The cameras watching Cole relayed his understandably increasing difficultly at keeping his expression in check. His eyes narrowed, sending nothing but hate Jack’s way.
Emma held her breath; she was ecstatic that he’d gotten the message so soon, but everything rested on the next few seconds. If Cole could get through them without snapping at Jack, he could prove to be a useful asset and the unlikeliest of allies in a situation whose outcome no one could predict.
Cole took a deep breath, and then another, before re-covering his watch with the sleeve of his blazer. He forced a smile, and although it was one of the least convincing Emma had ever seen it was also one of the most welcome. He still wouldn’t be winning any awards for his acting, but for once in his life John Cole’s intentions were good.
“Oh my God!” Dan yelped, instinctively placing a hand over his forehead and shaking his legs in agony. He waved his other arm in a plea for space. “Tara, Tara, Tara,” he said, trying to get her off the couch so he could lie flat.
Everyone turned to see him and Clark rushed to help, but Dan McCarthy was out cold by the time his head hit the couch.
V minus 7
???
???
All around Dan McCarthy was white. The floor, the ceiling and the walls — if there even were any — merged utterly into one.
He turned around, hopeful of what and who he would see, and immediately his hopes were met.
“I don’t want to hear anything,” Dan said, pre-empting the Messengers’ words. The two aliens stood before him, their large eyes striking him as concerned but the lack of eyebrows and the general almost-but-not-quite-human spatial layout of their faces making it difficult to be sure. “I don’t even want to see you here. I want to hear you and see you where you need to be: on Earth, for everyone else to see and hear, too. Whatever is going on, we can’t fix it while you’re hiding… wherever the hell this place is.”
The Messengers turned to each other. Dan didn’t know why, bearing in mind they could communicate telepathically, but he assumed it was an instinctive or habitual thing.
A second or two later, they turned back to Dan and very clearly nodded.
“You’re coming?”
A soft voice in his head relayed a single word before his senses faded to black: “Cornfield.”
V minus 6
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Within five minutes, Dan was out the door.
His immediate reaction to the atypical contact experience had been to sit bolt upright and blurt out the gist of it before his eyes were even open: “The Messengers are coming to the cornfield. Come on, we need to get out there before they show up and the police shut down the roads!”
Clark was the only one to react with physical urgency, running to grab his car keys. “You heard him, come on!”
“You’re sure?” Emma asked.
Dan nodded and got to his feet, then headed towards the door to get his shoes. Tara followed, no part of her wanting to stay behind.
Henry, Phil and Mr Byrd, though no less keen to see the promised return of the Messengers, shared confused looks before Phil took it upon himself to ask the obvious question: “Any particular cornfield?”
“Ohhhh,” Clark said, “shit, that’s right… we didn’t tell you. Uh, it’s your cornfield, Phil. Remember how it went up for auction right after Walker died? That’s because it was his old place.”
Phil’s eyebrows furrowed.
“Yeah…” Clark went on. “The Messengers landed there a few times, they called Dan to the cornfield twice, and they took Walker away twice. One of those times I was there and broke my nose running into a forcefield. I guess it’s a long story why we didn’t tell you, but you loved that place as soon as you saw it and you didn’t need to know. So, uh, yeah… your driveway is gonna get real busy real soon, and the government will probably seal off the whole area once this is done, just like they did at the drive-in. So if there’s anything in there you’ll need in the next little while, this would be a good time to get it out.”
While Dan, ready to leave, clapped his hands together to restate the urgency, Phil stood in stunned shock. “The four of you have got some serious goddamn explaining to do, keeping that shit from me for the past year,” he grunted.
At his side, the unusually quiet Mr Byrd smiled incongruously at the absurdity of it all.
“I’m not coming,” Henry announced. “The shadow of a spaceship is no place for a wheelchair… no place for a man who can’t run away.”
Mr Byrd, as loyal as friends came, insisted upon staying behind with Henry. Clark didn’t offer to do the same, completely set on going with Dan, while Phil had his own reasons to head out to Eastview and Emma and Tara were likewise in no doubt as to where they wanted to be.
The drive was short, filled with speculation as to what would happen next and occasional conversational lulls when the live radio news coverage of events in Havana and beyond dropped in some new information.
Nothing new had happened in China, which was news in itself; now a considerable amount of time since its arrival, the colossal alien mothership continued to cast an imposing shadow over much of central Beijing.
Clark was driving, and even through the tension of the moment he couldn’t help but crack a smile as Phil Norris somewhat irresponsibly overtook at the first possible opportunity and sped towards the home he had just found out to be an unparalleled hotspot of alien visitation.
“Guys!” Tara yelled from the back seat, next to Dan. Her voice was excited rather than frightened as she pointed out of the window. “I think that’s it!”
“Talk to me,” Clark said, keeping his eyes on the road.
