The Green Gyre (2 page)

The plastic cup it had come in rolled to a gap in the stone railing, balanced on the edge for a moment, then dropped silently to the water below, where it promptly disappeared under the bridge.

The ship’s leading edge was now a half mile ahead of him and quickly gobbling up what little remained of the morning’s pristine sky.

Closing them all in.

Mark spun on his heels and waddled awkwardly forward, forgetting that he was still crouching. A bolt of pain shot up his leg as the sharp edge of the sole of his shoe caught on a crack and wrenched his ankle.

He winced, then dropped his gaze and took a moment to scan around him. For sanity’s sake, he needed confirmation that he wasn’t the only one witnessing this. He wasn’t. Thanks to his six-foot-five frame and his vantage point at the top of the stone bridge, he had a clear view out into the park. Not a single person was paying him any heed anymore; everyone was now looking up at the ship.

Growing up in Connecticut, he’d always been the tallest boy his age. Even into adulthood he’d rarely experienced situations where he felt undersized. His freshman roommate in college, a basketball player-turned-football star, had given Mark a fleeting sense of the smallness others felt when they were around him. He didn’t particularly favor it, so, returning for his second year, Mark had sought out a new roommate. He found Adam, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Adam was a more manageable five-foot-nine and had no remarkable athletic skills; he was the perfect sidekick.

But now . . . .

Now Mark felt smaller than he’d ever felt before. Insignificant. Inconsequential.

Puny.

The craft couldn’t have been any closer than a quarter of a mile — still high enough above him that it easily cleared the tops of the tallest skyscrapers — and yet it was so immense, so imminently
there
, that Mark felt he could reach out and touch it. His hand rose to his shoulder of its own accord before he drew it back. He knew he’d go completely insane if he found that the sky had indeed solidified and dropped to street-level. If his manicured nails somehow contacted that polished surface and tapped against it, if his fingertips squeaked along as it passed, he knew his mind would simply shatter.

Behind him, between the maple and oak trees lining the walk, past the small hump of Cedar Hill and out over the marble and granite edifices lining 79
^th
Street, the shallow keel of the alien vessel — for how could it possibly be manmade? — extended as far as he could see.

Ever so slowly, as if afraid of drawing attention to himself, Mark straightened to his full height and turned once more in the direction he’d been heading. There was no more sky to be seen anywhere, only the vessel’s mirrored underbelly reflecting the city underneath. The perfectly slick shell of the thing was scored by an irregular pattern of floodlights. They reminded him of the recessed canisters in the low ceiling of the ballroom of the Carcher Hotel in Edgemont, site of his first multi-million-dollar deal. The diffuse yellow glow they cast down turned the noon day into dusk.

By now, people were streaming out of buildings, piling into the streets and staggering onto the paths from hidden park benches and maple-canopied grassy knolls. They were gawping, craning their necks and crooning, bulging their eyes out in naked wonder. The full impact of what they were seeing hadn’t yet hit them — would not for at least another ten seconds — just as it hadn’t yet hit Mark. For the moment, panic was fashionably late in arriving to this particular ball.

“Mark? You there?”

Mark blinked. It was Adam, again, or still, his voice reedy and thin, as if he were buried deep underground.

“Are you still there, Mark? God, you’ve finally given yourself a heart attack, haven’t you? I swear, one of these days—”

“Shut up,” Mark snapped. “Are you seeing this?”

He realized he was shouting, but his voice sounded far away, even to his own ears. Others on the street were also shouting, and yet he could barely hear them. The car alarms and the sirens of the emergency vehicles as they flashed past on 5
^th
Avenue were curiously muffled. They sounded . . . small, diminished. The ship must have had some sort of noise-dampening mechanism, which explained why it made no sound of its own.

“Seeing what?”

“Turn on the goddamn TV, Adam!” Mark screamed in his faraway voice.

“I’m still in the car.”

“The radio then! Jesus Christ, turn on the radio!”

