When the bartender went into the back room for something, Russell stood up quickly and started for the door. As he passed the mechanics, their leader reached out and clasped him by the shoulder. In a mocking whisper, he said, “Hey, Russ, tell us the truth. When they took you up in their space ship, did they do… you know… any sexual things to you?”
The blast of laughter that erupted from all three of the airport workers brought the bartender into the front room. Russell, no small man himself, was calmly preparing to knock the mechanic’s teeth down his throat when the long neon lights hanging from the ceiling began to shake back and forth. A deep rumbling noise, growing louder, came through the building’s walls. Beer bottles began to dance across the bar, and the sound of glasses and bottles tinkling against one another grew louder in the dingy barroom. In California, that could mean only one thing: an earthquake.
Their differences suddenly forgotten, the men ran out of the dark bar into the blinding midday glare of the parking lot. Something was wrong. Something about the way the ground was shaking, something about the evenness of the noise. It wasn’t like any tremor they’d experienced before. It was too smooth.
Russell glanced up, but the sun immediately stabbed into his eyes, causing him to look down at the dusty asphalt. The dark border of an enormous shadow moved toward him across the parking lot. As it passed in front of the sun, the men were able to see what was coming. All at once, the mechanics screamed and took off running in different directions.
Russell stood his ground, his hands clenching into tight fists. One of the thirty-six phenomena was rumbling through the air only a mile or so off the ground. He studied the enigmatic pattern of the object’s lower surface, knowing exactly what was happening and exactly who was inside the monstrous rumbling craft: the same frail-bodied, fast-moving freaks who had ruined his life years before.
When Troy was still a baby, and Russell was still in the business of restoring old planes, he’d stayed late at the hangar one night rebuilding an engine. It was a hot July night, so he’d left the rolling doors wide open. All of a sudden, he felt the strength go out of his body. His arms dropped to his sides and the wrench in his hand clattered to the ground. He couldn’t understand what was happening to him, thought he might be suffering a heart attack. His whole body had gone numb, paralyzed, except he was still able to move his eyes.
A noise came from the open doors. Glancing in that direction, Russell saw a strange little figure leaning around the corner. It couldn’t have been more than three and a half feet tall. This creature had a large head like a yellow lightbulb and two black eyes as lifeless as coat buttons. Gripped by a sudden animal terror, Russell struggled against his rigid body, trying to make it run, but his limbs wouldn’t respond. He looked back at the creature peering in at him, and after a few moments, his panic began to subside. All of this is quite normal, no reason to be alarmed, Russell told himself, you will not be harmed. This idea repeated itself continuously in his brain until he realized that it was a message, a form of mind control, being communicated to him by mental telepathy.
The next thing he knew, he was sitting on the floor, leaning against something. The creature from the door was sitting directly in front of him, its sinewy arms wrapped around its bent knees while others, perhaps a dozen of them, flitted in and out of his peripheral vision. They were doing some sort of work, moving with astonishing speed. The creature seated before him continued to cloud Russell’s mind with reassuring feelings. This succeeded in keeping him calm until he noticed something glinting in a narrow container. It was a needle, about six inches long, which was apparently going to be inserted into his skull. As clearly as if it were spoken aloud, one of the creatures told him, There will be no pain, no damage.
At that point, Russell remembered thinking of his family, struggling to form the words that would allow him to beg for his life. Then, blackness. The next thing he remembered was being far out in the desert, lifting off the ground. The landscape corkscrewed away as he lifted higher and higher into the air. Then the floor of a ship closed like an iris beneath him. He was in a small, dingy chamber. The dark walls around him glistened with moisture, creating the sensation of being inside the body cavity of a very large animal. He felt their tiny hands moving everywhere over his body. Only then did he notice he was stripped naked. Again he tried to plead with them, mentally howling to be released.
Then the experiments began. Unable to resist, Russell lay stretched out on his back while they invaded his body with several instruments that resembled medical probes. At some point, he remembered one of them lifting his head and laying it on its side so he could look out a window cut into the bottom of the ship. He recognized the vague outline of hills far below and remembered tears pouring off his face as the experiments continued until the whole side of his head was soaking wet.
He was found the next afternoon wandering through the parking lot of a supermarket ninety miles from the airport, suffering from amnesia. He couldn’t remember his name or his address, and it took him almost a week to recognize his own wife, Maria. When asked what had happened to him, he said that he’d been chasing a brace of jackrabbits through the desert and had gotten lost. It didn’t take him long to figure out this was only a screen memory planted in his mind to camouflage what had really happened.
He never fully recovered. Over the course of the next several months, irritable and depressed, he developed an obsession about reconstructing the events of that night, spending all his money and energy pursuing those fugitive fragments of memory. He put himself in psychotherapy, underwent hypnosis, and traveled to meet others who claimed to have been taken. It was during these months that Maria began to get sick. Her skin turned blotchy and, at night, she’d get terrible headaches that sometimes developed into trembling seizures. By the time Russell looked up from his own problems long enough to realize how sick she was, and drove her into LA for testing, it was too late. The same day she was diagnosed with Addison’s syndrome, an easily treated deficiency of the adrenal cortex, she died in her sleep.
