by John J. Rust
Karen took hold of his hand. “The last thing in the world I want to do is get rid of you.”
She bent down and kissed Rastun.
Read on for a free sample of Raptor Apocalypse.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John J. Rust was born in Hamilton Township, NJ, where he graduated from Nottingham High School and Mercer County Community College. After receiving a communications degree from the College of Mt. St. Vincent in Riverdale, NY, he worked for New Jersey 101.5 FM before moving to Arizona to become a radio sports reporter and play-by-play announcer. Rust is the author of the military sci-fi book “Dark Wings” and the baseball-themed books “The Best Phillies Team Ever” and “Arizona’s All-Time Baseball Team.” He has also written several sci-fi short stories. Follow John J. Rust at www.facebook.com/johnjrustauthor and on Twitter at @JohnJRust.
Other books by John J. Rust
Dark Wings
The Best Phillies Team Ever
Arizona’s All-Time Baseball Team
-1-
UNREMARKABLE
A.J. “JESSE” PRIEO stared out the front windshield of his F-250 SuperCrew, watching as the truck ate up the empty two-lane highway. Fields of honey-colored grasses, marred by green splotches of mesquite, flew past to either side. His face was tense and jaw set rigid. Ever since leaving work, something deep inside his gut had been sending out warn-ing signals.
Signals he just couldn’t ignore.
He’d finished his shift at the sheriff’s office barely twen-ty minutes ago. It had been one long day of answering phones, drinking coffee, and riding a desk chair around the office. His replacement, Deputy Henderson, who worked the night shift, had arrived thirty minutes late but sober for a welcome change. So, while irritated with Henderson, it wasn’t that. The feeling was coming from somewhere deeper, more primal. Hoping to calm his nerves, he rolled down the side window, thinking the rushing air might help.
It didn't.
The only other notable event of the day had been when his father, the sheriff, whom everyone called Big John, had strolled into the office around lunchtime, picked up his messages, and headed out in search of a barstool and a bot-tle of Jim Beam. But as Jesse reviewed every gesture his father had made, every word they’d exchanged, he couldn't find the culprit there either. He sucked in his belly and dug in his pocket for his cellphone, meaning to call his wife and let her know he’d be home soon but was running late. As he fished around for the phone, his fingers came back with only spare change and lint. The cell also wasn’t on the seat beside him, or inside the console. Then he remembered leaving the damn thing plugged into the charger at work. Crap. Was that it? The phone? No, the feeling was coming from somewhere different, more intimate. More along the lines of the tingly feeling he often experienced in Iraq, right before some disaster hit.
He readjusted himself on the seat and tried to shift his thoughts onto tonight’s football game. The Cowboys were playing the Redskins, and he wanted to get home in time to watch the kickoff.
Ahead on the road, a stone-ringed sign marked the turnoff into Rancho Lobos, a small enclave of rural paradise he called home. He merged into the left-hand turn lane and slowed for the signal light. The tires groaned to silence as the truck came to a full stop. He glanced at the rearview mirror. No one was coming up behind him. No one was coming from the opposite direction either. There should have been others on the road at this hour, a few at least.
So, where were they?
Once the light released him, he made his way into the neatly laid out neighborhoods of stick and stucco homes, each with their own square patch of green lawn out front and new trees held rigid by brown wooden posts. Chil-dren’s bikes, scooters, and other ride-on toys rested against curbs and filled nearly identical concrete driveways, but there were no kids outside playing. He narrowed his eyes and glanced at the dashboard clock. He’d made good time getting home, better than he’d expected. He now had an-other ten minutes until kickoff, which gave him plenty of time for a pre-game beer, maybe two, judging by how skit-tish he felt.
