Chapter Text
They kill time while they wait for Ray to get to the house by playing video games.
By “they,” Frank means him and Mikey. Illi comes down in jeans and a Watchmen t-shirt, but she doesn’t fight for a turn with the controller. Instead, she sits on the armchair a few extra feet away from the TV and buries her head in a sketchbook.
Frank isn’t very good at the game. Mikey keeps kicking his ass, and eventually they switch over so that Mikey is playing a brainless Sonic spinoff and Frank’s just watching, letting his eyes drift between the McMillin sitting next to him and the McMillin in the armchair.
Illi looks so serious and focused. She’s hunched over like a shrimp, her hair falling in a curtain over her face so Frank can’t make out any part of it. Every so often, she shifts from the semi-respectable sitting position she’d started in until she’s a complete pretzel with one leg practically over her head and the other contorted underneath her so she’s sitting on it. At one point, Mikey gets up and comes back with glasses and apple juice, and Illi doesn’t react at all until Mikey’s already filled her glass and set it on the table next to her, and even then it takes a couple of minutes for her to sit up and drink some, only to dive back into drawing.
Frank wishes he had that kind of ability to focus. If he could just channel some of this laser-focused energy into his homework, he’d be an honors student, no problem.
Illi keeps drawing for the nearly two hours they’re waiting for Ray. When Frank finally hears a car pulling into the driveway, Illi straightens up, stretching in the chair and shaking out her arms.
“I’ll get the door for him,” she says, and Frank and Mikey don’t argue.
“How does she know it’s Ray?” Frank asks when she’s out of the room.
Mikey shrugs. “Who else would it be?”
Sure enough, Illi walks back into the living room with Ray trailing behind her, also changed out of his uniform.
“Are we ready to go?” Ray asks, looking over at Frank and Mikey on the couch, clearly not ready.
“We’re going somewhere?” Frank asks.
“I can’t show you what I was talking about here,” Illi says like it was supposed to be obvious.
Mikey schleps himself off the couch and goes in search of his shoes. “Give us a second,” he says.
Frank has no choice but to follow, retrieving his converse from where they’d gotten kicked under the couch and lacing them back up.
“Do you want to give them the rundown you gave me?” Ray asks Illi.
“Actually, I think I figured out some new stuff,” Illi says. She pulls her backpack up onto the couch and digs through it, then curses. “Ray, do you have my notebook?”
Ray nods, pulling a familiar black notebook from his own bag. “You left it in science, I figured you’d want it.”
Illi grabs it like it’s going to be snatched away, then gives Ray a massive hug. Frank feels his gut curdle in an uncalled for and inappropriate way.
“Oh my god, thank you, you’re a fucking lifesaver,” she says into Ray’s shoulder. The two of them stand there for another second before Illi detaches herself. “So, Frank, you were saying earlier that the weather was really weird yesterday? All the signs of a storm coming in, but no rain?”
“Yeah,” Frank says, trying to push down the jealousy. Illi and Ray are friends, and he’s not going to flirt with Illi, so the interaction shouldn’t have affected him at all. He is not going to let it affect him.
“And all of a sudden, today, skies are clear and the air is still,” Illi continues.
“The news said wind speeds were two miles per hour,” Mikey offers up.
Frank blinks. “Wow, you do actually watch the weather.”
“Somebody’s got to,” Mikey says.
“Anyway,” Illi says, “that’s weird, right?”
She waits with one hand on her hip and the other on her notebook until everyone nods.
“Well, actually, it’s not,” she says triumphantly. “The same thing happened a week ago. And something else happened a week ago, too.”
She pauses again. This time, nobody reacts, but she forges onwards anyway.
“One week ago yesterday,” she says, digging through her bag again until she pulls out a newspaper clipping, “something crash-landed in one of the old factories.”
She lays out the newspaper clipping, and they all gather around it, walking over like they’re on a conveyor belt. Sure enough, the headline reads, Mysterious Crash at Abandoned Jenson Steel Plant.
“Police went to investigate because somebody nearby said they heard a noise,” Illi narrates, “but when they got there, all that was left was a little crater, only like, six inches across. They wrote it off as a meteorite, but here’s the thing–”
Everyone looks up at Illi. She’s sitting on top of the table, her notebook open to a blank page.
“No one could find the rock.”
“Is it really that weird?” Frank asks.
“It’s really fucking weird,” Illi argues. “What could have happened to it? Did it grow legs and walk away?”
