by Kris Ashton
But as he turned to start his unwanted journey, he spied the gatehouse. Its door was also shut and locked, but had been fashioned from timber. He went to it and rapped his knuckles against it. It did not even appear to be hardwood—perhaps a cost-cutting measure to keep the overall price of the facility down. He put his shoulder into it and the white-painted timber bent with his weight, the door shuddering in its frame.
Back in high school, Bert had been a pretty handy lineman and as he moved back four or five steps he imagined the door had now become Ernie Hanson, the biggest guy on the Vankman High team and the only one in the five surrounding counties who could hope to match Bert for poundage. He felt silly, even childish, playing this game of make-believe…but something about it liberated him as well. Just for that one moment, the real world and all its troubles fell back, supplanted by his memory of a happier and simpler time.
Bert charged forward with the lumbering gait of a rhinoceros and plowed his right shoulder into the door’s belly. It bowed inward—he felt the wood give, almost like rubber—and then there came a splintering snap as the locking mechanism sheared through the frame. Bert stumbled in, almost tripped over his own feet, and fell into the guard’s chair. Not designed for such roughhouse treatment, the chair’s felt-covered cushion caved in and Bert found himself face to face with his knees, his feet sticking up in the air. A laugh caught him unawares and he gave into it, enjoying the way it loosened his insides.
“Oh, you old idiot, Bert,” he said between wheezes, “you’re quite the football hero.”
When the laughs had run their course he disentangled himself from the chair and examined the gatehouse control panel. It consisted of two buttons—OPEN and CLOSE—plus a telephone. Bert slapped the OPEN button and the gate made its unhurried way into a wall recess.
Bert trotted back to the car, just in case the gate happened to be on a timer, but it still had not closed when it disappeared from his rearview mirrors. Bert put on his flashers and pressed his foot down, ramping the car up to seventy miles an hour and using the full width of the access road in taking the bends. He slowed somewhat on his approach to Main Street, but using drift and oversteer, flew onto it at close to fifty miles per hour. With only mild curves between himself and the i70, Bert urged the cruiser up towards the hundred mark.
The Esther farm was one of Bald Eagle’s newest holdings, its acreage cleared around the same time the reactor had been constructed. Bert eased off and pulled over on the flattest part of the i70 shoulder he could find. He turned the nose of his car towards the fence—perhaps the only farm fence in Bald Eagle not sagging or flecked with rust—and pressed down on the accelerator. Clouds of dirt plumed up around the windows and gravel pinged against the rear panels before the tires found purchase and the cruiser leaped forward. The three strands of fence wire wrapped across the front of the grille and stretched out and out but refused to snap. Bert gave it more gas and the fence posts either side of him began to lean over. He put his foot all the way to the floor and the engine screamed in surprise, but it did the trick—the fence posts flew out of the ground as easily as tent pegs in a high wind and all of a sudden Bert found himself belting across the field like a supercharged tractor. He checked his mirrors and saw almost thirty yards of fence lying bent and limp. Well, the council would foot the bill for the damage…and if a ruined fence was the worst thing the Esthers had dealt with in the past forty-eight hours, they could just drop to their knees and thank the Lord.
Bert’s unfamiliar vehicle alarmed a small meeting of cows and they made off at a heavy lope to find safer pastures. He weaved around a few other black and white individuals who were not so easily spooked and then directed the cruiser towards the right-hand side of the farmhouse. Like the fence it had a sheen; a fresh glow of new materials you did not often see in Bald Eagle dwellings, no matter how well they were kept. As he passed it, he wondered what bad things had transpired behind that shiny façade, if Mr Esther had discovered a curious steel ball while traipsing across the field to milk the cows, or if it had caught Mrs Esther’s eye as she hung the washing out. One small tale of dread in Bald Eagle’s expanding anthology of horror.
With the house behind him, Bert kept the cruiser on a straight course, tooting his horn to pry out some of the more stubborn cows. As he bumped and mushed across the fields, he gave thanks that there had been no heavy or consistent rains in the past fortnight. If he got bogged, his plan to economize their time would achieve precisely the opposite.
