Halifax Read online

  Rom put the ball in his backpack, which was black and white and shaped like a penguin. It had a friendly, smiling penguin face and a nose that squeaked when you pressed it. He headed for the back door, pausing for a moment to take one last, longing look back. Mother stood in the hallway, her arms on her hips and her head cocked slightly. She was still smiling. Smiling at her little boy. She looked like the perfect mother. Rom averted his eyes, keeping his head down, as he rushed out the back door and slammed it behind him.

  Farrell and Izzy and Rom scrambled up the hillside behind their house, climbing up above the cul-de-sac. They pushed aside dried scrub brush and slid through the dirt, finally making their way to a fire road overlooking the neighborhood. From this vantage point they could see all the cloned houses and the network of roads that wound around and around, connecting identical street to identical street, past identical mailboxes in suburban bliss. Roaring through the neighborhood, though, overtaking sensible mini-vans and screaming at top speed, were a squadron of police cars, sirens blaring. From every direction they converged on the cul-de-sac.

  Police officers climbed out of their cars, guns raised, and slowly began to surround the house as the kids looked on from their perch on the dry hillside.

  “It’s time to go, Rom,” Farrell said.

  “Do we really have to?” Rom asked as he reluctantly removed the Magic Eight Ball from his backpack. He looked down at it and rolled it across his palm. “I like it here. It’s a good place to raise a family. Nice and wholesome and…leafy…”

  “Now, Rom!” Farrell yelled at him, right into his face.

  “Fine!” Rom yelled back. He held up the Magic Eight Ball and looked down at its small screen. The message on it read Outlook Not So Good. Rom reluctantly pushed his thumb down onto the screen. It gave way like a button being pressed and suddenly their house EXPLODED! It exploded into a giant fireball. The police officers hit the ground and covered their heads as burning pieces of wood and insulation and, yes, pieces of the mother, fell around them.

  Smoke drifted up the hillside as Farrell turned to Izzy and Rom. He hadn’t even flinched when the house exploded and he wasn’t at all concerned about the chaos below --- the burning house, the panicked officers and the approaching fire trucks.

  “Izzy, we need a new house,” Farrell said to them. “Rom, we need a new mom.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Time had passed. Many freeways had been traveled. New files were created and a new life for Farrell, Izzy and Rom was beginning in another part of Los Angeles. It was in the Valley, a suburban section of the city trapped along with smog between two mountain ranges. It was a place with no discernable center and no real beginning or end. It wasn’t glamorous or cool, either in temperament or temperature, but such things didn’t matter to them. All they needed was a base camp and this place would do.

  A strange car moved down Main Street in Cahuenga Village, the closest thing to charming the area had. Old buildings, some dating back all of fifty years, lined either side of the street. Local businesses, ranging from a coffee shop to an ice cream parlor to small restaurants and a dry cleaner, advertised their wares with colorful signs and potted flowers gave a small town feel to the big city. Adding an extra measure of festiveness were Halloween decorations, pumpkins and hay bales and scarecrows and skeletons, placed in preparation for the upcoming Halloween Carnival. A banner stretched across the street inviting all to the event.

  The car, the strange one, passed beneath the banner and moved slowly down the street. The car was called a Citroen. It was a French car, pool blue and bug like, with a front end larger than the rear. It had slanting double headlights that stared out at the road ahead making it look like an alien from a 1950’s sci-fi movie.

  Behind the large steering wheel, driving the car, was Farrell. His arm was resting out the open window and a breeze tousled his hair. If it was possible to look cool in the very odd car, he managed it. Riding shotgun was Izzy. She looked out at the neighborhood. She was taking their new surroundings in and getting a sense of this part of the city. Rom rode in the back and watched the people along the sidewalks. He took special interest in a family, a mother and father and two small children. They were walking, hand in hand in hand in hand, and were laughing and smiling. Rom smiled too for a moment, but his smile disappeared as quickly as it came. He looked away, out the other window, looking at nothing, as they continued to drive along.

