The 17 (5 page)

Zack wearily shook his head. “No. I won’t fight you. I can’t even if I wanted to.”

The two figures looked at each other. The one on the right, much taller than the other, reached out with long, gray fingers and grabbed Zack’s headcloth, pulling him up to his feet. Zack wavered there and the figure on the left pulled out a serrated knife, its blade glistening in the sun, and slashed at Zack. Beads of dark red blood soaked through his tunic and he fell to his knees.

The figures marched off and Zack fell face first into the sand, let out one last gasp and felt his life slip away.

He smiled.
Finally, relief.

†††

Zack awoke—or regenerated would be a more apt description—on that hard cot in that sterile cell. He could feel a spring poking into one of the vertebrae of his spine.

He kicked his legs out and sat upright. The cell was dimly lit and a metal tray with a tin glass of murky water and a hard roll on it sat on the floor.

“Hello.” Zack muttered. He heard that disconcerting clicking and clacking noise again from the other side of the light barrier that swirled on the far wall. “Hello. Please, tell me what you want from me, from us. Please just tell me why I am here.”

Silence.

Zack stood and staggered toward the aurora-like light. His head still throbbed, but he was alive. He stood in front of the barrier and could feel the energy pulsate off of it. He reached his hand out and could feel heat emanating from the swirl.

“I don’t know who or what you are,” Zack said sternly. “But I’m not playing your game. I will not participate. I don’t care if you keep me in this cell. I will not perform for you.”

He heard more clicking and clacking, louder now. If he didn’t know better, he could have sworn it was the back and forth click-clacking of an argument.

Then he heard silence. He listened, holding his breath, but heard nothing.

Zack didn’t know why he was going to do what he was about to do. Perhaps it was the fact he had already died twice and had come back. Perhaps it was because desperation makes one do stupid things, but he reached his hand out again and pressed it against the swirling light. The flesh on his hand burned and the pain was like nothing he had ever experienced before. The pain was so intense he nearly vomited—and would have had there been anything of substance in his stomach. He was growing faint, but he refused to remove his hand from what he could only classify as plasma. The barrier flickered and then disappeared. There was no skin remaining on his hand, only blackened bone.

It was the sight of it that got him. He collapsed to his knees, vomited a yellowish liquid and rolled onto his side, his skeleton hand dangling there like some macabre Halloween decoration. He found it fitting and chuckled uncontrollably, hysterically. He was trapped in a fun house, a horror house, with no discernable exit, no clear escape to speak of. It was a nightmare playing on a loop.

As his vision dimmed he heard click-clacking near him and he saw a ball of shimmering light, changing colors and swirling over him.

It was a glorious hallucination of pain intense and overwhelming.

†††

Mizuki’s warm smile was mere inches from his face. It was so close he could smell the Hot Pocket on her breath.

She flicked a stray fall of hair from her eye. “He’s awake.”

Zack pried his eyes open and lifted his right hand into his field of vision. It was in perfect working order. He wiggled his fingers to make sure.

“Where have you been?” Brock asked. “You’ve been gone for a week. We thought they weren’t bringing you back—or bringing you
back back.”

Zack sat up and the room spun violently. Mizuki gave him a glass of water and he gulped it down, still thirsty from the desert trip or thirsty from frying his hand off in a plasma force-field— he couldn’t be exactly sure.

“Where …” Zack said, the rest of the words trailing off into a sound frequency no human ear could hear. He decided to repeat it. “Where are the others?”

Mizuki patted Zack on the shoulder. “They’re all here. They’re still sleeping. What happened?”

“Can you be more specific?” Zack answered.

“After that epic fail in the desert, we all got zapped back into those cells. After a day, we were back here … except for you. Where were you?”

Zack looked about to see where here was. It was a different house—a log cabin really—with a bear rug stretched across a hardwood floor. He lay on a green futon and flames crackled from a fireplace on the far wall. There was a hallway that most likely led to bedrooms and a sparse kitchen with metal pots and pans hanging on hooks and an iron stove that looked like a leftover from the 1930s.

It looked very much like the cabin Zack’s parents hauled him off to during summer weekends on family excursions near the beach in Maine. Zack very much disliked camping. It was so boring. He never understood the draw.

