The Deadliest Earthling Read online

  Mitchell’s friends helped him up. “So long, Aldrin. That’s a good look for you.”

  Johnny watched them wander off to a bench as Sarah strolled over, removed her black jacket, and tossed it onto his shoulder.

  “Thanks,” he said, wrapping himself in it.

  She smiled wryly. “For old time’s sake.”

  He could still remember how they’d exchange funny stories about Orun or her stepdad. How she would draw caricatures of the teacher and he’d pin it on their doors. They were best friends as children. They probably would’ve remained best friends if not for him. He pushed back a pang of guilt thinking about that.

  She turned away, and he waved, wishing he could properly thank her. Because soon he would leave New Bagram. Forever.

  Johnny beelined for Ibdan’s office, turning more than a few heads along the way. He probably looked borderline nuts, sporting a jacket and muddy, bare legs as he sprinted through the streets of New Bagram. Maybe people would throw it off as one of his pranks.

  He craved his Conifer. The one time he could’ve used it to create a hologram of some clothes, and it was locked inside the police station’s evidence vault.

  Ten minutes later, Johnny skidded to a halt in front of Ibdan’s office, an unassuming bungalow, specks of mud dotting the wooden exterior.

  The door opened before he could knock. Ibdan frowned. “I heard there was a cadet running around in his underwear. I was hoping it wasn’t you.”

  “I have something important to say,” Johnny managed, catching his breath. “May I enter, Drill Sergeant?”

  “Let me put out newspapers.”

  “Newspapers?”

  “I don’t want you bringing in mud.”

  When newspapers covered a patch of his drill sergeant’s office, Johnny entered with express orders to remain standing only in that one spot. Ibdan sat on the edge of his desk. “Go ahead, Aldrin. It better be good or you’re going right back into the Hole.”

  Johnny delivered his theory, piece by piece, his drill sergeant’s face devoid of expression even when he finished.

  “You busted out of the Hole to tell me this?” he asked, peaking an eyebrow.

  “Actually, Mitchell broke me out.”

  “Mitchell?”

  “A classmate who hates me. He—never mind. Look, if you don’t believe me, call the police station. And tell Orun to move my Conifer somewhere safer.”

  Ibdan cleared his throat and grabbed his walkie-talkie off his desk. “I suppose that can’t hurt. Now go wait outside. The less mud you drip, the less I have to clean up.”

  Johnny groaned, but complied.

  A minute later, Ibdan emerged, looking perplexed.

  “What?” Johnny asked.

  “Someone broke into the evidence room, but stole nothing.”

  Chapter 5

  The four teenage recruits sat on the airplane seats, two on one side of the first-class cabin, two on the other. Styrofoam cups rested in their hands. Leaky Sam, the barkeep, had seen fit to give them free beer. So long as Johnny promised to take a photo with him and autograph it. Which he still had yet to do.

  A pyramid of playing cards stood on a pull-down table, and rain peppered the window. Beyond defunct cargo planes, fighter jets, helicopters, and stealth bombers were strewn across the tarmac. Once they’d worked as weapons against the Anunnaki. Now they served as Watcher recruit quarters.

  Hamiad placed two playing cards atop the formation of cards that was looking closer and closer to one of the Anunnaki’s conoid bases.

  “If someone broke into the evidence room, there had to be a purpose. But what?” Hamiad asked. Johnny had wondered the exact same thing since Ibdan told him. Worse, the police didn’t even know who’d broken in. Just that the locks were loose and a couple documents had fallen off the shelves.

  “You think Ibdan wasn’t telling you something?” Skunk asked.

  “Ibdan’s a military guy. No reason for him to lie,” Johnny said, the Conifer dangling securely over his dark green tank top. The police station had done a full inspection of the Conifer and reported no tampering. He was just glad the voice of reason spoke to the city council and convinced them to let him go.

  “Who could be trying to steal it?” Krem said. He shared the same light brown hair as his sister, Sarah.

