Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  I stifled the sigh building up in my body. “What’s the problem, Jed?”

  He answered, “I’m out of a job…temporarily…on administrative leave.”

  He was a cop. Out on administrative leave usually meant he’d done something questionable. Or been accused of it, anyway. With Jed, it usually meant he’d actually done it, but the department found there had been extenuating circumstances.

  I sucked in my breath, let it out. “So, what happened?”

  Jed’s voice got louder. I pulled the phone back from my ear and turned the sound down while he ranted and shouted. I didn’t want to go deaf. He unloaded his version of the story on me: “I pulled over a couple niggers…”

  I rolled my eyes. God, why did he have to be that way? We both came from the same rough background. What made him so damned close-minded and bigoted?

  As he went on, his voice slurred. He’d been drinking, again. Big surprise there. I’d been wondering lately if he sometimes went into work drunk. He said, “They were all nervous-like…”

  Yeah, I’d be nervous, too, if I were them, knowing my brother. I was going to interrupt, realized it would do no good, let him continue. I just wanted to know how bad things were with him, if there was something I needed to fix.

  He went on, “So, I’m thinking cocaine, or that cheaper flakka stuff that’s on the street these days. I take a look at their car: an old, beat-up Chevy Impala. I take a look at them. Driver’s wearin’ a torn sweatshirt. The other guy’s wearin’ dirty jeans. Yeah, I’m thinkin’ flakka, gravel—that stuff. These guys aren’t exactly rollin’ in dough.”

  I popped my cell phone into the holder on the dashboard, put the jeep in drive, and headed out to the airport. This was obviously going to be a long story while my brother tried to show off his detective skills to his big sister. You know what? I hate being a mother figure. If our own fucking mother hadn’t…

  OK, I wasn’t going to let my mind go there. I focused on the road. I tried to focus on what my brother was saying. I want to ask what flakka or gravel were. Two different things or two different words for the same thing? I started diagramming his sentence, trying to figure it out from the grammatical structure. No way I was going to ask him. He’d just go on forever.

  As I pulled up to a red light and stopped, he was saying, “I tell them, ‘Let me see your license.’ Mr. Torn Sweatshirt reaches for his back pocket. Then he starts giving me lip. He says, ‘What did I do, Officer?’ I tell him, ‘Never mind that. Just give me your license.’ I’m watching his hand for a gun when, suddenly, there’s a flash of metal coming from the other side of the car. His buddy was pulling a gun out of his jacket! It must have been a gun. What other kind of shiny metal thing do you pull out of your jacket? I reacted. I shot them both.”

  My heart started racing out of control. My hands started shaking. Afraid I was going to pass out behind the wheel of my vehicle, I said, “What do you want from me, Jed?”

  He said, “Well, I could use some money. Stella don’t work. She stays at home with the kids. Her bein’ a good mom’s the most important thing to us.”

  Ya know, if you’re asking me for money, you probably oughtn’t bring that up again. I’d made my life choices. I didn’t want to be a mom right now. Maybe later. I’d spent my twenties earning a Ph.D. and getting a job as a college professor. Building a stable life brick by brick. On the other hand, he’d married his high school sweetheart two days after graduation. She was four months pregnant. He’d managed to stick with training to become a police detective, but his life was a mess. Anger management problems, for sure. I’d started wondering about alcoholism. I would have wondered about drug use as well except he was always so hostile toward anyone who used them. But who knows…

  I asked, “Aren’t you on paid administrative leave?”

  With a distinct hostile edge to his voice, he said, “Well, yeah, but I’m used to overtime. I’m not sure how we’ll get along without it. I got four kids to feed. And you know Alice needs medicine for the ADHD.”

  The ADHD? Did he really know anything at all about his daughter’s condition?

  I asked, “Have you thought about getting another job while you’re on leave? Maybe work at a grocery store or paint houses or something?”

  He said, “I’m a cop, Cora! I just have to wait until after the hearing; then I can go back to work.”

