Alien Invasion (Book 1): Invasion (26 page)

Something struck the Land Cruiser from behind: a large Jeep, with bars welded across its absent windshield.
 

Men crawled over the sideways tractor trailer ahead, each holding a weapon.

Meyer reached for the Land Cruiser’s center console, but there was a knock on the window before he got there. He looked up to see a man tapping the glass with the barrel of a pistol. On the other side, beyond Piper, a second man was doing the same.
 

Meyer’s visitor motioned for him to roll down the window, which Piper did for him.
 

“Best not reach for your weapon, mate,” said the man. “Leave it where it is.”
 

Meyer’s hand retracted. The man reached across to open the console and fish out the handgun. Meyer tried to remember where Piper had set the rifle, but it hardly mattered. Their chances of turning a hunting rifle on assailants in close quarters were somewhere between slim and nil.

“Come on out now,” he said, his voice eminently polite.
 

Meyer was still thinking of the rifle, still looking around. The man watched him, then tipped his head at Meyer as if he could read his thoughts.

“Open the door, and let it go, mate,” he said. “Be a good sport, and you can keep your lives. But dead or alive, we’ll be taking your vehicle.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Day Five, Morning
 

Colorado
 

It was hard to call the people who stole the Land Cruiser bandits. They worked with an efficiency that Meyer couldn’t help but admire: no drama, no bloodshed, no unnecessary emotional entanglement aside from the obvious implied threat.

Their compliance wasn’t a question. There were at least as many of them as there were hicks in Iowa, but this crew was entirely armed. They’d blockaded the road, boxed them in, then waltzed up to the window with weapons capable of killing them all. Maybe the Dempsey family could have fought, but they’d never have fled without a fatality, and Meyer wasn’t willing to spend one. Even Raj.
 

Once they stepped out of the car, one of the men climbed inside as dispassionately as a mechanic driving a car into the garage for service. The only difference was that instead of driving the Cruiser into a garage, the man drove it around the Jeep and back in the opposite direction. Meyer wondered: did they have a garage? A car carrier?
 

Meyer shouldered his backpack and nodded silently at his party to do the same. The highwaymen said nothing. They didn’t want food and water. Only the car, and perhaps the fuel in its tank.
 

After being relieved of their vehicle, the man who’d spoken earlier waved them around the semitrailer and suggested they start walking. Meyer looked back once they were a minute down the road; no one was following. The trailer seemed to be deserted and maybe it was: a one-time carjacking, and then everyone retired. It was a mystery Meyer didn’t suppose he’d ever solve, but it hardly mattered. Yet again, they had no car. Ten minutes later, he insisted on circling back alone to ambush the bandits, intent on recovering their vehicle (or any other), but found them all gone. Only the trailer remained.
 

They were alone in the mountains. The surrounding resorts all seemed deserted, waiting for a winter ski season that would never come.
 

The going was tough, and their lungs were unaccustomed to the thin air. After a half hour of walking, Lila sat on a rock by the roadside and stared up at her father, refusing to move like a stubborn dog.
 

“Come on, Lila.”

“What, Dad? We don’t have a car. It’s not like we can hitch a ride.”
 

Meyer looked around. They’d left what passed for a main road a while back, beginning the long and winding trek to the compound. He’d picked the spot because it was isolated, hours away on tiny roads, so hidden that even Meyer sometimes got lost trying to reach it when checking construction.
 

“We can walk.”
 

“How far is it?”
 

Meyer shrugged. He thought he knew exactly how far it was, but telling Lila wouldn’t do anyone any good. If anything, it would make the others refuse to budge.
 

“How far, Dad?” she repeated.
 

“Considering how far we’ve come? We’re almost there.”
 

“How about if you
don’t
consider how far we’ve come?
Then
how far is it? You know, in real-person miles. The way someone normal would measure it.”
 

 
“I’m not sure. But it’s that way.” He pointed.
 

Lila stared at him. He had a strange urge to grab her arm and drag.
 

“It’s outside Vail. This is basically Vail.”
 

“How far outside?”
 

“Lila, get up.”
 

Instead of Lila standing, Raj sat. Trevor followed a second behind. Piper, standing across from him, looked very much like she wanted to do the same, but this seemed to be a show of support. She could collapse later. Right now she had to stand with her obsessive husband against the will of her reasonable stepchildren who were, despite their father’s wishes, talking sense.
 

“We only have a day.” Meyer looked up. It had to be 9 a.m. or later. He looked over at Piper. “Right? Just a day still?”
 

“Why are you asking me?”

“Did you listen to the radio last night, while I was asleep?”
 

“A bit. As much as I could stand, anyway.”
 

“And?”
 

She’d seemed so bright when he’d woken. Now she seemed exhausted, cranky like a freshly waking teenager. “And what, Meyer?”
 

“Well, what are they saying?”
 

“Riots, looting, people doing stupid shit like stealing cars.” She looked back toward the ambush. “Although I’m not sure if the stupid shit is them taking the car, or us taking it a few days earlier.”
 

Lila had clapped her hand over her mouth but was smiling broadly behind it. Piper never swore unless she was being playful in bed. To Lila, right now, at this hideous moment, hearing Piper break her usual unspoken rule to say “shit” (twice) was a bizarre kind of Christmas.
 

“What about the ships?”
 

