[Alien Invasion 01.0] Invasion

by Sean Platt

  The station cut to another speaker — apparently a snippet of a previously recorded interview.

  “We believe several fires were set deliberately — particularly in the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and the Luxor. Due to its pyramid shape, the Luxor fire seems to have remained within the hotel’s walls, but the Hard Rock fire spread readily, caught dry vegetation outside, and was deliberately perpetuated as rioting increased, building upon itself. Now it’s kind of become a free-for-all. Police and Guard are focusing mostly on containment and crowd control, and a staged plan to isolate one area at a time and allow fire crews to do their work.”

  The station cut back to the original announcer.

  “Meanwhile, the president’s office has issued a statement promising the ‘full cooperative powers’ of all aerospace and space agencies to the United Nations. The UN is meeting today to enact emergency measures not just to prepare for contact with the approaching objects, but to ensure that all civilian needs are attended to globally, and that citizens are given ‘all appropriate assurances’ that this matter is being looked into at the highest levels.”

  “That’s a lot of words that say nothing,” said Trevor.

  Meyer couldn’t help but smile. His thoughts exactly.

  “Further analysis of the approaching objects by NASA scientists have revealed new information about their shape, size and number. NASA has reserved some of that information in the interest of national security, but appears to be sharing data globally. Here’s NASA Spokeswoman Holly Fletcher.”

  “At this point, we can tell that there are approximately two hundred objects approaching Earth, each about the same size, spherical, and thus far seemingly featureless, with a diameter of around two or three thousand feet each.”

  “Shit. That’s about a half mile,” said Meyer.

  The radio continued. “At this point we’re unwilling to speculate as to the origin or nature of the objects, other than that they first came to NASA’s notice about the same time they were spotted by Astral Laboratories and disseminated broadly to anyone using the company’s application, just beyond Jupiter’s orbit. It’s unclear at this time whether the objects were in transit beyond that, but as Jupiter itself is made of gas and exhibits a rather strong gravity well, it seems unlikely that the objects originated from Jupiter itself, as some Internet ‘experts’ have claimed. We can neither confirm nor deny whether they came from one of the moons at this point and are unwilling to speculate.

  “However, given their tremendous speed — somewhere between three and five million kilometers per hour — it seems possible that they may have a source external to our solar system. Among the questions we’re similarly unable to speculate on are whether the objects are manned, and if so, how beings with a constitution remotely similar to ours could survive such a trip. In space, relativistic considerations aside, velocity itself is trivial, but it’s clear already that the objects are decelerating, and the G-forces on anything braking that fast — plus any effects that whatever is causing them to slow (boosters, rockets, whatever) might have on Earth — would be exceedingly arduous for …”

  “That’s enough,” said Meyer.

  “No it’s not, Daddy,” said Lila. “I want to hear about the aliens.”

  “They said they ’won’t speculate’ on aliens.”

  “There have to be aliens,” said Raj. “What, they’re just giant space marbles? Someone had to build them.”

  “What if they are just giant space marbles?” said Trevor. “You know, nobody in them, but …” He made a marble flicking gesture with one hand and then made the other hand appear to blow up — a remarkable demonstration of someone cue-shotting Earth from the sky.

  “It said they’re slowing down,” said Raj.

  “Maybe they’ll just slow down enough. Then …” Trevor made the flick-explosion gesture again.

  “They’re only a half mile across,” said Raj. Not big enough. Although if they were moving fast enough …”

  “And there’s two hundred of them,” Trevor said.

  “Could be like with the dinosaurs. How big was that meteorite?”

  Trevor: “I thought it was a comet.”

  Raj shrugged. “Well, whatever, same deal. They could just raise a big dust cloud. Kill all life on the planet.”

  Lila’s eyes were huge. They were looking at Meyer, pleading for something. It was the look of a lost little girl, not a seventeen-year-old who seemed to increasingly crave her independence and distance.

