A Voyage in the Near Distance 1: From Here to Nearly There

by Alec Merta

  “46, 21…” It said.

  The crackling sound returned, louder.

  “…outside, west. May be over Harrogate.”

  Allie and I turned to look outside. The officer, seeing us do so, took our cue and turned to look in the same direction. We could clearly see his fellow officer, number 21 presumably, speaking into his transmitter. The third officer was probably still holding station near the side exit. Though we saw the person our Officer 46 was talking to, we heard nothing on the radio but an increasingly irritating din of static. Then a curious thing happened.

  Officer 21 broke into a dead-flat run away from the service station. He was followed only a few seconds later by the third officer, who had abandoned his post in the outside seating area.

  Our companion, Officer 46, displayed certain physical manifestations of contradictory outer stimulation combined with inconsistent internal motivations. By that, I mean he began to look from us to the door and then sort of wavered in a confused, side-to-side manner. He made several more attempts to raise his compatriots with no success.

  Then the shouting began.

  It was a distant, almost solitary shout at first. One or two people outside began to yell. Soon, more voices joined in. The people inside the station slowly began to pause their movements and conversations. Some near the front of the building pressed toward the glass in order to see what was going on. More people began to make noise outside.

  As the focal point of activity shifted from inside to outside, the former began to fall eerily quiet. Very quickly, the place was filled only by the sounds of workers in back areas and children too young to understand the need for silence. Our little corner was also filled by the sounds of a half-dozen gambling machines.

  All of this was just enough to start interfering with Officer 46’s standard procedures. He wavered more and more and tried many more times to reach his fellows. He took his mobile phone from his pocket and tried to place a call and send a text. Neither task was successful, and he stared dumbly at the phone for a moment before replacing it into his pocket.

  In his distracted state, he did not notice Allie turn to me and catch my attention. She shot me a serious glance and mouthed, “Bet you he’s hung.”

  Actually, she said, “Get ready to run,” but that was far from clear until my confused expression caused her to repeat it. Incidentally, Allie is very good at rolling her eyes.

  The shouting continued to grow in source and seriousness. It was soon the din of a small crowd gathered in pockets just outside. More and more people from inside the station (particularly those without children) began to exit in order to find out what the source of the commotion was.

  There had been no real sense of panic until that time. When it began, it was predictably the parents who started. Mothers sitting near the glass observed something that we could not detect from our vantage point. Whatever it was, it caused them to bundle up their children and hurry away from the glass. People spoke in hurried, clipped sentences, but I could not make out what they were describing. The electricity of panic began to fill the air.

  The pockets of watchers outside started to clump together along the outside of the building between the glass and the disabled parking spots. Arms rose into the air, and smartphones began to rise like the eyes of anglerfish. The crowd took on the look of a communal organism. The crowd-organism began to emit flashes of light from its eyestalks as its constituents tried (and certainly failed) to capture images of that which they observed. I longed to see for myself what could bring so many people to such an odd state.

  More and more of those calling on the services that evening began to cluster toward the glass windows. Soon, they too had clumped into an organism-like mass of their own. Silence fell, and we all waited.

  The glass was thick, so the truly frightened screams, when they came, were muffled. They started just after a bright, white shaft of light appeared instantaneously outside. It looked like a solid white pole that had spontaneously come into being. It stretched from some un-seeable point in the sky down to the middle of the crowd clustered outside.

  For an awful moment, I thought some weapon had been deployed. I thought this because the inside of the crowd at first appeared to explode with people. I quickly understood that the explosion was merely the shocked leaping of onlookers attempting to avoid contact with the light. I swear it looked like something solid.

  They screamed and scattered. The people inside followed suit, and screaming people began to take shelter under tables and inside the shops. Our own little outpost in the back of the station was quite small and soon became filled with people hiding behind slot machines and arcade games.

  The situation was now just too much for Officer 46 to handle. Amazingly, he turned to us to say, “You two stay put,” and then bolted for the exit.

  I stood there watching him go and expecting him to change his mind at any moment. He had to realize that we would flee. Of course he did, but at that moment all of his training and his goal-orientated way of looking at the world were overwhelmed by a basic curiosity and, probably, a desire to make contact with his peers in order to reclaim the protection offered by his social group.

  I turned to Allie and said, “What do we do? What’s going on?”

  She shook her head. I assumed that she was as out of her depth as I was, but I now understand that she was already forming quite reasonable suspicions.

  More and more people stuffed themselves into the casino. I was jostled and bumped toward the back of the place as whole families, or so they seemed to be, took refuge.

  “If we get to the car, we might make a clean getaway,” she said. She nearly had to shout over the frightened vocalizations of the people.

  “Maybe,” I replied, “but whatever has them distracted is probably not as interesting as a couple of fugitives kicking-off a high speed flight from the law.”

  A man with a very stout laptop bag swung around to avoid a gambling machine only to strike me in the solar plexus. I wheezed a bit and ignored his apologies.

  “Fine,” she said while I caught my breath, “So we have to be discreet.”

