Invaders

by Vaughn Heppner

  Parker lived a long way out of town in a rundown shack on a dusty hill. It had a two-mile driveway from the main road, three half-dead trees and a yard littered with beer cans and whiskey bottles.

  We stopped in the yard. Debby pointed at several skeletons. They looked like dog or wolf skeletons and had old ropes attached to their throats. The ropes were tied to stakes hammered into the ground.

  “Did those animals die here?” I asked.

  “No,” Debby said, looking scared as she scanned back and forth. “Parker has a weird sense of humor. He told me once he loved dogs. That’s what made him think Far Butte was an antechamber of Hell. Every dog that trotted into our out-of-phase place died in a matter of days. Parker figured that must make this the other place where no one wants to go after they die.”

  I opened the driver’s side door, and nearly jumped out of my skin as a boom sounded and a flash of flame exited a shotgun aimed at the sky.

  “Hold it right there,” a growling voice told me.

  I froze, and then I slowly moved my head to the left.

  Parker pushed off a side of his shanty, with a pump-action shotgun in his hands. He wore his black leather jacket, and his biker boots made chain-jangling sounds as he walked closer to us.

  “You have three seconds to get off my—” Parker stopped walking and talking. “It’s you,” he said.

  “It is,” I said. “Can I step outside?”

  “Hi, Parker,” Debby said, waving at him from the passenger seat.

  “You bastard,” he told me. “You pulled her into this?” He raised the shotgun.

  “Parker, no!” Debby shouted. “The sheriff beat him up. Walt threw him in jail. I busted him out.”

  “Debby,” Parker said, shaking his head. “You know that will be the final straw.”

  “We need help,” Debby said.

  Parker swore, and his eyes hardened as he studied me. I saw my death in his gaze. I could feel the chill of it crawling along my spine. Finally, though, after three seconds of having a maw of a death aimed at my chest, Parker lowered the shotgun, swearing some more.

  “All right, get out,” the old biker told me. “Let’s see if the new boy can tell us anything interesting.”

  ***

  The place reeked of alcohol with a coating of dust on just about everything except for the chopper in the living room. A dim yellow bulb gave us light as we sat at an ancient kitchen table.

  Parker set the shotgun near a hand-pump faucet. I noticed there were several other weapons, too, including an old bayonet.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  Parker’s eyes might have glinted. It was hard to tell. I decided to keep the rest of my quips to myself. The old biker didn’t want to hear them, and I didn’t want to push him over the edge concerning me.

  “The sheriff beat you up?” Parker asked, as he studied my face.

  I nodded.

  “You don’t look beat up.” He made it sound like a challenge.

  I wanted to tell him I took plenty of vitamins. Instead, I said, “I heal quickly.”

  His eyes narrowed, and it seemed as if he recalculated something concerning me. “You have a bit of size,” he said. “Are you strong or is it all for show?”

  “He took down Walt,” Debby said. “If he hadn’t, we’d never have escaped from the sheriff’s office.”

  “I’m going to have to hear about that,” Parker said.

  I told the old biker what had happened.

  “I don’t buy it,” he said when I’d finished. “No human could have done that to the robot.”

  I glanced at Debby. She nodded. Could she already be reading my mind? She seemed to say with the glance that I could trust Parker. I decided to go with my instincts.

  “Here’s my story,” I said.

  I told them about Station 5 in Nevada, the Learjet, and Greenland in all its glory. I told them what Rax had done to me. I told them about the Guard-ship and the rod attack that had originated in orbit from an alien vessel. Lastly, I told them how I’d entered this out-of-phase place by trying to figure out what the aliens were up too.

  As I explained these things, I watched them. The description of the stasis tubes, the Neanderthals and apelike hominids did nothing to elicit their interest or any sign that they’d heard of those things before. That eliminated one possibility for me: that the builders of the Greenland complex and the white tower belonged to the same group.

  Finally, I asked Parker, “When did you come here?”

