Oblivion (8 page)

“Clarissa Maddox runs the team.”

“Because you think she runs meetings efficiently,” Britt said. “They never start until you arrive. It’s unthinkable to have a Tenth Planet Project meeting without you.”

Cross sighed, and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Out of the comer of his eye, he saw Constance watching them. She smiled at him.

“Someday you’ll figure out that your strengths aren’t where you think they are,” Constance said.

Cross looked at her. “Oh? You mean I’m not a good archaeologist?”

She shrugged. “Right now, it’s not your digging skills that matter. It’s your imagination.”

“She’s right,” Britt said.

“My imagination is giving me nightmares,” he said.

“From California?”

He nodded.

Britt rested her head on her palm. “Tell me about it.”

He couldn’t yet. He didn’t have the right words, and to explain the horror incorrectly was to cheapen it. “It’s not something you want to discuss over breakfast,” he said. He pushed his half-finished meal away, and Constance brought him coffee without his having to ask for it. He put his hand around the warm mug.

“So,” he said, “did our alien
friends
get home safely?”

Britt blinked, obviously confused, and then she gave him a rueful smile. “I’m sorry to say they did, as far as we can tell.” He sighed. They were talking about the alien ships, heading back toward the tenth planet. Britt’s agency, the Space Telescope Science Institute, was using all of its telescopes, from the Hubble III on down, to monitor the alien ships as they left Earth’s orbit and headed back to the passing tenth planet.

“I was hoping they’d self-destruct or something,” he said. She shook her head. “That only happens in the movies. Too bad, huh?”

He sipped the coffee. It was better than the stuff the Army had served him. “Do we know what will happen at the meeting today?”

“No,” Britt said. “I know we’ll get a report on the alien ships—what they’re made of, how they’re vulnerable, that sort of thing.”

“We know that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. The report might just be about what we don’t know.”

Cross sighed. For all the speeches everyone was making about his importance, it sounded like the meeting would be the same old thing. “Anything else?”

Britt loudly sipped the rest of her coffee, then set the mug down. “If there’s something new and surprising, I haven’t heard about it.”

Cross closed his eyes. “The end of the world is coming, and all we’re doing is having meetings.”

“We’re doing more than that,” Britt said.

He opened his eyes. She looked tired. They were all tired. “Oh?” he asked. “What else are we doing?”

“We’re trying to figure out a way to destroy those aliens,” she said, her voice so cold it even stopped Constance for an instant at the stove.

Cross looked at Britt. Her eyes were dark, focused on something far away. And the anger was just below the surface of her face, just as it was below all of theirs at the moment.

Cross thought about the fillings rattling around in the wand in California, then sighed. “I would do anything to stop them. Damn near anything.”

“So would I,” Britt said, coldly. “So would I.”

April 27, 2018
11:41 a.m. Central Daylight Time

170 Days Until Second Harvest

Vivian Hartlein had spent the early morning standing outside the gates of Graceland until some security guard waved her away. Then she crossed Elvis Presley Boulevard to the now-boarded-up Day’s Inn and sat in its parking lot, staring at the long lawn heading up to the old mansion. She’d toured the King’s home dozens of times—the first with her parents when she was just a little thing—and she liked the way it always stayed the same. The dark kitchen with its faint never-to-leave smell of grease. The yellow dining room, the beautiful white piano. A permanent place. A historical place. A place where time seemed to stand still.

Vivian had come here every day since the attack. She wanted to go inside again, she wanted to see if time would reverse for her, and she thought maybe it would happen in Graceland. Maybe if she went inside, she would see her mom again. And her dad. They had been gone for years.

Maybe if she went inside, she’d see Cheryl and Lucy and Tommi Jo. She’d told them to stay out of California, but they didn’t listen to her. They’d gone anyway, saying there was nothing in Memphis for them. All the jobs were west. And what did Cheryl end up doing, but working in some tourist place near the ocean? She could’ve worked at Graceland or any of the places around it, or got a job on Mud Island, or even gone to Nashville. It was far, but not that far.

And it hadn’t been wiped off the face of the Earth.

Cheryl, her daughter. Lucy, her granddaughter. And Tammi Jo, who was just a baby. Their daddy didn’t even have the decency to call, to find out what happened. He was so dumb he didn’t even know the attack had happened over Cheryl’s house, over her work.

Vivian’s husband, Dale, he’d gone out there, trying to find his little girl, and the Army didn’t tell him nothing. Vivian stayed home. She couldn’t get herself in no airplane. Never had been able to. Dale thought it was maybe connected to that time when she couldn’t leave the house, back when she was pregnant with Cheryl, her only child.

Back when she had had hope.

She choked and swallowed hard. Dale was still in California, waiting to get remains, if there was going to be remains. He said he wasn’t counting on it. He said there was nothing he could do. He said he’d never felt so helpless in his whole life.

Dale Hartlein, a man who’d never been helpless. One afternoon in California, he told her, he jumped the fence, and went into that black mess himself without protection, tracing the concrete buried beneath the dust, picking up metal road signs with the names pressed into them, and finding, through sheer energy, Cheryl’s house.

Or what was left of it.

He said he sat down and bawled like a baby.

Vivian’d never seen Dale cry. He’d teared up when Cheryl was born, and them tears’d come back the day Cheryl said she was marrying that loser ex-husband of hers, but he’d never cried. Not once.

Till now.

And when he told Vivian that, she knew her baby, and her baby’s babies, was well and truly dead.

He was staying in California until he had remains, but that might mean he’d be gone forever. The bureaucracy ruled, just like she always knew it had. Like her own daddy used to say.
The government ain’t nothing but a pack of fools leading another pack of fools by the nose.

