Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation (4 page)

“You fucking coward!”
 

“Stop it, Lila. Stop it, or I’ll have them cuff you.”
 

“I’m your
wife!”
 

Raj ran his thumb along his lip, then looked down to see that it had come away wet. She hadn’t hit him high enough to break it, so he must have bitten himself when she’d landed her dirty shots. He licked his thumb and raised his attention to see all eyes on him, watching, waiting.
 

Lila’s eyes, livid, murderous.
 

Heather’s eyes, finally humbled, defeated.
 

Christopher’s eyes, wary. Reasonably so, because this was far from the first time Raj had found Christopher coincidentally in his suite, with his wife, alone. Christopher looked eager to obey, which was good. He was thinking of his own neck now that he saw who was in charge of Heaven’s Veil — unofficially now, officially soon.
Rightly
thinking of his neck. Because as soon as Raj felt sure the Astrals wouldn’t object, Raj thought he might have Christopher hanged by that neck, for trying to cuckold an entire power structure sure as he was cuckolding Raj.
 

And the eyes of every guard in the room, respectful and maybe afraid, waiting for orders.
 

Lila’s hard stare broke, her head tipping down then finding her mother.
 

“You’re just messing with me,” she said to Heather. Even though Raj could tell Lila had already known, maybe from watching the house activity or perhaps from their spooky daughter, that something big had gone wrong. Or — from where Raj was standing —
right
.
 

Heather was quiet, her piece said. The first time anyone had ever seen Heather Hawthorne shut her ceaselessly yapping mouth.

Lila looked at Raj, now more pleading than angry.
 

He felt less vindictive than he had a right to be, so he answered with a justification: “He turned on them. He was endangering the city.”
 

“He was standing up for my mom.”
 

“After you
left
,” Raj said, trying to tap his earlier indignation, “after he
tied me up
, Meyer helped Terrence put some sort of a virus onto the Heaven’s Veil network.”
 

As if on cue, the lights flickered, the virus in the power station trying the home’s connections. Power was failing across Heaven’s Veil, and if the human cops didn’t get the city generators running as dutifully as Raj had the mansion generators, the place would be blacked out come sundown.
 

“Try your phone, Lila. Try to sync your juke or Vellum. We have lights because
I did my job
— after your mother knocked me cold with a motherfucking rock, no less — but the network is dead. We’re cut off. Thanks to Meyer.”
 

Lila sniffed, trying to hold herself together as the truth sank in. “So you …
murdered
him.”
 

Heather, completely broken, hitched with sobs.

“I did my job.” Raj didn’t like the way Lila’s hurt expression made him unsure, or the guilt creeping up his neck like icy fingers. He’d ended a life. He’d ended his
father-in-law’s
life. He’d ended the life of the woman he’d once been so innocently, so childishly in love with. He fought a lump inside, looking to the guards for confirmation that this had all been necessary.
 

A tear streaked Lila’s cheek. Another spilled, from the other eye.
 

“He … he was … I had to, Lila.” Raj looked at Christopher, at the others with their guns. “He was begging the Astrals to … ”
 

There was a small noise. Before turning, Raj knew exactly what it was.
 

“Daddy?”
 

Lila shook the guards away and stood, crossing to Clara’s crib. The crib that, according to Raj’s two-year-old daughter, was an “embarrassment.”
 

“Shh,”
Lila said, wiping at a tear.
 

“I miss Grandpa.”

Heather, now half kneeling on the floor, sobbed harder.
 

“Honey,” Lila said, “come here.”
 

“I dreamed that Grandma thought Grandpa left,” Clara said as Lila moved to pick her up.
 

Lila’s outstretched arms paused.
 

“‘Thought’?” Lila repeated, her own grief paused, sent back to committee.
 

“Let’s go find him,” Clara said, smiling.

CHAPTER 7

Into the cliff’s face, looking up.
 

Beneath a fall of rubble, where an energy beam seemed to have struck nearby.
 

Charlie gave Piper a look that Cameron found he could read as plainly as if the man had held up a sign:
Does this look like it was done by someone who meant to cause actual damage?

And Cameron had to admit that the answer was no, it absolutely didn’t. There was a mammoth scorch mark in the space between house and cliff — exactly where, Cameron realized with amusement, he’d tripped and fallen on his face while sprinting to grab Piper before the ship could take her into its belly. Assuming the scorch had been made the day they’d outwitted the Astrals in Little Cottonwood Canyon, it was three days old. But to Cameron it looked like a shot across the bow, nothing meant to obliterate Moab. It was the swing of a bat taken by an angry man who realizes at the final second that he’d better not smash the windshield.
 

They’d destroyed the area
around
the ranch. But they’d no more obliterated the actual lab than they had their five-person troupe during the trip here.
 

Cameron wanted to nod, to mouth something to Charlie and Piper about those who’d stayed behind. Had the few lab techs and others who’d remained been abducted into the mothership? Had they been killed to prove a point? Cameron had been assuming they’d arrive to find nothing, despite his insistence on coming here — because, honestly, it was this or wander forever. Their only hope of finding Thor’s Hammer was at Moab if it hadn’t died with his father, but Cameron was realizing now that he’d been certain they’d find only ash and ruin.
 

And yet if the lab was standing, there was a chance people had been left alive.
 

Charlie didn’t see what Cameron was trying to say. He was already ducking though the entrance. And Andreus, whose daughter had been among those remaining (killed, abducted, or run away) was nowhere close enough to catch Cameron’s eye.
 

