The Other Ones

“Are we home yet?” Joe whined, his teeth dyed bright blue from the candy drops he'd been inhaling for the past hour. He used his sticky fingers to brush a lock of red hair over his head and it promptly fell back over his eyes.

“Almost,” their dad replied, strumming his fingers against the steering wheel.

They’d been driving five hours and Thomas was ready to be on solid ground. The trip to Tanark Creek hadn’t been too bad. He’d survived a week in his family's isolated holiday home without reception or contact with other people. The fact they were returning alive, without visible bruises or injuries, was somewhat of a miracle.

Still, he was relieved to be back in Westcastern and keen to see his friends. Well, his friends and Jessica. Just before he left, he’d given her a gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket on the end. He’d got it at a car boot sale when he was twelve and had planned to give it to his first girlfriend. Not that he’d ever tell Jessica that.

It hadn’t helped that he’d been without reception for a whole week. He pulled his phone from his back pocket. His battery had died. That was just his luck, finally getting reception only to lose the battery.

“Anyone got reception?” he asked.

“Oh my god, you are an addict,” his mum said from the front seat. “Look at you, practically itching to get back onto Intergram and Tik Toke.”

Thomas groaned. His mum intentionally got names wrong just to irritate him and it worked. Every. Single. Time.

“Actually, my phone is dead. Which is weird because I charged it before we left,” she said, showing him the black screen on her iPhone.

“If I had a phone, I could check,” Joe called, his left cheek bulging from stored candy drops.

“No need to panic folks. Home sweet home,” his dad said as they pulled into the driveway.

There was a woman on Kathy’s front lawn, opening up her mailbox. She wore a long, brown dress with a mismatching puffy vest over the top. Peculiar looking outfit, Thomas thought.

“Hiya! Are you visiting Kathy?” His mum walked over to her.

Kathy, their neighbour, was eighty-one and very deaf. Thomas cleaned her gutters and whenever he went over there, he’d have to practically bang the door down to get let in. His mum had been fussing about her most of their trip, imagining her falling over in the shower or forgetting she’d left the stove on.

“Hi Pam,” the woman smiled broadly. “It’s me. Kathy.”

“You’re also called Kathy? And how do you know the other Kathy who lives here?”

“No. I’m Kathy, and this is my home.”

“I don’t… I don’t understand,” his mum responded with a sharp intake of breath.

“I’ll see you around, Pam,” the woman said, clutching Kathy’s mail. She smiled before turning and heading back into Kathy’s house.

Thomas and his mum exchanged puzzled glances.

“Can you call the police? I’m going to go check if Kathy is okay,” his mum said in a low voice.

Thomas ran inside and plugged his phone into the wall. He waited several minutes but it didn’t turn on. He tried a different charger and a different outlet, but still nothing. Was their power out? He tried to turn his laptop on but it wasn’t working either.

His mum appeared. “She wouldn’t answer the door,” she said.

Thomas held up his dead phone.

“I’m going to run over to Jason’s house and see if I can borrow his phone,” Thomas replied. He was lucky his best friend lived a few doors down.

His mum nodded, fiddling with the ends of her hair, like she always did when she was anxious.

“Oh god, I hope nothing has happened to Kathy, what if she’s been taken to hospital? Maybe I’ll go see if Claire has seen anything,” she murmured, mostly to herself.

Claire lived in the house directly opposite from them and didn’t get on with his mum, but he had to hand it to the woman, she always knew everything about everyone.

Thomas walked briskly to Jason’s house, feeling naked without his phone. He’d been so excited about returning to hundreds of notifications, once they finally came back into reception. He wondered if Jessica would be angry that he hadn’t messaged her. She would be expecting him to have arrived home by now, not that he even knew what time it was without his phone.

A blonde boy roughly his age opened the door at Jason’s. Thomas took a step back to see if he was at the right place. Yes. Number 42, Jason’s house.

“Oh hey man!” The boy smiled at him.

“Do I know you?” Thomas responded.

“It’s me. Jason,” he said.

Thomas froze. Jason was hispanic. Dark hair, dark skin and a badly drawn neck tattoo of a rose that got him grounded for six months when they were fourteen. Whoever was in front of him, it wasn’t Jason.

“Quit playing. Where’s Jason?” He was struggling to keep the anger in his voice under control. “Is this some kind of fucking prank?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about bro. Are you coming inside or what?” The boy took a step to the side to make room for Thomas to walk in.

Thomas turned and walked back down the driveway, his head spinning. He broke into a run until he got home.

He heard his mum yelling from the street and found her pacing the living room. His Dad was fiddling with the television, trying to get it to turn on.

