by Sean Platt
CHAPTER 20
Day Three, Evening
Chicago
Light failed sooner than Lila expected.
At first, she hoped it was only the clouds and that daylight wasn’t bleeding from the sky. She looked at Trevor, seeing him meet her eyes, maybe thinking the same. A message seemed to pass between them. She was looking to her brother rather than Raj, as she always had until he’d entered his moody phase. Trevor’s face made her regret the reversal.
Her brother was as nervous as she was. And just as afraid of the dark.
Remembering her father’s earlier warning, Lila walked the streets warily, fingers tight on her tiny vial of pepper spray. She kept pressing the trigger’s top ridges into the meat of her finger, ready to spray anyone who approached. Ready to defend her family, while staying together.
She wasn’t sure what had passed between Dad and Piper in the crowd, but his warning about hesitation seemed to carry weight — an unspoken agreement and a stern reminder to someone who’d done wrong once and should be careful not to do wrong again. And even though the message wasn’t really for Lila’s ears, she was determined to heed it.
Things really had changed. For two and a half days, the world’s air had seemed electric with potential, but until now it had remained potential. The riot proved that things were falling apart. And if it really ever did come down to her family or someone else, Lila was all too willing to defend her family.
Her left hand stole to her belly, almost of its own accord.
All of her family.
Still, despite what Meyer had said at the aborted exit ramp, the neighborhood around them had thus far been much quieter than the highway had been even before the riot’s eruption. Houses were small and shoddy, paint peeling and windows hung with mismatched curtains. The power was still on, and at least that was something — some reminder of the civilized world Lila felt they were increasingly leaving behind. But the people stayed inside, if indeed they were even at home. It was possible they’d all fled.
They heard a few shouts on two separate occasions as they crossed the massive sprawl, both times they steered far away, content to never know what might be brewing.
A few other times, they’d almost run directly into groups of people out in public without knowing they were there. They’d skirted these too, but with far less warning. To Lila, as they passed and peeked between homes and across yards bordered with jangling chain-link fence, they looked like gatherings — the diametric opposite of what her father had warned them about, in terms of roaming, rioting, looting groups. She’d see old people sitting in chairs in front yards, more people behind them on the old houses’ long wooden porches. Others were in the yards to the side. Some milled; some stood as if watching. Many held weapons. But in one of them, a charcoal grill had been lit, and she’d smelled the scent of meat on the air. There had been light chatter. Civilized. Nothing to fear.
But as they moved farther from the expressway, that almost optimistic mood began to sour. Light bled from the sky, turning it yellow and orange and red, then finally dark blue and purple like a bruise. Neighborhood light seemed to drain. Fewer windows were lit. Many structures were boarded, dark as pits. Trevor suggested breaking into one for the night, seeing as they had nowhere to sleep and even streetlights were scant. The night harbored terrors — or, to humanize the threat — lowered inhibitions about theft and violence. As Meyer had said, they had supplies and were wandering around in a place where people were used to having little.
The idea sounded good (if terrifying) to Lila. She wouldn’t be able to sleep in a creepy abandoned house in Chicago’s underbelly, but at least they could hide.
But her father shook his head, not even slowing when Trevor indicated a suitable candidate. Breaking in would make noise — drawing more attention, not less. They might find that someone else had already bunkered in, and the resulting territory dispute could erupt like two dogs fighting over a bone. And most importantly, Meyer’s tone implied — was the issue of escape should something go wrong. If they broke into a dark house, they’d be boxed in. If anyone entered to see what the travelers had worth stealing, they’d be trapped with no way out.
No, he said. They would only shelter in an abandoned home if they absolutely had to.
So Piper — tentatively, as if suddenly deciding that her place, after the riot, wasn’t to ask questions — asked what they would do for the night.
Meyer said, “We’ll walk.”
After untold hours sneaking through the dark, the moon finally rose. Lila glanced up to see reality like never before. The moon had always been this thing above — a round yellow object that waxed and waned each month. Now she saw it for what it was: a rock floating through space, fathomless emptiness yawning into a lonely eternity. The thought made her cold. Lila found herself imagining the approaching alien ships, picturing them as they’d picture each other, from sphere to sphere: objects by themselves in a vacuum, with no ground nearby to stand upon.
The vacuum’s horror seemed to descend like an oppressive weight. Lila felt crippled. If not for the Earth’s atmosphere — and the comforting illusion of uniqueness and home it offered her planet — they’d all be floating through cold and empty space as well, prisoners on a giant rock.
Eventually, the air grew cold and strange enough, stirred by threatening noises, that they decided to abandon the road for shelter. The area had dwindled bit by bit into something semisuburban, sprawling away in places to empty expanses and groves of trees. They were edging the outskirts. Gangs might be roving in the neighborhoods to the road’s left side. But woods beckoned to the right as the lesser of evils.
They found a small shelter — possibly a fort built by kids. They lay down, huddled against the chill, and said little other than goodnights, knowing a good night was impossible.
