Invasion at Bald Eagle

by Kris Ashton

  Brolin loosened his safety belt and shifted around in his seat. The bare patch of skin between his hairline and his eyebrows had faded to a death-white. “Pardon my French,” he said, “but that was seriously fucked up.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” Bert said.

  “Do you think…do you think Sharna has…”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  Not only did Bert not want to think about it, he was determined not to think about it. Instead he focused on the road, weaving around the odd spore as if it were a traffic cone. If the tires flicked one up…well, the cruiser had bulletproof glass but he could see no sense in taking a risk.

  They passed no one (and nothing) else before pulling into Fletch Carter’s gas station. Bert left the engine running and tooted his horn three times. They looked in all directions to see if their presence had attracted attention, but nobody emerged from the gas station or the forest area behind it. Inside Fletch’s workshop a car sat high on a hoist waiting to be serviced. If not for that, one could have assumed the place abandoned or condemned.

  “Let’s make this quick,” Bert said.

  They all got out and Bert opened the trunk. Tucked into one of the side-wells was a pair of bolt-cutters. These were not standard police issue, but no experienced rural officer traveled without them.

  The trailers were kept in an open passage to the left of the mechanical workshop and secured to a steel rail with heavy-duty chains. As they walked over to them, Bert glanced up at the gray western sky and saw two helicopters buzzing around, no bigger than gnats. He wondered if Richard sat in one of them, perhaps surveying the county lines with a view to maximizing the air strike’s effectiveness.

  “Hold the chain taut for me,” Bert said. Barkley pulled it out straight and Bert cut through a link with a single snip. Then Brolin and Barkley took a corner of the trailer each and began to wheel it back towards the cruiser. Bert followed nearby, ready to assist if the trailer got out of control. He looked once more to the sky. The helicopters had spread out and now hovered at points north and south.

  As Barkley and Brolin guided the trailer attachment around to the cruiser’s towbar, Bert’s ears pricked up at what sounded like a section of chain being dropped onto the concrete. His cop’s instinct tightened his tendons to wire and a gush of adrenaline doubled his heart rate in a second. He swung around and drew his gun in a single seamless movement, capping off a shot as if in a slow-motion nightmare.

  The bullet hit the airborne alien’s shoulder with a metallic thump, spinning it like a lathe. Bert had time to hear Brolin say, “Jesus!” before he squeezed off a second round. This one caught the alien flush in the chest and dug a deep foil crater. The alien emitted a brain-screwing cry and scrabbled backward, its claws leaving fresh white scratches on the oil-stained concrete.

  “What the hell is that noise?” Barkley said, sounding like he wanted to cry.

  “Fire on it!” Bert roared, discharging his gun again. This bullet hit the ground in front of the alien, spewing concrete shards into its face. The alien uttered a discordant mewl of rage and tried to prop itself onto its feet.

  Stereo gun blasts assaulted Bert’s ears. By some miracle (perhaps Father Bronson had been praying) his two untrained deputies hit the target and the alien’s chest blew out in an explosion of cottage cheese guts. Its legs twitched once, twice, and then fell still.

  For a moment the only sound was the soughing of wind. Then Barkley’s most recent meal came up in a glut, splashing all over the concrete. Brolin retched as well but managed to hold his gorge. “What the fuck is that stench? Is that…what they smell like inside?”

  Bert nodded. “And we’re downwind.”

  “That’s horrible,” Barkley said, as if only exclamation could expel the foulness from his body. “Oh, that’s the most disgusting thing.”

  “Breathe through your mouth,” Bert said. “Come on, let’s get this trailer hooked up before more of them show up.”

  Barkley thought about tucking his gun into his pants, then noted the fine plume of smoke still emerging from its muzzle and thought better of it. He and Brolin put their weapons on the ground and took hold of the trailer again. They waggled it forward until the coupling dropped onto the tow-ball and then Bert screwed it down, tightening it with a wrench (he also carried a toolbox in the trunk of his cruiser). As he worked, each leaf that pattered to the ground and each clink of wrench on nut suggested an alien footstep. Brolin and Barkley stood as bookend watchmen and Bert could not quite believe he now entrusted his life to a disheveled hippie and a queer bureaucrat.

