Red Dot: Contact. Will the gravest threat come from closer to home than we expect? (15 page)

Maggie was walking into the kitchen when Scott made his move.

“Mags, DG, could we talk for a few minutes?” Scott said, using the affectionate nickname he’d made up soon after they began dating—Darling Girl.

Maggie stopped, turned her head, and looked at Scott with a frown for five to ten seconds. Finally, she said, “I’m not leaving my church.”

“No, no. That’s not what I want to talk about.”

She slowly took a couple steps to sit in a chair at their dining table, and Scott sat down facing her at the other side of the table, scooting a half-filled glass of juice and some magazines away to give him room to rest his elbows. Their dining room was the hallway between the living room and kitchen. It was cramped, and except for infrequent occasions when everyone ate at the same time, they ate on trays in the living room.

“Maggie I’m worried. We—I don’t know, we’re always fighting now. We’re getting so angry all the time. I want it the way we were, you know, normal and, I guess, closer.”

“That’s what I want, too, DB,” Maggie said after a brief pause. She stared down at her hands, which were folded in front of her.

Scott smiled when Maggie called him DB—Darling Boy. They sat for a minute in silence.

“But Scott,” Maggie said, shaking her head slowly, “these aliens. What the hell is going on? They don’t believe in God—how could they when they’re not in the Bible? Who knows what they will do? They don’t know us, and they are so strong.”

“I know. I know,” said Scott. “Exactly. They’re so frightening. We’ve got to protect ourselves. But, but…”

“Daddy, look!” cried Laura, standing at the bottom of the stairway between the living room and kitchen. She stretched both arms out from her
sides to show off long, brown gloves with bits of green paper and plastic taped onto them.

“Mommy made me tree limbs,” the little girl said, waving her arms up and down slightly. “For the play.”

“Wow!” said Scott as he glanced at his wife. He was heartened to see her smiling again, dimples and all.

“You’re gonna be the best tree in the play,” he said.

“Better go back to your room and take your tree limbs off,” said Maggie. “And be careful with them.”

“OK,” said Laura as she turned around and scrambled up the stairs.

Scott and Maggie sat at the table, still smiling in silence for a minute or two. Suddenly the front door opened, and Carl hurried in.

“Hi Mom, hi Dad,” he said as started bounding up the stairs to his room. Halfway up he stopped as if remembering that his parents might want to know what he had planned. “Linda will be here in a few minutes, and we’re going to study for a history test,” he said. “I think she’s already eaten.”

He took a couple more steps, then remembered something else. After a quick sigh, he said, “I’ll leave my door open while we’re studying.”

Maggie and Scott watched their son disappear into the hallway upstairs. “Nice talking with you, Carl,” Scott said, and he and his wife laughed.

After a pause, Scott said, “Maggie, I was just thinking. Why don’t we go to church this Sunday, like we used to?” Noting his wife’s frown, he said, “I don’t mean we have to change anything. But let’s just go with the kids, and see our friends, and, you know, listen to the sermon and sing the songs, as usual. Maybe it will help us get closer again.”

Maggie stopped frowning and said softly, “OK.”

The next morning was bright and cool. It didn’t occur to Scott to skip this Saturday’s drill with his local neighborhood protection group to spend more time with Maggie, but he did promise her that he wouldn’t stay late, as he sometimes did.

He pulled up to his group’s camp in a wooded area about fifteen miles from Laurel. About a dozen vehicles were already parked alongside the
dirt road. After he got his rifle and backpack out the trunk, he walked the one hundred yards to a small clearing, where members of his neighborhood group lounged about, drinking coffee and swapping stories. Stately white oak trees stood here and there among and beside them, the their pale bark covering massive trunks of ancient trees reaching more than one hundred feet into the chilly morning air. They looked like quiet residents of the camp, bestowing acorns and colored leaves on those below, but too dignified to react to the antics of the humans and other small creatures around them.

“Hey, dog face, did the ol’ lady let you out of the house?” said Winston. Winnie, as he was known, was what Maggie once derisively referred to as a “fat ass”: a pudgy, late-thirties postal clerk, already well past his glory days as a high school football player.

“Hey, when you got ten inches, the ladies won’t let you go,” Scott said.

“I told you guys you could only believe half of what this guy says,” Winston said.

Scott loved the macho banter in his self-styled militia’s meetings—raunchy jokes, profane rants against past wives and past and current politicians, spirited arguments about how the Ravens’ NFL team would do the next day…

After about twenty minutes, when all of the three dozen or so men had arrived, they got down to serious business, beginning with the Pledge of Allegiance. After that, group commander Frank Tarant, a tall, serious-looking high school teacher, said that starting this week, he would also lead the group in reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

“We’re just over two weeks away from an all-out attack on our way of life,” he said in his best ringing classroom voice. “Our traitorous politicians and journalists fired the first shots long ago. Now with these satanic aliens coming from outer space, we face evil of unimaginable scale. It is up to us, my brothers-in-arms, to protect everything we hold dear.”

As Tarant read the Lord’s Prayer, Scott and many others found that they didn’t remember all the words and had to mumble through most of it. Some of the men were a bit embarrassed, because their religion was supposed to be
one of the most important things in their lives, but they got through it. Then the neighborhood warriors split into squads, with ex-military men leading them in calisthenics, map-reading, and other drills.