  Farrell drove a few more miles, as houses gave way to warehouses, and the Citroen turned onto a side street and came to idle in front of an abandoned garage. An old electric sign was atop a pole above the garage. It was cracked and fading and its bulbs had long ago burnt out, but you could still make out the writing on it. Houx Citroen Repair.

  “Houx?” Izzy asked as she looked up at the sign. It came out of her mouth sounding like hoax.

  “It’s French,” Rom told her. “Like how-X.”

  “If it was French wouldn’t it be pronounced who?” Farrell said as he glanced back in the rearview mirror at Rom.

  Rom thought for a moment and either didn’t know the answer or didn’t want to admit he was wrong. “I don’t care what you call it,” he said with a huff. “I call it the Garage.”

  “Original,” Izzy told him.

  The Halifax siblings sat in their idling Citroen car outside the chain-linked fence of this Citroen repair shop. It was an old building with a double garage bay and a small office and was on a seldom-travelled street between some other industrial buildings that looked equally old and equally abandoned. In fact, a car had not been repaired at Houx Citroen Repair in more than ten years and the building’s peeling paint and broken windows bore testament to that.

  “It’s perfect,” Farrell said to Rom. He was actually pleased with his young brother. That was a rare thing.

  “It’s gross,” Izzy protested.

  “It’s amazing,” Rom said. “Just wait.” Rom held up a second set of Citroen keys. They dangled off the end of a purple rabbit’s foot keychain. Rom twisted the metal end of the keychain and the electronic gate along the chain-link fence began to pull back. Farrell drove the car through the gate and one of the garage bay doors in front of them began to lift up.

  “Just pull onto the ramp,” Rom instructed Farrell. “You’ll see.” He leaned over the front seat and looked at Izzy. “And you’ll see, too.”

  Farrell slowly moved the Citroen up onto two metal slats in the middle of the repair bay. Back in the days when there were Citroen repairmen --- who were probably French --- working there, this is where they would have put the cars so they could work on them. A mechanic would hit a switch and the car would rise up on the metal slats so it could be worked on from below. As Farrell finished pulling their Citroen up onto the slats, however, instead of lifting towards the ceiling, the floor opened up below them and the car descended into a hole in the bottom of the garage.

  The car came to rest three stories below street level in a cavernous room that resembled a space station. Steaming pipes and glowing wires snaked up and down metal walls and under hanging walkways. All manner of electrical equipment, beeping and buzzing and blinking, filled the room. It was the kind of place astronauts dreamed of when they dared to dream big.

  “I like it, Rom,” Farrell said as they all climbed out of the Citroen. Rom looked across the hood of the car at Farrell. He was shocked. Another compliment? “Well done,” Farrell continued. “You should have your own interior design show on cable.”

  “Finally. Praise. It’s been so long,” Rom said. He began to lead Farrell and Izzy around their new tricked out Batcave. “As you can see, we have all the standard equipment.” He stopped before a massive bank of hard drives. They were all connected to each other, a hundred high, two hundred wide, and generated enough heat to cause Izzy to step back and wipe her brow.

  “This is our master computer,” Rom said. “It’s linked to every government main frame and has a NASA interface that bypasses security clearance.”

/>   He moved on to a large screen displaying a map of the world with an overlay of grid marks. “Our barge tracking system,” Rom told them. “So simple even Izzy can understand it.”

  Izzy pursed her lips disapprovingly, something that only seemed to cause Rom pleasure. He brushed her off and continued his tour, pointing out a pod-like structure at one end of the room that he called “the penthouse” and a laboratory, gleaming white and filled with all known and unknown types of medical equipment, behind double glass doors along the back wall of the massive room.

  At the center of the room, rising all three stories above and disappearing somewhere deep into the ground below was a radiating orange tube filled with some kind of swirling thick liquid that periodically pulsated with bursts of light.

