Invaders From Mars Read online

  A nod and a smile.

  David was relieved. He didn’t want to go back to Dr. Wycliffe.

  Early last year, David had begun having nightmares. He would wake up screaming almost every night. He usually wouldn’t remember the nightmares, but knew they were horrifying.

  Mom had told him to stop reading comic books and watching monster movies.

  “Don’t worry,” Dad had said, trying to reassure Mom as much as David. “I used to have nightmares, too. All boys do. Let him have his comics and monsters. The dreams will go away on their own eventually.”

  When they continued, Mom had insisted that David see a doctor. A psychologist.

  “A head doctor!” David had protested, nearly breathless with dread. “A—whatta you call ’em?—a shrink! You think I’m crazy!”

  “No, no, Champ,” Dad had said softly, putting his arm around David. “We don’t think you’re crazy. Mom just thinks . . . we think that it might be a good idea for you to see this doctor. Maybe he can find out why you’re having nightmares and help you get rid of them. Remember when Dr. Stewart took your tonsils out to get rid of that awful sore throat? It’s sort of like that.”

  But it hadn’t been like that. Dr. Stewart was a pleasant man with silver hair who gave his patients chewing gum before they left the office.

  Dr. Wycliffe had been short and fat with a pinched voice. The first thing David had noticed about him was his hair. There had been something odd about it. On his third and last visit to Wycliffe, he figured out what it was: the hair wasn’t real! It was a wig! A “too-pay,” Dad had called it. David decided that any guy who’d wear a wig had to be pretty loopy. Besides that, he couldn’t stand Dr. Wycliffe’s squeaky voice and the way he was constantly flicking his pudgy little nose with his finger, as if it were always itching.

  Dad had talked it over with Mom and they’d decided that David wouldn’t have to go back to Dr. Wycliffe if he really didn’t want to. Maybe the nightmares would go away.

  They did, eventually, just as Dad had said they would. But David still had one now and then. Sometimes he dreamed about Dr. Wycliffe’s “too-pay”: a black, furry animal squatting on the fat man’s head.

  David leaned forward in the seat as they approached the marine base. It was set a short distance off the road, surrounded by a tall chain-link fence with barbed wire around the top. At the front entrance, uniformed guards stood around what looked like the box office at the Sky-Vu Drive-in and a large sign hung over the gate. It read in bold letters:

  U.S. MARINE CORPS BASE

  CAMP LEWIS B. PULLER

  CALIFORNIA

  “Can we go in, Dad?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “C’mon, just for a minute? We’ve come this far.”

  “Not today. We’re late already. You want us to get caught playing hooky?”

  David squinted at him. “Hooky? You mean cuttin’ class, Dad. Nobody says hooky anymore.”

  “Whatever. They’ve probably got bloodhounds searching for you right now, sniffing at your dirty old sweat socks.”

  David laughed and punched his dad’s shoulder. Then he spotted the radar and leaned forward again, putting his hands on the dashboard. “There!” he exclaimed, pointing. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Within the compound, two large radar dishes slowly and diligently swept back and forth, scanning the sky.

  “Yep,” Dad said. “They’re fully operational now.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Okay, see, it’s a phased-array system,” he explained, hunkering forward over the steering wheel, as if he were leaning over a campfire to tell a story. “A short pulse of energy is transmitted into the sky, and if something’s out there, the energy is reflected back and detected on a sensitive receiver.”

  As Dad drove slowly by, David watched the two radar dishes, his lower lip tucked between his teeth. He tried to imagine what those energy pulses would look like if he could see them as they shot into the sky—like big, glowing candy bars? Like bolts of lightning?—and he tried to imagine them bouncing off the side of an enemy jet or . . . or maybe even an alien spaceship, zooming back to earth like high-tech Paul Reveres with a message of impending danger.

  Two jets roared by overhead, flying low and breaking through David’s daydream.

  “What if the energy pulses missed, Dad?” David asked.

  He shook his head. “If something’s out there, they’ll find it.”

