by Jerry Hart
A loud echoing clang startled Owen as Silver finished his ascension into the hangar.
“Let’s go,” Calvin told his brother as a crystal catwalk extended outward from the platform. The path was level with the behemoth’s head. Calvin and Claude started toward Silver as Demetrius appeared next to Owen. The two of them waited at the hangar’s entrance while the twins did the work. Owen glanced nervously at the captain. Demetrius only stared forward, determined.
A loud bang made Owen jump. He looked back to the giant. Its head was opening. Calvin and Claude paused directly in the middle of the catwalk. They stared at each other briefly, then back at the scout. Something small, round and white floated out of the opening head. Owen recognized it immediately as a balloon.
Then another balloon, this one pink. Suddenly a lot of balloons floated out of the giant’s open head. The balloons floated up through the hangar’s round ceiling into the rest of the ship. The crew watched them go by. Owen figured there were at least thirty or more balloons floating around. One in particular was coming toward him now. The twins stared upward, as did Demetrius, so no one else seemed to notice this lone balloon. It was one of the white ones. Owen grabbed it. It had “Happy Birthday!” stenciled in pink letters. And there was something inside of it.
It was a small round object. A red object.
“Hey, who are you?” Owen heard one of the twins say. He looked up and saw them staring at someone clinging to the edge of the open cranium. Whoever it was, he was human, with short red hair and prominent freckles on his face. There were also dark tear tracks running down from his eyes.
A zombie! But how?
The zombie held something that looked like a remote. Owen’s mind worked slowly to process everything he was seeing. He looked at the balloon and the object inside of it. Then he looked at the zombie with the remote.
The remote. It was D’s remote. What the hell was the zombie doing with D’s remote? Just as Owen wondered this, the redhead pressed a button on the remote and the small red object in the balloon lit up. It was only a small white light in the middle of the object, like a button.
A button!
And then it hit him. This balloon had a Buster in it. All of the balloons did. Busters couldn’t be activated by remote, though. What was this? These zombies couldn’t possibly have engineered this.
Jason!
This was a trap set up by Jason. It had to be. The orb hadn’t been retrieved. All of this hit Owen at once, and he realized he was still holding the balloon-bomb. He tossed it away and grabbed Demetrius, pulling him to the ground.
“Get down!” Owen screamed to the twins. They whirled around on the catwalk to look at him. Then they looked up at all of the balloons floating around in various parts of the large ship. They were everywhere, and they were all glowing.
The sound was deafening as they all exploded at the same time. The balloon Owen tossed had been floating just over the catwalk when it detonated. The catwalk split apart. Calvin and Claude grabbed onto the half attached to the platform as it swung down, away from the scout. The other half fell to the bottom of the hangar and shattered.
The rest of the crew screamed and ran in terror as the explosions destroyed the ship. There were chain reactions as each explosion caused other things in the ship to explode. The computers, the life-support systems, everything was going up in flames.
Owen got to his feet and looked down over the railing. He saw the twins holding on to half of the catwalk like a rope bridge against a cliff wall.
“Hang on!” he shouted down to them as he looked for a way to help. There was a loud groan as the ship shook violently. Owen saw Silver sway back and forth. The giant was about to topple over and Owen prayed it would fall away from them.
But it didn’t. It fell face first toward them. Owen jumped away from the rail as Silver collided with the platform. There were more explosions overhead. Debris rained down to the hangar. Owen covered Demetrius, trying to protect him.
Once things settled down, Owen got up and looked over the rail again. Calvin and Claude were still hanging on, miraculously. Silver leaned against the platform at an angle, and Owen could easily see into his open head. It looked like an airplane cockpit. There were two other zombies inside with the redhead. They both had blond hair; one was a man and the other a woman.
They were both dead, but the redhead was leaning over the edge of the opening, his eyes open and his breathing shallow. Owen watched him die. It was the amusement park all over again. All of these people were dying because of actions that were out of their control.
“I’m sorry,” Owen said to the dead boy as he jumped onto the giant’s shoulder and crawled down its chest.
After a few moments of climbing, he was level with the twins. They smiled at him. “Fancy seeing you here,” Claude said. Owen laughed nervously. He couldn’t get over how human these two were.
“We have to abandon ship!” Calvin yelled.
“What about Demetrius?” Owen asked.
“I think he can take care of himself.” Claude gestured to something behind Owen. Owen saw the captain clinging to the behemoth’s side. He nodded to the twins. They nodded back. Then they dove for the giant, grabbing onto its chest like mountain climbers.
Together, the quartet climbed down Silver’s body to the hangar floor, where the escape pods awaited.
* * *
Curtis was helping Doug out of the tipped-over truck when he heard the explosions overhead. They sounded like thunder, but Curtis knew better.
After Silver had been retrieved, the dark vortex closed and the sky became gray clouds again. Now the vortex was back, and this time, it was bright yellow, as if it was made of fire.
And then Curtis noticed something shoot from the sky. It looked like a small round ship. It crashed a few yards away with a big thud that drove up dirt and grass from the ground.
