by Sean Platt
CHAPTER 36
Day Six, Early Morning
Axis Mundi
Garth didn’t like this at all.
He’d checked on the panel outside the bunker’s entrance three times since midnight, but none of those times had done anything to improve his mood. In theory, he should feel relieved. The clock was ticking, and in just a little while, this would all be over.
He looked at his cell phone, eyes ticking toward where the service bars should be in the vain hope that Verizon might have suddenly and inexplicably stitched its shit together. It hadn’t. And really, cell service had been hit or miss up at this job even before the aliens encouraged the world to start crapping its pants. That’s why the house had been hardwired for phone service. It struck Garth as strange that anyone would bother with real phones anymore, seeing as his grandmothers were the only people he knew who still had one. But maybe this was why: because sometimes in the mountains it was the only way.
3:07 a.m.
Just over an hour left. Garth wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He was almost positive that Meyer had been lying out his ass (who put a time delay on a panic room?), but hadn’t been positive enough to start shooting kids. They could wait. At the end of eight hours, if it turned out Meyer was as full of shit as Garth thought he was, then they could start pulling triggers.
The thought turned Garth’s stomach. He didn’t have kids of his own, but he did have nieces and nephews. The kid with the bushy eyebrows wasn’t as young as they were, but he was still just a teenager. Garth remembered being a teenager. He’d been stupider than a retarded idiot, and more ignorant than he’d have ever believed, driven by his dick and gluttony. He hadn’t had as much sex as his friends, owing to his awkward manner and equally awkward appearance, but that hadn’t stopped him from spending all of his time in pursuit. He’d broken laws, and a few heads. Even now, looking back as a man who was considering shooting kids to get his way, Garth wanted to groan at his teenage self’s poor judgement.
He didn’t want to shoot Meyer’s son, and didn’t particularly want to hurt Meyer. Or his wife, or that Indian kid. This was supposed to be straightforward. It was supposed to be bloodless. He’d been drinking with Remy on the day the news had broken. Remy was already dour, and started saying that if the world ended at the hands of the aliens, at least his pathetic life wouldn’t be much of a loss. Garth had tried to talk him out of it, to tell him he’d done okay.
But what did it matter? Remy had wanted to know. They were dead anyway. There was no place to go, no place to hide.
Maybe Garth shouldn’t have started talking about the Dempsey job. Maybe Remy shouldn’t have agreed as readily. And definitely, anticipating trouble on the drive, they shouldn’t have turned to his cousin, Wade, as necessary recklessness. But what was done was done, and by the time they’d found Dempsey’s cunt of an ex-wife in the living room, it had been too late to go back. By then, Remy had decided that staying alive was a good idea after all. Garth never needed convincing. Wade was too hopped-up, young, and dumb to consider hesitation.
Kill her, Wade had suggested.
But Garth didn’t like that idea, so they’d tossed her into the pantry. Now the fucking pantry was full, and he might have to shoot a kid to close the door on this mess. It was out of hand. But they’d come this far, so it wasn’t like they could walk away now. Wade, for one, wouldn’t have it. Garth, too, kind of wanted to keep on living. And at this point, it wasn’t like Meyer and his family would just let them hang out in peace, as they very well may have if this had been handled differently.
Garth stood. Wade and Remy were in bedrooms, maybe asleep. Garth couldn’t do the same. Even if he didn’t have to kill the kid himself, he’d have to order it. Even turning his head would be tacit agreement. Wade was an animal; it was the owner’s fault if a beast got off its leash.
But as much as Garth didn’t want to do what had to be done, he wanted to get into that bunker. He knew what was in it. He’d watched, between nailing boards, while Dempsey had stocked the thing on his last visit. He’d brought case after case of food through the doors off the kitchen, then dumbwaitered them down himself. There was some sort of mechanical unloading thingy at the bottom, it seemed, because Meyer was able to keep sending more and more stuff down without any help.
Food.
Water.
