by James Renner
“This is it,” Zaharie said. “Let’s hurry. She’ll be back in a moment.”
Jack followed Zaharie into the cockpit. It was tight inside, barely room for three. There were knobs and readouts and toggles everywhere and Jack was overcautious with his movements, fearful that he might brush up against a self-destruct button or something by accident. The first officer was asleep in his chair. Not asleep, really. Zaharie had dosed his coffee with Ambien. Jack and Zaharie pried the copilot from his chair and carried him back to the Captain’s seat in first class and strapped him in.
Sam touched Jack’s arm and he kneeled to her and kissed the top of her head. Then he helped the Captain to the cockpit, where his old man took the first officer’s chair. Zaharie pulled out a hard plastic shelf from a cache in the wall for Jack to sit on, then he shut the cockpit door, locked it tight, and climbed into his seat.
“I’m taking her off auto,” said Zaharie.
The Captain’s hands responded by muscle memory, drifting over the console around him, flicking switches and dialing down knobs. He opened a compartment between their seats and turned a key. “Transponder is off,” the Captain said.
Through the windows Jack could see a full moon reflecting gray light off a scrim of clouds below them. It was peaceful, dreamlike. Zaharie slowly banked the plane north-northeast.
There was a single runway on Mu, Zaharie had told them. The Germans had it constructed during the war for the Luftwaffe. “It’s where I landed in 1985,” he’d said to them at his kitchen table. “I was a surveyor for the Forest Service out of Juneau, flying a Cessna Citation. Squall come up. Tossed me around. Shorted my instruments over the open sea. Too dark to get a read on direction. No sun, no stars. Was about to run out of gas. Figured I was in for a freeze and a drowning. And then I saw the lights on the horizon. A city where no city should be. And just outside the city was this old airstrip.” Zaharie had lived on Mu until 2009, when he and four other revolutionaries had returned to take down a relay. They were caught by the Hounds. He had no idea where his friends were now. If they were not executed, their minds were wiped and they had no idea who they were anymore.
Jack realized he was holding his breath. He let it out and tried to calm down. He looked to the horizon, searching the night for the lights of Mu’s great city.
4 Nils was back in the bathroom. It was getting worse. Perhaps it was the stress of their current predicament accelerating the disease. He looked at himself in the mirror, horrified by what he saw. There was a purple boil under his right arm, a dark boil in his armpit that was getting bigger, expanding every second. Carefully, he probed it with one finger. It exploded with an audible pop. Pus and blood spattered the mirror and a thousand long green fibers fell from the abscess, dropping upon the sink, the counter, the floor.
Nils began to scream.
5 The scream was loud enough that Cole heard Nils from seat 2D. He clicked off his seat belt and raced to the door of the bathroom. It was locked.
“Nils?” said Sam, appearing just behind him.
The screaming stopped and something very large fell against the door. For a moment it buckled out. Cole had just enough time to pull Sam back before the door broke apart and Nils’s body collapsed into the aisle. His shirt was half off and he was covered in blood. Green fibers covered his legs. And the smell … like a fruit basket left to rot. Putrid sweet.
“Oh, shit,” said Cole. “It’s Morgellons.”
Sam couldn’t respond. She stood over the body, her hands covering her nose and mouth.
Cole leaned down and checked for a pulse. “He’s alive,” he said. “But he doesn’t have long. Fuck!”
“What the hell is Morgellons, Cole, and how did he get it?”
“One of the Hounds must’ve shot him. Maybe when you came through the door. Or in New York. It’s a parasite. Nazis weaponized it during the war. I only know what my dad told me, but he said it wasn’t contagious. It has to be injected into your blood. Little worms that eat you up from the inside, leave egg cases everywhere, these fibers. If we can’t get him the antidote, he’ll be dead in six hours.”
Another passenger, a Chinese woman from the row behind them, was leaning into the aisle, watching. She asked them something in Mandarin, and when they didn’t answer, she keyed the button for the stewardess.
