The Day of the Nefilim

by David L. Major

  “We figure, General, that since we’ve got their crystal, they’ll be sending another in its place. And just in case they decide to send that weird ship of theirs to do the job, I want you to be there to welcome them. You’ll be leaving for the Antarctic immediately. I want that ship. I want to know how it works, and I want those people. I want to know where they’re from, and how they got here.”

  “Will we be traveling in the new fliers, Secretary-General?” The General was looking forward to a chance to redeem himself.

  “Of course, unless you’d rather walk. Nothing else is working. Three of them have been set aside for you, complete with their Nefilim crew and the human pilots they’re training.”

  “Excellent. I’ve wondered what those things are like on the inside.”

  The Secretary-General poured everyone more to drink. “I saw inside one yesterday, actually. They’re quite something. Far in advance of anything of ours, of course. But that’s irrelevant. We have them now. I wonder how things would have turned out if we’d known that the Nefilim had stored hundreds of them underground for all that time. Just sitting there, waiting for their owners to come out of hibernation. We probably would have ripped the place apart looking for them,” he laughed. “We’re still finding out what they’re capable of. Accept nothing less than total co-operation from your Nefilim crew, General. If you have any trouble at all with them, let headquarters know at once.”

  The General nodded.

  President Veal lurched forward in his seat. “I’m sorry, I’m going to be…” Sick, probably, but he never finished his sentence. He clutched the back of his head and tried to stand up. He failed, and collapsed in a twitching heap on the floor. A few seconds later, he stopped moving altogether.

  “Oh dear,” said the Secretary-General, without moving. “A dead President! What are we going to do?”

  No one moved or spoke.

  “Well, it solves a problem, I suppose. I must admit, I had no idea how Veal and his bureaucratic cronies were going to make themselves useful in the future. He shouldn’t have been smoking, perhaps. Not these, anyway.” The Secretary-General laughed to himself and picked up the box of cigarettes from the table.

  “You mean…?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do, Alexis my dear,” said the Secretary-General. “One of the responsibilities of power, as you know, is having to make the hard decisions. Such is the price of greatness.”

  “Hot damn. Very neat, if you don’t mind me saying, Secretary-General.”

  “Not at all. Neat, yes. The chemists tell me that there will be no trace of anything in his bloodstream or his lungs. A purely academic point, of course, since there will be no autopsy. But it’s a nice testament to good work on their part.”

  His eyes flicked down at the dead President.

  “Poor old thing. He looks so peaceful. Oh well, I suppose we’ll just have to make Europe a special UN protectorate. No time for elections now. Such is life.” A gurgling sound escaped from the corpse’s lungs.

  “Now, where was I… ah yes, General, find that ship, that’s right. Take the boy with you.” The Secretary-General flicked a casual finger towards the end of the couch where Thead had been sitting quietly, watching and listening. What a terrible and efficient branch of humanity this was. In all the variants of the race that were scattered among the stars, he had never before encountered anything like this. No one had ever gotten the better of the Nefilim before, but these people had done it.

  At that moment Thead knew, deep in his soul, that he was on the right side.

  “An absolute pleasure, Secretary-General,” he purred. “If the ship and my former crew mates are anywhere near this Antarctica place you talk about, I will make it my first priority to deliver them to you, by any means possible.”

  “That’s a good boy. But make it your first priority regardless of where the ship is. And feel free to use all means, including the impossible.” The Secretary-General got up and went to his desk. He pressed a button on the intercom and asked for someone to come and take the President away, then spoke to the room again.

  “I think that’s all we need to cover for now. Thank you all for your attendance. Your co-operation is very much appreciated, of course,” he smiled, then added, “Don’t trip over the President as you leave. Oh, Thead. Stay a while. I’d like to talk.”

  As the others left, they passed two soldiers coming into the room with a stretcher. The Secretary-General put a finger to his lips, silencing Thead while the soldiers bundled the President’s body into a bag and zipped it up.

  “A tragic loss,” intoned the Secretary-General as the soldiers departed.

  “What did you want to see me for, Secretary-General?” Thead asked after they had gone.

  “First, Thead, I want to share a wonderful sight with you. It’s almost time.”

  The Secretary-General pressed a button, and the lights in the room dimmed. Another button, and the curtains that covered the window slid back to reveal the darkness outside. Apart from the hundreds of fires burning out of control in the city below, everything was black.

  “Looks like hell, doesn’t it? I’m told we’ve lost a few suburbs. Normally I could offer you an excellent view of the city. It stretches as far as the eye can see. But even though we’re blinded, as it were, there’s something I want you to see. Wait.”

  They stood in silence, Thead not sure where to look or what to look for.

  “Come on, come on… ah, there it is! Up there, boy! High in the sky! Look at that!”

  Thead looked up and saw the same points of light that Bark and Reina were watching from another part of the city. They watched in silence as the lights flared then broke up, falling towards the Earth in thousands of burning fragments.

  In a few minutes it was over, and the sky was as dark as it had been before.

  “What was that?”

