The Secret of Zormna Clendar by Julie Steimle (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

the back door.

“I’m not leaving.” He stalked back to the couch with a simple two-step then sat cross-legged among the flying dust and poufy pillows.

Zormna set a hand to her head. Why did she hesitate? Times like these, she wished she had her gun. Not to kill him. Maim sounded nice though. “What do you want?”

Darren’s smug grin answered her enough. “I just want you to be honest with me, like you are with Jennifer. She knows the truth. I know you told her.”

Shooting him one solidly dry stare, Zormna snorted. Back to the old shtick, that idiot. He just didn’t give up. But there was no way she would expose Jennifer to him.

Zormna about-faced and walked back into the kitchen.

She realized why she hesitated to just knock out the guy. With the FBI still outside, it would be problematic to deal with dead weight. Besides, it might also give them reason to listen to Darren rather than treat him like the neighborhood kook. The only alternative was to ignore the idiot until he got bored.

She went to the refrigerator to see if she had anything to drink.

“Come on! I know you want to confide in somebody,” Darren called from the living room. “You are all alone here. And only I know enough about your people to give even you a decent conversation.”

Opening the fridge, the bright shining light inside accentuated the bareness of the white hollow space. Zormna examined the meager contents. Three jars, an old half-eaten pizza, and a large plastic bottle with barely any juice inside. Not much. She also got a whiff of something nasty. The inside of the refrigerator reeked with mold. She’d have to clean it again. Bleach this time.

One of the shelves in the refrigerator door had a mold-filled spaghetti sauce jar, green fuzz plentifully lining the insides. Lifting it out with extended fingers, extended arm, and leaning back, Zormna carried it to the kitchen trash can, dropping it in. She dumped in the pizza also. Then she went back to examine the rest of the bottles inside.

“Why don’t you admit that you are a Martian? I know Jennifer knows, but she’s playing the same game you are.” Darren came up to the doorway. “All this secrecy is so stupid.”

Bristling underneath her skin, Zormna resisted the urge to throttle him. Did he think the FBI were merely playing a game of tag with her? Why could he not comprehend that this was life and death? But Zormna only grabbed the large bottle from the fridge. It still had something swishing in it. Screwing off the top, she sniffed the contents then shrugged. Nothing moldy or foul.

“What are you afraid of?” Darren asked, watching her ignore him. “It is just you and me here. The Feds can’t even listen now.”

“Ha!” Zormna rose, her face warming as she tightened her fingers around the bottle.

“What?” Darren leaned back, placing a hand on his chest with a convinced-that-he-was-innocent stare. “Don’t you think I’m trustworthy?”

“Trust worthy? No.” She circumvented Darren’s blockade of the kitchen door and continued to the dining room door with her juice, taking a glass from the cupboard. “An idiot? Yes.”

He lurched as if he’d been slapped, turning as she entered the living room.

“A complete and total blab? Oh, absolutely yes.”

Darren crumbled into a slouch against the kitchen doorway, but he wasn’t devastated enough. Apparently her words had to be arctic. He had to want to leave.

The fool watched as she dropped into an armchair and set the juice bottle on the coffee table.

“I’m not a blab.” He followed her back into the living room, sulkily dragging feet.

“Ha!” erupted from Zormna again before she realized. She poured herself a glassful of juice. It would help with the dehydration at least. Then she could plan a better way out of this mess. “You couldn’t keep a secret if you tried. All your stupid Martian talk has gotten you the reputation of the class weirdo. No one respects you. They think you are as crazy as my great aunt.”

 “But your aunt wasn’t crazy.” Darren rushed up to her, crouching at her feet like he was worshipping her. “You know that.”

“Oh, please.” Zormna shoved his forehead to get him away. He fell against the end table. “First off, she’s my great aunt. Secondly, she is dead. And thirdly, I never met her. I know nothing about her except what people have told me. And everyone I have met has said she was crazy.”

“That’s not what I meant.” His voice took on a whine. He rubbed his forehead, sitting up. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“Look, you—” Infuriated, Zormna downed the rest of the glass, pouring another tumbler-full—the rest of the bottle. She didn’t even know what flavor it had been. Some kind of citrus. “—you are an annoying pest. An idiot. Sane people don’t go around talking about things like that.”

Yet as she said this, Darren grinned smugly as if to say: “You almost admitted it.”

She got up, groaning.

“Come on.” Darren followed her. “What’s wrong with sounding a little nuts? The world should know about life on Mars.”

Throbbing started at her temples. Just the sound of the word Mars, set it off.

“Your aunt even said so.” Darren leaned nearer, almost whispering.

Zormna almost hit heads with him when she looked up. She lurched away. “Oh. For pity’s sake! Go away! Talking like that is what got my great aunt killed!”

But he didn’t seem to hear. “She said that someday Mars and Earth would unite. And someday we would all exchange ideas, and technology, and food stuff and…”

Clenching her scalp, Zormna walked away from him, not really going anywhere exactly. The headache was coming on stronger. But Darren rambled on, staring up at the ceiling in awe like he were beholding the cosmos right there instead of the hanging light that was missing a few crystals and new cobwebs tangled on them.

