He stares at me, and I can tell he’s thinking about what I said. I drop my hands. Then he sighs and lowers the gun. “I’m sorry,” he says.
I take a deep, nervous breath. “You should be. What the hell were you thinking?”
“It wasn’t actually loaded.”
“You should have told me that earlier,” I say. “Why do you want so badly to believe in this stuff?”
He shakes his head and puts the gun back in the drawer. I take a minute to calm myself down and try to act casual, like what just happened is no big deal.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Just more alien stuff. Maybe I should cool it a bit.”
“Or just read it as fiction instead of fact,” I say. “The stuff must be pretty convincing, though. Can I see it?”
He hands me the latest copy of They Walk Among Us and I sit tentatively on the edge of his bed. I think he’s calmed down enough to not spring a gun on me again at least. Again, it is a bad photocopy, the print slightly unaligned with the paper. It isn’t very thick—eight pages, twelve at the most, printed on legal-sized sheets. The date at the top reads DECEMBER. It must be the newest issue.
“This is weird stuff, Sam Goode,” I say.
He smiles. “Weird people like weird stuff.”
“Where do you get this?” I ask.
“I subscribe to it.”
“I know, but how?”
Sam shrugs. “I don’t know. It just started arriving one day.”
“Are you subscribed to some other magazine? Perhaps they pulled your contact info from there.”
“I went to a convention once. I think I signed up for some contest or something while I was there. I can’t remember. I’ve always assumed that’s where they got my address.”
I scan the cover. There’s no website listed anywhere on it, and I didn’t expect there to be, considering that Henri has already searched the internet high and low. I read the headline of the top story:
IS YOUR NEIGHBOR AN ALIEN?
TEN FAILSAFE WAYS TO TELL!
In the middle of the article there’s a picture of a man holding a bag of trash in one hand and the lid to the trash can in the other. He is standing at the end of the driveway and we’re to assume he’s in the process of dropping the bag into the can. Though the whole publication is in black-and-white, there is a certain glow to the man’s eyes. It’s a horrible image—as though somebody took a picture of an unsuspecting neighbor and then drew around his eyes with a crayon. It makes me laugh.
“What?” Sam asks.
“This is a terrible picture. It looks like something from Godzilla.”
Sam looks at it. Then he shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. “It could be real. Like you said, I see aliens everywhere, and in everything.”
“But I thought aliens looked like that,” I say, and nod to the blacklight poster on his wall.
“I don’t think all of them do,” he says. “Like you said, you’re an alien with superpowers and you don’t look like that.”
We both laugh, and I wonder how I’m going to get myself out of that one. Hopefully Sam never finds out I was telling him the truth. Part of me wants to tell him, though—about me, about Henri, about Lorien—and I wonder what his reaction would be. Would he believe me?
I flip the paper open to look for the publishing page that all newspapers and magazines have. There isn’t one here, only more stories and theories.
“There isn’t a publisher info page.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how magazines and newspapers always have that page listing staff, editors, writers, where it’s being printed, and all that? You know, ‘For questions, contact so and so.’ All publications have them, but this doesn’t.”
“They have to protect their anonymity,” Sam says.
“From what?”
“Aliens,” he says, and smiles, as though acknowledging the absurdity of it.
“Do you have last month’s issue?”
He grabs it from his closet. I quickly flip through it, hoping that the Mogadorian article is in this one and not an earlier month. And then I find it on page 4.
THE MOGADORIAN RACE SEEK TO TAKE OVER EARTH
The Mogadorian alien race, from the planet Mogadore of the 9th Galaxy, have been on Earth for over ten years now. They are a vicious race on a quest for universal domination. They are rumored to have wiped out another planet not unlike Earth, and are planning to expose Earth’s weaknesses in a quest to inhabit our planet next.
(more to follow next issue)
I read the article three times. I was hoping there might be more to it than what Sam already said, but no such luck. And there is no Ninth Galaxy. I wonder where they got that from. I flip through the new issue twice. There is no mention of the Mogadorians. My first thought is that there was nothing left to report, that more news failed to present itself. But I don’t believe that’s the case. My second thought is that the Mogadorians read the issue and then fixed the problem, whatever the problem was.
“Do you mind if I borrow this?” I ask, holding up last month’s issue.
He nods. “But be careful with it.”
Three hours later, at eight o’clock, Sam’s mother still isn’t home. I ask Sam where she is and he shrugs as though he doesn’t know and her absence is nothing new. Mostly we just play video games and watch TV and for dinner we eat microwavable meals. The whole time I’m there he doesn’t once wear his glasses, which is odd since I’ve never seen him without them before. Even when we ran the mile in gym class, he kept them on. I grab them from the top of his dresser and put them on. The world becomes an instant blur and they give me a headache almost immediately.
I look at Sam. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back against his bed, with a book of aliens in his lap.
“Jesus, is your vision really this bad?” I ask.
He looks up at me. “They were my dad’s.”