  “Well, gee, if we knew that we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Skunk said, rolling his cup back and forth against his chin.

  “Seems like whoever is planning this out is a real nut job,” Hamiad said. Even sitting, he was taller than Johnny, his skin several shades darker.

  Johnny scratched the back of his neck. First, Durmet set up explosives beneath the school. Then he shot himself. Police investigated, discovered his dog tag, and locked him up. Which meant putting his Conifer into their secure locker. And someone broke in, but they didn’t steal it. This didn’t add up.

  “Think Durmet was working for the Anunnaki?” Skunk suggested. He added a card to the stack they’d built on the pull-down table.

  The cabin door pressed open. A lanky guy named Turner walked in. He was a school friend of theirs, not a Watcher recruit. The disturbance of air from the door swinging shut made the pyramid of playing cards quiver.

  Everyone gave a collective groan of suspense, but the pyramid survived. Turner joined Krem and Skunk on one side and looked them over. “You guys don’t have to stop just ’cause I’m in here. You know I won’t tell anyone what I hear.”

  “Everyone says that until an Anunnaki probes them,” Skunk said.

  “We were talking about Snake-eater status,” Johnny said, not caring to fill Turner in on this whole incident of his brief time in the Hole and Durmet’s suicide.

  “And how Johnny’s going to earn it,” Krem said. He believed in him so much, he’d coined the phrase What would Johnny do?

  Johnny lowered his gaze. He probably would earn it. Every year, the Eagle recognized the single most promising Watcher cadet to become a Snake-eater. That cadet commanded graduating recruits in battle. Got his or her name in the New Bagram history books. Received important missions from Watcher higher-ups. All stuff that would have made people forget how his parents screwed up.

  Really the only two possible candidates for Snake-eater this year were Hamiad and him.

  Turner sipped from his cup and looked to Johnny. “Well, if I’m being honest, I don’t see them giving it to you.”

  Johnny tilted his head to the side, genuinely curious. “Oh really?”

  Turner seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “Aren’t Hamiad’s tactical scores better than yours?”

  “Well yeah,” Johnny admitted.

  Still, something in the back of his mind said the Eagle would never give Hamiad Snake-eater status over him. But it was a fleeting reassurance. A vague reason he took for granted so long ago that he didn’t even remember what it was.

  “Guess we’ll have to find out,” Hamiad smirked, extracting a single card from the pyramid. Somehow the whole card formation remained standing.

  “Oh, almost forgot,” Turner said. “There’s a letter for you. It’s on your bed.”

  Johnny nodded, got to his feet, and strolled to his hanging net hammock bed.

  Sure enough, a yellow envelope sat there with his name on it. He opened it and discovered a simple index card with the words, Do you remember your parents’ last words?

  Chapter 6

  Every Anunnaki is your enemy.

  Johnny never figured out why his parents failed their mission, but eventually he learned what they meant with their final words to him. He’d stumbled upon the phrase in an old textbook one day while cleaning out a storage closet as punishment for a prank involving a camel spider and a classmate’s desk. It was a really old Watcher code speak term. Apparently not a very good one, because it meant almost the same thing. Show no mercy. Take no prisoners. That summed up his parents’ final wishes for him. Sure, there was the chance their explosives cut off the radio, but deep down he sens
ed they wanted these to be their last words.

  Every Anunnaki is your enemy.

  An awful lot lived on Earth now. One billion plus. They were spread over just about every continent and governed most of the Earth in some fashion or another. If not with an iron fist, then through trade agreements or proxy-governments. In some cities, they directly ruled over humans, and the humans accepted it of their own free will. Small pockets of resistance still existed around the planet, but the hotbed of it centered here in the Middle East. And tonight, he would officially join that resistance.

  Obviously someone intended to get under his skin by sending that message. He couldn’t deny their success. He didn’t even want to think about how this would affect his concentration on the obstacle course. His final task before graduation.

