Burning Midnight

by Will McIntosh

  Sully tried to think. They needed a plan; they couldn’t just run blindly from these things until they were exhausted.

  The storefront window broke with a crash. The creature burst into the store and came right at them.

  Hunter yanked Sully’s hand, pulling him toward the long service counter. Sully sprinted after her; they dove over the counter and landed on the floor. An instant later, Dom and Mandy appeared, farther down the counter. The creature would be too big to reach them in such a narrow space, but its tentacles could. They needed to find better cover.

  When the creature didn’t immediately appear above them, Sully ventured a peek over the counter.

  It was gone. It had moved on.

  Deeper inside the building, someone screamed.

  “Why didn’t it come after us?” Sully asked. It seemed important to understand, if they were going to survive.

  “We’re not Lemon Yellow,” Hunter said under her breath.

  “What?”

  “That’s what the Gold thinks. The creature’s tips were Lemon Yellow, so it’s attracted to Lemon Yellow.”

  Sully gaped at her. He had no idea what she was talking about. The thing wasn’t going after Lemon Yellows, it was going after people….

  Then it registered. “You’re saying they sense the spheres that people burned?”

  Hunter swallowed, nodded. “It’s all about colors to them. Remember how I see them? The parents—the big marbles in the sky—they’re like that. They can’t see or hear or smell, so we’re invisible without the colors. These things work the same way. That’s why they’re so clumsy: all they sense is the colors—the marbles people have burned.”

  What the Gold was saying lined up with what Sully had seen of the creatures—they were running into things as if blind and deaf, but went after people as if they knew right where they were. Before Christmas, Sully hadn’t burned a single set of spheres. Neither had Hunter. Now, if the Gold was right, Sully could be eaten by creatures that had tentacles tipped with Mustard, Cream, Aquamarine, Chocolate, Periwinkle, Turquoise, Olive, or Seafoam Green.

  “Does the thing inside you know how to make this stop?” Mandy asked.

  Hunter shook her head. “It doesn’t understand what’s going on. They’re just children. They—” Her eyes widened as she stared at something outside.

  It was a minivan chased by a creature with Army Green tentacles. The minivan flew around the corner and slammed into the back of a UPS truck parked in the middle of the road. The front of the van crumpled.

  The creature paused at the driver’s-side door of the van, then moved on.

  “We have to get out of here,” Dom repeated.

  Sully eyed the UPS truck that the minivan had crashed into. When the driver took off, would he have bothered to take the keys?

  No way.

  In fact, exhaust was spewing from the tailpipe. The truck was still running.

  Sully pointed out the truck to the others. They looked up and down Fifth Avenue: two creatures were in sight, both a few blocks away. One was Vermillion, so theoretically they had nothing to worry about. The other was Turquoise, which they’d all burned except Mandy.

  “Let’s go. Fast as we can,” Sully said.

  They ran. All of them but Mandy had also burned Seafoam Greens in the past week, so they were fast. Not as fast as one of the creatures, if that was what it came down to, but fast.

  Sully jumped into the driver’s seat, Hunter the passenger’s. As soon as Dom jumped in behind Mandy, Sully threw the truck into drive and gunned it, heading for the West Side Highway.

  “Sully, I’m so sorry,” Hunter said. “I was so sure.” She covered her eyes. “They’re the only thing I ever believed in. I’m so stupid. I am so stupid.”

  “Don’t.”

  He checked a passing street sign, saw they were on Fifty-First Street. The on-ramp to the West Side was on Fifty-Seventh.

  Barely slowing, Sully hung a right and headed uptown, trying not to look at what was happening outside the windows.

  “Look out!” Mandy screamed.

  Sully swerved, just missing a gray-haired man running across the street. A Forest Green creature was closing on him.

  On the next block, a trio of cops was hammering one of the creatures with automatic rifle fire. It wasn’t bleeding, but it jerked and twisted as hunks of it were shot off by the high-caliber bullets.

  As they flew past, Dom turned to keep watching.

  “Did they get it?” Sully asked.

  “It’s in pieces, but it’s still moving.”

