They were watching him. He knew they were.
Behind the doors, peering through the blinds, a curtain furtively sighing back and away. Security cameras on, recording and streaming. They were always watching, watching and whispering.
The whispers would spread, leaping out ahead of him and behind as he walked through the neighborhood, burning like a fire all around him. He could read their whispers, right there on the community page, every evening after he came back sweaty and tired after a day of knocking on doors.
“There’s this creepy guy going through the neighborhood knocking on doors. Be careful!” And a picture of him, taken from a second story window, then another as he walked down the street.
“This guy might be a Jehovah’s Witness, but im not sure he isn’t just casing the neighborhood. He stopped right by my garage for a minute before moving on to my neighbor’s house. Should I call the police non-emergency number?”
That one with another short video clip, taken from a security camera, with a time and date stamp.
Then there were others, just comments.
“Man I hate when people rub their religious sh*t up in my face just keep it to urself.”
“This guy again? Came thru last month with sum other dude bangin on doors Man sumbuddy shud call the dam cops its a niusance.”
Then the likes and the comments, and every once in a while, someone who he knew from town would chime in. “Yeah, that’s Darren, know the guy, not a creeper, just, you know.” “I met him the other day, kind of weird, waaaay too into Jesus, not a bad guy.” And then the negative comments, and the moderator would chime in, and most Wednesdays and Sundays that was all he had to show for eight hours on his feet.
But Darren had a heart for evangelism, he always had, and God had put a call on his life to bring His Word to a lost generation. And he wasn’t the one bringing people to Christ. The Father drew the sinners, the Spirit convicted them, and it was Christ who did the saving. He was just a vessel.
“You’re really on fire for Jesus,” or so he’d been told back at Moody, as he poured out his best for the One who gave his all. His pastor, his teachers, everyone back in Kentucky, they’d all seen it in him, that fire for the Lord. He’d raised money, planted churches. He’d been to Ecuador, to Ghana, and sung praises in jubilant Spanish and open-throated Twi in dirt-floored rooms filled with the sweet scent of sweat and dance-tossed dust.
He was sweating now, but the smell wasn’t nearly as sweet.
The air hung hot and moist and heavy, the sun pressing into the dark fabric of his black t-shirt. It was a gift, a gift from Rick for wearing during praise worship. It was a good gift, a strong relevant shirt that was bold about the Gospel and magnified Him in ways that touched the heart of the youth.
But Good Lord, it was hot in the direct sun. He moved into the shade of an oak, and felt the heat of the day linger in the cloth.
He checked his old tablet, whose screen showed a map of the neighborhood. He touched the screen, inscribing a circle around the townhouse he’d just left with the tip of his finger. Circle meant no answer. An X meant an answer, but a clear negative. An X was shaking the dust of that house off of your feet, and shaking the Devil’s doubt from your soul. And a check and link through to a name and an email? A check and a name was the Spirit at work in the life of a seeker.
He’d designed this little app himself, a simple overlay of images from real estate mapping and an off-the-rack contact database. It sold pretty well, ninety-nine cents at a time, a little supplement to their meager income.
He still had the tracts, of course, eye-catching little comics that showed the plan of salvation. And the cards, with contact information and worship information and web and social media information. But that wasn’t enough. The mission field had changed.
Lord have mercy, had it changed. Like California changed during the Great Drought. Like the Midwest changed during the Dustbowl.
He panned out, then swiped his fingers across the map of the town, a streak of salty sweat across the touchscreen. It was a sea of circles and crosses, rows of circled Celtic crosses marking his failure like gravestones. Twenty months, Lord Jesus, it was twenty months already, and the soil of this field was hard. He’d never experienced such a challenging mission, never imagined there could be so many hearts so worldly and hardened against receiving Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
He sighed, said a soft prayer, and walked to the next door. It was a red door, the paint slightly faded, set above chipped and damaged concrete steps. He knocked, firmly but not too firmly, planted himself an unthreatening distance from the door, and waited.
Nothing. No sound of movement, no rustling, not even the barking of a dog. Nothing.
He knocked again, shave and a haircut, two bits.
There, the sound of movement. The first stirring in five houses.
A face, shadowed, peered from the bay window, then withdrew. There was more movement, and the door opened to set itself firm against a taut chain.
She was older, squat and doughy, maybe in her late fifties, her eyes bleary. The television was on in the background, braying out the manufactured conflict of some reality show. Around her the smell of alcohol and weed, thick and skunk-heady. It was two thirty seven on a Sunday afternoon.
“Can I help you?” Her voice was furtive, unsteady, suspicious.
Darren smiled, a genial mouthful of uncorrected horse-teeth bright in his long angular face.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Ma’am. I’m Darren Shifflett, and I’m from the New Life Covenant Community Church. I’m just out getting to know our community, and hoping to find out how our church can be of service to…”
“Yeah I already got a church, so, yeah, not interested.”
Darren’s smile broadened. “I’m so glad to hear that! Where do you…”
The door closed, the face withdrawing into darkness. There was the sound of a deadbolt being thrown.
“Have a blessed day,” Darren said.
That was the longest conversation he’d had in an hour.
Circle. Cross. Twenty two today. Seventeen circles, five crossed circles. Eighteen to go.
Darren wiped the sweat from his forehead, sorted his hair, and moved on to the next soul in need of Christ.
She sat in silence before Sunday evening worship, the five of them in a circle in the dim light, the rich warm baritone of her husband’s voice filling the room with the names of those they were holding in prayer, and she struggled not to cough.
The air in the old sanctuary had just the tiniest flavor, just a hint of the cloying, heavy must of mildew, and Julie felt it tickle her eyes and lungs. She breathed in, breathed out, slow and intentional and fighting against that maddening itch. She couldn’t sing, couldn’t offer her prayers, couldn’t add her voice. But it was what it was, and she wasn’t a very strong singer or speaker anyway, so really, it didn’t matter.
Her soft, small hands sat in her ample lap, clenched tight in prayer. If she clenched her hands tight, she coughed less.
She’d told Darren, on that first day when they looked at renting the building, that it bothered her a little bit. She hadn’t wanted it to be that way. When they’d arrived in Poolesville, they’d prayed and prayed over where the Lord was leading them, and she knew Darren was all excited about having found such a pretty little country church. He was sure it was a gift from God when he’d found out it’d rent out space on a Sunday evening, so close to town. It’s just a couple of miles, he’d said. He was sure, so sure it was an answer to their prayers. Darren’s certainty was so joyous, so childlike, and his face lit up like a little boy. It was hard for her to resist it, always had been.
Only on the inside that sweet little church smelled like the basement of her grandma’s house in Mobile, of decay and tightening bronchioles and inhalers.
“Do you think you’ll be alright with it, honey?” he’d said. “The Lord will provide another space, if this one isn’t part of His plan.” He’d looked at her straight, and then smiled that big honest smile of his. “If we set up a ministry in a space that folks can’t breathe and sing and pray in, Julie, we’ll be building on shifting sand. You know I get all excited and miss stuff like that. It’s a blessing that you notice.”
He meant it, too. For all of his enthusiasm, Darren always honored her, made space for her, treated her as a helpmate even when she felt weak or uncertain.
God help her.
She’d breathed in and out, in and out, drawing and tasting the air like well water, and walked around the church as Darren talked churchy-talk and rental costs with Pastor Williams. It was the carpet, she was sure, decades old, bunched and stained. Or maybe the ceiling, brown and chaotically speckled with water stains, stains that were older still, centuries old. Or maybe the faded velvet cushions, filled with padding that had long since turned to dust.
But she could handle it, sure, it’d be fine. That’s what she’d told him, when he’d asked.
Just a little itch in her chest, barely anything at all, not even enough to worry about.
“And Lord, we just ask, Father God, for your continuing blessings on this family and our ministry,” Darren intoned. “Just hold us in your gracious mercy, Father God. Keep us on the path you’ve set, and just make us...keep us...just filled with a heart for the unchurched and the unsaved.”
Her hands tightened, as her lungs begged for just one, just one little cough.
“We pray this on the Blessed Name of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.”
“Amen,” said Julie, faintly, and then she coughed, a sharp deep bark. Oh, it felt good.
“Amen,” Mary mumbled, but the sound was lost in mom’s coughing.
It was seven twenty eight on Sunday, and here they were again, just them still. Praise worship was supposed to start at seven fifteen, and it was just them. On a good day, no, on a great day, the old white wooden church was a third full, eighteen human beings in a room. But the Rogers were in Tulsa for something or other, and the Johnson’s baby was sick again, and the Donaldsons were just always late to freaking everything.
And the DiAngelos? Sometimes they came, sometimes they didn’t. She liked it better when they didn’t. Maybe. She wasn’t sure. Mr. DiAngelo was friendly, so friendly, a big hairy bear of a man, and he was very funny and super smart. He always paid attention to her, wanted to talk and listen, and sometimes he didn’t seem like a grownup at all.
But he was so touchy. Always hugs. Always a hand on a shoulder, or brushing an arm, or sitting right next to you all up in your face. Mary didn’t like anyone that close, but he was so nice, she didn’t want him to feel bad. It was kind of confusing. Mrs. DiAngelo was nice enough, too, but so quiet, and she always cried in worship, always cried about everything.
So the five of them, and maybe four others. Next to her, Ommy shifted in his wheelchair, his thin legs and arms all angles and tension. He gave a faint cry, his head lolling, his mouth working and straining.
“Hey, hey, what’s up,” she whispered, running her hand along his back. He liked that, when he was feeling whatever it was he felt. It was so hard to tell with Omri. “It’s OK. It’s OK.” He stilled, just a little, at her touch.
Dad got up from the chairs he’d circled for the prayer, and went over to where his little battered portable amplifier sat in front of the pulpit. It crackled and hummed when he turned it on, but it sounded pretty good. He’d had it at their last church, which was way bigger, and used it when they were in Ghana. She kind of remembered it from there, when she was little. It was dinged and dusty, just like she felt sometimes, but it still worked.
“Let’s get ready to receive Jesus into our hearts,” he said into the microphone, as he always did before beginning the praise. His guitar hummed softly under his warm voice, and they began to sing an old Chris Tomlin song, one of Dad’s favorites from when he was a kid.
The screen was blank, something wrong with the projector, so the Powerpoint wasn’t running, but it didn’t matter. They all knew the song by heart anyway.
She let herself drift, from one chorus to the next, over the bridges.
From the back of the room, two more voices joined in, a rich tenor and an alto, then two more, another tenor and a sweet, delicate soprano.
“The Lion and the Laaaamb, the Lion and the Laaamb,” the room hummed, richer and more resonant. John and Jerri, Rick and Patti, the Donaldsons and the DiAngelos, they’d come in together, and the little room was suddenly full of sound. Praise was happening, really and truly, and she heard the smile change the timbre of Dad’s voice.
Good praise always made Dad happy, which is why Mary liked it.
Darren shifted, softly, quietly, and Julie did not wake. He was sleepless again, awake and unable to shut himself down. The day had been another day, another blessed day of life, and yet it held his attention. It teased at him, an ant on the flesh of his back, a mote itching the surface of his eye, begging to be rubbed to redness.
Sleep would not come.
Praise had been good, and his message had been what it was, but the bible study afterwards had been so awkward. It was Isaiah he was preaching, about loving those who are different, and it had seemed like the little group was listening. Of all of the prophets, Isaiah was his favorite, because he was so anointed with grace, so musical, so poetic. And the Lord had begun his ministry with Isaiah, reading to the gathered synagogue about setting captives free. It was such a powerful foreshadowing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There were amens, and then the chairs had all circled around, and they’d sung their last three praise songs together, just his acoustic guitar and the sounds of their voices.
It was beautiful, and his heart had sung at the simple small fellowship. And then, well, then they’d prayed, and shared their witness.
And there, the pebbles gathered in his shoe.
There was Patti’s face, soft like a child, flushed with fervor. “But these young girls, Pastor Darren, you know how they dress. Tiny little skirts, all that makeup, taking selfies and Instagramming and making themselves look like they’re prostitutes. It’s those feminists at college, teaching girls that sex doesn’t mean anything, that it’s nothing, and I’m sick of it. It’s as bad as the homosex agenda, all over the schools, everywhere, and..”
Her face had blotched, a spattered pink watercolor, and the tears began. The familiar, familiar tears.
“..And I just don’t...I’m so afraid for…the lost and the...” Her throat had choked off the words, and she was crying. Patti cried at every Bible study.
Every. Single. One.
Rick hugged his wife, a strangely awkward sidelong hug, the one he gave her whenever she wept.
Rick spoke, then, and he seemed to get it. He referenced what Darren had been saying, tied it in, showed he’d been listening. He dropped in quotes from Paul, about not judging those outside the church, because that wasn’t our job. 1 Corinthians 5:12, he’d said, and Patti’d given him a strange look, pulled away a little bit.
Rick knew his scripture, and when he spoke, what he said was charming, funny, smart, in a way that showed he understood the heart of the youth. He talked about not judging others, about approaching everyone with forgiveness, about how that was the Gospel.
Yet there was something to it, something that Darren could not place. An echo from a far away room, a whisper in a cave. Rick was so earnest in his speaking, so calculatedly perfect. Maybe it was that neither Rick nor Patti would ever open up about their last ministry, just saying it was too painful.
Perhaps it was in the way Rick’s eyes would play across Mary, quickly, furtively, testing his speech against her reply. And how they would linger just an instant longer. About how he always seemed to be talking to her.
Darren was sure he was imagining it. Sometimes.
And then it was John talking, big John, face tanned from his construction work, close-cropped military cut, shoulders broad, too much of him for the little folding chair.
“Patti’s kinda got something. We’ve gotta do something, take a clear stand against the powers that are corrupting this generation. Unless we give them the uncompromising truth, they’ll just keep drifting. I mean, Mary goes to that high school. She’s part of this, every day, right there, getting that agenda shoved down her throat. I think we should be front and center in resisting it. I was listening to Pastor Steen on the Hour of Truth, and...”
Darren had known what was coming, had heard it before from Jon and Jerri. They watched a whole bunch of televangelists, men and women who sat in studios and prayed earnestly for the cold glass stare of the cameras. Men who marched proudly across large stages, filled with admiring thousands.
Some great ministry had been done through the media, some wonderful ministry, but there was some terrible, selfish, shallow, angry stuff out there too. Folks knew that if you just got people riled up and angry, got them afraid and feeling attacked, it was a great way to get them to do what you wanted.
If you had people to hate, people who were the enemy, people who you could be against, that helped too. Was it the Gospel? Was it loving every soul as a lost child of God, seeing in everyone the promise of Jesus? It wasn’t.
And everyone was angry these days, everyone. It was too easy, all these people who thought the only thing Jesus ever did was overturn tables and take a whip to people.
Darren sat, and listened, and tried to stay in Christ’s grace.
“..and there’s going to be a Prayer Warrior’s Army,” Jon had continued, “just this next week. Two hundred thousand strong, gathered to defy the devil at the doorsteps of the schools where he’s spreading his lies.”
John’s gaze had pressed into Darren, probing, testing.
“What do you think, Pastor? I think we ought to be a part of it, right here in town. Stand on the steps of that high school, and let the devil know we intend to contend for souls, not just roll over.”
Darren had seen his daughter, right there. Checking her, the only young one, the only one under thirty who bothered to come, even if it was just for her dad. The next, lost generation. Her face, a closed cipher, but Mary’s eyes were down and she was withdrawing, just like her mom when things got negative. He could tell what she was thinking, about how flat and dissonant and ugly that all sounded. How much damage it would do.
He saw that in her. Maybe that was all Rick was doing, just seeing how the Youth were responding. Maybe.
Darren had taken a deep breath.
And he had tried. Tried talking about prioritizing grace. Tried talking about reaching out to the lost and the broken, not kicking and cursing them. Talking about the dangers of taking up stones, about the power of the Adversary, turning us all against each other. Talking about focusing on our own sinfulness. Casting those truths out wrapped in words, the best he knew how, out of the heart of God’s Word.
As he lay there, still in the darkness, Julie’s quiet breathing by his side, he heard his own words, an echo in his memory, playing across the gathered faces of those around him.
He saw the circle, that tiny circle of friends and family, their faces, perfectly attentive. Their hearts, perfectly locked away and unknowable.
Omri let out a soft cry, just a little one. His jaw worked in an agitated, faintly circular motion, stopped, and reversed. Julie knew it, knew the sound of it, knew what meant. She had maybe ten minutes to finish shopping. Five on the low end. Twelve if she was lucky.
He was trying to be so good, but there was only so long he could go.
She picked up the pace, rolling through the Harris Teeter a step and a half faster, the Technibilt cart clattering along willingly. She’d talked to Bill Chesterton about leaving it there for when they needed it, and he’d been good about it. Not every store manager would have been, but he had a niece with Rett Syndrome, and he knew how hard it was.
It had been so much easier to get the shopping done when Ommy was with the County during the day, but a lot of times that just didn’t work out. Like Sunday night after praise, when that fever had come on, and he’d had to miss the program be home with her, and it’d gotten worse and worse.
By Tuesday morning, when the fever still hadn’t broken and his breathing was all raspy and raggedy, she was afraid of another trip to the ER, a trip they couldn’t afford, not with all those bills piled up from everything Ommy needed to live. All those services, all that support, and still the calls came and the bills came. She and Darren negotiated and renegotiated, borrowed and begged, and it felt like they were sliding down a mountainside, scrabbling for handholds that failed again and again.
But this morning, it was gone, the totally inaccurate in-ear thermometer chirping back one almost-normal reading after another. More importantly, his little forehead was no longer burning under the soft touch of her lips. That kiss, her mom had taught her, was a mother’s built in thermometer.
Another cry, less soft, more insistent. Seven minutes. Ommy could only go so long, and just driving the twenty minutes from Poolesville to Darnestown, the whole process of transfers and moving, that wore on him.
There was that grocery store in town, the one that had finally settled in after the family owned store had been driven out of business, but it was all locally sourced and organic and sustainable at five times the price. For the folks in the eight hundred thousand dollar homes in the new developments, it was fine, just a blip in the budget. But she and Darren couldn’t afford it. And some of what they needed could be found at the Dollar General, but not all. So forty five minutes, round trip, including getting Ommy loaded and unloaded.
She had most of what she needed for Wednesday Circle, most of it. And what they’d need for the week. Generics and cheap bulk chicken and rice and beans, greens and store brand boxes of cereal, carefully selected for thrift and nutrition. Still so much money.
Julie wheeled the cart towards the checkout lines, feeling it judder as he shifted and moved. She prayed, softly, her voice soothing, half to Ommy, half to God. Please Lord Jesus, let us get out without too much of a scene. Please, Lord Jesus, not that today.
There was no line at register four, and she muttered a word of thanks at the small, welcome blessing.
“Hey Julie,” said the large smiling woman behind the counter.
“Hey, Janine.”
“Hi, Omri,” Janine smiled. “Feeling better?” Omri turned his head, uttered a slight cry that may have been a reply.
“He is, thanks,” Julie replied. Janine was one of her Facebook friends, must have seen her post from yesterday. Janine had come by New Covenant once or twice, about six months ago, but she had three kids, and wanted more things for them to do. And that thirty thousand member church over in Virginia was so easy to drive to, with a kids program that put Disney to shame.
They made small talk as Janine rang up the groceries, each chirp of the scanner another notch against their last standing credit card, another dollar ninety nine, three fifty five, seven ninety nine. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
“That’ll be one ninety seven eighty seven,” Janine smiled. Julie plugged the card into the chipreader, and waited. Approved.
Julie’s mind whirred, made the calculations unbidden. There was another three hundred dollars of credit remaining on that card, on which they owed now almost twelve thousand seven hundred dollars. Two other cards, maxed out at ten thousand apiece, paying the minimum. Seven hundred and forty two dollars in the bank.
And sixty seven thousand dollars in unpaid medical bills. Three hospitalizations in the last twelve months, and that didn’t even count when they all had the strep. All those numbers.
“You want some help outside?” Janine asked, as Omri’s cries grew louder.
“That’d be a blessing, thank you,” Julie replied.
“Sure thing, honey,” Janine smiled, and Julie could see a faint sadness behind her eyes.
Cart filled with bags, she moved out the opening doors, as the bagger tagged along to help her unload. Ommy’s terse bleats, closer now, more frequent, sharper and more agitated. He was hungry, most likely, or had messed himself.
His cries grew sharper still as the bagger loaded the back of their old Toyota van, and he struggled and strained as she transferred him to his seat.
She knew the looks, the stares, the disapproval there’d have been if they hadn’t gotten out of the store. She’d felt them before, from the perfect mothers with their perfect, flawless children. Their eyes averted, the whispering, the turning away of curious eyes at this misshapen, squalling creature.
Thank God that’s not me, she could feel them thinking. Thank God that’s not my child, coming from all of those eyes, all doing everything they could not to look. She could feel it.
The bagger finished up, and Julie thanked him.
Inside the van, Ommy’s cries were bright and magnified.
Julie took a deep breath, and began the drive back home. She prayed, quietly, singing her prayer as she often would when it was just her and Ommy alone. About how much God loved all God’s children.
Especially the broken ones. Especially the little broken ones.
“You’re my little miracle, Ommy,” she said. “You’re my little miracle.”
Mary couldn’t help overhear her parents talking. The three small bedrooms of the townhouse were snuggled in tight together, and the townhouses themselves had been built on the cheap over a half century before. Leaks and creaks and paper thin walls, the cheapest places to stay in this little town.
Dad had come home late from his Monday night shift at Panera, and she’d woken up when he did. He tried to be quiet, he did, but those stairs were so noisy.
And now, through the wall, she could hear her mother crying, in the way that Mom did. She was trying to talk, trying to keep it together and say something important, all at the same time.
It was a talk about money. Mom and Dad had been talking a whole bunch about money lately, when they thought that she wasn’t listening. The conversations when they were driving, where they’d say something in a way she knew they were trying to make sure only they knew what they were talking about. The murmurings from downstairs as they huddled around Mom’s old laptop with the broken screen.
Mary knew things weren’t good. When she wanted to go to that conference with all the other kids in the drama program, and Mom had just looked at how much it cost, and told her maybe they could do it her junior year.
But she saw how Dad’s old Civic had gotten dinged up in the parking lot, and they’d never ever fixed it. And how Mom’s van was kinda falling apart, and even though Dad’s friend at that garage in town cut them a break when the transmission had to be fixed, it took a special love offering one Sunday to make that happen.
And how when she asked about maybe learning to drive, Dad talked about insurance and how much the class cost. So she was going to walk, and that was that.
They didn’t eat out, not ever, not like she remembered when she was little. And most days she’d go to that church near the high school, the old one with the big hall, because they had lunch for free, and she’d go with the other kids and it was fun and free but mostly free.
She’d seen the emails from Mom to the counselor, trying to get lunches, but Dad made just a little too much money.
Dad’s voice. “I can’t get more hours, but Jewel, the job’s got to help. I mean, I’m full time now, and…”
Mom, now. “It’s not enough, Darren, it just can’t…” A pause. “..work. It can’t. That’s rent and food and gas and insurance, but, oh, but there’s so much else, I mean, Dad will send us more, he will, he’s said he will, but they’ve already given us so much. And the Mission Society, they just don’t have anything left for this year, nothing but prayers now, and Darren, we, Darren, we…” Her voice caught, seized, stumbled, and fell into wet sounds that didn’t quite seep through the porous wall.
“Oh, Jewel, I know. I know.” Dad’s voice, not low enough, comforting, always so comforting. “It’s been the hardest here, the hardest. It’s been our test, our trial, and you’ve been wonderful. We’ve just got to trust the Lord, just a little longer, just until…”
Her mother’s voice, bubbling back, loud and awkward. “Oh, Darren, Darren, it’s just...I always said, I was never going to be like this, never in debt like my brother, never...seven hundred a month this month, just the interest, what kind of...what kind of way is that to spend money people trust us with? We haven’t even been here two whole years, and it’s all coming apart. It’s supposed to be for Jesus, not for borrowing money from those thieves so we can waste our lives on some ungrateful...I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I…”
And again, silence through the wall.
“Jewel, it’s OK. You’re my anchor, my rock, you know that. King Lemuel’s wife has nothing on you. I’d just drift without you. And you can’t blame other people, can’t let the accuser into your heart, it’s so easy, I know, I feel it too, I know.”
A snuffled affirmation, inaudible, Mom’s voice muted.
The silence lingered. Then Dad again. “How long do we have? Till we can’t?”
Mom’s voice, calmer, laid it out. Mary listened, stilling herself. They hadn’t paid the electric bill for three months. They could catch up this month, but they’d have to skip the phone bill and the internet, and renegotiate the ever mounting bills for Omri’s care. If she juggled, and shifted, and sorted, and cajoled, they’d be completely out of cash and credit in…
“Three months? Just...right. OK. OK.” Her father’s voice echoed the words, uncharacteristically hollow.
There was a long pause. The darkness in Mary’s room deepened, broken only by the passing roar of a pickup truck, pressed fast down the main road of town. She listened, straining into the quiet and the deep.
Her father’s voice, solid again, himself. “Then we have three months. At least we know.”
Then the sounds of their voices, together, offering up prayers side by side, so quiet that only they could hear.
Mary rolled away from the window.
The spring musical was in five months. Her teacher’s voice, so encouraging, her friends, so excited, her world...over. In three months.
She flushed in the darkness, which swallowed the wettening redness of her face.
Rick sat in the half-light of his darkened kitchen, and tried not to open his laptop.
Jesus. Jesus help me. Jesus help me.
He’d felt it, felt it coming on after worship Sunday, fought it off. But yesterday he’d drank, and tonight he’d drank more, and he was humming, buzzing, Patti just not there all evening, locked into reruns of some stupid nineties show on her tablet. She got up when he sat to be with her, went to the study, said she was tired, she was always so damn tired. She barely ever sold any houses, just a handful in the last year, there were already realtors established in town, but she worked all the time, always pushing herself, and it wasn’t even like she’d ever been good at it, too quiet, too passive for the hustle and bustle.
His prayers had come fierce and furious, and he’d gone to all of those places in God’s Word that he knew should help him. Jesus with the Gerasene, driving out Legion. Not emptying the house and having even more devils invade it. Psalm 22, with its cries and promise of deliverance.
He’d thought, when he met Darren, that it was a new day, that he was reborn, that this was how he’d find his feet again. Darren was real. Darren wasn’t the problem. He was the problem. He was all dried straw and weeds. He was a straw man, a false man, fit for the fire.
Because Jesus Christ, Jesus he wanted it, just a little bit, Christ forgive me, I mean it wasn’t like he hadn’t done it a thousand times before, what’d be the difference, just an hour while Patti was asleep now, and I mean did it matter, it’d change nothing, nothing, God knew that, God knew his heart, and maybe it’d be a good thing, get his mind off of her, because he couldn’t think about her like that. But he couldn’t not think of her. He couldn’t. Couldn’t.
God, but she was so perfect, those dark eyes set into pale skin, that little nose dappled with freckles, those, Jesus, those breasts, so full-round and young and ripe, just perfect. Those skirts, long and demure, but you could see the curve of her leg, the skin so smooth, so smooth. And so smart, and so pretty, and her voice like an angel’s, so sweet. And she laughed at his jokes and got him, she totally got him, you know, knew who he was, knew he was really just as young as she was, at heart, not like the girls when he was younger, really, and if he told her she’d…
Shut up shutupshutupshutup.
Goddamn it, damn it, damn it. He pressed his knuckles hard into the marble countertop, harder, until there was the hint of pain, veiled in a bourbon haze.
He knew he should have told someone, should have, as soon as he started thinking about her, but he didn’t, he just didn’t because he knew it was under control, of course it was under control. Just a fantasy, just a silly fantasy, all men have them, it’s totally normal, totally.
Couldn’t tell Patti, not again, not ever again, Patti’d break, Jesus, she’d been through enough with him, barely talked to him now, it’d be over. And he didn’t talk to Jane, hadn’t been to the practice in months, though he’d not told Patti he’d stopped the therapy, no couldn’t tell her that. And of course group had fallen away once they’d moved away from Raleigh, his sponsor’s messages so easy to ignore or deflect.
He should have told Darren, told him, dammit, he was such a good man, he was a pastor just like Rick had been. And they’d prayed together, and sang together, but Christ it was his daughter, Jesus, his daughter. And he was a man, who the hell wants to hear that shit from another grown man about their own child, he’d get his teeth punched in.
But she wasn’t a child, he wasn’t that way, she was a woman, really, in every way she was it wasn’t like that.
And it hadn’t meant anything, it hadn’t, but now it was always there, always there, and he had to fight to keep it from being there, but he wanted it to be there, oh God, it was like Tyler, she looked like Tyler, and Christ he wasn’t supposed to think about her either, but she had really loved him, like a mentor, like a teacher, and wherever she was she still loved him, he knew it, he could taste her on his lips, see her so expectant, so trusting, Jesus.
Goddammitgoddammit. You old, fat, hairy god damn lying pervert. Pathetic, worthless, empty, useless liar.
Just take the edge off, just need to take the goddamn edge off, who would care, it was for the good, for the good really, all for the best, and the laptop was open, the Tor browser open, and his fingers flew over the keyboard, old remembered addresses plugged in, deep in the darkweb, deep in the place where his demons could feed so they’d leave him alone.
He slid an earbud into one ear, the other alert for the sound of Patti stirring, and the moans of his demons filled him as overyoung flesh danced its wild carnival before him.
Just this one time. Just this one last time.
Darren was moving almost without thought, a blur of motion. The text had come in, one of the college kids, “sick,” meaning too hung over to show up for his shift on a Wednesday morning. Second time this month. Lord have mercy, who does that on a Tuesday night?
He knew what that meant as soon as Jill got the text, and they were suddenly understaffed and slammed, it was going to be one of those days, and he was back washing dishes right there in the thick of the lunch rush.
Jill, sheepish, had asked him if he’d mind filling in in the back.
“Darren, I hate to, but could you…” And he’d said yes, because sure she was his friend, but she was the manager and he was the assistant manager, and that was how he was going to assist today.
Forty two, and he’d travelled the world and planted churches and preached to thousands, and he was back washing dishes. Like he had when he was sixteen at the diner, or at the SDR at Moody.
