Out There: Book Four: Earth

By David Gordon

When Sami, Alejandro and Brian rematerialize in Paradise, Arizona...no one is there. The worsening planet-wide water shortages have forced everyone to pack themselves into the major cities. The three friends trek across the desert to Phoenix to find Sami's mother, to search for Brian’s parents, and to warn the world that the TakTi are coming.
It’s hell in Phoenix.
Worse, they soon discover that KetaNim is already there. He is helping the demagogue, Todd Rover, become president of the United States and, so, pave the way to TakTi colonization. To make matters worse, SimSimKeta and her forces are arriving near the planet Jupiter. And SimSim is holding Sami’s father as a hostage to prevent her from meddling.
Sami, Alejandro, Brian and their new friends (a gang of kids living in an abandoned underground station they call "Timbuktu") must do something about all of this. And they have only hours in which to do it.
It will take everything Sami has learned from her experiences with the Adonae, the TakTi, and the Svaash to free Brian’s parents, to save her father, and maybe, just maybe, stop a global catastrophe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Gordon
• Release date: Feb 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9780976561651

David Gordon

David Gordon was born in New York City. He attended Sarah Lawrence College and holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature and an MFA in Writing, both from Columbia University, and has worked in film, fashion, publishing, and pornography. His first novel, The Serialist, won the VCU/Cabell First Novel Award and was a finalist for an Edgar Award. His work has also appeared in The Paris Review, Purple, and Fence among other publications.

Book preview

Out There

Book Four: Earth

By David Gordon

Copyright 2014 David Gordon

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Cover design by Alex Gordon

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Our Timbuktu

About the Author

Chapter 1

"Crash!"

Home.

Sami hadn’t meant to say it out loud. It was what she had been thinking about, of course. But then it had just popped out, like a burp out of the blue. And just like a burp, it embarrassed her. She glanced at Alejandro, expecting to see him frowning at her, or perhaps cracking his crooked smile and preparing a sarcastic remark.

But he seemed not to have heard her. He was staring at the endless green sparks weaving the shell of their transporter egg. The lime glow flickered like candlelight across his face. Then Sami saw that she was wrong. His eyes were not focused on the curtain of light in front of him, but on something inside his head. His jaw was clamped tight, and his arms were knotted across his chest. His hands were fists.

Sami knew what the fists were about. Just hours before, she and Alejandro had escaped from TiWat, from certain death at the hands of KetaDas. But Maks, SimSimKeta’s fool, had not. He had died saving her, saving them. Maks had often driven Alejandro crazy with his wacky antics and foolish talk. But somehow Alejandro saw something of himself in Maks. Though he would never say it, he came to care for the misfit, the fool. And now he blamed himself for Maks’ death.

Sami felt the heat of anger pouring out of Alejandro, like a hot stove, warning, Don’t touch! So she let him be.

She looked at Brian. He also showed no sign of having heard her. He was staring too, but downward, at the quietly crackling floor of the transporter egg. The sparking light skated across the bald head of this Adonae boy, who was from another world and her friend. This was the alien boy who had scared and fascinated her when he had first walked into her classroom nearly three years ago. This was the boy she had protected from Alejandro (when Alejandro had been a major jerk), and whose parents, Shareen and Alexi, had been jailed by a country crazy with fear. The world was fast running out of fresh water. Someone had to be blamed. The recently arrived aliens had been easy to blame. Thanks to Sami and Alejandro, Brian had escaped the rounding up of the Adonae. But he had been the only one.

Indeed, the three of them had escaped Earth entirely.

They had spent two years on the planet Adonae, where she and Alejandro were the aliens. Two years of learning to become a Quick Eye (a martial artist of the rope) for Alejandro, and two years of learning to become a Scombro (a reader of people) for Sami. And two years of trying to avoid being executed by the TakTi ambassador, KetaNim. And being captured by the pirate, Pharos. Then there was the murderous knife of KetaGar. Then a narrow escape to wild TiWat, where there was nothing but one narrow escape after another. And then there was brave TanaSet. And her lost father, found…and lost again. And then and then and then…

Like a wet dog, Sami flicked her head to clear her mind of this torrent of memories. She looked again at Brian, still eye-fixed on the floor. Unlike Alejandro, Brian was not lost in memories. His body was tipped forward and tight. He was barely breathing, and his long arms hung uselessly at his sides. The two thumbs and two fingers on each of his hands twitched. He was looking into the future. And he was afraid.

Sami was afraid too. What would they find when they got to Earth?

