Transmission

“We’re safe,” Kevin said. Even to himself, he didn’t sound convincing. “We have masks.”

“A mask won’t stop them if they pull it away and breathe that stuff on me,” Luna said. She sounded angry now. Not angry at Kevin; angry at the world. “It won’t keep me from being like them. So promise me you won’t let me be like them.”

“How can I—” Kevin began.

“You can kill me,” Luna said. The tears in her eyes made them glisten. “I don’t want to be some mindless thing, trapped in my own body. If I end up like that, I want you to kill me. Say you’ll do it, Kevin.”

Kevin couldn’t say it. He couldn’t promise to kill Luna. How could anyone promise that? The best he could do was to stay silent while Luna cried, his hand on her shoulder in silent support.

“Where do we go, Kevin?” Luna asked. She sounded as though she was choking back her sobs now. “Where can we go? What can we do? What if… what if everyone’s like this?”

Kevin wasn’t sure he had an answer to that.

“We need to get somewhere safe,” he said. “Ted wanted us to do that.”

“He wanted us to get to the bunker,” Luna said. “We can’t go there now, can we?”

Kevin thought about all the scientists who would be in the way, who had come pouring out after them. He shook his head.

“No. We wouldn’t get through.”

“Where then?” Luna said. “We have to go somewhere. We can’t take the masks off unless we do.”

Kevin wasn’t so sure about that. After all, one of the scientists had grabbed his mask. “I think… I think I can,” he said.

“Well, I can’t,” Luna shot back. “How am I supposed to eat, Kevin? Or drink anything, or—”

“We’ll think of something,” Kevin said, and then froze, as he realized something. “There are more bunkers.”

“More bunkers?” Luna said. “But wouldn’t they be hidden?”

“Phil told me about some of them when he was giving me the tour of the institute,” Kevin said. “He even showed me a map.”

Behind her mask, Luna looked hopeful. “Can you remember where they are?”

“I…”

“Try, Kevin,” Luna insisted.

Kevin did his best. He could remember one for certain. “Phil said there was one in the state park up on Mount Diablo. He said something about it being a place they used to do military tests.”

“You’re sure?” Luna asked.

Kevin nodded. “It would be safer than being outside,” Kevin said. He tried to think about what they would need, and how it would work. “We’d need supplies. Food and stuff.”

In the end, they took what they needed from a gas station. They didn’t have any money to pay for it, but the clerk was busy standing at the back of the store, staring up at the sky. Kevin left a note anyway, with his mother’s address. It didn’t feel right just stealing stuff, even with everything that was going on.

They drove on, and now Luna seemed to be getting the hang of it, because the whole journey seemed smoother. There was certainly less crashing into things, although they still had to dodge around cars that had been abandoned in the middle of the highway, the former drivers getting out to look up. There were even a couple of police cars there, and Luna slowed down almost automatically as they drove past. But the police were just as busy staring as everyone else. There was no one to get them into trouble—and no one to help them either.

“Do you think there’s anything we can do to help our parents?” Luna asked after a while.

“I don’t know,” Kevin admitted. He’d been thinking about that almost constantly since he’d seen his mother like that. “I guess I should know.”

He’d had so many messages from the aliens, but none of them had said anything about how to undo all of this. None of them had provided a cure to whatever this was, or even suggested that it could be undone. A horrible thought came to Kevin then: the aliens had burned their own world to stop this from spreading, trying to burn off the threat, and even that hadn’t stopped it.

“What if there isn’t a way?” Luna said. “What if everyone is stuck like that forever?”

“If there is something, we’ll find it,” Kevin said, although he didn’t know how they could even begin to do that. He had to hope, though. He wanted to bring his mother back, and not spend the rest of his life hiding from any group of people he met.

They drove east, and kept driving. The road twisted and turned as they went up through the foothills, obscuring the mountain for a while, but soon it came back into view. They drove upward, and Kevin did his best to think where the red dot on the map had been marking the bunker. It was hard, because he’d only seen it briefly, and a lot of stuff had happened since.

“I think it’s near the top,” he said.

Luna nodded, and kept driving. There were fewer people out here, but even so, they were doing the same things others had been: standing by the road, staring at the sky. A few were walking back toward the city, too, as if there were something there waiting for them.

There was supposed to be a parking lot at the top of the mountain, but Luna pulled the car off the road a little way before that, hiding it in a stand of trees.