Orbs

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  To further complicate things, the silence of the night was alarming. It distracted him. He’d never been in such a dead zone before. Even the animals had disappeared. If Sophie was right, then they had probably been turned into Kool-Aid as well.

  Overton balled his hand into a fist and halted. He strained his ears; the nothingness was ghostly. Gone were the hum of machines and the familiar sound of chirping insects. Vanished were the agitating sirens that plagued the violent cities. The silence was unnatural.

  Deep down, a part of him wished it was all a dream, that the wail of a police car would tear through the night or the thump of the blades from an NTC helicopter would sound overhead. But he was a Marine, and he knew the truth of the situation.

  We are alone.

  Overton shot an advance signal to Finley. The private took the lead, sprinting up the hill, chunks of dirt and loose pinecones kicking up behind him. The darkness quickly consumed him, his heat signature fading from Overton’s HUD until it was gone altogether.

  Bouma carried the girl on his back, and Sophie followed close behind. Overton squinted and saw that the girl was fast asleep. That, or she was unconscious from the trauma she had been through earlier. Either way, he was glad she was keeping her tiny mouth shut. He knew better than anyone that kids could scream much louder than they appeared capable of. If he had learned one thing from his short time with his own two boys, it was to never underestimate a child.

  A boom tore through the silence, and Overton quickly forgot what he had been thinking about. He stole a glance over his shoulder to see one of the drones zip across the dark horizon. He pressed on, digging his boots into the hillside, moving deeper into the black abyss of the forest. They were getting close to a frontage road, almost to the coordinates, but they still hadn’t seen any sign of the beacon—no building or installation. There was a short gap where he could see the entrance to what had to be Turkey Canyon Road. Finley was crouched at the edge, his outline still and stoic in the darkness. It only took Overton and the others a minute to cover the distance between them.

  “All right, I think we’re in the clear for now,” he said, patting Finley on his armored shoulder. “See anything?”

  “Negative, sir. No contacts, at least, but there appears to be some sort of structure about a half a mile down the road.”

  Overton climbed up the short dirt hill and crouched onto the mix of dirt and gravel. Sure enough, there was a chimney jutting out of the trees to the east. He pulled the map from his pouch again and double-checked the coordinates with his compass. The house had to be the source of the signal. Not exactly what he was expecting, but considering the events of the past week, nothing was a surprise anymore. One-hundred-foot-long translucent alien worms, for example.

  “All right, let’s move,” he said.

  The sound of rocks crunching under his boots echoed in his helmet. He was glad to hear something, anything, to distract him from the silence. Even the invasion of Puerto Rico hadn’t been this bad.

  The metallic green outline of the chimney appeared on his display as he rounded the corner. Whoever had built this house did not want it seen from the road.

  He approached cautiously, his rifle aimed into the darkness. The house was a few yards away behind the pines, and there was no obvious path to get to it. Twigs and branches snapped under the weight of his boots as he entered the brush. He halted, blinking once, twice to enhance the optics of his night vision. Seeing the path was still clear, he continued, the ghostly green glow growing brighter with every step.

  A slight opening broke through the trees. He could vaguely make out the metal skin of the house.

  He paused in the gap of the tree line. They might have stumbled upon a prepper, which could be extremely dangerous. Many of his friends had retired from the Marines and bought a plot of land off the grid. They had rigged their houses with booby-traps to prepare for what they believed were the end days. But that didn’t explain the signal. How would a prepper have access to an encrypted NTC emergency channel?

  He sprinted to the side of the house and slumped against the metal siding. His eyes darted back and forth, checking the area before he advanced to the entrance.

  “Don’t fucking move, soldier!” a voice shouted from above him.

  Overton froze, his finger clenching the trigger of his pulse rifle.

  “I’m a friendly,” he said, opting to leave his team out of the equation.

  “That’s what the last guy said. You can find his head on a post about a quarter mile down the road.”

  “I’m Sergeant Ash Overton, United States Marine Corps First Recon Battalion. I’m not here to hurt you or take what you have. Our AI picked up a distress signal from this location.”

  Silence once again filled the night, but Overton didn’t move.

  “You’re a long way from Camp Pendleton, Marine.”

  “Recon mission, sir. Got caught in the midst of something much bigger.”

  “No fucking shit. Did you find any civvies down there?”

  “Yes, sir. One. A little girl,” he said, hoping the man would be empathetic.

  “How old?”

  Overton scowled.

  What do I look like, a fucking doctor?

  “She’s no older than five, sir.”

  “And I’m guessing she’s with your squad. How many total?”

  “Two Marines and an NTC scientist, plus the girl, sir.”

  “An NTC scientist, you say? You sure?”

  The question struck him as odd, but he answered, “Damned sure.”

  Another pause. The hum of silence filled Overton’s helmet. He cringed, the knot in his stomach getting worse. A combination of smoking and drinking had more than likely caused another ulcer.

  He waited for a response.

  “Don’t make me regret this, Sergeant. Gather your team and meet me on the south side of my house in five.”

