Iceling Read online

  “Stop firing!” He’s talking to the soldiers, not us, but we all stop anyway. “That is a fucking order!”

  Something about that voice makes me stop and put my ear to the air, and I know Stan hears it too, because he’s also frozen in place and searching my face for an answer. I turn around, and then I see him.

  Bobby. Bobby from the road trip, Bobby with an Iceling sister. Only he’s swapped out his fashionable clothes for a uniform and a baseball cap with E.T.R. on it, the same three initials on the helmets and under the flags of the people who are attacking us. He’s running into the middle of all this, elbowing soldiers out of the way, and Icelings too. He’s barking cease and desist orders through a bullhorn, and he’s just about the only thing we can hear over the bullets, and the drones, and the jeeps, and the flamethrowers.

  “What. The. Hell,” says Stan. “So Bobby’s . . .”

  “He’s with them,” I say.

  The guy who bought us dinner yesterday, who kept everyone calm, who kept me calm, who claimed to have devoted his life to studying the roots of language so he could find a way to say something to his sister, who lost his brother, this guy, Bobby, if that’s even his goddamn name, is one of them. He was with us, getting us here.

  “He was the shepherd,” says Stan.

  “And this was the slaughter,” I say.

  Bobby’s still screaming, “CEASE FIRE!” at the top of his lungs, but the soldiers don’t listen. They just keep firing on the already dead pods until they’re more bullets than bulbs and ashes, the desiccated bits just floating off into nothing.

  We stop in our tracks when the guns keep firing. At no point did I think they’d just fire at or around us when we started running. We’re just kids. We’re American kids!

  “What the hell were they shooting for?” says Emily, quietly, to no one. “Whatever’s in there was already dead.”

  Bobby’s ditched the bullhorn and is knocking the muzzles of rifles to the ground around him and screaming, “CEASE YOUR GODDAMN FIRING!” over and over until his voice starts to give, only just barely. The guy can shout, I’ll give him that.

  And that’s all I’ll give him.

  The shots keep ringing out, and I can’t look away, because I need to keep my eyes on Callie, I need to make sure they’re still only shooting at the ground and not at people. I hear a scream so loud I feel it might shatter the freezing cold air before making its way to my eardrums, and then I realize the scream is coming from me, because in the middle of the field, about a dozen Icelings throw themselves down on top of the remains of the pods, where the soldiers are still shooting. And the soldiers keep shooting, and now instead of just ripping apart the pods, they’re ripping apart our brothers and sisters, and I myself feel ripped apart as I watch them get hit by bullet after bullet after bullet. I don’t see Callie, and I run out toward Bobby, and I’ll kill him if she’s dead. I swear to God, I’ll kill him. Iceling and soldier blood stains the snow and ice and all that I can see, and then a soldier hurls something at the Icelings, and then they’re gone, replaced by a burst of fire.

  Bobby tackles the soldier who threw the flamethrower. He punches him in the mouth, repeatedly telling him to “Stand down!”

  Some of the soldiers stop now that Bobby has shown he’s serious and now that the soldier beneath him has stopped struggling back. The ones who are paying attention reach into their uniforms and put something into their ears.

  “Is that why they weren’t listening?” Stan says. “They had their earpieces out?” And then I swear I hear a familiar voice coming through the earpieces of the dead soldiers I’m digging through to get to Callie, blood all over my hands and arms, screaming, “Stop that!”

  And then Stan grabs me. He points. Ted’s stopped fighting. He’s got Callie behind him. And she’s got Greta and Tara. My sister is alive, and I take the biggest breath I’ve ever taken, and I let it out real slow.

  The air smells like burning leaves so much it’s choking out the lightning smell. I look around and see Icelings burning, the pods burning, the things that should have been babies in them burning.

  “There’s someone up there,” Emily says, pointing to the top of the hill, where that van from earlier is now parked. I look up. My whole body goes fiery hot and then freezing again, because up on that hill, standing under a military tent, wearing a fur-hooded parka and ski goggles that do nothing to hide the look in her eyes, is Jane.

  She’s screaming into a walkie-talkie that she holds in one hand, and she clutches a laptop or tablet underneath her other arm. She’s stomping around and waving wildly. We’re near a valley we hadn’t noticed before, lined with trees, leading out somewhere. The hill’s maybe as high as a row house, and roughly a half block to our left. Jane’s body language tells us she is furious.

