Hena Day One

by Odette C. Bell

  Most humans wouldn’t be able to detect what it was. They would assume it was some kind of acrid smoke.

  Those involved in the space industry, however, would be able to correctly identify it.

  There’s a certain scent that accompanies something falling through the atmosphere of a planet. It’s the scent of burnt up ozone.

  It could be mistaken for the sweet, tangy scent that accompanies the onset of rain. But not in this quantity.

  Chills started to race down Linh’s back as she took yet another step toward the shoreline.

  “Linh, start speaking or I will,” Harry said as he thumbed the button on the microphone of his camera.

  Linh would not start speaking. She walked, like a woman possessed, over to the shoreline. Then she stood there as the lapping waves traced over her shoes.

  She knelt down, pressed a finger forward, and pushed it into a wave as it scattered the sand over her black shoes.

  Instantly, the tip of her finger scolded. She didn’t yank it out of the waves. She left it there, focusing on the sensations that pushed through the innumerable specialized receptors embedded into her apparently human skin.

  “Shit, what’s that smell? Is that your skin? What the hell is going on? Is the ocean boiling?” With every new question, Harry became more and more terrified.

  Linh could start to hear screams picking up over the beach as locals and tourists alike realized what was happening to the ocean, as they tilted their heads back and saw the clouds reaching higher and further into the sky as if they were attempting to penetrate the upper atmosphere and punch out into orbit.

  Finally she stood. She paid no heed to her fingertip.

  She closed her eyes.

  They were coming.

  She knew it from the direction of the wind, from the heat still tingling against her fingertip, from the scent of the cooked fish.

  They were finally here.

  Linh snapped her eyes open.

  “Run,” she said with finality as she shifted forward, looped an arm around Harry’s, and started pulling him back.

  “What the hell are you talking about? We need to pick this footage up.”

  “We need to get to safety, if it still exists,” she added.

  When Harry resisted her pull, she put more effort into it, until her diminutive form managed to drag his six-foot broad build backward with little more resistance.

  Something passed through Linh. Passed through the beach. It passed through Da Nang. It pushed into Vietnam, it echoed out across the world.

  A jolt of recognition, if you will.

  A final realization of what was about to come.

  Linh ground to a standstill, her eyes opening wide as her hair fanned in front of her face.

  “What—” Harry began. He stopped.

  Every single person on that beach stopped. And all of them looked up.

  The top of the cloud formation burst apart as the bottom of the great, undulating mass suddenly shot into the ocean.

  From far out to sea, light built at the base of the clouds. Red and glowing like the center of a furnace.

  People finally started to scream.

  It was too late.

  Linh shoved into Harry, yanked the camera off him, and placed it down on the beach, careful to ensure the lens was directed right at the ocean. Then she lugged the cameraman backward, her shoes with their partially melted soles digging holes into the sand as she hauled his heavy body back toward the edge of the beach.

  Were they coming for her?

  Or were they coming for humanity?

  Did it matter?

  “That camera is expensive,” Harry tried to point out, but his voice was husky, his throat compressed, his force becoming weaker with every second.

  Linh didn’t stop pulling him until they reached the edge of the beach and ran up into the car park.

  Around her she saw people standing and staring.

  “Get out of here while you still can,” she snapped in Vietnamese then repeated in English and Chinese to warn the tourists as well as the locals.

  No one paid heed.

  Though some obviously had an admirable sense of self-preservation that saw them shrink back, others brought up their phones as if the glowing red ocean was nothing more than an Instagram-perfect curiosity.

  In her peripheral vision as she yanked open the passenger door of her Jeep and shoved Harry inside, Linh saw the beach.

  The glow now permeated the entire cloud bank, making it look as if it were now a pyrocumulonimbus, a superstorm created by violent heat and condensation.

  Sure enough, lightning started discharging through the massive cloud stack.

  Harry shrunk back in his chair, his head banging dramatically against the leather headrest, a few slicks of sweat from his neck transferring over the mottled black fabric. “What the hell is that?”

  “An invasion,” Linh said.

  “What?” Harry turned to her dramatically, his shoulder-length sandy hair scattering over his unshaven chin as his round green eyes opened wide.

  Linh didn’t pause as she gunned the engine, thrust the gear stick into reverse, and slammed her foot on the accelerator. The jeep’s old tires squealed as she forced them to churn over the gravel of the car park as fast as they could. She slammed on the brakes, shoved the car into drive, and threw her foot onto the accelerator with all her weight.

  The car shuddered as it shot forward.

  Harry gripped the side of his seat, his pale skin becoming all the paler, looking like a corpse that’d had the blood squeezed from every last capillary.

  As Linh drove, she watched the cars and motorbikes paused on the side of the road, the passengers leaning out of their doors, their phones lifted to the heavens.

  She honked at them, her window down as she tried to wave them to safety.

  Some ran, some didn’t.

  Harry no longer said a word.

  Linh drove. She drove where her body told her to. She shoved the fear away, throwing her mind into her sense of flow instead, allowing every movement, every muscle contraction, every damn breath to push her forward.

