The Newcomers: a novel of global invasion , human resilience, and the wild places of the planet

by Pamela Jekel

  The Newcomers

  Pamela Jekel

  Copyright Page

  Pamela Jekel

  Copyright September 19, 2009 by Pamela Jekel, Inc.

  1051 Hearthstone Way

  Athens, GA 30606

  ISBN: 978-615-99285-3

  Cover Design By Ryan Hirano

  Cover Graphics Copyright by Esteban De Armas

  Used by Permission

  For Gail Fay Meckley-Smith, my dear friend and traveling companion, an expert huntress, brilliant computer master, and a warm and witty almost-sister who daily proves there’s nothing a woman can’t do.

  And for my father, who still stands sentry over my soul.

  “We are citizens of the planet

  We were born here

  We’re going to die here

  Come what may

  We are entitled by our birth

  To the treasures of the earth

  No one must be denied these

  No one must be denied”

  “Citizens of the Planet”

  Copyright @ 1982 Paul Simon

  Used by permission of the Publisher: Paul Simon Music

  Prologue

  The impending end of the human species was demoralizing enough, and the inability to prevent it was terrifying, but the most awful part of the near-extinction was that people could not figure out why. It was the why of it that brought them to their knees. But no god, not the God of Abraham, nor the twin gods of medicine or science, heeded their supplications.

  When the worst thing most people could imagine actually happened, many found to their surprise that they no longer feared death. In fact, they wished for it, welcomed it, yearned for its release. When their wishes were not realized, and they did not have the strength to end their lives, they knew they had to find places in the world where they could still survive, if only to see if there was anything left of them worth saving.

  And so some of them went back to the wild places of the planet.

  A few went back to Africa. Back to Africa, where some found peace again and joy, and the gradual rebirth of hopes they thought they’d never feel again. Back to Africa, to a place that was more brutally beautiful than the cities they’d left and also far more deadly. And so it was finally the wild places which brought the survivors from death to resurrection.

  But of course, not in the way they imagined it.

  Joan Wettinger buckled into the jump-seat closest to the forward door, relieved that the long flight into LAX was nearly over. She’d flown for American for eighteen years, seemed like twice that, and every flight stretched out longer than its actual time in the air. Too many passengers, carry-ons, crying babies…it would be sheer delight to get to the downtown Hilton and spend the next day and night in bed.

  “Tired?” Billy asked, as he took the seat next to her. Billy Drummer, Purser on this and so many of Joan’s flights, was an old buddy, a sleek cross-dresser, and a hardcore dancer. Both senior crew, they could bid and hold the best domestic routes, the longest layovers.

  “Whipped,” Joan sighed. “These trans-cons beat my butt.”

  “Too whipped to hit the Strip?”

  “Maybe tomorrow night. Right now, I just want a glass of red wine and my pillow.”

  “Getting old, girl,” he grinned.

  She smiled and closed her eyes. She recalled one of her first flights into L.A., still domiciled in Manhattan, too junior to hold routes, on-call for overseas legs to London, Rome, Paris, Athens, and finally, finally, a deadhead back to her hometown with a layover long enough to see her family. So excited to see her mom and dad again after months of training in Kansas City, tickled to show off her uniform and sleek haircut to her little sister, let her get a whiff of all the exotic places she’d been, and she was called forward to hear the bad news. Kennedy tower said probable landing gear issues, might have to belly-in, get the cabins ready.

  “Two C and D,” the senior flight attendant added, “connecting from Paris. Not a word of English. You’ll have to translate.”

  While the captain informed the rest of the passengers that they’d have to remove their glasses, any pointed objects from their pockets, and assume the Come-to-Jesus position just in case they’d be sliding onto the tarmac in flames, Joan tried to explain to the two frightened Parisians in First Class with her college French that death might be imminent. For a horrible moment, she could only remember the words for “die” and “fire.”

  But then her training took over, and she assumed a calm she did not feel. She smiled and helped the woman remove her heels and the man his fountain pen, and she showed them the head-down-hands-over-neck brace for impact they’d need to help them survive. And only as she realized that her parents and sister would be watching from the wide windows in the arrival lounge as her flight burst into flames did her hands begin to shake and her smile tremble.

  ThankyouGod, the gear did come down, the fire and foam trucks alongside the runway trundled away, and her mother’s smile never looked so beautiful; her father’s arms never felt so safe.

  Joan opened her eyes and looked out the small porthole into the dark. They were on approach. After midnight Christmas Day, yet traffic at LAX was still heavy. So many overseas flights lined up over the city, each winking light was a few hundred people waiting their turn to land. Suddenly, she saw a huge slice of metal blocking out the lights, felt the door crumple in, and that was the last she saw or felt, as the plane exploded violently, sending them all into blackness.

  * * *

  The male whooper swan led his family out of the rainstorm, honking loudly to his mate and the two juveniles flying alongside her. He was a large Northern Hemisphere swan, the Eurasian counterpart of the North American Trumpeter, almost five feet long, over forty pounds of muscle, tendon, and feather, with a wingspan of more than eight feet. He needed all that span and strength for this migration, and he hoped that his pen and their two cygnets could make the last remaining miles.

