Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  There was a soft clanging, and a round hole on the ship’s underside opened like an old-time camera’s shutter. Inside was a light: green, like he himself would ask a director to color it, in one of his films.

  He knew what this meant.

  He knew why he’d come.

  Meyer spread his arms and looked upward, closing his eyes as a soft, warm glow surrounded his body.

  He felt his feet leave the ground.

  Sometime later, Meyer Dempsey and the ship he’d entered were gone.

  The mountain was still and quiet, as if vowing to never whisper a word of what happened.

  Author’s note

  I’m writing this note to you from the future. Not the not-too-distant future as portrayed in the world of Invasion, but the real future. The one that exists a short while after Invasion was published.

  Right now, I’m writing Colonization — the third book in the Invasion series.

  Before that, I wrote Contact — which, yes, you guessed it — is the second book in the series, which you may have already picked up.

  (Eerie how writing time travel works, isn’t it? Contact is in my past but it’s in your future. I’m getting all Back to the Future time-loopy just thinking about it.)

  Sean and I decided to add this author’s note to Invasion, now that we’re one and a half books further down the master story arc, because now we have perspective.

  When we first wrote the book you just read, we had only an inkling. As I write this, halfway into the rough draft of the third book, the big story we wanted to tell is filling out and taking shape. It’s hitting all of the big, cool issues we wanted to hit with our alien invasion series, and hitting them in what might be called the “traditional” way. Meaning: with aliens.

  See, Invasion got a great reception right off the bat. But among reviews, discussions, and casual comments with our core group of ideal readers, there was one thing that many people mentioned: the ending.

  Most people said they didn’t see the ending coming.

  Some of that group loved the ending: the sense of mystery, of a deepening of the plot as the series moved into more familiar (and ironically “more alien”) territory. They said they were getting excited, wondering where Meyer might be going, and eager to find out in the next volume.

  Other people hated the ending. A few said it felt tacked-on. These folks sort of suggested that we needed a shocking hook in order to drag readers into the next book, so we invented something nuts: Meyer Dempsey, who’s spent something like 80,000 words trying to get his family to safety, just walks right out in the open and lets the aliens take him.

  But actually, Meyer’s abduction is essential to the larger story we wanted to tell.

  We considered beginning the story there: Man is abducted by aliens; sci-fi adventure ensues. We could have done that: started with aliens, abduction, alien contact, and the colonization of Earth.

  But that would have been short-changing our readers, because Invasion is only part of the story.

  Contact continues that story.

  Colonization escalates it.

  We envision the entire series spanning seven books. That might change if we uncover new and unexpected angles the story wants to steer us in (this is common; if you think authors invent stories, we’d argue that’s not entirely accurate), but it’ll be around that number, give or take. We know how it will end. We know the phases it will march through on its way — again allowing that the story always seems to find its most natural path.

  Invasion — the story of what happened before the aliens set foot on the planet — matters to that end.

  And Meyer Dempsey’s creeping sense of intuition matters very much to that end.

  It’d be easy to enjoy this novel’s ride, taking a quasi-apocalyptic adventure ending in a confrontation and a twist ending. You can do that if you’d like. Plenty of readers certainly seem to enjoy this book on that level.

  But we hope, when this series is done, that you’ll look back and see Invasion for what it is in the larger story’s context.

  Because the story doesn’t start with the aliens.

  The story begins with Meyer Dempsey.

  The story begins with an itch that Meyer can’t quite scratch — an urge not to flee the city or escape the crowds or even to get his family away from danger … but rather from an overwhelming urge to reach his “Axis Mundi” — a place he was told was special through his dreams and journeying in an otherworldly haze.

  In Contact, you’ll learn where Meyer vanished to, and why.

  In Colonization, you’ll see what role Meyer has yet to play, and you’ll see how he was always hand-picked by his captors, always selected in advance for a purpose, always dragged toward his axis as if by an invisible hand.

  And in the following books, you’ll learn what the aliens want from us. From the planet. And from Meyer himself.

  We could have skipped Meyer’s flight to the mountains, but if we had, we’d have been shortchanging you. We’d have been starting in this story’s middle. We’d have been failing to look at the pre-invasion Earth through the eyes of its invaders. We’d have been closing our eyes to what the aliens crossed time and space to find.

  We didn’t just want to invade the planet with this story.

  We wanted to ask how, and what. But most importantly, we wanted to ask WHY.

  Invasion is the first part of the answer to that final three-letter question.

  Meyer’s fate in remaining six (we think!) books in this series is the rest of it.

  Happy reading!

  Johnny (and Sean)

  Contact

  Chapter One

  “Did you see anything?” Piper asked. “Anything at all?”

  Trevor was slumped on the couch, his NexFlight game system’s power cord creating a tripping hazard in the underground bunker. It was supposed to be plugged while charging, but the batteries had dwindled to useless over a month ago. There were vast stores in a cold cellar near the bedrooms, reserved for flashlights and lanterns in case of emergency. Meyer would have a fit if Trevor used them for games. But Meyer wouldn’t throw a fit because he was gone. And, Piper felt more certain by the day, was never coming back.