“What kind of medicine does he need?” asked Sam.
“There’s only one cure,” said Cole. “A kind of ambergris.”
“What?”
“Juice from the belly of a diseased bird.”
“What bird?”
“The dodo,” said Cole.
“But the dodo is fucking extinct!”
“Not on Mu.”
6 A red light clicked on above the cockpit microphone, an alert from the stewardess. Zaharie pressed a button. “What?” he said.
“We’ve got a situation in first class,” the stewardess said. “There’s a guy out here. I think he’s dying.”
“We’re three hours out,” he replied. “Do what you can to make him comfortable.”
“We should be on approach to Beijing in fifteen minutes.”
“I am diverting the aircraft to another airport.”
There was a pause. When the woman spoke again her voice was confused, suspicious. “Why?”
“I have been instructed to continue northeast of Beijing.”
“Zaharie, why is Fariq asleep in first class? Where is the passenger from seat 2C? Zaharie, have we been hijacked?”
Zaharie looked to the Captain. “We have not been hijacked, Melissa. I am in control of the plane. I’ll explain on the ground. Keep everyone calm back there.”
7 It took some effort on their part, but Cole and Sam finally got Nils back into his seat. Sam cleaned him off the best she could and slipped two pillows behind his large head. He was snoring now, a sound like a Husqvarna chain saw. Cole watched him from where he sat. Sometimes the worms moving under the Viking’s skin rippled the flesh around his neck like waves.
Time passed in a haze, like a shared delirium. The passengers became anxious. Why had they not yet arrived in Beijing? Was there a problem with the engines? The stewardess did her best to keep them calm. Their flight had been diverted to another airport, she told them.
Around 5:00 a.m., the aircraft shuddered as the autopilot kicked off. They were descending. Finally. Cole turned, lifted the blind on his window. Sam leaned over him to see, too.
It was sunrise and the tops of the clouds glowed with a warm pinkness, and then they were flying into them, through them, and for a moment they could not see. Then they shot out of the clouds and there, on the horizon, was Mu.
It was a vast island, larger than Cole had ever dreamed, the coast of a continent rising out of the Pacific. Blue glaciers hugged the shore. Cliffs, a hundred feet high, rose from the waters. There was a great plateau and in the distance a single peak, the Lonely Mountain, capped in snow.
“There’s nothing there,” said Sam. “You were wrong.”
“You’re experiencing what’s called inattentional blindness,” explained Cole. “I can see it clearly. It’s right there.” He pointed. “Give yourself a minute. Trust me when I tell you it’s there.”
“I don’t…”
Suddenly, Sam started in fright. She let loose a short scream before she covered her mouth. “What is that?” she whispered around her fingers.
There was a vast city on the southern plateau. She could see it now. Everything. The island. The mountain. The plateau. But it was the city that frightened her. Something about it scared Cole, too.
The city was a perfect circle of skyscrapers divided into equal slices, outlined by cobblestone streets. The buildings were made of steel and glass and reflected the light of the morning sun with a brilliance that caught in your throat. In the center was a great geodesic dome, a white sphere like the one at Epcot, only bigger, much bigger.
It was the symmetry of this city that frightened them. It was orderly to a frightening degree, th
e suggestion of a culture rigid in mind-set, devoid of beauty, of mistake, of forgiveness. Relentless.
“Cole,” she whispered, gripping his arm. “Who are they?”
8 “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” said Jack, looking out at the city, which Zaharie called Peshtigo.
“Where’s the runway?” the Captain asked. His hand was on the throttle, helping Zaharie guide the 777.
“There,” said Zaharie, pointing east of the city. Jack saw it. A long swatch of concrete and … “Oh, shit.”
“What the hell is that?” the Captain barked.
“It’s a goddamn park,” said Zaharie. “They built a goddamn park in the middle of the runway.”
