Final Assault (8 page)

Now she was walking north on Lake Shore Drive. From Randolph to the Chicago River, the streets were deserted. There was no sign of anyone or anything, and no sign of trouble. Somehow that made her even more nervous than movement had.

But once she crossed the river into Streeterville, she heard screams and shouts again. There was smoke coming from her left—the entire Magnificent Mile seemed to be aflame. Apparently things had gotten worse since she had walked to the Loop.

She had been walking for hours and she hadn’t even gotten as far north as she had been the night before. She was tired and hungry and her shoes pinched. She was tempted to go inside one of the destroyed businesses and grab a bottle of water. Who would know?

Who would care? In a month none of this would matter. Nothing would matter.

But that still didn’t stop her from wanting to go home.

She had to find some shelter so she could call her dad again and tell him she was walking. Maybe when she got farther away from downtown, he would be able to pick her up.

It had been so dumb for her to leave home. She hadn’t realized until she had done it that home was where she wanted to be. If she only had twenty-nine days left to live, she wanted to be with her family, not running in the street breaking things and stealing.

Maybe for the next twenty-nine days, she and her parents could pretend like nothing was happening. Maybe they could barricade themselves into their house, eat good meals and listen to music or watch vids. Maybe, if they worked at it hard enough, the end would come and they wouldn’t even know.

It was better than going like this.

It was better than destroying everything around.

Everything was going to be gone soon enough. She didn’t want to be one of the people who helped speed up the end.

October 12, 2018
4:56 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

29 Days Until Second Harvest

The Roosevelt Room was crowded and hot. The autumnal centerpiece in the middle of the long conference table gave off the scent of decaying leaves. It made Secretary of State Doug Mickelson want to sneeze. He’d been fighting allergies all day. The weather was surprisingly warm for October, and his hay fever, which was usually the worst in September, had lingered into this month. It made his head feel full, and despite the allergy medication he was on, he didn’t feel quite himself.

He needed to be doing the best job of his life right now, and when he had gone to his allergist the day before, he had asked that the allergist make all the symptoms go away.

I’m not God, Doug
, the allergist had said.
If I were, I wouldn’t be messing with your sinus cavities. I’d make those alien ships disappear.

Everyone on the planet would make those ships disappear if they could. Mickelson tried not to concentrate on them, but he was constantly aware of them—as if they were a storm bearing down on a particularly beautiful day.

Right now, he had most of his attention focused on the final draft of the president’s speech. He was supposed to vet it to get rid of “potential international problems.” The problems he was searching for were not with content—the world leaders had already spoken to Franklin and knew what the speech was about. They had, in fact, chosen him to give it.

What Mickelson was looking for was offensive language. He and a battery of international experts from the various foreign desks throughout the White House were going over the speech line by line. The press secretary and a battalion of the president’s speech writers were in the room as well, all making notes.

President Franklin himself was silting at the head of the conference table, a red pen in hand, marking on a hard copy before him. He was the only person not working off a palm-sized screen, and Mickelson actually envied him for it.

The door to the room opened, and Grace Lopez, the president’s chief of staff, looked in. She was a short round woman with curly gray hair and a manner that made Mickelson want to snap to attention.

“Everyone’s here,” she said. “All the networks are set up. They’ve blocked time. You promised a speech at five sharp.”

“Nearly there, Grace,” Franklin said.

She sighed loudly and closed the door.

Franklin raised his head only after she left. The worry lines around his dark eyes seemed even deeper than usual. “I want this speech to be perfect and it’s not going to be, is it?”

Mickelson opened his mouth to say that perfection no longer mattered, that the longer the president waited the more tom up the world would become, but at that moment, Franklin said, “Screw it.”

Everyone in the room froze.

Franklin looked at them. “We’re going to offend someone. That can’t be my concern right now. If a nation doesn’t like the way I say something, screw them. Their own leaders can try to clean up the mess.”

He stood. Mickelson held out a hand to stop him. “Mr. President,” Mickelson said, “just let us finish going through this—”

“Nice try, Doug,” Franklin said. “But it’s time we stop going through the political motions. If we dither too much, we won’t make our deadline. And this is one deadline that is aptly named, don’t you think?”

Dead ... line. The pun made Mickelson shudder almost as much as the thought of dealing with any diplomatic crisis that came from the speech.

“Right now I’m expected to speak for the world. Well, they’re going to have to like the sound of my voice. I’m tired of altering it for anyone.” And with that, Franklin grabbed the papers off the table and left the room.

“Shit,” Patrick Aldrich, the press secretary, said. “Someone stop him.”

“How can we stop him?” one of the speech writers asked. “He’s the leader of the free world.”

“It’s not done,” Aldrich said.

“I think the president thinks it is,” Mickelson said. “And if you don’t want this to become even more of a disaster, you might want to load the speech as is onto the TelePrompTer and make sure that everything’s ready across the hall.”

“Shit,” Aldrich said again, and ran outside.

One of the speechwriters looked at Mickelson. “That’s diplomacy?”

Mickelson grinned. “Hell, no. That’s passing the buck.”

He left the Roosevelt Room with its heat and smelly floral arrangement and crossed the wide hallway into the Oval Office. He had only seen the office like this once before, on June 15, the night that President Franklin made his famous “We Have Risen Up in Self-Defense” speech.

That speech, Franklin had believed, would be the defining moment of his career. At the time, Mickelson had agreed. Now, he thought that tonight’s speech was more important.