  “I didn’t look.” Trevor’s eyes never left the game.

  “You didn’t look? Go look, Trevor.”

  Trevor sighed and met Piper’s eyes for a split second. Then, as he’d been doing since his teen boy hormones had kicked on months before the ships had arrived, looked moodily away. As if he couldn’t face her, or was too cool for a maternal figure — stepmother or not.

  “What?”

  “What’s the point?”

  “‘What’s the point?’ What if your dad’s out there, Trevor?”

  “He’s not.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Trevor shrugged — he didn’t have an answer but wasn’t ready to obey. The same shrug he’d give his sister, if Lila had asked. But Piper wasn’t his sister. And with Heather around, she clearly wasn’t his mother. But she was something, and dammit, she didn’t like being ignored.

  “Go on, Trevor. We all have our jobs.”

  “Why, though? Dad made the place a fortress with everything we’d want or need. You keep making up things to do that don’t need to be done. ‘Check the air filters, Trevor.’ ‘Check the cameras, Trevor.’ ‘Bring out more cans, Trevor,’ as if anyone can’t just grab whatever food they want. And what exactly am I supposed to be looking for with the air filters? What do I know about air filters? ‘Yep, they still look like big fuzzy accordions.’” Trevor rolled his eyes. “It’s like you’re just trying to keep us busy.”

  Piper felt her temper rising. At first, she’d felt nothing but fear. Then Meyer had vanished, and intense worry mingled with her terror. A halfway sense of loss followed a few weeks of missing him, but even the emptiness had been hard to maintain over the past three months as the bunker’s day-in, day-out routine composed life’s underground ritual.

 
Wake, chores, kill time, sleep. Rinse and repeat.

  Crowds gathered on the grounds above, then swelled to a small colony. They’d stopped being able to go outside, and cabin fever worsened. Resentment was Piper’s newest emotion. She had to shoulder this burden herself. She seemed to be the only one willing to do what was needed to keep them together, safe, and sane. It was a responsibility she hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. Meyer might have saved them, but he’d also left his wife holding the bag when he’d gone … well … wherever it was he’d gone. It wasn’t fair.

  “Just do it, Trevor,” she snapped.

  He rolled his eyes again then stalked toward the control room next to the storage pantry. His shoulders were slumped, and she caught his put-upon look. She wanted to shout after him to improve his attitude but couldn’t stand the sound of those words from her mouth.

  “No sign of Dad on the cameras,” Trevor said, emerging a few minutes later. “Though I don’t know why you couldn’t just look.”

  Piper held her tongue, forcing herself to remember that Trevor was as scared, cooped-up, and angry as she was. It was inconvenient that his method of coping made it harder for Piper, but it was what it was.

  The thought softened her mood. She eased onto the ottoman beside the couch as he lay back and resumed his game.

  “Trevor. Look at me.”

  His eyes found Piper’s. She saw his angry glare melt into a boy’s dark and injured gaze. Then his eyes flicked away, but even a moment of vulnerability was better than nothing.

  “I know you think this is stupid. And I guess you don’t like me telling you what to do.” That last bit had a double meaning. Even back in New York, Piper hadn’t told either of the kids what to do. She’d always felt too much like one of them, being only eight years from her teens. But times had changed, and in their new situation, Heather only made jokes. Piper didn’t want to be the bunker’s only responsible adult, but if she didn’t take the helm, nobody would.

  “I’m just trying to do what your dad wanted. He built this place to keep us safe. And thank God he did, right?”

  Trevor shrugged without looking up.

  “But … Trev … it’s not enough to survive. It’s not only just having enough water from the spring — and food, and vitamins, and the UV lamp for Vitamin D, and enough propane to get us through the winters. Yeah, he did make this place a fortress, and yeah, he was a smart man who thought ahead and—”

  “You mean is,” Trevor mumbled into his shirt. “He is a smart man.”

  “Of course, honey.” Piper put her hand on his arm in what she hoped was a motherly way. Trevor flinched but let her hand remain. At least that was something. “He thought ahead, and that means we have everything we need to survive for a long time.”

  Piper considered telling Trevor some of the particulars she’d learned from the systems manuals but decided not to. Trevor was barely listening, and he might find the details more daunting than comforting. He didn’t need to know about the power redundancies, the satellite hookup, the three levels of water supply, the stockpiled propane, or the weapons that terrified Piper more than reassured her. For Meyer Dempsey, “prepared” and “paranoid” were sisters. There were entire sections of the manuals — the deepest cellars of Meyer’s paranoia — that Piper couldn’t bear to read. Meyer truly had thought of everything, including things nobody should ever have to think about.

  “But ‘just surviving’ is kind of like … like ‘barely alive.’ We don’t want to simply exist. We need things to do. To stay normal, you know?”

  “That’s why we have a TV. And games and books.”

  Piper sighed. “Yeah, but just being entertained is like being on vacation all the time. Do you know how, at the end of summer vacation, you’re almost eager for school so you’re not just sitting around, doing whatever you want?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not sure I can explain this in a way that’ll make sense, but …” Piper sighed. “Even if the result of our chores don’t matter, doing them does.”

