Alien Game (The Thousand Worlds) Read online

  He didn’t seem inclined to answer further, and I gave up.

  Maggie leaned forward. “Dad…you knew in advance this was going to happen.”

  Dad didn’t say anything.

  “Why didn’t you warn anyone?” said Maggie.

  He let out a tired sigh. “No one would have believed me. If you had gone on the Internet, you could have found a billion sites claiming that aliens would invade Earth any day now.” He grimaced. “That, and official government policy was to neutralize anyone who went around telling people the truth about the Dark. They feared a panic. Well, they’ve got their panic now, the idiots. Why didn’t they listen?”

  “Dad,” said Maggie. “You said we have to trust each other. If you didn’t trust the government…maybe it is time to trust us instead.”

  He glanced at her for just a moment. He never treated us differently, but I suspected that he liked her better than he liked me. No, that wasn’t quite right. I think he loved us both in his own harsh way, but Maggie was just more persuasive than I was.

  “You know I was in the army,” he said at last. “Afghanistan. While we were there, the Dark opened a gate near Kandahar, and my company had to fight them off. We drove them back and closed their gate—they use this crystal thing the scientists call a transductor to open the gates, and the only way to permanently close a gate is to go through it, grab the transductor, and retreat back to Earth with the crystal.” He scratched his jaw for a moment, the stubble rasping under his fingernails. “After that, the Division talked to us.”

  “The Division?” I said.

  “Covert force in the US Army in charge of dealing with the Dark,” said Dad. “General Culver is their commanding officer. Bill Culver.” He scowled. “He was sharp, but of course, the morons in the Pentagon didn’t listen to him. They never listened to him. Maybe if they had, a lot of people might still be alive. Anyway, I left the Army and joined the Chicago PD, but those of us who were in the Division had our orders. If the Dark showed up in force, we were all to go to Castle Base in eastern Washington. That’s where the Division is based, and General Culver will be basing a resistance force there.”

  “If he’s still alive,” I said.

  “He’ll be alive,” said Dad with complete confidence. “Bill Culver and the men at Castle Base know more about the Dark than anyone else. They’ve been planning for this day for years. Maybe decades.” He sighed.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Very,” said Dad. “I knew this was bound to happen someday. Didn’t know when. Hoped it wouldn’t happen in my lifetime, but you two are so young, I figured it might well happen in yours.” He sighed again and rubbed his jaw. “That’s why I’ve been so hard on you. I knew this could happen. So I tried to get you ready, so you can stay alive.”

  “What will we do when we get to Castle Base?” I said.

  “I don’t rightly know,” said Dad. “General Culver will be putting together a force to fight the Dark, so I guess I’m rejoining the U.S. Army. Assuming there is still a U.S. government, of course. You kids…I’ll make sure you’re taken care of. I don’t know what you’ll do, exactly. Maybe the Division will have a school or something, but you’ll likely be given jobs to earn your keep. We’ve never done this kind of thing before, so we’ll play it by ear.”

  We made it all the way to Wyoming before everything fell apart.

  I’m not sure exactly where it happened. We were somewhere in eastern Wyoming, in the more arid regions. There were a lot of rocky hills and a lot of scrub grass and the air felt dry and harsh and hot. It was about ten in the morning, and we had pulled over to relieve ourselves. It wasn’t safe to wander off alone for obvious reasons, which made for some awkwardness. I didn’t mind Dad and Maggie watching while I relieved myself (I could turn my back, after all), but Maggie absolutely hated doing her business when anyone could see her. I suppose girls have different needs in that department. So Dad had found her a nice boulder, and Maggie scuttled off behind it to heed nature’s call while Dad I stood guard, guns in hand. We didn’t talk. Dad discouraged casual chit-chat, unless I had questions of a practical nature, which I didn’t at the moment.

  I looked over the surrounding land, eyes squinting against the morning sunlight. The road was deserted, and I didn’t see anything moving in the grass. I suppose the Dark could have been creeping along in the grass, or bandits might have been hiding behind the boulders, but I didn’t see any sign of trouble.

