Invasion at Bald Eagle

by Kris Ashton

  As he swallowed his third mouthful, he felt like he was starting to choke. Only as the tears fell down his face and soaked into his beard did he realize he was crying.

  “Are you all right?” Barkley said, glancing at him worriedly.

  Derek’s nod was an outright lie; it seemed at that moment he might crack in half. He covered his mouth both to muffle a sob and to keep from spraying half-chewed tuna all over the dashboard.

  “You’re not choking or something, are you?”

  Derek shook his head, flicking a tear off the end of his nose.

  “Christ, what a morning. Do you know what’s going on? The sheriff didn’t tell me anything. I put my own neck on the chopping block to do the right thing and he doesn’t even have the courtesy to—”

  “Can you just shut the hell up for a minute!” Derek shrieked.

  “Fine,” Barkley said.

  They had driven about a mile before Derek could squash his emotions back in their box. That box’s latch seemed flimsy and incapable of holding its volatile contents for long.

  “Sorry,” Derek mumbled. “Just a bit of a freak-out, you know?”

  “Yes, well I’ve had a bit of a ‘freak-out’ morning myself,” Barkley said. “Do you know anything about what’s going on?”

  “More than I want to,” Derek said, watching the woods unroll on his right.

  “Would you mind telling me a bit about it? I feel like I’m playing Blind Man’s Bluff or something, except the police are involved.”

  Derek did not avert his eyes from the window. “Don’t have sex. Don’t touch the eggs. Don’t let them touch you with one of the eggs.”

  “Eggs? That’s what Sheriff Grayson called the…my secretary, she…”

  “Popped one out did she?” Derek said. He wore a diseased grin.

  “I thought I was going to throw up on my shoes. What are those eggs? Like some sort of deformed fetuses? I didn’t even know Carrie was pregnant.”

  Derek snorted. “Deformed? What kind of deformity makes an unborn child come out looking like a piece of metal?”

  “Don’t be so sure of yourself,” Barkley said. “I’ve seen some of the things radiation exposure can do to people.”

  “Who hasn’t?”

  “No, not just the two-headed calves and Hiroshima photos you see in the National Enquirer. As the head of the reactor, I’ve been shown the extreme effects of radiation poisoning. The idea was to instill a good safety ethos in RadiPower executives, and I tell you what, it worked. One bit of film footage they showed us…” Barkley shook his head, as if trying to discard the images inside.

  “Well, whatever—they’re not fetuses, I can tell you that. For a start, the first egg fell from the sky.”

  “Fell from the sky?” Barkley said, his voice inflecting upward.

  “Yep. And when someone—a man—tried to pick it up, it did something to him. It stabbed him.”

  Barkley swallowed. “And what happened then?”

  “It’s more or less guesswork from there on out, but I’m pretty sure whatever it did to Guy was somehow passed on to the others. If I had a gun against my head, I’d say it was transmitted sexually…although…”

  Derek saw no reason to finish that thought, to wonder how it could have passed on to Sharna when she had chosen to be faithful to him. Her bruises crossed his mind in an ugly flash and he ground his teeth together.

  “So what happens when you’re infected?”

  “Apart from giving birth to big pinballs?” Derek shrugged. “Nothing much, that I could see. They got vague. The light behind their eyes seemed to go out. Beyond that…” He shrugged again. “One girl at the commune had a theory it was some sort of biological weapon the Russkies had dropped on us. It’s just possible, I suppose. It would explain the interest from Brolin’s government friend.”

  “Carrie tried to touch me with one of those things,” Barkley said, cringing a little in his seat. “I had come in—”

  “Pull over here!” Derek said.

  “What?”

  “I said pull over!”

  “Now, Sheriff Grayson gave us very specific instructions and I—”

  “Do you want me to shoot you?” Derek said, picking the gun up out of his lap even though he had no intention of using it. “Pull the goddamned car over now.”

  Barkley had left his own weapon in the console area beside his right leg and his eyes flicked to it for a second before he geared down and indicated to a road almost devoid of cars.

