The Dark Above

by Jeremy Finley

  The light.

  The light in the trees. He remembered. At last, he remembered.

  Forget Brian and Greg and their stupid game. Jerks. They can have their stupid tent; it means they don’t see what I see. What was it, that far into Grandpa Tom’s woods? I’ll get there first before they even notice it. They’ll feel bad for not letting me in.

  I hope Mom doesn’t get mad about my muddy socks. Everything’s so wet from the rain, but I’ve gotta see it. That light is so bright!

  I hear Brian, he’s calling my name. I know it’s him. I can always tell the difference between him and Greg running in the house. Brian always dragged his feet more. Well, I can run too, Brian. I’m faster than you. I beat you.

  It almost hurts to look up at it, but it feels so good. Like the sun. It’s like I can fly! I am flying! Look, Brian, I’m above the trees! Can you see me?

  The light’s gone. I’m cold. I’m in the dark, I’m somewhere else. I can’t see anything! Brian! Brian! Something’s coming. I want to go back. Brian, something’s coming—

  William staggered back, and the ecstasy struck him again. All his pleasure sensors were firing at once, resulting in a painful erection. He was protected and loved and cared for. All he had to do was step into the machine, where more joy awaited.

  He walked without fear of slipping now, even though the path was barely a foot wide. He was safe and secure.

  His mind, however, was screaming.

  It has you! It has you! Get to to the girl!

  But the drenching comfort showed there was nothing to fear, certainly not in the machine.

  It’s not a machine! It’s part of it! Flesh and metal! Blood vessels and lights and straining membranes inserting into cords. God, something’s rising—

  It emerged like a pocket of air bubbling up from a putrid swamp. As he reached it, a pod surfaced, directly beside the one containing the girl. The grime covering it began to peel back; it was large enough to step inside.

  No! No! Don’t go in! Get to her—

  He stepped in, and a rush of gas blew across his face. As he lay down on the spongy interior, the gap from which he entered had already sealed, the film on its surface thin enough to see the chamber beyond.

  Fight! Break out! It has you!

  Even when the hundreds of penetrations began to sink into his skin, he did not flinch. Somehow, there was no pain. His hair rustled across his forehead as more gas sprayed at his face, and the extreme pleasure faded to a restful calmness. The pod trembled, and he could feel it rising, detaching.

  It slowly rose, and with it much of the thick moisture that coated the pod began to slide away. He watched as the floor of the chamber faded away and a tendril, like a curving stalk of a bindweed, lifted the pod into the air, slowly turning. The walls were now a mixture of deep shadows and brilliant lights, all fully awakened.

  As the pod completely shifted, he could see the girl far beneath him in the shadow of the rising head of the creature. A single neck, as thick as a subway train, supported the feelers that erupted from its maw and the waves of tentacles flailing from beneath its scaled dome. Several of the black coils reached for him, inserting into the sides of the pod.

  He could hear the puncturing of the walls around him, and the smell of it, of rock and spoiled water, reached his senses just as the thin outshoots of the pod sank in and his skin began to stiffen. He gasped at the infusion jolting into his bloodstream, exchanging with his own bodily fluids.

  It was within him now, just as he was within it.

  And he understood. It needed him to understand, to complete its task. It needed more than a connection; it needed a complete fusion.

  His eyes closed, and opened to stars.

  Millions of them, flying past as the scientist traveled the vast deep. Inside its cocoon, carrying memories of smoke and death, of battles fought in skies among ships the sizes of cities. Of wars that nearly obliterated not only its own kind, but that of the civilizations that refused to surrender to them. Of centuries of hatred between races that showed no sign of dissipating.

  To not only survive, but ultimately conquer, a new form of warfare was necessary.

  The first scouts had found it; a planet of blue and white, its only companion a solitary moon. So it came to see for itself, traveling across the stars to finally pass through the atmosphere and into air and water. Abundant, overwhelming life. From above, the scientist observed what the others had reported: a race of people with inferior yet remarkable intelligence and, vastly more importantly, containing a complex origination system.

  The world was covered in different landscapes and temperatures, proving an ideal location to test how their weaponry would work in various conditions.

  It chose a great barren canyon, its craft obliterating a once-towering mesa and landing in its sudden absence, altering itself it take its form, down to the very grains of clay and stone. Once completed, the scientist sent forth a telepathic message to the others: Bring them to me.

  Hiding behind the storms that were necessary to blanket their arrival, the testing began almost immediately, conducted on the very first of mankind to be taken. More people, then; samplings, dissection. At last, a single, successful manipulation, with extraordinary results: The very building blocks that gave them existence, the strands of molecules and chromosomes, if adjusted and twisted, affected the makeup of the very air around them.

  The experimentation continued. Few survived. But those who did, who had been changed themselves, each commanded a power: fire, storms, death, and disease.

  The testing began, small, slow. The specimens released into varying locations. From within the canyon, it watched their environments, seeing how each was affected by their return. Diseases spiked. Storms leveled homes. Murders increased. Even the food, for many, became deadly to eat.

  And the scientist was pleased.