  I didn’t have time to argue.

  The image of the two men he’d shot—blood and flesh spraying over the car interior, splashing onto the windshield, embedding itself in the car seats—flashed through my mind. I tried to block it out. I thought of flying saucers and interviewing people in the Roswell compound.

  I thought of people drinking poison.

  With bad memories resurrecting themselves like ghosts in my brain, I tried to bring the conversation to a close. I said, “How much do you need?”

  Jed’s voice got lighter, more cheerful. He said, “Can you send me a thousand for now?”

  Jesus. I was a college professor, not a rock star. I thought about my checking account. It would still have a balance if I moved some money over from savings. I said, “Sure. I’ll send it sometime tonight.”

  My brother said, “Awesome! Well, it’s been great talking with you.” Then he hung up. The click of him disconnecting was jarring. Not even one word of thanks. That was Jed. Some things never changed.

  Before I realized I had started crying, I felt the warmth of tears trickling down my face.

  Damn. I wished I could absolve myself of responsibility for him. My baby brother. My goddamn fucking baby brother who could blow the brains out of people who he constantly judged through the lens of bias and discrimination and his own dark sense of self-loathing.

  2

  We got to LAX an hour before takeoff. I preferred to arrive two hours early, but that just wasn’t possible this time. We’d gotten the go-ahead from Liam with very little time to spare. He’d been trying to get us into the Roswell compound for months. When one of their leaders finally said yes, he didn’t want to give them a chance to change their mind.

  Security was especially tight. Police were walking around with submachine guns. I’d never seen that before. There were also a lot of TSA canine teams. I’d seen the dogs before and always assumed they were brought in to sniff for drugs and explosives.

  Juggling suitcases and backpacks, we rushed into the airport terminal, printed out our tickets at the kiosk and checked a few bags. Then we walked as quickly as possible to the security line.

  The first TSA person we passed reminded me of a strict librarian. No smile. Her hand covered in a blue glove shot out in front of us. “Tickets.”

  I shifted my backpack from one shoulder to the other and fumbled in my pocket for the ticket I’d just shoved in there.

  When I looked up, I noticed her staring at me with steely brown eyes. It was a bit unnerving. Gave me the feeling I was a suspected criminal. I tried to shake it off. Her job sucked, I told myself. Maybe she was at the end of her shift, tired and irritable. I smiled and said, “Here you go.”

  She took it. She stared at me as though trying to make lasers shoot out of her eyes and snapped an order: “I.D.” She could have asked for that upfront. Pulling the backpack off my shoulder, I unzipped the front compartment and fished out my driver’s license.

  Grabbing it, she looked back and forth between me and my picture. I started sweating under my armpits. Did I still look anything at all like that picture? The expressions I had on my face in all my DMV photos—because they took them with something like a half-second warning—were always a cross between deer caught in the headlights and scary grimacing lady. And, oh shit, was that the picture from when I had tried putting rainbow streaks in my hair?

  Yup. It was.

  Finally handing my papers back to me, she said, “You should get a new photo taken with your present hair color. Otherwise, you’re just asking for trouble.”

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from rolling my eyes
and saying, “Yes, ma’am, but my middle name is trouble,” in the most sarcastic tone possible. Instead, I just thanked her for her advice and apologized for not doing it sooner. The atmosphere wasn’t normal. The vibe of fear hung in the air as palpable as poison gas.

  I waited for Nat to go through the same process.

  Waving a blue glove in my direction, steely-eyed librarian said in a tone saturated with annoyance, “Go. Go on.”

  There was no way I was going to get separated from Nat. I wanted to make sure we both got on our plane. I said, “We’re together.” That sounded awkward. We weren’t together together; we were just traveling together.

  She smirked and turned to Nat. She gave him much less of a hard time.

  We had three more sets of TSA inspectors to get through. One at the bottom of an elevator taking us up to the main security checkpoint, one at the actual checkpoint, and one at the place where bags are screened and bodies scanned.

