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

by Pamela Jekel

  “And then what did you do?” Chase asked, genuinely enthralled.

  “Well, I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and walked the long way round to grandmother’s house. Needless to say, I was in need of a new means of conveyance.”

  Asha chuckled, putting her hand on his. “Better than a stage entertainer, my dear.”

  Chase saw a look of love pass between them, and rather than making him angry or homesick, that glance made him drop his eyes and smile.

  “Have you ever had an experience with a wild animal?” Desta asked him.

  “Well, sorta. We have this amazing aquarium in Atlanta, and they do this deal called ‘Journey with Gentle Giants’, and you get to get in this tank—it’s the largest aquarium in the world—with whale sharks and hammerhead sharks and these monster groupers and manta rays wider than a car. So I got to do that, and while I was swimming with the guide, I got bumped by a whale shark. That was pretty cool. It didn’t hurt at all, but he rolled this big white eye at me, bigger than my head, and I put out my hand and touched him as he swam by.”

  “Now that’s something to remember for the rest of your days,” Jomo said. “I’m not much for water at any depth, but I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing that lot up close. Jata, your remarkable jelly!” he called, seeing that their plates were empty. “And after luncheon, we shall take a group photo outside by the front door. Baako can print up two copies, one for his mum and one for you, Chase, to send along with your letter today. That way, your parents can put faces with the names, yes?”

  Jata brought in a heaping plate of Jello, what they called jelly, and Chase could see chunks of fruit shimmering inside it. On the table she set a bowl of something white and thick.

  “This is clotted cream,” Desta said, passing it to him. “Ever had it?”

  He shook his head, his spoon hesitating. “Like whip cream?”

  “Only better,” Baako said, piling the jello on his plate.

  “From our own cows!” Jomo said happily.

  Chase put a small dab on his plate and tasted it. Sweet and cool and delicious. He plopped a large spoonful on his jelly, passed it to Baako and asked, “Do you have all these fruits on your property, too?”

  “The mangoes, guava, watermelon, and peaches,” Jomo said. “We get the apples from the north. But they’re all good Kenyan fruit. That’s one thing we don’t have to import from China, at least.”

  After luncheon they assembled outside the front door of the farmhouse, and Desta showed Peter how to take the photo with her digital camera. Asha put Chase between Baako and Desta, with Jomo on one side of the kids, herself on the other. “That way,” she said, “your mum can see that you’re smack in the middle.”

  “And she can see that I’m taller,” Baako said.

  “Yeah, she’s going to love those dreads.”

  “As do I,” Asha grimaced. “Right, then, are we ready? Peter?”

  Peter said, “Say Kenya!”

  “Kenya!” they all parroted.

  * * *

  Chase struggled with the letter to his family. He knew what his mom and dad wanted to hear, that he was safe, healthy, and welcomed to a family where he could thrive. But he was too angry to reassure them. Perhaps, if they worried for him, they might make some effort to bring him home. After he had labored over the page for a half hour, Jomo knocked at his door and came in, carrying the printed photo of them all.

  “All set?” he asked.

  “Not quite,” Chase said.

  Jomo glanced at the large amount of white space on the page. “I thought this might be sticky. When one feels fobbed off, one has trouble expressing gratitude. Nevertheless, it’ll do you good to write it and do them even better to receive it. You won’t understand this until you have children of your own, lad, but they made a frightful sacrifice to send you to safety.” He slapped his knees briskly. “So let’s have no more fannying about, just get it finished. And when you have done, give it to Asha to post, and come to the barn. We’ll go for a ride.”

  Chase wrote a brief letter, included some details that he thought Miranda would enjoy about the dogs and the horses, and then signed off, “Love from your son.”

  That night after dinner they sat down before the flatscreen, and Jomo turned on the Kenya Broadcasting Company station. “We used to have six stations,” he said, “but now we only have three. We lost two during the hanta epidemic, and it would appear we lost another one since the troubles, I don’t know. But this one is the national station, so it will give you the news of Africa and whatever news of America is available.”

  “Come sit next to me, dear.” Asha patted the overstuffed sofa. Baako moved a pillow so that Chase could sit between Desta and her mother. Chase could feel the increased tension in the room, and he knew it wasn’t only his.

  An announcer appeared with sober voice and face, leaning back from the camera as though he were reluctant to face it. After a brief preamble of discussion about weather, crops, and tourism numbers, he said, “The death toll worldwide from the epidemic of Legionnaires Disease is now estimated to be close to three billion people. Most affected are children five and under, adults over fifty, and those with long-term diseases or nutritional deficits. We have no new figures from China or India, but the numbers from European countries and America support these estimates, and clearly, those countries with high densities of population are worse affected. Those countries where a substantial percentage of the population depends upon ground water and private wells are less affected.” As he spoke, photos of South Africa appeared behind him, and Chase gasped quietly when he saw the alien craft still hovering over Johannesburg. The city looked like a wasteland with dark spires dotting the landscape.

  “What are those?” he asked, pointing to the screen.

  “Buildings,” Jomo said. “What used to be the skyline of the city.”

