by David Beers
"Where did they go?" Wren asked everyone in the truck.
This was their second drive by, going slower this time, craning their necks to see every nook and cranny of the place. Michael didn't hear any disbelief in his father's voice, no wonder that maybe some of Michael's story had been a lie—which was different than usual. If Michael was anything, he was a liar and lazy, according to Wren, but maybe Julie's face had verified the story for him.
"I don't know," Michael whispered.
He caught his breath as his father pulled slowly into the parking lot.
"What are you doing?" Julie said.
"Don't go in," Michael said.
It was too late though, the truck was already on the motel's property.
"There isn't a car here," Wren said, whether to himself or the rest of the truck, Michael couldn't tell.
"Go to the front office," Glenn said.
Wren listened, driving the truck to the right and stopping under the low overhang meant to protect guests from weather. Michael peered inside the windows, but saw nothing. Just a light on and an empty reception area.
Glenn opened the passenger door and stepped from the truck.
"Don't!" Julie said, grabbing for him like a mother would a child venturing too close to fire.
He didn't say anything, but simply walked forward so that her fingers grabbed only fleeting air. Michael watched him go, knowing that he would be dead in a few moments, and that once they were finished with Bryan's father, they would march out here and shoot everyone in this truck. He watched him walk with no curiosity, only a dead certainty.
Glenn pulled the door open and passed into the motel, his back to the car. It took him only a few seconds to look behind the counter before he turned and walked back out, his lips thin lines of white, like some kind of Halloween face paint.
"Let's go," he said as he climbed back into his seat.
"What's in there?" Michael asked, hearing his father trying to ask the same thing.
"It doesn't matter. We need to get out of here, out of Grayson, completely."
"What is it?" Wren said.
"The clerk is dead. Shot. Just like in the police station."
Michael closed his eyes. They were killing everyone now. Indiscriminately maybe. Perhaps they were marching through neighborhoods, simply going up to houses and pulling triggers.
"Where can we go?" Wren said.
"It doesn't matter. Just out of this place, out of Grayson. We have to get to the next town over, to Snellville, and see if we can talk to someone there. Staying here though is suicide. And I'm not going to die here before I have a chance at finding my wife and son. So either drop me off at my car or get the fuck to driving."
Michael looked at Bryan's father; the man wasn't crying, wasn't even looking at any of them, just staring out the front window. This whole time everyone's thoughts had been on Michael and Julie. On what was happening in Grayson, except for his. Glenn's thoughts hadn't ventured from Bryan, from his wife.
Michael turned to Wren and watched him reach down between his legs and pull up the flask. He opened the cap and took the smallest of sips, barely a taste, and Michael thought it was more out of habit than any possibility of it calming his nerves.
"Alright, let's try," Wren said, moving the car into drive.
Michael felt Julie's hand squeeze his, transferring some of her relief over to him, though he couldn't shake the feeling that regardless of what the two adults in the truck said, no one was ever getting out of Grayson.
* * *
Wren's flask felt light. He forgot how many shots the thing held, maybe six, but six over the past eight hours was a pretty good pace for him. He would need more though, and soon.
Focus on getting out of here, then we can find you something to drink, Linda said.
Her voice was sweet right now. It felt like a rose's petals moving lightly across his cheek. It hadn't felt sweet in years. Always the corrosive acid lined with her love for him. That though, that one sentence, there was no corrosive acid in it. She meant it. Or he meant it. Whoever it was…it felt right.
And the sentiment was right too.
The alcohol wasn't going anywhere, but if they didn't get out of here quickly, he would never have the opportunity to fill up another flask.
He came to a stop at the four way, looking around though both roads were empty, which was weird in itself, especially for a time like this. Four o'clock in the afternoon? People should be here, they should be driving home from work, or picking up kids from daycare, or something goddamnit. Not empty. But it was. The school. The police station. The motel. Wren didn't want to go into one of the neighborhoods in Grayson; he didn't want to even imagine what might be waiting for them there.
"Fuck…"
Wren looked over at his son, the curse word coming from his mouth like a rock's echo as it drops into a deep cavern. He followed Michael's look out of the car, to the right, to where he was planning on turning before he got lost in his mind.
There was a road crew a half-mile down, orange cones and large construction trucks. Four men stood around the trucks, though none of them were moving. The trucks weren't moving. Nothing being dug and nothing being built. Two of the men stood facing Wren's direction and the other two with their backs to Wren, looking down the other side of the street.
"That's not construction," Michael said.
"God, what is it?" Julie said.
"They're not letting anyone leave," Michael said.
Wren squinted, looking at the men as best he could from this distance. They certainly weren't working. "Glenn, have you been down this road lately?"
"This morning. Nothing was here."
Wren hadn't been down this road in a long time, so he wouldn't know if road work was an everyday thing and had been for the past two years. That wasn't the case though.
"We've been sitting here an awfully long time, Wren."