She believed it now. Only now they had gotten worse. Now they had killed her family. And for that, she was going to make them pay.

She had left the Day’s Inn at sunrise and come to Riverside Park. The Mississippi smelled faintly of mud and river mold. Barges and tugs still made their way through the shallow water as if nothing had happened. Planes flew overhead. Life went on.

For most people, life went on.

She sat on the old bandstand near a grove of trees and watched as the first car pulled into the lot. She was taking a risk holding the meeting here, in such a public place, in the middle of the day, but she didn’t know who would come. She’d keep things toned down. She didn’t say nothing in her flyers, or on the web site, or in them radio announcements she made to all the call-in shows about what, exactly, she was going to talk about.

She’d just tell them the truth she learned from Dale. She’d just tell them how the government killed her family and how she was going to get even.

She’d tell them the truth as she knew it from the moment she saw them phony pictures on CNN.

Another car pulled into the lot. Then another. People she didn’t recognize was opening the doors and getting out.

She took a deep breath as she watched them, straightening her shoulders, shaking the nervousness out of her. It began this way, with a small group. Jesus taught the world that, two thousand years ago. He started with twelve, and they spread the gospel all over the land.

The tough part was speaking out. Once she spoke out, then the news would spread and everyone would know.

Sometimes she wondered why they didn’t already. It seemed so obvious to her.

There was no aliens. There’d never been aliens. Ever since she was a little girl, there’d been talk of aliens. Best-selling books with slant-eyed creatures on the cover. Movies with those same creatures—sometimes friendly, but usually trying to take over Earth. Then those series of “true” stories, mostly on the TV, about people getting abducted.

By the time Vivian was twelve, as many people believed in aliens as believed in angels. She remembered that statistic because Reverend Foster used it in one of his most famous sermons, the one where he lamented the loss of true faith.

Well, she had true faith. And Cheryl had, too. But Cheryl had become an unwitting victim of a plot to take over the world. Vivian was already seeing it. The news carried parts of it. The other countries was listening to the president. Soon he’d take over everything, a man who didn’t believe in God or liberty or nothing.

A dozen cars was in the parking lot now, and a group of people was hanging around the edge of the grass, just staring at her. If she was going to do this, she had to take control.

Dale’d tried to talk her out of it, tried at least to get her to wait until he got home. But she wasn’t going to wait, not anymore. It was either wait and let the grief eat her up, eat her message and make Cheryl and Lucy and Tommi Jo die for nothing, or Vivian would start taking action. She was angry and someone was going to pay.

She’d always been an action woman. Sitting around just made things worse.

She waved a hand toward the group, and a tall thin man with long blond hair grinned at her. He spoke softly to the others around him, and they came forward like a little troop. She was surprised she didn’t recognize none of them.

More cars was pulling in. A man in a business suit got out of one of them, along with a woman wearing too much makeup for a rally. And sure enough, they took out a video camera.

She didn’t want them taping the rally. She knew what they’d do. They’d send it on, make her a laughingstock or, worse, sic the government on her. Kill her. That couldn’t happen. Not yet. Not this early.

The blond man had gotten to the bandstand. He looked like a take-charge type.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Vivian Hartlein. I’m the one who called this here meeting.”

“Jake Styles,” he said.

“Well, Jake Styles, there ain’t gonna to be nothing happening here if them reporters stay. Think you can get them to go?”

He looked over his shoulder. “Why would I want to?”

“Why’re you here?” she asked.

His blue eyes darkened. “My daddy lived on the California coast”

“My daughter and her babies did, too,” Vivian said.

They stared at each other a moment. Bonded. She felt it. The loss created a link between them. Without saying nothing more, he turned around and walked toward the reporters.

She’d picked well. He had a charm about him.

More and more cars came. There was maybe fifty people here now. Some she knew, most she didn’t. The ones she knew belonged to some of the same groups as Dale. They looked surprised to see her without him.

She wasn’t speaking for him today. She was speaking for everyone. And for her dead daughter and grandchildren.

The woman reporter laughed and then patted Jake Styles on the arm. Oh, charm was useful. But not everything. Still, the reporters got back in their car, backed up, and pulled out of the lot. Jake Styles stood at the edge of the lot until the car disappeared.

By then, her entire crowd was sitting on the dew-damp river grass or standing at the fringes, leaning on trees for support. He came back, shrugged amiably, and said, “I don’t think they’re coming back.”

“What’d you tell them?” she asked.

“That this was the traditional singing rally for the Baptist churches in the area. We’re just organizing, and we’d hope they’d come back when we’re getting ready to sing in the big sing-a-thon in July.”

“You didn’t,” Vivian said.

“I did.” He grinned. “They said that explained the strangeness of the announcements they’d heard on the radio, and they were sorry for troubling us. And they got the date of the big sing-a-thon. They were embarrassed they didn’t know about it.”

“I can’t believe they believed that.”

“People believe anything, you say it with enough conviction.” His eyes seemed to bore right through her. He was right, of course. That was what she was here to talk about. “You know, if you’re gonna talk about how awful things are and not give no ways to resolve things, I ain’t staying.”

“We got to take things into our own hands,” she said. “Things?” he asked.

“What do you do?” she said. “You ain’t government, are you?”

“If I was government, you think I’d be here?”

“Them reporters was.”

He took a battered wallet out of his back pocket. Inside was his electricians’ union card, tattered now, and a driver’s license, a few ripped photos, and nothing else. None of them credit cards or them identification strips that had a person’s entire medical history on it. No electronic slider cards at all.