Apocalypse Before Finals by Julie Steimle (electric book reader txt) 📕

of interest until that summer. Jeff was an enigma with a solid alibi claiming he was just an abused kid from Chicago who was living with an uncle for a second chance. He had a caseworker and everything. However, since his discovered connection to Zormna Clendar, the FBI eventually found holes in his backstory. It took a lot of digging though. The only thing the FBI could nail down was that Jeff was a sneaky conniving kid with more connections than a mafia boss.

It took the incidents in Florida and in Arizona to truly get the dirt on the pair, but most of what had been gathered on them had been unreliable, conflicting data. Rumors really. Talk of prophesies and blood lines. For starters, Jeff had an alias or two, but the FBI stuck to calling him the Boy. It was easier. As for Zormna, her life really was like a Dan Brown novel. The only solid fact they got was that Zormna was of royal blood. A Tarrn. But her family wasn't in power back in their home world. In fact, they had been thousands of years out of power, according to their informants. As for Zormna, it took truth serum to get her to even say a word about her secret lineage. Tarrns hid as Tarrns were hunted.

As for the rest? Jeff was her newly, self-proclaimed bodyguard.

That annoyed Zormna at first. The FBI noticed that more than anything else. And why not? Because why would a military captain of her influence need a bodyguard? Especially one whom everyone called Super Ninja behind her back - because she really was uniquely skilled in martial arts. Having a royal lineage thousands of years back was just too silly of a reason.

But setting all those facts aside, what did this mean to the Mars Project?

The Boy and Zormna Clendar were proof that there was life on other worlds. And not just that, but proof of a dangerous, advanced civilization which had already infiltrated the nations of Earth.

The problem was, Agent Sicamore no longer felt intrepidly able to pursue this project further. They had all the facts, but...the Boy had found a way to restrain the FBI's investigation, drawing it to a stifling standstill.

Agent Sicamore shook his head and closed his file. There really wasn't anything he could do. Zormna could commanded her fleet of Martian pilots and pick his operatives off, if she wanted. They had seen that in Arizona. And the Boy - well, the Boy knew Agent Sicamore's darkest secret. He, Agent James Sicamore of the FBI, was also of Martian blood.

No one in the agency knew this detail - and it was crucial to keep it that way. Truthfully, nothing had devastated FBI agent Sicamore more than this fact. He hadn't even known about this awful connection until three years ago when he met had Zormna's great aunt, merely thinking the woman a lunatic. And even then he had not understood what his connection to the woman meant until a year ago, when Zormna came into town. Sicamore had always assumed his parents were Scottish or something like that. The idea of alien had never occurred to him. Now... it would ruin his career as well as his life if it ever got out.

He blamed Zormna's great aunt. It had started with her.

Everybody in Pennington Heights knew the famous 'crazy lady of Hayes Street thought she was a Martian. And like a nut, she did crazy things, including 'borrow' electricity from her neighbors to power a radio that could send messages into space. If she hadn't done that, she never would have been killed...because the FBI never would have been sent to investigate her for a possible drug house.

But Agent Sicamore closed his eyes, chastening himself. It was wrong to blame the victim. It was all his fault the old woman had been killed. A proper FBI agent did not talk about on-the-job stories with their parents.  

But he had.

And they had reacted with such horror at the things he had said.

He should never have talked about the brand mark they had found on the woman's shoulder. He should never have mentioned her weird 'alien' name. He should never have said anything to them...but he had been de-stressing at the time and had let his guard down. And worse, a couple days later she was found by the neighbor boy, slumped in her couch with a bottle of pills at her side, dead as dead could be.

No one bought it as a suicide, though it was meant to look like one. Everyone had believed she was murdered. Her neighbors though her too bombastic in her eccentricity to just give life up with an overdose. Her accountant (who was also her lawyer), swore she was waiting for family to arrive. As for the FBI? They found too much evidence that she never took even one pill except for the one that lay on her tongue dissolving but not swallowed. And more plainly, her autopsy showed that she had been stuck with a needle and injected with fast-acting poison, poison not much different from the contents of the pill bottle, though hardly distributed in her body as the pills would have if digested. Everyone in neighborhood believed that the FBI had killed her, for whatever reason.

Yet the neighbor boy who had found her, Darren Asher, believed that aliens from her world had 'offed' her for political reasons. Everybody thought that boy was nuts...except the FBI. Unfortunately Darren could not tell them any more about who had the woman killed - only that she had been perfectly safe before they had showed up. In that interview, Darren accusatorily said to agents questioning him, "You've got a mole. Someone from her world heard about her from you people. One of your agents has to be from Mars, because she was safe until you came along."

