The soldier answered, and Logan thought his reply would have been the same even if he’d said Mike Ryan was the fucking Pope.
“This is a matter of national security. I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that with you,” the soldier said. “Now, move aside.”
Logan didn’t move.
The gun came up, and the soldier shouted, “Move aside!”
Logan still didn’t budge. If they were going to shoot him, they wouldn’t do it in the middle of a crowded hospital…
Would they?
He found out about fifteen seconds later, when a different soldier approached and wrestled him to the ground. When Logan started putting up a fight, he felt the thump of the rifle’s stock as it hit him in the stomach, knocking the breath straight from his lungs.
They left him there on his knees and carried on as if he’d never blocked their way.
Trudy bent down and asked if he was all right, but Logan could hardly talk. All he could think about was the soldier who’d said this was a matter of ‘national security’.
Logan thought—no, he knew, especially after what he’d seen in the woods behind the Monolith—that it was so much worse than that.
7
The Suicides
In Pittsburgh, later that morning, Bradley Long woke to the sounds of his roommates babbling.
Last night had been a wild ride. He and Danny had run the beer pong table until sometime past two in the morning, then they’d decided to take the party to the Diamond Peak, a strip joint on the edge of the city. All the tips Bradley had earned the previous night delivering pizzas had been tossed on the stage. Had he been sober, he would’ve never done that; he would’ve kept his measly one-fifteen in mostly one dollar bills and gone home to play XBOX or watch some Netflix.
But Danny had persisted.
“It’s the end of the semester, man! One more year. We gotta party!”
And party they did.
Now Brad was broke for the next three days, and he had a terrible hangover to boot. Topping it all off was the chorus of chatter that he could hear crystal-clear through the apartment’s thin walls.
He raised his arm, found that it hurt, and then poked himself in the ribs to find that hurt much worse. What the fuck happened last night?
“Can you keep it down? I’m sleeping!” he hollered.
Rushing footsteps.
The door burst open, and when Brad saw the girl standing there in her tight white shorts, low-cut halter top, and summer tan despite it being barely June, he nearly fell out of bed.
“Steph,” he said in a voice that sounded nothing like his own. “Oh…hey, what’s—”
“Brad, you gotta get out here and see this.” Steph’s eyes drifted down to his lower half.
He was in his boxer shorts, and he had a serious case of morning wood. Suddenly he was aware of nothing else. He grabbed the drool-covered pillow and threw it over his lap.
Stephanie blushed.
He had been sweet on her for some time now, since his freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. Really, too long. He had one year left and then he was out the door and onto bigger things—hopefully. It was during this small window, these four years, that he was supposed to take chances—yet he couldn’t muster up the courage to ask Stephanie out on a date. And now that she’d seen his morning wood?
Forget about it.
“Really,” Stephanie said, “get out here and see this.”
Brad stood up.
“Maybe keep the pillow,” she smirked and turned and left.
It was Brad’s turn to blush and feel embarrassed.
It didn’t last too long, however, because Danny was saying, “Dude, what the hell?” in the living room, and John and Miranda were talking so fast you couldn’t understand a word they said.
He threw some sweatpants on, slipped into some slippers, the blue pair that was no longer fuzzy, and went through the small corridor into the kitchen. There, Danny, John, and Miranda were cluttered around Miranda’s Macbook. The screen illuminated their faces.
For the first time, Brad realized that the sun was hardly up. The clock over the oven said 8:56, but who knew if that was right or not? They never changed the clocks when they were supposed to, and if there was ever a power outage, they just let it go on from 12:00, so really, who knew? If it happened to be right, there was also the question of whether it was AM or PM. Was the sun setting or just rising?
Brad didn’t know, but he did know one thing: He was never drinking again.
Well, he had told himself the same thing last weekend, right after he’d found out about the academic probation the University had put him on. But…best not to think about that now.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Dude,” Danny said. “There’s, like, these things popping up all over the world. These portal things.”
“I’m too hungover for this,” Brad said. Maybe still drunk…
Miranda muscled Danny out of the way. “What are they?”
“I don’t know,” John said. “I don’t think anyone does. Not yet, at least.”
“They’ll never tell us, man. The government did this. They brought ‘em. Probably for war or something,” Danny said.
“Are you day-drinking again?” Brad asked. He started searching around for his cell phone. Where the hell did I put it? Did I leave it at the bar? Jesus, not again.
“Look! ‘Mass suicides’,” Danny said. “Dude, click that video.”
“Don’t call me ‘dude’,” Miranda said.
For the moment, the time and his cell phone were forgotten. Brad found himself drawn by the blue glow of the computer screen. Mass suicides and portals? This was shaping up to be one of the worst mornings he had woken up to in a long time. It was almost too much to take in. His head felt woozy and his stomach grumbled. The last time he’d eaten was yesterday afternoon, but the idea of food brought on a wave of heavy nausea.
“Yeah, ‘Never drinking again’, huh?” Steph asked.
Brad nearly jumped at the sound of her voice. He’d almost forgotten her—how the hell could he do that? He shrugged.
“I know that one,” she said.
