Regardless of any potential actions on the part of any of the HS children, a distinct and vocal minority of the human people took this as a threat, a big threat. As evening progressed there were news reports about incidents all over the world. It was all still shaky at this time, but word was coming from a number of regions about assaults, executions, murders, and kidnappings of anyone even suspected of carrying the HS virus. Franklin Trinity was not unobservant. He predicted what would happen someday. He assessed his situation and decided that with a few more hours of hype, things could get very ugly at the Monmouth Orphanage. The staff, who never seemed to like the children anyway, was acting more openly hostile. As the light of day was fading, a crowd began to gather at the front gate of the complex. They held signs and banners calling for the death of the children inside. They called for an example to be made of these children, a message of defiance to send to those anonymous broadcasters in the Pleiades. Franklin’s room on the fourth floor of the dormitory had a small window that looked out over the main courtyard and front gate. He sat and watched the crowd gather, and planned for the worst.
Several of his friends had come in to see him. Enoch, Marvin, some of the smaller children. As one of the oldest ‘wards’ of the state, Franklin was looked up to as a big brother of sorts. It also helped that he had spent his formative years with Father Blythe, who encouraged him to be confident and to be proud of who he was. Most of the children here had been dropped off soon after birth, or had been found abandoned at police stations, hospitals, or trash cans. They had been harassed, hounded, and teased their entire lives. Like it or not, Franklin had become a role model, the only one who possessed any strength to deal with a crisis.
“What are we going to do Franklin?” Enoch had asked him. Marvin Wiggins, who was new to the facility and still too young to understand the politics of hate, had been tugging on Franklin’s sleeve for over an hour repeating, “I’m scared, hug me.” Franklin sat and watched the crowd gather, ignoring his young compatriots. It was only when some of the older boys entered that Franklin woke from his reverie to realize that people were depending on him.
“Ok,” he said turning from the window and reaching under his thin mattress. “I have a plan. Like practically everybody here, I’ve dreamt of escape. Of going someplace where I don’t have to give daily blood samples and I can go to bed when I want. Someplace where I’m not treated like a prisoner. I’m sure you’ve all felt the same way.” There was a murmur of agreement from the fifteen or so children who had crowded into his room. “But maybe its because I’ve been here longer than most of you, but I’ve been fed up enough to actually figure out an escape.” He pulled a sheaf of paper from under his bed. “I’ve got drawings here of what we can do. Some lists of equipment we’ll need and where we can find it, that sort of thing. It was mostly just a fantasy really. I’m almost 18, they’ve been saying that I can leave the orphanage then, so I’ve been trying not to make trouble. But it seems like we may have to put our plan in action.” He handed some papers around to the people he trusted.
“Here are some lists of things that we’ll need. I want you guys to go and scrounge around and get them. We’ll meet back here in two hours. If all hell breaks loose, we’ll put our plan into action and get out of here.” The children, missions having been assigned, headed towards the door. “One other thing. This plan can’t save everybody. If too many people get involved we’re all going to get caught. I know that it’s harsh, but we have to keep this thing quiet. The more people that know about it, the less likely any of us are going to get out of here alive.” He looked around the room for agreement. “Ok, now go, we might not have much time.”
Franklin spent the next few hours moving silently through the dormitories, contacting the children that he knew could be trusted and could be of value. Then he returned to his room to watch the gathering crowd at the gate.
Now, just as the President’s speech was about to be broadcast, the crowd was reaching a critical mass. Some police and security guards were on hand, but they were doing little to quell the growing call for violence. Franklin and his brood were waiting patiently, watching the crowd. On the inside of the gate, a large contingent of HS kids stood in the main courtyard, watching the protesters. There is a morbid fascination involved in watching people scream for your death. The children mistakenly believed that the gate and the orphanage personnel would protect them from any real harm. Franklin watched them with a tear in his eye, wanting to tell them to get the hell out of there, that something horrible was about to happen, but he couldn’t. He needed them to act as a distraction so he could get a small number of children to safety. If he raised the general alarm now, no one would be able to escape.
“Franklin, we’re all ready. Let’s go.”
“No, not yet. We can’t leave just yet. We have to stand by.”
“I’m scared Franklin,” said Marvin.
