AS GLENDA AND HER CHILDREN VENTURED onto the final stretch of Marblehill Road, Hanna’s breathing grew more labored. Her coughing exploded into the still, hot air like small pneumatic reports. The trees in the forest loomed over them on either side, dead brown things. No cars, trucks, or people, just the awful silence. Glenda could barely see her kids in the dark. She looked up at the sky. No stars, Moon, or clouds—just the blackness of the phytosphere.
Hanna sank to the ground and coughed more violently. Jake kept looking down the road, gun held loosely in his hand. Glenda knelt next to Hanna. The perpetual darkness felt like something evil inside her body, a tumor she wanted to remove but couldn’t.
“Hanna, we’ve got to keep going.”
“I’m too weak, Mom. It’s never been like this before. I’m going to die. I know I am.”
“You’re not going to die. We just have to get to Uncle Neil’s. He has medicine.”
“Yes, but I can’t make it. I can’t get enough breath.”
“Get between me and Jake. We’ll help you along.”
“I can’t, Mom.”
“You’ve got to, Hanna. Buzz is going to come along.”
Hanna coughed some more, then choked out the words, “Just give me a minute.”
While Hanna rested, Glenda stood up and turned on her flashlight. She shone it up the road toward Marblehill, but its beam was weak and could barely penetrate the gloom. Still, it was strong enough to brighten a big tree that had fallen across the road. As the beam brought the tree’s spidery brown branches into relief, she had the distinct impression of something darting by overhead in the darkness. She looked up just in time to see a large shadow, maybe twenty-five times the size of her car, disappear above the trees on the left-hand side, rustling above the uppermost branches.
“Did you see that?” she asked Jake.
“Yeah.”
“What was it?”
“I have no idea.”
But Glenda knew what it was, and didn’t want to say because her children were already scared enough as it was. She switched off the flashlight. She looked around at the dark forest with a sudden sense that they weren’t alone. That’s when she heard the bump and rattle of Buzz’s truck far down the road.
“Goddamn him,” moaned Hanna between coughs.
“Come on, sweetie. Let’s get up. Jake, give me a hand.”
“Maybe we should go into the forest,” suggested Jake.
“I’m not sure it’s safe.”
“Why?”
“Just give me a hand.”
They each took one of Hanna’s arms and lifted her to her feet. They struggled along with her as best they could, but she kept stumbling and they made slow progress. Glenda opened her eyes wide, something that was habitual now as a way to see as much as she could in the perpetual dark, and something that made her temples ache with a low throb.
She could barely see the left and right shoulders of the road. Her feet crunched through the gravel. Hanna started crying, getting her weeping done in between her explosive coughing. The bump and rattle of Buzz’s truck got closer, the signature sound particularly noticeable on this potholed road. Glenda had the sense that she had already lost, and that dragging her daughter up this lonely rural road in the middle of this perpetual night would be the last thing she would ever do. The futility of her situation made her want to weep, but she found that, despite these self-defeating feelings, her body kept going, as if it had an internal agenda for survival and couldn’t be bothered with the emotional fuss her mind was making.
“I don’t see his headlights,” said Jake.
“He’s behind that hill,” said Glenda. “He’ll be coming over the rise any second. Just keep going.”
They struggled and struggled, and finally came to the fallen tree in the middle of the road. The tree was huge and tinder-dry, and all the leaves had fallen off its branches.
“Let’s go around the left side,” she said.
She and Jake helped Hanna around to the left just as Buzz came over the rise. The dead branches, still thick, scratched her.
“Just push your way through. Hurry up. Hanna, lift your leg over the trunk.”
“I can’t see it, Mom.”
Glenda turned on the flashlight. “There.”
Her daughter climbed over the trunk, but it was as if death had already come to Hanna because, once on the other side, she collapsed.
“Just leave me here. Let him kill me. Maybe that will satisfy him. You two go ahead.”