  “Our core power source,” Rom told them as he stood beside the tube. All the pipes and cables surrounding them could be traced back to its super-heated center.

  “Nuclear?” Farrell asked.

  Rom scoffed at such a suggestion. “Volcanic,” he declared. “Much more friendly to the environment. I’m trying to embrace the whole green thing. I was thinking we should recycle. Maybe even compost.”

  “I was thinking you should finish showing us around before I recycle you,” Izzy warned Rom.

  “Fine,” Rom said as he led them to a vending machine at the bottom of a circular staircase that twisted up towards the street above. The machine was filled with every kind of candy bar, from the classic Charleston Chew to the wildly popular Snickers bar to the little known or understood Zagnut.

  “What is that?” Izzy asked.

  “It’s a candy machine,” Rom said.

  “And why do we need a candy machine?”

  “Because sometimes I get hungry,” Rom said. Sometimes he did. “And because I’ve always wanted one.”

  Izzy looked to Farrell, pleadingly, asking with her eyes if she really had to put up with Rom’s antics, but Farrell just shrugged his shoulders. Unfortunately, battling aliens was often the easiest part of the job. Getting along with one another sometimes proved to be their biggest challenge.

  Rom moved to the edge of the circular room, stepping around equipment that most scientists never imagined, and to a large steel door. “And, of course, no secret hideout of ours would ever be complete without --- a library!”

  Rom swept his hand across a small red panel. It was a palm reader that scanned his hand. The panel turned blue and a door slid open automatically to reveal an impossibly long corridor. It stretched on so far you couldn’t see the other end. It was lined on the left and right with row after row of shelves of books.

  “My library!” Farrell said with delight. “You can learn anything you need to know by reading a book.”

  “I can learn anything I need to know by searching for it on the Internet,” Rom declared.

  “Kids today,” Farrell said as he entered the library. “No appreciation for the simple pleasures in life.” Farrell left the others behind and disappeared into the rows of books.

  Rom and Izzy left Farrell in his library and Rom pushed his sister towards one of the three main workstations set up in the Garage, one for each of them. “I’m certain you’ll finally be pleased with me when you see what I’ve done for you.”

  The workstation, with its long table, bay of video screens and sensible ergonomic chair, was suspiciously pink in theme and Izzy approached it reluctantly. She wasn’t a pink kind of girl. She didn’t even like magenta. Mauve was also suspect in her book. The bright pink cloth covering the station, therefore, was not met with enthusiasm.

  “I hate pink.”

  “You’ll like this,” Rom told her. “Just wait until you see. Just wait.” He grabbed the edge of the cloth and paused for dramatic effect, making Izzy suffer --- or at least trying to make her suffer. Finally he pulled the cloth off with a great flourish to reveal a laptop computer beneath. It was a pink laptop computer. It was a pink laptop computer emblazoned with a cartoon image famous the world over --- possibly famous throughout the universe.

  “I’ve made you a customized Hello Kitty computer!” Rom said. He was full of excitement and the anticipation of glory. The smiling face of the Japanese kitten stared up at Izzy from the top of the computer. Izzy frowned back.

  “I don’t like Hello Kitty, Rom,” she said with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

  Rom looked crushed. “All girls are genetically predisposed to like Hello Kitty. That’s backed up by scientific data.”

  “I’m not using it.”

  “Then you won’t have a computer.”

  “You’ll make me another one,” Izzy told him. And she meant it.

  In his library, Farrell ran his fingers along a row of books. The shelf was appropriately labeled Science Fiction and all the classics were there before him. They were books he had read many times. Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Farrell pulled one well-worn book off the shelf. It was Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers. It was a book he especially loved, though he loved all books. He didn’t see science fiction as being in any way a study of things he knew in his own life. They were stories. They were his escape from the dangerous, stressful life he led. Farrell could find something worthy in any book. Advice. Adventure. Instruction. Poetry. He loved all stories, but most of all he loved the stories of Earth. Earth had the best stories of all.