  When they were stopped, Derek popped open the door. “I’ll be about five minutes. I just have to check on something.”

  Never again, Hank Woods thought as he cupped handfuls of tap water into his arid mouth. It felt like someone had taken to his temples with a hammer and chisel. His limbs quaked, struggling to make good on the messages sent down by his brain. I am never doing this to myself again.

  But he couldn’t put that in a written guarantee, could he? No, he had no intention of drinking again right now, because the hangover’s effects hurt more than the images of some spotty eighteen-year-old pumping his girl. When the hangover receded, however, and laid his emotional wounds bare, Hank thought his teetotaller’s resolve could falter.

  He leaned on the sink and stared at his reflection in the minute square of vanity mirror. It was like looking at a still picture from a horror show; the sunken eyes, the hairy cheeks, every line in his face deepened from twenty-eight to fifty. “What kind of a friend are you?” he asked that drawn, ghoulish face. “Derek does you the favor of a lifetime and you can’t stay sober long enough to help him in return. You have to get a handle on this.”

  The ghoul-face did look sorry, but it also appeared lost and afraid. It wanted to set things right but hadn’t the faintest notion where to start.

  Not avoiding Denise might be a good start.

  Hank heard a key in the front door. No doubt a cleaner coming to vacuum the room and turn down the bed. He hadn’t left any upchuck deposits this time, but he still didn’t want company.

  “Can you come back, please?” he called out. He sounded like a crow that had swallowed a beakful of dirt and was not surprised when the door opened. He hurried out of the bathroom clad only in his boxer shorts (and he buttoned the front of them as he went). Marjorie Bennett shut the door behind her. She did not, Hank noticed, have a vacuum cleaner or indeed any cleaning products.

  “Could you can come back later, please?” Hank said, his cheeks growing hot at the state of the room behind him.

  Marjorie seemed to search his face, and then said, “Make love to me.”

  “What?” Even if Hank hadn’t been about to hurl, Marjorie Bennett had nothing he wanted. “Ew, no!”

  She came at him with her hands bent into claws and her blouse unbuttoned to expose the freckled and slightly wattled dip of her breasts. “Fuck me!”

  The subject of Hank’s conversation with Derek came back in a flash—the doped-up expression, the abrupt and uncharacteristic demands for sex.

  “Get the fuck away from me,” he said backing away. He felt naked and pink and vulnerable.

  Marjorie’s face twisted with a hot frustration. She lifted her skirt and jammed a hand down the front of her underpants. For one manic second Hank thought she had decided to masturbate right there in front of him, but then her hand came out again holding something silver. “Your change,” Marjorie said, her lips crimping into a polite smile.

  Hank took another two or three steps back and his left thigh bumped against the desk. Had it been a coffee table, he would have gone head over turkey. “I don’t want anything from you!” he said, his heart slapping against his breastbone. “Get away!”

  The ersatz smile wrenched into a snarl of hate and anguish. She rushed the desk and lashed at him with the egg, like a catcher trying to tag a runner sliding towards home base. Hank got clear by about an inch and put the length of the desk between them. His eyes darted down to the typewriter, but it was old and heavy and he thought the time it
took to lift it above his head would be enough for Marjorie to close the gap and touch him with the egg two or three times. Instead, he shoved the desk at her, hoping to trap her against the wall—but she sidestepped this clumsy attack and made another cat’s paw strike.

  That one nearly ended it—as he swayed to his left, Hank felt something brush against his upper arm and he expected to feel the egg’s sting. But only Marjorie’s finger had made contact and he lurched up to the other end of the desk to get it lengthways between them again. They held a tense standoff for a few seconds, both panting, and then she lunged across the table.

