“Did something happen?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Britt said. “But I’m not the one who called the meeting.” She shoved her mug away, picked up her fork, and dug into her breakfast. “I suspect it’s just a briefing.”
Cross sighed and took a sip of orange juice. It was fresh and cool and delicious. “Then why call me back?”
Britt raised her eyes at him without moving her head. “Leo,” she said softly, “you just don’t get it sometimes, do you?”
“Get what?” he asked.
“How important you are.”
“I’m no more important than you or Jesse Killius or Yolanda Hayes,” he said, listing two other members of the committee. Jesse Killius was the head of NASA and Yolanda Hayes was the president’s science adviser.
“Yes, you are.” Britt set down her fork. “It was your insight that warned us of this problem in the first place, and you were the one who figured out that they’re coming back.”
“No,” he said. “You did.”
She shook her head. “You solidified it. You’re the unifying force on this committee. Without you, it goes nowhere.”
“Even if I never have another brilliant idea.”
“Even if,” she said. “This is no longer about brilliant ideas. It’s about survival. You run the team whether you want to or not.”
“Clarissa Maddox runs the team.”
“Because you think she runs meetings efficiently,” Britt said. “They never start until you arrive. It’s unthinkable to have a Tenth Planet Project meeting without you.”
Cross sighed, and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Out of the comer of his eye, he saw Constance watching them. She smiled at him.
“Someday you’ll figure out that your strengths aren’t where you think they are,” Constance said.
Cross looked at her. “Oh? You mean I’m not a good archaeologist?”
She shrugged. “Right now, it’s not your digging skills that matter. It’s your imagination.”
“She’s right,” Britt said.
“My imagination is giving me nightmares,” he said.
“From California?”
He nodded.
Britt rested her head on her palm. “Tell me about it.”
He couldn’t yet. He didn’t have the right words, and to explain the horror incorrectly was to cheapen it. “It’s not something you want to discuss over breakfast,” he said. He pushed his half-finished meal away, and Constance brought him coffee without his having to ask for it. He put his hand around the warm mug.
“So,” he said, “did our alien friends get home safely?”
Britt blinked, obviously confused, and then she gave him a rueful smile. “I’m sorry to say they did, as far as we can tell.” He sighed. They were talking about the alien ships, heading back toward the tenth planet. Britt’s agency, the Space Telescope Science Institute, was using all of its telescopes, from the Hubble III on down, to monitor the alien ships as they left Earth’s orbit and headed back to the passing tenth planet.
“I was hoping they’d self-destruct or something,” he said. She shook her head. “That only happens in the movies. Too bad, huh?”
He sipped the coffee. It was better than the stuff the Army had served him. “Do we know what will happen at the meeting today?”
“No,” Britt said. “I know we’ll get a report on the alien ships—what they’re made of, how they’re vulnerable, that sort of thing.”
“We know that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. The report might just be about what we don’t know.”
Cross sighed. For all the speeches everyone was making about his importance, it sounded like the meeting would be the same old thing. “Anything else?”
Britt loudly sipped the rest of her coffee, then set the mug down. “If there’s something new and surprising, I haven’t heard about it.”
Cross closed his eyes. “The end of the world is coming, and all we’re doing is having meetings.”
“We’re doing more than that,” Britt said.
He opened his eyes. She looked tired. They were all tired. “Oh?” he asked. “What else are we doing?”
“We’re trying to figure out a way to destroy those aliens,” she said, her voice so cold it even stopped Constance for an instant at the stove.
Cross looked at Britt. Her eyes were dark, focused on something far away. And the anger was just below the surface of her face, just as it was below all of theirs at the moment.
Cross thought about the fillings rattling around in the wand in California, then sighed. “I would do anything to stop them. Damn near anything.”
“So would I,” Britt said, coldly. “So would I.”
3
April 27, 2018
11:41 a.m. Central Daylight Time
170 Days Until Second Harvest
Vivian Hartlein had spent the early morning standing outside the gates of Graceland until some security guard waved her away. Then she crossed Elvis Presley Boulevard to the now-boarded-up Day’s Inn and sat in its parking lot, staring at the long lawn heading up to the old mansion. She’d toured the King’s home dozens of times—the first with her parents when she was just a little thing—and she liked the way it always stayed the same. The dark kitchen with its faint never-to-leave smell of grease. The yellow dining room, the beautiful white piano. A permanent place. A historical place. A place where time seemed to stand still.
Vivian had come here every day since the attack. She wanted to go inside again, she wanted to see if time would reverse for her, and she thought maybe it would happen in Graceland. Maybe if she went inside, she would see her mom again. And her dad. They had been gone for years.
Maybe if she went inside, she’d see Cheryl and Lucy and Tommi Jo. She’d told them to stay out of California, but they didn’t listen to her. They’d gone anyway, saying there was nothing in Memphis for them. All the jobs were west. And what did Cheryl end up doing, but working in some tourist place near the ocean? She could’ve worked at Graceland or any of the places around it, or got a job on Mud Island, or even gone to Nashville. It was far, but not that far.
