Return to Paradise

As expected, everyone at Alex’s is pretty buzzed. Half the team is there, and for a while it feels like it could be any Saturday night out of the last few years. Still, I spend the few hours I’m there sipping on the same warm beer just in case I need to keep my wits about me. No one seems to notice that I never need a refill as long as I’ve got a red plastic cup in my hands and mime drinking every so often.

When it starts to get a little late, I sneak out the back and to my dad’s truck. I don’t bother saying good-bye to anyone—tomorrow morning no one will remember what time I left, and I’ll get a text or two talking about hangovers and asking if I got home okay. I’m about to start the truck when I realize there are extra keys on Dad’s ring. One for our old house. One for my grandmother’s. And a few more with rubber around the tops: the keys to the police station.

The hair on the back of my neck stands on end as I consider the possibilities of what this could mean.

From what my dad’s told me, the FBI is basically working on-site at the school. That means at this time of night there are only a couple of officers at the station. Maybe a few agents too. But I know my way around pretty well up there. If I were to drop by, I could probably figure out a way to sneak past the front desk and get into my dad’s office, where all kinds of files might be kept. Even if the FBI’s taken over, there must still be initial reports at the station. Whatever it was that my dad and his officers saw when they arrived on scene that night.

If I could get my hands on some of those, maybe they could shed more light on the investigation.

I drive towards the police station before I can talk myself out of it.

CHAPTER NINE

TODD’S THE ONLY OFFICER ON DUTY. I THINK I’m the luckiest guy alive until he rolls his eyes and gives me a long, drawn-out sigh as I walk in.

“Go home, Mark,” he says curtly.

“Todd, man, what are you doing here all alone?”

“Someone mentioned that I was talking to civilians while on duty yesterday, and I got switched to the graveyard shift. That’s what.”

“Oh,” I say. Oops.

“Plus there’s been some kind of electrical fire on the outskirts of town that everyone was raring to get to.” He inhales and wrinkles his nose a bit. “Jesus. You smell like a bar.”

I’m not exactly surprised. Alex’s house smelled like it had been sprayed down with cheap beer. Still, this electrical fire is great news for me.

“I was just at a party,” I say with a shrug. “Someone must have spilled something on me. You know how it is. You’ve told me about the epic ragers you guys used to throw when you were on the team.”

Todd gets a wide grin and goes into a story I’ve heard a hundred times from him about how he drank the entire special team’s roster under the table out in the woods on his eighteenth birthday. I smile and nod and tell myself that I’m never going to be this dude when I get older. If humans aren’t the alien workforce or something by then.

Finally he’s done.

“Man, that sounds so hard-core,” I say, forcing a grin. “I’m super jealous. Anyway, I just came by to pick up some stuff my dad left for me in his office.”

Todd nods and gestures to my dad’s door, still grinning from his memories.

I unlock the office with Dad’s keys and quietly close the door behind me. The place is a mess of files strewn about the desk and seemingly random sheets of paper stacked on every surface. I start digging through the piles, but after a few minutes of searching, all I’ve come up with are weeks-old traffic violations and endless paperwork on stuff not at all related to John or the Mogs. Then I realize that of course that stuff’s not going to be lying around, and I use one of the small keys on the key ring to open the filing cabinet by my dad’s desk. After flipping through a few hanging folders, I come to the one I’m looking for: PARADISE HIGH SCHOOL.

Yes.

The first file I pull out is full of initial incident reports and nondisclosure agreements from the first responders. I toss it on the desk to come back to later. The second file’s a jackpot: full-page photos of the destruction at the school. The trenches dug through the football field and the huge divots I recognize as actually being footprints. Shotgun shells littering a classroom we holed up in for a while. The trashed auditorium. All signs that point to the fact that this was maybe something other than the work of a teenager with a vendetta against the school.

My pulse pounds as I take out my phone and start to snap photos of the pictures. I can upload them all to the blog later. GUARD and the others will flip when they see this shit. I rifle through the pictures as fast as I can, recording each one. My brain is buzzing, and I can hear my blood thumping in my ears.

Maybe that’s why I don’t hear anyone come in.

Someone yanks the back collar of my shirt and jacket, choking me. I’m swung around, and the surprise causes me to drop my phone. The file photos scatter across the floor. I expect to be staring into the face of a Mogadorian, or one of the agents.

But it’s worse.

It’s my father.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he bellows.

“Dad, I was—”

“Do you have any idea how much trouble you’d be in if someone else caught you in here? How much trouble I’d be in?”

“Dad, let me—”

“This is a matter of national security, Mark. I mean, Christ.”

He pushes me backwards with a strong shove. I stumble over my feet and hit the ground hard just as Dad’s picking up my phone. He taps on it, systematically deleting everything I’ve taken pictures of, cursing the entire time. It’s only then that I realize how weird it is that he’s here in full uniform so late. Whatever happened with the fire tonight, it must have been important enough to call him in.