by J. D. Laird
The young woman, her name Tayna, is flipping through the book they had found in the library. The book that was titled, “U.F.O.s: What we know about them and what they know about us.” Tanya stops on a page that depicts an artist’s diagram of a flying saucer. It is a flat, round disc with a bulbous half-circle resting on top of it. The diagram breaks down the different compartments of the saucer, some amateur’s best guess at the purpose behind the alien technology. The book is designed for children. It has simple words and stylized pictures. Gabriel thinks the whole idea of aliens is childish. It is material reserved for a children’s library, not something to be taken seriously.
“I don’t believe any of this.” Gabriel finally says. He stares into the fire made by the small camping lantern and watches the steady flame.
“How else do you explain what you’ve seen?” Jules says. The lantern’s light casts dark shadows across his face.
“I haven’t seen anything,” Gabriel pushes himself away from the small lounge table and goes to peer out the large window. He stands looking out at the empty playground. There are swing sets, slides and monkey bars. All of them are abandoned and have a ghostly glow in the moonlight. Parts of some of the sets are missing. Circular indents remain where sections of the sets have been removed. “Just those damn holes.” Gabriel mutters. “I don’t understand it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s…” Gabriel can’t even bring himself to say it.
Jules is concerned for Gabriel. His eyes flash between Gabriel’s back and the young woman who is with them. The young woman whom Gabriel has confirmed is the older man’s daughter. “What do you mean you haven’t seen anything?” Jules strokes his beard again and ponders over Gabriel’s words. “Were you hiding when they invaded?”
Gabriel turns away from the window. “Hiding? No. I just woke up and everything was gone.” There was something missing, something that the two parties were missing from one another. Something was blocking their attempts at effective communication.
“You were asleep then?” Jules leans back in his chair and furrows his brow. A silence falls over the room. Jules is lost in his own thoughts until his daughter kicks him playfully in the shins.
“You’re doing it again.” Tayna says.
“Doing what?” Jules says, snapping back from the recesses of his mind.
“Playing professor.” She says, cocking her eyebrows. She turns to Gabriel. “Dad was a professor at U Penn. Sometimes he gets like this. Thinking rather than talking.”
“A professor?” Gabriel confirms as he comes back to the table with the lantern and takes a seat.
“Yes.” Jules says as he rests his elbows on the table. “Biology. Neurobiology to be specific. I study brain waves mainly. How they are transmitted, at what frequency, and when. That kind of thing.”
Gabriel didn’t know anything about ‘that kind of thing’, but nodded his head anyway. “I worked maintenance at a building in Center City.” Gabriel says as he looks directly into the professor’s eyes. Gabriel was searching for answers. “I was in my office. It was in a basement. That’s where I woke up.” Gabriel then averts his gaze. “I don’t remember falling asleep. But when I woke up I was hungry, dressed in my same overalls, and then there was this.” Gabriel rubs his face where his beard was coming in.
“Remarkable.” Jules says. He studies Gabriel carefully. It makes Gabriel suddenly feel very aware of his appearance. He wishes he had shaved when he had the chance earlier.
“Dad!” Tayna says, nudging her father with her elbow. “He’s not one of your lab rats. Stop looking at him like that.”
Jules realizes he had been staring, probing Gabriel with his eyes looking for some clue to further his investigation. He turns now to his daughter. “I just think it’s interesting is all.” He says.
“What?” Gabriel asks. “What’s interesting?”
“Well,” It is Tayna who speaks. She is looking at a picture in the book of one of the saucers in the sky. There is a beam of light coming out of the bottom of it. The beam engulfs an image of a cow who is hovering off the ground, presumably being picked up by the beam.
“Everyone that we saw, those who fell asleep.” Tayna pauses and points at the picture of the cow. “They were taken.”
