Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization

by Alex Irvine

  She went silent, and he figured she was thinking about it. Kindness almost always got through, in his experience, even if expressions of faith didn’t. Just then, a gas station attendant came walking along the road.

  “We’re all out!” he shouted. “Sorry. Pumps are dry!” He didn’t even go back to the station, just kept on walking.

  “Clearly he’s taken the day off,” Sam said bitterly.

  Julius waved this little obstacle away.

  “Something will come up,” he replied stoically. “Now let me drive, give you a bit of a break.”

  Sam looked better. More together.

  She looked at him and said, “You would’ve been a good grandpa.”

  This gave Julius a little pang.

  “Maybe one day,” he said as Sam handed him the keys.

  * * *

  Flanked by two Marines, Lieutenant Ritter entered the command center, where General Adams was trying to get reports on the status of the aliens’ drilling progress, other nations’ military responses… anything. But they were for all intents and purposes cut off from the world. He turned to Ritter and noted immediately that one of the Marines carried the suitcase known colloquially as the football.

  “General, Cheyenne Mountain is gone,” Ritter said, keeping his professional cool even in the direst of circumstances. “All seventeen members of the presidential line of succession are presumed dead. To the best of our knowledge, you’re the highest-ranking officer still alive.”

  The other Marine held a Bible out at waist height, for General Adams’s right hand.

  “We need to swear you in, sir,” Ritter continued.

  David Levinson watched the proceedings with visible cynicism. “I’d say congratulations, but under the circumstances, it seems more appropriate to wish you good luck.”

  Then he got up and left. Adams placed his hand on the Bible and the Marine began to administer the presidential oath of office.

  * * *

  Whitmore had been right all along, and he’d never wished so hard that he would be wrong. This was even worse than ’96. Much worse. They were scattered, isolated, defenseless… and mourning.

  His cane clicked along the concrete floor as he searched through the personnel section of Area 51 until he found Patricia. She was in the pilots’ locker room, sitting in front of a particular locker.

  Joints creaking, Whitmore sat down on the long bench next to her.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “They never had a chance,” she said, her voice dull and almost without inflection. “You were right. We’re not gonna beat them this time.”

  Whitmore just looked at her, his beautiful and intelligent and resourceful daughter, who had survived so much when she was a child and lost her mother in this very research complex. He wished he could say something to comfort her, but he knew anything he said would be a lie.

  40

  The first thing Jake heard when he started to regain consciousness was screaming.

  Human screaming.

  Then he registered gunfire, and reflexively grabbed around for a weapon, but he couldn’t reach anything. He opened his eyes, his head clearing a little, and he saw that he was hanging from some kind of giant machine, moving slowly through an endless field of otherworldly vegetation. He’d have thought he was dead and in some insane afterlife if he wasn’t hearing people screaming.

  Or maybe this was hell?

  He looked around, swinging in his chute harness, which was caught on a protruding part of the harvester. In the distance he saw alien soldiers massacring the surviving pilots. The wreckage of burning jets and bombers—and a lot of alien fighters, as well—speckled the field as far as the eye could see.

  So he was alive, but maybe not for long, if he didn’t get moving.

  Jake unbuckled the chute harness and fell into the marshy field with a splash. The water was up to his knees, and cold as hell. He got to his feet and looked around, and the first thing he saw was a detachment of alien soldiers headed right for him. They opened fire, shredding the vegetation around him. He lost his balance trying to run, and someone came out of nowhere, tackling him out of the way of a second barrage.

  When he got himself clear of the muck again he saw that his rescuer was none other than Dylan Hiller, who had taken a round to the leg while saving Jake. Dylan was tough, however—he took off running.

  “Your leg,” Jake said, and he ran after him, just catching Dylan’s answer.

  “I’ll live.”

  They ran until they found a thicket that might provide some decent cover, and ducked out of sight.

  “We gotta get the hell out of here,” Jake whispered.

