by Platt, Sean
Sometime later, a few of the ships opened ports and released much smaller ships, like hovercraft. The smaller ships were like the larger ones: polished silver spheres perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. They seemed to be moving to certain locations and sending thin rivulets of energy down to the ground. Nobody was sure what they were, because cameras seemed to blitz out whenever they got close — some sort of electromagnetic interference, said those who seemed to know. Conspiracy nuts rushed to cobble two and two, theorizing that the green beams meant abductions in progress.
They were harvesting.
After one such conspiracy theory report, Piper looked down to see that Trevor had turned pale. That broke both her trance and addiction. She turned the screen off and vowed that for a night, at least, they would just be people. Not hiding people, but people.
“Did you know,” said Heather, running her fingers through Lila’s dark hair, “that your father and I named you after a song?”
Lila, safe in Raj’s arms, looked up at her mother. Piper, watching, felt it impossible that Lila wouldn’t know the origin of her own name. But maybe she did know, and it didn’t matter. Maybe she just wanted to hear the story again, and be young for a while.
“It was one of our favorites,” said Heather, looking over at Meyer with a nostalgic, almost bittersweet expression. “An old song, called ‘Hey There, Delilah.’”
The evening passed as if by candlelight. They told tales — each taking their turn, each free to go wherever he or she wanted, into authentic past or spinning fiction. Slowly, the room began to feel small again … but this time, the aura was more intimate than confining.
They would be safe.
The world had become a perilous place, but they’d made it to the ranch — to the somehow spiritual Axis Mundi that Meyer had been going on about for years. It was small, and they might be in it for a long time while the dust (hopefully more metaphorical than literal) settled beyond the bunker’s walls. But they would adjust. Piper would learn to walk on the treadmill. She’d do her yoga. She had millions of books stored on her Vellum; they had years of entertainment on the bunker’s various jukes. They had endless power (wind, solar, generated if need be), enough food, and three protected subterranean wells for water.
It would be okay. Somehow, because they were safe and because they were together, it would be okay.
Story time ended with the feeling of a fire’s coals glowing slowly to ash. Piper retired for the night, repeating that single refrain over and over inside her head, making herself believe: It will be okay.
She and Meyer made love that night. And when they did, Piper found herself wishing they’d had the history he shared with Heather — the kind that featured a song special enough to name a firstborn daughter.
DAY TEN
CHAPTER FORTY
Day Ten
Axis Mundi
Meyer’s eyes opened.
Something had changed.
He watched the concrete ceiling above the bed he shared with Piper before rising, suddenly realizing that the gray mass was actually a vibrating matrix of molecules, apparently solid on a macro scale but entirely permeable once you got down small enough. The concrete was composed of sand and cement, which in turn were composed of quartz, silica, and dozens of other components. Each of those were made of elements, and each of the elements were made of atoms that were all the same. But even then, those atoms were mostly space. A nucleus with electrons somewhere around it, not so much orbiting as existing. Between the solid cores of the elements and the electrons was nothing.
Like outer space.
He sat up.
He understood.
There had been a time, making a wish list of all to stock his bunker with for the end of the world, that Meyer had considered ayahuasca — his medicine. But you couldn’t just store it like pedestrian drugs, like coke or even weed. Ayahuasca was brewed by a shaman. If he wanted to go on his spiritual, other-level voyages while waiting out the apocalypse, he’d need Juha. But getting just his family here had been hard enough.
That, he saw now, had been a pointless thought. He didn’t need medicine to see the core of truth within him — or perhaps more accurately, far outside. It was a lens — or a rag used to wipe his lens, and he no longer needed that rag to see.
Something had changed.
Now his vision was clear.
Meyer could imagine his mind as an extension of a universal collective. He imagined himself as a blip of existence peeking beyond some kind of veil. Behind the veil, though, there was more of him. Like the tip of an iceberg. Other people might peek out farther down the veil, but behind the scenes, where few ever looked, they were all connected.
They were all part of one larger thing, with many heads.
And still, Meyer was himself. He was both things. They all were.
He saw the emptiness all around him, baked into even the most solid of objects.
The ceiling was space.
The floor was space.
Piper, still asleep beside him, was space.
If you peered close enough, everything was nothing. And if you pulled back enough, nothing somehow became everything.
Images that had been just beneath consciousness began to clearly rise inside his awakening mind. He saw a sun. A planet. A thing that was like a hole in nothing, leading great distances to another place.