“It could’ve rolled away,” Frank points out.
“Not on flat ground, out of a four-inch deep hole,” Illi says. “And the police responded fast enough that there was no chance someone could’ve gone there and taken it.”
“Typical fuckin’ cops, they can’t do shit about real crime, but they’ll trip over themselves for a meteor,” Frank scoffs.
“Right? Like, I'm kinda glad they did, but it’s so shitty. There was a story in this paper about some girl getting fucking kidnapped, on the same night, and the cops didn’t do shit,” Illi says. “I wish they had their priorities straight.”
“Yeah, leave the paranormal investigation to the teenagers,” Ray says, probably trying to diffuse some of the heaviness that’s entered the room.
“We’re not going ghost hunting, are we?” Mikey asks from behind a cabinet door. He emerges with a gallon bag of sour gummy worms and a bundle of half-empty chip bags. “You know I'm terrified of the restless spirits of the dead.”
He says it completely flat. Frank is shocked he isn’t rolling his eyes.
Illi makes a theatrical face of consideration, with one finger tapping at her lips and everything. Then, she breaks into a big, cheesy grin. “No ghosts! you’ll like it, I swear.”
“I trust you,” Mikey shrugs.
“So what are we looking at? Are we hunting something?” Frank asks. He feels kind of lost, like the three of them are on a wavelength that he's tuned out of.
“Frank,” Illi says, hopping off of the table and collecting her notebook and newspaper scrap. Her eyes are deadly serious, her face grave. “Do you believe we’re alone in the universe?”
“Uh,” Frank replies eloquently. Illi’s eyes are on him, and he feels that fucking pressure, like the air suddenly weights a thousand pounds and made of drills that are trying to bore holes in his skull. It’s not exactly painful, it’s not even scary, it’s just so much.
Ray coughs, Illi turns, and the feeling vanishes. “Save the spiel for the car, please? We’ve gotta get going if we want to make it there before dark.”
Illi hesitates before she fully turns to leave, but Frank is already halfway out the door. He’s hooked. He feels like he’s in a tv show.
If Frank loves Mrs. Elena's minivan, then he and Ray’s car will have a summer wedding. The thing is so fucking old it counts as vintage, with the bench backseat and fuck-all in the way of seatbelts and everything, but it’s in mint fucking condition because Ray is a crazy person, apparently. It’s an off-white with brass details that make it look like a wedding limo, and Frank finds it so fucking funny when the four of them, with their ratty clothes and dyed hair and obvious don’t-fuck-with-us energy, climb into it. It feels like it shouldn’t be allowed. Like they stole it.
Ray puts in an Iron Maiden cassette and Illi takes shotgun, setting her backpack into a spot in the footwell that looks like it was carved especially to fit her stuff. She must ride with him a lot, Frank realizes. He doesn’t have time to feel jealous over it, though, because as soon as the door is shut Illi is whirling around in her seat to face him.
“So back to what I was saying,” she says like she’d never stopped talking, “do you think we’re alone in the universe?”
“Um,” Frank says, prepared to give some vague answer.
“Because I don’t think so,” Illi talks over him. “I think the universe is so huge, and constantly expanding, and there’s this scientific theory that nothing unique exists because of how big the universe is. Like, the chances of something happening exactly once are so fucking low, because everything is always happening all the time.”
“Are you talking about-” Frank starts.
“Aliens,” Illi finishes. “Yeah, I'm talking about aliens. Life from other worlds, intelligent life. More intelligent than humans, even.”
“That seems like a leap in logic,” Frank argues.
“Is it, though? Or is it just easier to assume that we’re special because we’re humans? I mean, scientists are pretty sure life exists on other planets, just based on, like, plausibility.” Illi’s eyes are full of stars and she’s talking a mile a minute. Frank has to watch her lips and pray to understand her as she starts muttering. “You know, we used to think that the universe orbited around Earth, because that’s what it looked like from where we were standing. But we learned that it wasn’t true. It’s not that simple, it’s fucking wheels within wheels. It’s the most complicated thing in the universe. But also, it totally isn’t! It just looks that way because it’s foreign to us.”
“It’s all about perspective,” Ray pipes up when Illi has to pause for breath, like they rehearsed this so there would never be a pause in someone speaking.