  “They’re closing in on both sides,” Dylan said, looking back toward their pursuers. “There’s nowhere to run.”

  The aliens came closer. Jake held as still as he ever had in his life. It wasn’t going to work, though. They were on the verge of being discovered when there was a tap from Dylan. He looked over and saw Dylan slipping down under the water.

  Good idea, Jake thought. He sucked in a deep gulp of air and did the same, hoping he could hold his breath long enough for the aliens to pass by.

  * * *

  Julius rolled down the main street of some one-horse town in the middle of Nevada at about fifteen miles an hour, ignoring the blaring horns and upraised fingers of passing traffic.

  “If we go any slower, we’ll be going backwards,” Bobby griped.

  Julius didn’t want to hear it. “We have to conserve our gas.”

  “Area 51 is still seventy-five miles away, and we’re running on fumes,” Sam said. She was right, but Julius didn’t know what to do about it. They hadn’t seen a gas station with working pumps all day.

  Up ahead, he saw a school bus on the side of the road, its side painted with the words CAMP JACKRABBIT. A dozen or so kids wearing rabbit ears hung around outside the bus, trying to stay out of the merciless Nevada sun. Julius thought something didn’t seem right, so he pulled the car to a stop and powered down the passenger side window.

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  A freckled redheaded boy with a name tag that said “Henry” answered.

  “No one. Our driver left us to take a ride to Minnesota.”

  “He left you? Just like that?” Julius was disgusted. Who would do that to a bunch of kids in rabbit ears?

  “He went to go have sex with his girlfriend,” another kid said—this one with the name tag “Dennis.”

  “It’s his wife, stupid.” That was “Kevin.”

  Julius had an idea. He got out of the car.

  “Where are you going?” Sam asked, but he didn’t answer until he’d climbed into the bus and turned the ignition, just to see. The gas gauge went up, up… three-quarters of a tank! Even in a gas-guzzling hog like this, he thought, that had to be enough to make seventy-five miles.

  He stuck his head out of the window.

  “All aboard!”

  “What about our car?”

  “We’ll get you a new one when you get your license,” Julius said. He was impatient to take advantage of this good fortune, and get going to see David. His son would have answers. “Everyone in! We’re off to see the wizard!”

  * * *

  In the fields hundreds of feet below Rain Lao’s dangling feet, the massacre of the other surviving pilots was over. Alien soldiers filed back into their troop transports. They hadn’t seen Rain, but it wouldn’t matter soon, because she was snagged on a protruding piece of the ship’s interior, with a fatal fall below her and her parachute slowly tearing loose above.

  Rrrrriippp.

  Her time was running out.

  “Just taking in the scenery?” someone said from nearby. Rain looked over and saw, of all people, Charlie. He was perched on a ledge a few meters away.

  “It’s not going to hold,” she said.

  “You have to swing yourself to the edge,” Charlie said. He scooted along the ledge as far as he could, but he still couldn�
��t reach her. “I’ll catch you.”

  “What if you don’t?”

  Charlie looked down at the distant ground, then back up to her. “Positive thinking is key in a situation like this.”

  Well, she thought, I can’t very well just hang here and wait to die. Rain kicked herself into a series of swings. Each movement brought her a little closer to Charlie’s outstretched hands, but each one also tore the chute a little more. Far below, she heard the thrum of the alien transports powering up their engines.

  That was another problem. Whether or not she could get to Charlie, they were both dead if the aliens noticed them, and she was hard to miss when she was flailing around like this.

  “Almost there,” Charlie said. “Just a bit more!”

  Rain swung one more time.

  Snap!

  The parachute tore loose, but Charlie was quicker than gravity, and he caught both of her wrists before she could fall. For a long moment she swayed over the drop, her life literally in his hands. Then he pulled her up and they both ducked back into the shadow of the column that had snagged her chute.

  One of the alien transports flew past. They practically held their breath until it was gone into the distance and they were sure they hadn’t been spotted.

  “Thanks,” Rain said. “You saved my life.”

