The Never Army

by Hodges, T. Ellery

  Sydney and Anthony returned to their offices. They retired not long after. The US Government acquired their Mech Technology, but it was a fair trade when their names got left out of any connection to the huge disturbance that had led to the evacuation of Seattle.

  Then there was Leah, Paige, Collin, and Hayden. Jonathan’s roommates found themselves disoriented from teleportation sickness when they had arrived on a cruise ship with Jonathan’s mother. Evelyn found them on the carpet of her cabin floor blind and moaning.

  The first question out of her mouth . . . “Jonathan isn’t with you?”

  It wasn’t long until she realized that not a single one of them had a hand in how they had arrived there. Discovering this, Evelyn had gestured to the bar. “Anyone else need a drink?”

  “Well, this is straight up clown shoes,” Collin said.

  All but Leah took Evelyn up on the offer. What seemed strange was that Evelyn wasn’t exactly surprised to see them, and when they asked how this could be, she pulled four large manilla envelopes out of a drawer. They had apparently been left in her cabin that morning. Inside each, was a new identity, though the images associated to all the documentation was obviously intended for them.

  Collin’s had something extra. Upon pulling out his paperwork, a Post-It sized note fell out. In Jonathan’s handwriting, it was as vague as it was short. It read: Collin, in regards to Paige and that thing we ‘never’ spoke about. Take the hit. It’ll be worth it . . .

  He was still frowning at how Jonathan had chosen to word that when Evelyn asked, “So, is today the day I should turn the news back on?”

  They all looked at one another, and at a loss for what was going on, nodded. What was playing out on TV, well—it broke their hearts.

  For Jonathan, everything ended in a warehouse near downtown Seattle.

  A team of over forty men in tactical gear, all wearing body cams, poured into the building from every point of entry. Jonathan sat on a metal folding chair, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, with his hands up. There were five large tables around him and each one had a nuclear warhead resting on it that was property of the US Government.

  Media outlets acquired footage of Jonathan Tibbs being taken into custody. The body cam footage, leaked by an anonymous source, was all over the news before the President even got to hold a press conference. At that point, the narrative of the terrorist who stole five warheads being responsible for the city-wide evacuation of Seattle was cemented.

  Soon, another name was all over the different news outlets. The man who had been key in leading government officers to Jonathan’s arrest—one Grant Morgan. Unfortunately, the hero had himself been killed by the terrorist organization shortly after having been discovered as an infiltrator within their ranks. The story was, Grant Morgan gave his life to make sure the warheads never got detonated on US soil.

  The story was easy to sell. The US Government had been investigating Mr. Tibbs for months prior to his sudden disappearance. Grant Morgan had been his friend, a man they sent into his house months earlier as part of the investigations.

  Both men had disappeared within a week of each other.

  As far as Jonathan’s roommates and next-door neighbors’ disappearances, authorities were still investigating, but they were presumed dead.

  Jonathan was handcuffed and placed inside an armored car. Olivia and Rivers took a seat on opposite sides of him.

  “We’re good then?” Olivia asked. “The threat has been neutralized?”

  Jonathan nodded.

  “I didn’t expect you to be here,” Olivia said.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Jonathan said.

  “I suppose,” she said. “I need to start trusting that you’ll always tell me the truth.”

  “Well, then it’s all been worth it,” he said, a sad smile on his face.

  “It makes me sick, this business with Grant.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “I agreed to it. He earned it. Just make sure someone in the media connects him to his real father. The son of the late Jeremy Holloway was the hero. He was clear on that.”

  They were quiet for a time before Jonathan asked, “When do I head to that dark hole you mentioned?”

  Olivia and Rivers exchanged a glance as they remembered. He had said he would go, but only when he was done.

  “There will be a great deal of theater playing out in the media over the next few days, but . . .” Olivia sighed. “You know too much, and due to the nature of your arrest, you can’t be put into the general population of any prison.”

  Jonathan nodded. “So, interrogation, solitary confinement, and what, an eventual accident?”

  “Even if you plead guilty, it’s not exactly something we want to see go to trial,” Olivia said. “Jonathan, in the next few hours, every family member, friend, teacher, or person you went to pre-school with, are going to be getting calls. It’s really better for everyone who has ever been connected to you if—”

  “I know,” Jonathan said. “It’s as taken care of as I can make it.”

  He had given his full cooperation to law enforcement. Signed confessions and disclosed every detail of his operation. He left out anything to do with extra-terrestrials.

  Still, a day after the entire world watched Jonathan Tibbs being arrested, a convoy of government vehicles arrived at a remote location in Washington State. The place had no name on any map, but the land was owned by one of Anthony Hoult’s subsidaries. Jonathan said his organization had called it Hangman’s Tree. When they arrived, they found a clearing with a number of cargo containers that had been recently torched. The place clearly having been wiped clean and abandoned sometime around his arrest.

  None of Jonathan’s associates were ever found. A majority of The Never Army never even identified. Those who had been previously under suspicion for cooperation with The Mark never had their names made public. With no one else to arrest, the name Jonathan Tibbs was the only one to ever be associated with the evacuation.

