The Resisters (3 page)

Emma bounded up the porch stairs and banged through the front screen door.

She wouldn’t be leaving for a month, but Ethan had a weird feeling this would be the last time he’d see her. He wanted to go after her and tell her what a great sister she was and how she was going to show up all those Vassar girls … but then he rubbed his shoulder and winced. She hit too hard. He’d have a bruise in the morning.

There’d be plenty of time for that sappy goodbye stuff later.

His throbbing shoulder reminded Ethan of the other slug he’d
almost
taken tonight. To his face!

Those two pale strangers.

What had they called each other? Felix? Madison?

Now that Ethan thought about it, his theory about them being a prank by the Westside Warriors didn’t make sense.

What was all that talk about him being “the right size”?

That he’d “have to do”?

That they could “save dozens and the suit”?

He glanced around, half expecting to see them again.

The streets were deserted, though.

Ethan kicked a paper cup into the recycle bin like it was the last shot of the match. He missed.

Had winning tonight been luck or skill? He didn’t care—he’d made the shot. The trick next time would be to win without a desperate last-second play.

Superior long-range strategy
, Coach was forever telling the team,
always wins over superior immediate tactics
.

Ethan’s thoughts about soccer halted as he saw the milk truck turn onto his street. It was early. Deliveries came at four a.m. so the milk was fresh for breakfast.

The white truck doused its headlights and rolled to a stop in front of his house.

Had it broken down? Was something wrong with old Miss Jenkin, the milk lady?

Ethan walked over to see if he could help.

Miss Jenkin didn’t get out of the driver’s cab—instead, the huge boy, Felix, stepped out and strode toward him.

Ethan didn’t understand why he had Miss Jenkin’s truck, but he did know there was no way he’d let that guy within fist range again.

Ethan would just yell for his parents. He whirled about—

—and almost ran straight into the pale, spiky-haired girl!

Ethan saw a split-second blur of her hand as she lashed out and hit Ethan dead center in his chest.

He staggered back, sputtering for air. He couldn’t even whisper for help.

Felix stood over him, grabbed his arm, and hauled him up.

Ethan finally sucked in a breath to scream for help—but the big guy wrapped a forearm around his throat and squeezed.

“Nuh-uh, small fry,” Felix whispered. “Not after making us wait all night.”

“What’s with the ‘small fry’ remark?” Madison said, and jabbed Felix in his ribs. “What’s that make
me
, then?”

Felix chuckled, and the jiggling motion made Ethan choke. “It makes you a
pip-squeak,
” he told her. “A little coral snake, full of venom.”

Madison considered this, tapping her lower lip. She then nodded, mollified.

“What are you going to do?” Ethan croaked.

“Shhh …” Madison stood on her tiptoes and patted him on the cheek. She motioned Felix to the truck.

He dragged Ethan away.

Ethan tried to keep his legs under him so he wasn’t strangled in the process. Panic burned inside him, and he tried to squirm free—yell—anything, but Felix tossed
Ethan into the back of the truck, banging Ethan’s head on the side panel so hard that black spots swam in his vision.

Madison ducked inside the truck. “What are we going to do?” she replied. “We’re going to see if you have
any
survival instinct left after living in this test tube.”

She slammed the door shut behind her and locked it.

The engine rumbled to life, and the truck pulled away from the curb.

Ethan managed to raise his spinning head, blinked through blurred vision, and saw what he thought was his ordinary, happy home … one last time.

ETHAN WOKE FROM A DREAMLESS SLEEP.

It was dark. He felt a textured metal floor. He was rocking gently from side to side and smelled bleach and stale milk. His eyes adjusted, and he saw stacks of plastic crates.

He was inside Miss Jenkin’s milk truck.

The evening came back to him in a rush: the soccer match—those two strangers—his party—and how the pale boy and girl had grabbed him and tossed him into the truck.

When he’d bumped his head, he must have blacked out. How long?

He probed his scalp, winced, and felt a lump.

Ethan wanted to yell, but he was too scared to make a sound. He scooted into a corner and kept still until he could figure out what was going on.

The truck sped through an intersection, and an overhead streetlamp lit the night. He saw a street sign that read AVENUE K.

Avenue K led to the outskirts of town … and farther, into the mountains.

He thought he caught a glimpse of the old lumber mill—but it flashed by too quick.

This truck was definitely breaking the speed limit.

Before the light faded, Ethan spotted the strange girl, Madison, sitting on a crate at the other end of the truck. She was watching him.

“About time,” she said, and uncrossed her arms.

She brushed from her eyes the hair that had escaped her spiked ponytail. Her face scrunched as she examined him. She leaned up to the truck’s cab and called out, “Looks like he’s in one piece … more or less.”

“Good,” a boy said.

Felix. That was the big boy’s name. He was driving. He’d grabbed Ethan like he was a rag doll and put him in a choking headlock.

Ethan fought his rising panic as he remembered.

Nothing in school—in his entire life—had prepared him for anything like this. Things like this didn’t happen in his neighborhood.

But part of him
did
understand (on what his parents called a “gut level”). He was in real, life-or-death trouble with these two crazy kids.

Wouldn’t his parents have noticed him missing after
ten minutes? They’d call his friends, the school, the police, maybe even the mountain search-and-rescue team.

But … if no one had seen this milk truck, they’d assume Ethan would be on foot. And if that
had
been the old lumber mill he’d seen back there, he was sixty miles from his house.

How long before anyone looked this far?

