Alien Invasion (Book 1): Invasion (19 page)

Piper gripped Meyer in a death hug, burying her face in the comforting smell of his shirt, his body, the adrenaline sweat of fear and aggression.
 

“Something you need to understand, Piper,” he said.
 

She looked up, her vision still blurred. His handsome face, his hard jaw line, his serious green eyes.
 

“The rules are different now,” he said. “Any time you hesitate, you fail. Any time you don’t do what you should at this point, someone dies.”
 

In her mind, she saw the man with the tie and the glasses — an ordinary fellow driven to madness. He didn’t seem like he’d normally have hurt a fly, but if not for Meyer’s intervention, he would have hurt her plenty.

She hadn’t been able to pull the trigger. To end a life.
 

Even though he’d have ended hers, and almost ended Meyer’s.
 

It seemed for a moment as if Meyer would wait for her to agree, but instead he simply offered them each the same look he’d given earlier, after the exit ramp argument. The look that asked if they all agreed to follow his orders, without second-guessing.
 

“Let’s go,” he said.
 

Piper looked at the group, somewhere between a second authority and a true follower. Raj had somehow lost his pack. Lila and Trevor had kept theirs and so had she despite all the tussling, but Meyer’s had been split and was almost flat, emptied somewhere along the way.
 

He looked back once, his eyes repeating the summons.

Then they set off through the rundown neighborhood on the outskirts of Chicago, their supplies half-gone, as the first signs of evening brushed the sky’s light.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Day Three, Evening

Chicago

Light began to fail sooner than Lila expected.
 

At first, she hoped it was just the clouds and that daylight wasn’t bleeding from the sky. She looked at Trevor, seeing him meet her eyes, maybe thinking the same. A message seemed to pass between them. She was looking to Trevor instead of Raj, as she always had until Trevor entered his moody phase. What she read on Trevor’s face didn’t make the reversal worthwhile.
 

Her brother was just as nervous as she was. And just as afraid of the dark.
 

Remembering her father’s earlier warning, Lila walked the streets warily, her fingers tight on her tiny vial of pepper spray. She kept her index on the vial’s trigger, pressing the ridges on its top into the meat of her finger. She was ready to spray anyone who approached. Ready to defend the family, but to stay together this time.
 

She wasn’t sure what had passed between her dad and Piper in the crowd, but his warning about hesitation had seemed to carry weight — an unspoken agreement and a stern reminder to someone who’d done wrong once and should be careful not to do wrong again. And even though the message wasn’t really for Lila’s ears, she was determined to heed it.
 

Things really had changed. For two and a half days, the world’s air had seemed electric with potential, but until now it had remained
potential
. The riot proved that things were falling apart. And if it really ever did come down to her family or someone else, Lila was all too willing to defend her family.
 

Her left hand stole to her belly, almost of its own accord.
 

All of her family.
 

Still, despite what Meyer had said at the aborted exit ramp, the neighborhood around them had thus far been much quieter than the highway had been even before the riot’s eruption. Houses were small and shoddy, paint peeling and windows hung with mismatched curtains. The power was still on, and at least that was something — some reminder of the civilized world Lila felt they were increasingly leaving behind. But the people stayed inside, if indeed they were even at home. It was possible they’d all fled.
 

They heard a few shouts on two separate occasions as they crossed the massive sprawl, both times they steered far away, content to never know what might be brewing.
 

A few other times, they’d almost run directly into groups of people out in public without knowing they were even there. They’d skirted these too, but with far less warning. To Lila, as they passed and peeked between homes and across yards bordered with jangling chain-link fence, they looked like
gatherings
— the diametric opposite of what her father had warned them about, in terms of roaming, rioting, looting groups. She’d see old people sitting in chairs in front yards, more people behind them on the old houses’ long wooden porches. Others were in the yards to the side. Some milled; some stood as if watching. Many held weapons. But in one of them, a charcoal grill had been lit, and she’d smelled the scent of meat on the air. There had been light chatter. Civilized. Nothing to fear.
 

But as they moved farther from the expressway, that almost optimistic mood began to sour. Light bled from the sky, turning it yellow and orange and red, then finally dark blue and purple like a bruise. Neighborhood light seemed to drain. Fewer windows were lit. Many structures were boarded, dark as pits. Trevor suggested breaking into one for the night, seeing as they had nowhere to sleep and even streetlights were few and far between. The night seemed to harbor terrors — or, to humanize the threat — perhaps lowered inhibitions about theft and violence. As Meyer had said, they had supplies and were wandering a place where people were used to having little.
 

The idea sounded good (if terrifying) to Lila. She knew she wouldn’t get much sleep in a creepy abandoned house in Chicago’s distant underbelly, but at least they could hide.
 

But her father shook his head, not so much as slowing when Trevor indicated a suitable candidate. For one, they’d need to break in, and that would make noise — drawing more attention, not less. Second, they might find that someone else had already bunkered in, and the resulting territory dispute could erupt like two dogs fighting over a bone. Third — and most importantly, Meyer’s tone implied — was the issue of escape should something go wrong. If they broke into a dark house, they’d be boxed in. If anyone entered to see what the travelers carried worth stealing, they’d be trapped with no way out.
 

No, he said. They would only shelter in an abandoned home if they absolutely had to.
 

So Piper — tentatively, as if suddenly deciding that her place, after the riot, wasn’t to ask questions — asked what they would do for the night.
 

Meyer said, “We’ll walk.”
 