  Nat got pulled over for a random testing of his hands and full-body search. I looked away to give him some semblance of dignity. He didn’t seem too bothered by any of it, just seemed like he wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.

  As soon as I stepped through the scanner, the alarm went off. Nine times out of ten, this happened to me. There was always something I hadn’t thought of. This time, it was my cargo pants. Too many metal rivets and zippers in what must have been an overly sensitive machine.

  The body search was rougher than anything remotely acceptable. The burly woman patting me down didn’t warn me where she was going to put her hands. She patted me down hard, then grabbed me in the crotch. Bitch! I didn’t have any drugs in there, but I suddenly felt like I could use some.

  When we finally got on the plane, I looked through the booze menu. As soon as we took off and were allowed to place orders, I got myself a couple larger bottles of wine. I knew I needed to pace myself. I didn’t want to get sloppy drunk on a business trip with Nat. I ordered some snacks and a movie to pass the time.

  Before watching paid entertainment, I turned on cable news. More reports of UFOs. Lots of fear. The sightings this time were over a stretch of forest in Oregon. Most of the sightings were in isolated places. Very hard to verify them and certainly a place where one’s imagination could go wild.

  We had a four-hour-and-a-half flight, including a one-hour-and-twelve-minute layover in Phoenix. As soon as the wine came, I poured myself a plastic cupful. It always seemed strange to pour wine into plastic, but they certainly weren’t going to provide wine glasses in steerage class.

  Nat ordered coffee. As soon as the stewardess handed it to him, he proceeded to dump two packets of sugar and some fake cream into it.

  More tired than I had thought, I slipped into a nap after two cups of wine.

  I was awakened by something.

  People were looking out the windows on the starboard side of the plane. A bunch of people were standing in the aisle, holding onto the backs of seats, leaning over the people seated there and pointing out the windows.

  Every once in a while, a loud gasp erupted from the crowd.

  A woman started screaming, “We’ve got to get out of here! Where’s the stewardess? Get the stewardess! Make her tell the pilot to fly in a different direction!”

  A man yelled, “Stewardess! Stewardess!”

  A steward came hurrying up the aisle from the back section. He said, “We’re talking to the pilot. There’s nothing to worry about. Everyone, please sit down! It’s not safe for you to be standing in the aisle.”

  From the back of the plane, a little boy started crying. Between sobs, he shouted, “They’re going to shoot us down with lasers! All the UFOs have lasers, Mommy! Big lasers!”

  Then a calming voice, obviously his mother: “Shhhh. It’s OK. These ones don’t have lasers. They’re friendly.”

  Nat was standing, leaning into a space between people across the aisle from us, looking intently out the window.

  A steward put his hand on Nat’s shoulder and said, “Please sit down, sir.” Then he moved on to the next person, delivering the same order.

  Sitting back down, Nat dropped his tray table from its upright position. He grabbed his coffee off my tray where he must have placed it when he got up to take a look.

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus. I said, “What’s goin’ on? Did you see anything?”

  Nat took a sip of coffee, then said, “Just a flash of silver. It could have been anything. Maybe a plane flying too close to us for a brief moment, I don’t know.”

  Suddenly, screaming and gasping arose from the passengers again. This time, people stared out the windows on the port side of the plane, where we were seated. A bunch of people from across the aisle stood up and leaned into the open spaces between seats. A young guy in his early twenties wearing a T-shirt with the words The Truth is Out There! emblazoned on the front leaned over Nat and pointed to our window. I had closed the shade before going to sleep, so I could lean my head against it. He said, “Hurry! Open up your window!”

  I started to wake up. The words on his T-shirt: an expression from the X-Files. Oh, right. This was a crowd headed for Roswell. Of course, they were going to believe that every metallic flash of light was a UFO.

  It’s never good to defy a true believer when they’re revved up with fear. I sighed and opened the shade.

  I leaned away from the guy leaning into our space. I peered out into the darkness as Nat moved his cup back over to my tray, so it wouldn’t get spilled.

