by Neil Clarke
“Yeah, except nothing happened,” he said, just like he did twenty times last night. “We backed away when the glow started. Then the police came, and some guy from Homeland, and Mr. Rightly found me that old sweatshirt—”
“I was so scared,” she interrupted, talking to the wall. “I got home and you weren’t here. You should have been home already. And the phones weren’t working, and then everything went dark.”
“I had to walk home from the zoo,” he said again. “Mr. Rightly couldn’t give me a ride if he wanted, because he was parked over by the crash site.”
“The crash site,” she repeated.
He knew not to talk.
“You shouldn’t have been there at all,” she said. “Something drops from the sky, and you run straight for it.”
The luckiest moment in his life, he knew.
“Simon,” she said. “Why do you take such chances?”
The woman was a widow and her other son was a soldier stationed in a distant, hostile country, and even the most normal day gave her reasons to be nervous. But now aliens were raining down on their heads, and there was no word happening in the larger world. Touching the cool forehead once again, she said, “I’m not like you, Simon.”
“I know that, Mom.”
“I don’t like adventure,” she said. “I’m just waiting for the lights to come on.”
But neither of them really expected that to happen. So he changed the subject, telling her, “I’m hungry.”
“Of course you are.” Thankful for a normal task, she hurried into the kitchen. “How about cereal before our milk goes bad?”
Bloch stood and pulled on yesterday’s pants and the hooded Cornell sweatshirt borrowed from the zoo’s lost-and-found. “Yeah, cereal sounds good,” he said.
“What kind?” she asked from inside the darkened refrigerator.
“Surprise me,” he said. Then, after slipping on his shoes, he crept out the back door.
Mr. Rightly looked as if he hadn’t moved in twelve hours. He was standing in the classroom where Bloch left him, and he hadn’t slept. Glasses that needed a good scrubbing obscured red worried eyes. A voice worked over by sandpaper said, “That was fast.”
“What was fast?” Bloch asked.
“They just sent a car for you. I told them you were probably at home.”
“Except I walked here on my own,” the boy said.
“Oh.” Mr. Rightly broke into a long weak laugh. “Anyway, they’re gathering up witnesses, seeing what everybody remembers.”
It was still night outside. The classroom was lit by battery-powered lamps. “They” were the Homeland people in suits and professors in khaki, with a handful of soldiers occupying a back corner. The classroom was the operation’s headquarters. Noticing Bloch’s arrival, several people came forward, offering hands and names. The boy pretended to listen. Then a short Indian fellow pulled him aside, asking, “Did you yourself speak to the entity?”
“I heard it talk.”
“And did it touch you?”
Bloch nearly said, “Yes.” But then he thought again, asking, “Who are you?”
“I told you. I am head of the physics department at the university, here at the request of Homeland Security.”
“Was it fusion?”
“Pardon?”
“The creature, the machine,” Bloch said. “It turned bright blue and the pond was boiling. So we assumed some kind of reactor was supplying the power.”
The head professor dismissed him with a wave. “Fusion is not as easy as that, young man. Reactors do not work that way.”
“But it asked for water, which is mostly hydrogen,” Bloch said. “Hydrogen is what makes the sun burn.”
“Ah,” the little man said. “You and your high school teacher are experts in thermonuclear technologies, are you?”
“Who is? You?”
The man flung up both hands, wiping the air between them. “I was invited here to help. I am attempting to learn what happened last night and what it is occurring now. What do you imagine? That some cadre of specialists sits in a warehouse waiting for aliens to come here and be studied? You think my colleagues and I have spent two minutes in our lives preparing for this kind of event?”
“I don’t really—”
“Listen to me,” the head professor insisted.
But then the ground rose. It was the same sensation that struck half a dozen times during Bloch’s walk back to the zoo, only this event felt larger and there wasn’t any matching sense of dropping afterwards. The room remained elevated, and everyone was silent. Then an old professor turned to a young woman, asking, “Did Kevin ever get that accelerograph?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, see if you can find either one. We need to get that machine working and calibrated.”
The girl was pretty and very serious, very tense. Probably a graduate student, Bloch decided. She hurried past, glancing at the big boy and the college sweatshirt that was too small. Then she was gone and he was alone in the room with a couple dozen tired adults who kept talking quietly and urgently among themselves.
The head physicist was lecturing the bald man from Homeland. The bald man was flanked by two younger men who kept flipping through pages on matching clipboards, reading in the dim light. An Army officer was delivering orders to a couple soldiers. Bloch couldn’t be sure of ranks or units. He had a bunch of questions to ask Matt. For a thousand reasons, he wished he could call his brother. But there were no phones; even the Army was working with old-fashioned tools. The officer wrote on a piece of paper and tore it off the pad, handing it to one scared grunt, sending him and those important words off to “The Site.”
Mr. Rightly had moved out of the way. He looked useless and exhausted and sorry, but at least he had a stool to perch on.
“What do we know?” Bloch asked him.
Something was funny in those words.
Laughing along with his teacher, Bloch asked, “Do you still think our spaceship is different from the big probe?”
