It's Better This Way (6 page)
“I am Colonel Eric Hardaway, United States Army, First Army Division out of Crater Lake,” he said at what I figured was parade rest. A couple of the older councilors gave him a hard look at the ‘First Army Division’ title. “The old United States military died the day of the invasion. We’ve regrouped and decided to start over since at least ninety percent of forces were killed on I-day.” He looked back briefly at the three soldiers behind him. “This is Corporal Hackett,” he said nodding to the soldier with the over-sized black plastic suitcase. “Sergeant Waters is my number two,” he said, nodding to the other soldier who looked career military as well. He looked like a killer to me. He was only slightly less hard looking than the Colonel. “And you probably know Corporal David Hamida.”
We all nodded towards the three, then Jerry spoke. “Colonel, we are glad you have chosen to visit us, but we’d like to ascertain what might be in that suitcase your colleague is carrying.” When the Colonel gave him a frown, Jerry went on, “Seeing as how you’ve asked us to gather our numbers for a vote tonight, and we have no idea who you are or where you come from other than what you’ve just told us. No offense of course.”
“None taken, Councilor,” the Colonel said, indicating with his tone and his eyes that there damn sure had been offense taken. “However, I’d rather not go into it here, out in the open.”
“Colonel,” Deena Samuels said, stepping forward, “I assume whatever is in that case is what you’ve asked us to gather our numbers for?” When Hardaway nodded, she said, “Then you can understand that we have concern that it might be a bomb of some kind to wipe us out, can’t you? If not, then let me explain that the citizens of this area are not stupid, and it will be easier to gather more of them if there is something of interest to talk about as they are walking the roads to join us tonight.”
Colonel Hardaway scowled at her for a fraction of a second, then gave a hand signal to Corporal Hackett to open the case. Hackett placed the suitcase flat on the ground and dialed in the numbers on the roller locks. The lid popped open, and all of us leaned in to get a closer look.
“Bang!” David Hamida said loudly, making all eleven of us councilors jump back. When the Colonel glared at him, David threw up his hands in an ‘aw shucks, it was too tempting’ gesture.
“I apologize for Corporal Hamida’s lack of maturity,” Hardaway told us.
Jerry waved off the apology as we gathered around the suitcase again. Inside was what looked suspiciously like an old flex monitor and a notebook computer, along with a bunch of cables and what could only be a projector. Murmurs up and down the line of councilors followed as we realized that indeed these men had brought actual tech with them.
I hadn’t seen an electrical device that functioned in almost two decades. We’d heard through the network that some places had been able to get their electrical grids back online after rewiring the generators and going inch by inch down the transmission lines replacing all of the hardware that had been blown out on I-day.
I thought about ‘I-day’. Only the military would try to give it an abbreviated name that could be used in a patriotic story or song one day. D-Day. VE-Day. VJ-Day. MI-Day. The rest of us just called it ‘the day’ or ‘the invasion’. I also thought about what we’d heard on the network about the places that had put their hydroelectric generators or coal-fired plants back online. The bulls would either send a plasma bolt down through the clouds and obliterate everything within a mile or two of the gens, or they’d send a dropship that would hover above the place and slag it into molten steel and concrete dust. No one knew what they’d done to the nuclear power plants all over the world, but since Geiger counters never spiked, it seemed likely that the bulls had contained their runaway reactors after everything shut down.
Tony and I showed the soldiers to temporary quarters to wait, eat, and freshen up before the gathering in a few hours. We figured that everyone would stop trickling in from the outlying areas by nine or so, which meant we could all find out just what the hell these four soldiers were here for by ten.
CHAPTER 9 - Invasion Redux
“Thank you for gathering to hear us speak,” Colonel Hardaway said in a loud, clear voice from the platform on the south lawn.
I estimated at least four thousand bodies in the crowd, but it was dark and hard to see. We’d built large fires all around the area to illuminate both the platform and the main house.
“My name is Colonel Eric Hardaway. My fellow soldiers and I have traveled from the new Division headquarters at the Crater Lake complex.”
This got a grumble from the crowd. Everyone had heard of Crater Lake, but no one had suspected that it was where the remnants of the military branches had gathered to regroup.
“We’ve traveled to talk to you about a lot of things. For twenty three years, these aliens, these ‘bulls’ as we’ve come to call them, have been grinding up our major cities and digging massive holes in our earth. They’ve set up thousands of the giant towers and hundreds of massive factory complexes. They’ve used technology far beyond human understanding to wipe out our societies in one fell swoop, along with our ability to fight back. Before you hear why I’ve called for all of you to hear my words, I would first like to show you something.”
He gestured to Hackett, who in turn gestured to me and a couple of other councilors to rig up the screen. The projector screen was something almost out of science fiction. It was a paper-thin sheet of transparent material that felt like cloth, sounded like sandpaper when you unfolded it, and stretched to over a hundred times its initial size. Sergeant Waters and Corporal Hackett had helped us set two twenty foot poles in the ground near the platform. The poles stood twenty feet apart, and we stretched the projector screen across the entire expanse, locking it in place around the poles with what looked like bungee cords.
Once Hackett saw that we’d made sure the screen was ready to go, he took the projector out of the case and walked into the crowd about fifteen deep. The people parted for him like he was Moses. He set up the projector on a tripod and pointed it between the two poles. The whole thing looked to be about as big as the old digital cameras from before the invasion. Not much more than an old pack of smokes. That made me think about the last Camel I’d smoked. Twelve years ago maybe. My pulse still quickened at the thought of puffing on a fresh cigarette.
The crowd’s murmuring turned into a loud buzzing as Hackett set everything up. The instant he flipped the switch to the projector, there were a few seconds of oohs and aahs before everyone fell silent as Colonel Hardaway began to talk again.