Mysterious cases with no labels.
Garth knew what was in at least some of those cases. He’d even considered calling Meyer on it, joking that he was breaking all sorts of laws. A man couldn’t own those things. Only armies could. Normal people wouldn’t even recognize some of the stuff Meyer was sending down the chute, but Garth, thanks to his time with the Army, knew plenty.
Electronics, for entertainment.
Survival supplies.
Body armor, gas masks — paranoid shit that Garth wouldn’t have a clue how to find.
It was all down there, just waiting in the enormous bunker under the well-paced floor. His crew had only built parts of it (and had been specifically barred from other parts by polite men who seemed an awful lot like private security), but he knew it was big, comfortable, and well stocked. He’d even had the place furnished like the ultimate man cave before they’d capped the last corner, lowering couches and beds from above on cranes.
It was all right below his feet, and he wanted it. He’d thought they could waltz in and steal it, but he’d had no idea they’d be cockblocked by such nasty security. But they had, and so maybe Dempsey’s arrival, as unpleasant as it might get, was a blessing. He still believed in blessings, when they served him. So yeah, maybe this was meant to be. Maybe Garth Wrigley was destined to survive the apocalypse. Maybe God had arranged this. Didn’t God occasionally kill his own people? Garth’s Sunday School was rusty, but he was pretty sure he had. Maybe this was like that.
Or maybe Meyer would make it easy. Maybe he’d just tell them the code. Maybe he’d open it up without any fuss.
But then he’d be a threat. No, he’d probably need to go. They all would.
It would be okay. Wade could do it. Or maybe they could just reinforce the pantry and leave them in there forever. But of course, that would mean they’d die of thirst and starvation, and that sounded worse than a bullet. Maybe he’d be doing them a kindness.
He looked again at his phone: 3:18.
The room was too quiet. It was impossible to believe any of this was real — either the approaching doom from above (that would, by the way, forgive extreme acts like kidnapping and killing in self-defense, which is what getting rid of those in the pantry would be, when you thought about it) or his new position as a home invader. The silence and darkness were their own presence.
He walked through to the kitchen, peeked at the clock on the supposed time lock, then backed away again, wishing time would hurry the fuck up.
He looked through the bay window. The moon was huge, perched between two distant peaks. Was it full? Well, there was only one way to be sure.
He walked to the French doors, then unlocked them by turning the lever that Remy, retard that he could sometimes be, had left open earlier. He stepped out onto the porch, then walked out to its middle.
No, not a full moon, but close.
He looked up. Garth wanted to see the stars, but the moonlight had washed most of ‘em out. All he could see were a few of the brightest blips, including the really bright one that he seemed to remember wasn’t even a star. It was Venus. Sunlight simply bounced off it just as sunlight bounced off the full moon, and …
Garth staggered back and almost fell to the deck. He had to grip a chair to recover, then give himself a moment to find his balance.
The air was peppered with dozens of tiny round blips, each lit on one side like miniature crescent moons. They were disturbingly obvious, once Garth’s eyes began to adjust. If he’d held a marble at arm’s length, it would be about the same size to his eye as the alien spheres in the sky.
Garth looked up for a long time, feeling li
ke he was tumbling upward. That was them. It had to be. The sight of what looked like half-lit ball bearings in the sky was pure, blood-chilling menace. Something that odd should have a soundtrack or at least appear to move, but as long as Garth watched, the spheres appeared silent without motion. It was quietly ominous — the way a person with feet in concrete might feel watching a steamroller creep forward.
Which, really, was a fair analogy for what was happening.
There was a sound from the lawn, opposite where Garth had been looking.
He whipped around, his hand automatically going to the gun on his hip. For a moment, he stared into the dark, waiting for his eyes to adjust. But the home’s rear side was thick with trees and hills; much was shadow even in moonlight.
He didn’t like turning his back on the ships in the sky. They were just hanging there, surely still thousands of miles away or more. Slowing down, if the NASA people were right. But still Garth felt them like a cool hand on his shoulder — a boogeyman waiting to strike the minute he stopped looking them in the eye.
