by Sean Platt
“Don’t you fucking move!”
“Listen,” said Meyer. “What’s your name?”
“None of your fucking business.”
With his hands still raised, Meyer’s eyes narrowed. After a moment, Trevor saw what he was peering at: the brass-colored plate on the desk he was crouching behind.
“Frank,” he said, reading the plate. “Can I call you Frank?”
“Isaiah!” the man blurted.
Trevor watched his father nod. He’d known his name wasn’t Frank, but getting people to do things they thought had been their own idea was one of his specialties.
“Isaiah,” Meyer said evenly. “I’m going to stand. My son over there is going to stand, then the rest of my family behind me. Please. One father to another, I’ll ask you: keep the gun on me.”
Something registered in the former car salesman’s face. The rifle lowered a fraction of an inch. Apparently, the man did have a family. Then Trevor saw a different desk with another nameplate, right where his father’s eyes had been while Isaiah looked at the others. The plate on that desk said Isaiah Schwartz, and there were several photos beside it in frames, of children with brown hair.
Isaiah didn’t ask Meyer how he knew what he’d known, but he did allow Meyer to stand. Slowly, Trevor and the others did the same.
“We’re just going to walk out. Okay? Keep your gun on me.”
Meyer stepped backward. Piper, Raj, and Lila were already out of sight. Trevor watched his father’s eyes beckon. Trevor had gone the farthest in, but Meyer wanted him behind. The man probably wouldn’t shoot, because Meyer’s voice had a way of soothing the savage beast. He’d once told Trevor he used anger and indignation as a negotiating tactic — not in himself, but in others. If he could get the other party ranting and raving before he calmed them, they always felt stupid and somewhat conciliatory. Once they blew their energy being pissed off, they lost their advantage unless they could maintain their anger — which, thanks to Meyer Dempsey’s considerable charisma, they never could.
Trevor walked behind his father, then watched his slow retreat. There was something different in the way he was moving. He wasn’t like himself. He had a slight waddle, just as he’d had a slight affect in his voice a moment ago that wasn’t usually there. It was subtle. But once you knew what he was doing — once you realized he was matching Isaiah Schwartz’s vocal patterns and walk as he came forward — it was obvious.
People like people they’re like, Trevor’s father had once told him. It was amazing what people would agree to if you spoke like them and copied a few of their mannerisms. Just like how Isaiah, now that he’d risen from behind the desk to march them out, kept tilting his head to the side as if to crack or stretch his neck. Just like how Meyer, backing out of the car dealership, was doing exactly the same thing. You’d think people would notice being copied. But that was another thing Meyer had told his son: most people are so far up their own asses, they barely notice there are other people in the world.
“Don’t come back. And if you tell anyone I’m here …” said the salesman, still walking forward.
“We won’t.” Meyer tilted his head. Crack.
“Don’t you hide on my lot, either. You go up there. To the road.”
Meyer stepped backward, barely looking down to watch the stairs. He effortlessly descended heels first, bringing himself below the salesman’s eye line. It would make the man feel superior — elevated in status because he was literally higher up. Trevor knew that trick, too. He fumbled down slightly faster, less graceful than his father, and looked up doe eyed. Just another helpless animal of prey, like those he probably used to shoot on the weekends, using the rifle he kept in his trunk.
Meyer was now halfway across the apron of driveway in front of the building’s doors, his hands still obediently raised. He waited for the man to lower his weapon or definitively allow them to go, but instead he stood on raised steps, the rifle’s barrel slowly lowering.
“They left without me,” he said, his voice suddenly small.
Trevor looked at his father, seeing if he wanted to parlay this moment of weakness into a new advantage.
Who left? His friends? His co-workers? Or most coldly: his family?
Trevor never found out. Raj stepped out from behind the alcove behind the door and hit Mr. Schwartz hard with a large cigarette Butt Depot that had been set in the designated smoking area around the corner.
