by Wyatt Savage
“How did you do that?” the kid asked after one particularly impressive snatch and grab.
I favored him with a curious look. “Do what?”
Ronimal Jr., continued to fire pitches at the sandbag as I joined his old man in the massive workshop, which was large enough to house his RV. The air inside the wooden box was thick and hazy, little motes of dust falling down like flurries as Ronimal eased the door shut.
My SecondSight was still active and some kind of enhanced vision application clicked on because I could see even better in the murk.
“How’s he doing?” Ronimal asked, gesturing back at his boy.
“Reminds me of me,” I replied wistfully.
“Coaches think he’ll be able to really bring it when he gets older.”
I nodded. “It’s all about pushing off, using those legs to power the ball like Clemons used to do. He’s got those long arms of course...”
“Just like his mother.”
We shared a smile and the big guy handed me a warm can of soda. Then he looked back to see if his kid was listening and leaned into me. “What was that back there before?”
“Sir?”
“You catching those balls.”
“Lucky day.”
“It was a little more than that, Logan. I bet you’ve seen ‘em, haven’t you?”
“I saw the aliens if that’s what you mean.”
His gaze narrowed. “That is not what I mean.”
“Then what is it?”
“Those boxes and quadrants and whatnot.” He waved his hand in front of my face. “All up in your grill. You seen ‘em, haven’t you?”
I held his look and my targeting reticle centered on his nose. “What if I did?”
“What do you make of it?”
I opened the can of soda and took a pull from it. “I figure it’s all part of that game.”
“The Melee?”
“You know the name, huh?”
He nodded. “You know how to operate a firearm, Logan?”
“Sir?”
Ronimal moved to his workbench and pulled out a drawer. The gun that I’d seen him sporting near the small of his back was inside. He slid it out.
“You ever fired one? A forty-five?”
“No, sir,” I replied, which was true. I’d used shotguns a bunch of times with my old man on several halfassed deer hunts, but I’d never squeezed one off from a forty-five.
Ronimal placed the gun in my hand. It was warm like the can of soda, greasy, and the way it was positioned made it look like the head on a snake. “There’s only a couple of things you need to know.”
I aimed the gun and was surprised to see that my targeting reticle popped up and followed the movement of the gun, as if it was synched to the weapon.
Ronimal took the gun back from me and tugged back on what he said was the slide. A bullet leaped from the gun. I didn’t even see the damn thing, I just reacted to the disturbance in the air. Two fingers on my right hand snapped out and snagged the bullet in mid-air, like Mister Miyagi spearing flies with a set of chopsticks in Karate Kid.
Ronimal stared at the shell.
“I’m gonna ask you some questions, and I’d appreciate honest answers.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Do you have that voice inside of you? The one that sounds like the lady from the cellphone?”
I nodded.
“You talk to yours?” he asked.
“I have, yes.”
“What’d you say?”
“I believe I used the words ‘fuck’ and ‘off,’ sir.”
Ronimal chuckled and mussed my hair. “Good man,” he muttered. “Good man.” His smile wilted and he began stalking the workshop like a panther, running a hand through his hair. “That voice knows things, Logan.”
“I figured that, sir.”
“I spent several hours early this morning conversing with it.”
“What did it say?”
“Nothing good. Bottom line is, things might stay the way they’ve always been or they might get very bad,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the end of the world, but this game that’s coming, this Melee or whatever they call it, might make the apocalypse seem like a Sunday stroll in the park. We all might have to do things we don’t even want to talk about.”
“Like what?”
“Like godawful things,” he replied, his nostrils flaring in disgust.
He set the gun down on the workbench.
“You need to know that when the game starts you can’t trust nobody, you hear me? Moreover, it might be that you and me see each other out there. On the roads, the highways, wherever they decide the game is to be played...”
I brooded on this. “Yes, sir, I figure we might see each other at some point.”
“If I have to, I won’t hesitate to put you down, son. I hate to even say such a thing, but if it comes down to me and my family and you and yours, I will shoot you dead and you have to do the same to me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m pretty sure it’s scored.”
“What is?”
“The game, the Melee…there are points.”
I did a double-take. “Points as in—”
“Points like in a friggin’ video game,” Ronimal said.
“What kind?”
“I don’t exactly know, but that’s what I reckoned from what the voice told me. That woman, that voice is awful cagey, but sometimes it slips up.”
I took this in and he placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry for telling you all this, but I wanted you to hear it from me.”
My throat was as dry as the desert. “I appreciate you telling me, sir,” I croaked.
I flipped the bullet back at Ronimal who swung his hands, but completely missed it.
6
On the seventh day after the aliens arrived, Walt Goucher’s kid, Blaze, was walking his recalcitrant pitbull, Cerebrus, down past the guardrail on the dead end when he found it.
A silver sphere.
No bigger than a suitcase, the thing was just lying there in the brush near the banks of Horsepen’s Branch, a muddy coil of water that smelled of rotten eggs. I was out front washing my dad’s primer-splotched Accord when Blaze and Cerebrus came streaking past screaming bloody murder.