  “Raj. Trevor,” said Meyer. He patted the air, easing them down.

  “Not us, I mean,” said Raj with the air of correcting a big misunderstanding. “We’ll be underground. Unless one hits right on top of us …”

  “But man, three to five million miles an hour? That’s …”

  “Kilometers per hour,” Raj corrected.

  “Whatever. Point is, how does something that big brake that hard? They’d have to fire boosters, right? Wouldn’t that — just the boosters! — knock the Earth out of orbit or something?”

  “The Earth is huge, man. Do rockets taking off from the ground push the Earth out of orbit?”

  “Yeah, but these are bigger and faster.”

  “Maybe their boosters will just burn our faces off,” Raj suggested.

  “Boys!” Meyer shouted. He inclined his head toward Lila for Raj’s benefit then spoke calmly, mainly toward Trevor. “We can guess all day long, but even NASA doesn’t know. All that matters is that we need to be prepared.”

  “But for what?” said Raj. “Annihilation or occupation?”

  “Or both,” said Trevor.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Meyer. “You can’t know, so stop guessing. You’ll make things worse. You’re scaring your … your stepmother.” He looked toward Piper, apologizing for deferring to save Lila embarrassment. Piper was equally horrified.

  “I’m just wondering what the plan is,” said Raj.

  Meyer looked at the boy for a long moment, considered reminding him that he shouldn’t even be on this trip, then decided to let it go. The chance to drop Raj off had vanished a long time ago. He was with them for the duration, and if the Guptas survived and life somehow returned to a parody of normal later, he could return their son then, safe and sound.

  “The plan is to drive until we …”

  The van was slowing.

  Meyer turned.

  They were in the middle of the expressway, every lane slowing to a stop. A Volkswagen pulled into place beside them. A Land Rover settled on the other side. Meyer glanced at the rear camera’s screen and saw a wave of vehicles slowly closing them in from the rear.

  He’d thought they had another hour at least before reaching anything remotely resembling Chicago traffic. They were nowhere near the city limits, and the land around was still mostly suburban, bordering on rural.

  They’d been planning to exit the main road far in advance and detour around, taking winding roads through the boonies. It would cost a lot of miles, going that far around Chicago, but it was better than being stopped like … well, like this.

  Meyer looked to the cars ahead, to either side, and piling in a long metal line behind them.

  They’d entered Chicago’s orbit while the car had been on auto, discussing the end of days.

  They were boxed in, and this time it looked permanent.

  CHAPTER 16

  Day Three, Early Afternoon

  Outside Chicago

  The night had been cool. The day was warm. Somehow, the van’s heat and the proximity of other cars radiated into the cabin enough to make Lila sweat.

  Or maybe it was the hormones.

  She wasn’t sure. It was terrible, feeling all the changes inside herself and having no idea what to do. Was this what it had been like for her grandparents, growing up before the Internet? How had they answered all their questions about the world? Back then, if a girl got knocked up, she’d have to ask her friends (who might have bad information) or her mother (with obvious downsid
es), or she’d have to hit the library and find the right book. Even then, the lost little girl with a bun in her oven would need to fear being seen and discovered or stay ignorant. Like Lila was now.

  Did you get hot flashes when you were pregnant? If so, did it happen this early? She knew women got uncomfortable later in their pregnancies, when the baby’s internal heater turned on inside them. But did it happen so soon?

  This was intolerable. Lila might have to risk searching on one of the tablets. If Meyer saw she could say she was … researching to write a book or something.

  A cruel joke. Lila had known all about sex since she’d been thirteen, had played around at fourteen when she and a boy could be sure of being alone (mostly over-the-clothes stuff, though a few times she’d let guys feel boob) and had finally popped that cherry at seventeen. Given the way most of her friends had dated from fourteen and started having sex around fifteen or sixteen, she thought she’d done a damn good job. How could her father be upset with her restraint?

