Manipulate (Alien Cadets) Page 2

“I don’t trust anybody that trusts them,” the guy said. “Go back to Spo!”

  Greg shifted from four feet to two, readiness stance.

  Sam shook his head slightly. Stared at the guy.

  “Are you done?” Sam demanded.

  For a moment he thought the man would climb onto the stage.

  “I’m done,” he said finally.

  “Fine. I’ll lay it out for you,” Sam said. “It was humans that killed nearly a billion Europeans in the Hadron explosion, wasn’t it? Not the Spo. Trusting them or trusting me isn’t simple; I'm not saying it is. But we cadets have a working knowledge of the galaxy and Earth’s place in it. We want to help, and that can only be a good thing for Earth.”

  The questions started up again. Aggressive guy had poisoned the crowd.

  “You are brainwashed!”

  “What about the families they slaughtered?!”

  “You no longer believe in humanity?”

  “What does it mean to believe in humanity?” Sam repeated, spreading his hands. “I believe that we exist. And I darn well hope we continue to exist, despite the state of our planet. I hope that you’ll support us as we get reacquainted with Earth. We’re your children; we’re on your side.”

  Greg dipped his head forward, Sam’s cue.

  “Thank you. You’ll be seeing a lot more of us in the future,” Sam said. He stepped back, but not into formation.

  Back on the chartered bus, Sam slumped into a seat while adrenaline faded from his system. The bus’s tinted windows shielded him from the thronging reporters and growing crowd surging through the parking lot. They all shouted. Some had makeshift signs.

  “SPO GO HOME!”

  “Clear the Zone! Leave us alone!”

  A rhyming chant rose erratically, "Spo. Go. Spo. Go." Others had questions.

  “What did they do to you?”

  “Where is Spo?”

  “Can you help us?”

  Some were offering help.

  “They can’t hurt you here!"

  “You’re home, come out!”

  Maybe they expected one of the cadets to clamber out a window and fling themselves into the crowd.

  Sam grimaced. He’d talk to Greg about getting a different set of security guys. This was Los Angeles. If any city should have security that knew how to handle celebrity situations, it was this one.

  As Nat filed by him, Sam reached out to snag her hand.

  “Sit with me,” he said. “We’re home.”

  Nat didn’t make eye contact, just glanced out his window. “Decent job out there,” she said, brushing past him.

  Sam sighed and leaned his head back. She hadn’t changed her mind yet. She would though; they had years and years ahead of them. Sam closed his eyes and inhaled the soft, Earthy air.

  ***

  Shara paused in the mall food court to watch the cadets on the news. She couldn’t see her target until Greg moved away from the microphone. For a moment he stood center screen, but then the camera started panning the length of the stage, and he was gone again. She could rank all the cadets by age, importance, and vulnerability, but she was a little curious how they would act on TV.

  The cadets wore new uniforms, Shara noted, but they were terrible. Like prison jumpsuits in baby pastels, and they looked awful on TV.

  Shara stroked her emerald green sweater. She’d only been human for a few weeks, and she loved their sense of texture. The Crosspoint and the Merith both had more sensitive eyes than humans, for seeing heat gradients in darkness – but she was willing to bet that nobody saw or felt better colors. And she never had to give it up. Her species could only transfer bodies once, and she’d done it. Her new body was cute and small and she got to keep it.

  When Sam and Greg wrapped up the press conference, Shara went to the next store on her list. She needed a wine bottle to make a bomb. Or no, not a bomb, a Molotov cocktail the humans called it. She just needed it to splash and burn, should be fairly simple.

  She’d only been looking for two and half minutes when a store clerk approached her.

  “Can I help you find something in particular?” he said.

  He was hot; Shara liked his curly brown hair and squinty, little eyes. Maybe she could… Focus! Shara told herself. The hormones in her body kept distracting her.

  “Can you help me find a bottle that’ll break easily, with good alcohol inside?”

  “Um. For a wedding or something? Is that why you need it to break?” he asked.

  Shara smiled. “I want to fill it with gasoline and throw it at someone.”

