The Children of Roswell (Book One) The Swift Chronicle

by Alan James

  Three, four, then five soldiers charged through the door, rifles firing even before they were aimed at Kelly. A round struck him in the upper left pectoral muscle, just above the larder bag still clutched in his tightly closed hand. Another ricocheted off his right thigh. His senses were being overloaded. He held his Brothers in one hand and untold power in the other. As the next round struck him in his belly, just grazing the larder bag … he screamed.

  This was not a scream like the others. It was a roar; a deep, powerful, guttural roar. It came from the pit of all his fears and hatred. It held within it the love he felt for his Brothers, the fear for their safety, and with it came POWER.

  This time the ball of plasma formed around his entire body. The rifle bullets were now being deflected before reaching him. He stepped forward quickly with his right foot, aiming with the palm of his now outstretched right hand. This time the energy left him in a solid wave. It filled the room in front of him from floor to ceiling, and it was on the soldiers in an instant. Their bodies exploded from within, but before the mass of their insides could be scattered around the room, the heat turned them to a thin, black ash that floated slowly to the floor.

  Kelly was no longer Kelly. He was a now an uncontrollable mixture of alien mind, intelligent material, and unleashed human emotion.

  “I will protect you, my Brothers,” he screamed at the top of his lungs, “by all that is in me, I swear, I will protect you.”

  With lightning speed he made for the door, and as he appeared to the soldiers outside, they, like the others, made the same deadly mistake; they paused; gaping in amazement.

  With rifles pointed at him from all directions, and a two inch canon straight ahead of him, he again gathered the power within him. An early rifle shot from his left tore through the larder bag, sending shards of bottle glass, and his now precious bottle caps, flying. He watched the bottle caps, as if in slow motion, each one holding the essence of one of his Brothers. And again he screamed; “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

  As the energy built from within, the heat emanating from the light ball around him drove the soldiers from their positions. The barrel of the two inch gun deformed and sagged so that when the gunner pulled the lanyard to fire, the barrel and the breech split at the same time, the resulting explosion killed the gunner, the loaders, and a couple riflemen hiding behind them.

  Kelly suddenly bent in the middle, doubling to his knees, then, with another deafening roar, standing quickly, stretching both arms wide, he loosed the most tremendous ball of plasma yet. It drove the now melting equipment; the jeeps, trucks, the remains of the gun, backwards as if they were cardboard toys in a windstorm. Small, black dust forms, holding the shape of humans for only an instant, drifted slowly to the ground to mingle with the desert sand.

  In the distance, toward the hangars, he could see two, maybe three jeeps, nearly hidden by their own dust trails; making for what they thought was the safety of the hangars.

  Kelly, now breathing heavily, as if starved for oxygen, turned slowly to assess his surroundings. There was no movement; at least none that he could see. He held the torn larder bag in front of him, its precious cargo … gone.

  “Oh,” he screamed, and then, falling to one knee, he screamed again, “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” He grabbed his head with both hands.

  He did not scream for his Brothers. He screamed from pain. His head was filled with it, and it was worse than he had felt inside the bunker. He was not shot. He felt to make sure. He was not shot.

  “Ohhhhhh,” he winced again, the pain striking even harder.

  The top of his head … it came from the top of his head; bearing down on him, as if to crack his skull. And then … he could hear it. It was the sound of rattling, buzzing, rumbling, all rolled into one. It shook the ground around him. He could see what loose pieces of dirt and sand there was around him, dance to its vibration. And then … he knew what it was. He had heard the sound before. Looking up, in the distance to the northeast, he could see the tiny black spot. Magnifying his vision, the blackness covering the rose color of his home world, now, suddenly, took shape. It was the B-thirty-six, its mighty Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines, each producing thirty-eight-hundred horsepower and driving massive nineteen foot propellers, produced such a loud and powerful resonance that they could shake dishes off a kitchen shelf from fifty thousand feet. Relentlessly, it came forward. And there, in the foreground, ahead of it, stood his Brothers. They seemed somehow broken, weeping, helpless. They reached for him, cowering from the monster behind them. As they fell to the ground, the demon that was the B-thirty-six moved over them, devouring them.