“Holy shit!” Danny yelled.
Miranda screamed and turned away from the computer. She looked like she was close to puking. Steph’s beautiful smile waned as she stared at the screen, her features illuminated blue and white. Brad followed her gaze.
He did not like what he saw.
“Rewind it,” John was saying. “Go back!”
Brad wanted to tell him not to. He couldn’t stomach seeing what he’d seen again. He was sure he would hurl, even without any food in his system, and dry heaves sucked. A lot.
On the screen was one of those portals, except it didn’t look like a portal to Brad. It looked like a giant diamond, easily as tall as a skyscraper, maybe a few stacked on top of each other. Wider, too. A mass of people were gathered in front of it, and in front of the people were police barricades, orange sawhorses, and cops in full riot gear.
The camera panned closer to the men and women and children pushing against the barriers. Their faces were dark. Their hair was black. Most of them were well-underfed. This isn’t America, Brad figured. Probably some Spanish-speaking country in South America. Someone was shouting, and the microphone of the outdated video camera picked it up. They were saying words Brad didn’t know the meaning of.
“Steph, what are they saying?” Danny asked. “I skipped most of my Spanish classes.”
Steph’s face had paled beneath the light coat of makeup she wore. Brad didn’t like seeing her like this. It made what he was seeing on the computer screen somehow more real.
“This is fake,” Miranda said. “This has got to be.”
But John was scrolling through his Twitter feed on his smartphone. The trending topics, he told them, were Invasion18, TheArrival, and #ENDTIMES. John’s voice shook as he read these off.
“What are they saying?” Danny continued.
<
br /> “I don’t want to know what they’re saying,” Brad said. Though he couldn’t understand their words, he understood their tone; they were in pain, and a lot of it.
That was when the people in the video all raised their hands. Like clockwork, like players on a stage. It was timed perfectly. How they could’ve done that, Brad had no idea, but they did.
Gotta be fake. A hoax. No way could they sync up like that—
The bright sunlight gleamed off the metal they held in their raised fists. The camera shook more, as whoever was behind it screamed in fear, in pain. Some of the police in riot gear drew their weapons, but none pulled their triggers.
The picture was blurry, but Brad still saw with too much clarity.
The men and women held sharp objects: kitchen knives, rusty razor blades, jagged pieces of glass, tin can halves. Some of the children held these, too, and the looks on their faces, the sheer confusion, was enough to break Brad’s heart. He wanted to turn away, wanted to grab Miranda’s computer and launch it against the wall, shatter it into a million pieces, but he couldn’t. He had to see what happened next, no matter what it was.
Danny suddenly cringed away, and that said a lot. Brad had known Danny to seek out the grossest possible things on the internet. He would scour the web for videos of real beheadings, the aftermaths of suicide bombings and school shootings, you name it, yet even he couldn’t stomach watching this again. That was the last straw.
Well, it should’ve been, should’ve told Brad that he really should look away.
“What are they saying, Steph? Tell us!” Danny said.
The people were chanting now. It sounded like the collective voice of hyped soccer fans in a packed stadium.
“I-I—” Steph began, and Brad turned and saw that she was holding her hand over her face, like she did whenever they all got together for a scary movie marathon.
The chanting grew louder, but there was something else, something humming and buzzing beneath their foreign words. The shaky camera panned upward toward the diamond-shape. Despite the poor quality, Brad saw the edges pulsing red. It was as if the alien thing was alive and breathing. Shimmering.
Or it was eager for something. But what?
The cameraman screamed, but Brad barely heard it over the sounds of slitting throats. The children crying. The slap of blood hitting the cracked and faded pavement. The groans of the riot police.
A woman held her squirming son tight and sawed at the soft spot beneath his chin with a blade that was nearly as dull as a butter knife. Soon the kid stopped squirming, and the front of the woman’s raggedy clothes were soaked dark with his blood. She took the dripping blade and began sawing on her own neck. Back and forth. Back and forth. Smiling the whole time she did this.
Brad’s stomach contracted. He moved away from the counter, bending low and heaving. Nothing came up. His ab muscles cramped, and he couldn’t stand up straight without any pain.
“This isn’t real,” Miranda kept saying over and over again. “Not real. Not real.”
As much as Brad wanted to believe that, he knew that wasn’t the case. It was real. It was all too real.
“What did they say? Steph?” Danny said.
John had since stopped scrolling through his Twitter feed. Something about the sour look on his face told Brad that he had found something there he didn’t want to see, too.
“They’re saying…‘Our blood for them! Our blood for them!’,” Steph answered.
The video ended. A play button came up over the screen with a timer around it, signifying another video was lined up to come on next. The thumbnail showed fire and the title read: Riots and Death in Wyoming near Anomaly…MUST SEE!
Brad didn’t want to see. He wanted to go back to his bed and lie down, try to sleep this nightmare away, but he knew there would be no sleep for him today.
Perhaps there would be no sleep for him ever again.
Though the kitchen was quiet, Brad heard a voice inside of his head as clear as day: Our blood for them…our blood for them!
8
The Army Moves In
The following days did not bring any answers.