Wren clicked his blinker left and pulled out into the intersection, going the opposite way he had intended.
"You think it's every road that exits this place?"
"That's a lot of roads," Glenn said. "That one there leads to a major highway, so maybe that's why people are on it." He turned looking through the back window as the truck moved down the road. "I don't see any cars pulled off to the side; it doesn't look like they've hurt anyone."
"Maybe it is roadwork," Julie said.
This girl wasn't Thera, that's what Wren understood. She wasn't Michael either. This was a sheltered girl who just had her first taste of how nasty the world could be, and she didn't seem able to actually believe it.
"No," his son said, answering her. "If we go down that road, we'll die."
Glenn turned back around. "It looks like they've been able to turn most people away, which means that people may be leaving through other roads. They probably want to make sure no one is coming in but those that absolutely belong. You know the back roads, Wren?"
Did he? He knew what the backroads had been, maybe five or six years ago, but that probably wasn't the same as they were today.
"You're going to need to tell me where to go."
"Take your next right," Michael said.
Wren looked over to his son, though Michael wasn't looking back at him. Of course Michael would know. Michael would probably know more about this entire town than Wren could ever hope to again. He kept forgetting, or maybe he had never learned, his son was almost a man. This wasn't Glenn and he sitting here making decisions—Michael was going to contribute, regardless of what Wren thought.
How did it all pass so quick? he asked himself, looking back to the road again. Wren had a son once, a boy, and now that person was nearly a man, sitting next to him, and Wren didn't have the first idea as to what was going on in his head.
Focus, babe. There will be time for that, maybe, Linda said.
* * *
There weren't trucks and men wearing orange, reflective vests on every road, but that didn't mean they weren't blocking ev
ery road.
Glenn wasn't speaking, wasn't shaking, wasn't doing anything besides looking straight out the window, but he felt that his stoicism might shatter at any moment. He felt like, fairly or unfairly, he wanted to kill Wren. He wanted to ask him to pull the truck over, get out his side, and go to Wren. Yank him from the truck and just pound his face until there was nothing but a bloody mess of ragged and torn flesh left.
It made no sense, and Glenn knew it. Wren, while a drunk and a shitty father, had done nothing but try to help today. He hadn't created this mess, but yet the rage building inside Glenn needed to go somewhere. And Wren was the weakest one in the car, morally at least. The man had let alcohol consume him and now, with Glenn's wife and child missing, he wanted to turn all that anger on the easiest target.
He wouldn't though.
Couldn't, really.
Because they were in this together now. Until the end, is what Glenn was beginning to think.
There hadn't been cars pulled over to the side back at that fake construction site, no remnants of where people had tried to pass but couldn't. Glenn didn't know how that happened, but he knew it wasn't happening on the other roads they had ventured to.
Death hovered around their car like heat on a summer day, unable to enter, but there, just on the outside of the thin metal separating them from the outside world.
After the second road they ventured down in their attempt to exit, they turned back and headed into the town again. Glenn didn't say anything as the truck rolled along, but he thought they might have been another ten feet away from allowing all that death into their car with a marked accuracy. Everyone in the truck had been able to see the cars pulled to the side of the road, had been able to see them from a good distance. There were ten on the first road and maybe six or seven on the second. Had Glenn and the people he traveled with been simply driving around, without any doubt, they would have ended up on the side of the road too—their car looking stalled, but in reality, the people inside possessing an extra hole in their head.
Glenn saw the road spikes, though he didn't see the snipers. The road spikes slowed the car and the snipers stopped the driver. Glenn could make out the shapes of slumped people from the distance their truck turned at, desperately trying not to venture close enough to trigger the sniper's attention.
"We can't get out," Julie said. "We can't get out."
No one answered her. Though the girl needed comfort, Glenn had none to give. He saw Michael put his arm around her, but even he stayed silent.
This was fear. It smelled like fall in a southern town, but that was only the top layer. Underneath, just one layer deep, was a crystallized understanding of what was happening.
Whoever descended on this town was locking it down. No one in. No one out. Glenn wanted out because he needed to get help; he needed to bring someone in here that could help him find Bryan and Rita. There wasn't going to be any help, though. No getting out and no bringing anyone back in.
"I have to find my son," Glenn said. "I don't know what else to do, but I know that I have to find him. I need to go back to my house. I need to start there again, and see what I find with a clear head. Take me back, Wren."
He didn't care if they stayed with him or not. He didn't know where else to go, but that was the only place that he could think of to start this thing over. If they weren't getting out and they weren't getting help, then he would go at it alone.
"Alright," Wren said. "We're staying together, though. The four of us. There's no way anyone in this car is going off on their own. Fair enough?"
"Sure," Glenn said.
66
Present Day
Thera closed her eyes for a second, forcing away the brilliance of Morena. Somehow the creature didn't know Thera was near, and she wanted just one last moment before she grabbed Morena.