  At first, there was nothing out there except a fog of clouds lit up by the lights from our plane. My guess was that’s all the true believers on our plane saw. Light on the backdrop of the clouds served as a kind of Rorschach illuminating the viewer’s own mind. I saw plane lights and clouds. Others saw alien spaceships.

  The longer I stared, the sleepier I felt. There just wasn’t enough out there to capture my interest.

  In that twilight state right before sleep, my mind flooded with strange, random images. My life as a little girl back in the compound in Utah. The survival drills. The times I had to crawl through a long tunnel on my belly to practice escape should the military come to round us all up. The night I had to watch a woman give birth, so I’d be prepared to deliver a baby in an emergency situation when no one else was around. Fear gripping me around the throat as I watched in horror. I was nine. I prayed I’d never get pregnant if that’s the result. I worried I might get pregnant because I had no idea how it happened. I had a general idea from the animals we kept, but I wasn’t exactly sure how that translated to humans. After the memories, random images of babies being taken away. Babies with green skin and large haunting eyes. Buildings and forests burning. Floods overtaking cities, swallowing them whole. Violent storms and monstrous ocean waves buffeting people around like kites in the wind.

  I stifled a scream. For a moment, it seemed like I’d descended into madness. Then it cleared, like the sun coming out from behind clouds after a storm.

  A stewardess approached the guy leaning into our aisle, peering out our window. She said, “Please, sir, you need to sit down.”

  At that moment, the plane shook. A tall, lanky woman standing next to the seat behind us lurched forward and spilled the Diet Pepsi she was holding onto the back of Nat’s shirt.

  He whipped around. “Goddamn it! Can you please sit down?”

  She apologized profusely and went off to find her seat.

  Handing Nat a pile of napkins and a bottle of water, the stewardess whose hair and makeup still managed to look perfect this late in the rather tumultuous flight, said, “I’m so sorry,” as if she were the one responsible for soaking him in sticky soda.

  Mumbling, “No, no, it’s fine,” Nat grabbed the napkins and water and started dabbing at the soda stain.

  Ping! The fasten seat belt signs lit up.

  A steward came on the speaker: “We’ll be experiencing turbulence as we pass through a windy area. Please stay in your seats and keep your seat
belts buckled. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to get up.”

  Attempting to lighten the mood, I leaned over and said to Nat, “It looks like something shit on your back. Something with rather liquid diarrhea.”

  Never failing to level up a joke, he replied without missing a beat, “Yup. It’s the secret ingredient in all brown soda.”

  Nat gave up trying to remove the stain. Instead, he just leaned back and shut his eyes.

  3

  By the time we landed in Roswell, my head had cleared. I’d finally managed to take a nap on the second part of our flight from Phoenix. I had also drunk lots of water after worrying the wine might have gone to my head and affected me more than usual on the first leg of our journey. The most eventful part of the second leg was some old guy complaining about the food and a baby crying for about half an hour. Other than that, no problems.

  We rented a Land Rover, so we’d have plenty of room for gear and could travel over rough terrain if needed. After throwing all our bags into the back, we headed out to the place Liam had rented for us. The drive was long. Gradually, we left the artificial lights of the city that mostly slept at night. During the day, Roswell was a tourist destination filled with people searching out museums and shops. But at night, those places were shuttered and the streets so deserted, it seemed practically a ghost town.

  As the artificial lights dimmed, the moon and stars popped more brilliantly against the dark sky. While I drove, Nat turned on the local radio. They were covering the story of our initial plane flight. Apparently, a number of passengers had called into CNN and MSNBC and their stories were now going viral. Of course, Roswell news would report anything UFO, but especially if it made the major cable news channels. Somehow, that made it seem legit.

  Nat laughed. “You think anyone recorded it with their cell phones?”

  I shrugged. “Probably. Doesn’t everything get recorded these days?”

  Opening a can of Diet Coke, Nat said, “The medium is the massage.” He took a swig of soda.