The Next Thing I Knew (Heavenly) (9 page)

"I'll be leaving soon," Nick said to the camera.  "Somehow I found the keys to the Sno-Cat and traced out a good route to the airstrip while drunk.  I can't get Lucy or aliens or ghosts out of my mind.  The images are so strong right now and every day I feel more and more like I've been living two lives.  What the hell is wrong with me?  And who is Nibbles?"

I laughed and petted Nibbles who in turn regarded Nick through heavy-lidded eyes.

But my joy at this success was short lived.  Kyle contacted me.  The aliens had just entered Earth's orbit.

The aliens landed.

The massive ships pulled into Earth's orbit, each one parking in various locations around the planet.  I watched alongside thousands of ghostly spectators as the ships broke apart into cubes which then descended into the atmosphere and left behind a long thin skeletal structure.  Dread clutched at my nonexistent heart and I feared for the safety of my former planet.

"They're landing in every major city," Kyle said.

"Atlanta?"

"Yep.  Soon as they hit a certain elevation, those big cubes break into smaller ones."

I followed one of the Atlanta-bound cubes.  It separated into more cubes than I could count which each diverted to separate parts of town.  I followed one that landed on the outskirts of Candler Park in Edgewood.  It slowed and set down gently in the massive parking lot of a Lowe's, crushing hundreds of cars in a deafening screech of metal and flattening part of the warehouse-sized building.  Once landed, I got a sense of its scale.  It was twice as tall as the Lowe's and half-again as wide.  The parking lot looked like a battle zone, filled with moldering, rotting corpses.  Streams of gasoline from crushed cars mixed with blood and other bodily fluids.  Vultures and land-bound scavengers scuttled and flapped about, looking for corpses not too far gone.  If I hadn't been a ghost, I probably would have puked.

Kyle and Bella joined me.  "The cubes are all over town," Kyle said.

Massive doors on the cube slid silently open, impressive for such huge chunks of metal.  Hisses, clicks, and a low rumbling emerged from the cube.  A loud trumpeting alarm pierced the air.  Kyle and Bella raced inside before the doors had fully opened.  I set Nibbles down and followed.  I took two steps inside and screamed.  A giant centipede with a gaping maw and a gazillion legs was scuttling right for me.  I flitted up out of its reach.  It, of course, didn't see me and kept going.  Nibbles hissed and joined me.  I noticed the thing wasn't purely a bug, but a patchwork of robotic extensions attached to the side and a large blue orb glowing just above its glittering dome-like eyes.  Several more of the creatures detached from niches in the chamber walls and followed the first.  Like the first, they resembled bus-sized centipedes with massive square maws in the front and trundled along on hundreds of legs.  Their legs chattered against the metal floor like hundreds of typewriters being used at once.

Once outside, the centipedes lowered their mouths and dug into the asphalt, scooping it up like a big fudge brownie sprinkled with rotten corpses.  In a matter of moments the asphalt, bodies, gasoline, and other nasty stuff not underneath the cube were gone leaving muddy red clay.  A noise like sledgehammers on sheet metal emerged from the cube behind me.  I faced the source.  A massive spider creature with a fat quivering sac on its abdomen appeared from the gloom within.  I screamed.  Again.  After my moment of hysteria, I noted upon further inspection that the spider thing was covered in fine black fur and had a long neck with an almost feline head.  It had ten legs rather than eight.  It still gave me the creeps.

Gray metallic tubes shot from ports in the centipedes and plugged into similar ports in the spider cat's sac.  The creature paced all six centipedes as they chomped through concrete, cars, lamp posts, bodies, and anything else that got in their way.  Every so often, the huge sac on the spider cat vibrated and pooped out a glowing car-sized cube from a hole in the lower front part of the abdomen.

Kyle called me.  I flitted to him and Bella deep inside the cube ship.  "We found them," he said.

"Yeah, the big bugs."  I was a little disappointed and a lot grossed out.  I'd expected little green people with big eyes.

"No, over there."