He pulled into his driveway and cut the ignition. The en-gine rumbled to a halt. “It’s nothing,” he said, shaking his head, and then repeated the words in his mind, trying to convince himself he had it all wrong. There had to be a simple explanation. Maybe it was just his weary mind play-ing tricks. Grunting, he snatched his notebook from the seat beside him and tucked it up under his arm, pulled the keys out of the ignition and climbed out of the truck. He hiked up the narrow pathway leading to his front door while glancing up the street. The yards were empty. Just empty. There should have been a few kids outside for God’s sake. Always were. A parent or two, maybe. But the only other person he saw was cranky old Robert Neville, his neighbor from across the street. The man had the hood up on his classic Willys Station Wagon. He was working on some-thing as he did most game nights. The guy just hated foot-ball. What sort of guy hates football? In Texas? The man wasn’t right in the head. Jesse waved and nodded to Robert as he did every game night. He received the same blank stare in response, so he turned and continued up the walkway to his front door. As he drew nearer, he heard sounds coming from inside, the TV, mumbled voices. At least something was working right.
He entered his home, letting the door swing shut with a thud behind him. Cheryl stood in the middle of the living room with her arms folded against her chest. She was watching the flat-screen TV on the far wall. She did not turn away from it or in any way acknowledge his arrival. He grunted a ‘hello’ and slid his belt under his protruding belly then knelt to undo the laces on his work boots. He glanced up at her while finishing. In the glow of the TV, her face looked as if someone had chiseled it from a block of stone. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and held there by a crumpled piece of black cloth. A few strands had come loose and now draped down over her eyes. His daughter Hannah, his pride and joy, sat on a leather sofa set against the back wall. She had her socked feet tucked be-neath her. “Daddy!” she said. He smiled at her. She meant everything to him. She was the most beautiful little girl on the planet. Eight years old and painfully shy. Shy, except when around him.
Cheryl broke her gaze away from the TV long enough to gesture for him to come join her in the living room. “You have to see this,” she said. “Hurry.”
He finished stripping off his boots and set them next to Hannah’s little brown hiking shoes on the tile foyer, then ordered them all in a row against the wall. The TV contin-ued to fill the room with muddled sounds. He watched it with growing interest while making his way around the cof-fee table to his usual place on the sofa. There, he sat down heavily. The cushions wrapped around him with a whoosh. His first look at the TV had told him that something was wrong, but not what. And one glance at Cheryl let him know he needed to keep the negative stuff to himself. She looked worried enough for them both.
“So, everything okay?” he asked in a forced calm.
She flashed him a nasty look, as if he were stupid for even asking.
Snorting, he rubbed his jaw, realizing she was too wound up to say much, so he shifted his attention back to the TV. The images on the screen were coming from a news heli-copter far away from the scene. Tornado? Flood? Earth-quake? No, it didn’t look like any of those. Maybe some kind of rescue? Though, that didn’t reconcile with his un-ease. Terrorists? Again? He leaned forward, scratching his day old beard while further processing what he saw. On the TV, an army of emergency vehicles had formed a line in-tending to stop traffic from crossing a two-lane bridge. Fat beams of white light shined down from helicopters hover-ing above and illuminated police, fire, and other rescue units. Emergency bars mounted on the ground units lit up the area surrounding them in alternating blues and reds. Still, it didn’t seem all that much different from any other night of network news. Carnage and chaos were their stock and trade. If it bleeds, it leads. But what if it was terrorists again? Had those crazies found another soft spot to strike? He certainly hoped not. The last big attack had been terri
-ble, the bungled response had been even worse.
The camera zoomed in for a tight shot of the vehicles. He could not pick out any movement on the scene, which struck him as odd. There should have been a minimal num-ber of responders near the vehicles regardless of what was happening, there to monitor radios, or direct resources. Where had they all gone? And what the hell were they re-sponding to?
“Wait, watch,” Cheryl said, seeming to read his mind. “They’ve been running a clip you gotta see. Just wait, they’ll show it.”
She pressed something into his palm, and his fingers in-stinctively wrapped around it, a cold bottle of Lonestar beer. Somehow, and it had always seemed like magic to him, his wife had made her way into the kitchen and re-turned without him noticing. Mindlessly, he opened the beer and crushed the bottle cap between his thumb and fin-gers, folding it up like a taco. Cheryl sat down beside him on the sofa, and he patted her knee in thanks.