The salesman hit the ground. Lila, behind Raj, looked aghast and as if she’d been trying to stop her man from acting. Piper snatched the rifle, taking too long to free the strap from the man’s unconscious body.
“Stupid, Raj,” said Meyer, shaking his head, clearly surprised. “But good job.”
CHAPTER 24
Day Four, Early Afternoon
Chicago, Rural Illinois
According to Lila’s phone, it was just after noon by the time they located the transponders, then figured out the dealership’s system for matching key fobs on hooks to vehicles on the lot. Her father wanted a Land Cruiser — and, given the vast selection they finally found themselves able to take advantage of, would settle for nothing less. Now that Toyota offered a Land Cruiser hybrid, there were tons of upsides with almost no real downside.
The tanks were massive, and the new hybrid engines averaged 32 mpg on the highway when running on full auto. A driver, if they needed to go manual, would lower the efficiency, but they could still expect to hit thirty or more once they found open roads. With luck, they might be able to get all the way to Vail, stopping just four times for gas — more if they could fill tanks to carry as they had in the JetVan. The Land Cruiser was also heavy enough to crush through smaller obstacles and push lesser vehicles out of the way if it had to. And it would run off road, which meant they could cruise up the medians if they found open grass.
They didn’t tie the salesman, at Piper’s insistence. He’d need his freedom to survive. They needed to get away before he woke (taking his rifle; Piper was foofy but hardly naive), but he wasn’t a threat if they left him inside the building, on his side in case he vomited in his sleep.
The dealership also had a wide variety of paper maps — something Lila hadn’t considered but that her father took as a great relief. They didn’t have atlases, but they had Chicago and the outlying areas, and a wide-view Midwest map that showed a good chunk of their forthcoming trip from far up. Lila wasn’t used to navigating without a GPS, but her father had spent a childhood with parents who were always behind the times, and hence knew the basics of following a line on paper. And beyond that, she suspected he’d boned up on map reading as part of his crazy survivalist fetish — no longer so crazy.
Before leaving, Meyer tried the dealership’s hardline phones to reach her mother. He had no luck, but kept at it for long after Piper had begun waving frantically that they needed to go. They’d hit the road, and he’d resumed trying on his cell. There was still no data coverage and intermittent voice. Their devices were quickly becoming useless, not much more valuable than rocks they might throw to defend themselves.
The Land Cruiser was as good as its name, and Meyer wasted no time heading out in the grass bordering the highways. Seeing this, several cars in the slower lanes on concrete followed, zagging out of line and into the faster way paved by the oversized vehicle. Most made it just off the road, then stuck in what was essentially a large drainage culvert. A few made it onto the grass and rattled bumpily along for a few miles behind them before sticking. Only the toughest, most off-road-ready trucks and SUVs kept up, forming an impromptu express lane beside the road.
Eventually, traffic thinned enough to jockey back onto the highway. Meyer kept going, always staying in the right lane and keeping an eye on the berm to keep a lane of escape available. But luck stuck to them, and once past the outermost of Chicago’s sprawl, roads became rural. Lila’s father handed the paper maps to Piper, who proved an adept navigator. She led them onto forgotten roads, reasoning that the more they avoided
people, the better. The gas gauge was the only barometer in need of watching, and until it started to creep down near a quarter, they’d stay out in the backwoods, pretending humanity was already gone.
They followed signs for Davenport and Moline, then skirted the cities by a wide berth on approach. “We don’t want another Chicago,” her father said from the front seat. No one disagreed.
The way was smooth and predictable enough that once Meyer was through watching the berm in case he needed to go off roading again, he turned on the autodrive and they rode like normal people on a regular trip. The car’s GPS wasn’t working any better than their phones’, but the maps programmed into memory did a fair job working with the odometer to keep an eye on their rough position. Proximity detectors worked fine without a connection, and when they approached other, slower vehicles (decreasingly often), the car corrected easily, passing with everything but a wave.