He looked down to see what he was wearing: a gray thermal shirt, worn jeans and hiking boots. Mizuki and Brock were similarly dressed.

“Well, bud?” Brock was not patient. He needed answers. Zack got that about him.

“I was in the cell, too. But I did something stupid.”

“What did you do? What could you do?” Brock asked.

Zack raised his right hand and wiggled his fingers again as he spoke. “I stuck my hand in that light barrier thing. Let’s just say it’s not flesh friendly.”

Brock’s eyes were even bigger now cast against his dark skin, and his white teeth were in clear view through his large grin. “I bet our jailors didn’t like that too much.”

“As for the rest of the week, I have no idea where I was. I have my hand back. I feel good. I guess they had to fix me up before dropping me back into their experiment.” Something occurred to Zack. “I guess we failed in the desert.”

“You think?” Brock mocked.

“What happened to Harness and Cass after they marched off?” Zack was curious and he hoped one of them had the answer. He certainly didn’t want to ask Harness or Cass. They probably wouldn’t give him a straight answer anyway.

“They said they came across a couple of others … aliens or whatever those things are,” Brock explained. “They were with a group of others of their kind. They were short with big heads and long fingers and their skin was grey—kind of like the classic aliens from TV. Two of them were already dead. Two of them were still alive—barely.

Brock continued. “Harness said the one tried to crawl away, but collapsed dead in the sand and the other spoke in some sort of gibberish. They had canteens, but they were all empty. Harness dropped a knife he had found at the feet of the living one, but he wouldn’t pick it up, so Cass killed him. They didn’t want to kill an unarmed alien. He thought that would piss off the captors.”

Zack was in shock and Brock and Mizuki could tell.

“Wait wait wait,” Zack did the repeating thing again. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Mizuki, concerned, put her arm around him. “What is it, Zack?”

“That was Jenai and I. We were the aliens and Brock and Zill were the two dead bodies. That’s exactly what happened to us. Jenai tried to crawl away. The knife was tossed at my feet. I didn’t pick it up and I was slashed across the chest and died. They looked like the grey aliens.”

Brock went into Contemplative Brock Mode. Mizuki’s mouth dropped open before she muttered a few inaudible syllables that might as well have been clicking and clacking.

The implications were far reaching. Whoever or whatever was keeping them in this wicked game had the ability to make them see whatever they wanted them to see. It was a plot twist that deeply disturbed Zack.

“What happened to Harness and Cass after that?” Zack asked.

Mizuki finally mustered some intelligible words. “They said they just eventually collapsed to the sand and died. Cass said Harness went first, which has just made Harness an even bigger baby to be around. You’re lucky you’ve missed the last week.”

“They’re toying with us,” Brock said calmly, analytically, quite Brock-ly. “They wanted to see what we would do if we thought the others were aliens instead of familiar faces; very intriguing.”

Zack sensed Brock almost admired their captors, respected them in a scientific way, anyway. Zack could understand that. He, too, had a sliver of respect for them. The experiments had been well crafted—he gave them that much.

He just wished he knew who
they
were.

“Well, I don’t much care what they are trying to accomplish,” Mizuki said defiantly. “I just don’t see the point. What are they trying to learn? What are they studying exactly? We’re a bunch of teenagers. And they want to see what makes us tick?”

Zack offered his own take. “We’re not even sure if it is aliens. This could be purgatory. A God or a demigod could be pulling the strings, or the devil.”

“It’s aliens. Has to be.” Brock did that thing with his clasped hand and index finger on his lower lip. “This feels like a test. This feels like an examination, for what purpose I don’t know. We may never know.”

That wasn’t comforting.

Harness burst into the room, Cass, Zill and a groggy Jenai following. His words were even less comforting. “They’re gonna mess with us until it isn’t fun for them to mess with us anymore and then we’re toast. Our only hope is to make things as fun for them as long as we can.”

Zack pushed himself to his feet and walked to Jenai, who cracked a smile, rubbed her eyes and threw her arms around him. That drew an eye roll from Harness. “Get a room,” he barked.