  The only people who knew the whole truth were few, and they were the sort who rose to their stations because they knew how to keep secrets.

  In the years that followed, there would be several conspiracy theories about what really happened. After all, there were a lot of details to the story that the public remained in the dark about. No single guess ever got anywhere near the truth. Of course, if anyone ever said, “the city was the site of an inter-dimensional war, taking place outside of time, against an alien invasion and the terrorist Jonathan Tibbs had, actually, been the leader of Earth’s forces . . .”

  Well, it was the sort of problem that solved itself. No one in their right mind would ever believe it.

  EPILOGUE

  FOUR YEARS LATER

  AN HOUR OUTSIDE of Salem, Oregon, there was a small town near a lake. During the winter, the town emptied out for the most part, but when summer came it filled back up with vacationers. People from all around the state came to take their boats out on the water and go camping with their families.

  Not far from the town was a house.

  To find this house, one had to turn off the main highway and head down a dirt road. The place wasn’t grandiose nor was it humble. A few years back, the property had been purchased by a buyer who had offered more than the asking price and paid in cash to make the sale as quick an affair as possible.

  If one turned off the dirt road, they would find a driveway paved with white gravel. As they drew closer, they would pass a garden surrounded by a large lawn. Just past the garden, the driveway turned to cement, and led into a two-car garage.

  Today, the garage door was up. Inside, a man sat on a stool.

  Behind him was a semi-cluttered work bench. In front of him was an old truck. This truck looked as though it belonged on a farm somewhere. Its exterior was so rusted over one would get a sideways glance saying the ancient vehicle had character. Beside the truck was a hoist from which hung an equally ancient looking engine. That man on the stool had been looking back and for
th between the two for quite a while now.

  A month or so earlier, the man had gone to visit an old public storage building just outside of Portland. There was a unit there that needed to be cleaned out. Apparently, the unit had belonged to a relative of the leader of the most well-known terrorist group in the world. They had called themselves The Mark.

  A few years earlier the entire country had been held in terror by this man and his followers. They had tried to level the entire city of Seattle, and if the reports were true had nearly managed it. The President of the United States had been forced to declare a national emergency—a city-wide evacuation of Seattle had been in place for seven days before the leader was captured and the nuclear weapons recovered.

  In the end, it was one of the biggest messes in the country’s history. Not just to the psyche of the city residents, who only learned how close they had come to being at ground zero of the worst terrorist attacks since 9/11, but to the country’s GDP. In a manifesto published online, The Mark claimed to have chosen Seattle because they aimed to cripple the economy by blowing up the headquarters of Boeing, Amazon, Starbucks, and Microsoft.

  Suffice it to say, any relatives or acquaintances to this man had little choice but to change their names and move. Still, when the man on the stool showed up at that storage facility a few months earlier and loaded all the contents into a moving truck, no one recognized him, and no one from the media showed up. The whole affair went unnoticed, almost as though unseen hands did not want any fuss to be made.

  The truck had been in disrepair for years. After getting new tires on it, the man on the stool had to tow the rusted beast a few hundred miles, but it was important enough to him that it never end up in a junkyard.

  In town, everyone knew the man as Joshua Clark. They were fond of his wife Rachel, who had gained some renown as the resident artist. A few of her metal sculptures were currently on display around the town’s main drag. She had a younger brother, Jack, who was turning twelve that year. He attended school two towns down the mountain. He could have been a better student, but his teachers seldom had anything bad to say when Joshua and Rachel came to parent-teacher night.

  Lastly, the couple had a son and a daughter, Peter and Rylee. Both were turning four that year and would be starting kindergarten soon.

  People often asked Joshua and Rachel how surprised they were to find out they were having twins. As newlyweds, they had taken some sort of early test when they found out they were pregnant. The test had confirmed the boy. Later, when they went in for a sonogram, they found out this was only half the story.

  Peter and Rylee’s approaching voices roused Joshua from his staring contest with the truck and its dismantled components just before his children came through the door into the garage.

  He stood from the stool as they reached the last step of the small staircase, spread his arms as he lowered into a stance that made him look like a goalie. Having played this game with their father since before they could remember, Rylee and Peter grinned before each tried to shoot by him. They laughed as he first caught Peter under one arm and then Rylee after she tried to dart in the opposite direction. Joshua growled like an oversized monster and spun them in a circle, until they were all dizzy and laughing.

  “No, one escapes the beast,” Joshua said as the twins pretended to hate it. As often is the case with children their laughter gave them away.

  “You two are getting big,” he said, as he set them down. The whole affair having left him breathing heavily.

  Rylee pointed to the truck. “Still can’t get it started, Dad?”

  Joshua gave her a look. “I’ll get it.”

  “Mom says that you’d have been finished a month ago if you’d let her help,” Peter said.

  Joshua saw her then, out of the corner of his eye. Rachel standing in the doorway, eavesdropping—her face a warm smile.

  “That’s true,” Joshua said, looking back at his son, “but . . . it would be cheating.”

  He looked back at his wife who watched him now with a raised eyebrow and he cocked one right back at her. “In fact, I think I got this figured out. Just need to go into town and order a part.”