He came upon the southern fence line a few minutes later. As Barkley had promised, the reactor’s secondary access road ran parallel. Bert performed some more makeshift fence demolition (driving straight over the top of a post this time) and turned out onto the road. To his surprise it was unsealed, nothing but impacted earth, and he cringed at the idea nuclear waste had been carted back and forth along this primitive strip. Another cost-saving, no doubt, and one he planned to query with all vigor—should Bald Eagle still exist as a town on Monday morning.
Unfamiliar with the access road’s kinks and bends, he kept the cruiser at a steady thirty miles an hour. A few minutes later he mounted a crest and the reactor’s twin bottlenecks emerged from the tree-lined horizon. Five minutes after that, he approached the unlocked gate and found Barkley and Brolin standing around with the barrels, like teamsters trying to fit in at a fancy-dress cocktail party.
“You took your time,” Brolin said. “We washed down the barrels and everything.”
“I ran into a bit of trouble.”
“Aliens?”
“No, some jerk locked the front gate and I had to break into the gatehouse to open it.”
Bert and Brolin looked at Barkley, whose pale cheeks had already flushed a ruddy pink. “I thought it would be safest. I didn’t know—”
“It doesn’t matter a damn,” Bert said, waving him off, “let’s just get these barrels loaded onto the trailer.”
Brolin and Bert took a side of a barrel each and lifted it up. Barkley ‘guided’ them over the trailer’s back rim, but mostly got in the way and made nervous noises. “We should really use a forklift for this,” he commented as they squatted for the third barrel.
“To hell with it,” Bert snarled. “If I’m exposed, I’m exposed. I probably won’t get out of this alive anyway.”
“No, I mean safety regulations sent down from head office stipulate that for any load greater than—”
“Barkley, how about you be quiet for a while,” Brolin said, letting the barrel slip through his hands and into the trailer. It landed with a steel crash.
“I’m just saying, is all.”
“Then go and say it in the back of the car,” Bert suggested.
The far-off drone of helicopters provided a soundtrack as Bert and Brolin stacked in the last couple of barrels and then squashed the radiation suits into one corner. Bert fetched the tarpaulin from the trunk and he and Brolin spread it out over the load. The barrels stood quite high in the trailer, but with much stretching and pulling on the tarp’s elastic cords, they were able to fasten it to the trailer’s hooks.
“Right, let’s get this ridiculous show on the road,” Bert said.
They joined Barkley in the cruiser and started back out onto the secondary access road.
“You’re not going to shut the—”
“No!” Bert and Brolin said together.
They drove the next ten minutes without exchanging a word.
3:46 p.m.
“You guys wait here.”
Bert had parked the cruiser in much the same place that Barkley had set up his roadblock and he now alighted with the full attention of the military and ADETI operatives securing the area. If they felt one way or another about his approach, their reflective shades—not so different to the aliens’ eyes—kept such emotions classified.
Bert got within about ten feet of an agent before the agent’s left hand went up in a halting gesture. The right sneaked inside his jacket. “That’s far enough, sir.”
Bert rolled his eyes to the clouded sky, then looked at the agent in the sunglasses, and said, “Sheriff Bert Grayson. I’d like to speak with Agent Richard Warland.”
“Agent Warland is indisposed at this moment.”
“I’m sure if you tell him I’m looking for him he won’t be indisposed anymore.”
“I highly doubt that, sir.”
“Well now, how about you tell Agent Warland I’m here and let him decide.”
“I don’t need to. You see that helicopter over there?” the agent said, pointing to a small black form flitting across the eastern sky. “Agent Warland is in it.”
“Oh. Okay, well he promised to give me anything I needed and what I need are weapons and lots of them.”
The agent’s right hand had not emerged from his jacket. “I don’t believe I can grant your request.”
