Invasion at Bald Eagle

by Kris Ashton

  “He comes out onto the porch telling me what a pleasure it is to see an officer of the law and asking what he can do for me. I told him he could bring Mrs Greeves out right away. He said she was out shopping.

  “‘Mr Greeves,’ I said, ‘Mrs Greeves called me in obvious distress. Now, you either bring her out here right now or I’m going to march right in there and find her myself.’”

  “Well, Greeves looks over his shoulder and then his smile gets even sunnier. He takes out his wallet but keeps his eyes on me the whole time, except to glance at my badge. ‘I’m a man of considerable means, Deputy Grayson,’ he says. ‘I don’t think you need to see Mrs Greeves right now, do you?’

  “Well, the bribe offended me enough, but when I looked down the son of a bitch was trying to slip me a five dollar note.”

  Barkley burst out laughing. “So what did you do?”

  “I grabbed him by the throat and pinned him against the wall. His head was almost touching the porch roof and his feet were dangling a good foot and a half off the ground. His face went purple almost straight away and he dropped his wallet as if he thought that could save him or something. I said, ‘Let me spell this out for you. If I ever have to come back here again, for any reason, I’m not going to bother arresting you. I’ll just deal out some quick justice on your puny little head. You got that?’

  “Greeves nodded and I let him go. He bent over and coughed and spluttered for a minute, but I think most of it was for show. It stopped when I started to walk back to my car, anyway.

  “I heard that he drove Mrs Greeves down to the doctor that afternoon to have a small cut above her eye stitched up. These days she might have left him, I guess, but back then when you got married, you stayed married. But after my chat with Mr Greeves, his wife stopped walking into doors and falling down the porch stairs.”

  “Are they still living in Bald Eagle?” Barkley asked. “You know, if they’re not…”

  “No, they sold up and moved out of town about a year later. Damon Greeves’ idea, I suspect. Wherever they went, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts he started battering her again. It never really ends, unless the husband or wife decides to end it one way or another. I just hope she showed the same good sense and called the police in their new town. We’re here,” Bert said.

  A high chain-link gate, fastened between two sturdy concrete posts, prevented access to the strip mine (Davison’s Mining Concerns Inc. as it was known to the IRS). Or at least it should have. The robust chain and padlock hung from the steel-piping crossbar like a snake that had gone to sleep. The wind had blown one of the gate’s wings wide open. The other wing, pegged to the ground, sported a diamond-shaped sign:

  DANGER!

  EXPLOSIVES

  No Unauthorised Entry Beyond This Point

  Behind this sign was a small gatehouse, not much more than a fibro shack with a door and a couple of windows. During operating hours, a man with an odd name that Bert couldn’t quite recall—Skelton maybe—would wave people on if he recognized them and stop them to ask their business if he didn’t. “You’d better open the gate right up,” Bert said. “We don’t know how fast we’re gonna want to get out of here.”

  “Right.” Barkley checked his mirror and over both shoulders before he got out and trotted up to the gate. He lifted the peg and turned it so it rested on its little ledge, then swung the second wing of the gate open. He dropped the peg into a divot in the hardened earth and came back to the car.

  They rolled on, the access road dipping down for about fifty yards before rising steeply up and winding off to the right. Soon the trees started to thin and the road opened right out to reveal the strip mine’s huge barren expanse. The road then forked; one strand bent left into the big dusty heart of the mine itself, the other curved right and pointed the way to the site management office, a demountable building which overlooked the ringed bowl of mineral commerce below. Bert veered onto the left side of the fork and they followed it for about a hundred yards before they came upon another structure, this one like an overgrown aluminum tool shed. Unlike the front gates, its door was shut and padlocked. Another explosives sign warned any trespassers to KEEP OUT.

  Bert switched off the cruiser. He and Barkley got out and walked up to the door. Bert fanned out his keys and selected a large brass one.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Barkley said, keeping his voice to a whisper for some reason, “why do you have a key to everything in this place?”