Lila tried to stay calm. She didn’t want to raise her father’s ire (or hopes), so when he was turned from the car’s middle, watching the sun-washed flat land ahead, she tried to call her mom. She knew the phones didn’t work and that she was foolishly wasting battery power (though Lila supposed she could rummage for the charge cord), but still, each time she heard the out-of-service message her heart dropped a little. She tried not to think of Mom, of the way she’d been cut off when Dad’s phone had failed. But it was hard not to think of something — like her mother probably raped, murdered, and left in the burning desert.
She looked at Raj. He smiled. She smiled back, supposing she owed him some adoration. She’d protested when he’d gone for that smoker’s station to clock the man with the gun, but it had been a catch-22: if she protested too loudly, the man would turn, see Raj, then shoot him. Still, whether she’d thought him an idiot or not, it was thanks to Raj that they had the Cruiser and were on their way to Vail.
She gave his arm an affectionate squeeze, then looked at the passing scenery. Close to the wheels, grass and wire fences whipped by. Farther out, pastures and even a few grazing cows seemed almost stationary, creeping by as if on a conveyor. Little by little, they were moving west. Little by little, they were going to make it.
They’d have their shelter for whatever came.
They’d have food, water, and (if her father’s preparation was as thorough as she suspected) an impervious wall between them and anyone who might want in. The bunker itself was under a sprawling estate, and while her father had said it was finished and stocked, the house itself was only at about three-quarters. The bunker’s entrance from the house would be concealable. Vagrants and opportunists might camp upstairs, but nobody would even know the underground refuge was there, if they were lucky. And so far, they were getting quite lucky indeed.
They’d have soft beds.
They’d have pillows, too, which was good because Lila remembered the way Piper’s friend, Willow, had gone on and on about her huge body pillow while pregnant. Lila even seemed to remember her mother having an enormous pillow when she’d been about to have Trevor, though those might have been false memories because she would only have been two years old. But either way, pregnant women needed their pillows. And Lila would have hers.
But she wouldn’t have a doctor. Not for the delivery if they had to stay underground, and not for the checkups. How would she know how the baby was developing? Who would she ask her medical questions? If Mom arrived, she could ask her, but Piper had never been pregnant. How would she know if she was gaining enough weight, too much weight, or if something was wrong? What if the baby’s umbilical cord was wrapped around its neck during the delivery? What if it was breech?
Oh, shit — what if she needed a C-section?
Lila told herself to relax. As her father had pointed out many times already, nothing had even happened yet. Wasn’t it possible that the aliens would be friendly? Wasn’t it possible that there were no aliens, and that the spheres were just probes or something? Wasn’t it possible that they were, indeed, alien ships … but that they were bound for somewhere beyond Earth, maybe on their way to the sun?
And besides — women had been having babies forever. Since way before modern medicine. It’s the reason humanity still existed. Even Eve had managed it, and she’d had the world’s first vagina. And it’s not like Adam had been prepared to be an obstetrician, amateur gynecologist though he’d undoubtedly been.
And hey, throughout history, only, like, half of women died in childbirth.
She was pulled from her reverie as the car slowed, shocked to realize hours had passed into dark. They’d found a gas station at the crossroads of nothing and nowhere, and its lights were on — obvious now that the light had mostly drained from the day. It was fully automated, like a real civilized station in the city. There didn’t need to be an attendant — and there was, therefore, nobody around.
At least that’s what they thought before they knew they were wrong.
CHAPTER 25
Day Four, Early Evening
Rural Iowa
Piper didn’t want to breathe a word, but she knew something was wrong, or about to be.
They’d been too lucky. Things had gone entirely too well. They’d found themselves stuck in a highway riot, in the middle of an apparent alien invasion, and they were still alive and together. They were still on their way. They still had a fair amount of supplies, including not-terrible food and clean water. They’d managed to steal a good car without so much as getting shot, and were only a dozen or so hours away from living out the coming apocalypse in opulence.