“This is not a request. I’m trying to save my town from extinction and your boss said he would give me anything I needed to that end. I have a church full of children that need to be kept safe and right now all I have to do it is one revolver and these.” Bert held up his hands. “We’ve already been attacked once.”
“Attacked?” the agent said. His sunglasses hid his eyes but his expression contorted his entire face.
“That’s right, up here at…” Bert sighed, an out-of-patience huff. “Why am I telling you where it was, you don’t care a damn do you? Short version: I know that van is full of weapons and I need as many of them as you can spare.”
The agent stripped off his shades and his hand came out of his pocket grasping a pistol. “How do you know about the contents of that van?”
“For Christ’s sake, were you taking a nap a couple of hours ago? I brought down one of those things after it picked up your buddy and threw him into the side of the van. I was in the van talking to Richard Warland when it happened. Any of this sound familiar you pen-pushing imbecile?”
Had he not been afraid of instigating a gunfight, Bert would have advanced on him, menaced him like a Kodiak bear. Reinforcements, some in army greens, some in suits, crept forward to join their comrade.
“I’m not at liberty to—”
“No, of course you’re not,” Bert said, shaking his head. “All you and Warland are at liberty to do is bomb a hundred innocent Americans out of existence. Most of them kids. You have a nice day now, you repugnant sack of shit.”
Bert stalked off towards his cruiser, expecting the agent to call him back, to make some sort of compromise or concession. But they let him go, all of them, and when he got in his car he saw the agent had put his sunglasses back on, blanking out what traces of compassion Bert had seen in his eyes.
“I guess things didn’t go so well,” Brolin said.
“Richard’s flying around in a helicopter, so we might as well be invisible or bums or something.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t just shoot you on sight. Goddamned fascists. They make cops look like Gandhi.”
“You’re a cop as well now, in case you’d forgotten.”
Brolin laughed. “So I am.”
“What do we do now?” Barkley asked from the back seat.
Bert started the cruiser and let it idle as he mulled this over. “I think I might know where we can get some weapons,” he said. “It’s only a hunch, though. How do you two deputies feel about investigating a hunch?”
“As long as it doesn’t involve looking under rocks or trying to sneak past heavily armed fascists, you can count me in,” Brolin said.
“Fine by me,” Barkley said.
“All right, let’s roll,” Bert said. He swung the cruiser around and soon the ADETI agents and their army flacks were consigned to the distance.
“So are you going to let us in on this grand plan?” Brolin said.
“There’s nothing grand about it, I’m sad to say. There’s a farmer named Jim Coultier with a property on the east side. Lovely fella, although when God handed out brains I think he must have been in the john. Most of the town knows he collects antique weapons—any money he doesn’t spend on food and drink and keeping the farm going, he blows on antique guns and knives and such. But for some time now, I’ve suspected Jim might be collecting other weapons. The kind you need special permits for, although I can’t imagine Jim bothered getting the permits.”
“How do you know that?” Barkley asked.
“People talk, that’s all,” Bert said. “In a bigger city no one says boo to a cop, but in a town like Bald Eagle, I’m just another familiar face that happens to be in uniform. Old ladies like to stop me in the street and gossip. And old men, for that matter. Some retired farmers could talk the leg off a chair.
“I’ve picked it up in bits and pieces—the civil war musket he has over his mantelpiece, his wife complaining that he never buys her anything but can find money for his silly hobby, strange trucks making deliveries to the Coultier place. Whispers add up to suspicions, and if you follow your suspicions they tend to lead to evidence.”
“Cop logic,” Brolin said. “Let’s hope it pays off.”
“Watch it, Sheriff,” Barkley said, his face squashed up against the back window. “There’s one of those goddamned things!”
Leaning with its hands pressed against a tree, as if trying to hide, it stood out like a silver spoon in a wooden bowl. Bert tightened his hands around the steering wheel, ready to swerve and run it down if it showed intent to attack. But it kept stock still until they were about a hundred yards away, and then darted into the forest like a humanoid bullet. When they passed the spot where they had seen it, the alien had vanished.
