Surge Forward

by Nate Castle

  President Kaplan, walked away from the group to call his contact on the west coast.

  “The White House looks almost complete, unless I’m missing something?” Thomas said.

  “It’s ready to rock,” Logan said, “President Kaplan didn’t listen to Hank while he was under the influence. I went ahead and had the crew install all of the materials that he had originally put on the building plans. The building now appears to be more secure than Fort Knox.”

  “Somehow, that is going to have to fit into our strategy,” Garrett said.

  “Let’s send these aliens to the lab, just for the heck of it. Maybe Sierra or one of the others can learn something new about them,” Thomas said.

  President Kaplan walked backed to the group.

  “My guy out in Cali said he saw a few days ago when he drove by San Quentin that there was a lot of suspicious activity there. Large groups of people were walking onto the campus. He couldn’t tell if they were doing so on their own accord or being forced to by someone or something else. He’s going to drive by again this afternoon and see if he can get more info.”

  “Golly, that was fast. This guy sounds like a good contact to have,” Thomas said.

  “You want to know my theory?” Hank said, “The aliens are capturing humans, similar to the way that they captured me, and are storing them at San Quentin.”

  “Pretty farfetched, but in this day and age I guess anything is possible,” Logan said.

  19

  Hell Breaks Loose

  The Zyrgians over the past two weeks had successfully captured 9,000 humans and locked them up inside San Quentin. The captures didn’t raise any red flags because it was difficult to spot an alien the size of a slug, crawl up a body and enter the ear. Sure, the actual capacity of the prison was closer to 3,000, but a lot more humans than that could fit inside if having a bed for each one wasn’t a priority. The Zyrgians now felt that the prison was full and began looking for another site to house additional humans. They chose a spot across the bay in Oakland. The former stadiums of the Golden State Warriors and Oakland Athletic’s/Raiders shared stadiums. The two stadiums had been abandoned for the past twelve years or so, after the sports teams all left to move to different cities. The beauty of the San Quentin facility was that it was designed to keep people in. The Zyrgians didn’t have to stay there and make sure the humans didn’t escape, and instead could do more productive things. The stadiums would need to have around the clock security on site, to make sure that the humans didn’t find a way to escape, so it was more of an inconvenience for the aliens. Nevertheless, they had begun capturing and transporting new human victims to the stadiums, filling up the basketball arena first before they would use the football/baseball stadium.

  Back at headquarters in D.C., President Kaplan called an emergency meeting. Before the meeting where everyone on the premises would be in attendance, he held a conference in the Situation Room with all of the key players: Logan, Garrett, Thomas, Christina, Noel, Sierra, Hank to discuss strategies. This meeting lasted approximately three hours and they exited the Situation Room to see a crowd of a few thousand people waiting anxiously around the stage that had been constructed on short notice by the construction crew. President Kaplan got up to the podium and put his hand up to silence the crowd. He began to address the crowd.

  “I’ve got some exciting news I would like to start off with today. Thomas Taylor is once again ready to be your commander in chief so I’ve decided to hand the reins back to him. I am going to be in charge of strategy going forward, but will ultimately run those strategic decisions by him. I’d like to now turn the mic over to President Taylor.”

  ‘General’ Kaplan walked down the stage steps gave President Taylor a fist bump as they crossed paths. President Taylor now had the mic.

  “Thank you for your continued support. I am glad to be back. Last time around, we ended up with some small victories, but the aliens still remained on Earth and came back to present more challenges for us. What do you say that this time around, we take them out for good, so we can go back to living normal lives again?”

  His question was welcomed with a loud ‘YEE YEE’ response from the crowd.

  “It’s going to take a team effort, with many of you putting your lives on the line for our country, but if you believe in me, this time we’re going to make the aliens pay. I’m going to try to keep this speech as short as possible, so let me just go over the key points. #1: We have intel that the aliens have been capturing humans and locking them up in San Quentin. We are going to release those who are in captivity and in the process lure the aliens back here to the White House. #2: Our wonderful ladies on the research team have discovered from studying some of the dead aliens that they left behind a footprint, if you will. This footprint shows all of the places they have been recently. All of them have been to Yosemite recently. So we have reason to believe that the alien headquarters is at Yosemite. We plan on going there, hijacking as many crafts as possible and flying them back here, again with the goal of luring the aliens back to us. For the crafts that we can’t hijack we will throw a glass box around. #3 You’re all wondering why do we want the aliens to come to us? The answer is that Christina has figured out that bots can kill aliens easily. She now has control over two bots. Also, the White House that Hank designed is now the safest place in the country to be inside. The aliens can’t breach it or come inside due to the materials used in the building process. So, the bottom line is that once the aliens are here, everyone will go inside the building and Christina will kill off the aliens using the bots.”