Of course he’d known they were coming. It’s why he’d run. It’s why he’d come here. It’s why he’d protected them all. Because what had happened in Moscow? That was the beginning.
He could see their purpose — the visitors’ purpose — as clearly as he saw his own feet sliding into slippers at the bed’s side, standing up, leaving the bedroom to enter the quiet nighttime living room.
He knew what they wanted.
He knew why they were here.
He knew what the shuttles were doing. Why they were breaking homes open like nutshells. Why they were pulling people from their beds, so many screaming. He knew that fear. It percolated beneath his awareness like an unscratchable itch.
He knew why he’d fought so hard. Why he’d risked them all dying, if the alternative was to not be here, to not be inside. Of course they’d had to be here, now. It was ludicrous that he’d ever, ever hesitated.
Meyer crossed the living room, now quiet. The kids were asleep in three rooms. Heather was asleep in a fourth. This was their sanctuary. Their place of sanity. The place where, in discreet doses, they could see what was happening in the larger world without having to fear it.
If only they truly understood.
But how could Meyer explain? He’d never understood it all until now.
He watched the dark screen for a full minute, aware as he did it that he must look like a lunatic. If Heather or Piper came out and saw him gazing at the blackness, they’d worry for his sanity, thinking him sick with some kind of cabin fever. Yesterday, they’d think, he’d been normal. They were all settling into normal, finding their routine as more and more spherical shuttles ventured from the motherships, as more and more desperate and fearful factions struck at the ships and were reduced to rubble. The shuttles would take whomever they wanted, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. But that was a hard thing for humans to accept — that there were powers in the universe that found their force and aggression not just laughable but unworthy of notice. And so there were always reports of someone fighting back. Always reports of that someone — be it a lone man with a shotgun or a nation with artillery — getting smacked away like a fly.
Still, Meyer stared at the screen. Within it, he saw space. Beyond it, he saw space.
The notion was fascinating. If he were reduced to small enough size — as large as one of those electrons, say — he could fly through the television and all of the bunker’s walls as easily as a ship flying through the vacuum of empty space.
Finally, he turned away, glad that he’d had time to gaze without being watched.
They wouldn’t
understand. They’d think he’d lost his mind.
He moved to the spiral staircase, put a hand on its cool railing, and began to move upward.
When he opened the door into the kitchen, he found the air strange. Compared to the canned, filtered, and scrubbed air below, the home’s atmosphere was almost electric. Too cool, too raw. Naked air.
He closed the door and crossed the kitchen.
It was dark. There should still be a partial moon tonight, but it must not have risen. He opened the French doors to the porch, taking a moment.
His skin adjusted to the cooler air. His eyes adjusted to the dark.
After a few minutes, he found that the black wasn’t pitch after all. Maybe the moon was up beyond a rise, and it was reflecting off the atmosphere. Something was letting him see, even if it was merely the scant candle cast by the stars.
Meyer went to the lake.
For a strange moment, he wondered at himself: still in pajamas, still in slippers, his hair a mess, outside as he’d told the others never to be — having locked them in until now. And he was standing by a lake without moonlight. Was he going to go swimming? It was strange to realize that his mind wasn’t entirely his own.
Meyer looked up.
Above him was a perfectly smooth silver object, large enough to fill the small lake’s basin if it chose to. He could see it clearly despite the dark, as if the sphere cast its own light. And with that realization, he found himself looking through it as he had the ceiling and the TV screen. He couldn’t literally see space above the ship’s bulk, but could imagine it perfectly. As if he were but a particle, and could zoom through apparently solid space to find it as cavernous as the space the ship had come from.
There was a soft clanging, and a round hole on the ship’s underside opened like an old-time camera’s shutter. Inside was a light: green, like he himself would ask a director to color it, in one of his films.
He knew what this meant.
He knew why he’d come.
Meyer spread his arms and looked upward, closing his eyes as a soft, warm glow surrounded his body.
He felt his feet leave the ground.
Sometime later, Meyer Dempsey and the ship he’d entered were gone.
The mountain was still and quiet, as if vowing to never whisper a word of what happened.
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Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I’m writing this note to you from the future. Not the not-too-distant future as portrayed in the world of Invasion, but the real future. The one that exists a short while after Invasion was published.
Right now, I’m writing Colonization — the third book in the Invasion series.
Before that, I wrote Contact — which, yes, you guessed it — is the second book in the series, which you may have already picked up.
(Eerie how writing time travel works, isn’t it? Contact is in my past but it’s in your future. I’m getting all Back to the Future time-loopy just thinking about it.)