  His cute little eyes shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t think…”

  “Just kidding!” Shara said. “It’s for a celebration. It’d be great if it tasted good, and if it burns well that’d be even better. It’s a Vegan holiday thing.” Shara’s superior had drilled her in convenient cultural knowledge.

  The guy laughed. “Uh, okay. That’s weird, but I can probably help you. Some of the champagnes come in thin bottles, and they should have enough alcohol content to do what you need."

  He steered her down another aisle, and even took her back to the front for a few free samples when she couldn’t make up her mind. Eventually she left with a Blanc de Noir and a pleasant buzz. She stopped at a gas station on the way back to her apartment and filled up a gas can.

  Now all she had to do was pick a shirt to sacrifice as a wick. Her buzz started to slip away as she faced her closet. Maybe the tan v-neck… if it wasn’t so nubby and wonderful. Shara ran her delicate fingers over her clothes slowly. Someday when her assignment was done, after humanity lost their trial and her people lived here, she would treat herself to a whole new wardrobe.

  Chapter 3

  Sam’s calves burned as he and the other cadets jogged down the lawn at Pepperdine University. He could see the ocean, half a mile away, across the highway. The sky was a cloudless green, the water grayish blue with ash.

  When terrorists sabotaged the Hadron collider and caused the cataclysm that had killed so many people, all those irradiated particles dispersed into the atmosphere and the ocean. Spo technology mostly scrubbed the atmosphere, but the colors were different.

  He hoped Greg wouldn’t jog them down by the beach today, though. They weren’t up to it. Armen lurched along next to him, his head dipping with each jarring step. Melanie was just in front of them. She was usually the chipmunk of the group, but the transition to Earth’s atmosphere was weighing her down. Sam tried to remind them how to breathe correctly, to avoid over-oxygenation, but Armen shook his head, still sucking air like an asthmatic.

  Greg brought them diagonally across the grounds to the corner of Malibu Canyon Road and the Pacific Coast Highway, PCH. The light turned red as they approached and Greg halted on the sidewalk.

  Melanie grabbed Sam’s arm as they stopped, doubled over and panting. Her brown hair was coming out of its ponytail; strands of it stuck to her face and fell past the tattoo on her cheek.

  “Physical strength, important to survival,” Greg said to them. “Survival is sanity!”

  “Survival is sanity,” chanted Sam.

  “Survival is sanity!” Greg shouted.

  “Survival is sanity!” they repeated. Sam could hear Armen, Melanie, Nat, Downy, and all the others yelling with him.

  Greg nodded, and began running as the crossing sign changed to WALK.

  A yellow Mustang squealed to a halt at the intersection. The driver’s mouth hung open as he watched Greg bound in front of him, and he groped for his phone, holding it up to snap a picture of Greg in the street. The Mustang guy must be a tourist, Sam thought. There were still a few of those, even though LA plummeted in popularity when the spooks made it their global headquarters.

  The driver took a picture of Sam and his friends, too. The tattoo on each of their cheeks displayed what they were. Spook cadets. The newscasters had already dubbed Pepperdine the ‘alien academy.’

  “Don’t quit, Sam,” his friend Armen muttered. “Remember,
Snickers are sanity.”

  “Right. Idiot.”

  Greg jogged them through a huge parking lot on the other side of the highway toward the water. It was one of those gargantuan parking lots for beach visitors, with section labels so people would remember where they parked. There were only a few cars in it now, although July was perfect beach weather.

  A general moan trickled through the group when Greg left the asphalt and they started across the sand.

  Half an hour later they started back up the hill to Pepperdine. Sam was getting a bit of a runner’s high now, but he ran at the rear of the group with Armen, who clearly wasn’t on a high. Greg headed straight towards their dorm, but Sam saw Nat veer off to run past the tower at the front of campus.

  Sam grunted to Armen and followed her. By the time he caught up, she’d stopped. Sam pounded to a stop next to her, in front of the Theme Tower. She was standing off the path, staring at the tower with her arms wrapped around herself. The tower had no purpose now; it was several stories high and about six foot square, sporting a huge, empty cross on the front. It could be lit from within, making the cross visible for miles around. Pepperdine’s had been a Christian university.

