by Sean Platt
“It makes us think of our youth,” said Heather, smoothing Lila’s hair. But Piper had been far too young to remember the show. She liked it in the way Heather liked older shows before her time — with a sense of days passed, times she’d missed out on.
“What’s going on?”
“The ships are starting to settle over big cities.”
“‘Settle’?”
Heather nodded. “Just hanging there. Floating. Like in V. Did you ever see V?”
Piper shook her head.
“Lucky. Meyer made me watch it a few times.” She pointed at the screen. “There. Like that.”
Piper put her hand over her mouth, feeling her wide eyes bloom wider. The picture on the screen was surreal. She saw the familiar New York skyline, now circled with what seemed to be an unusual number of helicopters. But smack in the middle, eclipsing the screen’s top half, was the curved bottom of a huge silver sphere. Then the screen changed, an announcer babbling on in words Piper could barely hear. The new shot was from several miles farther back, taken from a helicopter, judging by the high viewpoint and slight jostle. It showed the sphere in its entirety, just hovering above Manhattan like a giant brushed steel bowling ball.
Piper looked at Lila and Trevor, feeling a strange urge to shield their eyes. They shouldn’t have to see this. Then again, it was their new reality. And they’d seen so much worse already.
Heather reached for the tablet on the back of the couch, tapped the screen, and killed the picture.
“I know that look,” Heather said. “It’s how I think I looked a bit ago, when they first started showing footage of the things arriving.”
“They’re not doing anything?”
“Not as far as I’ve heard. Just waiting.”
“For what?”
But Heather could only shake her head.
DAY SEVEN
CHAPTER 39
Day Seven
Axis Mundi
The first twenty-four hours were hardest.
Piper was used to being out and around. She was a New York girl now, and living in Manhattan meant constantly walking. Meyer had had the foresight to equip a small gym, but walking on a treadmill wasn’t the same. She craved fresh air and felt slightly claustrophobic — a fear that seemed to magnify if she considered tomorrow and the next day, knowing that depending on what the ships did, they might be here for a long time. Knowing Meyer, “a long time” could provide sustenance for a decade. The idea of staying inside this bunker for a decade was suffocating, and when she thought about it the first time, Piper retired to her room while Meyer was playing a game with the kids, closed the door, and cried.
There was a floor area in the gym, and Meyer, bless his considerate, forward-thinking heart, had floored it in bamboo so that Piper could do yoga. Doing a few sun salutations calmed her mind, so she pulled up some of the stored routines on the small juke in the gym and played through a few longer sessions as led by her favorite video instructor, Heidi Bleue. That helped more. But even after the invigoration of a long and tiring session, she found Savasana, the moveless pose that always closed her routines, hard to stomach.
Piper was supposed to be clearing her head, breathing into universal intelligence with her body and mind. But now her universal intelligence was polluted with Meyer’s visions — with the premonitions he’d seemed to have about all of this, as spied when he’d taken his drug. The aliens seemed to be out there somehow, visible when one cleared his or her mind. And now they were all Piper could imagine: gray skinned with black almond eyes like in the movies, or green and dripping with slime.
She looked longingly at the spiral staircase, wanting with everything she had to go up. The ships might be above Denver, but they wouldn’t be above Vail. This was the back country. It’s why Meyer had chosen the land, why he’d bought so much to assure isolation. So why couldn’t she go outside? The bunker’s air felt stale, almost suffocating.
She’d known Meyer wouldn’t want anyone to leave, so feeling reckless one day, Piper quietly climbed the stairs with her walking shoes on, vowing to only taste the air for a few minutes.
But the door was locked, the access code changed.
He’d sealed them in.
In the afternoon (Piper didn’t know when and didn’t care; time didn’t matter in a world where sunshine was rumor), Piper found herself preparing an argument for Meyer.
They couldn’t hide for the rest of their lives, especially when there wasn’t even anything menacing going on. Maybe the ships were there to stay, but maybe they’d only hang there forever without disembarking. Maybe they were stranded. Piper hadn’t seen V as described by Heather, but she’d seen another of Meyer’s favorites: a rather violent film called District 9. Those aliens had basically run out of intergalactic gas and parked their ship above Johannesburg. Maybe this was like that.
Or even if this wasn’t like that, why couldn’t they wait until there was something to fear before hiding? They’d have time to react if a war began. Piper didn’t want to drive to Dallas; she wanted to take a walk around the house. She wouldn’t even enter the woods if he didn’t want her to, and he could come with her if he insisted on babysitting. They wanted protection, sure. But there was no reason to voluntarily turn themselves into prisoners.
Piper found Meyer in the living room, which after just a day had already become the underground home’s clear nexus. They’d eaten dinner and breakfast from TV trays rather than at the table, and thus far the kids’ only slumber had been on the living room couches, passing out from exhaustion rather than truly falling asleep.
“Meyer,” she said, her spine tall and her hands uncomfortably near to perching on her hips, “I think we should talk about …”
He shushed her. Piper didn’t like that at all and was about to call him on his rudeness, but then she saw his eyes. He, like Trevor, Lila, Raj, and Heather, was staring at the TV, transfixed.