Lila wanted to ask her father about his plan for tomorrow. They needed a car, and his obsessive drive toward Colorado meant he hadn’t surrendered the idea. But the plan had supposedly been to buy one, and after the riots, Lila couldn’t imagine anyone selling something as valuable as a car or fuel. Or not stripping them of all they carried the moment they entered the neighborhood to ask, perhaps raping the women for good measure.
Lila told herself she was being paranoid. There were still good people in the world. Not everyone could have lost their mind — not when so little, other than a threat, had even happened.
Yet.
She closed her eyes, trying to forget the thoughts that swirled behind her eyelids.
The road had grown infinitely harder.
They had no car, no way to travel.
There were over a thousand miles to go, and only two days before the armada of spheres filled the sky.
DAY FOUR
CHAPTER 21
Day Four, Early Morning
Chicago
They woke to screaming.
At some point overnight, a critical threshold had passed. Amateur astronomers could now see the alien ships with backyard telescopes. Meyer later learned that this change (and its aftermath) had made the news — but as they slept uneasily in the woods, their only indication was riotous yelling, braying horns, and the crashing of metal on metal. Seeing those ships crystallized the threat, and the world lost its mind.
Lila jerked awake. Meyer was already up, sitting, a hand hovering above his daughter’s shoulders, ready to soothe.
“Shh.”
“Dad? What is it?”
“Shh. We need to be quiet.”
But he wasn’t sure that was true. The one thing they didn’t have was the one thing everyone was apparently interested in. The street they’d been walking along had been quiet during the night, and remained still as the others nodded off one by one. But that wasn’t true now. They could see cars through the trees, making their way out of the small neighborhoods, honking and tapping bumpers, trying to drive around each other like drowning people huddling to be on top when everyone else’s air ran out.
Meyer had stayed awake longer than anyone, and for a while he’d amused himself over his phone’s backlit screen. But without the JetVan, there was no signal. Either the networks were down for good, or they were being used nonstop by information and voice hoarders who thought learning more might change reality for the better. He’d tried for much longer than he should have, dialing Heather with a thrumming heart, remembering the horror of her voice cutting off. Had she been able to use her gun? Or was his ex-wife (and best friend; let’s tell the truth) gone forever?
Meyer got a connection failure with every try. Even if he could ring out, the cell network near Heather would need to be available to reach her. The obstacles between them (or at least her phone) seemed as insurmountable as the roadblocks between Chicago and Vail.
He’d closed his phone shamefully, looking down at Piper with an unarticulated guilt. Then he’d cabled one of the external batteries to charge his phone, deciding not to let the others know how hard he’d tried to reach Heather, and how badly he’d wanted information his little brick could no longer provide.
They didn’t have GPS. If they were going to find a way out of Chicago’s urban sprawl, they’d have to do it by gut instinct or find a map. Did gas stations still sell paper maps and atlases? Meyer’s grandmother had lived to be ninety-four, and she’d driven almost until the end. Grams hadn’t used a cell phone once. She wouldn’t complete her medical forms online, either. Meyer offered to do them, but Grams had insisted they send her paper.
The world must still have maps, for stubborn old bitches like Grams.
He’d fallen asleep uneasily. Hours felt tissue thin, giving him the kind of sleep he wasn’t sure he even had. Meyer may have laid in semisleep through the night, his mind unwilling to leave their makeshift camp unguarded, his pride unwilling to wake someone else to stand watch in his stead.
How much time had passed?
It was still dark when he’d heard the commotion, but the moon was no longer visible through the canopy. He’d fished his phone to check the time, but was unsure whether it had made the leap to central. It must have, back when they’d still had the JetVan’s signal to synchronize it to the satellite? That seemed ages ago.
It read 5:40 a.m.
He’d heard a crack at the edge of his foggy awareness, but thought it might’ve been the slap of a screen door as someone left a house in the neighborhood past the road. The neighborhood where, in the daylight, he’d been hoping to shop for a car.
But the engines had come alive one at a time. First just a few to break the night’s stillness. In the dark, surrounded by trees, it had been easy to believe they were in a forest. But it had only taken fifteen minutes before it was apparent that they were in a spreading panic instead.
Now, with his hand on Lila’s shoulder, Meyer looked at Lila, Raj, and Trevor, all of them stirring. Meyer had already sneaked to the tree line and back. He knew the answer to their collective question, had overheard enough to put it together.
Raj said, “Are those car engines?”
Trevor looked at him with the disdain of a teenager woken before he was ready. “So you’ve heard engines before. Hooray.”
Immediately defensive: “Listen to how many there are, you little shit!”
“Don’t call me a shit, you shit.”
“Shut up, Trevor,” Lila snapped.
Piper sat up beside Meyer. She looked toward the headlights illuminating the forest’s edge instead of at him, but he looked over at her profile without thinking, taking in her sleep-tousled hair, the strangely confident look in her big, blue eyes. Yesterday’s encounter had changed her in some small way. It was as plain as the nose on her less-panicked-than-expected face.
“What’s going on?” Piper finally looked over, and for a moment Meyer felt guilty. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t his fault alien ships were on their way. But then again, maybe that wasn’t why he felt guilty.