  Hank telegraphed this move, but as he tried to skip away his leg tangled with one of the table’s legs and his momentum threw him full length onto the floor. Winded, he got on all fours and started to crawl away, the hard-wear carpet skinning his knees. He could feel Marjorie bearing down on him with the egg, her arm outstretched, reaching for the tender flesh of his back…

  A gunshot rang out and Hank dropped lizard-flat on the floor, lacing his hands across the back of his head. He had no idea where the first shot had come from and he waited to hear a second; to feel the bullet punch into his neck. But came the boneless plop of something falling to the floor behind him and, a moment later, footsteps on carpet in front of him. He looked up and saw a crouching Derek. He had a gun. A thin wisp of smoke issued from its muzzle.

  “Are you okay?” Derek asked.

  “Fine…fine, I think.”

  Hank got to his knees and looked back over his shoulder. Almost exactly where he had fallen, Marjorie Bennett now lay with a grape-sized bullet wound in her throat. A small wash of blood emerged in time with her slowing heartbeat, adding to the widening pool on the floor. The egg had fallen from her fingers and rolled away. She appeared to be reaching for it but her eyes showed she no longer cared. Air whistled in her throat…a death-breath tune.

  “You were telling the truth,” Hank said, getting to his feet.

  Derek just raised his eyebrows, but not in an unfriendly way. “Get dressed,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “Work?”

  When Derek returned with Hank in tow he found Barkley leaning against the driver’s side door of the cruiser, arms folded.

  “What the hell is this?” Barkley said.

  “Not what, who,” Derek said. “This is Hank.”

  “I know who it is,” Barkley said. “The sheriff said we weren’t to trust anyone. How do we know he’s not…one of them?”

  “I’m telling you I’m not one of them,” Hank said.

  Barkley pouted. “That’s not good enough.”

  “I found one of them chasing him around his motel room,” Derek said. “He’s cool.”

  Barkley took his revolver from the waistband of his pants. Set against his business shirt and paisley tie, the effect was ridiculous and unnerving at the same time. “I don’t like it,” he said.

  Derek raised his own weapon. “You have a gun, I have a gun. Mutually assured destruction, I think they call it. If we shoot each other, it’s not going to matter whether Hank is one of them or not.”

  After a moment Barkley rolled his eyes and lowered the weapon. “Fine. But he’s riding with you.”

  “Sure beats the alternative.”

  “Oh-ho-ho, you’re so witty.”

  They piled into the cruiser and set off. Their taste for banter dried up as they sliced their way through the township.

  “Have you guys noticed anything weird?” Hank said.

  “Is that a trick question?” Derek replied.

  “No, seriously. Look around and tell me what you see.”

  What Derek saw defined weird, but he didn’t think Hank referred to that. Even for a Sunday, Bald Eagle appeared deserted, as if God had made a human withdrawal from his Colorado bank account. Here and there he saw pockets of children—some alone and crying, others loitering on the pavement, watching the police car roll by. Women made their way along the sidewalks, but they all appeared to be headed somewhere—none stopped to chat with one another or perhaps find out why the little boy sat beneath the bench seat and cried into his knees. Those goddamned silver balls were everywhere this morning, too, like some vile Easter egg hunt gone wild. But while all these things were weird, odd, wrong, strange, Derek realized the ‘weird’ to which Hank referred existed behind all the bizarre window dressing. This weird manifested itself in absence.

  “Where are all the men?” Derek said.

  The question hung in the car like a bad aroma. As Barkley turned left a few moments later he said, “We’re men. Sheriff Grayson’s a man.”

  Somehow that only made it creepier and Derek and Hank had nothing to add.

  They found Deputy Benson’s car parked in his driveway. Barkley pulled over and Derek got out, walking around back to let Hank out of the back seat.

  Hank said: “Derek, wait. I think our arrival has attracted some attention.”

  Derek did a clumsy pirouette into the cruiser’s front seat, then slammed the door and locked it.

  Perhaps half a dozen women were closing in on the cruiser from all points of the compass. They seemed to have come from nowhere, as invisible as trapdoor spiders until prey had blundered over their tripwires. Derek twisted around in his seat, trying to monitor their approach.

  Barkley flicked off the safety on his revolver but Derek said, “Wait. Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “We’ve got limited ammunition. We might need—”

  One of the women slapped her hand against Derek’s window. Her fingers squeaked as they slid down the glass. In her other hand, Derek saw, she held one of the silver eggs.