  But Nat wasn’t looking at the cross.

  The base of the tower was defaced. A huge yin yang, in red paint, was swirled on the wall. Sam remembered his sister wearing the symbol on bracelets and stuff. Asian, meant peace or tranquility or something? He couldn’t remember. He did know they were black and white. This yin yang, in red paint that was drying brown, looked messy. Long drips and smears made the circle appear to be melting, dripping onto the ground. Nat rubbed her mouth, and then spat. Sam saw with surprise that she’d thrown up on the ground nearby.

  Sam stood next to her for a moment, and then put his arm around her. She looked cold, after all. From this angle he could see that the next wall said, “Die, now,” in the same dark red.

  “That’s nasty,” Sam said. “Somebody else angry with the Spo, I guess. We knew it would be a problem.”

  Nat shook her head. “Go around,” she said.

  Sam frowned. He took his arm away from her and circled the tower. The yin yang was on his left. “Die, now,” was scrawled on the next wall. The wall after that held a sketchy picture that might have been a Spo killing a person. Or maybe it was a Spo and a human making out. Sam squinted at it. Maybe a human cutting off a Spo’s head. The figures were strangely drawn. Sam was no criminal profiler, but it disturbed him. The details were unclear but still managed to scream violence and passion. Whoever painted them didn’t see the world the same way Sam did.

  Sam forced himself to complete the circle. On the back wall of the tower, facing campus, were two slaughtered sheep. Not just slaughtered, but dismembered. And skinned. Parts of them were scattered on the ground before the tower, and their pelts, clotted wool and skin, were taped on the wall with duct tape. Some of the wool was stained with blood. The perpetrator must have used the wool to paint the other sides of the tower.

  Sam didn’t throw up, but he turned away and stared back toward the ocean for a few minutes. He breathed deeply of the fresh sea air and let his stomach settle. And his mind. He didn’t blame Nat for throwing up. The sheep slaughter was disgusting on a deep level. Sam ate meat, he didn’t think it was wrong to slaughter animals for food, but something about this wrenched his gut.

  Pull it together, Sam, he told himself. You’ve been trained for analysis. Why exactly is this scary? He walked away from the dead sheep, back to Nat. He didn’t speak to her, but just looked at the yin yang symbol for a while. Then he circled and looked at the other three walls again.

  The violence in the killing was a rational reason to be upset. But some reptile part of his brain was telling him that he and Nat should run. Get under cover, out of the open.

  Sam started to tabulate the parts that disturbed him. The sheep, of course, and particularly the chaos of the dismemberment. The wacko who did this should have placed them in an orderly arrangement. Or placed a piece at each corner of the tower. Or something.

  If he didn’t want to do anything with the pieces, why did he cut them apart? He didn’t have to do it to skin the sheep.

  The yin yang. It was a fairly benign symbol. Not a swastika or an upside down cross or anything that your average American would find intimidating. Heck, a McDonald’s M might have conveyed more.

  “Die now.” That was just boring. It was trite and didn’t fit the visual creativity used for the rest of it. It didn’t even have an exclamation point, just a period. That had to be weird.

  Nat started circling with him.

  “We should go talk to Greg. This isn’t a normal hate message.”

  Sam started to rub the small of Nat’s back, but she moved away from him.

  “Don’t do that, Sam.”

  “I wasn’t – sorry, Nat. I miss you. You’re not going to let Greg’s stupid plan get in the way forever are you?”

  “No, but… how can I not? They’ve controlled everything in our lives Sam. Everything. I can’t let them control this too.”

  She shivered and backed up a step. “I need to get cleaned up. Will you tell Greg about this?”

  That afternoon Sam showered off in the dorm. Grey sand ran down his legs and made silt lines around the drain. Greg had called the local police to report the graffiti/animal blood on the tower, and now some unlucky grounds crew guys were cleaning it up. Greg took the threat seriously, but advised Sam not to be overly concerned.

  “The Spo fascination with sheep has been widely publicized. I’ll get a Spo investigator to look into it, but I suspect the rage is aimed at the Spo, not the cadets.”