“Exactly,” Illi picks up. “Like, we as humans think astrophysics are so fucking complicated, but shit like psychology, it’s all pretty intuitive, and all the hard stuff comes from trying to define it. It’s all innate. What if there’s life out there that thinks astrophysics is innate? And they think human behavior and shit is as mysterious as the workings of the universe?”
“If they’re as smart as us,” Ray says in a tone that makes it clear he’s used to summarizing Illi’s tangents like this, “we could learn so much from them.”
“The exchange of information,” Illi agrees dreamily. “I don’t even give that much of a shit about psychology, but it would be amazing for, like, mental health treatment and stuff. And they could tell us all new stuff about space! Stuff we’d never have a hope of learning otherwise!”
Frank thinks Illi would make a really good cult leader, because he has no idea what his opinion on aliens was before he got in this car, but he’s all in now. He pictures little green men talking to scientists in big spaceship labs, how society would be able to advance so much faster with help from beyond the stars.
But Frank is also a horror geek who has watched one too many alien-invasion movies, so the anxiety creeps up pretty quickly.
“Who says they’ll actually help us, though? What if they try to kill us or something?” he asks.
Illi shrugs. “They might.”
“Real reassuring,” Mikey says. Frank feels slightly queasy.
“I mean, we did it all the time,” Illi continues. “It’s the colonizer mindset, right? We invaded other countries and killed the people there because they were dangerous savages and we were enlightened. To a hyper-advanced alien species, we’re no better than big animals with ranged weapons. If they can make us submit to their will by force, they probably would. At least, if they’re anything like humans.”
“Cool,” Frank says weakly.
“But that’s assuming they are like humans. They might be totally pacifistic. Or maybe they’ll keep us as pets or something.” Illi looks weirdly hopeful for that. “The point is, again, we have no idea what aliens are like, because the only intelligent species we have to go on is ourselves.”
“Except, if you believe in some of the reports, we might know more about aliens than we think,” Ray says. He’s driving one-handed, the other hand lifted off the wheel to gesture.
“And that’s what we’re going to investigate,” Illi finishes with a flair. “We’re going to the steel factory, and we’re gonna see if anything happened with the crash since yesterday.”
The rest of the drive isn’t long. Ray turns up the music and he and Illi chat in the front while Frank contents himself with watching the clean-cut lawns of suburbia give way to the industrial block.
It’s miles upon miles of overgrown, scraggly grass and barbed-wire fences. Beyond the barriers, massive concrete buildings emit a subsonic buzz that seems to drown out any other noise, so that Ray has to blast the tape just to hear it. All talking stops once they get deep enough into the maze of factories and warehouses. They’d just have to shout anyway, and there’s nothing to talk about that’s worth that much effort. The sky, blue as it was when they left, is rapidly darkening into a murky gray-green, not with rainclouds, but with pure smog from the smokestacks in the distance. It’s still too early for sunset, but Frank can tell that if it does get dark, even with the lack of lights in this area, you wouldn’t be able to see the stars.
They pass through the active factory roads in strangely tense silence. It’s only when they escape the hum do they start to relax. The plant life, where it was dry but maintained, is now choked with weeds and wildflowers, growing up as tall as four feet in some places. Signs dot the fences at regular intervals, but most are so rusted over that Frank has no hope of being able to read them. He chooses to assume they say trespassers welcome, as long as you’re searching for proof of extraterrestrial contact with Earth and moves on. If they didn’t want kids exploring, they should have taken better care of the place. Everyone knows dilapidated industrial sites are a teenage haven.
Ray parks the car on a patch of cracked asphalt that might have once been a parking space and, once they’re all out, pops the trunk.
“Okay everybody, respirators on,” he says, pulling out four objects that look like gas masks.
Frank takes one hesitantly. “Did you just… have these?”
“Me and Illi go exploring a lot,” Ray shrugs. “I keep a few handy.”
Frank shoots a glance at Mikey, who already has his mask on and therefore is even harder to get an expression out of than usual.
“But like… why?” he asks.
“So we don’t inhale mold spores and die,” Illi says brightly. “Mikey, you especially need to be really careful. Do you have your inhaler on you?”
“Yup.”
“Great! If everyone’s ready, let’s get moving.” Illi starts walking towards the factory.
Frank thinks they moved on from the dying of mold thing way too fast, but he’s already several paces behind everyone else and he refuses to get left behind in a freaky abandoned parking lot, so he secures his mask over his face and jogs to catch up. The grass seems to pull at his pant legs as he walks, catching every few steps. He nearly falls flat on his face after tripping over a giant, thorny dandelion, and he reaches out to grab Illi’s shoulder for support on instinct.