  “Those dark things?”

  Jomo’s voice was solemn. “The Newcomers moved the people into camps, just as they’ve done in most of the capitals, and then with some sort of laser device, they fused the buildings into what you see there. Those ghastly monoliths are what’s left of the skyscrapers of the capital of South Africa.”

  “Oh God.” His voice broke. Asha reached out and covered his hand. “What happened if the people didn’t leave?’

  Jomo said, “I’m not sure, lad. But I would imagine they were fused into those obelisks. No doubt, they were warned. But of course, some people may have defied the order to leave their homes. And now they’re entombed in them. Vile piece of work. Your parents were wise to follow the directives. Your family is safe, Chase.”

  The announcer was reading from an alphabetical list of African nations, updating his listeners on death tolls and movements of populations. Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, Chad, The Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Libya, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, the Sudan, and South Africa were decimated by disease, and alien ships still controlled their populations. Chase never realized there were so many African countries. But some nations of Africa, according to the announcer, had no alien ships over their capitals and the death tolls had been slight. Botswana, the Canary Islands, Gabon, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Kenya, and more nations he’d never heard of seemed to be accepting refugees from other parts of the world. “Ships from America have ceased to arrive,” the announcer said, “in what seems to be perhaps a temporary halt to all emigration. However, refugees from Spain, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany continue to collect at seaports and railheads, waiting for transport to those foster countries willing to accept them.”

  “So no more American kids are getting out?” He hated that his voice still quavered, but he had to ask.

  “It would appear so for now,” Jomo said.

  The announcer was saying, “The African National Conference is insisting that refugees from African nations should be given refuge on their own continent, before refugees from outside
the continent are accepted, however, there seems to be no consensus on how such can be enforced. The United Nations Security Council has issued a proclamation supporting a non-preference policy for refugees, stating that every citizen of the world has a right to refuge in any country, without regard to nationality or borders. However, the South African Nations Council has rebuked that proclamation and seeks to place children in bordering nations with priority status. And now for an update on news from those countries, we have film from Boston, Massachusetts, provided by the U.S.S. Mississippi, which our records indicate is a U.S. Naval fourth-generation nuclear submarine. These images were posted on the Internet yesterday.”

  The film was obviously taken from the water, probably from the harbor. The first few photographs showed the same forest of tall dark spires that they’d seen in the pictures of Johannesburg. But these were Boston. The skyline of Boston was reduced to sharp, jagged monoliths of stone and glass which reflected back the sunlight on what was evidently a clear winter day. The next photographs on the screen were groups of people who seemed to be working outside the forest of spires. Some of them appeared to be moving dirt with machines or shovels; others carried rubble and debris. The last photograph showed a cluster of children with baskets or buckets, throwing something onto the ground.

  Chase slumped against Asha, his eyes wide in bewildered horror. His heart was slamming in his ears. “We went there four years ago,” he murmured, “when I was nine to see the Freedom Trail. We heard the Boston Pops. Beantown, my dad called it.” He realized, with rising fear, that he could see not a single car on the streets of Boston.

  * * *

  Aspis waited for dawn near the side of the man’s building. The nights were still cool enough that she enjoyed the stored heat of the wood and the stone foundation, so she lay alongside the barn sensing the gathering strength in her long body. It was spring, and she had been mated a moon before by the male who had followed her scent trail in the rocky hill near the river. Normally more comfortable in trees, Aspis was driven to find a new hunting territory, since the river had flooded her hollow fever-tree log. She slowly eased her way along the dry grass next to the stone foundation, questing with her black tongue for the scent of prey or danger. Her scales were dull, rather than shiny like those of the cobra, so she was well-concealed. Her head was coffin-shaped; her gray-brown body was slim, with lateral blotches that added to her camouflage in dappled sunlight. Her belly was cream-colored, her eyes were dark with yellow edges at her keen-sighted pupils, and the inside of her mouth when she stretched her jaws and yawned in the gathering daylight was stark black. She was eight winters, nearly ten feet long, the longest venomous snake in Africa and one of the fastest snakes in the world, a black mamba.

  Aspis felt the movement of large animals near, and she paused to ascertain their distance from her, feeling the vibrations through her body. She knew that hooved animals could be dangerous, but she was now large enough and confident enough to disregard their presence. These hooved animals were smaller than the buffalo, larger than the gazelle, but she knew she could either avoid them or warn them away. If threatened, she could be highly aggressive, rearing her body up nearly five feet in air, arching her back and advancing rapidly while she spread her neck like a cobra, hissing violently.

  Her warning was usually enough to turn back even an elephant and certainly to stampede the zebra. If her warning was ignored, she would not hesitate to strike, swiftly and more than once if the animal was large. She could deliver enough neuro and cardiotoxic venom to kill fifteen men in one bite, should she need to, but normally she struck once and backed off, waiting for her prey to die. Except for birds, of course, which she hung onto until they ceased quivering. Aspis wisely conserved her energy for hunting, not for chasing down dying birds which might fly to where she could not find them. The death never took very long.

