“Alright. Another hour.”
I look up nervously at the ceiling lamp that’s holding the weight of the sheets, and glance around the fort. It looks like it could fall apart at any moment. “Are you sure it’s safe in here?”
“Don’t worry,” Sam says with a laugh. “We’ve done this a million times. Right, James?”
“Nobody’s safe out here in the wastelands,” James says in his creepy voice.
“That’s right,” Sam says to play along. He looks at me. “We should really be worried about what’s outthere.Better cuddle up, and keep each other safe,” he whispers playfully. He leans in and kisses me on the cheek.
James winces. “Ew. Not in thefort!”
“It was just the cheek!”
I break out with laughter, then go quiet again. “Do you hear that?” I pause to listen. “I hear rain.”
“Acid rain,” James corrects me.
I look at Sam and sigh. “I’m gonna have to walk home in that.”
“Or you can stay the night,” he says through a smirk.
“Sam.”
James points the flashlight at our faces. “Mom says to tell her if Julie ever stays past midnight.”
“You would do that to me?” Sam asks, looking hurt. “My own brother?”
“She said she’d give me ten dollars.”
“So you’re taking bribes now, eh,” Sam says. “What if I gave you fifteen?”
“Mom said you’d make an offer. She says she’s willing to match anything, plus tickets to the Rockets game.”
Sam and I look at each other. He shrugs. “She’s good.”
“Let’s focus,” James says, looking out through the opening of the fort for signs of trespassers. “We need to figure out what the aliens have done with the others they kidnapped.”
“I thought we were hiding from the zombie apocalypse,” Sam says.
“… That the aliens started. Duh,” James says, rolling his eyes. He repositions his arms, holding the flashlight like a light saber. “We need to hurry and get the ingredients for the antidote. We can’t lose any more men.” Behind us lays the body of Mr. Bear wrapped inside a pillowcase. Together, we had to make the hard decision of putting him down before the virus spread to the rest of us.
“Oh. You mean—this antidote?” Sam holds up a glass vial that looks a lot like his bottle of cologne.
James lowers his light saber slowly. His voice darkens. “You’ve had that all along… while one of our men was infected?”
“Been in my pocket the entire time.”
“You traitor.”
“Worse,” Sam says. “I’m the alien.”
James narrows his eyes. “I knew it.”
I gasp as James throws himself onto Sam, pulling down the fort with him. The sheets fall over me, covering my face, and then rise again in the air before they shift and fall into flakes of snow as the scene changes around me.
I am sitting in Sam’s car with my door open. We are parked across the street from the Reed College campus. The ground iscovered with leaves and a thin layer of snow. Sam opens his door and walks around to my side of the car. He squats down to look at me, and offers a hand.
“Come on, Julie. Let’s check it out,” he says. “We drove all the way here.”
