Mother Ship

by Scott Bartlett

  “Not yet. But I’ve flown civilian planes a fair bit. Getting my hours in. What about you—what do you do?”

  “What did I do, you mean?”

  “Yeah.” He returned her coy smile with his best attempt at a smirk.

  “Nanotechnologist. At least, that’s what I was trying for. I just finished my second year of nanoscale engineering at SUNY Poly, in New York.”

  “SUNY Poly?”

  “Yeah. State University of New York Polytechnic Institute. You’ve never heard of it?”

  “Rings a bell,” Max said, though it didn’t. His mind was elsewhere. He thought back to Chambers’ talk of the “dust” the aliens had been using to control humanity. Hadn’t he said the dust was ultimately just a bunch of nanobots? And here he found a farm girl with half a bachelor’s degree in nanotechnology. Coincidence?

  “Has anyone ever told you that your voice sounds distinctly familiar?”

  She narrowed his eyes. “No,” she said, drawing out the syllable. “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  23

  5 days to extinction

  Ted led Daisy between two rows of wheat, occasionally glancing over his shoulder, toward what Gord had styled Fort Benson.

  The kid trudged along behind, leading his own horse, but Ted wasn’t paying him much attention. Yet. For now, he only cared about whether they were being watched.

  As they neared the first oaks, Jimmy came to a stop, stubbornness firming his jaw. “Wait. We’re going into the woods?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “So Benson can’t see us.”

  Jimmy furrowed his brow for a moment, looking as though he was going to argue. Then he shook his head. “Whatever.”

  Ted tugged on Daisy’s reins, prompting her to continue forward, and Jimmy followed.

  Ted spotted two oak trees within about a meter of each other, each marked with yellow tape. After a moment, he saw the wires that stretched away from each tree.

  “Ho, there,” a voice called from above.

  Ted looked up to see a raven-haired young man crouched amidst the branches of the yellow-marked tree on the right.

  “Does Mr. Benson know you’re leaving?” he asked.

  “He does.”

  The boy nodded. “Be careful.”

  Ted eyed Jimmy, pointing. “Lead Ollie between those trees.”

  “You got it.”

  They took the horses past the perimeter.

  “What do you want to know, anyway?” the little shit asked as the first slender trunks slid by.

  Ted didn’t answer—not at first. He waited until the forest blocked them from the lookout’s line of sight, and then he waited longer: till he was sure they were out of earshot.

  “I want to know how long we can all expect you to keep the attitude of a thirteen-year-old girl,” he said at last.

  “Oh. Very sorry, Principal Chambers. Will I get detention now?”

  Ted glanced back through the woods again. We’re far enough. He turned, crossed the distance between them with a couple strides, and slammed his fist into his former student’s stomach.

  Jimmy sank to his knees, clawed hands clutching at his torso as he gasped for breath. When he looked up, his eyes were wide with shock.

  “Tell me something.” Ted kept his tone steady—conversational. “Have you realized what’s going on yet? Who Max is, and what’s at stake?”

  “You can’t—do this,” the kid wheezed. “You can’t—just—attack me.”

  “Oh? And what’s stopping me?”

  Jimmy grimaced as he struggled to recover. He managed to get one foot under him, but the pain kept him from rising just yet.

  Ted stood over him, hands still curled into fists. “I’m helping Max as a favor to Cynthia and Peter Edwards. Because they’re good people. But you shouldn’t mistake me for a good person.”

  “You don’t scare me,” Jimmy managed to choke out.

  “No? In that case, maybe it would be easier to kill you.” Ted drew his pistol, then unsafetied, charged, and cocked it. He placed the barrel against Jimmy’s forehead. Within seconds, the boy’s face took on the pallor of a corpse.

  “You need to start acting as fire support,” Ted said. “Not an enemy in our midst.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jimmy was finally able to breathe more or less properly, but his voice still trembled.

  “You’re letting petty jealousy make you stupid. You need to cure yourself of that, along with everything you think you know about Max Edwards. And you need to do it now.”