Over the next few seconds it became clear that Tara was right, with a huge uncloaked alien craft appearing larger and larger as it descended from the heavens. It didn’t look to be coming down all that quickly, but this was a matter of perspective and reflected the high altitude at which it had first become visible.
Huge was the best word to describe the craft; for although the scale was difficult to ascertain, it was clearly much larger than the craft that had landed in the drive-in on Contact Day but just as clearly much smaller than the obscenely sized mothership hovering over the ELF’s global headquarters.
“Emma… that’s the one from Lolo!” Dan observed when the craft came low enough for the clear shape and first signs of detail to emerge. “The one we went inside first time round, when it was cloaked and Clark couldn’t see.”
“Definitely,” she replied, recalling every detail and slowly seeing them come into view. The car took the semi-concealed turn towards Stevenson Farm at this point, temporarily blocking their view of the incoming craft. “And that was their mothership, right? So there’s probably going to be more of them than just two…”
Although the narrow road that led the rest of the way to the house and more importantly to the adjacent cornfield was a short one, the news being discussed on the car’s radio changed abruptly before it reached its destination. Eyewitness testimony and images of the incoming craft were spreading like wildfire on social media, evoking memories in Dan of the old plaque-hunting days when the California Fireball had captured the nation’s attention.
This event was far more significant, with the Messengers’ uncloaked return intriguing the whole world enough to tear attention away from the remarkable live images in Havana. Those images now appeared to show friendly cooperation between ELF personnel and a faction of the Messengers’ species who only Dan’s group and a select few others knew to be considered hostile by the Messengers themselves, with several police officers having boarded the parked craft one-at-a-time with an extraterrestrial escort at their side.
Police sirens, distant at first, became audible just as Phil’s farmhouse came into view. The Messengers’ mothership was close, directly above the cornfield and now moving only vertically, with its relatively and perhaps deliberately slow descent having enabled the police and likely co
untless others to set off with a general idea of the landing site before it touched down.
Dan rushed out of the car before it drew to a complete halt, but Clark was too awestruck by the sight of the incoming mothership to rebuke him like he normally would have. The etched details on its underside were highly visible now, and the police sirens ever more audible.
The mothership touched down gently in the centre of the cornfield, taking up a far larger area than the circle-making craft of old, but no ramp extended to the ground; because just like at Lolo, the mothership itself didn’t actually rest upon the ground. Instead, a pseudo-metallic cylinder extended from its base to act as a remarkably strong support, holding the whole mothership in position at an angle that surprised everyone except the two people lucky enough to have seen it before.
“They’re going to come out,” Dan said, utter confidence in his voice. “I know it. We don’t have to go in, they’re coming out.”
Every passing heartbeat and second led the others to exchange increasingly unsure glances, which progressed to fairly urgent questions as to how sure Dan was about this when two police cars arrived. Right behind them came an ACN news van and then a line of civilian vehicles.
A police officer hurried out of his car to instruct the civilians to stay back, while one of his colleagues walked straight to Dan. These men were Clark’s colleagues, too, of course, but Dan was naturally their focus for now.
“How did you know they were coming?” the man asked.
“Not now, Terry,” Clark replied on Dan’s behalf.
Terry ignored Clark and asked again, but Dan responded by decisively ignoring him.
More and more cars continued to arrive, packing the narrow road like it was a drive-in itself. People abandoned their vehicles and rushed as far forward as they could, stopping only at the arbitrary point which the police had decided was close enough.
A loud collective gasp sent Dan’s eyes away from the growing crowd and towards the cornfield, where he took great delight in seeing two very familiar Messengers in their very familiar all-white tunics. The aliens emerged from the field with graceful steps but stopped very abruptly when they saw a raised weapon.
Dan, literally as well as figuratively caught in the middle, gestured several times for the officer to lower it.
Despite this, the stubborn and frightened officer didn’t budge.
“You need to lower your weapon,” Dan snapped, wondering how the man — Terry, as Clark had called him — didn’t know that was what he meant and how he didn’t understand that Dan wouldn’t be signalling for such a thing if it wasn’t necessary.
“Terry, what the hell do you not understand here?” Clark boomed. “Put it down!”
One of the Messengers began to raise its hand, planting a seed in Dan’s mind that it was about to immobilise the armed man it perceived as a threat, just as had happened at the drive-in a year earlier.
“Don’t even think about it,” Terry yelled at the Messenger, grasping his firearm ever tighter and adjusting his aim for its head.
A voice entered Dan’s head: “This imminent threat cannot stand. He leaves me no choice but to—”
Dan appreciated this warning and made full use of it, taking matters into his own hands before even hearing the entirety of the thought.
Without any hesitation, he turned towards Terry with his thumb pressed to his middle finger and pointed at the weapon with his index finger. Dan then swiped his finger through the air, effortlessly emptying Terry’s hand and sending the gun to the ground.