After untold hours sneaking through the dark, the moon rose. Lila glanced up to see the orb’s reality clicking into place in a way it never had before. The moon had always been this thing above — a round yellow object that waxed and waned every month. Now she saw it for what it was: a rock floating through space, fathomless emptiness behind stretching out into a lonely eternity. The thought made her cold. She found herself imagining the approaching alien ships, picturing them as they’d picture each other, from sphere to sphere: objects by themselves in a vacuum, with no ground nearby to stand upon.
 

The vacuum’s horror seemed to descend like an oppressive weight. Lila felt crippled. If not for the Earth’s atmosphere — and the comforting illusion of uniqueness and home that it gave her planet — they’d all be floating through cold and empty space as well, prisoners on a giant rock.
 

Eventually, the air grew cold and strange enough, with threatening noises starting to stir, that they decided to abandon the road for shelter. The area had dwindled bit by bit into something semisuburban, sprawling away in places to empty expanses and groves of trees. They were edging the outskirts. Gangs might be roving in the neighborhoods to the road’s left side. But woods beckoned to the right as the lesser of evils.
 

They found a small shelter — possibly a fort built by kids. They lay down, huddled against the chill, and said little other than goodnights, knowing a good night was impossible.
 

Lila wanted to ask her father about his plan for tomorrow. They needed a car, and his obsessive drive toward Colorado meant he hadn’t surrendered the idea. But the plan had supposedly been to buy one, and after the riots, Lila couldn’t imagine anyone selling something as valuable as a car or fuel. Or not stripping them of all they carried the moment they entered the neighborhood to ask, perhaps raping the women for good measure.
 

Lila told herself she was being paranoid. There were still good people in the world. Not everyone could have lost their mind — not when so little, other than a threat, had even happened.
 

Yet.

She closed her eyes, trying to forget the thoughts that kept swirling behind her eyelids.

The road had grown infinitely harder.
 

They had no car, no way to travel.
 

There were over a thousand miles to go, and only two days before the armada of spheres filled the sky.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Day Four, Early Morning

Chicago
 

They woke to screaming.

At some point overnight, a critical threshold had passed. Amateur astronomers could now see the alien ships with backyard telescopes. Meyer later learned that this change (and its aftermath) had made the news — but as they slept uneasily in the woods, their only indication was riotous yelling, braying horns, and the crashing of metal on metal. Seeing those ships crystallized the threat, and the world lost its mind.

Lila jerked awake. Meyer was already up, sitting, a hand hovering above his daughter’s shoulders, ready to soothe.

“Shh.”
 

“Dad? What is it?”
 

“Shh. We need to be quiet.”
 

But he wasn’t sure that was true. The one thing they didn’t have was the one thing everyone was apparently interested in. The street they’d been walking along had been quiet during the night, and remained still as the others nodded off one by one. But that wasn’t true now. They could see cars through the trees, making their way out of the small neighborhoods, honking and tapping bumpers, trying to drive around each other like drowning people huddling to be on top when everyone else’s air ran out.
 

Meyer had stayed awake longer than anyone (over Piper’s protests, who said he was overwrought, and Trevor, who was trying to be the second man of the no-longer house), and for a while he’d amused himself over his phone’s backlit screen. But without the JetVan, there was no signal. Either the networks were down for good, or they were being used nonstop by information and voice hoarders who thought learning more might change reality for the better. He’d tried for much longer than he should have, dialing Heather with a thrumming heart, remembering with horror the way her voice had simply cut off. Had she been able to use her gun? Or was his ex-wife (and best friend; let’s tell the truth) gone forever?
 

Meyer got a connection failure with every try. Even if he could ring out, the cell network near Heather would need to be available to reach her. The obstacles between them (or at least her phone) seemed as insurmountable as the roadblocks between Chicago and Vail.
 

He’d closed his phone shamefully, looking down at Piper with an unarticulated guilt. Then he’d cabled one of the external batteries to charge his phone, deciding not to let the others know how hard he’d tried to reach Heather, and how badly he’d wanted information the little electronic brick could no longer provide.
 

They didn’t have a way to stay in touch. Separation meant a permanent parting.
 

They didn’t have GPS. If they were going to find a way out of Chicago’s urban sprawl, they’d have to do it by gut instinct or find a map. Did gas stations still sell paper maps and atlases? They’d have to, right? Meyer’s grandmother had lived to be ninety-four, and she’d driven almost until the end. Grams hadn’t used a cell phone once. She wouldn’t complete her medical forms online, either. Meyer offered to do them, but Grams had insisted they send her paper.
 

So the world must still have maps, right? For stubborn old bitches like Grams?

He’d fallen asleep uneasily. Uneven hours were tissue thin — the kind of sleep he was never sure he’d even had upon waking. He may have laid in semisleep through the night, his mind unwilling to leave their makeshift camp unguarded, his pride unwilling to wake someone else to stand watch in his stead.
 

How much time had passed?

It was still dark when he’d heard the stirring commotion, but the moon was no longer visible through the canopy. He’d fished his phone to check the time, but was unsure whether it had made the leap to central. It must have, right? Back when they’d still had the JetVan’s signal to synchronize it to the satellite? That seemed ages ago.
 

It read 5:40 a.m.
 

He’d heard a crack at the edge of his foggy awareness, but thought it might’ve been the slap of a screen door as someone left a house in the neighborhood past the road. The neighborhood where, in the daylight, he’d been hoping to shop for a car.