by David Beers
He came to very slowly, the darkness inside him lit by the outside world. It felt like the slowest sunrise to ever occur, as if the world nearly stopped its spinning. Yet it came all the same, and that was all that mattered. The darkness lifted and Bryan looked out into the world for what felt like the first in a lifetime.
His parents lay on either side of him, and he recognized the three of them lay in their room. He didn’t move, but just stared up at the ceiling, blinking sporadically. He didn’t know if he had been sleeping, only that he couldn’t remember how he got here. He remembered his mom, remembered watching Morena tie her up with his hands, and remembered leaving the house. He didn’t remember coming back, though.
Bryan sat up as his body finally came back to him, the need to use the restroom pressing on him. He scooted down the middle of the bed, trying not to disturb the two lying on either side, and went to his parents’ restroom.
“Bryan?” his mother said from the other room. “Bryan, are you up?”
It only took a second, but then he heard her trying the doorknob. Old habits died hard, he supposed, as he had locked it absentmindedly when closing the door.
“Yeah, just give me a second.”
“Oh, God.”
He heard her start crying on the other side and more movement as his father got out of bed.
“Bryan? Bryan, are you okay?”
The questions came then, but Bryan didn’t answer any of them. When he finished, he flushed the toilet and stared out the window in front of him. They were banging on the door, truly trying to get in, but he only wanted to remember. What happened, and why was he here? Something inside him felt wrong, though he didn’t know what it was. He thought if he could remember, he might be able to understand, though.
“Bryan I’m going to kick the door in if you don’t open it right now,” his father said, though the stress in his voice might was nearly enough to crack the wooden frame.
“No,” he said, turning around and unlocking it. He opened the door and his parents grabbed him, barely taking time to look, just grabbed him and pulled him in as if he would float off into the sky without them holding onto him. His mother cried, her tears transferring to Bryan’s neck, and his father too—though he did a better job at wiping them away.
“Are you okay?”
The questions again, firing at him with barely a second in between each one.
Remember, he thought.
“Thera,” he said, the word rolling off his lips slowly.
“Thera?” someone asked, someone holding him, though Bryan paid no attention to the question or who asked it.
“Is Thera okay?” someone asked. Bryan ignored the question though, ignored the others that came next.
He was remembering.
Thera was dead.
She lay in a hole that Michael and he built years ago, a hole that was never meant to be her grave. A hole that they built for fun, but one that now housed only pain. And Morena. It had been real. She had been real. She was real.
For the first time since waking, Bryan felt the unsteady floor beneath him, the constant vibration that hadn’t ceased since he opened his eyes.
He saw her, Morena, standing out in the middle of that blackened ring and remembered the ground cracking around her. Remembered it falling in, revealing heat and light shooting up from beneath. Terror rose in Bryan, terror so large that the Tower of Babylon would have looked minuscule in comparison, terror that would have reached a god if one existed in some heaven above.
Tears streamed down his face—hot, burning. With questions still flying around him much the same as the bullets had in that forest, he interrupted them all.
“We have to leave. We have to get out of here. Now.”
* * *
Kenneth Marks sat on a chair in the corner of the room with his legs crossed, keenly aware of what the people around him thought. He wasn’t a mind reader, but their body language said more than their mouths would ever dare. He watched their eyes, how Rigley’s darted and how Will’s moved slowly. Jenna was on her computer, the only one besides Kenneth Marks truly engrossed in her work.
The others watched him, even though they thought he didn’t know.
He talked, but it was mostly mindless chatter. Things to keep the room from turning into complete silence. He was waiting on a call, to understand what happened with the infantry that lined up outside Grayson. The talk in here didn’t matter in the slightest, but it did allow him to keep having fun with Rigley and to start understanding how he might enjoy this Will fellow as well.
Will was an interesting one.
He wasn’t anything abnormal; he definitely fell within the appropriate range of someone with his background and childhood. The interesting part was how Kenneth Marks could use him. He understood Rigley, through and through, and barring some new source of information, nothing would change there. Will, though…Kenneth Marks needed to devote some serious thought to understanding the best way to have fun with him. He rarely devoted serious thought to anything, but he wouldn’t waste this opportunity.
“Oh, will you pardon me for a second?” he asked as the phone in his pocket chirped at him. He pulled it out and put it to his ear. “Yes, General?”
The words came through the phone and Kenneth Marks’ excitement grew. He didn’t move, didn’t show a single facial expression, but was beginning to feel like a child the night before Christmas. This kept getting better and better.
“You don’t say?” he asked. “So what is going on down there now?”
He listened, categorizing and strategizing simultaneously. He did have a job to do here, one that he took seriously—or as seriously as someone like Kenneth Marks could take a job—and what the General said was making that job sound like it might be a serious challenge. Plans needed to be made, because he did need to put down this little uprising, but the new development meant his own fun could grow exponentially. Rigley Plasken would go for a ride, perhaps a long one, but certainly not a boring one.