  The bugle of the reveille echoed across the city. Johnny sat up in his hanging cargo net, already dressed in a white shirt and black pants with his Conifer dangling over his neck. With the merest thought, he activated the Conifer’s cloaking. Anyone could use the Conifer, and it didn’t require much practice to create a basic hologram. He’d racked his mind all night why someone wouldn’t just steal it and use its cloaking to escape.

  Five minutes later, the thirty graduating cadets fanned out. Every year on the day of the Feast of Endeavors, the Watcher recruits did an honorary good deed for New Bagram. A way of saying thanks for all the support. Johnny’s squad was assigned to help a veteran. Sarah’s stepfather.

  A wide, muddy road delivered Johnny, Hamiad, Skunk, and Krem to a row of large wooden houses. A dark green Humvee rested in front of one. Despite the vehicle’s age, the layer of dirt covering it appeared to be its only real wear and tear. Johnny wrinkled his nose in disgust. Not dirt. Sewage. Too much water pressure during the storm must’ve burst a pipe.

  “Dig in,” Sarah said, holding out fresh towels.

  Johnny started on the Humvee’s windshield.

  “You don’t have to clean if you don’t want to,” he offered.

  “Yes, I do,” Sarah said, cocking her head to her house. Johnny knew immediately that she was referring to her stepfather, Tobias.

  “He’s not in a good mood, huh?”

  She shook her head. “You know that guy who shot himself?”

  “Durmet.”

  “A few weeks ago, Tobias lent him a lot of his research files. About Mars and the Anunnaki. Well, the man burned those.”

  They were a good ten minutes into the car wash. Johnny could feel his wrist tightening from the constant scrubbing of the tires. And the scent of sewage kept him snorting every minute.

  “How neat does Tobias expect this thing?”

  “Wants the stink to come off,” Sarah said, rolling her eyes at her stepfather’s ridiculous standards.

  “Guess the Conifer won’t help any,” Johnny said.

  She shook her head.

  “He’d probably think this is good practice anyway,” she said wryly.

  “Right. You can already speak their language,” Johnny said, straining to reach beneath the front tire. “Now you just gotta hone those housekeeping skills, and you’ll be the perfect Naga servant.”

  Sarah shared a laugh with the four of them. Johnny hadn’t heard her laugh that way in ages. He forced away a pang of regret that they could never make up their years of lost friendship. The consolation was that he could at least apologize to her before he deployed.

  Between Krem’s boasting over how he wasn’t afraid of dying out in the battlefield and Skunk’s complaining to Hamiad that the drill sergeants were giving away his cherished cockpit bed, Johnny didn’t get a chance to talk to Sarah for another half hour.

  “Thank your mom for us,” Hamiad was the first to say as they gathered up the towels and brushes to leave. It was because of Sarah’s mother that New Bagram received funding to train recruits like him into great soldiers. That’s where she was now. On a trip to speak with New Bagram’s financial backers.

  Skunk nodded, tossing a damp towel into a yellow bucket.

  “You know I’ll be at the Feast tonight,” Sarah said.

  “Yeah, but we’ll probably be so drunk, we’ll forget to say bye,” Skunk said.

  Johnny quietly stuffed all the stray towels into the yellow bucket from the sidelines. When the other three began walking away, he gave a long sigh and faced Sarah.

  “I know, but…” He pulled a few shiny tin medals from his pocket. The Feast of Endeavors was so chaotic that many times people didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to everyone they wanted. He didn’t want to risk that. Once cadets shipped out, they almost never returned. Not because they died, necessarily, but because they could never find their way back. They weren’t meant to.

  The whole idea of the Feast was to get graduating recruits super drunk. Then instructors would take them out of New Bagram through a secret passage, blindfolded and blacked out. They’d wake up in a city somewhere, ready to battle Anunnaki, no idea how to get back to New Bagram.

  “I figured I should give these to you now.”

  He deposited the four medals in her palm. One for each of his years as a recruit. Each denoted him as the overall best cadet that year.

  Sarah rattled them in her hand. “Medals, huh?”