  Except that she’d been knocked up in a kind-of-preventable way. They’d been spontaneous that first time, and blowjobs didn’t require birth control. So Lila wasn’t on the pill, and they didn’t have condoms. They could have simply stopped and not done it, but that option was only obvious in retrospect. At the time, it would have been absurd. You didn’t stop when you felt that itch between your legs. You found something to put in there to scratch it.

  Which were, interestingly, probably the exact same words her father would use when berating her for being so stupid. He’d never call her a slut or a whore, but he might call her idiotic. Or retarded. Or “smarter than that.” That last one was the worst of all. Many of Lila’s friends didn’t get along with their dads, but Lila had always adored hers. The idea of disappointing him was far, far worse than angering him.

  To make things worse, Lila was sort of a hypochondriac. Not in a big, ridiculous way, but she did tend to be suggestible. Once she’d seen a TV show where a character had a brain tumor. She’d decided she might have one, and had developed headaches until she’d scheduled a scan. She always exhibited flu symptoms when her friends did. Lila was the kind of girl who gets thirstiest only when she realizes her bedside glass is empty.

  They hadn’t moved in hours. She pulled the phone from her pocket, mentally reminding herself to charge it again soon, and looked at the time.

  FOUR hours. They’d been stuck in this prison of vehicles, surrounded and totally unmoving, for four whole hours.

  Being trapped in the van when they were moving was boring. They’d been in here for three days now, and she’d felt restless after one. But if being trapped while driving was bad, being trapped while stuck was so much worse. She felt a creeping sense of claustrophobia, almost unable to breathe. That might be part of the warmth.

  Partly because it was warm.

  Partly because she was pregnant.

  And partly because she was a mental basket case and didn’t like the walls around her.

  Jesus. What kind of a mother was she going to make? It looked like that’s where things were headed, like it or not. She and Raj had ditched school and absconded to Central Park to talk it out, but the talking had mostly been on Lila’s side. She’d told Raj she was against abortion (for herself, anyway) in one breath, then changed her mind in the next. Her personal pro-life stance had always made sense, but then again she’d never been pregnant.

  Regardless, it’s not like she’d have a choice to be “pro” about. If they didn’t get crushed from above, become enslaved, or have their faces burned off by alien braking rockets, she’d be spending the next several years underground. Where she was sure her claustrophobia wouldn’t be a problem at all. Where there weren’t going to be any abortion doctors.

  Maybe she could use a coat hook. Or fall down the stairs.

  Both ideas sounded painful and gross, and besides, it’s not like she wanted the baby gone quite that bad. She’d just have it. No big deal. One of the upsides of the apocalypse was that she’d be shut in with babysitters twenty-four/seven. Piper loved babies; she’d love to watch it. And on the plus side, her boobs would get bigger.

  Meyer said, “We have to leave the car.”

  Lila looked up. Trevor said, “What?”

  Piper picked up the same refrain. “Leave the car? We can’t leave the car.”

  Meyer shook his head. “There’s no choice. No other way. We’re blocked in.”

  Lila said, “We can’t just go out there, Dad.”

  “We can’t stay in here either.”

  Lila’s pulse started to rise. He was serious. How could he be serious? He’d stocked this van for the end of the world. This was his paranoid bunker on wheels until they could reach their permanent paranoid bunker. If they left, they’d not only be stranded — they’d be vulnerable. They’d be exposed, subject to whoever was out there and whatever hardships awaited. They’d have to carry food and water on their backs. They’d never reach Colorado.

  “You wanted to get to Vail,” said Piper, as if he hadn’t remembered.

  He raised his hands to gesture around at the traffic jam, at the van, at the world. “What do you want me to do, Piper? It gets harder to get to Vail without the van, yes. But if my choices are moving slowly and having options or staying here forever, I’ll take moving slowly.”

  “But how … ?” Piper began. There was no more to say.

