“Here’s your key, Dylan,” she warbled.
“Thank you, Ms. Dunbar.” Dylan, Jasmine’s six-year-old son, accepted the house key, then slid down the seat until his feet reached the sidewalk. He was dressed in Oshkosh overalls, Nike sneakers, and a You & I backpack, the fashion statement of choice among the neighborhood’s younger set.
“Everybody say goodbye to Dylan!” Ms. Dunbar chirped. The three kids strapped into the backseat waved over the top of the seat. Dylan could see nothing but their hands, but he waved back anyway. “Remember, tell your mommy you can sleep over next weekend, okay? Bye-bye, I’ll wait for you to get inside.”
A Mercedes-Benz convertible came tearing down the street at fifty miles per hour. It flew over a bump, then bottomed out on the pavement. Joey, outraged, turned to see who was driving like that through her quiet neighborhood and noticed the neighbors standing on their roof looking through binoculars. A busybody, she whipped around the other way to see what they were looking at.
“What? What’s so interesting?” she asked, scanning the block in exasperation. Then she saw the thing in the sky and fell quiet. She stared westward over the housetops, unconsciously baring her teeth. She remained frozen until the squealing of tires broke her concentration. Another neighbor had jerked his car into reverse down his driveway, leaving behind rubber as he sped away around the corner.
Before Dylan was halfway to the house, his baby-sitter hit the gas and fishtailed away, leaving the confused boy staring skyward.
“Mommy, wake up! Look at this,” he cried, coming through the door. Making a bee-line for her room, he jumped on the bed. “Mommy, come outside and see.”
Jasmine quickly covered her naked body with the bedsheet, but remained otherwise immobile. “See what, baby? It’s too early.”
“A spaceship!” Dylan had seen similar situations on cartoons and knew exactly what to do. Wasting no time, he sprinted back to the front windows intending to shoot the thing down.
“What’s with your dog?” a man’s groggy voice asked.
Boomer, Jasmine’s golden retriever, had started barking and whining a few minutes before Dylan came in. After following the boy into the front room, he returned carrying a high-top basketball sneaker in his mouth and deposited the shoe at the head of a large lump under the sheet next to Jasmine. The lump turned over and threw back the cover. “You’re just not gonna let me sleep, are you?”
Steven Hiller, a handsome, muscular man in his late twenties, pushed himself reluctantly into a sitting position and stared back at the excited dog. The sour expression on his face showed he needed another hour of sleep. He and Jasmine had been out late last night, closing down Hal’s Restaurant after hopping between nightclubs.
“He’s trying to impress you,” Jasmine said into her pillow.
Groggily, Steven surveyed the scene around him. Large dolphins splashed and smiled on a poster while several smaller ones, statuettes, were arranged on the dresser and nightstands. A trail of hastily removed clothing led from the hallway to the bed. A framed snapshot of Steve in the cockpit of a fighter jet winked back from the top of the dresser. His and hers robes hung on the hook near the bathroom door. He listened to the dog and the kid in the other room and, for a moment, was surprised to find himself in such a domestic situation. This is the way married people live, he thought. If that same idea had occurred to him a few months earlier, he would have dressed quickly and hit the road ASAP. But now, slumped against the headboard, he only smiled. I think I like this.
He and Jas had been seeing each other exclusively, passionately, exhaustively for half a year, whenever Steve could get into town for the weekend. But he didn’t realize he’d fallen in love with her until a pair of experimental F-19 bombers landed at El Toro Marine Air Base, where he was stationed. Normally, the arrival of such planes would have kept a gung ho pilot like Steve hanging around the base for a chance to fly them. When he chose to spend the time with Jasmine instead, he knew his priorities were changing.
