Mother Ship

by Scott Bartlett

  But whatever had happened two days ago, it had been sudden, and brief. Coldly efficient. And it seemed the invaders hadn’t even needed to get their hands dirty.

  Assuming they have hands.

  Either way, other than a few abandoned vehicles, many of them crashed into fences or ditches or each other, he enjoyed a leisurely drive in his parents’ Subaru Impreza. Most of the cars sat with at least one door open, as though the driver had suddenly forgotten to drive, and fled in confusion. Which was probably exactly what had happened. Just outside the city, he saw a truck with all four doors left open. Like it had been vacated by a family.

  I wonder if they’re still together.

  Then he reached the city outskirts, with fast food chains and strip malls popping up on both sides of the road. Every digital billboard he passed still worked, each flashing their ad rotation at him, vying for his attention. Contrasted with the lifeless streets, it was creepy.

  Here, navigating became tougher. Intersections were the worst. Depending on which lights had been red at the moment society lost its mind, his path forward was either clear or completely blocked. A few times, he had to drive over the grassy median to continue on.

  Sooner or later, he would have to stop and start hoofing it. The question was how long he should wait to do that—and also whether he cared about recovering the blue Impreza at some point. His parents had kept it well-maintained for years, and the idea of just ditching it didn’t sit right.

  Then, someone made the decision for him. A man wearing a business suit stepped out from behind an SUV up ahead, and Max slammed on the brakes. His seatbelt bit into his chest, and the front bumper came to a stop inches from the man’s shins.

  For a moment, he glared at Max through the windshield with blazing eyes, looking about as infuriated as a regular pedestrian might have been at almost getting mowed down.

  But he wasn’t a regular pedestrian, which became clear when he threw himself onto the Impreza’s hood and started pummeling the glass with his fists.

  It didn’t have much of an effect, but it was unsettling. The man’s knuckles split, and his blows began to leave bloody smears.

  Max sat rigid, paralyzed. If he kept driving, he might hurt the man. Even if he managed to shake him off by reversing, there were cars to the Impreza’s left and a concrete wall to the right, so there would be no driving around him. The oncoming lanes were also jammed.

  The man behaved savagely, but the ship had done that to him. Two days ago, he’d been a regular person. Was there a chance he would be again?

  Ten excruciating minutes passed, the man’s fists becoming more raw and red with every second. At last, when they were completely coated with scarlet, he rose to his knees, staring at Max through the blood-smeared glass with an exhausted grimace. With that, he slid off the hood and continued walking, as though nothing had happened.

  Max watched him make his way through the tangle of cars, then out of sight behind a McDonald’s. He breathed out in a long whoosh.

  The Impreza had been idling the entire time, and now he guided it ahead of the SUV that had hidden the man, parking there.

  “Sorry, old girl,” he said, patting the Subaru’s steering wheel. “You’ll draw too much attention if I take you any farther.”

  He picked up the Ruger P89 Jimmy’s father had kept under his bed, double-checking the safety before tucking it into his belt for easy access. The handgun had a detachable magazine that held fifteen 9mm rounds, plus one in the chamber, with three extra mags he’d filled at Jimmy’s house before stowing two of them in his pack and one in a pouch he slid his belt through. Avery Somerton hadn’t believed in running out of ammo, and even after filling the magazines, there were still four fifty-round boxes, which Max had added to his backpack.

  He’d stuffed in some crackers and a few cans of random food around the ammo—whatever he could find with a ring-pull for opening, since he hadn’t wanted to take Jimmy’s only can opener.

  Gripping his pack, he checked the Subaru’s surroundings one last time. He inhaled deeply, then slowly opened the door.

  As he pressed on, he began to notice the bodies littering the city, splayed on asphalt or draped over cars. Nearly every corpse seemed to belong to someone who’d suffered a gruesome death. Blow to the head, slit throat, multiple stab wounds. He hadn’t seen them on the drive in, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t been there—just not on the street.

  Now, they seemed to be everywhere. He passed hundreds of bodies within ten minutes. People just lying in the sun where they’d been killed, where they would almost certainly rot. No one left to bury them.

  They deserve better than this.

  He decided to abandon the streets after a narrow brush with a mob of people who trudged out of an alley, some of them armed with various blunt objects, some of them not. Max threw himself behind a mailbox at the sight of the first crowbar-wielding rioter, and crouched there, holding his breath.

  Amidst dozens of footsteps, one set grew louder, until Max was sure one of them was standing on the other side of the mailbox. His hand went to the butt of the Ruger, but what good would it do? Sixteen rounds wouldn’t help him against dozens of attackers. Sure, if he counted his filled magazines he had sixty-one rounds, but his shooting would draw more attackers, and he didn’t relish the idea of rooting around in his backpack for more ammo as they closed in.

  So he waited. After several long moments, something crashed against the mailbox, ringing the metal like a bell. Max started, gasping, but it was lost in the noise.

  Then the footsteps trailed off, in the direction the others had gone.

  He was even more careful, after that.

