//------------------------------//
// The Refugees 
// Story: I'm Afraid of Changeling (and other short stories) 
// by Cold in Gardez 
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I remember being surprised by the camping trip.

Dad picked me up from school. Dad never picked me up from school – he worked late and I took the bus home like the other latchkey kids, and a few hours later he’d show up with a pizza or fast food and help me with my homework or play videogames with me until bedtime. Normal kid stuff, in other words. But we never went camping.

I’m not sure Dad knew the first thing about camping until he picked me up that day. The back of the Toyota was loaded with coolers, tool boxes, sleeping bags  and one of those collapsible tents from Gander Mountain with the sales tag still stuck on it, all atop a foundation of bottled water packs. I stood on the sidewalk, peering over the pick-up’s side at this odd collection, too surprised by his sudden presence to ask what they were all for.

“Hey Billy, hop in!” Dad leaned across the seat and popped open the passenger-side door. “We’re going camping!”

I pulled myself up into the truck. Outside, more parents had come to collect their children. Teachers stood outside, corralling kids and clutching their cellphones.

“Why?” I asked.

“No reason.” He revved the engine as soon as I fastened my seatbelt, and we shot out of the parking lot. The 20-MPH school zone stretched down the block, but we broke fifty in just a few seconds. Police cruisers zoomed past, lights flashing, but they didn’t seem to notice us.





“Okay, this looks good,” Dad said. We’d been driving in tense silence, all my questions resolutely unanswered. We skipped the main thoroughfares, sticking to back roads until we reached the start of a long, desolate stretch of Illinois highway.

I looked around. Corn stretched out for miles. “We’re camping here?”

“Yeah.” He turned the wheel as we reached a seam between two fields, the truck’s tires chewing up stray stalks of corn that intruded on the margin. Behind us, the road receded, and in minutes we were surrounded by nothing at all.

Dad popped the truck into park and jumped out. “Listen, we've got some time, but there's a few things I've gotta tell you.”





Hours later we had a campfire going. It turns out anything will burn if you use enough lighter fluid.

We sat beside each other. Dad had our new .308 rifle in his lap. It came with a short instruction sheet that focused mostly on cleaning proceedures.

“They taught you about the Visitors in school, right?”

I nodded. Part of the history curriculum included the Visitors, the sole aliens humanity had ever encountered. The lessons were short and scant on details – they came, stayed for a bit, then left, never to be seen again.

“Okay, good. So, those lessons are a bit, uh, incomplete.” He worked the rifle’s bolt, ejecting an unspent round onto the grass between my legs. I picked the cartridge up and stared at it, amazed, until he took it away.

“They were refugees, and they asked for help,” he continued. He was sweating now, his face a sheen alight in the fire’s glow. “And we wanted to give it to them. It was the right thing to do. There was so much we could have learned from each other.

“But there were problems. There were millions of them on that little ship, all frozen like popsicles. It would’ve cost more than our country made in a year just to unthaw them and feed them.”

He stared up at the sky. It was filled with stars, more than I had ever seen from our Chicago suburb. “And more than that, they were dangerous. They were refugees fleeing a war, and we couldn’t let that war come here.  It was their problem, not ours. We wanted to help, of course, but we had to look out for ourselves first. There was no way for us to know which ones were good and which were bad.”

“Dad, why—”

“Some people wanted to help, but we voted and they lost. It was a close vote, though… maybe that will help?”

Something streaked across the sky above us. A new star appeared, and then another. Dozens, hundreds followed, until a new galaxy spun in orbit over our heads.

“Listen, I don’t know how they feel about us now,” Dad said. “But you see this? This is the bolt. You lift it up and pull it back to eject the round you just fired, and push it forward again to reload.”

I learned an interesting lesson that night. And all the while more stars arrived above, the wages of our fathers' cowardice come home to haunt their children.