It bothered Piper that they were cut off from the world. The Internet had still been up and running as of twenty-four hours ago, but they hadn’t been able to access it since. The JetVan had a private network fed from the satellite, but without the van they were subject to the whims and traffic limits of ground-based towers like everyone else. That meant no service, no access, and no news beyond what local radio (not even the satellite network, which didn’t have an active subscription in the Land Cruiser) provided.
The same was true of voice coverage on the phones. She and Meyer both kept turning their seats around, to check on the kids’ mood and to pass the time with conversation. Several times, she’d seen Trevor and Lila listening to their phones like kids hoping to hear the ocean in a conch shell. They’d dropped the phones guiltily into their laps as soon as Piper looked back — and Piper, sensing she should allow them their dignity, hope, or both, allowed them to think she’d seen nothing.
But she knew what they were doing: trying to contact their mother. Trying to call Raj’s parents. Trying to call friends they’d had back when the world was still a more innocent place.
Not that the adults were immune to hope. She’d tried her parents several times, and she kept seeing Meyer listen to his phone from the corner of her eye. Sometimes she let him have his privacy and sometimes she raised an eyebrow as he hung up, silently asking if he’d had any luck. But of course he hadn’t, same as her. No one could answer without a connection.
Trevor and Lila’s mother might be dead. They might never know for sure, but privately Piper thought it was a safe bet, given the last they’d heard of her.
Raj’s parents might be dead too. That one seemed less likely as an isolated event, but it raised a troubling uncertainty for Piper: the fate of New York as a whole. Piper was just twenty-nine, and felt herself still just a child these past few days. She’d grown up in a connected world, where you could learn just about anything about anywhere at any time. Having no news of New York — or anywhere — for long stretches of time unsettled her to the core.
They’d been sticking to back roads, with Meyer always watching the map for a way out in case they ran into another traffic jam. There was always a way around, but that precaution meant sticking to farm roads big enough to be on the map but not large enough to risk congestion. It meant a lot of driving through nothingness, and sometimes all that prickled the radio dial were low-wattage religious broadcasts: preachers who thought
the aliens were Jesus coming home, or that they carried the wrath of God in their round ships’ bellies.
When they could get news, it felt to Piper like surfacing for air in a vast expanse of water. Each time she heard a broadcast, it felt like Genesis, with the world created anew rather than simply reported upon.
Chicago was back! It hadn’t been destroyed!
New York was back! Nobody had burned it to the ground!
But between strong signals, both cities might have perished. Anything could have happened. Nobody could contact anyone, and no responsible souls had taken to available airways to trumpet the good news of America’s survival.
Piper found herself pondering the sky’s edge as dusk slowly turned it from dim to dark. How far away was the horizon in flat land? She had no idea — and, being a child of the Internet, felt helpless with no way to Google the answer. Maybe fifty miles? Maybe less?
It meant she knew that for fifty miles (maybe less) in every direction, the world still existed.
Beyond that was anyone’s guess.
The thought made Piper feel cold and lonely, so she unlocked the seat and slid it closer to Meyer’s, then lay down with her head in his lap. He looked down, brushed dark bangs from her eyes, and smiled. Piper suspected he knew what she was thinking — at least her thoughts’ vague color. He always did. Meyer seemed to know everything in advance, same as he’d known to build a bunker and make plans bent on getting them to it. Same as he claimed, through visions brought by the drug Piper feared and didn’t understand (and partaken with Heather, her mind added bitterly), that Meyer knew they’d better be in their shelter when the clock ran out.
She’d asked him, in a whisper, what he suspected.
What will happen, Meyer? What will happen when those ships arrive?
But he wouldn’t even answer. He’d shaken his head as if he didn’t know, and maybe at the top level of his mind, he didn’t. But something in Meyer knew. Something had them running scared, thankful that they were a night’s drive from Vail, afraid that something might yet stand in their way.