We called the cops, but they either didn’t believe us or were too busy to drive by, so a bunch of us went down to investigate.
Sure enough there it was.
Ten feet from the water, an eight-foot circle around the thing scorched, the shrubbery blackened and pressed to the ground.
We tried to move the sphere, even using some crowbars and a helluva lot of elbow grease, but the sphere wouldn’t budge. I conjured up my SecondSight, but that didn’t provide any information and when I placed my hands on the thing, I found it neither hot nor cold, but there was something emanating from it, what felt almost like a faint heartbeat.
Walt waited for us to leave and then went back with his shotgun. Later, he explained to us that the slugs and buckshot hadn’t even left a mark on the thing. I summoned up Sue, the alien voice, and asked her about the sphere, but she was coy. It was yet another goddamn thing she wasn’t at liberty to discuss. Social media had all kinds of answers of course, and none of ‘em good. I did find, however, that the spheres had appeared in hundreds of small and midsized towns all over America and the world. If the aliens’ plan was to fuck with us, they were doing a very good job.
On the seventh day after the aliens arrived, it was decided by the neighborhood honchos that since Christmas was only a few weeks off, there should be a winter block party. A way to blow off a little steam and regain some semblance of normalcy. Dad was especially pleased by the idea and had a spring in his step since the aliens hadn’t seen fit to show their faces after the initial visit.
“Didn’t I tell you,” he said, wagging a finger. “Didn’t I tell you it would all blow over?”
I grilled some burgers that tasted vaguely of lighter fluid, M
om made her famous German-style potato salad, and we headed on down to the end of the cul-de-sac where everyone had grub spread out on card tables next to a rented bounce-house, and an older gent named Mister Ha-Ha who wore suspenders and a bowler-hat made balloon animals for the kids.
I’d invited Lish and Dwayne and they seemed to be enjoying themselves, sucking down beers and nibbling on Justin Best’s thermonuclear chicken wings that were so damned hot that they nearly ate through the paper plates.
Lish had a balloon animal in hand that vaguely resembled a giant penis. She pointed it suggestively at me and I smiled. “This looks awful familiar,” I whispered.
She blushed and swatted me. “You wish.”
I’d grown a bit closer to Lish over the last few days, bonding over the whole end of the world thing, but had taken my time in making a move on her. For one, I was naturally shy, and two, I was pretty sure she might be able to whoop my ass if she got her dander sufficiently up. I’m a hair under six feet tall and nearly two hundred pounds, but Lish had this look that could freeze gas, like she was stalking a creature much larger than herself.
“Nice little get together, James,” Dwayne said. “I dig it. Course it’s the calm before the proverbial storm.”
I chomped down on some potato salad. “Know something I don’t?”
“Haven’t you been following the news?”
“Not when I can help it.”
Dwayne and Lish took me behind a massive oak tree that the local kids had roped with one of those tire swings.
“Something’s happening,” Dwayne whispered.
“Sure is. We’re having a party, D.”
He sighed. “I didn’t mean that.”
He angled his cellphone around, one of those newfangled ones that was as big as a goddamn laptop, and tapped the screen. A video played, footage that appeared to be shot by a shaky human hand. The POV zoomed in and then pulled back to reveal a silver-block object sitting in the middle of a broad plaza. When the POV pulled back once again I recognized the plaza as the area in Paris where the Eiffel Tower sits.
“That’s happened in every major city in the world over the last five hours,” Dwayne said, flipping through more images. “The Great Wall, Red Square, Spain, Nigeria, Egypt…”
“A few of them dropped out of the sky over Los Angeles,” Lish offered.
“One of them crashed through the roof of the Kardashian’s house while they were filming that stupid-ass show of theirs,” Dwayne added.
“Anyone hurt?”
“It killed two of ‘em,” he answered.
“That’s a start,” I said as Lish elbowed me in the side.
“They’ve even got one in downtown D.C.,” Dwayne said.
“I hadn’t heard that,” I said.
“Just appeared.”
I squinted at the screen. “What are those things? Shipping containers?”
“Nobody knows, but they’re warm to the touch, have no markings or handholds on the outside, and no matter what you do to them, you can’t leave a fingerprint or even a smudge.”
My brows knitted. “Kinda like the silver spheres.”
They nodded.
“You think…the aliens?”
“Who else would it be?” Lish replied.
“Maybe Amazon’s figured out a new way to deliver shit.”
“Hi-larious,” Dwayne said, raising his brows in an exaggerated fashion.
“Okay, so it’s the aliens. Why would they leave those things there?”
“They’re getting ready for the game,” Dwayne answered.
“You still believe that game stuff?”
Dwayne nodded. “I got no reason to disbelieve, brother.”
“Why aren’t people rioting?” I asked. “Why aren’t they just going ape-shit and looting and whatnot if the end is near?”
“Maybe they haven’t lost hope yet,” Lish said.