And he didn’t care. It felt good. He hummed and sang softly to himself, bluesy gospel, something to cast a rhythm to the work. It was like praying, like losing yourself in praise, because he knew that dishroom like it was a part of him. Everything had its place, everything was just so, falling to hand in the careful ergonomics of corporatized productivity.
Tayshawn had checked in, good kid, big and tall and lanky, his cornrows neatly bundled in a hairnet. “Hey man, you need me back here?” And Darren told him, no, no, I’m cool, Jill and I need you out on the floor. Tayshawn had been leery of him, leery at first, like everyone else, all so much younger. Who was this sketchy old dude?
But a job was a job, and work was work, and Darren had always thrown himself totally into everything he did. No shame in this, this is good work, no-one should ever feel above doing honest labor. He enjoyed it, and that caught on.
“You got it,” Tayshawn had said, and he’d flashed him a grin. “Damn, boi, you flyin’.” And he was.
He forgot the ache in his legs, the ache in his feet, the throb in his head, the terrible conversation with Julie that made his heart seize, forgot everything, it was just the clatter of dishes and the metallic rattle of forks and spoons and the steam and the movement.
It was perfect, this thing he could do, so simple and clear and easy. Dishes didn’t close the door in his face. A half-eaten bread bowl of broccoli cheddar soup didn’t make a commitment and then fail to show up.
When he tossed them into the racks or washed them or stacked them, they did as he asked. This is your purpose in this time, he told them with his hands. This is why you exist. They heard, and they responded.
Out on the floor, the room hummed, packed as always. And to the back the dirty dishes streamed, a rabble of plates, a mob of glasses, smeared and sticky and used and crusted. The clean dishes streamed out, cleansed and sparking, stacked and ready, order from the waters of chaos.
It was like a vision of salvation, like a dream of church, an endless glass and ceramic altar call, a steaming baptism of thousands.
He lost himself in the vision of it, until the flow of dishes became a trickle. Hours had passed.
“Darren, hey..” It was Jill, her round face smiling.
“Finally slowing down out there?” Darren took the spray, hosed the crusted food from his arms, and cast the spray across the stainless steel work surface.
“Yeah. Man. Seriously cranking today. Hey, um, can you maybe pick up a shift tonight? Alicia called, and she just up and quit, not that I’m surprised, no notice, and I’m…”
Darren wiped down the surface, and gave her an awkward smile and a shrug. “It’s Wednesday, Jill. You know I can’t. And technically, my shift ended an hour and forty minutes ago.”
“I know, but…” Jill sighed, her short frame sagging. “Yeah, I know. I just wish I had five more like you. Man. Dinner rush is going to be a beast tonight.” She stepped in, helped sort silverware.
“Hey, how’s things coming with New Covenant?”
Darren shook his head, thought for a moment. How much to share? “Slowly. It’s not easy. I mean, you know you can come out any time and worship with us.”
“Yeah, yeah, you know I’d totally come, but, like, it’s so far from me, and I don’t know I’m ready to go back to church, you know the story of that shitshow, sorry, heh, and I don’t know that Becky feels totally comfortable…”
Darren smiled softly. “Hey, it’s fine. You’ve got to find your way. God’ll lead, you just have to follow.”
She nodded, and hemmed and hawed, and then they talked about anything else, nothing and work and sports, until things were prepped for second shift best they could be.
Darren got out of his spattered outfit, put on his clean clothes, and headed out to the car. His stomach snarled, deep, rumbling. Lord, he was hungry. All day around all that food, so much uneaten. Sure, he could buy lunch there, sixty five percent discount, but that was still more expensive than the apple and the peebee-n-jay he had waiting out in the old Honda.
Two and a half dollars difference. But that was two and a half dollars they didn’t have. He fumbled for his keys, popped the door, and slid into the seat of the Civic. From the bag on the passenger side floor, he pulled his wrapped sandwich, and ate quickly.
He checked the long cracked screen of his phone, saw the texts.
AT&T, automated texts about nonpayment and outstanding balances. Two of them.
From Julie. “Ommy running 99.5 again not bad but should be home. Will drop off stuff, study at church, emailed everyon. LU”
From Mary. “Chorus tonite dad have to rehearse can’t make study. Can you come next week to the performance.” Thursday night, it was, at seven. His shift ran nine to nine that day.
And a text from Pastor Williams. “Have to talk about missing rent payment, I’ll be at the church at 6.”
What? Missing payment? What was that about? His mind struggled into gear. Lord have mercy. He had to find some coffee.
Rick sat in his chair in the call center, and the hum and chatter of hundreds of voices filled the air around him, the squawking rowdy rabble of chickens in an industrial coop.
His head throbbed, and his bones ached, ached in deep, a deep stress-anxious pain woven through the whole of him like spun cold wire drawn tight under his skin. Jesus, last night, Jesus, he’d promised it’d never go that way again, promised himself, it had been months. Ibuprofen had barely taken the edge off, shouldn’t take it while drinking, yeah, yeah, but he couldn’t work if he was in pain.
But it wasn’t the drinking that set his soul on edge, that left his body at odds with itself. The dark from the recesses of the darkweb hung in him, memories burned over memories, open like the meat of a freshly retorn wound. O Christ, not again, not this again.
“Hi this is Rick thank you for calling Verizon how may I be of service today is this in reference to Five five five one seven three two one two one.” His voice, coming from somewhere, not him.
“Who am I speaking with?” Roger. He was speaking with Roger, and now Roger was talking about upgrading, rambling on about specs, and Rick knew he had to beat the clock on this call.
And he was working Roger through it, Rick’s voice warm and soothing.
The voice that used to move five hundred people to rise up in praise.
The voice that could make a room full of kids weep for Jesus, make them laugh, make them feel that God himself was in the room, before he shat it all away, before he let himself give in, and now that promising voice of a new generation in ministry was agreeing about how terrible the website was, so sorry for the inconvenience, we’re going to make things right for you today, Roger, thank you SO much for your patience today.
He clicked his way through the menus, stalling with questions which Roger was happy to go on about, it was a conversation, they were friends and buddies, yes they were. Rick squinted away a wave of nausea, and here was the information, and it was all settled, and he was upselling, now the insurance, which of course Roger needed, and it was all on autopilot.
He felt like his bones had pulled loose from inside him, like he was an oozing nothing. Christ it hurt.
He needed to talk to Darren.
Not about Mary. Not about that. Darren didn’t need to know that. But about the darkness. About his mess. Someone had to know, this time, someone. He knew it. Couldn’t feel like this, couldn’t let this be who he was. He needed a man’s help, a Godly man, a strong man right with the world, because it wasn’t bullshit, it hadn’t been bullshit, it had never been.
“Thanks Roger for choosing Verizon is there anything more...no...well you too, you have a wonderful day.” Click and out and undertime for the transaction.
He surreptitiously slid his phone from his pocket, a violation, but the floor manager off making some announcement about the prize for the first to get to five new contracts, and fired off a text.
And the chicken coop squawking went on. There was chime, and there was the data up on the screen, and two and one and:
“Hi this is Rick thank you for choosing Verizon how may I help you today?”
It was early enough, and there should have been smooth sailing, but there he sat, one hundred and seventy yards closer to home from where he’d been thirty one minutes ago.
Darren had shut down the engine of the Civic five minutes ago, coasting forward only twice, a slow roll down the slight incline of the road. The line of brake lights extended as far as he could see, down and around the curve of the road. No point in wasting gas.
The radio said nothing, not a thing, but there must have been an accident. Must be. Couldn’t be anything else.
He was going nowhere.
There was no way to spend time in the Word, there just wasn’t, not without either rear ending someone or hearing that honking reminder behind him.
So he’d prayed, and he’d prayed some more, when that line of lights first appeared in front of him. And over the last half-hour, he’d taken the time to pray for his family, for his church, for missions, for ministry world wide, for Christians suffering oppression in the Middle East, and for everything he could think of.
But he was all prayed out, and now he just felt tired, deep and soul tired. That coffee he’d himself to at 7-11 had left him awake but feeling on edge, and he could feel himself drifting.
He was going nowhere.
Here, in the traffic, again. But in this ministry, too. So many hopes, so much planning, so much conviction. And so much prayer. Every day for months before they came, for six whole months, every day was prayer. They called on the name of the Lord, they asked for His Blessings, they offered themselves and their lives to the glory of the Gospel. It had felt so right. He’d had dreams, and all of them pointed to this ministry as being radical and transforming and a blessing. Something big was coming, it was, and he’d never been wrong before.
It felt like it was taking off, it did, for a while. After four months, they were almost twenty, then twenty five, then over thirty and he felt the hand of God, felt the souls being touched, felt the harvest coming. But then Doug Larson had gotten that great new job in Houston, and that was six gone. And Sue had run off with a guy at her office, and Marty had been so heartbroken he’d moved back to Newark. Betty had gotten mad about something Darren had said, not that she’d ever told him or prayed with him, and Stan had left with her.
The wind was out of their sails, and he felt it.
He was failing. He could feel that even more. Every ministry he’d ever attempted had flourished, had grown and blossomed. But not this one. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t grown and prospered God’s work. It was that he had compromised the future of his family.
Jewel was right, right about how bad things were. He’d known it, even before last night. There was just nothing he could do about it.
Authentic, relevant preaching grounded in God’s Word? It went without saying. Door to door for the FTF time? Done it. Presence at community events? He was at every show, every game, every event. Maybe not the events put on by the five established churches in town, sure, but he was no sheep-stealer. Social media in all forms? Yes. Professional web presence? It was there. They’d done the marketing, done the front end demographic research, done it all just by the book.
Not a bit of it was working any more.
He sighed, and let off the pressure on the Civic’s brakes. Slowly, slowly, he rolled forward a foot, then three, then ten, then back to a stop.
And Julie was barely keeping it together, and Mary was unhappy, and Ommy just...well...he was Omri. That wasn’t ever going to get better. They’d prayed and prayed for a miracle, when the doctors had told them that he would be born broken.
One of them had suggested they abort, put it out as an option. He knew they would suggest that. He and Julie had been surprisingly polite in reply, made it clear that they wouldn’t even consider it. That baby would be a blessing, they knew it.
They’d prayed and prayed for healing, for a miracle, for things to go differently. There’d been laying on of hands, a prayer chain that spanned thousands. There’d been the intimate prayers of the two of them, face to face in bed, Julie’s growing belly between them.
He was born as he was born, and they took his life as a gift.
But it was such a hard gift. It was a test, his father had said. He lets us show our love for all life, he had said. And they loved Ommy, but it was a very difficult test. Because just keeping him alive and healthy kept costing money, money they barely had.
Money they didn’t have, not if they were honest with themselves.
But he’d hoped and prayed, and prayed and hoped on Jesus and God the Father to make things right.
All those prayers, and still this was where things were. Bankruptcy. Failure. A precious but broken child, growing into a precious broken man. Every month, something new, some new thing, some new hardship. It was never the one they expected. You thought the car was the problem, but then there was an ER visit. Then another ER visit. You were sure outreach was the problem, but then you strung a couple of sentences together off the cuff in a message, and that couple that you’d been hoping and praying on and visiting for months never showed up again.
He knew it must be part of the divine plan, but for the life of him he couldn’t see how. He could feel his sense of calling waning, eroding away under the endless trickle of not-quite-good-enough. He felt the grimness slipping in under the sharp edge of the caffeine, felt himself doubting, doubting everything.
He edged forward again, a couple of feet, then to a stop.
Enough of this. A quick flick of a knob, and the car stereo was on. He thumbed his way through a random shuffle, thousands of songs, thousands, and no, not that one. Not that one. No.
Then a couple of chords, and the sharp bitter lemon twang of an Iris Dement gospel song, and he was leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms, singing along in close harmony. He played it once all the way through, and again, and then again.
Traffic started moving, just a little bit more. He was starting up the fourth run through the song, when there was a buzz of vibration and a chime.
He glanced at the screen, for just an instant. A text from Rick. “Need to talk with u. U hav time 2nite? After study?”
“I have time,” he said into the phone, and it got it. “Send,” he said. Things were going to change. He knew it.
God had to be working something.
The radiance of the modest little star bathed the rocky inner planet.
Sworls of charged particles danced filled the emptiness, a wild radiant fluid dance. The magnetic field of the planet’s iron core heaved out against the endless flow from the star, carving out its own pocket of calm.
The star’s light played through the shallow oxygen nitrogen atmosphere, dancing across the shallow liquid water oceans and the sparse, intermittent cloud tops. The line of nightfall marched over the surface, and throbbing veins of unnatural light cast themselves across the landmasses as it passed.
The spectrum of the world was filled with shouting and sounding, endless patterns of cluttering, chuddering data, mingled with probing tendrils of energy, seeking outward.
High above the surface, a mass of objects and debris, glistening, sparkling, filling near-space with transmissions.
Below them, at the tickling edge of the world, it was waves and froth and chaos. The whorl and churn of the gas trapped in the gravity well of the world teased against the void, particles bright-hot from the star, their heat meaningless in the isolated cold.
In that place between the emptiness and the sky, there was simple chaos, mindless, thoughtless energy.
Then a concussion, explosive, sudden, casting out a radiating circle of noctilucent compression waves that rang through the mesosphere.
Where nothing had been, now, there was something, and the world rang like a door bell.
The object shone, perfectly reflective, as the shock of its arrival echoed outward across the almost-void.
It was long and slender, a mirrored needle, a thing of simple beauty. The weak energies of the faint upper atmosphere pulled and played across it, but it was not part of their chaos. The gravity of the world did not touch it, for it did not wish to be touched. The pulsing, seeking energies of the world below passed over it, unable to find a purchase.
It held position, perfect, precisely geosynchronous, tracing the very faintest brushstroke of ionized particles across the skin of the world.
For a time, all was calm and changeless. Then, from its surface, three perfect copies extruded themselves, each precisely one seventh its size. They held for a moment, slowly rotating around the largest spire.
Then, the three smaller needles faded, slowly and with intent, like they were seeping through the fabric of being.
Gently leaving one place, and becoming present in another.
There’d been a buzz in his pocket, and he had checked, and it wasn’t Darren. It was a voicemail. From Patti. It had been Patti’s voice, on the voicemail.
Not crying Patti. Not muffled Patti. Not sad Patti.
It was another Patti. She was screaming into the phone.
It was screaming Patti, cursing Patti, feral, sobbing howling Patti and Oh Jesus.
“RICK you son of a BITCH you THINK I wouldn’t install a keystroke monitor, I even TOLD you I might, we talked about this Jesus Christ, it’s called a keystroke monitor, I said, you said yeah, maybe not a bad idea it’s every thing you type Christ they’re girls Rick they’re still basically CHILDREN and you promised promised me you promised me don’t even come home don’t you ever come home you worthless piece of…”
And a scream, a piercing scream of rage, and the sound of a phone being hurled and clattering and then silence.
Rick had frozen at his cubicle, his mind alight with horror, O God she knew, she knew.
“DiAngelo, no personal calls, hey, shut it down, that’s four points.” Mike, bald and bullying, walking over from the manager’s station.
Rick didn’t put down the phone, but stood, abruptly. He had to see her. He was going to go see Darren, he was going to open up, get better, it wasn’t fair.
“Family emergency,” he said, dully, his eyes glazed and watering, looking at Mike but not seeing him. “I’ve got to go.”
And Mike said something about more points and policies and grounds for termination, but Rick was walking right past him, past him like he wasn’t even there, out the glass doors, and then he was running to the car.
“Darren, it’s just that, you know, we need to know you guys can maintain that commitment.” Keisha looked at him, her look sympathetic but firm. “Talk to your treasurer, see what happened, but if we don’t have the last two month’s rent by next week, maybe renting space just isn’t the right thing for your ministry now.”
Darren sighed. She was right. He made himself meet her gaze, strong brown eyes set into the dark clay of her face under a tight frosted tangle of hair.
“You’re right, Keisha, and I’m really sorry about this. I’m going to talk with Jerri, see what happened, and get y’all what we’ve committed to get you. What we promised.”
“Look, Darren, I know it’s hard. You and me both know it’s hard. I been here seven years, seven years, and it’s just hard every day. People ‘round here get just too busy to do church, just got too much going on. I mean, you’d think, here there are thousands of folks in new homes, and you got something good, and they’d want some of that. You got your mind full of seekers, like they’re gonna come in by the truckload. But they’ve got jobs that never quit, and they’ve got kids with fifteen hours a day of karate and soccer and homework, and, yeah. If they want to get to know Jesus, they got the town churches, but mostly they don’t. Maybe they go down county to someplace that gives them what they want exactly, the pastor who never says or thinks nothing different than them. Or they just sleep in on a Sunday, because hell, they got a right to ‘cause who wouldn’t be tired? It’s a heck of a place to try to do what you’re doing, Darren.”
Darren nodded his head. “Yeah, I know. Still, no excuse. It’s no excuse.”
She smiled a wide bright perfect smile, let out a short, percussive laugh. “Hey. It is what it is. And don’t be hard on yourself, Darren. I see how you try. Ain’t nobody tries harder than you.”
Darren nodded again, tried to reply, but found the words weren’t there.
“Look,” said Keisha, moving towards the wide doors of the old church. “I gotta get home. Got things to do. But walk with me a minute.”
“Sure,” he said, and they were moving together through the wooden doors, their white paint flaking. Then across the sparse dirt and gravel towards her pickup in the gathering twilight of the late summer day.
“You’re a good man, Darren. But sometimes, you know, God doesn’t work the way we think. Messes with our heads. Lets things go ways we don’t want. Sometimes it’s a lesson. Sometimes it’s just a mess.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said.
“Look, just tell me what’s going on when you find out. I mean, you could always do the house church thing. Maybe this wasn’t right. Maybe it wasn’t the right time. Lord only knows. It’s not like I’m all mad at you. Things just gotta be this way. Lord knows, I got my own messes.”
“Yeah.” His voice, a shell.
She opened the door of her battered old Ford pickup, clambered up and in, settling her short frame onto the frayed cloth seat. “I’m always praying for you, Darren. For you and your family. I got a niece, same deal as your Omri, and it’s just so hard on his mom, every day. I feel it. You know that, right?”
“I’m thankful for that, Keisha. I really am.”
She paused, almost said something, then chose not to. “You just let me know what you hear, brother.”
And the door closed, an imperfect metal clang. The engine turned, and she gave a wave and pulled away, leaving Darren alone in the half-light.
He stood, feeling the stones beneath his feet, looking out across the little country road, over the hedges, into the lushness of well kept fields and trees. The world had taken on that sharpness that comes with the fading of day, that peculiar supersaturated intensity that makes it seem like something, something immense was about to happen. It felt potent and real and present.
All he felt was lost.
Kathy was running late. Seven ten. She was supposed to have picked up Sam from Ross and Lisa and over to Kicks for karate at seven. So of course things had gotten completely crazy at work.
But it was right at the end of the fiscal year, and that meant work started at six and ended at whenever it ended, and today there was an irregularity in reporting that had to be chased down before the audit. Every time they thought they’d gotten it, they’d found the error went deeper.
So the day that was supposed to end at five thirty had ended at six fifteen, and traffic just hadn’t cooperated. Twenty-eight was dead slow, not just the usual logjam at Quince Orchard, either, but construction and then some crazy cyclist who couldn’t figure out to leave room to pass. She’d called, and apologized, but karate was close and her father-in-law didn’t mind dropping off so long as she could pick up.
Then the road had opened up, which was great, because at least she’d be there to pick Sam up once his lesson was over. You just had to be patient. So. Very. Patient.
And it was worth it, to live in Poolesville, near family, such a quiet little town, and even the commute wasn’t so bad once you got past where most everyone else lived.
She arced off onto the one oh seven, didn’t even have to slow down, and she was just minutes from home. The Lexus hummed along, smooth and quiet and utterly dependable, as in the background two guys named Mike talked at one another about sports. There was something soothing about that, about listening to men ramble on at endless length about sports trivia, as they dissected whatever game had most recently occurred with as if it were as complex as a Byzantine bureaucracy. Less stressful than the news, certainly.
She zoned out, driving down the beautiful roads, completely on autopilot. She was driving through woods, the trees zipping by, the sky dappled behind a bower of leaves. Now, so close, she might even have time to get home and….huh.
“Drat,” she said, and took her foot off the accelerator. The engine of the Lexus shut down, and she coasted, silently, the regen brakes whining slightly, harvesting energy as the hybrid gradually slowed.
Up ahead, brakelights, right about at the first turn of the dogleg into town. Looks like people were stopped for something. Maybe an accident past the Partnership intersection? Or a combine on the road. Could be that.
As she cleared the trees, she saw that the line of cars extended out all the way around the turn to head into town, red lights snaking around a large field of fast-growing soy.
The SUV came to a stop, and she realized that there were figures standing out in the field, the doors of the cars and minivans and utes wide open, a field full of people, gaping up at the sky. She glanced up out of the moonroof, but saw nothing.
She opened her door, and turned her eyes upward.
“Oh Jesus.”
It shone in the summer sky. Not a plane. Larger. Not a blimp, not an airship, but a drop of pure molten silver streaked across the sky, impossibly beautiful, impossibly large, reflecting the blues and reds and umber of a fading day. It was growing. Just getting bigger, like it was inflating or getting closer, but that wasn’t it.
It expanded slowly, patiently, a teardrop blossoming into the warm summer air.
“Oh Jesus.”
Others moved forward, transfixed, and she joined them, the soy brushing against her ankles, watching the silver dagger cut across the sky. It was huge now, so huge, had to be at least a quarter mile high, just so big.
It was, it was, she thought, her mind scrambling for a frame of reference, like one of the arms of the Racnoss Webstar from one of those David Tennant episodes, because this was just her dreaming a Dr. Who dream, it had to be, only a dream where you commute and you work a whole day and you commute back.
Kathy took out her phone, took a picture, then another, then another, and a short video of the descent, and then through the menus to the favorite contact list, she needed to call Ken, tell Ken.
Her finger touched the screen. It went dark.
She played with the phone. It was dead. Around her, others were having the same reaction. The phones were dead. This was not good, this was really not good, like something out of a Steven King book, like she was an extra in some remake of the Tommyknockers.
She shuddered. No no no.
Kathy moved back through the waving soy, back to the Lexus. She slid in across the leather seat, pressed the start button, and there was nothing. The dash, dim. The nav and media screen, dark. It was as dead as the phone.
“Oh God oh God.” Her mind leapt to Sam, not a little kid, sure, but she was his mom and this was crazy.
“You...yours won’t start either?” A harried looking woman, two girls dressed for poms, standing at her door, having disgorged from the inert minivan behind her.
“No, no, it’s dead, my phone too.”
“What are those...things?” the woman asked, her voice with a slight tremble.
Things? Kathy looked, and yes. To the west of town, two more, growing, identical.
“I...I have no idea.”
Kathy was out of the Lexus now, closing the door. She clicked the fob, then gave a short, nervous laugh.
“I,” she announced firmly and reassuringly to herself, “..am going to walk.” It was at least two miles, she was pretty sure.
At least she was wearing comfortable shoes.
IAD ATC Log
19:57 EST
IAD ATC: United 4703, descend to seven thousand, I have you for runway one right.
UA4703: Dulles tower, descending, confirm runway one…[garbled] holy [expletive] [garbled]
IAD ATC: United 4703, say again?
IAD ATC: United 4703, do you copy?
UA4703: United 4703, on approach, we’ve got objects in the flight path, it’s...I… [inaudible]
IAD ATC: Repeat, United 4703, didn’t copy that.
UA4703: [inaudible]
IAD ATC: United 4703.
UA4703: Tower, we’ve got three...uh...massive...Jesus, what the hell...objects at seven thousand feet on flight path, just east of the Potomac. Not sure what we’re looking at, need new approach, over.
IAD ATC: United 4703, radar shows no traffic on flight path, over.
UA4703: Nothing on ours, but I’m looking right at them, over. Jesus those things are huge. Banking right to zero two zero, still descending.
IAD ATC: United 4703, nothing on the [background noise]. Yeah. What? [background noise.] Can you describe what you’re seeing?
UA4703: Three needle-like objects, gotta be [garbled] thousand feet, maybe three thousand, tip to base. No lights, no nothing, like mylar but way too big to be a blimp. Those things have to be the size of, Jesus. Like three skyscrapers, just floating there.
IAD ATC: That’s what we’re seeing, United. We’ve got...um…[garbled] visual confirmation from the tower, still nothing on the radar. Maintain flight path, United 4703. Virgin Atlantic 1473, do you copy?
VA 1473: Copy that, tower.
IAD ATC: Change approach to right zero one five, descend to seventy five hundred, cleared for runway one center.
VA 1473: Roger that, tower, right zero one five, descending, one center confirmed. And what the hell am I looking at?
IAD ATC: Damned if we know, 1473.
VA 1473: Copy that.
UA4703: Roger.
President Ortiz stood on the rooftop, and looked upward, carefully focusing the Steiner optics until the image was crisp and true.
“Do you see it, Mr. President?”
He looked at the intern who had brought them, Rachel, Rachel Samberg, daughter of Ira Samberg, major donor, core circle. Young, idealistic, perhaps not the brightest, but utterly loyal. Highly useful.
“I could see it before, Rachel.” His voice, strangely flat, a faint smile, his slightly soft lips turned up. “But thank you. Yes, that does help.”
Above, impossibly high above, a silvery gash in the sky, caught by moonlight. It was clearer through the optics, but just as featureless, a drop of liquid mercury glistening frozen in the heavens. Every eye on the White House rooftop was trained on it, after Joe had insisted...demanded...that they move from the situation room and get to the roof of the White House.
“Gentlemen, I can see no reason we should sit here and talk in the abstract about something we can see with our own eyes.” Secret Service had hemmed and hawed and tried to come up with reasons to live as a coward. But he was the Commander in Chief, and that was why they climbed the stairs.
Vice President White, The White House Chief of Staff Rios, Defense Secretary Richardson, and a smattering of military brass. All with binoculars, all looking to the West North West and almost straight up. Around them, five times the usual rooftop security detail, and the air around Lafayette Square whirred with the swooping presence of weaponized drone quadcopters.
“What are we hearing from NORAD, Terrence?”
Terrence O’Leary had been Defense Secretary for two months, after his predecessor had proven, well, less than committed. Joe Ortiz had orchestrated the threats of impeachment that drove that...weakling...out. His deep connection to the Majority leaders in both House and Senate, and his undisputed position as the leader of the Party made that inevitable. The confirmation hearings for O’Leary were remarkably devoid of contention. Terrence was tall, lean, former Green Beret. Briskly competent, didn’t ask questions, a good soldier who followed chain of command and got the job done. That’s how he worked his way to the top.
“No change in status, Mr. President. NGA overflights and observation confirm that the object is almost exactly ten kilometers in length, one hundred meters in diameter, holding in the upper mesosphere, at one hundred clicks up.”
“How far up?” Ortiz gave him a hard look.
“A little over 300,000 feet, Mr. President.”
“That’s better.” Ortiz hated this push to move to metric, all part of this global system that America just needed to have no part of. “So, out of reach even of our highest recon planes. That’s, what, three times the operational ceiling of an old SR-71.”
President Ortiz had those facts down, all of them, had a head for them. Neatly filed away for relevance and context, it was a skill that had served him well as a debater at Princeton, where his command of esoterica and his raw confidence had helped him smack down more than one coddled, cocky liberal.
“Yes, Mr. President.” The acknowledgement of his capacity.
“So no new data.”
“No, Mr. President. The boys at NASIC tell us it has absolutely no radar signature. Visual spectrum observations only. IR indicates external temperature is indistinguishable from the atmosphere.”
“And the other objects? Those three shuttles or the landing craft or whatever they are?”
“Equally invisible to radar, Mr. President, and identical in design. One klick..um..around three thousand feet in height, thirty feet and change in diameter. They’ve settled in about thirty-three miles to the West North West, directly below the position of the primary object, around the town of Poolesville in the Western Upper Montgomery County Agricultural reserve.”
“Remind me about that, Marcela.”
Marcela Rios was slender, whippet thin, fiercely precise and relentless. She’d been with Joe since his first Senate campaign, and was both a ruthless strategist and fiercely pious. Not an attractive woman, either, which was a blessing, given how much else she and Joe shared. Estela would not have approved, otherwise. Would have been more difficult. As it was, she was the perfect Chief of Staff.
“Lowest density area in the DC Metroplex. Set aside for ag, now mostly equestrian country for the elite, that and an array of moderately sized organic farms and orchards. Poolesville is a strange community. The town is like Mayberry or some Disney vision of a small town, an accidental byproduct of the People’s Republic of Montgomery County and their obsessive regulation. Consistently Democrat, got one of those magnet schools in it to drive development and buy in. Seems to have worked.”
“Why, Marcela, would...whatever these objects are...bother with it? Why there?”
She thought for a moment. “I can only assume they’re looking for a lower level of population density. To minimize disruption. Or potentially to minimize resistance. The best beachhead is the undefended beachhead, Mr. President.”
Joe nodded. “Thank you, Marcela.”
“And have they minimized disruption? Bob?”
Press Secretary Robert Bernstein had arrived on the roof, and the climb had left him short of breath. “Mr...President...uh. No. It’s a category five media shitstorm out there. Everyone’s completely freaking out.”
“Language, Bob. Language.” Joe raised an eyebrow, and gave Bernstein a soul-freezing look. Profanity was the language of the morally weak, the language of the unbelieving and the irrational. “Quantify that.”
“Yes, Mr. President. All the networks and the 24-7’s are full on coverage. The net is berzerk. Twitter went down twenty minutes ago, too much video, evidently. Cross platform social media analytics indicate a SocVIX of two-seventy.”
“Two-seventy?”
“Yeah. We’re talking a half tick from needing to declare martial law. People think it’s the end of the world. Totally crazy. Cats and dogs, living together.”
“Excuse me? That means what?”
“Sorry, Mr. President. It means that some of our primary constituencies believe this is apocalyptic in character. And it’s an..um..Ghostbusters reference, Mr. President.”
“Is that appropriate, Bob? Movie references? Now?”
“I…”
“And do you believe that the good Christian citizens who put me into office, who trusted me with the moral compass of this nation, do you believe that they are...what did you say…’totally crazy?’”
“Um...no, Mr. President.”
Joe shook his head. It amazed him what passed for competence in this era of secular self-absorption. Bob got the job done, and seemed to have a sense of what resonated. But he lacked conviction, was too woven up with the old boy network, the establishment backroom types, and failed to understand the seriousness of the new vision Ortiz was bringing to America.