  “That, boy, was the last you’ll ever see of the invasion fleet from the Nefilim home planet. They just blew themselves to hell on HAARP! We’ve had it installed for years. As soon as they touched the layer of harmonic scalars, well… they disintegrated. Their craft just fell apart. Alien stir-fry, God knows how many of them!”

  The Secretary-General laughed loudly. For now, he was a truly happy man. “If the Nefilim down here were planning on getting any help from home, they’re going to be mighty disappointed! It’s looking good, Thead. It’s looking damn good! We’re on top of things!”

  He paused for a moment. When he spoke again, his tone had changed. “Can you understand our power, Thead? There is nothing that can stand in our way. With the alien technology, and their help – regardless of whether or not they want to give it – the stars themselves will soon be ours! You’ve been there, you’ve traveled through the universe; I don’t doubt you for a moment, boy. Your experience will be most valuable. Get me that ship of yours, Thead, and you’ll find that my gratitude can be plentiful. I remember those who help me.”

  “Tomorrow is a bright place, my boy, and it is adorned with the banners and flags of a humanity that has claimed its rightful place in the galaxy. I intend to be remembered by future generations as the leader who pulled Earth back from the brink of disaster and led humanity in its conquest of the stars!”

  Thead thought about the universe. Not the whole universe, of course, because that would have taken more time than he had right now, but he did have time to briefly contemplate the state of at least part of the universe as he knew it. Because it was so easy for anyone to go anywhere, there was no fuss made about territory. Borders had long ago ceased to mean much. The galaxy was a fluid, messy place; the many races that shared it tended to co-operate, and for the most part in peace.

  The reason the Nefilim were so infamous was that they were, in all the known history of the universe, the only race that had resorted to violent conquest and enslavement. In the face of their fleets of warships, their weapons and their brutality, the scant resistance that the more peaceful races had put up had meant nothing. Wh
en the Nefilim horde had come sweeping in from the distant edge of the galaxy (this edge of the galaxy, Thead realized now), they had swept the soft civilizations of the inner star systems ahead of them like dust before a wind.

  And when their progress through the galaxy had stopped for no apparent reason, and they had retreated, disappearing as quickly as they had come, they had left behind nothing but an abiding fear of them. Who they were and where they had come from had been lost, if it was ever known, under layer upon layer of myth and legend. What a terrible, beautiful thing their history was, thought Thead.

  But now the Nefilim had met their match in these humans. Pragmatic, cunning, treacherous, deceitful – no puerile abstract-ions of compassion or peace for this race. If the Earthmen wanted to take the stars, there was nothing out there to stand in their way. Tomorrow belonged to them, just as the Secretary-General was saying.

  “But I didn’t just want to show you the fate of our enemies, Thead, as inspiring as it is. After all, you’ve already seen that at close quarters, and you performed well yourself, I’m told. No, there’s something else. A little task I want you to perform during your trip to the ice.”

  The Secretary-General drew the curtains and turned the lights back on.

  “Sit down, Thead.”

  * * *

  Interlude

  What we did during the darkness at Barker’s Mill

  72 HOURS AFTER IT ARRIVED, the darkness passed. The sky shuddered and convulsed as though a cover was being dragged away, and in an instant the darkness was replaced by a radiant, uniform light unlike anything anyone had seen before.

  The sun had become a pale orange orb in the sky, as though its fire had been washed away. Just as the darkness had been total, so too the new light seemed to have no center. It was everywhere. It was as though the sky and the light had become the same thing.

  Barker’s Mill came through in reasonable shape. The dark-ness had come late on a moonlit evening, while most people had been indoors, and being a small town, it lacked the dangers of a big city.

  Onethian had been at Tommy’s house, wondering whether he should write his memoirs, when it happened. The stars visible through the window in front of him disappeared, and a few seconds later the power failed. He went to the kitchen and rummaged around until he found candles and some matches. Then, thinking that this was as good an omen as any, he began writing, which apart from sleeping is how he spent the rest of the Darkness, as it came to be known.

  Tommy and Ortega spent the seventy-two hours of the Darkness in the Red Lion. This was an accident, albeit a happy one. Apart from the barmaid, they had been the only people in the place, so they had a plentiful supply of beer, potato crisps and peanuts for the duration.

  None of them had any idea what was going on.

  “It’s the end of the fucking world, that’s what it is,” said Tommy. Neither the barmaid nor Ortega could come up with any convincing argument to the contrary.

  “Not looking good,” lamented Ortega.

  “Not looking like anything, is it, mate,” Tommy had replied.

  Using matches for light, the barmaid led them to the upstairs rooms. There they spent the three days, thinking that time, or the planet, or something, had stopped.

  By the time the light returned and the cold began to abate, they had eaten pretty much everything in the place that could be eaten, and had made serious inroads into the bar’s top shelf.

  And they all knew each other a lot better. “Well,” said Tommy, “we won’t forget that in a hurry, will we.”

  Ortega said nothing. He was sleeping off a bottle of vodka. Denise was finding her clothes.

