The 17 (22 page)

Zack heard more click-clacking, loud at first and then growing softer. It faded to a whisper and then nothing.

He was alone again.

He no longer wished it.

†††

Zack was forced to urinate in the corner. The smell was staunch and rancid because he had little to drink in the last twenty-four hours.

He thought about taking a leak onto the plasma field, but wondered if it would be similar to whizzing on the third rail of a subway track.

He decided to be safe instead. He had no idea if the Ankhs would bring him back this time if he managed to get himself mortally wounded in a stunt like that.

Instead, he waited for his punishment.

It wasn’t coming swiftly.

As the hours dragged on, he wondered if this was perhaps his penance. There was no worse sanction on a teenager than boredom. He remembered the days back at home when he could scarcely go five minutes without checking his iPhone. His classmates were worse, obsessively tied to their mobile devices and downright belligerent when the WiFi went out.

It wasn’t easy being a teenager. It was vastly overrated. The pressures were too many to count sometimes. The bullying, the teasing, the feelings of inferiority—and those were just at home. No parent was perfect. All families were dysfunctional—some more than others.

Zack’s parents were flawed and woefully disconnected from him, and he thought he had it lucky.

His life was very much a routine of worthlessness. School mattered little, grades even less. It seemed they were arbitrarily given by teachers who didn’t seem to care.

His generation defined themselves with music lyrics and movie quotes. They were constantly berated by the generations that came before them as useless.

Zack was tired back there. He was tired of the people, tired of his parents, tired of hearing how his generation was doomed. He was tired of hearing about global warming, of terrorism, of diseases and the end of days that were surely coming. He was tired of feeling alone and scared.

In many ways, he was much like the Ankhs.

And he was tired of waiting for the text message that was never going to come. And he was tired of pretending everything was fine. He was tired of saying, “I’m okay,” when he was anything but.

He wondered why he so desperately wanted to return to that. He wondered why he didn’t embrace this new life he was given, where he had seen wonders so sublime. He wondered why he hadn’t tried to kiss Mizuki yet. And he wondered if he would even get another chance to try.

All these thoughts bombarded him in the quiet and stillness. Maybe that was the point of his incarceration. Maybe that was his sentence—to realize he had it pretty good here and that his home, his Earthly home, was no place for him anymore.

Not long after he came to that epiphany, the barrier blinked and melted away and the men who had dragged him here emerged again.

“Time to take you back,” the man with the pythons for arms barked.

Zack walked in the middle of them, grinning. He was happy to return home—a home more real than any other to him now.

Part II

Chapter Seven

The Lonesome Man on the Moon

Eb’s voice prattled on. “Did they brainwash him? I didn’t know they could brainwash someone.”

Mizuki whispered, but Zack could still hear her. “They can make my room look exactly like home. They can hang my two moons in the sky, so, yeah, they probably can brainwash someone.”

“What do we do?”

“You’re the details guy. How do you un-brainwash someone?”

Zack chuckled at the silence that followed and he shoveled eggs into his mouth. Mizuki and Eb stood just a few feet away. They watched him, examined him, studied and scanned him worriedly.

They had nothing to be concerned about. The Ankhs didn’t brainwash me. Quite the contrary. They enlightened me. They just made me realize there was no use to resist.

Eb began to speak again between Zack’s hurried egg consumption. “Are you sure it’s actually him? They have been known to body-snatch.”

“It’s him. They can’t pretend stupid like that. Look at him. They did something to him. At least they sent him back. I haven’t seen Splifkin in days.”

Eb whined ruefully. “Oh … I shouldn’t have helped you. Oh … we did the wrong thing. I just know it.”

“You did nothing wrong. It’s they who scrambled his brain like those eggs he’s eating. And now they only need two more to get the seventeen. Bastards.”

Zack had heard enough. “I can hear you.”

Eb scurried away, looking back at Zack nervously. Mizuki sat down across from him, folded her arms on the table and stared.

Zack tried to ignore her, but couldn’t. “Oh, now you want to talk to me?”

“I’m worried about you. What happened? What did they do to you?”