As soon as it landed, Dan used tiny finger movements to remotely — telekinetically — knock the weapon away from Terry.
The civilians standing beside their cars at the edge of the exclusion zone had clearly seen what happened and were standing in genuine awe following the most concerted collective gasp Dan had ever heard. His eyes briefly took in the even more stunned expressions of Tara and Clark, from whom he and Emma had kept their knowledge of his untested telekinetic ability.
This instance was far more significant than when Dan had stumbled upon the frightening power in catching Emma’s falling drink on board Timo’s private jet, and it went without saying that the size of the crowd was sufficient to ensure that word would spread and his already complicated life would take another decisive step away from normality.
Telekinesis was certain to be too much for many, perhaps even burn-him-for-witchcraft territory in some minds, as Dan knew only too well. He tried to push all of that out of his mind, but this became impossible when the rest of the uniformed police officers turned to him in response to orders received via their barely visible earpieces.
One even called for him to put his hands up, fingers spread.
“Back the fuck off,” Clark yelled at them, prompting calls of ‘stay out of this’ from men he had considered loyal colleagues and in some cases even friends. Dan had never done anything to hurt anyone in his life, so no part of Clark could understand why he would suddenly be seen as a threat. His telekinetic control of the firearm had been a truly remarkable sight to behold, for sure, but by no means an inherently threatening one. “He could’ve saved Terry’s life by doing that!”
“Exactly,” Dan insisted, as glad as ever to have Clark in his corner to the very end. He encouraged Emma and Tara to retreat into the car, and Emma accepted the safety-first suggestion; talking to the media or politicians may have been her forte, but Clark was undoubtedly better suited to talking to the police.
Even he couldn’t seem to get through to them, though, as the attendant officers approached Dan and ordered him in firmer terms to raise his hands. When he didn’t, they starkly raised their firearms in unison.
“Get back,” Dan said, his voice loud but weak.
“Hands above your head!” Terry’s gruff and fear-struck voice called. “Hands above your head right now or I swear to God they’ll—”
With a forceful downward thrust of his hand, Dan sent everyone within a thirty foot radius flying off their feet. This included all of the attendant officers, even the off-duty Clark, and left Dan alone in an otherwise empty circle.
The ground was charred by his desperate and instinctive creation of a forcefield far less discreet than those typically used by the Messengers, and the visual effect was remarkable.
Dan glanced down at his hand and contemplated the power within it. When he looked back up, none of the countless faces that met his gaze, with the sole exception of Clark’s, any longer looked as though they were meeting the eyes of a fellow human.
With two Messengers standing directly behind him and dozens of accusing expressions bearing down, Dan McCarthy very suddenly knew how it felt to be alien.
Part 7
The Elders
“Courage is a kind of salvation.”
Plato
V minus 5
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
The human faces around Dan reflected fear and unease at the decidedly alien ability he had just exhibited.
The Messengers, behind him, meanwhile appeared entirely unmoved. Their body language was approving, if anything, with the one that had looked ready to act against Clark’s gun-toting colleague now standing in a perfectly relaxed manner next to its partner. Only these two Messengers had emerged from the craft despite its size having suggested a far larger crew was not only possible but likely, but that didn’t necessarily mean they had come alone.
The only faces Dan cared about in a personal sense were those of Clark and Tara, the latter of whom had now stepped back out of the car for a first-hand look at the incredible sight of Dan standing with only the Messengers for company inside a forcefield of his own telekinetic creation.
Even in the heat of the moment, Dan was aware of how this would be reported and how incredible it would look from the outside. He knew the image would instantly become even more iconic than last year’s remarkable snapshot of him standing at the drive-in like Moses in the parted sea, the only person able t
o remain inside the Messengers’ forcefield.
The reason was simple: this time, he had generated the forcefield. This time, he had the power.
It didn’t take more than a split second of reflection for Dan to know that once the dust settled and the understandably startled observers realised they had nothing to fear from his power, it would doubtlessly bring him an even higher level of messianic worship.
Crucially, though, with the traitorous and spiteful Jack Neal in cahoots with a hostile alien faction, Dan knew that even having a future to worry about could depend on his own ability to work with the Messengers to solve whatever was really going on with their Elders. Because that, after all, was why the Squadron were here in the first place and why Jack Neal was by their side in Havana rather than being securely held in the McCarthys’ basement.
Dan didn’t like that he’d kept this new ability from Tara and Clark, even though he and Emma hadn’t kept it quiet for any dubiously motivated reasons, but right now he knew that their expressions weren’t the ones that mattered; there was nothing to forgive him for, but they would accept his reasoning in time even if they did currently feel slighted for having been kept in the dark when secrets were supposed to be a thing of the past.
The Final Call Page 32