As the vast coal-black ship rumbled past overhead, Russell clenched his fists tighter. He wanted nothing more than to murder a few of the shifty little runts he thought were inside the ship. The object was moving north at about two hundred miles per hour. By the time it had moved past, allowing the sun to beat down once more on the parking lot of Burlie’s, Russell was gone.
*
In Washington, D.C., the first people to make a visual sighting of the oncoming ship were the tourists crowded into the observation platform at the tip of the Washington Monument. They began a stampede down the stairwell of the 555-foot structure, trampling everyone who didn’t get out of their way. The first casualty was an eleven-year-old girl visiting from Lagos, Nigeria. Although her father had to shelter her body under his, someone had stepped on her back while her head was resting on one of the steps. She was limp and unconscious when he finally got her outside, the last two people out of the building. The National Park rangers, not knowing they were still inside, had already gone.
The man looked down the grassy hill and saw people running as fast as they could in every direction. In the sky behind Capitol Hill, one of the huge black disks, still trailing wisps of smoke, was looming over the Maryland state line, rumbling closer. In vain, the man shouted to the people running past him, asking them where he could find a hospital for his daughter. No one stopped, or even slowed down.
Thousands of confused visitors were pouring out of the Smithsonian and the other museums lining the mall. As they came outside and saw the disk-shaped gargantuan crawling along the sky, most of them panicked. Great herds of frightened humans were running in all different directions, crashing blindly into one another. Mothers separated from their children stood amid the chaos screaming over and over again the names of the little ones they’d lost. Some froze in their tracks, uttering profanities or calling out the name of God. Here and there, groups of strangers had clustered around trees at the sides
of buildings, staring mutely upward. Many others had collapsed to the ground, some praying, others cowering with their arms thrown over their heads. Thousands more, armies of federal employees, came tearing down the granite steps of their workplaces, sprinting, elbowing their way toward the entrances to the underground Metro system. The thing in the sky inspired an immediate, all-consuming sense of dread, an angel of death grinding inexorably closer.
Less than a mile away, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Whitmore was on the phone with Yetschenko, the Russian president. “Yes, I understand,” he said to the translator on the line with them. “Tell him we’ll keep him informed and that Russia and the United States are in this together.” While his message was being translated into Russian, he looked up at Connie and rolled his eyes. “Okay, and tell him I said goodbye. Das vedanja.”
“What was that all about?” Connie asked.
“I don’t know. I think he was drunk.”
Suddenly the doors flew open and a frightened staffer bolted into the room. “It’s here!” the woman shouted, leading the way to a set of tall windows that opened onto a balcony. Whitmore and Grey shared a look, then stood up and followed the excited woman to the windows.
“Daddy!” Patricia Whitmore came tearing across the carpet toward her father with tears in her eyes.
“You’re supposed to be downstairs,” her father snapped at her. But the next moment, realizing his mistake, he was down on his knees to catch the girl as she threw herself into his arms. Alarmed by the tense mood that had seized the White House, Patricia had escaped from her baby-sitters. Whitmore picked the girl up and carried her to a quiet corner of the office, consoling her.
When he turned around again, he noticed his entire staff standing frozen in place on the balcony. Still holding his little girl, he walked out to join them.
The black mass of the ship was prowling low over the capitol, almost on top of them. Its front edge came sweeping over the Anacostia River, casting a circular shadow fifteen miles in diameter. Unconsciously, Whitmore tightened his grasp on his sobbing daughter, pulling her closer to his chest to shield her from the awesome, terrifying sight. Without realizing it, Connie and the others had taken hold of one another, hands and arms laced together in order to keep their balance and stave off the deep dread the ship inspired. Only the Secret Service agents patrolling the edge of the roof remained detached, focused on the job of protecting their leader.
“Oh, my God, what do we do now?” Connie whispered.
“I’ve got to address the nation,” Whitmore said. ‘There are a lot of frightened people out there right now.”
“Yeah,” she looked at him, “I’m one of them.”
*
Having communicated nothing to the people of earth except their arrival, the three dozen ships fanned out over the globe’s most populated and powerful cities including: Beijing, Mexico City, Berlin, Karachi, Tel Aviv, and San Francisco.
In Japan, the citizens of Yokohama had watched the fireball splashing out of the heavens then level off at six thousand feet, a cauldron of boiling smoke. Out of the dense clouds, the clean front edge of the ship came plowing forward. The audacious scale of it staggered the thousands of people watching from the docks, then turned them into a screaming mob as the endless bulk of the ship continued to emerge. It had moved directly over their heads, plunging the great port into a quaking artificial twilight for several minutes until it moved away to the north. It was still visible from the rooftops, hanging in the air forty miles away over the nation’s capital, Tokyo.
In Yokohama’s central train station, the mood had calmed considerably once the object was no longer directly overhead. People loaded down with personal belongings jammed onto the platforms, waiting impatiently for the trains they hoped would carry them off to the safety of the countryside. Transit officials in blue uniforms and white gloves stood on crates above the throng, blowing whistles and urging the crowd to cooperate. Visible through the Plexiglas walls, a battalion of American soldiers from the nearby base were trotting down the street in formation toward an unknown destination. For the moment at least, the evacuation was proceeding in an orderly fashion.