She imagined running up the stairs to her apartment, crashing through the door and into the arms of her mother, Melanie Lightfoot, who would instantly burst into tears of relief. Mrs. Lightfoot would cry, and then scold her for disappearing for three years and wail about how worried she had been, and then start sobbing again and hold Sami even tighter. Sami would be crying too, by then. When the tears dried, they would go next door to give Mr. Sanchez the good news. There would be more tears and his big arms around her. Later that night, sitting on the sofa, she would tell her mom about finding dad, and show her the white queen from his chess set. That would be the hard part.

Sami patted the lump in her pocket where she kept the white queen. (The other lump beside it squirmed. That was Finn, the sonio, shifting as he slept.) She felt pretty good about what she would be coming back to when they got to Earth. She still had her mom and Mr. Sanchez. But what about Alejandro and Brian?

She glanced again at Alejandro. He still steamed with anger. She knew that the only reason he was with them now was that he was their friend. He had no mother. (Why have I never asked him about that? Sami suddenly thought.) And Alejandro hated—and feared—his father. No, Alejandro was not looking forward to getting back to Earth at all.

She looked again at Brian. This time her movement caught his eye. He glanced at her and tried to smile. But it was both brief and false. He resumed staring at the floor and into the future. Where would his parents be? Were they even alive? The people of Earth were mad with anger and fear when he had left. Had the hate thinned to feathery wisps and then disappeared, like a cloud baked by the sun? Or was it still there, and perhaps even thickening, like thunderheads growing and darkening the sky?

Sami remembered the swarms of SimSimKeta’s ships rising into the sky above TiWat, and she shivered, as if suddenly chilled. There would be more—much more—waiting for her and her friends when they got to Earth. SimSim’s invasion was on its way. Maybe they would even beat Sami there. Indeed, agents of SimSim’s were already there, had been there, for a long time.

A whole world, and what a mess.

She suddenly felt small. Really small. And utterly helpless. Who do I think I am? she scolded herself, and she shook her head.

They will be alone, so alone now. Their friends, TanaSet, Pharos, Sonda, Bellos, Noom, Weem, Tomsei and the rest were billions of miles away, somewhere in the galaxy. Maybe Tomsei will realize where we’ve gone, she thought. She reached up and fingered the yellow crystal hanging from the silver thread around her neck, a present from Tomsei. He was smart, very smart. Yes, he would figure it out. But he was also the Voice of the Adonae Council. He will probably go back to Adonae to talk with the Council about what to do. The Adonae people meant well. But the TakTi were right about them; the Adonae talk and talk, and take a long time getting around to doing. The Council will debate. Meanwhile, Sami and her friends—and SimSimKeta’s hundreds of ships—will arrive back on Earth. And who knows what will happen then?

The whizzing sparks began to slow and the green glow of the shell began to dull. They were arriving.

Alejandro and Brian had noticed the change as well. Both of them snapped out of their regrets and fears into the present and watched as the web of sparks around them slowed and the green shell grew thinner and thinner, like a fog rapidly burning away. Without realizing what they were doing, the three friends drew closer to each other, until their shoulders were pressed together. They stopped breathing and peered through the dissolving shell. There, right there! The hazy edges and forms of a room—

Crash!

Chapter 2

Everyone’s gone

They were sprawled upon the floor of a dark room. Groaning, they propped themselves up on their hands and elbows and looked around. At first they could see nothing. Then a fluttering flash of light from a window briefly lit the room. In that moment they saw that they were back in Brian’s house on Earth, in his father’s computer room.

Sami pulled her feet under her and got onto her knees. Again light flickered into the room. Lightning, she realized. Feet scraped and throats grunted on either side of her, and with the next flash she saw Alejandro and Brian struggling to stand up. Blind again in the sudden darkness, she reached up and found Brian’s hand. She tugged and he helped her to her feet. She wobbled for a moment in the blackness. But already her eyes were adapting. The bright edges and grey surfaces of the desks and cabinets and shelves were becoming clear. Looking up, she saw, still sitting on a high shelf, the back of the monitor that had been sliced in half (as clean as sliced cheese, she thought) when she had left this room in the transporter egg, nearly three years ago. Lightning relit the room again and she saw Alejandro stooping to pick up something from the floor. He held it out for her and Brian to look at. It was the transporter platform that Alexi had disguised as a scanner. It was what they had just arrived on and tumbled from. And it was busted in half. Tiny lights inside its now exposed guts still flickered, but weakly…then they winked out.

Well, we won’t be going back on this, said Alejandro. He dropped the shattered scanner clattering onto a nearby table.