“Stay here,” Curtis told Doug, and then he ran over to the ship. As he got closer, he was able to make out more details. The ship was indeed spherical and light blue. He wondered who or what was inside. If they were aliens from space, what would they look like? Would they attack Curtis the moment they saw him?
A door opened on the side of the ship. Curtis still had his hammer, but hid it behind his back—he didn’t want to appear hostile. The inside was dark, and at first he couldn’t see anything at all.
Then a hand gripped the doorframe. Curtis jumped and almost brought the hammer out. The hand looked human. Curtis waited, then a head appeared. He dropped his hammer there and then, for the person in the ship was none other than Owen.
* * *
Patrick couldn’t believe he was about to do what he was about to do. He was driving away from the giant now, but planned to circle around on another street to get to the building it was currently standing in front of. He still had no idea what he was going to do when he got there, but he had to do something. Doug Hudson told him so.
Right now, the strangers were using the giant to pull the dangerous-looking scepters out of the ground. So far, it had retrieved two of them and was working on the third. This seemed like a good thing to Patrick, but Mr. Hudson had been pretty adamant about keeping control of the beast out of their hands. And that’s what Patrick intended to do.
He’d told Lindsay and the other officers to stay put in case things got hairy on the ground, but now he was wishing he had someone to help him. He was worried he wouldn’t survive his encounter with the strange beings. But he was an officer of the law, and he had a job to do.
As he drove down 2nd Street, he passed Henderson Street and looked over to see the blue giant continuing its work.
“Please don’t let them see me,” he muttered as he drove. And then he was safely out of sight. He turned onto the next street over—Busby Street—and parked in front of the building that separated him from the giant. He could hear grinding metal and concrete and it scared him even more not seeing what was causing it. He felt he would die from fear if somehow the mons
ter suddenly appeared at the end of the street and simply stared at him.
He pushed the thought out of his head and ran into the building. Inside, the noise was worse. Everything was rattling and thumping, the lights flickering. Patrick wanted to turn around and leave, but he didn’t. He made his way from the lobby to the stairwell. He had to get to the roof.
The giant was twenty stories tall and this building was forty; Patrick would be able to look down on the monster from a relatively safe distance. If the giant’s head was still open, the officer could get a clear shot at the people inside. He didn’t want to kill them, but he would if he had to.
Huffing and puffing, he made his way onto the roof. He walked slowly to the ledge and looked down. The giant was just placing the third scepter into its chest. Patrick decided to let it finish with the fourth before he made his move.
* * *
Curtis and Doug stared at the alien twins and their creepy-looking captain as Owen explained everything that had happened to him on their ship.
“So I was right all along?” Curtis asked, still not taking his eyes off the aliens. “They are the good guys.”
Owen groaned loudly. “Yes, you were right. I’m sorry.”
One of the twins—Claude, Curtis guessed because of the extra gray hair on his head—tried to stand but collapsed on the ground next to his brother. This was the second time he’d attempted it.
“That crash took a lot out of us,” Claude finally admitted. Calvin nodded as he tended to a head wound on the captain, Demetrius. All three of them were banged up, with Owen being the sole exception. He didn’t have a scratch on him.
“You said Jason is in that house?” Owen asked, nodding to the farmhouse yards away. Curtis and Doug nodded.
“You can’t face him alone, though,” Doug protested. This was the first thing he’d said since the ship crashed near him and Curtis.
“Yes, I can,” Owen said. He looked to the aliens and added, “You still can’t contact the mothership?”
Calvin pulled out something that looked like a cell phone, messed with it for a second, then shook his head. “They may have gone back accidentally during the explosion. Either that or they’re all dead.”
Everyone looked up to the sky. The gray clouds had dispersed and the moon shined down on the field.
“Gone back where?” Curtis asked. The alien trio looked at him nervously, then cast their glances in different directions.
“Well, keep trying,” Owen told them. “I’ll be back.”
He started off toward the house when Claude said, “You will bring the orb back to us, right, Owen?”
Owen stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. Claude grinned. Owen took off again, passing the truck, which was totaled after Silver’s mighty kick. Owen ran as fast as he could, which was considerable. That boy was something else.
* * *
The blue giant was pulling the chrome scepter from the ground when Patrick drew his gun. He aimed it through the cracked cranium at one of the three pilots. As the behemoth placed the scepter into its chest, Patrick fired, hitting an old man in the shoulder. He had been helming the middle portion of the controls.
As soon as the shot was fired, all of the strangers—the ones on the giant’s shoulders, even the one Patrick shot—turned their faces up to him. The giant froze in place and there was nothing but horrible silence.
Then, quick as lightning, the blue monster smacked its massive hand at the building. Patrick fell down as another tremor rocked the building. He could hear debris falling to the street below. He could also hear gunfire and knew that his fellow officers were shooting at the giant.
Patrick got to his feet just as four figures leapt onto the roof with him. Two of them were kids, a boy and a girl barely in their teens. The other two were young blond girls, probably in their early twenties. Patrick got his first good look at the people who had commandeered the giant robot. They had pale skin and dark tears running down their cheeks.