“What?”
“Shh, Piper,” Lila said.
Piper looked at the screen and saw what had already become a shockingly familiar sight: a massive silver orb hovering above a city. Judging by the Slavic architecture (all swirls and onions), she thought it might be somewhere in Russia. At the bottom of the screen a red banner said, SATELLITES SHOW MOSCOW HEAT BLOOMS.
“What’s a heat bloom?”
“Shh!” This time, it was Trevor.
The announcer was going on, but Piper was coming to this party late and didn’t have the background the rest of them, who’d apparently camped in front of the TV like drones, had already absorbed. For some reason, being shushed a third time made her furious.
“Don’t you ‘shh’ at me, Trevor! Someone tell me what the hell is going on!”
Heather looked up. For a second Piper thought she might bark at her for yelling at Trevor. Instead, her usual sarcasm still mostly absent, she said, “It’s what happens when they launch missiles.”
“Who’s launching … what kind of missiles?” She heard her voice falter.
The screen seemed to come alight all at once. Whatever had struck the sphere was massive. Piper didn’t know much about weapons of war, but the explosion looked like something from Cold War footage — a kind of awkward mushroom that shook the enormous sphere like a piece swinging in a Newton’s cradle.
“Was that one of the big ones?” she asked, now desperate. “They can’t do that, can they? Wouldn’t it destroy the city? Wouldn’t it give them all radiation poisoning?” There was more, too: where was the camera showing this footage? It looked like a helicopter. Had anyone told the pilot that nuclear action might be afoot?
Nobody answered.
Maybe the city had been evacuated.
Maybe a rogue faction had managed to launch something, not strictly authorized by the government.
Or maybe the world had gone to shit inside a single day.
“What’s going on in the rest of the world?” she asked, panicked, feeling her legs start to wobble. She grasped the back of a chair
for support as a torrent of rapid-fire questions spilled from her lips.
“What about New York? Is there one over Denver? Did they say if they’ve done anything to us? Is our government talking about launching missiles too? Oh Jesus. Oh shit. What about the president? Has the president made any …”
The entire bottom half of the sphere turned bright, like a down-facing lamp. Even with the set’s downturned volume, she could hear a loud, low fwump like a fire suddenly coming alight.
A few seconds later, some kind of shockwave must have struck the camera and killed the feed.
In those seconds — between the massive light beam and the loss of signal — Piper could clearly see that Moscow’s city center was gone.
The TV was off. They sat around the coffee table in the quiet the way they’d sit around a campfire, with the lights low. Nobody had wanted to watch the news after satellites started showing overhead shots of the damage. The ground seemed flat and burned, no structures standing within a radius of a dozen miles or more. And most ominously, front and center on the satellite image was the ship itself — an impossibly large silver circle above the debris, again unmoving and silent.
After that, the huge Moscow ship had moved on. Without a city to watch, it seemed to feel it had other business to attend to.
They’d watched sporadically after that, checking for new and horrible updates in the way Piper remembered her grandparents describing 9/11. Nobody, they’d said, wanted to see more of what had happened that day. And yet few had been able to look away.
Piper could relate. She told the kids to keep the screen off but found them with it on a few times, Heather disobedient in their midst. But she herself had been peeking too, ducking into rooms to watch on a tablet, staying too long behind Trevor, Lila, and Raj before laying down the law. It was impossible to turn from. Her desire to go outside had evaporated, and she was quite sure, now, that they were all going to die. But she still wanted to know when she was going to die. How she was going to die. And to be as frightened as possible in the meantime.
None of the other ships struck. Other nations, apparently having learned Russia’s lesson, stood down. Even the amount of helicopters circling the things decreased their numbers and increased their distance. There were addresses from the president, promising that the government was doing all it could to communicate and keep the people safe. Pundits pointed out that Russia had struck first, though there was no information on why, or if the action had been official.
Sometime later, a few of the ships opened ports and released much smaller ships, like hovercraft. The smaller ships were like the larger ones: polished silver spheres perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. They moved from one location to another, sending thin rivulets of energy down to the ground. Nobody was sure what they were, because cameras seemed to blitz out whenever they got close — some sort of electromagnetic interference, said those who seemed to know. Conspiracy nuts rushed to cobble two and two, theorizing that the green beams meant abductions in progress.
They were harvesting.
After one such conspiracy theory report, Piper looked down to see that Trevor had turned pale. That broke both her trance and addiction. She turned the screen off and vowed that for a night, at least, they would just be people. Not hiding people, but people.
“Did you know,” said Heather, running her fingers through Lila’s dark hair, “that your father and I named you after a song?”
Lila, safe in Raj’s arms, looked up at her mother. Piper, watching, felt it impossible that Lila wouldn’t know the origin of her own name. But maybe she did know, and it didn’t matter. Maybe she just wanted to hear the story again, and be young for a while.
“It was one of our favorites,” said Heather, looking over at Meyer with a nostalgic, almost bittersweet expression. “An old song, called ‘Hey There, Delilah.’”
