“So what happened?” Steve asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “It was really confusing, all right? I don’t know what happened after that.”

  Nina stared at him. “What do you mean you don’t know?” Her mind was racing. The Visitors might have taken the rest of the group hostage, or worse.

  Jack brushed the last bits of shattered glass out of his hair. “Oh, like you guys would have stuck around for that,” he snapped.

  “Wait a minute,” Steve said. “You just left?”

  Jack glared at him. “I know you’re probably into aliens, being Weird Steve and all, but I don’t need to mess around with space monsters. I don’t think you do either, even if you’re pretty good at talking a big game in front of your little girlfriend.”

  “Hey!” Steve said, starting to tense up again.

  Nina held up her hands. “Guys, c’mon. Let’s not get into this right now. Jack, what happened to everyone else? Do you know where you guys were going when the Visitors attacked?”

  “No, I was just following the crowd. I don’t even know if those soldier guys actually had much of a plan—it seemed like they were arguing with each other,” Jack said. He glanced quickly out the door, then returned his attention to the others. “You guys weren’t there. You don’t get it. I figured I could come back here and get my car started while they were distracted with everybody else. Maybe I could . . . I don’t know.”

  Steve scoffed. “You’re a real hero, Jack.”

  Nina half expected Jack to haul Steve off and knock his teeth out, and for a second it looked like he was going to. But then he just sighed and snapped, “Yeah Steve, just like you. I’m sure if you’d been there you would’ve been able to scare them off. Get real. You wouldn’t have lasted two seconds out there.”

  There was an uncomfortable moment of silence. Nina realized they had no way of knowing what had happened to their families. Steve took another step away from them and gave the doorframe a solid kick. He must have been having the same thought.

  Jack shook his head back and forth and then pulled one of his hands backward through his hair. By the time he returned his arm to his side, he seemed to have shaken it off.

  “Whatever. It’s just whatever,” Jack said. “So what’s the plan here? Or have you been too busy making out in here to come up with anything good?”

  Nina felt heat start to build up in her cheekbones and knew she must be turning bright red. It took everything she had to ignore the comment. Luckily, Steve barely seemed to register what Jack had said. “No, we haven’t come up with a plan yet. We’ve been stuck in here, so we didn’t know how bad it had gotten out there.”

  Jack began pacing back and forth. Steve watched with his arms crossed and an eyebrow arched. Nina wondered how long he would give Jack before making a snarky comment.

  Then, out of nowhere, Steve bolted away from the doors. Before Jack and Nina could ask what he was doing, he began loudly shushing them and gesturing for them to back away from the entrance.

  They retreated several yards into the darkness before Nina grabbed hold of Steve to stop him. “Steve, what is it?”

  “Something’s out there,” he said, voice shaking. “I saw it slip between the buses.”

  Jack crouched beside them. “What was it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t want to find out,” Steve hissed.

  “Well neither do I,” Jack said. “I was just out there—it’s not great.”

  Nina sat back, briefly considering their options. Since this invasion had started they’d been both literally and figuratively in the dark, and they didn’t have much to show for it other than perhaps lasting slightly longer before getting abducted. If they didn’t figure out what was going on in the parking lot, they’d probably just end up sitting there, half-in, half-out of the mall. Eventually they would either be captured where they sat, or her blood sugar would get low again and they’d have to move without having any idea what their options were.

  “I’m going to check it out,” she said.

  “No!” both boys said in unison. But she had already started crawling back toward the doorway. She’d had enough of discussion for the moment. It was time to get something done.

  Chapter 7

  Nina crept toward the exit. Once she got closer to the doors, she carefully avoided the broken glass that littered the floor. She positioned herself in the lower corner of the door farthest from the broken one. She cautiously scanned the parking lot. Other than the lack of people and the pair of jeeps the guardsmen had left behind, everything outside appeared astonishingly normal. The sun was even out. She reminded herself not to slip into a false sense of security and focused intently on the line of buses in the center of the lot.