“Terrence?”
“Mr. President?”
“Are we being invaded?”
There was a pause. “By definition, yes, Mr. President. Unauthorized entry into sovereign airspace constitutes invasion. And I concur with Marcela’s assessment. Unusually low density near a population center makes a potentially valuable patch of territory.”
“What assets are being deployed?”
“We’ve got both recon and combat air patrols up and inbound, Mr. President. We’re coordinating with Maryland National Guard, and they’re moving ground units and air cav to the area now, Mr. President. Local law enforcement is on scene.”
“Any signs of hostile action?”
O’Leary shook his head, a tight, controlled movement. “No sir. Not yet.”
President Ortiz raised the milspec binocs to his eyes, and looked back at the perfect object that hung like a new star in the night sky.
“Not yet,” he repeated. “Not yet.”
It was not what Darren had expected the Wednesday study to be like, not even in the slightest. There was no study. It had all fallen apart.
After he’d talked with Keisha, he’d walked back into the sanctuary, and lost himself in prayer as he waited. He felt empty. Like death. He hadn’t realized, just hadn’t, that Jerri hadn’t been paying the rent on the space.
Out came the phone, his angular thumbs clumsily pounding out the text.
“jerri i just talked to pastor williams. have we not been paying them pls text me back”
He waited, there in the still stale air of the sanctuary, and looked blankly at the screen in his hand. A minute passed. Then a second minute. No reply. No chime. His mind leapt to what that might mean. She’d been paying him, assuring him that everything was fine, that the donations were coming in, that everyone was tithing and making special offerings.
Surely there was just an error, just some missed connection or wrong address.
And though he was looking directly at it, the shudder of the phone in his hand startled him.
“darren meant to talk with you sunday sorry no haven’t been. thought we’d get enough $, didn’t, been prioritizing you I’ll send a link to the account w info. John and i will talk w you Sun. Can’t come 2 study 2day.”
Ten seconds later, it buzzed again. “sorry.”
He stared at the phone, stared at those words, at that stone rolled over his grave, at that nail driven into his hand.
He turned it off, shut it down, closed himself off to the world outside. It was too much. Just too much.
He’d told himself it would work, that it was going to happen, that God’s spirit was with them, that the Lord would find a way. He’d preached it, prayed over it, sat in the homes of his brothers and sisters, and it was all just a lie he was telling himself. It wasn’t true. None of it was happening.
He’d seen the plate offerings, seen the love offerings, and had been sure that they looked nowhere near what he knew was the meager budget of the little gathering. Just a small stipend for him, and the rent, and that was it. And they couldn’t even manage that.
Darren’s mind was empty, his heart was empty,
He’d sat there, and seven o’clock had passed. Seven fifteen. Seven twenty. No-one, no-one up with him, no-one there with him, like Christ in the garden.
Then, headlights outside, refracting and softened by the frosted windows, accompanied by the sound of gravel under tires. Someone here.
Normally, the sound of tires stirred his heart, like the smile of a child or the laughter of an old friend. It was a hopeful sound, a movement charged with promise, like that faint shadow that would fall over the keyhole of the old doors of the church when someone was about to enter. It meant something good.
But now, Darren didn’t have the heart or the soul power for anyone. He was spent, a shadow. How could he pray or teach, when he knew he had failed?
And the door opened. It was Rick. Patti didn’t follow.
Rick was a ruin. He had been crying, not bothering to hide it, stumbled a few steps forward, and collapsed into a chair. His eye was swollen and bruised, and had scratches on the left side of his face, deep tracks, bleeding, drawn by nails.
“Oh Jesus, Darren, I’m so glad you’re here, I’m just, I’m just so fucking lost.” The words jarring and profane, slurred and tumbling over one another. The bright sharp sweetness of bourbon filled the air around him. Rick was very, very drunk.
And for the next hour, they prayed and Darren listened and Rick cried and they prayed some more. Rick poured himself out, a chaotic mess of weepy nothing. It was all there.
About Rick’s marriage to his high-school sweetheart. About Rick’s drinking. About how he’d been a youth pastor at a giant church down south, hundreds of kids, a rockstar, up and coming. About how when the intimacy evaporated following Patti’s miscarriages, Rick started in on the porn.
About how that was bullshit, he was such a liar, the porn had always been there, always, since he was a kid, hidden away, more important to him than Patti, more important than anything.
About how he’d become more and more obsessed with the teenage girls in his care, about how he’d been their friend, their buddy, like a peer, the funny one, the wise one.
About how he’d fallen into darkweb browsing, looking for high school girls, girls who were what Patti once was.
About Tyler, fifteen, slender and beautiful and fragile and trying to get over her mom and dad’s divorce.
About how he loved her, fucking loved her, Jesus, but fuck he’d hurt her so bad, and what the hell was he, what kind of sonavabitch does that to a girl.
About how that all came apart, how it was hushed up, how he was fired.
About six months, minimum security, court mandated counseling and group.
About how he saw no love in Patti’s eyes, none, just contempt and sadness and loss.
About his feelings now, his hungers, how they were devouring him. About how the porn was back, how his eyes leaped to it, about how he hid and spun and dodged and lied. About...and he’d spewed it all out, vomited it up, emptied himself.
“Christ, Darren, you can’t fucking trust me you can’t I’m just a monster a goddamn monster.”
And Darren knew what he meant, even though Rick hadn’t been able to say it, even though the bourbon had broken him almost all the way down, that one last word was caught in Rick’s throat, choking him, a chickenbone caught in the truth he was trying to speak.
Mary.
Darren saw Rick, looking at Mary, a flicker-snap of a dozen memories, marked and filed away as worthy of further forensics by a father’s eyes. Mary, bright and smart and pretty, Mary, unsure of herself as she found her way into womanhood, Mary, the tiny baby giggling as Daddy blew raspberries into her belly.
He saw Rick, as Rick saw himself, a corrupted failed ruin of a soul, irredeemable, an inchoate mass of insatiable hungers and grasping nothingness. Saw that hunger turned towards that child, still so young, still his baby. Darren felt a rage rise in him, unfamiliar, bright and hot and red.
Murderous.
He felt it seize him, driving down roots into him, drawing power wherever it could find it. It tapped down deep, mingling with his anger at his failure, his anger at the world for not hearing, his anger at everything that was broken and not working. His anger at the ache in his feet after a long day, at the loss of the child they’d hoped Omri would become, at a world that was so cold to fragile broken things, at a world where his Jewel wept and struggled.
He felt how strong that anger made him, felt the singularity of its purpose, how it burned and seethed and yearned, how his fists tightened and his heart raced and his eyes shone bright.
And he drove it back. Something drove it back. Not him, he was lost to it, but the discipline of a thousand spoken prayers, the pattern of listening to the broken and the lost, the practiced rhythm of a compassion that had no place for that shining bloody ape-rage.
“Pray with me, Rick,” a voice said, apparently his own, and Darren was intoning old familiar words, from a place outside of himself. And Rick was shuddering and weeping, his collapse complete, and Darren’s hand found its way to Rick’s bowed head, and he felt the oil in Rick’s unwashed hair, the anointing of his self-contempt.
Darren spun out words, bright with the possibility of redemption, of restoration, and the anger fell back and away as that familiar story laid itself in.
Then, silence, silence in the old worn room, just the fading sobs of a broken soul, and the sound of his own breathing.
And there was another sound, something else that Darren couldn’t quite hear, that teased at the edges of his awareness. Some other sound, distant, a faint pressure that he couldn’t place, like the hushed presence of sleeping children in a quiet house.
He shook it out of his head.
“Rick?”
“Yuh..yuh...yeah?”
“Let’s get you home. You and I need to talk to Patti.”
“But I’m, but I’m..” The words, slurred, the eyes, reddened with tears and bourbon.
“It’s OK. I’ll drive you.”
“But you, how will you, I mean…”
“I’ll figure it out. Come on, Rick.”
He helped Rick to his feet, felt him totter, felt his weakness and the swirling imbalance in his mind. And he felt something else, something again, a shadow moving behind him, a whisper of a distant radio, the weight of a mountain as you pass deep beneath it.
And behind that feeling, helicopters, a thrum, far away and nearing, so late for Marine One to be out doing a maintenance check, there’d be complaints in town. Distant sirens, many of them.
He was so tired, must be it, that feeling. He was so tired.
They walked together to the old wooden doors, and stepped out into the night.
Darren drew in a breath, fast and involuntary, his body frozen, hairs on end. He looked up, looked up and further still, higher and higher, it was bright and silver and perfect and...
“Oh My God,” he whispered, as he felt Rick collapse to the ground at his side.
The one stands, barely. The other one falls.
From behind the carapace, from within the place of calm, she observed the two primates, cast her awareness about them and into them. It was the first she had touched them, first she had felt them.
Bilateral symmetry, so peculiar and polar, two halves in exchange, relation and tension. Their sensorium, weak, limited to a tiny range within the radiant spectrum, simple structures for a simple creature. Their cognitive capacity, shallow, cast solely in the meat of the moment, most of their knowledge hidden from them. Oblivious to their potential, to themselves, to their reality.
Two manipulating appendages, an array of calcium structures wrapped in soft and vulnerable organics. So frail, so small. So beautiful, in the way of living beings.
Binary, mostly, in their reproduction. Female and male, so separate. Binary in their genetic intermingling, as two unknitted and rewove and became an unbidden, chaos-formed third.
Creatures of duality, so young in their growth.
None like these, none had been encountered in the Seeking, not for time stretching back into the deep of memory.
The one stands, observes, hums the atmosphere with symbol. She reached inward, caught the cascade of thought, the neural interplay in the one standing, the surface layers of cognition, the interpretation of sense into perception into symbol.
It was evoking, calling to being from a narrative, reaching towards the One with the crude tools of a fumbling awareness. But there was something there, a fragment, an awareness of being beyond being. It was intriguing.
This one was worth the Sharing, perhaps.
The fallen one was damaged, not well, poisoned. Self-poisoned, with intent. It harmed itself because it was internally dissonant, experientially malformed, the structures of its awareness shaped around traumas and subconscious drives that ruled it.
She moved towards the boundary of the carapace, feeling its delicacy and its strength. She extended a single tendril, and pressed softly against the surface. It poured back awareness, of the characteristics and composition of the atmosphere beyond, and allowed her to subtly modify herself to what she would encounter.
This interaction would open up such a new array of potentiality, create radical new timelines, weave such intricacy into being. Why this encounter? Why these two simple and elemental sentiences, in their particularity and in their manifestation?
Why was it worth sharing with them?
There was no reason to wonder at it, no reason to seek the optimal encounter. Every moment had within it all that might be needed. She conferred with the whole of the Five, still adapting, still observing, and the two who were with her on the surface expressed their approval. Let this be the way, with this one, in this place and permutation.
The two observing from above concurred. Let this be the way.
So she would make that path, open that door.
She touched the boundary of the carapace, and passed through to the world beyond, her emptiness meeting its emptiness, like mist through a field of grass.
The spire rose to the low clouds, and hung in the air like a silver jewel, and Darren gaped at it, mouthing fragments of stunned prayer. It was a tower, a dagger, an impossibility, giving the simultaneous sense of immense mass and incredible lightness. It was as tall as any building he had ever seen, as dizzying as standing in Chicago on that trip to the Moody campus, and looking up and up.
Only there were no features, nothing to give away a sense of scale, just silvery sameness and the dance of light across still waters.
And it was floating there, towering there, fifty yards away, right above the field, the twilight playing across the surface.
Beside him, Rick was faintly moaning, overcome, unable to stand.
Darren turned, looked away, anything not to be seeing this thing that shouldn’t be there. To the northeast, just three or four miles away, another spire, faintly visible above the surface of the trees. Near the intersection of the one oh seven and Partnership, his mind offered, trying to put things into scale.
He looked back, hoping that the looming giddy thing wouldn’t be there, that he’d look back and see only empty sky. But it remained, insane and incongruous.
And then there was that sense again, that sense of closeness, of something that was almost touching him, a hand that he could not see, just inches from the flesh of his face. That feeling moved through him, and he repeated the Lord’s Prayer, once, twice.
The feeling passed like the shadow of a cloud, and that was when he saw it.
It passed out of the surface of the object, no door, no opening, just passed through. It simply extruded, as if birthed through quicksilver.
It was alive, it was a living being, whorled about with wings and limbs and eyes, like some fever dream after reading Ezekiel late into the night. It floated from the object, wings outspread but unbeating, a butterfly pinned open on the fabric of the world.
Darren tried to take a step back, tried to move away, but found that his limbs were unresponsive. He just stood there, rooted in, frozen, as the thing drifted downwards towards him.
It was strangely serene, effortless, moving with a quiet grace, and as it grew closer, Darren saw it clearly in the overbright LED glow of the nearby street light.
Five leg-like limbs hung down from a barrel-like core, out of which five wildly complex branching arms extended outward, arms with fingers that had fingers with fingers, mingled with boneless tendrils and peculiar thorny outgrowths. At the top of the torso, a starfish whorl of thick stubby tentacles, dotted with dark pools and puckerings, eyes and other...things...less easily named.
All of the limbs undulated softly, exuding a strange patience, a calmness that spread around it as it grew closer and closer still, a calmness that suffused him, like the comfort of waking briefly with soft warmth at your side, like the comfort of a warm fire and your grandfather’s voice reading an old favorite story.
It was insane, a mad mess of a being, as much plant as animal, with peculiar symmetries that added to that sense of offness, wrongness, of not belonging. That wrongness was redoubled and multiplied, because, no, no, it wasn’t a mess. It all worked, it had order and structure. The wrong order and structure. Living things were not like this, not living things that rose from the same stream of life as Darren.
And it was watching him, seeing him, knowing him, with an intelligence and sense of purpose that should have had him running or screaming or in a blind rage of panic and hatred.
But he was so calm. So at peace. He became aware that his voice had fallen silent, that he was looking at this thing as it drew near, just fixed to the spot. Darren became more and more aware of his inability to move, that he just didn’t want to move, why move at all?
It was close, now, closer than Rick’s car, haphazardly parked with a smashed mirror and long gashes down the passenger side. It touched the earth, and its...legs...played across the surface, not supporting it, just touching and caressing the earth, more a tongue playing across a lover’s breast than the stolid heaviness of foot and knee and bone.
It was big, big up so close, browns and greens and golden iridescence, patterns changing and shifting across the leathery flesh. The great barrel of the body was bigger than Darren, seven feet, it’d make a hell of a forward, hah hah, and now it was closer still.
He could smell it, and it smelled so so very good. It smelled like a Southern summer night, barbecue, steak and pork on the grill, homemade marinade, mingled with the taste of honeysuckle and the sweetness of the air after a rain.
It spoke.
“Darren.”
Just his name. His name filled the air around him. There was no mouth that moved, no face, no obvious source for the sound. But the air sang with it.
Not voice, but a Voice of voices, familiar voices, speaking together and in harmony. Mom’s voice, and Dad’s voice, Julie’s and Mary’s, Rick’s voice. And his own, above them all, both the voice he heard in those podcasts, nasal and horsey and not familiar, and the voice that he heard in himself.
“Darren.” His voice, in the air, speaking his name.
Darren’s mouth worked, like Ommy’s, but nothing came out.
“I’m not well.” Rick’s voice, but it did not come from Rick. It came from the air itself, it rose up from the many voices. The thing drifted slightly to Darren’s right, settled down softly on the earth, and compressed. The arms of arms danced in the air over Rick’s insensate body, the branches of a willow in a soft breeze by the riverside.
The air around Rick blurred and shifted, and there was a pause. Then words came again, Julie’s voice singing out above the others, over a rumble like thunder, Julie’s words from when she would put a bandage on Mary’s bloodied knee, or when she’d soothe Omri into calm.
“All bettersauce.”
The thing withdrew, rising again to full height, the...wings...unfurling into a blurring tremble. It rose, slightly, then more, pulling up and away, back towards the great silvery slash.
Darren pushed through the haze, struggled to find a word, struggled to speak.
“Who…” he managed, his voice a faint croak.
The ascent of the being stopped, paused for an instant, and the air sang and shuddered, a word like the resonance of a great bell.
“Jaumm.”
Again, the word tolled, and he could feel it resonate in the meat of his body.
“Jaumm.”
Then the world fell silent, but the voice sounded on in him, an echo fainter and fainter.
It was broken finally by the footsteps on gravel, followed by an unfamiliar woman’s voice.
“Sir? You all right, sir?”
Becca ran through the darkness of the country road, maglite in one hand, her Glock in the other. The light cast wild circling shadows as she ran, but she knew precisely where she was going.
She’d been doing a little face to face with citizens, just a children’s program at the sweet little hole in the wall strip mall library, when the call had come through. Hated to cut that short, but the kids and parents were freaking out just a few seconds later, so it wasn’t like that event was going to continue much longer.
The nine-one-one calls had come in, first one, then two three four five, panicked and crying. And then the lines, all dead, callbacks failed.
She was going where her dispatcher had told her to go, the voice just a little more tense than usual, OK, fine, way more tense, dispatch sounded like they were going to start screaming or crying at any moment.
But Becca had six years on the force, two tours in Iraq before that, and things just didn’t phase her the way that they once did.
She had known exactly where Sugarland Road met Sugarland Lane, that sweet spot just a few miles outside of town, that little church where they filmed that movie years ago. Not like you needed an address or GPS, because the thing was right there when she looked to where she was headed, one of the three glistening silver daggers painted across the sky on the periphery of the town.
It was, if she let herself think about it, terrifying.
So she couldn’t think about that, about what that meant. Thinking slowed you down. Thinking made you anxious, got in the way of the reflexes you needed, kept you inward when you needed to be open and outward and situationally aware.
She had lit up the old patrol Taurus, peeled out, pushing it hard through town. Someone would complain, she was sure, because someone always did, but that was just how it was.
The police interceptor raced through the darkness, out of town, suspension bottoming on the wildly irregular surface of the old country road. A hard left turn onto Sugarland, she was flying, the all wheel drive of the Taurus scrabbling for grip, the turboed six roaring.
The object was ahead, towering over a line of trees, a spike driven by God into the forest.
And she was slowing, lights off, engine off, siren off, the road ahead suddenly dark. She hadn’t turned them off. They were just off. She tried the ignition, once and then again. The radio. Her phone. None of it worked. None of it. Dead.
She let out a slight dry laugh. Just like the movies. Just like every one of those movies.
But she was close now, no more than a click away. She was out of the car, on foot, running, running the way she did every Sunday morning, every morning she had time, and it had to be just a single K, she’d be there in no time.
She maintained a quick jog down the side of the little two-lane, the trees passing in shadow, the towering presence rising. Up ahead, on the right, the little church, closer with every step.
There was the sound of a bell, deep and resonant, a bell that spoke, a bell with a voice, and Becca felt the strength drain away from her, felt her legs suddenly weak, suddenly fading, leaden like it was mile twenty five of the Marine Corps and she’d not prepared, oh, c’mon, and she was pushing herself, hard, just keep it going what the and the bell rang again, like that huge one she’d heard when she visited that monastery in Okinawa with Sarah, only it spoke, only it was a word.
She stopped for a moment, bore down hard against the weakness, turned her will against it, and it released as suddenly as it had begun.
She redoubled her pace, and out came the gun and the light. The light worked, incongruous, bizarre. Why would the light work? But it did, and why question it?
There, in the bright circle of light around the front of the church, a shadow moved up and away from two figures on the ground, disappearing upward towards the darkening star-speckled thing.
It was, she wasn’t sure what the shadow was. She saw it, could describe it, but couldn’t process it. Did not want to process it. What she saw she filed away.
She moved into the circle of light, towards the two men, one standing. Six two, maybe one seventy five, lean and angular, rocking back and forth on his feet. And one collapsed at his feet. Five eight, one ninety, maybe. Dark hair.
Becca approached, carefully, light up in her off hand. In the other, the Glock out, finger safe, safety on.
“Sir? You all right, Sir?”
“No, Mr. President. None of them.” Terrence sat, ramrod straight, his eyes tracking the CinC as he moved.
The President paced the floor of the Cabinet Room, back and forth, back and forth. The table was half empty. He was frustrated, angry, and for all of the power of his office, felt remarkably impotent.
“We can’t get close, then.” His voice high and bright, a surprising tenor given the great barrel of his body.
“No, Mr. President.”
President Ortiz tried to process what he was hearing. The rundown was the same, from both the services and the first responders. The...objects...were visible, but that was about it. No energy signatures, nothing. Efforts to get close all ended the same way. Six National Guard helicopters had come down, not shot down. Not at all. Just a gradual loss of power. A half-dozen guardsmen in one were lightly injured, as their Blackhawk came down in a wooded area.
Nearly a dozen recon drones, both winged and quadrotor, had met the same fate.
Efforts at close overflights by F-35s out of Andrews were equally useless. Pilots reported gradual loss of power, one system after another as they approached, forcing a change of course. That would have been a lot of taxpayer dollars to splash into the Potomac.
And first responder vehicles on the ground shut down almost exactly one kilometer from each object. Loss of power, same as the airborne response.
“What time is Governor Malone available to meet?” Ortiz made no effort to sound eager. Governor Rachel Malone was as liberal as they came. They’d been on opposite side of the aisle in Senate, served on committee together. She was not a friend, not even faintly, and he wasn’t eager to be pushed into working with her.
“She’s in a press conference now, presenting the State of Emergency declaration, talking about the mobilization of the Guard, Federal support, which of course, we’ve promised in full. We’re on for twenty-one hundred hours.”
“Marcela, what does Counsel think about making this fully ours? I don’t trust Governor Malone with this, not with something like this.”
“Not much precedent for that, Mr. President. Not recent precedent, at least. We work with the Dem, unless threat levels escalate, in which case, well, martial law might be an option.”
So threat levels would need to escalate. She had not said that without purpose.
“What’s the timeline for an executive announcement, Bob?”
Bernstein looked up. “We’re on for eleven thirty Eastern Standard Time, Mr. President. Both networks, plus all the major cable and net outlets. Scripted, no questions, Presidential, confident. I’ll have the text for you within five after we wrap here.”
“The draft text.”
Bernstein grunted. Ortiz always, always insisted on editing. “Yes, of course. We’ll be talking about keeping the peace, nothing to fear, focusing on our competence, being strong and resolute, defending our freedom. The usual. ”
Joe looked to the White House Science Advisor. Dr. Mark Ingall, short and rumpled, prone to rambling, and the former Head of the Creation Science Institute. His appointment had done wonders for the base, and met with the significant approval of a wide array of major funders. He had proven a rather less than effective liaison with the mainstream scientific community, but that had been anticipated.
“So, Mark. What are these objects? Are they evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence?”
Ingall cleared his throat. “Well, Mr. President, I think it’s not entirely clear what it is we’re dealing with here. Intelligence is, as we know, part of God’s plan for this world, and the existence of entities that are part of non-terrestrial holobaramins is radically unlikely. There’d be no place for them in the created order of our designed biome.”
President Ortiz had no idea what most of that meant. He looked over to Bernstein, who was struggling not to roll his eyes. For once, he did not blame him. He considered asking for clarification, but elected against it.
“What do your sources suggest is happening, then?”
“Well, my sources say it’s possible that these are of terrestrial origin. Something the Russians or Chinese have cooked up, some kind of projection or energy weapon.” It was clear, from his response, that he hadn’t actually talked with any sources.
The President looked to John Taylor, Secretary for Homeland Security, who was looking at the Science Advisor with an utterly inscrutable expression. “Your thoughts, John?”
John’s lean, patrician face remained veiled. “Localized, targeted damping of cellular networks and internet, that leaves powerlines and other electronics unaffected? Focused EMP shutting down vehicles? A ten kilometer high object neatly tucked into the mesosphere that’s completely invisible to radar?” He stifled a laugh, then composed himself. “The domestic intelligence community has never encountered this. No-one can do this, Mr. President.”
Terrence nodded. “I concur. Defense intelligence analysis suggests this is well beyond the projected capacities of any sovereign nation or corporate entity, Mr. President.”
Ingall coughed, tried to interject. “Well, that may be so, but that doesn’t mean that there’s…”
President Ortiz cut Dr. Ingall off with a sharp look. Enough.
He looked directly at Ingall. “Has there been any contact? Any effort to communicate intention?”
“Not to my knowledge, Mr. President.”
President Ortiz was not sure that meant a great deal.
Darren stood at the door. It was his door. There was the door knob. There was the key hole. His keys were in his hand. There. That one was the house key. The little townhouse was lit inside.
He knew he should probably go in, but didn’t. Instead, he stood and looked at the door.
He could barely remember the last forty minutes. It was a haze, a mist, like the waking memory of a particularly vivid dream.
He had walked with the police officer, walked with Rick back to the abandoned squad car. There were two other officers there, and two other cars. Neither of them worked.
The officer’s name was Becca. He had met her before, a couple of times, at community events. Once at that dinner over at the Methodist church. Once at a town hall meeting.
She remembered his face, but didn’t remember his name. She and the other officers had asked him questions, and he had tried to answer. His address. His name. What had happened. What he had seen.
He hadn’t done a very good job of answering.
They had asked Rick the same things. They had noted that he was drunk, which he admitted, but at this point that wasn’t really something they were worrying about.
Then the officers had told them to go home, that they would be in touch with them. So they walked, together, along the roadside. It was miles and miles, and the walk seemed forever.
When it was time for Rick to go to his house, he had gone there. Darren had walked alone, along the road, past the high school. There were lots of cops, bright lights, hundreds of cop cars, SWAT vans. And soldiers in their big vehicles, and everyone else walking around seeming lost.
Darren knew he had to go home, and he knew where home was.
He had walked past the Episcopal church, the one where Mary got lunch, and the lights were on. He walked past the McDonalds, the parking lot full of people, talking, pointing, staring up.
Then into the townhouses, and there he was. Home. Here he was. He was home.
Time passed.
The door opened.
“Dad?” Mary, her voice crackling, panicked.
Then she was crying. “Dad’s here, Dad’s here, Dad are you OK what’s wrong?” He stepped into house with her, dazed. Empty.
Julie, now, right there, holding him, hugging him. “Oh dear God, thank God, Darren, Darren what’s going on, where were you, what happened?”
He said he didn’t know, or he thought he said it. “Tired,” he heard himself say. “Need to lie down.”
And Julie was talking and crying, and Mary was talking and crying, and Ommy was making an upset sound. He went past them. He went up the stairs.
He walked into his room. There was his bed.
He lay down, and darkness enveloped him.
We interrupt this livestream for a special emergency message from the President of the United States.
Good evening.
At seven fifteen eastern standard time, three immense objects arrived in a sparsely populated area just outside of Washington DC. Every American has, over the last few hours, seen thousands of images and videos of these objects. A fourth object, even larger, now hangs in the skies in a low orbit over Washington. Many of you can see this from your doorsteps and the windows of your homes. We do not, as yet, know what these objects are, where they came from, or what their intent might be. But rest assured, our country is strong and ready.
We are a great people, and a great nation. When we are confronted by the unknown, or by threats to our integrity as a people, Americans pull together. This may prove to be just such a time. We can only assume that whatever these objects are, they have arrived on our shores because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, the greatest nation this world has ever seen. Whatever tomorrow may bring, and whatever these objects prove to be,
Immediately following the arrival of these unidentified objects, I implemented our government’s emergency response plans. Our military is powerful, and it’s prepared. Police, our intelligence services, and America’s armed services are working in and around Washington D.C. to help respond to this crisis.
Our first priority is to insure that Americans are safe, and to take every precaution to protect our citizens at home and around the world from possible danger. The functions of our government continue without interruption. Our financial institutions remain strong, and the American economy will be open for business as well.
As Commander in Chief, I have directed the full resources of our intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities to be prepared to respond to any eventuality, and to any action that these objects might take. I am working directly with state and local government, as together we work insure the safety and security of those living in the affected area.
On behalf of the American people, I thank the many world leaders who have called to offer their concern and assistance.
Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those affected, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. As a faithful people, we gather tonight in our places of worship, our churches and our synagogues, and offer prayers of hope and trust that God will see us through this. Tomorrow will dawn as a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve to stand together as we confront whatever challenges these strange objects might bring.
Thank you. Good night. And God bless America.
Darren’s eyes opened, reflexively, automatically, at 4:00 AM. Outside, the world was faintly flickering, reds and blues dappling and stuttering against the screens of the windows. He lay there, eyes open, watching the lights play across the ceiling of their small bedroom. If it was Thursday, he had first shift. Had to get up. Had to.
And so he was stumbling his way through the Lord’s Prayer, the first part of his morning devotional, mouthing the words quietly, his mind struggling to surface the old familiar cadence.
He started it, stopped, tried again, stopped, and finally completed it. It was so hard to think, so hard to focus.
Next to him, Julie slept, curled up close to him, nestled in close. He gently extricated himself, and moved over to the window. He was completely dressed, clothes still on from his shift yesterday.
The Tractor Supply parking lot across the street was filled with law enforcement, county and state troopers, media trucks and military vehicles, a bright bustle of urgency. Little clusters of people stood in the strobing half light. Cameras and other instruments pointed in one of three directions.
Darren rested his weight against the window frame, as memories of the night before flooded back. That word, that name, still hummed and sang in his remembering, so vivid that he could almost still hear it in the air around him.
He had not dreamed it. He had seen it, heard it, smelled it. It had spoken, whatever that was, it had spoken to him. Then it had done something to Rick.
He moved over towards the door, his mind set on coffee and work, when he paused.
Was he really going to go work first shift at Panera? Was that what he needed to do today?
The world was upside down, the world had utterly changed, and he was part of it, and he was going to go check whether the third shift bakers had made enough sourdough for the bread bowls.
“What am I doing,” he whispered to himself. “Sweet Jesus, what am I doing?” And he realized, suddenly, that he’d left the car at the church. So, well, that was that.
Julie, still asleep, the house still asleep. He fished his phone from his pants and made his way to the kitchen. Fifteen messages, dozens of texts.
He sorted through them. Texts from last night. “Where r u Dad” “Darren pls call where r u????” Messages, from Julie, from Mary, one after another.
A very drunk message from Rick. Texts from work, from Jill.
He started texting her back. “I’m stuck here in Poolesville things are crazier than you would think.”
He sent it, and was halfway through a second message when that...name...hummed again in his consciousness. A thought came to him.