Something squeaked, and Sami tensed. Finn! She patted her pockets, but felt only one lump, and it was wood hard. Finn? she called. He squeaked again, and this time she identified where he was—or at least the direction. She bent forward and peered through the gloomy darkness. Something was thrashing around at the far end of the desk. Finn had gone headfirst into a coffee mug and was stuck there. Sami popped him out. Are you okay? she asked the sonio. He sneezed and coughed and stamped his foot upon the palm of her hand, then shivered like a dog and ran up her arm and onto her shoulder. There he squatted, with his tiny arms crossed and looking very sulky.

It’s so quiet, said Brian.

The three of them listened for a long moment. Not a sound.

There’s no one here, said Alejandro. Turn on a light, will you, Brian?

Brian went to the wall switch and clicked it up and down a few times. Nothing.

That’s why it’s so quiet, Sami said. There’s no electricity. Nothing’s running in the house.

Alejandro went to the window and peered out. Take a look. They joined him. There were no lights on at all in the neighborhood. None. A bolt of lightning scratched the sky and they briefly saw rooftops and leafless trees and walls. Then they were gone again.

Alejandro scanned the darkness and muttered, What’s going on?

A half-moon was shining through the windows at the back of the house, so they could see pretty well as they moved through the living room. Shareen’s dozens of instruments were still scattered and piled here and there about the room, just as Sami had last seen them years before. The sheets of music Shareen had been playing when the police had come to take her away were still open upon the piano. Looking at that silent music on the yellowing paper made Sami both sad and angry.

They were hungry, so they filed into the kitchen. They didn’t dare open the refrigerator. It had been off for who knows how long, so there was no telling what horrible glop was growing in there now. Instead they went into the pantry. Most of the boxes of cookies, chips, bread, and crackers had been chewed open and emptied by mice. They had not left a crumb. A bag of gummy worms had been shredded by little teeth and left empty and hanging from the shelf, like a tattered flag. Beside it they found a large glass jar with a lid. It was still a quarter full of mixed nuts. And on the shelf below that there was a row of soup cans. Two of them had split open at the top and were crusty with soup that had long ago burst out, dried, and gone black. Three others were tilted at different angles on bottoms that had ballooned out because of the pressure inside in them. Their tops were rounded, too. Whatever was growing inside of them was trying to get out, and it wouldn’t be pretty. So the kids left those cans alone. But there were two—a can of chicken noodle and a can of tomato soup—that still looked okay.

While Sami and Alejandro wrestled with the jar of nuts, trying to get the lid off, Brian poked through kitchen drawers for a can opener. He found it and at that same moment the lid on the jar finally gave way, sending Alejandro and Sami flying backwards and nuts filling the air like confetti. Brian laughed for the first time in a long time. Sami and Alejandro immediately started arguing about whose fault it was, even as they dropped to their knees to start gathering up the nuts. Finn helped. Still smiling, Brian shook his head at his friends and carefully clamped the opener onto the top of the can of chicken soup. There was no hiss of air or sickening smell when the opener cut into the top of the can. It seemed okay, so he opened it the rest of the way. The tomato soup also seemed okay. He found a couple of small sauce pans, poured in the soups, set them on the stove, and turned the knobs. No flame, no hiss of gas. He sighed. With no electricity, the microwave was also useless, of course. He found three soup spoons and set them and the two pans of cold soup onto the table. Sami and Alejandro had collected the nuts into a pile there as well. Finn was already at work, eating. The three friends picked nuts from the pile and passed around the pans of cold soup. They were unusually quiet while they ate. Perhaps it was the spookiness of the house. Perhaps it was the uncertainty of their situation. Perhaps it was the unpleasantness of cold soup and stale nuts. But for Sami it was sad memories. As she ate she was remembering the last time she sat at this table. There had been nuts and carrots and grapes, and orange juice, and gummy worms and boxes of animal crackers. Better than that, there had been Brian’s parents, Alexi and Shareen, talking and laughing. The four of them had been so happy.

After the kids ate they were very thirsty. The nuts had been salty. Brian twisted the taps on the sink. They made a raspy squeal, like rusty gate hinges. Not a drop of water came out.

At first the three friends crept along, racing from bushes to shadowed walls to pools of darkness beneath trees, trying to avoid being seen. But it soon became obvious that there was no one around to see them. They moved out of the shadows and began walking boldly down the middle of the street. They were followed only by their own black shadows, cast upon the asphalt by the bright moonlight. Brian’s old school backpack sagged on Alejandro’s shoulders. It sagged not because it was full, but because it was nearly empty. It held only a jar of what was left of the nuts and a coil of thin rope Alejandro had yanked off of the living room drapes. Just in case, he had explained to Sami. They had hoped to change their clothes. Brian was still wearing his close fitting, Adonaean clothes, and Alejandro and Sami still wore their TakTi tunics and pants. The clothes they had found in Brian’s old closet were now too small for them, and those left behind by Shareen and Alexi were way too big.