He couldn’t see anything that might have caused the noise he’d heard. Or thought he’d heard. Because he might not have heard anything. It might’ve been his imagination.
“Fuck you, squirrel,” he said aloud.
Joking — even with himself — should have calmed Garth’s nerves. But all it did was remind him that he was all alone, whistling in the dark to keep the spooks at bay.
He turned back to the house, and heard that sound from the front yard again. This time, he took a few steps forward, forcing his feet to move in an attempt to defeat the stupid, childish fear he felt threatening to suffocate him. He squinted.
A pair of pickup trucks, yellow moonlight glinting from the hoods and bumpers.
The place where the driveway broke through the trees, headed to the main road, looking like a shadowed archway in a fairy tale.
Nothing else.
It must be an animal. A deer or something. They were up in the mountains, after all, and just last night he and Remy had sat on this deck, huddled in blankets, happy to get out of earshot of the woman’s loud mouth. With Wade sleeping something off, they’d felt they could go outside without him deciding to shut her up in an obvious way. And they’d found all sorts of natural sounds: owls, wolves, or coyotes in the distance, the wind’s heavy sighing.
Still, Garth continued to stare at the shadowy yard for an extra few seconds. Then he seemed to feel the spheres in the sky watching him and turned to look, sure they’d have grown to the size of basketballs. But they were no larger than they’d been, no more of a menace.
He turned, reasonably sure he was choosing to leave rather than being frightened back into the house. But when he reentered the kitchen, Garth found himself looking at someone’s back. Someone who shouldn’t be where he was, covered in drywall dust as if he’d found something sharp, then dug his way through a locked pantry wall.
Someone who, in going to the bunker lock before the timer expired, had just shown his hand.
Garth wanted to wait until Meyer Dempsey finished his business at the lock, but Dempsey must have heard the doors open. He turned slowly, the two men facing each other like gunslingers in a standoff.
“Meyer,” Garth said, reaching for his gun.
Before Meyer could respond, there was a tremendous wrenching from outside. A long, cacophonous rattling. A bone-shattering crash of metal and glass.
Garth’s head twitched toward the yard, toward the sounds he’d so recently dismissed as an animal’s.
Meyer leapt.
CHAPTER 37
Day Six, Early Morning
Axis Mundi
It took Lila far too long to figure out how to put the first of the old trucks into neutral.
She’d been able to drive a car in manual for over a year, but was a New Yorker, and her opportunities to hit the open road were few and far between. Even then, you almost never needed to take a car out of autodrive, and Lila, other than for instruction, never had. And even THEN she’d only driven Dempsey cars: rich girl cars, top of the line. If they even had neutral, it would be a utility.
But these trucks were ancient. Beater vehicles, owned by blue-collar guys and kept until they fell into piles of rust, meant for hauling wood and reeking workers. They had a big stick between the front seats, and you could yank it down to take something out of gear. That’s what Piper had said, anyway, but Lila wasn’t sure Piper had ever driven a manual car much before this trip, either. If Piper knew “neutral” and “out of gear,” it was from movies.
Lila could feel the seconds ticking away. She’d lost track of Piper some time after they’d left the cover of shadows, when they’d both sprinted out into the moonlight toward the house. This was all taking too long. She saw the stick; the doors of the first truck opened without a lock. But the stick didn’t want to move, and Lila was afraid she’d break something. Or make the old truck run her over.
Lila felt dizzy, her heart beating in her ears like a tympani.
How much time had passed? She had no idea, because every minute was like a quickly passed second. It was especially disorienting because up until they’d seen her father pass the window covered in what looked like powdered sugar, time had been dragging. She’d stopped checking the time because seeing minutes freeze was so disheartening. She’d check it at midnight, then feel hours pass as they huddled in the trees — and find it was 12:15 the next time she looked. It was excruciatingly boring, and yet the attention needed to watch the windows through her father’s binoculars had drained her energy.