  David turned around in the seat and got on his knees, watching the dishes grow smaller as they drove on.

  “What if they didn’t come back?”

  Dad thought about that a moment, then said slowly, “Well, then, I guess we’d have to put an ad in the paper offering a reward to anyone who finds and returns some lost energy pulses.”

  For a moment, David thought his dad was serious; then he saw the crooked smile and laughed, turning back around in the seat.

  “You sure we can’t go in for just a minute, Dad?” he asked.

  “Positive. But . . .” Dad paused, looking at David from the corner of his eye. “. . . if you want, you can steer until we get to the main road.”

  “Okay!”

  They scooted the bench seat back a notch and David squirmed onto his dad’s lap. He put a hand on each side of the wheel.

  “Eyes on the road,” Dad said, his voice soft.

  “Eyes on the road,” David echoed.

  Dad wrapped his arms around David’s waist and gave him a warm squeeze.

  C H A P T E R

  Two

  The halls were deserted when David got to school. The door to every classroom was shut tight and all the classes were in progress.

  Mrs. McKeltch is gonna be pissed, David thought as he began to run. Mrs. McKeltch was always pissed, it seemed, and usually at something David had done—sometimes even if he hadn’t done anything.

  Mrs. McKeltch was his homeroom teacher this year. Last year she’d just been a matronly woman with tightly curled and wavy gray hair. He’d seen her walking very fast through the halls in her stuffy old-lady dresses that always smelled like mothballs. They were always black or gray or brown with lots of busy swirls and curly-cues and stripes, and they always came below her knees. Her stockings were usually wrinkled slightly from her knees all the way to her thick ankles where they seemed to be stuffed into the flat, black shoes she always wore. Her shoes were almost totally silent as she stormed through the halls, her big hands curled into fists that weren’t quite clenched at her sides, looking as if she were on her way to the principal’s office, anxious to have some poor student expelled from school. She’d never smiled at David nor spoken to him—she hadn’t even seemed to notice him, in fact.

  She noticed him this year, though, and, as far as David could tell, she didn’t like him. Didn’t like him at all. Now when he saw her storming down the hall, it seemed she was hurrying to the principal’s office to expel him.

  The thought of Mrs. McKeltch—the way her jaw always jutted and her eyes narrowed to little cuts in her puffy face when she was angry, the way she always seemed to be thinking silently, This is the last straw!—made David run faster. His backpack jostled at his side and he clutched his pouch of pennies in his right hand. His feet made thunderous echoes in the empty halls as he rounded a corner and smacked into somebody hurrying in the other direction. David fell on his behind and his pennies spilled from the felt bag, jingling over the hall floor in a shower of copper. He locked his elbows and propped himself up on both hands, his legs splayed before him.

  It was the nurse.

  She was getting to her feet when David looked up, brushing off her burgundy skirt and running a hand through her blond hair.

  “Are you all right?” she asked with a breathy laugh.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.” He didn’t know what to do first—stand or start picking up pennies.

  “Let me help you,” she said, reaching out her hand.

  David took it and pulled himself up. Her hand was smooth
and cool. He smelled her perfume then, that cinnamony holiday smell. The blue name tag on her coat read: LINDA MAGNUSON, R.N.

  She bent down and quickly began picking up pennies. “You sure have a lot of pennies,” she said.

  “Yeah. I have over 760.” David started picking them up, too, noticing that some had rolled way down the hall. He would just have to let them go; he had to get to class.

  “Looks like you’re a little late,” Linda said, getting down on her knees to make the job a little easier.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me, too.” She laughed again; she had a pretty laugh. “I got lost this morning jogging in the hills by my house. I took a different path today and it took me nearly forty minutes to find my way back home!” She shook her head, embarrassed at herself.

  David stopped a smile at her. “Yeah, I saw you,” he said, instantly regretting his words. That was stupid, he thought. Now she’ll think I’m some kinda perv! A peeping tom!

  She cocked a brow as she held out a handful of pennies, giving him a quizzical smirk. “You did, huh?”