“Wow! I can’t wait for that to happen. Martians openly coming to Earth. We’ll have a leap in technological advances and a real chance at space exploration. We’ll finally find out if there is really life out there! Well—besides human life. She said…she said it was likely, but only the Surface Patrol really knows. ” He looked to Zormna. “So do you?”

“Shut up!” Zormna moaned. Her head felt like it was about to split. Questions about a take-over ran through her mind, repeating over and over like an awful dream. “Stop being so stupid! My great aunt should never have said any of that.”

Darren was only slightly miffed at being called stupid. He gave Zormna a harmless shrug. “What for? It’s true isn’t it?”

She only moaned, dropping back against the chair. “I told you! This nonsense why she is dead! She told you that crazy story, and you blabbed it to the world. Then the FBI heard about it, and thinking it was an alien plot to take over the Earth, they killed her.”

Darren’s mouth popped open, not quite forming words. Blinking, shocked, he slapped a hand to his chest. “You aren’t blaming me are you? It isn’t my fault she died. Honest!”

Her head felt like it was splitting in two. “Is that so?”

“Yes! I swear! The Feds didn’t kill your aunt.”

“Then who did?” she growled.

Pulling back, his shoulders slumped. “Ah, Zormna. Don’t look at me like that. I am telling you the truth.”

Her angry expression did not change. Darren had always acted like he knew something, but he held that knowledge at ransom. He cringed.

“The FBI did kidnap her. Everyone knows that is true. But they didn’t hurt her—”

“They hurt me,” she snapped.

 He swallowed. Looking to the ground, he replied in a lower voice, “Look, she came back a little groggy. That’s all. But she was on her feet by the end of the week, telling me what she knew. It was after, that I—” He abruptly looked down, choking on the words. “It wasn’t the FBI. Someone else killed her—someone from your home world.”

Which she had already figured out. She had just been hoping to make him feel guilty so he would go. Zormna dropped into a chair. Though her head throbbed, it didn’t hurt so much now. “You were the one that found her dead, weren’t you?”

He did not look up as he nodded. Then he peeked up at her critically. “There’s something you’re not telling me about this. Something you know.”

Moaning, Zormna stood up again. “There is a lot I am not telling you, you moron. Just go away.”

She picked up the bottle and carried it back into the kitchen.

But he followed her like a puppy. It was a shame it a crime to kick puppies.

 “Look,” she whipped back around, “Stay out of this. Give. It. Up.”

“But Winston Churchill said to never, never, never, never, never—”

She stomped up to him so that they were nose to nose, even though he was taller. “Winston Churchill never met me.”

Darren leaned back, almost laughing. “What can you do? I heard from Jennifer that you are stuck here.”

Zormna stiffened, really hating him now. He was right of course. But that was no reason to let others control her life. And it was downright impossible to ignore him. He was like a mosquito.

“Well, I do know a lot.” And Darren followed her again into the kitchen. “I know you have to be in the Surface Patrol of Mars—looking at your haircut. Those long strands in front of your ears are symbolic of being an orphan, worn until you are done mourning your beloved dead.”

He tugged on one before she could jerk her head away.

“Where did I leave that rolling pin…?” Zormna muttered.

“I know a lot of Martian history,” he continued, following her. Apparently he did not scare easily. “I can tell you about the nation of Knarr and the first Orr-quarr revolution. I can tell you about the Battle of Cliff Walls—which was major battle with, I think, a few songs. And I can recite the story about this demon named Asgul and how he had many heads. You see, people once believed that a giant lived in the north polar ice cap and he—”

Zormna slapped a hand firmly over his mouth. “Don’t.”

Silently, he smiled, stepping back. His eyes glittered.

Dropping the empty bottle into the trash, Zormna went to the sink to wash out the glass. Unfortunately, Darren followed, practically at her elbow.

“Well,” he continued, enjoying the moment. “I can also tell you about the Tharser’s Law—how your caste system was made. Your aunt told me everything. I think she was lonely.”

Zormna whimpered with a look to the ceiling.

“I wanted to write it up in a book, but my English stinks,” he said.

“Stop.” She closed her eyes.

Darren stared at her. “Are you all right?”

“You are giving me a headache.”

He blinked at her.

After a while, he spoke a little softer. “You know, she told me about your family also. How your father was a doctor and your mother was a nurse. They met when they were young at that orphanage. But they didn’t become soldiers like you did. She said (your aunt) that she had been waiting a long time for you to come here. She said she knew one day you would be here in this house, I dunno, like she could see it happening.”

Zormna stared at him. “That’s how she knew?”

He nodded. “She said it was a family trait. Knowing important things before they happened.”

Zormna’s eyes widened. Not that she believed that she had the gift of prophecy or anything—but there were times when she had known certain things would happen. Her dreams were always vivid. If she wasn’t reliving the past, she sometimes had dreams of things that came true—like the moment she had arrived in Pennington Forest. She had dreamed that event for years, not knowing what that was. Except for the dream of Pennington Forest, she had always ascribed the phenomenon to deductive reasoning of her subconscious mind. But her most recent dreams were of frightening events, like war. And some were of people whom she