  The cygnets had hatched on the Iceland nesting grounds, ten months ago and many hundreds of miles away. This was the fourth trip for the cob and his mate, paired for life. There was a good chance they would be joined by their offspring from other years once they reached their goal, the English wetlands.

  He kept honking regularly to keep their spirits up; his mate repeated his calls, and the cygnets struggled to answer as well. His pen was a powerful flier, an excellent nester, and their last clutch had numbered six. Of those six, only these two were left, the others gone to foxes and owls or simple weakness. He paused in his honking for deep huffing, something he did when he remembered those threats, those deaths. Nothing for it. Keep flying. He took up his honking again.

  He focused on the wetlands ahead. Wet and warm, deep cover, good forage, safe and protected from man. Sometimes dangerous to approach, so close to man’s houses and streets and aircraft, but once landed, worth the trip. The whooper swan could not know that the London Wetlands Centre was one of the foremost birding destinations in urban England, but he did know that for four migrations, he and his mate had thrived there.

  This migration had been more difficult than any he could remember, and his youngest male was slowing their journey. Several times, they had to slow for him to regain his energy, more delays than for his sister. Weakness could be dangerous, would pull down the rest of the family. Because of him, they were more than a moon late arriving to the south. Fortunately, the autumn season in the breeding grounds had been warmer than usual, so their delay wa
s not a calamity. But now, they were likely to find the wetlands crowded with earlier arrivals.

  They slowly descended over Scotland and, eager to get down out of the air and into the water before full darkness, the cob glided to ten-thousand feet, listening for the honks of his mate and juveniles behind him as they followed him lower. He looked down at the lights below him, knowing he needed to keep a steady pace if he wished to find cover before dark.

  He heard a sudden humming, felt a heat, and then with no other warning and no further sound, a huge object was suddenly before him. He honked and swerved desperately, collided with the dark mass and careened off, broke one wing and slid along the cold surface, and the last thing he heard before his neck snapped was the solid thunk-thunk-thunk of his mate and cygnets hitting the object after him.

  Chapter One

  Jack and Skylar Cummings

  Atlanta, Georgia

  2022

  “Close encounters of the second kind (CE2s): Incidents

  in which a UFO affects the environment in some way,

  for example by scorching vegetation, leaving landing traces,

  burning or otherwise injuring witnesses. In a CE2, a UFO

  has a ‘measurable physical effect on either animate or

  inanimate matter.’”

  Jerome Clark, The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial,

  Visible Ink Press, a division of Gale Research, Detroit, MI, copyright

  1998, Omnigraphics, Inc., page xx.

  Jack and Skylar Cummings, like most of their friends and neighbors, would remember forever the day the Newcomers parked their alien ship over the White House, in the same way their grandparents remembered where they were and what they were doing when Hitler declared war on the world or their parents remembered when President Kennedy was shot. There was Before Aliens, and there was After Aliens. The simultaneous appearance of identical alien space craft on December 26th, 2022 over all capitals and every major city in the world became The Day. No other explanation was necessary.

  At first, panic was sporadic and mild. Looting broke out in pockets of Atlanta, but cops and homeowners quickly and brutally suppressed that disorder. Religious leaders pointed out that the Mayans and Nostradamus were wrong; spiritualists said they weren’t wrong, just off by a decade, likely translation errors. The media and Internet swiftly revealed what many had suspected for decades: the governments of the civilized world had known about alien activities on earth for generations, but had feared panicking their populations by admitting openly that aliens came and went freely from the planet. Alien craft had materialized with no warning, no radar visibility, and no communications from whatever was within. U.S. defense satellites were compromised, and all efforts at contact were met with silence. An attempted attack by Chinese missiles over Beijing was met by deflector shields and more silence.

  For a week, the news media and the Internet convulsed with rumors, predictions of disaster, and pleas for peaceful approaches. Financial markets bucked and heaved with each new governmental announcement until trades were halted on the Dow, Nikkei and Hang Seng exchanges. North Korea attempted a nuclear attack on the ship over their capital, Pyongyang, and the heat of the fission set the Taedong River to a boil. The Chinese attempted a similar attack on a craft over the Tibetan Plateau. The world-wide rebukes were led by India when the Indus and Ganges flooded from the incineration of Tibetan snows. Still no response from the invaders. The Saudis executed a nuclear response over Dubai, and the city was now a glowing slag heap with hot zones extending all the way to the Arabian Sea in the south, across the Persian Gulf to Kerman in Iran, and as far west as Zalim.

  Hovering military helicopters in Washington DC, Paris, and London dared to get close enough to take photographs, and those partial images of aliens moving past observation windows were quickly printed all over the world. Skylar was not surprised that they seemed to look much like the bald and bulbous-headed, insect-eyed creatures Whitley Streiber and abductees had warned about for years, what they had called “the grays”. Now all the theories of Einstein-Rosen space time wormholes, of Jungian psychological archetypes of the human unconscious, and Jacques Vallee’s hypothesis that aliens weren’t aliens at all but simply humans from another dimension were all rather beside the point. They were real, they were clearly not us, and they were here.

