Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel)

by Greg Keyes

  Of course, the one overshadowing London was nearer to him, and everyone else in the Old Tom.

  Closing time came, but the owner didn’t shut down. The place became more crowded with people who didn’t quite believe what was going on. One older gentleman insisted that it was all a hoax, à la the War of the Worlds radio broadcast. The idea caught on, and drinking games were invented. As dawn approached, Dikembe switched from beer to coffee and bought a hot breakfast.

  Halfway through the meal, the television showed the torching of London. He and Brian watched, unbelieving, as some of the world’s greatest cities were laid to waste in an instant.

  Dikembe finished his coffee and stood up. He stuck out his hand for Brian to shake.

  “I’ll see you, old fellow,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “What?” Brian said. His face was so drained of color, it nearly matched his cottony hair. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Home,” Dikembe said. “May I borrow your bicycle?”

  “You can have it, mate,” Brian said, “but you’ll have to pump the tires way up to cross the Channel.”

  “I’ll deal with that when I get there,” he said. They shook hands and parted company, as around them the world unraveled.

  The bicycle proved the way to go. The main roads were packed, not so much with refugees from London—there weren’t very many of those—but with people fleeing every other city, fearing they were next.

  * * *

  In some cases, they were right. Birmingham and Liverpool were annihilated within the next day. News of the rest of the world was hard to come by on the road.

  He stopped for a sandwich and some crisps at a roadside convenience store whose owner still had the stones and the greed to remain open. Everything was double price. He didn’t flinch about it though, guessing that the ten pounds he’d paid would be worth slightly less than dog piss in a day or two.

  He rode south and west toward the coast, skirting very wide around where London used to be, often going cross-country when the roads were too mad. He wasn’t sure what he expected—squads of aliens on the march, fliers murdering people from the air—but if the world was ending, the scenery didn’t know it in the fields and meadows of the West Country.

  He first thought to go to Portsmouth, but remembered there was a Navy presence there the aliens might be interested in blasting, so he went farther west to the little resort town of Weymouth. He reached it, exhausted, about eight o’clock in the evening. He couldn’t find a room, but he did find another pub, where he ate and watched the television, which had maddeningly little to say, especially about his homeland. In England and Europe, the pattern was clear—each ship destroyed a city and then moved on to the next. So Lagos was finished. What about Kinshasa? Was it now a smoking ruin like London and Paris? From what he gathered, the first targets had been chosen by size, and some military installations had been targeted, as well.

  “Is this seat taken?” someone asked.

  He looked up from the well of his thoughts and saw a young woman with slightly wavy flaxen hair and a dimpled chin.

  “No,” he said. “Please.” He stood and pulled out the chair for her.

  “Oh,” she said. “A gentleman.” She craned her neck in an exaggerated way. “A very tall gentleman. You don’t see that a lot these days. The gentleman part.” She was about his age, maybe twenty-five. Her eyes were gray, and she had a nice smile, judging from the single one she had let slip when he pulled the chair out.

  “I still can’t believe it,” she said, looking up at the television. “It’s like science fiction. So unreal.”

  “It’s—difficult,” he said.

  “Did you have anyone—in any of the cities?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not really. Not that I know of. Where I’m from is pretty far from any major city. And you?”

  She nodded. “I’m from Atlanta,” she said, a little sadly. He had noticed the American accent, but had declined to ask about it. People were always making assumptions about him and where he was from, or else fishing to find out. He generally tried not to do the same, and found that people usually wanted to tell you about themselves anyway.

  “Atlanta had time to evacuate,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied. “I hope they made it out. They would have tried, but there’s no place to call, you know? Even if the phones were working.”

  “I know,” he said. He had tried placing a few calls, to no effect. “Look, my name is Dikembe. And you are?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry, misplaced my manners. I’m Hailey. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Hailey, may I fetch you a lager?”

  “Yes sir,” she said. “You certainly may.”

  He pushed his way politely through the crowd at the bar and ordered the drinks from a young woman with purple hair wearing a railroad engineer’s cap.

  “So what brought you to Weymouth?” Hailey asked when he returned.

  “Yesterday I was in Oxford,” he replied. “Now I’m trying to return home.”

  She nodded. He thought she would ask him if his home was Africa, as if it was a country instead of a continent. He got that a lot.

  She surprised him.

  “Why Oxford then?” she asked.

  “School,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, dipping her finger in the foamy head of her beer. “College man. What did you study?”

  “Art,” he said. He took a drink.

  “Art,” she repeated. “Every parent’s dream, right? An art major at an expensive school.”

  Dikembe smiled.

  “My father did not approve,” he admitted. “Drawing and painting aren’t fit pursuits for a man, especially an Umbutu man. I finished my degree two years ago, but I could never quite bring myself to go home. I’ve been working up to a gallery exhibition…” He trailed off, realizing.

  “What is it?”

  “Well,” he said. “My studio was actually in London, in Earl’s Court. I was just visiting a friend in Oxford.”

  “Lucky you,” she said. “Best visit you ever made.”

  He thought about the paintings, two years of work…

  “Sure,” he said. “Lucky me.”

