The Distance

by Jeremy Robinson

  “Sounds like the perfect preparation for fending off an actual alien attack.” Her sarcasm isn’t exactly biting, but my imaginary back feels a little less silver.

  Distant but approaching light strikes my eye through my small peephole. “Quiet. They’re here!”

  The crickets continue their auditory domination of the night, until all at once, they fall silent, too. To them, the light of day has returned.

  I hold my breath as the luminous craft, visible as nothing more than bright light, glides past overhead. I wait for it to do something. To attack. To turn me into dust. To send another translucent assassin. But it slides past, stopping beyond my range of vision.

  I try to turn my head to continue watching, but a second light appears above me.

  “There’s more,” Tanya whispers. Her voice is barely audible, but in the dead silence, it feels like an explosion. I reach out and pinch her arm, expressing my disapproval without making a sound.

  A third light slips into view, the three craft forming a triangle above the field at the campground’s center. Them, not it. What are they waiting for?

  They don’t know if we’re here. They have limits. They’re looking for us, visually. They can’t see through walls. Can’t even see heat. These aren’t soldiers. If they were, they’d have military weapons beyond imagining. So what are they?

  In the stillness, I decide to compare what I know about the Blur to what I know about the human race. What kind of person has the ability to destroy a civilization, yet lack the military might to win a conventional fight? What kind of person can kill a living thing without qualms, and without weapons? What are we to them in human terms? Ants? Apes?

  Biology didn’t come up much in the mathematical world of astrophysics. Conversations tended to avoid the physical realm. Subjects like sex, physical ailments and fitness were taboo. Not even more pressing subjects like an Ebola outbreak or the Hochman’s illness came up at work. We couldn’t be bothered with such things. The one time biology was discussed, and even hotly debated, was in relation to the idea of finding life on other planets. We might be focused on things like nebulas, dark matter and black holes, but life on other worlds sparks every child’s mind and drew some of us toward space, even if we spent our lives in labs buried miles beneath the ground.

  What kind of life was out there? And once we found it, assuming it was biological, what would we do with it? We were never able to agree on a Star Trek-like Prime Directive dictating how the human race should interact with alien life—advanced or not—but we all agreed on how humanity would react: greedily. We’d experiment on the living while plundering natural resources. It’s what we do to our own planet, to which our future as a species is connected. Why treat alien life any better? The rich would hunt alien wildlife for sport, and science would collect, poke, prod and dissect any living thing, from megafauna to microfauna, in an effort to squeeze out every bit of knowledge. That is, assuming we were the dominant species.

  I nearly gasp when I realize the truth.

  We’re the mice.

  The lab rats.

  Bacteria.

  The human race is the lesser species, and the Earth is nothing more than a giant petri dish to these things. We few survivors are rogue cells, having survived a cull. Or perhaps this is simply the experiment? Wipe out the population and see how the survivors behave. When they become complacent, poke them. Give them some external motivation. Shake the cage. Throw in a snake.

  “Oh my God,” I whisper, but I’m silenced by three rapid-fire hums in unison with flickering lights. They’ve sent one of their killers. The flickering lights and hum repeats. Again. And again. Six times total. The craft Poe found appeared to be for a single Blur. The UFOs above us must be different. Larger. But I’ll never be able to see them, or the interlocked rings, past the bright light.

  What I can see is that they know we’re here.

  Hiding in the dark. Cowering.

  Like rats.

  Not tonight, I think. I kick away the soft plaid blanket I’d been lying beneath at the center of the field, hiding in plain sight. “Not tonight!” I scream, taking aim at the first patch of distorted light I see.

  The rifle booms through the stillness, and its echo is interrupted by a shriek. Contact made. A face slips out of the light, becoming clear for an instant, as I’m spotted by oily eyes. Tanya sees it, too, sitting up beside me and pulling her trigger twice. The face snaps back, shattered, then gone. But the flattened grass beneath the still body is easy to see.

