Alien Invasion (Book 4): Annihilation

by Sean Platt

  With Meyer dead and Heather finally in custody (or soon to be; there were a dozen guns on her, waiting for her tearful reunion to end), everything had turned out tidy. If Titans had brought Raj back to the mansion, it meant he wasn’t in some kind of misguided trouble. Mo would listen to him now. The Astrals would make him.

  A flurry of fists came at Raj. He honestly didn’t see it coming and had no time to block. Lila didn’t bother with slaps. She punched him in the neck and gut then landed a kick to his balls before the guards finally pulled her away. A bit reluctantly and without hurry, Raj thought, wincing while catching his breath.

  “You son of a bitch!” Lila blared, her eyes furiously wet, her face ugly with anger. “You miserable, murdering son of a bitch!”

  “Keep hold of her,” Raj managed to say, trying not to betray how much that had hurt.

  “You fucking coward!”

  “Stop it, Lila. Stop it, or I’ll have them cuff you.”

  “I’m your wife!”

  Raj ran his thumb along his lip, then looked down to see that it had come away wet. She hadn’t hit him high enough to break it, so he must have bitten himself when she’d landed her dirty shots. He licked his thumb and raised his attention to see all eyes on him, watching, waiting.

  Lila’s eyes, livid, murderous.

  Heather’s eyes, finally humbled, defeated.

  Christopher’s eyes, wary. Reasonably so, because this was far from the first time Raj had found Christopher coincidentally in his suite, with his wife, alone. Christopher looked eager to obey, which was good. He was thinking of his own neck now that he saw who was in charge of Heaven’s Veil — unofficially now, officially soon. Rightly thinking of his neck. Because as soon as Raj felt sure the Astrals wouldn’t object, Raj thought he might have Christopher hanged by that neck, for trying to cuckold an entire power structure sure as he was cuckolding Raj.

  And the eyes of every guard in the room, respectful and maybe afraid, waiting for orders.

  Lila’s hard stare broke, her head tipping down then finding her mother.

  “You’re just messing with me,” she said to Heather. Even though Raj could tell Lila had already known, maybe from watching the house activity or perhaps from their spooky daughter, that something big had gone wrong. Or — from where Raj was standing — right.

  Heather was quiet, her piece said. The first time anyone had ever seen Heather Hawthorne shut her ceaselessly yapping mouth.

  Lila looked at Raj, now more pleading than angry.

  He felt less vindictive than he had a right to be, so he answered with a justification: “He turned on them. He was endangering the city.”

  “He was standing up for my mom.”

  “After you left,” Raj said, trying to tap his earlier indignation, “after he tied me up, Meyer helped Terrence put some sort of a virus onto the Heaven’s Veil network.”

  As if on cue, the lights flickered, the virus in the power station trying the home’s connections. Power was failing across Heaven’s Veil, and if the human cops didn’t get the city generators running as dutifully as Raj had the mansion generators, the place would be blacked out come sundown.

  “Try your phone, Lila. Try to sync your juke or Vellum. We have lights because I did my job — after your mother knocked me cold with a motherfucking rock, no less — but the network is dead. We’re cut off. Thanks to Meyer.”

  Lila sniffed, trying to hold herself together as the truth sank in. “So you … murdered him.”

  Heather, completely broken, hitched with sobs.

  “I did my job.” Raj didn’t like the way Lila’s hurt expression made him unsure, or the guilt creeping up his neck like icy fingers. He’d ended a life. He’d ended his father-in-law’s life. He’d ended the life of the woman he’d once been so innocently, so childishly in love with. He fought a lump inside, looking to the guards for confirmation that this had all been necessary.

  A tear streaked Lila’s cheek. Another spilled, from the other eye.

  “He … he was … I had to, Lila.” Raj looked at Christopher, at the others with their guns. “He was begging the Astrals to … ”

  There was a small noise. Before turning, Raj knew exactly what it was.

  “Daddy?”

