He closed the email without replying. As the weeks rolled on, there was less and less to say. In his head he knew he was doing the right thing, that he was standing up for the faceless masses who didn’t trust their governments, their police, their military. He was preserving a cultural touchstone that wouldn’t come again in his lifetime, in his children’s lifetime . . . perhaps in all the human lifetimes to follow. It was important. In his head he knew that, but in his heart, he was just a man who desperately missed his family.
And if he left this place to see them, he would never be allowed to return.
George rubbed at his face.
It was time to check on the children.
He left his room. The guard turned sharply on one heel, knowing where George was going and leading the way without being told. George followed, amazed as always that this had all begun with one simple phone call.
• • • •
George finished his call. Or, rather, the call finished for him when the signal dropped. The bars vanished and didn’t return. He was pretty sure he’d given good directions before he’d been cut off. If so, he would find out soon enough.
Through the hull’s cracks, the wind eased from a howl to a moan. The storm died down, like all storms do.
He heard Toivo arguing with Bernie. George couldn’t make out the words. Toivo sounded pissed. Maybe he was campaigning for the others to join him, to murder the children.
Exactly how far was George willing to go to stop that from happening?
“Don’t know what to do,” he said.
The children didn’t answer.
“You guys are a big help.”
The words turned to white as they left his mouth.
Temperature dropping. Winter’s fist was slowly squeezing tight around the wreck, snatching away what heat remained.
The children . . . they were shivering.
From the cold? Maybe. Or, maybe, from fear.
He terrified them.
Which was fine, because they terrified him.
A human shape that could never be mistaken as actually human. Two arms and two legs, but thin, so thin, tree branches come to life with fluid motion. Black eyes — three, not two — set in heads too big for the deathcamp-skinny bodies. And those mouths . . . George did all he could not to look at their mouths.
An hour passed.
A banging on the door. The sound reverberated through the room, bounced off the twelve crash chambers, or shock seats, or whatever the capsules were that had kept these children alive while their parents had been turned into paste. The children flinched at the sound, huddled together, made noises that sounded frightened and pathetic.
George unslung his rifle. He held it nervously in both hands. He thought of slinging it again — was he going to threaten his lifelong friends or something? The pounding came again. George decided to hold onto the weapon.
He pushed the door open.
There stood Toivo and Jaco. Toivo, who had already executed one of the children, and Jaco, little Jaco, who had shown more bravery than George and the others combined.
“Give me your phone,” Toivo said.
George didn’t move.
Jaco stared past George, at the children. He hadn’t seen them yet. The man seemed oddly calm in light of the situation. George wondered if Jaco wanted to kill them, just like Toivo did.
“The phone,” Toivo said, holding out a hand palm-up. “Bernie’s phone ain’t got shit for signal. Mister Ekola isn’t doing great, we need to try and get help.”
George nodded absently. “Already called someone,” he said.
That caught Jaco’s attention. “Who?”
“Ambulance,” George said. “That’s part of the deal.”
“What deal?” Toivo said.
George was suddenly unsure if he’d given enough info before the call cut off. Did they know where to go?
“I had a signal but it’s gone,” George said. “I made a call. Help is coming.”
Toivo’s eyes hardened. “For the last time, Georgie — give me your phone.”
Any pretense of friendship had evaporated. Three decades they had known each other, come here every year to reconnect, shared all the experiences life had to offer. It was all gone. If George had raised his rifle as Toivo had, if, together, they had slaughtered these helpless beings, that friendship would have been strengthened beyond any measure — but George had chosen otherwise.
He pulled the phone out of his pocket and handed it over. Jaco and Toivo huddled over it as if it had a secret warmth that might chase away the encroaching winter.
“No bars,” Toivo said. He looked at Jaco. “And it’s almost out of power, eh? What are we gonna do? How do we get Mister Ekola to da hospital?”
Jaco stared at the phone for a moment, perhaps hoping for a connection to suddenly appear. He shrugged.
“I dunno, eh? Maybe we can see if da snowmobile made it through da explosion?”
The three men — and the eleven alien children — fell silent. In that void, the sound of the wind, dying even further, from a moan to a whisper. And through that whisper, another noise. The faint, growing whine of a distant siren.
Jaco and Toivo looked at George.
“You called an ambulance?” Toivo said.
George nodded.
Jaco shook his head. “There’s a fucking alien invasion, and you got an ambulance to come out to da middle of nowhere? How? And da roads are snowed shut — how did you pull this off, Georgie?”
George shouldered his rifle. He felt nervous without it in his hands, naked, as if his friends might suddenly aim and fire, taking more innocent lives. He glanced at his friends’ weapons, at them, until they got the hint. The attitude of both men had changed: Somehow, George had got help for the man who had raised them all.
They both slung their rifles.
“Let’s get outside,” George said. “It will take us at least thirty minutes to hike back to the cabin. We need to be there when they come, or they might drive on by.”