He should go get the car. He needed it. He needed to go there and get it. For work. And they needed the car because Jewel needed the van for Omri. It was exactly what he needed to do. Yes, that’s exactly what he needed to do.
The thought echoed in his head, echoing and redoubling, harmonizing with the deep bellsong that still sang low in his awareness. Yes yes I should go there and get the car.
He set the phone down on the kitchen table, slid his feet into his shoes, very quietly opened the door, and walked out into the warm early summer night. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him.
Though it was early morning, the road was lined with vehicles. Most were military, National Guard Humvees. Soldiers were everywhere, but Darren didn’t notice them, not really. He had to go get his car, and so he walked through the deep darkness by the side of the road. Up ahead, a checkpoint, where the road was cordoned off. Two cop cars and a light armored vehicle, barricades erected, two cops and a pair of soldiers standing guard.
Overhead, a whirring, the sound of rotors moving air, something flying, something nearby.
And a car, an old Buick, parked with engine running and lights on, right in front of the roadblock. The man it belonged to was standing, arguing with one of the cops, his voice raised.
Darren needed his car, he needed to go get it.
He walked towards the cordon.
Officer Jesse Vasquez took a half step to the right. “Sir, this area is restricted. Until further notice, the evacuation of properties within the cordon is mandatory.” He was short, short for a cop, but he was solid as a boulder, and just as immovable.
The man, older, slightly taller, his hair a wild thinning frizz. waved his ID, pushing the wallet into his hand, pressing in close. “That’s my house, my house,” he said, repeating what he’d said repeatedly for the last five minutes. “You people can’t keep me from my home. I know my rights!”
Man, this was getting old. Officer Silver called out to him, asking if he’d like some coffee. He shook his head.
Officer Vasquez looked down at the ID, again, casting the brightness of his flashlight at the surface, making a show of perusing the license. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to take a step back, sir. I know you live there. Perry Lee Smith, 15732 Sugarland Road. I can see that, sir. But we’re in a state of emergency, sir. There are temporary emergency shelters at the high school.”
The light and the squawking, insistent presence of this insufferable old loon filled his attention. He did not see the shadow passing to his left.
Officer Becca Silver had been on duty all night. She’d called in the two men she’d encountered by the old church, and notified her dispatcher that her squad car was inoperable. After backup arrived, she had spent the rest of the evening walking from door to door along the narrow country roads, notifying citizens of the mandatory evacuation order. She was tired. Exhausted. The elderly gentleman who was laying in to Officer Vasquez was a piece of work. He just didn’t get it, just didn’t, but Vasquez was patient. They’d get the message across.
She remembered, in that moment, the thermos filled with coffee sitting in the door of Vasquez’s unmarked Taurus. Damn. Just what she needed.
“Hey Vasquez! Want some coffee?” He grunted and shook his head, and went back to dealing with the Concerned Citizen. But Becca needed that coffee, just like she’d needed coffee by the thermos-full on patrol in Kirkuk.
She wandered over to the car, opened the door, and fished around for the thermos.
Behind her, a figure moved past, but she was too intent on getting caffeine to see it.
Staff Sergeant Juanetta Taylor stood with her AR-15 cradled in the crook of her right arm, and stared out into the darkness. She’d been at school when the notification had come in, when she’d learned that her unit had been mobilized. The plans for the evening...a slow dinner with Doug and the girls, maybe a movie, just chilling...those had evaporated into nothing.
Her unit, the first to respond, and it’d been a couple of hours of house to house with that freaky shit thing just hovering there. Orders were clear and straight up. There was a zone around each of the objects, in which everything stopped working. That zone was to be cleared. No-one was going inside the zone, period, not until they’d gotten the whole thing locked down. The guard and local yokels had established a perimeter around each, roadblocks, cordons, and both foot and drone patrols.
That was exciting, like some war of the worlds shit, but now there was hours of nothing on this road in the middle of freaking nowhere. Most of the locals had gotten the word, except for this one crazy old bastard who just couldn’t get it into his head.
The cops were handling it, that was their job, Juanetta was just there to...huh.
Her phone vibrated, a dull tickle at her side, and then again. Shoot. Doug had said that Dawna might be feeling sick, man, babygirl just got sick all the time. She really should check that.
She fished around, pulled out the phone. It wasn’t on. She dug around in the menus, checking to see if it had maybe been a call, the pale bluish light of the screen playing across her face, momentarily washing out her night vision, consuming her attention.
She panned back through the last several hours of messages. No-one had called or texted or messaged her. Weird. She could have sworn she felt that vibration.
“Hey, did you see that?” It was Teague, his voice a little higher than usual. Jesus, that boy was barely keeping it together.
Specialist Mark Teague was, if he was straight up with himself, more than a little freaked out. He stared out into the darkness, and yeah, he was freaked out. Here he was, out on this spooky-ass road with freakin’ aliens or some shit just less than a mile away, and sure, he was supposed to keep people from getting close, because people were stupid.
Like this old dude hassling the cops, hey, lemme go get eaten or anally probed or whatever the hell because I need to go feed my damn cat. The cat’ll be fine, assuming it hadn’t been already been eaten or anally probed. People were just stupid. Dude, you’re a character in a freakin’ horror movie, like totally that stubborn old fart who makes the dumbass choices and bites it.
Mark shuddered, involuntarily.
And he was one of the soldiers, firing wildly into the darkness before...Jesus.
I mean, damn, this always went down the same way, right? Yeah, he had his rifle, but once the lasers or heat rays or freakin’ death beams started up, he wasn’t even gonna have time to shart himself before the whole thing was over.
Or maybe it was, like, damn. He didn’t know. But this always went seriously bad, like, every single alien invasion movie he wished now he’d never seen.
Maybe he should have tried more in high school, smoked a little less weed and studied a little more, wouldn’t have needed that sign up bonus, wouldn’t be standing here hoping not to be the first dude to die in the alien war, Jesus, this was some freaky stuff.
Out of the corner of his eye, it seemed like the world brightened, a flicker of something.
He turned, looked out into the darkness to the spire that hung to the west of town. It had glowed or something, just for a second, he could have sworn it.
He stepped away from his position on the left hand side of the roadblock, and took a few steps forward, his eyes straining into the darkness, the hackles on the back of his neck raised, all attention turned to whatever it was. What the hell was that? He stood, frozen, as a shadow moved behind him.
Juanetta was doing something on her phone, man, she should be seeing this. “Hey, did you see that?” His voice, a little wobbly.
Perry was outraged, outraged, these jackbooted thugs standing between a man and his property, between a man and his rights. This was all supposed to have stopped after President Ortiz was elected, but no, this was just what Dr. Max at LibertyHour.com said was going to happen.
He’d seen the coverage, the lamestream media talking about maybe this was aliens, and what better excuse to lock things down. Those aliens were probably just blimps, just balloons, a total false flag, just like Nine Eleven, just like all those so-called school shootings with their actors and their libtard secret agenda.
Perry was furious, because he’d been stupid, hadn’t thought ahead, hadn’t made sure that he’d brought at least one gun with him when he left earlier in the day. Would it have been so hard to drop the Remington into the trunk? Or packed that little Smith and Wesson? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Here it was all coming down, and every last weapon he owned was at home, and it was all so unfair, not his fault, because the clinic had taken longer, lazy people, stalling on his pain meds, like he was just making his hip pain up. It was a chronic condition, he had the prescription, so what if it had been six years, that’s what chronic meant. So it was their fault that he got stuck in traffic. And of course there was traffic, because his tax dollars were wasted on incompetent bureaucrats rather than building the new road they need, and now this thug spic cop was treating him like he was some sort of criminal.
He forced his ID into the hand of the cop, because, dammit, he was a citizen, and he’d be treated with respect. He glared at “Officer Vasquez,” if that was even really who he was, a seething, fierce glare, all of his frustration and anger showing on his face, this “Vasquez” at the heart of it, nothing else mattered.
All he saw was his anger.
Darren walked on by the cordon, moving slowly down the road in the deep shadows of the early morning. No human being saw him, and soon he was lost to the darkness.
There, in the burgeoning light of a summer morning he stood. He was standing by the front of the little church, and there was the car. Only the car wasn’t so important, really, it wasn’t.
Darren stared at the Civic, the battered little sedan that had served him for the last six years. Two hundred and thirty seven thousand miles, speckled with the dun acne of rust, rear bumper unrepaired from that fender bender in the Harris Teeter lot four months ago, the left tail-light affixed only through the miracle of duct tape.
Yes, he needed the car. It was a part of him, a place, a marker, countless hours spent. But that wasn’t important. That was not why he was here. Why he had walked for the last hour, was it just an hour, down darkened roads that had passed like a waking dream.
He couldn’t remember, not exactly, why he was there.
Then he looked up, and realized that he knew why he was there.
There, the spire, the object, the...word came, and it was...carapace. Into which it had moved, into which Jaumm had moved, because that was the name.
Or more than a name. It was that, and it was something else.
He suddenly felt light, so light, not lightheaded, not dizzy. He was light as he was when he dreamed, when he’d reach his arms out and feel the weight of the world fall away. He felt it in his legs, like they were dangling, hanging free, floating in the swimming hole outside of town on a warm summer day.
It was liberating, it was exhilarating, and he felt strangely joyous, overbrimming with a sense of quiet bliss, and he breathed in sharp and deep because he was caught up, rising slowly, the ground falling away, the softest of breezes as he moved. The great funhouse-mirrored side growing closer, there he was, he could see himself, a little action figure rising from a warped model train set church.
And higher, up towards the fat center of the spire, its thickest point, hundreds of feet in the air, the ground far below, fall to your death far below, but he could feel nothing but delight, delight so deep that the words he tried to speak popped like bubbles in his mind, they couldn’t hold it, couldn’t contain it.
Now closer still, he could see himself, see the huge toothy smile on his angular face, see his silly Panera outfit, see that he should have cleaned and ironed those khaki pants. There he was in the sky, bright with the light of dawn, there were the fields and farms and the town water tower, Sugarloaf mountain far away behind him, bent and taffy-pulled at the far edges of the reflection.
He could almost touch it, almost touch it, and now he could as he slowed to a near stop, he could reach out and touch it.
Closer still, and he was looking at his own face, his wildly happy face, his eyes deep brown, looking at himself, closer and closer until he lost focus, till everything blurred for a moment, and then he was somewhere different.
“Right...about...there. He’s gone, sir. Just went right in. No door, no nothing. Right into Object Three.”
In the screen-lit darkness of a large room, deep in the bowels of a featureless facility in the Dakotas, the airman shook his head in disbelief. From over his shoulder, his CO let out a tight grunt. The flatscreens in front of him showed a sequence of different images, visible spectrum and infrared, the streaming optical data from the Global Hawk that prowled in long lazy circles over the farms and fields, standing off well outside the influence of that peculiar damping effect around the objects. It was a thousand miles away, but it was their eyes, and they were its mind. The image from the primary screen was up on the main board in the room, but the CO stuck with his subordinate.
“Run me that whole sequence again, airman.”
“Yes sir. I picked him up on IR right…” he expertly turned a knob, and the images whirred in time. “Right here, at oh five five seven eastern standard.” A tiny speck, a sliver of warm mammalian life. The camera locked, centered, the gimbals and optics focusing in on the operator’s interest. “Zooming in...now.” The figure grew abruptly, blossoming out until it was identifiably human, moving forward slowly, at a casual amble. “Just walking, sir, right up the middle of the road. No sign of trying to be stealthy. Just right out in the open. He walked up to that car, stood there for, hold on.”
He twisted the dial again, and the figure accelerated, a crazy Benny Hill rush down the road, until it stopped suddenly at a car in the parking lot of a tiny church building. The figure stood, stock still. “Just over five minutes.”
“How the hell did he get in there? We’ve got several thousand assets on the ground, law enforcement and National Guard, roadblocks, automated drone patrols, our eyes on from the RQ-5s, and…”
“Right here, sir. One of the drone perimeter-patrol quads picked him up crossing at a cordon, about forty minutes before he arrived at Object Three.”
The airman’s hands flew over the keyboard, and another, cruder image surfaced in a wash of image-enhanced green. There, a cluster of five figures around three vehicles, floating faintly as the quad bobbed and adjusted.
“Let me speed this up a bit.” Twice, now, three times faster.
A sixth figure appeared from the bottom of the screen at triple time, walked up to the left of the roadblock, and passed on.
“What the hell. Just walked right by them. What the hell were they doing?”
“No idea, sir. Beats me. Didn’t challenge him, didn’t even seem to see him.”
The CO blinked, shook his head, a dazed look crossing his grizzled face.
“Run the sequence from Object Three again.”
“Yes sir.”
The previous image returned, and they watched as the figure stood, and stood, and then rose slowly from the ground. Up, up over the car and the church sign, over the road, higher and higher, over the field, and Object Three came into view, and the little mannequin kept climbing, the gimbaled chameleon-eye array on the Global Hawk following its rise.
It slowed, for a moment, at the surface of the object, and then was gone.
The CO rocked back on his heels, and rubbed his hand over his face. “Jesus.”
“This one going upstairs, sir?”
“Yeah. Prep and prioritize.”
Rick opened his eyes. He was on the couch in the living room. It was light outside, clearly the next day. He checked the time. Jesus. He was three hours late for work. But then he remembered that he probably didn’t have a job any more anyway.
He sat up, and felt surprisingly good. His head felt clear, his thoughts, bright. He wasn’t hung over, not even in the slightest.
Jesus, was his tolerance that good now? He’d downed a good fifth after Patti stormed out to spend the night with the Donaldsons, before he’d gotten in the car and driven to talk with Darren.
After Patti stormed out. O Lord. O Jesus. The memories rolled back, of her at the door packed to leave, her screaming, her fists against his chest, against his face, the taste of blood in his mouth, his hands trying to stop her, to plead.
The fists opened, and her nails raking at his eyes, his face, his arms. His chest tightened, his hand moving involuntarily to his face. That had hurt, hurt bad, at least until the bourbon drowned out the pain.
He got up, shuffled to the master bathroom. He’d get some antibiotic ointment, some of that generic stuff that they kept in the medicine cabinet. Best not to let an infection set in.
Something he was forgetting, he was sure of it. He remembered getting to the little church, remembered the careening drive, the sideswiped tree, the stutterstep blur of a deep hard drunk. Hitting the doors, hard, and weaving through the space. Darren’s face, blanching, flushing. Darren’s prayers, his words, his care.
And something else. Darren must have brought him home, must have. But that wasn’t it.
He opened the door to the bathroom, walked to the wide cabinet, looked in the mirror at the damage.
There were no marks.
Nothing. His face was unshaved, but also untouched, uncut, unbruised.
He peered at himself. What? He’d felt the blood, felt the sting. He looked at his forearms, and they were unscathed, the torn flesh in his memory completely missing.
Huh.
And all of a sudden, he felt dirty. He really did, felt it, all of a sudden, felt the stick of it on him, days since he’d showered, the stress bourbon sweat and stench.
The shirt came off, then the pants, then the boxers, and he fired up the shower, nice and hot and steaming, and it was on him, Jesus it felt good, felt good to be clean.
It was the shower, and the memory of the habit rose in him, it was what he did every time, every shower, the place he relieved it, his hand, his sex, let that pressure go, let his mind wander to the hungry eyes and a thousand remembered visions of illicit flesh.
It was a pattern, part of his day, woven back deep as far as he could remember.
But his hand didn’t move. Nothing stirred in him. He felt nothing at all. It was just a memory, a shell, an empty, uncharged nothing.
He didn’t want to, and it surprised him. He tried to make himself think about it, drawing from the memories and images burned and rewritten into him through countless obsessive repetitions.
It just wasn’t there. The urge was gone.
He laughed, short and bright.
“What?”
And he laughed again, and found that he couldn’t stop.
Julie paced the floor of the kitchen, and tried to concentrate.
He had come home. He had gone straight to bed. There was something wrong, she knew it. Darren, going to bed without a devotional? He never missed that unless he was sick, never just lay down like he had no life left in him.
And he’d slipped out of bed, like a ghost, without waking her. Darren always woke her, just enough, just enough to let her know he was leaving, a whispered word, the brush of his lips and the bristle of his mustache against her cheek.
There, on the counter, his phone. He must have just set it there, just left his phone behind, and that wasn’t like him either.
Something had happened to him, something strange, and the news was saying how one of those Objects had set down just right there, right where Darren had been at the church. Maybe it had done something, hurt him, hurt his mind, because he just wasn’t right. She could feel it, feel it because she just knew, it was just wrong.
She felt her heart race, felt her anxious tension build.
She could call the police, maybe she should do that, but things were so crazy now, she’d had to shut off the television.
Residents were being encouraged to stay in their homes. Stay off the streets, be out of the way of emergency personnel. It was there on CNN, there on Fox, there on NBC and ABC, broadcast and cable, pictures of their quiet little town.
It just made her feel more upset, so she shut it all down.
There was a sharp buzz from the countertop, which startled her. Darren’s phone, and it buzzed again, rattling against the damaged, off color formica.
She checked the number, and it was Jill from Panera.
She picked up.
“Hello Jill, this is Julie.”
“Hey, Julie. Didn’t expect to get you. Is Darren coming in today? I know things, um, couldn’t be weirder out there, but I got a message from him this morning, but, um, he didn’t make his shift, and I thought maybe…”
“I don’t know where Darren is. I mean, he came home last night, there was something wrong, he was really tired, couldn’t talk, and this morning he was just gone.”
“Gone?” Julie could hear the concern in Jill’s voice. She was a good woman, a good friend to Darren.
“I, yes. Just not there. Left his phone. I don’t know where the car is, he came home last night without it.”
A pause on the other end. “Wow. I. Yeah, that sounds like something’s up. I mean, not just the something we all know about. Are you and Mary and Omri OK?”
Julie laughed, a little high, a little off.
“No, not really. We’re not supposed to leave the house, and there are cops everywhere, and people with guns, and everyone’s pretty much totally freaking out. You can only get out of town on Fisher Road, 28 is closed, the one oh seven, Partnership, Hughes, the ferry, everything has roadblocks. That’s what they said on the radio, what came through on Facebook. ”
“Julie, I’m so sorry. Look, Darren will be fine, he’s such a good man, I’m sure he’s just, I don’t know, maybe getting the car or something.”
Julie gave a little shuddering sigh. “I hope so.”
From the living room, a cry, then another, and then Mary’s voice. “Moo-oom? Mom!”
“Hey, Jill, thanks, look I’ve got, I’ve got to go, hey I’ll call you if I hear.”
She set down the phone.
“Mom, Omri’s messed himself! It’s leaking everywhere! Mom! ”
Julie felt like she was about to break. Lord, have mercy.
President Ortiz rubbed his eyes. It had been a long night.
The whole Cabinet had gathered for the briefing, but it was almost entirely pointless. One presentation after another, but no new information. Just panic. Panic in several major cities, requiring some significant police and National Guard presence. Panic in the markets. Gas shortages everywhere. The DOW and the NASDAQ, both down nearly seventeen percent before trading was halted.
Significant portions of the web down, servers overwhelmed by the chatter panic of the weak and the weak-minded. Rumors everywhere. That this was a false flag operation, cover for some Chinese/Russian plot. That it was CG, which is insane, because you could step out and actually see Object One in the upper atmosphere, see how huge it was. Social media, where it still stood, was magnifying the panic, as provocateurs and professional agitators used the event as an excuse to cause as much clickbait mayhem as they could.
It was one disaster after another, one failure of backbone and patriotism after another, as Secretary Taylor dryly recounted riots in Philly and looting in several California cities, along with a rash of what appeared to be mass suicides.
Secretary O’Leary looked up from his secure phone, and broke into the litany of woe and incompetence.
“...but, Mr. President, I do have one further detail, one I’ve just recently received and has been confirmed with Dee Eye Ay. We appear to have some form of contact.”
“Contact?” It was Bernstein, who perked up at the word. “They’re talking?”
O’Leary continued, in his blunt way. “No. Not to our knowledge. We’re not sure quite what it means, but we’ve received video from one of the patrolling Global Hawks from the 348th Recon Group out of Grand Forks that shows, well, Mr. President, I think we all need to see this.”
The Presidential Seal vanished from the large screen at the head of the conference table, and a grainy vid began to play, a little IR-adjusted man, walking alone down a country road in the darkness.
At the moment the figure rose from the ground, President Ortiz felt himself gasp, involuntarily, as the room erupted.
He wasn’t sure where or when he was. He saw his eyes, and then a blur of nothing, and then that sense of presence. It was warm and comforting, sustaining and gentle, a floating amniotic reverie. Darren was safe, was at no risk, was cared for, would be fine.
Then a teasing, a flutter of something, a coalescing half-formed reality. He could see it and feel it, but it would not reveal itself, its coyness a querying, a permission-seeking.
Yes. Yes. He wanted to know. Jesus, did he want to know. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
And then it was.
Time whirled and eddied, pausing and then leaping forward, frames and moments and aeons, all cast out before Darren. He was seeing it, only he wasn’t there. He felt separate from himself, separate from his body.
He saw a world, a great old fat red sun in the sky, the surface lush and wild and alive with movement and growth. Things that were both plant and animal and neither lived and died and grew and changed. Species rose and fell. Bright meteors lit the world as they fell, and the creatures burned and died and rose again, years passed, deeper than thought, years deeper than memory could hold.
Then a creature, a fat little starfish, clambering from the water and changing, five limbs becoming ten, growing in complexity, manipulating objects, then shaping the objects to its need. And it bred, and then it died. Its progeny bred and died, and each passed itself on. Years passed by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands, and the creature grew, and struggled, and succeeded.
Subspecies rose, and struggled with one another for territory and for resource. Conflict rewarded the stronger, rewarded the smarter even more, and the beings changed and grew and became more social. Language, symbol, and art, wildly alien and unknowable, themselves evolving and changing and in tension.
The conflicts raged and burned, as the energies turned to control and power deepened. Spasms of light and impossible energies left continents charred and desolate, beings shattered and ruined by the billions.
From the conflict, a singular purpose, Zhe’eyteh’tez, a name, a particular being, but also a singular end, spreading and iterating, Zhe’eyteh’tez.
The idea played and iterated, as alive as the beings that dedicated themselves to it, found a unifying purpose within it. Zhe’eyteh’tez, the search for the real, for the depth of reality, for the span and breadth and essence of all things, a seeking out of knowledge that transforms and sustains.
And from the little world, outward, radiant waves of life, from one world to another, leapfrogging fractally outward, dozens and hundreds and thousands, growth exponential and explosive, filling the whorl of a galaxy, splashing outward, galaxy to galaxy, accelerating, catching the stretching yawning chasm of expanding space and time.
In that growth, urgency, deepening and growing, as the fabric and fire of the universe waned. Existence itself, time and space in all its vastness, completely finite, the universe fading towards heat death.
As the lights died in the heavens, as galaxies collapsed into nothingness, the Zhe’eyteh’tez fragmented. By the billions, by the countless trillions, most living things ceded to the cold, to the creep of the final cosmological winter, to the inevitability of it, the peaceful nothingness of it.
Others, fewer and fewer, followed the path of life, retrenching and seeking adaptation or escape, knowledge itself seeking its own survival.
And in a research megastructure spanning light years, rising from the work of billions of beings over a yawning chasm of time, first a flicker and then a fire of hope.
Darren felt it, that moment of delight, and of discovery, as a story seemingly ended found a way to carry on.
There was a way out.
“Patti, just look at me. Look at me!”
The door, cracked open, the security chain taut.
“Go away, Rick, right now, I’ll call the cops, Lord Jesus, I’ll have you put away again.” From behind her, another voice, whispered and intense.
“Stop talking to him, Patti. You deserve better. Close the door. I’ll call nine one one.”
Rick pressed his face in closer. “Do that. Fine. Call them. You’ve got the right, and I deserve it. But look at me first, look at my face. I’m not trying to make you feel bad, or even trying to make you take me back. You know what you did to me last night, I know it, but look at my face, for the love of God, Patti, please look at me.”
Her eyes, from shadow, away from the crack in the door. She watched him in silence.
“You drew blood. You saw it. I saw it.” He thrust his bare arm forward. “And here, too.” He pushed right up to the gap.
“I don’t have a scratch on me. Not on my face. Not on my arm. Not a scratch on me.”
From behind the door, silence, a slight motion in the shadow.
“Something happened to me last night, Patti. Something happened. I’m different. Not just my face. Not just my arms. Something’s been changed inside of me. It was after I went to see Darren, after...whatever it was that happened.”
“You’re a liar.” The voice from the shadow, worn and flat and without affect.
Rick nodded. “Yes. Yes I am. I have lied to you for decades. But something’s different. I can make stuff up about how I’m a different person, I know I have, I’ve told you that a hundred times. I can’t lie about my face. I can’t. It’s just not possible. Patti, it’s...it’s a miracle.”
The shadow shifted, and made an indeterminate sound. A cough, a laugh, a sob.
“I don’t...I can’t believe in miracles anymore, Rick. I just can’t.”
The door closed, slowly, firmly, and stayed closed.
Rick stood there, looking at the door.
Then he looked away, and turned, and walked back to the road.
OMFG Mary my Dad is making me totally crazy. I can’t go out, and he’s like completely freaking out bcause I’m supposed to be at his place tomorrow. Mom is like completely screaming at him on the phone right now, because there are freakin aliens and he needs to not be such a shit.
Yeah well you know where your Dad is. FML.
He’s not home? WTF?
No he’s not, he’s gone and we don’t know where he is, I’m srsly scared I want him to come home.
But I thot you said he got home last night.
Yeah but then he took off again, like in the middle of the night rly quiet. I hrd him get up. He left his phone behind and everything.
He was at the place that third one came down isn’t that like right where it was?
It’s right there, like right across the street in that field. I think something happened to him, like they did something to him, he’s like WRONG, and he like lost the car we don’t even know where that is either.
What do you mean WRONG? Your freekin me out.
I mean he like didn’t hug me or say anything to me, just came inna house and went to bed like I wasn’t even there or worried about him.
So he’s like my Dad now, huh? ;0p
STFU. I’m scared I miss him and I think something happened to him.
Sorry, I am your dad is awesome, I mean a little wierd and all but so so nice.
I kno pls call me I want to talk to somebody.
K.
Special Agent Smith sat in the thicket of the cubicle farm and watched the flickering screen, images spraying staccato, faster than he could register.
The light played across his work area, the strobing light flickering across pictures of Beth and the boys, across a Magic Eight Ball, across his Matrix bobblehead collection, Neo and Trinity and three different Agent Smiths, me, me me, ha hah he never got tired of that joke. They shuddered in the light, dancers at a rave, across a desk notable for neatness and order.
The algorithm danced through faces, faces by the dozen every second, checking and crosschecking against the specs he’d input from the Dee Aye Ay images. Between six one and six three, male, Caucasian, between thirty and fifty years of age. The facial recognition software, mapping features against a muddled blur, taken in low light and at considerable distance. With a clear shot, you were in like Flynn, but with this mess, it was going to give false positives. Just going to have to drill down.
There, a possible. And another. And another. It spun on through DMV records, arrest records, and four hundred thousand publicly accessible image records from Facebook and LinkedIn.
Thirty two possibles from the regional run.
Unlikely. Sure, it could be a tourist, or a cultist, or a UFO nut. Or maybe someone doing the Close Encounters thing, one minute they’re at a KFC in Richmond buying up forty two sides of mashed potatoes, next thing you know they’re scrambling across a field in the darkness towards the landing site because they. were. In-VIE-TED.
But that felt wrong. Not sure why. Just his gut, and he’d learned to trust his gut as much as he trusted the network of subconned INTELCLOUD analytics that were his glitchy, barely post-beta eyes and ears to the world.
He refined and narrowed the search, locality only, zip codes in a jigsaw pattern around the landing sites of Objects One through Three.
That narrowed it down to seven possibles, a much more manageable N, and he was entering their names, one after another, into another HomSec meta-analytic program.
Nothing on the first two.
The third had a rap sheet that ran on for pages, arrests and convictions for petty theft, breaking and entering, domestic violence, two restraining orders, meth and heroin. Just a wreck of a soul, total fustercluck. Not what he was looking for, not for this.
Number four had one speeding ticket, one minor accident report.
And, as it so happens, was also part of a long a police report, filed this morning, from the site of Object Three. One of two men, found dazed and quasi-responsive outside a church just two hundred meters from the Object. The suggestion, in the report, that something might have been interacting with them. The report included a description of that something, terse and just the facts ma’am.
Dry as the description was, Agent Smith shuddered. Non human? Seven feet? Jesus.
The officer had gotten the names and the contact information of the two men, and then had sent them home. That was it. Among the thousands of panicked calls, the thousands of eyewitness accounts and attention seeking fabrications, this little nugget of data had been buried. Two names.
Rick DiAngelo, 37, Caucasian male, five foot eight. The system returned detail, an arrest record, probation reports. Canoodling with minors. One of those. Jeez. That wasn’t the primary. Not the match.
And the match. Darren Shiflett, 42, Caucasian male, six foot one. Address: 17730 Hoskinson Road, Poolesville, Maryland, 20837. An image, ripped from Google, one townhouse sandwiched in a row of townhomes.
Bingo.
He shook the Magic Eight Ball, an old habit, just for funsies, and turned it, waiting for the little floating dice to settle through the dark bubbles. All signs point to yes.
Yes they did.
Darren watched, compressed and downclocked for his understanding, the energies of the last Zhe’ehtey’tez venture, the culmination of billions of years of theoretics and seeking focused down to this one concerted effort. There was no hope for their time and space, no way to reverse the process, no way to turn aside the heat death of their universe.
But it could be escaped. To step sideways, out of being, and into the infinity of universes that arose outside of space and time. Existence was not the cold prison of linearity, not the finite boundary of one story with one ending. It was evolving, bubbling, budding, splitting, quantum-branching, layering impossible complexity on top of impossible complexity.
And into that complexity, life had fled.
The Construction was all that remained, a bulwark that spanned light years, harnessing the energies of synthetic stars and harvested singularities, hanging in the fading darkness. It had bustled and shone for gigayears, but now it was empty, empty of all but a few, the last of them.
Jaumm, among those last. Jaumm, who had watched as countless others had wrapped themselves in the Transit Carapace, as much a part of them as it was a technology. They had gathered at the great core of the Construction, gathered and shared knowledge for the last time, the shapes and forms of worlds without count or measure, the fruit of this universe, both organic and synthetic.