  Dad waited with an air of patience that I found difficult to emulate. I felt exposed standing out here, but I supposed Dad knew better than to rush a girl in the bathroom. I yawned, not bothering to cover my mouth (I needed both hands to shoot if necessary), turned around.

  There were black specks in the sky to the west.

  “Dad,” I said.

  He stepped next to me, gravel crunching beneath his boots. “I see them. Maggie, better hurry up. We might have to leave.”

  My first thought was that the black specks were vultures or buzzards. Ever since we had gotten over the Mississippi we had seen carrion birds circling over a lot of car wrecks and burning towns. The Dark might be wiping out humanity, but the vultures and the crows were doing well out of it. Except that vultures and buzzards tended to circle a lot, and crows traveled in big groups. I only saw a dozen of the specs, and they were flying perfectly level. Helicopters? For a wild instant, I hoped that the army had sent helicopters to rescue us, that maybe Dad’s friend General Culver had sent men out to find him.

  But the black specks were too small to be helicopters, and they were flying too fast. And too quiet.

  They were also headed right for us.

  “Dad,” I said. “Flying things!”

  “Maggie, hurry up!” shouted Dad. “We’re about to be under attack!”

  Maggie scrambled up from behind her boulder, doing up the front of her jeans with one hand, her other grasping the handle of her pistol. She started to run for the SUV, but Dad stopped her with an upraised hand.

  “No,” he said. “They’re too fast. They’ll rip the roof off the SUV. Now they’ve seen us, they won’t let us go.”

  “Darksiders?” I said.

  Dad nodded. “Different type of scout drone. Flyers. They’ll try to kill us or disable us, and then go find some warriors to convert us.” At the time, I didn’t know what that meant, but it did sound dangerous. “We’re going to have to fight. We can’t let a single one of them get away. Even one of them gets away, they’ll summon reinforcements and we’re finished. Ready?”

  I managed a sharp, jerky nod. Maggie offered a shaky nod as well, though her hands didn’t shake as she held her gun.

  “Say it,” said Dad, still watching the approaching Darksiders.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  “Ready,” said Maggie.

  Dad nodded and raised his pistol, and we followed suit. By then, I could make out details of the approaching creatures. They looked a lot like the Darksider scout Dad shot dead in the backyard, but these creatures were bigger. Part of the extra mass was a massive bag of pulsating gray flesh that rose from the dorsal ridge of their shells, black veins threading through the quivering mass. I realized that those bags were kind of like the bags of a zeppelin or a balloon, full of hot gas that kept the creature aloft. The flying Darksiders also had blurring gossamer wings like those of a dragonfly, but far larger, and they looked somehow greasy.

  “Aim for the bags!” shouted Dad, and he started shooting.

  Maggie and I followed suit. There hadn’t been time to put in any ear protection, and the crack of gunshots was loud in my ears. The noise the bullets made when they ripped through the Darksiders’ gas bags was far louder. The bag exploded in a spray of fire and greasy flesh, causing the flyer to shriek and spiral to the ground.

  That killed some of them. They hit the road or the desert with enough force to crack their shells, black slime spilling out. But some of them were able to survive the impact, and they rushed towar
ds us, pincers and claws snapping.

  “Take the flying ones!” Dad shouted, shifting his aim down. “I’ll take the ones on the ground! Keep shooting, keep shooting!”

  My gun clicked empty, and all the practice clicked in as I ejected the spent magazine and rammed another one into the weapon. With it reloaded, I shifted aim and sent more bullets into the sky. In a weird way, it was kind of like being at the shooting range, though the targets were much uglier.

  We shot down the Darksiders in a storm of bullets. One by one they crashed against the ground, going motionless, or charged towards us and Dad shot them down. Maggie ejected a spent magazine from her gun and shoved another one into the weapon, and I covered her while she reloaded. Dad shot one of the grounded flyers, then another, and then another. The last creature raced towards him as my gun clicked empty, and Dad fired his final three bullets into it.

  He killed it, but not before the Darksider slammed into him and drove him to the ground, its lethal pincers driving into his chest.