  The kid’s shoulders rose and fell with increasing tempo.

  “Do we understand each other?” Ted asked him.

  “Yeah.”

  He uncocked the pistol and safetied it before sliding it back into his holster. “Good. Get up.”

  Jimmy did.

  Ted nodded toward Fort Benson. “Take the horses back and find stalls for them. Gord said there’s enough room for all three. Make sure Yago’s taken care of, too.”

  Before complying, Jimmy held eye contact for a second, like he was about to say something. He didn’t. Instead, he took Ollie’s reins, led him to Daisy, and began to leave the forest.

  “Jimmy.”

  The kid stopped.

  “Don’t mention this to anyone, or next time I’ll pull the trigger. Oh, and leave Max alone for the night. I suspect he’ll be busy.”

  He chuckled to himself as Jimmy ranged ahead with the horses. Ted followed a few meters behind, keeping an eye on the boy’s posture as they made their way back.

  It wasn’t hard to tell Jimmy still had some fight left in him, but maybe he’d be more malleable, going forward. Less obnoxious, at the very least. For now, Ted would call that a win.

  As for Max, Ted had seen the way he’s looked at Benson’s girl, Tara. And the way she’d looked at him.

  He’d seen Jimmy ogling her, too. No doubt he expected things to play out exactly as they had in high school. As their principal, Ted had made his students’ business his business—especially the students surrounding Max Edwards. He was well aware of Jimmy’s success in the romance department, and of Max’s comparative drought.

  But this wasn’t high school, and Max was fresh from a year of tough conditioning at the academy. Judging from Jimmy’s general demeanor, he’d spent the last year smoking pot and hanging around his father’s acreage.

  Ted didn’t know her one iota, but he got the sense Tara Benson had a good head on her shoulders. And who would such an individual be most interested in—a do-nothing stoner or an aspiring fighter pilot who had the physique to go with it?

  Ted chuckled again. Maybe the GDA’s intergenerational experiment would continue after all.

  24

  5 days to extinction

  Max was no closer to figuring out why Tara’s voice sounded almost identical to the one he’d been hearing in his head. But somehow, he didn’t care much anymore.

  As they talked, they kept throwing the ball for Tilly, letting her lead them closer and closer to the forest’s edge. Then, without warning, Tara lowered herself to the ground between two rows of wheat.

  Max glanced toward the house, wondering briefly where Jimmy and Chambers were. But only briefly. He joined her on the ground. This early in the growing season, the wheat stalks weren’t quite level with the tops of their heads, even when they were sitting.

  “I’m still processing everything that’s happened.” She fiddled with a blade of grass, lining it up between her thumbs. “Like everyone, I guess. It’s funny, though. The thing I keep going back to is that Elon Musk will ever make it to Mars, now.” She blew through her thumbs, around the grass, and a high-pitched bird’s warble was the result.

  Max smiled, delighted that Musk’s quest to colonize Mars was the thing foremost in her mind after the apocalypse. “Maybe he will. Maybe he’s still alive, and when we get this alien situation figured out, he’ll get right back on track.”

 
Talking to Tara was…interesting. They’d quickly discovered shared interests—not the least of which was a borderline unhealthy obsession with Elon Musk and his career. They were both from out of state, too. Tara said she missed Texas, though Max couldn’t say the same about Ohio, where he’d grown up.

  It wasn’t just their similarities Max found compelling, though. Something about her slow smile made him feel awkward, somehow. And when she drew her auburn hair back over her ear for what must have been the fifteenth time, he could swear he felt his heart rate spike.

  Now that they were sitting close, the faintly sweet scent of her perfume was producing a similar effect.

  “We?” she repeated. “When we get it figured out? What do you see us doing about it, Maxwell?”

  “Um. I don’t know.” He’d spoken carelessly. That, and she’d called him ‘Maxwell,’ which had been his father’s name for him when they were kidding around.

  Peter, he corrected himself. Not my father.

  “Well, I appreciate your optimism.”