“Nothing. I talked to George. He explained some things to me. That’s all.”

“They had to have done something to you. Look at you. You have a dumb grin on your face. Well, dumber than usual.”

Zack shook his head. “Mizuki, I’m fine. We’re all fine. What do we want to go back to so badly? Do you really want to go back to your world to be forgotten and overlooked? Do you really want to go back there and drift around like some sort of hobo? You say you want to carve out a new path for yourself, but you’re just so afraid to walk it. Here you have a defined purpose and it’s a noble one.”

Mizuki fumed. Zack could see a rage welling up in her.
If she had been of Splifkin’s race, her skin would surely be blood red by now.

She remained calm.

Didn’t think she had such restraint in her.

“I’m going to let that go because they turned your brains into mush.”

“They did nothing to my brains.”

Mizuki slammed her fists on the table, rattling his now empty plate.

Perhaps she didn’t have restraint in her after all.

“Zack! C’mon. They did something to you. Maybe you don’t realize it, but what happened to fighting this?”

Zack stood and tossed his napkin on his plate, smeared with leftover egg residue. “I’m no fighter,” he said calmly, and then walked away.

†††

Zack lay awake on his bed and stared out the window at the moon hanging in the velvet sky. It was remarkable how detailed the Ankhs had made it in this menagerie; they had even recreated the craters on its glinting surface with incredible accuracy.

He peered at the man in the moon and thought him so lonely up there with no companion. It was a thought that never would have entered his mind before he met Mizuki and gazed the two glorious moons of her planet. But now, it was all he could think about.

Like the Alldan, he missed his Anneka.

They were so like-minded before, but now so dissimilar in their views. It made his heart ache. “She doesn’t understand,” he muttered to himself, or maybe to the man on the moon, lonesome like he.

†††

Zack’s eyes flew open to a blurry face hanging over him in a beam of moonlight. A hand cupped his mouth while someone pulled at his legs.

“Oh … I don’t know if I can do this,” Eb whined.

“Shut up and pull,” Mizuki barked. “He has to see this.”

Zack squirmed and broke free. He rolled off his bed and sprung to his bare feet. Eb, who in normal illumination looked like a ghost, appeared quite normal in the near darkness. He held his pudgy fists up in front of his face. “I don’t want to hit you, Zack, but I will.”

“You don’t have to kidnap me,” Zack said. “What do you want to show me?”

Eb put his hands down and sighed in relief. “Oh, good, I’ve never hit anyone before.”

They led him, still barefoot, to another wall that warped to reveal a door that led into a set of hallways, these much older and worn by time. It was dank and smelled musty; the stone walls seeped water.

They carefully wove down a set of crumbling stone steps and into what looked like a storage room, similar to the nook they had found before, only much larger.

It was less a room to cast things away, but more a place to worship. It was full of old wood chests, stuffed with gold and silver trinkets, and more statues, some bronzed, some solid gold. Covering almost every inch of the walls were strange, carved symbols. Zack wasn’t up on his strange symbols, but they looked ancient Egyptian. He recognized some of the hieroglyphics—the serpent, the lion, the owl, the swallow and the quail.

He also saw many ankhs, including one etched painstakingly in the stone floor just in front of an arch with hundreds of snakes carved into it.

Zack smiled as his hand traced the hieroglyphics. He felt he understood the Ankhs more than ever now. It all made sense to him. He always scoffed at the ancient alien theorists, the people on the television who droned on about how the pyramids were built by a race not of this world and how this alien race had shepherded humans through their formative years.

They were correct, it seemed.

Zack beamed. “This is incredible.”

“Yeah, freaking awesome,” Mizuki mocked and grabbed the sleeve of his Whitesnake T-shirt. “This is what we want to show you.” Mizuki dragged him to the arch, the soles of his bare feet blackened by the dirt and muck “Look at this.” She pointed at a set of symbols carved and encircled by an oval at the apex of the half moon.

Zack tilted his head and strained his neck to get a better look. “Okay, what am I looking at?”

Eb cleared his throat and spoke. “It’s an Egyptian cartouche. They were usually reserved for royals and pharaohs.”