  “Oh,” Rachel said, stepping past the threshold, “and, what part will we be ordering this time?”

  He looked at her, perhaps with a little more self-doubt than he had a moment earlier. “Distributer coil.”

  She pinched her lips and nodded, trying not to confirm or deny what she thought. “If that’s the case, you realize you didn’t have to hoist the engine all the way back out of—”

  “Yes,” he said, cutting her off. “That has occurred to me.”

  She grinned as she came down the steps. Then slowly inched toward a cabinet. Her eyes never faltered, holding his gaze as she reached inside without looking and pulled out a shipping box. Without a word, she left the package on the work bench and made for the stairs.

  “Love you,” she said, playfully. “Don’t forget, company should start getting here soon.” He looked at the box, and his eyes narrowed as she disappeared into the house.

  He trudged over to the box. He found it was postmarked a month earlier, and there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that it contained a distributer coil. When he turned back around, he saw the children hadn’t left yet, in fact, they looked as though they had known that box was in the cabinet for a while now. Waiting for him to figure out the right part.

  “Have fun, Dad,” Rylee said, running out of the garage with Peter on her heels. Joshua watched them run across the garden’s paving stones to play tag on the lawn.

  Alone again, Joshua turned to the truck. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s the journey not the destination.”

  He got the distinct impression that if it could, the vehicle would have scoffed at him.

  Sometime later, a black car pulled into the driveway.

  Joshua wiped his hands on a cloth and shoved it in his back pocket as he saw Olivia and Rivers step out of the vehicle. He put his hands up jokingly as they came close. “You got me, her tags are expired.”

  Olivia’s lips moved, as though she’d had to actually make an effort not to smile. Rachel must have noticed them arrive, because behind him the garage door opened and she came out to join them.

  Rivers smirked. “The only crime here is that you’ve had three months and she hasn’t moved an inch since the day you hauled her in.”

  He looked between Rachel and Olivia. “Seriously, how did this guy ever convince us he could stop an inter-dimensional demigod?”

  “I confess, I’ve often questioned my judgment,” Rachel said.

  “It isn’t something I’m proud of,” Olivia added.

  Joshua smiled, it wasn’t often Olivia made an effort at humor. “For the record, it’s only been two and a half months.”

  Ignoring him, Rachel turned to the agents. “We didn’t expect to see you two, but you’re welcome to stay for dinner.”

  The two politely declined. “We were still in the area. Thought we’d let you know your friends are all safely on their way before we head out. No one recognized them as acquaintances of the infamous Jonathan Tibbs.”

  “I do appreciate you looking out for them,” Joshua said.

  “So, any recent visits from our more otherworldly friend to report?” Olivia asked.

  “Been a few years,” Joshua said.

  The four exchanged equally suspicious and at the same time conspiratorial glances. “Well, of course, had it been otherwise we’d have heard from you.”

  “Of course,” Rachel said.

  Olivia reached up to her ear, as she received a message. “We should go, your friends have just pulled off the highway.”

  “Always a pleasure,” Joshua said. “For what it’s worth, it’s a lot brighter in this hole than I thought it would be.”

  Olivia smirked, waved, and got back in the car.

  Joshua stood beside Rachel as they drove away. “Do you think those two ever finally—”

  “E
ven I can’t tell,” Rachel cut him off.

  A few minutes later an SUV pulled up the drive, and parked. The passenger side window rolled down and Paige’s face appeared. She looked a little angry. “Hey! Saw Rivers and Olivia on our way in . . . do I need to check the bathroom for cameras?”

  Her expression melted into a smile as the rest of the doors opened, and Evelyn, Hayden, and Collin stepped out. A moment later, after Collin finished struggling with the latches on a child seat, a three-year-old ran away from the car in a beeline for the twins.

  Collin only making a mild effort to say, “Lucy, at least say hello to Uncle J and Auntie Rachel before—and she’s gone.”

  Out of politeness, no one really said it, but Collin had pretty much accepted that he was going to have a dad bod for the foreseeable future. The only reason it ever went noticed, was because Hayden had become a bit of a fitness guru over the last three years. So, while Hayden looked about thirty pounds lighter since their last visit, Collin looked equally heavier, making it somewhat difficult for anyone to say, ‘Looking great Hayden’ while Collin was standing beside him.

  Evelyn was last to step out of the car, and as Joshua hugged her, she made the same joke she had for the last four years. “May I see my grandchildren? I don’t want to be pushy and find myself checked into a hotel in Austria or plane heading to Guam.”

  “Missed you, Mom,” Joshua said.

  Later that evening, after they had all eaten, the kids returned to the sloping lawn to play for the last hour before the sun went down. The adults, who had all partaken in libations, found themselves split. Evelyn, Paige, and Rachel having taken glasses of wine to the garden while Hayden, Collin, and Joshua stood in the garage. There was a comforting familiarity to it all.

  “So, Superman or Jesus?” Hayden asked.

  Joshua smiled, but as he had said the first time Hayden asked the question, his answer hadn’t changed. “Neither. Yeah . . . definitely neither.”