And it hadn’t been wiped off the face of the Earth.
Cheryl, her daughter. Lucy, her granddaughter. And Tammi Jo, who was just a baby. Their daddy didn’t even have the decency to call, to find out what happened. He was so dumb he didn’t even know the attack had happened over Cheryl’s house, over her work.
Vivian’s husband, Dale, he’d gone out there, trying to find his little girl, and the Army didn’t tell him nothing. Vivian stayed home. She couldn’t get herself in no airplane. Never had been able to. Dale thought it was maybe connected to that time when she couldn’t leave the house, back when she was pregnant with Cheryl, her only child.
Back when she had had hope.
She choked and swallowed hard. Dale was still in California, waiting to get remains, if there was going to be remains. He said he wasn’t counting on it. He said there was nothing he could do. He said he’d never felt so helpless in his whole life.
Dale Hartlein, a man who’d never been helpless. One afternoon in California, he told her, he jumped the fence, and went into that black mess himself without protection, tracing the concrete buried beneath the dust, picking up metal road signs with the names pressed into them, and finding, through sheer energy, Cheryl’s house.
Or what was left of it.
He said he sat down and bawled like a baby.
Vivian’d never seen Dale cry. He’d teared up when Cheryl was born, and them tears’d come back the day Cheryl said she was marrying that loser ex-husband of hers, but he’d never cried. Not once.
Till now.
And when he told Vivian that, she knew her baby, and her baby’s babies, was well and truly dead.
He was staying in California until he had remains, but that might mean he’d be gone forever. The bureaucracy ruled, just like she always knew it had. Like her own daddy used to say. Th
e government ain’t nothing but a pack of fools leading another pack of fools by the nose.
She believed it now. Only now they had gotten worse. Now they had killed her family. And for that, she was going to make them pay.
She had left the Day’s Inn at sunrise and come to Riverside Park. The Mississippi smelled faintly of mud and river mold. Barges and tugs still made their way through the shallow water as if nothing had happened. Planes flew overhead. Life went on.
For most people, life went on.
She sat on the old bandstand near a grove of trees and watched as the first car pulled into the lot. She was taking a risk holding the meeting here, in such a public place, in the middle of the day, but she didn’t know who would come. She’d keep things toned down. She didn’t say nothing in her flyers, or on the web site, or in them radio announcements she made to all the call-in shows about what, exactly, she was going to talk about.
She’d just tell them the truth she learned from Dale. She’d just tell them how the government killed her family and how she was going to get even.
She’d tell them the truth as she knew it from the moment she saw them phony pictures on CNN.
Another car pulled into the lot. Then another. People she didn’t recognize was opening the doors and getting out.
She took a deep breath as she watched them, straightening her shoulders, shaking the nervousness out of her. It began this way, with a small group. Jesus taught the world that, two thousand years ago. He started with twelve, and they spread the gospel all over the land.
The tough part was speaking out. Once she spoke out, then the news would spread and everyone would know.
Sometimes she wondered why they didn’t already. It seemed so obvious to her.
There was no aliens. There’d never been aliens. Ever since she was a little girl, there’d been talk of aliens. Best-selling books with slant-eyed creatures on the cover. Movies with those same creatures—sometimes friendly, but usually trying to take over Earth. Then those series of “true” stories, mostly on the TV, about people getting abducted.
By the time Vivian was twelve, as many people believed in aliens as believed in angels. She remembered that statistic because Reverend Foster used it in one of his most famous sermons, the one where he lamented the loss of true faith.
Well, she had true faith. And Cheryl had, too. But Cheryl had become an unwitting victim of a plot to take over the world. Vivian was already seeing it. The news carried parts of it. The other countries was listening to the president. Soon he’d take over everything, a man who didn’t believe in God or liberty or nothing.
A dozen cars was in the parking lot now, and a group of people was hanging around the edge of the grass, just staring at her. If she was going to do this, she had to take control.
Dale’d tried to talk her out of it, tried at least to get her to wait until he got home. But she wasn’t going to wait, not anymore. It was either wait and let the grief eat her up, eat her message and make Cheryl and Lucy and Tommi Jo die for nothing, or Vivian would start taking action. She was angry and someone was going to pay.
She’d always been an action woman. Sitting around just made things worse.
She waved a hand toward the group, and a tall thin man with long blond hair grinned at her. He spoke softly to the others around him, and they came forward like a little troop. She was surprised she didn’t recognize none of them.
More cars was pulling in. A man in a business suit got out of one of them, along with a woman wearing too much makeup for a rally. And sure enough, they took out a video camera.
She didn’t want them taping the rally. She knew what they’d do. They’d send it on, make her a laughingstock or, worse, sic the government on her. Kill her. That couldn’t happen. Not yet. Not this early.
The blond man had gotten to the bandstand. He looked like a take-charge type.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Vivian Hartlein. I’m the one who called this here meeting.”