  No longer would it be necessary to send their kind into battle, to eviscerate valuable natural resources in order to wage war. Once perfected, the very populations they wished to remove would be taken, altered, returned, and activated.

  In the end, all their enemies would ultimately kill their own kind.

  But almost immediately, the scientist discovered the fatal flaw. The abducted, when their weapons were activated, could not withstand it. Their fragile brains faltered, leaving them incapacitated. And when the time came to see how far the specimens had traveled, the scientist made an astounding and enraging discovery: Even their pathetic governments had realized the danger they posed and corralled them, limiting the scope of the sampling.

  Furious now, the scientist ordered all of them removed, even the one—the boy—who it intended to thrust them into the next phase of testing. None of its kind knew what it had done, how far it had gone, to complete the task.

  Take them away, the scientist had ordered. They may still be of use.

  It was much later when the scouts—the scurrying, smaller of its kind that quaked in his presence—alerted the scientist that a few of the abducted were not in their ships. Including the boy named William.

  Enraged, the scientist retreated into its work, knowing full well that the boy was alive. Only it, and it alone, could know this.

  Longer experiments, more extensive manipulations, taking year after year, examining the strands of DNA that they had taken from the boy himself. The conduit was too valuable to abandon.

  Then the scientist unraveled its mistake, the fatal miscalculation born of pride and arrogance. It ordered the scouts to begin the reaping once again.

  The boy would be grown now.

  This time, nothing would be left to chance. No great swaths of people. Only four of each population, on each border of the population. All of them with the correct alterations, tied to the boy.

  It pained the scientist to realize what must be done, as distasteful as it was. It was now time to see if its theory would, in fact, prove to be the missing link.

  The scientist itself would have to be altered. M
anipulating its own genetics, it intertwined the boy’s DNA into its own.

  It would be shunned amongst its own kind if any were to learn. But when the work was done, the connection was complete. Even the boy’s dreams belonged to it now.

  Each of the newly taken was brought to him. Their manipulations had been improved as well, a sliver of the boy’s genes added to each.

  When the four were in place, on the corners of the populations, it reached out for him in the darkness of his mind. And in turn, the boy had found the others.

  When the scientist willed the activation, the boy, in turn, willed it. The newly abducted not only survived but thrived.

  It was careful with the boy’s mind, as pushing him too far, too fast, threatened to ruin him. Already, he could feel how he was struggling, at times, with the inability to breathe. In time, it learned how to push him to the others around the world. And when all the others were linked, the time had come to bring the boy in.

  There was just one glaring problem: Despite their genetic and telepathic links, the scientist could not control him while he was awake. Influence, yes. Move him to a central location amongst the four to enrich their connection. But the boy would always wake from the dreams untouchable, as of late, for days on end.

  It was why the girl had to be released. To see if, in fact, she could lead him back. If the emotional attachment to her sibling would serve as a beacon.

  Unexpectedly, the boy began to usurp the scientist’s control. Reach out to others on his own accord. And most troubling of all: The boy’s physical touch of anyone that shared his DNA enabled him to disarm their weapons as well.

  A defiance that could no longer be allowed.

  * * *

  “They’re in range, General!”

  “Do not hesitate!” General Wolve shouted. “Fire at that mesa with everything you’ve got—”

  “General, please!” Kate grabbed his arm. “William could be our only chance—”

  “Realize this,” he said, pulling her in closely. “We’re all dead. Do you understand that? If we don’t do that, your mother, the others, will kill us all. All those people taken all over the world into those ships fifteen years ago, they’re returned. And they’ve been placed all over the world, in all the gaps between. This is what they intended. Unless we take him out.”

  Kate looked helplessly at the screen where a feed of the mesa was coming in from a satellite. From its vantage point, she could even see the F-15 fighter jets emerging from every direction.

  “Fire!” the general bellowed.

  They watched the jets approach, knowing they carried Tomahawks.

  Oh, William.

  She gasped as the planes suddenly exploded, all at the same moment.

  “What the hell is that?” the general screamed. “What just happened? What fired on them?”

  “Sir, it doesn’t look like anything did,” the soldier at a computer stammered. “It looks like they just smashed into something.”

  “There’s nothing to hit, only fucking air!”

  “Unless when those drones went down, when William’s phone died, something went up that we can’t see,” Kate said. “Something those pilots couldn’t see either.”

  The image on the screen just showed the undisturbed mesa, with the burning remains of the wreckage lying on the edge of an imperceptible barrier.

  * * *

  The boy felt the intrusions into his body. There was a dullness, a numbness. When a sudden infusion ripped into his body, there was at last pain, his eyes burning in the light.

  He didn’t remember his name. Only that it considered him a boy. And it was both angry and pleased with him.

  He saw them. All of them, all of their faces at once. Four in every large population, in smoke, in storms, in death and disease. But now there were hundreds more, in clusters, standing together. Who were they? Why were their eyes that milky white? Who was the beautiful woman with brunette hair? The girl with black skin? The old woman with curls of white?

  He knew that, just like him, they had no thoughts, no memories, no concerns. Blissful, unmoving. Waiting.