“Twenty three years ago, the aliens destroyed all of our infrastructure, then all of our military assets,” he said as a shaky video of an object large enough to blot out the moon slid into view on a black sky.
The view was from a satellite that was either orbiting the moon or thousands of miles above the planet. The object, what had to be the alien ship, covered almost a quarter of the Earth behind it. The scale made it hard to estimate just how large it was, but I decided it was entirely too damn big. The clip went black and immediately a new one played, the alien ship blotting out a quarter of the planet while white fireballs poured out from below it and plunged into the atmosphere. Within seconds there were bright flashes on the surface. I watched as North America swung into view and then was inundated with a swarm of plasma bolts. Idaho was hidden from view by the ship, but I knew exactly where two of those bombs hit.
“Within two days, the aliens began using dropships to bring down their tower components,” the Colonel went on.
We watched enormous thrusters bring down objects that looked like metal fence posts, land them gently on the ground, and return to the ship. The satellite had a hard time zooming all the way down to a landing site, the alien ship blocking the view most of the time, and the haze of looking almost horizontally through the atmosphere to the ground below it made the video foggy. The clip went black and a new one started. Gasps from the crowd came when we watched a tower come together, three gargantuan posts that raised themselves onto their ends, the other ends touching the sky.
The clip switched to another tower, this one built near a city. The city could have been any Midwestern capital like Omaha or Minneapolis. It had been too long for most of us to remember what particular cities looked like unless we were looking at geography textbooks. The city in the video had high-rise buildings. I estimated them to be in the forty story range, though I was just guessing. When the alien tower assembled, it was at least five times taller than the largest skyscraper in the city, and at least three times as wide at the base.
“Two days after that, the aliens began using dropships to assemble massive complexes,” Hardaway said as the video showed another wave of ships departing the alien mothership.
The video once again changed to a hazy ground view, and we watched four huge bricks come together then begin unfolding outward. There was no way to judge the size of the completely unfolded building until the video cycled to one that was near a tower. It was unthinkable that a building could be that large. It was a titanic complex that reached about one sixth of the way up the tower in height, and was at least ten times more massive around the base than a tower.
“As you might have guessed, you older types anyway, this footage is from SEES-31, a Navy spy satellite that sits almost fourteen thousand kilometers above the earth. SEES-31 and a few other sats survived the EMP attacks, but we had no way of contacting them, even knowing they were still up there, still functioning, until about eight years ago. The SEES spy sats were automated, and the minute the alien ship entered our orbit, we tasked them to track anything and everything, from orbit all the way down to the surface.
“First, I want to tell you about the towers,” Hardaway continued as the video switched to a high-resolution shot of a tower, its top far above a jungle canopy. The alien ship must have moved out from below the satellite, or this was video from a different sat. “We weren’t able to get close to them because the bulls keep a wide perimeter around them guarded by automated weapon systems. Ten miles is as close as you can get to them before an energy beam reaches out and kills you. Thanks to the satellite data though, we understand a lot more about them that we ever have.
“After tasking the two remaining research satellites still active in orbit, we’ve been able to determine that the towers are four kilometers in height, and four kilometers in circumference at their base. We also believe that the towers have two important properties. One is as a wireless power source for bull technology. Certain energy waves emanate from the towers,” he said as the video changed to a thermal or some other filtered view, and waves of energy radiated outward from the tower’s top. “The other task, and the most important one, is that the towers are removing methane from our atmosphere.”
This caused a bit of a stir with the older ones in the crowd who could remember back when global warming had been a hot-button issue, and methane gas from all the cows and power plants as well as the natural decay of organic material (mostly cow shit) had raised the methane levels in the atmosphere to alarming levels.
“We believe,” Hardaway said, “that methane is a super-toxic poison to the bulls. Notice if you will the activity around the towers and complexes. Most of the bulls don’t have their head armor activated.” Slow-moving bulls with their faces uncovered moved in varying patterns in the clips that played. The majority of residents had never seen an armored bull, let alone one with its alien face completely uncovered. “We believe this based on two pieces of evidence. The first is the atmospheric concentration of methane near these towers is non-existent to about a ten klick radius from each tower. The second is because of this.”
The video changed to a daylight scene cut with sharp, dark shadows. The video was shaky for half a minute before it smoothed out. Two soldiers were in front and off to the right of the camera’s view. It looked like it had been filmed in a large city, Los Angeles or San Diego if I had to guess. Two bulls patrolled the trash-filled streets six blocks behind one of their massive crushing machines that ate up human cities and spit out dusty chunks from the rear. One of the two soldiers pulled two items out of a backpack, handing one to his partner.
I watched, holding my breath, as the two soldiers walked up behind the two bulls. I knew from experience that the bulls would do nothing to them since neither soldier had a weapon visible, but I also knew something amazing or frightening was about to happen. The soldiers split, one walking to the left of a bull, the other to the right of the other bull. The one on the left had just turned its head slightly as if to acknowledge a human next to it when both of the soldiers stabbed at the bull next to them with what looked like a metal syringe.
Gasps and shouts from the crowd rang out as the syringes found their way through the alien armor. Before the bull guns could even swing around, both of them turned rigid, their armor turning off within a second, their skin no longer a steel gray but an inky black. More cries of surprise came from the citizens gathered on the south lawn.
“Those two bulls were injected with concentrated methane. The effect, as you have just seen, is instantaneous. The bulls don’t even have time to react. The very second the methane enters their blood, an escalating system shutdown from toxicity is achieved.”
His words were punctuated by the puffs of dust and debris as each of the aliens in the clip froze up and fell over.