Blackness surrounded Thera and she was truly alone despite being inside this large ecosystem of consciousness.
She thought of her mother, of her father. She saw their faces, frozen in time by her mind's eye. She thought of Michael jogging down the steps of his trailer, unconscious of the grace with which he moved, not knowing how she loved to watch it. She didn't think of college. She didn't think of the future that Americans all seemed to think was promised. She thought of Bryan, of him before she found him on that bed, before he sat up like the dead.
She saw her life and somehow, despite the suffering endured here, she loved it.
She opened her eyes and reached forward with her hands, her human hands, and grabbed a hold of an alien that surpassed the cumulative history of human power.
* * *
Morena felt the grip before she opened her eyes, but only a moment before. It felt like someone spilling ice cold water across her during a deep sleep, shocking, frightening, and then from those early births of emotion grew a monster of anger.
Her eyes flashed open and she saw a world that she hadn't seen before, something that was built by someone else, but a place that she now lived. Controls in front of her, things that she innately understood, and she realized that the grip around her throat wasn't real, just as these controls weren't. Symbols of something else happening inside this mind, of her host trying to repudiate her. Trying to…
Kill her.
Morena stopped everything. The grip tightening around her throat, the men she controlled outside of this pit, everything that she had been either dictating or fostering. The grip on her throat didn't release, only stopped its tightening.
Morena quit caring about the men outside, the ones shooting at each other, the ones she was trying to spread through. Outside of the pit, the men remained in whatever position she had placed them in, but without any action. Some died, others stood there with guns pointing and fingers mere moments away from pulling triggers, but none moved at all.
She stepped away from the hands around her neck, then turned so that she faced the girl.
Thera's eyes were wide, the last movement she had been able to manage before Morena effortlessly stopped the attack. She looked into the girl's eyes for a moment. Nothing on this planet held the beauty of a Bynum’s aura, but Morena thought these creatures' eyes were the closest. These humans said they were the windows to the soul, which was another way of saying they were a window to their auras. If so, then Morena was looking at this girl's aura.
And what is it? Morena asked herself. What does her aura say? What color is it?
The girl couldn't move her eyes, but her consciousness still worked. She might not know what Morena was thinking, but she knew Morena was staring at her. Knew that something was going on inside Morena.
Thera’s eyes were brown, but that wasn't her aura—her soul. It was only the physical manifestation of a genetic coding. Her aura, her soul, was deeper, but Morena thought these humans might be right. That she might be able to see her aura through these openings.
What color is it?
She thought that if she could peel back all the ego and consciousness of this creature, she would find a deep blue underneath. A blue almost black, like the ocean, deep down where light barely reached. A blue that couldn't be moved, tranquil as a meditating holy man. Even now, with whatever plan she concocted completely thwarted, that underlying blue remained still.
A beautiful creature, this one. Different perhaps than the other—the male.
Morena reached forward with speed unnatural, and snapped Thera's neck in two.
* * *
Bryan shrieked, having no idea what—or if any—words scorched from his mouth.
He had watched, watched Thera creep slowly up to Morena, watched as she paused for just a few seconds, and then as she reached forward to take hold of the alien's neck. He had watched with impending doom weighing across him like an iron blanket. He wanted to scream, wanted to bring her back to the hole, but it was all impossible. He had been only able to watch.
Only able to watch as Morena stopped all movement. Only able to watch as everyone outside of this old pit stopped movin
g as well. The world, as far as Bryan could see, no longer moved—perhaps the planet itself had stopped its orbit, all due to Morena's wish.
The two, alien and girl, stared at each other for moments that seemed to reach out into forever's oblivion, moments that Bryan didn't think would end. And when they did, he wished those two had stared at each for the rest of their lives.
He heard Thera's neck snap, sounding like a dead tree limb breaking between a child's hands. Heard it and watched as she collapsed to the floor, no more life available to hold her up. He felt Thera's body, her actual body standing next to him in this small pit, fall too.
It took a second for him to understand, for his mind to connect everything in front of him.
Then his screams started. Uncontrolled, uncalled for, but inescapable. Thought left like smoke in a hurricane, leaving only anguish.
He watched as Morena came to him, standing above, looking down into his hole. Whether she heard his screams, he couldn't tell. She looked at him the way an overly full man might look at a plate of food.
"WHY?" he screamed up to her.
She looked on for a second longer, and then without Morena deigning to answer, he felt himself dropping, felt himself going lower into the hole of his consciousness—Morena shoving him further and further down, further away from her.
In the end, he could barely see the alien above him, could barely see as she turned from his hole, heading out to the battle in the woods.
67
Bolivia
"You have to do something," Will said.
"Oh, really?" Rigley asked. She didn't smile though she wanted to. This man telling her she needed to do something, as if that wasn't apparent to everyone involved in the entire operation. As if she wasn't standing outside with him, looking at a collapsing city covered with pink Sherman. "You think I do?"