Alien Invasion (Book 1): Invasion (36 page)

“Don’t you ‘shh’ at me, Trevor! Someone tell me what the hell is going on!”
 

Heather looked up. For a second Piper thought she might bark at her for yelling at Trevor. Instead, her usual sarcasm still mostly absent, she said, “It’s what happens when they launch missiles.”
 

“Who’s launching … what kind of missiles?” She heard her voice falter.
 

The screen seemed to come alight all at once. Whatever had struck the sphere was massive. Piper didn’t know much about weapons of war, but the explosion looked like something from Cold War footage — a kind of awkward mushroom that shook the enormous sphere like a piece swinging in a Newton’s cradle.
 

“Was that one of the big ones?” she asked, now desperate. “They can’t do that, can they? Wouldn’t it destroy the city? Wouldn’t it give them all radiation poisoning?” There was more, too: where was the camera showing this footage? It looked like a helicopter. Had anyone told the pilot that nuclear action might be afoot?
 

Nobody answered.
 

Maybe the city had been evacuated.
 

Maybe a rogue faction had managed to launch something, not strictly authorized by the government.
 

Or maybe the world had already gone to shit, inside a single day.
 

“What’s going on in the rest of the world?” she asked, panicked, feeling her legs start to wobble. She grasped the back of a chair for support as a torrent of rapid-fire questions spilled from her lips.
 

“What about New York? Is there one over Denver? Did they say if they’ve done anything to us? Is our government talking about launching missiles too? Oh Jesus. Oh shit. What about the president? Has the president made any … ”
 

The entire bottom half of the sphere turned bright, like a down-facing lamp. Even with the set’s downturned volume, she could hear a loud, low
fwump
like a fire suddenly coming alight.
 

A few seconds later, some kind of shockwave must have struck the camera. The feed went blank.
 

In those seconds — between the massive light beam and the loss of signal — Piper could clearly see that Moscow’s city center was gone.

The TV was off. They sat around the coffee table in the quiet the way they’d sit around a campfire, with the lights low. Nobody had wanted to watch the news after satellites started showing overhead shots of the damage. The ground seemed flat and burned, no structures standing within a radius of a dozen miles or more. And most ominously, front and center on the satellite image was the ship itself — an impossibly large silver circle above the debris, again unmoving and silent.
 

After that, the huge Moscow ship had moved on. Without a city to watch, it seemed to feel it had other business to attend to.
 

They’d watched sporadically after that, checking for new and horrible updates in the way Piper remembered her grandparents describing 9/11. Nobody, they’d said, wanted to see more of what had happened that day. And yet few had been able to look away.
 

Piper could relate. She told the kids to keep the screen off but found them with it on a few times, Heather disobedient in their midst. But she herself had been peeking too, ducking into rooms to watch on a tablet, staying too long behind Trevor, Lila, and Raj before laying down the law. It was impossible to turn from. Her desire to go outside had evaporated, and she was quite sure, now, that they were all going to die. But she still wanted to know
when
she was going to die.
How
she was going to die. And to be as frightened as possible in the meantime.

None of the other ships struck. Other nations, apparently having learned Russia’s lesson, stood down. Even the amount of helicopters circling the things decreased their numbers and increased their distance. There were addresses from the president, promising that the government was doing all it could to communicate and keep the people safe. Pundits pointed out that Russia had struck first, though there was no information on why, or if the action had been official.
 

Sometime later, a few of the ships opened ports and released much smaller ships, like hovercraft. The smaller ships were like the larger ones: polished silver spheres perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. They seemed to be moving to certain locations and sending thin rivulets of energy down to the ground. Nobody was sure what they were, because cameras seemed to blitz out whenever they got close — some sort of electromagnetic interference, said those who seemed to know. Conspiracy nuts rushed to cobble two and two, theorizing that the green beams meant abductions in progress.
 

They were
harvesting
.
 

After one such conspiracy theory report, Piper looked down to see that Trevor had turned pale. That broke both her trance and addiction. She turned the screen off and vowed that for a night, at least, they would just be people. Not
hiding
people, but
people
.
 

“Did you know,” said Heather, running her fingers through Lila’s dark hair, “that your father and I named you after a song?”
 

Lila, safe in Raj’s arms, looked up at her mother. Piper, watching, felt it impossible that Lila wouldn’t know the origin of her own name. But maybe she did know, and it didn’t matter. Maybe she just wanted to hear the story again, and be young for a while.
 

“It was one of our favorites,” said Heather, looking over at Meyer with a nostalgic, almost bittersweet expression. “An old song, called ‘Hey There, Delilah.’”
 

The evening passed as if by candlelight. They told tales — each taking their turn, each free to go wherever he or she wanted, into authentic past or spinning fiction. Slowly, the room began to feel small again … but this time, the aura was more intimate than confining.
 

They would be safe.
 

The world had become a perilous place, but they’d made it to the ranch — to the somehow spiritual Axis Mundi that Meyer had been going on about for years. It was small, and they might be in it for a long time while the dust (hopefully more metaphorical than literal) settled beyond the bunker’s walls. But they would adjust. Piper would learn to walk on the treadmill. She’d do her yoga. She had millions of books stored on her Vellum; they had years of entertainment on the bunker’s various jukes. They had endless power (wind, solar, generated if need be), enough food, and three protected subterranean wells for water.
 