  Sully hung a left onto Fifty-Seventh Street. He stabbed at the power button on the radio. A newscaster’s voice came on at deafening volume, speaking rapidly, breathlessly.

  Hunter turned the volume down.

  It was happening everywhere. The newscaster, at least, hadn’t connected the attack to the spheres yet.

  A creature snaked from behind a parked truck, right into their path. Sully slammed the brakes, instinctively raising one arm to protect his face.

  The impact hurled him forward; his chest slammed into the steering wheel, the crown of his head cracked against the windshield. The truck rolled to a stop.

  “Sully?” Hunter, who’d slammed into the dashboard, reached for him. “Are you all right?”

  Sully took a couple of breaths to clear his head. “Yeah. I think so. Dom? Mandy? You okay?” Mandy’s lip was bleeding.

  The driver’s-side window shattered.

  Sully shouted, gripped the steering wheel, and gunned the accelerator as tentacles surged through the broken window.

  One of the tentacles landed on his shoulder before the truck’s momentum tore it away. It sliced his skin as if the tentacle was covered in fishhooks. The tips were barbed.

  As they sped off, Sully’s torn shoulder burning with pain, he realized the tips had been Turquoise. He’d burned a pair of Turquoise spheres. Enhanced hearing. Rarity four.

  “It’s chasing us.” Mandy was watching out the window.

  Sully glanced in his side mirror, saw the creature slithering after them with remarkable speed.

  Ahead, the ramp to the West Side Highway was jammed with traffic. Four or five of the creatures glided around the cars. Sully hung a right, heading uptown. They’d have to take the avenues.

  He was surprised traffic wasn’t worse. Maybe that was understandable, though: most people’s instinct would be to retreat to inner rooms or basements, where the creatures couldn’t reach them. That’s what the people in Holliday’s had seemed to be doing. The only people in vehicles were probably the ones who’d been there when the creatures struck.

  He checked the mirror: the Turquoise creature was falling behind. It wasn’t as fast as a truck, thank goodness.

  As Mandy and Dom pulled out their phones, Sully dialed his mom with one hand.

  “Sully? Are you all right? Where are you?” Sully’s chest tightened at the sound of her voice. She was safe, at least; she’d wanted nothing to do with burning spheres after Hunter explained what they were.

  “We’re on our way. We’re okay. Mom, we screwed up. We screwed up so bad.”

  “Just don’t let those things get you. Don’t come here, head into the country. They’re saying there aren’t as many in the country.”

  “I’ll call you when we’re out there.”

  As he hung up, he saw he had missed a call from Holliday. Maybe they’d be safer with him. He had bodyguards with guns.

  Sully hit redial.

  “Where are you?” Holliday asked.

  “In a truck, on Eleventh Avenue.”

  “You see how stupid you are? Do you see what you’ve done?” Holliday sounded unhinged.

  “What do you mean?” Sully said. “You tried to burn them, too. We didn’t know this would happen.”

  “I hope they get you. I hope one of them eats you, and you’re inside that belly screaming your lungs out and crapping your pants.”

  “Same to you!” Sully shouted into the pho
ne. “And every single one of them is after you, so good luck with that!” He disconnected.

  “Let me guess who that was,” Hunter said. Out of the corner of his eye, Sully saw her wiping tears from her cheeks.

  “My mom said there aren’t as many out in the country, so that’s where we’re headed.” Sully had no idea how they were going to eat or where they’d sleep.

  “I don’t want one of those things to eat me,” Hunter said. “I know I deserve it, but I don’t want to die like that.”

  “You don’t deserve it,” Sully said. “You did this because you thought it was going to help people. You weren’t doing it for yourself.”

  Dom and Mandy didn’t chime in, but maybe they were too preoccupied watching for monsters.

  Mandy leaned forward, looked up through the windshield. “Look at that. Oh, my God, look at that.”

  Sully followed her gaze. One of the creatures, a Cranberry, was snaking through the air as if gravity was nothing, heading toward a Cranberry moon. The sight made Sully want to crawl under the seat.

