Alien Invasion

by Flame Tree Studio

  “Dead?” the girl asked.

  Nod. She was already backing away from the mother, her eyes locked on the girl. As she moved she looked for the other girl, found her still face down, some distance from her sister, but starting to move.

  “More or less,” the animate girl answered, her head cocked at CJ. “Do I frighten you?”

  CJ stopped moving. Thought about it. No one had done anything. It was just unexpected. But dead was supposed to be dead. The EMTs said they were dead. Now one of them was talking to her.

  “More or less.”

  That elicited a smile from the girl, mocking and cocky, but no more so than Kev’s average smirk. What are you? She stopped herself from asking. “What’s your name?”

  Another smile, this one actively unpleasant. Her eyes met CJ’s as she rose easily to her feet.

  “I am without name.” She looked past CJ, out to the street. “It’s not what you think it is. Or at least, it doesn’t end there. Everyone thinks this is the end. For you, it is. For us, it’s the beginning. Those left behind when the new order comes in always panic. It’s natural. But we’re as old as you are. We’ve been around as long. It’s only recently you’ve set us free.”

  CJ opened her mouth again. She was dizzy. The house was too hot. Panicky heartbeats struck her ribs. This time she would ask, What are you?

  Behind her, the door opened. “What’s taking so – oh, my god.”

  She heard something fall just before the EMT stood beside her.

  “She was dead.”

  “Still is,” CJ said, and wasn’t contradicted.

  “But what –?”

  “You need to tell them,” the girl with no name said. “Tell them the future has come calling.”

  The door banged behind them as the EMT dragged CJ to the porch.

  They stopped on the steps, facing a sea of waiting faces. Cameras. Signs. The world stared back at them.

  “They’re alive,” CJ said.

  The EMT looked at her. She couldn’t see any reason to keep that a secret. But she capped the hypo and tucked it into her back pocket without fanfare, hoping no one noticed. That she kept secret.

  The yellow tape around the scene came down. Sheriff’s deputies, unprepared for this, tried to push back against the surging crowd. Neighbors, relatives, press and protestors, a tide of hot bodies, tablets, phones, microphones pushed forward, everyone asking questions at once. CJ took a step back and bumped into the front door. The EMT cursed, once, then managed to look stoic.

  Over the crowd, CJ could see the helicopter blades start to turn, lazily at first, then faster, and the high pitched whine of the engine kicked up. Over the confusion of voices she heard commands being given, saw deputies spreading out, surrounding the house, and thought, Shouldn’t they wait to see if maybe it wasn’t all just a ghastly mistake and the family never was dead?

  The sheriff pushed his way through the crowd to them. “Military is demanding to see you. They’re alive?” He gestured at the front door as if she might not know who he meant.

  The EMT said something about movement, muscle contractions. His eyes were dazed. CJ touched his wrist, as if they’d known each other forever. “One of the girls is up and talking. One is coming to. Maybe not dead? That make the most sense, doesn’t it?”

  The sheriff stared at her. “Ma’am, nothing has made sense in this country in months. The house is going to be sealed until we figure out who’s in charge and –”

  “They haven’t done anything wrong,” CJ said softly.

  “No, ma’am,” the sheriff said with a tangible lack of sincerity. “Public safety. They could still be contagious.”

  And having them in that flimsy house will certainly be enough to prevent contagion.

  “Meanwhile, the military infectious disease folk want to see you. The chopper’s winding up.” He motioned her to precede him and took a step.

  CJ didn’t move. “My kit is still inside. I need it. And I’m not going anywhere in a helicopter. Where is it they want to meet?”

  He looked at her as if she were simple. “There’s a temporary command post set up in Reno.”

  “Reno is 20 minutes from here. I’ll drive.” When he didn’t stop staring at her but looked mutinous and stubborn, she said, “Am I being arrested for something?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She wished he’d stop calling her ma’am.

  “I’ll drive. Where to?”

  “County public health.”

  She was crisis-team-based there anyway. They had an electron microscope there. “Want to come with?” she asked the EMT.

  “I like helicopters,” he said and she didn’t know if he really did or if he was simply cooperating the way she wasn’t. He looked kind of avid about the chopper. CJ wanted time to think. She didn’t think she’d get it at a USAMRIID base.

  * * *

  The minute she drove onto I-80 she called Kyle’s cell, but instead of Kyle, Kev answered. She didn’t want to waste her drive talking to Kev. Why wasn’t he out protesting something, anyway?

  “Nah. He forgot his cell. Like always. He’s out turning some building into some other building.” He sounded bored and belligerent.

  Damn it. She took a chance. “Look, Kev, I need you to tell him something.”

  Silence. Then, “That’s not my name.”

  She took a breath. “Kevin, then.”

  “Whatever.” He’d never offer anything up front. She sighed. “I’m very likely going to be arrested for disobeying a direct military command.” No idea if she could really be commanded by military – she was a normal civilian. No idea if they could arrest her for not coming when they called. The point was to impress Kevin.

  “Cool.”

