by Rob Horner
“I just need to know two things,” Brian finished. “Who are the bad guys? And can we include helping my fellow cops in the list of things to take care of?”
“Not interested in where your ability came from?” Fish asked.
“I figure that part will fit in somewhere,” he answered.
The next fifteen minutes were a rehash of the history lesson I was treated to on the ride from the carnival, though it went much faster without the half-dozen other voices interjecting. Brian took it all in stride, having already prepared himself to some degree for the information. The revelation that Fish wasn’t human didn’t bother him either, other than for him to ask, “So that’s why you have the helmet on?”
“Yes. Your atmosphere is almost identical to the Dra’Gal home world, which makes it just different enough to be poisonous to me.”
“Must make sleeping uncomfortable,” I said.
“Oh no, I have a room prepared for my needs, where I can rest without the helmet,” he said. “Though I require much less in the way of sleep than you do.”
Iz went through the list of Mandatum Chosen who had been with the program from the start, giving names and abilities: Ricardo the healer; Michael the pyrokinetic; Chris, who could change his skin texture; Danielle, with her vocal powers that could break glass, shatter ear drums, or just prevent Dra’Gal from manifesting; Ben, with the power to bind Dra’Gal so they couldn’t move or manifest; Angelica, another healer who also had the ability to see auras that denoted Chosen, Dra’Gal, and Quins, and a young woman named Caitlin whom I hadn’t met, with what he called the world’s most paradoxical ability, super strength in a petite package.
“Every soldier, police officer, or federal agent who joined us came hoping to have something stirred within them,” Iz said. “I was no different. But like many of our men, nothing happened when I bathed in the Phosphorescent Catalyst. Of the hundred or so here at Mandatum, only seven were Chosen, and that’s a high percentage, though it wasn’t all luck.”
“You guys had data on your recruits, didn’t you?” Brian asked. “Something that led you to believe the ones you were talking to had a better than average chance of being able to be…Chosen.”
“Very perceptive,” Fish said. “Yes, there were patterns. And for the record, both of you exhibit the biomarkers we isolated as appropriate for Instillation.”
“I’m sure the others did too, right?”
“Yes,” Fish nodded. “We knew we were on the right track, but we ran out of time to refine our search.”
“Because they were coming?” I asked.
“It was more than that they were coming,” Fish replied. “Remember, there were already some here, working behind the scenes, setting up these false ceremonies with gullible humans—no offense intended—who thought they were communing with the devil, or with ancient Mother Gaea, or a hundred other mythical beings tied to achieving power over one’s enemies. The specific promise didn’t matter. The Dra’Gal had identified a time when astral and atmospheric interference would be least problematic for a mass transmission of their consciousness.”
“A mass conversion,” I whispered.
“Exactly. All over the world a hundred quasi-religious ceremonies culminated at exactly eight p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Sunday, April the fourteenth, unleashing a horde of converted humans on a world that wasn’t ready to fight them. We’ve been trying to warn the planet for decades, but only in the last seven years have we had any success with certain leaders. In America, that means we have places like this to meet, plan, and strike from. In other countries, we haven’t been so fortunate.”
Fish lowered his head, and Iz reached across to pat him on his shoulder. “What he’s not telling you is that some of his people have learned the hard way that not all of us respond well to the new or different. Some of his compatriots have ended up under a microscope rather than leading the battle against our common enemy.”
“It’s worse than that,” Fish continued. “Quite a few countries don’t even believe we have a common enemy. They shut us out completely.”
Into my mind came a memory of a news story, thousands of people clamoring for recognition of the current crisis outside the Vatican. There were hundreds of Chosen and dozens of yellow-glowing Quins. Perhaps the Quins were organizing the protests, but as far as we could tell from the new story, those people wanted an official pronouncement about the presence of demons in the world, not aliens.
“The light that came down,” Brian began, “that was you guys?”
“Yes. Once it became apparent we weren’t going to be able to find and Instill a suitable number of volunteers in time for the confluence, we resorted to plan B,” Iz said.
“In easy to understand terms, we piggy-backed on the trails of the strongest resonance signals coming to Earth, thus insuring our largest possible pools of subjects would be grouped around the resonators.” Fish clasped his hands together, then spread them apart in an indication of a widening circle. “That’s a general way of describing it. As exact as the science was that guided the Phosphorescent Catalyst, like many things in nature, its wave pattern spread as the distance grew between the source and the target. It was aimed at the resonators, but each beam ended up encompassing a circular area with a thirty- or forty-mile diameter.”
Which not only explained how people many miles from the carnival could see a light that had seemed as narrow as a pencil to me, but also how a friend in a neighboring city could have been Instilled with a power at the same time I was.
“The Catalyst would only affect those with a certain…predisposition to change, a very specific set of bioelectric markers within the brain. There’s a common theory which states the average human only utilizes five to ten percent of the power of the brain. That’s not entirely true. A better way to state it would be to say that only a small portion of the brain’s capability is available to the average human. The rest is locked behind barriers that may never be breached. Humans self-define their own limitations through a lifetime of being told what is and isn’t possible, following restrictions placed by religion and society. There are even genetic changes which haven’t yet occurred, potentials which may develop through evolution. All of these serve as a barrier to what humanity may eventually achieve.”