  “1985,” he said, “Ronald Reagan was president.”

  “You’ve been here a long time,” I said, wondering if Parker realized he’d been here a shorter amount of time than Debby had.

  The biker did not respond to my comment. Could something in the tower be keeping Debby younger? Why would the thing in the tower be doing that?

  “Here’s the thing,” I said, pumping energy into my voice. “It’s the reason we came to see you. Can you remember what you do in the tower?”

  “Yeah,” Parker muttered, as if the remembering was a chore. “I crawl into tight places. I connect couplings. Sometimes, as I do the connecting, I get shocked. That’s my clearest memory. The shocking hurts like Hell every time and half my skin gets charred and hard. Others lather cream on my skin. That makes everything itch and I want to howl. I don’t, though. I don’t want to give whatever’s watching me the pleasure.”

  “Who’s watching you?” I asked.

  Parker shook his head. “I don’t know, but I can feel him. I can always feel him when I’m inside the tower.”

  “What does he feel like?” I asked.

  Parker stared me in the eye. “Evil,” he said in a breathless voice.

  The way he said that reminded me of the sensation of evil I had felt inside the Greenland complex. Was there a connection between the two places?

  “Have you ever heard of the Polarions?” I asked, thinking they might have something to do with the evil sensation.

  “Never,” Parker said.

  That had been a long shot, but still, his answer left me disappointed. I was stuck in an out-of-phase place with some kind of evil inside an ancient white tower. Debby seemed to be a prize to the tower. She was one of the few, maybe the only one, to polish a giant ornament, take out cracked pieces and insert specials crystals in the empty slots. Since knowing about Rax, I had an awful feeling this ornament might be alive in some nefarious fashion.

  “I have to get into the tower,” I said.

  “No!” Debby said. “It’s over if you try that. Walt has to interview you first, assign you a number. You can’t surrender, Logan.”

  “Who said anything about surrendering?”

  “How else can Walt interview you?” Debby asked.

  “I need to sneak into the tower,” I said. “I have no intention of going in officially.”

  “Debby’s right,” Parker told me. “Walt guards the tower. The robot is going to be watching closer than ever. That’s how it caught Martin Cruz.”

  “Is there another way inside?” I asked.

  “None that I know about,” Parker said. “What about you, Debby?”

  She shook her head.

  Parker looked at me and spread his hands.

  Something about that made me mad. “That’s it?” I asked. “The bad old biker wants to give up just like that?”

  Parker scowled as if I’d just pissed on his boots. Maybe I should have stuck to my plan of keeping my quips to myself.

  “Boy,” he told me, “you have no idea who you’re messing with.”

  “Look,” I said, “you’ve been here a long time. I get that.”

  “You don’t get shit,” he said.

  “There’s a way to do this. But I’m going to need your help. You must have hated the Man back in the day.”

  Parker watched me, the scowl sinking deeper into his seamed face.

  “I have a feeling you’re still an outlaw biker in your heart. Here, something in the tower is the Man. The
sheriff enforces the law. The robot tells you what to do and you ask it, ‘How high should I jump, Walt?’”

  Parker’s lips hardly moved as he said, “I’m going to whip your—”

  “Why get mad at me?” I asked, interrupting, running with my new approach. “I’m just saying how it is. Get mad at the hidden thing in the tower. It’s the one screwing with you for all these years. I know how to beat the robot. If I can get into the tower, I can screw with the thing that has screwed with you since 1985. Tell me a biker wouldn’t like some payback after all that time.”

  “You can’t do anything to it,” Parker said.

  “Not out here, I can’t. But if I can get inside the tower…”

  Parker sneered.

  “Hey,” I said. “I wrecked Greenland for the Unguls and the Organizer. I have a few aces up my sleeve. I’d be in a grave in the desert if I wasn’t different from the others.”

  “He has a point,” Debby said.

  Parker crossed his arms as he chewed that over. Finally, he asked me, “You think it’s the tower that keeps us locked in this hellhole?”