  “We killed it,” I say. I turn to Tanya with wide eyes that match her own. “We killed it!”

  The night erupts. The silent Blur wail, high pitched, their alien voices unnerving. I can’t tell if they’re angry, terrified or confused. If they’re scientists, it could be any of the above. Or a mix. Hollywood always depicts aliens as being of one mind, of one personality, but they’re probably more like us than they’d ever admit, maybe arguing about what to do next. How to respond.

  I aim and pull the trigger twice more before screams draw my attention. A cabin door flies into the air, wrenched free by some invisible force. Rifle fire from Jeb and Mark answer, pushing the Blur back with a shriek. But the people inside are now exposed.

  “Protect the cabins!” I shout to Tanya, as I charge for the open door. A Blur fills the door’s rectangular gap. I raise the rifle to shoot, but I can see people on the other side. If the round passes through the thing’s body, I could kill one of the people inside. So I charge instead, turning the rifle around and wielding it like a bat. Before the Blur can fully enter the cabin, I launch myself up the stairs and bring the rifle down hard, connecting with something solid.

  At the precise moment of contact, I’m flung back, repulsed by whatever technology that makes physical contact with the Blur nearly impossible. I land hard on my back and slide across the grass.

  Gunfire surrounds me. Shouting and shrieking mixes. The sounds of battle. Then, above me, the night sky distorts, the light bent by the body of a Blur standing above me. I look for the rifle, but my hand is empty.

  The Blur’s face slips into view above me. The swirling oil in its eyes congeals for a moment, forming what appear to be pupils. For an instant, we make genuine eye contact. Its head cocks to one side, and I get a sense that it’s evaluating me, inspecting the rat before putting it down.

  The scent of ammonia stings my nostrils.

  It’s him. The one I shot.

  A long gnarly hand with mottled gray skin rises from beneath the light-bending cloak.

  This is how they do it. How they kill. A finger to the chest. If the Blur that had tried to kill Mark didn’t miss and stab my shoulder, this is how I would have died a month ago. But it doesn’t stab me with its one long digit. Instead, it opens its palm toward me. There’s a flicker of light where its three fingers and thumb come together. And then, pain. It radiates out from the old, healed wound in my shoulder and explodes like a bomb.

  All control of my body slips away and I fall back. I’m defenseless.

  The Blur moves closer, and I sense humor in its alien eyes.

  “It has August!” I don’t recognize the feminine voice, but the mix of panic and rage is unmistakable.

  What happens next is like some movie where the perfectly laid trap is sprung by the heroes and the tables are suddenly turned. Except this was not a trap, and it’s just about exactly what I was hoping to avoid.

  The cabin doors are flung open and the people hiding inside pour out. But they’re not running away from the danger, they’re charging headlong toward it, wielding shovels, branches, chains and anything they could find. The group of survivors, inspired by my impending doom, has become an army.

  The Blur above me glances toward the ten people charging toward it, and then turns its attention back to me. It’s just a momentary glance, but the expressionless face somehow conveys the look of a scientist on the verge of success. And despite the turned tables, this one is confident. It slips away, fully c
oncealed once more, and then with a flickering flash of light and a pulse of hums, it’s gone. And along with it, the paralyzing pain in my chest.

  I sit up to greet my rescuers, clutching my shoulder. “It’s gone,” I tell them, and I take in the action taking place around me. Tanya is firing her weapon and doesn’t stop until it runs empty. I can’t tell if she hit anything, but she quickly replaces the empty clip with a fresh one and looks for more targets. Mark and Jeb hurry to her side, also looking for targets, but they find none. A group of five manages to tackle one of the Blur, but are then flung away, repulsed. The Blur disappears in a flash of light. Then all around us, the Blur retreat in a mass of strobing lights and sound. In seconds it’s all over.

  Tanya points her weapon skyward and unloads the clip toward one of the glowing craft. There’s no visible effect, but the three craft buzz and shimmer before going silent and streaking into the sky. A second later, they’re the size of stars, lost in the night sky.

