“Are you OK?” I asked.
“April . . .” She moved from the chair over to the couch. “April, I did it. I found you.” She leaned into me and said quietly, “I found you.” I reached my arms around her and held her. Not because I wanted to, but because the part of my brain Carl had built told me it was the right thing to do.
But then it started to feel right. Her short hair tickled my nose, and my hands, both real and new, pushed into her tummy, and it felt as right as anything ever had. But then she pushed away, and the look she gave me was hard.
“I’m going to need you to apologize to me,” she said. “Not right now. You need time to think about what you’re going to say, because if you do it wrong, I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive you.”
“That’s terrifying,” I said with a stab of fear, almost as big as the one I’d felt as I initiated a fistfight with two police officers. I still wasn’t sure how I had beat them both.
“But in the meantime,” Maya said, pulling a DVD out from underneath the pile of snacks, “I have acquired the best thing created in 1993.” It was Pauly Shore’s Son in Law.
I smiled, and I really was happy, just not as happy as I knew I should have been.
I can’t remember this conversation without smelling that cabin. Popcorn and dust and wood and old paper. We were there for such a tiny amount of time, but it seems so sharp to me. Just those first moments of not being alone anymore, even if they were tense, and even if I was still very lost. Son in Law is ruined for me forever; it will only ever be about those moments, doing everything I could to ignore the fact that a space alien had told me I was the last, best hope for humanity’s survival. I’ll never be able to watch a Pauly Shore movie again without reliving what was about to happen.
“Jesus Christ!” Maya shouted from the kitchen, where she was popping another bag of popcorn.
I stood up so fast the chair I was sitting on flew back. “What is it, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, it’s nothing. I . . . I just saw, like, the biggest squirrel I have ever seen in my life out the window. It’s fine,” she breathed. “It just scared me.”
“How certain are you that it was a squirrel?” I asked, trying to sound very serious.
She laughed.
“I’m not kidding.”
“I mean, I don’t know, it didn’t really look like a squirrel, but it was small and fuzzy.”
“Could it have been a monkey?” I asked, starting to slink toward the door.
“I mean, sure, maybe, I haven’t seen many monkeys.”
“Fuck . . . FUCK!” I said.
“What?”
“There are things I haven’t told you. I think it might be about time to explain,” I said, and then I jerked open the door.
A man jumped back from the doorway. He was wearing tight blue jeans and a red plaid shirt. His hand went to his waist, and he pulled up a gun.
“April May?” he asked, pointing the gun at the ground in front of us.
I could feel Maya’s presence burning behind me, but she was still and silent. I could not turn away from the man.
“Yes?” I said calmly.
“I need you to come with me.” He gestured toward his car.
“Did Fish send you?” I asked, my initial fear having washed away.
“Yes.” He fidgeted with the gun in his hand. “Come with me, outside.”
“No,” I said.
“Come. With. ME!” Each word came out louder than the last. He was shaking. This guy was not a cop; he was not used to holding a gun.
“No, you have to go right now,” I said, my voice steady.
And then he raised his gun up to point it at me and said, “Oh god, I’m so sorry . . .” He closed his eyes, and suddenly I realized he wasn’t here to abduct me. Still my panic wouldn’t come. I yelled, “MAYA, GET DOWN.”
A fuzzy blur streaked out of the darkness and onto the man’s face, screaming high-pitched and inhuman. The gun popped, but I didn’t feel anything. I reached out and grabbed his wrist with my left hand and squeezed. He screamed. The bone under my pinky went first, and then the one cradled in the pad between my thumb and forefinger cracked. His arm felt like Play-Doh in my hand.
He dropped to his knees as I let go.
“What the fuck! What the fuck!” Maya was yelling behind me.
“It’s OK,” I said.
“Maya has been shot.” Carl’s voice came out of a smartwatch that the monkey was wearing like a collar.
I turned around in time to see monkey Carl arrive at Maya’s side, but she pushed them away. “No!” she said in terror and anger. I felt like I was floating, like I was seeing from outside of my body.
She made a noise, just a long low vowel sound.
“Maya . . .” I was suddenly on my knees next to her. I didn’t remember getting there. I finally broke eye contact and looked at her. She coughed. Blood came out of her mouth.
“Maya!” I shouted. I didn’t know what else to say. I looked down at her body and didn’t even see where she had been hit. The black folding fabric of her hoodie was obscuring what had happened. I lifted it up and saw, under her right breast, a black hole.
“No. No no no no!” I realized it was my voice. Apply pressure. You have to apply pressure.
“CALL SOMEONE!” I said to Carl. They were a monkey, but they had to know how to get help. “CALL SOMEONE!” I pushed my hands onto the wound. The blood came up through my fingers. Maya was crying, awake, in pain, her breathing coming in small, rapid gasps.
“No NO NO!” I heard myself screaming. A mantra now. Whatever dam had kept my emotions at bay had broken. The force of them now