“Something happened overnight. I went out there when it started a while ago. I heard one guy arguing with another, saying that he had a good telescope inside and could ‘see better than you can.’ I think they must be close enough to see.”
Confidence bled from Piper’s face. It was easy to forget the approaching ships with all the mayhem on the ground. Riots were rational. Aliens were not.
“You mean … ?”
Meyer nodded. “I’m sure they don’t look like much with what most people have, but there are plenty of nerds out there with big telescopes who aren’t official NASA.”
“But we already knew they were coming,” Trevor said.
“You know the expression: ‘Seeing is believing.’”
“But … why would they all be leaving? Where are they going?”
“Harder to say. I wish we had a TV or a radio. Just from overhearing, though, I think someone might have made some predictions.” Meyer looked around the small group. “About landing spots, maybe.”
“How could anyone know where they’re going to land?” said Trevor.
“They don’t have to know. Someone just has to guess, or make a suggestion. Then this happens.” He raised his arm toward the growing cacophony. “Once a few people decide they’d better get the hell out of Dodge, everyone else decides the same.”
Meyer crept forward. The others stayed behind them, dragging their packs.
“What now, Dad?” said Trevor.
“I wanted to get a car.”
“And now?” said Piper.
“I still want to get a car.”
They reached the wood’s edge. It was a poor thicket, really just a handful of unused lots where the trees had yet to get chopped. But it was enough for concealment — especially given that no one seemed to have interest in anything but the road.
It was bumper to bumper, mirroring the riot they’d fled the previous afternoon. The only differences were the number of lanes (the road had two, and both directions were occupied by cars desperate to leave) and the civility. There wasn’t any, really. Meyer thought that might be okay. If these people wore fear on their chests and openly panicked, maybe they wouldn’t explode into chaos like the expressway had. Alternatively, there might be nothing to halt immediate chaos.
“How are we going to buy a car now, Meyer?” The wooded area was on a slight rise, and Piper was watching the people across the packed street above the hoods of jostling, honking vehicles.
“I said ‘get.’ Not ‘buy.’”
“So, what, you’re going to steal one?”
“I’ll write them a credit chit if it’ll make you feel better. Slip it under the door, and they can cash it later, after they’re done murdering each other for food.”
He’d been joking, but the comment shut Piper down. Another presence appeared at his side. Meyer looked over and saw Raj beside him.
“You know how to hotwire a car?” he said.
“Not since cars had ignition wires.”
Meyer tried to keep the condescension from his stare. The boy was only trying to help.
“No, I don’t know how to ‘hotwire’ a car. But unless you expect to find an ’04 Camry in there, that doesn’t matter.”
Raj had no rebuttal. Meyer sighed.
“Look. We have two choices. I’d love to find an unused vehicle in there somewhere — something that was a second car, and the people who own it took another and left it behind. But that means finding the key fob transponder if we expect to start it, and I don’t think it’s going to be that simple, even if we break into the house and root around.”
“We can’t break into someone’s house!” Lila said.
Raj put his hand on her arm. “What’s the other choice?”
Meyer firmed his jaw. “We take one that someone’s already using.”
Piper was staring at him. Meyer looked over.
“No,” she said.
“We have to get to Vail. We have to.”
“They have places they need to go.” She nodded at the line of cars. “They all do.”
“They’
re running in circles. They don’t know where they’re even going. They just think one of those ships is going to park over Chicago, and they’re looking the things in the eye for the first time. They’re not thinking smart, Piper.”
“But you are.”
“We’ll put a vehicle to good use. These people are just panicking.”
Piper nodded. “Oh, that’s right. Whereas you’re thinking smart.”
“Don’t argue with me, Piper.”
Something snapped. Her husky, often-sexy, often-demure voice rose, becoming too loud for early morning. Despite the engine noise and shouts of fleeing people below, Meyer thought they might be seen, making themselves into unwitting targets.
“Don’t give me your superior bullshit, Meyer! You are not dragging someone out of a car by gunpoint! Just because you think you know something they don’t, that doesn’t make you …”
“I do know something they don’t. I have all along.” He kept his voice calm, fighting anger fused with frustration. Maybe some fear. If they couldn’t get a car, they were stuck. And they couldn’t be stuck, no matter what. They had to reach Vail. They had to get to his Axis Mundi. Anything else was unthinkable.
“You wouldn’t have wanted anyone to take our van.”
He flashed back to the teens in New Jersey. The panic had barely begun, and they’d already been ready to rumble. “Didn’t stop them from trying.”
“Doesn’t mean we should do the same.”
“How else are we going to get out of here, Piper? We actually have somewhere to go! What’s really going to happen? We’ll strand someone where they should have fucking stayed all along?”
“That’s their decision to make,” she said.
Meyer looked at the line of vehicles and the gibbering people yelling from their home doorways and car windows. For a few clear seconds, he saw them all as sheep, running in pointless circles fueled by their fear. Clogging the way for shepherds, with places they needed to be.
