by Wyatt Savage
My eyes flapped open and all I could see for several seconds was boxes of light, grids, and icons, as if I’d been transported into a video game. I blinked, and the boxes and icons vanished, replaced by Dwayne and Lish.
Dwayne had changed out of his store clothes into casual attire, T-shirt, and a pair of retro Jordans. He was puffing on a vape pen, gaping down at me like I was an insect. “Typical. Leave it to the black man to pull the white man up.”
“Keep sucking on that vape pen and it’s gonna blow up in your face, Dwayne,” I groaned.
He smiled and pulled me to my feet. “If you’re done napping I’ve got some good news. We’re all free to go home!”
I shook my head. “What happened?”
He blinked. “What?”
“Didn’t you see that flash of light before?” I asked.
Lish scrunched up her nose. “See what?”
Before I could respond, I noticed the store’s air handler was silent.
Lish read my look and nodded. “Power’s out.”
“But we’ve got a backup generator,” I said, pointing to the boxy Generac generator propped on a concrete slab.
“That’s out too.”
Dwayne held up his cellphone. “So’s this.”
“How is that even possible?” I asked.
Dwayne shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care, but Bryson said we can go home so I’m out of here before he changes his mind. Peace out!”
Dwayne mimed tapping ash from his vape pen, then headed out past a loading dock as I rubbed the back of my head, which was throbbing from my fall. I noticed Lish standing by herself, staring into the overcast sky as the wind cooed.
“Do you feel that?” she asked.
“Feel what?”
“There’s something in the air.” She closed her eyes. “My momma always said the scariest thing in the world is the moment before a summer storm. That feeling of…electricity that just hangs in the air. I’m getting that feeling right now.”
If there was something in the air, I didn’t feel it.
Because of my accident I couldn’t drive, but it wasn’t really a biggie since I only lived a quarter mile from the store. I walked down the main drag, past pawn shops, vape stores, and several other dollar stores. Sometimes I think there are more dollar stores in America than there are stop signs.
Crossing an eerily silent intersection, I loped through a stand of trees behind a Shell gas station and stopped. I fished in my pocket and pulled out a yellow sticky that I’d written my address on. You’d think I could remember the place I’d lived in since I was four, but that’s what my life had become since the accident: lots of little yellow post-it stickies and reminders left all around the house by my mother. I’d gotten some Mountain Dew on the sticky at work, but the address was still legible.
Realizing I’d made a wrong turn, I doubled back and headed down a ghost road left by a utility company when it pruned the undergrowth near some power lines. Eventually, after several stops and starts, I recognized my block and neighborhood, a cluster of forty-two houses, mostly Colonials and Cape Cods, on tidy little lots.
Like lots of places in Maryland, my ‘hood had been blue-collar back in the fifties. When black folks started moving in during the 80s, those that were lighter-hued beat a hasty retreat to the state’s more southern counties. This “white-flight” was later followed by an influx of Hispanics in the nineties, and now a nice diverse mix of younger families looking for a starter home had started to filter back in.
Since the power was out, almost everyone was outside shooting the shit, which made me a little sad because that was what it took to bring people together in the Twenty-First Century: disasters and emergencies.
I waved at Justin Best, a cantankerous black dude in the middle of his years who drove a Frito-Lay truck. Justin shot me an icy glare and continued conversing with Steven and Elise Bruciak, a pair of thirty-something medical-marijuana “government-relations specialists” (which is a fancy way of saying lobbyists), who had a fondness for electric cars plastered with bumper stickers about making government “noble again,” whatever the hell that meant. The Bruciaks’ two rugrats, a boy and a girl, were busy trying to kill each other in front of the souped-up RV that took up most of the yard of Ronald Bessemer, a forty-nine-year-old gentle giant of a process server with a half-mullet who everyone just called “Ronimal.”
Ronimal waved at me and I noticed the glint of something metallic near the small of his back.
My eyes strained to see what it was.
A pistol.
I was about to ask Ronimal why he was packing heat, but then my mind detoured and I kept on walking.
By the time I entered the front door on our three-bedroom rancher, things had changed. For one, the power had come back on, and a sound echoed up and down the block, a note that lay somewhere between a terror-stricken shriek and a cry of joy.
I wanted to step back outside and see what it was, but I sensed a disturbance in the force, a weird vibe in my house. For starters, Mom and Dad were not simply watching TV; they were staring at the flatscreen while sitting on the ground in our living room.
Mom was in her underwear, as if she’d been in the middle of dressing when something got her attention, and her hands were pressed to her ears like she was trying to stop her brains from oozing out. Dad was seated, legs tucked up into his gut, rocking back and forth like Ellis Prince, the little fair-haired autistic boy that lived three houses down.
They didn’t even turn when I entered, just continued to stare at the screen which flashed with images from all over the world.