The same scene was repeating itself in cities around the world. One of every five people on earth found themselves trying to get out of the cities, great hives of humanity, only to learn what a tiny fraction of them could be accommodated by all of their roads, trains, and subways. As they stood waiting, sardined onto loading platforms, crowded at bus stops, or stacked into the backs of pickup trucks, they were having the same conversation in every conceivable language: Who or what was inside these gigantic ships, and what were their intentions? Their sinister exteriors convinced the vast majority of people that they had not come for an exchange of gifts and ceremonial handshakes. Still, many remained optimistic. The advanced technology of the ships, they argued, suggested a correspondingly high degree of evolution. Perhaps the extraterrestrials inside were representatives of a higher form of civilization. They would certainly be able to teach us many things about the universe. The optimists compared their situation to that of Stone Age humans on some undiscovered island who looked up and saw an airplane circling overhead. Terrified, they might naturally assume the world was ending when the crew of the airplane was there merely to satisfy their curiosity and thirst for discovery.
Arguments such as these usually led to the depressing admission that humans had never gone anywhere new merely for the sake of curiosity. The people who first populated North America had slaughtered the American Indians. The Spaniards wiped the Incas out with prisons and disease. The first whites to visit Africa were slave-catchers. Whenever humans had “discovered” a new territory, they had turned it into a conquest, subjugating or killing those who were already there. Everywhere, the prayer went up that the newcomers would treat humans in a more civilized way than they had treated one another.
*
One of the fifteen-mile shadows swallowed New York Harbor, dimming the Statue of Liberty. It was moving directly toward Manhattan. Sporadic clusters of New Yorkers littered the banks of the Hudson, hundreds of frightened strangers, most of them poor, who’d come to see with their own eyes the grim spectacle they’d spent the day following on their TVs. The mood of hushed anticipation ruptured into a wave of human screams rushing north along the river when the dark ship came into view. Long before the craft’s low rumble could be heard over the growl of traffic, the city’s collective anxiety swelled to a crescendo. Given their visual cue, the riverside crowds bolted off in separate directions, running for home, the subways, their cars, or wherever they instinctively felt they would be safe.
Over the Bowery and Wall Street, the sky disappeared and a bone-rattling vibration began pulsing through Lower Manhattan. Taxi fenders crashed like cymbals. Pedestrians walking along the avenues cleared the sidewalks, hiding themselves in doorways and behind corners when they saw the giant swooping above the city. Everywhere, as car horns blared, people ran out of their houses to watch the ship pass overhead, or ducked into offices and restaurants to get away from it. And everywhere, it seemed, people were screaming.
David’s legs churned through the pitch blackness, taking the stairs three at a time. He came to the top, rammed the door open with his shoulder, and stepped outside. The rooftop lay beneath a web of thick cables connecting the satellite dishes and transmitters with the offices below. A moment after he stepped into the sunlight, it was obliterated. Midtown Manhattan was plunged into the same semidarkness the earth usually experienced during a total eclipse.
“God help us,” David muttered, face-to-face with the low-flying colossus. His first, irrational reaction was to stoop down, physically oppressed by the sheer weight of the thing rolling over him. The underside of the ship was an endless black-and-gray surface stretching away into the distance. Like the computer-designed tread on a knobby tire, it was studded with sharp outcroppings, building-sized projections arranged into complex patterns. Although the thing was well above the city
, its overwhelming size was much larger than the island on which David stood. Its western edge protruded well into New Jersey while the other end was still over Long Island. It seemed to be crushing down on top of him, a mosquito facing the front bumper of a semi. Around him, the equipment on the roof began vibrating, adding its rattle to the steady rumble pulsing through the city. He ran to the north side of the building and watched Central Park fall under the blanket of artificial night.
David imagined his father, terrified and alone in his brownstone. He knew Julius would never in a million years abandon his home. He was probably boarding up the windows and barricading the doors, preparing for another Masada. Yet, for some strange reason, the picture in David’s mind changed to Julius calmly playing chess at the kitchen table. He flashed back to that morning’s match in the park and then, all at once, a horrible realization unfolded in his mind. He made the connection.
“Oh my God, the signal!”
*
In the middle of the Los Angeles basin, the Baldwin Hills were an awkward mix of derelict oil fields and million-dollar homes. Many of the houses commanded views which stretched from downtown all the way out to the ocean at Santa Monica. Magazines called it the “most affluent Afro-American neighborhood in the country.” Lots of Jaguars and circular driveways. At the top of Glen Clover Drive, sandwiched between a pair of traditional four-bedroom houses, was a narrow piece of property with a bungalow built on the bluff. This red-and-white cottage with a neatly manicured yard featured a redwood deck hanging over the city. The rent was obscenely reasonable, making it one of the best rental deals in all of LA. The tenant was a young woman named Jasmine Dubrow who had moved west from Alabama only two years before.
A minivan pulled into her driveway. Its driver, an energetic housewife, “Joey” Dunbar, unbuckled her passenger’s seat belt and helped him open the door.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 7
