[Alien Invasion 01.0] Invasion

by Sean Platt

  Still, Meyer stared at the screen. Within it, he saw space. Beyond it, he saw space.

  The notion was fascinating. If he were reduced to small enough size — as large as one of those electrons, say — he could fly through the television and all of the bunker’s walls as easily as a ship flying through the vacuum of empty space.

  Finally, he turned away, grateful for time to gaze without being watched.

  They wouldn’t understand. They’d think he’d lost his mind.

  He moved to the spiral staircase, put a hand on its cool railing, and began to move upward.

  He opened the kitchen door, and found the air strange. Compared to the canned, filtered, and scrubbed air below, the home’s atmosphere was almost electric. Too cool, too raw. Naked air.

  He closed the door and crossed the kitchen.

  It was dark. There should still be a partial moon tonight, but it must not have risen. He opened the French doors to the porch, taking a moment.

  His skin adjusted to the cooler air. His eyes adjusted to the dark.

  After a few minutes, he found that the black wasn’t pitch after all. Maybe the moon was up beyond a rise, and it was reflecting off the atmosphere. Something was letting him see, even if it was merely the scant candle cast by the stars.

  Meyer went to the lake.

  For a strange moment, he wondered at himself: still in pajamas, still in slippers, his hair a mess, outside as he’d told the others never to be — having locked them in until now. And he was standing by a lake without moonlight. Was he going to go swimming? It was strange to realize that his mind wasn’t entirely his own.

  Meyer looked up.

  Above him was a perfectly smooth silver object, large enough to fill the small lake’s basin if it chose to. He could see it clearly despite the dark, as if the sphere cast its own light. And with that realization, he found himself looking through it as he had the ceiling and the TV screen. He couldn’t literally see space above the ship’s bulk, but could imagine it perfectly. As if he were but a particle, able to zoom through apparently solid area to find it as cavernous as outer space.

  There was a soft clanging, and a round hole on the ship’s underside opened like an old-time camera’s shutter. Inside was a light: green, like he himself would ask a director to color it, in one of his films.

  He knew what this meant.

  He knew why he’d come.

  Meyer spread his arms and looked upward, closing his eyes as a soft, warm glow surrounded his body.

  He felt his feet leave the ground.

  Sometime later, Meyer Dempsey and the ship he’d entered were gone.

  The mountain was still and quiet, as if vowing to never whisper a word of what happened.

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  Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I’m writing this note to you from the future. Not the not-too-distant future as portrayed in the world of Invasion, but the real future. The one that exists a short while after Invasion was published.

  Right now, I’m writing Colonization — the third book in the Invasion series.

  Before that, I wrote Contact — which, yes, you guessed it — is the second book in the series, which you may have already picked up.

  (Eerie how writing time travel works, isn’t it? Contact is in my past but it’s in your future. I’m getting all Back to the Future time-loopy just thinking about it.)

  Sean and I decided to add this author’s note to Invasion, now that we’re one and a half books further down the master story arc, because now we have perspective.

  When we first wrote the book you just read, we had only an inkling. As I write this, halfway into the rough draft of the third book, the big story we wanted to tell is filling out and taking shape. It’s hitting all of the big, cool issues we wanted to hit with our alien invasion series, and hitting them in what might be called the “traditional” way. Meaning: with aliens.

  See, Invasion got a great reception right off the bat. But among reviews, discussions, and casual comments with our core group of ideal readers, there was one thing that many people mentioned: the ending.

  Most people said they didn’t see the ending coming.

  Some of that group loved the ending: the sense of mystery, of a deepening of the plot as the series moved into more familiar (and ironically “more alien”) territory. They said they were getting excited, wondering where Meyer might be going, and eager to find out in the next volume.

  Other people hated the ending. A few said it felt tacked-on. These folks sort of suggested that we needed a shocking hook in order to drag readers into the next book, so we invented something nuts: Meyer Dempsey, who’s spent something like 80,000 words trying to get his family to safety, just walks right out in the open and lets the aliens take him.