  David opened the pouch and she dropped in the coins. “Through my telescope,” he added. “I have a . . . a telescope in my bedroom window.” Dumber and dumber, he thought, embarrassed. “I live just over the hill from you. I think.”

  She picked up some more of the coins. “Do you always watch people through your telescope?”

  “No. Usually just stars. At night, I mean. Tonight there’s gonna be a meteor shower.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. My dad and me are gonna watch it.” He couldn’t hide the anticipation in his voice.

  “Here.” She handed him the last of the pennies and stood, brushing off her knees. Leaning toward him conspiratorially, she whispered, “Don’t let the hall monitor catch you.” She waggled her fingers at him as she started to walk away. “Enjoy the meteors.”

  David headed for his classroom, stuffing the pouch into his backpack. Impulsively, he spun around and said with a smile, “You smell nice!” Then, before she could look back, he turned away, giggling into his palm.

  Linda Magnuson was still smiling when she got to her office. The boy reminded her of the crush she’d had on her fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Scribner. He’d been a tall man with thick dark hair and a craggy face. Had it been possible, she would’ve watched him through a telescope, too. She wondered if the boy’s parents knew he was standing at his window spying on the school nurse in the mornings. Oh, well, it happened to everybody at that age, and usually more than once, before adolescence. Before that sort of thing got complicated and painful. The boy was at least normal, which was more than she could say for a few of the staff members at W. C. Menzies Elementary School.

  Mr. Cross, the principal, was a nice enough man, but during the short time Linda had been at the school, she had yet to see a single sign of leadership in the man. He was tall, thin, and bald, walked with a bit of a hunch in his back, as if to compensate for his height, and seemed more eager to please everyone than to run the school responsibly. His attempts to welcome her and settle her into the routine at W. C. Menzies were comical. For the first week, he was always poking his head into her office and saying, “Hi-de-hi! How are we getting along?” His intentions were good, she was sure, but rather annoying.

  Linda seated herself at her desk and found a note written in small, economical handwriting.

  Ms. Magnuson:

  Sorry to see you were unable to make this morning’s faculty meeting.

  —Mrs. McKeltch

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you were,” Linda muttered, crumpling the note up in her fist and tossing it into the trash can.

  McKeltch was another odd duck. Crimson bitch is more like it, Linda thought, slipping off her coat and hanging it on the back of her chair.

  Mrs. McKeltch seemed to be the one who ran the school. She’d been there longer than anyone and seemed to be the type who would stay until she dropped dead. Stuffy and unpleasant, neither smiling nor expressing any feeling other than, perhaps, silently boiling contempt for everyone and everything around her, Mrs. McKeltch stalked the halls like a warden in a low-budget women’s prison movie. Linda supposed she ran her classes the same way, and she pitied the woman’s students.

  From what little Linda had heard about her—and it was very little since the other faculty members did not speak of her often, and even then in hushed, fearful tones with cautious glances left and right—Mrs. McKeltch had been married briefly, many years ago, to the local librarian, a timid little man who, only a few months later, left town suddenly, leaving behind an unattended library and an unfazed wife. No one knew if the divorce had ever been made official, although it probably didn’t matter because Mr. McKeltch had never been seen or heard from again. Some joked that she’d murdered him and buried him in her fruit cellar, but everyone knew better. No one in his right mind would have stuck around long enough for that to happen and, although Mr. McKeltch had been timid, he was said to have been very smart and resourceful. He’d got away while the getting was good.

  There were rumors, of course, about Mrs. McKeltch’s sexual preference. Linda tried, as a rule, to disregard hearsay about anyone, but that possibility had occurred to Linda the day she’d arrived at Menzies. Mrs. McKeltch had stepped before her in the hall, apparently from nowhere.

  “Well,” Mrs. McKeltch had said, “you must be the new nurse.”

  “Yes. Linda Magnuson.”

