by Mark Alpert
“Because it isn’t safe to stay here.” She pulled him toward the exit. At the same time, she looked over her shoulder at the grad student. “Tell everyone in the building to get out. You hear me? Make up a story if you have to, but get everyone out.”
* * *
Joe staggered down the dirt trail along the lakeshore. He finished his next-to-last bottle of Olde English and dropped it in the weeds. But he didn’t open the last bottle. He kept it tucked under his arm, saving it for the end.
Luckily, the place was deserted. There were no college kids around, maybe because they’d already gone home for the summer. Or maybe it was just too damn hot out here. Joe was sweating through his shirt, and a cloud of mosquitos followed him.
All in all, though, it wasn’t such a bad place. Wooded slopes rose from both sides of the lake, and the only signs of civilization were the campus buildings on the heights to the north and south. As Joe walked along the trail he kept his head down and tried to imagine he was in the countryside, far away from any city. But it was tough to picture a peaceful wilderness when he knew that a swarm of tentacles could erupt from the ground at any moment.
He was going to die here. There was no avoiding it. And though he kept imagining what the Emissary was going to do to him, his worst fear wasn’t the agony of death. What scared him most was the possibility that he’d wake up in the afterlife and see Annabelle again. He’d dreamed for so long of reuniting with his daughter, but now the thought of it terrified him. Because now he remembered what he’d done to her.
Karen was right. It was his fault. He’d stormed back to their apartment in Riverdale after pummeling her boyfriend, and he was drunk, oh yes, he was pissed to the fucking gills. He screamed at Karen, and she screamed right back at him, and Annabelle cowered in the corner of the living room. Then his legs gave way and he collapsed on the carpet. He sobbed and trembled like the sad piece of shit he was, howling at his wife and himself.
Karen shook her head and kept her distance, but Annabelle came toward him. She knelt on the carpet and patted his back.
After a few minutes Joe grasped his daughter’s hand and led her out of the apartment. Before Karen could stop them, they got into the elevator and went down to the lobby. As they left the building he told Annabelle they were going to move somewhere else, to a different apartment, a different city. He said they were going to leave right now, just get in the car and go. But he was too drunk to drive, so instead of getting into his Lexus he pulled his daughter across 232nd Street and headed for the closest subway stop. Annabelle dragged her feet, trying to slow him down, but he was fucking determined. She yelled, “What about Mom?” and he shouted, “She’s staying here! She doesn’t want to go with us!” Then Annabelle yanked her hand out of his grasp and turned around.
She started running across 232nd Street, heading back to their building. Her long brown ponytail bounced against her back, her neon-pink T-shirt flapped at her waist. Joe couldn’t keep up with her, she was too fast. He yelled, “Stop!” but she kept running.
The SUV hit her so hard, her body flew down the street.
Amazingly, she didn’t die at the scene. She lay in a coma for seven days before she passed away. Joe spent the whole week in her room at St. Luke’s Hospital, watching her lie motionless on the bed. And now, two years later, he could still see her in that bed, in her blue hospital gown. He’d downed an ocean of malt liquor to wash the image from his mind, but it was still there, behind everything he saw.
He reached the end of the dirt trail. Without realizing it, he’d walked the whole length of the lake. Now he stood near the intersection of two roads, Forest Home Drive and Thurston Avenue. He looked to his right and saw a dam at the lake’s western end. The water flowed over the top of the dam and cascaded down a dozen concrete steps. Then it poured into a deep gorge between cliffs of bare rock, almost a hundred feet high. The noise of the water had been roaring in Joe’s ears for the past five minutes, but he hadn’t noticed it until now.
Just ahead was the Thurston Avenue Bridge, which soared above the gorge and connected the northern half of the Cornell campus with the southern half. It was an eye-catching bridge, about two hundred feet long, with a swooping arch on either side of the roadway. But someone had spoiled its appearance by spray-painting graffiti on the concrete below the bridge’s railing. The graffiti said, in tall white letters, ASK FOR HELP.