It was an eerie, creepy walk. There was the occasional boom of distant thunder, and the constant brush of their soft shoes on the asphalt. Other than that, silence. Every house and building appeared to be deserted. Windows were utterly black; nothing but darkness behind them. The only light other than that cast by the moon was the flicker of lightning in distant clouds. It was quite hot, too. Between the heat and the storm clouds, the kids figured that it must be late summer. That would make it the monsoon season in Arizona when, at any time, the sky could open up and pour down rain, as if from a giant bucket, flooding the streets of Paradise in minutes.

They were zigzagging toward the center of the city. Alejandro led the way. When he had lived here before he had often run off at nights (sometimes with friends, but more often alone). Nights had not been good around his house. While his father raged in the living room, Alejandro would slip out his bedroom window and go. Anywhere. So he had learned quite a bit about the streets of Paradise. Now he led his friends through silent neighborhoods, along strip malls with windows covered by peeling plywood, past apartment buildings fronted by dead trees, near a cinema multiplex whose marquee still listed twelve movies (but most of the letters had been blown away and the kids had no idea what the movies were), past the public library, where they could see rows of dark computer screens and piles of books spilled from sagging bookcases. Everywhere, darkness and silence.

Then they found themselves on the sidewalk in front of their old school. Sami stared at the words inscribed in the low, concrete wall: Salt River Junior High School. Alejandro had sat on that very wall years before and teased her. She looked at the play field—now nothing but pale, bare dirt—and at the ribbons of dark hallways disappearing between the schoolrooms. She remembered racing down those halls with Brian and Alejandro, escaping the police and Mr. Sombra, and wondered, Had they actually done that? It seemed impossible. A dream. She focused again on the school and said aloud, It looks so small.

Yeah, Alejandro agreed.

A slight breeze fluttered something on the wall of a classroom. There were still scraps of paper—announcements, class work, drawings?—clinging to a bulletin board beside the classroom door. This immediately reminded Sami of her mother’s Wall of Fame in their apartment. Suddenly Sami felt the panicked need to see her mother. Without a word to her friends, she started running down the sidewalk, toward home.

Hey! Alejandro and Brian shouted. Then they took off after her.

When they caught up with her, she was panting in the entryway to her apartment building, frantically pushing all of the call buttons to get someone to open the door.

Sami… said Alejandro, huffing for air, Sami, there’s no electricity. That isn’t going to work. She stopped punching the buttons and stared down at the ground. He put his hand on her shoulder. Everyone’s gone. She nodded once.

Brian looked closely at the latch of the glass entry door, then said, It’s not locked. He pressed on the door and it swung open. Sami rushed past him and inside.

Moments later the three of them spilled out of the stairwell and into the hallway to Sami’s apartment. Alejandro and Brian rushed to her door, then realized that she wasn’t with them. They looked back. They could hardly see her in the deep darkness, stopped halfway in the hallway. She stared in front of her, looking very sad.

What is the matter, Sami? Brian asked her.

She glanced up at him. My door is open too, isn’t it. Brian turned the knob and the door swung open. No one bothered to lock the doors. She looked at Alejandro, then into the space between them. They weren’t expecting to come back. Ever.

Alejandro said, We’ll find your mom, Sami. She frowned at him. But he nodded and added, We will.

Inside the apartment they found the living room and kitchen almost exactly as they had last seen it. The Wall of Fame was still plastered with the photos and scraps of paper that Sami’s mother had been so proud of. There were even unwashed dishes still piled in the sink, and one of the windows was open a few inches. Dust coated everything. Sami went straight to her mother’s room. The bed had been made. The closet and the drawers were empty. She went across the hall to her own room. The first thing she noticed was that her bed had not been made. Sami grinned; her mother could have made her bed, too, but instead she had left it just as Sami had always left it, a rumpled mess. Her clothes were still in the closet and spilling out of her chest of drawers (and wadded in heaps upon the floor). But she quickly discovered that they were all now too small for her. She glanced around the room, looking through the gloomy darkness at familiar posters and trinkets pinned to the walls, at her furry cat clock (now stopped and silent), her pile of comic books, her pencil sharpener shaped like the Eiffel Tower, and the scorpion trapped forever in plastic. She picked up the stuffed camel with the floppy neck and gave it shake to make its head waggle from side to side. These were all things that had once mattered a great deal to her. But now they seemed…distant, like they belonged to someone else. Then she remembered something that did still mean something to her. She searched the room with her eyes. It wasn’t there and her heart began to sink again. Then she spotted it. Someone—her mother, of course—had partly hidden it under her