He wasn’t helpless, though. Ethan could open the back door and jump out. Sure, he might be in the middle of nowhere and have to hide from—

“Don’t even think it,” Madison said. She eased back on her milk crate and smiled.

Ethan sneaked a hand behind his back and fumbled with the door. It was locked, and his fingers couldn’t find the release.

“Even if you got that open and had the nerve to jump,” she said, as if she could see right through him, “you’d bounce off the pavement so hard, you’d break every bone in your
stupid
body.”

She snorted as if this was funny.

Anger flared inside Ethan. “Is this a joke to you?”

“Not really,” she said. “But I am relieved to see you have
some
survival instincts.”

That’s what she’d said before:
“We’re going to see if you have
any
survival instinct left after living in this test tube.”

See
how
?

And what did she mean, “test tube”?

In a way, this Madison girl was like any other girl in the
seventh grade—cute and annoying all at the same time. But there was a cold, hard thing about her that Ethan had never seen in a girl … in anybody.

She looked him over and seemed to decide something.

“I’ll tell you what we’re doing,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything. Just promise that you’re not going to freak out, okay? I don’t want to get rough with you again. It’d defeat the whole purpose of this if I had to break your arms.”

Ethan swallowed, recalling how hard she’d hit him—right in the chest with what had felt like a sledgehammer.

Maybe letting her talk was a good thing. In fact, he
ought to
let her and Felix talk all night if he could get them to. That’d give his parents and the police more time to find him.

“You thirsty?” She slid a bottle of chocolate milk across the floor. “Drink that.”

Ethan grabbed it, pulled off the aluminum seal, and drank greedily. It was ice-cold and sweet. He felt better.

Madison’s nose was a little crooked, like it’d been broken and set not quite right.

No big deal, except Ethan had never seen anyone who’d had a broken bone and hadn’t had it perfectly fixed by a school doctor.

Her eyes were the strangest thing, though. They followed his gaze and glittered with a wild intensity.

Madison sat up straight and took a deep breath. “What I’m going to tell you is the truth, but it’ll be hard to believe.”

From the driver’s seat, Felix called back in his soft voice, “Why are you trying? It only works when they
see
it. And then they usually just lose it.”

“Shhh!” Madison hissed. “I’ve got a feeling. This one is different.”

She focused back on Ethan. “Where was I …? Oh yeah—fifty years ago the Earth was invaded by aliens. They call themselves the Ch’zar Collective. They came in a ship so big, people said it looked like a second moon in the sky.”

What she said confirmed Ethan’s assumption: She was
completely nuts
.

“So how come no one ever heard of it?” Ethan asked.

“I’m getting to that.” Madison frowned. “It was a ‘swarm’ ship from another star. It took them hundreds of years to travel here. And when they got near Earth, they broadcast messages of peace in every language.”

She had a fact wrong already with her made-up story. There was only one language on Earth. Multiple languages had been outdated and left behind so long ago, it was ancient history.

“When the Ch’zar got into Earth’s orbit, they started their invasion. It took them fifty-five seconds to conquer the world.”

“Hang on,” Ethan said. “Even if they dropped bombs from orbit, it’d take longer than that for them to hit the ground!”

Madison nodded. “Sure,
if
they were using bombs,” she
whispered. “But they had a better weapon. Mind control. They took over the brain of every human in the world … absorbing it into their Collective.”

She waved her hands around her head to indicate this mysterious, totally made-up event.

“People kept all their knowledge and skills,” she explained, “but they became slaves to the aliens—controlled and all communicating with some kind of ESP. It was like the billions of humans on Earth ceased to exist and turned into a single … 
thing.
”

She stopped and swallowed and looked sad for a moment.

She must really believe this stuff. Ethan felt sorry for her.

Of course, there had never been a billion people in the world. Today’s population was at an all-time high of a couple hundred million. But that was just one more hole in her fairy tale (along with aliens who never existed).

Ethan wondered why Madison and Felix weren’t getting help. He’d heard of mental cases that weren’t caught with genetic tests and treated early. Those poor people were always placed in hospitals, given medicines to make them feel better … and control any violent behavior.

Maybe these two had escaped their hospital.

“One thing went wrong with the Ch’zar’s invasion, though,” Madison said. “Kids. They were immune to their mind control.”

Something bothered Ethan about this part of her story. His forehead wrinkled as he tried to remember his science project on the nervous system.

Then he got it. When puberty hit, there were changes in your brain. Big changes.

One special part of the brain changed a lot. The prefrontal cortex. It did things like help you make good decisions and understand other people.

It was kind of what made you human.

The connection to that scientific fact and Madison’s story almost made sense, because kids’ brains were different from adults’.

It made Ethan’s skin crawl.

“So why are you and I here?” he asked, his tone skeptical. “If aliens control the world, our parents … why do I still have to wash the dishes every night?”

Madison slowly shook her head. “At the start, the kids were put into work camps. The aliens kept them there until they grew up, their brains changed, and they got absorbed into the Collective.”

Ethan imagined hundreds of thousands of kids losing their parents and going to prisons. How would he feel if he lost his mom and dad like that? It would’ve been the worst thing in the world.

But he shook off that feeling. This was just a made-up story. An
insane
story.

“The thing was,” Madison continued, “when those first kids became part of the Collective, they didn’t have the
smarts or skills of the other controlled humans. The aliens figured that humans had to be raised in a
natural
environment to be as smart and creative as possible.”

She reached behind her and pulled out a manila folder.

It was a school record. Ethan had seen them a million times before. It held teachers’ notes, your extracurricular activities, medical records, and every test score. It’s what high schools looked at when they decided to accept you (or not).