  Hunter’s sharp intake of breath made him start. “The Gold is getting it now. It understands.”

  “Well, we don’t,” Dom said. “You think you can enlighten us?”

  “They’re harvesting people and delivering them to the parents. The spheres are markers, like dye in our blood, so the harvesters can find us. They’re bait. Nothing but bait.” Hunter folded, her head sinking to her knees. “The Gold can’t believe it. They thought they were children, but they’re nothing. They were dropped here for us to burn so these things would be able to locate us.”

  At the moment, Sully couldn’t muster much sympathy for the spheres, but he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t have one of them inside his head.

  “At least we understand what’s happening,” Sully said. “Sort of.”

  “Because, why wouldn’t we believe the aliens? They haven’t steered us wrong yet,” Mandy said.

  “Mandy, come on,” Sully said. “We’re in this together.”

  Mandy gestured at the windshield. “Do you see what’s going on out there? I warned you. Don’t tell me to come on and get with the team.”

  “You had to push it,” Dom said to Hunter. “You just had to push it.”

  A booming explosion overhead rocked the truck.

  Dom looked up through the windshield. “Jets attacked a moon with something bigger.” He kept watching. “It doesn’t look like it did anything.”

  “If they’re made of the same stuff as the spheres, nothing is going to damage them,” Sully said.

  “We have to call someone,” Dom said. “The police. The FBI. We have to tell them what we know.”

  “How does that help anything?” Sully asked. “They’re hitting them with everything but nukes.” If they called the authorities, they’d all be thrown in prison. Hunter would be sent to some top-secret military prison.

  “I don’t know how that helps anything!” Dom shouted. “I don’t know anything. At this point I don’t even know if your girlfriend is human.”

  “Dom,” Mandy said, “hold on.”

  “No. This is bullshit. I’m calling the police.” He lifted his phone.

  Sully stabbed a finger in Dom’s direction. “If you make that call, you’re walking. And I don’t think you want to walk right now.”

  “Pull over!” Dom shouted. “Go ahead and pull over.”

  “Shut up!” Mandy shouted over him. “Everyone shut up. Maybe we do need to call the authorities, but let’s think this through. We don’t have to do it right this minute.”

  Out the window, Sully saw an Army Green creature swallowing a kid. A kid.

  “I don’t blame you for wondering about me,” Hunter said to Dom. “For a while I wasn’t sure I was still me. But I am. The Gold’s inside me, but it’s separate.” She pointed an emphatic finger at Dom. “Just like all the things inside you are separate from you.”

  Dom didn’t reply. Sully had almost forgotten that, in a very real way, they were in the same boat when it came to housing aliens. The only difference was Hunter could talk to hers.

  “My parents are freaking out,” Mandy said, looking down at her phone. “They want to come and get me.”

  “Do you want me to drop you at home?” Sully asked.

  “No. We’re safer in the boonies. I convinced them to head up the interstate, that we would meet up later.”

  —

  The thick forest on either side of the highway was reassuring. They hadn’t seen one of the creatures—the harvesters, the Gold called them—for almost ten minutes. Mom had been right; there were fewer in the country, just as there were fewer spheres hidden in the country. Sully had also noticed that more harvesters seemed to be the color of common spheres—Army Green, Rose, Lavender, Lemon Yellow. If that was true, it was good news, because Sully, Hunter, and Dom had mostly burned rare, high-end spheres. Theoretically, the harvesters couldn’t sense Mandy at all, although Sully didn’t blame her for not wanting to bet her life on that.

  He was glad he’d gotten a chance to talk to Mom before the phones went out. According to the radio, everything was going out—phone, electricity, Internet. No one was hanging around to keep services running.

  “Does the Gold know what the moons are doing with the people the harvesters bring them?” Sully asked. He spoke quietly, because Dom and Mandy were asleep in the back, among undelivered packages.

  After a pause in which, Sully assumed, Hunter consulted the Gold, she said, “It has something to do with us being intelligent. That’s why the spheres are hidden and have to be burned in pairs—it’s so you have to be intelligent to burn them.”