  The walk to the house took hours, a journey made longer by staying constantly on the lookout for crazed citizens, and hiding at the first sign of them, aware every minute could be his last. But at last, he stepped onto the front step, sticking the key into the lock. He’d been clutching it for blocks, now, in anxious anticipation.

  He closed the door behind him, engaged the deadbolt, and leaned against it, eyes closed, just breathing.

  I made it.

  “Mom?” he called. “Dad?” No answer. A quick check of each room turned up nothing. They weren’t here.

  Heading upstairs, he went into his old room, which was a bizarre experience. Returning to it after a year at the academy had been surreal enough, but being here in the post-apocalypse was really doing a number on him.

  His parents had kept it exactly the same. Bed neatly made, chair wheeled into the desk, laptop riser standing empty atop the faux-wood desktop.

  He dropped onto the bed, scooting back to lean against the wall and stare at the door, the Ruger nestled in his lap.

  He still vividly remembered coming here almost every day after high school, tossing his backpack in the same corner every time, and settling down to his computer for the evening to research random curiosities, troll message boards, or play first-person shooters and strategy games like Starcraft. Some nights, he would load a flight simulator and lose himself until the early hours of the morning. His parents had noticed his interest in flying, and they’d even started paying for weekly flying lessons halfway through grade ten.

  Peter and Cynthia Edwards had never worried about anything distracting Max from his schoolwork. Public school hadn’t required much study from him to ace it.

  I was such a nerd. He’d never been popular, but after he’d moved from Ohio in the first year of junior high, he’d found himself a total outcast. Semester after semester, he’d sit alone in the cafeteria, his nose in a book, ignored by everyone. On the bright side, bullying had been minimal. A few times someone had slapped the novel out of his hands, but other than that he’d been left alone. Jimmy said Max had a way of looking at people he didn’t like as though he planned to dedicate himself to their disembowelment, so maybe that had something to do with it.

  The isolation had done its own damage, though, and now Max recognized that he’d been on his way to becomi
ng a twisted, resentful person. His taste in music had changed, grown darker, and darkness had flooded his dreams as well. He sometimes woke at night, drenched in sweat and shocked at the scenes of wanton violence his mind had just produced. In waking life, he found himself enjoying shooting games a little too much.

  His parents had become worried, and he’d found himself visiting the guidance counselor regularly, and even the school principal. Max had come to respect and even like Mr. Chambers, who seemed to take an equal liking to him, checking in on him periodically. Of course, getting befriended by the principal hadn’t done much for his social status, but that couldn’t get much worse anyway. It had been Mr. Chambers who’d first sparked his interest in the military.

  He didn’t like to think about where his dark path might have led him. Luckily, he left it forever in his freshman year of high school, when Jimmy Somerton had approached him in homeroom. By the next year, Jimmy had moved his desk to the one ahead of Max’s, and each morning they talked about anything and everything.

  For one of the popular kids, Jimmy spent a lot of time on the internet, and he brought tales from its strangest corners. Unsolved mysteries, elaborate hacker heists, clever memes.

  And alien conspiracy theories. So many alien conspiracy theories.

  The academy had been nothing like high school. People there respected you, as long as you could hold your own, and he’d had no shortage of friends. He’d even started to feel like a normal person—happy with his career choice. But in high school, there was never any goal to bring the students together. No sense of “team,” unless you were a sports jock, or one of their hangers-on. Mostly, though, it was all petty one-upmanship and gossip.

  Thinking about Jimmy made him remember how fascinated he’d been with what Max’s parents did. Ever since they’d met, he’d been dying to discover the truth. Any mention of New Mexico would make his eyes light up, and he’d try to get Max to see if he could sneak a peek at his parents’ flight itinerary, or any clue about where in New Mexico they were actually headed. Of course, Jimmy was convinced he already knew where: Roswell.

  Max had refused Jimmy’s urging every time. Cynthia and Peter Edwards had always stressed how important it was for him to respect their jobs’ classified nature, and he did respect it. He couldn’t have asked for better parents than them. No one could have been more loving or attentive. So the idea of betraying their trust was unthinkable to him.

  Except, things were different now, weren’t they? Aliens had actually invaded Earth, and Jimmy’s rants no longer seemed so nuts.

  If his parents actually had known something about what would happen, hadn’t that become intensely relevant, now? They would want Max to know. He felt sure of that.

  At the end of the hall was his parents’ office, which they kept under lock and key—barred to the world. Barred to him. He got up now, leaving the Ruger on the bed to walk the short distance. First, he knocked, mostly out of habit. He hadn’t checked this room, but it hadn’t occurred to him they might be in here.

  They weren’t. He stood there, contemplating the slab of wood between him and the secrets inside.

  It’s time.

  He braced himself against the opposite wall and raised his foot, booting the door. At first it held fast—then his foot crashed through the spot next to the knob. Carefully, he extracted the limb, wary of splinters.

  He picked away at flakes of plaster and pieces of wood until he was able to reach the lock on the other side.

  He was in.

  Filing cabinets towered on both sides, bracketing a single desk underneath the window, which had two chairs so his parents could work side-by-side.

  He opened a random cabinet drawer and removed a hanging file folder, tossing it onto the desk.