  “The tower does something,” I said. “It’s the key to all this. It has to be. We know it needs humans. Why else would the sheriff who guards the tower look like a human? Why else would people go inside the tower to do secret work? Keeping Far Butte as it is must take effort. Why do all that if the thing in the tower could dispense with humans?”

  Parker rubbed his leathery face. “Not that I’m buying into your thinking, but how do you propose to get inside?”

  I’d been waiting for that question. I doubted he was going to like the answer, though. I took a deep breath and told him the only way I could see of getting it done.

  Parker didn’t say a word afterward. Would he throw me out? Would he want to fight? Slowly, to my surprise, laugh lines appeared on his face. He shook his head.

  “You have gall,” Parker said in a rough voice. He walked to the sink, put his hands on the shotgun, and faced me once more. “I’ve been here too long, way too long.” He looked at Debby. “Are you in?”

  “All the way,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” Parker said, seeming wistful. “So am I.”

  -32-

  I slept poorly that night even though I was dead tired. I was nervous, and I hated putting anyone else in jeopardy.

  Come morning, I put on Parker’s jacket. I kept his hat in a saddlebag, but I wore his old pants and boots. They were all a bit too big for me. Finally, I wheeled his chopper out of the shanty.

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  He grinned. “You’re okay, punk. Hold out your hand.”

  I did.

  He slapped my palm with his. “This is righteous, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Thank you, Parker,” Debby said. She stepped up to him, took his leathery face in her hands and gave him a peck on the lips.

  He snaked his right arm around her waist and pulled her tight, and he gave her a real kiss. After releasing her, he said, “If I were younger—”

  “I’d run screaming,” Debby said with a laugh. “Good-bye,” she said.

  Parker gave me a solemn look. “You look after her. If she gets hurt because of you, I’m going to find you and beat you to death.”

  I acknowledged that with the barest of nods.

  “You’ll need these.” Parker pulled out ancient mirrored sunglasses from his front shirt pocket. He handed them to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, putting them on.

  “You look good, punk,” Parker said. “Make sure you get it done.”

  I didn’t have any words left, so I kicked-started the Harley. It roared into life on the first try. His place might be a junk heap, but Parker kept his hog in nearly perfect condition.

  Debby climbed up behind me, putting her arms around my waist. I revved the throttle and took off, leaving Parker staring after us on his lonely dusty hill.

  ***

  Talking on a motorcycle wasn’t impossible, just hard to do well. After leaving the two-mile driveway, getting onto the concrete, I opened up the Harley. It felt good having Debby with me. It felt good having the morning briskness blast against me. The leather jacket was excellent protection against the morning chill.

  The desert terrain passed by in a blur as the sun began its journey across the sky. After ten miles, I saw the cluster of buildings and trees that made up Far Butte in the distance, with the sunlight glinting off the obscene white tower.

  I slowed down and half turned my head.

  “We have to do this as normally as possible,” I shouted.

  “I know,” Debby shouted into my left ear.

  We’d made our plans last night. I couldn’t think of any reason to change them.

  There was a pickup ahead of us. I debated blowing past it just because. Then, a sense of caution held me back. The driver might be able to tell I wasn’t Parker. This wouldn’t work if someone ratted me out to the sheriff.

  Nervousness hit as we neared Far Butte. I’d been able to put out of my mind what we were going to do. Now, the realization I might be dead within the hour—if we failed—made my palms sweaty and my stomach churn.

  Debby must have felt the same thing. Her arms tightened around my waist. That helped me feel a little better. I’ve found that it was easier to stay cool if others around me were freaking out. Not that Debby was freaking out; she was simply scared like me.

  I turned my head. “We can do this.”

  She squeezed even harder.

  After that, I followed the pickup to the parking lot near the tower.

  “Over there,” Debby said in my right ear.

