Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  Having lost Dan’s original trail long ago, Clark exited the cornfield considerably further from the car than he’d entered it. He walked directly towards Emma and the waiting vehicle, squinting against the headlights.

  Emma jumped out of the car and ran towards them the second they came into view. “Oh my god,” she yelled. From her position, Dan looked like a wet scarf around Clark’s neck. She was far too concerned for his wellbeing to even think about the plaques, much less ask where they were.

  Clark handed her the flashlight so he had a free hand to open the door. He then gently placed Dan on the back seat. Rooster helpfully moved out of the way before nuzzling at Dan’s wet legs.

  “He could have hypothermia,” Emma said as soon as the car door was closed.

  “There’s a blanket in the car,” Clark replied, still having to shout over the rain. He took the plaques out from behind his back and handed them to Emma. “Come on. We need to get out of here.”

  Emma stepped back into the car. Curled up in the back seat, all arms and legs, Dan looked almost like a fawn. “Are you okay?” she asked, taking off her coat and laying it over his exposed legs.

  “I’m sorry,” Dan replied through barely suppressed tears.

  “For what?”

  “Making you both come out here to find me. I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  Clark opened the door beside Dan’s feet and partially covered him with an old picnic blanket; he would have given Dan the shirt off his own back, but it was just as wet as Dan’s. “I need you to stay awake for me until we get home, okay?”

  “Okay,” Dan said.

  “Can you call Phil and Mr Byrd and tell them we found him sleepwalking?” Clark asked Emma, handing her his phone.

  “I don’t think I was sleepwalking,” Dan butted in. “It didn’t feel the same.”

  Clark turned to face him. “What did it feel like?”

  “I don’t know… just different. But when we get home, you have to lock the doors and hide the keys.”

  “Oh, I will,” Clark laughed.

  “I’m not joking,” Dan said flatly. “Whatever I was doing, I don’t think it’s finished.”

  D plus 44

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  “Crop circles aren’t real,” Clark said to Emma. Both sat at the kitchen table now that Dan was sleeping like a log in his warm bed with Rooster on the floor beside him, no longer afraid of the room. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Maybe he did it before we got there. How perfect was the circle? How big? Did you see any planks of wood?”

  Clark shrugged. “I could hardly see anything. I didn’t even see Dan at first.”

  “Walker could have done it, too, I guess.”

  “Or just a random hoaxer,” Clark said. “It could have been there for weeks for all we know.”

  “Yeah. It’s either one of those, or, you know…”

  The look on Clark’s face suggested that he didn’t.

  “Think about it. Walker disappears into thin air,” Emma said, snapping her fingers. “Just like that. The camera flashed like it did when the Límíng module exploded, only for longer. Maybe there actually is a bear, and maybe we really did poke it.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense even if you accept the alien part. We’ve sent loads of things into space. Why would they get pissed off by this one all of a sudden?”

  “This one was a test run for putting an entire arsenal of megaweapons in space,” Emma said. “It’s totally different.”

  Clark shook his head dismissively. “Launches fail all the time. You heard Godfrey.”

  “So everything’s all a coincidence?” Emma asked with a hint of derision.

  “It makes more sense than aliens.”

  “You weren’t saying that 27 hours ago when we didn’t know about the hoax!”

  “Once bitten,” Clark said. “You know the rest.”

  “I get that, but all I’m saying is: I spent long enough in PR to know that sometimes lies come true.”

  Before Clark could say anything to Emma about how inapplicable her aphorism was to their current situation, the sound of Dan’s door opening captured their attention.

  “You alright?” Clark called before he could see him.

  Dan didn’t reply. Seconds later, he walked straight past the kitchen.

  Emma went to see what he was doing. “Uh, Clark?”

  Clark joined Emma at the kitchen door and watched Dan sleepwalking — or whatever this was — towards the blue box on the coffee table.

  “Do you think he’s looking for the plaques?” Emma whispered.