  “Can you please have Kyle call me? If he can’t reach me in a reasonable amount of time, I’m probably at public health.” Because if they did arrest her, they’d probably only take her where they wanted her in the first place.

  “Got it,” Kev said, and he sounded like he really did. And then, without warning, he voluntarily spoke to her. “Have you figured it out yet?”

  Please, no more Kevin riddles.

  “Have I figured what out yet?” The road in front of her was clear. Where I-80 out of Reno used to be jammed in every direction, the traffic was now in fits and starts, military carriers, huge refrigerated trucks carrying things she didn’t like to speculate on, scared families crossing each other’s paths as they looked for somewhere safer in a world that no longer offered safer places.

  “What’s going on.”

  “Have you?” She didn’t want to hear more placard slogans. She didn’t even know if Kev believed or simply wanted to annoy.

  “Change,” he said promptly. “If everyone would just calm down, it’s not that bad.”

  “People are dying,” CJ said. Her cell fluttered, going through a canyon near the power plant. For once she didn’t want to lose the connection.

  “Not permanently.”

  She blinked. The road in front of her was empty. She sped up. She thought of the girl in the house in Wadsworth. Alive. Again?

  “Not everything that’s living is human,” said Kev. “Those left behind are always afraid.” Her phone went dead. He’d probably hung up on her. It was the most Kevin had said to her since she’d married his father.

  Those left behind are always afraid. The girl in the house said the same thing. So did one of Kev’s signs. So maybe it was nothing more than teenagers making a craze out of the insanity, turning a virus into a cause celebre.

  Not everything that’s alive is human.

  In the wake of the viruses. Viruses were alive.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said aloud. Because she needed to hear it out loud. Because she needed to deny it. Because viruses on Earth didn’t reanimate.

  S
he’d been heading to public health, hoping something would make sense before she got there. So far her thoughts had just gone round and round.

  She bypassed the Wells Avenue exit to public health. Just in case someone saw her. She took the next exit by the University, turned around, took I-80 East again, connected with the interchange, headed south to her own practice. Every lab in the city had been seized by the remaining researchers, but no one had thought of her little one-person veterinary practice. It wasn’t state of the art.

  But it had a lab.

  * * *

  Her techs had been in every day, caring for the animals. Otherwise, the place was empty, just the dogs making a racket and the cats sounding like parrots in their rage. But all the animals had food and water.

  “You’re all fine, you big babies,” she said, and let the boarded basset twins out to hang out under her feet while the clinic cat perched at her computer. She didn’t have an electron microscope. She sent virus samples out.

  So what did she know?

  She started making a list.

  The eastern seaboard and much of the Midwest had been devastated by an arenavirus causing hemorrhagic fever with an eighty percent mortality rate.

  People had headed west before anyone could think to set up barriers or stop them. Before quarantines were imposed. Before common sense took effect, which still hadn’t.

  Then the summer hit and the West exploded into a virus with no name, one that looked like a member of the hantavirus family but refused to admit it in any experiment. So people in the West started dying.

  Or disappearing and reappearing, she thought suddenly and wrote that down. Like Kev. Like a good many adolescents and young adults listed as missing.

  Everything that’s living isn’t necessarily human.

  Everything has a right to life.

  Those left behind are always afraid.

  A virus without name. Close to Sin Nombre in effects. People found drowned in open air, their lungs filled with fluids. A virus without name and a girl, who had been dead, standing and saying, “I am without name.”

  Tell them the future has come calling.

  The lights in the sky at the beginning of summer.

  “You’re over-tired. You’re insane.”

  She turned off the laptop and sat, thinking. She turned it back on and waited impatient for virus checkers to do their stuff.

  Virus checkers, she thought, amused, and brought up Google.

  She typed in ‘smart viruses.’

  * * *

  The military never came. Maybe they had too much else to do. Maybe they were too old. The people surviving, by and large, were under 30. Or 20. She’d find out. It was strange to realize she was no longer part of the equation, that all those eons of evolution had suddenly bypassed her and left her behind. She wondered what relationships would be like, what thought processes would be. The kids seemed cocky as ever but there was never any way of knowing what went on inside a teenage mind and less chance of it now.

  On her way back to the condo she went by the Public Health Administration complex and dropped off the syringe of blood she’d taken from the dead woman in Wadsworth. There didn’t seem to be any point in using the electron microscope to look at the viruses in the sample. The virus had resisted being identified this long and whatever she saw now she wouldn’t understand.

  She thought about the family in the white house in Wadsworth and wondered that the parents had still been dead while the daughters had been moving, talking. Laughing. The next generation always bypassed the ones in front of it, but she’d be annoyed if she had to die and stay dead just because she was over 30.

  “Just barely over 30,” CJ said aloud, and laughed. The woman who collected the syringe and logged it extensively on a clipboard gave her a funny look. “Inside joke,” CJ said, which didn’t get her a better reception. After all, she was alone.

  Probably.

  * * *

  “It’s me,” she told the scanner at the door to the condos and then she slugged it for good measure. She’d go upstairs, see if Kyle was home, talk to Kev. No, that wasn’t his name anymore. She didn’t think it was because he wanted to be Kevin. She thought he didn’t expect to be called anything. The future didn’t have a name or shape, it was all just possibilities.