  Due to public outcry in New Bagram, girls couldn’t enlist as Watcher recruits unless they filled out a petition with support from an enlisted recruit. Four years ago, Sarah had asked him, and initially he’d agreed to vouch for her. But when the time came, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Deep down, he couldn’t accept that she could so easily escape her stepdad and make her life perfect. Afterward, he tried to play it off as him not wanting her to endanger herself. But they both knew that was a lie.

  Johnny realized she had no clue why he’d given these to her.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to be a Watcher, but I think you deserved these,” he explained.

  Sarah squinted at them with a lukewarm smile. “Oh. Thanks.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She shrugged. The back of her white shirt was stained brown from all the cleaning. She gestured to the medals. “Thanks again for these. I’ll see you later.”

  Johnny swallowed, his throat suddenly raw. “You’ll see me later? I might not even see you tonight.”

  He stared hard at her, willing her to turn around. After a few seconds, she did with an impatient sigh.

  “Yeah, I’ve got some chores.”

  “The medals are already clean,” Johnny said.

  “What?”

  “If you were planning to clean them off, I already did it.”

  She didn’t want them, though, did she?

  Her hand and the medals fell to her waist. “Johnny,” she groaned. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

  Johnny spread his arms. “Hang them up. Tell people I gave them to you.”

  She’d never gotten to enlist, but he figured these tokens were the next best thing.

  “Oh yeah, they’ll sit really nice next to my dad’s collection.”

  Johnny shut his eyes hard for a couple of seconds and opened them. This was spiraling out of control fast.

  “Sell them if you want,” he said, keeping his voice as calm as possible. “You know everybody here eats this junk up.”

  She narrowed her eyes skeptically. “This isn’t another of your pranks, is it?” she said dryly. He had, on occasion, given useless trinkets—bullet casings, grenade pins—to teachers and indulged in a laugh with his fellow recruits when they fawned over it.

  The question caught him off guard. “Whoa, you’ve got me all wrong.” As soon as he said it, he realized how guilty he sounded.

  She shook her head with disapproval. He started to talk, but Hamiad called out at the same time. “Wrap it up over there.”

  His grin and loose tone didn’t help dispel the notion that Johnny’s apology attempt was only a prank.

  Johnny extended his hand. “I’m sorry, okay?”

  Sarah stared, her mouth c
lenched tightly. “I’ll see you at the Feast.”

  His stomach knotted at that, but he knew not to press the issue any further. He’d give her some space and try to resolve things tonight.

  Shoulders drooping, he gave a timid wave and walked away to join Hamiad, Skunk, and Krem.

  But as he drew near, someone materialized at the edge of his vision. He glanced at a long-faced man with pepper-colored hair, dressed in a blue jacket, dull black pants, and boots. Johnny registered the gleaming starred badge that hung on his chest. Officer Harrison.

  “Good to see you, Aldrin,” the police officer said, raising a hand cordially.

  Instinctively, Johnny lifted his, and their hands met.

  Something pinched his palm. He barely stopped himself from cursing.

  “Did you get my message last night?” Officer Harrison said, cracking a wrinkled grin.

  Chapter 7

  Johnny yanked his hand away and noticed the tiny red mark in the center of his palm.

  “They always said I was prickly,” the aging Officer Harrison said, dropping his hands to his side.

  “What do you want?” Johnny barked, glancing to see that his friends had continued up the road.

  “Eh, you don’t need their help,” Officer Harrison said.

  Eyebrows knitting together, Johnny asked again, “What do you want?”

  This guy had to be involved with the incidents of the last couple days, but how?

  “You don’t remember me?”

  “Should I?” Johnny felt like his feet were stuck in blocks of cement. He couldn’t leave despite the internal warning going off in his head.

  “The night your parents failed their mission, I was right there in the command room with you. But you were barely six, I guess you wouldn’t.”

  “But you’re a police officer now?”

  “Very perceptive. Yes, after your parents’ demise, I fell into a minor slump. I had worked out most of the logistics of their mission. And I thought I had done a good job.”