  “Probably.” Clark turned back to the kitchen table to check that the plaques were still there. They were.

  Dan gave up on the blue box and started towards the kitchen. His vacant expression, familiar to Clark from an hour or so earlier, startled Emma. She stepped behind Clark.

  “Dan…” Clark said, loudly and slowly. “I’m going to wake you up now. Okay?”

  Dan continued towards the kitchen, unblinking. His eyes were more widely open than normal, his mouth more tightly closed.

  Clark very gently slapped Dan on one cheek and then the other. Showing no notice, Dan barged into him in an effort to get into the kitchen.

  “Dan,” Clark said, more firmly. “Knock it off.”

  But Dan continued. He outstretched his arms and tried to push Clark back. His eyes seemed to look through Clark rather than at him. He soon stopped trying to budge Clark — by far the heavier of the two — and turned away from the kitchen.

  “Is he going back to the box?” Emma asked from her retreated position by the kitchen table.

  “I think so,” Clark said. “Wait, no. He stopped.”

  Dan had indeed stopped at the back of the couch. He turned back towards the kitchen. And then, without warning, he charged.

  “Dan!” Clark shouted as he sprinted nearer and nearer, head ducked and shoulder primed. “Stop!”

  He kept charging.

  Clark planted his weight firmly and took the full force of Dan’s charge into his lower chest. It knocked him back but not down.

  The impact had no visible effect on Dan. He took advantage of the slight space left by Clark’s several steps back and now found himself face to face with Emma.

  Instinctively, she lifted the plaques from the kitchen table and held them behind her back.

  “Give them to him,” Clark said.

  “No way.”

  Dan inched closer to Emma.

  Clark leaned against the counter, badly winded. “Emma, give him the damn plaques! I’ll get them back in a minute.”

  Emma put the plaques on the floor and raised her hands. Though her eyes saw Dan, she felt like the person she was looking at was someone else.

  Dan crouched down and picked up the plaques.

  “Open his bedroom door,” Clark said.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it!”

  Emma slipped out of the kitchen and did as Clark asked. She then waited in the living room, on the safe side of the couch, to see what would happen next.

  As Clark had been counting on, Dan ignored the door that led outside and instead crossed the kitchen to head into the living room and ultimately for the front door. “Stay back,” he called to Emma.

  She was already planning on it.

  Of the countless differences between the two brothers, one of the most pronounced was that, unlike Dan, Clark was both built and trained to fight. Clark knew how to contain people without hurting them and how to hurt people without engaging them. Right now, Dan needed to be contained.

  Clark watched Dan cross the kitchen and waited until he was one step from the living room. At that moment, he dashed the few paces between them and swept Dan’s legs out from under him in a single, rapid motion. He then dragged Dan across the floor by his feet and dumped him in his bedroom.

  “Get a few glasses of water,” he said to Emma.

  She go
t right to it.

  In Dan’s room, Clark then made the foolish move of rolling him onto his back to check whether he was lucid or still in his inexplicable trance. As soon as Dan was face-up with Clark’s body looming over him, he poked Clark in the eye and kneed him in the groin.

  “Motherfucker!”

  Emma hurried through to see what was wrong.

  “Get back!” Clark screamed at her.

  Dan got to his feet and took a step towards the door. With one hand instinctively nursing his groin, Clark slammed his other forearm into the back of Dan’s knees. He held nothing back with the blow this time; the gloves were off.

  Clark climbed on top of Dan and prepared to slap some sense into him, but Dan was too strong. Somehow, Dan was too strong. He freed himself from Clark’s weight by sheer force of will, pushing off the ground with his arms and then using one to club Clark in the side of the head.

  “Come out of there,” Emma pleaded with Clark.

  He heard the words, but they didn’t register.

  Dan picked up a pair of scissors from his desk.

  “Clark, seriously!”

  “Pass me the plaques again,” he said.