She barely even reacts, just reaching out an arm to keep him steady while he reorients himself.
“You okay?” she asks, turning to face him–
Frank looks away, anticipating the force-stare before she can get a chance to lock him into it. “Yeah, just tripped,” he says. It sounds lame.
Illi keeps a hand on his arm for a moment longer than he thinks is normal, but she’s gone before he can really tell, bounding back up to the front of their group to lead them through the open hole in the side of a wall.
“This used to be the loading dock,” Frank hears Ray say through the ringing in his ears. “So it just goes to a warehouse area. But there should be a few ways onto the factory floor. There’s the conveyor belts, but if they’re in a closed system I wouldn't risk using them. All the walkways should still be intact, but we shouldn’t use the catwalks unless we have to. They might buckle if they’re too rusty, and any paint will hide the rust until it’s too late. We should really avoid any elevation.”
Frank stares at the back of his head.
How the hell does he know all this? When he’d said he and Illi explored a lot, Frank thought that meant fucking around in empty lots and after-hours skate parks, but Ray sounds competent, like he breaks into dangerous decomposing buildings every day. Hell, he might. Frank was honestly kind of freaked out going inside the building, but listening to Ray talk kills all his anxiety. He’s more at ease climbing into the factory than he’s been in months.
Inside, the walls are plastered with graffiti. Most of it is actually pretty good, and it’s all well-lit from the evening sun shining through high, grimy windows. One mural really sticks out to him in particular, because it barely looks like spray paint at all, more like a stencil, but it’s huge and all made of interlocking bright green circles and lines. The pattern is splashed over an entire wall, overlapping and in some places completely covering other throw-ups (which Frank is pretty sure is against graffiti code or something, but he’s not sure), and it must be pretty recent, because it’s completely unobstructed.
He doesn’t realize everyone else is gone until he hears footsteps behind him.
“Frank? Where’d you go?” he hears Ray say.
Frank can’t seem to take his eyes off the mural, so he responds without turning, “just looking at the art, man, sorry.”
Ray walks up next to him, staring at the graffiti with a weird expression.
“Somebody must’ve spent forever putting this up,” Frank laughs. “D’you think they brought a ladder?”
“Maybe,” Ray says, but he sounds distant and skeptical.
“C’mon, you against street art or something?”
Ray shakes his head. “No, it just reminded me of something. I don’t know. Come on, Illi’s gonna run into a death pit if we aren’t there to stop her.”
Ray has to actually, physically pull on Frank’s shoulder before he turns to follow him, and Frank feels weird and off-balance once his back is to the wall. He’s got a sinking feeling in his stomach as they catch up with Illi and Mikey, but he ignores it. He’s always a little nauseous with adrenaline when he’s trespassing. Just a cool quirk of his.
Ray said to avoid elevation, but Illi sees a stairwell with the door propped open and leads them through it anyway. Ray doesn’t protest, which Frank decides is as good as he’s going to get. Besides, the only thing worse than potentially falling to his death or getting buried in rubble is being left alone in the creepy warehouse with the doom-feeling he’s got slowly creeping up his spine.
Peer pressure is funny like that.
Unlike the loading bay, the stairwell is pitch black and windowless. Illi pulls flashlights out of her backpack and distributes them. The beams are weak and white, but with all four of them pointed in the same direction, the stairs are pretty well-lit. Frank wants to ask if, like Ray with the masks, Illi just keeps a number of flashlights in her regular school backpack, but something feels like it’s gluing his jaw shut, so he leaves it be. He can always ask later.
On the first landing, Illi stops, pointing her flashlight at the ceiling so it illuminates the whole room.
“Okay, so, once we get in there, we should have a plan,” she says. “We shouldn’t split up, exactly, but if we’re all in the same room it should be fine. Just stay within shouting distance. We’re not looking for anything super specific, obviously, just anything that looks cool or like alien shit. Oh, and look out for the crater, ‘cause the article didn’t mention–”
There’s a loud, metallic scraping sound and Illi goes quiet.
They all go quiet. Frank’s not even breathing, and he doesn’t think anyone else is either. They’re all just holding their breath together in the stairwell for a long second, glancing at each other with big, startled eyes.
When no more noises follow, Frank whispers, “what was that.”
“Building settling?” Ray says, sounding not very confident.
“Doubt it,” Mikey voices. He sounds scared beneath the deadpan.