Zack cocked his head and craned his neck again to get an even better look at the wide array of symbols. “What does it say?”

Eb stammered. “That, um, that’s the thing of it. It says ‘Zack Earnest.’”

Zack stared at the cartouche and the carvings contained in it—the door bolt, the vulture, the golden bowl, the feathers and the mouth—for several moments, trying to figure out what it all meant.

Mizuki’s voice echoed forebodingly throughout the tomb. “We found other chambers like this—a lot more.”

“Thirty-four of them?” Zack asked abruptly. He already knew the answer.

Mizuki peered at Eb, who shot her a confused, perplexed look. “Um, well, more than seventeen. Sure.”

It was clear to Zack now. He was a history buff—another reason why he was often stuffed into lockers. This was a burial tomb, the symbols on the walls directions to the afterlife, the arch the first of the twelve gates of hell he needed to pass through.

The only way to get to the afterlife is to die. Clearly, they would not survive the extraction of the Spark.

Mizuki probably had one with her name on it. So did Valentina and most likely all of the seventeen—or thirty-four as George had let slip.

Zack rubbed his hands through his thick hair and closed his eyes. He was flustered. He was confused. Perhaps they had brainwashed him into thinking he was part of some grand design of the universe, that he was more than just an awkward seventeen-year-old boy with nothing to offer. Perhaps they had preyed on his desire to be important, to be essential to someone.

All they had collected shared the same trait: All were lost and disillusioned. All longed to be important. All wished to be needed.

The Ankhs were no more than intergalactic cult leaders.

They were evolved humans, but still humans. They were still callous and savage, couching it in tradition and logic. Zack and those like him were there for one reason: to be consumed.

Mizuki pleaded, unaware she didn’t have to. “They’re gonna kill us Zack. One way or another, we’re all gonna end up in tombs like this. They don’t care if they are already dead. They’re gonna take us down with them—unless we fight.”

Zack sighed, his exhale billowed mist into the cool, damp air. “Fight how?”

Mikuzi grabbed Zack’s hand and rubbed it gently. “I don’t know. But we have to try, don’t we? It’s all in the trying, right? What did George say?”

Zack paced in front the arch and glanced every so often up at his name in the cartouche. He could read it as clearly as if it were chiseled in English. “He said they know they are all but dead, but they won’t give up. He said they seeded my planet and many others. He said there are actually thirty-four Sparks, but they only need seventeen and he said only the strongest seventeen will survive.”

“Oh … this is bad,” Eb whined. “Oh … this is so bad.”

Mizuki shot him a scowl. “Shut up, Eb.”

“He’s right,” Zack muttered as he stopped his pacing and stared at Mizuki. “This is bad. I guess a part of me always had faith in them, that they were genuine and really needed our help, that we would be filling a grand service to the universe in helping keep them alive. I was wrong.”

They made their way back up the steps and through the seeping halls and to the long hallway where the seventeen were to be housed. Two more were ushered in by Apparat. They smiled and bounded with nary a care. They were completely oblivious to the fate that was waiting for them.

“They have the seventeen,” Mizuki lamented.

“No,” Zack replied. “They have the thirty-four.”

Part III

Chapter One

Such a Small Universe

Mizuki was as despondent as Zack had ever seen her. She sat on his bed with her legs tucked under her and rocked to-and-fro slowly, like a boat being jostled by small waves. She stared out at his moon, rising high in the velvet sky.

“Your moon is so beautiful,” she said. “It has so much character. It has been barraged and gouged and scarred, but it keeps rising.”

She wiped a tear with the back of her trembling hand. For the first time, Zack had seen Mizuki surrender. He was saddened by the sight.

He wanted to offer her words of encouragement but had none for her. He wanted to console her, but had no comfort left in him. He was as rudderless as she was, as rudderless as he had always been.

Instead, he sat next to her, his legs tucked under him and rocked in unison with her. It brought a little spark to her face, bathed in moonlight, as she turned her gaze to him.

“Let’s just enjoy the time we have left,” he whispered.