  “Thanks.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  His hand twitched, and she glanced down at it. He felt like he should do something, but he had no idea what. He’d stopped breathing, he realized, and for the moment he focused on resuming that.

  Clearing his throat, he said, “How many people are living here, anyway?”

  “Fifty-four. Fifty-seven, now you three are here.”

  Max shook his head, genuinely impressed. “It seems like not too many people stayed sane. Pretty impressive that your dad managed to gather together fifty-four people who did.”

  “Yeah, well, I have a theory about that. Almost half of them were in dad’s survivalist network. Maybe people who are that self-reliant were already the kind of people with the makeup to stay sane…but I think having a strong leader helps, too. Dad’s a veteran—served two tours in Iraq. People around here have always looked up to him. And I think having a rock like that…well, I think it helped people to stay with it, when otherwise they might have gone nuts like everyone else.”

  “What about the ones who weren’t part of the survivalist group?”

  “Those, Dad and Maisie found. They went around on that first day and gathered together all the sane people they could. Told them what Fort Benson had to offer, then brought them here. It’s gotten pretty cramped, and a lot of people want to build more shelter, but Dad’s against the idea for now. Says the noise of building them would risk attracting the…the crazies.” Tara grimaced as she said the last word, clearly uncomfortable with the term. Then, she smiled, and put on a thick Texan accent, like her dad’s. “‘I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let a bunch of shit-for-brains be the end of me!’ That’s what he said. Dad’s very eloquent.”

  Max chuckled.

  Tara sighed, then. “So many here lost someone. Most of them, several someones. I’m not sure any family was left intact, unless you count dad and I.”

  They both fell silent, for a while, then. Lost in thought.

  “When did your dad first turn survivalist?” Max asked after a while.

  “Oh, he’s been predicting something like this for years. Like most preppers, I guess. But I got so sick of him talking about ‘Fort Benson,’ growing up. How he planned to turn this place into some kind of military base. I guess I should have been more receptive to it. He didn’t predict the alien part…but in a weird way, he was right all along.”

  “Seems so.”

  Her eyes brightened. “There’s an underground bunker here, you know.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep. It’s only big enough for like, four people, and dad was never about hunkering down and shutting everyone else out. But he calls it his command center. It’s connected to the house, barn, and silo.”

  “Wow.” Max nodded along to everything Tara said, but he felt distracted. At least, he wasn’t focused on Tara’s words so much as the question of when the optimal time was to kiss a girl. Would there be a cue? Or maybe a certain type of statement to listen for?

  Nothing they were discussing seemed particularly romantic. Should he try to turn the conversation in that direction? He had no idea. All he knew that, right now, the idea of kissing Tara was very appealing. He knew where he wanted to get, and he knew where he was. He just had no idea how to get from here to there.

  Tara broke off mid-sentence—a sentence that, he realized now, he’d completely missed.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” She leaned forward, cupped his jaw, and pressed her lips to his.

  A couple minutes later—or hours, Max wasn’t totally sure—they parted.

  Tara smiled. “I was getting the feeling you weren’t ever gonna go for that. So I did.”

  “No objections,” Max said.

  This time, he kissed her.

  25

  5 days to extinction

  The klaxon alarm jerked Ethan from sleep to full alertness.

  He rolled from the cot he’d set up in the back of one of the M35s, already in battledress—he hadn’t taken that off since all this started, other than to switch it for an identical uniform. Janet still complained about his stench, but screw her.

  An M4 rifle coughed from somewhere nearby, and then another started up…from the opposite side of the camp.

  That’s not good.

  He hauled on one boot, then another, lacing them as quickly as his fingers would move. By the time he snatched up his own rifle from the crate he’d left it on, the camp was alive with gunfire.

  He brought the handset of his PRC radio to his mouth. “Zim, how many are we looking at?”

  “How many?” His first sergeant sounded harried. “Uh…all of ’em, sir.”

  “What do you mean, all of them?”

  “I mean, I can’t imagine there are any Berserkers left in the surrounding area, because they’re all here.”