As if sharing a secret, Mr. Rightly leaned close. “It came from a different part of the sky, and it was alone. And its effects, big as they are, don’t compare with what’s happening on the other side of the world.”
The professors were huddled up, talking and pointing at the ground.
“What is happening on the other side?”
Mr. Rightly asked him to lean over, and then he whispered. “The colonel was talking to the Homeland person. I heard him say that the hardened military channels didn’t quit working right away. Twenty minutes after the big impact, from Europe, from Asia, came reports of bright lights and large motions, from the ground and the water. And then the wind started to blow hard, and all those voices fell silent.”
Bloch felt sad for his brother, but he couldn’t help but say, “Wow.”
“There is a working assumption,” Mr. Rightly said. “The Earth’s night side has been lost, but the invasion hasn’t begun here. Homeland and the military are trying not to lose this side too.”
Thinking about the alien and the dead kids, Bloch said, “You were right, sir. We shouldn’t have trusted it.”
Mr. Rightly shrugged and said nothing.
Some kind of meeting had been called in the back of the room. There was a lot of passion and no direction. Then the Homeland man whispered to an assistant who wrote hard on the clipboard, and the colonel found new orders and sent his last soldier off on another errand.
“What’s the alien doing now?” Bloch asked.
“Who knows,” Mr. Rightly said.
“Is the radiation keeping us away?”
“No, it’s not . . .” The glasses needed another shove. “Our friend vanished. After you and I left, it apparently punched through the bottom of the pond. I haven’t been to the Site myself. But the concret
e is shattered and there’s a slick new hole reaching down who-knows-how-far. That’s the problem. And that’s why they’re so worried about these little quakes, or whatever they are. What is our green-eyed mystery doing below us?”
Bloch looked at the other faces and then at the important floor. Then a neat, odd thought struck him: the monster was never just the creature itself. It was also the way that the creature lurked about, refusing to be seen. It was the unknown wrapped heavy and thick around it, and there was the vivid electric fear that made the air glow. Real life was normal and silly. Nothing happening today was normal or silly.
He started to laugh, enjoying the moment, the possibilities.
Half of the room stared at him, everybody wondering what was wrong with that towering child.
“They’re bringing in equipment, trying to dangle a cable down into the hole,” Mr. Rightly said.
“What, with a camera at the end?”
“Cameras don’t seem to be working. Electronics come and go. So no, they’ll send down a volunteer.”
“I’d go,” Bloch said.
“And I know you mean that,” Mr. Rightly said.
“Tell them I would.”
“First of all: I won’t. And second, my word here is useless. With this crew, I have zero credibility.”
The physicist and colonel were having an important conversation, fingers poking imaginary objects in the air.
“I’m hungry,” Bloch said.
“There’s MREs somewhere,” said Mr. Rightly.
“I guess I’ll go look for them,” the boy lied. Then he walked out into a hallway that proved wonderfully empty.
Every zoo exists somewhere between the perfect and the cheap. Every cage wants to be impregnable and eternal, but invisibility counts for something too. The prisoner’s little piece of the sky had always been steel mesh reaching down to a concrete wall sculpted to resemble stone, and people would walk past all day, every day, and people would stand behind armored glass, reading about Amur leopards when they weren’t looking at him.
Sometimes he paced the concrete ground, but not this morning. Everything felt different and wrong this morning. He was lying beside a dead decorative tree, marshaling his energies. Then the monster came along. It was huge and loud and very clumsy, and he kept perfectly still as the monster made a sloppy turn on the path, its long trailing arm tearing through the steel portion of the sky. Then the monster stopped and a man climbed off and looked at the damage, and then he ran to the glass, staring into the gloomy cage. But he never saw any leopards. He breathed with relief and climbed back on the monster and rode it away, and the leopard rose and looked at the hole ripped in the sky. Then with a lovely unconscious motion, he was somewhere he had never been, and the world was transformed.
Cranes and generators were rumbling beside the penguin pond. Temporary lights had been nailed to trees, and inside those brilliant cones were moving bodies and purposeful chaos, grown men shouting for this to be done and not that, and goddamn this and that, and who the hell was in charge? Bloch was going to walk past the pond’s backside. His plan, such as it was, was to act as if he belonged here. If somebody stopped him, he would claim that he was heading for the vending machines at the maintenance shed—a good story since it happened to be true. Or maybe he would invent some errand given to him by the little physicist. There were a lot of lies waiting inside the confusion, and he was looking forward to telling stories to soldiers holding guns. “Don’t you believe me?” he would ask them, smiling all the while. “Well maybe you should shoot me. Go on, I dare you.”
The daydream ended when he saw the graduate student. He recognized her tight jeans and the blond hair worn in a ponytail. She was standing on the path ahead of him, hands at her side, eyes fixed on the little hill behind the koi pond. Bloch decided to chat with her. He was going to ask her about the machine that she was looking for, what was it called? He wanted to tell her about carrying the alien, since that might impress her. There was enough daylight now that he could see her big eyes and the rivets in her jeans, and then he noticed how some of the denim was darker than it should be, soaked through by urine.