“Oh, I don’t know, Meyer. It’s hard to tell the real reports from the crazy ones. Remember what your dad was saying about 9/11? How it got all ‘foggy’ and nobody knew what terrible things were actually happening and what wasn’t true? That’s the whole world, right now.”
 

Meyer considered pushing, but decided against it. He’d made his living negotiating one thing or another, and a forgotten key to success was knowing when not to play the game. He wouldn’t make Piper say what he wanted, but she hadn’t denied it, either. So they had a day, maybe thirty-six hours. They could walk it in that time if they’d toughen up.
 

“Look,” he said. “It’s stupid to give up now. I know you’re tired. I’m tired too. But we have to do it. We can rest at the house.”
 

Raj lay back on the gravel. “Let’s rest here.”
 

Lila lay back beside him, then rolled to side-spoon him. “I agree.”
 

“Get up, Lila.”
 

Now Piper was sitting. She didn’t lie back, but she perched on the guardrail. Why not? Nobody would be traveling these roads anytime soon. They could sleep in the middle of the road if they wanted to.
 

“Get
up
, Lila,” he repeated.

“I’m tired, Dad. And I feel like I’m going to throw up again. Maybe you should have a bit of mercy, considering … ”
 

“Considering what?”
 

She rolled her eyes. “Nothing.”
 

“We have to go,” he said. “We can rest for a while, but then we have to walk. A bit at a time, but we have to keep moving.”
 

“Let’s just find a nice barn to shack in,” said Piper. “Like I suggested back in Pennsylvania.”
 

Meyer straightened. Then he took Piper by the hand and practically picked her upright. Something in his manner must have registered with Trevor, because he stood too. Even Lila and Raj sat up, but showed no sign — yet — of coming along.
 

“What?” said Piper.
 

“You gave me an idea.”
 

“About a barn. So we can do that. Shelter in a barn. Maybe steal some guy’s car later on so that we can make a run.”
 

“Not the barn.” Meyer shook his head. “What’s in the barn.”
 

“A tractor.” Lila looked at Raj. “I am
not
driving down the road on a tractor.”
 

“Horses,” Meyer replied.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Day Five, Afternoon

Colorado
 

Lila didn’t know that Colorado — this part, anyway — was horse country. But it clearly was, and once they started walking and knew what they were looking for, they found a farm almost immediately. But there were people visible, milling in the house and walking back and forth to the barns. For a moment as they walked past on their way to the next one (not so close as to be obvious), Lila thought of who those people might be and what they might be thinking. Were they a family, like the Dempseys? Were they highwaymen who’d left the road to occupy a ranch? From a distance, it was impossible to tell. Good men and bad men looked the same from the road, especially considering how thin the line between them had become.
 

For hours at a time, Lila forgot her pregnancy. It was still important (vital, really), but so many more important things had surfaced in the past four days. There were the alien ships; there was the riot and fear of death; there were two ambushes resulting in one grand theft auto. Only during the slow times — like now, as they walked — did she stop to be a seventeen-year-old girl again. There would come a time when Lila grew large and another time when she’d have to talk to her father about what had happened. It hurt to think of; she’d always been such a daddy’s girl. Admitting to a baby would be admitting, in an irrevocable way, that she was no longer her father’s. She’d had at least one deeper relationship with a man her age. And she’d soon be a full-grown woman in nature’s most obvious way.
 

Thinking about the baby made Lila think of her mother. Mom had, despite her caustic comedy act and her reputation for outrageousness, been an excellent mother. She’d only given Meyer custody because his life (with far less travel and fewer late nights) was more stable. It had crushed her to give them up, and she still doted on Lila and Trevor whenever she saw them. She stopped being irreverent Heather Hawthorne and became Mom again.
 

Lila watched the first horse farm vanish behind a rise. Who were those people? Did they own the ranch and had simply never left? Was this all business as usual for them? Were they tending to chores as if the world wasn’t about to change forever — feeding horses who had no idea, no fear that Earth might be seeing its final days? Supposedly, animals could sense threats like storms and fires well before they were upon them. There was a hardwired, inborn fear that told them when running was worthwhile. What would it mean if, when they eventually found some horses, the animals were as calm as those people appeared from a distance? Would it mean there was nothing to fret about after all, and that their human fear of change was manufacturing the panic — all this chaos and lawlessness?
 

What did it mean, when they found those horses, that they themselves would resort to theft …
again
?
 

It was okay to commit crimes if it was for your own good, it seemed.
 

It was okay to steal if it meant getting away from people who wanted to steal from you.

It was okay to beat people up and make your own rules if it would get you to your hole in the ground, where you could hide while everyone else either died or tore themselves apart.
 

Maybe the Dempseys weren’t anything special. Maybe they were just five average people, marching toward judgment like all the rest.
 

Ten minutes later, they came to a large horse farm just as nice as the first. It was either deserted, or the owners were hiding. Either way, the horses whinnied loudly when they entered, clearly hungry, their stalls overfull of manure and in need of cleaning. Meyer and Piper strapped saddles on five of the horses while Lila closed an access gate and opened the seven remaining stalls to let the horses run free in a large indoor arena. Then she opened a gate at the other end, giving the animals access to stacked hay and a few unopened piles of feedbags in a storage area.

Trevor was behind her, watching with ambivalence. “I think horses just eat and eat until they explode if you don’t ration their food.”