“To say that the Catalyst bypassed those limitations is simplistic, but it suffices. Many of your abilities manifested out of the greatest need at the time they were first used. And once used, the human mind sets many boundaries back in place, striving to make the body fit back into the arbitrary lines of normalcy that have always defined it. There are undoubtedly numerous Chosen who haven’t yet manifested an ability, and may never, simply because they are so set in their self-limitations that the mind will not allow a change.
“Your ability to purge the Dra’Gal, Johnny, is unique as far as we know, but keep in mind we only know a small percentage of the total number of Chosen.”
I remembered Crystal counting the number of people with a white aura while we ate lunch in a Taco Bell.
“Now, the Catalyst was meant to provide protection as well as an Instillation, like a vaccine,” Fish continued. “But somehow that’s been lost. Our command is still working on the problem. In a nutshell, becoming Chosen is supposed to make you immune to the Dra’Gal perversion.”
“It helped me,” I said, only realizing after the fact that the words were spoken aloud.
“What do you mean?” Iz and Fish asked together.
It was one of those moments that made me uncomfortable, having to discuss a weakness, even if only momentary. So, I squirmed a little talking about it, stumbling here and there, but finally managed to describe the feelings which ran through me when the red light washed over me.
“Wait, you were at one of these ceremonies?” Fish asked. “Dude, you should have told us before.”
Hearing an alien say Dude was just as cool as you think it would be.
“I haven’t had a chance to,” I said, though the excuse
sounded lame even to me. “Why does it matter?”
“It might not, but there exists the possibility of a kind of residual connection.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Iz said, echoing my thoughts.
“Look, it works like this: the light created a bridge between your consciousness and a particular Dra’Gal, one who sought to enter you through it.”
I shivered, remembering the feeling of corruption and, paradoxically, the amazing freedom that corruption would bring.
“The same aspect of the Phosphorescent Catalyst that should protect all Chosen from Dra’Gal possession was also enough to break that link before it could be used to transport the Dra’Gal into your body.”
“Okay.”
“But since we know now that being Chosen doesn’t provide immunity, it bears asking the question. What if the Catalyst didn’t completely heal you? What if you are flawed on some fundamental level, an easy target should they ever get one of those statues in front of you?”
Now was the time to ask about the dreams. It was the perfect opportunity. All I had to do was say something like I’ve been having these weird dreams that seem to be coming true. And one time a voice spoke to me, telling me I was doomed. Granted that voice came from a dream version of this pretty girl who was dressed in a see-through nightie, but I’m sure that didn’t have anything to do with it.
It was on the tip of my tongue. But before I could start, Iz chimed in. “I’d like to think maybe it goes the other way. Maybe he’s immune now, vaccinated. Maybe his power to purge people is because of that brief contact, which is why no one else has demonstrated anything similar.”
“It’s possible,” Fish conceded. “But let’s hope we don’t ever need to find out.”
“Amen to that,” I mumbled.
“Anyway, from hearing your description, it sounds exactly like what Fish said,” Brian said, “a religious ceremony.”
“It was,” I said, nodding. “But it also wasn’t. And there were these people there, like handmaidens or helpers—”
“Wait,” Fish interrupted, “did they seem wrong to you?”
I nodded. “Like their joints weren’t quite right.” I finished describing the ceremony, how the robed Dra’Gal tore into the unsuspecting carnies, then melted into them.”
Fish elbowed Iz. “I told you there would be Betas.”
“Like the fish?” Brian said. “Um, no pun intended.”
Fish laughed, a hollow bark from inside his helmet. “Like Alphas and Betas. Lieutenants, if you will.” He went on to give a description of the Alpha we’d seen the night before, which drew a stare of goggle-eyed incredulity from Brian. “Those smaller creatures were typical Dra’Gal in their physical form, converting themselves into a pure form of energy and entering the human host as it died. You won’t be able to Purge them, Johnny. They are their host now. The spirit of the human is gone.”
“And an Alpha is…what? A queen bee?” Brian asked.
“An Alpha is a physical representation of the collective. It’s a Dra’Gal whose power and size increase in proportion to the number of subservient thought beings in the hive mind.”
“Wait,” I said. “Iz told me destroying a resonator won’t actually stop the Dra’Gal that are already here. But if the Alpha gets its power from the…what did you call it…shared consciousness of the collective—”
“Destroying a resonator will reduce an Alpha back to its original form,” Fish asserted. “It’s a second reason why finding and destroying those resonators is our primary objective.”
“Okay—" Brian said, dragging out the syllables while he searched for a way to put his thoughts together. “So, the Alphas and the Betas are already here physically?”
Fish nodded.
“And the Betas, at least the way Johnny described them…that’s what will happen to all of us if the Dra’Gal actually come here?” Brian asked.