  “Oh, it’s… um…” For the first time she’d ever seen, he wasn’t sure what to say.

  “I’ve never seen you so quiet,” she said. Maybe she liked him a little. Just a little.

  “This is kinda like a date,” he said. “We even got to hold hands.”

  Rain rolled her eyes. “Aaaand he’s back.”

  * * *

  President Lanford snapped awake in darkness, sweaty and disoriented. She couldn’t tell where she was. Had the aliens pressed their attack on Cheyenne Mountain? Was anyone left? Was she even there still?

  “Hello?” she called out. “Is anyone here?”

  In the darkness she heard something moving. Feet scraping the ground, or… something larger? She couldn’t tell. The room seemed huge, and sounds didn’t carry well.

  “Show yourself! I can hear you.”

  Out of the shadows, she saw Tanner slowly lumbering toward her.

  “Tanner, thank God!” she said, grateful to see a familiar face and also remembering how brave he’d been when the aliens attacked—

  Then she saw it. A giant tentacle, thick as her leg, translucent with strange fluid running through it… wrapped around Tanner’s neck. His feet barely touched the ground.

  She wasn’t in Cheyenne Mountain. She had to be on the alien ship.

  “Oh no,” Lanford said, backing away from him, and then Tanner spoke.

  “Wherrrrre issss it?”

  A holographic image appeared. It was a representation of the spherical ship that had come out of the wormhole by the Moon, and it started playing in a constant loop near Tanner.

  “We shot it down,” Lanford said. “It crashed on the Moon.” Why did the aliens care about the ship if it wasn’t theirs, as David thought? And if it was, couldn’t they find it on their own?

  “Not the shiiippp,” the alien said through Tanner. “I waaaaant what waaass insiiiddde—”

  Something else moved in the darkness, beyond the radius of the faint light falling on Lanford and Tanner, and a moment later a massive alien head descended into view. The alien queen must have been a hundred feet tall, Lanford thought, stunned by the scale and sheer malevolence of what she was seeing.

  The infrared image hadn’t done her justice. Her head was the size of a house, each eye nearly as big as Lanford herself, the slope of her skull extending back into the darkness. She was horrific, a thing out of human nightmares, predatory and evil—but Lanford could also recognize that she was beautiful, in the way all living things had a certain beauty. That wasn’t going to stop her from killing the queen, though. Not for a minute.

  “I don’t give a shit what you’re looking for,” she said, right into the creature’s monstrous face. “I know I won’t live to see it, but we’re gonna beat you again, you ugly bitch!”

  That was all she had to say, and when she was done saying it, President Elizabeth Lanford stood defiantly in front of the alien queen, preparing to die.

  * * *

  With Okun fussing over them the entire time, the hangar crew got the LXR-73 mounted on a crane so they could move it across the hangar to where the piece of wreckage still hung in the tug’s cargo arms. The laser bumped over a crack in the floor.

  “Careful!” he said. “Don’t agitate the crystals!”

  Floyd was watching the proceedings, wondering if maybe he should be in another state. Okun turned and spoke to him.

  “Built it back in ’94,” he said. “Had to shelve it though after the meltdown in sector G.” He gave it an affectionate kick and a frightening noise came out of it, as if it might blow up at any moment.

  “What meltdown?” Floyd asked nervously. “Are we sure this thing is safe?”

  Okun gave him a big grin. “Not in the slightest.” He flicked a pair of welding goggles down over his eyes, and as soon as the laser was in position, he powered it up and started cutting into the wreckage.

  Floyd weighed pride against safety, and safety won. He took cover behind a console, waiting for the whole thing to go blooey.

  * * *

  “Stop,” Dikembe said. “Go back.”

  Catherine clicked back. Dikembe stared at two symbols on the display. One was the familiar circle-and-line. Catherine recognized the other from the charts Dikembe had tacked up to the walls in his study—

  “What?” she demanded. “What do you see?”