  And only intelligent species could ultimately figure out how to open the gate and let the harvesters in. They’d triggered an elaborate alarm, or maybe a dinner bell, although Sully didn’t think the moons were actually eating the people the harvesters delivered. Although, what did he know? Maybe they were.

  “They do the same thing on other worlds,” Sully said. It wasn’t a question. Of course they did. They were setting traps on billions of worlds, wiping out intelligent species all over the universe. Maybe there was some chemical in the brains of intelligent species they fed on, or they used the beings they captured as slaves. Maybe it was simpler than that: this could be an invasion. They could be taking over.

  It occurred to Sully that the damned Mustard spheres he’d burned were probably allowing him to make these connections. Would the old Sully have been able to spin theories about what was happening so quickly? He hadn’t been a dummy before, but there was no denying his mind was nimbler now. Insights came effortlessly; before he had to sweat to make things click.

  As they approached the next exit, Sully checked the gas gauge.

  “We’re below empty; if we drive for much longer we’re going to run out of gas.”

  “Okay,” Hunter said.

  Sully put on his signal.

  Maybe the gas stations out here still had gas, but he doubted it. The news said at most of the stations the pumps were either tapped out from people trying to outrun the harvesters, or they weren’t working because the power was out.

  At the end of the exit ramp, a sign indicated that Rhinebeck was to the left. Sully turned right, drove for a mile, and pulled into a dirt lot in front of a small concrete building, the office of Lomeli Sand and Gravel. There were piles of stone and gravel all over the grounds.

  Mandy climbed into the front, looking alert, as if she hadn’t actually been sleeping. “You think we’re safe spending the night in the truck? Maybe we should break into that office?” It was getting dark. Soon it would be harder to see harvesters coming. The office had small windows, so a harvester might not be able to get inside. It would also be more comfortable than spending the night in the truck.

  Sully wasn’t sure what they were going to do in the morning. Find food, water, and a gassed-up vehicle and head deeper into the country, maybe? Keep driving until they reached complete wilderness?
r />   “Let’s go inside,” Dom said from the back. No one argued.

  They broke out a window and boosted Mandy through, and she unlocked the front door.

  It wasn’t much of an office, just a room with wood paneling and a concrete floor, two steel desks, filing cabinets with a TV and portable stereo on top, a coffeemaker, piles of papers. No food.

  The stereo had a radio, so they listened to the news for a while. No one knew exactly how many harvesters there were, but there were millions. They could be stopped if you shot them up badly enough, or doused them with gasoline and burned them, or dropped a bomb on them. If you had nothing but a handgun, the newscaster said not to waste your time emptying the clip into them. Just run. She pointed out that not only was shooting a handgun at a harvester useless but also there might be people inside it. Sully hadn’t even thought of that.

  The news report also confirmed that harvesters were preying only on people who’d burned spheres that matched the color of the tips of their tentacles. They’d figured that much out, at least.

  “You were right all along, Stretch,” Dom said. “Burning marbles gives you worse than cancer. Smart girl.”

  “You could go home, if you wanted to,” Sully said. He gestured out the window. “There’s nothing out there that can hurt you.”

  Mandy was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. “I think I’ll stick around for now. If it’s safe for me to go out there, I can get food and supplies. Plus we still haven’t decided whether to tell the authorities about our part in this.”

  “Can we decide in the morning?” Sully asked.

  No one objected.

  Sully volunteered to take the first watch. He pulled one of the rolling desk chairs to the window with the best view of the road.

  As it grew dark, Sully eyed the mountains of gravel blocking his view to the left. A harvester could sneak up behind one of those piles and they wouldn’t see it until it was on top of them. Then he remembered that harvesters couldn’t see piles of gravel, and he doubted they thought in terms of sneaking up.

  He didn’t want to get eaten by one of those things. Somehow it made it worse that they didn’t kill you, that they brought you to a “parent” alive. He didn’t ever want to find out what happened when you got there. His imagination summoned vague, unspeakable possibilities that stayed on the edges of his mind, just out of reach.