And then they departed.
Darren saw them go through many eyes, Jaumm’s eyes, across unfamiliar richness of the spectrum, as they shone silver and folded away without effort, disappearing from time and space like droplets swallowed by dry earth.
Jaumm, in her five-fold form, ageless, the Oldest of the Old Ones, would be the last.
She and her four self-sisters looked out across the remains of life’s final redoubt, savoring the awareness of this time and space. Darren through her sensorium taking a last glance at a childhood home, emptied of furniture and suddenly unfamiliar, no longer resonant with memory or identity.
He felt her reach out, extending herself with her sisters to join their intention with the carapace.
Again, a blur, and everything that had been known or knowable was suddenly falling away.
Bob Bernstein sat heavily down into the leather recliner, spilling a few drops of his scotch onto his hand. He felt the coolness as the alcohol evaporated, and the reassuring clatter of the ice against the glass. He took a mouthful, felt the warm peaty fire as it went down.
He checked his Rolex. Two fifteen. Jesus. Two fifteen on a Friday morning. Sarah hadn’t even gotten up when he came home.
What the hell was going on? Really, seriously, this was going to fucktown in ways he’d never imagined possible. He’d been in the business for nearly thirty years, he was a party man, connected, tied in, part of the old boys club. He was a Jewboy, sure, but also a Yalie, had that Skull and Bones ring, knew the handshake, was part of the Circle of Trust. He was Rob, Bob, Bobby, on everyone’s contact list, everyone that mattered on both coasts and on every bright spot in the heartland. And he was damn good at his job, really, damn good.
Eighteen months ago, when the election had looked to go every which way but right, he’d been contacted by the Ortiz campaign, and of course he’d signed on. Jumped at it. He’d been tracking the stats, the RCP numbers, following probabilities. With an independent lefty candidate running better than nine percent of the popular and draining down the support for their primary opponent, hell, that whole outsider-anti-Washington thing had a shot.
It was an outside shot, of course, the demographics were running wrong, but they’d run hard and negative and done what they could to divide and conquer, and it had worked. He’d put together a hard hitting media campaign, plus some subversive shell game oppo, and it’d won.
Ortiz won with a plurality, forty one point three percent of the total vote in the lowest turnout election in sixty years. The margin was more in the electoral college, of course. They had the House, thanks to some creative districting, and the Senate, because Corporate America knew who they wanted in power. The Court was theirs, by supermajority. For the first time in decades, America was united.
United by a minority party that knew how to play the game, sure. But united, and dammit, that’s what counted.
And yes, there’d been some riots, particularly on campuses and in some of the major cities, but the Constitution was clear. You could shout about that fascist Ortiz not being your President all you wanted, put it onto your signs, hashtag #NotMyPresident all you wanted on twitter. But he was President Ortiz.
The job of Press Secretary was his, and he knew it, and of course the Transition Team gave it to him, and he settled in for four years of doing what he did best.
Only that wasn’t how things were rolling. It wasn’t just that it was too much, that he was exhausted all the time, that his angina was getting to the point where he couldn’t ignore it.
That was just the game. There was a price to pay, in time, and in flesh.
But damn. Ortiz was, well, he was more than ol’ Bobby had bargained for. Careful, smart, methodical, manipulative, and sure, Bernstein could respect that.
But also evil. Not just the bully he’d been in the Senate, not just the elegant infighter and triangulating oppo master that he’d been on the campaign trail. But actually evil.
It had been hard to pin down, at first, but as the purity tests had gotten tighter and tighter, and as more and more lifelong practical party people had been replaced by ideologues and true believers, Bernstein had watched friend after friend ousted in one pogrom or another.
Media, the media that you built relationships with, where you had friends and shared drinks and doled out knowledge, the media was the enemy. Everything was managed, so tight that the press was left to spin out speculation. Which undermined their credibility. Which seemed to be the point of the very different, very long, very frightening game Ortiz was playing.
Today, though, today things went deeper.
After that impossible image, there’d been silence in the Cabinet Room. Ortiz had locked it down, made it clear, no-one, no-one was to speak of or let that image out. He’d started talking about existential threats, about freedom, with Terrence along the whole time, and Rios looking at him like some cultist in Guyana, looking bright eyed at Jim Jones as he poured out glass after glass of sweet red drink.
Lock it down, he’d said. No-one sees this outside of need to know. No thought of contacting the scientific community, which was being systematically shut out from interacting with the Objects. This was all military, one hundred percent a security and national defense operation. Then the President had started talking about martial law, about the legal steps necessary to temporarily suspend Constitutional governance in a time of national emergency, what was needed to institute a full scale military response on U.S. soil.
Rios had rattled off the steps, what would need to be done to reassure our allies, what would need to be done to ensure market stability. She had clearly done work on this. It was carefully planned out, prepackaged, prearranged.
“I’ll need a draft emergency powers statement by oh seven hundred tomorrow, Bob. No eyes but your own on it.”
“Mr. President, I’m not sure, I mean, do we have any idea what we’re looking at there? It may not be…”
“I see a threat to our freedom. I see an American citizen being abducted from U.S. soil by an unknown and likely hostile force. That’s what I see.” His eyes, icy and sleepy lidded, devoid of feeling above his strangely soft mouth. “That’s what you see, isn’t it, Terrence?” A curt nod. “Marcela?” “Yes, Mr. President.” There was no hesitation in her voice, none. There never was.
“That’s what all of us see, isn’t it, Bob?” A circle of stares, and Bob realized that none of them, not a one, was a friend.
He was fucked.
Bernstein had done what he’d been told, gotten it done. He left the draft with the President at almost one am, Rios and O’Leary still huddled tight with the POTUS. He felt their eyes on him as he left, hard as stones. It had been a long drive home.
He fumbled with the flash drive in his pocket, a little pocket USB, integrated encryption.
The full video hadn’t been that hard to come by, not with his clearance. Nor had it been hard to copy the data about who that little speck of human being was, the one who’d gone soaring up into that...thing. His address. Background information. And the memos, top secret, about how this whole thing fit with the larger plan.
He took another mouthful of the single malt, felt it burn down his throat. This was a mistake, he was sure of it. Career ending. Maybe a little more than that. Maybe dangerous. But someone else needed to see this.
A name came to mind. If she’d talk to him. It had been a long time.
Darren watched as Jaumm moved on, from spacetime to spacetime, dancing across the variable probable forms of being. Some were chaotic, some were collapsing, some seethed with wildly different physics, all of them slowly dying as her own birth universe had died.
Relative time ceased to have meaning, passing at such lengths that it almost ceased to be a relevant category, but Jaumm was ageless, life that did not rust or oxidize or decay. The heart of the Zhe’eyteh’tez purpose, the seeking after knowing, that deepened and continued.
She wandered through transit after transit, leaping from universe to universe, encountering life in all of its forms and possibilities. She divided in some places, planted other Fives, other sisters, and moved on as civilizations blossomed and spanned new pan-galactic space.
Within the wild splitting bubbling churn of countless universes, a peculiar order began to be evident. An intent, embedded within the underlying laws of stable spacetimes. A purpose that bordered on knowledge. It felt like part of her purpose, a distant reflection. Or she, a reflection of it.
It was not present everywhere. Some of being was pure entropy, formlessness and no-thingness. But those places were quite literally nothing.
Yet where it was present, it hung faintly in the fabric of being like an echo, like a marker, like a guidepost. It manifested itself, imperfectly, in localized sentiences. The chaos whirled around its influence, entropy recasting itself as order.
Jaumm found herself pursuing it, seeking forms of reality in which it was more manifest. She leapt faster from spacetime to spacetime, across times indefinite, and spaces that knew no end and infinite variance.
Her seeking led her to universes of ever heightening harmony and mathematical perfection, in which entropy and heat death had been vanquished, where beings of boundless age and knowledge followed paths much like her own. They welcomed. They guided. They pointed the way, and so deeper in still she chased, to universes that had themselves emerged as singular intelligences, which themselves expressed knowledge and possibility in an endless song of joyous creativity.
Yet all of that had poured, like a fountain, from elsewhere.
Up and in, further and further, until she found herself within a perfectly stable and aware spacetime, pouring out from its integrated self a stream of realized thought, an endless cascade of other universes, everything that could possibly be. It did so for the simple joy of creating. Those infinite realities were a part of it, and it was woven into them yet forever beyond them, a nested paradox.
There, on the cusp of the source of all form, she dwelled in awe, a part of it, timeless and beyond time. In that, a teasing moment of time recurred. A faint yearning stirred. Jaumm felt the yearning, timeless and endless and perfect.
Within the infinitely complex chaos mechanics of being, there were nodes of wild beauty and complexity. Wherever sentience rose and flowered, it ordered the chaos around it, brief moments, each a bright flicker of the endless heart of knowing from which it rose.
And those flowerings, beautiful and delicate and fleeting, were the heart of the stirring. Because so many of them died and suffered for nothing. So many never found the Way.
Darren remembered it with her, and his mind struggled to find language to grasp it. To cast a story around it, struggled for the sake of sanity, language and emotion and memory reeling. As he did, his mind pushed back hard against what he was encountering. This was not the story, not the Word, not the inerrant Word.
How could this be real? Yet it was.
Like a mother hen, sheltering her chicks under her wings, rose the thought. For God so loved the world, hummed the old familiar words. En arche en ho logos, hummed a memory from that Greek class at Moody. They wrapped themselves around the experience that was shared with him, colored it, defined it.
Then he was lost again in the wildness.
From within the heart of knowledge rested the knowledge of what it meant to struggle and fail, the despair of sentient life’s struggle against nonbeing. And from that, at the heart of things, the stirring of compassion that comes from knowing.
From that compassion, intent.
Driven by that intent, Jaumm danced downward, cascading downward, splitting out fractally into a thousand five-forms at once, manifesting in other times and spaces where heat death still threatened, where life still struggled, where the knowledge gained from her path might help shape and change the direction of being.
Then suddenly Darren was drifting in shadow. Show’s over, he thought faintly, as he floated in a softly silver space, a cast veil hung from the clouds. He felt content, at ease, neither particularly hungry or thirsty. He wondered, for a moment, how long he had been there.
Below were fields and farms, the snaking circuit of the Potomac. Below him, almost directly below, the little country church at the crossroads.
And before him, the being floated, drifting in the warm metallic glow, at the very center of the space in which he found himself. The thick segmented barrel of its body danced and speckled with patterns of pigment and light, which whorled about the roots of five arms or tentacles or tendrils.
The arms branched out, touching at invisible motes with branches that divided and divided out until they were as fine as hairs, every one moving with intention, moving not with the random undulations of a floating weed, but with purpose. Not being shaped by the world around it, but shaping the flow and ebb of energies that Darren could not see.
Jaumm.
That was its name. Not of just that one living thing before him, but of its kind, its tribe, the Five identical sprouted sisters that had found their way to this tiny world in this tiny universe. Jaumm meant all of these things, woven all up into one.
He knew this, but he was not sure how he knew it.
The arms swept forward, as one, and the veil darkened, silver shifting to a deep metal gray, and the world outside vanished away into the shadow.
Becca sat in the parking lot of the townhouse community, right where dispatch had told her to wait, and watched as they pulled up next to her. Two men in a late model Impala, featureless, the kind of car that would pass you and you’d barely register that it was present, standard government issue.
The men themselves were equally featureless, standard issue cookie cutter persons, tall but not too tall, decent looking but nothing that would hold your eye. Special Agent Rogers and Special Agent Sullivan, as they introduced themselves, but she quickly forgot which one was which.
Not that it seemed to particularly matter.
The call had come from the house, a missing persons call, there were a whole bunch of those lately. That, and opportunistic crime, particularly outside of the affected area. There just weren’t enough cops on the ground to manage this, and even with the National Guard up, well, things were messy. Some people, Jesus.
But they had time for this call, because this was the same guy she’d seen standing there in the light by that church, standing and staring. He was missing now, so that was something. Something that might mean something.
This was more than just a missing persons investigation, more than just some guy who ran off with another woman or the money from their bank account.
That was what Rogers and Sullivan were interested in. Federales, they were, the both of them, not that they bothered sharing much in the way of pleasantries or icebreakers.
They had questions for her, a stream of questions about the report from the first day. She described the men, told their names, reiterated things that they should have been able to read for themselves.
It was when they asked her about that shadow, that shadow rising up and away, that she found herself saying things that surprised her.
She’d seen an alien being, a creature, could remember every detail of it, which she told to them with as much precision as she was able. Why didn’t that bother her? Sure, she’d seen terrible things in her life. Bodies by the side of the road between Baghdad and Kirkuk, bloodied from torture, blood seeping from the burlap sacks over their heads. A friend, mid sentence, taking a round in the neck, the spray of his blood, the gurgling struggle as he drained away to nothing.
Those were terrible things. She still dreamed them, still woke with her heart racing, all these years later.
But this alien left no mark of horror, no fear, as if it was the most usual thing in the world to see an impossibly inhuman thing flying through the air.
She described its wings, not beating but holding it airborne. Tendrils and eyes and tentacles and dangly, fleshy legs, the “head” an undulating swirl of tongues and eyes in fivefold symmetry, all of it alive and aware and radiating a profound intelligence. Not an animal. Not.
She heard her voice saying these things, watched the incredulous looks on the faces of the agents, and wondered why it all seemed just so very normal.
But it did.
“Officer Silver, we’re going to be talking with the two men you encountered today. We’d like you to accompany us, help us with the questions.” It was Sullivan asking, although he wasn’t really asking. It was more that she was just going to do it, no matter what. Or maybe Rogers. It was so hard to tell them apart.
The three of them walked, together, to the door of one of the nondescript townhouses.
Darren drifted in a haze, but he was not at ease. He ached, like in a fever dream, his mind filled with aeons of memory that were not his own.
He felt shaken, struggling to cohere, struggling to find his ground. How could this be, how could this mingle and mesh with the purpose that was the core of who he was? He knew, with a certainty born of a lifetime, that Jesus was his Lord and Savior. And that God had a plan for his life, and for the whole world, a plan of redemption. From Eden to the Fall to the Cross to the Final Judgement, it was all one clear map, etched into him. The story was part of him, and he was part of it.
He knew how that story worked, how that story felt, and that it was the Only Way.
But it wasn’t. Everything was so much larger, so impossibly much larger. No. No. It couldn’t be so, couldn’t be that something he knew was so good could be so seemingly meaningless.
As he struggled, that sense of presence again, and things changed.
The haze coalesced, and it was warm and dry and dusty, and there was a really short man speaking under a tree to a crowd gathered on a small rise, Arab looking, talking in a language that sounded faintly familiar in Darren’s ears. And Darren saw through Jaumm’s awareness, the way that possibility wove bright and fierce around this man, how he changed the direction of things, bent them towards the heart of the One. How that man was a part of that Way, inseparable from it, a necessary part of it.
That faded, and Darren saw a blurring kaleidoscope of himself, of all of the paths and all of the ways that flowed from that moment. He didn’t see it fully, couldn’t make out the details, there was too much of it, all of the futures streaming out in a wild spray. But there were dark paths, in which the light of humanity extinguished itself. Or died out in the vastness of time.
If he chose one way, that would be so. But it did not have to be.
Because he was in a moment of brightness, potent and radiant, and his actions could take life down a joyous path. Or not. It was his choice. It would not be forced.
The Way was never forced.
Three loud knocks, one after another.
Mom was off with Omri, trying to get out to Germantown for a therapy appointment. Mary sat frozen for a moment, her phone in her hand. It had been three days, three, since she’d seen Dad. Maybe it was Dad, God, she hoped it was Dad, because it was so weird him not being around.
“BRB,” she texted, and then the phone was off, and she was up to peer through the living room window. It wasn’t Dad.
It was a police officer, a woman, and two guys who looked like extras from one of those Men in Black movies.
Maybe they knew something about Dad. Or maybe, Mary’s mind surged, they knew something had happened to Dad.
She moved to the door, unlocked it, and swung it open.
“Can I help you?”
The cop, unsmiling. “We received a call regarding Darren Shifflett. Does he live here?”
“Yeah,” Mary said. “He’s my Dad. Do you know where he is?”
Glances, between the three on the doorstep.
The cop, again, her face softened. “Can you tell us your name?”
“I’m Mary Shifflett,” she said. “I’m his daughter.”
“How old are you, Mary?” the cop asked, her voice gentle and reassuring.
“Fifteen. Fifteen and a half.” She was confident, unafraid, cooperative. Why wouldn’t she be? These were people here trying to figure out what was going on with Dad. If they could help, then maybe he’d come home sooner, they’d figure this all out.
“Do you know where my Dad is? Mom’s so worried, and it, it isn’t like...” Mary blurted it out, the anxiety clear and bright in her voice.
“We will,” said one of the two men. “We’ll do everything we can to find him and to be sure that he’s OK. Can we come in and talk?”
Mary thought for a moment, like, shouldn’t they have a warrant or something? That was how it always worked in the movies. But she didn’t care, and it wasn’t like she was afraid of them or had anything to hide.
“Sure.” She stepped back, opened the door wide, and made a motion for them to enter.
They did. The three entered, and she could see them looking around, taking in the little house. It wasn’t too messy, at least. She’d helped Mom clean yesterday, in between calling and praying and crying and praying.
The other man spoke up.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
Mary’s voice shook, just a little. “I...it was late Wednesday night. He came home from church hours late, he’d lost the car, it was after those, you know, the Objects arrived. He was weird, like something was wrong with him.”
“What was wrong with him?”
She thought for a moment. “He was, Dad is, I don’t know, he’s alway like, he pays attention to you. He always asks me how I am, and how my day was, and he listens, and…” Mary found herself struggling to go on, struggling for the words against the choking wet rise of missing him.
The woman cop put her hand on her shoulder, and looked at her with a very human, very gentle look. “I’m sure your Dad is a very good guy. We just want to find him. So what was wrong? How did you know something was wrong?”
She thought about how he looked, there, Dad. He was dazed and vacant in the hard shadows of the porchlight, not Dad at all, and “He…” But the vision of her father was too much, and her voice seized. Mary struggled to compose herself. “He just was standing there, you know, just right there at the door. I don’t know how long he was there, maybe a minute, but like, he must have known we were worried, and he was just standing there, rocking back and forth and staring at the ground.”
“What did he do then?” One of the men, why was it so confusing to tell them apart?
“Nothing. I opened the door, and I ran out and hugged him and he like just didn’t hug me back, just stood there. And Mom came out, and she was like freaking out, but he didn’t do anything. Just came inside and went up and went to sleep.”
The cop, a look of concern on her face. “Where’s your Mom now?”
“She had to go to an appointment with Omri, he’s my little brother, but he’s, well, he’s got all kinds of problems. He’s, I don’t know, like autistic, but it’s more than that, he can’t walk or talk by himself, but sometimes like you can just see his eyes, and he’s like there, but like he can’t say anything because he’s so broken and messed up.”
“So tell us more about what happened with your Dad,” the taller man asked, his voice smooth and easy.
Mary went on. “He left that night, literally in the middle of the night, I heard him get up. I woke up even though Mom was completely out. I heard him get dressed, go down the stairs. It must have been, like, four something in the morning. He just walked right out the door, I heard him leave, and it’s been days.”
“No calls, no contact, no nothing?”
“No, ma’am.”
One of the two men started to ask something, something about if Mom and Dad had argued, but then he stopped.
The taller man gave her a card from his wallet.
“When your mom gets home, please give her this, and have her call us. We want to hear everything we can about your Dad, that might help us figure out where he is.”
Mary had the strangest feeling that they already knew, but she took the card from the man, and from the policewoman. The door closed behind them, and Mary grabbed her phone to call Mom.
The voicemail had come through, and it wasn’t at all what she had been expecting.
She’d been hoping, just maybe, someone from the press, someone who remembered her skillset and her expertise, one of the few remaining real journalists out there in the sea of publicist clickbait, political posturing and pseudoscientific hysteria.
But no. It was Uncle Bob, and he sounded a little drunk.
It’d been at least three years since Rachel had talked to her uncle, and honestly, he really wasn’t her favorite person in the world right now. I mean, sure, he was family, good old Uncle Bob with his reactionary worldview. He was a character, always good for a nice political argument after the family had gotten together for Thanksgiving or Hannukah, some good solid interpersonal tension and raised voices after a Seder.
It had been funny, when she was a girl, and when she was a grad student.
It was less funny when she was working full time as a subcontractor for SETI, designing search algorithms for massive radio telescope arrays, and suddenly the country went insane. The Ortiz Administration had gone through the budgets of every non DOD program like a fire across parched prairie. NOAA, NASA, USGS, if it didn’t have an immediate and clear military application or fall under direct military authority, it was slashed. If it had anything to do with climate change, or product safety, or anything that threatened the profits of the corporations that had bankrolled the last election, it was gone.
And the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, already an infinitesimal part of the budget? That fraction of a fraction of a percent disappeared. As did Rachel’s job, and the jobs of most of the people in her field.
Now, with the whole world staring up at the boundary of the mesopause, at what could only be rationally interpreted as the arrival of a nonterrestrial intelligence, she’d been forgotten. Here, the dream of SETI made a reality, right there on the doorstep, and all the media wanted to talk about was military responses and the strange fevered craziness of apocalyptic preachers.
Rachel was sidelined, living at home, scrounging for work, like she was a high schooler again, and it made her totally crazy.
All because of the people Uncle Bob helped get into office. It wasn’t just that they were anti-science, which they’d made clear from the outset. It was that they had other agendas, darker ones, and for the first time she could remember, her colleagues weren’t just complaining about funding. They were actively fearful.
So dear old Uncle Bob wasn’t exactly her favorite person. But he’d called her, and the message he left was furtive. “Meet me. I have a birthday present for you.” And after the call, a text, clumsily written, with the address of a Starbucks in Mt. Vernon. And a time.
He’d not talked to her in three years, hadn’t given her a present for her birthday since she was, Christ, what, eleven years old?
Something more was happening.
She was there on time, of course, with her grande Americano room for milk sitting right in front of her, back to the back wall, watching the lot for the arrival of dear old Uncle Bob.
The Mercedes pulled in, big S class, exactly what she’d expect him to drive. He got out, and he looked older, looked tired, moved slowly, more slowly that just a handful of years would seem to warrant.
He saw her through the door, but didn’t smile, none of the usual Uncle Bob schmooze. He looked furtively around the inside of the Starbucks, then came in, moving a little quicker now.
“Rachel.” His voice, gravelly, lacking the warmth she remembered. “It’s been too long.”
“Yeah.” She made no effort to get up and greet him. He sighed, and sat down across from her.
“So,” she said, flatly. “What’s this about?”
“A present. For your birthday.” He slid an envelope across to her. “To make up for all the years I missed it.”
She opened it. A USB drive, some weird brand. “What’s this supposed to…” He cut her off.
“Open it. Read the files. Watch the vids. Then do what you think needs to be done. Just make sure no-one knows it came from you.” She looked into his slightly watery eyes, and saw that he was frightened.
“Bob, is everything OK, I mean, what are you…”
He rose. “Look. I’ve got to go.” He laughed, shallow, hollow. “You know how busy I am. Just look at it. And I’m sorry, you know, for...for making all this possible.”
He turned, and she watched him leave.
Estela lay sleeping, her breath quiet and soft next to him. Joseph Ortiz was not asleep. He had been deep in prayer, speaking the words with only the barest breath under his voice. He was, he knew with absolute certainty, the man that God had ordained for this time in the life of America.
His ascent to the Presidency at a time when America had wandered so far astray was a clear act of God’s providence, to have a man of unbending faith and personal integrity at the helm of the nation.
It had not been an easy path, and many was the night that he had walked the floor with the Lord, or lay deep in prayer as his dear Estela slept. Around him, the world was filled with those who were weak and willing to yield on their principles, willing to back down in the face of the powers that were trying to subvert God’s plan for America.
He had shown no such weakness, not at Princeton, or in his first state campaign, or in the Senate. And he had needed that strength when he faced down his opponents during that glorious, God-given campaign.
The shrill, shallow campus liberals, spoiled and bitter, who taught only sophistry, for whom incompetence and lack of purpose were their morality. The perverted, warped agendas of those who’d divide Americans into a shattered mess of self-absorbed interest groups, endlessly labelling and categorizing. The bizarre gender-masturbatory obsessions of those who’d lost sight of the strength of the individual, who had no idea about the power of faith to change both a person and a nation. He had outthought them, outflanked them, as they had spat their contempt at him, oblivious of just how badly they were being beaten.
And now, he was facing the greatest challenge to America in her glorious history.
He was sure, somehow, that this new chapter in the life of the nation, these “Objects,” would somehow become part of that plan. In his daily prayer call from his Uncle, Uncle Raul had nailed it down for him, named it as only a man anointed by God could name it.
“This work will prove to be a work of the Powers of the Air,” he had said. “The liberal media will try to turn these things into some icon of New Age paganism, Joe. You have to stand fast, look at it for what it almost certainly is. It is a work of the Devil. All around the country, everyone talking about the End Times, but this is nothing like what the Bible teaches. It is a trick, a trick of the accuser, and you must watch for it.”
After his mother and father had died, Uncle Raul had raised Joe, not just as a nephew or an obligation, but as a father. Raul was hard on him, always hard, because that was what shaped a man. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Iron sharpens iron. Not a moment of weakness, not one, and Joe was the finest sharpened blade in God’s hands.
That was the word of God’s fire he had heard preached from the pulpit of Uncle Raul’s ministry, a God who wanted nothing more or less than your all. Who wanted to return America to her rightful place as a perfect shining city on a hill, a nation washed in the Blood, pure and righteous.
“This could be a gift, Joe,” his Uncle’s voice had sung. “For the Devil himself cannot escape God’s plan for his country and his people. Promise me, Joe, in the name of Jesus Christ, that you will do what needs to be done.”
Joe had promised, and they had prayed. Now he lay there, and called upon Jesus to strengthen his hand and his will.
America needed him. Without him, America would fall. Without him, America was nothing.
Julie dried her hair, feeling the roughness of the old worn towel against her face and neck. It felt good, there in the warm moist air of the small bathroom. She’d hated to shower, hated be where she couldn’t hear the phone, couldn’t be there if those agents came back to the door or if...if Darren came back.
Mary had insisted, though, after dinner.
“Mom, you’re looking a little rough.” Julie felt rough. She felt like she was barely keeping it together. The day was a blur, the usual visit to the physical therapist just a haze. There’d been calls, from the Donaldsons, Jerri so worried, so prayerful, then John, reassuring her that Darren was a man of God, he’d be protected.
Four calls from Patti, or at least, she was pretty sure they were. It was Patti’s number, but she left no message.
A message from Rick, could she come by, he wanted to talk with her about Darren, about him. Rick had sounded strange.
And all of this mingling with the overwhelming urge to just start screaming, because he wasn’t there, because she couldn’t feel him. She’d prayed and she’d spent time in those parts of the Word that gave comfort, the 23rd Psalm, Psalm 54, Psalm 35, Psalm 149, song after song of protection and victory and triumph over adversaries and adversity, but everything was dry.
She was dry, drained, missing a part of herself, that part that he was.
She stepped out of the bathroom, felt the chill of the air conditioning against her skin, felt her flesh speckling with goosebumps. She walked over to the dresser, picked out clean clothes, old but clean, and began to dress.
The sound of someone coming up the stairs, Mary, coming to bed. Mary’d been a real trooper, a total support, such a good daughter. This was so hard, and it was a blessing to have a child willing to pitch in.
A pause, the sound of a door opening, and a noise from Ommy’s room.
“Mom? Is that you?” Mary, through the thin wall of her room.
It wasn’t Mary. Not Mary, not Mary, her heart racing, exploding, the sounds of the footfalls down the stairs too heavy, far too heavy.
Julie froze, just for a couple of heartbeats, her body suddenly lit up, charged with current.
And Julie was out the door of the room, her blouse half on, first to Omri’s room by reflex, and the bed was empty, he wasn’t there, and she rushed to the top of the stairs, then down, down as fast as she could and there the sliding door wide open to the back yard, that little shaded walled-in soulless rectangle of concrete and paving stone, not a yard at all. And Mary was after her, behind her, both of them rushing to the door and out.
“Daa..” came the gasp from behind her, and it was Darren, right there at the foot of the steps to the patio, he was stepping backwards, his back to her, his back to Mary.
And in front of him was.
Was.
A Christmas tree up against the back wall of the yard, that’s what she saw, it’s too early for Christmas, her mind cried, eight feet tall, and yes there were lights shimmering and coursing across it, it had a star on top and branches and they were made of meat and eyes and leather.
And its branches like fingers like willows like feathers were folded in front like a thousand hands in prayer and they unwrapped and opened like a blossom and there was a thin little boy with dark eyes and he was standing there on his own two feet standing there on his own and he was looking at her and he said
“Mommy?”
And Julie had just enough time to hear Mary’s strangled, sobbing cry before she fell into a roaring white emptiness.
Mary let out a little scream, it was not very loud but it was a scream, because there was Dad and there was the, the Thing that was there.
But mostly because there was Ommy.
She’d seen him when he was tiny, that little tiny pink thing with all the tubes and wires, and he didn’t look like a baby much at all. She was just a girl, but here was her little brother, and he was so broken.
She’d cleaned him up a hundred times, helped feed him a hundred times, carried him and wheeled him and sung to him. Most of the time, he didn’t respond, his eyes and his body moving without purpose. Sometimes, sometimes, he would look at you, and it looked like he was seeing you. But mostly it had always been as the doctors all said. He was the one who would never get better, no matter how much you prayed or hoped or the doctors worked. Mom and Dad had told her that, when she cried about how God didn’t make him better, when she was a little girl.
Mary knew who he was, that was just part of the family.
All her life, he had been broken. Ommy was just what he was, only now he wasn’t. He was still small and frail and angular, and his face was still his face, but different. Himself, but different.
Dad caught Mom as she fell, the light gone out of her, and the little boy that looked just the way Ommy looked but different walked towards her. Away from the thing, the creature, which swelled and glowed and shifted.
Mary wasn’t scared of the creature, because she could tell she didn’t need to be scared of it.
But she was really kind of scared of Ommy.
“It’s all right, you know,” came Dad’s voice, confident, strong. “It’s all right.”