  Armen and Downy were already showered off, but they lingered in the large bathroom. Armen put on deodorant, and Downy crouched near the sinks rubbing engine oil in his joint crevices and chattering. Downy was small for a Spo at about six feet tall. His skin was slick like a McDonald’s toy and he smelled like a tire shop, which the engine oil only enhanced.

  Spo faces, when relaxed, looked like they were smiling. It didn’t mean they were happy, but gave them a cheerful animal look – like a dolphin. Of course, when one of them threatened you with death for noncompliance that same half smile became extremely creepy.

  “You know what guys?” Downy said. “I want to go to a petting zoo in La Brea tomorrow. It sounds very great. Goats, pigs, chickens, even an emo.” He rubbed the thick oil into his second pair of knees.

  “I think you mean emu,” Sam said. “At least I hope you do. And if you get that oil on my clothes I’ll put sand in your bed.”

  Downy flicked a hand, spattering drops of oil toward Sam, who jumped backward.

  “Hold still,” Downy said, “It would only improve your smell.”

  Sam grabbed his clothes off the counter. “If we’re going to talk about smell – what did you eat this morning? I almost puked during Greg’s debriefing.”

  “I drank root beer,” Downy said simply. “It is fantastic.”

  Sam groaned while he brushed his teeth. “Please, please Downy. Stick to Spo food. You’re my roommate, you owe me.”

  Armen laughed. “That’s why none of us would take him. It’s your own fault, Sam.”

  Sam and Downy went down the hall to their room, where Downy dropped to his mattress on the floor. Downy wasn’t a bad roommate, really. Just smelly. When Sam was fully dressed, Downy hoisted himself off the mattress and walked with him down to Greg’s office for a meeting.

  “So, what do you think? Did I pass at the Cathedral?” Sam asked.

  “I hope, dud. Dud, is that right?” Downy asked.

  “Dude – friend, cool buddy.”

  “Ah. I think so, dude. Your species is very aggressive. I was told so, but it is different to see it.”

  “You should talk. Your species owns half the galaxy."

  “It is our winning personalities,” Downy said, turning green with pleasure.

  Sam slapped the back of Downy’s head affectionately. “Crazy
alien,” he said.

  Downy flicked Sam with the smooth side of a claw. “Look who’s talking.”

  Sam followed him into Greg’s office, wiping his grin away.

  Greg was a seasoned warrior of the Spo nation, with a long, half melted scar of battle on his face. Sam stood and Downy crouched at attention when they entered. Greg motioned for them to sit. He was pale lavender – extremely tired or disgusted.

  Six years ago, when Sam and a bunch of other terrified kids were loaded onto a Spo spaceship, an alien met them in the loading bay.

  “You,” he said, gesturing to the first boy in line. “What is a common male name?”

  The boy just looked at him, the giant four-legged alien.

  “Come now,” the alien said. “What is your grandfather’s name?”

  “Um … Greg?”

  “Acceptable. I will be Officer Greg. I will be your teacher. Please follow me.”

  And that was that. It was typical Greg, as they learned later. He didn’t waste any time. He chose an acceptable name and went with it. Armen said if he took a last name, it would be Acceptable.

  Downy was just the opposite. He’d picked their brains about their favorite names and watched hours of TV. He almost chose Cinema as his name, but then he’d seen a Downy commercial with a little teddy bear flopping around on a pile of white, fluffy towels. He fell in love with it. He was Downy from then on.

  Greg turned on the lamp behind his desk.

  “The police want a statement about the tower vandalism, Sam. I’ve already given mine. Call them this evening,” Greg said.

  “Why?” Sam asked.

  “They don’t like the timing. Our arrival, animal killing.”

  “Surely they don’t think we did it?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Don’t concern yourself. We need to talk about your performance at the Cathedral.”

  Sam grimaced. “How’d I do?”

  “You did extremely well,” Greg said. “You are our best manipulator, after all. That’s why I’ve slotted you for most of the press events in the next few weeks.”

  “I- Manipulator? You’ve never called me that before.”