  With the trailer secured, plus a manual pressure pump and a tarpaulin in the trunk, Barkley and Brolin collected their guns and they all piled back into the cruiser. Bert turned right onto Main Street and the trailer followed, rattling and jouncing behind them.

  “How many bullets do you guys have left?” Bert asked.

  “We’ve only fired one shot each,” Brolin said.

  Bert took his gun from its holster and handed it to Brolin. “I think I’m down to one or two. There’s a box of bullets in the glove compartment. Fill all our chambers up. With what it takes to kill those things, one bullet might make all the difference.”

  Brolin found the bullets and slotted them into the empty chambers of Bert’s gun. He replenished his own as well and then slotted a bullet through the wire cage so Barkley could restock his.

  “Is that a body?” Bert said.

  They were nearing the reactor turnoff and anything not road black or forest green caught the eye like a warning sign. Bert did not stop—he had learned his lesson—but he cut ten miles an hour off their speed.

  “It’s a skin,” Brolin said.

  It took Bert a second to register what Brolin had said—he had never heard those words in that context. Skins came from sheep or bears or seals…but if this one were made into a rug, it would be a human-skin rug. It sat in the middle of the road in a wrinkled pile, slick with blood and already attracting a whirlwind of flies.

  “It looks…freshly shed,” Barkley commented.

  “I don’t think we should stick around to find out who shed it,” Bert said, speeding up again.

  “There must be thousands of those skins all through the forest,” Brolin said.

  “Well, I’m just glad they didn’t leave them in town,” Bert said. “The last thing we need is rotting skin adding disease to our list of problems.”

  “Who’s around to get sick?” Brolin asked.

  They left that question rhetorical.

  Bert indicated on their approach to the plant’s access road (it could be doomsday and he would still use his indicators out of good habit, he thought) and took it at a daring drift, the tires whickering across the bitumen and the trailer clanging and fishtailing a little. A minute later they pulled up outside the reactor’s front gate.

  “You gonna let us in?” Bert said to Barkley, whom he could see had a queer (or rather an odd) smile on his face.

  “If no one has any protests.”

  “Yeah, funny, man, real funny,” Brolin said. “Get your ass out there and let us in.”

  Barkley chuckled as he got out and walked up to the gate. He spent a while picking through his jumble of keys, not often needing to use this one, Bert supposed. He turned it in the lock and walked the gate across just far enough to allow the cruiser and its trailer to creep through. After Bert had driven into the courtyard area, Barkley rolled the gate shut behind them, locking it again. Bert could not decide if that was a good or bad idea.

  “Okay, follow me,” Barkley said, hurrying past them.

  They moved away from the office, which was as much of the reactor as Bert had ever seen, and along an expansive concrete strip. To their left was a gigantic cyclone fence topped with a coil of shiny razor wire. Inside the fence, an endless procession of parking spots was marked out with glossy yellow paint. To their right was a single-story corridor of offices, each segment devoted to different divis
ions (which were marked in large black letters across a main door). This stretched for about two-hundred yards before burying itself into the square block beneath the two towers of the reactor proper. Barkley searched through his keys again and unlocked another set of glass doors, which opened onto a secondary reception area (for receipt and dispatch of goods, Bert assumed). Barkley led them through here and out into a corridor than ran off in either direction. He turned left and they walked for some time until they came to a place that reminded Bert of his high school PE change rooms—albeit thirty-five years more modern. Rows of yellow radiation suits hung from hooks on the left-hand wall. Bert almost expected to see equivalent rows of showers and lockers somewhere, but the only other similarity to a PE change room was a wooden bench bolted to the right-hand wall. Farther along, the room ended in a robust steel door with a hazard sign printed in blazing primary colors. WARNING! loomed over all in tall black letters and beneath this were the familiar fan blades that designated radioactivity. REACTOR CORE the sign continued. STRICTLY NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS FULL RADIATION ATTIRE MUST BE WORN BEYOND THIS POINT. Beneath this, someone (perhaps Barkley himself) had affixed a small Bakelite plaque that adjured all workers to observe Safety First!