No one had expected the world to erupt into so much chaos. Well, he hadn’t. Tavi Bernstein, the director of the FBI had warned that this would happen on an internal level. She had predicted the bombing of the Capitol Building, too.

He slipped into the far side of the Oval Office, near the white couches where he had been during so many meetings. The other advisers stood near the walls, as they had during the Rise Up speech. Vid reporters from dozens of networks had set up on the space between the partners desk and the couches. The eagle emblem of the United States, with the words
E Pluribus Unum,
was completely hidden beneath expensive shoes.

Someone had placed lights around the front of the partners desk, and Grace had closed the drapes. Next to the American flag were flags of the European Union, the African Nations, Russia, and several other countries. That had been Mickelson’s idea. He wanted a visual symbol that Franklin was speaking for all of them.

The vid reporters with their tiny handhelds and their chip-sized mikes, tried to be inconspicuous while they waited. The only person who was missing was Franklin. How could he have disappeared so quickly?

Mickelson scanned the room. Aldrich entered through one of the side doors. Lopez was missing, too. Maybe Franklin had pulled that little stunt in the Roosevelt Room just so that he could get this started on time.

Either that or he was in his study, rewriting the speech himself.

Mickelson cringed inwardly. He was as worried about this speech as Franklin was, maybe more so. Mickelson had been all over the world in the last few weeks, and he knew that everything was close to boiling over. And now the riots and the unrest that had started since the announcement that there were alien ships returning was like the steam that appeared before a volcano erupted.

Franklin’s speech would either contain the eruption or force it to happen tonight. Mickelson hoped that Franklin could channel all that pent-up energy and direct it where it needed to be—against the aliens.

Perhaps that was why they were all tinkering with the speech, because they all knew how important it was, and how hard it would be to get it right. Perhaps that was what had irritated Franklin the most. Ultimately, this moment was his.

The door from the president’s study opened and Grace Lopez entered. She was a small dynamo making her way into the fray. She beckoned Aldrich, who joined her. As they walked, she whispered something to him. He nodded. They stopped in front of the partners desk and she held up her hands, the sign for silence.

Mickelson smiled. Except for whispered conversation, the room had been silent. No one had dared talk—it was as if the night were too solemn for even casual conversation.

Surprisingly, it was Aldrich who spoke. “The president will be here in a matter of moments. He will make his speech and then leave. There will be no time for questions. This is not the place for them.”

Mickelson heard some groaning from the press, but no one raised a hand and asked for the policy to be changed even though Aldrich seemed braced for that. Lopez was watching the door to the president’s study. After a moment, she elbowed Aldrich and got out of the way.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said as if they were in the larger, better equipped press conference room, “the president of the United States.”

Mickelson noted that the final stage of lighting did not go on until Aldrich moved out of the way. The international press did not broadcast the introduction— which was probably the right move.

Franklin walked across the room with a dignity that Mickelson had only seen in the man once before—on inauguration day. On that day, Franklin had later said, he felt the history and weight of the office for the first time.

He clearly felt it now.

Franklin sat at the partners desk, placed some papers on the top, then pressed a button on the side. A small clear screen rose from the modern protector that had been placed over the desk by the previous administration.

Mickelson winced. Franklin was using his own TelePrompTer. He had revised the speech. Mickelson hoped he didn’t lose any of the content in the translation. That would definitely cause an international incident.

“Citizens of Earth,” Franklin said, holding up the hard copy, an old-fashioned habit that he still favored.

“I come to you tonight not as the president of the United States, but as a spokesman for all the world’s leaders. We have a plan that will allow us to defend ourselves against the threat posed by the tenth planet, a plan that we are going to share with you tonight.”

So far so good, Mickelson thought. The opening was slightly different than originally written, but it sounded warm and personal.

“I am speaking to you right now as a representative because we, the world leaders, believed that you should hear about what we are going to do from one voice. After my speech, your own country’s leader will speak, explaining how the plan will affect your individual country. But for this moment, we are one world. We are united in our opposition to the threat posed by the tenth planet. We speak with one voice—a human voice. A voice that the tenth planet will learn to respect.”

Mickelson felt a shiver run down his back. Here was where Franklin deviated from the plan. He was going to sound tougher than the speechwriters had thought he should. The international experts and the speechwriters were afraid that a tough U.S. president would alienate the other countries.

Mickelson hadn’t agreed, but hadn’t really argued his point either. He didn’t know the fine art of speech-making. He did most of his diplomatic work on the fly.

“I know that all of you are frightened and panicked. You have all seen the images of last April’s destruction over and over again. But let me tell you about what we have done to the tenth planet.” Franklin’s dark eyes shone in the bright light. “We have hit them with nuclear weapons, destroying some of their shielding around their planet. The destruction we have caused to their surface would be the same as if someone had destroyed over half of the United States. In other words, we have hurt them worse than they have hurt us.

“Why are they returning? Because they have no choice.”

Franklin went on to outline why the scientists believed the tenth planet harvested Earth. As he did that, and as he told the citizens of the world why this was an important detail, Mickelson examined the faces. So far everyone in the room seemed rapt, even the reporters. It seemed as if information was what they had lacked, and getting it satisfied something, something they hadn’t even known they needed.

“We have no choice,” Franklin said. “We are
not
some other planet’s food source. We will defend ourselves. And we will win.”