Alien Invasion (Book 1): Invasion (37 page)

He closed the door and crossed the kitchen.
 

It was dark. There should still be a partial moon tonight, but it must not have risen. He opened the French doors to the porch, taking a moment.
 

His skin adjusted to the cooler air. His eyes adjusted to the dark.
 

After a few minutes, he found that the black wasn’t pitch after all. Maybe the moon was up beyond a rise, and it was reflecting off the atmosphere. Something was letting him see, even if it was merely the scant candle cast by the stars.
 

Meyer went to the lake.
 

For a strange moment, he wondered at himself: still in pajamas, still in slippers, his hair a mess, outside as he’d told the others never to be — having locked them in until now. And he was standing by a lake without moonlight. Was he going to go swimming? It was strange to realize that his mind wasn’t entirely his own.
 

Meyer looked up.
 

Above him was a perfectly smooth silver object, large enough to fill the small lake’s basin if it chose to. He could see it clearly despite the dark, as if the sphere cast its own light. And with that realization, he found himself looking through it as he had the ceiling and the TV screen. He couldn’t literally see space above the ship’s bulk, but could imagine it perfectly. As if he were but a particle, and could zoom through apparently solid space to find it as cavernous as the space the ship had come from.
 

There was a soft clanging, and a round hole on the ship’s underside opened like an old-time camera’s shutter. Inside was a light:
green
, like he himself would ask a director to color it, in one of his films.
 

He knew what this meant.

He knew why he’d come.
 

Meyer spread his arms and looked upward, closing his eyes as a soft, warm glow surrounded his body.
 

He felt his feet leave the ground.
 

Sometime later, Meyer Dempsey and the ship he’d entered were gone.
 

The mountain was still and quiet, as if vowing to never whisper a word of what happened.

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Contact

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WANT TO GET THE SECOND BOOK IN THE INVASION SERIES FOR FREE?
 

If you liked Invasion, you’ll LOVE Contact, the second book in the Invasion series.
 

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http://realmandsands.com/get-contact/

THANK YOU FOR READING!

Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant

A
UTHOR
'
S
N
OTE

I’m writing this note to you from the future. Not the not-too-distant future as portrayed in the world of
Invasion
, but the
real
future. The one that exists a short while after
Invasion
was published.
 

Right now, I’m writing
Colonization
— the third book in the
Invasion
series.
 

Before that, I wrote
Contact
— which, yes, you guessed it — is the second book in the series, which you may have already picked up.
 

(Eerie how writing time travel works, isn’t it?
Contact
is in my past but it’s in your future. I’m getting all
Back to the Future
time-loopy just thinking about it.)

Sean and I decided to add this author’s note to
Invasion,
now that we’re one and a half books further down the master story arc, because now we have perspective.

When we first wrote the book you just read, we had only an inkling. As I write this, halfway into the rough draft of the third book, the big story we wanted to tell is filling out and taking shape. It’s hitting all of the big, cool issues we wanted to hit with our alien invasion series, and hitting them in what might be called the “traditional” way. Meaning:
with aliens.
 

See,
Invasion
got a great reception right off the bat. But among reviews, discussions, and casual comments with our core group of ideal readers, there was one thing that many people mentioned: the ending.
 

Most people said they didn’t see the ending coming.
 

Some of that group loved the ending: the sense of mystery, of a deepening of the plot as the series moved into more familiar (and ironically “more alien”) territory. They said they were getting excited, wondering where Meyer might be going, and eager to find out in the next volume.
 

Other people hated the ending. A few said it felt tacked-on. These folks sort of suggested that we needed a shocking hook in order to drag readers into the next book, so we invented something nuts: Meyer Dempsey, who’s spent something like 80,000 words trying to get his family to safety, just walks right out in the open and lets the aliens take him.
 

But actually, Meyer’s abduction is essential to the larger story we wanted to tell.
 

We considered beginning the story there: Man is abducted by aliens; sci-fi adventure ensues. We could have done that: started with aliens, abduction, alien contact, and the colonization of Earth.
 