By now, the alien vessel had paused in its interminable advance and had started instead to slowly rotate directly over him. Or at least it appeared to be rotating. Mark couldn’t be sure because of the absence of discernible features on its gleaming underside other than the lights, and those seemed to be moving in disparate directions, as if floating unanchored in a sea of mercury. He felt a moment of vertigo and nearly tumbled over the railing into the duck pond.

“Flipping through stations, Mark,” Adam relayed. “Can you give me a clue what I’m supposed to be listening for? Financials? Useless traffic reports? What?”

But Mark didn’t answer, for at that moment a clap of thunder crashed down upon him and shook the ground. He dropped, scuffing a hole in the knees of his pants.

Ruined!
he thought, hysterically.
Three-fifty for these slacks!

The rumble seemed to have no end. He threw his hands to his ears to block out the noise. The cell phone bounced away down the walk, this time permanently forgotten.

Above him, a crescent of darkness appeared in that vitreous surface, forming from an invisible seam in the belly of the ship. He stared into it, felt himself
falling
into it, as if it were the vacuum of space itself.

The aperture expanded with surgical precision, became a dark crescent. This was accompanied by a terrifying ratcheting noise and a series of tremendous booms. The percussive blasts continued until the opening formed a perfect circle, a hole large enough to engulf the entire park and several of the surrounding neighborhoods. This was marked by an ear-splitting screech as the portal’s titan gears braked to a stop and locked into position with a terminal thud which shook the trees.

Finally, blessedly, silence.

Except the world wasn’t exactly silent. Mark became aware of someone screaming, pulling on his arm. He found that he was fully upright again, though he didn’t remember standing up, and the person tugging on him was yelling into his ear: “Run! Run! It’s an invasion! Get the hell out of here!” He looked numbly down, but the person had already abandoned him before he could tear his eyes away from the ship.

He blinked, slowly regaining awareness of himself, of the chaos surrounding him. The acrid stench of melting plastic and oxidized metal filled his nose— not from above, but from somewhere nearby. His eyes burned. In a small pocket of sanity in the far recesses of his splintered mind he realized that there’d been a car accident out on the street. More than one probably.

Something flashed by close to him on the bridge, a body. Then another, and immediately after that, several more, all of them shouting incoherently as they streaked past. His brain registered the colors of their clothes and the terror in their voices, but was incapable of parsing what any of it meant. Buried in the chaos was the rapid
pop pop pop
of scattered gunfire. It didn’t seem real. None of this seemed real.

Still he didn’t move. He was too terrified to do anything but stare, too shocked to process a single thought. All sensibility was gone. The lost investments and the lies which had been written about him and the company he’d founded? Vanished.

None of these things concerned him anymore, even though a couple minutes ago they had so consumed his entire existence that he’d been prepared to crawl through the phone and sacrifice someone, anyone, even if it was his most trusted friend Adam, if that’s what it would’ve taken to return sanity to the world. But now he didn’t think about Adam or radio stations or exploding cars or even his own sanity. His mind had been completely emptied, and the space was now filled by the inchoate roar of the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unbelievable.

Above him. Crushing him. Drowning him.

From out of the depths of the dark opening a massive structure had begun to appear, a shaft of some sort, or maybe landing gear. Lowering. It was at least a quarter-mile wide. On the bottom surface was a curious repeating spiral design, scaly, reptilian. But it wasn’t simply a pattern on the surface, it was the edges of some kind of lens-like opening. The seams took on a greenish tinge. Then something began to trickle through and was starting to fall toward him.

Sanity — or maybe its polar opposite; he couldn’t tell — began to take control of him then. “Oh, dear God,” he whispered. If the shaft reached the ground, he and half the park would surely be crushed beneath it.

Run!
RUN, YOU IDIOT!

He listened and obeyed. He ran as fast as he could into the park, caroming off trees and people and benches like a ball on a crowded billiards table. His heart slammed against his chest and threatened to explode through his neck. Above him a clattering clanking grinding noise had begun, and it was growing louder by the moment. He didn’t need to look to know that the end of the tube was opening.
What?
his mind screamed, managing somehow to break through the singular imperative of survival which now fully occupied it.
What’s going to come through?
Alien soldiers? Airships firing lasers? Robots? Bombs?