Maneuvers the previous Saturdays had always been lighthearted affairs—ambling across the gentle hills with good buddies. But the drills were more serious now that the ETs were getting so close, Scott thought.

As the drills stretched toward late afternoon, he gathered his gear and drove home.

The next morning, Scott woke up early and was glad to see Maggie’s side of the bed empty; she was already up and getting ready to go to church, as they had agreed.

Scott and his family arrived early and found a place near their usual seats. Latecomers, however, had to sit on folding chairs in the aisles, hallway, and vestibule. Scott, as he had hoped, felt a comfortable sense of familiarity. He smiled as he scanned the crowd of neighbors and other worshipers sitting quietly in their good Sunday clothes. The lofty ceiling and the large, colorful stained glass windows depicting Bible scenes filled him with a feeling that he was in a special, safe place. Even Laura’s fidgeting and Carl’s furtive attempts to play video games on his cell phone assured Scott that everything was normal.

After the liturgy, which Scott found a little less boring than usual, the sermon began.

“It’s easy, isn’t it, to say we trust in the Lord,” Reverend Tomski said, leaning forward with one hand on each side of the pulpit, gazing around at the overflowing congregation. “But when danger and uncertainty face us, as they do now, it’s even easier—tragically so—to forget what Jesus taught us.

“We want to turn our backs on love and charity and look to violence and mistrust to protect ourselves. My dear friends, do we or do we not trust in the Lord and believe in his teachings?”

Sermons were Scott’s least favorite part of the service; he always felt he had failed to live up to expectations. Today’s sermon was no different. He
looked at Maggie to see her reaction, but she stared straight ahead, with a blank expression on her face.

The rest of the day, Scott avoided serious discussion with his wife, worried that the recent strife would reemerge. Going through the old Sunday morning ritual was soothing, but the danger they faced was so big. Scott hadn’t completely thought through what he wanted to change, except to ease the fear and bitterness infecting his marriage. He seemed to think he could dial back on his concerns even if he stayed in the militia, but Maggie’s fire-breathing online church would inevitably build her fears to a fever pitch. Contrary to what he’d told his wife on Friday, he had hoped she would feel enough comfort in their regular place of worship to give up her new hate-filled church.

When Scott got up the next morning and started to walk toward the bedroom door, he saw Maggie sitting at their desk with her back to him, looking at the rantings on the website of her online church. Crestfallen, he approached her slowly, anticipating another painful confrontation.

“Don’t say anything,” Maggie warned without turning around. A few seconds later, she abruptly turned and faced him. Her expression surprised Scott—rather than hard and bitter, it was soft, and even sad.

“Scott … DB … I want us to have a normal family life like before, too, but it’s not possible,” she said.

“But what about Reverend Tomski’s sermon, about trusting in God?”

With her voice and expression growing hard, Maggie said, “Scott, we have our own two flesh-and-blood children to protect, with aliens, space aliens, Scott, coming from God-knows-where with terrible powers and intentions. I, I can’t trust God and just sit here peacefully.”

When Scott stood silent with his head hanging, Maggie said sharply, “Can you?”

After a few seconds, Scott slowly raised his head and in a soft voice said, “No.”

C
URRENTS AND
C
OUNTDOWNS

A
s most people
got on with their lives in the last week of September and first week of October, the anticipation of a visit from beings from another world now resembled a brewing volcano; beneath a surface that changed little, red hot, dangerous currents flowed and expanded.

The currents represented national, political, and in a sense, tribal, interests, often passionately held as matters of life-or-death or good vs. evil. The groups supporting these interests disdained and feared compromise or even serious communication with others. Ceaselessly self-reinforcing their beliefs and fears, they judged opponents not so much by their actions but by whether they belonged to the chosen group.

And, masked by the united response to D9 through the UN and other international organizations, virtually every nation maneuvered to bolster its standing. Sometimes the deadly currents broke through the surface.

Violence or threats of violence usually emerged due to fear or opportunism—or to a combination of both—as in the case of North Korea’s attack on the South a few days after the red dots appeared. As weeks went by, so many global crises flared up that some, which would have called for the President’s urgent attention any other day, were handled by high-ranking staff, according to Douthart’s guidelines. The President got ongoing briefings on dangerous hot spots, but made final decisions only on the most desperate developments.

He knew a crisis demanded his attention in the Situation Room when he saw the flashing of the distinctive yellowish-orange light the size of the cap on a tube of toothpaste on a new device installed on his desk in the Oval Office.

Douthart dreaded seeing the light flash, because it meant he would have to make yet another life-or-death decision. He’d developed an almost personal hatred of the light. Its surprising brightness, irritating color, and persistent, insistent blinking (it could be turned off only from the Situation Room) seemed to mock him for his inability to shape events.

One afternoon, just over two weeks before D9 was expected to start orbiting the Earth, the blinking yellowish-orange light told him that he had to handle another crisis.

As soon as he stepped into the Situation Room, he heard the sound of gunfire, and anxious shouting coming from a live feed on one of the room’s monitors.

“What is it?” he asked as the sound of a distant explosion reached through the monitor into the Situation Room.