  Emma picked them up from the spot on the floor where Dan dropped them. She walked to Dan’s bedroom door and slid them along the carpet to Clark.

  Clark held the plaques and slowly moved towards Dan. “Swap?”

  If Dan understood, he didn’t show it. Without warning, he dropped the scissors to the ground and lunged at Clark again.

  “Watch out for the fish tank!” Emma shrieked from the door.

  Too late.

  The force of Dan’s charge pushed Clark back again. But this time, rather than an empty space, there was a giant aquarium at Clark’s back. Clark immediately heard a crack. The glass didn’t seem to have smashed, but he definitely heard a crack.

  “Fill as many pots as you can find,” Clark ordered Emma, his voice high-pitched in this moment of desperation. The weight of Dan’s incongruously strong frame still pinned him against the tank, but Clark could now see a vein-like crack spider-webbing its way down from the top right of the side panel. “The old smaller tank is in the shed,” he said, “but it might take too long to set up. Get some pots first. Pots, buckets, whatever.”

  “I am!” Emma called back.

  Clark didn’t want to move too much, worried that the pressure he was applying to the tank might somehow have been all that was keeping it in one piece. He saw water beginning to drip through the hairline crack. He felt relief that the crack was near the top of the panel and that the water was dripping rather than flowing out, but any leakage was still a very bad sign.

  More in hope than expectation, he then threw the plaques as far across the room as he could.

  Instantly, Dan backed away and went to collect them.

  Clark took several deep breaths. He moved his back away from the tank very carefully, holding his arm against the side panel and gradually removing the pressure. He looked at the tank and saw that the dripping was gaining pace.

  When Dan passed directly by, plaques in hand, Clark spotted the opportunity for a full-nelson takedown onto the bed. He executed it perfectly then flipped Dan onto his back and delivered a stinging slap with all the force he could muster.

  Dan gasped sharply and screwed up his face. When his eyes opened a second or two later, Clark knew straight away that he was back.

  “Dan? You alright?”

  “Aaah!” Dan moaned, holding his face. Clark had taken care to avoid his ear, but Dan’s cheek stung like a cut dipped in alcohol. “What the hell, man?”

  “You made me do it! You went all… I dunno. Like before.”

  Dan’s expression changed from anger to horror as he looked over Clark’s shoulder. “Clark, the tank!”

  “I know. That’s why I had to—”

  “Get the fish out of there,” Dan cried, jumping to his feet. “Hurry up! I’ll get the other tank from the shed.”

  Clark stood dumbly for a few seconds as Dan ran into the kitchen.

  Emma flinched when she first saw Dan.

  “Bring those pots through to Clark,” he said. “Just fill them with the water from the tank; we need them now.”

  Emma lifted two empty pots. She met Clark at the kitchen door, on his way to get the net to lift the fish out of their fragile habitat. “What are we going to do?” she asked him.

  “Put the fish into pots of water until we reassemble the old tank from—”

  “I meant with him. What the hell is going on?”

  Clark found the net and headed back to Dan’s room. “One thing at a time, okay?”

  “We can’t just ignore this,” Emma said.

  “The tank could break any second. Whatever’s going on in Dan’s head, he’s alright for now.”

  “How long is for now? He was fine an hour ago, and then suddenly he wasn’t. What’s the plan for making sure we’re not doing this again in another hour?”

  Clark stopped at Dan’s door and shrugged. “I guess we have to keep him awake.”

  THURSDAY

  D plus 45

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  Emma and Rooster sat alone in the living room on Thursday afternoon while Clark and Dan drove to a speciality pet store in the city to buy a replacement side panel for Dan’s bedroom aquarium. The fish seemed fine for now in the smaller tank Clark had hastily reassembled and filled overnight. Most of them were goldfish, after all, and the others — including Skid, Dan’s favourite — were hardy enough and easily pleased.

  Clark gave up emptying the main aquarium by hand when he realised how long it would take. After a quick online search, he rigged up a basic syphon between the tank and Dan’s window.

