Invasion at Bald Eagle

by Kris Ashton

  Invasion at

  Bald Eagle

  Kris Ashton

  Copyright © 2018 Kris Ashton

  Published October 2018

  Digital Fiction Publishing Corp.

  All rights reserved. 2nd Edition

  ISBN-13 (Paperback): 978-1-988863-86-3

  ISBN-13 (Kindle): 978-1-988863-85-6

  Contents

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Thursday, July 31, 1969

  Friday, August 1, 1969

  Saturday, August 2, 1969

  Sunday, August 3, 1969

  Monday, August 4, 1969

  Tuesday, August 5, 1969

  Wednesday, August 5, 1969

  Thursday, August 6, 1969

  Friday, August 7, 1969

  Saturday, August 8, 1969

  Sunday, August 9, 1969

  PART TWO

  1:13 p.m.

  1:31 p.m.

  2:05 p.m.

  3:46 p.m.

  5:01 p.m.

  5:35 p.m.

  6:29 p.m.

  6:44 p.m.

  6:53 p.m.

  7:14 p.m.

  7:30 p.m.

  7:42 p.m.

  7:45 p.m.

  8:01 p.m.

  8:27 p.m.

  8:40 p.m.

  9:22 p.m.

  10:15 p.m.

  10:29 p.m.

  10:32 p.m.

  10:59 p.m.

  12:31 a.m.

  Monday, August 10, 1969

  The Denver Post, August 11, 1969

  Wednesday, August 12, 1969

  Saturday, October 30, 1969

  EPILOGUE

  Sunday, November 16, 1969

  Monday, November 17, 1969

  Thank You!

  Also from Digital Fiction

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Thursday, July 31, 1969

  The whiskery, alien mouth pouted and gasped for air. Neville Bates grabbed the catfish around its middle, careful to keep his fingers clear of its sharp defenses, and extracted the hook from its cheek. He tossed the fish into a bucket, where it kicked its tail and upset two other fish that floated half-stunned in six inches of muddy river water.

  Neville took a fresh beer from his cooler and popped the top with an opener he always kept in his pocket. For the first time in many years he noticed the small white scar at the base of his thumb. An old catfish injury, sustained when he was fourteen and still clueless about the spines jutting from the fish’s slippery face. Goddamn, that had hurt. Even now, twenty years on, he could still feel the agonizing throb in his hand and see the vermillion wound—as if someone had shot him at close range with a pellet gun. The pain didn’t recede for hours. He had since read the spines sometimes broke off and could only be removed with tweezers. Now that would have hurt like a bitch.

  Neville sipped his beer and then checked his watch. It was after three. If he didn’t get back soon and fix the sagging door in the outhouse, Cheryl would give him the silent treatment for a week.

  He re-baited his hook and cast in. As he wound up the slack on his line he heard something chop through the treetops and thud into the sandy soil at the top of the riverbank. He glanced over his shoulder but couldn’t see anything, so he jammed his fishing pole into the sand and got up to investigate.

  Initially he saw nothing, save for the trees and the foot-worn track that led to the access road where Neville had left his car. But then he noticed the wisp of smoke rising from the ankle-high grass, which was dry and yellow with the summer heat.

  He clawed his way onto the bank and went towards the smoke, which was climbing to the height of a man before it diminished into the air. As he got closer he saw something that looked like the chrome brightwork on an old Chrysler. But when he stood right over the object, he saw it couldn’t be the end of a bumper bar or a side mirror.

  What it looked like was an egg.

  He craned his head back and searched the forest canopy for a bird’s nest, unable to conceive a better explanation. But what sort of bird laid an egg in mid-flight, and what sort of egg could make the grass smolder like that?

  Neville took a knee and produced a pair of glasses from his jacket pocket. Improved eyesight didn’t help him identify the object, but he could see its colors a little better—in fact, he decided, it seemed to be absorbing the colors around it: the yellow-green grass, the dark mottle of the canopy and a fleshy stripe from his own inquisitive face.