• • • •
George would later learn that the alien attack had failed within the first twelve hours. Ships had appeared out of nowhere over the skies of the biggest cities in the most-advanced nations: Beijing, New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Mumbai, Berlin and more.
Trouble was, the most-advanced nations had the most-advanced militaries. Air-to-air missiles blew flying saucers out of the sky, turned them into flaming wrecks that plummeted into the cities below. Some US pilots said it was like shooting down a space shuttle — a target that couldn’t dodge, that exploded easily and spectacularly. Others used more colloquial terms: It was like shooting flaming arrows at hydrogen-filled fish swimming in a barrel of jet fuel.
Maybe the plan had been to take out the strongest first, in hopes that the weakest would then surrender. Whatever the reason, it turned out that the great military minds of the attacking aliens weren’t that great. Some guessed they weren’t military at all. Sociologists theorized that the invasion was more religious than military in nature, that it was more the covered wagons of armed civilians crossing the great plains than it was the landing craft of D-Day.
One thing seemed certain: The ships that attacked were not built for battle. Now it was assumed that the aliens had gone to war with what they had, because they had no place else to go. The children were proof that their species could breathe just fine on Earth. After some trial and error, they were able to safely eat many kinds of food. The aliens, so the theory went, had to abandon their own planet, and Earth was the only place they could reach.
They could have tried to communicate, but instead they declared war, and they paid dearly.
The conflict had been so fast, so decisive, that the only alien ship left intact was one that hadn’t fought at all — the one that crashed not far from George’s hunting cabin. Some assumed it was destined for Chicago before the malfunction that brought it down. Every other vessel had been engulfed in flame, then hit the ground like a b
omb. End result: very little material remained intact. Very little material, and no survivors — save for George’s eleven charges.
Through the thrice-daily interviews, George had learned there were no known alien survivors except for “the children.” That made them beyond important, an immeasurable resource. If there were other survivors, they were locked up tight in some secret government location. People speculated that was true. George was one of those people.
The invasion changed the world, but not in the way scifi authors or great intellectuals might have predicted. Governments didn’t come together. If anything, they were more divided than ever. What changed was the people. The people came together, ignoring racial and cultural divides. They came together with one common interest: absolute distrust of authority. Among the countless conspiracy theories was the top dog of them all: that governments knew what had been coming and hadn’t warned their people. Theories like that weren’t new. They’d been part of the populace since governments had formed. What was new was a technology that no government could completely control. The Internet. Cell phones. Local networks. People organizing, encrypting, working together as one against anything that smacked of authority. In the years before the invasion, people had come to fear their governments. Now, the governments feared the people — and with good reason.
• • • •
George, Toivo, and Jaco stood by the ruins of a hunting cabin that had been the centerpiece of their friendship for three decades, the centerpiece of Mister Ekola’s relationship with his own childhood friends for the two decades before that. Over half a century of tradition, now nothing more than shattered timber and scattered camping supplies.
The wind’s ebb hadn’t lasted long. Whitened treetops swayed slightly. The woods were here before people. The woods would be here after people were gone. The woods just didn’t give a shit about any of this. Those trees bracketed a long stretch of white: the road, thick with snowdrifts three feet high, motionless waves in a snapshot of a frozen ocean.
And coming down that road, a moving spray of snow rising up in grand arcs, crashing to the sides in puffing clouds of white that caught the morning sun. Through those clouds, a pulsating orange light.
“Ambulance lights are red,” Toivo said.
“Not an ambulance,” Jaco said. “It’s a goddamn snowplow. Let me guess, Georgie — an ambulance is right behind it?”
George nodded. “I sure hope so.”
The flashing orange light came closer. As it did, the three men could make out the cabin of the snowplow itself, highway-maintenance orange seeming to surf on a flowing, crashing wave of snow.
Toivo turned to George. “How’d you get a snowplow to come out here, eh?”
Jaco laughed, the first time that sound had been heard since the alien ship had torn open the night sky with a boom so loud it shook the ground.
“Because it ain’t just da plow and da ambulance,” he said.
• • • •
George hadn’t called the police. He hadn’t called the military (not that he would even know how to call the military, or if such a thing was even possible). And, he hadn’t called an ambulance — not directly anyway.
He’d called Channel 10.
The attack had hit major cities. As far as George knew, Houghton and Hancock — the closest cities of any size at all — hadn’t been hit. The hospitals wouldn’t be flooded, the ambulances wouldn’t be swamped. He hoped that if he acted fast enough, he could put someone to work getting the resources needed to help Mister Ekola.
Not knowing how long his connection would last, George had talked fast, not caring who answered the phone, hoping that whoever it was could remember all the info.
He’d been so nervous he’d been shaking. He’d known, somehow, that he was committing himself to something big, something long-term. The words had rushed out of him. He’d heard his own voice as if there were two of him, one speaking on the phone, the other listening to every syllable.