  She hit the button for the elevator and it opened. “Just kidding,” CJ said when the power flickered. She turned for the stairs and as she pulled the door open, the puncture wound on her left index finger began to throb.

  The Battle of Dorking

  Reminiscences of a Volunteer

  George Chesney

  You ask me to tell you, my grandchildren, something about my own share in the great events that happened fifty years ago. ’Tis sad work turning back to that bitter page in our history, but you may perhaps take profit in your new homes from the lesson it teaches. For us in England it came too late. And yet we had plenty of warnings, if we had only made use of them. The danger did not come on us unawares. It burst on us suddenly, ’tis true; but its coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes, if we had not been wilfully blind. We English have only ourselves to blame for the humiliation which has been brought on the land. Venerable old age! Dishonourable old age, I say, when it follows a manhood dishonoured as ours has been. I declare, even now, though fifty years have passed, I can hardly look a young man in the face when I think I am one of those in whose youth happened this degradation of Old England – one of those who betrayed the trust handed down to us unstained by our forefathers.

  What a proud and happy country was this fifty years ago! Free-trade had been working for more than a quarter of a century, and there seemed to be no end to the riches it was bringing us. London was growing bigger and bigger; you could not build houses fast enough for the rich people who wanted to live in them, the merchants who made the money and came from all parts of the world to settle there, and the lawyers and doctors and engineers and other, and trades-people who got their share out of the profits. The streets reached down to Croydon and Wimbledon, which my father could remember quite country places; and people used to say that Kingston and Reigate would soon be joined to London. We thought we could go on building and multiplying for ever.

  ’Tis true that even then there was no lack of poverty; the people who had no money went on increasing as fast as the rich, and pauperism was already beginning to be a difficulty; but if the rates were high, there was plenty of money to pay them with; and as for what were called the middle classes, there really seemed no limit to their increase and prosperity. People in those days thought it quite a matter of course to bring a dozen of children into the world – or, as it used to be said, Providence sent them that number of babies; and if they couldn’t always marry off all the daughters, they used to manage to provide for the sons, for there were new openings to be found in all the professions, or in the Government offices, which went on steadily getting larger. Besides, in those days young men could be sent out to India, or into the army or navy; and even then emigration was not uncommon, although not the regular custom it is now. Schoolmasters, like all other professional classes, drove a capital trade. They did not teach very much, to be sure, but new schools with their four or five hundred boys were springing up all over the country.

  Fools that we were! We thought that all this wealth and prosperity were sent us by Providence, and could not stop coming. In our blindness we did not see that we were merely a big workshop, making up the things which came from all parts of the world; and that if other nations stopped sending us raw goods to work up, we could not produce them ourselves. True, we had in those days an advantage in our cheap coal and iron; and had we taken care not to waste the fuel, it might have lasted us longer. But even then there were signs that coal and iron would soon become cheaper in foreign parts; while as to food and other things, England was not better off than it is now. We were so
rich simply because other nations from all parts of the world were in the habit of sending their goods to us to be sold or manufactured; and we thought that this would last for ever. And so, perhaps, it might have lasted, if we had only taken proper means to keep it; but, in our folly, we were too careless even to insure our prosperity, and after the course of trade was turned away it would not come back again.

  And yet, if ever a nation had a plain warning, we had. If we were the greatest trading country, our neighbours were the leading military power in Europe. They were driving a good trade, too, for this was before their foolish communism (about which you will hear when you are older) had ruined the rich without benefiting the poor, and they were in many respects the first nation in Europe; but it was on their army that they prided themselves most. And with reason. They had beaten the Russians and the Austrians, and the Prussians too, in bygone years, and they thought they were invincible.

  Well do I remember the great review held at Paris by the Emperor Napoleon during the great Exhibition, and how proud he looked showing off his splendid Guards to the assembled kings and princes. Yet, three years afterwards, the force so long deemed the first in Europe was ignominiously beaten, and the whole army taken prisoners. Such a defeat had never happened before in the world’s history; and with this proof before us of the folly of disbelieving in the possibility of disaster merely because it had never fallen upon us, it might have been supposed that we should have the sense to take the lesson to heart.

  And the country was certainly roused for a time, and a cry was raised that the army ought to be reorganised, and our defences strengthened against the enormous power for sudden attacks which it was seen other nations were able to put forth. And a scheme of army reform was brought forward by the Government. It was a half-and-half affair at best; and, unfortunately, instead of being taken up in Parliament as a national scheme, it was made a party matter of, and so fell through. There was a Radical section of the House, too, whose votes had to be secured by conciliation, and which blindly demanded a reduction of armaments as the price of allegiance. This party always decried military establishments as part of a fixed policy for reducing the influence of the Crown and the aristocracy. They could not understand that the times had altogether changed, that the Crown had really no power, and that the Government merely existed at the pleasure of the House of Commons, and that even Parliament-rule was beginning to give way to mob-law.