“I know child, I know. It’ll all be over soon.” He rubbed the small child’s head.
Exactly forty-two seconds into the President’s address, one of the protesters at the gate leveled a rifle through the bars and fired a shot. It hit one of the children square in the chest. He crumpled. Franklin couldn’t tell who it was, and he was glad for not knowing. The sound of gunfire fanned the flames. Soon multiple shots were ringing out in the night. People rushed the gate. It would have been quite comical to see the sight up close. These were normal, everyday Americans. Mothers, fresh from their kids soccer practice, men still dressed in suits from their day’s labor, even children in bright clothing pressed up against the entrance to the facility, all screaming in a whorl of panicked violence. It wasn’t the type of crowd that you normally connect with this sort of behavior.
“My god Franklin, let’s get the hell out of here now!” screamed one child.
“Not yet, patience,” replied the leader. “Right now this is the safest place to be. Patience.”
Slowly the gate began to open. Someone on the inside had pushed the button to open the facility. People began to pry themselves through the opening. The children were running, scattering over the courtyard. The orphanage personnel did nothing to stop them. Some ran, some stood in silence, but no one made an attempt to save even a single child. The rioters entered the complex with bats, tire irons, whatever they could find. Soon the courtyard became a charnel house as decent, hardworking Americans murdered children in a frenzy of fear and bloodlust. An alarm began to sound.
“Now!” shouted Franklin. The group crossed the hall to Marvin’s room. Marvin’s window didn’t face the courtyard, it faced the back of the facility. The dormitory was on the edge of the complex, and the only thing stopping the children’s escape was four vertical stories and alarmed windows. Franklin entered the room and in one fluid motion threw Marvin’s chair against the window. It shattered in a spray of glass. An alarm sounded, but it was drowned out by all of the other alarms and noise from below. Enoch smashed the rest of the glass out of the way with a stick. Two children began lowering a rope of tied bedspreads to the ground. Children were running everywhere. Only those who followed Franklin kept their heads about them. The facility had kept a tight rein on their charges, and most of the children didn’t know what to do without the authority of their human masters to lead them. The rope reached the surface.
“Ok, Enoch, you go first, make sure that there isn’t anyone around on that side of the facility, then give the signal and we’ll all come down.” The spry child complied and hurriedly lowered himself to the ground. He looked around in the darkness. The action was taking place on the other side of the compound. Anyone who might have been lurking about on this side had moved to the front entrance when the violence began to rage. He signaled above.
“Ok people, now we can’t panic. We have to remain calm. You all know what to do. We are going down the rope one at a time, then we’ll hide in the swamp. Our eyes are bigger then human eyes, we can see better in the dark. They won’t be able to find us out there. Move through the swamp in small groups. We’ll reconnect tomorrow morning under the on-ramp to Route 512. Now go!” The children queued up and began filing down the rope. “One at a time, one at a time,” Franklin said. “Don’t break the rope.”
There was little that he could do at this point. He ran back to his room and watched the mayhem that was occurring below. The courtyard was mostly clear. Dead and injured children lay in groups. Rioters moved through the compound freely. Franklin could see them as they filed into some of the other dormitories. There were several fires raging. Protesters were lighting Molotov Cocktails and hurling them into shattered windows. There was the sound of sporadic gunfire and crying. “They’re only children,” thought Franklin. He smashed his fist against the windowsill in frustration. “They’re only children.”
When it became too much for him to bear he returned to Marvin’s room. Most of his followers had descended. Several screams and shouts came from down the hall. The echo of a weapon discharging sounded in the stairwell. It could only have come from the floor below. “Quickly quickly,” he said. The other children looked scared but they continued their decent. “Don’t wait for the rest of us, just start running.” Franklin barred the door to the room with some furniture. “Go, go!”
Soon the only two in the room were Marvin and Franklin. “It’s your turn Marvin, go, go!” shouted the elder boy.
“I can’t. I’m scared I might fall.”
“You have to go, go now!” He pushed the youth towards the window.
“No, you go first, I’ll follow. That way you can catch me.” It didn’t make a lot of sense, but there wasn’t much time left. Someone in the hall rammed against the door. The furniture wouldn’t hold for more than a few seconds.