I don’t have long, so take notes. My name is George Pelton. I grew up around here. An alien ship crashed near my deer camp. It came down during the storm. No one saw it, but you don’t have much time before the major networks and the military come. I can show you the ship. I have alien survivors — I can put them on camera. If you want this story, you need to get here as fast as you can. The roads are snowed-in — find a way to get here. You have to bring an ambulance, and no police. If there isn’t an ambulance, I won’t show you. If there are police, I won’t show you. One reporter, one cameraman. I’m giving you three hours to get an ambulance here, or I’m calling Fox News.
George had given the cabin’s address, then the signal had dropped. Even if he’d had a full cellular connection, how many calls would he have had to make to try and get an ambulance and a snowplow out here? Would anyone have even listened to him? Maybe, maybe not, but a reporter, a motivated reporter, would do anything in his or her power to make it happen. That’d been George’s guess, and from the way things turned out, he’d guessed right.
• • • •
Paramedics worked on Mister Ekola. George was still in the room with the children, but had caught a few snippets of conversation, enough to know that Mister Ekola would be all right. George’s friends clustered around the old man and the paramedics. Other than a smile from Bernie, knowing nods from Toivo and Jaco — the three friends’ way of saying thanks to George — they didn’t give a damn about the reporter, the cameraman, or the alien children.
George stood in front of the children, who clustered together, cowering. Maybe they didn’t know the difference between a rifle and a camera. How could they? The last time a human had pointed something at them, one of their friends had died.
Surprisingly, George recognized the reporter — a woman named Nancy Oostergard. Even though he didn’t live up here anymore, he’d seen her faces on billboards in the area. That was because she wasn’t a “reporter” at all — she was the nightly news anchor. Maybe the anchor of a small-town station didn’t have a lot of pull on the national scene, but she had enough to be the one that drove out on the freshly plowed road to do this shoot.
“Mister Pelton, are you ready?” Nancy asked.
George nodded.
Nancy stood by him, her left shoulder almost touching his right, a microphone in her hand.
The cameraman re-settled the camera on his shoulder, then switched on the lights mounted atop the rig. The small room lit up. The children squealed in fear, clutched at each other even tighter.
“Four . . . three . . . two . . .” the cameraman said.
Nancy took a slow, deep breath through her nose, let it out even slower through her mouth.
“This is Nancy Oostergard, reporting live from near Eagle Harbor. I am inside a crashed UFO, the same kind that has laid waste to cities all across the planet. This ship has actual alien survivors, the first we’ve heard of through the sporadic reports coming from across the planet.”
George watched the cameraman step to the side, trying to get a shot of the children. The children saw this — as a huddled, mewling pack, they moved to keep George between them and the camera.
“Yes, these are actual aliens,” Nancy said.
The camera swung back sharply, locked on Nancy and George.
“They were discovered by this man, George Pelton,” she said. “He was here on a hunting trip with his friends. Mister Pelton, could you describe what you saw the night this ship crashed?”
The camera’s small light burned brightly, nearly blinding George. How did reporters stare into that night after night? Was he on local TV? Or was this signal carried across America? Across the world? He shouldn’t be doing this. He should be in the other room with his friends helping get Mister Ekola through the deep woods and to the ambulance waiting by the cabin.
“Mister Pelton?” Nancy said. “This is a live signal. I’m told we’re being watched all over the globe. Can you describe what you saw?”
George took one look behi
nd him, at the children. Cowering, terrified. He looked at the walls, at the crash seats the children’s parents had used to keep their beloved little ones alive. And in that moment, something deep inside of George awakened.
Awakened and took over.
He looked dead into the camera.
“These kids haven’t done anything to anyone,” he said. “They’re helpless. They’re innocent. Everyone watching this, we can’t let the government get them, cut them up, study them. What if they were your kids? Would you want your babies butchered?”
The cameraman moved again, tried to get an angle. The children were too many to fully hide behind George, but they tried anyway.
George took one step toward the camera, leaned toward the lens.
“They’re just kids,” he said. “I’ll stay with them, try to keep them safe, report to the world however I can, till we know they won’t be killed for some experiment. I’ll stay with them. The government lies — I don’t.”
• • • •
If only he had known the way the world would interpret his words. If he had, would he have said them?
“Mister Pelton, ready to go in?”
George stared at the airlock door, at the guard standing next to it. Behind that door lay the ruined ship. In a matter of days, the Army had built a huge pole barn around the wrecked vessel; within a week, they’d built a second building inside the first, one that covered the alien vessel like a shell. That was where George was headed now.
The dead bodies had been removed, the debris cleared away, and the wreck had been scanned for radiation, poisons, gasses, anything that might harm a physiology humans knew very little about. Nothing dangerous had been discovered. Not knowing what might hurt the aliens, the government scientists had decided to leave them in their own ship.
“Mister Pelton?”
“Yes,” George said automatically. “Thank you, I’m ready.”
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