  It would have helped if she had any idea what she was actually looking for. So far they’d only ever seen the Visitors’ ships—she had no idea what the aliens themselves looked like.

  She thought about different types of aliens she’d seen in all the movies Steve used to make her watch. Based on that, she was either looking for something pretty large, maybe a little bigger than Jack, or else something normal-sized but with a giant head.

  Still, it was possible they could change their shape. She wondered briefly if Jack was really who he said he was. Could he actually be an alien disguised to look like Jack Kurten? But she quickly dismissed the idea. Jack had trouble doing basic human things like getting through a door, but that was also standard Jack. Plus, if Jack were a shapeshifter, he wouldn’t have called Steve “Weird Steve” or known that Nina had been dating him.

  A sudden movement near the buses interrupted her thoughts. She inched closer to the door and peered through it, practically pressing her nose up against the glass. There it was again. A flicker of light was coming from behind the front tires of one of the buses.

  Slowly, a helmeted human head poked out. It was one of the guardsmen from earlier—he must have somehow made it back to the mall. He reached an arm out and began manipulating what she could now see was a small mirror. He flashed reflected sunlight toward her in regular intervals. The broken glass behind her crunched underfoot, and then a hand grabbed her shoulder and startled her.

  “Don’t do that!” she hissed at Steve, who had crept up behind her as she had been observing the parking lot.

  “I think he’s trying to signal us,” he said. “It might be Morse code.”

  Nina shifted her weight so she could glare at Steve. “Great, so do you know Morse code?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well then that’s not very much help, is it,” she sighed. “I’m going to see if I can get him to come over here.”

  She slowly lifted herself up and waved to the guardsman, who continued flashing the mirror at them. She mouthed that she couldn’t understand and then began waving him toward them. He dropped the mirror and shook his head, then returned the same gesture she’d been giving him, urging them to come join him outside. She looked at Steve, who was shaking his head.

  “You heard what Jack said—we’re not going out there,” he told her.

  The guardsman was standing up now, no longer trying to conceal himself with the bus, and frantically waving at them. There was a flash of movement in the sky above him, and Nina could see one of the smaller Visitor ships approaching. Nina pounded on the glass, trying to draw the soldier’s attention to the ship. The guard spotted it and took off, sprinting back toward the woods.

  “We have to get out of here—now!” Steve shouted. “Before they see us!”

  Nina was rooted in place. If the soldier came back here alone, she wondered, what does that mean for the others?

  “Nina! Come on! Get up!” Steve urged, grabbing her by the shoulder. “It’s getting closer!”

  The ship seemed to crawl through the sky as it passed the mall and continued in the direction the soldier went. Nina snapped back into action and pushed herself up off the floor, catching a shard of glass with her palm in her rush to get away from the windows and opening up a deep gash. As they hurried back into the darkness, she couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to the soldier.

  Chapter 8

  In their rush to get away from the windows, they almost ran into Jack.

  “Hey, wait a second—slow down,” he said. “What happened?”

  Nina only slowed enough to grab him by the shoulder and drag him deeper into the mall. “They’re out there, and they’re headed this way!” she shouted. “There was a soldier, but I think . . . he’s gone now.”

  She didn’t have to tell Jack twice. The trio barreled on through the darkness, banging shins and kneecaps against benches and planters as they went. The blood was sticky and hot on Nina’s palm, but at least the cut didn’t hurt. She wondered how bad it was, but there was no way to tell without any light. They pressed onward, deeper into the mall until they lost sight of the entryway. Nina’s arm was starting to feel strange—a little lighter than it should and cold and tingly just underneath the skin, like it was falling asleep.

  “Hold it!” she called out. The group stopped, loudly catching their breaths. “This isn’t going to work—we need a plan.”