  “And you choose to go home now?” she said. “Why the change of heart?”

  He gestured at the television, although at the moment it displayed only static. “Why do you think? I should have returned a long time ago. Now I may have waited too long.”

  She took a lingering sip of her beer, looking thoughtful.

  “I came over here to go to school too,” she said, “but it didn’t turn out to be my thing. I ended up working on yachts instead.”

  “Yachts?” he said. “That must be interesting.”

  “It’s a living,” she said. “The travel is fun—I’ve been a lot of places I never imagined I would see—and the owner is almost never on board, so we’re pretty much left to do our own thing. I’m still young, footloose. Surrounded by luxury, even if it doesn’t belong to me. Yeah, it’s kinda cool.”

  “Why own a yacht if you’re not going to be on it?” Dikembe wondered.

  She shrugged. “He’ll call and say, ‘Take the boat to Marseilles.’ Or Sydney, or wherever. Then he’ll fly in, throw a big party on the yacht for his very important guests, and then fly out, leaving us to clean up and have a few parties of our own.”

  They had a few more drinks. She told him about working for a Russian mobster and he told her about growing up on the savanna, and for a little while they almost forgot what was happening in the world around them. Yet it crept back in. Dikembe mused that his handful of paintings weren’t the greatest loss to culture.

  “The Louvre is gone,” he said. “The British Museum. The Prado. The Met. MOMA.”

  “The house I grew up in,” Hailey countered. “The World of Coke. My parents, maybe.” She sighed. “The two of us, tomorrow or the next day, if things keep going this way. They’re beating the hell out of us. What do
they want?”

  “I don’t know,” Dikembe said. “Maybe they just don’t like cities.”

  “We’re never going to get this off our minds with that thing on.” She waved at the television. It was now replaying footage of London going up in flames.

  “What do you suggest?” he asked.

  “There’s booze on the boat,” she said. Her expression was somewhere between shy and artful. He wasn’t sure which was affected.

  * * *

  Lao Lei climbed into the cockpit of the Shenyang J-8, familiarizing himself with the controls as quickly as he could. He had trained and flown somewhat more modern jets, most of which were now piles of wreckage near the ruin that was once Beijing.

  “That’s okay,” he said to the plane. “You and I, we’re going to be friends.” He started through his checklist, just as the others in his squadron were doing.

  Lu, one of the ground crew, looked up at him.

  “Do you believe it?” Lu asked him. “Do you think the American plan is real?”

  Lei shrugged. “I don’t care,” he said. “Real, or not real. Maybe they can bring down the shields. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. My job is to fly and fight, and die if it comes to that. I know myself, I know my enemy. I fear nothing.”

  “Sun Tzu?” Lu said.

  “I may be paraphrasing,” Lei admitted.

  Lu nodded. “What have you named this one?” he asked.

  “Meifeng,” he said. “Beautiful Wind.”

  “That’s a good name,” Lu said. “A little odd—”

  The radio crackled. It was time.

  Lu bowed to him. “Good luck,” he said.

  “And to you, my friend,” Lei said.

  * * *

  As the monstrous ship loomed on the horizon, everything seemed to slow down. They were coming from the east, and the sun was setting beyond the ship, so its shadow rose toward them. There was a bit of chatter, but most of the pilots were silent.

  It seemed to take a long time to reach it, like walking toward a distant mountain.

  Lei’s anger and grief were so closely tied together that he could not tell them apart, and both had been gnawing his soul away from the inside out. Now he felt almost quiet. He remembered his wife, brushing the lock of hair from her face. He remembered when they met, how young they were, how alive the world had seemed.

  He thought of Rain, his daughter, of singing a lullaby to her as he held her by the light of a candle. Some part of him had been disappointed, of course. Under the one-child policy, a daughter meant the end of his father’s line—but she had been so beautiful, so quick and intelligent, that any discontent on his part had vanished, and he thought only of the years ahead, of watching her unfold, reveal herself, become who she was meant to become.

  If they failed today—if he failed—that would never happen. His wife was already entombed in the ashes of Beijing. He would never know her touch or see her smile again, and maybe he would never see Rain again either.

  But Rain was going to live. If he had anything at all to say about it, his daughter would grow to be a woman.

  He was carrying missiles, so he had something to say about it.

  “Fighters!” someone shouted, and ahead he saw flickers of green light as the alien craft disgorged from their carrier and began attacking the slender Chinese force.

  “Come along, Meifeng,” Lei said. “Come along, my beautiful wind.” With a clear heart and terrible purpose, Lao Lei accelerated toward the enemy.

  * * *

  Dikembe awoke to cheering. He sat up, rubbing his eyes, wondering if he was still in some sort of dream.

  “What the hell?” Hailey swore. She looked pleasantly disheveled and slightly cross.

  But she smiled when she saw him.

  “Hey, you,” she said. She looked around. “Not dead yet.”

  He remembered Scotch and the sea air, and holding her. Her standing on tiptoe to kiss him…

  Someone banged on her cabin door.

  “Hailey, get out here,” the someone yelled.