  Farrell began to thumb through the pages of The Body Snatchers, ready to lose himself for a moment in words, ready to relax and forget, but his attempt to do something as simple as read a book was interrupted by the sudden, jarring sound of an alarm. It blared loudly, blasting from the Garage and echoing down the stacks of Farrell’s library. Farrell quickly stuck the book back on the shelf, back in its place, and ran out to join Rom and Izzy.

  They stood before the giant screen that Rom had called the barge tracking system. There had been nothing but a map of the continents of Earth on it before but now a blinking light moved across the grid on the screen, moving east to west across the map of the United States, passing across the states at speed. Rom frantically pushed buttons on the console below the screen. He turned dials and moved levers but nothing he did seemed to accomplish whatever he was trying to do. He slammed his fist down in frustration.

  “What’s going on?” Farrell asked as he quickly scanned the monitors and tried to make sense of the mayhem that had suddenly taken over the Garage.

  “It’s the Reno barge,” Rom said, his eyes fixed on the screen, following the red blinking dot as it moved across Arizona and into southern California. “It’s off course. It came into the atmosphere too fast. It’s unstable.”

  “Can’t you contact them?” asked Izzy.

  “I tried. They’re not answering. It’s going down!”

  “Take over the controls from here,” Izzy told him.

  “I can’t!” Rom yelled at her. “Their system is locked down. It’s going to crash!”

  “Where is it going to crash, Rom?” Farrell said calmly as Rom continued pushing every combination of buttons possible on the console, working to no avail. “Rom?” Farrell said again as he grabbed his brother by the shoulders and turned him towards him. “Where is it going to crash?”

  Rom’s eyes were wide with excitement and more than a little panic. “Six blocks away,” he blurted out. “Six blocks away!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A set of skid marks stretched from the ten to the fifty yard lines on a school football field. The sod was churned up and dirt was pushed aside along a path that led to a large crater in the center of the field. Smoke filled the night air. It wafted through the dimly lit klieg lights that hung on towers above the bleachers in the small stadium. There were skid marks, a crater and smoke, but no signs of what had obviously crashed right where the coin toss usually took place before a football game.

  Farrell, Izzy and Rom stood on the sidelines examining the scene. Rom took his penguin backpack off his shoulders. It
s friendly penguin face smiled at him and two googly eyes bounced in circles as he rummaged through its contents and pulled out a red children’s Etch-A-Sketch. It had a grey monitor and two white dials at the bottom that Rom began to twist and turn until the monitor lit up.

  This Etch-A-Sketch wasn’t for drawing. It was an electronic scanner. Rom held it up and pointed it at the football field. He used the dials to adjust it and an image appeared, fuzzy at first, and then focusing to reveal the outline of some kind of space ship on the monitor. To the naked eye, there was nothing there. Through the Etch-A-Sketch, however, the unmistakable lines of a large, boxy vehicle were at the end of the skid marks. It was half buried in the crater at the fifty-yard line.

  “There it is,” Rom said.

  “Deactivate its screen,” Farrell told him as Izzy looked over Rom’s shoulder at the monitor.

  Rom turned the white dials again and there was a flash on the football field as a shield of light appeared around the crater and then slowly peeled away, opening like a curtain, to reveal a smoking, crumpled space ship. It was streaked with burn marks across its sides and its front end was buried in the turf of the football field. It had no windows, but did have one large door on the side. The door was half open and was bent back and mangled at the edges.

  The Halifax siblings approached the ship with caution, looking backward as much as forward as they slowly walked towards the wreckage and reached the open door. A light from within the ship was flashing off and on and sparks poured from broken wires in the ceiling. They all peered in and all three instantly pulled back, disgusted by whatever it was they had seen within. Izzy even covered her mouth with her hand, trying to keep from being sick.

  “That’s a good reminder to always wear your seat belt,” Farrell told the others. He tried to shake off the horror of the carnage within and turned to his little brother. “Go in and check it out, Rom. Get a body count.”