And that ended the investigation. The FBI thoroughly doubted they had been infiltrated by aliens from another planet, which saved Agent Sicamore who had in that moment recalled his encounter with his parents. And later that evening, he had gone home and confronted them.

But they had denied everything and the incident had been forgotten. Or at least he tried to forget it. For two years Agent Sicamore felt a nasty low guilt that it was his fault the crazy lady of Hayes Street had gotten killed. Instead, he worked with the investigation to find a more 'credible' killer with a more credible motive. 

None showed up. And the case went cold. Since then, they had focused on more pertinent subjects - such as terrorists from the Middle East and cyberattacks from countries that were currently out of favor with the leading political party of the day. Fact was, when Zormna Clendar had showed up, they were ready to box the entire thing up and leave that part of the state for a better office.

She had really ruined everything. The girl would have entirely gone under the FBI's radar if she had not committed the same foolish mistake as her great aunt. Zormna had also used the radio system that hogged her neighbor's electricity (which had never really been dismantled, as the house had never really been put on the market to be sold). Using that radio was like lighting a beacon, saying "I am here." Even then the two FBI agents had been dispatched to merely find out who had activated that radio system, never mind sending signals into space. That's when they discovered Zormna Clendar.

And they were floored. Not just by her looks - though they were mesmerizing. In fact, her looks proved she was a relation to the old woman. But her manner, all her marching, her military posture, and her intense paranoia proved to them there was more going on about this family than first suspected. And though Zormna claimed to be from Ireland, when Zormna admitted that her family had all been murdered and she was upset to find upon arrival that her great aunt was also dead, it just stirred everything up again. The FBI wanted to know who in the world would go out of the way to murder a crazy woman. And who is the world was this peculiar, mesmerizing young woman?

Zormna's presence made Agent Sicamore nervous. His fellow agents were, unfortunately thorough when doing the background checks. They found out that Zormna's documents were all forgeries, which made them suspicious. Their minds started to work out theories about terrorists and political coups. Zormna's claims about growing up in a military school made them even more suspicious, as she could not give them an exact address. And though Zormna had been adamantly insistent that she had come from Ireland, it was all Agent Sicamore could do to keep a lid on the investigation so that it would not blow out of control. Yet, he also wanted to know where she had come from and why she had come to Pennington, of all places.

He had not given the permission for her three-day kidnapping and interrogation. That was the fault of the other project head, whom Sicamore was sure was a secret Nazi part of the supposed "Project Blue Beam". The go-ahead was given when their agents saw that Zormna had the same exact circular brand mark on her right shoulder as her great aunt. Of course Agent Sicamore was terrified that history would repeat all over again...and they would have a dead girl in the neighborhood.

The worst part of it all was that under interrogation, using truth serum, Zormna Clendar had admitted to being a soldier from Mars. She did not deviate from it. They had taken samples of her blood, recordings of her peculiar language, x-rays of her skeletal structure, measurements of her body density, and lots of other proof that she was not from this world.

And that ended their exodus. The FBI would not be moving from Pennington Heights after all.

If it had been just Zormna, Agent Sicamore was sure he would have kept the entire thing contained - but that was before the Boy was discovered. That was before the Boy and Zormna were friends.

The Boy, it turned out, was no one to mess with. And worse, Agent Sicamore had no idea how the Boy had unearthed his secret.

On that thought, Agent Sicamore rose from his desk to leave his office, shaking his head and massaging his temples. It really was of no use. One day the Boy would spill the beans, and his life as an agent would be ruined. And there was no way he could leave the project now with his parents at risk. The Boy needed him to stay put to keep the other agents in line.

The door opened as he came to this thought. Sicamore found himself facing Agent Steve Keane, the FBI agent who had once pretended to be a high school student (by the name of Sam Perkins) to get more information on the teenagers - a tactic that didn't work well. Darren, of all people, had seen right through him, and Zormna was quick to listen to Darren Asher.

"Mr. Sicamore, sorry, I didn't see you there," the young agent started, haltingly.

Startled initially, Agent Sicamore waved it away, still rubbing his temples. "S'all right. What do you need, Keane?"

The young agent ventured to look pleased in spite of his superior's headache. "I wouldn't have intruded but, Agent Wills wanted me to hand you the visual report. Your secretary wasn't here, so I just came in."

The head agent nodded and waved him in. "Come in. Marc is off at lunch. I can take it anyway. I've nothing better to do."

Agent Keane nodded and stepped into the room, closing the door. He placed the file onto the desk. His feet shifting awkwardly, as his task was done and he had not originally intended to linger. Taking in the stress on his superior's face, he said, "What's troubling you, Sicamore?"

Agent Sicamore moaned. "If only you knew,"