  Overton slowly took his finger off the trigger and swung the rifle over his shoulder, not daring to look up at the rooftop, where he guessed the man had been camped out. He turned and took off in a sprint back to his team. For some reason he had a bad feeling about this guy, but at this point, he knew they had no other choice but to trust him.

  * * *

  A combination of beeps and chirps from Saafi’s cryo chamber filled the medical ward with an annoying melody. Holly sat on a white bench in the corner of the room, holding Owen in her lap. She ran her hand through his thick mop of hair and watched Saafi’s chest rise up and down through the clear panels of his medical coffin.

  Nearby, Timothy paced back and forth like a caged animal, his eye twitching rapidly. Holly ignored him, refusing to acknowledge him in the slightest way. She was at her wit’s end, and couldn’t handle much more of his antics. Holly felt something inside of her twist at the admission of the truth—that not even her PhD in psychology had been enough to prepare her for his irrational behavior. It was hard to swallow, but she knew that she was allowed to have a breaking point.

  Timothy’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “How long have they been gone? It’s been too long; something must have happened. Alexia, have you detected any movements inside the Biosphere? Can those things get in? They’re going to get in, aren’t they? We have to hide. Is Emanuel hiding? Where is he?”

  His words were a random assortment of thoughts that Alexia found difficult to process. Every time she attempted to answer one question, he would present another.

  “Mr. Roberts, I have not detected any—”

  “Maybe they’re after the pond. Yeah. That makes total sense,” he said, a somewhat deranged grin spreading across his face.

  “After analyzing the current data and the hypothesis presented by Dr. Winston, I would conclude your assumption is reasonable, Mr. Roberts.”

  “So they are coming for our water supply!”

  Before
he knew it Holly was standing in front of him. Her eyes were hard. “You’re scaring Owen,” she said calmly.

  Timothy glanced behind her, acknowledging Owen’s presence for the first time since they had entered the medical ward. And for a second, something inside him clicked—something changed. His eyes lit up, and he strolled past Holly toward the young boy.

  He crouched to pick the boy’s blanket off the ground, handing it to him. “How did you hide from them?”

  Owen looked at the man sleepily. His chubby cheeks were a flushed rosy red.

  “I want my daddy,” he choked, tears streaking down his face.

  Holly paced over to the bench and sat down next to him, eyeing Timothy suspiciously. “It’s okay, Owen, we’ll look for your daddy when the soldiers get back,” she said. The boy buried his head in her arms and began to whimper softly.

  Timothy reached for Owen’s small hand and tapped it cautiously. “Owen, you have to tell us how you hid from them, because we’re going to need to play that game again.”

  The boy peeked one eye out and observed Timothy’s face for a few seconds before he jammed his face back into the safety of Holly’s arms.

  “Leave him be,” she whispered, running her hand through his hair again.

  “Maybe he knows a way to evade them. Maybe he knows a way to escape,” Timothy insisted.

  Holly’s mouth opened, but she paused as Alexia’s voice sounded over the com.

  “Movement detected in the offices outside the Biosphere facility. Detecting several heat signatures in the briefing room. Switching to Camera 6. Stand by for video footage.”

  Timothy jumped up and raced to the monitor hanging on the wall over Saafi’s cryo chamber. It flickered to life, revealing the NTC briefing room. The lighting was dim, with only a faint blue glow present in the corner of the room.

  “Enhance image,” he requested.

  The camera zoomed in and the blue light amplified. He compressed his eyebrows and squinted, desperately trying to make out the shape of the intruder. But all he saw was darkness.

  “I don’t see anything, Alexia!” he said frantically.

  “Scanning.”

  The sound of Saafi’s chirping monitors filled the room once more before the com blared back to life. “Signatures appear to be heading into the ductwork.”

  “Zoom in,” Timothy said, moving aside so Holly could see the screen.

  “There,” she said pointing. “Angle the camera toward the back corner near the podium.”

  They watched the view slowly rotate. The blue glow increased as the camera moved into position.

  Holly felt a tug on her pants from behind, and she turned to see Owen staring up at her. “Can I see?”

  In the second it took for her to consider his request, she watched Timothy’s face go pale. His eye stopped twitching, and the tablet he was holding dropped to the floor. The sound of the device’s screen cracking reached her ears an instant before Owen’s screams. She didn’t need to see the video footage to know what they both had seen, but she forced herself to look anyways.

  Climbing through a hole in the tile ceiling was a luminous creature—a monster with six thin legs, a round, stocky torso, and a small head with mandibles full of jagged teeth. As the spiderlike thing pulled itself into the ceiling, it glanced at the camera. For a moment it looked like it was staring right at them with its eight malformed eyes, right before it opened its jaws and emitted a high-frequency scream. Then it was gone, vanishing into the duct.

  Holly forced herself away from the screen. She grabbed Owen and led him to the bench as calmly as possible. Crouching down to his eye level, she rested her palms on his narrow shoulders. “Owen, you have to be strong. You have to tell us how you hid from those things, okay? Can you do that for us?”

  The boy looked up at them, sniffling. “You can’t hide from them. They’ll find you. They always find you.”