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you,” she said, slipping her t-shirt on. “I mean it was fun and everything, but we thought it was the end, didn’t we? We didn’t think we’d see daylight again. I sure didn’t, anyway.”

  “I’m not so sure we’re seeing it now.” Tommy was looking out the window. The dull, anemic disk of the sun hung in the sky like a paper cutout. He wasn’t just looking at the sun, though; the window also provided a good view of the harbor, and on its far side, the sand dunes that surrounded the military base.

  Hovering above the base, motionless, were two cigar-shaped craft. They were big, and they glowed with a soft orange light that hung around them like an aura. He had never seen anything like them before, and they had no markings on them that might give a clue as to whose they were.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll be our secret. I don’t think anyone’ll be caring about what we got up to, anyway.”

  A pained groan came from Ortega’s direction. He was coming around. Tommy smiled. That’d teach him.

  Denise went to where Ortega lay. She leaned over and ruffled his hair, then kissed him. She did the same to Tommy and went to the door.

  “You’re nice boys. Thanks for the good time. You can let yourselves out, okay? I’d better find the boss and see what’s happening.”

  “No worries.”

  * * *

  PART 4

  Ice

  WHEN THE LIGHT RETURNED, they left the doctor’s office and returned to the basement where Pig was waiting. With the subway out, they had to walk all the way, and it took them hours of navigating their way through streets full of people wandering around in shock, looking up at the new sky with open mouths, before they finally reached the old theater.

  * * *

  They were glad to get back to the ship. Exactly how Geoca navigated them through the network of underground passages and caves and found their way to the surface was beyond any of them. He stayed quiet, as though he was listening to something, and spoke only when he whispered directions to Bark. After several hours, the ship emerged from a cave located high in a cliff face.

  This was a place that the surface dwellers rarely visited, said Geoca. It was a wilderness area, supposedly protected for the sake of the environment, but actually used by the authorities for secret research that was carried out in large, isolated compounds hidden in the most inaccessible parts of the park.

  Geoboy and Geogirl knew about it. They created one of their mental slide shows and showed it to the others. It began with chalets set in idyllic forest settings and against backdrops of majestic mountain scenery. Inside the buildings, grim-faced men and women oversaw animals in cages or in various kinds of apparatus, or being dissected alive or burnt with chemicals. There were diseases beyond imagination. Animals and prisoners wrapped in tinfoil were being cooked alive with radiation. Humans and mutants were there as well, undergoing the same experiments. They all had numbers tattooed on their foreheads; they weren’t going anywhere. There was more suffering here than anyone on the ship could think about.

  Bark shook himself loose from the vision. With him not attending to it, the ship was rolling away from its center. He brought them back onto the right course, still wondering at the local humans. How could they do these things?

  The others kept watching as the vision continued. Finally, it finished with the sight of acid baths, in which bodies were being dissolved. When it finished and her eyes had cleared and refocused on the material world around them, Reina turned away without saying anything and walked to where Pig was lying on the deck. She sat down beside him.

  “Pig, I saw you just now. When you were young. You were in that place, weren’t you? In one of the cages. I recognized you. I don’t know how.”

  The vision, which he had seen as well, had left Pig disconsolate, confronted again by memories he would rather leave behind. “I was there, yes. I was born – no, I was created – there. I am no work of nature. I am the result of their experiments. Not really mutant, not of the underworld, like Geoca, but the product of the surface dwellers and their manipulation. I don’t know exactly what they did to make me how I am. I don’t much care.” Pig was choosing his words carefully. “I was rescued from the vivisectionists when I was young. The recollection that I have of my time there is disorganized, just a string of impressions and feelings.
”

  “Geoca and some other mutants came in the middle of the night, they tell me. They destroyed the place, so that the surface dwellers could not perform their evil there any more, and took away the animals and other victims they found there. I was one of them. They took us underground, and cared for us there.”

  “So they raised you as one of their own?”

  “Yes. But I like the surface, I like the space, and the open air and the freedom. I would very much like to live under this new sky that is above us now, but it is safer underground. With my friends and their kind. What do you think, Reina?”

  “Think of what, Pig?”

  “Of our situation. Of what you’ve seen.”

  Reina didn’t know what to say. “Well, I don’t know if I’d rather be delivering fruit and vegetables or not. I’m not shedding any tears for the old world, Pig. It was heading for a bad place all along. Now that it’s finally there, ruled by idiots with shit for brains; well, I’m not surprised at all. Disappointed, but not surprised.”

  “But there is hope, isn’t there?”

  “Yeah, I suppose there is, but you’d have to agree it’s a long shot.”

  Pig lowered his head to the deck. She saw the effect her words had on him.

  “Don’t worry, piglet.” She scratched him behind the ears. “We’re doing our best. We’re taking the crystal to where it’s needed. What more can we do?”

  It wasn’t long before they were high above the open sea. The receding coastline was nothing more than a distant smudge on the horizon. Pig luxuriated in the smell of brine on the fresh breeze. Open space. His snout wrinkled, this time with pleasure.