  “I once had this horrible gymnastics coach,” says Emily, and I look at her like she’s just had a stroke, “who, whenever we’d go off-routine, would just pace and scream and pace and fume.”

  “Uh, cool, Emily, what the hell does that have to do with us dying out here?” Stan says, the meanest I’ve ever heard him sound.

  “That lady up there looks exactly like that gymnastics coach. Like everyone down there did the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in lockstep.”

  “She’s right, Stan,” I say.

  “Fine,” Stan says after a sulky pause. “But what the hell do we do with that? And who the hell is Jane really?” says Stan.

  I’m shaking. Of course it was Jane. Of course she’s been orchestrating all of this, a puppeteer from above. Whether or not she’s trying, like Bobby, to put a Band-Aid over this atrocity, I know she doesn’t care about what happened, because at the end of the day she came here to kill all of us. She’s the villain, she’s been the monster all along. Oh my God, do I hate her right now. It’s burning white-hot in me. She’s studied Callie her whole life just to figure out the best ways to murder her. The government paid her well to do this, and it’s obvious to anyone she loves her job, which is to be a complete and utter monster. That’s Jane. Heels clicking down a hallway toward a door marked: THE BRUTAL AND INEVITABLE DEATH OF YOUR BELOVED SISTER. Her coat is zipped up over her mouth, but as I look up at her, I swear I see her eyes lock with mine, and though I know it’s not true—I know she’s up there trying to do what Bobby is doing, only from on high and with a walkie-talkie instead of her fists—it makes me feel better, more fueled with rage, to picture her smiling.

  But of course she’s not. That’s just the easiest thing to think, and it’s all wasted because it doesn’t even make me feel better.

  Most of the troops have stopped firing and are slowly backing away. Bobby’s fighting anyone who gets near him. Ted’s whole gang is dead except for the ones who, like Ted, ran to stand in front of other Icelings. Icelings are throwing themselves on the burning pods, as if they can put out the fires or save what was inside. Or as if they’ve given up. But as I’ve spent my life constantly re-realizing, constantly catching and correcting myself about: I have absolutely no idea what they’re feeling. Their actions, their facial expressions, the depths of their gazes—they don’t mean for them what they mean for me. Hell, that rule is true even when you speak the same language as the person you’re attempting to judge, let alone for an Iceling from an entirely different world. All I can do is guess. All I can do is ascribe the intentions and emotions within my limits of experience to their actions, which, if you think about it long and hard enough, is meaningless. It’s an exercise. And it doesn’t make anyone feel better—or feel anything—except for me.

  My eyes drift to the one lone soldier left who is still shooting at Icelings. His eyes are glazed over, his jaw is slack.

  Bobby walks up to him and says, “I SAID, STAND DOWN, SOLDIER.”

  The soldier doesn’t stand down. Bobby shoots him in the head. He falls.

  There’s no more gunfire now.

  In
the absence of gunshots, all around us kids are running to their dead brothers and sisters, maybe even feeling betrayed by or scared of their siblings now that they know what they really are, which is something decidedly Other, something maybe not even hu man, but it doesn’t matter, because they still care, and they care that they’re dead. This is the central truth of their lives right now. That girl’s brother is dead. That boy’s sister is dead. One of them got shot in the head by a soldier and then set on fire. Another threw her body on a burning pod to try to save it, and then she died because she tried to save a life that wasn’t going to make it anyhow.

  I see a giant bug hovering and buzzing in the peripheral of my vision, and I swat at it. I miss and swat again, this time making contact, only what I hit isn’t a bug at all. It’s heavy and manmade, and I go at it again with both hands, and when I smack it down to the ground, I see that it’s a drone. I take a step back and start to run, but then the drone rises up again, this time very wobbly, one of its rotors coughing and spitting, and because it doesn’t look equipped with weapons or like it was sent to hurt me, I decide to stop and wait it out. It floats itself up to eye level and then a little bit above, and that’s when I see it. A smartphone, adhered to the undercarriage of the drone. And staring at me, from the screen of the smartphone, is Jane.