Sean and I decided to add this author’s note to Invasion, now that we’re one and a half books further down the master story arc, because now we have perspective.
When we first wrote the book you just read, we had only an inkling. As I write this, halfway into the rough draft of the third book, the big story we wanted to tell is filling out and taking shape. It’s hitting all of the big, cool issues we wanted to hit with our alien invasion series, and hitting them in what might be called the “traditional” way. Meaning: with aliens.
See, Invasion got a great reception right off the bat. But among reviews, discussions, and casual comments with our core group of ideal readers, there was one thing that many people mentioned: the ending.
Most people said they didn’t see the ending coming.
Some of that group loved the ending: the sense of mystery, of a deepening of the plot as the series moved into more familiar (and ironically “more alien”) territory. They said they were getting excited, wondering where Meyer might be going, and eager to find out in the next volume.
Other people hated the ending. A few said it felt tacked-on. These folks sort of suggested that we needed a shocking hook in order to drag readers into the next book, so we invented something nuts: Meyer Dempsey, who’s spent something like 80,000 words trying to get his family to safety, just walks right out in the open and lets the aliens take him.
But actually, Meyer’s abduction is essential to the larger story we wanted to tell.
We considered beginning the story there: Man is abducted by aliens; sci-fi adventure ensues. We could have done that: started with aliens, abduction, alien contact, and the colonization of Earth.
But that would have been short-changing our readers, because Invasion is only part of the story.
Contact continues that story.
Colonization escalates it.
We envision the entire series spanning seven books. That might change if we uncover new and unexpected angles the story wants to steer us in (this is common; if you think authors invent stories, we’d argue that’s not entirely accurate), but it’ll be around that number, give or take. We know how it will end. We know the phases it will march through on its way — again allowing that the story always seems to find its most natural path.
Invasion — the story of what happened before the aliens set foot on the planet — matters to that end.
And Meyer Dempsey’s creeping sense of intuition matters very much to that end.
It’d be easy to enjoy this novel’s ride, taking a quasi-apocalyptic adventure ending in a confrontation and a twist ending. You can do that if you’d like. Plenty of readers certainly seem to enjoy this book on that level.
But we hope, when this series is done, that you’ll look back and see Invasion for what it is in the larger story’s context.
Because the story doesn’t start with the aliens.
The story begins with Meyer Dempsey.
The story begins with an itch that Meyer can’t quite scratch — an urge not to flee the city or escape the crowds or even to get his family away from danger … but rather from an overwhelming urge to reach his “Axis Mundi” — a place he was told was special through his dreams and journeying in an otherworldly haze.
In Contact, you’ll learn where Meyer vanished to, and why.
In Colonization, you’ll see what role Meyer has yet to play, and you’ll see how he was always hand-picked by his captors, always selected in advance for a purpose, always dragged toward his axis as if by an invisible hand.
And in the following books, you’ll learn what the aliens want from us. From the planet. And from Meyer himself.
We could have skipped Meyer’s flight to the mountains, but if we had, we’d have been shortchanging you. We’d have been starting in this story’s middle. We’d have been failing to look at the pre-invasion Earth through the eyes of its invaders. We’d have been closing our eyes to what the aliens crossed time and space to find.
We didn’t just want to invade the planet with this story.
We wanted to ask how, and what. But most importantly, we wanted to ask WHY.
Invasion is the first part of the answer to that final three-letter question.
Meyer’s fate in remaining six (we think!) books in this series is the rest of it.
Happy reading!
Johnny (and Sean)
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Johnny B. Truant is an author, blogger, and podcaster who, like the Ramones, was long denied induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite having a large cult following. He makes his online home at SterlingAndStone.Net and is the author of the Fat Vampire series, the Unicorn Western series, the political sci-fi thriller The Beam, and many more.
You can connect with Johnny on Twitter at @JohnnyBTruant, and you should totally send him an email at [email protected] if the mood strikes you.
Sean Platt is speaker, author, and co-founder of Realm & Sands. He is also co-founder of Collective Inkwell, home to the breakout indie hitsYesterday’s Gone and WhiteSpace, co-authored with David W. Wright. Sean also publishes smart stories for children under the pen name Guy Incognito, and writes laugh out loud comedies with Johnny under the pen name Max Power. You can see Sterling & Stone’s complete catalogue at SterlingAndStone.Net/Books. Sean lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, daughter, and son.
You can find Sean at SterlingAndStone.Net, follow him on Twitter at @SeanPlatt, or send him an email at [email protected].