“Hanna, come on, get to your feet,” said Glenda, her voice now panicked. “He’s nearly here.”
“I can’t, Mom. I really can’t.”
And she simply lay there on her side coughing, too weak to move.
“Jake, let’s drag her.”
But Jake was looking over the tree. “I’m going to take him out.”
“No, no … not with a handgun. Not from this range. You’ll waste bullets like you did last time. Just grab her and let’s go.”
They dragged her—literally—so that her jeans scraped along the gravel and kicked up a small cloud of dust. Buzz’s truck rattled to a stop on the other side of the fallen tree, and she heard Buzz open the door and get out of the vehicle. She didn’t look back, couldn’t look back, because her eyes were glued to the sky above the road, where she saw the dark shape again—huge, hovering silently, with no lights, no visible means of propulsion. Now that she listened more closely, she heard a faint hiss, like water being sucked down a drain.
The headlights on Buzz’s truck shone through the dead branches of the fallen tree, making a wild tracery of shadows all over the road. She glanced at Jake and saw that he was outlined in the branch-broken glow of Buzz’s headlights. But it was as if he didn’t care, because he was looking up at the Tarsalan vehicle as well.
“Goddamn it, Glenda, why don’t you let me kill you easy?” called Buzz.
The sound of a rifle shot rocketed through the air.
That’s when lights exploded everywhere on the Tarsalan Landing Vehicle. Shaped like a clamshell, the TLV now glowed with a mother-of-pearl mix—violet, green, silver—and this light coalesced into a single beam, which quickly pinpointed Buzz’s ramshackle old truck, while a smaller, separate beam outlined Buzz. She saw Buzz clearly in this small beam. He lifted his arm to his forehead to shield his eyes from the light, and squinted at its glare. Then a series of blue and green embers floated away from the alien landing craft and drifted, in no particular hurry, toward Buzz and his truck.
“Get off the road!” she cried.
She and Jake dragged Hanna up a small incline to the other side of a hummock. She got on her stomach and watched things unfold. As the blue and green embers got closer to Buzz they began to whine with a rising pitch until finally the sound was so painful that she had to cover her ears. Buzz figured things out quickly and, after a moment of drop-jawed scrutiny, ran away from his truck, rifle in hand, and disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road. Five embers drifted toward his truck and burrowed into it like hot little drills. A few seconds later, his truck exploded and was left a flaming heap on the asphalt.
Other embers pursued Buzz into the forest. She watched in horrified fascination. With all the underbrush dead, she kept fairly good track of Buzz. He ran from tree to tree as if pursued by a band of malevolent fairies. The embers cruised after him, closing the distance quickly. When they were a yard away, they pulled back, then dove into his body with the ferocity and quickness of bullets. Buzz cried out, an awful throaty scream. His limbs went stiff, his fingers splayed so that he dropped his rifle, and it was as if he was illuminated from within by high-voltage electricity. He shook violently. His shirt burst into flames, and he fell to the ground so that half his body was hidden behind a tree trunk, the other half still visible. Then came a small explosion and she got the distinct impression of a detached leg flying into the air. She turned away. She was saddened that it had come to this, but she was also relieved. And terrified that she now had to elude the Tarsalans herself.
At that point, the alien spacecraft descended to the road. It was wacky, a scene out of a science fiction movie, something she had never expected to see; visitors from another star at last landing on her planet, the spacecraft settling on the road like a giant glowing egg. It made a creepy sound, a sudden buzz with low-frequency harmonics that vibrated through her whole body, then that sucking sound again, like the last bit of water in a bathtub going down the drain. Then all sound faded.
In the ensuing silence, her body took over. She got her kids to their feet and helped them through the forest. Hanna didn’t have to be dragged—fear was a great motivator. Glenda got all kinds of scratches from the thick, dead bushes, but continued to cajole her kids through the dark forest past the spaceship, and finally back out onto the road. Her mind, in its own separate universe, reeled from the terror of it all.