  Unsure what else to do, Neville spat at it. He expected his spit to sizzle, but it just sat on the surface, white and bubbly. Apparently whatever heat the egg had brought down with it was gone.

  Neville scratched his head. Then he stroked his chin. Then reached for the egg.

  Neville Bates, a man impervious to catfish attack, cried out in pain.

  Friday, August 1, 1969

  The phone rang. Sheriff Bert Grayson put down his turkey sandwich, closed his newspaper and picked up. “What is it, Martha?”

  “Sheriff, I have a Marcus Barkley on the phone. He sounds quite agitated.”

  Bert couldn’t place the name. “Who?”

  “He’s managing director of the nuclear reactor.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “Shall I tell him you’re busy, Sheriff?”

  Bert sighed, looking mournfully at his newspaper. “No, put him through.”

  He heard a click and the not-quite-silence of an open line. “This is Sheriff Grayson.”

  “Sheriff, thank the Lord! They’re all over the place! I think they’re going to knock the gates down and storm the place and then—”

  “Now just hang on a second,” Bert said. “Calm down, Mr Barkley. It’s Mr Barkley, right?”

  “That’s right! I need you out here right away. They’re trying to knock the gate down!”

  “Who’s trying to knock the gate down?”

  “The protestors! There must be…let me see…I think there must be at least a hundred of them. An unruly mob. Waving their placards around. You should see what’s written on them. Of all the disgusting, ignorant—”

  “Let me see if I have this correct. There’s a group of protestors waving signs out front of your nuclear reactor.”

  “That’s right! They’re chanting as well.”

  Bert rolled his eyes. “Okay, so we have a group of protestors standing outside a nuclear reactor chanting and waving signs. What exactly would you like me to do about it?”

  “Make them disperse, of course!” Barkley said, his voice hitting a reedy falsetto. “Tell them to move on!”

  “They’re American citizens, Mr Barkley. Last I heard, American citizens had the right to stage a peaceful protest.”

  “But that’s just it—they’re not peaceful. They’re chanting and rattling the gates and trying to break in.”

  “Is anybody getting violent? Has anybody been hurt?”

  “Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time if you don’t come out here and stop them. Why won’t you help me?”

  “Now hang on, I—”

  “This is outrageous. As I think you know, Sheriff Grayson, I have many friends on the board of selectmen. I doubt they’d be too pleased to hear that you refused to come out here and assist me. You only have another six months of your current term left and if you plan to be re-elected—”

  “This may surprise you, Mr Barkley,” said Bert, “but I do this job because I love Bald Eagle County and the people who live here and it’s my job to protect them. I won’t be intimidated by anybody, least of all a self-important piece of rubbish that just blew in from California.”

  Soft huffing and spluttering came down the phone.

  “Now, my only deputy is out coveri
ng a domestic disturbance, so if I’m going to leave the station unmanned it had better be for a good reason.”

  A short pause followed as Barkley apparently reassessed the situation. “They’re trying to break down the fence,” he said sulkily. “Damned hippies.”

  Bert’s ears pricked up. “Hippies?”

  “That’s right, those unwashed, long-hair degenerates that live in the woods. You know who I’m talking about.”

  Bert did know. About six months earlier a man named Derek Brolin had bought up the property on Bald Eagle Hill, a remote northwest corner of the county that seemed to hide away, embarrassed by its minor elevation. An elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Jenkins, had lived there until 1964, but as so often happened with old folks they had passed on within two months of one another—and their spacious but understated homestead on Bald Eagle Hill had remained unoccupied for nearly five years. Somehow Brolin—who hailed from San Francisco—had gotten wind of the property and decided it suited his needs.

  Those needs worried Bert.

  Soon after Brolin moved in, Bert had called the San Francisco Police Department to find out more about Bald Eagle’s newest immigrant. Back on the coast, Brolin had apparently been some sort of ‘guru’, whatever the hell that meant, and while he had never been arrested he was a well-known anti-war activist. In Bald Eagle, his appearance—floppy clothes, thick bushy beard, hair down past his shoulders like a girl’s—had created considerable unrest among the townsfolk. What concerned Bert was something the desk sergeant at the SFPD had told him.