  Dad landed with a startled grunt, and Maggie screamed and emptied her pistol into the side of the Darksider, the bullets punching through its armored black shell. The kinetic energy of the impacts knocked the creature to the side, and it rolled off Dad, dead, but one of its pincers had broken off in his chest, his shirt wet with blood.

  “Dad!” said Maggie. “Daddy!”

  She sprinted to his side. On pure reflex, I looked around, but the rest of the Darksiders were dead too. I ran to join Maggie as she fell to her knees next to Dad. I didn’t know much about combat wounds, but I had a cold certainty in my chest that the injury was mortal. There was just so much blood. It was spreading out beneath him in a pool. His face had taken a grayish pallor, and his mouth opened and closed without sound.

  “Dad,” I said.

  He reached into his jacket, yanked something out, and thrust it in my direction. It was a bundle of colorful papers. I took the papers, blinking away tears, trying to figure out what to do, and then he died.

  He just died. There wasn’t time to say anything, or to do anything. If this had been a movie or something, he would have told me to take care of my sister, and Maggie would have grabbed his hand as she sobbed, and he would have told us he loved us. Then he would have sighed, closed his eyes, and passed away.

  Instead, he just sort of…stopped. Later on, I understood that he had died of a combination of massive blood loss and cardiac failure. The broken pincer had gone right through his heart, and it had been nothing short of astonishing that he had held on long enough to press those papers into my hand.

  I started at him, too stunned to react. Maggie was sobbing uncontrollably, grabbing his hand. I’m not sure what I felt at that moment, just…shock. Dad was invincible. He wasn’t afraid of anything. Nothing in the world could possibly hurt him.

  That jolted me a little into something like lucidity. Nothing in the world could hurt Dad, but the Dark hadn’t come from this world. We might have wiped out that band of flying scouts, but others would be along eventually.

  Those papers. Why had he given them to me? I opened the bundle. One was a road map of Washington State, with a location circled in red ink on the eastern side of the state, below the Cascades Mountains. Another was the business card of General William Culver, United States Army, and the third was an ID card in a leather holder. It was a picture of Dad, though much younger. He still had all his hair, though it was a buzz cut, and the card identified him as a member of the United States Army Rangers.

  Castle Base. He had said that General Culver and the Division operated out of Castle Base. Did that mean Dad wanted us to continue to Castle Base? I looked at the SUV. We were in eastern Wyoming, and we needed to get to eastern Washington. How was I supposed to do that? I sort of knew how to drive, but it was nearly a thousand miles.

  I looked at Dad’s corpse again, and sort of lost it for a few minutes. I had been only sixteen, and while my upbringing hadn’t been anywhere near normal or healthy, I was still only sixteen, and my entire life had been dominated by Daniel Kane’s commanding presence. For him to die so suddenly was like the sun going out at midday. The destruction of Chicago and the invasion of the Dark had a strange, dreamlike feel to it.

  My father’s death seemed far more horribly, brutally real.

  “Maggie,” I said, once I pulled myself together. “Maggie, we need to go.”

  She looked up at my, bleary-eyed, tears running down her face.

  “We can’t stay here,” I said, holding out the map towards her. “This is the way to Castle Base. I think Dad wanted us to go there. If we stay here, the Darksiders will kill us too.”

  “We can’t just leave Dad here,” protested Maggie.

  I started to say that we couldn’t take him with us. A cold, practical voice in my mind that sounded exactly like Dad’s pointed out that driving across the country with a corpse in the back seat would likely lead to disease, to say nothing of the smell.

  “Dad’s not here anymore.” I pointed to his body. “That’s not him, Maggie. You know what he would tell us to do.”

  “Yeah,” said Maggie. She took a deep breath, her whole body shaking with it, and then forcibly calmed herself down. Her face became a mask of pure emotional control. “He’d tell us to keep moving, not to look back.”

  There may have been a lot of Daniel Kane’s remorseless practicality in me, but there was at least some of it in his daughter too.

  “All right,” I said. “We don’t look back. We move on.”

  “Do you even know how to drive?” said Maggie.