  “You haven’t exactly demonstrated an aptitude for that so far,” I replied. The wall had come up to us, and we were beginning to feel at risk of being crushed.

  “You’re just getting to know me Carver, I can be plenty discreet.”

  “How the hell do you plan to discreetly-”

  Now, this has happened to you, I know it has. The situation is this: you are at a party or, perhaps, a crowded restaurant. You are one of twenty or so people having individual conversations about all sorts of subjects suitable for polite company. Then, in response to your companion’s riveting tale about his latest visit to the gastroenterologist, you say, “I know exactly what you mean, they didn’t know what to make of my colonoscopy.” Only, as you do so, every person in the room reaches a perfectly synchronized lull in their own conversations. This leaves you now effectively shouting, “How many times must I let that man have his way with my rectum?”

  Actually, as I write this, I realize that my cousin’s sweet sixteen party might have been more uncomfortable than the incident at the motorway station. But the point remains.

  The noise of the crowd was such that shouting became necessary. Each new movement of the light outside was cause for another round of yelps and screams. So I was understandably caught of guard when every man, woman, and (I swear) infant in the place went utterly silent all in the same fraction of a second. Even the machines in the casino seemed to pause in their bleeping.

  Thus, in that instant, I went from calmly conversing about how best to avoid the authority of the law to shouting like a madman words along the lines of, “-steal a car we already stole right in front of the police who came to arrest us?”

  Yes, now that I have considered it fully, Millie’s party was definitely worse. At least this time, no one seemed to turn around and look at me. Recognizing the silence, I looked at my fellow refugees. No, the
y were not looking at me. They were all looking outside and standing in mortified stillness.

  I craned my head to see what had so enthralled them. As I did, I saw the white shaft of light on the other side of the glass wall. It was approximately where it had been a few moments before. There were no people around it now, as they had fled to the safety of the building.

  I stretched higher and saw what had inspired such stillness. Instead of a pole reaching from the sky to the ground, I saw that the shaft of light was now bent in a perfect right angle. Like an L-bend in a plumber’s pipe.

  It had bent in some impossible way and was now projecting into the station itself. Even more amazing, this light simply terminated near the middle of the interior. Like it had struck a pane of glass, only there was no pane. How could this be so?

  Everything about this was wrong. I needed to know what was out there. What possibly could have inspired such fear? What could cause such an impossible light show?

  “Allie?” I said.

  She remained silent. I looked over at her. Her eyes were wide. There was no hint of sadness or disappointment now, only fear.

  “Allie,” I said, this time more quietly and with a forced calmness.

  She shushed me. It was not harsh, only a bit distracted. I turned back to look outside.

  “What the hell is going on?” I said, not expecting an answer.

  “It’s aliens, mate,” whispered a man nearby. “End of the world or aliens.”

  “What?” I said. Several others shushed me. They had cause to, for the light had begun to creep forward. I wanted to ask the man what he meant, but I dared not speak.

  “They’re looking for me,” Allie said in a voice so low that I only understood the words after replaying them in my mind. What she said did not make immediate sense to me, hence I replied, “They don’t seem to care about you right now.”

  “Not the police.”

  I looked over to her, “Then who?”

  She pulled me through the crowd and to the corner of the room, near the emergency exit. She motioned for me to put my ear near her mouth. I heard her swallow away dryness before whispering, “Carver, I may have gotten you mixed up in something a lot worse than car theft. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to stick with me for a while.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said with obvious honesty.

  I doubt she heard me, for I spoke so low. She raised her head and looked toward the shaft of light. Its termination was peering into the shops, like the head of a gossamer snake.

  “They must know. They must know, or they wouldn’t be here.” She looked down at me and said in a louder voice, “When it happens, we’re going through the emergency exit.”

  “What? That’ll trip the alarm! And when what happens?”

  She ignored me still, her eyes focused on the light. It had swung around and was peering inside our little hole in the wall. Half the people stopped breathing entirely, and the others began to hyperventilate. We were just apes hiding in a cave while a pride of lions stalked outside. But this beast would not be frightened away by fire or a show of primitive collective defense. We all knew this. Allie, I am sure, knew it most keenly.

  “It’ll be dark, so put your hands on the door and wait for me to tell you when.”

  I leaned automatically to the door. My hands rested on the silvery metal bar. My mind became distracted by the wording on the warning handle.

  “Any second now,” I heard her say behind me.

  Everything went black. In a moment far too brief to be discernible by the human brain, the building lost all power. To my amazement, nothing made a sound. No automatic beeps came from devices warning of power loss; no emergency tones sounded from the fire alarms; nothing. Every light simply snapped off. It happened so fast that my vision was briefly clouded by an eerie green fog that looked almost electric. Then Allie was at my back.

  “Run!”

  She and I pushed the door open. No alarm sounded. We darted through it and into a pitch-black nothingness. We had not made it outside, but rather into a utility area that ran along and behind the shops. I misjudged how deep the room would be and slammed into a wall. Stars and comets filled my vision. Allie, hearing the slightly squishy sound my body had just made, helped steady me. I felt her move by me in the dark. She took my hand and led me forward.

