Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation (44 page)

“So am I.”
 

“I look the part.”
 

“Then I guess we’re equals.”
 

But looking at the huddle, it was obvious that wasn’t true. Neither was precisely Meyer to them. The man steering the shuttle on the circle of light — moving them
away
from danger, Piper’s doubts notwithstanding — looked like the Meyer they’d always known, though clearly he wasn’t. The frail-seeming human, who would take time to re-feed and recover his strength, looked nothing like Meyer. Nobody won. Not yet.
 

“Why aren’t you driving us away?” Human Meyer asked. “The motherships might see us.”
 

“The motherships are occupied.”
 

“Shuttles then.”
 

He said nothing in reply. The original Meyer Dempsey had part of the collective just as Piper had part of the collective, but he was still human. Right now, the swarm’s attention was tuned to the signal. He could buzz around the ships, shooting them from the sky as they’d helped blow a tunnel for Cameron and the others. If they’d had another shuttle, he could plant another bomb. They’d never care. Their alien ears were all waiting for the scream.
 

“You know where it is. Clara has known for a while now. And Cameron has the name.”
 

“Shh.”
 

“Why are we staying? Why aren’t we crossing the ocean?”
 

The charge reached critical. The beam lanced down, filling the city. From high inside the shuttle, there was almost no sound. When the light dissipated, Heaven’s Veil was nothing but splintered remains, felled buildings, and canted utility poles. None had survived, and that was the point.
 

He was cut off from the collective — discarded, like a useless remainder, now that he’d taken on the dangerous mantle of humanity. But he heard the scream same as them. He heard the device from untold miles distant as the outpouring of human agony streamed from Heaven’s Veil, recorded now for the ages.

“Did it go?” asked the human.
 

“It went.”
 

“Will they be able to home in on it immediately?”
 

“It will take time to triangulate. Human experience is always being summoned to it. This wave was large enough to pinpoint for sure. But we still have our advantage, even if it’s a small one.”
 

Human Meyer shook his head in a very Meyer Dempsey way — a way that the new Meyer recognized from his mirror. A gesture that was both dismissive and irritated, conveying scorn at abject idiocy.
 

“You’re wasting time being here,” he said. “Let’s go.”
 

After an extra moment, he tilted forward in the drive circle, and the shuttle leaped forward — fast but not too fast, in deference to the fragile human bodies inside.

The first Meyer would never understand why he’d wanted to see the city destroyed, to hear the scream as the wretched agony from tens of thousands in tormented pain passed them on its way to the archive.

Part was curiosity, wanting to see if the thing seemed to call from where they imagined it had been hidden.
 

The other part was human guilt: a desire to savor the great regret over what he’d helped to cause, just as the others had spawned so much pain (both human and inhuman) to him.

CHAPTER 91

Lila sensed the cessation of motion more than she actually felt it. Being in the shuttle did something to her equilibrium — something about the sense of being high in the air in what looked like a bubble from the inside combined with a force that felt like an invisible seat belt. Her fear was making everything worse.
 

Her father was alive. Maybe. Kind of. Twice.
 

Lila didn’t know how to feel about that. Mostly, she felt afraid, and assumed it would be that way for a while.
 

When the shuttle slowed and then began to descend, Lila wondered if they’d reached their destination. Despite the confines and the situation’s general oddity, Clara seemed to have already adjusted. She kept assuring her mother that there
was
a destination, that they were on their way, and that there was hope after all. She’d been skipping around the ship. Hugging Grandpa Meyer: the sunken-faced man she’d never met but whom she recognized as kin immediately. And she hugged the apparent obvious Meyer as well: the man who’d shared her home, but who’d never, it seemed, actually been Lila’s father. Cameron was the only person to leave their human pile. He was standing by the well-dressed Meyer now, acting like they were in a business meeting.

But there was no mountain where they descended, and Clara and Cameron had both mentioned one. Lila had been spacing out, letting her mind go away whenever it wanted, trying not to consider the losses she could barely accept: Trevor, her mother, even Raj. Her husband hadn’t been all bad. She’d loved him, once.
 

But not now. She couldn’t handle any of that now.
 

They seemed to have been slowly moving away, the two Meyers and Cameron discussing topics unknown. And now here they were, slowly coming down,
not
across the sea,
not
seemingly where Clara had indicated.
 

“There,” Cameron said, pointing through the shuttle’s floor near the edge.
 

Lila looked where he was pointing. She saw a long canyon. A short cliff. And, as they came closer, what looked like a demolished building, like a scattered pile of charred matchsticks when seen from high above.
 

The steering Meyer moved his hands. Leaned slightly. The shuttle came lower.
 

“What are we doing?” Lila whispered to Christopher. He shook his head.
 

“By the cliff?” said standing Meyer.
 

“The arch. Do you see it?”

“There?”
 

“They knew it was here. The motherships knew; they came right to it. How can
you
not know there’s a money pit on this land?” Cameron looked at the frail human Meyer Dempsey. “And you. You were in the ship that parked here. For months, hanging over my father’s lab like a beehive.”
 

“I was in a cell,” said the human.
 

“And I can’t see all they can,” said the tall Meyer. “Only bits and pieces, like parts of a dream.”