The girl heard Bloch and flinched, but she didn’t blink, staring at the same unmoving piece of landscape just above the little waterfall.
Bloch stopped behind her, seeing nothing until the leopard emerged from the last clots of darkness.
Quietly, honestly, he whispered, “Neat.”
She flinched again, sucking down a long breath and holding it. She wanted to look at him and couldn’t. She forced herself not to run, but her arms started to lift, as if ready to sprout wings.
The leopard was at least as interested in the girl as Bloch was. Among the rarest of cats, most of the world’s Amur leopards lived in zoos. Breeding programs and Russian promises meant that they might be reintroduced into the Far East, but this particular male wasn’t part of any grand effort. He was inbred and had some testicular problem, and his keepers considered him ill-tempered and possibly stupid. Bloch knew all this but his heart barely sped up. Standing behind the young woman, he whispered, “How long have you been here?”
“Do you see it?” she muttered.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Quiet,” she insisted.
He said nothing.
But she couldn’t follow her own advice. A tiny step backward put her closer to him. “Two minutes, maybe,” she said. “But it seems like hours.”
Bloch watched the greenish-gold cat eyes. The animal was anxious. Not scared, no, but definitely on edge and ready to be scared, and that struck him as funny.
The woman heard him chuckling. “What?”
“Nothing.”
She took a deep breath. “What do we do?”
“Nothing,” was a useful word. Bloch said it again, with authority. He considered placing his hands on her shoulders, knowing she would let him. She might even like being touched. But first he explained, “If we do nothing, he’ll go away.”
“Or jump us,” she said.
That didn’t seem likely. She wasn’t attacked when she was alone, and there were two of them now. Bloch felt lucky. Being excited wasn’t the same as being scared, and he enjoyed standing with this woman, listening to the running water and her quick breaths. Colored fish were rising slowly in the cool morning, begging out of habit to be fed, and the leopard stared down from his high place, nothing moving but the tip of his long luxurious tail.
Voices interrupted the perfection. People were approaching, and the woman gave a start, and the leopard lifted his head as she backed against a boy nearly ten years younger than her. Halfway turning her head, she asked the electric air, “Who is it?”
Soldiers, professors, and the Homeland people—everybody was walking up behind them. If they were heading for the penguin pond, they were a little lost. Or maybe they had some other errand. Either way, a dozen important people came around the bend to find the graduate student and boy standing motionless. Then a soldier spotted the cat, and with a loud voice asked, “How do you think they keep that tiger there? I don’t see bars.”
Some people stopped, others kept coming.
The head physicist was in the lead. “Dear God, it’s loose,” he called out.
Suddenly everybody understood the situation. Every person had a unique reaction, terror and flight and shock and startled amusement percolating out of them in various configurations. The colonel and his soldiers mostly tried to hold their ground, and the government people were great sprinters, while the man who had ordered the woman out on the errand laughed loudest and came closer, if not close.
Then the physicist turned and tried to run, his feet catching each other. He fell hard, and something in that clumsiness intrigued the leopard, causing it to slide forwards, making ready to leap.
Bloch had no plan. He would have been happy to stand there all morning with this t
errified woman. But then a couple other people stumbled and dropped to their knees, and somebody wanted people to goddamn move so he could shoot. The mayhem triggered instincts in an animal that had killed nothing during its long comfortable life. Aiming for the far bank of the pond, the leopard leapt, and Bloch watched the trajectory while his own reflexes engaged. He jumped to his right, blocking the cat’s path. Smooth and graceful, it landed on the concrete bank, pulling into a tuck, and with both hands Bloch grabbed its neck. The leopard spun and slashed. Claws sliced into one of the big triceps, shredding the sweatshirt. Then Bloch angrily lifted the animal, surprised by how small it felt, but despite little exercise and its advanced years, the animal nearly pulled free.
Bloch shouted, “No!”
The claws slashed again.
Bloch dove into the pond—three hundred pounds of primate pressing the cat into the carp and cold water. The leopard got pushed to the bottom with the boy on top, a steady loud angry-happy voice telling it, “Stop stopstopstopstop.”
The water exploded. Wet fur and panicked muscle leaped over the little fake hill, vanishing. Then Bloch climbed out the water, relieved and thrilled, and he peeled off his sweatshirt, studying the long cuts raking his left arm.
Eyes closed in terror, the young woman hadn’t seen the leopard escape. Now she stared at the panicked fish, imagining the monster dead on the bottom. And she looked at Bloch, ready to say something, wanting very much to thank the boy who had swept into her nightmare to save her life. But then she felt the wet jeans, and touching herself, she said, “I can’t believe this.” She looked at the piss on her hand, and she sniffed it once, and then she was crying, saying, “Don’t look at me. Oh, Jesus, don’t look.”
He slept.
The medicine made him groggy, or maybe Bloch was so short of sleep that he could drift off at the first opportunity. Whatever the reason, he was warm and comfortable in the army bed, having a fine long dream where he wrestled leopards and a dragon and then a huge man with tusks for teeth and filthy, shit-stained hands that shook him again and again. Then a small throat was cleared and he was awake again.