Final Assault (13 page)

And those were the people that Kara had known before all this began. The strangers were living up to that name, as well.

The house was big, so they were required to take in several families. And that didn’t count the people who had pitched tents on the lawn. Her mother’s roses were forever ruined, or so she said. Her father just rolled his eyes; he, like Kara, knew there was a good chance that the roses wouldn’t bloom again anyway.

The strangers included Barb, the elderly woman; crazy Denny and his family; their replacements, the Nelsons; and the Hendricksons, whose son, Connor, was just a little too cute to be ignored.

Kara now shared her room with her cousins Eve and Michelle, and could barely stand to go in there. It smelled of cheap perfume most of the time, and there was no longer a floor to walk on. Mostly, she had to step over piles of clothes—some of which were hers, because Eve had no notion of asking before she put something on.

Kara had complained to her father just once, and he had looked at her with that measuring gaze he sometimes had.
If you can think of something better
, he had said,
do it. Otherwise, why don't
 
you look at all the other houses around here? Everyone’s going through the same thing.

Not quite everyone.

Old Mr. McMasters down the street got busted for charging his “guests” for everything from parking to food. He was told to stop or move out of his own house.

The Stanhopes had gotten some kind of exemption, claiming too many family members, but Kara had never seen anyone but the two of them. For a while, she had thought they were going to get away with it, but as the neighborhood caught on, more and more of the tent people moved into the Stanhopes’ yard. They may have had the inside of the house all to themselves, but they couldn’t cross the yard anymore. And they didn’t get city-sponsored rations because they couldn’t provide evidence of boarders.

The food was turning out to be more important than anyone thought. Kara’s mother and Barb spent a lot of their time online, filling out the forms that gave them permission for their rations. Barb was training the others to fill out the paper forms, as well. She was afraid that the power would go out, and then there would be no computers at all.

Kara couldn’t imagine a world like that. She couldn’t imagine a world without electricity, even though she’d been through one outage, in that awful blizzard of’15. Nothing had worked then, and she had been afraid she was going to die.

Only she hadn’t known then how fear really felt.

She did now.

The aliens were supposed to come back tonight. She had tried to go to bed, but there was no sleeping, not with Michelle’s snoring, and Eve’s whimpering bad dreams. Kara had lain on her back in her bed—at least she still had her bed—arms folded behind her head, and stared at the ceiling, wishing she could see through it to the sky.

She knew, she just knew, the aliens were going to try to destroy Chicago. And she had a hunch they’d miss and hit Lake Forest. She and her family had had too much luck already. Yeah, they had lost the other set of cousins out west, but they hadn’t really been touched otherwise. Even the president’s declaration that only areas within a twenty-mile radius of a major city center would be protected hadn’t affected them in the way she had thought. Lake Forest was theoretically outside the protection zone, but since half of that zone was Lake Michigan, the FEMA people and the city governments decided to spread their safety zones north along the lakefront.

People south of the city were screaming discrimination, but they didn’t have any recourse. They had to move north. There wasn’t time to sue or to fight anything in the courts.

Or, as Kara’s father said, they could just stay home and take their chances.

Almost no one wanted to do that.

So they were all coming north. Kara’s once quiet neighborhood was a sea of tents and cars and strangers. There was no place to have privacy anymore. She couldn’t go to her room and she couldn’t go outside. Even if she went to the park, she would find tents filled with people, most of whom were snarling at each other because they never got a moment’s peace.

And things got even tenser yesterday when the planes flew over. They dropped grayish black stuff from the skies and everyone got scared, as if the aliens had come with planes instead of big huge spaceships.

Kara had pretended not to be scared—she’d heard the warnings that this was going to happen, same as everyone else—but her heart pounded hard all the same.

The powder, which up close was more gray than black, covered everything. The whole area had been sprayed several times, and no one could walk across the street without leaving footprints.

After the second spraying, Kara had gone outside and crouched, trying to see the nanorescuers up close. She had seen the video of the rescuers eating the alien machines. That had impressed her dad, but she hadn’t understood how there would be enough rescuers. How had the government known how many rescuers to make? Had they counted all the ones the aliens had sent down before? Kara couldn’t imagine how they would have been able to do that: the aliens had sucked most of them back up again.

So she figured the government was guessing, and if they guessed wrong, everyone would die.

But she didn’t say anything about her suspicions to anyone, not her father, not her stupid cousins, not even Barb who seemed—despite her folding bed—like one of the most sensible people in the house. Kara had just crouched and tried to study the rescuers, and she hadn’t really seen a thing.

They didn’t even move. She had at least expected them to move. But they lay like sand on the pavement, shifting only when a wind blew them around.

Now, on the screens, commentators were talking nervously about the aliens’ return. Some were showing simulated views from orbit—none of the stations had any way of filming above the Earth. All of their equipment had been confiscated for use by the governments, something that relieved Kara, but seemed to be annoying the commentators.

And the Nelsons and the Hendricksons—except for Connor—had been trying to find out what was going on all day. Connor was in his room, which used to be the guest room, pretending to sleep. No one who was sensible would sleep tonight.

The world might end tonight. How could you sleep through it?

Kara pushed away from the wall and jumped off the stool. All these people were too close. She wondered where her father was. Probably in his study, since the Nelsons, who slept there, were out here. He hated that anyone had use of his study, but he didn’t say anything. He believed everyone had to do his duty and not complain.