  With the brother’s gone, Emma remained in their house rather than her own to keep an eye on the blue box and particularly the plaques. Clark refused to leave Dan unattended for a second, hence bringing him along.

  Emma took the opportunity to catch up on the news. While she and Clark had been dealing with whatever was wrong with Dan, politicians and citizens alike had been continuing to react to the DS-1 launch disaster.

  Most notably, Blitz News reported that Ding Ziyang’s decision to blame the accident on “an unclear external factor” had seen the number of American citizens who suspected alien involvement “soar past 60%.” While strictly true, Emma’s SMMA app told her that the exact figure was now 56% having peaked at 61% in the immediate aftermath of Ding’s comments.

  Most of the foreign representatives who attended the launch in China had now departed for home, with only President Slater and her Russian counterpart staying behind. The Global Shield Commission’s strained Chairman, William Godfrey, also remained.

  Despite growing support for the alien sabotage theory, Godfrey’s pleas for calm and his promises over DS-2’s swift development seemed to have worked; since the hours immediately following the explosion, no further looting had been reported in any major American or British cities.

  Domestically, Billy Kendrick appeared on several news networks for interviews in which he insisted that he took no pleasure in being proven right. In Billy’s view, aliens had caused the explosion. “Launches don’t just fail like that,” he repeatedly said. He took the fact that the explosion occurred at an altitude “high enough that no one got hurt” as proof that the aliens weren’t hostile and merely wanted to “put an end to our ridiculous plans for orbital weapons before it’s too late.”

  Emma couldn’t help but wonder what Billy Kendrick would be saying if he knew what she did. His initial reaction to learning of the hoax would likely have mirrored Dan’s physical sickness, but what would he think now?

  What would he think if he knew that Richard Walker had disappeared without trace in a flash of light?

  What would he think if he knew that Dan had been found in a crop circle in the middle of the night?

  What would he think if he had seen the vacant expression in Dan’s
eyes as he physically attacked Clark to get his hands on the third and fourth fake plaques?

  Emma stopped wondering what Billy Kendrick might have thought when she realised that she didn’t even know what she made of it all.

  Hell, she thought, Dan doesn’t even know, and he’s the one it’s happening to.

  * * *

  Dan and Clark left the pet store having been told that they needed a whole new aquarium. They bought the same model which, though huge, was an off-the-shelf product of very basic design. Dan noted the price in quiet shock; the cost wasn’t an issue now that they were swimming in advertising dollars, but he couldn’t believe Clark had paid this much first time round. As then, installation was included in the price.

  “These are the slots we have available,” a staff member said, pointing to a screen at the checkout.

  “Next week?” Clark said. “We need it today.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

  Clark didn’t pull out the old “do you know who we are?” card — the entire store falling silent when they stepped inside hinted that everyone already knew — but instead lobbied for an exception in language that all businesses understood: “I don’t care what it costs.”

  The staff member called his boss over and a deal was soon struck for same-day delivery and installation.

  Outside, Dan told Clark that he had to pop in to the store next door to buy a few things. Clark didn’t relish the prospect of being gawked at by a new set of customers and staff, but he stuck by Dan’s side.

  “Why do you need pencils and a notebook?” Clark asked when Dan picked them off a shelf.

  Dan looked at him for several seconds without speaking, weighing up the best way to verbalise the reason he knew would sound ridiculous however he worded it. Eventually, he decided to be as straightforward as he could: “Because I think they’re trying to tell me something?”

  “Who?” Clark asked, genuinely missing the point.

  Dan couldn’t bring himself to say it. For almost five months, he and everyone else had been talking openly about aliens and Messengers and extraterrestrial intelligences. But now that the great IDA secret had been revealed as a lie, he understood how hesitant Clark would be to accept that maybe — just maybe — the real alien truth was still out there, above and independent of human politics and subterfuge.