18 Tayna
The sun is coming in through the curtains in the same space between them where Tayna had neglected to pull them all the way shut the night before. She can already hear her father rummaging around downstairs. There is the sound of a tea kettle whistling as he makes himself another cup of English Breakfast tea. Rolling over, Tayna tries to ignore both the light and sounds. She tries to go back to sleep. She tries to tell her body it is just a dream. She tries to get some more rest.
Her body aches. It longed for another few hours to recover from the previous night’s escapades. But Tayna’s mind is awake. It is already running through the list of things she had to do that day, homework mainly. After a few more minutes of battling with herself and her covers, she finally surrenders and rolls out of bed.
Tayna stumbles across the floor, out of her room and into the hallway. She finds the bathroom and falls into it. After freshening up, Tayna splashes some water in her face. The water feels cool but has the tinge of a metallic taste to it as drops of it creep into her mouth. Tayna’s father had all of the water in their house purified and double-purified. As a result, the water always tasted a little like the carbon filters it passed through. Her father shipped the water in from the mountains and insisted it was necessary. “Do you have any idea what’s in the city’s tap water?” He would say. Tayna knew he did it to keep her safe but it still always tasted funny. The purification process takes out some of the taste that she enjoyed in ‘regular water’. Her father would say that ‘water doesn’t have a taste’ but she disagreed.
Tanya meanders back to her bedroom and shuts the door.
Her father would know that she is awake but as long as she stayed upstairs she knows he won’t bother her. Tayna flicks on her desk lamp and looks at herself in her vanity mirror. Her black curly hair puffs out from her head in wild spurts. She rubs her eyelids to make sure they don’t look too swollen. Then she checks her eyes themselves. She and her friends had gone to a bar down the street that was notorious for not carding students. Tayna is underage and remembers feeling so nervous ordering her drink with the other freshmen girls at the table. Staring into the vanity mirror now, she looks for any evidence of her indiscretion. She checks her eyes for signs of acute onset jaundice. She had drank more than she should have.
Satisfied that there is no evidence of her follies the night before, Tayna grabs her backpack and pulls her agenda book out from inside. She flips through the pages to see what assignments are due over the next two weeks. There is an online lab test for her Biology class on Wednesday, a reflection paper for Philosophy class on Friday, and a chapter summary for her English class due next week. Tayna tries to think how best to divide up her time.
Her phone then buzzes. It is a welcome distraction. Tayna finds her phone on her nightstand. A text message from her friend Clarissa flashes across the screen. “Woot!” It reads. “What a night! Thx BFF!” It makes Tayna smile. The memories of the previous evening comes back to her. She fondly recalls her new college friends chatting over drinks about guys, their parents, and their hopes for their future careers. Immediately Tayna wants to go out again to experience it all, all over again.
Just as Tayna’s thumbs start punching in a response into her phone the screen goes dark. Outside there is the sound of a car swerving, a crash. Car horns follow. Tayna’s desk lamp goes out. Her digital clock no longer flashes the time.
Tayna smacks her phone on its side with her palm hoping to jar the battery lose. Outside the sound of a car horn blaring continues. Tayna can hear her father stomping around downstairs. Popping off the back of her phone, Tayna makes her way over to her curtained window at the same time. With one hand she slides out the battery of her phone, while with the other, she pulls back one of
her window curtains. The battery slips through her fingers when she peers outside.
It is as if someone has hit the pause button on the world. The normally busy streets around The University of Pennsylvania’s campus are now still. The only sound is that of the car horn. The sound never ceases, it is one consistent blare. There are people outside Tayna notices, but they are lying on the sidewalk. Tayna can see ten, maybe twenty people, all either on their backs, their sides, or with their faces buried in the sidewalk. They aren’t moving. Tayna fears they are dead.
She can see that cars and the people within them aren’t moving either. One of the vehicles in the street crashed into the car in front of it, which had forced that car up onto the sidewalk where it had struck a lamppost. There is steam coming from the vehicle’s engine. Oddly there is no exhaust from the tailpipe.