With Hanna in such a debilitated state, it took them a long time to get the rest of the way to Marblehill. Glenda looked at her watch in the dim glow of her flashlight, and wasn’t sure if it was one o’clock in the afternoon or one o’clock in the morning.
When they finally reached Marblehill, she looked up at the three-story mansion and saw lights burning in four windows. In the glow of these lights she saw a helicopter sitting on the big front lawn. The building itself looked as if it had been under prolonged attack, with the east turret demolished and the rest of the various walls, dormers, and cornices badly shot up.
The three Thorndikes stood outside a big stone wall. There was a path outside the wall that led into the forest. In happier times, she had walked along this path, hand in hand with Gerry, down into the rugged limestone ravine that abutted the property where the trees used to grow. Hanna lay on the ground outside the wall. Her coughing sounded different: still persistent but not as strong, as if she had long ago ripped all her abdominal muscles to pieces and no longer possessed the muscular mechanics to cough the way she used to
“Jake, stay with your sister. I’m going to the gate.”
But beyond that? She didn’t know. What if this whole thing turned into a bust? What if everybody was dead inside? Shut up, Glenda. Live a minute at a time … minute at a time … minute at a time …
She reached the gate and turned her flashlight on and off three times. She waited, then repeated the signal, terrified that, somewhere out in the dead forest behind her, Tarsalan refugees watched her. She repeated the signal a third time, then saw someone run from the house, across the lawn, and toward the helicopter.
As the figure got closer, she saw that it was recognizably human, with normal human proportions, not short legs and long arms like a Tarsalan. She was so overwhelmed with relief that she felt dizzy and pressed her hand against the gate for support.
The figure resolved itself into a man. “Mrs. Thorndike?”
“Yes … yes, it’s me. Call me Glenda.”
“Where are your kids?”
The man closed the distance between them, and she saw the name FERNANDES stitched above his left breast pocket.
“Just down here.” She peered into the darkness. “Jake? Hanna? Come on.” She saw movement in the shadows along the stone fence. She turned to Fernandes. “My daughter’s really sick. I hope you have medicine.”
Fernandes nodded. “We have all kinds. Let’s get them across the lawn … before the Tarsalans come.”
New anxiety shot through her chest like a lightning bolt. “It’s bad?”
“We have five dead. Six including your sister-in-law.”
“My sister-in-law?”
Fernandes nodded. “It’s just three airmen left, Dr. Thorndike, and his three girls.”
“Louise is dead?”
“One of the VMs got her a few days ago.”
Her children appeared out of the shadows.
“Kids, Aunt Louise is dead. Just so you know.”
“What?” said Jake. “Really? What happened?”
Fernandes was looking at the gun in Jake’s hand. He then turned to Glenda. “He know how to shoot? I mean, really shoot?”
But Glenda was too upset about Louise to respond.
“I’m getting better,” said Jake.
“Ever handle a Montclair?” asked Fernandes.
“A Montclair? What’s that?”
Fernandes’s face sank. “Come on. Let’s get everybody inside.”
Fernandes hustled them across the lawn.
The lawn was brown and had the texture of a piecrust, the sod seeming to have come loose in a single piece from the underlying soil, as if the lawn’s root system had died at the same time, en masse. In a world where things kept getting worse and worse—where the sun could be extinguished by alien plankton, where Glenda could become a cop killer, and where mass famine took the lives of millions every day—Louise was just one more catastrophe, and it was hard for Glenda to immediately feel grief. She just felt shocked. How was Neil handling it? How were the girls handling it?
Fernandes led them under the great stone portico and up the steps. They went through the front door, and … there they all were, Neil and the girls, waiting for them, just like any other Marblehill visit, only this one was so different.
Neil was smiling in the oddest way. “Welcome to Marblehill.”
His face was lit by a light that was hanging on a hook, a bare bulb in a cage, the kind mechanics used to look under cars. The greeting came out in a stiff, formal way, and the man standing before her didn’t sound like Neil at all.