Curious, Joe stepped onto the walkway that ran between the bridge’s railing and Thurston Avenue. Near the middle of the span, just to the right of the graffiti, a sign listed the telephone number of a suicide hotline. With a sinking heart, Joe realized this was a jump spot. Depressed students came here to leap into the gorge.
He leaned over the railing and looked down. The drop was certainly high enough, and the creek at the bottom of the gorge was shallow. And then Joe’s heart sank even further because he recognized why Sarah had chosen this meeting place. If things got desperate enough, he had another option.
He rested an elbow on the railing and cradled his head in his hand. He still carried the last bottle of Olde English under his other arm, and he was seriously considering whether to open it. The waterfall behind him seemed to grow louder. It kept roaring in his ears, making it hard to think.
Joe didn’t believe in God or heaven. He’d stopped believing so long ago, the idea seemed ludicrous. But what if he was wrong? What if the afterlife really existed? And though he shuddered at the thought of seeing Annabelle again, wasn’t there at least a small chance she might forgive him?
The roaring of the waterfall grew so loud, Joe raised his head and turned around. At the same time, the bridge rumbled under his shoes. A hundred feet below, the creek at the bottom of the gorge churned and bubbled.
Then a monstrous black tentacle burst out of the water. It stretched up and up, rising between the gorge’s rocky cliffs and then high above them. It was at least five hundred feet long and as thick as a redwood tree, and the sunlight gleamed off its polished surface. It hung over the Thurston Avenue Bridge like a whip.
Joe reacted without thinking. He climbed over the bridge’s railing, still clutching his last forty, and jumped off.
TWENTY-NINE
Emilio landed on the fire escape of 172 Sherman Avenue. His sneakers hit the steel grating outside the fifth-floor windows, just below the roof. He scrambled down the rusty stairs until he reached the second floor, then slid down the ladder to the sidewalk.
Then he looked up and saw Luis and Carlos at the roof’s edge. Both boys pointed their arms straight down and fired.
The stairs and gratings of the fire escape exploded. Emilio leapt aside as the molten iron sprayed onto the street. A speeding glob of it glanced off his hip, charring his jeans and the skin underneath, but he had too much adrenaline in him to feel any pain. He charged down the sidewalk to the apartment building next door and took cover in its entryway.
After a couple of seconds he peered around the corner. He didn’t have the right angle to see Luis or Carlos, but he spotted Miguel and Diego on top of the building across the street. He had a chance to return fire and hit both of them, but he wasn’t going to do that. That bitch La Madre wasn’t going to make him kill his homeboys. He was going to kill her instead.
He sprinted to the middle of the street, directly in front of 172 Sherman Avenue. Then he pointed his right hand at the entrance to the apartment building.
The first blast obliterated the building’s brick wall and exposed the sheet of black metal underneath. Emilio aimed the second blast at the lower part of the sheet, the part that shielded the bitch’s black room on the ground floor. He fired the beam and kept firing, hurling all of its energy against the metal. The heat built up inside his arm, scorching his bones, but he didn’t stop. It was working. The metallic sheet reddened under the blast and started to melt.
But there was another black sheet behind that one, an extra layer of protection. Emilio faltered when he saw it, losing his balance.
Then a tremendous wave of h
eat struck him from behind.
* * *
Sarah sat in front of a computer in the Physical Sciences Building, struggling with the message. It would’ve been easier if she’d had more time to compose it, but she didn’t have that luxury. The target was at the edge of the section of sky that Arecibo’s radar transmitter could be pointed at, and the Earth was rotating away from it. In fifteen minutes it would be out of view.
Fortunately, Sarah had special privileges for using the Arecibo radio dish. Because unidentified asteroids often approached the Earth with little warning and Sarah needed to track them as they whizzed past the planet, NASA had worked out an arrangement that gave her top priority. If her Sky Survey telescopes spotted an incoming rock, the operators of the Arecibo dish had to immediately aim their radar at the coordinates Sarah gave them.