  I drove to a bike rack where others were shoving front bicycle wheels into the metal rack. No one locked his or her bicycle. That was like the old days of my youth.

  With my thumb, I pressed the motorcycle’s kill switch. I let Debby get off first. Then, I used my foot to push down the kickstand, leaned the Harley and swung my other leg over.

  I felt exposed out here, and my face felt as if it were sunburned. This morning before leaving, Debby had applied makeup, trying to make me look older. I hunched my shoulders as I’d practiced last night, and I tried to imitate Parker’s swagger.

  People milled about on the huge plastic-coated court just as I’d seen yesterday from Observation Hill. Debby walked slowly ahead of me.

  The sheriff stood on the other side of the plaza. I’d seen the robot on our way in. It lacked a deputy today. I wondered how long it would take the robot to choose someone else to help it.

  My stomach tightened worse than before as I saw the sheriff step onto the plaza, studying people before moving on.

  Ahead of me, Debby faltered.

  The tower siren blared, the shift signal. People began to part, half heading home, the others heading for the door at the base of the tower.

  In a plan like this, it usually worked like a snap or it failed horribly. There were few in-between stages. If the sheriff recognized me, I’d never get into the tower. If the robot didn’t recognize me—

  Debby stopped and began to turn my way.

  “Hey, Debby,” I said, trotting, catching her left arm. The fear was stark in her eyes and her lips trembled. “Keep going,” I whispered.

  “The sheriff’s is heading this way.”

  “Keep going anyway,” I said, shoving her forward.

  Debby stumbled, sucked in her breath and let her head droop. I could feel the defeat oozing from her.

  I looked up. The sheriff seemed to be walking directly toward us. Was my plan a miserable failure?

  At that point, tires screeched to the left of us in the parking lot. People looked up in wonder. The sheriff’s car stopped, and the driver kicked open the door and jumped out. He leveled a pump-action shotgun at the sheriff. People screamed as the gunman opened fire, many of them hitting the plastic to get out of the way.

  None of the shots hit the sheriff, or anyone else for that matter. Walt was standing too
far away for that. The cowboy-hat-wearing robot drew its revolver and began to sprint toward the police car.

  Parker, wearing my jacket with a hat pulled low over his eyes, jumped back into the prowler car. He burned rubber and created a cloud of smoke. The police car fishtailed back and forth, gaining speed.

  The sheriff shoved its gun back into its holster. This time, the robot began to run with purpose, taking strides and building up speed. Soon, it was running faster than any human could have.

  The biker was likely sacrificing his life for us. It had been hard to ask Parker to do it. I didn’t see any other way, though. There was an off chance I could fix things before the robot caught up with Parker. But at the speed the robot was giving chase, I didn’t give that high odds.

  The tower siren blared a second time as if angry with the interruption.

  Woodenly, people picked themselves off the plastic and began to line up slowly. Debby and I joined them. She stood in front of me. Others soon stood behind me. No one spoke, which was fine with me. I kept my head down. I wore Parker’s biker hat now. I doubted it would have fooled normal people. Everyone in line seemed listless, though. Even Debby had begun to shuffle forward in a mechanical fashion.

  She’d told me most of the people became zombie-like while lining up. It was different experiencing it, though.

  Finally, I couldn’t resist any more. I looked up. The tower door was close, seven people away from me. I squinted, trying to pierce the gloom of the entranceway. What was in there? What would happen once I stepped through?

  Neither Debby nor Parker had been able to tell me anything about the immediate process. They both remembered aspects of their jobs, not the process that had brought them there. Did we cross another phase barrier at the door?

  There were five more people to go, and then it would be my turn. I was finding it hard to breathe.

  Four people left.

  Three.

  Two.

  I still couldn’t see anything past the dark entranceway. I couldn’t detect a process or a check system before the door.

  Debby stepped up, and I saw it then. A small scanner the size of a fingernail blinked blue. It blinked more, more, turned green and Debby stepped into the darkness, disappearing from sight.