Free Alien Invasion and Other Inconveniences by Brian Yansky Page B

but as soon as I get in the doorway, it feels like this one time that I was stupid enough to touch an electric fence, but worse. I’m thrown back on my butt, and my whole body is shaking.
    I can see the room. I can see Catlin. But she’s on the other side of the force field, or whatever it is.
    “What did you do?” she says.
    “I opened the door. Something stopped me from getting in.”
    “I told you it’s like some kind of spell.”
    “I can see you,” I say.
    “Do something.”
    I stand up. It hurts. My feet feel numb. I force myself to move.
    “I don’t know what to do.”
    “Maybe see if you can make the spell look like something you know,” she says. “Like a curtain maybe. Then try to tear it.”
    I hear something that sounds like water rushing toward me. It’s loud. It sounds like a killer wave. I suddenly slip back into a memory, only it seems more real than a memory: I’m a kid and we’re white-water-rafting in Colorado and I fall out of the raft. I get caught on a rock and I’m pounded by rushing water and then pulled under. I can’t do anything. I know I’m going to die. Then I’m out of the water. My dad has me somehow. He’s saying my name over and over.
    No
.
    “It’s not real,” I say out loud. I know my dad isn’t here to save me.
    I concentrate on seeing a curtain in front of me.
    “Are you doing it?” she says.
    “I’m trying.”
    “Me too,” she says. “I’m trying, too.”
    “I’m pulling at it.”
    “Wait, look at the bottom.”
    I see it. A tear. I yank it. I hear the rushing water behind me. I feel the memory of being pulled under the water, being held there, and being sure I’d never get back to the surface. “But you did get back to the surface,” my father’s voice says. “You got back.”
    I yank a big piece off the curtain.
    “We’re getting it,” she says.
    We’re pulling and yanking and finally it unravels and Catlin runs out of the room. She runs right past me.
    “Come on,” she says. “There’s no time.”
    It’s hard getting down the stairs. They’re jammed with people. About halfway down, we jump over the rail. It’s about an eight-foot drop, but it would take too long to shove our way through the crowd. I lead Catlin to the kitchen. It’s easy to get there. Everyone else is going the other way, trying to get out the doors in the den and front. We step out the back door. I hear a few voices at the front of the house, but I also hear people screaming inside that the doors are locked.
    Lauren, Michael, Lindsey!
I shout with my mind.
    They shout back. They’re close. I see them down past the pool. No one else is there.
    “Come on,” I say to Catlin.
    The three of them are staring at something. Then I see it. A wall. Not the stone wall that surrounds the grounds but something much taller and wider. At first it looks like some kind of metal. Then it becomes a mirror and I can see our reflections in it. I can see the house, and because the lights are on, I can see faces up against the windows in the den. I can hear windows break but no one gets out. Something is holding them in. I hear them screaming.
    “This is why there weren’t any traps,” Catlin says. “They’ve put everything into this wall. They’re going to destroy everyone inside it.”
    “But we’re valuable,” Lauren says.
    “They don’t care anymore.”
    The wall is enormous. I see in my mind that it stretches to the sky and into the earth, that it is as deep as a city block. To me it now becomes steel. It’s the worst thing I could imagine. Am I imagining it? How else is it possible for it to keep changing?
    “It’s not real,” I say.
    “It’s real,” Catlin says.
    “What we see isn’t. It’s like what he did to trap you in your room, only more powerful. What do you see it as?”
    “It’s like a mountain,” she says. “It’s like a smooth cliff. Black and shiny.”
    I hear the wall of water crash over the house and I know it’s only a matter of minutes