  Dikembe put on his shirt and slacks as Hailey drew on a T-shirt and blue shorts. Then they made their way to the deck, where a party was in progress, and fine champagne was flowing freely.

  “What’s going on?” Hailey asked a young man with unfortunate sideburns, who was handing her a flute of Dom Perignon.

  “What’s going on,” the fellow said, “is we kicked their asses.”

  “The aliens,” Dikembe said dubiously.

  The fellow pointed to a large-screen TV set up on the deck. It displayed images of the huge spaceships, crashed and burning. A glance around the little port revealed revelers in the streets.

  Sideburns offered him some of the bubbly, and in a bit of a daze, he took it.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  * * *

  The euphoria following the defeat of the alien fleet had a half-life of hours. Estimates put the death toll in England alone at more than four million, and more than a million were now homeless. The government was in a shambles, as were most governments everywhere.

  Global mortality was guessed to be in the billions, and the aliens hadn’t been entirely defeated.

  At least not all of them.

  Their ships seemed to have all been destroyed, but in the areas where they crashed, reports were on the rise of encounters with armed survivors. In England that was mostly in the north, which only meant more refugees were headed for the south and for Europe, where many hoped things might be better. So Dikembe knew he had to work fast. The docks were already starting to get crowded. He needed to stay ahead of the next wave of refugees, or he might drown in them.

  Hailey had disappeared. He spent a few precious minutes finding her. She was in a deck chair near the bow, well on her way to being drunk again.

  “Hey, end-of-the-world buddy,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “I just wanted to say goodbye,” he said. “I need to find passage to Europe before everything fills up.”

  She stood a little shakily and kissed him.

  “Umm, last time I checked,” she said, “you were already on a boat.”

  “Of course,” he said. “But I couldn’t ask—”

  “You didn’t,” she said. “Anyway, we heard from the boss, who seems to have survived. We’re headed for Greece, but we’re not in a hurry. I think we can drop you somewhere convenient on the way. Algiers, maybe?”

  “That would be—really good,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Cool,” she said. “You can bunk with me in the meantime. If you want. If you can handle the company. Or I can find you a stateroom.”

  “I would be happy to share with you,” he said. “If you can stand the company.”

  * * *

  Mr. Marshall looked at them across the small fire. For a while, it seemed like that was all he was going to do, but finally he cleared his throat and began speaking.

  “So I know some of you are scared,” he said. “So am I. I’ve been thinking what the best thing to do is, and for right now, I think we should stay right here. We’re about as deep in the national forest as we can get, and from what we’ve seen of the aliens, they seem mostly interested in cities. At least, that’s where they started. Up here, I don’t think we’ll draw their attention.”

  “How do you know?” Hank asked. “We don’t even know what they want.” He massaged an ankle and winced as he spoke. He’d gotten tangled in some barbed wire on their hike back down the mountain.

  “That’s a good point, Hank,” Mr. Marshall said, “but until we have more information, it just seems safer up here. We still have gas in the bus if we need to leave. In the meantime, we need to focus on surviving, on living off the land. There’s fish in the lake and food in the woods, and we have some supplies. We’re going to be alright.”

  Jake raised his hand.

  “Jake?”

  “Mr. Marshall, how are my parents going to find me way up here?” he asked.

  “Oh, jeez, kid,�
�� Hank said. “Grow up.”

  “Hank,” Mr. Marshall said. “There’s no need for that.” He turned his attention back to Jake. “I don’t know the answer to that. I only know that your parents would want me to keep you safe. Do you understand?”

  Jake just stared at him. It was like no one grasped what he wanted. But he didn’t say anything.

  Later he helped gather wood and drew water to be boiled for drinking. At night, they slept in the bus. The older kids managed to catch a few fish, but the food that was supposed to be in the woods seemed to be pretty well hidden.

  Meanwhile, Hank was getting sick. His leg swelled up and he slept a lot, although he yelled in his sleep. When Jake was close he noticed that the leg smelled really bad. Mr. Marshall got more and more worried, and after five days he called them back together and told them they were getting back on the bus. He said there was a small town nearby that should have a hospital.

  Jake was happy to be back on the bus, to watch the trees go by as it bumped along. If they were going to a town, maybe his parents would be there. If not, he might be able to use a phone to somehow find them. It was better than being in the woods, starving.

  They drove a few hours, and then Mr. Marshall stopped the bus. He got out, and after a minute everybody else followed him.

  They were still in the hills, but down below they could see the small town Mr. Marshall had been talking about—just a few buildings and a water tower. Only now the town was completely surrounded by cars, vans, and campers. Dozens of big green tents stood along one edge, near the highway.

  “There must be thousands,” Mr. Marshall said. “Tens of thousands.”

  “Aliens?” Marisol asked.

  Mr. Marshall shook his head. “They must be refugees, like us,” he said. “See those tents? Those are army tents. So we still have an army.”

  “That’s good, right?” Jake said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Marshall said, looking out over the makeshift settlement. He didn’t sound completely convinced, though.

  Still on the bus, Hank moaned.

  “Back on the bus,” Mr. Marshall said. “Let’s hope they have room for a few more.”