  “Make love to me,” she said.

  A second woman threw herself bodily against Barkley’s side of the car, rocking it on its springs. She hitched up her dress and ground herself against the window, leaving behind a gooey smear. “Fuck me!” she insisted.

  “This is just…wrong,” Hank said.

  Barkley raised his gun and placed its muzzle against the glass.

  “Don’t be an idiot!” Derek cried.

  Barkley rounded on him. “What do you suggest then, Mr Know It All?”

  “Run them down.”

  Another woman slammed her hands down on the trunk and demanded sexual gratification in the most vulgar terms.

  “Run them down?”

  Derek rapped his knuckles against the window, sending his would-be lover into a thrusting, fist-beating paroxysm. “This is bulletproof glass. As long as we stay inside the car, we’re safe. So I say we save the guns until we really need them and use the car as a weapon.”

  All four windows were now obstructed by writhing, insistent female bodies. Another woman clambered onto the hood and pulled down her top, rubbing her huge breasts against the windscreen. Derek had the cloying sensation of being swallowed up in a mass of flesh.

  “Do it now,” Hank said, “before they let down our tires or something.”

  Barkley put the cruiser in drive and stepped on the accelerator. There was a high-pitched squeal of hands sliding across window glass and then they were ten feet free, then twenty, then fifty. They rushed towards the turning circle of the cul-de-sac with one woman still kneeling on the hood and staring at them, apparently oblivious to the vehicle’s forward motion. With the speedometer needle pointing at forty, Barkley stamped on the brake, sending the car into a skid. Barkley, Derek and Hank were thrown hard into their seat belts. The woman flew off the bonnet and sailed twenty feet through the air before she slammed back-first into a sandstone letterbox. She slumped onto her side, facing away from the car.

  “Do you two see that?” Barkley whispered.

  They did.

  The back of the woman’s cotton top had ripped open on impact and most of the skin had been flayed away. Three of her vertebrae now showed through like teeth grinning in a bloodied mouth…except that the bones were not a bone color.

  They were silver.

  The woman wormed around on
the grass and propped herself up on her hands. She appeared to want to stand, but her legs had ceased to function.

  “Better make sure you hit them hard, Barkley,” Derek said in a distant voice.

  Barkley threw the cruiser into reverse and made a reckless U-turn, almost running the back wheels up the curb. He wrenched it into drive and put the hammer down, the tires screaming and smoking in response.

  He hit one of the women dead on. The car jolted and flung the woman up over the roof, where she somersaulted and cartwheeled before landing face-first on the road. They clipped a second woman, the cruiser’s headlight smashing into her hip and sending her into a crippled triple axel. The moment she landed she tried to get up, but her right thigh now stuck out at a forty-five-degree angle. She began to drag herself along the road in a semi-paraplegic crawl, silver egg clutched in one hand.

  Barkley had overrun the others and now slowed to turn around for a second pass. The women made no attempt to scatter or even get off the road. He pressed his foot down in a more controlled fashion this time, picking his line.

  He collected three at once, two going under his wheels with a thunderous, bone-jarring bump and the other caroming off the windscreen with such force that regular glass would surely have shattered.

  As Barkley curved around for a fourth pass, he found the road now littered with bent and debilitated female bodies, one or two wobbling to their feet, the others wrenching and writhing on the ground like half-squashed cockroaches. He used the dented hood of the cruiser as a kind of broad gun sight and used his right foot to pull the trigger. They disappeared under the car like weeds bent beneath the battered chassis of a power mower.

  When the thudding and bumping stopped and the road flattened out again, Barkley pulled up. His hands were tight and white around the steering wheel and his breath came in little gasps. Derek looked at different angles in his side mirror and Hank had turned in his seat to survey the street through the back window.

  “I think you did it, man,” Derek said.

  “Yep, looks like you did it,” Hank agreed.

  Barkley unstuck his hands from the wheel one at a time and proceeded to cry quietly and with whatever dignity he could muster.