“I’m so awk,” Jenai said. Zack could only infer awk meant awkward. “I’m sorry I tried to crawl away. I’m just glad you’re back.”

Zack was glad to be back. He noticed Mizuki was not glad to see Jenai embracing him warmly and tightly, and that made Zack feel good. Rarely had he been the subject of jealousy, but he sensed it now from Mizuki.

Jenai peeled herself away and added to the Mizuki jealousy flame by getting on her tip-toes and pecking Zack on the cheek. “I promise next time not to be such a douche.”

Zack knew there would be a next time and that quashed any good feeling Jenai had given him.

Harness banged around in the kitchen and swore. Cass took a drag from her e-cigarette and made sure to blow the vapor toward Zill, who sat sulking on the futon next to Brock, and Mizuki put more logs on the fire.

Zack peered out the window and saw a rolling landscape of tall grass framed by large redwood trees.

“Has anyone tried to go outside before?” Zack asked. The others just peered at him as if he had three heads. “I’m going outside.”

Mizuki tried to stop him, mentioning his hand-in-the-light-saber fiasco in his cell, but Zack shrugged off her suggestion and offered a counter proposal. “You can come with.”

Mizuki hesitated. Jenai did not. “I’ll go,” she said, hopping into the room with uncommon glee. “It will give me a chance to redeem myself.”

Zack smiled. “Great. Let’s go.”

He could tell Mizuki wanted to tag along, too, but she hung back, fuming instead.

Perhaps she didn’t want to be the dreaded third wheel.

Brock offered his own warning. “We have been able to come and go from our houses, but only when they let us. We’ve never tried this before. Be careful.”

Zack nodded, grabbed a wool coat off a rack near the door and slipped it on over his weary shoulders. Jenai plucked another coat off the rack that was far too big for her —she looked like a turtle hiding in its shell.

Zack reached out cautiously for the door, fearing it was made of plasma, and finally wrapped his fingers around the knob and turned it, swinging the door open with his eyes half closed, bracing for something, what he did not know.

He smelled the fresh air blow in and took a deep breath.

“Well, I didn’t vaporize. That’s a good sign,” Zack quipped as he passed through the arch. Jenai hooted and followed him closely, closing the door behind her.

The crisp wind smacked Zack in the face like it always seemed to do in Maine. It was rarely warm there, just dreary and cold much of the year, sort of like his surrounding now. He kind of welcomed it here; the air smelled fresh as they marched through the knee-high grasses toward the tree line.

“What are we looking for?” Jenai asked, smiling and nearly skipping alongside him.

“Not sure. Maybe some answers.”

They reached the tree line and pushed through it, dead branches crunching under their feet. Zack knew they weren’t really in the wood and everything around them was fabricated, but it certainly felt real. It smelled real, too, as Zack caught a whiff of the redwood cones as their boots cracked them.

“You know John Steinbeck wrote about the redwoods,” Jenai said, prompting Zack to stop and smile at her.

“Really? You read a lot?”

“Always. I don’t have many friends. I’ve never had a serious boyfriend. I read to go to other worlds. I never thought I’d really be doing it.” She tilted her head back and stared up the long trunks to the canopy high above them “He wrote about how redwoods can never be drawn in pictures or captured perfectly in photographs. They inspire silence and awe and are not trees, but ambassadors from another time.”

Zack realized he had seen another side of Jenai, not the sniveling insecure girl who hid from all adversity, but one who was willing to tackle it, perhaps for the first time in her life.

She had changed a bit in those woods with him. She was no longer afraid. She was confident and brave and bold. Zack liked this side of her.

They continued to walk and could see the end of the tree line, a bright light filtering through the brush in the distance. They reached what looked like a large hedge, but could peer through the spaces. Zack could also see a swirl of light much like the barrier in the cell and could feel it pulse with power.

Jenai peeked through the break in the hedge that was there to obscure the plasma field, and then Zack knelt and did the same, warning Jenai not to get too close or she could lose her nose. On the other side, they saw a scene in stark contrast to theirs. There was a wooden shack, separated from a rocky terrain by a large body of milky water. The sky was a swirl of orange and red.