“Jake Styles,” he said.
“Well, Jake Styles, there ain’t gonna to be nothing happening here if them reporters stay. Think you can get them to go?”
He looked over his shoulder. “Why would I want to?”
“Why’re you here?” she asked.
His blue eyes darkened. “My daddy lived on the California coast”
“My daughter and her babies did, too,” Vivian said.
They stared at each other a moment. Bonded. She felt it. The loss created a link between them. Without saying nothing more, he turned around and walked toward the reporters.
She’d picked well. He had a charm about him.
More and more cars came. There was maybe fifty people here now. Some she knew, most she didn’t. The ones she knew belonged to some of the same groups as Dale. They looked surprised to see her without him.
She wasn’t speaking for him today. She was speaking for everyone. And for her dead daughter and grandchildren.
The woman reporter laughed and then patted Jake Styles on the arm. Oh, charm was useful. But not everything. Still, the reporters got back in their car, backed up, and pulled out of the lot. Jake Styles stood at the edge of the lot until the car disappeared.
By then, her entire crowd was sitting on the dew-damp river grass or standing at the fringes, leaning on trees for support. He came back, shrugged amiably, and said, “I don’t think they’re coming back.”
“What’d you tell them?” she asked.
“That this was the traditional singing rally for the Baptist churches in the area. We’re just organizing, and we’d hope they’d come back when we’re getting ready to sing in the big sing-a-thon in July.”
“You didn’t,” Vivian said.
“I did.” He grinned. “They said that explained the strangeness of the announcements they’d heard on the radio, and they were sorry for troubling us. And they got the date of the big sing-a-thon. They were embarrassed they didn’t know about it.”
“I can’t believe they believed that.”
“People believe anything, you say it with enough conviction.” His eyes seemed to bore right through her. He was right, of course. That was what she was here to talk about. “You know, if you’re gonna talk about how awful things are and not give no ways to resolve things, I ain’t staying.”
“We got to take things into our own hands,” she said. “Things?” he asked.
“What do you do?” she said. “You ain’t government, are you?”
“If I was government, you think I’d be here?”
“Them reporters was.”
He took a battered wallet out of his back pocket. Inside was his electricians’ union card, tattered now, and a driver’s license, a few ripped photos, and nothing else. None of them credit cards or them identification strips that had a person’s entire medical history on it. No electronic slider cards at all.
The casual way he handed his life to her was just as it should be. A code among compatriots. A way that believers knew they weren’t alone.
“I been thinking about this a long time,” she said. “Studying it. Not just when them so-called aliens came, but before. You want to listen?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded toward the people before her. “Join them. When I get ’em fired up, I’m going to find out how many of them is truly interested.”
“In doing what?”
“Crippling the government. Getting rid of all them who killed our family and aim to kill our country. I know the perfect way to do it.”
“Them reporters would say that the government is our only protection.”
“Yeah,” Vivian said. “They would. They’re the ones who aired the phony pictures of those alien ships, and they’re the ones who say, ‘believe in the president,’ and they’re the ones who’re encouraging allying with other countries. We’re going to lose our sovereignty. We’re going to become part of a worldwide dictatorship, run by godless people. It’s been happening for a while. But now your daddy and my daughter
, they been caught in the first assault.”
“You think our government did that to our own people?” She raised her eyes to his. His look was flat, even. He didn’t seem shocked. “You do, too.”
He nodded.
“Sit down. We got a lot of talking.”
He found a place in the crowd. She stared at them for a moment, wishing Dale was here instead of in California. He’d be proud of her. Whenever he had a group needed convincing, whenever he had a difficult customer who needed coddling, he called her.
You missed your calling, baby doll, he used to say. You shoulda been some sort of preacher, a leader. You wasted it sitting home.
Don't never say I wasted time raising our girl, Dale Hartlein, she used to say in response. She hadn’t wasted time.
But she had lost it.
She stood in front of the crowd and raised her arms. They looked wary. Then she started to speak, and they all looked at her as if she was going to lead them to the promised land.
They was in the promised land. She was going to show them that. And then she was going to show them how to cast out the evil ones and take the land back.
It would not be easy.
But it would be right.
April 27, 2018
12:55 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
170 Days Until Second Harvest
Dr. Leo Cross wished he had never seen this room.
It was a standard conference room, built in the middle of the last century, and furnished in the 1980s. The conference table, which stood on wobbly legs, carried coffee rings so old that they were practically fossilized. The cushions on the chairs had been worn thin fifteen years ago.
Cross had sat in this room more than he wanted to think about, ever since the Tenth Planet Project was founded earlier that year. The discussions here were often a prelude to gaining more information in the days before the attacks. In those days, he had considered the meetings successful.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
He kept going over and over information in his mind, wondering if he had spoken up sooner—maybe even a year sooner—about his suspicions, the first attacks wouldn’t have gone as badly as they had.
Oblivion Page 6