She’d never abused that privilege before, but now she was about to. She’d already sent the target’s coordinates to the dish operators in Puerto Rico. The radar was locked on.
But Sarah hadn’t sent the transmission yet. She needed to make it perfect. Her message began with the binary code composed in 1974, because it provided a good description of Earth and its inhabitants, but she was having trouble describing the newer events in the same simple mathematical language. What should she put into the message, and what should she leave out? What information would trigger the response she needed?
Deep in thought, she gazed out the window of the office she’d borrowed, on the building’s fifth floor. The window faced south, toward the Space Sciences Building, and over the past five minutes she’d witnessed the building’s evacuation. She hadn’t trusted the grad student to do the job properly, so she’d called campus security from her disposable phone and made a bomb threat. That had worked very well.
Still, she jumped out of her chair when she heard the first explosion. The glass doors of the Space Sciences Building disintegrated, spraying shards across the parking lot. Then the windows on the second, third, and fourth floors shattered. Sarah couldn’t see the tentacle, but she knew it was inside the building, bashing through the walls of the offices and conference rooms. It was looking for her.
She wasn’t safe here either. The tentacle would come to the Physical Sciences Building next.
Frantic, she forced herself to look at the computer screen. She had to finish the message.
* * *
Joe plummeted into the gorge. The rocky cliffs seemed to rise like curtains as he fell, and the slender creek below grew fantastically wide. He saw the rushing water and the white foam and the slick boulders at the surface, and then he closed his eyes.
Then something grabbed his right ankle. It yanked his leg and halted his descent and wrenched his thighbone right out of its socket. He opened his eyes in pain and shock and saw his forty-ounce bottle slip out of his embrace and hurtle down to the creek. It smashed against one of the boulders and vanished in the water.
He hung upside-down in midair, about forty feet above the creek. He craned his neck to look up and saw the thick black tentacle arched over the bridge. A dozen thinner cables had branched off from its tip, and one of them had looped around his right ankle. The goddamn thing had stopped him from killing himself. It wanted him alive.
Another branch descended toward him and curled around his left ankle. Then the tentacles started pulling him upward, out of the gorge. Looking down, he saw the creek become narrow again and the cliffs sink below him. He rose above the Thurston Avenue Bridge, dangling like a fish at the end of the line. The massive trunk of the tentacles straightened as it lifted him higher. Now he could see the Cornell campus on both sides of the gorge, all the buildings and quadrangles and crisscrossing walkways.
The pain in his dislocated hip was intense. He felt dizzy and sick and petrified.
He finally stopped rising. A strong wind buffeted his upended body and made him sway from the cables. Then a third branch coiled around his chest and slid down to his face. Its tip pointed at his eyes, just inches away. Joe stared at a black spike with a perforated surface. There were thousands of tiny holes in the gleaming metal.
“Where is she?” The question boomed from the holes. “Where is Dr. Pooley?”
The voice sounded so different from the one Joe was familiar with, the one he’d heard so many times inside his head. It was huskier, less feminine. And very angry.
“Answer me!” The air vibrated and the tentacles trembled. “I know she’s near!”
Joe shook his head. “No, it’s just me. I don’t—”
“Dr. Pooley attended this university. She collaborates with the scientists in its astronomy department. And now, of all the places you could’ve escaped to, you’ve come here. You expect me to believe that’s a coincidence?” The spike drew closer, almost touching the bridge of his nose. “You’re going to tell me where she is. I can’t extract the information from your brain because you’ve put too many toxins in it. So if you don’t cooperate, I’ll have to use more primitive methods to force you to answer.”
Joe’s heart pounded, struggling to pump blood upward to his legs and feet. He felt his fluids pooling in his head and pressing against his eyes. His nausea was unbearable and his vision was darkening, yet his mind made a sudden, unexpected leap. The machine’s voice wasn’t the only thing that had changed. The intelligence behind the voice was also different.
He focused his aching eyes on the spike. “You’re not the Emissary. Who are you?”