It was dark and creepy. She’d seen the ships through the trees once, then had moved into an area with a thicker overhead canopy so she wouldn’t have to look up by mistake and see them again. It was boring and exhausting, worrying without being able to do a thing. She’d felt guilty disobeying her father’s wishes. And on top of all that, she’d been cold this high in the mountains, without even horses to keep them warm. They were tied farther up. Piper thought their movement or noises might give them away.
They’d seen Meyer walk past a window, slow and creeping, clearly having freed himself from something, someplace where he shouldn’t be.
Then they’d seen the guy with the dark hair and the mustache in the kitchen. They’d watched him go outside, then watched Meyer enter the kitchen, apparently with no idea the bad guy was there.
It had taken maybe ten seconds for Piper to tell Lila what to do. Another ten to reach the trucks when the bad guy was looking away, sure with every running step that she was about to be seen then shot. She almost had been; she’d peeked through the truck’s windows and seen him standing there, practically staring right at her. But then he’d gone away.
He’d gone inside.
Liquid seconds ticked. Lila fought panic, a strangely insistent part of her mind arguing that it was all too late anyway and that she should just give up. But eventually, the big stick between the truck’s seats came free as she tugged it, dropping into a wiggly position. She only had a moment to wonder what she was supposed to do next before the truck began to roll.
Lila jumped back, nearly clocked by the still-open door. The house had been built on a small rise — possibly built artificially, so rainwater would run away from the house rather than toward it — and the bad guys had driven through the raggedy lawn’s edge to park against it. Now she understood why Piper had said she really wouldn’t have to do much after getting the truck into neutral. She asked, How am I supposed to move a truck with the engine off? But Lila didn’t have to. With gravity’s help, the truck was moving just fine.
Lila stood dumbly in the truck’s vacated spot, watching it clatter and bounce down the short, shallow hill. It gathered speed, going at a good clip until it smashed into a tree at the bottom with a sound that rattled to the mountains.
Something happened in the windowed kitchen, visible as a blur in the corner of Lila’s eye.
Dad.
Before she could do something even more fo
olish than run toward the bad guy in the kitchen, a pair of lights popped on inside the mostly-dark house, almost at the same time.
Move, stupid! she told herself. The whole point was to attract attention.
Lila ducked to the right, toward the porch where the bad guy had been watching. She tried to tell herself it was because the other truck was still there to hide behind, but it was more likely a little girl’s unthinking need to find her daddy. Who, really, might already be dead.
As if someone had read her thoughts, Lila heard a gunshot, maybe from the kitchen.
She ducked low, squatting behind the second truck’s tailgate. The front door burst open. The two other men ran out, the blond’s hair in corkscrews. He looked lost, baffled by the wreck at the bottom of the incline. But the other — the one with the buzz cut — didn’t look lost at all. He looked like he knew exactly what was happening, angry as a kicked nest of wasps.
His head ticked toward Lila. She slunk back, hopefully out of sight. She had no idea if he’d seen her, and couldn’t peek to check. Lila was blind. And he might be coming after her. She had to stay frozen, waiting to be taken like prey.
Where is Piper?
Lila had no idea. She might have run forward when Lila did, but if that was the case, wouldn’t she have gone for the second truck?
Lila looked around the truck, toward the kitchen and away from the shaved-headed man. The door was closed, and she could see the cab’s upper half, angled up from below. Unless Piper had slipped into the truck, closed the door, and ducked into the footwell, she wasn’t here.
Lila saw movement: a blur, running at an angle toward the trees.
Dad!
She kept the cry in her mind — good because after another gunshot splintered a wooden post on the deck beside the runner, Lila realized it wasn’t her father. The bad guy was about to run right by her, and would see her clear as day if he turned his head. But she didn’t think he’d be turning; back at the kitchen door, her father was still aiming the man’s weapon at him.