  “Hippies equal narcotics,” he had said in tones of mild disgust. “If you see a group of hippies, you can bet you’re within hopping distance of a marijuana stash.”

  During Brolin’s occupancy, more and more hippies had trickled in and begun to live on Bald Eagle Hill. Mostly they kept to themselves, only descending into the town center to buy occasional necessities like tobacco. Word was they tended vegetable patches. Bert suspected they might be tending a crop of an entirely different nature, but he had no proof.

  This protest was an unexpected development.

  “They’re trying to trespass and all you can do is sit there breathing down the phone at me.”

  “All right then, Mr Barkley. I’ll be out there as soon as I can.”

  “Do you have the address?”

  Bert might have laughed, had he not wanted to clout Barkley over the head with the phone receiver. “I assure you, sir, I know where your reactor is.”

  “Please hurry.”

  “Good day, Mr Barkley.”

  Bert hung up and leaned back in his chair to think. He stared at a framed photo propped on the corner of his desk. It remained one of his most cherished snapshots. Sharna—still young enough to care more about dolls than boys—sat at a picnic table, the late morning sun captured in her hair’s natural glittering highlights. Sharna’s mother, Bert’s wife, had her arm around Sharna’s shoulders and wore an easy grin. You couldn’t see it in the photo, but a freckle the size of a pinhead had appeared on the back of Dana’s right ear. From that infinitesimal melanin base a malignant army would deploy. The clandestine invasion force would spread to Dana Grayson’s heart and lungs before a single symptom betrayed its deadly march.

  Since Dana’s death Bert had lived for Sharna, and now that she had flown the nest to go and fight for women’s rights in Boulder, Bert lived for his job and the townspeople—even smarmy, whiny outsiders like Marcus Barkley.

  Bert got up and took his Stetson from the hat rack next. As he walked out, Martha looked up from her work (which appeared to be a fashion magazine) and gave him a sympathetic smile. “Going out, Bert?”

  “Apparently some protestors are trying to force their way into the reactor. If you ask me it’s Marcus Barkley being hysterical. They’re all like that in LA. Wired up to have a nervous breakdown if somebody so much as sneezes.”

  Martha giggled and nodded. “Isn’t that the truth.”

  “I shouldn’t be long. If Cody comes back while I’m gone and there’s no other call-outs, tell him to go home. He sounded sick as a dog this morning.”

  “Flu,” Martha said, nodding wisely. “It’s going around.”

  As Bert exited the station he jammed his hat on his head and put on a pair of dark aviator sunglasses. His beat up old cruiser waited patiently on the gravel strip that served as a parking bay for the Bald Eagle County Sheriff’s Office. He backed the car out and rolled onto Main Street. The road bisected Bald Eagle County’s town center. Access roads jutted out from Main Street like crazy spokes, most leading to farm properties or businesses. The Sheriff’s Office sat at the fringe of the town center, added almost as a grudging concession to a new age.

  If one continued along Main Street in either direction it eventually met up with the i70, but Bert swung left onto an access road that veered south-west. Most access roads in Bald Eagle were dirt, but this one had a center line marked along its sterile, white-concrete length. A short way in it rose to a crest and revealed the reactor’s flask-shaped towers with their endless puffs of wispy steam. Bert’s car topped the rise and drifted down the final grade to the reactor’s main gates.

  The protestors did appear to be hippies and they carried placards, but the veracity of Marcus Barkley’s claims ended there. On a quick visual, Bert estimated thirty or forty individuals. They stood at the gate but were not in contact with it, much less trying to knock it down. As Bert came to a stop behind the protestors he looked up and saw Barkley’s terrified schoolboy face peering out an office window. He wondered how—and why—a man so neurotic and easily frightened had taken on a job that almost guaranteed conflict.

  When he noticed Bert’s cruiser, Barkley—apparently emboldened by the law’s presence—started purposefully away from the window.