  “Time to frock up,” Barkley said, taking a radiation suit off its hook.

  “This may come as a surprise to you, Barkley, but I have never worn a radiation suit before,” Brolin said.

  “It’s simple—not much different to putting on a pair of overalls.”

  “I don’t think he’s ever had cause to put on a pair of overalls, either,” Bert said. “They’re usually used for working.”

  “Oh, man—you’re even funnier than Barkley,” Brolin said. “Maybe I’ll light my nose hair on fire for the ultimate yucks.”

  Bert laughed out loud and handed Brolin a radiation suit. They spent the next couple of minutes squashing their shoes into the yellow boots, wriggling themselves into the overalls (Bert’s trousers kept riding up and bunching around his knees) and getting their facemasks to sit right. Barkley had his gear on in the time it took Bert to put on his boots, and set about helping Brolin get his arms into the armholes.

  When they were suited up Barkley made a final check that everything was properly fitted and that they could breathe comfortably through the filter masks. Bert and Brolin both gave him the thumbs up.

  “Okay, we’re going to do this as quickly and efficiently as possible,” Barkley said. No doubt he enunciated clearly, but between his mask and the hood over Bert’s ears, he might have been speaking from a ventilation shaft in the ceiling. “The trick with radiation is to limit your exposure to it.”

  “I thought these suits were supposed to protect us,” Brolin said.

  “They will—but you don’t stick your hand in a hive of bees just because they’ve been smoked, do you? Now follow me closely and do what I say when I say and we’ll be in and out of here in ten minutes.”

  He led them up to the door with its burden of warning signs and opened it with a small flourish. They emerged onto a three-way steel-grated landing with a high rail. They headed right, down a short flight of stairs and onto a second level. Their feet rang on the sturdy grating until they reached a door marked STORAGE AREA. Barkley pushed his way in.

  The room, illuminated almost to daylight with rows of powerful fluorescent lights, had the floorspace of a small factory—most of it taken up with shelving and barrels and boxes marked with names and symbols Bert had never encountered. He had an idea the STORAGE AREA accumulated waste in its own way—just not the radioactive kind. Barkley guided them left, where rows and rows of barrels were lined up against the wall like a regiment of troops awaiting orders to march. He lifted one out of the line and turned to Bert and Brolin.

  “Take one of these and follow me,” he said.

  Bert hugged one of the barrels and lifted with his legs, expecting a considerable load, but the barrel was made of some sort of light plastic and he nearly fell over backward with his own momentum. As he followed Barkley out of the storage room, he squeezed the barrel tighter, somewhat alarmed to feel it bend to the will of his arms. No doubt these barrels were the safest vessels for carrying radioactive waste, but the conservative old man in Bert, the one who had lived in a pre-plastic world, observed the barrel with squinty-eyed disapproval.

  They followed the corridor for another twenty yards and then picked their way down another small flight of stairs, which this time ended in a concrete landing. To their left, on the other side of the rail, was what could perhaps have passed for an Olympic diving pool—if not for the pipes and grid plates and other bits of machinery climbing up one side. The flawless blue water was gorgeous in its own sterile way and—hot and beginning to sweat inside his suit—Bert felt a lunatic urge to strip off and go swimming.

  They put the barrels down and returned to the storage room to get another barrel apiece. With the six lined up along the rail, they made a final trip upstairs and returned rolling rubber-wheeled trolleys, a length of rope and a long pole that Barkley had turned up from amongst the storage room’s clutter.

  Barkley peeled the lid off a barrel and fastened the rope around its belly like a cheap belt before hefting it onto the rail. “You guys lower this down into the water,” he said.