But that would have been short-changing our readers, because
Invasion
is only part of the story.
 

Contact
continues that story.
 

Colonization
escalates it.
 

We envision the entire series spanning seven books. That might change if we uncover new and unexpected angles the story wants to steer us in (this is common; if you think authors
invent
stories, we’d argue that’s not entirely accurate), but it’ll be around that number, give or take. We know how it will end. We know the phases it will march through on its way — again allowing that the story always seems to find its most natural path.

Invasion
— the story of what happened before the aliens set foot on the planet — matters to that end.
 

And Meyer Dempsey’s creeping sense of intuition matters
very much
to that end.

It’d be easy to enjoy this novel’s ride, taking a quasi-apocalyptic adventure ending in a confrontation and a twist ending. You can do that if you’d like. Plenty of readers certainly seem to enjoy this book on that level.

But we hope, when this series is done, that you’ll look back and see
Invasion
for what it is in the larger story’s context.
 

Because the story doesn’t start with the aliens.
 

The story begins with Meyer Dempsey.
 

The story begins with an itch that Meyer can’t quite scratch — an urge not to
flee the city
or
escape the crowds
or even to
get his family away from danger
… but rather from an overwhelming
urge to reach his “Axis Mundi”
— a place he was told was special through his dreams and journeying in an otherworldly haze.
 

In
Contact
, you’ll learn where Meyer vanished to, and why.
 

In
Colonization
, you’ll see what role Meyer has yet to play, and you’ll see how he was
always
hand-picked by his captors,
always
selected in advance for a purpose,
always
dragged toward his axis as if by an invisible hand.
 

And in the following books, you’ll learn what the aliens want from us. From the planet. And from Meyer himself.

We could have skipped Meyer’s flight to the mountains, but if we had, we’d have been shortchanging you. We’d have been starting in this story’s middle. We’d have been failing to look at the pre-invasion Earth through the eyes of its invaders. We’d have been closing our eyes to what the aliens crossed time and space to find.

We didn’t just want to invade the planet with this story.
 

We wanted to ask
how
, and
what
. But most importantly, we wanted to ask
WHY
.

Invasion
is the first part of the answer to that final three-letter question.
 

Meyer’s fate in remaining six (we think!) books in this series is the rest of it.
 

Happy reading!

Johnny (and Sean)
 

D
ID
Y
OU
L
IKE
T
HIS
B
OOK
?
 

WE NEED YOU …

Without reviews, indie books like this one are almost impossible to market.
 

Leaving a review will only take a minute — it doesn’t have to be long or involved, just a sentence or two that tells people what you liked about the book, to help other readers know why they might like it, too, and to help us write more of what you love.
 

The truth is, VERY few readers leave reviews. Please help us by being the exception.
 

Thank you in advance!
 

Johnny and Sean
 

A
BOUT
THE
A
UTHORS

Johnny B. Truant
is an author, blogger, and podcaster who, like the Ramones, was long denied induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite having a large cult following. He makes his online home at
SterlingAndStone.Net
and is the author of the
Fat Vampire
series, the
Unicorn Western
series, the political sci-fi thriller
The Beam
, and many more.

You can connect with Johnny on Twitter at
@JohnnyBTruant
, and you should totally send him an email at
[email protected]
if the mood strikes you.
 

Sean Platt
is speaker, author, and co-founder of Realm & Sands. He is also co-founder of Collective Inkwell, home to the breakout indie hits
Yesterday’s Gone
and
WhiteSpace,
co-authored with David W. Wright. Sean also publishes smart stories for children under the pen name Guy Incognito, and writes laugh out loud comedies with Johnny under the pen name Max Power. You can see Sterling & Stone’s complete catalogue at
SterlingAndStone.Net/Books
. Sean lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, daughter, and son.
 

You can find Sean at
SterlingAndStone.Net
, follow him on Twitter at
@SeanPlatt
, or send him an email at
[email protected]
.
 

For any questions about Sterling & Stone books or products, or help with anything at all, please send an email to
[email protected]
, or contact us at
sterlingandstone.net/contact
. Thank you for reading.