  She had already inspected the chicken yard. Good hunting there, but the rooster was wary and wise, and the rodents were not so plentiful, despite the spilled grain. A large cobra burrow was directly under the coop, and Aspis decided to avoid that conflict.

  She rounded the corner of the building and kept to the side of the entryway, following the wooden walls cautiously. She felt the vibrations of four large animals, moving their hooves behind other walls. But more importantly, she could taste the presence of rats and mice in the particles of dried grass on the wooden floor. It was these which drew her, these which made her body tense with anticipation and hunger. She had not fed in six days, and her stomach reminded her that she needed the warmth and sustenance of a rodent’s body in her belly. She rounded another corner and found herself within a walled confine with one of the large hooved animals. She held very still, questing with her tongue for fear particles in the air.

  She sensed no danger. Smoothly, she climbed the wooden wall and lay along a rafter, watching below. More vibrations. Two men came to the animals and led them outside into the open field. She was not afraid of men. Last winter, she had struck one. Basking in the sun on her favorite termite mound, a small man, playing with others, crept around the mound, crouching low. Aspis bit him without hesitation on his back. He had run away then, and she smelled the strong fear around him and in the air as he raced in the direction of the village. She waited in the sun, watching in case the larger men came to try to drive her away, but they did not. Had they come for her, she would have killed them as well. She would not give ground.

  Aspis watched the floor below her, her eyes glittering in the shadows, her tongue moving constantly. Finally what she awaited appeared. Now that the hooved animals and the men had departed, two rodents came out of hiding and began to eat the dropped grain on the wooden planks. Aspis glided smoothly, quickly down from the rafter, down the wall, and slid around the corner of the confine that the man had just left. She could taste the man’s scent on the wood, on the metal tools hanging from the wall, but she was focused on the rats before her, particularly the largest, fattest rat which was now within five feet of her strike.

  Silently curling her body under her, she coiled slightly, realizing that she would only need part of her length for a successful kill. She watched the rat for a moment, waited until it had its back to her, and then struck swiftly, jabbing her fangs into his neck. She quickly withdrew, coiled, and watched. The rat leaped into the air, stretched out all four legs, shrieked once in terror, and fell to the floor. Aspis waited another long moment. When the rat had stopped convulsing, she slid to it, took it by the head within her jaws, stretched herself around its body, and swallowed it slowly. It took her several minutes to accomplish this, but once the rat was nothing more but a bulge below her neck, she climbed the wall up to her rafter perch, and lay along the top of building, where small bits of dappled sun came in through openings in the planks.

  Aspis rested for a day there, feeling the sufficiency in her belly, knowing that she would need that strength for the hard work ahead. The next morning, she began to explore the top rafters, finding at last what she sought, a crevice between boards where she could make a nest. It was time; they were already ripening within her body. She rested another day, and then she laid her clutch of seventeen soft, leathery eggs. She would fiercely guard them for three moons, until the height of the summer season, and then she would leave them and never look back.

  As the heat and humidity rose in the summer months, when the elephants were bad-tempered, the night temperatures stayed high, and sleep was difficult, they would thrive. When the hyenas ventured close to the man’s automobiles to chew the tires for the salt, they would thrive. When man put a light on his door, and the insects came, and then the frogs came too, they would thrive. From the day of their birth, her babies would be more than a foot long and able to kill any rodent which lived in this man’s building. By the following rainy season, they would be strong enough to kill the hooved animals as well, but it was unlikely they would stay long near their nest. Her brood of seventeen would disperse through the fields, the woods, the river
ine rocks, and to the villages beyond.

  Chapter Four

  Jack and Skylar Cummings

  Atlanta, Georgia

  2024

  “That we are not alone in the universe is now a scientific given…Moreover, there exists a secret ‘unacknowledged’ operation that has used very advanced electromagnetic weapons systems to track, target, and on occasion, but with increasing accuracy, down extraterrestrial vehicles…The so-called MJ-12 or Majestic group that controls this subject operates without the consent of the people, or the oversight of the President and Congress. Upwards of $100 billion of USG funds go annually into this operation, also known as the ‘black budget’ of the United States.”

  “Special Presidential Briefing for President Barack Obama”

  CSETI Disclosure Project, POTUS Briefing, Steven M. Greer, MD, Director, January, 2009, Copyright 2009 Steven M. Greer, M.D. All Rights Reserved

  After they left Chase at the Collection Station, Jack and Skylar drove to the Georgia World Congress Center in a fog of despair. Miranda was weeping quietly in the backseat, and Jack’s hands were stiff from his painful grip on the wheel. He had never felt so helpless in his life. Again and again, he heard Chase’s words drum in his head, “Don’t make me go! I want to stay with you!” The whole time they were packing, burying supplies, securing the cabin, Chase worked alongside him, nearly killing himself, trying to show his father he could work like a man. And still they had to leave him, weeping like a child. His family was being ripped apart; his son would likely never forgive them. How much more could his wife take? He knew that marriages often capsized in the wave of grief left after the death of a child. Could they stay afloat in the sea of desolation left after the death of one and the abandonment of another?