Iz turned away from the table, scooting his chair to the low desk that ran under the computer monitors. He clicked away at a keyboard, bringing up a computerized image of the continents, laid out on a flat surface. The side edges of the screen shared the same longitude number, as though a globe was sliced open at that point and spread out in a two-dimensional plane.
“Let me answer that,” Iz said. “You’ve all seen maps like this before, I’m sure.” He clicked a few more keys. A red dot appeared in the center of Europe. “Plague projections, disease spread, things of that nature. This is day one.” The single red dot became two, then four, then a cluster. The cluster developed thick tendrils extending east into Asia and south toward the Mediterranean Sea. “Day ten. This isn’t what we’re facing, but I want you to see this, so you have a way to compare.”
The red dots only covered ten percent of Europe, but already spots were appearing along the eastern edge of North America, places where international flights routinely landed, like New York, Washington DC, and Florida.
“Day twenty.”
More dots appeared in Asia, extending down into India and east into Japan. Another few key clicks, and the red spots showed up on the west coast of North America.
“Day thirty.”
From that point, it was a simple game of the clusters growing, tendrils reaching for each other across the large masses of land. By day sixty, more than sixty percent of every continent was covered. At day ninety, coverage was complete.
“Was that a CDC presentation?” Brian asked.
“That’s who we copied it from, yes,” Fish answered. “It’s actually a projection of the communicability of smallpox, what would happen if, for example, someone managed to weaponize it and release it into a large population center in Europe.
A second map appeared on the screen just to the right of the first one, identical except it had no colored dots on it. “This is the same map,” Iz said. “Now let’s add the human population to it.” He clicked a key, and most of the brown land masses filled in with green. They weren’t dots so much as concentrated masses of color that covered almost every available pixelated speck of brown land, except for Antarctica. Smaller land masses in the vast areas of blue that denoted the Earth’s oceans also came alive with green, showing how densely-populated some island chains were, like those surrounding Greece.
“You won’t see much change here unless you look where I tell you, but I’m going to add the current probable Dra’Gal presence.” He tapped a few keys. “Look at the part of the United States where we are.”
Brian and I leaned forward in our chairs, but even searching the East Coast, I couldn’t see any difference.
“Let me enlarge it.”
The screen zoomed in on the south-eastern United States, showing Virginia down to Florida. Another click, and the image came closer, focusing solely on the area surrounding the Chesapeake Bay.
“This is today, approximately. Even at maximum resolution, the total population of Dra’Gal and possessed humans is so small that you cannot make out any difference.”
Iz started typing again, and the image shrank back down to the map of the globe with its green overlay.
“Even if the Dra’Gal reach enough humans to fully utilize the power of all the resonators on Earth,” Fish said, “it will still be just a drop in the bucket compared to the total population of the planet, a few hundred thousand out of several billion.”
“It’s hard to conceive of numbers on a scale like that,” Iz said. “The Quins estimate the total remaining population of the Dra’Gal at ten million, which is about one-fifth of one percent of the total number of humans on Earth.”
“They want to take over this planet,” Fish said, “and to do that, they have to accomplish saturation, which is the term we use to define full deployment of their resonators.”
“Here’s the map at saturation,” Iz said. Small pocket of red, nothing more than tiny specks, appeared on the map. One dot for most major cities, surrounded by oceans of green. “Their goal, we think, is to gain control of our centers of power, the cap
itals, the state governments, which will help facilitate landing their forces.”
“Here’s what the day of arrival looks like.”
The singular dots grew into large blobs of red, like a cancerous sore in the heart of each country. “Millions of Betas,” Fish said, “who will spread out and begin to cull the majority of humanity.”
“Thirty days,” Iz said. Unlike the map showing the spread of a plague, this map showed a recession of the green spread of humanity. It began as a nimbus of brown surrounding the areas of red. “They will sweep the closest areas clean, removing any possible form of resistance. At sixty days, you can see large swaths of land free of any human life, as the Dra’Gal solidify their hold on the cities. Humanity is pushed out and into the interior, grouping together by necessity.”
One more click, and most of the green disappeared. The Earth remained, brown except for the concentrated areas of red where the Dra’Gal held power, and small, scattered flecks of green.
The screens went dark.
“What happened to the green?” Brian asked.
“So far they’ve never found a planet so accommodating to their physiology,” Fish said.
“Our fear,” Iz continued, “is that once they have control of the governments, they can push humanity away. And we’ll go willingly. Our people will gravitate to one another, building strongholds, planning to fight back. But the Dra’Gal will have the nukes.”
That word brought a hush into the room.
Nukes.
My parents told me stories of drills done in the public schools during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when air raid sirens would sound an alarm, and all the children would climb out of their chairs and hunker down under their desks. It was frightening for them, and almost laughable as the availability of information increased. By the time I began reading about the astonishing destructive power of modern nuclear weapons, it was accepted knowledge that having children hide under desks was ridiculous as a safety measure; a single weapon striking within ten miles would permeate the area with so much radiation that no one would survive, unless they were protected in a hardened lead, steel, or concrete bunker.