“The pit is under the arch,” Cameron said, apparently not caring to inquire further.
 

The ship lowered.
 

But whatever the healthy-seeming Meyer didn’t know or couldn’t see about the Astral collective, it didn’t extend to the details of connecting their shuttle to a pit in the ground, beneath the stone arch.
 

They waited, hovering.

The feeling of static returned as the ship seemed to refuel, drawing energy from its underground depot like a car at an old-time gas station from back before the world ended.
 

CHAPTER 92

The refueling, such as it was, didn’t take long. Five minutes, and it seemed to be finished — or done enough, apparently, to fill the tanks or batteries or whatever it was that would get them where they needed to go. Jeanine wanted to ask. She knew there had been a mothership suckling power from that pit for months when the Moab ranch had been whole, and that not long ago they’d watched a second do the same, again for a longer time.
 

Maybe the batteries were bigger on the motherships, or the tanks were deeper. It made sense. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that their short stop was more about safety than anything else. They couldn’t use the pit below what was once Heaven’s Veil for obvious reasons … but maybe this pit, too, would soon be occupied by massive ships suckling power. Charging up for whatever was coming, now that they’d be able to find Thor’s Hammer, too.
 

The ship slowly backed away from the arch. Then Piper Dempsey said, “Wait.”
 

The ship ceased. Piper stood. She walked toward the thing’s curved outer wall, placing her hands against what looked like lightly fogged glass. She was facing away from the arch and the money pit, as Cameron called it. On the opposite end of the large ship from the others, looking toward the cliff lab, past the house of debris.
 

Coffey stood. She crossed the space, skirting wide around the pilot in the middle.

“What?”
 

“There.”
 

Piper pointed. At nothing.
 

“What?”
 

“You don’t see it?”
 

The hard, cracked land was bare, nothing but bristly weeds, intermittent and hardy. The particular patch of ground at the end of Piper’s finger didn’t have a single feature. Yet still, Jeanine felt a chill.
 

She turned her head slightly.
 

Defocused her eyes.
 

And saw the same shadow as before, sitting patiently in the middle of the dry land like a dog awaiting its bone.

“It knew we’d come here to charge,” Piper said.
 

“Good for it.” She looked at Meyer — the
standing
Meyer; they’d need a way to tell them apart before the second fattened back up. “Let’s go.”
 

“No,” said Piper. “Don’t.”
 

Coffey watched the thing come closer. The shuttle wasn’t far off the ground. If it could leap as well as it could spread across an entire courtyard and fill it with opaque blackness, it could reach them in a single bound. She thought suddenly of the air around them becoming like that again: day turned to night in a blink. Would they be able to fly away? Or could it follow them forever, even off the ground?

“It’s waiting for us.”
 

“All the more reason to leave.”

“It can’t get to us. It’s stuck out there.”
 

“Good.”
 

“It’s stuck here. In Moab. It ran here. But it has its limits.”

“How the hell do
you
know so much?”
 

Piper looked toward Clara. She gazed back out at the thing, now seemingly able to gaze directly at it, and said, “I can feel it. I can feel how it is. How things are for it now.”
 

She turned to the Meyers.
 

“Open the door.”
 

Jeanine felt a jolt of panic. She grabbed Piper’s wrists as if it were her hands nearing the controls. She looked back at the pilot. Her voice left less sure than she would have liked.
 

“Go. Fly.”
 

Piper pushed Jeanine away. “It saved us.”
 

“It saved itself.”
 

Piper slowly shook her head, still looking through the shuttle’s skin. There were footsteps from the rear as the better-dressed of the Meyers approached on polished loafers.

Jeanine turned to him.
 

“Don’t open the door. It has her mesmerized or something. We can’t know what the hell that thing is. We don’t have any idea.”
 

Meyer, peering out, said, “I know exactly what it is.”

He set his hand to the shuttle’s wall beside Piper’s. The door boiled away. And the shadow leaped aboard, wafting through the arch like smoke.

CHAPTER 93

They slept.

The shuttle didn’t move like lightning. It was simple physics, Piper supposed; you put a human in something that accelerates and decelerates in an instant, and the G-forces liquified their skeletons. She had time to watch the land speed by far below, to see the mountains become the plains, reliving their trek from New York in reverse. To watch the breadbasket approach. And as they moved east, she had time to see the sun set in a hurry.
 

And she had time to sleep, exhausted in spite of it all.
 

Piper woke when her arm moved seemingly of its own accord — Lila, sliding beside her.
 

“Hey, kid,” Piper said.
 

“I’m sorry. I just … I couldn’t sleep.”
 

Piper looked around the shuttle. One or both of the Meyers must have been human enough yet to sense the mood and had dimmed the lights. The ship’s interior turned out to be as liquid as its doors; after they’d begun moving in earnest something had made walls drip up from the floor to create rooms. There was even a bathroom. It was a hole in the floor that sent waste God knew where, but it worked.
 

“Where is Clara?”
 

“I left her with Chris.”
 

“Why aren’t
you
with Chris?”
 

Lila acted like she hadn’t heard, and Piper spared her the dignity of asking again. She knew why. Lila had lost half of her family today. Piper was the only mother she had, even though she was an adult herself.