  “In case of emergency,” Bert said, popping open the padlock and sliding back the bolt. “Bradley Davison insisted I have a key to everything. I have a dozen more at the station, but I keep this one and the one for the front gate on my keyring.”

  “That might be a good idea for the reactor,” Barkley said. A smile, somewhere between wistful and despairing, crossed his lips. “If it’s still standing after everything has run its course.”

  Bert opened his mouth to say, Even Richard wouldn’t be that crazy, but uncertainty made him close it again. He slid back the door and fumbled around for the light switch. He bumped his bad arm and hissed through gritted teeth.

  “Are you all right, Sheriff?” Barkley said.

  “Fine, fine,” Bert said. His fingers lit upon the switch and he flicked it down. Two bare globes burst into life, their metal hoods spraying light through the storage shed. Bert shielded his eyes until they had adjusted. A thin layer of dust, stroked into lines with regular sweeping, covered the concrete floor. Boxes were stacked up like bricks against the back wall, each one with a warning stenciled on it in red paint. Hung on each side wall was an enormous reel, holding hundreds of yards of wire. Sundry objects such as blasting caps, insulation tape and a pair of mud-caked gloves littered the floor.

  Barkley looked around as though he were seeing an eighth wonder of the world. “Jeez Louise, is this all dynamite?”

  “Sure is,” Bert said. “Enough dynamite to do some real damage. Come on, let’s load it into the trunk.”

  Barkley looked at Bert as if he had lost his mind. “We’re going to drive around with a trunk full of dynamite.”

  “Don’t fret, Barkley,” Bert said. He took a stick of dynamite from one of the boxes and tossed it around like a juggling club. “It’s not nitro-glycerine. Without a detonator, it might as well be putty.”

  As Barkley squatted to pick up a box of dynamite, Bert went outside to open the trunk. Night-blackened clouds exposed the fullish moon for a moment and it cast bleak light across the strip mine’s scarred, sterile rings. That fleeting image seared itself on Bert’s mind and seemed to sum up everything that had happened to him and his town. A brief, tenebrous sorrow quickly gave way to towering rage. He clenched his teeth so hard he almost expected to hear a snap, taste blood and enamel. His lips barely moved as he spoke. “You’re not going to win,” he said. “I’ll save the rest of my people or die trying.”

  “Did you say something, Sheriff?” Barkley said, dropping a box into the open boot.

  “Hmm? Oh, nothing. I was just talking to myself. Let’s finish loading up and get the hell out of here.”

  9:22 p.m.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Barkley said.

  “Bradley Davison gave me a demonstration when he took over the mine,” Bert said.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “That would have been 1961, I guess.”

  “Oh, great.”

  Brolin held up the dynamite stick like a microphone. He might have been interviewing Barkley, who had the small metal rod of a blasting cap tweezered between each forefinger and thumb.

  “Just push the rods into the center of the stick,” Bert said.

  Barkley licked his lips and steadied his hands. He pressed one rod and then the other into the dynamite. When they were not blown into a trillion microscopic atoms, he exhaled a shaky breath and took a theatrical step back.

  “Easy peasy,” Brolin said with an ironic arch of his eyebrows.

  “Okay,” Bert said, “roll out t
wo measures of wire. About ten feet each.”

  Barkley looked around. “We don’t have anything to measure with.”

  “Barkley, just estimate,” Bert said.

  “Oh. I thought they might have to be exact.”

  “It’s dynamite. Nothing about dynamite is exact except how much you use.”

  Using their arms to judge length, they unwound two lengths from a smaller coil of wire Bert had picked up in the strip mine’s storage shed. Despite Bert’s earlier order to stand back, many of the Bald Eagle children crept forward to peek, unable to resist the lure of dangerous adult doings. Brolin snipped the wire off and Bert explained how each strand should be connected to the charge box.

  Bert propped his hand on his hip. “Okay, we don’t have much time left. I only want to explain this once, so listen carefully…”

  10:15 p.m.