He looked at the only person left: Piper. But she was already following Charlie, ducking inside, shifting the fallen beam that had done little more than block the entrance.
 

The lights were off, all of the old power sources either destroyed or shut down by Terrence’s virus. Charlie might know where to check a generator, but ahead of Cameron in the gloom, the tall scientist simply lit his flashlight. The thing had a wide beam, more like a camping lantern. Charlie made its glow as broad as it went and shone it around in the eerie silence.
 

“Ransacked,” he said.
 

Piper seemed to feel none of Cameron’s in-the-dark trepidation. Their roles had almost reversed: She was the brave one, and he seemed to have grown a timid heart. Cameron had become the group’s most tentative. Mile by mile, Benjamin’s death had settled on his shoulders like a heavy cloak. It made him hesitate. He’d lost enough, and couldn’t bear to lose more.
 

But Piper had gone ahead with Charlie, flicking on her own flashlight. She was moving ahead, going farther. From where Cameron was standing, he could see that Charlie’s one-word assessment had it pretty much covered. The place had been tossed, every neat pile of research sifted and thrown aside as if by impatient hands.

“Why is the building still here?” Piper asked, fingering a stack of papers. Then, as if remembering, her head moved toward the ceiling as if she could see the mothership through the rock. Wondering, perhaps, if the Astrals had merely been waiting for the mice to come home before closing the trap.
 

“They need to know where the Hammer is,” Charlie said. “We’re on the same quest. They want to turn it on, and we want to turn it off, but that doesn’t change the fact that finding it benefits us both. They wouldn’t destroy the place any more than I would.”
 

Cameron had been scanning the space, his eyes absorbing disorder. The entrance was behind them, outside light already feeling feebly distant. He had his own flashlight but hadn’t lit it. Now, in the rocking shadows made by Piper’s and Charlie’s lights, something struck Cameron as wrong. A shadow that moved the wrong way. An echo, perhaps, of what he’d seen outside before they’d entered.

His hand came up. His light clicked on. Cameron speared the spot where he’d seen the disobedient shadow but saw only the coffee room’s open door. For some reason, seeing it gave him a pang of sadness. Ivan had called that plain old coffee room the communications room, and Cameron had sat in there for hours beside his father, holding vigil, waiting to hear from Terrence or Franklin — whom Piper had met before his irrational end.
 

“What?” Piper asked, noting his urgent gesture.
 

“I thought I saw something.”
 

Piper turned, her body language changing. Something had been in here, not from this planet. They’d recently left a cave in the rock filled with alien predators. The feeling of being trapped in another with something similar was clear on her face.
 

Piper shone her light next to Cameron’s but saw nothing.
 

“Over here,” Charlie called.
 

After a lingering moment, Charlie and Piper turned.
 

Again, something shifted at the edge of Cameron’s peripheral vision, just out of sight.
 

“Look.”
 

Cameron did. Benjamin’s keyboard was in front of his old office terminal. Many of the lab units didn’t even have keyboards, but Benjamin had always liked taking notes and preferred typing to dictation.
 

Now the keyboard was a twisted mass of plastic. It had been torqued as if twisted like taffy, snapped in the middle. The two halves were destroyed, keys popped loose and scattered across the floor like knocked-out teeth.
 

“What do you make of this?” Charlie asked.
 

“Someone doesn’t like lab work.”

Piper turned to Cameron. He thought she’d roll her eyes, given the mood. Instead, she gave him a tiny smile. Her warmth barely helped. Cameron still felt a chill at his rear, and no matter which way he turned it felt like there was something beyond his vision, just out of sight.
 

Charlie picked up half of the keyboard. He set it back down then shone his light around the workstation with fresh interest. The floor was littered with pens and other miscellany. Beyond, one of the thin monitors had been smashed.
 

“I don’t get it. This looks like it was done by people.”
 

Cameron picked up the keyboard. “I don’t know. I’d swear this was bitten. Like by a Reptar.”
 

“It’s pointless. If they wanted the place gone, they could have just blasted it. If they wanted to get information, tossing it like this would be counterproductive.”
 

“They’re not good with our computers,” Piper said. “And they don’t understand the way we
share our consciousness
over the Internet.”
 

“Then why try? Why walk in here?” Charlie kicked at a wheeled chair lying sideways on the ground beside a shattered water glass. “They’ve been siphoning the Heaven’s Veil network from the start. Not by coming down and hacking, just by using the air. They could have tried that. Maybe already did.”
 

“Terrence’s virus,” Cameron said. “Maybe it cut all of the connections, and coming in here was the only possible way to get what they needed.”
 

Charlie shrugged. “Maybe. But still … ” He kicked through more debris, the answer apparently too elusive.
 

There was new movement to the rear. Cameron heard what sounded like a sniff before spinning, sure that the shadow had come to claim them at last.
 

But his flashlight lanced the face of a teenage girl instead, her blonde hair a mess, her clothing filthy.
 

Cameron didn’t know the girl well, but he knew her, all right: Nathan’s daughter, Grace.
 

“We thought they were looking for something,” she said in a broken whisper. “But mostly, they were angry.”
 

CHAPTER 8

Piper listened to the girl for as long as she could.
 

Charlie had offered to calm her nerves with a cup of tea. When he remembered that the lab didn’t have power, he offered to hike back to the RV to boil the water. Cameron looked at Piper when Charlie said that, and they exchanged an amused glance. Charlie barely acted human most of the time, and here he was offering to be this young girl’s hero. Grace declined with thanks, and Charlie looked at both of the others as if he’d just realized his fly was open, daring them to call out his tenderness.