  The invaders offered no response to the helicopters, and still the silence continued.

  Gradually the word, “invaders” began to disappear from media and government announcements, and the world seemed to return to bewildered stasis. The only visible change was that every time people turned on the TV or their computer, the screen was green except for a small space at the top which said, “Current Advisor Message”, with a button to click which said, “I have read and understood this message.” There was no message as yet, but it was necessary to click the button to be able to use the computer. The new screen was on every computer, cell, and IPOD in the Cummings household.

  Jack said, “I wouldn’t have thought they could take such complete control of communications so fast. That’s pretty terrifying.”

  “Just think, though,” Skylar said, “for the first time in human history, we’re all sort of linked. Or most of us anyway.”

  “The key word there is human history.”

  “Probably Google could’ve done it a decade ago, if they wanted. No guarantee those guys are human.”

  At first, Jack refused to click the button, but a few days with no Internet caved him, and within two weeks, that green screen and the button became more a nuisance than a terror. The craft hovering over Atlanta was like a new traffic light, Skylar thought. At first you hated it, then you accepted it; finally you scarcely noticed it at all. Jack said that disasters rarely announce themselves, but instead become gradually terminal, like global warming or the aging process. Skylar preferred to believe that this was not such a disaster as it first seemed. This could be the best thing to happen to the human race since the wheel, as the President claimed. There was so much to be learned from these Newcomers, particularly when it was clear that they weren’t newcomers at all but had been for centuries in and out of our planetary space like Walmart parking lots.

  Because the areas directly under the crafts were lit up by spotlights all night, properties beneath them were worthless. Most governments confiscated all homes under and within a mile perimeter of the shadows of the crafts, removing the residents. The populations still did not panic. Many people acknowledged that they had believed in UFO’s all along, but chose not to allow alien arrival to change their belief structure. Some of the most fervent Catholics Jack knew did not stop going to Mass when it was obvious that the Pope and their Bibles were wrong, they simply adjusted their religion around the new order. Clearly God had created the Newcomers just as He had created Adam, and as always, God’s plan was His to know and ours to obey. As God asked Job, “Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?”

  The scientific community lost credibility the moment the spacecrafts appeared, since they had denied the existence of UFOs for decades. It became obvious that astronomers and NASA had remained silent about what they’d been seeing, and other scientists in government employment now came forward, claiming they had known for generations that aliens were among us. Psychologists then scolded them publically, stating that it was an axiom of their particular science that it was better to prepare a population for a new reality than to have it simply descend on them without warning.

  Statements from the government made it clear that in fact, the official policy had been slow disclosure to citizens through books, movies, the History Channel, and occasional news reports by credible witnesses. The fact that there was so little panic, a Senator from New York claimed, was evidence that the disclosure project had worked.

  The question remained: what did they want?

  But with no forthcoming answer, people gradually stopped asking the question. The financial marke
ts stabilized, and people still got up every morning to go to work, even though some questioned the value of money, the work ethic, and getting and spending…ultimately, it was what they knew, so they continued to do it. Besides, since the Work Share Program in 2020 which stipulated that no one employee could work more than ten months of every year, it was dangerous to be absent, with or without leave. Too many employees were waiting to fill any vacancy. Same with universities, and so kids still competed for sport scores, grades, and college placements, and whole new fields of study were offered in Galactic Relations, Universal Communications, and String Mathematics. Yoga and mediation classes were jammed. Life flowed forward.

  People kept talking about thinking outside the box. Skylar thought they were several lightyears outside the box now, for sure. She sensed their world would likely change for the worse, and that made her anxious, but then she got up every morning, drove the three kids off to school or daycare, went to her management position at the Holiday Inn Express four miles from their Atlanta home, and her anxieties quieted. The churches were still full, the shops remained open, and the newscasters blared their usual inanities twenty-four, seven. Even though every network showed it nightly on the news, somehow it became possible to forget the huge craft twenty-thousand feet up and stationary over the city like a black flapjack.

  Jack found it more difficult to forget. Said it made him feel helpless, like he should be doing something, but he knew there was nothing he could do. She noticed that when he made love to her, perhaps less frequently but with more vigor, he seemed a little rougher, somehow tense with anger. He didn’t stroke her breasts, he covered them, possessed them. No lingering feather touches over her pubic area to make her hotter and hotter until she all but begged him to come inside her, fewer deep soul kisses, wet and warm which riveted her attention to his lips, his tongue. It wasn’t that he was too quick; he was almost too intense. As though he had a job to do and was fiercely determined to do it well. When she murmured to him afterwards that something seemed different, he said, “I read somewhere that fucking is the last resort for a guy who feels impotent.” His mouth twisted in an unpleasant smile. “Those things cast long shadows.” She didn’t need to ask him what he meant by those things.