  “Look,” Meyer said, addressing them all, “I don’t want to leave it either. But we have to face facts. Four hours, it’s been.” He tapped his wrist, but wasn’t wearing a watch. “And that’s four hours since we moved last. It didn’t just slow; it stopped.” He held up one of the van’s tablets. “Traffic reports aren’t exactly to the minute, but I did find an hour-delay Google Earth shot that shows a river of metal all the way through Chicago from around here. We can take our chances and hope that it’s moved since that shot was taken, but I kind of doubt it, and I don’t think it’s going to start moving any time soon.”

  “So we go around,” said Trevor. “Like Pittsburgh.”

  “We’re boxed in, Trevor. Even the berm has filled up. A million cars behind and a million cars ahead. We’re in the center goddamned lane. I don’t know how we’d get out even if everyone agreed to set aside their personal needs and try. Everyone’s impatient. Almost literally bumper to bumper. When I was out walking around before, I could barely squeeze between cars.” He shook his head. “This van would have to be a tank to get out of here, and shove everyone aside.”

  “No chance you were quite that prepared, huh?” said Raj.

  A tiny smile touched Meyer’s lips. “Not quite.”

  “But … all our stuff is here!” said Lila.

  “We’ll have to carry what we need.”

  “And we’re … we’ll never get to Colorado that way. Where will we stay?”

  “We’ll find a car. The world hasn’t ended, Princess. People are just scared. It’s not like money’s lost all meaning.”

  “Don’t call me that!” Lila blurted.

  Everyone looked at her. Were mood swings typical this early in a pregnancy? Another thing she didn’t know. Maybe she was getting her period. But then she remembered that wasn’t exactly possible, and couldn’t believe there would ever come a day when she’d actively miss the Red Menace.

  “I know it’s scary,” Meyer said carefully. “But it’s our only choice. This car will be here for weeks if it’s not here forever. And we only have days.”

  Piper put her hand on Meyer’s shoulder, speaking quietly. “We’ll have to stay here somewhere. Find … I don’t know … an abandoned barn or something.”

  Meyer gave a half nod, but Lila had seen that face on her father before. Tacit agreement, meant to get what he wanted in the short term. She’d bet money that he hadn’t come close to surrendering his quest. He was doing whatever it took to get them out of the van now … and get them to do the rest of what he wanted later.

  “Sure,” he said.

 
; “Better than the van, stuck in traffic,” said Piper.

  “Of course.”

  “Wait a sec,” said Trevor, and Meyer almost rolled his eyes. “Is it? If we’re going to bunker in a barn, why not just bunker here? Four walls —” he knocked on his window for emphasis, “— stocked pantry. Bathroom.”

  Meyer shook his head at Trevor. “For now, but there are two problems with that plan. Eventually, even with the gas in back, we’ll to have to stop the engine — for no other reason than that the people behind us won’t tolerate choking on our exhaust forever. And without gas, the batteries will run down. That’s the entertainment, the plumbing, the heat, and A/C.”

  “So? We’ll still have all our supplies.”

  “That’s the second problem with your plan,” Meyer said. “‘We’ll still have our supplies.’”

  “What about it?” Trevor asked.

  “Eventually, someone else is going to look at this big, fancy van and think the same thing.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Day Three, Afternoon

  Outside Chicago

  By the time they exited the van, the rather mild-mannered, everyday people in the stopped line of cars were looking at the Mercedes with interest. To Trevor, they looked like dieters facing a pile of donuts.

  Those people were mothers and fathers, office drones and carpenters, people who worked for the gas company checking meters, and people who laughed at awkward jokes in romantic comedies. They were the people Trevor had lived among all his life and passed every day. And yet, two days wiser about the ways of the universe and the fact that humanity wasn’t alone in it, he thought their resolve was crumbling. They were civilized folks with ordinary lives, but something inside seemed to be telling them that the van was full of what the world might soon be fighting over.