“Neil, I’m sorry about Louise. This fellow …” She glanced inquisitively at the airman. “Fernandes, is it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Fernandes told me.”
Neil raised his hands—no need to make any fuss. “We’re all right, Glenda. We’re just glad you made it here okay. We were starting to wonder.”
And that smile. Something wasn’t right about that smile.
The cousins got to know each other again. They had something to eat—military-issue stew, just add water—and her nieces came and clung to her off and on through the next several hours, especially Morgan, who mistakenly called her mommy a number of times.
She got to know the two other airmen: Captain Leonard Aft, who was nominally in charge, and Lieutenant Yuri Rostov, who was always wearing a pair of headphones and seemed to be the technical man; he had a constantly abstracted look in his eyes.
They had a rest. Hanna got her medicine. Her coughing got better and she breathed, for the first time in several days, without a wheeze.
Later on, Glenda stood guard duty with Neil in his study on the second floor. He still had that odd smile on his face, the squeeze of the curve so tight that his lips were white. Light-gathering goggles sat hinged in the up position above his eyes on a strap, and he kept scanning the grounds out front, his face lit by the dim glow of the communications apparatus on the floor next to him. He had lost weight. Not that he was gaunt, but his customary paunch was gone, his clothes were too baggy for his frame, and the usual fullness around his jaw had melted away like wax around a candle.
Now that his face was thin, Glenda couldn’t help seeing the resemblance to Gerry: the way his brow crowned around his eyes in a somewhat falconlike mold, the same generous nose, and a similar rounded protuberance to his chin. Her heart ached for Gerry.
And, as if Neil had read her mind, he said, “I’m sorry about Ger. I’m sorry he’s stuck up there.”
She looked away. Tears came to her eyes. “It’s a bit much.”
He reached out and put his hand on her arm. “Don’t worry, Glenda. I’ve got everything organized. We’ve got listening posts reaching a mile in every direction. We’ve got infrared cameras the size of your thumb up in trees. We’re tracking each new landing and plotting it on a map. We’ve cataloged their movements and fed the results into a computer, and we’re coming to a real understanding of how they think, at least from a tactical and guerrilla standpoint. We’ve also made a fallback position in the cave.”
She dried her tears. “I forgot about the cave.”
“We’ve fortified the first chamber, and provisioned the second. We’ve got fresh water in there. Enough to last a month. Medicine, too. Not to mention food. We go out on patrol regularly. We search the area. And we spray the house every day for bugs. Unfortunately, before we started spraying, the Tarsalans sent in bugs and found out we had food. But don’t worry about the Tarsalans. They haven’t mounted a strike in the last three days. We think they’re starting to tire. As for the cave, everything’s buried under rocks so they don’t know it’s there. And we go up there to spray, too.”
And still that smile, the lid on something that was simmering deep inside her brother-in-law.
She glanced out the front window. “I’m sorry about Louise.”
He didn’t say anything. She turned back to him. In the light of the communications apparatus, she saw that his face had turned red. She moved closer and put her arm around him.
“I’m okay…. I’m okay,” he said.
“No … you’re not.”
He took a deep breath. The smile disappeared from his face. “Maybe not.” And then he bowed his head, as if in shame, and closed his eyes. “I failed her, Glenda.”
“You didn’t fail her.”
“And I failed the kids.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I finally realize what a big fool I’ve been all these years.”
“You’re not a fool. For God’s sake, Neil.”
After that, they lapsed into silence for a long time. She must have dozed. And Neil must have thought she was asleep—even when she opened her eyes around a quarter to eleven.
His shoulders heaved and he wept silently. The pain bristled off him like heat from a furnace. Her throat tightened with anguish and her own eyes filled with tears. God. What were they going to do? Here was the end of time. And Neil, once the world’s hero, was nothing but a broken man who cried alone in the dark when he thought no one was watching.