He had to balance his fun with his job, though.
“Would you mind sending over that video you have?” he asked. He looked around the room for a brief second. “Would you mind sending it to the phones in my nearest vicinity as well? You should see them attached to mine. Thank you, General.”
He hung up.
“Well, at the risk of being a bit late, we’ve made contact.” Kenneth Marks smiled, the best one he could put on, the one that would woo panties off women at any bar in the world if he so desired. “You’re all going to get a video showing what this contact looked like. I think it would be a good idea for us to view it together, yes?”
Rigley reached into her pocket, pulling out her phone. Will only looked at him, not moving.
“Mine's ready. What about you two?”
Rigley nodded and Will took his phone from his pocket.
Kenneth Marks didn’t plan on watching his phone. He planned on watching the others as they watched theirs, but when the video started playing, Kenneth Marks lost himself in it. He didn’t look up, didn’t look away from the satellite images of the men choking like all of them had swallowed a bone. He saw the somewhat fuzzy image of the creature cloaked in green, flying thirty feet above the ground like Superman. He watched as the tanks’ missiles appeared out of nowhere, flying so fast and then stopping immediately. He saw the same green color that floated around the creature infiltrate the missiles, and then watched as they crashed back down to the ground.
Fire erupted everywhere.
The creature wiped out the whole division in perhaps thirty seconds. He looked into his phone and realized there wasn’t a single person alive, that the only thing still living from the encounter was the creature not of this planet.
Kenneth Marks looked up from his phone at the two people across the room. Wonder danced in his eyes, wonder and questions that no one here could answer. Except for maybe the first.
“So, Rigley. This is what we’ve let loose?”
*
* *
Kenneth was talking, but Will wasn’t listening.
He wasn’t even looking at the man.
He kept replaying the video. Over and over.
Will had missed his shot. He planted his feet, raised his weapon, aimed, and pulled the trigger. What did Bruce Lee once say? I don’t fear the man that has practiced one thousand kicks a hundred times, but the man who has practiced one kick, ten thousand times. Something like that, and Will had practiced that one, singular kick, ten thousand times. Still he missed. Left. The goddamn bullet went left.
And this was the result?
Again and again he watched the creature stop the tanks’ shots, stop them and send them right back as if it was catching a baseball and throwing it to the pitcher.
What could stop something like this? Had Will unleashed the world’s end by missing that shot?
He looked up for a second, letting Marks’ words filter into his mind. The man was talking to Rigley and in one complete moment, Will realized he hated Marks. Will realized that he would kill this man if given the chance, shoot him and take a nap right after. It was clear what was going on in this room, clear to Will at least. This is what Rigley feared, this is what made her run and cry and lose control throughout the operation. This man and what he was doing right now.
Tormenting her.
The questions he asked, the opinions he posed, every one of them dug at Rigley in a way that they couldn’t anyone else.
“What do you think we need to do?” he asked.
Will looked over to Rigley, now sitting on the bed, her own phone discarded next to her. She wasn’t concerned with what the video showed, because that’s not what she feared here. She had never feared the infection in Grayson. She feared this man.
What Will didn’t understand was why?
Marks turned his eyes to Will’s then, just as the thought moved through Will’s head. He felt a chill roll down his spine like someone dripping ice water down his back.
“Will, you’re awfully quiet. What are you thinking?”
His mouth suddenly felt like he tried to swallow a gallon of sand. It wasn’t fear but an impossible feeling that Marks already knew what ran through his mind. That Marks pulled him into this conversation at the exact moment he wanted to, and that while Will hadn’t paid any attention to Marks, he was definitely paying attention to Will.
“You keep asking her what’s next. I’m wondering what you think we should do next.”
Will held the man’s eyes and watched the joy bouncing around inside them. There wasn’t a single ounce of seriousness inside the man, all of him playing with the cleverness a cat must feel when pawing a mouse.
“I’m glad you asked,” Marks said.
* * *
Kenneth Marks entered the hotel room reserved for him. Jenna passed behind him, moving to hers, neither of them saying anything to each other. Kenneth Marks closed the door and stood in front of it, statuesque. He looked into the dark room, but didn’t bother turning on any lights. He looked, but saw none of it.
He looked at the creature that flew above men as if they were merely ants. The green cloak wrapping around it, seeming to be a part of it, actually more like skin than any kind of cloak. The beauty of it, of the creature. No one in the other room had spoken of its beauty, because everyone besides himself was too concerned with the damage it doled out—as easily as a lunch lady handed out tater-tots in a cafeteria. Everyone in the room feared it, feared what it would do, and in that fear, they missed what it was.
Kenneth Marks walked into the room, taking his jacket off and hanging it up in the closet to his left. He closed the closet and went to the curtains across from the bed, pulling them back, and revealing Atlanta to him. The lights of the city poured into his room, fighting back the shadows.