Since graduating from the flight academy, he’d learned to fly every kind of aircraft the service had. When a new airship came through the base, whether it was an old World War II bomber or a highly classified spy plane, Steve always managed to win permission to take her up. On dry weekends, he’d jump in his red Mustang convertible and rip north along the 405 Freeway to LA, his hometown. He’d party all weekend, crashing at his parents’ house, or at one of his girlfriends’ places. He had the reputation of a lady’s man, a smooth operator. Then one night, his parents twisted his arm into going with them to one of their stodgy dinner parties, where, much to his surprise, he became smitten with one of the female guests, the drop-dead gorgeous woman now lying beside him. He turned and examined the perfection of her mocha-colored skin and the graceful way her shoulder curved down to her chest.
Boomer continued to whine. He was whimpering and turning in circles with his tail tucked between his legs. Steve knew there was no use in resisting any longer; he was awake for the day. He stood up and padded into the bathroom. While taking his morning leak, his noticed a tall glass jar set on the back of the toilet. Was it his imagination, or was the bath oil inside vibrating slightly? He knew he didn’t pee that hard. The sound of a low-flying helicopter caught his attention, a Marietta, judging from the sound of the engine. When he was finished doing his business, he looked out the bathroom’s narrow window. He couldn’t see the helicopter, but he got a damn good view of the neighbors. A man and wife ran to their Range Rover, flung a few things into the backseat, then tore off in reverse down the driveway.
“Kinda weird,” he said to his reflection in the mirror. He looked down at the oil in the tall jar. No doubt about it: it was shaking ever so slightly. He stood absolutely still for a moment. Between the gunshots of Dylan’s shoot-out in the living room, Steve thought he heard a low rumbling noise. He hurried out to the bedroom and searched for the remote control.
“Whatcha doing, baby?” Jasmine’s Alabama accent was stronger when she was tired.
“I think we’re having an earthquake and I wanna put on the TV.”
“Where’s Dylan?” Jasmine sat up, suddenly wide awake. “Dylan, come here, baby,” she shouted into the other room. The television snapped to life, showing a local newscaster reading from her notes.
“…through the Southland, but so far there are no reports of injury or property damage. Eve Flesher, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, issued a statement from the steps of city hall only moments ago urging people not to panic.” As tape of the news conference began to roll, Dylan burst into the room, Rambo-style.
“Hey, Steve!”
“Hey, Dylan!” The men hugged good morning. “What’ve you been shooting at, outlaws?”
Dylan looked at him like he was crazy. “What outlaws? I’m shootin’ at the aliens.”
“Aliens?” Steve and Jasmine exchanged a knowing glance. Dylan had a vivid imagination and they loved encouraging him to spin out his fantasies.
His mother asked him, “Did you get any of them?”
Dylan only stared back at her, perturbed. He was old enough to know when adults weren’t taking him seriously. “You think I’m pretending, but I’ll show you.”
“I’m going to see the space ship,” Jasmine said to Steve as she was being tugged out of the room. “Want some coffee when I’m done?”
“I’m coming, too. This might be a job for the Marines.” On his way to the door, he glanced once again at the television. As they did almost monthly, whenever a small tremor rattled the city, the station cut to a shot of the seismometers at Cal Tech in Pasadena. A true Californian, Steve had learned to ignore earthquakes. But when he switched off the set, the rumbling was still there, growing louder.
Plates crashed to the floor in the kitchen and Jasmine shrieked at the top of her lungs. Steve ran out and found her pulling Dylan away from the window. She was scared out of her wits by something outside. Steve threw open the front door and marched on to the porch, prepared to c
onfront whoever or whatever was out there. Or so he thought.
One of the ominous ships was surging toward downtown like a poisonous thundercloud. On this nearly smogless morning, the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains surrounding the city seemed puny, dwarfed by the stupendous size of the object in the air. The entire LA basin resembled a giant stadium with a mechanical roof slowly rolling closed.
“What is it?” Jasmine called from inside. Steve moved his lips, but no explanation came out. He cleared his head and made a careful observation.