  “Sort of,” I said. Dad had been showing me. “I’ll go slow. You watch for the Dark and bandits.”

  Chapter 4: Castle Base

  I had to kill my first man two days later.

  We made a stupid mistake. We stopped at a rest area in Idaho to use the toilets. In my defense, after several days of relieving myself in the woods and trying to clean myself up with leaves, using an actual working toilet seemed like a vision of heaven. So, I pulled over to the rest stop (without going over the curb this time), a squat cinder block building, and Maggie and I went to use the bathrooms.

  She started screaming as soon as she went into the women’s room.

  I ran to the women’s room door just as a burly man dragged Maggie out, her arms pinned behind her back. He had a big gut, but his arms were just as thick, and he was smiling as if he had just found a twenty dollar bill in the gutter. His left arm held Maggie’s arms pinned, but his right hand held a shotgun pointing towards the ground.

  I didn’t hesitate. I raised my pistol, aimed, and shot him through the temple.

  That made a mess, but Maggie jerked free as he collapsed, and she yanked her own gun from its holster.

  “He was hiding behind the door in the women’s room,” she said, breathing hard, her pistol pointed at the motionless man. “I think he was waiting for us…”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s look around and make sure there aren’t any more of them about to ambush us.”

  As it turned out, he had been operating alone. We found his van parked behind the building. Inside his van he had a lot of ammunition, and he also had sets of handcuffs, rubber gloves, and a lot of drugs and syringes.

  I was pretty sure I knew why he had tried to kidnap Maggie.

  Maggie knew, too. She was noisily sick next to the van. I waited until she finished, then together we helped ourselves to the dead man’s foodstuffs, ammunition, and shotgun, and loaded them into the SUV. As we did, I glanced at the corpse by the restroom, and was surprised that I didn’t feel anything. I mean, you’re supposed to be consumed with guilt and sorrow when you kill your first man, right?

  I didn’t feel any of that. Mostly I felt satisfaction. He deserved it. I was pretty sure Maggie had not been his first attempt at kidnapping.

  Yeah, I had a lot of my father in me.

  We drove on.

  Our luck ran out a little west of Spokane.

  By mutual agreemen
t, Maggie and I gave Spokane a wide berth, keeping to the side roads. From miles away, we had seen the plumes of smoke rising from Spokane, and I guessed that the Dark had opened a bunch of their gates inside the city. I suspected the wreckage of the city would be crawling with Darksiders, and I didn’t want to bring Maggie anywhere near them, or any desperate survivors crawling out of the rubble.

  “Roland,” said Maggie, her voice tight.

  I glanced at her. We were driving down a narrow county road, pine trees rising on either side of us. Based on the map that Dad had given me in his final moments, I thought we were about a hundred and fifty miles from Castle Base, maybe a two hundred if we had to go further out of our way.

  I looked at her, and then back at the road, and saw the man waiting for us.

  He was a cop, a Washington State trooper, to judge from his uniform. He was standing right in the middle of the road, and I slowed down. I had a flood of hope. Maybe law and order was still functioning in this part of the country, and I could find an adult to take charge and get me and Maggie to safety.

  Then I saw his eyes.

  They were black. Like, I don’t mean the irises were black. The pupils, irises and the whites had all turned the same black as the armored shells of the Darksider drones. The trooper began walking towards us, and I saw that black veins bulged beneath his skin, and his skin itself had turned a pallid, corpse-like gray.

  He looked like a zombie. But he wasn’t dead, not completely. The fist-sized lump of black flesh pulsing at the base of his neck saw to that. It was an Darksider parasite, and it had sunk its tendrils into the trooper’s spinal column and rewritten his nervous system and his DNA. It wiped the trooper’s mind and turned him into a drone under the control of the Dark’s hive mind. The scientists had some long Latin word to describe the process, but since zombie TV shows were popular right before Invasion Day, we just called those who had been taken zombies.

  Unlike most of the zombies on TV, the converted people were just as fast and as strong as they had been in life. In fact, they were stronger, since they were immune to pain and unconcerned about injury.