  Lila shook the guards away and stood, crossing to Clara’s crib. The crib that, according to Raj’s two-year-old daughter, was an “embarrassment.”

  “Shh,” Lila said, wiping at a tear.

  “I miss Grandpa.”

  Heather, now half kneeling on the floor, sobbed harder.

  “Honey,” Lila said, “come here.”

  “I dreamed that Grandma thought Grandpa left,” Clara said as Lila moved to pick her up.

  Lila’s outstretched arms paused.

  “‘Thought’?” Lila repeated, her own grief paused, sent back to committee.

  “Let’s go find him,” Clara said, smiling.

  CHAPTER 7

  Into the cliff’s face, looking up.

  Beneath a fall of rubble, where an energy beam seemed to have struck nearby.

  Charlie gave Piper a look that Cameron found he could read as plainly as if the man had held up a sign: Does this look like it was done by someone who meant to cause actual damage?

  And Cameron had to admit that the answer was no, it absolutely didn’t. There was a mammoth scorch mark in the space between house and cliff — exactly where, Cameron realized with amusement, he’d tripped and fallen on his face while sprinting to grab Piper before the ship could take her into its belly. Assuming the scorch had been made the day they’d outwitted the Astrals in Little Cottonwood Canyon, it was three days old. But to Cameron it looked like a shot across the bow, nothing meant to obliterate Moab. It was the swing of a bat taken by an angry man who realizes at the final second that he’d better not smash the windshield.

  They’d destroyed the area around the ranch. But they’d no more obliterated the actual lab than they had their five-person troupe during the trip here.

  Cameron wanted to nod, to mouth something to Charlie and Piper about those who’d stayed behind. Had the few lab techs and others who’d remained been abducted into the mothership? Had they been killed to prove a point? Cameron had been assuming they’d arrive to find nothing, despite his insistence on coming here — because, honestly, it was this or wander forever. Their only hope of finding Thor’s Hammer was at Moab if it hadn’t died with his father, but Cameron was realizing now that he’d been certain they’d find only ash and ruin.

  And yet if the lab was standing, there was a chance people had been left alive.

  Charlie didn’t see what Cameron was trying to say. He was already ducking though the entrance. And Andreus, whose daughter had been among those remaining (killed, abducted, or run away) was nowhere close enough to catch Cameron’s eye.

  He looked at the only person left: Piper. But she was already following Charlie, ducking inside, shifting the fallen beam that had done little more than block the entrance.

  The lights were off, all of the old power sources either destroyed or shut down by Terrence’s virus. Charlie might know where to check a generator, but ahead of Cameron in the gloom, the tall scientist simply lit his flashlight. The thing had a wide beam, more like a camping lantern. Charlie made its glow as broad as it went and shone it around in the eerie silence.

  “Ransacked,” he said.

  Piper seemed to feel none of Cameron’s in-the-dark trepidation. Their roles had almost reversed: She was the brave one, and he seemed to have grown a timid heart. Cameron had become the group’s most tentative. Mile by mile, Benjamin’s death had settled on his shoulders like a heavy cloak. It made him hesitate. He’d lost enough, and couldn’t bear to lose more.

  But Piper had gone ahead with Charlie, flicking on her own flashlight. She was moving ahead, going farther. From where Cameron was standing, he could see that Charlie’s one-word assessment had it pretty much covered. The place had been tossed, every neat pile of research sifted and thrown aside
as if by impatient hands.

  “Why is the building still here?” Piper asked, fingering a stack of papers. Then, as if remembering, her head moved toward the ceiling as if she could see the mothership through the rock. Wondering, perhaps, if the Astrals had merely been waiting for the mice to come home before closing the trap.

  “They need to know where the Hammer is,” Charlie said. “We’re on the same quest. They want to turn it on, and we want to turn it off, but that doesn’t change the fact that finding it benefits us both. They wouldn’t destroy the place any more than I would.”