The top of the ship was a low curved dome, smooth except for a craterlike depression a mile across at the very front of it. Jutting out of this hollowed area was a gleaming black tower roughly the size and shape of a skyscraper. It was perfectly rectangular, except where its back wall followed the curve of the depression. The tower was as black as wet tar. Irregularities on its surface suggested doors or windows behind concealing black screens.
The bottom was essentially flat and had a distinct pattern to it. It resembled a perfectly symmetrical gray flower with eight petals. These petals carried a blue tint and ran seven full miles out to the upturned edges of the craft. Seen from a distance, they had the same vein-laced shimmering transparency of an insect’s wings. Each “petal” appeared to be built of eighteen thick slabs, planks laid down in long rows that overlapped to create a jagged surface. Crowded onto them was an array of industrial-looking structures. They looked to Steve like cargo bays, docking equipment, storage containers, observation windows, and other large-scale mechanisms. These structures were not separate pieces bolted individually to the underbelly, but parts of the body, protruding like innumerable hard-edged tumors just below a glistening skin. Further away from him, the eye of the flower was a smooth steel plate with deep lines etched into a simple geometric pattern. At first, he thought these lines might be some kind of hieroglyphic decoration, but when they passed overhead, they looked more like the seams to a set of complicated doors. There was nothing decorative about the ship. It was a floating barge, obviously designed to do a job, not to look pretty.
Steve’s first reaction was revulsion. It was not only the sheer volume of the thing hanging over them, or the instinctual dread of feeling trapped beneath a potential predator. There was also something disturbing about the design of the craft, something built unconsciously into its architecture. There was a sinister, joyless necessity to it that revealed something ugly and starkly utilitarian about the personalities of its builders. As if all the industrial waste ever produced had been mixed together into one vast sludge heap and transformed into this stunning, intricate, terrifying machine. Still, there was a certain dark magnetism about it, like microscopic photographs of fleas or fungus that reveal a certain hideous beauty.
*
When David returned to the ground floor, the office was completely empty. The wall of television monitors played for no one. Adjusting the volume on one of the sets, David listened for any information that might confirm or deny his new theory. CNN, still distorted, had pasted together a flashy letterbox logo—a bold graphic that twirled toward the viewer until it filled the screen: “Visitors: Contact or Crisis.” Wolf Blitzer, looking frazzled, was standing in the false night outside the Pentagon.
“Officials here at the Pentagon have just confirmed what CNN has been reporting. Additional airships, like the one hovering directly above me, have arrived over thirty-six major cities around the globe. No one I’ve spoken with here is willing to make an official comment, but speaking off the record, several people have expressed their dismay and frustration that our space defense systems failed to provide any warning.”
A graphic superimposed on the screen. It was a world map showing the locations of the spaceships. David nodded. It was exactly what he had expected to see. He heard a voice coming from Marty’s deserted office and walked closer.
“Yes, I know, Mom. Calm down for a second, will ya?” Marty had crawled under his desk and was yelling into the receiver. When David stuck his head in the doorway and said hello, Marty got such a scare he banged his head hard against the underside of his desk. “Ow! Nothing, I’m fine. Somebody just came in. Well, of course he’s human, Mother, he works here.”
“Tell her to pack up and leave town,” David said.
“Hold on, Mom.” Marty covered the phone. “Why? What happened?”
“Just do it!” he yelled.
“Mom, stop talking and listen. Pack up a few things, get in your car, and drive to Aunt Ester’s. Don’t ask. Go. Call me when you get there.” Marty hung up and crawled out from under the desk. “Okay, why did I just send my eighty-two-year-old mother to Atlanta?”
David was pacing around the cluttered office, thinking. “Remember I told you that the signal hidden inside our satellite feed is slowly cycling down to extinction?”
Marty suddenly recalled the television disruption he’d been so worried about a few hours ago. “Not really. Signal inside a signal, that’s all I remember.”
“That’s right, the hidden signal. Marty, it’s a countdown.”