The spike retreated a few inches, as if in surprise. But then it moved back to the bridge of his nose. “I’m Naomi of the First People. The Emissary transplanted me.”
Joe shook his head again. He recognized this voice. He just couldn’t remember where he’d heard it. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”
“Why would I bother to lie to you? I’m Naomi of the First People, and when your species is gone, I’ll be this planet’s Great Mother.” The cable tightened around Joe’s chest. “Now tell me, where is Dr. Pooley?”
Then he remembered. He thought of the kind woman from Holy Trinity Episcopal Church who used to come to Inwood Hill Park to visit him. Joe felt a surge of anger so strong it cleared his head, driving away the nausea and dizziness. “That’s Dorothy’s voice!” His hands clenched and unclenched. “Christ, what did you do to her?”
The spike retreated again, and the cable loosened. For a second Joe thought the tentacles would let go of him, but the other cables held on to his ankles. Naomi of the First People seemed more volatile than the Emissary, more impulsive and unpredictable. For some reason, she repelled Joe more than the computer program had. He found it easier to hate a living creature than a machine.
His anger grew even stronger and his mind took another leap. He remembered the gleaming needle that had punctured Dorothy’s foot. “You used her, didn’t you? You and the Emissary? You turned her into your servant, just like you did to me?”
The cable gripping his right ankle jerked upward. It gave his leg a swift tug, straining his dislocated hip, and the pain shot up and down his body. As he writhed in midair, the spike angled toward his forehead and pricked his skin.
“Yes, I took her cells.” The voice turned low and vicious. “The Emissary dissolved her body and extracted what was useful. But I have no use for humans anymore.”
Because he was upside-down, the blood trickled from his forehead to his hair. The pain grew worse as the spike dug deeper, but Joe’s anger was the best anesthetic. He gritted his teeth and glared at the cables. “Sarah knew you’d come after her, so she didn’t tell me anything. I have no idea where she is.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll search all the buildings in this area until I find her. Then I’ll kill her too.”
The blood flowed faster now, pouring from his forehead and dripping from his hair. Joe tried to pull his head away from the spike, and as he arched his back he caught a glimpse of the ground below. The landscape was so empty compared with Manhattan—there were no crowds looking up at the giant tentacle or runn
ing down the streets in panic. But directly beneath him, in the middle of the Thurston Avenue Bridge, Joe spied a lone figure waving her arms. It was Sarah, and she was screaming.
“I sent the message! To Second Planet!”
* * *
Sarah stared at the colossal machine, observing it carefully, waiting for a reaction. It moved like a living thing, like an enormous hydra with a dozen black arms sweeping across the sky. Joe dangled from the arms like a morsel of food the hydra was about to devour.
Sarah called out to it again, shouting as loud as she could.
“Look at the messsage! It went out from the Arecibo dish, and your antennas can pick it up! Go ahead and look at it!”
She was hoping the machine would lower its arms to the ground, bringing Joe down with them. Instead, another cable branched off from the thick black trunk and rocketed toward her. Without any warning, it curled around her waist and yanked her skyward.
The jolt knocked the air of her lungs. She blacked out for a moment as everything blurred around her.
When she came to, she was suspended hundreds of feet above the ground. She was so high up, she could see Lake Cayuga in the distance. Joe hung upside-down from the cables about ten yards to her left. One of the tentacles had slashed his forehead, and now he was leaning away from it, stretching and straining to avoid its sharp tip. A similar cable extended toward Sarah, its surface covered with a fine metallic mesh. A deep rumbling hum came out of the mesh, making it vibrate like a loudspeaker. It was a mechanical growl, ringing with hatred.
“You revealed my presence on this planet! You told the Second People where to find me!”
The voice was so loud it rattled Sarah’s skull. But she withstood the blast and narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I did.”
“Do you realize what’s going to happen now? As soon as the Second People receive that signal, they’ll launch an invasion! They’ll bankrupt their civilization if they have to, but they’ll assemble a war fleet and send it here!”