“New plan,” Illi whispers, “is that we stick together. Nobody gets out of arms’ reach, okay?”
“Sounds great,” Ray says shakily.
Frank nods.
“Lets go find some fucking aliens,” Illi grins.
The sinking feeling in Frank’s stomach is becoming something physical. Not just the usual nerves, it feels like he swallowed a magnet and it’s trying to stick to the metal-grate flooring underneath them. It takes serious effort to move his feet, but he diligently follows Illi up the staircase.
Every step upwards, the feeling gets stronger, until it feels like the gravity of an entire solar system is trying to pull his digestive tract out through his toes, and he can’t take a full breath. He swallows hard and tastes bile and metal. He feels dizzy with doom.
At the top of the stairs, there’s a closed door. Illi reaches for the handle and Frank’s vision tunnels.
“Don’t open it–” he tries to say, but it’s too late.
Illi swings the door open to a wall of light that’s green and white and dark purple and too much, and a long, loud wail like microphone feedback, and then Frank is unconscious, tumbling down the stairs.
Frank wakes up a few seconds later, thank God, to Mikey kneeling over him.
“Thank God,” Mikey echoes.
Frank’s mouth feels thick and unruly, but he manages to say, “what happened?”
“I have no idea,” Mikey says. “Something fucking exploded or something. How’s your head?”
“Fucking ow.” Frank says, but that’s not actually completely accurate. He’s got a crazy pressurized feeling in his skull, like his brain is four sizes too big, but it doesn’t actually hurt. He sits up, rolling his head on his shoulders, testing the sensation and grimacing. “Feels really weird.”
Mikey’s eyebrows are furrowed, but he’s still got his gas mask on, so Frank can’t tell what expression he’s actually making.
Behind him, the sound of someone else groaning makes them both turn.
Illi is slowly pushing herself into a sitting position from a crumpled heap, and Mikey’s at her side in a second, pulling her up and leaning her against a wall.
“I’m fine, leave me be,” she tries to say, but Mikey’s not hearing it. He’s got an instant ice pack (where did he get that?) in one hand that he’s pushing to her forehead, and she rolls her eyes before taking it.
Frank can see Ray now, also starting to move from his laid-out position. Frank tries to help him up, but he’s not exactly steady on his feet and has to crouch to avoid falling over again and giving himself more head trauma.
Ray blinks at him blearily. “Why am I on the ground?” he asks.
“Something happened and we all got knocked out for a second,” Frank mostly guesses.
“Like an explosion,” Mikey adds.
“Shit,” Ray says. “We should check for concussions.”
“Do any of us know how to do that?” Frank asks.
Nobody says anything.
“Great,” Frank sighs, rolling his eyes.
When he looks up, though, his vision catches on something.
The door to the factory floor is wide open, and he can see a sliver of wall. It’s bright inside, so there must be windows somewhere, but that’s not what stands out.
He stands carefully and climbs the stairs, leaving heavily on the handrail.
“Frank, what the fuck, where are you going?” Mikey demands, climbing up after him, which apparently means it’s time for everyone to get up, since Illi and Ray are right behind them.
When they all get to the doorway, they’re stunned into silence.
“You said we were looking for alien shit?” Frank says.
“We fucking found it,” Illi breathes.
All over the walls of the factory floor are more of those stenciled designs, massive and precise and layered in shades of lime and indigo. They cover every inch of flat space in the room, except the floor.
The floor is one gigantic crater.
“That has to be at least half a mile wide,” Ray breathes.
“What the fuck,” Mikey says, astutely summing up how Frank feels.
“There’s no fucking ceiling,” Illi says, sounding slightly manic.
And sure enough, the ceiling has been smashed open, letting weak gray sunlight flood the space.
“That explains why it’s so bright in there,” Frank says.
Then his stomach drops, half a second before another metal screech echoes through the factory.
“Fucking run!” Frank shouts, grabbing Illi’s hand (because she’s closest to him, he tells his brain) and sprinting back into the loading bay.
They retrace their steps at top speed until they’re back in Ray’s car, and they don’t relax until they’re driving through the active factory roads. Ray keeps driving until they see a gas station, where he pulls in and parks, breathing heavily.
“What the fuck was that,” Ray says. “Illi, what the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know,” Illi answers, mystified.
“Aliens,” Mikey says.
“Motherfucker,” Frank wonders. “It really was fucking aliens.”