The volume was up so high with one of those emergency broadcast things beeping that I could barely hear myself think. I moved over, grabbed the remote and lowered it, catching sight of the caption on the TV and a string of words: “Global,” “Panic,” “Extraterrestrial,” and “Arrival.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
They both turned. We traded a long look and then they hugged me, almost violently taking me up in their arms and I could smell the perspiration on them. You have to realize that I’ve got mostly Irish blood in me and the Irish aren’t exactly an emotional bunch, so I knew then and there that something was seriously amiss.
I asked Mom why she was in her undies and she didn’t respond. Dad grabbed the remote and turned off the TV and that’s when we heard it.
A sound.
A note that reminded me of a thousand knife blades drawn across one another.
Mom had her hand over her mouth, pointing toward the open sliding glass doors that led to the backyard. “You…it…it’s coming from outside,” she said, spitting the words like a curse.
Dad massaged his face and grabbed a robe that he draped over Mom. “The news people said to go outside and see.”
“See what?” I asked.
Without replying, Mom breezed past me out through the doors. I followed, moving across our rear deck, and looked up into the sky and there they were.
Somebody else might’ve called them craft, or vessels, or even ships, but I thought the things in the sky looked like a collection of old-timey, blown-glass Christmas ornaments.
Some were round and glowing, others were long and cigar-shaped, and still more were vaguely in the form of snowflakes or those cubes I’d heard people call tesseracts. Whatever they were, they weren’t ours and they hovered in the air, stretching across the horizon like a proper armada.
A hand grabbed mine and I looked over to see Dad. His lip was quivering and there was a look in his eye I’d never seen before. Fear. Real fear for perhaps the first time in his life. He released my hand and took a liking to the ground.
“Jesus God, Lo,” he whispered, using a nickname I’d had since childhood.
“Are they real?” I asked.
Dad didn’t reply, but his look spoke volumes.
I glanced sideways to see that a good portion of the neighborhood was outside too. Most folks were in their backyards, but some were on t
op of their cars, and a few brave souls had even ventured onto their roofs, where they sat perched like crows.
Some of the assembled were laughing nervously, others were crying, and several women screamed as Jess Larson, the one-legged mechanic who lived two houses up from us, clutched his chest and keeled over in an untidy heap, dead before he hit the ground.
Before anyone could react, there was a retina-searing flash and a dazzling wave of white light that rolled toward us like one of those tsunamis.
3
I was a little slow on the uptake on account of my damaged brain so unlike the others, who dove for cover, I caught the full brunt of it.
The wave, the alien presence or whatever it was, didn’t so much as roll over me as it seemed to surge right through me. I was blinded for several seconds, the air smelled of copper and ozone, and I had the sensation that my internal firewalls had been breached and the doors to my consciousness ripped wide open.
Figurative dust seemed to fall from my eyes as I opened them to see a sky that flickered and wavered like a heat haze. In defiance of gravity, something hovered in the air forty feet out in front of me.
It was a spiral of black smoke.
A whirlwind.
The smoke twisted in the sky and I caught a hint of movement within it, what might be the silhouette of a vaguely humanoid shape.
The air warped and the smoke resolved into the form of what I took to be an extraterrestrial creature of some kind, a thing that stood several feet taller than a normal person, with no eyes and a ludicrously oversized mouth, the mouth of a clown I thought. Its body was pewter-colored and slabbed with muscle and sinew, its translucent torso displaying a collection of throbbing innards that looked part-biological, part-machine.
In the place of normal limbs, the creature had gimballed frames with pallid hands that opened like the petals on a flower. In the very center of the hands was what looked like another mouth complete with tiny, needlelike teeth. The alien was intriguing and downright horrifying in equal measure.
The others—Mom, Dad, and our neighbors—appeared to be seeing the same thing as they too were standing, mouths open, rooted in place.
Without apology or acknowledgment of the situation, the alien, with a vocalization that initially sounded like something between a person barfing and drowning, informed us that the world as we knew it was over.
“We are known by some as a word that translates into your language as Noctem, and have come to play a game,” the thing said, communicating directly to me without moving its mouth. “The game began eons ago, and has been played in your corner of the galaxy since the time of the construction of what you call the Great Pyramid of Giza, an engineering and geographical marvel that sits at the intersection of the longest line of latitude and the longest line of longitude. At or around the center of your planet’s landmass.”
I wanted to ask a question, hell I wanted to scratch an itch on my butt, but I couldn’t move a muscle. My paralysis was nearly complete, although I could move my eyes.
“The game shall begin in 27 days,” the alien continued. “Everyone on your planet between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four shall be required to participate. All others shall know the peace of the great void.” The little hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention. I didn’t like the sounds of that great void thing at all.
“The rules of the game are that there are no rules save one: once the game begins, participants are to use any means necessary to reach the pyramid in 19 days,” the alien added, placing special emphasis on the phrase any means necessary. “All participants shall be gifted neural implants that some call SecondSight, which will assist you in the playing of the game. What was once virtual, will now become reality.”
It was here that the alien smiled and lifted its freakshow hands. “Rejoice, for the game is our gift to you. Hundreds of millions shall play, but only a fraction of that shall taste victory!”