  I try to take the phone off the drone, but at the slightest tug, the drone flinches and pulls back, does a little topsy-turvy circle in the air like a bothered wasp, then hovers again with the phone at my eye level, this time just a little bit out of my reach. I look at the live feed of her image on the phone, but either the sound is broken or I can’t hear anything in the midst of this military chaos, and all I can see is Jane mouthing something that I can’t make out. She goes on like this for a while, and I just shake my head and grit my teeth and keep turning to look for Callie, and I want to just grab the drone and throw it into the middle of the fray so at least some part of Jane can get blown up by her own firepower, but then I see something new flash on the screen. Behind Jane, a young officer holds up a sign that says: I’M SORRY.

  “You’re SORRY?” I scream into the phone, which Jane must take to mean that her message was received, because then she gestures to another officer who then ducks down behind some little device, and then all of a sudden a stream of text pops up on the screen beneath Jane’s face.

  LORNA. THIS WAS A MISTAKE. THIS WASNT SUPPOSED TO HAPPN. WE WERE JUST HERE 2 CONTAIN + MONITOR. I AM SO SORRY BUT

  The words are going blurry from the tears in my eyes. My stupid mind goes numb, and against my will, I start to remember this one time at the hospital. I was waiting for Callie in the front when I heard this noise, like a little crash or an office object being slammed against a desk. And then there was a voice, one I didn’t recognize at the time but which I now know belonged to Jane—the real Jane, the monster Jane up on the hill. In the scariest whisper I’ve ever heard, Jane said, “I swear to God, if you don’t fix this, I’ll wear your useless balls as earrings, and your brother will fail out of college, and your wife will leave you, and your student loans will never get paid, and your whole life will be repossessed by the U.S. government, which owns you, you sloppy, useless, inefficient peon in a clip-on necktie.” Part of me, I admit, wanted to find the owner of the voice and shake her hand for being a good role model for girls who need to see examples of women taking charge in the workplace. But that part of me was quickly and easily trampled by a more immediate, cell-level part of me that was completely chilled and terrified. I had no idea what she was talking about or whom she was talking to or what the consequences were, but it didn’t matter. I was overcome with a need to see my sister and get her home, and I pleaded with the front-desk lady for forty-five minutes until finally they relented and released my sister early and with a rescheduled appointment.

  This is who has been in charge of Callie’s whole life. And right now, in the middle of hell swallowing us up—a hell that she ordered—she’s trying to apologize.

  I shake the tears out of my eyes, and the words on the screen blink back into view. THE ICELINGS R A DANGER. LORNA. PLZ LEAVE. PLZ GET 2 SAFETY, IT IS SO V IMPOR—

  But I don’t want to read the rest. I spit at the phone, and the drone pulls back a bit, flutters around in the air again, then steadies itself and hovers once again so I can see the phone. The camera refocuses on me, and I give it the finger.

  Jane gives me a look like she’s sighing, but then her face jumps with fear and her eyes go cold, and just as that’s happening I feel Stan start beside me.

  “Shit,” he says. I turn from burning Iceling corpses, whose bodies smell more like burning leaves than meat, and I see the soldiers clearing a path, saying, “Come with us, we’ll get you home.”

  Home? To our parents who lied to us? Who let this kind of slaughter happen? Home with the people who just killed—or tried to kill—the kids we spent our whole lives as brothers and sisters to?

  “We’re not going, Stan,” I say.

  “Not even a little bit,” says Emily.

  And then my body jerks, wrestling between the idea of running and falling to my knees, because before me I see Callie, the one thing that could ever make me think I had any business being a survivor at the end of the world, felled and fallen on the ground. Oh God, please let her be breathing, oh God oh God oh God, and then Ted leaps over and crouches down in front of her. And then I wind up and start to run right over to her, but Stan holds me back and then Emily helps him, and I’m caught in a net of their arms as I watch Ted stand up and break into a full run at a soldier with his weapon ready. Bobby’s yelling at the solider, telling him not to shoot, and now Stan’s no longer holding me back, because Stan is the one who is running. I’m about to bolt from Emily’s grasp when a round goes off, and my heart flutters everywhere, and I cower and crouch down with Emily. I look up and see Stan and Ted, both of them on the ground. Stan is holding his head, covering it with his arms. Bobby’s yelling.

