PART ONE
AFTER
CHAPTER ONE
I only go out at night.
I walk along the empty street and pause, my muscles tense and ready. The breeze rustles the overgrown grass and I tilt my head slightly. I’m listening for Them.
All the warnings I remember from horror movies are wrong. Monsters do not rule the night, waiting patiently to spring from the shadows. They hunt during the day, when the light is good and their vision is at its best. At night, if you don’t make a noise, they can shuffle past you within an inch of your nose and never know you are there.
It’s so very quiet, but that doesn’t mean that They are not near. I walk again, slowly at first, but then I pick up my pace. My bare feet pad noiselessly on the cracked sidewalk. Home is only a few blocks away. Not far if I remain silent, but it may as well be miles if They spot me.
I’ve learned to live in a soundless world. I haven’t spoken in three years. Not to comment on the weather, not to shout a warning, not even to whisper my own name: Amy. I know it’s been three years because I’ve counted the seasons since it happened. In the summer before the After when I’d just turned fourteen.
A branch snaps in the distance and I stop immediately, my body tense. I shift my bag slowly, carefully adjusting the weight so the cans inside don’t clank together. Every little noise screams at me that something is wrong, but it could be nothing.
Clouds shift and moonlight suddenly brightens the street. I glance around, searching, studying an abandoned, rusted car for any signs of the creatures. When I don’t spot Them, I almost continue on, but at the last second I decide to play it safe. Stepping into an abandoned yard, I disappear into the shrubbery. I’ll wait until a cloud passes in front of the moon and darkness reclaims the night.
I can’t take any chances, not with Baby waiting for me. My bag holds the food we need to survive. We only have each other. I found Baby shortly after the world failed, when I still believed things would return to normal. I no longer hold that hope. Nothing this broken can ever be fixed.
CHAPTER TWO
This is how I think of time: the past is Before, and the present is the After. Before was reality; the After, a nightmare.
Before I was happy. I had friends and sleepovers. I wanted to learn how to drive, to get a jump start on my learner’s permit. The worst thing in my life was math homework and not being allowed to date. I thought my parents were so clueless; my dad with all his “green” concerns (I told my friends he was an eco-douche), and my mom, who was never home except for Sunday-night family dinner. I was kinder to my mom, though, and only called her a workaholic. Her job was with the government, her work very hush-hush.
I always thought of myself as smart, and I was definitely a smart-ass to my parents. I loved seeing them squirm, letting them know that I didn’t buy into their “because I said so” crap. I was good in school. I could always guess the endings of movies and books. Now there is no school, there are no more movies, no new books, no more friends.
The creatures arrived on a Saturday. I know it was a Saturday because if it were a weekday I would have been at school and I would be dead. Sundays I went with my father to visit his parents at Sunny Pine, and if They had come on a Sunday I would also be dead.
I remember that the electricity flickered and I was annoyed because I was watching TV. I had wondered if my father was on the roof screwing around with the solar panels. They didn’t require much maintenance, but he liked to hose them off twice a year, which always messed with all our electronics. I checked the garage. His electric car was gone. He was at the farmers’ market, probably overpaying for organic carrots.
I microwaved some pizza bagels (the ones my mom hid from my dad at the back of the freezer) and sat back in front of the TV, flipping through the channels mindlessly. I’d wished my parents would listen to me and upgrade to the premium cable package. I thought life was so unfair. My mother had bought my father a brand-new electric car for more money than I would probably need for college, but she wouldn’t spend fifty bucks extra a month to get some decent television.
I checked my cell phone but there were no calls from Sabrina or Tim. I was supposed to go to a movie with them later. Tim had been madly in love with Sabrina forever but her parents would only let her go out with him if I tagged along. I joked with Sabrina about being the old spinster in a nineteenth-century novel. “No secret love child for you two,” I’d tell her with a wink. “Not while Matron Amy is on duty.”
I didn’t really mind being their chaperone; they never made me feel awkward or like a third wheel. Sabrina hadn’t even decided if she was all that into Tim. I’d been friends with her since fifth grade, when I was the weirdo who skipped a grade and she was the nice girl who didn’t treat me like I had the plague. Pretty soon we were friends and stayed besties through middle school and into high school.
I tossed my phone on the coffee table and kicked up my feet, giving my full attention to the TV screen for the first time. But I noticed that even when I changed the channel, the picture stayed the same. I paused, curious. The president was making a speech. Boring. I ate my snack, only half listening.