  Ethan squeezed his eyes shut. “Then we aren’t dealing with Berserkers anymore.” Under the GDA taxonomy, when the crazies started banding together and attacking in organized groups, they weren’t called Berserkers. “These are Ravagers, now.”

  He sprinted for a nearby heavy logistics truck and hauled himself up into the back, joining a trio of his soldiers. All three of them were pumping rounds into an oncoming tidal wave of people.

  Almost every shot found a target—it was basically impossible to miss. But the crazies went down harder than insurgents hopped up on dope. Unless you got them in the brain, or shot their legs out from under them, they kept coming, no matter their injuries.

  “Zim.”

  “Sir?”

  “Time to break out the big guns. And make sure everyone has their goggles. Spraying and praying isn’t gonna cut it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do we have funnels set up?”

  “Yes. In two places, on opposite sides of the circle.”

  “Concentrate firepower on each gap, and point the Bradley cannons and Humvee turrets at them. If things get too hairy, we’ll pull the men back and put the Bradleys and Humvees on cleanup.”

  “I’m on it, sir.”

  Ethan took out his own night vision goggles and affixed them to his helmet, using them to get a better look at the oncoming masses.

  Zim was right. They were looking at thousands of crazies, all intent on swarming the GDA camp.

  The aliens changed up their programming, all right. Just like we thought they would. Unlike Berserkers, the Ravagers didn’t bother with attacking each other. Instead, they swarmed the circled vehicles in a focused mob.

  Grenades arced out from Mark 19 launchers, ripping the oncoming ranks to shreds. It didn’t matter how single-minded you were when a grenade exploded in your face. Sniper fire came next, blowing the tops off Ravager heads one by one. Ethan’s unit didn’t pack light. He’d made sure of that.

  Those who’d been on watch when the attack started had already had their night vision turned on, but now that the entire unit could see properly, the M4s were doing good work too. />
  Once they got close enough, some of the crazies tried crawling under the trucks, but Ethan’s soldiers were too smart to let that happen. They shot them as they came out the other side. Bodies soon clogged the area under each vehicle’s undercarriage.

  The crazies also closed in on the funnels, just as Ethan had known they would. It wasn’t long before they threatened to overwhelm his men, but when that happened, they simply pulled back to let the Bradleys and Humvees have a turn. The invaders didn’t have much hope against the 50-caliber rounds, not to mention the Bushmaster’s armor-piercers.

  It was overkill, but overkill got the job done. The weapons tore the Ravagers to shreds. Soldiers waited nearby with combat knives ready for any that somehow managed to make it through that barrage.

  Ethan’s men fought with cold efficiency. The amygdala-suppressing drugs that kept them sane weren’t cheap, but no pill had been wasted on anyone who didn’t have a high level of training and plenty of combat experience. Many had once been Rangers, SEALS, or Green Berets, others were former marines, and some had been infantry. He’d hand-selected them not just for their skill but also a lack of family attachments.

  All so that they wouldn’t be compromised emotionally if and when the world went to hell.

  Of course, there were other stressors apart from missing family. Lack of sleep, remaining on constant vigil for the approach of mindless killers, the spreading awareness that the sanity pills were running out.

  His men were tired, but it didn’t matter. Their movements were automatic, born of long years of training. They’d drilled killing again and again, and now they performed it without thought. Aim, reload, fire. If it ended up bothering them, it wouldn’t be until long after this was over.

  It was over in less than an hour, with the circular camp sitting in the middle of a mass grave that extended for dozens of meters in every direction. Bodies lay strewn through both funnels, and a couple dozen littered the ground just beyond—twice, Ethan had needed to divert men from their stations atop the circled vehicles.

  Nonverbal groans filled the air, floating in toward the camp from Ravagers who were still alive, but too incapacitated by weapons fire to move. Ethan tried his best to deaden himself to those calls of pain, but they were beginning to get to him. He caught himself grimacing, and schooled his face to what he hoped was a look of calm.