Dwayne breathed through his nose. “Or maybe the aliens are controlling us. Maybe whatever they put in us is preventing people from going nuts.”
A few seconds of silence fell as we digested this.
“We’re going down tomorrow by the way,” Lish said. “Dwayne and me. Going down to D.C.”
“Really?”
Dwayne nodded. “It was either that or go see the new Madea movie.”
“What happens in the new one?”
“The same bullshit that happens in all the other ones.”
“Okay, so what are you planning to do in D.C.?” I asked.
“Visit the container, silly,” Lish answered. “Everyone’s doing it.”
“Is visiting a box an actual thing now?”
She nodded. “Everyone’s taking selfies in front of it to put up on Instagram.”
Selfie. Instagram. If there were two more annoying words in the English language, I hadn’t heard them. Still, I liked the idea of hanging out with Lish and Dwayne and so I forced myself to nod. “If you’re asking, I’m down for a little road trip as long as you can swing by and pick me up.”
“That can be arranged,” Lish said with a grin and a tiny clap. Dwayne nodded, pocketed his big-ass cellphone and we rejoined the festivities. Minutes later, some wise ass started shooting off bottle-rockets, which sent everyone scurrying for cover.
7
Most of the partiers started heading home around nine o’clock, but I was still kicking around, having volunteered for cleanup duty. It was me, a retired school teacher named Pearl Honeywell, two older guys named Tap Jones and Billy Briggs, and an Indian girl named Noora who’d just moved into the neighborhood with her parents who supposedly worked for the NSA. Noora was probably twenty or twenty-two, handy when it came to tying off trash bags, and a real looker to boot.
We bundled up all the garbage and then I hauled it down to a rented dumpster at the end of the street. A pair of cigarettes flared in the darkness off to my left. I tossed the trash into the dumpster and moved beyond the spillage of light from the street lamp where Ronimal stood staring at me.
“How you doin’, Ron?”
“Still a million bucks shy of being a millionaire. Can you spare five minutes?” he asked.
I nodded and he led me toward his workshop. I entered to see the RV wedged inside. Ronimal held the door of the RV open as I followed him into the interior, which was cramped.
There were all sorts of boxes everywhere and in a closet I caught a glimpse of five military-style assault rifles before the big guy pulled a curtain across it. There was a radio on up near the front of the RV, some shock jock shrieking about the coming of martial law and food riots and the like. Ronimal floated the dial on the radio, changing it to a classic-rock station. I jumped when someone else entered the rear of the RV and closed the door, locking it.
It was Justin Best and he was holding three beers.
I stared at Justin for longer than seemed appropriate. It was the closest we’d come to one another since I got home from the hospital. God had seen fit to give Justin one child, a boy named Marvin. He was four months younger than me, a helluva athlete, great all-around human being, and there was so much of him in Justin’s face. Marvin and me were buddies and he was with me that night in the car coming home from the game, when everything went to hell.
I stared at the laminated card Justin had attached by a clip to his belt. It was a prayer card from Marvin’s funeral service. I’d been in the hospital and was invited to the service anyway, but a friend had gone and shown me a similar card. Neither one of us said anything and then Justin handed me one of the beers and Ronimal gestured for us to sit at a small laminate table.
We did and nobody said anything for several seconds. There wasn’t much air in the RV and what little there was smelled of sweat and the vinegary scent of fear. A pain flared behind my right ear and without even summoning it, my SecondSight popped up.
I panned my head and the HUD began picking things up that populated a few of the little boxes and icons. For instance, those assault rifles in the closet were now groupe
d inside the box marked “chattel,” and I was able to discern boxes of medical supplies on the floor that were grouped inside the box marked “health.”
Ronimal tapped his finger on the laminate table top. “You have a good time at the party, Logan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Cause it’s good to get in some fellowship every now and again. Somebody much smarter than me once said friendships are a bond that transcends all barriers.”
Justin made a face. “Says the resident bleeding heart.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with a little openness.”
“I heard that causes brain damage,” Justin said.
“Well, you would know.”
The men traded smiles and then Ronimal fixed a look on me. “Me and Justin, well, Justin and I wanted to chat with you.”
“‘Bout what?’
“About a number of things.”
“Okay. Shoot,” I said.
“What does your father do, Logan?” Justin asked.
“Sir?”
“What’s his place of employment?”
“He’s retired.”
“Before he retired.”
I scratched my head. “He worked for the government.”
“What agency?”
“I can’t remember.”
“He was military wasn’t he?” Justin pressed.
“He didn’t do any fighting if that’s what you mean.”
“That is not what I mean,” Justin replied. “He was a spook.”
“I’m not sure I understand what—”
Ronimal held up a hand to silence me. “I think what Justin means is your pops was an intelligence guy, right?”
“I can’t remember.”
“You need to remember,” Justin said.
“Why does it matter?”
Ronimal forced a smile and shot Justin a “back off” look. He folded his mallet-sized hands on the table. “We’d just like to know if your dad has told you anything.”