  “Mom says they’re stupid.”

  Piper looked toward the doorway, leading into the bunker equivalent of a study. Heather and Lila were in there, mostly out of earshot. Piper would probably win if Heather challenged her authority to tell the kids what to do because Heather was such a wiseass. Piper didn’t want to test that theory. Heather, like the kids, seemed determined to deny certain realities. But it wasn’t fair to ask the kids to choose between two mother figures. Like parents divorcing, Heather and Piper had to present a unified front rather than using the children as pawns between them.

  “She’s not thinking about things like this, Trevor. Your mother has her hands full with Lila. She’s much better with the whole pregnancy thing, seeing as I’ve never been pregnant.”

  Seeming embarrassed, Trevor glanced down at Piper’s body then back at his own chest.

  “Your mom’s good at being a mother, and I’m good at …” She trailed off. Nagging came to mind, but Piper didn’t like that at all. She searched for a replacement to describe her pestering duties. Nothing came.

  “Look,” Piper said. “Think of it this way: do you think it’s stupid to keep checking those cameras?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What if tomorrow is the day you check them and see your father?” Piper pointed toward the spiral staircase in the room’s corner. “Right up there, at the door by the bathroom, appearing on the kitchen camera. What if he comes back, but we never see it?”

  “Can’t he just knock?”

  The simple question — and the almost hopeless way Trevor had asked — broke Piper’s heart. “I don’t think he could do anything we’d hear, sweetie. The door is strong, and closed is closed.”

  Trevor shifted moodily on the couch. “If you wanted him to come back, you shouldn’t have closed us in.”

  “That’s not fair, Trevor. We discussed this. All of us, together.”

  Trevor shook his head. Again, Piper tried to slip inside his mind to see things as he must be seeing them. He wasn’t trying to be difficult. He was dealing with their situation in the only way his defenses allowed. They all had their defenses. Heather made jokes; Lila got bitchy and blamed it on pregnancy hormones; Raj acted like an obnoxious prima donna, complaining and whining and futilely trying to contact his family on his idiotic little communicator watch. And Piper? She checked manuals and made chore lists.

  As Trevor had said: the bunker ran itself so long as power from the windmill stayed on. And yes, that power had been buggy, but it was nothing she needed to worry about. There were redundancies: a rechargeable battery array inside the bunker, plus solar panels on the roof and in a nearby clearing. If redundancies failed, a generator sitting in the utility room with the battery array exhausted to the outside. And if that failed (or if its gasoline went bad; she’d read that it only lasted about six months), they had daylight reflected down from concealed skylights to light their way, propane to heat the place, and a lifetime’s supply of food. There were plenty of lanterns and LED flashlights, plus a few security lights mounted on the walls. They’d be fine. Her constant policing was just whistling in the dark, and it wasn’t fair to blame Trevor because his coping strategies appeared less productive than hers. Fretting was fretting, no matter its form.

  “I didn’t want to close the door, Trevor. But we all agreed that we had to. We left it open as long as we could. It isn’t as if we can just leave the thing closed and unlocked. Your dad changed something when we came in the first time, somehow arming the place. Now the only way to get in is for the person on the inside to let them in. We would have had to literally prop it open. And how would that work once the crowds started showing up?”

  Trevor looked toward the ceiling. It was made of reinforced concrete and could probably (knowing Meyer) withstand a bomb blast. But for a moment Trevor seemed to be trying to see or hear through it — to cast accusing eyes on the hundreds of people occupying the house, the grounds, the hills beyond the trees
in their tents. The people who’d forced the family to shut the door that might keep his father out.

  Power flickered. Piper flinched, looked up, and saw a tear brimming in the corner of Trevor’s eye. He noticed it before it could fall and wiped it furiously away.

  He looked toward the TV, obviously longing. For the first month and a half, that thin black screen had been their window to the world. They’d obsessively watched. Then, one morning, Lila had turned it on and found nothing. There was still power to the set and satellite receiver, but not a single channel on air. The Internet died the same day. Cell service, spotty from the start, had ceased. They’d used the screen to watch old TV shows stored on the living room juke ever since. They’d been living in a little black box. Their world was the bunker and what the cameras showed them. Beyond that, there might not be any Earth left, for all the Dempseys knew.

  “Do you really think he was … you know … taken?”

  “I don’t know,” Piper said. But yes, she did think that — same as the many other abductions they’d heard of before the broadcasts stopped. Meyer wouldn’t have run off. Not after all he’d done to get them here. And if he’d gone out in the middle of the night and been killed, they would have discovered his body. Despite searching far and wide, they’d found nothing.

  “Do you think any more of the people who were taken have been sent home?”

  Piper patted his arm. She had no idea. It had been five or six weeks since they’d seen their last news report, but as of that time, abductees had been returning at a rate of about five or ten per week. They simply arrived back at their doorsteps — always dazed and confused, usually strange to loved ones and friends, sometimes paranoid and violent. Even if Meyer returned, he might be different. But still, even after all this time, there was a chance he might come home as he’d been, against all odds. But here and now, Trevor was seeking reassurance rather than fact.