  If only it were going to be that simple, Logan thought. President Taylor finished off his address by directing people to the appropriate location based on what job they wanted to volunteer for. Within the hour, the first team was ready to deploy. Logan and the key players decided to go on the first team and then keep moving from place to place to help out the other teams when needed. The team must have had 400 or more members, Logan didn’t bother to count. They loaded a cargo plane and also one alien craft. Garrett was the pilot of the craft and Hank was in charge of the plane. President Taylor and General Kaplan didn’t join Team 1 because they needed to orchestrate the logistics of the other teams. The plan was for them to join Team 3 when it departed. With the plane and craft now airborne, and Logan seated next to Shelby, he figured now would be a good opportunity for them to reconnect. Ever since the trip that was cut short in Nantucket, they hadn’t been able to spend much time together. Logan’s hope to get some time to chat with Shelby was crushed.

  “I need to get some rest,” Shelby said and leaned her head onto Logan’s chest, falling asleep instantly.

  Logan decided to meander up to the cockpit to pick Hank’s brain a bit.

  “There he is. Is the hero rested up? He’s got a big couple days ahead of him,” Hank said.

  “I wouldn’t flaunt the name ‘hero’ until we make it out of this mess in one piece, “ Logan said as he chuckled.

  “You know what I just realized?” Hank said, “The craft Garrett is flying will arrive at San Quentin almost five hours before we do. That’s not a good thing, Garrett can’t sit still more than a few minutes, he’ll get restless and start making rash decisions without us there.”

  “Good point, that’s bad news. I can’t believe we didn’t think of that. Is there any way we can reroute him back to the White House? Is there anything that we forgot that we need him to go back and get?” Logan said.

  “Not really, but I’ll hard sell him some bullshit, that will get him turned around and keep him occupied for a few hours,” he said.

  Hank picked up the radio that was synced up to the same frequency as the one in the craft and proceeded to tell Garrett that he needed to go back and pick up one of the alien guns from Hank’s shop. Before they could leave again though, they would need to disassemble the gun so that there was no imminent danger during transport. He described to Garrett how disassembling the gun was a slow process and could
take a few hours, but it was very important to the success of the overall mission that they had that gun. Garrett bought Hank’s B.S. story and agreed to turn the craft around back to the White House.

  “Beautiful, now we’ll arrive at San Quentin around the same time he will,” Logan said.

  In their final descent to San Quentin, Hank started looking for a place to land. The commercial jet he was flying didn’t have the luxury of landing right on the campus. The spot he chose was roughly a mile north of the campus on the Highway 101. He would have landed on the frontage road that connected to the prison, but was concerned it wasn’t wide enough, if he was slightly off on his landing angle. After landing, he continued to taxi the plane towards the prison along the frontage road. He figured driving the plane on the frontage road was a different animal than trying to land the plane on the frontage road. He brought the plane to a halt when the front entrance to the prison was in sight. Waiting outside the front gate was a prison transport bus with the engine running. Logan wasn’t at all surprised when he looked over and saw Garrett behind the wheel. The roughly 350 people on the cargo plane exited quickly.

  Garrett, now outside of the bus said, “Well I can drive about fifty of you, the rest are going to have to walk, but it’s not too far of a walk.”

  Garrett didn’t mention it, but the craft that he flew there must have been parked inside the prison gates. Logan and Hank were among the fifty that boarded the bus. Once at the front entrance to what seemed like the main building, Logan said to the others, “Take it easy when you’re in there, no fast movements. Stay together in a group. If we determine that there are no aliens guarding the prisoners then there is no rush, so make reasonable choices.”

  Logan led the way through the large double doors into San Quentin. He was surprised that the first five doors he went through were unlocked. When he came across a metal door that resembled a jail cell door, all he had to do was push a red button on the wall and the door slid open from left to right. They were now walking through a cell block, though these cells were vacant. At the end of the block, one final door with a glass window was the only thing standing between them and the humans that the Zyrgians had captured and placed in the prison. Logan’s group didn’t bother hiding their excitement, they were about to rescue thousands of people. Logan put his hand up for the others behind him to halt.

  “It just seems too easy. Not a single alien guarding the humans, and not a single door requiring a key. There’s something wrong with this picture,” he said “We need to closely examine our surroundings before we go in there, to make sure we aren’t walking into a trap.”

  “I’m going in, the sooner I get out of this creepy place, the better. Besides, who designated you to be in charge?” a member of the team who Logan hadn’t met before said.

  “Don’t! You’re making a mistake,” Logan said, but the guy ignored the orders and rushed past him. The guy had convinced some others to join him and they also sped past Logan, a group of ten in total.

  Logan noticed a device placed near the ceiling of the room that looked like a motion sensor except that it had a barrel protruding out from the base of the object, pointing in the direction of the entrance door. The device was small enough that you wouldn’t notice it unless you were scanning the perimeter for irregularities. Logan wasn’t going to waste time trying to reason with the ten outlaws who had almost reached the door, but he sure hoped this motion sensor device was supposed to be there.

  The man who had started the rebellion placed his hands on the door when another pressed the red button, but instead of the door opening a beam of green light shot out from the motion sensor device and hit all ten of the men. The laser cut through the flesh of the area that it first made contact with so of the ten men, seven ended up losing one or both legs, one lost an arm, and two less fortunate ones got their heads severed clean off. Loud shrieks of horror came from the group behind Logan. Considering their options, and deciding that getting medical help for these victims was not an option, Logan turned the group around and quickly hustled them out of the prison.