She looked at Dad, and it was him, sitting right there, his face, he was smiling that big stupid horse Dad smile as he held Mom. She flung herself at him, held him, let the tears come. He held her, held Mom, pulled them close.
And then a little hand, softly on her shoulder, slender and tentative and uncertain.
A little voice. “Daddy?” Smaller still, so small she could barely hear it. “M...mary?”
Dad’s big hand, resting on the face of the little boy who looked like Omri, who was Omri but couldn’t be because that was all wrong. It made the world all wrong.
“Yes, Omri.”
But the boy didn’t have anything more to say, didn’t have many words, how could he have words? Mary looked at the little boy through eyes that couldn’t focus, blurred by tears, and she let him nestle in to her, and she felt his bony little boy elbows and his bony little boy knees and the smell of his scalp and it was Omri.
They lay there together, for a while, the four of them all woven up like one thing.
Then Dad looked up, and so Mary looked up too, and Omri. Mom woke, her eyes opened, half seeing.
The Thing was changing, great wings unfurling behind it, and the lights faded until it was like smoke, like mist rising from the fields on a cold morning, hard to see, a shadow in the air.
“What is that thing, Darren?” Mom’s voice, weak. “Oh God, Darren, what is it?”
“It’s called Jaumm, Jewel,” Dad said, his voice bright. “Oh Jewel, I…” He struggled for words, and used the only one that seemed to make any sense to him.
“It’s an angel.”
The angel rose and was gone, but Mom didn’t seem to notice, because all she could see was Omri.
It was late, really late, well past midnight, but no-one was sleeping.
“But Darren, I just don’t know if it makes sense to share this, because...I...I...just don’t know.”
Darren looked at Julie, looked at his sweet and faithful wife, looked at how kind she was. “How can we not share this? Everything I told you is true, and all of it is real, and now, I mean, look.”
Mary was showing Omri her old tablet now, some little kids game she had, and he was lost in it, his fingers moving across the screen, touching things. He laughed, a tiny bell, a sound that Darren had never heard. Julie laughed, a little crying laugh.
Julie had finally let him go after over an hour, stopped hugging him and crying and touching his face and talking to him.
“But the police and those agents will want to come, want to talk with you, we should let them know because, oh, I don’t know.”
Darren smiled at her. “Of course we’ll tell them I’m here. And they can ask me all the questions they want. But we need to let people in town know what these things are, let them know what they can do. Let them know that we’re not alone, let them know about the miracle, and what a blessing from God we’re all being offered. This is good news, Jewel. Such good news.”
“I know, Darren, it’s just that, I…”
“What, honey?”
“I mean, Jesus is our whole life. He’s been that, since we met. I just can’t, I can’t tell if this is for Him. It feels like it is, but what if it isn’t?”
Julie was struggling, Darren could see that. But he had never felt more certain that everything he believed was true. Maybe not exactly the way he’d thought. He could convince her, convince others, that this was something wonderful happening, something amazing.
“Jewel, you know I’m not going to do anything if we aren’t of one mind. But right now, before anyone knows that I’m back, we have a chance to show the world what God has done for us. What a gift we’ve been blessed with. I know people out there are scared and angry and freaking out, but all we have to do is show them this good thing. Just tell them what Jaumm showed me, show how they blessed Omri, and it’s nothing that’s different from anything I’ve ever known is important about Jesus.”
“But everyone’s talking about aliens, Darren. Nobody thinks they’re angels. Just invaders from space. You’re going to sound crazy.”
Darren laughed. “Since when has that ever stopped me before?” And Julie laughed, just a little, despite herself.
“Look,” Darren said, his voice earnest. “I know what I saw. I mean, these...Zhe’eyteh’tez… they aren’t part of our creation. They’re from a totally different place, not another planet, not another galaxy, but totally different, like, blessed Jesus, I don’t know. And isn’t that exactly what we talk about, when we talk about angels and heaven? Beings of incredible power, close to...oh...close to God, I can’t describe it any other way, who live in a place that isn’t our creation. It’s the same thing, just a tiny bit different, and we can see it. It’s a real thing, this good thing. It’s the same thing Jesus taught. It comes from him, I’m sure of it.”
He saw Julie’s struggle, her face working.
“It’s just, it’s just so much to think about, and I want time to...to be with you and us all together without everything going totally crazy.”
“We’ll have time, Jewel. We will. But now, we have to show people. I have to. It’s what I do. It’s why God made me.”
Julie sighed. “Oh, Darren. I…OK.”
Darren hugged her, and held her close for a long moment.
“Let’s tell people.”
Rick sat at the kitchen counter, his laptop open in front of him, and watched the video again.
It was pretty straightforward, really, really not professional at all.
Just a little boy, very thin, with an angular face. It was hard to pin down his age, small and frail as he was. He was walking across the room, towards someone just off camera. He smiled, as he walked, even though he seemed a little unsteady. The boy stopped, right in front of the camera. He smiled wider, toothy and genuine.
“Who am I, Omri,” came the voice from behind the smartphone. “Daddy,” came the voice, as frail as the body.
“Go to Mommy, Omri,” came the voice, and the camera panned clumsily, unstabilized, and there was Julie, and she was crying and smiling, and Omri tottered over to her and hugged her and said I love you Mommy and she said I love you too and the video ended.
Jesus Christ. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
He clicked on the replay icon, and started it up, for the fourth time.
Still pictures, at first. Of Omri right after birth, in the Nic-U. Barely a baby to be seen, in all those tubes and wires, snaking down into the incubator. Pictures of him at home, with family, always in special seats and chairs. Video of a therapist appointment, the child a nest of bones and flesh, crying out as the therapist worked the gnarls of his legs. A clip of a thanksgiving dinner, a circle of family around a table, a girl feeding the boy, who ate with difficulty and messily.
Pictures of Christmases and outings, Omri and Julie and Darren at a pro-life demonstration, a video of Omri and Darren, Darren talking, up there on the stage at a fundraiser for children with severe disabilities.
And then, there he was, Omri. God that was him. Walking. Talking. In Julie’s arms.
Rick felt the wetness return to his face, felt himself crying again.
He re-read the text of Darren’s message.
“My name is Pastor Darren Shifflett. This is my son Omri Shifflett. He is eight years old, and was born with multiple and severe disabilities. He has never walked or talked, and the diagnosis from every doctor and every specialist has always been the same. He was never going to get better. And we had come to terms with that, as a family.
On Wednesday night, I was at my church outside of Poolesville, Maryland. You all know where that is now. ;0) I made contact with a being from one of those objects that showed me amazing things.
I don’t know what they are, maybe aliens or angels, but after telling me everything about itself it came to my house and made my son better. They fixed him.
I know this seems crazy, because it’s so hard to believe. Watch it with your own eyes, and you can go to my website, where I’ve uploaded some of our medical records, along with other videos.
I have always been, and continue to be, a Christian, a disciple of my Lord Jesus Christ. I have never been more grateful and thankful to God than for this miracle and the arrival of these wonderful messengers.”
Rick watched the last of the video play out again, then pushed himself back in his chair.
He felt dazed. This was, well, wow.
He leaned back in, began typing out a message, preparing to share it. The one hundred and forty seventh share.
One last click of the keyboard, and it was away.
He was still staring at the screen when his cellphone rang. A reflexive glance at the screen, as he raised it to his ear. It was Patti’s number.
“Hello?” he said, tentative.
There was silence.
Then a familiar, tumbling, frantic voice, “Oh God Rick Oh My God Rick You’ve seen it, you’ve seen it.”
“When was this from, airman?”
“Six hours ago, sir. I was right there, monitoring the whole time, went back to processing and analysis, they didn’t notice it either, sir.”
On the screen, a slow circling around the featureless surface of Object Three. Then, a shadow, a ripple, a mist, moving out from the center of the images. Two objects, one slightly larger than the other, indistinct.
“Now here, sir.” The video accelerated forward. A five second clip, a single shadow, a ripple across the surface of the trees, occluded by the bulk of the Object.
“Who caught this, airman?”
“No-one, sir. I…” The embarrassment was clear in the airman’s voice. “It was...flagged by one of the second stage targeting and motion tracking programs during analysis. And labeled by my own program, sir.”
The CO looked hard at the airman. “But then why didn’t you…”
“Sir I don’t know sir. I don’t know why I didn’t see it. We only tagged it after it came back from Dee Aye Ay with a request for clarification. Five eyes on, systems alerts apparently triggered, and none of us noticed, sir. I consider myself responsible, sir.”
“Just a moment, airman.”
The CO moved back to his monitor array, reviewed his logs. There. And there. Desk alerts, his, clear as a bell, from the same tracking systems. He’d missed it. He’d been sitting right there, eyes on, and the alerts had sounded, and he’d missed it. As had the airman. As had the processors and the image analysts. Just ignored it completely, even though...reviewing the records...those two sections were tagged as two of only seven motion anomalies in that twelve hour period. The five others were wildlife. Four deer. One wandering fox.
He remembered all of the other motion anomalies. Remembered the banter, back and forth, as they were seen and discussed. Jokes about venison, which honestly had gotten a little old after the third time.
And then there was a shadow, moving with purpose and masked swiftness from the object they’d been charged with monitoring, and then returning.
Not five sets of eyes, but six, with visible alerts. His own included. It had been over six hours. No one had noticed.
There were too many coincidences, too many oversights to be random.
He picked up the phone, and made a call.
Susan stared at the video, her mouth open. This was totally crazy. Rick DiAngelo didn’t post much, not any more, he really didn’t, and she didn’t even know why she was still friends with him, after all that had happened at KingdomVine Ministries.
Just hadn’t deleted him, maybe for no reason at all.
She knew he’d settled up in Maryland somewhere. Then there was this video, and he was back in a church, apparently.
She didn’t know why she watched it, I mean, the rumors and gossip about his departure had been pretty intense.
But there it was, videos of this little boy. Here he is, growing up severely disabled. And there, the same boy, clearly the same boy, and he was walking and talking. Rick’s message was simple.
“This is my pastor Darren and his son Omri. We live right where the aliens landed, and because of them, the boy has been healed, it’s a miracle. Please share.”
She watched it again, and seeing the mother’s tears made her cry. It really did look like a miracle.
So she shared it. It had been shared seven hundred and forty two times.
In the early morning, Rachel had made her way around the Beltway, the cordon, through the traffic, through the growing tent encampments of sightseers and tourists and crazies. She’d been forced to park out on the outskirts of town, in the gravel lot of a small Presbyterian church, and had walked through the countless gathered media trucks and the impressive array of military personnel.
It was a bustling hive of activity, a churning, chaotic tableau framed by the three towering objects that glistened in on the periphery of the town.
She’d watched the video last night, watched it four or five times, and read through the various still-classified documents that Uncle Bob had given her. The missing person’s report, the strange police report that seemed to verify everything that was being seen in that video.
The Administration knew there had been contact, and was keeping it from the press, for reasons that she honestly was having some trouble wrapping her head around.
The answers to this might lie, or so she thought, with that family. If they knew anything more, they could tell her. And she could share with them what she knew, because they deserved to have some idea what had happened to their husband and father.
She walked past the commons at the center of town, filled now with media trucks and the bustle of gawkers and onlookers. There’d been days now, days for people to gather, and gather they were, the fear at what these strange visitors might mean overcome by raw human curiosity.
She’d seen the object in the upper atmosphere, observed it..along with tens of millions of others..through her small telescope. It was crazy enough, the sort of thing that she and her team could have only dreamed about years ago.
But to see these vessels, tall and sleek and inhumanly featureless, just floating fixed into space above fields and farms, that was really remarkable. It put things on a scale that felt real, felt present, felt like something remarkable was in fact happening.
The summer morning was bright and warming, and the light playing across the silver tops of the Objects just added to their concreteness, the strange normality of walking by a Post Office and a Dollar General and a McDonalds and there were the towers. She had no frame of reference, no memory of this place without those objects, so they were simply where they were meant to be.
She walked on, through a parking lot filled with emergency vehicles, and towards a group of townhouses, part of a larger development.
There, there in the middle of one row, the house she was heading for, that was the address. Nothing special about it.
The door was open, she noticed as she approached, cars parked haphazardly in front, several deep. Odd. Climbing the stairs, she noticed that the house was crowded. Dozens of people, pressed in, filling the small space, strangely quiet. A voice, from inside, talking loudly, after which there would be murmurs.
“Excuse me,” she said, quietly, to a woman at the threshold of the door. “I’m looking for the Shifflett house. Is this where they live?”
The woman looked at her, her eyes strangely bright. “This is their house. It’s amazing, isn’t it, so wonderful, a gift from the Lord? A miracle, I’ve seen that boy with his mom when they come into the CVS, and look, right there, sweet Jesus, it’s like straight from heaven.” She seemed on the verge of weeping, and Rachel realized that half the house was sobbing, listening to the tall man standing with a little boy by his side.
That was Darren Shifflett, she realized. The one who was supposed to be missing. The one who had flown through the air, up and into Object Three. She shuddered, slightly, imperceptibly. In person, he was taller than she’d expected, leaner, with a long face and slightly awkward manners.
He was talking in a rhythmic cadence, to a room at rapt attention.
“...and I thought to myself, was this the Devil’s work? I know some of you may be thinking the same thing, that this might be some kind of trick, but then remembered how the Pharisees challenged Jesus, how they claimed he drove out devils by the power of the devil, you remember that?”
There were nods of assent, and Rachel realized some of them had bibles out. It felt, frankly, a little like that awkward, terrible revival meeting that her freshman year college roommate had taken her to, which had been the last time she’d actually spent any time with that particular human being.
“He said you can’t drive out the devil with the devil, just can’t happen, and so here’s my boy, my Omri, the boy I’ve loved from the day he was born, and he’s healed and who else heals but God? Who makes things right but Jesus? If a thing is good, it belongs to Jesus. It can come from no other place.” Again, the nodding assent, the murmurs of affirmation.
“Mr. Shifflett?” Rachel’s voice, carrying strong through the room, and eyes were turning to her. You didn’t get far as a woman in her field unless you were unafraid to speak up in a crowd. “Darren Shifflett?”
He stopped speaking, his eyes seeking, and he found her in the crowd, and smiled.
“I don’t know you. Who are you?”
“I’m Dr. Rachel Bernstein. I worked with SETI. I don’t know if this is the time, but I don’t know how much time we have. I need to talk with you.”
His face brightened. He recognized the acronym. “Yes, yes. Friends, I have to take a little break. Please forgive me.” He looked to the woman sitting to his right, short and gentle eyed and conservatively dressed. “Julie, if you can stay here with Omri and Mary, maybe lead a little prayer for a while, I think it’s important that I talk with Dr. Bernstein for a bit.”
The woman nodded, and the little boy clambered onto her lap.
He walked across the room, towards Rachel, and the social energy in the space was...intense. Every eye on him. An intensity that Rachel wasn’t sure she was totally comfortable with, like being part of something a little insane, a little massly hysterical.
But he was calm and easy, and seemed completely sane. Seemed that way, at least, which may or may not have been reassuring.
He extended a hand, blocky, large, and calloused. “Darren. But you know that already, ah, Dr...Bernsen?”
“Bernstein.”
“Bernstein. Sorry. Guess I didn’t hear that quite right.” His smile, again, broad and honest. “Let’s go upstairs, we can talk for a couple of minutes about how crazy this all is.”
He led her up the stairs, and Rachel could feel every eye in the room following them.
Maria stood on the packed subway car, and wished that someone would just get up. She was tired, tired already, even though this was the morning rush, and she was going to spend the rest of her day on her feet.
But nobody moved, because there was barely any room to move. She nestled her phone in close, feeling the heat and the smell of the freshly washed mass of New Yorkers around her. Mostly washed. Jeez, that guy.
She flipped her way through her Insta, check it out, such a cute little puppy, the laughing baby, man wat a cute outfit, so pretty, nice to get a break from all the stuff about those aliens, because it was getting a little scary. Last night, Marco had come crying into bed because he had nightmares. About monsters from space, chasing him, and who could blame him.
Then onto Facebook, see who got a birthday, and there at the top was like this video. “Alien Miracle Heals Boy,” and she watched it and it made her think of her little niece and she cried and she shared it and tagged Juanita, “OMG praise Jesus its a miracl”
It had been shared 22,347 times.
That was it. They were done. He’d talk to Jerri, but this was just so craven and disgusting, so beyond the pale, a betrayal of the Gospel.
What a disgusting, false video. And already shared 37,000 times.
And it was all over money. Oh, sure, Darren knew the ministry was struggling, had to know that things weren’t working out. And John knew why it was failing, because it was increasingly obvious. Darren lacked the uncompromising commitment to the Word of God that was the foundation of any anointed ministry.
It had taken a while for John to realize this, although the hints were there. They’d not homeschooled Mary, sending her off to that godless liberal high school. Jerri had pressed Julie about it, but Julie claimed to have her hands full with Omri and thought the public school, with its “reputation as the best in the state,” would be fine. That wasn’t Julie’s fault. She was a woman, and lacking in God’s wisdom.
It had been Darren’s job to set her straight, to show his headship of the family, and he had clearly failed.
Last week’s Sunday study was particularly bad. As soon as John had suggested fighting the demonic powers, joining in the National Prayer Army, Darren had backed away from the battle. Oh, Darren knew scripture, sure he did, and John left that study almost persuaded. But so did Satan, and thank the Lord Jesus for Pastor Steen’s strong word.
Pastor Steen just cut through all of the wiles of the devil, and the Hour of Power Ministry had really equipped John to see how the Evil One was at work in the world. It was so disappointing. Every church John and Jerri had tried had shown itself to be flawed, compromising in some way or another, corrupted.
But Darren was just a disappointment, and now he was faking a “healing” so that he could save his own skin. It would fail. He knew it.
He quickly typed up a post, God’s truth about false teacher Darren Shifflett, and shared it to the Hour of Power network.
The truth needed to get out there.
Jae-Shin leaned back, and watched the video play back again on his monitors.
It’d been totally crazy, crazy this last week. Picture after picture, videos of the Objects as they’d come down, Videos of Object One, reaction shots, reaction shots to the reaction shots, celebrity reactions, it was just freakin’ nuts. It was all eyeballs on, traffic at two to three times the normal levels, like a wild raging viral infection. The world was obsessed. Hell, at the staff meeting this morning Ravinder had run the stats, and more people were looking at images of the Objects online and talking about the Objects online than were looking at porn online.
It was, man, crazy. And BuzzPulse had to stay on it, had to be on top of the most viral pictures, the most intense videos, because this was a seriously rolling tide.
BuzzPulse got to be where it was by running realtime metaanalytic filters over the seven primary social media platforms, a proprietary program that Ravinder had designed that put them at the forefront of net content promotion. Once that fire started to burn, they knew just how to fan the flames.
Here, a picture of aliens, totally photoshopped, but buzzing across twitter anyway. Here, the fallen pop starlet, trying to make her way into the cordoned area to “share Earth’s love the visitors.” She was scantily dressed, lots of cleavage, man, you could never fail with boobs and alien invasion.
And this morning, from right out of the hot zone, was this Facebook video of this kid. Not a pro job, or so it was made to seem, like someone with modest skills had cobbled it together on a very out of date Mac. He recognized those transitions, they were consumer grade shit from five years ago.
But damn. That made it some weird, weird shit.
Jae-Shin knew fake, had seen photomanip and CG used to pitch all sorts of wild deepfake stuff, but this seemed different. So seamless, totally believable, whatever effects they’d used embedded under a layer of mediocre post processing. And it couldn’t have been better scripted. Internal narrative, serious age progression makeup and effects, just, like, real. Almost real.
Hell, he almost believed it.
Analytics indicated it was breaking from FB, starting to trend cross-platform. Already some counter-trends, which meant controversy, which meant this would blow way way up.
Still early enough that they could siphon some traffic, be part of the surge, draw in those eyeballs.
He whipped off some boilerplate text, prepped it for a multi-platform push, flagged and tagged it for C-suite level reporting and followup, and let ‘er fly live on site and cross platform.
The vid had one point two million views on various tubes, one hundred and forty thousand shares on FB, and variants had been tweeted and RT’d nearly six hundred thousand times.
And it was going to be way, way more viral than that.
Bam.
Carl Tuckerson’s phone hummed in his pocket. It was Tina from the newsroom, again, Christ, he didn’t want to take the call.
He’d been on site for thirty three hours, gotten great shots of the Objects, followed by the same damn great shots of the Objects from about four different angles, including the one with the town’s watertower in the foreground, the huge needle rising into the haze of the sunset in the background, and circling vultures giving the whole thing a sense of impending doom. He’d liked that one, and they’d been using it for, Jesus, like seven hours.
He’d sent them local color bits, interviews with the nice but very freaked out folks on the town council, interviews with local kids, interviews with one resident after another, but right now not a damn thing was happening.
The last feed they’d pitched out was a human interest piece about one of the high school cheerleading squads, of which there were apparently many. Cute girls, out there doing stuff for the gathered media, it was, well, yeah.
Just a little slice of Americana to leaven the whole “we’re being invaded by aliens” vibe. Twenty four hours a day, they had to run stuff, and you’d think the whole alien invasion thing would be a little bit more action packed.
But they just sat there, not doing a damn thing. Doug and Xiu-sha had gone to snag coffee at this sweet little bakery near the town square, best damn donuts he’d ever tasted, seriously. Maybe he could pitch that to Tina as the next human interest story.
“Tina.”
“Carl, answer your damn phone. I’ve been on you for the last half hour, and…”
“Yeah, I’m here, you got me, I took a break after we sent you the feed thirty goddamn minutes ago. What’s up?” “We’ve got a local lead for you, need you on it like right now, right now.”
He perked up a little. “What we got?”
“Internet’s blowing up now, again, yeah, I know, but this one’s got some legs. Local man, been in contact with the aliens, and…”
“Jesus, Tina, not another freakin’ crazy, I’m…”
“Carl, shut up. We’re talking millions of shares and likes and all that crap, all over, blowing up. He’s got a story, yeah, but he’s also got a freakin’ kid who he’s claiming was healed by an alien, and…”
“Tina, are you seriously suggesting that…”
“Yeah, I know, I know what it sounds like, tin foil hat batshit, but the shit is checking out. He’s provided medical records, videos, I’ve got a stringer down south already talked with the boy’s old physical therapist, and she was like hysterically crying the whole time. The shit, Carl, is checking out.”
Carl didn’t know what to say.
“Where is he?”
“Hey, great news,” Tina’s voice, laying the snark down thick, “It’s like a quarter mile from where you’re standing right now. Go look for the crowds of people, how ‘bout that, Carl?”
A buzz from his other phone, she’d sent him links to a couple of Youtubes, and an address.
“Get there now.” She hung up.
Damn, he thought. Serious bitch. Amazing, driven, knew-what the hell she was doing always got it right bitch and three quarters. God damn. He sighed. “Hey Doug! Shoesha! Get the gear!”
“What we got?” Xiu-sha, always eager, Jesus, like a frisky little overcaffienated otter, must he always be so eager?
“Damned if I know, but we’ve got marching orders. Some crazy, says he saw the aliens. It’s just right over…”
Carl checked his map, then looked up. There was, he realized, a flow of human beings, not a crowd but starting to be, moving by their ones and twos and threes, all headed exactly where he probably should have been twenty minutes ago.
“Christ. Move it! Move it!”
And he was walking, fast as he could, his camera and sound tagging along behind.
“Things are breaking out of control, Mr. President, and I think the facts speak for themselves. We need to act now, or this is going to get ahead of us.”
President Ortiz was sitting, fist pressed against his forehead, eyes closed. Around the table, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gathered for emergency meeting.
“Air Force is sure of this?” He looked up, fixed O’Leary with a sharp look, which he then turned to bear on General William Hare. “One hundred percent sure?”
General Hare, compact and lean, gave a grunt. “Yes, Mr. President. The pattern’s clear. Whatever these things are, they seem to have the ability to manipulate our perceptions, in very subtle ways.”
“You’re saying mind control. Is that what you’re saying, Bill? These...things...can control our minds?”
“There’s no other explanation for the breaches in security, Mr. President. None. Guards who are all suddenly looking the other way. First responders who reported feeling suddenly unmotivated, lost focus. Every single airman, pilot, officer, and analyst in the 348th Recon Squadron managing to not notice alarms and visual evidence of covert movement. I talked to the CO myself, reviewed the security vids. You can see the alerts, hear the chimes, and every man in that room should have responded. They weren’t asleep, just going about their duties like nothing was happening.”
President Ortiz pursed his lips. “You would typify these as hostile acts, General?”
“Yes, Mr. President. They’re clearly hiding their intentions, and now we’ve got evidence that they’re working the local population into what appears to be mass hysteria.”
“I saw the report on that. Any updates?”
Terrence O’Leary, to the right of the president, spoke. “It’s spreading, sir. Claims of miraculous healing, being made by a local pastor who says he was taken up into the ship. Which he was, Mr. President.”
“This is that same guy? From the Global Hawk recon?”
“Yes, sir. And he’s making all kinds of wild claims, about what he knows, about miraculous healings. Put out a video and a statement, which have gone berzerk. Social, mainstream media are lit up, totally on fire.”
Rios, who had just come striding into the room, interjected. “Mr. President, It’s got the feel of a sophisticated PsyOp, multi-tiered propaganda, to prepare a population for a particular response.”
“You have any word from Bernstein? He should be on top of this, don’t know where he thinks he is not being here right now.”
Rios grimaced. “Just got this, Mr. President. Doesn’t surprise me.”
She dropped a letter on his desk. “Resignation. Must have done it this morning. Doesn’t have the stomach for this, those collaborating old establishment in-name-only types are all the same, Mr. President.”
“Gentlemen, it’s the assessment of your Commander in Chief that this threat needs to be taken down before it escalates, before any more of these Objects arrive, before we find ourselves unable to respond. If any of you disagree, I need to hear it now.”
General Adam Tanner spoke first. “Mr. President, I’m not sure what we can offer. I think getting in front of this thing is important, and I’m as concerned as anyone in this room about the evidence of covert and PsyOps activity. And Sir, when I think that these things can influence the minds of soldiers from thousands of miles away, I’m amazed we’ve had the luxury of taking this long to take action. But we can’t position assets anywhere near the object, and we can’t hit them with missiles. I’m not sure artillery’s going to cut it, especially not given that we’re talking about a major metropolitan area. And nukes are, well, we can’t just set off an airburst above Washington, sir.”
President Ortiz laughed, but it was empty. “Yes, General. That would seem to be a problem. Suggestions?”
The room was silent for a moment.
Admiral Steyner coughed, briefly, shifting his considerable solidity in his seat. “We could use the new Nemesys 7 railgun platform, Mr. President. Unguided, hard hitting, over-the-horizon standoff. Once under way, there’s no armor we know that can withstand that impact. It’ll punch through thirty inches of Chobham 2 Composite Plate. No explosives, less chance for civilian casualties. No electronics to mess with. No pilots to confuse with whatever...voodoo...they’ve been doing. The retrofits to the USS Zumwalt and the USS Monsoor were finished at the first of the year, and the USS Johnson was finished last month, and all three are at Norfolk for sea trials with the new system. With our targeting, we could take down the three smaller vessels, force them to withdraw. If it doesn’t work, it’ll show them we mean business, while minimizing collateral damage.”
“Thank you, Admiral. That sounds like a viable option. Other perspectives?” President Ortiz asked the question, knowing that there would be. Air Force wasn’t about to hand this one over to Navy. He could see Bill Hare shifting in his seat, preparing a rebuttal that would include drone strikes and the new airborne directed energy weapon that the folks at Boeing and General Atomics had just tested.
But he also knew that he had decided.
The Nemesys-equipped destroyers, precisely, would be their primary course of action. He’d throw a bone to the other services, of course. All on board, everyone gets a piece of it. After the state of emergency had been declared. And shortly after he’d used the Kill Switch, shut down the panicked, hysterical lies that were spreading like a plague, sapping the will of the American people to do what must be done.
The interweavings of what might be were narrowing, possible futures precluded, others growing more real. The Five felt it, all of Jaumm felt it, could see the paths growing brighter, billions of actions and intentions coalescing into a particular shape.
It was not optimal, but also not without deeper possibility. There could be loss, disruption, an absence, an occurrence that had not happened in so long that Jaumm held only the faintest recollection of it. It had been back in the seed universe, far back, thousands upon thousands of transits back. They had shared and lifted a hundred cultures, bent the arc of a hundred universes away from the long slow fade to black. Still, the knowledge of it was in them. A memory of absence and the rise of nothingness.
It was not yet certain, not yet set. It could be avoided, easily, a thousand tiny micrograces bending the flow of probability away from that particular event.
And yet beyond that, beyond that loss, the purpose of their arrival seemed brighter and better realized. Not in that moment, but for this strange, frail, promising species, soon.
It was worth proceeding. The Five were agreed. It had been decided.
Rachel had sat, and she had listened, as Darren talked. He was, well, he wasn’t a scientist. Farthest thing from it. He was wincingly far from it. He was trying, trying to be convincing, but Christ, all this guy could think about was God.
“The Lord blessed me with this,” he’d say. Or, “I’m just so grateful to God for that.” He wasn’t nearly as bad as others she’d heard, and he came across as a decent guy. But she’d dealt with so much shit from fundamentalists, watched as hard science had been defunded and replaced with pseudoscience and creationist bullshit, that it was a raw thing with her, a trigger, one of her big red buttons.
She fought back that irrational response, because it wasn’t helping her listen and observe, and she knew it. And she needed to listen.
Because when you cut through this guy’s Youtube homeschooled Jesus-preacher look, and listened to what he was trying to describe, it was, damn. It clicked, it worked, it resonated with the bright edge of theoretical physics and cosmology, in a way that he just wouldn’t have come up with.
It had been one thing to see that video, to watch this little IR-illuminated figurine float through the air. It was abstracted, a game. But here in front of her was the real thing, a human being, and he’d seen and experienced things that she’d dreamed of since she was a little girl.
Was she a little resentful? Yeah, yeah, but nobody got to choose those things. It wasn’t like a competition, where the person who worked the hardest and put out the most effort always got selected. It was just a little random. Deal with it, Rachel.