A square patch of trees and shrubs divided the runway in half. Jack could even see the statue in the middle of the park, a tall granite sculpture atop a fountain.
“Dump the gas!” the Captain shouted.
“What?” said Jack over the whine of the engines. “We need the rest of the gas to fly the passengers back home!”
His father turned in his seat to look at him. Jack recoiled at the fear he saw in the Captain’s eyes.
“We’re going to hit that statue at sixty miles an hour and this bird is going to break apart. We can’t have it turn into a fireball, too.” He looked at Zaharie. “Dump it!”
Zaharie pressed a button, twisted a toggle. “There!” he said. “Help me bring her in.”
The Captain took the wheel and pushed forward with Zaharie. The nose of the plane tilted downward and they were coming in. Coming in fast. Jack tightened his seat belt.
Zaharie clicked on the intercom. “This is your captain speaking,” he said. “Brace for impact!”
PART FOUR
THE LATENESS OF THE HOUR
There are weapons that are simply thoughts … For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.
—ROD SERLING
ONE
THE INVADERS
1 The psychiatrist leaned back in his chair and listened to the round woman explain why she wanted to leave her husband.
“I can’t look at him,” she said. “I’m tired of his fat face.”
“Why are you tired of looking at his face?” he asked.
The doctor was a rough-looking man in a sharp suit, a cleaned-up hit man from a daytime soap. His face was gaunt and lined with long wrinkles, and a black velvet eyepatch covered his right socket. His hair was mostly gray. He’d have been all-around intimidating if not for that single sea-blue eye that demanded your attention and held it, warmly.
“I just can’t look at it anymore,” the woman said.
She was round but not unattractive. Dark hair, dark skin. She was forty-five. A Navajo. Full-blood. One of the librarians from section twelve. Biographies.
“We weren’t made to live like this.”
“What do you mean?” asked the shrink. He’d had this conversation a hundred times before with a hundred different clients. It was epidemic, this ennui. The doctor opened his eye wider so that she would feel that he was paying attention. Outside his office window, a squat bird with a comically large beak waddled up to its reflection, pecked the glass, and then sauntered away, back toward the ocean.
“We weren’t meant to live this long.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s true. When you married Catori you promised to love each other till death do you part, but…”
“But I had no idea how long that would be.”
The doctor nodded. “How old are you this year?” he asked.
“Goodness,” the woman said. “One hundred and seventy-four.”
Just then the door to his office opened and a teenage girl stepped in.
“Guten Morgen, fräulein,” he said.
Becky was no more German than he was. But they pretended. She was thirteen, tall for her age, a blonde with skin the color of meringue. She was dressed in a dark smock. Same as always.
“Dr. Sanders!” she said excitedly. “A bunch of people just crashed a plane through the park. A whole plane!”
The doctor grimaced and set down his notebook. Becky was hopping up and down, waving her hands at her sides, barely containing her excitement.
“Where are they from?”
“Home!” she said. “And they ask for you by name!”
2 Scopes pulled up to the guardhouse outside Area 51, in southern Nevada. There was a man in uniform on the other side of the bulletproof glass and he regarded Scopes only a moment before retracting the gate. The guard knew him well.
Groom Lake, they called it. Conspiracy nuts believed this isolated base in the Nevada desert was where the United States military kept crashed UFOs. In reality, Area 51 was operated by the NSA. It was a warehouse for forgotten tech, storage for strange machines made before the Great Forgetting, stuff meant never to be remembered.
Scopes parked and walked inside. He had a small office in the main hangar, a black dome so expansive and tall that microclouds gathered at the rafters and sometimes sprinkled the floor with a misty rain. There was a platoon of Zerstörer mechs in the corner, nine-foot-tall humanoid robots the Nazis had used at the Battle of St. Louis.
Inside his office, he powered on the Apple II while he boiled water for tea on a hot plate. The greenish-yellow screen came on. CLEMENTINE, it read. PRESS ENTER TO ACCESS MAINFRAME.
