Authors: J.E. Anckorn
Untaken
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© 2014 J.E. Anckorn
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For my mum, Christine who taught me to love books, and for Eo McNeil, who gave me a place to write one.
Gracie
f you’d seen the three of us picking our way along the edge of the busted up highway, you’d likely have thought we were family. Brandon, fifteen and the oldest, was rocking the “moody teen” look and stalking alone way off in front. He scowled back every now and then at Jake, whose little kid legs would have been too short to match Brandon’s pace even if he’d tried.
And then there was me, Gracie, a year younger than Brandon, and stuck between the two of them.
Brandon wasn’t my big brother. Jake wasn’t my little brother.
My real brothers and my mom and dad were taken by the Space Men. We called them “the extraterrestrials” at first, which sounded more scientific than “Space Men”, but the wise guys on the WBZ evening news started calling them the “Space Men” and it kind of stuck.
That was after the first panic of them arriving, but before everything ended. When it was still something people could joke about a little.
Jake’s mom and dad were taken, too, I guess, but Brandon’s dad was dead. For sure dead, not just maybe-dead like the people who were taken. Brandon’s mom was dead too, but that happened when he was a baby, and had nothing to do with the Space Men, although it was still tough luck for Brandon.
Brandon said we had to form a unit for survival purposes. He’d often says things like “form a unit for survival purposes” when anyone normal would just say “Hey, let’s be friends and try and help each other.” Like, when we found somewhere to sleep at night? We weren’t looking for a place with a roof to keep the rain out and a door that shut so we wouldn’t freeze our butts off, we were looking for a “defensible position.”
Brandon thought he was a grown-up, but he was just a kid too, even though he talked like an army guy and acted all tough.
What we were defending
against
, were Drones.
If we spotted a Drone, we either had to get out of there as quick as we could or, better yet, smash it up so it couldn’t let the Space Men know our location. Or worse. That’s what Brandon said anyway. I didn’t know if we
could
smash up a drone—they were probably made of some special Space Men metal like their ships were. The army guys couldn’t shoot those ships down and they were real army guys with jets and missiles and stuff, not just some skinny kid who watched too many action movies.
Brandon said that Drones were “the primary threat.”
At first, there’d been many Drones around, and we had to be super sneaky—sorry, Brandon—
covert
. We hadn’t seen any for weeks now, though, which was good, but also scary. Sometimes it’s best if you can see the bad stuff right in front of you, because when you don’t know where it is… it could be anywhere.
That was another reason we stayed away from big towns, or just tried to get past them as quickly as we could, sticking instead to the highways that breezed on by.
I hated towns because they were frightening somehow, even without Drones. I hated how sometimes I’d see a store, and half of it was all fresh and new looking, and maybe there were still posters up for Slushies or lottery tickets, or “SPECIAL ONE DAY ONLY SALES!”, and then the other part was burst open and black, and all the good things from inside the store were spilled out onto the road. There was no one around to pick them up and set them back into their places, no one to care about “SPECIAL ONE DAY ONLY SALES!”
The registers were still filled with money, and at first, we’d filled up our pockets with twenties and tens—there was so much money that we didn’t even bother with the ones and fives—but now, we didn’t bother with money at all. Things like money weren’t so important these days.
There were dead people, too.
People like Brandon’s dad, who wasn’t taken. Seeing those people still laying where they’d fallen was getting worse now than it had been at the beginning, because the bodies had begun to go bad. They didn’t look so much like real people anymore, which was good, but they stank and were all swollen and squishy and, as Brandon said, a “potential disease hazard.”
Jake didn’t like towns either. He didn’t care about the dead people, which you’d think he would, being a really little kid, but he hated going inside buildings. Even at night, when we had to find a “defensible position,” he’d sneak out after Brandon was asleep, and curl up outside the door like a puppy. Brandon got mad at him sometimes and told him he had to “man up,” but the kid was five at most! Who expects a five-year-old to “man up?”
Then, the next night, out Jake would creep again, so Brandon may as well have saved his breath.
I didn’t think Jake was any safer sleeping inside than he was outside, honestly. Lots of people tried to hide in their houses when the Space Men came, but it didn’t make any difference. In some places, especially places where the invaders fought with the army, those big silver ships blew the roofs right off the houses, and sometimes even blew the whole house down, like the Big Bad Wolf in the story books.
And, of course there were the Drones, who seemed to be specially made for sneaking inside and grabbing people right inside their own homes.
Sometimes, we still saw the Space Men ships fly over, but now it was the small speedy ones, not the huge ones that had taken people away, and even the small ones didn’t land any more. I guess they’d taken almost everyone left to take, and any survivors had found themselves a good hiding place, so the Space Men had about given up looking.
That was what we were going to do next—finding a hiding place was Stage Two of Brandon’s Big Plan. It was actually a pretty good plan, although I didn’t like to tell him that. He was a Mr. Know-It-All anyway, and didn’t need encouraging.
Stage One was getting supplies, and once we had our supplies, we were heading to Maine, where Brandon’s Uncle Bob had a hunting cabin. Brandon said it was out in the middle of nowhere so it’d be safe to spend winter there—no other survivors around to mess with us or take our stuff, and no towns big enough that the Space Men might still be hanging around.
Was there a Stage Three to Brandon’s Big Plan? After the winter, if we didn’t freeze to death or run out of food, or get munched on by bears or something? Did he still think we were going to get rescued by the army guys?
I didn’t know.
Sometimes, I’d try to think of what it might be like. The army guys would fly down in a big helicopter—after they’d figured out how to bust through that special Space Man metal—and they’d chase the creeps back into space, never to return! All the people, our friends and our moms and our dads and everyone else, wouldn’t be dead at all, just captured. And, of course, the army guys would set them free.
Maybe the Space Men would just die without the army guys having to do anything. I’d seen a movie once where Space Men came, and in the end, they just died of the flu! “
Achoo, Achoo, we all fall down.”
I didn’t like to think about things like that much, though.
At first, thinking about being rescued made me feel better, but now, imagining the future was something I tried not to do.
Because, another thing that might happen? We’d live in the woods and get old out there waiting for someone to come save us, and when the three of us died, there would be nobody left at all.