  Richard sipped at a cup of instant coffee and listened to the quacking electronic voice in his headphones. The coffee tasted like diesel, but it was hot and would do its job.

  “That’s right, sir,” he said. “We had trouble securing the perimeter but the area will be prepared for eradication within the hour.”

  Richard listened to another crackling admonition and then rolled his eyes. “Understood, sir. Airstrike to commence at 2300 hours. Over and out.”

  He pulled off his headphones and tossed them onto the desk. He finished his coffee in a beer-like gulp and then rubbed his face. “Sorry old friend,” he said.

  “What was that?” said an agent.

  “Nothing,” Richard said. “I’m going out to get some air. I’m sick of the sight of this trailer.”

  He got up and opened the door, welcoming the cool summer air as it blew over his skin. He tromped down the two steel steps and breathed in, his spine crackling and popping as he stretched. Answering pops came from far away—not from another stiff back, but from a gun.

  It was a hell of a thing. Richard had always known his job would require sacrifice; he had never held any illusions to the contrary. Yet nothing could have prepared him for this.

  He grabbed the pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, took one out and lit it. After a single puff he tossed it on the road and ground its fresh ember beneath his heel. A silly way to stop smoking, but it seemed to work. He got through a pack a week, but smoked maybe one cigarette in total.

  “Hell of a thing,” he said to the dead cigarette.

  When he looked up again he saw the lamp eyes of an approaching car. The jumpy army guys leveled their guns.

  “It’s okay, fellas,” Richard said. “I know this one. Let him pass.”

  “There’s a bus too, sir,” one said. “About a hundred yards off.”

  “The bus doesn’t get through,” Richard ordered briskly. “Patrol car only.”

  The corporals (the lowest rank allowed to operate on ADETI business) lowered their arms and stood back warily. Bert’s cruiser rolled forward at no more than two or three miles an hour, bitumen and road grime crackling under its tires. Richard walked up to meet it. He looked in the window and saw Bert with his arm in a makeshift sling, which appeared to be fashioned from someone’s shirt. Richard did not need to see this to know his friend had been through nine shades of hell in the past ten or eleven hours. Each awful experience was chipped into his face—and Richard knew well enough what sort of experiences they would have been.

  “I was hoping you’d see the futility of the situation, Bert,” he said. “You’re a stubborn old goat, just like I am, but at least you’ve come to your senses. We’ll have to keep you locked up in quarantine for a few days just to be on the safe side, but—”

  “No, Richard,” Bert said. He picked something up off the passenger’s seat and put it in his lap. In the chancy light, Richard could not tell what it was, but he did see two long wires running from it into the back of the car. “My problem has just become your problem.”

  “Bert? What…what do you—”

  “This detonator is wired up to a trunkful of dynamite. Along with a half a tank of gas, I figure that’s enough explosive to vaporize you, your men and pretty much anything else within a three hundred yard radius.”

  Richard swallowed. Instinct would have him draw his gun, but he dared not do it. “You can’t be serious. You’re willing to risk the end of human civilization as we know it, for what? A couple of dozen kids? A hippie and a faggot that you’d just as soon spit at as talk to? This is insane Bert.”

  Bert’s eyes flashed like gemstones in torchlight. Richard had seen that glint a time or two when they were on the beat together in Denver, usually when some delinquent started to give him cheek. “No, I’ll tell you what’s insane, Richard. Wiping out innocent people as though you were doing nothing more than sweeping leaves into a gutter. Mass homicide just so you can tick every box on one of your goddamned forms. Cut right down to the bone, you’re nothing but a petty bureaucrat.”

  “You still don’t understand the magnitude of this thing, do you?” Richard said. He bent down to the cruiser’s window so he and Bert were eye to eye. “It only takes one. If just one of those things gets through our defenses they’ll spread across the country like wildfire. Think, man, for God’s sake. I know you’re smarter than this.”