  And as she was pushed forward, the world behind her fell apart.

  For the day she had dreaded was finally upon her.

  The invasion had begun.

  Chapter 4

  14:30 Southwest National Kim, Tasmania, Australia

  “She’s not the greatest tour guide,” Shane muttered under his breath, fixing the straps of his pack as he tightened them and pulled them closer to his already tired shoulders.

  “She’s silent, but she always seems to know what to do when things get rough,” Rachel replied gruffly.

  “Not the point of a tour guide though, is it? These people paid top dollar for this.”

  “They haven’t paid top dollar for us to natter in their ears about how damn special this UNESCO World Heritage site is,” Rachel said, repeating that phrase as if she’d rote learned it. “They paid for peace and quiet. And nothing says peace and quiet like the Southwest National Kim.”

  “She hasn’t said a thing to a single one of the guests, and be damned if I’m gonna let her ruin our Yelp rating.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes as she navigated around a tricky section of rocks. “You think top-rated executives care about Yelp ratings? They care about this.” She thrust her hand to the side, indicating the sweeping Western Arthur Ranges. From the high ridge they stood upon, dotted with the wind-beaten grasses and gray, starkly jagged rocks, they stared down into the untouched wilderness of the Southwest. “You don’t get views like this in downtown Sydney and Shanghai.”

  It was Shane’s turn to roll his eyes. “And there are a million other tour operators who could be running gigs just like ours. We need to offer full customer service,” Shane said through clenched teeth as he ticked his gaze toward the object of his ire once more.

  Alice Edwards. A 20 or 30 something diminutive woman who didn’t say a word and never revealed anything about
herself. At 5’3, she had no commanding presence, and yet somehow managed to lug around a 30-kilo pack with ease.

  Shane didn’t doubt that she was a good walker. She was sure on her feet, and she never complained about extra weight being put in her bag when one of the guests realized that running a high-powered business did not mean they had the wherewithal to trek these great ranges.

  But Alice lacked one thing. A pretty key thing in someone who was meant to guide others. A personality.

  She was a blank slate. Her expression was almost always neutral, her attention almost always turned within.

  Rachel sighed, tipping her head back, bringing up a hand, and scratching her short nails through her brown hair. “Would you just give it a rest, already? She can probably hear us, you know?” Rachel said as she dropped her voice down low.

  Shane snorted. “She’s upwind. And no one has that good hearing.”

  “I don’t know. Alice has always given me the impression she can do anything.”

  Shane snorted derisively. “Except hold a conversation for longer than 10 seconds. I don’t care what you say. When we get back, I’m making a complaint.”

  “Then you’re a dick,” Rachel huffed.

  Shane opened his mouth to snap a snide reply, but then heard one of the guests – a highly paid, highly powered, highly arrogant executive from Shanghai – muttering in excitement.

  The guy had his satellite phone out and was presumably spending an insane amount of money using it to check his messages.

  The entire point of this trip was so that the apparently stressed out executives could tune into nature and tune out for a while.

  “Be kind,” Rachel said as she caught Shane’s expression. “These people have businesses to run. Plus, with the amount of money they’re paying for this experience, who cares if they want to surf the net while walking through some of the most unique scenery in the world?”

  Shane didn’t bother to reply, and instead pushed further ahead. “What’s going on, fellas?” he asked.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Alice.

  Though she’d been walking quickly before, she suddenly stopped. And it was the exact way that she stopped that caught Shane’s attention.

  Her back became rigid, her overly large pack pushing out and up as her head twisted to the side. The movement was slow, precise and controlled like a snake tracking its prey through the grass.

  At first her gaze darted over the side of the ridge, then up, locking onto a point in the sky.

  The movement sent a pulse of nerves pushing through his stomach, even though it was just that – a simple movement. But there was something—

  The executives started to talk quickly amongst themselves, and though Shane spoke a little Chinese – the entire reason he’d got this job – their muttered Mandarin was too quick to discern completely.

  He picked up several words. Tsunami and impact.

  He frowned, walking up to the group. “What’s going on?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Alice’s head jerk all the way up until the long line of her neck revealed the ridged muscles of her trachea.

  “Something’s going on in the South China Sea,” one of the Chinese Australian guests, Chan, pointed out.

  Shane tried to shake off the blast of adrenaline that pulsed through his body, sending biting tingles down into his toes and fingers. “What’s going on? Some kind of tsunami? Where has it hit? I have friends in—” he began. He didn’t get to finish his sentence.

  More people were checking their sat phones, and a real fear pushed through the group.

  Shane had an imagination. One he sometimes couldn’t switch off. Sometimes when he lay awake in his tent at night, he’d stare up at the canvas flapping in the wind and wonder what it would be like to ride out the end of the world far away from civilization in a place like this.

  Countries could go to war, there could be large-scale cyber-attacks, and whole cities could fall to untreatable viruses, but you wouldn’t know. Not out here. Without a phone, you’d have no idea civilization was crumbling at all.