“Countdown?” That didn’t sound too good. Marty parted the shades and peeked at the dark shape outside. “Countdown to what?”
“Think about it. It’s exactly like in chess. First you strategically position your pieces. Then, when the timing’s right, you strike hard at the opponent’s major pieces. You see what they’re doing?” David motioned toward the television picture of a ship parked above Beijing, China. “They’re positioning themselves over the world’s most important cities and they’re using this signal to synchronize their attack. In approximately six hours, it’s going to disappear and the countdown will be over.”
“What then?”
“Checkmate.”
Marty took a minute to digest the information, then he started having trouble breathing. He opened a can of soda and picked up a phone. “I gotta make some calls. My brother Joshua, my poor therapist, my lawyer… Oh, fuck my lawyer.”
David grabbed a second phone and punched in an eleven digit number he’d rarely called yet knew by heart. While the phone was ringing, every television in the office switched to the same image.
The president of the United States approached the podium in the White House press room, doing his best to project calm and confidence. Everything is under control, no need to panic. While a number of people, including Grey and Nimziki, joined him on the small stage, Whitmore smiled tensely around the room.
“My fellow Americans, citizens of the world, a historic and unprecedented event is taking place. The age-old question as to whether or not we humans are alone in the universe has been answered once and for all…”
“Communications.” The voice on the phone was curt, all business.
“Yeah, this is David Levinson. I’m Connie Spano’s husband. This is an emergency call. I need to talk to her right away.”
“I’m sorry, she’s in a meeting,” the man answered, “can I take a message?”
“No. I need to speak with her right now. I know she’s busy, I’m watching her on the television. This is more important, believe me. Now go get her.” David’s voice was full of command.
“Hold please.”
David turned his attention back to the president’s speech. Connie was standing with a group of people near the stage, just inside the doorway that led into the White House offices. A young man, probably the guy he’d spoken to, came to the door and whispered something in her ear. A moment later she slipped discreetly, professionally through the guarded entrance. David felt a wave of relief. He hadn’t been sure Connie would take the call.
“What do you want?” she hissed into the phone.
Taken completely aback, David sputtered, “Connie, listen, you have to get out of there. The White House, I mean. You have to leave the White House.” Neither of them knew what to say for a second. It sounded like David was rehashing an unpleasant conversation they’d had countless times before. Aware that he wasn’t communicating what he had to s
ay, he bulled forward. “Wait, you don’t understand. You’ve got to get out of Washington all together.”
Connie, angry with herself for leaving the press conference, tried to get off the line. “Thank you for being concerned, but in case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a little bit of a crisis here. I’ve got to go.”
Realizing she was about to hang up on him, David yelled into the phone. “I’ve been working on the satellite disruption all day and I’ve figured it out. They’re going to attack,” David blurted.
The line went silent for a moment. David thought she must be thinking over what he’d said but soon realized she was only covering the receiver while talking to one of her assistants. “They’re going to attack,” she repeated, “go on.”
That made him angry. He was calling to try and save her life, and the last thing he needed was for her to speak to him in a condescending tone. “That’s right, attack,” he said with an edge to his voice. ‘The signal is a countdown. When I say signal, I mean the signal that’s causing all the satellite disruption.” He could sense her impatience. He knew the information wasn’t coming out in order, which only made him more nervous. “I just went up on the roof and it hit me. This morning I… Connie?”
She’d hung up. He hit the redial button on the phone, but realized that wouldn’t do him any good. She wouldn’t take another call. He looked up at the snowy image of President Whitmore.
“…My staff and I are remaining here at the White House while we attempt to establish communication…”
When he heard that, David knew what he had to do. He packed up his laptop and a few diskettes, then grabbed his bike and headed for the door. “Marty,” he called across the office, “quit wasting time and get out of town right now.”
Marty, still on the phone, listened to the end of Whitmore’s address. “…so remain calm. If you are compelled to leave these cities, please do so in a safe and orderly fashion. Thank you.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 8