaze on the girl, who stood silent and still ten feet away, staring at him.

“You too. Hurry,” he continued, beckoning her on, “we need to get out of here. Before more of them show up.”





64

AC/DC

RAIFF REVERSED, DANCER AND the girl squeezed next to him in the cab.

“Tell me this isn’t happening!” he heard the girl utter, her words partially drowned out by an AC/DC song blaring over the speakers.

“Highway to Hell,” of all things.

The dashboard was too dark for him to find the controls to shut it off, as a raspy voice screeched something about a one-way ride.

“Alex!” he said, calling him by name.

“Who—”

“Am I,” Raiff completed. “Doesn’t matter. Tell me you’re okay, you’re not hurt. That you’re whole.”

“Whole?”

“Intact!”

“I’m not hurt. I’m not okay, either.”

Raiff looked at him, then back to the front as he reversed the trash truck around the front of the strip mall and ground the gears into “drive.”

“You saved me, us.”

Raiff said nothing.

“Who are you? It does matter.”

“I’m a Guardian, your Guardian. Have been for your entire life.”

“Then you know who I really—”

“Yes, I do know,” Raiff said, completing the boy’s thought yet again.

“Then tell me, please, because I don’t know shit.”

“Yes, you do,” Raiff replied, stealing a look at him. “You know everything. You just don’t realize it.”

*

AC/DC was now headed to the promised land along the highway to hell, Alex sitting board straight against the passenger-side window of the trash truck.

“Am I an alien or not?”

“We both are.” Raiff gave the big truck as much gas as it would take. “But we’re human too.”

“You just said—”

“I know what I just said. We’re human, but also aliens. To this planet, anyway.”

Sam rotated her head back and forth between the two of them as each spoke, trying to make sense of their words. She reached forward and turned off the radio just as the lyrics “highway to hell” sounded for what felt like the hundredth time.

“You’re losing me,” Alex said.

Raiff’s eyes fixed on the side-view mirror. “It’s them I want to make sure I lose.”

“‘Them’ as in the drone things?”

“Interesting term.”

“It’s what the ash man called them,” Sam interjected. “Drones. Back in Alex’s house after…”

“It’s okay, Sam,” Alex said, trying to sound reassuring.

“Ash man?” Raiff repeated.

“Before Alex split him in half. He kept talking out of both sides of his mouth.”

“That’s because he wasn’t real,” Alex added.

“No, he was a projection,” Raiff noted.

“Like a hologram or something?” asked Sam.

“Far more advanced,” Raiff said, holding both of them in his gaze. “Holograms don’t split in half. Weapons go right through them, for obvious reasons.”

“Like a drone’s severed arm,” Alex told him. “That’s what I used.”

Raiff glanced over at Alex to make sure he’d heard that right. “Not holograms as you understand them. Next generation, actually about five hundred generations. I call them Shadows.”

“Shadows,” Alex repeated.

“But they’re more like astral projections—with actual mass created by a gas and gamma rays; the particular gas is found only on our mother planet.”

“What,” Sam speculated, “like an out-of-body experience?”

“No,” Raiff said, impatient to have to be addressing her at all and aiming his response at Dancer instead. “Our world is so far away from this one, there’d be no way to hold the signal carrying the hologram together. So this projection who spoke to you, the Shadow you call the ash man, is instilled with gamma energy to simulate form and matter in order to maintain structural cohesion during the transmission.”

“Okay,” Alex managed.

“Like pouring sand into water,” Sam concluded.

“Pretty much.” Raiff nodded.

“So he was talking to me from your planet.”

“Our planet, Alex, but yes.”

“He said I had something he wanted, something that belonged to him.”

“You do, but it doesn’t.”