PART 2
SCHOOL
TWELVE
Jeremiah sighed as he collapsed next to his wife on the living-room sofa. Today he had been more badgered, interrogated, and harassed than in the rest of his life combined. Plus, in the medical examinations, he had been more thoroughly probed… Now finally, they were letting him take a break. He leaned into Lori and closed his eyes.
“They just gave me my phone back. If you go ask that woman,” Lori pointed, “She’ll give you yours back, too.”
Jeremiah shrugged, then put his arm around her. “I’ll get it in a minute. Have you called the kids?”
“I texted them a minute ago and let them know we’re okay. Maybe I’ll call now.”
“Will they,” Jeremiah waved in the direction of the soldiers and scientists, “Let them come home? Are they moving the aliens out?” His tone was dubious.
“For some reason they’re not taking the aliens yet. Maybe we’ll have to stay in a hotel tonight.”
While Lori was speaking, she called Suzy. It went straight to voicemail. As his wife dialed Jeff, grumbling about kids and responsibility and cell phones, Jeremiah opened his eyes and looked around ruefully at the disaster that was his house. A gloved figure wearing a surgical mask was boring a small hole in the corner cabinet, carefully collecting a plug of the wood Two-Head had peed on.
Jeremiah sighed again.
“Maybe they HAD to turn off their phones, like we did,” Lori mused.
“No Jeff?” Jeremiah asked.
“Straight to voicemail.” Then, peeved, “But look! Suzy posted a video on Instagram just a few minutes ago. If she, right now, in the middle of all of this, posted more campaign propaganda, I swear, I’m taking away her phone. These kids, they just don’t understand...” she trailed off as the video played, and Jeremiah didn’t get to hear what kids these days don’t understand.
“What WAS that?” he breathed out as the video finished. “Play it again.” They watched it again.
“She just left?! She just ran off and drove away?!” Lori was shaking her head, her jaw clenched.
“Wait. What? Did we just see an alien get turned into a woman? Why are you mad?”
“That was Ms. Hacking!” She fumed into Jeremiah’s blank face. “The kids’ math teacher! And she’s running away from the school while the kids are still in there – assuming Suzy recorded this video. And I don’t think the alien turned into her; I think they switched places. Did you see how scared she was? Here,” they watched it again.
Jeremiah still didn’t understand what exactly was happening in the video, but as he finished watching it for the third time, he knew other people needed to see it. “We need to show this to people.”
They both looked up to see whom they could talk to and finally noticed the change in energy in the room. A half-dozen researchers were crowded around a laptop on the kitchen counter, riveted to whatever they were watching. The incessant chatter from the front room was ominously absent.
Jeremiah and his wife approached the group, and with growing apprehension craned over the shoulders of the scientists to see the laptop. On the screen was an aerial view of a dark, stone castle.
Jeremiah furrowed his brow. He had expected something more shocking. He did think the castle grounds were odd – a large parking lot on one side, a soccer field on the other, a running track behind...
He felt it in his belly before his hazed mind had decoded the words on the bottom of the screen.
The banner on the screen scrolled: “Georgia middle school near alien site has disappeared, replaced by unknown castle.”
His kids were gone.
The scroll continued, “Governor declares state of emergency.”
The school was gone. His kids were in the school, and the school was gone, replaced by this castle.
“Students and teachers presumed missing.”
He was suddenly dizzy.
“Well, has anyone gone into the castle?” His wife was asking nearby. “Has anyone bothered checking to see if the kids are in the castle? Have they looked to see if the school is somewhere else?” Lori was firing off one question after another at a scientist she had backed into the counter. Jeremiah could hear hysteria bubbling just under the surface, her voice rising in pitch and speed as she went on.
“You can look with satellites. They have satellites all around the world. You can get on the internet right now and see anywhere in the world. Are they looking to see where my kids’ school is? Are THEY TRYING TO FIND MY KIDS?!” She was yelling into the scientist’s face now, holding him by the lapels of his lab coat, oblivious to his litany of “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know anything,” as he tried to free himself.
The need to help his wife grounded Jeremiah. He pulled himself together and went to her, placing his hands over hers on the scientist’s coat. “Honey, he doesn’t know anything. Let’s watch for a minute. Maybe they’ve already figured something out.”
As Lori relaxed, he relaxed a bit, too, and his brain started working again. “It’s like with Ms. Hacking on Suzy’s video,” he said. “Ms. Hacking got switched, but she came back. She was okay. Now the school got switched, so it’ll probably get switched right back.”
On screen, the castle was eerily still, the windows shuttered, the doors closed. Jeremiah watched as a military response team arrived, noticing the delicate balance they tried to strike between defense and aggression, optimistic welcome and pragmatic fortification.
A lone man stepped out from the human entourage and walked across the school parking lot, stopping when he was some fifty yards from the front doors of the castle. He was wearing body armor but not carrying a weapon.
He stood in the no-man’s land, flanked by the cars of now-missing school