  As Bert stepped out, the protestors’ chant met his ears: a simple chorus of No nukes! No nukes! Most signs were directed toward the reactor, but Bert could read one: Nuclear Power—Clean, Efficient, Deadly. Only one man had turned to see Bert’s approach. He was young like the rest of them, perhaps mid-twenties. Rather than alert the rest of the mob, he grinned sheepishly. Only then did Bert realize he knew him: Hank Woods, a journalist with a small regional newspaper called The Bald Truth. He sometimes visited Hank at the station to try and whip up stories or confirm facts, and on every occasion had been dressed in a suit and cleanly shaven—a young man on his way to somewhere. Now he wore loose-fitting garments, had let his hair grow out and had two weeks worth of fuzz sprouting from his cheeks.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Bert said.

  “I’m writing an article on the commune, from the inside.”

  “That doesn’t sound like something Larry would come up with,” Bert said, speaking of the Bald Truth’s ancient editor.

  “No, he didn’t commission it,” Hank explained. “I’m actually on leave. I figure I can probably sell the story to Rolling Stone or one of those magazines.”

  “Are all these people living up on Bald Eagle Hill?”

  “No, only eight—nine if you count me. The rest are Derek Brolin’s friends. They drove in from San Francisco last night.”

  “Hey, it’s the cops,” someone said, but interest in Bert was short-lived, because Barkley emerged on the ground floor and strode towards the gatehouse.

  “You’re in trouble now, you smelly freaks!” Barkley said in his whinnying voice. “Clear out! Get out of here!”

  The protestors stepped up their chant. Hank, apparently determined to get the full hippie experience, turned back and added his own voice to the cause.

  “You goddamned spineless tax-evading longhair weirdos!” Barkley cried. “We don’t even make nuclear weapons here! Clear out! Sheriff Grayson, make them clear out! Get a fire-hose!”

  Bert stroked his chin thoughtfully to cover up the big grin trying to emerge.

  Receiving no aid (or fire-hose justice) from Bert, Barkley flew into a rage. He slammed his hands against the gate, the irony of this presu
mably lost on him. “Why won’t you leave us in peace? You barbarians might like to sit around in the dark and do whatever ungodly things you do, but normal God-fearing Americans like streetlights and televisions and ovens! We’re making people’s lives better! Sheriff!”

  Bert had to walk away for a moment or risk full-blown laughter. Barkley sounded just like Bert’s brother Ralph when they were kids, only instead of “Sheriff!” it would have been, “Mom!”

  Meanwhile, the implacable No nukes! catch-cry continued, and despite Barkley’s escalating fury and added epithets, the protestors would not be antagonized. In the gatehouse, old Terry Davison watched on with an almost prurient curiosity.

  “You stupid disease-ridden bastards! You smelly whores! Get the hell off my property! Get out of here before I…We don’t make nukes here you fucking idiots!”

  That did it. A small snort of laughter escaped Bert’s nose and he turned his back to the scene, not wishing to add to Barkley’s real (if completely unfounded) distress. As he did, he saw a female protestor put down her sign and break ranks. He first thought she might be sneaking through an alternative gate while all attention was elsewhere, but she simply slunk away to one of the cars parked on the roadside, climbed in through the back door and lay down out of sight. More intrigued than concerned, Bert left Barkley and the protestors yelling at one another and went to the car. He recognized it as Brolin’s beat-up old Dodge, although he had only seen it once—the ‘guru’ and his companions preferred to walk or cycle the three miles between Bald Eagle Hill and the town center.

  He went to the back window and peered in, prepared for anything—or so he thought.

  He found himself face to upside down face with his daughter.

  Her eyes widened and she said, “Daddy!”

  “Sharna…What on earth are you doing here with these people? You told me you were in Boulder!”

  “I know I did, Daddy, I know I did,” she said, sitting up and turning to face him. As she wound down the back window he noticed a redness creeping onto her cheeks like rouge.

  “You lied to me?” Bert had to phrase it as a question, because he still couldn’t believe it.