I screamed.  It was my theme for the day.  Oily black tentacles writhed from a dark niche in the wall.  They slithered and snaked around the sides of the niche and lifted their owner, a horrific slimy creature, from within.  Its description defied my imagination.  The closest Earthly analogy might be a black octopus with a shark's mouth, a long tubular snout, and four legs armored with an exoskeleton.  A sharktopusephant?  An elephasharktopus?  Apparently I needed a better imagination to come up with a name.  A shiny black casing of exoskeleton held a bulbous mound atop the head.  Probably the brain.  More of the creatures emerged from wall niches.  Their tentacles stretched, their toothy maws yawned.  High-pitched trumpet-like vocalizations echoed through the chamber, like elephants on a rampage.

Several of the aliens approached each other and rubbed tentacles while trumpeting what I assumed were probably greetings after a long hibernation.

"This is so cool," Kyle said, his eyes alight.

Bella walked to one of the creatures and ran her fingers along it.  I shuddered at the thought of even approaching those disgusting things.  I would kiss the spider cat first.  Nibbles sat on the ground, watching the creatures with intense interest, especially their flailing tentacles.  He crouched into hunting mode and stalked them, then dove for the nearest one.  He successfully caught it, but was flung into the air like a puff of lint when the tentacle snaked through the air to meet that of another alien's.

Nibbles flitted to the ground and renewed his attacks.

The odor in the place was wretched, like rotten fish and dog vomit.  I had to get out of there.  "Did you see the giant bugs?" I asked.

"Yeah," Kyle said.  "I wonder what they're for."

"They're eating up the parking lot and everything in it."

"Eating it?"  He flitted away.  I joined him outside the cube and gasped.  The Lowe's store was vanishing as the giant centipedes crawled over and consumed it.  Chunks of mortar, shelving, and their contents crashed down atop the centipedes, slowing them only a little as they vacuumed everything in their paths.  Dozens of the large glowing bricks lay in neat rows on bare dirt where the parking lot and buildings had been.  Hundred of people hovered, sat, or stood watching the bugs eat.

"I died in the gardening section of that store," a woman told me, pointing to the other end of the large store.

"Holy crap, me too," said a middle-aged man.  "I didn't know anything about planting azaleas so I was asking a clerk.  Next thing I knew, I was dead.  And I still don't know how to plant the stupid things."

"Oh they're easy," the woman said and launched into a tutorial.

"What's going on?" I asked Kyle.  "What are those cubes?"

"Uh," he said and shrugged.  "Maybe energy blocks or something."

Bella stepped up to one of the cubes and touched it.  Her face brightened quite literally, as did her body.  She glowed.  "This is amazing," she said.

I touched a cube and immediately felt hyper-caffeinated, like I'd just binged on Starbucks espressos.  "So it's energy?"

"Pure, condensed.  Amazing."

"Wow, I wish we'd met while alive," I heard the azalea man say to the woman.  "You could have saved m--"

I glanced at the Lowe's in time to see the gardening section vanishing into the centipedes' mouths.  Someone shrieked.  A man called out a woman's name, his voice laced with terror.  I noticed the man and woman who'd been happily discussing gardening were gone.  Other nearby people poofed out of sight.

"Where's everyone going?" I asked.

"Probably bored already," Kyle said.

"Where'd she go?" a man said in a hysterical voice.  He walked to us.  "She disappeared."

"Who?" I asked.

"My wife.  She was looking at her body when one of those--those monsters ate it.  Now she's gone."

"You sure she didn't just flit away?" Kyle asked.

"We haven't been apart since, well, everyone died.  Not a moment."

A woman screamed hysterically as a centipede closed in on a body just outside the remains of the building.  It sucked in the body.  Seconds later, her screams cut off midstream and she vanished.

Kyle paled.  "Oh crap."

"Oh crap what?" I asked.

"The people who died here, they're gone.  Those two talking about gardening, they're gone."

"So what?  They flitted away or shifted back to Heavenly."

"Dear God," Bella said and looked at the energy cubes.  "They vaporized the bodies.  They changed the molecular structure."

"And the quantum ghost image went with it."

Cold icy dread marched down my spine and my knees went weak.  "They're totally dead now?"