  Dikembe waited a moment. “That symbol means ‘hunt,’” he said.

  At last we’re getting somewhere, Catherine thought—but where? “If that’s ‘hunt’ and the circle means ‘fear,’ then maybe they’re being hunted by it.”

  “Or the opposite,” Dikembe said.

  Maybe he was right, she thought, and then she remembered something else, from another case. She started digging through her laptop case files until she came up with the one she was after.

  “I had one case study in Brazil where my patient didn’t describe the circle as fear. He referred to it as ‘enemy.’ What if the aliens aren’t afraid of it?”

  What if instead they were at war with it?

  * * *

  When the satellites went down, the crew of the Alison had to find a new way to keep in touch with the American government. Ana-Lisa and Jacques thought they remembered a shortwave radio stored down below somewhere. When they found it, they dragged it up into the tech room, where McQuaide and Boudreaux were watching the drill on the monitor. The aliens either hadn’t noticed the submersible or didn’t care.

  “We found a shortwave in the hold,” Ana-Lisa announced. “We should be able to communicate with that.” The captain nodded as Boudreaux noticed something on the monitor. A sudden upwelling of bright-red sludge, boiling into slag around the plasma beam. Ana-Lisa saw it, too. “What’s that?”

  “The drill cracking the outer mantle?” Boudreaux offered. “But that shouldn’t happen for another—” A thought occurred to him and he grabbed the pad he’d used to do his math before. “Oh, no. No no no…”

  “What’s no no no?” McQuaide wanted to know.

  “We didn’t compensate for the porousness of the mesosphere,” Boudreaux said, as if either McQuaide or Ana-Lisa would know what that meant. He finished his new round of calculations and sat back. “We don’t have seven hours left until the Earth core breach. We have two.”

  There wasn’t enough booze in the world to make McQuaide feel better about that.

  * * *

  The laser did the trick, and didn’t even blow up in the process. Floyd stood up as Okun powered down the laser and yelled at the crew member inside the tug.

  “Pull!”

  The tug’s arms engaged and pulled the wreckage apart, releasing the smooth sphere from its
battered casing. It hit the floor with an ear-splitting clang and then rolled slowly toward Okun. He beamed down at it.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” he said. “It’s time to see what secrets you’re hiding.” Waving the rest of the team over, he started issuing orders. “Let’s run every scan, and find out what we’re dealing with here!”

  Amazing, Floyd thought. He’d never in his life met someone he considered a bona fide mad scientist, but Dr. Brakish Okun fit the bill perfectly.

  41

  Not knowing where else to go, David wandered into the fighter hangar and stared out into its emptiness. Without the fighters and their crews, the place felt uncomfortably like a graveyard. A few mechanics and ground crew milled about without purpose—or maybe that was David projecting, because he sure as hell didn’t know what his purpose was now.

  Everything he’d done had failed.

  “Well, Dad,” he said, “Earth’s gonna be destroyed and in the end it wasn’t even global warming.”

  “David,” Tom Whitmore said from behind him.

  David turned around. “Ah, President Whitmore! Good to see you up and about, Tom. You gave us a scare.”

  “It’s been a while,” Whitmore said.

  “Connie’s funeral,” David said. “I miss her every day. At least she didn’t have to see this.” Since Whitmore was there, David kept up his confession. He had to get it off his chest. “I had twenty years to get us ready. I threw myself into work, ignored my wife, my father… and we never had a chance, did we?”

  “We didn’t last time either,” Whitmore said. After a pause, he added, “We always knew they were coming back. We’ve been fighting this war in our heads for a long time. It’s worn us down.”

  That’s one way to look at it, David thought. “Maybe we just got lucky last time.”

  “You think that was luck?” Whitmore said. “David, look how far we’ve come. For the last twenty years, our planet has stood united. That’s unprecedented in human history. That’s sacred. That’s worth dying for. We convinced an entire generation this was a battle we could win, and they believed us. And now we have to believe in them. We can’t let them down.”