“Tayna!” It is her dad bolting up the stairs. Tayna can’t pull herself away from the window.
“Tayna!” He yells again, by this time he is on the other side of her bedroom door. He bangs on it with his fists. When she doesn’t answer he opens the door and barges in out of breath. In his hands he holds a trashbag that is bulging with misshaped objects.
“Tayna!” Again he says her name but she doesn’t move.
All those people had been suddenly petrified, Tanya thinks. The image is beyond her understanding. Her father’s arm wraps around her and he pulls her away from the window.
“Tayna,” He says, this time softer. He looks into his daughter’s eyes. “We have to go now.”
The two of them bolt down the stairs. Tayna is in a daze. He holds her father’s hand and is being dragged along. Her bare feet patter across the kitchen tile. Eventually the two of them are heading down another flight of stairs. Tayna is suddenly cold, only wearing pajama pants and an oversized t-shirt. Her father closes the door to the basement behind them and she hears the sound of tape being pulled off of its spool. There is also the sound of plastic crinkling.
“The windows!” Her father shouts. Tayna looks around her. The basement of their row home had two windows. One facing the street and one facing the backyard. Both were thin and at head height, so that someone could peek out just above ground-level. At Tanya’s feet was the trashbag her father had been carrying. Tayna sorted through it. There was a roll of trashbags and a few rolls of duct tape. As if by instinct, practiced skills from drills they had performed when she was child, Tayna takes one of the trashbags and tape rolls and runs over to the front-facing window. She holds the plastic bag up over her head with one hand, covering the window pane, and using her teeth to pulls the tape roll out and adheres the bag to the wall.
By the time she is done both windows are covered completely by the trashbags. There is no room for air from the inside to seep in. Her father is busy tapping into their water supply, the water they had shipped in from the mountains. He is re-routing the piping so that it will no longer flow into the rest of the house.
Tayna finds a blanket in a crate labeled, “Emergency Supplies” and drapes it around her shoulders. “What’s happening, Dad?” She asks as she sorted through the supplies her father had brought down in the trash bag. Most of it is food he has haphazardly grabbed from the cupboard and thrown into the bag in a hurry.
When her father looks at her Tayna can see the fear in his eyes. “I think,” He was struggling to find the right words to say. “I think we’re under attack.”
19 Jules
The first hour is the hardest. Jules and his daughter spend it organizing their supplies and planning out their rations. Jules knows that they might have to stay in the basement for at least a week before help arrives. There is no way to know for sure. They desperately need contact with the outside world to know what is happening. Jules is dismayed when he finds that their emergency radio does not work. He curses himself for not checking the condition of their supplies more regularly. Nothing is working, not even their flashlights. The only way they had any light was from a small gas-powered camping lantern that wasn’t affected by whatever had knocked out all of the electricity.
Jules tries not to think about all the people he had seen on the street. He had seen them at first out of his periphery while he was busy pouring himself some tea. It was a normal morning, with the daily traffic outside that was expected in the University Area for a weekday. But then everyone stopped and fell over simultaneously. The power went out as well. Then there was the crash and the car horn.
Everything that Jules had learned about emergency planning kicked into gear. He didn’t know for certain what had caused the attack. Probably a combination of an electro-magnetic pulse and a biological attack, he theorized. His daughter and himself were likely not affected by the later because they were inside. Jules hoped none of what he assumed was an invisible gas that had knocked out the people on the street had crept inside the house. Now Jules felt they were safe. The effect had been instant for those outside, as if all had inhaled the poison at once. He and his daughter were fine.
Tayna is adjusting well to the crisis, Jules thought. He was proud of her. He didn’t understand human psychology as well as biology, but he figured it was probably the resiliency she had built up as a young adolescent after the death of her mother. Jules still worries for her, though, a father’s worry. He watches her carefully as she callously cataloges their food stock on a clipboard. It had been her idea to categorize the items based on caloric and nutritional value. That way they ate as balanced and as nutrient-dense meals as possible.