  The battle is won, but the confidence that Blur transmitted said otherwise. It said that the real battle, or war—or experiment—is already finished. We just can’t see it yet. Rats in a maze.

  41

  AUGUST

  “How many?” Poe is on the other end of the satellite phone. Aside from the limited description she’s given me of herself, I don’t really know what she looks like. But the image I’ve conjured of her is comically wide-eyed at the moment. Hand to her mouth. Seeking a chair to sit in.

  “Twenty-seven,” I say again. “Twenty nine if you count Mark and me.”

  “Oh my god,” she says. “And no one was hurt?”

  I remember the pain radiating out from the old wound. It’s only been fifteen minutes since the attack, but I can still feel a lingering burn. I don’t know if it’s psychological pain or not, like still feeling a hat that’s been removed. I haven’t checked. If I’m honest, I’m afraid to look. So I focus on the positive.

  “Everyone is safe,” I say. “I wish you could have seen them. The way they charged out of these cabins. The way they fought. If these bastards had bothered with a more conventional war, they wouldn’t have stood a chance. But that’s probably also because they’re not soldiers.”

  “You’re sure about that now?” she asks.

  “Aside from their apparent interest in Squirt, which is something a soldier would never bother with—not for any reason I can think of anyway—everything they do and have done screams scientist. To me, at least. I think I recognize them because their actions reflect those of more than a few of my colleagues. It’s the results that matter. Not the equipment. Not the money spent. Certainly not the test subjects.”

  “The ends justify the means,” she says.

  “Exactly.”

  “Could they really see the human race as being so inferior that they’d conduct genocidal experiments with no regard to our lives?”

  Tanya, Mark and Jeb take seats atop tree stump stools. They’re here to talk business, having completed the tasks I set out for them—to pack up everyone and get ready to leave. Tonight. We’re going to head out under the cover of darkness and continue on through the next day until dusk, moving closer to Poe and further from what is now our last known location.

  I look at each of them as I speak. What I’m about to say is for more than just Poe. “We need to consider that these beings, these Blur, experience the world, the universe and maybe even time, differently than we do. Colonies of bacteria, grown in labs, thrive and multiply through countless generations, adapting to whatever medium they’ve been released into. We observe them. Test them. And in the end, destroy them.”

  “Dude,” Mark says, “you really think the Earth is like a petri dish to these guys? We’re like bacteria to them? And they’re just cleaning up after an experiment?”

  “Was that Mark?” Poe asks.

  “Yeah,” I tell her and put the phone on speaker. “You’re on speaker now.”

  “Hey Napoleon,” Mark says. Most times they talk, he tries to come up with a witty nickname for her, including the word, Poe.

  “Hey Mark,” she says, unimpressed. “Who else is there?”

  “Tanya and Jeb,” I say.

  “Hi,” Tanya says.

  “Ma’am.” Jeb chimes in.

  “You sound like a good ol’ boy, Jeb,” Poe says.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You willing to come to the rescue of a pregnant Yankee?”

  “Way I see it,” Jeb says, “the only thing left that should define our loyalties is our humanity. You’re my sister now, Poe. I’d do anything for you.”

  “We all would,” Mark says.

  “Back to what I was saying.” I don’t really want to tell them my thoughts, but they need to know, mostly because if I’m right, it will provide a clear window into the thought processes of the Blur, and perhaps present an opportunity to let them know we are more than they believe us to be. That we are worth saving. That we are not rats. “Take the laboratory, petri dish analogy to its logical conclusion. We’re the bacteria, spreading through the medium, adapting through generations. They’ve observed, tested, theorized and postulated. Maybe the last six thousand years of a more civilized humanity has been a month to them. A day. Who knows.”

  Jeb chimes in. “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.’ Second Peter.” He raises an eyebrow at me. “Sounds dangerously close to blasphemy.”