The evening passed as if by candlelight. They told tales — each taking their turn, each free to go wherever he or she wanted, into authentic past or spinning fiction. Slowly, the room began to feel small again … but this time, the aura was more intimate than confining.
They would be safe.
The world had become a perilous place, but they’d made it to the ranch — to the somehow spiritual Axis Mundi that Meyer had been going on about for years. It was small, and they might be in it for a long time while the dust (hopefully more metaphorical than literal) settled beyond the bunker’s walls. But they would adjust. Piper would learn to walk on the treadmill. She’d do her yoga. She had millions of books stored on her Vellum; they had years of entertainment on the bunker’s various jukes. They had endless power (wind, solar, generated if need be), enough food, and three protected subterranean wells for water.
It would be okay. Somehow, because they were safe and because they were together, it would be okay.
Story time ended with the feeling of a fire’s coals glowing slowly to ash. Piper retired for the night, repeating that single refrain over and over inside her head, making herself believe: It will be okay.
She and Meyer made love that night. And when they did, Piper found herself wishing they’d had the history he shared with Heather — the kind that featured a song special enough to name a firstborn daughter.
DAY TEN
CHAPTER 40
Day Ten
Axis Mundi
Meyer’s eyes opened.
Something had changed.
He watched the concrete ceiling above the bed he shared with Piper before rising, suddenly realizing that the gray mass was actually a vibrating matrix of molecules, apparently solid on a macro scale but entirely permeable once you got down small enough. The concrete was composed of sand and cement, which in turn were composed of quartz, silica, and dozens of other components. Each of those were made of elements, and each of the elements were made of atoms that were all the same. But even then, those atoms were mostly space. A nucleus with electrons somewhere around it, not so much orbiting as existing. Between the solid cores of the elements and the electrons was nothing.
Like outer space.
He sat up.
He understood.
There had been a time, making a wish list for his bunker at the end of the world, that Meyer had considered ayahuasca — his medicine. But you couldn’t just store it like pedestrian drugs, like coke or even weed. Ayahuasca was brewed by a shaman. If he wanted to go on his spiritual, other-level voyages while waiting out the apocalypse, he’d need Juha. But getting just his family here had been hard enough.
That, he saw now, had been a pointless thought. He didn’t need medicine to see the core of truth within him — or perhaps more accurately, far outside. It was a lens — or a rag used to wipe his lens, and he no longer needed that rag to see.
Something had changed.
Now his vision was clear.
Meyer could imagine his mind as an extension of a universal collective. He imagined himself as a blip of existence peeking beyond some kind of veil. Behind the veil, though, there was more of him. Like the tip of an iceberg. Other people might peek out farther down the veil, but behind the scenes, where few ever looked, they were all connected.
They were all part of one larger thing, with many heads.
And still, Meyer was himself. He was both things. They all were.
He saw the emptiness all around him, baked into even the most solid of objects.
The ceiling was space.
The floor was space.
Piper, still asleep beside him, was space.
If you peered close enough, everything was nothing. And if you pulled back enough, nothing somehow became everything.
Images that had been just beneath consciousness began to clearly rise inside his awakening mind. He saw a sun. A planet. A thing that was like a hole in nothing, leading great distances to another place.
Of course he’d known they were coming. It’s why he’d run. It’s why he’d come here. It’s why he’d protected them all. Because what had happened in Moscow? That was
the beginning.
He could see their purpose — the visitors’ purpose — as clearly as he saw his own feet sliding into slippers at the bed’s side, standing up, leaving the bedroom to enter the quiet nighttime living room.
He knew what they wanted.
He knew why they were here.
He knew what the shuttles were doing. Why they were breaking homes open like nutshells. Why they were pulling people from their beds, so many screaming. He knew that fear. It percolated beneath his awareness like an unscratchable itch.
He knew why he’d fought so hard. Why he’d risked them all dying, if the alternative was to not be here, to not be inside. Of course they’d had to be here, now. It was ludicrous that he’d ever, ever hesitated.
Meyer crossed the living room, now quiet. The kids were asleep in three rooms. Heather was asleep in a fourth. This was their sanctuary. Their place of sanity. The place where, in discreet doses, they could see what was happening in the larger world without having to fear it.
If only they truly understood.
But how could Meyer explain? He’d never understood it all until now.
He watched the dark screen for a full minute, aware as he did it that he must look like a lunatic. If Heather or Piper came out and saw him gazing at the blackness, they’d worry for his sanity, thinking him sick with some kind of cabin fever. Yesterday, they’d think, he’d been normal. They were all settling into routine as more and more shuttles ventured from the motherships, as more and more desperate and fearful factions struck at the ships and were reduced to rubble. The shuttles would take whomever they wanted, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. But that was a hard thing for humans to accept — that there were powers in the universe that found their force and aggression not just laughable but unworthy of notice. And so there were always reports of someone fighting back. Always reports of that someone — be it a lone man with a shotgun or a nation with artillery — getting smacked away like a fly.