Scopes pressed Enter.
A crude desktop came up. He used the flat, square mouse to move the cursor to a folder titled READ ONLY FILES, ALGORITHM: ASPEN.
He held the tea in his hands, reading over the data that appeared on-screen. On his mug was the logo from the 2026 Winter Olympics.
“Okay, Maestro,” he said. “Let’s see what you’re up to.”
3 “We’re here to see Tony Sanders,” Jack said again, this time a bit slower. But the robot remained still.
Jack was standing on the broken tarmac of Mu’s only runway, the remains of Flight 370 smoldering behind him. The statue had sheared off the right wing, just as the Captain had predicted. The jet had rolled then, and the impact had snapped the fuselage in half. It was a good thing they’d dumped the fuel. Miraculously, no one had died. There were, however, a dozen injured Chinese businessmen lying on the grass. Most had concussions and one had broken his leg.
This robot was whatever passed for a welcoming committee on Mu. It was four feet high, nothing more than a tin cylinder with a dome head that swiveled back and forth, watching them with a single camera eye. It had rolled out of a decrepit hangar like an oversize Roomba while Jack was pulling passengers from the wreckage.
Sam stood beside Jack, squinting her eyes at the machine. Nils’s body was strapped to a makeshift gurney behind her (a seat cushion tied to thin steel girders from the wreck). Cole crossed the runway and joined them.
“Looks kind of like R2-D2,” the boy said.
“More like a Dalek,” said the Captain, who had made sure each of the 240 displaced passengers was off the plane before he walked away from the broken bird.
Jack gave his father a puzzled look.
“Dr. Who,” the Captain explained. “What kind of a nerd are you?”
“Folgen Sie mir!” the robot said. Its voice was modulated and shaky, a very old computer program shaking off dust. Then it turned and rolled back toward the hangar.
“What did it say?” asked Sam.
“It said, ‘Follow me,’” the Captain replied. “In German.”
Fifty feet away, Zaharie held up his hands. “Dàjiā bǎochí lěngjìng!” he shouted to the Chinese passengers of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Remain calm.
“Come on,” said Jack. He followed the robot. Sam, the Captain, and Cole walked behind him. The robot rolled along on thick rubber wheels, deftly avoiding potholes and puddles, and led them through the open door of the hangar. Inside, it was dark and dingy and smelled of spilled oil. They followed it across the empty garage and through another door, into a tiled hall.
“What’s this?” asked Sam.
“Looks like a sho
wer,” said Cole.
It was at that moment the door to the tiled hall closed and they heard a lock turn loudly. The robot spun around and regarded them coolly.
“Ausrotten,” it said.
Jack looked up to the ceiling. Long pipes ran overhead, from one end to the other, attached to round spouts like the kind used for fire sprinklers in hotels or …
“What did it say?” asked Cole.
The Captain was thinking. “Uh … my German’s rusty…”
“Ausrotten,” it said again.
“Ausrotten,” the Captain muttered. “Uh … uproot…”
“Uproot?” the boy asked.
“Uproot … destroy…”
“Exterminate,” said Jack. He pointed to the ceiling. Painted on the tile behind the pipes was a black swastika. “We’re in a gas chamber.”
But before anyone could scream for help, the door at the far end clicked open and a man stepped into the room. He was tall, with gray hair. A surgical mask obscured his face below a dark eyepatch. He looked at the robot and put his hands on his hips.
“Damn it. I thought we got rid of all these guys.”
“Ausrotten!” it said.
“Yeah, yeah,” the man in the mask said, waving a hand. “We heard you.” He looked at Jack. “Don’t worry,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. “It’s just replaying old programming. None of this stuff works anymore.”
“We need to find Tony Sanders,” said Jack.
The man’s good eye gleamed. And then he pulled the mask down around his chin.