  When back at the front entrance gate he said, “We’re going to use the roof as our access point this time. I’m hoping there are no similar sensors up there, but keep your eyes peeled. If you don’t want to partake in this adventure after witnessing what just happened, I totally understand.”

  “Logan, I’ll meet you guys up there, I have to grab something from the craft,” Garrett said.

  Logan calculated the best way to get on the roof and decided on a route that involved him having to climb up a guard tower, shimmy across a steel cable that connected the roof to the guard tower and disconnect an emergency ladder from a retaining wall, before throwing that ladder down to the guys below. Logan made this all happen on impulse simply telling the others to ‘Wait here’ while he played daredevil for a minute. Not more than four minutes had passed before he was positioned on the roof and the ladder was in place down below. People began the simple climb to the roof. When Garrett made it up, Logan noticed he was carrying some sort of power tool.

  “What’s that?” Logan said.

  “This is our key to accessing the inside, my friend. It’s like a Sawz-all but one hundred times more powerful,” Garrett said.

  Some of the group remained on the ground, choosing not to participate in the roof mission. Once all who wanted to be were up, Logan led the way, moving slowly so that he could scan for motion sensors first. He stopped when he reached a skylight. Through the skylight he could see humans down below, meaning that they were now at the correct wing of the prison. There were steel bars around the skylight, so breaking the glass wouldn’t provide an access point. This is where Garrett’s power tool came into play.

  “Back up, this thing could kick back a lot of debris,” Garrett said. He turned his ball cap backwards and put on a pair of sunglasses that he pulled from his pocket. He positioned the tool over the steel bars and pulled the trigger. The rest of the team was a healthy thirty yards back. The tool cut through each bar like it was carving up a Thanksgiving turkey. With the bars off, Garrett pointed the blade of the tool at the skylight glass and thrusted down. The glass shattered and got the attention of the people trapped in the prison. A group of them ran up a flight of stairs until they were standing under the skylight that Garrett had just demolished.

  “We’re here to help,” Garrett said before they could question the team’s intentions. “We did our job figuring out how to break y’all out of here, now you do your job and figure out how to get from where you’re standing up through the hole I just created.”

  20

  Are You Fired Up?

  Christina was not a happy camper when President Taylor broke the news to her.

  “I’m sorry, I know you want to go, but we need you to stay behind. At any moment you may need to initiate a bot attack on the aliens and so we can’t risk not having you at the White House if the aliens show up.”

  “But I can initiate an attack from a remote location, I don’t have to be on site,” she said.

  “I’m old fashioned, I don’t trust modern technology. This is how it’s gonna be and I hope you understand,” said President Taylor.

  Christina decided she wouldn’t disobey the President’s orders to not make the trip across the country, but she surely wasn’t going to follow his orders to a T. She walked out of the White House to one of the prototype crafts that they had finished building. She loaded some supplies onto the craft, including her computer hacking bundle and started up the craft. If there weren’t any altercations, she would be back at the White House before anyone knew she was even gone.

  Flying this craft took some getting used to, it was not as smooth as the alien craft it had been modeled after. She landed on Park Avenue in New York City and recognized the territory upon exiting the craft. All of the wreckage was still there from the previous alien and bot encounter. She walked the streets searching for one thing in particular. After ten minutes she stopped to exam
ine her findings. It took some digging and throwing debris in every which way to uncover a bot, and right away she knew this was the right one. It was incredible how this bot looked to be in normal condition given that a skyscraper had fallen on or around it. She fired up one of her laptops, placed it on the ground and then took the free end of the cable on the bot and reattached it to its base. Typing a few commands into the computer program, the bot came to life. This was the one that Garrett pulled the wiring from to stop it from destroying the alien craft on the roof a couple weeks prior. She typed in a new command and the bot drove up to her craft, extended itself upward like a ladder and entered the craft. Christina didn’t want to get greedy so she followed the bot onto the craft and took off back to the White House, making it back there with no one realizing she was even gone. At the time, she didn’t know that she was being followed.

  “So you’ll fly these poor people back to base, and immediately turn back around to meet up with us again?” Garrett said.

  “That’s the plan. I wish one of them knew how to fly so that I wouldn’t have to waste eight hours going there and back. But I guess they can’t stay here. After all it was a rescue mission and what’s the point of that if following the rescue, the people are still in danger?” Hank said.

  Their plan to extract the hostages through the hole in the roof at San Quentin had worked and they were all standing by the front gates, 9000+ people in all. By now, Team 2 which was deployed from the White House four hours ago would be close to reaching Yosemite.

  “I’ve set up buses for the ones that I can’t take. And then a bunch of them have volunteered to go with your team,” Hank said.

  “We have one more problem,” Logan jumped into the conversation, “One of these guys somehow has intel that the aliens are using to the Oakland Coliseum complex to hold thousands of additional humans. Apparently San Quentin was the starting point, but once that filled up, they had to find facilities with more capacity.”