  It was labeled “ASSET, AGE 7, APR 16 - MAY 1. DIETARY RECORDS.”

  Max frowned as he palmed the folder open and found an itemized list of daily meals, complete with calorie and macronutrient counts. Vitamins were also listed, with the covered minerals and micronutrients printed neatly alongside.

  “What the hell?” he muttered, and opened another random drawer, pulling out a second folder: “ASSET, AGE 13, NOV 15 - DEC 2. BEHAVIOR AT SCHOOL.”

  He pulled out a sheet of paper which was covered in his mother’s handwriting:

  “The move has been hard on the asset, and he’s having trouble fitting into his new school environment.”

  Max stared hard at the paper he held, which had begun to shake in his grasp. He lowered himself to the floor and sat against one of the filing cabinets, its handles sticking into his back.

  With that, he brought a hand to his forehead and tried to grapple with what he’d just read. His stomach roiled.

  9

  7 days to extinction

  He resumed his reading.

  “The move has been hard on the asset, and he’s having trouble fitting into his new school environment. We’ve tried to counsel him as we can, and have even intervened with the parents of other students on his behalf, but that backfired when our actions were relayed by the students in question to their peers.

  “The asset reports feelings of isolation and worthlessness. Dr. Greenwood has recommended a small, regular dose of antidepressants, believing it will ensure the asset’s vital qualities are preserved by stabilizing him, but the asset is vehemently against the idea and frankly we agree that it should only be a last resort.”

  Dr. Greenwood had been his family doctor since he moved with his parents to Oklahoma City. He remembered objecting to the drugs Greenwood had suggested, and his parents ultimately agreeing with him.

  These records were about him—that didn’t seem in question. What he did question was why his parents had kept such extensive notes on him in the first place. And why were those notes kept in the office they said was for their government-classified work? Why did their notes refer to him as “the asset?” And what were the “vital qualities” his parents and Dr. Greenwood had been so keen to preserve?

  He got to his feet and yanked open drawer after drawer, piling folders on the desk until the entire surface was covered with manila paper.

  Cynthia and Peter Edwards had documented every day of their son’s life in detail. His diet, moods, grades, notable verbal statements, and actions outside his normal spectrum of behavior—it was all here, clinically recorded and analyzed.

  There were incidents written about in these files that his parents shouldn’t have known about, including notes about private conversations, and things he’d done at the academy.

  In embarrassing detail, one passage documented his brief involvement with Lara Deacy, the girl who’d started at his school halfway through tenth grade. Their budding romance had crashed and burned once she’d picked up on his social status, or lack thereof.

  There were also folders documenting the exercises he remembered his parents running him through as a child. There was the cookie test at age four, which had measured his willpower by placing a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie in front of him.

  “You can eat the cookie now,” he dimly remembered Cynthia Edwards saying. “Or you can wait fifteen minutes and have two cookies. It’s completely up to you.”

  At the time, it had seemed pretty simple to him: two cookies were more than one, so he’d held out for the quarter-hour, despite how much the wait had made him squirm, his mouth watering.

  Later, he’d learned that test was used to determine children’s likelihood of success as adults, across a number of areas. When he’d discovered that, Max had simply figured the test was the sort of thing extremely conscientious parents gave to their children. But now he held records that showed it had been used to flesh out a comprehensive psychological profile for him.

  Other tests had measured his IQ, personality type, temperament, spatial awareness, and motor skills. Over the years, his parents had managed to continue testing him by telling him they’d taken a certain test online, and challenging him to take it too, to compare his results with th
eirs. It had become a fun family pastime, a tradition.

  Now he saw there had been much more to it.

  Other tests had been worked into his school curriculum and given to all the students, so that he wouldn’t suspect anything. Clearly, at least some of the staff at his school had also been involved in monitoring him. Studying him.

  His entire life was an elaborate science experiment. But for what purpose? What was the result they’d been hoping to achieve?

  He started combing the filing cabinets’ contents for some kind of explanation for his parents’ behavior. His palms were clammy, and so was his forehead. His armpits felt greasy and damp. He wanted to take a shower, and not just because he was uncomfortable. He felt soiled. Violated. Betrayed.

  Then, downstairs, he heard the deadbolt click. His heart leapt into his throat. Someone was coming in. Someone with a key.

  Fear flashed through him. And, on its heels: anger.

  But most of all, self-preservation. Clearly, he couldn’t trust anyone. And if so many people had such in-depth access to his private life, then why wouldn’t they also have access to his house? That could be anyone coming through that door.

  The Ruger still lay on his bed.

  He crept out of the office and down the hall to his room as quietly as he could. Retrieving the handgun from atop the comforter, he returned to the hall and made his way to the top of the stairs with the weapon aimed dead ahead.

  At the bottom of the stairs stood Mr. Chambers, his old high school principal. He held a weapon of his own, a pistol, but it was pointed at the floor while Max’s was aimed straight at Mr. Chambers’ head.

  “Whoa, Max.”

  Max didn’t lower the Ruger. Seconds ago, his head had been filled with muddled thoughts about his world getting turned upside down. Questions about who his parents really were—about who he was.