Well, Kara wasn’t complaining either, except to herself. She grabbed her coat off the rack and opened the door.

“Who’s that?” her mother shouted from the kitchen, but no one answered her. Kara quietly closed the door behind her and stepped onto the porch.

The air was cold and crystal clear. It felt like snow, and looked, with the nanorescuers on the ground, as if it already had. Kara looked up, but saw only light in the night sky. There were too many artificial lights in the Chicago area to allow her to see the stars.

Then she stepped off the porch and onto the sidewalk. The tents were zipped up for the night. She felt sorry for the people inside. The tents, even with their built in thermal units, had to be cold and cramped. Her father had said that, if she really looked, she could see people who were worse off than they were.

She hadn’t really realized that all she had to do was look outside her front door.

The street wasn’t empty, though, as she had been expecting. Some of her neighbors had pulled their lawn chairs out of winter storage and placed them on the asphalt. Others were standing nearby, hands buried in their armpits as they tried to keep warm.

Everyone was looking up, and no one was saying anything.

That was why she hadn’t noticed all the people at first. It was so very quiet. The dozens of people in the street should have been making some kind of noise.

But she wasn’t either. She couldn’t even bring herself to say hello to them. The cold air made her feel as if she were encased in a sheet of ice, separating her from the world.

She went to the curb and looked up again. Still no stars. She wouldn’t be able to see the alien ship until it was right overhead. And then it would be too late.

Maybe she would see it as a darkness, a flat darkness, above her. Maybe it would block out the lights of the city or reflect the streetlights from below.

Or maybe it would be nothing at all, as silent as the people around her, and barely visible.

She had only her imagination as her guide on this. Her imagination and all that news footage she had seen last spring.

She shuddered, and drew her coat in closer. Mrs. Lauderdale from across the street had a blanket wrapped around her, and she wore a knit cap on her gray hair. She was leaning back in her deck chair, her mouth slightly open, as if she were trying to catch candy being tossed from a balcony.

Why did Mrs. Lauderdale think she was safer out here? If those alien harvesters fell from the sky right now, they would land in her mouth and chew her up from the inside out—rescuers or no rescuers. The rescuers attacked the harvesters after they landed, jumped on them like bugs, and sucked all the energy out of them. They couldn’t do that to any harvester inside someone.

Kara shuddered and glanced at her house. The roof was darker, coated with a light dusting of the grayish rescuers. They would stop anything that landed on the house. They would protect the people inside.

The people outside were taking an awful chance. They had to know it. Why weren’t they acting on it?

Why wasn’t she?

She shuddered one more time and went back up the sidewalk. Better to be inside with her snoring cousins or the annoying Nelsons than it was to be out here, where the harvesters could touch her before the rescuers could help.

Her father would probably say that she was being foolish. But her father—one of the most sensible people she’d ever known—was inside.

Kara went inside, too, walking past the vid screens with their useless information to the kitchen where her mother was making the final loaf of bread.

The flour, spread on the counter, looked like bleached nanorescuers.

“Do we still have sugar, Mom?” Kara asked.

Her mother looked up, a dot of flour on her nose. “I think so.”

“Can we make something with it? Something good?”

Her mother smiled. It was a tired, yet understanding smile. “I don’t see why not,” her mother said.

And together they hauled out her great-grand-mother’s baking book, and looked for something good. Something sinful. Something that would make them feel as if the world weren’t going to end today.

November 10, 2018
4:03 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

Second Harvest: First Day

Doug Mickelson paced the length of the Map Room and silently cursed the fact there was only one window. That window overlooked an outdoor walkway that, if memory served him right, was built over 150 years before to ease the flow of visitors out of the White House.

There was no flow of visitors into or out of the White House these days. The White House had been declared off limits to the general public, not that Mickelson could believe anyone would want to tour the place. The tensions in the nation, in the entire world, were so high that people were thinking only of survival, not of their nation’s history.

He had his hands clasped. He did so to prevent his fingers from finding the edge of the curtain and pulling it back. He was in the Map Room, with the president and six other trusted friends and advisers, precisely because it had one window and could be easily guarded.

The president was seen as the center of the entire worldwide defense against the aliens. Because he had made the rallying speeches, he was the focal point, and because there were still a handful of crazies who believed that the aliens’ return was just a plot, created by the government, the Secret Service and the FBI believed the president had to take as many precautions as possible.

Mickelson believed it, too. He was just feeling claustrophobic. Tonight he wanted to be outside, looking at the sky.

The president was restless, too. He was standing in front of the fireplace, warming his hands over it as if he had a permanent chill. Beside him stood Shamus O’Grady, the president’s national security adviser, and on the other side was Tavi Bernstein, head of the FBI.

Grace Lopez, the chief of staff, sat in one of the antique, upholstered chairs. Carlton Hagen, one of the president’s personal aides, sat beside Lopez, and the first lady, who had served as Franklin’s closest adviser from the moment of their marriage, stood near the embroidered fire screen.

Patrick Aldrich, the press secretary, had been going in and out, attempting to control the flow of information, trying to prevent an international panic.

Someone—Mickelson didn’t know who, but he suspected it was someone on Cross’s Tenth Planet team— had predicted the aliens’ return down to the second. Cross, whom Mickelson had been friends with since childhood, had sworn that the aliens would be predictable, and so far they had been. According to the last report the president had gotten, the aliens were going to arrive in Earth’s orbit exactly at the moment they had been predicted to.