He lowered his gun as they stood there, staring at him. He didn’t know what to do. He had no idea what was going on in this city, but he knew he couldn’t shoot children.
Suddenly they all charged him. Patrick shot one of the blondes in the leg. She went spinning through the air and fell to the ground. The little boy was nearly right on top of him, so Patrick spun around and elbowed the kid in the face. The boy spun and landed on his stomach.
The little girl and the other blonde grabbed Patrick’s arms with terrible strength and for a moment, he thought he was going to be pulled apart as they tugged on him, but he kicked the blonde’s kneecap. She let go immediately. He then punched the little girl right in her large forehead. She dropped like a brick. Patrick groaned as he swung his arms to get the pain out of them. He honestly thought he was going to be pulled apart.
The four strangers were on the ground, some unconscious, the others rolling around aimlessly. Patrick ran to the ledge again and saw the other strangers on the street, fighting with his fellow officers. He saw Lindsay firing strategically at a couple of the, for lack of a better word, zombies. It was eight cops against at least a dozen of these unarmed freaks. Perhaps the officers would be okay.
Then Patrick saw one of the zombies toss a squad car at the cops. The car landed a few feet from Lindsay. He fired a few rounds at the zombies who were taking advantage of Lindsay’s dazed state and took them down easily.
Suddenly, the blue giant, who had been watching the scene in the street, looked up at Patrick again. There were no more zombies on its shoulders, only the three in its head. And they were now controlling the mechanical monster to climb the building on which Patrick stood.
“Holy crap!” he screamed as he looked for a place to run. He started for the roof entrance just as the entire building gave a terrible lurch and he nearly fell off his feet again.
The building was collapsing! He would never make it to the ground floor if he went back inside. He whirled around and saw the blue giant appear from over the ledge. Its blue stony eyes stared at him as if they had life in them. Patrick was reminded of the way they stared at him in the field not that long ago.
The giant pulled itself up to the roof as the building crumbled under its weight. Patrick did the only thing he could. He ran to the ledge on the right side of the building and he jumped.
There was a brief sickening feeling of weightlessness as he soared through the air. Then he landed hard on the thirty-story neighbor building. The overwhelmingly loud crash of the other building’s collapse made him spin around. What he saw made his jaw drop.
The blue monster, barely visible in front of the dark sky, was in midair as it attempted to jump from its building to Patrick’s. The problem was it couldn’t get any momentum. It slammed into the side of Patrick’s building, shaking it beyond belief.
The giant’s open head was facing Patrick as the beast tried to climb onto the roof. Patrick aimed his gun and tried to shoot the other two pilots, but he was out of bullets.
He ran toward the other side of the roof to stay well out of the giant’s grip, but sooner or later, this building would collapse as well. He didn’t want to even try going down its stairs.
The building next to his was taller, so he couldn’t jump to it. He was trapped without a weapon. And then he remembered something he’d found at the Huntington house. When Marco Garcia’s and Alyssa Turner’s bodies had been removed from the trunk of that car, Patrick had seen something there. A small, midnight-blue ball similar to those red ones at Alyssa’s condo. Experts had reported those as “bombs,” so what did that make the blue ones? Were they bombs too?
He reached into his pocket and pulled it out. Why he had taken it in the first place, he wasn’t sure. How he even saw it in that dark trunk was an even greater mystery, but he did.
Suddenly the roof collapsed and tilted toward the giant like a slide. Patrick fell and tumbled toward the struggling monster. He dug his fingers into the fractured roof to stop his progress, holding the mysterious
ball in his free hand. There was no other choice. He had to take his chances with it.
Patrick pressed on the little button on the back of it and threw the contraption into the open cranium. As it flew through the air, he could see the little window on the side opposite the button light up.
Then all noise ceased entirely. Patrick thought he’d finally gone deaf. All of a sudden, a brilliant white light flooded the open head as some kind of force pushed the three bodies out. They fell to the street below.
All sound returned after that.
The giant lay motionless on the roof. Its eyes were still focused on Patrick, but this time there was no life behind them.
The giant fell and its collision with the street was earthshaking. Patrick expected nothing less.
Chapter 42. Owen’s Choice
The farmhouse was eerie and silent, much like how Les Huntington’s had been. Owen stood in the yard, inches away from the porch. There was a dark, nasty puddle just in front of him—it looked like leftovers from a leech. That meant the last of them had been killed. Owen looked back up to the house. Chances were good Jason already knew he was there. The villain always knew.
There was a faint light coming from the front window. The front door was closed but most likely unlocked. Owen held on tightly to Curtis’s hammer, wondering if it would be enough. Curtis had told him about the beatdown he delivered to Jason in the garage and how it hadn’t done much.
But Curtis was just a normal guy, not super-strong like Owen and Jason. When Owen delivered his punches, Jason would feel them.
Finally working up the nerve to take a step, Owen walked up the porch to the door. He pulled the screen door open and turned the doorknob. It was unlocked.
He stepped into the foyer and looked around carefully. The house was quiet. The air smelled familiar; it burned his nose. He was reminded of the way Les’s house had smelled, and there had been dead bodies there.