  “Mrs. McKeltch. Welcome. You’ll have plenty to keep you busy here. You know how clumsy and irresponsible children are. Always hurting themselves one way or another. Of course, they’re just after our attention, but—” A tight smile, there and gone. “—what are we to do? Well,” she’d said, cocking a brow and looking Linda up and down slowly—a bit too slowly for Linda’s comfort, “I’ll be seeing you around, I’m sure.” Then she’d strutted off prissily, her dark, matronly dress fluttering about her.

  Linda sighed heavily, pushing Mrs. McKeltch from her mind. Time to get to work.

  David stood in front of the classroom door, staring up at the strip of green plastic that read: MRS. MCKELTCH—5TH GRADE. He could hear a man’s voice inside.

  Turning the doorknob slowly, quietly, he opened the door just a crack and peered into the classroom. Two uniformed men stood before the students. David recognized them both from the base. One was General Wilson—Dad called him Mad Dog Wilson, always saying the name with a laugh—and beside him stood Captain Rinaldi.

  “Camp Puller is where we train one of the Marine Corps’ largest air-to-ground combat teams,” General Wilson was saying, his hands joined behind him, his feet spread, as if he were standing at ease. He was a tall man with gray hair, a craggy face, and just a bit of a paunch above his belt. “Our infantry and aviation forces can respond to threats from any enemy force,” he went on, sounding just a bit nervous. He and Captain Rinaldi came to the school once every year to talk about the base and to invite the teachers and their students to come visit, and every year there was a field trip to the base, always led by General Wilson. He would always seem slightly uncomfortable, though, as if he weren’t quite sure how to act around so many kids.

  David opened the door a little farther and poked his head in, looking around for Mrs. McKeltch. She was to the right of the door, looking stern as always, her eyes scanning the students, looking for misbehavior of any kind, like those two radar dishes watching the skies for . . . whatever.

  Heather turned to the door, saw David, and smiled, shaking her blond head slowly, as if to say, “Shame on you.”

  Mrs. McKeltch saw the girl turn, followed her gaze, and spotted David. She turned her whole body to him, clenching her fists for an instant. “David Gardiner!” she hissed. She sounded like Jasper when she talked that way; the lizard always hissed when he was angry or scared.

  “Sorry,” David whispered, stepping inside and closing the door softly.

  “This is the third time this month,” she said, hissing again, stepping toward him a
nd leaning forward, her head cocked a bit, her eyes narrow with anger.

  Every head in the room turned to David, and he felt his face getting warm as he made his way to his desk. He was just two rows up from the door, but with all those eyes trained on him, it felt like a mile.

  Before he could get to his seat, Doug grabbed David’s hand as he walked by, pressing a tightly folded note into his palm. David wrapped his fingers around it and sat down, hanging his backpack over the back of his seat.

  “I’m sorry, General Wilson,” Mrs. McKeltch said. “Please go ahead.”

  General Wilson fidgeted, cleared his throat, and glanced at Captain Rinaldi, who smirked at Wilson’s discomfort, casually trying to hide his amusement behind the knuckles of his right hand, moving them across his lips.

  “Thank you,” General Wilson said, nodding to Mrs. McKeltch. “Um, we at Camp Puller are your protection against any hostile forces that threaten the peace and security of this school, city, or the country.”

  David turned to Heather, who was seated next to him. She was still smiling. David shrugged one shoulder, then looked down at the note. It was folded into a tiny square. He opened it slowly, trying not to let the paper crinkle.

  LATE AGAIN,

  DICK BRAIN!

  David looked at Doug, grinning at David with his head in his hands, elbows on his desktop, and smiled. Doug was always writing him notes like that, calling him names—usually dirty ones that would curl any parent’s hair—but it was okay, because they were friends.

  A hand shot over David’s shoulder and grabbed the note, tearing it away from him suddenly. David turned around to see Kevin Addams reading it, hunched over in his desk behind David.

  “Gimme that!” David snapped, instantly wishing he hadn’t.

  “Mister Gardiner!” Mrs. McKeltch hissed.

  He looked to the back of the room and saw her glaring at him, her jaw jutting.

  “I want to see you after class today,” she said, the hiss gone, her voice suddenly low and level with anger.