Kyle shook his head.  "I don't know.  Maybe.  Oh, man.  How far away are our houses?"

"A few miles."

"At the rate these things are going, it won't take long at all to reach our neighborhood."

A rumbling noise split the air and a tractor-like hovercraft emerged from the cube ship.  I flitted two stories up to windows set in the front of the craft and saw the tentacled aliens inside.  The craft glided over the cubes and they shot up into a port in the bottom.  Another hovercraft rumbled from inside the cube ship and paced behind the energy cube collector.  White shafts of light speared into the ground behind it, plowing the earth and dropping a green mossy material into the furrows.

Kyle cursed under his breath.  "They're cleaning all signs of our existence off the planet and planting their own vegetation."

I watched, entranced as the convoy of bugs and machines made short work of any manmade structures, working back and forth across the landscape until they reduced what had been a sprawling shopping center to a mossy green field.

* * * * *

Everyone panicked.

Thousands of ghosts clustered around a building erected by the religious group Ms. Tate associated with, The Faithfully United in Christ's Kingdom.  Apparently none of them had considered what the acronym would look like.  They were praying and chanting for deliverance.  Ms. Tate stood nearby, telling everyone that this was God's punishment to the unfaithful.  That they would be cleansed from the Earth as it was being remade anew for her and the faithful to repopulate.

"Are you crazy?" I yelled at her.  "They're aliens, not angels of God."

Ms. Tate glared at me.  "I know you, Lucy Morgan.  Your parents never took you to church.  They've doomed your soul to an eternity of damnation."

"Bull," Kyle said swatting his arm through the air.  "If being dead in this place isn't enough to convince you that your religion is full of dog turds, then you've got problems, lady.  "We need to figure out a way to stop these octo-bastards before we're all really dead."

"You're doomed, Kyle Jones.  Your mother is a good woman, but you're a little demon child.  I know you're the one who killed my pansies last year."

"What are you talking about?" he said.

"It's Hell for you, child.  Hell!"

"You stupid witch."

I grabbed him and pulled him away from the group.  "We've got to assemble our own group.  These people are about to go David Koresh on us."

"You mean those wackos in Waco?"

"Exactly."

"I'm glad I killed her pansies."  He stared blankly for a moment.  "Okay, I just got a call from the group who was researching the ships.  They're holding a meeting Earthside right now."

The science group was depressingly small, maybe a few hundred at most.  They were more orderly and a lot more geeky than the religious fanatics, but had no greater insight to a solution than anyone else.  I saw a familiar figure watching us from a distance and flitted over.

"Harb!"  I hugged my long-lost friend and asked him where he'd been all this time.

"Away," he said simply.  A sullen look clouded his face.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing.  These fools drive me crazy.  They have no imagination or ability to save us from this crisis."

"Who does, then?"

"I could, but they don't listen to me."

I almost smiled at the thought of this small Indian boy saving us, but his look was so serious that I repressed my amusement.  "How could you save us?"

"I can show you."  He flitted elsewhere.

I called him and followed, arriving in what at first appeared to be an amusement park.  Then I realized it was a zoo.  Animals roamed the place freely.  I wondered how they'd escaped their cages.  Harb motioned me over to the gorilla refuge.

"How have they survived without people?" I asked.

"I helped them."  He approached a sitting silverback gorilla and lowered himself into it until he vanished.

"You merged with an animal?"  I was stunned.  It had never occurred to me that might be possible.

The gorilla grunted.  It stood up and danced around.  Harb emerged a moment later.  His body remained opaque and didn't appear the least bit weakened.

"It's difficult, but we can use this to stop the aliens."

"Like planet of the apes?"  I chuckled.  I crack myself up sometimes.

He didn't laugh.  "Yes."

"Is this where you've been all this time?  Merging with animals?"

"Mostly.  I made mistakes at first and was lucky enough to survive them."

"Like what?"

"When you merge, it retards your thoughts and makes it difficult to think like a human.  I stupidly merged first with a zebra.  I was petting it when the idea came to me, so I tried it.  How long I remained in that body, I don't know, but I remember very little of it."