“None of our phones are working. I don’t know what’s going on. When I went to see Claire, another woman answered and insisted she was Claire. Am I going crazy? I feel like I’m losing it.”

“Same thing happened to me with Jason just now,” Thomas interjected, biting down on his lip as hard as he could.

“It’s like we’ve turned up on a different street. We’ve only been gone a week!”

“I’m sure there is an explanation. Why don’t we go to the local police station,” his dad said gently to his mum before turning to Thomas. “Can you stay here with your brother?”

Joe was sitting on his bed reading a book. Thomas lay down on the bed next to him and covered his face in his hands, trying to think. Jessica lived a few streets over; it usually took him twenty minutes to walk to her house. If he ran, he could probably make it there in ten.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he said to Joe, who didn’t look up from his book.

He arrived at Jessica’s house sweaty and out of breath. Her house looked the same, pink hydrangea bushes sprouting around a freshly painted pale blue fence. Her dad was a gardening nut and always trying to get Thomas involved.

He knocked on the front door, then wiped his clammy hands against his jean pockets. He tried to steady his breathing. As soon as he saw Jessica’s face and knew she was safe, he’d feel better. He liked her face. She had a round one with chubby cheeks that she hated, but he loved, and dark brown skin with a spattering of freckles across her nose. Once he could see her, touch her, smell her, everything would be okay.

The door opened and standing there was a pale skinned girl with thin black hair.

“Hi Thomas,” she said, a solemn expression on her face. Her eyes were large, like two round coins, and they stared at him, unblinking.

Hanging around her neck was the locket he’d given to Jessica.

“No… How… how did you get that?” he stammered, taking a step backwards.

“You gave it to me,” she said, tilting her head to the side as she continued to stare at him.

He continued to back away but then tripped and fell backwards into the hydrangeas. He clambered up and ran home as fast as his legs would move. Hot tears pricked in his eyes and caught in the wind as he ran.

Joe was where he’d left him, still reading. The sight of Joe sitting there with candy stained lips, reading a book when everything was upside down, infuriated him.

“How can you be reading right now?” Thomas yelled.

“Because I’m trying to work out what is happening,” Joe responded, without looking up.

“What?”

“When we saw that woman outside Kathy’s house, it reminded me of this book I got from that car boot sale a few years ago. So I went and found it. Look at this,” Joe said, handing the book to Thomas.

On the cover was a picture of a person smiling, their head tilted to the side, under the title ‘The Other Ones’, by Anonymous.

Thomas opened to the first page and began to read.

In the not too distant future, the other ones will come. They will look and sound just like us. But they aren’t like us. The other ones are from a different Universe. There will not be room for both us and the other ones on Earth.

He skipped to the next page.

They will remove us from our planet, so they can take our place. They will study us before they come so they know all there is to know about us. They will need to do this, so they can replicate and mimic us. They will track us through our phones.

Thomas shivered. Now that he thought about it, everyone he’d encountered had given him a similar, eerie feeling. One he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but there was something missing behind their eyes.

He flicked to the last page.

The other ones will come on the 1st of November, 2030.

Thomas looked up at the football calendar on Joe’s wall. On November 4th, in red marker, it said: Return from Tanark Creek.

“So what, you’re saying that what’s in this book came true?” Thomas said, flicking his eyes from the book to his brother.

Joe shrugged. “We didn’t have reception or wifi in Tanark Creek so it’s possible this happened while we were away and we just got missed, somehow”

“Now we’re back, they’re going to realise we’re not one of them right? If they’ve studied us?”

Joe nodded, his expression turning grave.

“We need to go back to Tanark Creek,” Thomas said.

Thomas started the engine of his dad’s car. They had shoved some non-perishable foods and whatever clean clothing they could find in the trunk, but had made sure to leave their phones behind. Thomas had only done fifteen hours of driving lessons, because his dad was conveniently busy whenever he wanted one, but he knew the basics. He and Joe were going to drive to the police station, find his parents and get the hell out of Westcastern.

He backed out of their driveway and began to drive slowly down the street. He didn’t want to accelerate or make any noise. Some of the other ones already knew they were back.

He adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see the street. The other ones had all come out from the houses and were standing on the front lawns of people who had once been his neighbours. They remained still, watching him and Joe make their way down the street, their heads tilted to the side.

“They’re so creepy,” Thomas muttered under his breath.

“You doing okay back there?” he asked Joe, who was sitting in the back seat.

Joe didn’t respond so he adjusted the rearview mirror again, so he could see him.

Sitting in the backseat was a raven-haired boy with round eyes, his head tilted to the side.