“Where did it go?” Brolin said.
“I don’t care, as long as it went away,” Bert said.
They had traveled half a mile farther when Brolin said, “There’s another one.”
This alien repeated its comrade’s performance, watching from the hem where forest and road met and then flashing into the underbrush as the cruiser neared.
“Are they afraid of us?” Barkley suggested.
“One of them walked into a circle of heavily armed agents and military personnel,” Bert said. “I doubt we’ve got them shaking in their boots.”
“No, Barkley could have a point,” Brolin said. “Hank and I ran six or seven of them down with this car before. Maybe they’ve passed the word around somehow. Or maybe they’ve never encountered anything like it. You know, on the other planets they’ve…colonized.”
Bert’s skeptical reflex demanded he tell them they were both nuts, but for the first time in his life he had to act against that impulse. Skepticism relied on belief in certain precepts, and in the past few hours several of those precepts had been proven false. The spores’ arrival had rewritten the Book of True and False and as he tried to comprehend it Bert felt his grip on reality slip. How did you apply logic when the prevailing logic no longer applied?
“Who knows,” he said. The words came out louder and more gruffly than he intended.
They spotted two other creatures during their trip—one sat atop Janet Underwood’s shop and another had hunkered down in a roadside culvert, the top of its mirrored head peeking up above the grass. Both made a furtive dash for cover when the cruiser drew near.
“I don’t like it,” Barkley said as they whisked past the last creature’s hiding place. “It’s almost as though…”
“Don’t worry about it, we’re here now,” Bert said, turning into the driveway of the Coultier property. Actually ‘driveway’ was too generous a name; it was really a wide track with treacherous ruts and ditches, some of them six inches deep, carved by years of rainfall and snow runoff and exacerbated by neglect. Considering his cargo, Bert brought the car to a crawl and tried to maneuver a safe passage up to the homestead. Yet even at this lethargic pace, the trailer seemed to have an exuberant life of its own, bouncing up and rearing at the slightest bump beneath its tires.
Somehow they made it to the house without losing a barrel overboard. Brolin freed Barkley from the bac
k seat and they converged at the driver’s side door to gaze up at the homestead. In keeping with most Bald Eagle houses it had a simple architecture that stood at odds with its imposing size. A short flight of timber stairs let onto a wide porch, which in turn gave access to the front door, framed on either side with a modest picture window. An eave topped it all like a wide-brimmed hat and separated it from the second story, which also featured picture windows beneath a sharply sloping tiled roof. The four windows made Bert think of spider’s eyes and this put him in mind of the creatures.
“Let’s not hang about,” Bert said, striding for the stairs.
The front door had been fashioned from solid oak and both its knob and its deadlatch had the gleaming honey color of new brass. One look told Bert that if he tried the sort of shoulder-barging antics he had used on the reactor’s gatehouse, he would spend the next nine hours or so with an arm dangling out of its socket. Instead, he went to the corner of the porch, where a leafy plant stood in a concrete pot to disguise the plainness of the unvarnished timber behind it. Bert lifted the pot, told Barkley and Brolin to stand back, and heaved it through a window. Glass crashed and tinkled and the pot ripped down a curtain as it thudded to the floor. When everything had settled, Bert kicked the remaining glass from the bottom of the window frame with the sturdy sole of his shoe.
“Watch your heads,” he said, hitching his leg over the sill and ducking low to avoid the shards that hung down like vitreous teeth.
He found himself in a commodious living room with corniced ceilings and a small chandelier whose crystal ornaments had not been dusted in an epoch or two. An ancient velvet lounge that probably dated back to the earlier part of the century muscled up against one wall, flexing its stout oaken arms. A burgundy rug the size of a runway spread out across the rows of polished floorboards. On the wall above the lounge chair hung a miserable painting that depicted a crying child set against a dark green background. Its drab olive frame had carved ornamentation not so different to the cornice above it. The room ended in a capacious fireplace, over which a mantle jutted like a brickwork promontory.