  He screamed his mournful plea again, “Nooooooooooo,” and then again, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

  And then, as if his whole life had been lived to save himself for this one single moment in time, he spread his legs for balance, reached both hands to the sky in the direction of the darkness and issued forth a single ball of pure plasma. It lingered, dancing on his fingertips until, with his own mighty roar, it leapt upwards making the air before it incandesce, like a meteor sent back to the heavens from whence it came.

  He watched as it slowly became a pinpoint of light, as bright as the sun, moving ever upward. Surely the men in the giant bomber could now see it too. They, however, could but look in wonder as it closed on them, becoming bigger … brighter … more ominous. After the nearly ten mile climb to the beast, much of its energy was spent, but it still hit the huge bomber with a force large enough to do great damage. Kelly watched through his chrome eyes as the left wing of the huge plane gave way just inside the outboard twin jet-pod. The wingtip folded upwards, then back, finally coming loose from the spar. Its momentum carried it into the rear of the fuselage where it buried itself in front of the massive vertical stabilizer. It seemed, for a moment, that the monstrous plane would carry on like that; compensating for the missing thrust and extra drag. But then, the fuselage buckled at the point where the wayward wingtip was protruding from it. In one mighty flutter, the entire tail section separated and the forward fuselage and wing dived forward and down, turning itself on its back. And now, with more thrust on the starboard wing, the bomber went into a deadly inverted flat spin.

  Kelly could see the tiny specks as they left the plane one by one, the crew abandoning their lost ship.

  And now he tried to relax, his whole body feeling like a fire was burning from within. He fell to his knees, then leaned back onto his heels, his head falling forward to rest his chin on his chest. But, with his first deep breath, he knew he was not done. The huge monster, now dead, was still falling from above, and in its belly laid the real cause of the darkness he had seen earlier. The bomb would have been armed by the time the plane came apart, so, there was no stopping it now. With his head still resting on his chest he calculated. From fifty thousand feet he would have less than three minutes to get back inside, climb into his new disc and fly at least a distance of ten to twelve miles, depending on the size of the bomb.

  Pushing himself up, he stood slowly, aching he thought, like an old man. Holding his lower back with one hand, he turned to walk to the blast door, noticing that its progress had stopped half way open. One of his plasma releases had blown the compressor to oblivion. Looking down as he continued walking, he saw one of the bottle caps nearly covered with granite dust.

  ‘It must have been inside the radius of the plasma release that did so much damage out here.’ he thought as he went to one knee to pick it up. “My God, it’s warm … it still glows,” he said, rolling his fingers closed over it, then, “Three more, three more … I’ve got to find the other three.”

  And then he remembered the blackness above him … falling; relentless. He wouldn’t have time to find them all, get to his disc, and make the safe distance in time. He was a few short feet from the control panel at the guard shack. Stepping inside he pushed the red bottom and listened for the huge motor below.
He breathed a quick sigh of relief as the door began to close. The general’s engineers hadn’t damaged the interior mechanisms.

  He was now back outside, on hands and knees, sifting through the dirt and sand with his fingers. There … there was another, and then another. He had three.

  Above he could hear the giant bomber, in its death-throws, spinning slowly around and around itself, its huge motors still shaking the ground. The bomb would be detonated by an altimeter set to at least a thousand feet above the local ground level. As he looked up he realized the blast door would not be fully closed before the blinding light of the lithium-deuteride core put an end to everything within a seven mile radius. As the giant door inched its way forward, Kelly caught a glint in the track just ahead of the big rollers. There it was: number four. As he moved to grab for it, the vibrations from the door and the bomber shook the bottle cap enough that it slid to the center of the track. As the roller moved over it, Kelly lost his chance to get his fingers under the massive door fast enough.