Or maybe nothing would come out; maybe, instead, it would suck him and everything around him up into the ship, beam me up, Scotty, set a course for home, warp six. These aliens had come here from some far off planet, to Earth, to New York City of all places, to collect samples.

Why couldn’t it have been Atlantic City instead?

They were going to take him away to their distant home to be poked and prodded, dissected, turned into a slave or an object of amusement. Or food. Or—

His mind, already fractured, nearly exploded then.

Thoughts of abduction spurred him to run ever faster, and yet he realized as he threw a horrifying glance upward that he had stupidly run the wrong way. He would never be able to escape that gaping hole and that descending vacuum tube. He should have run
out
of the park, where things weren’t so open. Where there were buildings and cars and hundreds more people — if not thousands — and the likelihood of his getting singled out compared to someone else who deserved it more was much, much smaller.

He turned and nearly fell as something crashed into his side, spinning him around and disorienting him for a moment. There was a flash of blond hair, a tangle of sweaty bare arms and legs and bright red sexy short shorts. A screech. The smell of fear. He tore himself away from the screaming jogger-turned-sprinter-turned-human projectile and felt a burning pain in his hand. He looked down and saw a pair of earpods, the wires twined and cutting into his fingers, an iPod dangling from the end. He didn’t bother to see if the girl wanted them back. He just kept running.

He needed to get inside—

No! Not inside! Buildings collapse and fall on you during alien invasions!

He ran through the strange sepia twilight, blasting his way through the madding crowds thronging the street, and his mind filled with utter nonsense as he went. He found himself jabbering: “Slithy toves! Slithy toves gyre and gimble in the wabe. Gyre and gimble!
GYRE AND GIMBLE!
”

His large body tucked as he weaved from side to side, bucking and cursing with each collision. He willed himself onward, forcing the nonsense from his head. Ignoring the anguished cries of those who had tripped and fallen, the ones getting trampled beneath the feet of the stampeding feral mass of humanity, he ran. His ankle twisted and he nearly fell over a body. He grabbed something fleshy, pulled himself up, kept going. He needed to escape the—

bandersnatch

—alien ship.

He was determined to at least make it to the road. His size was both help— longer legs, better vantage, more leverage — as well as hindrance. Height made him top-heavy, and should he fall, he’d have more time to accelerate before he hit the ground. Most of all, he was painfully aware of how conspicuous he was; he could almost feel the aliens’ sights focused on him, on the top of his head and the expensive hair plugs, on his shoulders rising up above the crowd.

Where the hell’s the military? Why aren’t they here?

The timber of the noise above him changed and there came another deep groan from the massive machinery. He felt the rumbling beneath his pounding feet, felt it on his skin, on his face, inside his head. The people around him gave a collective gasp and he knew it was already too late. Whatever was going to happen was starting.

He didn’t look to see what it was.

The noise above him abruptly vanished and in its place his ears were filled once again with the muted sounds of the city in panic— sirens and whistles and yells. Sweat poured down his neck and into his collar. He tore off his jacket and flung it away behind him. It was an Armani, twelve hundred dollars, his billfold in the left pocket. It didn’t matter; he was down to his last twenty anyway. His bag with the tablet computer was gone; he couldn’t remember dropping it. His phone was gone, too.

Adam? It should’ve been Adam here!

His three-hundred dollar shoes were trashed.

Everything was ruined.

But right now he didn’t care about any of it. He didn’t care about his company or the lost millions. All he cared about was getting away, saving himself.

A woman stumbled in front of him. Without thinking, he reached down and yanked her up by the hair, releasing her to the side as she found her feet. He barely slowed. The woman ran off in a different direction, still screaming.

Not even a thank you!

He realized he was screaming too, screaming and crying and still uttering gibberish.

Strands of her hair had tangled in his fingers; the earphones were gone.

Another metallic groan thrummed the air, and then, without warning, everything turned green; the liquid he’d seen dripping from the shaft moments before had turned into a torrent. Except it wasn’t exactly liquid; it was some sort of globular gel or . . . .