A rock struck the alien in the head.
Or at least it was aimed at the thing’s head.
Some kind of barely visible forcefield blocked the rock before it could make contact.
My eyes ratcheted to the right.
Mary Wray was standing next to her parents in the next-door yard. She was all of seven or eight, the only child of Tom and Brenda.
Tom, who was able to move, held up his hands and forced a smile to act like he’d done it, but it was clear Mary had tossed the stone. She was holding another one in her left hand, you see.
The alien’s expression never changed, but he, it, twirled a finger like a wizard casting a spell. Some kind of green mist flew in a stream from a fingertip and haloed Mary’s body.
Then the mist turned her inside out.
That’s right, little Mary Wray’s insides were suddenly on the outside of her body. The organs were just hanging there. Heart. Lungs. Liver. Little yellow patches of fat and strings of muscle and sinew. Pulsing. Glistening. There are some things that once seen cannot be unseen. That was one of them.
Mary tried to scream, but her mouth was on the inside of her body so the effect was like she had a plastic bag wrapped over her face. The hole where her mouth should’ve been sucked in and out.
Everybody was too shocked or immobilized to do anything and then the mist wreathed her body and sucked everything out. That’s the only thing I can think of because her skin, and that’s all that was left of her, a robe of flesh, dropped to the ground. It looked like some kind of Halloween costume you slipped into and out of.
The alien didn’t react to the death of Mary. Instead, the thing uttered something indecipherable in its alien tongue, and whipped its hands as a cascade of images and data, everything from the complex to the mundane, swept over me. It all streaked by in the blink of an eye, a library’s worth of information as a surge of energy gripped my body, a powerful kick of adrenaline.
My paralysis suddenly ended and I fell to my side and lay there for a good long while, cognizant of the fact that the aliens were inside of me. I could feel something skittering around in my guts like tiny crabs. I closed my eyes and listened to the sobs of my neighbors and the chirping of the birds.
When I opened my eyes, a kind of head-up display, a videogame-like HUD, what I presumed was my SecondSight, filled my POV. Just as before, there were boxes and icons, only this time they were filled words like “vitals,” “kills,” “class,” “species,” “health,” “chattel,” and a blinking cursor.
Words appeared next to the cursor, some kind of alien script or calligraphy that transformed into the phrase: “Do you have questions?”
“Yes,” I said audibly.
Nothing happened.
The box with the words, “Do you have questions?” blinked.
I stared at it. Repeated the word “yes,” and when nothing happened again, closed my eyes. This time I simply thought of the word yes and that’s when I heard it. A disembodied echo, an alien ghost voice that came to me. The voice was feminine, but had a cold, steely quality.
“You’re one of them aren’t you?” I thought.
“I am one with the Noctem, yes.”
“What happened to that little girl? What happened to Mary?”
“She has reached her journey’s end.”
“What are you?”
“Whatever you want me to be,” the alien voice replied.
“What’s your name?”
“I have no identifier.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You have already asked more than one.”
“How the hell are we talking?”
“A method of vicarious communication translated roughly into your language as ‘Mindspeak.’”
“Why did you come to Earth?”
“All civilizations must participate in the game, what you will come to know as the Melee.”
“Why?”
“It is the only way to separate the weak from the strong.”
“Are you inside me?”
“Yes.”<
br />
“How?”
“Your planet was seeded long ago. Bits of us are in your air, your
water, your land.”
My mouth was raw and my cheeks suddenly felt flushed, felt wind-burnt.
“Why are you communicating with me?” I thought.
“I will assist you once the game begins.”
“What happens if I don’t want to play?” I asked.
“You will reach your journey’s end,” the voice said matter-of-factly.
“What happens to people who are under eighteen and older than fifty-four?”
“They will reach their journey’s end.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“There are no accolades for those found wanting.”
I was instantly chilled to my marrow. I didn’t want to ask what that meant, but I knew deep down that it wasn’t good.
“What happens to my parents and the rest of my family?”
“How old are they?”
“I’m not telling you that.”
“If they are not between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four they will reach their journey’s end.”
“Can I say one more thing.”
“Yes.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I said.
The voice was silent and I pressed my eyes closed and willed away what I’d come to think of as an internal head-up display and I’ll be damned if the thing didn’t disappear. I pushed myself up to see Mom, Dad, and all the others slowly rising, dusting themselves off.
I moved over and hugged them tightly, staring up into a sky that had returned to the way it always was.
The aliens were gone.
4
DAY TWO
“Year of Fear,” Mom said the next morning as I came downstairs for breakfast. She had the TV blaring and was pointing at the screen. “That’s what those jackals are calling it now.”
Mom had this strange compulsion to toggle between Fox and MSNBC, which never made a whole lot of sense to me. They were different kinds of same in my book, water carriers for the big corporations that had a knack for finding ways to screw over regular folks. I stared at the screen where an off-the-rack lolly-pop head of an anchor was breathlessly talking about what had happened under a banner with scary letters that said Year of Fear.