  “Hang on,” Jack said. Nina heard Jack’s backpack hit the ground with a heavy thud, followed by a zipper and the sound of him rummaging through the pack. “Okay, everybody stand back to back.”

  “Why?” Steve asked.

  There was a grunt off to Nina’s left. “Just do it, all right?” Jack said.

  After groping in the darkness to find one another, the group assembled back to back, facing outward. There was a loud crack like the striking of a match, and suddenly Nina’s nostrils burned with the rotten egg stench of sulfur. The area around them was illuminated with a flickering light, and she turned around to see that Jack was holding a road flare.

  “Ugh, that smells awful,” she said, suppressing a sneeze from the sting in her nose.

  “It’s the sulfur in the flare,” Steve said. He turned beside her, the light dancing across his sweat-smeared forehead. “Where did you even get that? Did you have that the whole time?”

  Jack grinned. “I dumped my books when I heard about the space ships and got some stuff out of the safety kit I keep in my car,” he explained. “I figure it’s more likely to do me some good than a bunch of homework, given the situation.”

  “That’s . . . surprisingly good thinking, Jack. What else do you—” Steve started, but Jack interrupted him with a sharp gasp.

  “Nina, what happened to your hand?”

  Nina glanced down at her palm. It looked pretty bad. Her whole hand was red and sticky with blood, and it had dripped all over her shirt and pants during their retreat into the mall.

  “Whoa, Nina,” Steve stammered. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  Nina’s arm was still tingling. She hadn’t realized how bad her injury actually was. She took a deep gulp of air in attempt to push down the panic that was rising up in her chest. “I cut myself on the glass,” she said. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

  “Umm, you’re looking at your hand, right?” Jack said sarcastically. “It’s really bad.”

  “Thanks, Jack, really helpful,” barked Steve. “We gotta find something to stop the bleeding—a T-shirt or something.” He glanced around the illuminated circle provided by the road flare. “There!” He pointing to a storefront whose security fencing wasn’t quite closed.

  “I cut myself on the glass,” Nina felt herself saying again. She was starting to feel strange, like none of this was actually happening, and she was just in somebody else’s bad dream.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” Steve told her. “Just hang in there. Jack, help me with this.”

  Jack set down the road flare. Then he and Steve grabbed onto the bottom of the fencing and forced it open, grunting with the effort. After retrieving the flare, Jack and Steve slid under the gate and into the store, beckoning for Nina to follow. She did clumsily, leaving a trail of blood droplets in her wake.

  They were in some kind of novelty shop, full of various odds and ends, party supplies, and T-shirts with bad one-liners and edgy slogans plastered across the front. Steve rushed over to a rack of shirts and tried to tear one into strips. The shirt proved surprisingly strong, and if they weren’t already in such a bad situation, it would have been pretty embarrassing.

  “Seriously, Steve?” Jack said, grabbing another shirt from the pile and taking it apart at the seams with ease.

  “I didn’t think it was that bad,” Nina said, still dripping blood onto the floor steadily. She felt as if there was something that she really needed to do, but couldn’t remember what it was. She looked at the sticky mess that was her hand. I should probably take care of that, she thought to herself in a daze.

  Steve grabbed the strips out of Jacks hands and began winding them tightly around Nina’s hand, applying pressure to the wound. “Here, it’s okay. Just sit,” he told her, helping her to the ground. “We’ll just sit here for a while, and you’ll be fine.” Nina started to shiver all over, suddenly feeling freezing cold.

  “It’s cold,” she mumbled. “I cut my hand on the glass. I didn’t think it was that bad.”

  Steve grabbed a hoodie and wrapped it around her shoulders. “You’re all right, you’re all right,” he reassured her, then turned to Jack. “Hey, we gotta rest here for a minute. Why don’t you look around and see if you can find anything useful in here.”

  Jack nodded and disappeared into the racks of novelty items.

  Steve grabbed her hand with both hands and held it above her head. “Let’s just keep this elevated so the bleeding slows down.”