It would be okay. Somehow, because they were safe and because they were together, it would be okay.

Story time ended with the feeling of a fire’s coals glowing slowly to ash. Piper retired for the night, repeating that single refrain over and over inside her head, making herself believe:
It will be okay.

She and Meyer made love that night. And when they did, Piper found herself wishing they’d had the history he shared with Heather — the kind that featured a song special enough to name a firstborn daughter.

CHAPTER FORTY

Day Ten

Axis Mundi
 

Meyer’s eyes opened.
 

Something had changed.
 

He watched the concrete ceiling above the bed he shared with Piper before rising, suddenly realizing that the gray mass was actually a vibrating matrix of molecules, apparently solid on a macro scale but entirely permeable once you got down small enough. The concrete was composed of sand and cement, which in turn were composed of quartz, silica, and dozens of other components. Each of those were made of elements, and each of the elements were made of atoms that were all the same. But even then, those atoms were mostly space. A nucleus with electrons somewhere around it, not so much
orbiting
as
existing
. Between the solid cores of the elements and the electrons was nothing.
 

Like outer space.
 

He sat up.
 

He understood.
 

There had been a time, making a wish list of all to stock his bunker with for the end of the world, that Meyer had considered ayahuasca — his medicine. But you couldn’t just store it like pedestrian drugs, like coke or even weed. Ayahuasca was brewed by a shaman. If he wanted to go on his spiritual, other-level voyages while waiting out the apocalypse, he’d need Juha. But getting just his family here had been hard enough.
 

That, he saw now, had been a pointless thought. He didn’t need medicine to see the core of truth within him — or perhaps more accurately, far outside. It was a lens — or a rag used to wipe his lens, and he no longer needed that rag to see.
 

Something had changed.

Now his vision was clear.
 

Meyer could imagine his mind as an extension of a universal collective. He imagined himself as a blip of existence peeking beyond some kind of veil. Behind the veil, though, there was more of him. Like the tip of an iceberg. Other people might peek out farther down the veil, but behind the scenes, where few ever looked, they were all connected.
 

They were all part of one larger thing, with many heads.
 

And still, Meyer was himself. He was both things. They all were.
 

He saw the emptiness all around him, baked into even the most solid of objects.
 

The ceiling was space.
 

The floor was space.
 

Piper, still asleep beside him, was space.
 

If you peered close enough, everything was nothing. And if you pulled back enough, nothing somehow became everything.
 

Images that had been just beneath consciousness began to clearly rise inside his awakening mind. He saw a sun. A planet. A thing that was like a hole in nothing, leading great distances to another place.
 

Of course he’d known they were coming. It’s why he’d run. It’s why he’d come here. It’s why he’d protected them all. Because what had happened in Moscow? That was the beginning.
 

He could see their purpose — the visitors’ purpose — as clearly as he saw his own feet sliding into slippers at the bed’s side, standing up, leaving the bedroom to enter the quiet nighttime living room.

He knew what they wanted.
 

He knew why they were here.
 

He knew what the shuttles were doing. Why they were breaking homes open like nutshells. Why they were pulling people from their beds, so many screaming. He knew that fear. It percolated beneath his awareness like an unscratchable itch.

He knew why he’d fought so hard. Why he’d risked them all dying, if the alternative was to not be here, to not be inside. Of course they’d had to be here, now. It was ludicrous that he’d ever, ever hesitated.
 

Meyer crossed the living room, now quiet. The kids were asleep in three rooms. Heather was asleep in a fourth. This was their sanctuary. Their place of sanity. The place where, in discreet doses, they could see what was happening in the larger world without having to fear it.
 

If only they truly understood.
 

But how could Meyer explain? He’d never understood it all until now.
 

He watched the dark screen for a full minute, aware as he did it that he must look like a lunatic. If Heather or Piper came out and saw him gazing at the blackness, they’d worry for his sanity, thinking him sick with some kind of cabin fever. Yesterday, they’d think, he’d been normal. They were all settling into normal, finding their routine as more and more spherical shuttles ventured from the motherships, as more and more desperate and fearful factions struck at the ships and were reduced to rubble. The shuttles would take whomever they wanted, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. But that was a hard thing for humans to accept — that there were powers in the universe that found their force and aggression not just laughable but unworthy of notice. And so there were always reports of someone fighting back. Always reports of that someone — be it a lone man with a shotgun or a nation with artillery — getting smacked away like a fly.
 

Still, Meyer stared at the screen. Within it, he saw space. Beyond it, he saw space.
 

The notion was fascinating. If he were reduced to small enough size — as large as one of those electrons, say — he could fly through the television and all of the bunker’s walls as easily as a ship flying through the vacuum of empty space.
 

Finally, he turned away, glad that he’d had time to gaze without being watched.
 

They wouldn’t understand. They’d think he’d lost his mind.
 

He moved to the spiral staircase, put a hand on its cool railing, and began to move upward.
 

When he opened the door into the kitchen, he found the air strange. Compared to the canned, filtered, and scrubbed air below, the home’s atmosphere was almost electric. Too cool, too raw. Naked air.