He went on, and through the filter of his faith-language, she could see the reality that he’d encountered. That he’d been shown, or rather, that he’d been allowed to experience and know himself. He was insistent on that, which was a fascinating detail. Whatever this Jaumm was, whatever this Zay-tay-thing was, it conveyed information in ways that were post-lingual and experiential. Not about symbol and semiotics, but about the unmediated sharing of knowledge. It was sentience that no longer relied on chicken-scratches in the dirt to convey information, that had torn down the wall between epistemology and ontology.
She didn’t say that to him, of course, as he talked, because breaking down those words for people just made her seem like a smug, elitist douche.
Beyond that, these weren’t just aliens, little green men from another world. These were extradimensional beings, not from our spacetime at all. His story, when you got down into it, laid out and reinforced not just that there might be life elsewhere in the universe, but that the suggestions, the whispers from the outside boundaries of physics, that there might be universes beyond this one. It was possibly unprovable, beyond the reach of empirical observation, teasing at the mind like a baby tooth, loose and sharp under the tongue.
Only now, here, something that might shift the paradigm even more radically than the arrival of some galactic neighbors.
What was amazing was that he’d adapted to the experience, that he’d somehow folded it in to what he believed. The way he described the beings as if they were part of his worldview, the way he encountered what they had allowed him to experience as affirming and not shattering.
And the way he described it did sort of work, more than sort of, in ways that Rachel found were surprising.
“So, Dr. Bernstein,” he said, kind of nice that he used the title, was at least trying to be respectful, “What do you think? I mean, about all of this.”
She took a deep breath. “I think, Darren, that you are a very lucky man. And that what you’re saying needs to be out there, out in the world so that people know about it. This is an amazing, amazing thing, a pivotal moment in the history of humanity.”
“I think so too.”
“So...from what you’ve experienced. Why would you say they’ve contacted us? Why now?”
Darren’s brow crinkled. “You know, I don’t know why right now. I have no idea. I’d think it’s God’s will, but..” and he laughed, just a little, “I know you probably don’t think so. I believe it is. But the why of it? I think they want to let us know something, something that every living thing should know. It seems like that’s really important to them.”
“But why not let us find out about it ourselves? Why not just let things take their more natural course, you know, let us find it when we’re ready?”
Darren shrugged. “Yeah, again, you know where I’m coming from. Sometimes, when you know something and someone else doesn’t, keeping them in the dark about it isn’t the right thing to do. Some things are just good, and if you keep them to yourself, well, then you’re only hurting other people. I mean, that’s the story of my life, right? I tell people about Jesus, because he changes lives. And like, if you find something out, a new discovery, and you sit on it and don’t share it with other scientists, that doesn’t do anyone any good either.”
He paused, reflecting, the crags of his face bright in the morning light that streamed through the bedroom window.
Rachel cleared her throat. “Look, you have to know that there are people out there who aren’t comfortable with what’s happening. I’m, um, not from SETI any more. As a federally funded project, there really isn’t a SETI any more. My uncle is Bob Bernstein, and…”
“I’ve heard of him. He works with the President?”
“Yeah, well, maybe not any more. Look, he’s how I know you’re here. He leaked me information, videos, documents, and the government is completely freaking out about these...visitors. They think there’s a military threat, and they’re going to respond accordingly. Martial law. Preemptive strikes. All those pretty bombs and missiles, shoot first, ask questions later, that kind of thing.”
Darren looked a little startled. “But they’ve not done anything to hurt anyone. And my son, my Omri, that’s, that’s just a miracle. How could anyone take that as anything other than a gift from God, a…”
“Human beings are weird, Darren. You try to teach them something, try to show them something good that’s not what they already know, and the next thing you know, they’re killing you for it.”
Darren laughed. “I know what you mean.”
“Look, I know that you and I come from very…” But his voice faded, as he stopped to listen.
From downstairs, other voices were suddenly raised. The house was filled with the sound of agitation, something was happening.
“Darren? Darren?!” Julie’s voice, shouting up the stairs. “Darren, I need you down here right now!”
He rose, and Rachel rose with him. “Something’s up,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s a good something.”
“Carl?”
Doug, futzed with the uplink. They’d just run a few takes of a preliminary spot, forty-five seconds, three conversations with random locals. People were freaking out, and certainly thought something was going on in there. Carl had put on the charm, there he was, the semi-celebrity from the major news network, and folks were always happy to talk with him.
Weird stuff. Everyone talking about the boy, about the Dad, everyone seemed to know him, or wanted to seem like they knew him.
They’d get more once they could get in, but things were feeling more than a little mobbish. Outside the townhouse, there was now a crowd of several hundred people, and among the crowd, there was a growing rumble of discord.
“What, Doug?” Carl asked. He was not going to be pleased, but he only went full on hissy-fit diva occasionally.
“I’ve lost the portable uplink. Cellular is down, all the way down the line. Phone and data. I’ve got no signal on my phone, either.”
Carl made a show of checking his smartphone. His face showed his confusion. “Crap,” he said. “Same deal here. That’ll keep Tina off our back for a bit, but she’s going to be seriously at Defcon 4 when we finally get through.”
“You got a backup?” Doug nodded, but he’d already checked his secondary. “Nothing on my disposable, either. We can’t just blame it on Verizon.”
“Hey guys, no service,” said Xiu-Sha, his eagerness a little muted by his confusion. “Nobody has it.”
Doug thought through options. Satellite uplink, back at the truck. It was a redundant system, one made pretty much obsolete by high-speed cellular, but heck, he’d give it a run.
“I’m going to use the uplink. Shu, pitch me the drive, could you?”
He caught it, and then started his way back towards the van, parked about a quarter mile away.
“Let me know if you hear back from Tina, Doug.” Carl shouted after him. “Seriously. I do not want her going off.”
“I hear you,” Doug shouted back, and began a half-jog towards the truck. Ooof. Man, this was not the business to be in if you wanted to stay fit. Editing, driving all over the place, doing more editing, standing around, eating donuts. Damn, this town had good donuts.
Jenna was starting to get on him about it, and she was right. He felt the heaviness in his legs, felt the way his body moved all sorts of directions that weren’t forward, and Jeez.
He slowed down to an almost brisk walk, walking past a local broadcast network.
“Hey,” shouted one of the crew, big black guy with a sweet fro. “You guys lose your FTE uplink too?”
“Yeah,” Doug hollered back. “You think it might be our friends in their ships? I’m not saying it’s aliens, but...”
“It’s aliens,” came the reply. That old meme was like every freakin’ where these days. “Nah, man, something else is going down. Got word over a local landline that there’s a special statement from the White House, for broadcast networks and cable only, hitting in like three minutes.”
“Damn. Y’all hang in.”
Doug waved and got himself moving again. He got to the van, red faced, sweating, and clambered in. It took him a moment or two to get back up to speed with the system, get the uplink...and the connection was there. Sweet.
He started the upload process, slow, tetchy, nothing like the stuff he was used to.
He switched one of the van’s monitors over to broadcast, and huh. That was working. A couple of anchors of a network affiliate, looking harried, and he listened in.
The net was down, almost entirely, everywhere, they were saying. Not just in the United States, but splashing out globally. Social media was primarily hit, but also all of the largest email providers.
It was part of an emergency action. Word from “Washington sources” was that this was the first step in declaring martial law, that the net deactivation was that legendary kill-switch that fringe wackos and civil libertarians would rant about.
Reports were spotty, but more military units were on their way to the impacted area, and a mandatory evacuation of all civilians had been ordered.
Then the signal cut to the Executive Seal.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States of America,” came a stentorian voice, and outside the van, the wail of sirens and people shouting.
And the sound of tracked vehicles, heavy ones.
Damn. This can’t be good, thought Doug.
My fellow Americans, it is with a heavy heart but steadfast will that I come before you this evening. It’s been a very difficult last few days for many of you, a time that has tested our faith and our love of our great country. Many of you have wondered about what the objects that arrived on the outskirts of our Nation’s Capital intended, and it was our hope and our prayer that they were peaceful in intent.
I am afraid that I must now report that we now know with certainty that this is not the case. These Objects, whatever they are, appear to mean us harm. They are actively threatening our national security, and are engaged in covert activities that strike at the heart of our freedom. Our intelligence community has gathered significant evidence of malicious psychological warfare, including some form of mind control and the distribution of falsified information designed to undercut our patriotism and to weaken Americans in preparation for an invasion.
Under the authority of the Communications Act of 1934, I have instructed the Department of Homeland Security to temporarily disable significant portions of the domestic internet, which will prevent the influence of this insidious disinformation campaign. We have also shut down, temporarily, all civilian cellular traffic. The spread of public hysteria is a real threat to our response, and to our pulling together as a nation.
With the full support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I have also declared martial law by executive order, effective immediately. The United States is under attack, our liberty imperiled.
We are evacuating the area immediately around the invasion site. We will be bringing the full force and technology of the United States to bear on those who would seek to control us and take away our freedom. We know this is a frightening time.
But we trust that with the full commitment of our armed forces, the strength of our faith in God and America, and God’s love for our country, that we will prevail.
Good night, and God bless America.
When the radio fell silent, the house erupted into a babbling cacophany of shouting, dozens of voices tumbling over one another.
“But that’s a pack of lies!” “No no no no no!” “Jesus please be with us in this time of trial and bless us Lord with your protection, thank you Jesus.” “I voted for that lying bastard, what the hell.”
“Everyone, everyone,” Darren’s voice, trained from countless outdoor meetings and youth group gatherings, hummed through the air. He stepped up onto the staircase, up above everyone, and thundered it out. “I need y’all to listen up!” The room quieted, and he went on.
“My friend Rachel here let me know this might be coming.” He pointed to Rachel, who grinned awkwardly. “I wish we’d had more time to get the word out about the miracle God has worked here, but the powers and the principalities want things to go a little differently.”
“She’s also told me that she’s pretty sure that the authorities will be coming for me, and I think that’s gonna happen real soon.” A faint gasp from Julie, “Darren?”
Then more shouting, which Darren shouted down. “Hey, hey HEY!”
“Look, what happens here and to me doesn’t matter all that much. Every single one of you has seen what happened, every one. You’ve heard what I’ve told you, about the truth of our friends, of how they’re pretty much the closest thing to angels we can imagine. There’s nothing to say they’re not, far as I’m concerned. And you’ve all seen my boy, what they’ve done for him. Right?”
There were nods of assent. “How can we help you, Darren?” A woman’s voice, from just outside the door.
“I need you to go, follow the orders, get out of town. And tell every single person you meet, all of your friends and family outside of this place, about what’s really been going on here. I’ve been a follower of Jesus Christ my whole life long, and it’s about being a witness. It’s about using your words and your life to share good news, and that’s just what this is. It’s a new thing, and it’s good, and it’s from God. Here’s what you need to do with this blessing we’ve been given. Tell people.”
He grinned. “And yeah, I know you can’t talk to your Facebook friends. Maybe try knocking on doors. It’s gotta work sometime. In the meantime, I need to be with my family right now, please, so go out there and tell the world.”
There was a smattering of Amens, and a few shouted words of encouragement, and the gathering began to disperse, the word spreading to those gathered outside, repeated and the instructions retold in a dozen voices.
Rachel turned to Darren. “Look, I don’t know what else I can do to help. I’ve got video and documents that tell the truth of what the Ortiz Administration is doing here. They know, they’ve got to know, that this isn’t the threat they’re claiming. That you’re not some alien fifth columnist. And that what you say about contact is true. I’ve got the surveillance video, and the memos where senior administration people talk about using this as an excuse to lock things down. We’ve got press here, so for what it’s worth, I think I’ll see if any of them want to take a risk with this.”
She extended a hand, and Darren took it. “Thanks, Darren,” she continued. “I’ll tell everyone I can about this. You keep yourself safe. Maybe find someplace to lay low from this mess for a while.”
“Thanks,” he replied. “I’ll do what I can. And bless you, Rachel. I’m hoping this works out for you.”
“Thank you,” Julie said, settling in at Darren’s side, Omri clinging to her leg.
Rachel joined the crowds on their way out.
Looking out the front door of the house at those moving away, Darren saw Patti and Rick, pushing their way against the flow and into the house. Patti was teary. Of course. But there was a different feel to her, a different kind of sadness. And as Rick came over, there seemed a subtle difference, something...not off. The absence of a strange undertone. A look in his eye, a shift in the way he moved, an ease. The echoes of their last conversation eased up back through Darren’s memory.
It was just a day or two before, but it felt a lifetime ago. Aeons ago.
“Darren, Jesus, Darren it’s good to see you. I...have to ask you something.” There was an eagerness to him, an intensity, one he’d not seen before.
“Sure, Rick.” Darren saw Patti shared Rick’s peculiar energy, her focus on him, almost a hunger, a hunger for something she wanted to hear.
“Something happened to me, there at the church, with the Zeyt...whatever they’re called. The Jaumm. I was so drunk, so, Jesus, such a mess, I don’t really even remember, but I’m...I’m different. What happened?”
“Jaumm said you weren’t well, Rick. Then it did something. Then,” he let out a little laugh, “It said, ‘All bettersauce.”
Julie, standing by Darren’s side, gave a little gasp. “Just like you, Jewel, yeah. I think they don’t really use language, not any more. They just are, and share what they know, and so they just used words they got from me. Or from my memories.”
“So it did something to me?” Rick, a slight quaver in his voice.
“I think so. You’re...different?”
Rick shuddered. “I, Jesus Lord, I just don’t know. I’ve thought I changed, just about a hundred times before. Thought I had it beat, the drinking, the...obsessions. But I’ve never ever felt like this. Like, just...different.”
Patti interjected. “So maybe Rick is..maybe he’s...like your Omri. Maybe it’s real.”
Rick sighed. “I mean, there’s no way you can tell with me. I look the same. For all anyone knows, I could just be lying. I’m not, but I’ve lied and lied so much in past, nobody’d be blamed for not believing me.”
Darren put a hand on Rick’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’ve been released, brother. It’s, yeah, I know how hard it is, once something’s got its claws in you. Once a demon..or a bunch of demons..have control of your life. But I think I can see it in you. You’re loosed, my friend. You’re loosed.”
Patti pushed forward, and was suddenly hugging Darren. Just as quickly, she pulled away. “But, but what about you? If..I mean, they’re coming for you...they’ve got checkpoints up around the town, every road that’s open. What are you…”
Darren interrupted, gently. “I’m going to be fine. I need to stay here, but I need to go to ground for a while. I’m going to need your help and Rick’s help with that, Patti.”
“Um, sure. How?”
Becca knocked on the door of the house, the lights of her squad car flashing from the street of the house behind her. The house was was large, tasteful, one of the nearly million dollar homes that had popped up like dandelions in what had once been a small rural community. A large garage, big enough for two full sized utes. Small yard, at least they all seemed small to her, next to houses that were three times the size of the little rambler where she’d grown up.
She knocked again, harder this time. Across the street, Vasquez was talking with the residents, giving them the evacuation route information and instructions about emergency shelter. Out front of the house, a late model minivan, already half packed up.
The drill was the same at each door. Military jurisdiction, imminent deployment of resources, national security emergency, significant and unknown risk to any remaining citizens.
Meaning: there’s going to be things blowing up, and you might die if you stay. Your children might die.
That seemed to work for most people. Up and down the spare street, whereever there was movement it was packing, and packing with urgency. The roads out of town were full, but not jammed. The entire agricultural reserve was being evacuated, but it wasn’t like trying to clear out one of the sprawling, overdeveloped exurbs to the south, or across the Potomac in Virginia. There just weren’t a huge number of people there.
Had to thank the aliens for that, she supposed.
Just about six thousand souls lived in town, although that number had exploded to thirteen or fourteen thousand between thrill-seekers and media and random alien-worshipping crazy-encampments. Outside of town, farms and small communities, thirty houses here, a country estate there.
Those folks were fine. It was the recent arrivals who were proving to be less than cooperative, with their “welcome aliens” t-shirts and tin foil hats. There was a little bit of knocking heads involved there.
But the residents got the message.
She knocked again, hard. “Police!” She announced, loudly. “If there’s anyone in there, you have to evacuate. I’m going to leave instructions on your door. Failure to comply is a federal offense.”
From behind the door, nothing. No shuffling, no sounds of movement. The lights were all out.
The house, she was sure, was empty. About every other house was, now.
Enough people had watched War of the Worlds to get the general idea. Pack up, get the hell out, go stay with relatives somewhere as far away as physically possible.
She taped the instructions and order to vacate on the door, and moved on across the neatly kept yard to the next house.
It was dark, too. There was a for sale sign in the front yard, and one of those realtor access locks on the front door.
She didn’t bother knocking. She pulled a couple of strips of tape, put up the form, bright yellow, a marker that the house had been checked and cleared.
She took a deep breath, and walked back to her squad car. Sixty two down in the neighborhood, fifty seven to go.
All around him, they were taking up positions. And what did he get to do?
Mark got to fill and heft sandbags, one on top of the other, the National Guard HEMTT’s having dragged in supplies to the easy, sloping field. It’d probably been a great place to have horses, about a week ago, for those richyrich essohbees who were lucky enough to live out here. Now, it was churned up, a total mess, the huge eight wheel drive trucks having torn their way back and forth positioning supplies.
He heaved a full bag over to the guys on the bucket line, started in on another. Damn. It was getting hot. He almost preferred being on one of the roadblocks. Hell, that was boring and creepy, yeah, but at least his back wasn’t going to give him hell the next day.
He’d thought he was seriously going to catch it when he had to sit down yesterday morning with those regular army MPs and the two Federal Bee Aye dudes, man, they were some weird guys. All those questions about patrol that night, about what he was thinking, what he saw, what he was feeling.
And he was like, man, I didn’t see anything, I was just totally freaked out. And then he’d remembered that weird light, which he’d kind of seen but kind of not seen. And he asked did I do something wrong, and they were like, no, man, but we just need you to answer some questions it’s important for your country.
Like he believed them. He was sure he was going to get courtmartialed or something.
But nah.
So here he was, filling bags, digging in. Maybe it’d be better to be locked up somewhere way the hell far away.
On the near horizon, the three towering Objects, freakin’ huge even though they were like ten clicks away. Quiet, just sitting there they way they had since he’d first seen them. Seriously, they could mess with your mind, that was the chatter. Maybe they’d messed with him. How the hell would he even know? They were some scary ass shit to begin with.
Behind him, another HEMMT was towing a missile launcher into position, eight wheels churning up dust. Regular army was here, now, with their state of the art stuff, no hand-me downs. A whole armored brigade was getting prepositioned, a row of M109 mobile artillery having churned up the slight slope, their wicked 155 mm long-gun snouts now pointed straight at Object Three, the barrels dull even in the brightness of a hot summer. They looked huge, especially in close.
Half a click away, a tight group of battle tanks, the latest Abrams iteration, all angles and still running desert camo, little sand sculptures on the mud and green of the field. The bustle and heat and intensity of thousands, preparing, rangefinding, digging in deep.
Seriously, things were going to go apeshit. Jesus Christ, man.
As awesome as all this heavy weapon badassery was, Mark couldn’t get over the feeling he was, like, watching one of those Godzilla movies, all the tiny little remote control toy tanks and rocket launchers, all lined up neatly on the field of a soundstage.
And over there on the other side of the stage, three shiny MechaGodzillas shone in the sun, waiting for the director to shout “action.” Pew pew pew, would go the little guns, flashing sparks. Stomp stomp crunch, they’d go.
Despite the heat, Mark shivered. He felt very, very small and very very...crunchable.
“Ma’am, we have a federal warrant for the arrest of Darren Shiflett, and a warrant to search the premises. I’m going to have to ask you to step aside.”
The two men were the same agents who had visited before, Mary recognized them, and they were right there, talking to Mom. They weren’t alone. There were military police, a dozen of them, maybe more. And they all had guns, which was really, really scary.
“Come on in, Officers,” Mom said, and her voice was shaky even though she was trying to be brave. “But my husband isn’t here.”
The taller of the two agents took out a small tablet, with which he started to record. “Where is your husband, Mrs. Shiflett?”
“He left about,” she glanced at the clock, “ an hour and forty five minutes ago, when we got the news about the evacuation and martial law. He didn’t tell me where he was going.”
The shorter agent pursed his lips. “Where is your son, Ma’am? The one your husband made the claims about online? Omri?”
“He was healed. It’s a miracle.”
The taller one, again. “That’s not his question, Ma’am. Is he with your husband?”
“Yes, I think so. He’d better be.”
And the short one, back and forth “And your husband didn’t tell you where he was taking your disabled son? You expect us to believe that?”
“Yes, I do.” Julie’s voice strangely bright.
“Why wouldn’t he tell you that?”
“Because he didn’t want me to have to lie to you. If I don’t know, I don’t have to lie to protect him. Because lying is a sin, isn’t it, officer...I’m sorry. I don’t think you told me who you were. What were your names again?”
Mom was smiling now. Mary had never seen her like this.
The flashing lights of the patrol car moved further down the street, casting a stuttering red blue cadence across the darkened room. Darren lay flat on his back on the carpeted master bedroom, Omri curled up by his side.
“Be very quiet, Omri,” he’d said, when the sound of the cop’s footsteps could be heard faintly on the front porch. And Omri had nodded, and they had held very still.
He wasn’t sure how long they could stay there. They had a couple of cans of food, a dozen cans, store brand beef stew and knockoff spaghetti-os. Patti had turned the water on in the house, and so they could eat and drink for a few days.
It had been easier to persuade Jewel than he’d thought. Not just about the leaving, and the not telling her. But that he needed Omri with him.
He wasn’t sure why he needed Omri with him, honestly. He’d told her that.
“I don’t know why,” he’d said, which honestly struck him as a pretty stupid thing to tell her. You know your newly healed son, our miracle boy? I’m going to disappear with him for a while.
But that sense that it was what he should do was just so strong, so impossible to shake, and he told her so. And there was Omri, standing with them, and he seemed to know what they were talking about.
He’d shifted over to Darren, held out his arms to be picked up, and he was so light, so light. He’d hugged Darren, wordlessly, and then turned to look at Julie.
Something in his look, something in his eyes, well, she knew. Knew he had to go, that it was God’s will, all part of the Lord’s plan for all of this, crazy as it seemed.
She agreed, and it wasn’t easy, wasn’t at all, but she knew it was the thing that she needed to do.
Patti and Rick had loaded them into Patti’s car, and they’d laid down on the seat as the car moved through the crowds and the swirl and the chaos of the day, over into one of the new developments where Patti had been trying to sell a house.
She opened it up, and after waiting for a lull in the bustle of packing and semi-panicked neighbors, they slipped in.
It was such a nice place, empty of all furniture but so big and open, so much larger than their tight little townhouse. “You can hide here, for a while,” Patti had said, showed them the finished basement, showed them the upstairs bedrooms, at times almost like she forgot herself and was trying to sell him the house.
“And such a lovely view of our alien friends,” she’d said at one point, as they looked out the windows of the smallest of the upstairs bedrooms.
When she’d and Rick were ready to go, he’d thanked Patti, who’d, well, she’d cried a little, but just a little. Rick had hugged him, sworn to get out and tell the whole world, hugged him again. The front door had closed. Then he’d taken Omri upstairs, and they had found a carpeted room and set themselves down on the floor.
And there they’d sat. Darren had prayed, and then sat, and then he prayed again, Omri just sitting and watching. The cops had come through, banging on doors, announcements over the loudspeakers, the bustle of neighbors packing up.
And now they were lying there in silence, quiet, father and son, side by side. Darren felt a little hungry, only a tiny teasing stirring, not nearly enough to turn him to sneak downstairs, to the huge double doored stainless steel refrigerator that loomed like a monolith in the beautiful open-floorplan kitchen.
“Are you hungry, Omri?” he asked. The boy...his son, Omri, Oh Dear Lord, it was still hard to wrap his head around it...gently shook his head.
How did he know, how to shake his head, how to speak, how did any of those things work? It was all so abrupt, so sudden. Darren suddenly found himself wondering if Omri knew how to use the bathroom, I mean, he’d never been trained, he never had, and...
And then Darren felt tired, a great heaviness, just this huge sense of falling back and folding in to the lovely padded carpet. It was all at once, it was all of a sudden, and he lay back and rested his head on the softness and let himself ease away into sleep.
Thirty miles off of the coast, the lights of Ocean City had finally washed out in the brightness of the sunrise. The sunlight fell on a low form, a dagger slicing across the surface of the bright warm summer water. It was barely visible above the surface, the design presenting a strange and inverted aspect, like a racing yacht, overturned, just sharpness and a stubby tower.
There was a second, its sister, off to the north, at the edge of the horizon. And a third, barely visible at the southern horizon.
The dagger slowed, turning to face the west north west. It stopped. They sat, for an hour. For two, for three.
From the top of the blade, a portion raised itself, hinged upward, upward. To the north, the same. To the south, the same.
An immense concussion, and the seaframe of the USS Zumwalt shuddered, heaved backward.
Another, to the north, and another, to the south.
A heartbeat, and another, and the windows of the city shattered in the trailing wave of hypersonic projectiles.
So slow, across the thin nothing of atmosphere wreathing this little world. Against the scale of time and space, barely more than the tumbling of a leaf or a mote of pollen drifting on the summer breeze. Nothing, or almost nothing.
The Five felt them, saw them, three inbound flechettes, limited self guidance, stupid objects, a handful of pebbles thrown by a petulant child. The encrypted orders, brayed over a simple spectrum to the small, simple machines arrayed around them, as transparent as the Pig Latin half-whispering of a simpleton.
They could be so easily deflected, brushed aside as nothing. So simple, as simple as a breath against a falling petal.
Yet down that path lay only darkness for this time and space. For its vastness and age, it was so terribly empty, so devoid of the joyous interweaving and possibility of life. In all of being, iterating and blossoming most beautifully various from the One, it was wildly improbable to find a universe so quiet, so silent, so dead.
But not silent here, not dead here, not in this pinprick on a slowing whorl in the fading embers of nothingness-sundered singularity. Here, the one hope, to turn this precious part of being away from nothingness, and towards form and life and joy.
That, why this life was so precious. That, why these tiny flecks of flesh and their pinprick consciousnesses were so precious. That, why planting the seed of the Knowing here was so precious.
The Five saw down the paths, and one was a bright thread of hope, already with an established root in this world and these creatures.
Jaumm saw the path, and Jaumm accepted it.
A hand on his shoulder, a light pressure. “Excuse me, are you Carl Tuckerson?”
Carl really never tired of hearing those words, particularly if it was in a bar after 1:00 AM, and the speaker was cute and more than a little buzzed.
But it was early afternoon, and he had just filed another report through the uplink, which the Feds hadn’t shut down yet, and the questioner was...well, she was kind of cute, in a birdy New York progressive Jew sort of way.
What the hell she was doing here was beyond him. Civilians were almost entirely gone, although the last of the sweeps through the town were still ongoing. And valid press ID was still working, it was clear it wasn’t going to be for much longer.
She had an ID, a badge around her neck that he noticed as he glanced in that general direction. Seemed official-ish.
“Yes,” he said, in his most I’m-eventually-going-to-be-an-anchor voice. “I am Carl Tuckerson. And you are?”
“My name is Rachel Bernstein. Dr. Rachel Bernstein. I used to be a researcher for SETI, before we got defunded. Still got the badge, knew it would come in handy sometime.” She smiled, her eyes still mirthless. “My uncle is Bob Bernstein, who was the White House Press Secretary.” Her voice, precise and clipped.
“Was? I thought he still…”
“He was until last night. He resigned. Easy to miss that bit of political trivia, given that other things are going on right now. He gave me something I need you to see.”
Carl arched an eyebrow. This sounded promising. “Oh? What?”
“That Darren Shifflett guy, you know, the one who was making all of those claims on social media before the kill switch got thrown?”
“Yeah, that guy. We talked with some of the folks in the crowd around his house.”
“I just spent an hour with him, talking about his experiences. He’s kind of a total Jesus freak, completely. But he had the encounter, and the Ortiz administration knows it. My uncle got me out here, got me talking with him. This whole martial law thing, the whole idea that these creatures pose a threat, it’s all being used as an excuse to seize power.”
She held out her hand, and in it, a flash drive.
“I’ve got video. Documents. All ripped from White House servers by my uncle before he resigned. Everything you’d need to kick that open, right here. Interested?”
Carl couldn’t even bring himself to make a show of disinterest.
“If that’s what you say it is, we absolutely would be…”
There was a report, a crack, someone whacking a soft object with a large stick right behind them.
And another, and another, until they blended into thunder and they were down, reflexively down on the ground.
Darren woke with a start to the sound of a toilet flushing.
Where in the Lord’s name was he? He felt wildly cloudy, unsure of the day, unsure of the place, unsure of why he was face down in a puddle of his own drool on the carpet in a strange room
“Dufff...whaaa,” he attempted, but the words didn’t quite manage to coalesce as they bubbled out. He tried to move, and oh, his left arm was totally asleep, he’d been lying on it and aaaah, O Lord that was uncomfortable.
The arm tingled and throbbed back to life, and he turned himself over and folded into a sitting position. He clumsily wiped the slobber from his cheek with his right hand before going back to massaging his arm. Ah. Mmmgh.
Huh. He was where? He was…
And there was Omri, dark haired and big eyed and padding out of a very large master bathroom, Omri walking towards him quiet across the floor, and Darren remembered. Lord, how long had he been asleep?
He fumbled in his pocket for his phone. It was just about five thirty, the same day. He’d been lying there for nearly six hours. He felt his face and the flesh on his arm, strangely contoured and shaped by the nap of the carpet.
“Daddy?”
The voice, he still wasn’t used to his voice, O Jesus but it was good to hear it.
“Dad? I’m hungry.” Omri, down in a squat, awkwardly close to his father, his face just a few inches away. “I’m hungry.”
Darren stood, and tousled Omri’s imperfectly home-cut hair. “OK. We need to be quiet and careful.”
“Quiet and careful,” Omri echoed. Darren motioned for him to be still, and he was. Darren moved to the windows, carefully checking the street. They’d have to be careful not to be seen from outside. There was no movement, no neighbors, no evidence of law enforcement.
“C’mon,” he said, and they descended the stairs. They were hardwood, and nicely finished, and Omri was holding tight onto the rail, a little uncertain on his feet. Darren stayed right in front of him.
“You’ve got it. Good job, Omri. Good job. Just a couple more.”
They moved into the kitchen, to the big dufflebag resting incongruously on a very tasteful marble countertop. Darren pulled out a couple of cans of Dinty Moore and a big tupperware container. It wasn’t exactly gourmet, but it’d do.
