Chapter 1: Ashley
My name is Ashley Rose. For all thirteen and three-quarter years of my life, I have lived in the town of Metier, Wisconsin. I even died in it once.
But that's another story.
You've probably heard of Metier. It's been on TV a couple of times. Mostly on those cheezoid shows with titles like Weird Universe or Unexplained Mysteries. The kind that feature stories on Big Foot and crop circles and alien visitations.
Metier falls into that last category. In fact, over the years we've become pretty famous as a place for UFO sightings. So many people here say they've seen strange lights at night that we've been nicknamed the Roswell of the North.
I never used to believe in the stories. But that was before my thirteenth birthday. Before I found out I wasn't like most kids. Before my life became one mind-warping test of survival after another.
You wouldn't guess it to look at me. On the outside, I look just like an average junior high student. Too average, if you ask me. If you saw me on the street or in line at the movies, you wouldn't even look twice -- especially if you're a boy.
I have light brown hair and plain brown eyes, which I get from my father. From my mother I got the silver blood, supersensitive hearing and vision, the ability to stay underwater as long as I want, and the power to regenerate new parts of my body if they get cut off. (Don't ask how I found out about that last one.)
Of course, Mom didn't tell me about my powers. She vanished without a trace when I was four years old.
She didn't tell me about the evil, shape-shifting aliens who would try to hunt me down when I turned thirteen, either. I had to find it all out for myself.
But luckily not by myself.
Because there were other kids in Metier whose parents mysteriously disappeared when they were four. Kids who also developed special powers on their thirteenth birthdays -- and who also got a visit from the alien hunters.
Two of them -- Todd Aldridge and Elena Vargas -- didn't escape the aliens that were sent for them.
The others -- Ethan Rogers, Jack Raynes, Toni Douglas and me -- were luckier.
And until today, our luck had held out.
Two hours ago the aliens had trapped the four of us remaining kids in our town's deserted mall. They weren't taking any chances on our getting away. They cut the power and the phone lines and blocked off all the exits. Then they crashed their UFO right through the skylight over the food court. They must have expected us to put up quite a fight. We did.
What they hadn't expected was that we'd hijack their UFO, leaving them behind.
But we did that, too.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Unfortunately for us the ship was preprogrammed to return to the aliens' planet. And once aboard, we had no way of turning it back. Amazingly the entire trip only lasted a couple of minutes.
But the biggest surprise didn't come until we exited the UFO....
"I don't believe this," I now whispered in shock. "This can't be real. It can't be."
We were standing outside the hatchway of the hijacked alien craft. The silver ship crouched above us on six spindly metal legs, looking like a giant metallic beetle.
Before us, stretching as far as the eye could see, was a hostile, alien-looking wasteland. It looked like the set for a movie about an interplanetary war -- and it wasn't the planet that had won.
A dry, foul wind whistled over the rubble of ruined buildings. Dust swirled in craters left by massive explosions. Above, the sun was white-hot and strangely intense.
My thoughts were like a tiny scream inside my head. I want to go home. I want to go home.
The problem was...we already were home.
In front of us, half buried in the dirt and sand, was a ten-foot-high letter M. At one point it had been part of a sign hanging outside the front entrance of the Metier Mall. Now the mall was just a charred, bombed-out shell. The large brass letter was all that was left, and it was corroded and tarnished green by the polluted atmosphere.
The UFO wasn't a spaceship. It was a time machine.
It hadn't brought us to another planet. It had brought us into the future.
"Anybody want to see if the food court is still open?" Jack cracked. "I could go for a pizza with everything. Make that double everything."
"Why don't you hold the jokes for a while, Jack?" Ethan replied. "We've got to think of a plan."
"Hello?" said Toni. "Don't you think it's a little late for that? Look around you. The earth has been destroyed. It's over. We lost."
I was suddenly struck by a sickening thought. "What if somehow those aliens we left behind caused all this? This could all be our fault!"
"You can't think like that," Ethan said. "First of all, we didn't lose. We escaped. Second of all, we had no choice in the matter. No one knew the ship was a time machine or that it would take us here. But now that we know, we just have to get back."
"And how do you suggest we do that," Jack asked, "by walking back to our time? Because I think they only built this buggy to go one way."
It was true. No sooner had we landed than the UFO went dead, like a stalled car. Even Toni's power -- the ability to conduct and channel electricity -- was no use in powering it back up.
"Maybe there's some kind of an emergency override," Ethan suggested, "or maybe we can figure out a way to trick it into turning back on."
"What difference does it make?" I said, waving my arms around helplessly. "If this is Earth's future, it doesn't matter if we make it back to the past. Not when we already know how this movie ends."
"This isn't a movie," Ethan countered, "it's real life. And who knows how time travel works? This is the future, but it might just be a possible future. It doesn't have to happen. Maybe, if we can figure out what caused all this, we can travel back in time and stop it. Change the course of history."
"Yeah, well, you can talk about changing the future all you want," Jack said. "But in the immediate present, I'm about to pass out from hunger. How are we going to find food? How are we going to find water? I'm guessing the nearest vending machine is about three thousand lightyears away."
"I'm sure we'll find some water out there...somewhere," Ethan replied, though from his tone, I don't think even he believed himself. He started patting the pockets of his jeans. "As for food, well, I can do something about that."
Reaching into his front pocket, he withdrew what looked like a small red, white, and blue plastic doll. It was some superhero -- Captain America, I think. I always knew that Ethan was into comic books, but this was taking things a little too far.
Then Ethan tilted the doll's head back and a small purple candy popped out of its neck. It was a Pez dispenser.
He held one of the violet candies out to Jack. "It isn't much, but it's better than nothing. At least the sugar will keep us going until we can find real food."
Jack took the candy. "The world's largest collection of Pez dispensers is owned by Zachary Kolodny of Farmingdale, New York," he said mechanically. Jack was always reciting some bit of trivia he'd memorized from The Guinness Book of World Records. It could get annoying, especially when he did it in one of the thousands of foreign languages he could speak.
Toni laughed bitterly. "Look around, Jack," she said. "The largest collection of Pez dispensers is right there in Ethan's hand."
That brightened him up some. "Wow," Jack said. "I bet I could set any record I wanted."
"Sure," I told him. "It's not like there's much competition."
"Fattest man, thinnest man," Jack said.
"Worst haircut," Toni suggested.
"Ethan, you've got a lock on oldest," I told him, grinning.
"Alive, anyway," Ethan stated, not returning my smile.
It was a sobering thought. Could everyone on Earth be dead? Were we the only ones left? I shuddered, not wanting to think about what had happened to the people I'd left behind, like my father and my best friend, Jenny Kim. Had they somehow survived? Had anyone survived?
Something had happened to turn the earth into this wasteland. When it happened was anybody's guess. How far into the future had we come? Two months? Two years? Two thousand years? It was time to find out.
"Let's do it, I said. "I'm not beaten. Let's explore a little and try to figure out what happened here. Then see if we can't turn the tables on those bug-eyed creeps."
The others stared at me. I'm not usually the one who takes charge. "I'm with Ashley," Toni said. "Girl power, right?"
"Are you in, Jack?" Ethan asked. "We can't do it without you."
"I suppose," Jack said, sighing heavily. "But I can already tell, it's all going to end in tears."
"Fine," Ethan told him. "Let's just hope they're alien tears."
Moments later we were trudging across the surface of the strange planet. The fact that it was the same one I'd grown up on only made the whole thing stranger.
I hoped that no one saw how badly I was shaking.
Copyright © 1998 by Daniel Weiss Associates, Inc.