  This is nice, Nina thought, although the voice in her head sounded like it was coming from a million miles away. Her brain felt like it was wading through molasses. Sitting feels nice. We’ll just sit for a while. She looked over at Steve. It’s nice that he’s trying so hard.

  “I’m sorry,” she said then. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

  He looked her in the eye and squeezed her hand even tighter between his. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “It’s not. Everything is going to be okay.”

  Chapter 9

  By the light of the road flare, Jack searched the store for anything that might help them survive while Steve continued applying pressure to Nina’s wound. It took a while, but eventually the bleeding stopped. Nina started to feel a little more like herself, although she was a little lightheaded. Still, she didn’t want to stay in the store any longer than they had to. In the time they’d spent collecting themselves, it was entirely possible that the Visitors had somehow detected their presence and entered the mall. She didn’t want to wait in one spot and find out.

  She tried to pull her hand away from Steve’s, but he wasn’t paying attention and his hands wouldn’t seem to let go. Nina cleared her throat and gave another gentle but sturdy tug. “Steve, you can, uh, stop holding my hand,” she said.

  “Oh, sorry,” he responded sheepishly, checking her makeshift bandages one last time before letting go. “We should try to find some real bandages and some antibiotics or something,” he said. “You don’t want it to get infected.”

  Nina snorted. “If we live that long.”

  “It just seems like a good idea,” Steve said. “We might as well try to stay positive.”

  Jack returned with his haul, looking pleased with himself. “All right, I think I found some good stuff. I got a bunch of glow sticks, some more T-shirts in case any of you klutzes manage to hurt yourselves again, some kind of weird samurai-looking sword thing . . .” He swung a model katana into a mug, shattering it instantly. “And two hundred fifty bucks!”

  “Hey, be careful with that sword!” Steve cried as he stepped away from the pieces of the shattered mug on the floor. “What is it with you and breaking things?”

  “What is it with you and not knowing how to just chill?” Jack retorted. His road flare began to sputter in his hand, and it fizzled out by the time Steve came up with an answer.

  “It’s a little hard to chill when everyone we know might’ve just been abducted by aliens!”

  “Thanks, man, I definitely forgot about that.” Jack dropped the dead flare, cracked a glow stick, and handed some more to Steve and Nina. They didn’t offer as much light as the road flare, and definitely lacked its intimidation factor, but at least they smelled better.

  Despite her recent injury, Nina had other concerns. “Did you say you found two hundred fifty dollars?”

  “It was in the register.” Jack grinned. “Don’t worry, I’ll share.”

  “You can keep it. I don’t want to go to jail when this is over,” Steve grumbled.

  Nina looked at Jack sternly. “I think you should leave the money where you found it, Jack. Besides, I doubt the Visitors take cash.”

  “You guys really are nerds,” Jack laughed. “But fine, whatever, we’ll leave the money.” He tossed the bills over his shoulder and they rained down among the merchandise, illuminated by the blue and green light of the glow sticks. “So what now?” he asked.

  “I think I saw a directory out there,” Steve said. “We should figure out what’s around so we can plan our next move.” Although he had been irritating at first, Nina was actually starting to appreciate crisis-mode Steve. He was surprisingly good at this, and he was certainly a lot less sulky than postbreakup Steve.

  The group gathered up their supplies in Jack’s backpack and cautiously slid back out under the storefront fencing, keeping their eyes and ears open for any sign of the Visitors. It didn’t take them long to find the directory, and they surveyed the listings in search of anything useful.

  “So, I don’t want to be a whiner,” Jack started. “But Coach has us doing two-a-days, so I’ve been doubling up on the protein in the mornings lately, but with the whole green-men-from-outer-space situation I didn’t get my hands on any grub yet today. I’m thinking we hit the food court.” He turned to Nina. “Don’t you have some kind of disease where you’re addicted to sugar? We could probably grab something for you there.”

 

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