  For him.

  It guided him. Beyond their minds. Into the fabric of their bodies, their veins, their cells. Deeper still, to the foundation of their existence.

  It was there that the irregularities of the molecules were apparent, as if each of the strands of curving phosphates had been infected. While the purity, the original designs of the DNA strands, were still intact, they had been corrupted, twisted. The irregularities were visible, like a plague that was still not yet complete.

  A flicker of memory flashed, of what he had done with the four in igniting the weapons within them. He understood it now; the very essence of how he, alone, could command them all. He was the missing part of the distortion.

  With his intrusion, he would complete the disjointed nucleotides, just barely, enough to awaken what had been placed within them all.

  All it took was a blink, and it would be done.

  Who was the woman? Who was that girl? The old woman, who was she? Why did it pain him to see her most of all?

  He was inside her. She felt familiar somehow. He was somehow not just within her, but part of her. Where she began, he ended. What originated in her, continued to him. Not a mother. A grandmother.

  “Nanna,” he whispered.

  Nanna, Lily, Ryan, Juan. And Jane. Beautiful Jane, weary from passing through the storm in the government cells beneath the earth. Climbing the stairs to escape, wet and cold. William had reached her, and she responded in anger.

  “This is not me. This is not me. I want it out of me. I want out,” Jane had said.

  He remembered what he came here to do.

  William felt the monster’s approval as he took control of all the DNA strains in all the abducted. Just a slight adjustment, and the activation would occur.

  Instead, he began to break.

  Beginning with the molecules, then the chromosomes, smashing the pervasive alterations. In doing so, he sensed how his own DNA had been placed inside the infected strands, and obliterated it.

  To the furthest edges of the world he reached, finding the four in each population. From one nation to another; a flash of light sprinting around the globe. The relief from all those who had been taken washed over him as he then began to exit their bodies, their original DNA strands almost gleaming in response.

  But before he could completely break free of them, the rage from the creature blasted him like a furnace, so hot it felt as if he were on fire. He felt the infusion again, this time a hundred times stronger.

  Everything faded. He was a breath away from becoming a husk of himself; a mindless tool to once again reach into the abducted and twist the very fabric of their being to reignite their weapons.

  His hand, however, had already reached behind him and pulled out the gun.

  There should be five bullets. All he needed was one.

  “You’re free, Jane,” he whispered.

  He raised the gun to his own head, and fired.

  SEVEN DAYS LATER

  TWENTY-THREE

  The two vans pulled up to the small house deep in the palmetto trees.

  “Are you sure this is it?” Stella asked, stepping out.

  “It’s the address,” Kate responded. “Mom, are you sure—”

  Lynn was already out of the van, walking towards the house.

  “Is this it?” Anne called out. Chris had hurried around to open her door.

  “My God, it’s hot here,” Brian commented, stepping out and shading his eyes.

  “Son, your seventy-nine-year-old grandmother seems to be doing quite fine in this heat. Greg, help her,” Chris motioned.

  “Hold up, Nanna!” Greg said, the last to step out of the van.

  Lynn was already at the stairs, climbing.

  The door opened, and a man with a shaved head walked out. He extended his hand to Lynn. “Hello, Mrs. Roseworth. My name is SJ Rudd. But everybody calls me Rudd.
”

  “It is nice to meet you,” Lynn said. “Please tell me…”

  “I think it’s probably best that the rest of you wait outside. She really only needs one visitor at a time,” Rudd said.

  “Mom?” Kate asked, her two sisters coming to stand beside her. “Are you OK?”

  Lynn nodded quickly.

  “We’ll be right outside,” Stella said.

  Rudd opened the door. The house was a typical bungalow, hidden, just as described, in the Florida Everglades. A bachelor pad, mostly. Except for the quilts thrown on the recliner and several other chairs.

  “She gets cold,” Rudd said. “Even in Florida.”

  Lynn stopped. “Does she still … remember?”

  “Oh, she remembers all right. And even if she didn’t, all she’d had to do is look at you. You’ll see, the resemblance is pretty uncanny.”

  “Where is she?” Lynn’s voice was thin.

  “Right through here.” Rudd walked down the hall to a pair of French doors. He knocked softly on the glass. “Miss Blue?”

  He opened the door, and the woman inside turned her wheelchair.

  Lynn raised her hands to cover her mouth.

  “My girl,” Blue said softly.

  Lynn walked across the tile floor, her eyes swimming. She then rushed over, leaning down to embrace the old woman gently.

  “I won’t break. I’ve waited my whole life for this,” Blue said. “Did you know it rained last night? A bad storm, my girl. Lightning. Lightning took you from me. And you see? It brought you back.”

  Lynn sobbed. Rudd scrambled to bring over a chair, but Lynn was already on her knees.

  “Mama. You’re really here.”

  “I always have been,” Blue said, petting her hair. “He did it, in the end. Steven. That sweet man. He brought you to me.”

  Lynn uncurled her hand, a flash drive in her palm.

  “Did you bring them, Lynn? Your daughters? Your grandsons? My family?”