  Cameron had been scanning the space, his eyes absorbing disorder. The entrance was behind them, outside light already feeling feebly distant. He had his own flashlight but hadn’t lit it. Now, in the rocking shadows made by Piper’s and Charlie’s lights, something struck Cameron as wrong. A shadow that moved the wrong way. An echo, perhaps, of what he’d seen outside before they’d entered.

  His hand came up. His light clicked on. Cameron speared the spot where he’d seen the disobedient shadow but saw only the coffee room’s open door. For some reason, seeing it gave him a pang of sadness. Ivan had called that plain old coffee room the communications room, and Cameron had sat in there for hours beside his father, holding vigil, waiting to hear from Terrence or Franklin — whom Piper had met before his irrational end.

  “What?” Piper asked, noting his urgent gesture.

  “I thought I saw something.”

  Piper turned, her body language changing. Something had been in here, not from this planet. They’d recently left a cave in the rock filled with alien predators. The feeling of being trapped in another with something similar was clear on her face.

  Piper shone her light next to Cameron’s but saw nothing.

  “Over here,” Charlie called.

  After a lingering moment, Charlie and Piper turned.

  Again, something shifted at the edge of Cameron’s peripheral vision, just out of sight.

  “Look.”

  Cameron did. Benjamin’s keyboard was in front of his old office terminal. Many of the lab units didn’t even have keyboards, but Benjamin had always liked taking notes and preferred typing to dictation.

  Now the keyboard was a twisted mass of plastic. It had been torqued as if twisted like taffy, snapped in the middle. The two halves were destroyed, keys popped loose and scattered across the floor like knocked-out teeth.

  “What do you make of this?” Charlie asked.

  “Someone doesn’t like lab work.”

  Piper turned to Cameron. He thought she’d roll her eyes, given the mood. Instead, she gave him a tiny smile. Her warmth barely helped. Cameron still felt a chill at his rear, and no matter which way he turned it felt like there was something beyond his vision, just out of sight.

  Charlie picked up half of the keyboard. He set it back down then shone his light around the workstation with fresh interest. The floor was littered with pens and other miscellany. Beyond, one of the thin monitors had been smashed.

  “I don’t get it. This looks like it was done by people.”

  Cameron picked up the keyboard. “I don’t know. I’d swear this was bitten. Like by a Reptar.”

  “It’s pointless. If they wanted the place gone, they could have just blasted it. If they wanted to get information, tossing it like this would be counterproductive.”

  “They’re not good with our computers,” Piper said. “And they don’t understand the way we share our consciousness over the Internet.”

  “Then why try? Why walk in here?” Charlie kicked at a wheeled chair lying sideways on the ground beside a shattered water glass. “They’ve been siphoning the Heaven’s Veil network from the start. Not by coming down and hacking, just by using the air. They could have tried that. Maybe already did.”

  “Terrence’s virus,” Cameron said. “Maybe it cut all of the connections, and coming in here was the only possible way to get what they needed.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Maybe. But still … ” He kicked through more debris, the answer apparently too elusive.

  There was new movement to the rear. Cameron heard what sounded like a sniff before spinning, sure that the shadow had come to claim them at last.

  But his flashlight lanced the face of a teenage girl instead, her blonde hair a mess, her clothing filthy.

  Cameron didn’t know the girl well, but he knew her, all right: Nathan’s daughter, Grace.

  “We thought they were looking for something,” she said in a broken whisper. “But mostly, they were angry.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Piper listened to the girl for as long as she could.

  Charlie had offered to calm her nerves with a cup of tea. When he remembered that the lab didn’t have power, he offered to hike back to the RV to boil the water. Cameron looked at Piper when Charlie said that, and they exchanged an amused glance. Charlie barely acted human most of the time, and here he was offering to be this young girl’s hero. Grace declined with thanks, and Charlie looked at both of the others as if he’d just realized his fly was open, daring them to call out his tenderness.

  There was still bottled iced tea in the refrigerator. It had warmed, but tea was still tea. Grace accepted it even though the lab seemed to have been her home all along and she clearly could have drunk the tea at anytime. When Piper led to her the couch, she’d gone willingly.