Turn on any news channel and all you’d see were the voids, which was what the majority of the people in Ohio were calling them now. They were all over the United States—all over the world. But Logan could just walk out on his front porch and see not only a hundred news trucks, but a void, too, if he stood on his tiptoes and the angle was right.
CNN was calling them ’The shapes’; FOX was calling them ‘anomalies’; MSNBC, ’The diamonds’.
Does it matter what we call them?
No. All that mattered was that they were unnatural.
Scientists were working around the clock to figure out what exactly they were, sure that at least one of the hosting countries would be able to come up with some answers. If any of them had, though, they were being tight-lipped about it.
Logan tried his best not to watch the news, but Jane had it on constantly, just as she constantly called her older brother, Adam, in West Virginia to make sure he and his family were okay.
Logan liked Adam. He hadn’t seen him since the wedding, where Adam had walked Jane down the aisle in place of her father, who’d passed away when she was a senior in high school. Jane’s mom was out of the picture, too; had been for so long that Jane didn’t even remember her.
Logan supposed that was part of the reason they’d been drawn together—their lack of families. He had his Uncle Tommy, had lived with him here in Stone Park while growing up after his mom’s car accident. But Tommy had the movie theater then, and now Tommy had the vacations and the golf, and Logan was grown up. He’d have been on his own, just like Jane would’ve been, had they never found each other.
On CNN now, a gray-haired man in thick-framed glasses was talking about a mass suicide in Brazil that had happened the second day of the voids’ existence. Worshipers of the shapes had ‘sacrificed’ themselves in front of an array of cameras. Now, more security was being put up near the voids.
Logan turned away from the screen. Jane wasn’t even in the living room; she was upstairs in the shower. He might as well turn it off…
But the voices are oddly comforting.
He couldn’t do it, so he got off of the couch and went outside, hoping to clear his mind. He’d had enough death and destruction in his life over the past few days. Constantly seeing all that bad stuff had to have negative effects on a person, right?
Logan Harper hadn’t celebrated his birthday the day after the void appeared, and he hadn’t been into work since that fateful Friday night a few days ago. All the businesses on Broad Street downtown had been closed and cordoned off by the police and United States Army until further notice. He hadn’t seen or heard from either Mike or Trudy Ryan, either. Logan didn’t like that. It scared him more than he cared to admit.
Tommy had called to see how the business would be affected, and when Logan told him the Monolith was shut down, he’d thought his uncle was having a stroke. It wasn’t a stroke, though, just a crazy fit of rage. Understandable.
Tommy said he’d be back in another week from Florida, and then those Army pricks would get a piece of his mind. Logan told him good luck. He hadn’t heard from him since.
With each passing minute, he thought the soldiers would break down his front door and cart him off in a plastic bubble like they’d done to Mike. So far, that hadn’t happened; aside from a few questions the hospital staff had asked the night a soldier had sent Logan to the floor with the stock of his rifle, he hadn’t heard anything from anybody. Neither had Jane, who’d been off work for the past three days. He supposed they were probably lucky for that.
Mum was certainly the word in Stone Park.
Logan took a seat in an old rocking chair on the front porch and looked north, toward the sea of trees that separated Stone Park from neighboring Woodhaven. He could hear the clamor of people, the grinding of large vehicles and whirring machinery (and that buzzi
ng) not far away, but he could not see the void from his spot in the old rocking chair.
Thank God for that.
Like the rest of the week had been, today was a perfect summer’s day. Logan was content to sit out on the porch and enjoy it as much as he could—
The screen door creaked open.
Jane Harper looked like she hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, even despite being fresh out of the shower and alert. Most people hadn’t gotten much sleep since ‘The Incident,’ as it was called around Stone Park. The presence of military helicopters was a big part of that reason, as were the news vans and general clamor of the concerned citizens.
Jane handed Logan the cup of coffee he’d half-drunk that morning with his eggs. It was lukewarm; he sipped it anyway. One thing he was always thankful for was coffee. And Jane.
“Thanks,” he mumbled.
She took a seat next to him. “Do you think we’re going to be okay? Do you think Adam—”
Logan turned, set the coffee down on the porch railing, and put his hand on her cheek, brushing away a tear that had begun rolling down her smooth, shower-hot flesh.
“I don’t think,” he said. “I know.”
Suddenly, the whole street shook, the vibrations causing his cup of coffee to shimmy toward the edge of the railing. Logan’s reflexes were good, though, and he snagged the mug before it could shatter on the wood floor. He looked up and saw the cause of the vibration.
Since the void had manifested out of nowhere, a steady and seemingly endless stream of military trucks had been driving through town, using Front Street as their personal runway. Now, three hummers flanked by two larger vehicles, their backs covered in army green tarps, trundled through the narrow road, coming dangerously close to Rick Snyder’s Prius, parked in front of his house.
Perched on the sides of the vehicles, gaunt-faced soldiers stared out at the Harpers. They held guns and wore grim expressions.
“I feel like I’m in some Middle Eastern country or something,” Jane said. “Why do they have guns?”
Ravaged: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 1) Page 3