  Bert and Brolin let the rope slide through their hands until the barrel touched down, ripples ruining the water’s glassy perfection. The barrel preferred to float, so Barkley prodded it with his pole until it started to drink and then sink. When the last of the air had bubbled out of it, Bert and Brolin hauled the barrel back up. It had an unbelievable weight—Bert almost expected to see a hogtied elephant appear at the edge of the rail. When it came into arm’s reach, Barkley braced his foot on the lower bar of the rail and guided the barrel over the top, ensuring it remained upright. The three of them lifted it off the rail and squatted until it touched down on the concrete floor. Barkley sealed up the lid on the barrel and they started the process again.

  By the sixth barrel Bert’s eyes stung with sweat and his lower back felt strained and sprung. Barkley’s ten-minute estimate proved to be a fairy story—they had been at it almost half an hour by the time he and Brolin began to wrench the rope up for the final time. One side of Brolin’s plastic mask had fogged up, and judging by his one visible eye, he was pushing through his own physical misery.

  Brolin shot a hateful look at the trolleys with their three wheels. “Don’t tell me we have to drag these fucking things up the steps,” he said.

  “No, no,” Barkley replied, some of the defensive reediness returning to his voice. “There’s a service elevator.”

  “So why didn’t we bring the barrels down in the service elevator?”

  “Because it’s located at the other side of the core and we would have had to carry them much further.”

  “Let’s stop talking and whining and just get on with it,” Bert said.

  Lining the trolleys up, they walked a barrel onto the lift-plate of each one and tilted them back. Even with the trolley doing most of the work, Bert could still sense his barrel’s dense weight. They followed the ‘swimming pool’ (this, Barkley explained later, was in fact the technical term for it) around a corner into a second passage. The service elevator awaited them midway along. Barkley slapped an industrial-sized yellow button and the doors shambled apart, in no hurry to accommodate his demand. Barkley pressed another button inside the lift, this one marked ‘G’. The doors heaved shut again and the lift gave a lurching bounce before commencing its laborious ascent.

  To Bert’s surprise, when the doors opened again he saw daylight. They were at the top of a gentle ramp in what resembled a small aircraft hangar. Off to their right, a half-open roller door let in the afternoon’s dismal radiance. “Where the hell are we?” Bert said.

  “This is the waste transport dockyard,” Barkley said. “On the other side of that door is a secondary access road. It bypasses Bald Eagle altogether and emerges as a small turnoff on the i70.”


  “So you could hide your toxic waste from the townspeople,” Brolin said.

  “So the sight of the trucks wouldn’t alarm them,” Barkley said.

  “Why didn’t we take the cruiser up the secondary road, then?”

  “Because it’s almost a half-hour trip from the town center to this dock. It’s like a massive triangle of roads.”

  “So instead we’re going to spend the next half an hour carting this stuff to the other end of the facility? To hell with that. I’m gonna go and get the car.”

  “You have to wash off, first!”

  “What does that involve?”

  “It’s just like taking a shower with your suit on.”

  Barkley was right, although it was a very thorough and fussy shower. When it was completed, Bert made his way back through the facility in large strides and nearly broke into a jog once he got outside again. They seemed to have wasted a lot of time for a meager result.

  Sliding into the driver’s seat made him feel better, restored that sense—or at least a reassuring illusion—of control. He wheeled the car around and took off at twenty miles an hour. Five seconds later he screeched to a stop, confronted by the forged steel of the front gates.

  The locked front gates.

  “Oh, Barkley, you stupid asshole!” Bert said, dashing his hand against the steering wheel. “Of all the stupid, weak-kneed…”

  But if locking the gate made Barkley a prize idiot, Bert had to place himself in the same pen, didn’t he? He had seen Barkley lock the gate and shrugged it away instead of stopping to think properly.

  “God damn it,” Bert said, getting out and walking up to the gate. He knew it was locked, he had seen Barkley lock it, but he tried opening it anyway. It didn’t budge, not so much as a fraction of an inch. Faced with its unrelenting sturdiness, Bert looked up at the sky, as if he expected bombs to start raining down then and there.

  There was nothing else for it. He would have to walk all the way back down, go through all the radiation-related rigmarole and then bring the gate keys back. Another twenty minutes wasted. If he hurried.