  Then she unspooled her tale.

  Not long into it, Andreus and Coffey entered, their pointless distraction having come full circle in its futility. Of course there was nothing in the obliterated basement. And of course the Astrals hadn’t been fooled, if they’d been watching.

  Every card was on the table. The ship above must know they were here; it was too much to hope that they simply looked skyward and never down. The humans knew the ship knew, and the ship knew they knew. It was, in a strange way, as Charlie had said: They were twisted partners, each in pursuit of the same thing. The only questions were how long each party would let the other tag along … and who would attempt to knife whom in the back.

  Andreus saw his daughter and finally lost his cool. It touched Piper just as Charlie’s kindness had, and she fought, strangely, not to cry. The big bald man embraced the girl, holding her tight for too long while she squeezed him back. Then their former awkwardness seemed to recur, and they separated: Grace moving back to the couch, and Andreus to the small group’s outer halo to listen.

  And then Grace talked.

  About the attack, which Piper guessed had timed perfectly with their own escape into the tunnels. The shuttles that had come here first must have arrived seconds after Trevor’s death. After he’d kicked Piper away and shut the door, saving her while feeding himself to the wolves.

  Trevor had been seventeen. So was Grace. They might have been friends. Or maybe something more. But Trevor would never see another birthday. Or a proper burial.

  The ships came. Shuttles first then the mothership. The lab’s skeleton crew had hidden with nowhere to go, slipping under desks like a 1950s duck-and-cover drill. There had been a volley of shots from outside. Grace said she’d heard the ranch house break apart and burn, “like someone kicking down a house of sticks.” Another energy shot close to the door filled the room like a live wire.

  Then the Reptars had come, tall white Titans beside them like escorts. They’d riffled through the papers, to poke impotently around the computer monitors. Either the network had managed to survive that long, or the mothership had somehow held Terrence’s virus temporarily at bay because the screens had remained lit; the lights had stayed on.

  Unable to access whatever they were trying to retrieve, the smashing and killing started.

  The first to go had been a tech whose name Grace didn’t know. She’d spent her ranch time mostly in the house out back, and had only run to the cliff after the tumult had started. Telling the story, Grace teared up — not over the tech’s life, but over not knowing his name. As if she hadn’t cared enough to learn it and had somehow caus
ed his death by her own hands.

  “That thing they do,” Grace said. “Do you know the thing they do, with your mind?”

  Heads shook. Cameron almost spoke, but Grace had moved on by the time he thought to. He knew a thing they did, if not the thing. He and Piper had shared a strange mental bond once upon a time, but this sounded different as Grace described it. Like an intrusion. Like a rape of the mind, pinning the nameless tech to the wall with Reptar claws, alien eyes meeting his while the thing pillaged his brain like a hacked data bank. Listening, Piper couldn’t help but recall the monks telling her how the Astrals understood human minds as they should have developed, even if they didn’t understand the Internet.

  The others had watched. Literally watched. They saw the tech’s thoughts as the Reptars searched them. They saw the intrusive images the Reptars inserted to apply leverage. Then they saw the kid die from the inside, and then the outside as claws ripped him to shreds.

  Then the next person in the lab.

  Then the next. Furious. Smashing things along the way. Kicking like a tantrum. The Titans’ big white hands pinning each victim against an outside wall so the Reptars could do their job, the dark-think inside the Titans percolating through to the survivors, indistinguishable in image and tone from that of the Reptars.

  Maybe Titans couldn’t fight. Maybe they really couldn’t hurt a fly. But they could make it easy for Reptars to hurt plenty, and the lines between Astrals, in all of their minds, had grown so thin as to no longer matter.

  When Piper could no longer take the story — when Grace neared her climax, the part of the story where she alone survived, possibly specifically to report this grisly tale — she walked away. She didn’t make excuses. She simply turned into the deeper part of the lab, searching for all the Astrals couldn’t find.