  Bert stared through the windscreen and ran his tongue over his teeth. Then he looked back. “You say it’s important that no one is allowed out. Well, I guess we’re going to find out how important. Here’s the deal: you either take my word that none of this group is infected and let us through, or I press this button and put a helluva big hole in your perimeter. I don’t think it would take those things long to cotton on that the front door was open. So, what’s more important to you, Richard? Decide now.”

  Richard clenched his fists hard enough to make his forearms ache and he could feel a vein pulsing in his forehead. “I’m going to go down for this—you know that, don’t you? My ass is grass. A fuck-up this big could even mean jail time.”

  Bert gave him the bitterest grin imaginable. “Right now, Agent Warland, I don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to you.”

  Richard thought again about pulling his gun and just blowing the insubordinate asshole’s head off, but not even Billy The Kid could beat Bert to this draw. He closed his eyes, trying to will away an oppressive sense of dread and impotence. Then took a step back and gave a furious little wave of his hand. “Go on, then.”

  Bert switched his flashers on and a second later the bus lurched forward, roaring like a rusty yellow dinosaur. As it passed by, a dozen young faces regarded Richard from the dark windows and he could not help but wonder which, if any, concealed an alien intelligence, the single spore that could destroy the world and would destroy his career.

  “You won’t get far, Bert,” Richard said, raising earnest eyebrows. “The helicopters will track you all to a deserted part of the highway and wipe you out there.”

  Bert grinned again, but this time it seemed genuine—cheesy, even.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

  10:29 p.m.

  Derek slowed only a little as they came to the i70, treating the intersection’s stop sign more like a yield. With only sparse late-night traffic, it didn’t matter—he slipped the bus into a long gap and they were away.

  Marcus stood just behind the driver’s seat, gripping a handrail. Unlike Derek, however, he stared out the back window, his eyes wide. “It worked,” he said, his voice just a little faint. “Holy crap, it worked.”

  10:32 p.m.

  For the past few minutes the cruiser’s idling engine had made the only conversation. Barkley, Brolin and their yellow school bus of refugees were long out of sight.

  “Well, it’s done now,” said Richard. He sighed and crossed his arms. “The air strike is coming in at 2300 hours. If you don’t want us both to be in the center of a chemical furnace, I think you’d better put that detonator down, Bert.”

  “I know I’ve never been quite as sharp as you in the brains department, Richard, b
ut do you honestly think I’m that naive?”

  “I’m not lying, Bert. The President himself has ordered the eradication for 2300 hours. Unless a freak hurricane blows the jets off course, Bald Eagle will be a smoking hole in the ground in less than half an hour.”

  “I have no doubt about that. But I do doubt you’re just going to assume all those creatures are dead. I do doubt you’re going to let a ten-mile-wide fire burn unchecked near a nuclear reactor and state forest. And I also doubt you’re going to pull out without picking up every last one of those eggs or spores or whatever you want to call them. So if it’s all the same to you, Richard, I think I’ll wait around and watch the fireworks with you.”

  Richard stared at him, his eyes as hard as chunks of blue-metal. Then he sighed again and pressed a small button on the side of his watch to illuminate its face. “You are one annoying son of a bitch, Bert Grayson. I have to go and make some arrangements before the strike. If you want to drive about two miles that way,” he said, pointing back along Main Street, “and then activate that detonator of yours, it would really help me out.”

  “No, I thought of that. It seemed…what was your word? Irrelevant.”

  Richard shook his head and walked away to his trailer. Bert heard the clank-clank of his shoes on the metal stairs, and then the slam of the trailer door. A minute or two later a squad of heavy-booted troops ran past his car on their way to somewhere else. Not one of them glanced in his direction, their eyes directed forward in perfect, unquestioning military precision. When the chain of men had passed, Bert let his head fall back against the headrest and he looked out at the stars—or those he could see through the shifting, black-cotton clouds. His broken arm conducted heartbeat pulses of pain and his belly began to grumble and tremble with hunger.