  But actually, Meyer’s abduction is essential to the larger story we wanted to tell.

  We considered beginning the story there: Man is abducted by aliens; sci-fi adventure ensues. We could have done that: started with aliens, abduction, alien contact, and the colonization of Earth.

  But that would have been short-changing our readers, because Invasion is only part of the story.

  Contact continues that story.

  Colonization escalates it.

  We envision the entire series spanning seven books. That might change if we uncover new and unexpected angles the story wants to steer us in (this is common; if you think authors invent stories, we’d argue that’s not entirely accurate), but it’ll be around that number, give or take. We know how it will end. We know the phases it will march through on its way — again allowing that the story always seems to find its most natural path.

  Invasion — the story of what happened before the aliens set foot on the planet — matters to that end.

  And Meyer Dempsey’s creeping sense of intuition matters very much to that end.

  It’d be easy to enjoy this novel’s ride, taking a quasi-apocalyptic adventure ending in a confrontation and a twist ending. You can do that if you’d like. Plenty of readers certainly seem to enjoy this book on that level.

  But we hope, when this series is done, that you’ll look back and see Invasion for what it is in the larger story’s context.

  Because the story doesn’t start with the aliens.

  The story begins with Meyer Dempsey.

  The story begins with an itch that Meyer can’t quite scratch — an urge not to flee the city or escape the crowds or even to get his family away from danger … but rather from an overwhelming urge to reach his “Axis Mundi” — a place he was told was special through his dreams and journeying in an otherworldly haze.

  In Contact, you’ll learn where Meyer vanished to, and why.

  In Colonization, you’ll see what role Meyer has yet to play, and you’ll see how he was always hand-picked by his captors, always selected in advance for a purpose, always dragged toward his axis as if by an invisible hand.

  And in the following books, you’ll learn what the aliens want from us. From the planet. And from Meyer himself.

  We could have skipped Meyer’s flight to the mountains, but if we had, we’d have been shortchanging you. We’d have been starting in this story’s middle. We’d have been failing to look at the pre-invasion Earth through the eyes of its invaders. We’d have been closing our eyes to what the aliens crossed time and space to find.

  We didn’t just want to invade the planet with this story.

  We wanted to ask how, and what. But most importantly, we wanted to ask WHY.

  Invasion is the first part of the answer to that final three-letter qu
estion.

  Meyer’s fate in remaining six (we think!) books in this series is the rest of it.

  Happy reading!

  Johnny (and Sean)

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  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Sean Platt is the bestselling co-author of over 60 books, including breakout post-apocalyptic horror serial Yesterday’s Gone, literary mind-bender Axis of Aaron, and the blockbuster sci-fi series, Invasion. Never one for staying inside a single box for long, he also writes smart stories for children under the pen name Guy Incognito, and laugh out loud comedies which are absolutely not for children.

  He is also the founder of the Sterling & Stone Story Studio and along with partners Johnny B. Truant and David W. Wright hosts the weekly Self-Publishing Podcast, openly sharing his journey as an author-entrepreneur and publisher.

  Sean is often spotted taking long walks, eating brisket with his fingers, or watching movies with his family in Austin, Texas. You can find him at www.SterlingAndStone.net.

  Johnny B. Truant is the bestselling author of the Invasion series, the political sci-fi thriller The Beam, Fat Vampire, Axis of Aaron, Unicorn Western, and many more fiction titles in addition to the nonfiction bestseller Write. Publish. Repeat.

  He is also co-owner of the Sterling & Stone Story Studio, and along with partners Sean Platt and David W. Wright hosts the weekly Self-Publishing Podcast, openly sharing his journey as an author-entrepreneur and publisher.

  Johnny and his family are thrilled to finally call Austin, Texas their home after far too many years of planning to move and complaining about life in northern Ohio. You can usually find him hanging out at www.SterlingAndStone.net.

  For any questions about Sterling & Stone books or products, or help with anything at all, please send an email to help@sterlingandstone.net, or contact us at sterlingandstone.net/contact. Thank you for reading.