  “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?” he shouts again and again while standing over a soldier he has just thrown to the ground. “DO I NEED TO SHOOT YOU TOO? YOU HAD ORDERS! You had orders. Observe and contain. Contain doesn’t mean shoot, it doesn’t mean burn, it doesn’t mean kill. It means restrain. You opened fire on American citizens, buddy.” He kicks him. “Do you understand how much shit you’re in? Surrender your weapon and get back to the jeep. Now, soldier.”

  And he does.

  And I’m walking toward Bobby with what feels like death in my eyes.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “THIS IS NOT how this was supposed to go down,” says Bobby.

  We look out at the decimated field. Callie’s safe. The soldiers are backing away, escorting whoever’s willing to go back to the jeeps, all of them with that look on their faces like they know they’re about to be punished. It’s so obvious that they weren’t ready for this, for whatever they saw here, just like us. But not Bobby. Not Jane. They were ready.

  I look up at the sky, and it’s gone. The hole where the sun was—closed up and gone.

  The clouds are darker now. They’re shifting shape and moving around the sky quickly. They seem to move like the island moves, like when there’s trouble below there’s trouble above too.

  Bobby’s trying to move us and our Icelings over to that shaded wooded valley where we were when we first saw Jane. Callie is still on the ground, but she is breathing, and I’m with her now, with her head in my lap and my hand stroking her hair. She was trying to save the pods, and seeing them all dead and burnt up like that just about killed her, I think. I’m staring daggers at Bobby. Tara won’t leave Callie’s side either, so Emily sits next to her right across from us. Stan and Ted are back on their feet, though Stan has to hold Ted back from jumping on Bobby and removing his head from his body. Greta’s here and holding her Other’s hand. The hand that is all that’s left of her Other.

  “Nobody was supposed to get hurt,” Bob
by says. “Nobody was supposed to blow anything up.”

  “No? Were they also not supposed to shoot at our brothers and sisters?” spits out Stan. “At any living thing that might have been about to come out of those pods?”

  “Look, you can give me shit,” Bobby says, his sternness from the battlefield coming back into his voice, “or you can listen while I try to help save you. Take your pick.”

  “I think you’re a little late for that, buddy,” says Stan. “Coulda used your help a long time ago, like when we were still on our way up here? Coulda given us a heads-up.”

  “I know you’re pissed. There’s nothing I can do or say that will make you feel better, so just trust me that had I come clean with you back on the road? Things would have turned out a lot worse. What happened here? This is the second-worst-case-possible scenario. Believe it or not, things could be worse. And it still could get worse, so you need to leave.” And he’s right. He’s a monster and an asshole and a liar, but he’s right. He gives us a beat to figure this out, then he tells us, “You need to take Greta with you and leave the island.”

  “And why the hell should we trust you?” says Stan, and Bobby immediately jumps to respond, but Stan won’t let him. “No, I get it. We all saw you with your megaphone, trying to wave off those soldiers.” Bobby looks at Stan in confusion, as if to acknowledge that yes, he was trying to call them off, and yes, he did do all of those things, so can Stan just try to give him the benefit of the doubt? “But who gives a shit? What does any of that prove? That it bothers you that your men, the people you’ve been planning this whole thing with, tried to slaughter our brothers and sisters? That’s great, it’s great that you give a shit about them slaughtering Icelings after it happens. But what about your role in everything that just happened should make us feel safe right now? That you were a spy this whole time? That you were prepared to take an order and then kill Greta and Ted and Callie and Tara and whomever else at a moment’s notice? That you never really told us what really happened to your brother, Alex, who was the one who was actually close to Greta, the one who was actually her brother, and that it’s awful convenient that she’s stuck with you now that he’s out of the picture? That it’s one thing for you to come up here and get involved with a group trying to exterminate all these kids, but to use your sister, who is one of these kids you people think are monsters, as a way of studying and getting closer to that group, so that you’ll be able to carry out your orders to kill them that much more easily? It’s great. It’s really super compassionate of you. No, I can tell. I can tell how, like, the death of your brother really made you and Greta super close, really made you want to bond with her and look out for her like the sister your brother always saw her as. No, dude. You’re super compassionate. I get it.” And I place my hand on Stan’s arm, because I can see that this is going to get us somewhere, though I don’t think it’s anywhere we really want to go.