  “Except this higher power is present,” I say, before holding up a placating hand. “I don’t want to argue religion. I just want everyone to consider that if we’re the bacteria in a cosmic petri dish—” I turn my eyes to the crystal clear night sky. “—it might be them who put us here.”

  Tanya gets to her feet. She looks angry. Ready to punch someone. “And that gives them the right to destroy us?”

  “Maybe the bacteria think the same thing when we decide to incinerate the world we created for them?”

  “We’re not bacteria!” Tanya shouts.

  “That’s a matter of perspective,” I say, but can see the theory is not being well received. It’s offensive. I get it. But it could be the truth. The human race has advanced in unpredictable ways over the past hundred years. We’re reaching out, past the moon. Past Mars. Voyager One is well on its way to explore the interstellar medium outside the confines of the heliosphere, at the outer fringe of our solar system. In biological terms, the bacteria is escaping the petri dish. It’s a theoretical motivation, of course, based on limited data, but it rings truer than the Blur being cosmic environmentalists.

  “Hey!” a distant voice shouts. “Over here. Check this out!”

  I turn toward the voice and see dark shapes on the other side of the campground, aiming flashlights at the ground. The light appears to be illuminating nothing but the ground. That’s when I notice the light is being bent on its way down. Distorted.

  I take the phone off speaker, place it to my ear and stand up. “Poe, I need to go.”

  “What’s happening?” she asks, sounding worried.

  I’m not about to hang up on her like this, leaving her worried. I head for the distant lights. “I’m not certain yet, but I think there might be a body. I think we might have killed one of them.”

  “I hope you’re wrong about that,” she says, her voice serious.

  I pause, realizing she’s come to some kind of conclusion that I haven’t. The idea that we can kill them, that we can fight back gives me a little bit of hope. “What do you mean?”

  “When the bacteria gets out and kills someone in the lab, what’s the typical response?”

  My hope is dashed. “Clean slate. They’d sterilize the lab.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, it’s already too late. But I think they already tried that. For whatever reason...maybe some ongoing experiment, they want the rest of us to live. Who knows, maybe the Blur aren’t even the scientists. They could just be some kind of agitating medium.”


  “Like getting an electric shock if we pick the wrong food?”

  “Yeah...” I stop walking. “Which means we’re still being directed.”

  “To what?” she asks.

  To you, I think, but I decide to keep that tidbit to myself for now. I don’t want her doing something that would put Squirt in more jeopardy. “I don’t know. Can I call you back in a little bit? I’m going to check this out, and then we’re leaving. By tomorrow night, we’ll be a lot closer to you, especially if we can find bikes for everyone.”

  “Sounds good to me. Be careful.”

  “Hanging up now.”

  “Okay.”

  “See ya.”

  “Bye.”

  The familiarity of that exchange grounds me and brings a smile to my face. In a world gone crazy, it’s a steady reminder that some kind of normality can be reclaimed. If we survive long enough.

  “Everyone get back,” I say to the gathering group. Nearly everyone has formed a circle around the bent light. “You all have jobs to do. We’re still leaving. This changes nothing.”

  “But—”

  “Is anyone here qualified to examine a body?” I ask. I know I’m not, but my gear is already packed and my bike recovered. Mark and I are ready to go now. Since we don’t know whether or not the Blur will return, the rest have no time to spare.

  To my surprise, one person says, “Yes,” and steps forward. She’s a young woman, early twenties, with straight dark brown hair and matching eyes. “I was a Forensic Scientist Trainee.”

  There is no denying that her experience, even if limited, far exceeds my own. “You can stay. Everyone else, back to work.” I point to Jeb and Tanya. “That includes you two. We’re out of here in fifteen.” Tanya looks unhappy about being told what to do, but complies with a nod.

  Jeb tips an imaginary hat. “You got it, boss.”

  I point to Mark. “You stay put.”

  Mark doesn’t look happy about it, but stands his ground. He’s a smart kid. Knows that whatever we find here is probably going to haunt his dreams.