The news anchor from the local station appeared on the screen. He was wearing an overly large blue suit with shiny brass buttons. Apparently, he hadn’t expected the focus to be solely on him. His brow knitted together in a look of perplexed confusion, as if he wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else. Jesse remembered seeing the guy before, but thought he usually did the Sunday weather. An uncom-fortable moment of silence passed before the anchor’s hand shot up to an earpiece. The picture cut away. Bold colors and blaring trumpets replaced the embarrassed reporter, but one thing they hadn’t shut off was the news crawler. It continued to scroll along the bottom of the screen, dis-playing a story about a man from Lubbock who had died after being pulled into a post-hole digging machine. Jesse stifled a laugh, knowing his wife would not find it at all funny. When the sounds and colors of the breaking news alert message cleared, the big-shot network news anchor from New York appeared. A single piece of white tissue stuck out from one side of his collar. Jesse hated the guy, so he reached for the remote on the coffee table, intending to switch to a different channel.
“Don’t,” Cheryl said.
“Good evening,” the anchor began. “We regret interrupt-ing your normal programming tonight, but we did so to bring you important breaking news. In a few short mo-ments, you will see something, which at first might appear made up by Hollywood. However, I assure you, what we are about to show you is very real.”
The deep, vibrating bass from the subwoofer of Jesse’s expensive surround-sound system rattled the pictures on the wall. A woman walked behind the anchor, trying to stay out of the shot. She plucked the tissue from his collar. Jesse drained his beer in a series of gulps and scooted forward, slamming the empty bottle down on the coffee table. The three remotes lying there all bounced in sympathy. He leaned back and settled into the sofa. Then he noticed Cheryl. She was twirling her diamond wedding ring nerv-ously around her finger. He placed his hand back on her thigh to reassure her that everything was going to be okay.
The news guy did seem worried. But he always looked that way with any breaking news story. Still, Jesse had nev-er seen the guy look this worried before. He squeezed the folded bottle cap between his fingers a little harder, consid-ering why.
“It appears,” the anchor continued, “a number of areas outside metropolitan New York are experiencing unusual activity. Many of the reports are still unconfirmed. Emer-gency response teams are on the scene and doing what they can. We have reports from local authorities that everything is under control. Though, of course, that could change at any moment. And if the situation does change, we will bring you the very latest.”
Jesse stretched to grab the remote, again intending to switch channels. He stopped when Cheryl lifted her hand, threatening to smack him with it.
The anchor drew a breath. “Senior Washington officials have informed our network that this was not a terrorist at-tack. However, they have asked us to advise everyone in the affected areas to please stay indoors and remain off the roads so authorities can respond to what has been labeled an ‘unanticipated incident’.”
“What the?” Jesse said. “An ‘unanticipated incident’? What the hell does that mean?” He reached for his empty beer bottle on the table and stopped. He leaned back. “I hate this dumbass.”
“The President has left his extended vacation early. His staff has scheduled a news conference, which we are ex-pecting to occur within the next hour.” The news anchor paused and pulled his shoulders back, trying to look even more serious.
Jesse wasn’t buying it for a second. “Can’t we just change the channel?”
“Shhh,” Cheryl said sharply.
“Here is what we currently know,” the anchor said. “Small creatures, animals of sorts, or perhaps something of unknown origin.”
“Aliens!” Cheryl said. “They’re aliens, Jess. I know it.”
He squeezed her thigh gently, and she stopped talking.
“National Guard units have been alerted and are current-ly responding. Reports are coming in of sporadic gunfire in several areas. Casualty numbers are unknown as of yet, but we will bring you the very latest as it arrives. At this time, we only have a few reports for areas outside of New York City, but we are working with local affiliates to stay on top of this breaking story.”