  “No,” was his meek cry of resignation. The cap was lost. He could never reverse the door, remove the cap, and get the door closed in time. In fact he was already certain it wouldn’t be fully closed as it was.

  He stepped inside the door, the sound of the bomber now nearly overwhelming. He ran to the back of the second room, sitting against the back wall behind the new disc, the big half melted rubber-tired loaders all rattling from the vibrations.

  And then … there was utter silence.

  A BILLIONTH OF A SECOND

  In the first billionth of a second, it was as if the Big Bang had taken place in the bomb-bay of the huge aircraft.

  In that infinitesimal amount of time, the entire explosion was over, and all that followed was merely a manifestation of that little universe expanding at near light speed. The air around it, in all directions, was turned to plasma. A great glowing, boiling, writhing, orange ball, in seconds almost five miles across, its bottom now touching the ground; continued to expand, growing, alive with heat and death. In another few seconds, as the heat began to dissipate, the plasma ball, almost as quickly as it had formed, disappeared, showing at its center, a great rising column of desert sand, now turned to chunks of molten glass. Rising with it were the remains of anything that had been unlucky enough to be within a half mile of the epicenter; rocks, plant and animal life, stones … humanity. At the top of the column sat the mushroom cloud, rolling, climbing ever higher. Huge circular cloud formations took shape around it as the pressure change wrung moisture from the surrounding atmosphere. And then the mushroom cloud separated from the column and continued its climb upward as if some mythical giant had lain on his back on the desert floor, snapped his jaw, and sent the leviathan’s own smoke ring hurtling into the heavens.

  REBORN

  As Kelly sat with his back against the wall, the sudden silence startled him. He did not realize that at the center of such a conflagration of fire and brimstone, there could be no sound. The bomb had removed all that could make sound. There was now nothing left outside but the Sun’s own heat, violence, radiation, a deadly maelstrom for an instant, frozen in time. The air molecules, that only a second before, would have transmitted the vibrations that Kelly might have recognized as sound, were now gone. All that truly existed outside in the middle of the plasma ball, was a great emptiness; a nearly pure vacuum.

  As the giant door was less than an inch from closing, a vertical shaft of unbelievably bright light cut through the opening. Kelly cowered in fear as a fierce heat filled the room. Paint on the guard shack disappeared in a puff of smoke, and as the door finished closing, just as quickly, the light was gone. In a straight line from where the small door opening had been near the floor, a red line seemed to be painted. The line went straight to the guard shack where the paint was gone, then up the wall to the ceiling behind, and finally to the door seam at the ceiling. Kelly suddenly realized that the thin shaft of light had heated the stone and metal to the point of incandescence.

  Kelly watched in the lingering silence as the glowing red line slowly faded.

  And then, as the Earthly world outside rushed back in to fill the void left by the plasma world the bomb had created … the sound came.

  Kelly did not expect its suddenness. It was as if his ear had been held against a wall with a small hole punched through it, and someone had quickly pulled open a sliding door to open that hole. A thousand jet engines were on the other side of that wall, and they filled his head, and they filled his body.

  He thought the Earth itself was being shaken to its core. Again rocks and dust fell from the ceiling, and he rolled to his side and took refuge under the loader closest to him. He lay there, once again in the fetal position; waiting.

  The sound seemed to go on forever, diminishing ever so slowly. He held his clenched fist, with its precious cargo of Brothers in their bottle-cap vessels, close to his chest … close to his heart; again, waiting.

  When, finally, the sound seemed to be only a distant rumble, far beyond the distant hills and whatever else was left outside, he slid out from under the loader and stood. Steadying himself with a hand on the huge piece of machinery, he leaned himself against its six foot tall rear tire.

  Now, shaking uncontrollably, he realized that, except for his convulsions, he was paralyzed. Paralyzed not of body however, but of mind. He looked to the huge blast door, so far away at the end of the other room, and he saw the fear that held him. It was the door itself.