“It has come to our attention,” the president droned, “that we are not isolated in this attack.”
I sat up, my bite half chewed. Attack? I was too young to remember the string of terrorist attacks at the beginning of the century, but my mother worked for the government and was constantly talking about our “lack of counterterrorist mechanisms.”
I turned up the volume. The president looked exhausted, bags under his eyes, makeup caked on for the cameras. “The structure landed in Central Park early this morning,” he said into twenty microphones. “As of now, the fate of anyone residing in New York City and the surrounding suburbs is unknown. We are working to find the cause of this interruption in communication as soon as—” He was cut short. The breaking news logo flashed across the screen.
I took a swig of soda. It was strange that the network had interrupted the president. I didn’t understand what they were talking about, didn’t know what it all meant yet. I glanced at the screen and what I saw nearly made me choke on my soda. They had footage of the “structure” in the park. Something emerged, turned toward the camera, stared. Still coughing, I pressed PAUSE on the DVR remote and stood.
That was the first time I saw an alien.
CHAPTER THREE
After They came, I did not leave my house for three weeks. The broadcasts stopped after the first few days, but they were not helpful anyway. They kept repeating the same things. Aliens had landed, they were not friendly, half of the planet was dead.
They were horrifyingly fast, traveling across the globe at an alarming pace. They didn’t destroy buildings or attack our resources, like in so many crappy Hollywood movies. They wanted us. They hungered for us.
That first day, I was slow to understand what was happening.
My hands shook as I desperately tried to call my friends and family. My father didn’t carry a cell phone. He didn’t believe in them, said they gave people brain cancer. My mom had one of those fancy touch-screen phones that her job paid for, but she never answered, and her office line went straight to voice mail. Sabrina’s phone just rang and rang. So did Tim’s. I tried my cousin in Virginia and my mom’s parents in Miami. No one answered. I went through the phone book on my cell, furiously calling one number after another. Eventually I could no longer dial out. I kept getting a recorded message. “All circuits are busy. Please hang up and try your call again at a later time.” Soon I couldn’t even get service. I stared at the screen for a minute, then, frustrated, threw the phone against the wall.
I curled into a ball on the couch and tried not to cry, but I couldn’t hold back the tears for long. When my father didn’t come back after a few hours, I had to admit to myself that he was dead. He had camping skills, but I could not imagine him holding his own against an alien attack. My mother might be okay, her government offices were high security, surrounded by soldiers. But I had no idea how to reach her, and could soldiers really protect her from those repulsive creatures? I had to face the reality that my parents could both be gone.
I stayed on the sofa and cried until I had no tears left and not enough energy to sob. I eventually crawled to the fridge and grabbed my dad’s Ben and Jerry’s from the freezer. It was the one junk food he allowed himself. He said life wasn’t worth living without Cherry Garcia. I gorged myself on ice cream and ended up vomiting purple-pink onto the floor. I fell asleep there, exhausted and miserable.
When I woke several hours later, I couldn’t figure out why I was on the kitchen floor. I opened my eyes and saw the mess I had made, instantly remembering everything. I wanted to stay there, but the smell finally got to me. I sat up and rubbed my deadened arms. Sobbing hysterically wouldn’t help my dad or my friends. It wouldn’t help me. Something inside me shifted or maybe just broke. I had to take care of myself.
I stood carefully, my legs still shaky, and went to retrieve the cleaning supplies from under the sink. When I was done cleaning the mess, I numbly grabbed a book from the shelf and hid in my room, unable to face my own thoughts. I needed to escape, if just for a short while, into a story from long ago.
My first night alone, I still assumed things would settle down. I stayed glued to the TV, watching the news report the same thing over and over. People were dying, and I was sick with grief, but I knew that we would overcome the invaders or whatever they were. We were the strongest nation on earth.
The second day passed and the TV was out, but there were still people on the radio. I was comforted by their voices, even though they spoke of mass chaos. People tried to run away, but They were everywhere. People tried to hide, but They found them.
Then on the third day, the radio went silent. I stayed in my room and obsessively read one book after another, to keep my mind on anything other than what was happening. I’d always escaped into books, but now reading had become something more. It allowed me to be somewhere else, to feel something else, not just the numbness that overtook my body and made me wonder if I was still alive.