Jesse nodded. “New York,” he repeated. “Figures.” He turned to Cheryl and let out a derisive laugh. “Can’t be all that bad. It’s happening in New York City. They always blow this stuff out of proportion when it is about their pre-cious city. Center of the damned world.” He then reconsid-ered. It didn’t look like a terrorist attack. What if it was important? What if she was right? What if these were aliens? Little green men coming to take over Manhattan. Nah, couldn’t be. Had to be something else.
The anchor grabbed a sheet of paper and glanced at it. “We have a video provided by one of our local stations. Some of you may have already seen it. It apparently shows the aftermath of one of these incidents.” The anchor drew an excited breath. “I must warn you the video we are about to show you is extremely graphic and very disturbing. We would like to ask, if you have any small children in the home, please have them turn away from the television.”
Jesse leaned back on the sofa and folded his arms across his chest. He was intrigued but remained skeptical. They never showed the truly horrible stuff. The stuff he’d seen plenty of in Iraq. He continued to laugh half-heartedly, ex-pecting Cheryl to say something to their daughter about not watching. Maybe tell her to go to the kitchen, or to her room. But when his wife didn’t say anything, he turned to say something instead. Then he stopped himself. Had she seen this already? Would she be able to handle it? He’d ex-posed her to quite a bit already. She’d been hunting with him and had even shot her first armadillo.
The television switched to an image from a shaky cell phone camera. Cheryl started stabbing her finger at the screen again, leaving him with unsaid words on his lips.
“This is it,” she said. “This is the video I told you about. You gotta see it. Aliens, I’m sure of it.”
Jesse continued to watch. He progressively leaned for-ward, closer and closer to the TV. The folded bottle cap he’d been squeezing between his fingers fell onto the carpet by his feet.
-2-
LIVE REPORT
THE IMAGES DISPLAYED on Jesse’s high-end TV re-mained washed out through no fault of the expensive LED panel. White shapes flitted across the screen, moving too quickly to be seen clearly. Wild dogs? Coyotes? Couldn’t be, he thought. They were walking on two legs, not four. And the necks were too long. What the hell were they? Al-iens? No, that’d be even crazier. His wife was wrong. Just wrong. She had to be. As much as he loved her, she some-times bent the needle to the crazy side.
The television cut back to the network news anchor. A single still image of scattered bodies, ringed by blurry white forms, zoomed out to appear in a box over his left shoulder.
“What are those?” Cheryl asked. “They’ve gotta be al-iens.”
“Nah, not aliens,” Jesse replied. “Has to be something else.�
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His daughter Hannah spoke softly, too softly for him to understand what she had said.
“What, dear?” Cheryl asked before he could.
“Dinosaurs, Mom. Those are dinosaurs. Velociraptors. We saw them in school.”
Cheryl and Jesse turned to her in unison. Hannah was squeezing her favorite teddy bear, Poochy, between her folded arms and looking back proudly.
“What?” Jesse said, confused. He turned back to the tele-vision. The graphic had shrunk too much to verify what Hannah had said, but it kind of made sense.
Cheryl tried to stand, putting her hands on top of her head. “That’s crazy. They’re aliens. I know it. What are we gonna do?” She sat back down, bouncing him on the sofa.
He touched her on the back. “Shhh. Don’t worry. Listen. Listen to me. It’s going to be okay.”
“We now go live to our local network affiliate who has a reporter on the scene.”
The picture shifted abruptly. An attractive female dressed in a dark blue pantsuit appeared. She seemed to be from a well-mixed ethnic background he could not quite identify.
“I’m Trina Martinez-Herald live near the Berkshire Bridge. Behind me are the first responders, and they are—” She stopped. The camera shook as if bumped, and skewed sideways. She let her microphone slump, and it bounced off her ample chest with a popping sound. Jesse tilted his neck to match the new angle of the shot.
“What the hell, Charlie?” the reporter said. “Get back over here. Don’t you run away.” She received no response from her cameraman, so she shook her head and stepped forward to readjust the camera on her own. The image wa-vered slightly before leveling out. She then backtracked to where she was standing earlier and held up her microphone.
“We are live here at—”