  He was safe here, in this room. He had his disc. He had his Brothers (three anyway). He had himself (in one piece, no less). He did not want to open that door. Not from fear of the radiation that was surely waiting for him behind it, for he was certain that what radiation had entered through the crack as the door closed should have been enough to kill him; but for the fear of the new life that waited for him … out there.

  It was sinking in. He was the only human like himself on Earth, and the feeling that was now flooding over him was … well … it wasn’t really loneliness … he just felt … empty.

  ***

  Having walked the almost one hundred feet to the blast door, Kelly stood, staring blankly at the green button. The button that would either open the door to a world of confusion, violence, temptation, danger, and quite probably, at some time in the future (near or far) his own death, or, if he took the time to explore this new self he had become, gather what positive aspects of this new life he had experienced over the last few days, even seek the council of a few new friends he had made (if they had escaped alive) then maybe, just maybe, the door would open to a life that would see him survive; perhaps, even thrive.

  He reached up and pushed the green button. It had been nearly thirty minutes since that first billionth of a second. As the door slowly rolled open he could hear the last few pieces of rock, sand-glass, concrete, and melted and twisted metal falling to Earth, some of the flotsam having reached an altitude of one hundred thousand feet from the force of the blast. It would continue to rain like this for minutes longer, the dust in the valley taking days to finally settle.

  Except for these missiles falling back to the valley floor, the view in front of Kelly was empty. There was nothing remarkable left. The Sun, just now tucking itself behind the horizon to the west, scribed a long bright orange trail in a straight line toward him; its light reflecting off the valley floor’s new glass covering.

  The minutes passed. He stood looking into the emptiness as the door continued to open, and, finally, he was jolted back to the reality at hand as the echo announced the huge piece of metal had reached the end of the roller track.

  He held his three Brothers tightly in his fist as he walked back to his disc. He had made up his mind. He would accept his new self, his new world, and, he would take his Brothers with him, even though he was now certain there was little he could do to help them.

  As he approached the saucer he heard the gravity drive increase slightly
as it raised itself so that the wing, or disc portion, was about six feet above the room floor. As he thought the canopy open, instead, a long door-like seam appeared on the underside near the central bulge. Kelly watched as the doorway opened to the floor, acting not only as a door, but a ramp. He smiled as he thought, ‘Much more civilized,’ then chuckled at his paradox.

  Inside, he made his way up a three step stairway to the cockpit. He stared in amazement at the roominess of the place. Two form fitting seats graced the forward section at the windscreen while three others, evenly spaced behind, made for a very comfortable feel. Another set of steps led down to a small hold in the rear.

  “Amazing,” he said aloud, “I wouldn’t have thought it was this big, looking at it from the outside.”

  He stood for a moment, unconsciously rubbing the headrest of the pilot seat, his seat, then without further hesitation, he stepped forward and took his place at the helm.

  Still clutching his Brothers tightly, he pondered where to put them. He couldn’t simply set them on the floor. As his eyes moved across the dash area, a rectangular seam formed, complete with a well placed finger hole. A quick pull opened a flat drawer about a foot square. He laid his Brothers gently on the smooth surface and immediately Kelly could tell that there was something special going on between the disc material of the drawer, and his Brothers. Each bottle-cap nestled itself into the floor of the drawer and began to glow (albeit weakly) with that familiar rose color of his home world. Kelly caressed the edge of the drawer and then removed his hand. It closed itself and the seam disappeared, as if never there.

  Thinking the ramp closed, he listened as the landing struts snapped to the up and locked position, and, leaving the gravity drive in its near idle state, he inched the disc forward, just easing it passed one of the huge granite support columns on his left. He could see the twilight pouring in the open blast door ahead of him. It was the same darkening twilight he remembered from a few nights ago when he stepped from the motor-pool car and first looked at the little cone of light over the trailer porch at Marana.