  * * *

  Sophie slipped into the brightly lit house behind Overton. She removed her helmet and peered up at the high ceilings, admiring the metal beams zigzagging across the living room. The entrance branched two ways, with a hallway leading to the rest of the first floor and a staircase leading to a second floor.

  A middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair stood at the entrance to the hallway, scanning his guests through a pair of black shades. At his side was an evil-looking submachine gun with a banana clip extending halfway down his right leg.

  He waited for Finley and Bouma to enter the house before he strolled over and closed the massive oak door behind them.

  Overton took a step forward, offering his hand. “Thanks for sheltering us, sir. I’m guessing you’re the one who sent out that distress beacon?”

  The man ignored the question, instead shaking Overton’s hand with a strong grip. “Welcome,” he said in a flat, monotone voice. “The name’s Luke, and this . . .” He waved his other hand, indicating his house. “This is my modern bunker.”

  When he let go, he reached for his glasses and stuffed them in the breast pocket of his tan army fatigues.

  “Forgive me for my earlier behavior. It’s been twenty-four hours since I’ve seen or heard from anyone. When those things first showed up, a few people escaped undetected. Mostly kids, but a few adults who found shelter. One of them caused me some grief, but I took care of him,” he said, glancing down at his firearm.

  “What do you mean when you said they went ‘undetected’?” Sophie asked.

  “Are you the NTC scientist?”

  “Yes. Dr. Sophie Winston,” she replied, offering her hand.

  “Well then, you should know, Doctor. Those things are here for our water. When they first came, they used some sort of device to suck the surface water up into their ships. I saw it myself; watched the sky turn a weird turquoise blue from my rooftop before I retreated into my granite bunker. It was the oddest thing I’ve ever seen, like it was raining but in the opposite direction. When I emerged, I investigated the frontage road and found one of those spheres. Inside was my neighbor, Hal Greene. I’m no biologist, but I put two and two together and figured they aren’t just here for surface water. They are here to exterminate us.”

  Sophie stepped forward and looked the man directly in his hazel eyes. “Actually—and I mean this with all due respect—they aren’t here to exterminate us in the sense you may think. They aren’t just after our surface water. They’re after the water inside of us.”

  Luke’s eyes widened and he swallowed the lump forming in his throat. “Shit. It all makes sense, then.”

  Bouma stepped forward with the girl sleeping peacefully in his arms. “How did you go undetected?”

  Luke shrugged. “My bunker leads into granite caves deep beneath this house.”

  Sophie eyed the man suspiciously. Her gut was sending the same warning feelings she’d had before, indicating something was amiss—that the man was leaving out some important details. She studied him intently. His face and his monotone voice were both oddly familiar, but she couldn’t place him.

  “Perhaps they aren’t able to penetrate granite with their scanners?” the man offered.

  “Oh, I’m sure they’ll find a way. Once they pillage the rest of the surface and track down every living thing with an ounce of H2O inside of it,” Sophie replied.

  “But that still doesn’t explain how you’ve managed to avoid them,” said Finley, his eyebrows raised. “We ran into two drones in the few hours we were outside. Not to mention that we haven’t seen a single living person besides this girl.”

  Luke caught Finley’s gaze and shied away from it, pacing across the length of the room. “You really want to know?” he asked, craning his neck and scanning the faces of Sophie and her team one by one. “Then follow me,” he said, motioning them with his machine gun toward a narrow metal door just beyond the hallway.

  Overton jammed an u
nlit cigarette into his mouth and winked at Sophie. “Ladies first,” he said, with a grin just wide enough to keep the cigarette from falling out.

  She wrinkled her nose and followed their host through the door and down a long, steep flight of stairs. After what felt like hundreds of steps, they emerged into a dim cave. Candles dripped wax down the black walls, and shadows danced across the passage.

  Sophie froze, listening intently to the sounds of the cavern. She waited for a few agonizing moments but heard nothing except the distant trickle of water and the shuffling of footsteps. A strong pat on the shoulder startled her.

  “Something spook you?” Overton asked.

  She ignored the question and strained her ears for another few seconds before following him into the shadows. They had to have been over fifty feet beneath the surface, and she was getting more nervous with every step. Things simply didn’t add up. Something about Luke made her feel uneasy—something about his robotic voice and small, hazel eyes.

  She didn’t trust him, but she didn’t know why.

  And although she had delegated security details to Overton, she couldn’t help the impulse to micromanage. As she glanced at the sleeping girl, her long-buried maternal instincts stirred. She’d always been a little disdainful of her colleagues who dropped out of the field to have kids. After meeting Emanuel, she’d started to come around to the idea, but somehow it had never been the right time. The distance between them, new projects, and her own insecurities had conspired against the both of them.

  With a sigh, she reached out to brush the girl’s hair from her face.

  Sophie didn’t have the heart to wake her. Not yet—not until she could guarantee the girl’s safety, something she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to do. The thought frustrated her. She could only imagine what the poor child had already gone through. The possibilities sent a wave of grief through her tired body. She ignored it and continued on, stopping only momentarily to hand her helmet to Finley so she could pull her frizzled hair back into a ponytail.