  She found her target after only a moment or two of effort. The next emergency door, the one leading outside, was opened soon after.

  We went through it and began to dart away from the station. We let the door slam shut. No alarm had sounded and, I knew, none would sound. All power was lost. Mains, batteries, backup generators, everything was gone and dead. I sensed without looking that even my mobile phone would be disabled.

  Allie and I ran, she from a fate understood and I from an entirely unknown danger. We crossed a paved area connected to a loading dock. My eyes began to adjust. There was some light out here, and its obvious source filled me with dread.

  The service station was quite large, over two stories tall. Thus, it took us gaining a bit of distance away from the building before we could turn and see what had so engrossed our would-be captors. I took a moment to turn around and look at what lay behind us.

  “Oh my God,” I said. I uttered many oaths and summoned a variety of deities. Allie said nothing.

  In the sky was an object such as I had never before seen. I say ‘object’ even though it took some time for me to discern the physical structure of the craft. I did immediately appreciate that three massive red lights hung in the sky in a triangular formation. At the middle of the formation was the brightest, most intensely white light I have ever seen.

  I tried to examine the station and its surroundings. This was nearly impossible, as the power failure seemed to have affected every car and building for some distance. What should have been a beacon of commercialism along the motorway was reduced to a frightening shape looming out of the darkness, beneath the truly terrifying shape hovering above it. I realized that the hovering lights were making no sound.

  I tried to look closer at it, but my eyes fought against the blinding white light. When my vision adjusted, I was able to see that the lights were part of a large, dark triangular craft. Then it was time to run again. Allie was pointing in the distance.

  “There! Go that way!” she shouted.

  As she ran off, I began to follow. I could see twin lights in front of us. Headlights.

  “Where are we going?”

  “That car…” she took a breath, “…that car is still running. They haven’t gotten to it.”

  And with that, we were off to steal another car.

  6

  The object of our latest scheme was a beaten-up Land Rover. It was parked on a country road that lay behind the station and ran to the north. Evidently, the vehicle was far enough away from the station to be unaffected by whatever phenomenon had stricken all else without power.

  Allie ran flat-out, while I lumbered behind in a demonstrably ungainly and ineffective way. Several times I thought I had lost her only to catch sight of a female silhouette blotting out the headlights we ran toward. I had truly pushed my body harder than it had been driven in a very long time, and the added exertion of running for my life was more than I could take. For better or worse, fear and excitement caused my blood to become filled with sufficient adrenaline to mask the pain.

  In the dark, I relied on sound to gauge the world. The wheezing brought about by my labored breathing was most immediate and constant. Farther out, the air was filled with the shuffling and scattering of rocks as our footfalls disturbed heaps of gravel. Beyond that lay a blanket of silence. I heard no screams or yells from the station. Had the people fallen silent out of fear or because of some hostile act? How long would the silence remain? When would the wail of distant police sirens fill the night? I concentrated on my breathing and focused on the ever-approaching headlights.

  I had no clue what plan, if any, Allie had in mind for when we reached th
e vehicle. We had notched off so many ignominious accomplishments that evening, that surely armed robbery was not too far out of the question. Was she armed? That question remained unanswered, and I was still half-convinced that she bore some means of self-defense concealed upon her person.

  All of this made it easy for me to imagine the addition of a crime of violence to the night’s events. I shuddered to think of how far I would fall in the world once the evening was over. Prison and unemployment surely awaited me. That was, of course, if I survived.

  Survival itself was anything but a given. I could no longer limit the list of worst-case scenarios to those involving criminal penalties and loss of reputation. That had changed when I stopped running from police and started to flee a mysterious flying machine. No, as I raced down that country lane, I did so for my very life.

  What made all of this even worse was the vast amount of unknown and unknowable that lay before me. Police were understandable. Robbery and flight were both, in a sense, understandable. The object hovering behind us (or possibly in swift pursuit of us) was a thing properly confined to imagination. It was impossible, incalculable, and utterly terrifying. And yet it was. It inexorably was.

  I pushed myself to run faster.

  As I did, I felt a desire to know just what else Allie continued to conceal from me. I wanted to stop her; to shout questions about the triangle craft. I needed to know just how it was that Allie had predicted the sudden power failure and our need for flight. Obviously, I could do nothing of the sort. Instead, I merely trotted on.

  When we reached the car, the headlights were still on, but the engine was off. I searched around for the driver and saw no one. Allie gestured for me to move and act quietly. I complied as best I could. I peered around, scanning the darkened English countryside but saw not a soul.

  Finding myself alone with Allie, I took a moment to catch my breath. I leaned upon the vehicle and closed my eyes. My heart was beating at a frightening pace and with noise sufficient to cause me real concern. I kept my eyes closed for a moment or two in order to calm myself down. Try as I did, though, calm was unobtainable.