  “There’s live footage, live footage,” he picked up broken Mandarin from one of the walkers as they shoved their phone in front of one of their friends.

  This far out, far away from the comfort of the modern world, everything humanity holds dear – from the Internet, to distributed power grids, to technology itself – could all crumble, and you wouldn’t know. Your friends and family could die, and you’d have no clue. Whole governments could crumble, and it wouldn’t matter.

  Rachel wasn’t saying a word. Neither was Alice. But while Rachel had moved toward the group to pick up the footage on their sat phones, Alice hadn’t moved at all.

  She was still standing exactly where she was, her head tilted up, her eyes never blinking as she stared at a single point in the sparse clouds shooting through the otherwise blue sky.

  Rachel suddenly gasped. “What the hell is that cloud? What’s going on?”

  “It appeared over the east coast of Vietnam,” somebody replied, their words quick, harsh, and full of pressure.

  Shane might’ve imagined what it was like to ride out the end of the world in the Southwest, but he hadn’t ever bothered to fill in one detail.

  Fear.

  The primal, gut-wrenching, spine-climbing fear of someone who has no idea what’s going on and who can’t even begin to gauge the level of threat out there.

  Sweat slicked his brow, trickling down the sides of his temples and splashing over the waterproof fabric of his windbreaker.

  Rachel shunted forward, grabbed a hand over his arm, and pulled him in, showing him one of the sat phones.

  And Shane stared at the end of the world.

  But as the group stared down, Alice continued to look up.

  The first hint something was wrong was a sound. So sharp and piercing. It started off low, but then arced up.

  It finally got the group’s attention.

  People pulled their gazes off the phones and stared at the clouds.

  “What the hell?” Shane had a chance to say, then he saw it. This black dot, punching through the clouds, getting closer every second.

  No one said a word. Except for Alice. Her lips slowly parted as a single word echoed out. “Invasion.”

  Shane had a second – a second where his blood ran cold and his heart skipped several beats. Then an almighty boom split the air, and he was forced down to his knees as he clamped his hands over his ears.

  The rest of the group fell like daisies, too – everyone except for Alice.

  She kept her head directed up as a black shape suddenly appeared above them.

  It was more than a shape.

  It….

  Impossible. It was impossible.

  It… was some kind of ship. But it wasn’t a jet, and God knows, despite the fact it was jet black, that it wasn’t a spy plane.

  Shane’s brother worked maintenance at Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne, so Shane knew a thing or two about airplanes. About their inherent design. You needed a certain aerodynamic shape and a specific engine design in order to get a chunk of metal off the ground for any prolonged time.

  But as far as he could tell, the sleek black shape that now hovered right above the ridge didn’t even have any engines.

  People screamed. And yet, their screams didn’t echo. They didn’t punch out over the ridge, sail down the side of the mountain range, and bounce through the valley. It sounded like they’d had a blanket thrown over them.

  “What?” Shane managed, his lips wobbling.

  A hatch opened in the side of the black vessel, a cloud of white atmosphere escaping around the door as it didn’t open upward, but instead disappeared into the side of the ship, sleek shards of metal breaking apart and somehow re-knitting themselves against the hull of the hovering craft.

  He heard two metal clunks – but the sound was as soft as two droplets of water splashing against wood.

  A black sha
pe appeared in the shadow of the hatch, sunshine instantly glinting off its smooth metal body.

  It was a man. Dressed in full boot-to-head armor.

  The sun glimmered along his gauntlets as he gripped the side of the ship, tilted his head down, then pushed off. He sailed the 20 meters down to the ridge, then landed. Though his heavy, armored form should have clanged against the dolerite rock, it didn’t. Those two solid black boots striking the stone was the equivalent of two feathers falling from the sky.

  The man punched his gauntleted hand into the ground and rose.

  The hovering ship closed its hatch, lifted several meters and shifted in direction, turning with all the ease of a bird on the wing, then shot off back into the clouds, disappearing until it was little more than a dot on the horizon in under three seconds.

  As it flew away, Shane flinched, expecting a sonic boom as he wrapped his hands around his ears, his shoulders punching high, the sound of his wind breaker scrunching indiscernible.

  But there was nothing.

  Nobody screamed anymore, and nobody ran. The entire group stared in awed shock at the black armored man.

  And the man stared at Alice.

  She hadn’t moved.

  Her expression was unmoved, too.

  The man took a step toward her.

  Alice stood her ground. “Why are you here?” she asked. There was no passion in her tone. Nothing at all. She had the same blank expression as she always did.

  She was facing off against some kind of armored warrior, and she looked as if she was talking about the weather.

  “Taking,” the man said.

  “The word you’re looking for is invasion,” Alice said.

  Shane didn’t bother to ask what the hell was going on anymore. He hunkered down with everyone else, a protective hand on Rachel’s shoulder.

  “Invasion, then,” the armored man said as he tilted his head to the side, the sun glimmering off his helmet.

  “But why are you here? Have you come for me?”

  What the hell was going on here? Why wasn’t Alice reacting? What the hell was this creature?