He slopped the contents of both cans into the tupperware, and then carried it over to the oversized microwave, Omri tagging along. “It’ll be ready in just a couple minutes, Ommy. You’ve been so good, I’m really proud of…”
And the windows shuddered, then shuddered again, the sounds of giants at the rifle range.
And then immense percussive blows, three so close they were almost one, the air filled with glass and ears lost in a high pitched whine that devoured everything,
Omri’s mouth, crying out daddy, terrified but no sound, Darren couldn’t even hear his own voice, mouthing jesus omri jesus.
The QA-10 banked hard to the left, pulling away from the surface of the river, maintaining perfect distance from the identical drone to the left and the right. Control had been released three and half minutes before, and it was on its own, a simple mind, a simple machine, moving with a complete singularity of purpose.
Radar targeting showed nothing, but the cold glass eyes that fed into the autonomous systems showed a clear and obvious mark, fat and clear and unmistakable. It jinked up, up, up, banking as it climbed, straining the airframe to the extent of design parameters, pulling enough Gs to drain the blood from the head of any human pilot.
Which is why it did not have a human pilot. More armor, more ammunition, more survivability, more maneuverability.
It arced over and downwards, one sister pulling away to the left, the other to the right. The descent accelerated, the target now below and ahead, impossible to miss, targeting systems locked at the dead center.
A faint shudder in the airframe, picked up by onboard accelerometers, as three somethings passed by coming from the east south east, registering for only an instant in the sensorium of the drone as they passed in excess of Mach 7.
Range, now, almost a kilometer, and the big rotary cannon around which the airframe was constructed roared and roared, a uranium tipped fountain, a 30mm firehose, a chudder of shouted consonants, the rattling of a demonic grogger.
Now a kilometer, and the drone’s simple consciousness winked out, snuffed like a candle, engines off, the sound silent, the airframe an unguided paper airplane, gliding mindless towards the lovely open fields.
The flechette passed, and Jaumm observed it. Such a simple thing, yet elegant, almost organic in its singularity of intent. The composites, rudimentary but effective, managing both heat and lethal purpose. The aerodynamics, so simple.
It entered the transit carapace as if nothing were there, because nothing was, not really. It was unslowed, unchanged in course. Jaum slowed local spacetime, observing the complexity of the heat signature within the ferroceramic structure. It was lovely, complex, and unusual, beautiful and rare as all things wrought by life were beautiful and rare and precious.
Even the terrible things, even the things whose purpose was the ending of life, even they bore that mark within themselves.
It passed, out and through and gone, only the hum of the air casting across Jaumm’s ageless hide, within which she had sealed herself.
Others, slower, local, still with the scent of the complex chemical residuals that hurled them trailing behind them. Simple, potent, mechanical, the devices set to trigger a modest explosion upon impact.
There was no impact.
A dumb bit of metal, not quite sentient, not life or post-life, passed through her boundary field, the energies silenced within it, and damped and mindless fell like a leaf cast from a tree. But from it, a stream, a gout of alloy.
There, there in the incoming stream was where the probability lay, where uninfluenced the fat curve of chance began to swell and stretched out into inevitability. It would have been easy to change, to simply seal the carapace, as her sisters had sealed theirs.
Against that seamless surface, sealed away from the physics of this spacetime, there was no purchase. They were a rift, an ungiving nothingness, in encounter with which the flechettes and the projectiles were torn to oblivion in showers of sparks and gouts of fire. One of the mindless objects that had sprayed projectiles caromed off of her sister’s side, torn in half, a wild tumble of fire as it crashed earthward.
That was not Jaumm’s path.
She opened up, unfurling herself, all eyes open, all branches out, tasting all of being, the old display, unused but remembered. Time around her slowed still further, and from her branches she sang out herself, the memories of aeons, of all that she had known and tasted.
Her sisters sang, too, calling out their remembrances of her, of their sameness and their difference, back to the moment of first birth.
The first of the projectiles entered the carapace, slow and graceful and inevitable. Then another, and another, a stream of particles, each with a purpose. Each designed to penetrate and tear and tumble.
Jaumm could not remember the last time she had felt pain.
OH JESUS OH GOD OH JESUS, this was loud, this was nuts, and Mark cringed despite himself, barely able to look out over the top of the bag, to keep the binocs focused in, Christ everything was opening up, all of it, the howitzers and the Abrams, the earth shaking, launchers standing by, Jesus.
And then whatever the hell that was, like blasting three holes in the sky, oh man, and the combat drones shrieking low, rising up and the BRRRRRRRT BRRRRRRRT BRRRRRRT of those bigass guns. Man, that was an awesome sound.
Objects One and Two were spattered with fire and flame and sparks, booom badda booom booom boom, distant enough to be out of sync with the fire, like far off color in the Fourth of July sky, and a noise that might have been the word CHUD, if a freaking giant had said it twice fast and been really damn angry.
Object Three, there was nothing, like nothing, like no boom or anything, like they weren’t hitting it at all.
Mark focused in, because what the hell, and it just popped.
Pop, like it was there one second, and just gone the next, like when he’d chase soap bubbles around with a supersoaker as a boy.
And there, magnified, at what had been the center of the Object, a tiny thing, a little asymmetric dot, tumbling, falling. It vanished behind the tree line.
Holy shit. We killed one.
There was a murmur, some shouts audible through the ringing in his ears, raised fists from his platoon.
And the others were moving, not moving, maybe getting smaller, or getting smaller and moving, he couldn’t tell.
Then a sound, high pitched, pulsing, throbbing, like that sound in his ears when he’d tried nitrous at a party, wahwahwahWAHWAH but so high up like so high up oh like…
Everyone was falling down, just easing down, just folding in on themselves because that was nice and good to do. Let’s all fall down, like the little specky alien dude.
Mark was falling too, but it was soft and soft and good and quiet and white gold like the sun on snow.
Around the table, the shouts still hung in the air, but the room was suddenly quiet.
“We’ve lost all of the feeds, Mr. President.”
Four different angles, they’d watched, all of the Joint Chiefs and key staff, hunched forward as the live vids streamed in. It had looked disastrous, then promising, then...then they watched one and then another of the handhelds drop, the second showing first soldiers falling like dominoes, then a blur, then the insensate face of the Lieutenant holding it for a moment before winking out into an error code.
The fixed high gain on the ridge of Sugarloaf Mountain just went dark, no warning, no nothing. And the realtime from the standoff Global Hawk had skewed wildly before the word had come from Grand Forks that contact had been severed.
They’d seen the explosions, seen them doing nothing. And then Object Three, blinking out, like it had never been there. And the falling thing.
The room had shouted, almost as one, right there, a historic victory for America, humanity winning one for the Gipper.
Then their eyes had been poked out. The screens at the end of the table showed only static and code.
“Suggestions, Gentlemen?” President Ortiz, his voice cold and hard. “We need information about what’s happening out there. What do you have?”
“Everything’s down, Mr. President. Audio feeds. Orbital recon. It’s all down. As best we can tell, for a thirty mile radius in...”
The lights in the Situation Room dimmed, flickered, and went out.
President Joseph Ortiz sat in the darkness.
“Apparently more than a thirty mile radius, Terrence,” he said, and in the darkness, a faint sneer. Then his face tightened, eyes dead ahead.
The ringing in his ears was fading. It had been about ten minutes, but Darren was still feeling it. There was no sound, no nothing, and it wasn’t just because it felt like someone had poured sand in his ears.
There was no movement, no sounds of vehicles. Just stillness.
Half of the windows in the house had blown out, when whatever that was had happened. And through those windows, the moist heat of the late summer afternoon came, the house gradually growing even warmer.
Omri was sitting on a stool, up above the shattered glass which Darren had carefully swept out of the way, the lovely kitchen cabinet doors now a tangle of shards and fragments. Darren guessed that the interior designer hadn’t factored military action into their vision.
His little face was a mess, caked with the stew he was fishing out of the plastic container with his hand. Darren had tried giving him a spoon, but that seemed somehow too slow, and Darren was so amazed to see him feeding himself that he just didn’t care. There would be time to learn the social graces later, because honestly, the toilet thing was considerably more important.
And he didn’t have to worry about Omri burning himself, because there wasn’t any power. The lights had gone out within thirty seconds of the windows which meant cold stew, which honestly wasn’t nearly as bad as he thought. Or maybe it was that he was nearly as hungry as Omri.
The water was still running, thank you Jesus, and after gulping down handful after handful, he had Omri drink. And washed off his face.
“Daddy?” Omri said, an urgent look on his face. “Daddy?” His hand, on Darren’s shirt, pulling him, pulling him towards the shattered sliding glass door leading out to the deck of the house.
Darren felt it too, a faint insistence, not overwhelming but present. To walk somewhere, somewhere that was not near but not too far away.
“You know the way?”
Omri nodded, his little face serious.
“Are you ready?”
A quick nod.
So Darren took the small, extended hand, and they walked out of the house together.
There was nothing, no movement, nothing but the sound of birds angrily singing, and the distressed sound of a dog, half barking, half howling. Darren looked towards the river, towards the city, and the three Objects were not there. The three Transit Carapaces, his memory corrected.
Up above, there it was, the one that was Jaumm together, still present, a steel wound in the sky so high and almost immediately above them. It was caught by the warmth of the late day sun, shining as bright as a star, a dart, an arrow, a marker.
They continued to walk, past the high school on their left, and the Baptist church on the right, the windows in the sanctuary strangely unbroken. The parking lot of the church was full of vehicles, all military. Around them, bodies, unmoving. Dozens of them.
Darren glanced down at Omri, wondered if he should try to shield him, keep him from seeing. But Omri seemed not to notice. He was eagerly pushing on, and the two of them continued to walk, on down the road, towards the fields ahead.
The houses, one after another, so small, such delicate structures, the paper nests of wasps, the calcium walls of coral.
Darren felt a strangeness as he walked, felt his body, felt the memories of what he had been shown playing across him. He was a creature of earth, fashioned from the dust of this soil. Everything about him was woven in with this world.
He looked down the road they were walking, felt himself weighed down by the gravity of the earth. He felt the gaze of his eyes, the set of his head on his skull, looking not upward and away to the stars but across the surface of this pebble in God’s creation. He felt his breath, in and out, in and out, his life dependent on the wisp of air clinging to that same pebble.
So small, so mortal, so frail, so fleeting.
They turned right, after the middle school, through newer houses again.
Up ahead, a roadblock, two cop cars, their lights dark. On the ground, up ahead, the bodies of two police officers. They were directly in their path, directly ahead, and there would be no walking around them.
He slowed as they approached. Omri let go of his hand, and trotted over to one of the officers, squatting down to get a closer look. Darren joined him.
It was Officer Silver, that cop. She’d gone down on the pavement, not hard, but she was face down.
Omri set his little body against hers, and pushed her over. She moaned, faintly. Darren leaned in, and saw that she was breathing. He checked the other cop, a stocky, solid Latino. He was breathing, too, a faintly peaceful look on his face.
They weren’t dead. It struck him, with certainty. None of them were dead.
Darren felt relief move over him.
“Daddy?” Omri had moved a little further down the road, past the cars, standing in the middle of the two-lane looking plaintive. “Daddy!”
It was time to keep walking.
Rachel smelled dirt, dirt and grass. Why was she smelling dirt and grass? She breathed out, opened her eyes. The world was a blur, spots and shadows across her vision. Oh Christ her head hurt, hurt so much it spun out into nausea. Damn. Why was she hung over? What had she been doing?
She pushed herself upright, moaned, felt the world spin a little bit.
Next to her, Carl Tuckerman was trying not to throw up.
“Oh Jesus,” he said, in between retching. “Oh.” He made a moist sound. “Oh Jesus what the hell was that?”
Rachel managed to stand, rocking a little bit but upright. Around the field at the center of town, people were getting to their feet. There was the faint smell of vomit, which suddenly grew brighter in her sinuses as Tuckerman lost his battle.
The wet spattering and the newsman’s moans caused her gorge to rise sympathetically, but Rachel hated throwing up. Hated it. She had always hated it, ever since she was a little girl. Prided herself on her ability to keep it together.
She fought it back, turned her will against it, and the urge subsided.
Carl Tuckerman got to his feet, strands of mucus hanging from his nostrils and mouth. He wiped them away with a sleeve, and gave an involuntary shudder. He seemed about to say something, paused, and then bent over towards the ground.
Rachel grimaced, expecting more foulness, but instead he picked up a small object and stood back up again. It was the drive.
“So,” he said, weakly. “We need to do something with this.”
It was a beautiful summer evening, the sun now low in the sky and the heat of the day gradually dissipating away. It had been a longer walk than Darren remembered from his blurry return that evening, miles and miles of roads, through fields and by farms, the houses few and far between. Omri had pressed on, moving eagerly, but after the first three miles he’d tired.
The arms came up, and Darren squatted down and let him clamber on piggyback. Thank God he was still light. The extra weight was barely a thing, barely noticable, and together they continued forward on the roughly paved two lane.
They both knew exactly where they were going. To that place, right there, by the little church sitting quiet in its clapboard simplicity.
No, not there. A little beyond. But very close.
It could have been a beautiful jaunt, father and son, out together exploring country roads on an early Fall afternoon. But off to the west, columns of smoke were rising from three different places, marking the day as something very different.
They had passed the church, lit up warm by the redness of the sun. There, by the church, parked where he had left it, was the Civic. Or what was left of the Civic. Something big and hot and metal had torn into it.
They had crossed the road, and clambered over the fence, Darren helping Omri up and over. The field was green and growing, a nice large house sitting abandoned to their right as they pushed through the tall grass, the air alive with insects.
Omri was walking again, two strides ahead, then four, forging through grass nearly as tall as he was, seemingly oblivious to the gnats that danced like a cloud of dark faeries around his head. Darren followed, feeling the itch of grass against his forearms, the sweat wet against his back where Omri had pressed warm against him.
Ahead, a patch of trees, a dense and thorny copse at the corner of the field, the underbrush heavy. It was directly below the great needle above, which appeared from that angle like a circular dot, dark on one side, sunkissed on the other, a new moon in the sky.
Omri slowed, then stopped at the edge of a tangle of thorns and vines. He peered into the deepening shadow, then moved to his right a few steps, then a few steps more, never averting his eyes.
“What is it, Ommy? Is it…”
But Omri had slipped into the shadow, slowly, purposefully moving forward, his spiderlike frame easing through the tangles. Darren followed, clumsily, the thorns clinging and tearing. Through a veil of green and brown, he saw Omri push ahead, almost to where he could no longer see him.
“Omri! Wait for me!”
But Omri had already stopped, and was standing still.
Darren reached him. There, on the ground, was Jaumm.
Jaumm, lying like a barely inflated football on several large broken branches shattered and brought down by the fall through the trees. The legs hung limp, the fleshy star of eyes hunting, shifting feebly. The thick leathery flesh had been torn and rent in a dozen places, and oozed a thick iridescent fluid that glowed with its own faint light.
The arms, so fine, so delicate, hung haphazard and shattered, draped across the underbrush like sargasso on a rocky shore. Only two continued to move, their graceful undulations interrupted by occasional spasms and shuddering that cast strange shimmerings through the air.
“Darrennn,” came the voice, far and faint as a childhood memory. It was flatter, just a single voice. It faded like a dying breeze, soft and strangely melancholy.
“Omri.” The voice rose again, stronger now, mingling with other voices. “Omri.” The space around them felt suddenly charged, filled with energies, the branches extending themselves outward, opening and extending, an arcane benediction.
The broken bag of flesh rose, slowly, from the ground, the star of eyes finding their shape, turning themselves downward.
“You know the way.” Darren’s own voice, familiar, now echoed and resonating, a hundred voices, all speaking in the affirmative.
Omri’s feet left the ground, his hair rising, a black dandelion blossom around his head, the branches teasing across his body like dancing flames.
Light played across Jaumm’s form, brighter and brighter, the patterns radiating from the wounds and scars torn across its flank, Omri cast in silhouette against a field of glowing runes.
There was the sound of movement, behind Darren, but he did not turn.
“You. Know the Way.”
“Go Go Go! Move Move Move!”
They’d hit the ditch, a boneshaking holyhell impact, first in the column. The momentum shattered through the fencing, and they’d torn across the field, wheels kicking up dirt and grass.
And they were out, and Sarge was shouting, and damn.
Move move move, and Mark was moving, lockedandloaded, shit shit shit.
Out of the lead Humvee, out and hitting the ground running, there, right there, running to where the recon quad was spitting IR and visual back to the Lieutenant, two heat signatures, right there where the thing had fallen.
Orders had come through, all ground units proceed, a circle closing in, a snare with teeth, and they were the tip of the spear, goddammit why did they have to be the tip of the spear.
Mark running, his head still throbbing, the taste of bile still sharp in his mouth, I’m not the tip of anything, I’m just the freaking nothing, oh Jesus.
“Hold and in slow, trigger safe people, trigger safe, hold for my call.”
The thrum of choppers inbound, dozens of choppers up and coming, the skirmish line spread out and moving forward, all eyes into the darkening patch of trees.
Then he saw it, Mark saw it first, right there up in the trees suddenly a great sparkling thing with the shape of a man against it holy shit look at that thing it was lit up like fire and there was a small man, arms outstretched, was it a man, Holy Christ was it even a man and he shuddered and squeezed and the shadow whirled suddenly dark and closer as the rifle bucked against his shoulder, one long full auto burst.
The shadow crumpled and fell, and the man toppled like a stone.
“Hold fire, Jesus Christ Teague hold your goddamn fire!”
Oh God.
The Friend had picked him up, so gently.
Like Mom picked him up. Or Daddy. Or Mary.
The Friend was so big and kind.
The Friend showed him everything.
Even the sad thing that was about to happen, and it was so sad.
The Friend was sad, too, but happy at the same time.
Because Omri was being shown everything.
Like how to make shadows to hide in.
And how to know what was going to happen.
And how to bend everything the way it needed to go.
It was so different, because Omri remembered from before.
He remembered just being hungry or sad or sleepy.
Every day was the same, and he hurt a lot.
That had been who he was for a long time.
Until the Friend had woken him up.
Now the Friend was going to go to sleep.
And Daddy was going to go to sleep.
Daddy going to sleep made Omri sad.
But then the Friend showed him a special trick.
A way to remember Daddy the way the Friend’s friends would remember her.
That made it better.
Now there were loud sounds coming.
Omri was going to run.
He could run very fast now, he told the Friend.
The Friend knew he could.
Because the Friend had taught him.
“Are you ready?” asked the Friend, using Daddy’s voice again, but quiet in his head so only Omri could hear.
Omri said that he was, quiet and in his head.
There was a loud sound.
Brrrrrratttt, it went.
The Friend whirled around so fast.
Thup thup thup thup, it went.
The Friend shook, and gave Omri a gentle push away.
It was time to run.
Omri heard Daddy make a noise.
Huuuuh, Daddy said, sounding surprised.
Omri felt sad, like a big sad.
But he didn’t cry.
Omri ran.
He ran fast.
He ran in shadows.
And when there were no shadows, he made his own.
It felt good to run so fast.
Sometimes he ran so fast, he forgot to touch the ground at all.
Rachel stood by her Corolla, at the side of the road, and allowed herself to weep.
She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d cried. Not crying was like not puking, a point of pride, but she just couldn’t. It was. Fuck.
It had taken her about half an hour to get past the checkpoint at the Bealesville intersection. Every car checked and searched. The military policemen at the checkpoint had questions about Darren, his picture, his description. She said she had seen the news, seen what he had been passing around, but no, no she didn’t know where he was.
Which was true.
They had asked her about why she was in Poolesville, why she hadn’t evacuated, and she said she should have, but showed them the old SETI ID, pictures, a once in a lifetime chance, and she was stupid and should have left because it was horrible.
They searched her trunk, searched the car, and then sent her on her way.
She was about half a mile past the roadblock when she saw the car and the pickup truck, pulled over, their occupants out of their vehicles and looking up.
She stopped, and got out, and there it was, the main object, the last one, the big one, only now it wasn’t so big.
It was growing smaller. Not because it was moving away, but because it was shrinking, closing up. Returning not to space, but...elsewhere.
The road around her was dark, but it was still catching the setting sun, shining bright as a star, brightest thing in the sky, brighter than the risen moon. The brightness was fading.
It was a seam of light, slowly knitting itself closed. It was the last light of sunset, the final sliver of a Key West sun as it sank into the sea, the sound of Jimmy Buffett and drunken margarita applause across the beach.
There, all the wildest hopes of all of her career, all of her training, the whole purpose towards which she had set her life, every relationship, her whole field. Slowly, inexorably vanishing.
It was the most horrible thing. The most horrible thing. Like watching the last struggling breath of that child born too soon, the tiny chest going so very still. Like seeing Jim’s eyes, after that fight, after all those fights, and realizing suddenly that there was no love left in them. Like seeing Dad’s skin grow sallow as the life left him.
It was everything she had hoped for, and they were leaving, and she hadn’t even had a chance to know them.
“God damn it,” she managed, her voice hitching, her throat choked. “God damn it.”
Tina stared at the words, scripted and vetted, prepped for the teleprompter. Segment after segment.
They were all from official sources, every last one of them toeing the line. That’d been a huge fight, a screaming fight, one that had nearly torn the newsroom apart.
There would be the short video from the White House, the official press statement offered up by...Christ, what was his name? The new guy. Bernstein was apparently in hiding, they’d tried to reach him for comment on his resignation, but nothing.
And that was before they knew why he’d resigned.
The press statement congratulated our troops on standing up for our freedom, talked about damage inflicted by the invaders, talked about steps being taken to insure our continued security.
Meaning, the ‘net was going to be let back up, gradually, with new Homeland Security and NSA filters in place to monitor for alien influence.
They can be anywhere, at any time. They could still be here among us.
Then a bit of filler, followed by an “on the scene report” from Carl Tuckerson. Carl honestly was looking worse for wear, seriously beat up. Hadn’t even bothered with makeup, which was something for him. There was back and forth about how the alien weapon had knocked him unconscious. Lots of shots of shattered windows, one money shot of stained glass fragments scattered all over the pews of a little church in town.
Of course, the U.S. navy had done that, and everyone knew it, but that detail wasn’t going to make it into the report.
Another short segment, on reports that the remains of an alien body had been found below the obliterated alien craft, which sources suggested was being moved to USAMRIID at Fort Detrick for isolation, containment, and research. That could be neither confirmed or denied, according to sources.
Tina found that darkly amusing, given that those sources had intentionally leaked the report.
Then a talking head, ex-military, one of their usual stable of commentators, about the operation. He was great, right up until the question about why there didn’t seem to be any wreckage from a craft nearly a kilometer high. He made some comment about how there’d been hopes to reverse engineer from extraterrestrial tech, then had gone into a long rambling excursus about something unrelated. That one had to be edited.
There was the semi-fluff piece about the return of Facebook. Social media was still down, cut off at domestic servers. Cellular non-data service was back up, as was texting, but everything else was locked down. Soon, it was promised, once things had been fixed. A complaining tween girl, the subtle message, don’t be a whiner.
And then there was the stuff they weren’t going to report.
The files that Carl had sent her, leaked from Bernstein. Damning, damning stuff, about how this was just being used to cement power. About how the administration was intentionally overstating the threat, as a way of locking down opposition. How it worked into a larger and preestablished plan, intended to be implemented in the event of a terror attack.
There were the on-scene reports, from Carl, interviews with an excitable and loose lipped Guardsman, about the other body that was being moved to Fort Detrick, the body of that preacher whose “discredited” contact video had started making the rounds right before the aliens were driven off. The stories, now on the government’s mouthpiece network, about how he was just an attention seeker, about financial problems and hoaxes. The preacher, “missing.”
And the government knew, knew the whole time, that he wasn’t making it up. They knew he was dead.
Christ.
More stuff from Carl, Jesus, the poor sonofabitch, Jesus, he’d tried to get this stuff out, about that preacher. About his boy, eyewitness accounts that were all exactly the same. There was no question that he’d been severely disabled, and then he...wasn’t.
She’d fought tooth and nail with corporate, and she’d lost. Sure, they’d be shut down, just like social media’d been shut down, and like the presses at the Post and the Gray Lady had been shut down.
There was that delay, now, one minute between “live” production and broadcast. Wasn’t even being monitored by humans, that was too slow. It was one of those programs, language processing, so fast, Big Brother’s little helper, nice and neat and autonomous. It’d flip the switch, and the news would never see the light of day.
But it was worth being shut down for this. She’d backed down, finally, when she saw that pushing harder now might jeopardize this ever seeing the light of day. It was a tactical retreat, she told herself, a regrouping, not a defeat. She would play ball, now. She’d get the research done, wait for the right moment, then find a way.
However long it took to bring those bastards down.
Julie sat, and stared at her open Bible. But she couldn’t read, couldn’t focus, couldn’t anything. She curled up in a ball on the old sofa in the strange basement, and stared out the sliding glass door into the darkness. She felt, for an instant, like she was going to start crying again. Then it passed, and the deadness returned.
She was only kind of sure where they were. Out in the country somewhere, some kind of farm. Friends of Rick and Patti had put them up the first night. It was so crazy. After those agents had finished searching the house, they’d gotten out of town in that long line of cars, and headed north. It’d been an hour or more, just pure fear.
They’d heard the roar, but like, there was no news. That whole night, just praying and crying and praying, hoping they’d hear from Darren and Omri.
And today was horrible. It was a void, a darkness, a nothing.
That Rachel woman had come late in the morning, the one that Darren had talked to at the house, and she had talked to her, and then she was screaming and crying and she couldn’t stop, just couldn’t.
Because Darren was…
And she didn’t want to think it because it couldn’t be real and it just couldn’t and…
Her throat closed up, and her chest felt tight, and she felt her face grow hot and swollen but she didn’t have any tears left.
The woman knew, because she knew a newsman, and a soldier had talked to him and told him. And then he’d told her, when he couldn’t get the news out.
And she was screaming, and they were trying to get her to be quiet, what about Omri, she was screaming, what about Omri. She screamed until she no longer had the life in her to scream.
But the woman didn’t know. Nobody knew anything.
They had to move to another house. Because things were really bad, and they were in danger because people were being arrested now. She got all quiet, and she couldn’t even talk. Not the whole way here. Not when she went back into the bedroom, like a ghost, not even eating dinner. It was like she wasn’t even there anymore, just a shadow. She didn’t want to be alive. She didn’t want to exist, not if this was life.
Her eyes stared blankly at the sliding glass door. She felt as dark as that window, as dark and empty as the night.
Only the window wasn’t dark. Not empty.
There was a shadow, a grayness, a movement.
Then two hands, and a face, and a Monsters Inc shirt and some pajama pants.
“Guh,” Julie said, because her throat wouldn’t let her say anything, and she couldn’t move. “Guh.” She forced herself up.
She stumbled to the door and slid it too hard it went bang.
“Mom,” he said, in his strange little voice.
She fell down to her knees, and opened her arms and held him.
Julie found she did have tears left. She had a lot of tears left.
One one side, the Transit Carapace glowed bright in the light from the nearby star. On the other, darkness and the starfield of the the local sector, mirrored perfectly from the surface. Brightest in that starfield was a blue green dot, outshining everything around it.
Within the Carapace, the Four-Remaining tasted the flow and ebb of being, the bend of time and space shaped by the fierce probabilistic warping pouring from the little blue green star. They were together, drifting interconnected at the heart of the Carapace, open and seeing together in every direction.
What they saw was good. There was a different flavor to this dark and silent spacetime now, so subtle.
The cost had been high, so very high.
But the seed had been planted in this place, and as tiny and fragile as it seemed, it would be enough.
Just one small movement, a single change, and it would be enough.
They could return, back to the One, to where they would be whole again.
And then they were gone, the silent universe not even noticing their absence.
EPILOGUE
The knock at the side door came, just as he had known it would. It still startled him, jolting him from his tense expectancy.
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
OK. OK. This was it.
Barry got up from his chair, and walked over to the door to the carport. He checked the security camera, and there were two men standing there. One older, stocky, a little heavy. One tall, young, lean and angular.
He felt a rush of excitement, but tried to keep himself calm. He checked the other cams, the ones discreetly mounted, the ones watching the street. There on the cams, long rows of old ramblers, some now unoccupied, a neighborhood that had seen better days. The whole country had seen better days. Days when you could say what you liked. Believe what you liked.
But what was important, right now: there were no featureless late model cars. No white windowless work vans with too many antennae.
He pressed the button on the security speaker.
“Who is it? Can I help you?”
The older man replied. “We’re here for a bible study. I’m sorry. Did we get the right house?”
Exactly the right answer, word for word. Barry gave the reply.
“Seek and ye shall find.”
And from the speaker, the end of the sequence.
“Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
Barry threw the deadbolts, all three of them, and unlocked the door. He opened it, slowly, and the two men came in. The older man extended a hand. “Barry, eh? Rick. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“Rick. I’m just, like, so honored. You look, well...
A laugh. “What, fatter than you expected? They use an old picture of me. I’m almost thankful. Almost.” And again, another laugh.
The younger one was barely a man, really just a teenager, all gangly legs and long arms, a mop of dark hair set above dark eyes and the wisps of a moustache and a first beard on his face. He didn’t speak, just opened his arms. Barry hugged him, hard, and gave a shudder as he did, though he’d promised himself he’d keep it together.
“God it’s so good to finally meet you.” The boy, half a head taller than Barry, silently pressed his forehead against Barry’s, affectionately, and gave him a grin, his mouth a snaggletoothed mess.
“Look, everyone’s downstairs. I can’t tell you just how, I mean, it’s like some of us…” Barry felt himself getting tongue-tied. Oh Jeez.
“Well, let’s get down there, then,” said Rick. “Don’t want to keep folks waiting.”
At the bottom of the stairs, the room was full. Every chair taken, the sofa full. Three wheelchairs, their occupants in various stages of agitation. The room was quiet, or trying to be quiet, struggling to keep itself calm. Nervous, half suppressed sobs came from a woman sitting in a far corner, holding a small child that lay limp in her arms.
“Hey, everyone,” Barry said. “I know you’ve waited, and you’ve hoped, and it was hard to get here. But our guests have arrived. This is, um, this is…”
“Omri,” the young man said, in a rich baritone that seemed to fill the whole room.
“You know why I’m here. I have something to share with all of you.”