They would need to evacuate the state. There wasn’t any way around it. The President would lose his mind and some international leaders might try to get involved, but keeping people in this city—or any other in Georgia—meant too many eyes on something that no one should see. He would let the storytellers concoct a rationale for why the state needed to be evacuated. His job was to end the threat, not contain the information about the threat. Someone else would need to handle that.
End the threat.
He didn’t know if a neutron bomb would work on the thing he saw. He didn’t know if anything would work on it, but he knew he wanted to make Rigley use the bomb. Or he had.
Kenneth Marks had never in his life felt attachment to anyone or anything outside of his own enjoyment. Yet, looking at the video, he felt a stirring inside him that he didn’t understand completely. Even now, an hour later, with plenty of time for his mind to digest the feeling, he wasn’t quite sure what to think. His mind formed two paths before him, one that he should follow and one that he was beginning to think he wanted to follow.
Evacuate the state and bomb the foreign entity.
Or.
Talk to it.
The stirring in him, though he couldn’t be sure, might be kinship. There wasn’t any real emotion combined with it, only a thought that perhaps Kenneth Marks had met something he could identify with. Something that flew over men and destroyed them as humans did insects. He saw greatness in that video, even if everyone else in the room saw a threat. He saw something that felt like…home.
He wanted to make actual contact. He wanted to speak to it, to converse, and to see if the feelings inside him were correct. If perhaps he had met something in this universe that matched his intellect, his detachment from the trivialities of this life.
He knew what he needed to do, but doing that would eliminate any ability to see if those feelings inside him meant anything. Now, bombing the entire state would lead to less enjoyment.
What to do, what to do?
But the decision had already been made. He needn’t do any calculations in his mind to understand which path he would choose. He had already chosen it. The moment he saw that magnificent creature, he knew. To hell with the rest of this planet. He would have his fun.
They were going back into Grayson.
88
Present Day
Michael listened as Bryan spoke. Listened as well as he could.
Things had progressed.
Michael could think of no other word that described his own state of mind. Such a detached, uncaring word.
Thera was dead.
Julie’s parents were dead.
Some kind of alien walked in the forest.
And only the most basic of emotions rolled through him at all. A twinge of sadness at Thera, though he understood what her death meant—that he would never, ever speak with her again. Julie, the girl he traveled through all of this with, she now sat next to Bryan, trying to get as close as she could. Michael felt no attachment, no togetherness from what they went through. His father, the only one who seemed at all concerned about him, could have been a piece of furniture.
The colors were leaving now, though Michael still saw them. To him, it appeared as if they had finished exploring this world, and now needed to be somewhere else. They moved slow, as if there was no set time they needed to be there. Michael tried to focus on his friend, but it was hard to pull himself away from watching the colors leave.
He wanted to tell the people around him, wanted to tell Wren. He tried earlier, but it went nowhere, because whatever these things were, no one else could see them. He tried to explain, tried to make Wren see what was in front of him, but it only ended with his father thinking Michael was dealing with PTSD.
Maybe he was.
Even that thought didn’t perturb Michael, though.
Because whether this was PTSD or there were actually innumerable ghosts made of extravagant colors swimming around them all, he couldn’t pull his eyes from them. So many colors, and none of them the same. Different shades, even if only minutely, so that when Michael thought he couldn’t possibly find another shade of blue, it would float by him.
Most of them
passed through the house now, through walls and windows as if the structures didn’t exist.
He watched the orange color though. It wasn’t moving like the rest. It paused near the ceiling, and though it had no eyes nor body, Michael thought it was looking at him. How many different versions of orange had he seen today? He couldn’t count them, but he knew this one. The one that wrapped around his hand, the one that touched him.
It remembered him.
It moved slowly, just as slow as the others trying to leave the house, but this one headed toward Michael. It passed through other colors and other colors passed through it, but the intention was clear. Michael was its end goal.
He didn’t move, didn’t even blink, and finally it paused directly in front of his face. He could see through it, see the wall behind it, but yet felt he was looking at something very much alive. Something with intelligence, at least enough to recognize and remember him. Enough to decide it wanted to come back to him—these things weren’t following directions, but moving with free will.
He breathed in and as he did, the orange cloud moved with the air, following it through his nose. For a single moment, perhaps less than a second, panic gripped him. He nearly stopped breathing, but then the panic left, and he sucked in the orange as he had every other breath in his life.
Bryan was speaking. Telling them what happened. Telling them they needed to leave.
Michael loved Bryan. He wanted to listen. Wanted to be there for everyone next to him. But he couldn’t. Because something was happening. He felt it moving from his lungs to his bloodstream, flowing into his muscles and bone. Through his brain. A pinprick of great light appeared in the middle of his head, like a hole into heaven. Warmth flooded out of it, warmth almost too much to handle—but not quite enough to burn. It grew, and as it did, Bryan’s story faded away. The colors around Michael faded away. Life as he knew it faded away until there was nothing but that great light shining in every crevice of him.