But both of them stop when they hear the distant sounds of something...different. Jules can’t be sure of what. The car horn that had been blaring had stopped after the first half hour. Since then the world outside had been silent. However, now Jules hears sounds from outside. It sounds like an earthquake that is happening far away.
Jules can’t risk tearing off the dark trash bags on the windows in order to have a look. He fears what he thought might be a biological agent might seep in. He doesn’t want his daughter exposed. Regardless, Jules has to know what is going on. It is the scientist in him. He can’t just sit back and now know. The curiosity will gnaw at him incessantly.
Searching through one of the several storage bins that line the wall of Jules’ basement, he finds what he is looking for. An old gas mask, a remnant of a project from his thirties. A time when he had worked on a project team investigating the effects of neurotoxins in the Middle East. It was a miserable experience, and one that had turned Jules away from the study of biological warfare. He remembered all the bodies he had investigated and autopsied. There were men, women and children. All were victims of some government’s attempts to maintain control through fear mongering. Jules never imagined he’d have to wear the mask again.
Taking one of the trash bags and some duct tape, Jules pulls on the mask. He tells his daughter he will be right back. By this time the sounds of what seems to be vibrating earth is getting closer. Jules and his daughter can feel the vibrations in the cement floor.
Making his way up the basement stairs, Jules is quick to tear off the plastic covering the door. Hurriedly he opens it and scampers through. Holding up the plastic bag he had brought with him, he reseals the door from the other side. He put an extra coat of duct tape across the edges of the door for good measure.
The moisture of Jules’ breath in his mask threatens to fog up his visor. He tries to control the rate and the force of his respirations. His beard itches as it rubs against the respirator. The sound of the vibrations coming from outside and in the streets is louder than ever. With the utmost stealth that his sixty year old body can manage, Jules creeps toward the front of the row house to peer out the front windows.
His head peeks up over a window sill and Jules sees that the streets are the same as they were before. Bodies lay scattered across the sideway or passed out in their vehicles. None have been disturbed. The rumbling sound of shaking ground beneath him continues, however. Only now, it is accompanied by a growing humming that fills the air.
Jules creeps to his front door and his hand trembles as he turns the handle. Just cracking the door ever so slightly, he peers out. He spies down the street in the direction of the growing humming sound. What he sees defies belief.
A large triangular black object hangs in the sky. It is drifting closer, slowly and methodically. It is of immense proportions and is like nothing that Jules had ever seen. Spinning around this large object are smaller shapes. These flat circular objects have matte metallic surfaces that repel the sunlight. Atop these circles are domes, also solid and metallic, but these domes had circular portholes that may be windows. From these smaller saucers emit green beams of light. They are targeting different locations along their trajectory.
Jules freezes. There is a lump in his chest. The armada of vessels in the air, flying ships he assumes, are heading in his direction. The number of metallic saucers is incalculable. Jules tries to count them at first, but their flight pattern is too erratic. They swarm and weave between each other, projecting beams of light sporadically as their make their hasty maneuvers.
As the ships come closer, Jules feels the urge to close the front door to the house. He can’t. His body won’t move. Instead he remains a petrified witness as one of the saucers flies overhead. From it, a green beam of light shoots out from its base. The beam comes down and encircles one of the fallen people on the sidewalk. It is a student in her early twenties. Her books from her backpack have spilled out onto the pavement. In an instant, both the student and the beam of light are gone. In their wake only a spherical intent in the sideway remains where she and her books had been.
Jules has no thoughts. He just watches, frozen and afraid. The inquisitive part of himself is stunned. His whole being is marveling at what seems like a miracle before his eyes. Soon the sky overhead is filled with saucers and they take turns shooting down the same beams of light. Each ray targets one of the incapacitated persons that line the streets. After each light vanishes it leaves an impression of where a person had been. Everything the light consumes is cut away and disappears.