“Fine, let’s go.” Franklin pulled his cap tightly around his ears, scrambled over the windowsill and began his decent. He went down about one floor and then looked up. Marvin was fumbling through the window. “Come up, hurry up!” Franklin shouted. There was a shot from the hallway. It snapped the door frame into pieces. As Marvin began his decent the door cracked open and a human face appeared, mouth frothing.
Marvin made his way down quickly. Franklin watching his own decent didn’t notice the face at the window until Marvin screamed. He looked up. At the window was a man. He looked down at the pair of escapees. “Marvin, watch out!” Franklin shouted. The man at the window grabbed the makeshift rope and untied the end from the radiator. The two children fell to the ground.
Franklin was about a story and half in the air at the time. He landed hard on his arm, which snapped like a twig. For Marvin, who was almost three stories up, the outcome was far worse. He wasn’t moving when Franklin got to him. Franklin held the child’s head. There was blood, too much blood. He wasn’t breathing. “Come on Marvin, wake up, wake up,” said the boy. His eyes were blurry with tears. A ricochet sounded close by. He wiped the tears from his eyes enough to focus on the window above. Two faces now looked down. One held a rifle. A second shot was fired. It missed, but not by much. Franklin looked up in disbelief. “We’re only children!” he shouted to his attackers. He ran into the woods. More shots rang out. As he hit the treeline he could hear the alarms and sirens vividly. Most of the screams had died down. With the fires raging there was some light in the darkness of the bog.
He ran through the swamp, tears in his eyes for all the dead and dying. He tripped over a tree branch and fell headfirst into a foot of muddy water. He must have blacked out from the pain in his arm because the next thing he knew he was lying on his back. The stars came into focus above him bordered by trees. Something happened to him that night lying there in the mud. Franklin would later claim that he had a religious experience of some kind– that a voice rang down from the heavens and told him what to do. He was in tremendous pain and emotional distress, so perhaps it could be chalked up to hallucination. But maybe those conditions just make one more receptive to divine messages. It didn’t matter if the revelation was real or imagined actually. It is only the effect that counts. Franklin came to the realization out there that the God he had worshipped was not his god, that the people who claimed to be his protectors were not his protectors. He realized what they had been telling him all along; that he was not human, that he was indeed an alien. If the people of Earth acted like his enemy then they were his enemy. Father Blythe had told him over and over that he could be accepted if he tried hard enough, if he made them accept him. Franklin no longer wanted that. He no longer wanted acceptance. He no longer wanted to live peacefully with the humans. He wanted revenge. He wanted to destroy as his life had been destroyed. The message from space was a call to arms. His true lineage was of the stars, his true faith lay above in the heavens, not here down on Earth. He was through playing human. He stood up, eyes still focused on the heavens. He threw his cap to the ground and felt the starlight on his naked head. He knew what he had to do. He knew that the only way he and his compatriots could truly be free would be to rid this place of the human plague that now infested it. By the time his parents came to reclaim him he would be in a position to present the Earth to them as a welcoming gift.
Meanwhile. The Watley family residence, Tyler, TX
The sound of truck tires was audible before President Potter had finished his announcement. Joyce Watley was sitting on the family couch, her bulk taking up slightly more than one cushion. Like most Americans, she had spent the day listening to news reports of the signal and the effects that it was having in other parts of the world. In the Middle East, several Mullahs had issued fatwas absolving anyone who killed an HS person from guilt. Areas of Africa had erupted into flames. Riots and looting were occurring at this hour in many large cities in Asia. Stock markets all over the world tumbled on the report, and there were runs on dried food, weapons, gasoline, and other items people think they need in an emergency. No one knew for sure what the message meant exactly, but they did know one thing, that ‘they’ (whoever ‘they’ were) were coming. Until now it had all seemed a dream; the alien ship in Ohio, the alien children popping up all over the place, prophecies of doom by extremist talk show hosts. It all didn’t seem real somehow. No one really felt threatened. It came so slowly that people got used to it a bite at a time. Possibly most people thought up until now that it had all been just a hoax, something to keep the masses in line now that the Cold War was over. Very few people actually thought that honest-to-god ‘aliens’ would be coming here, not in the flesh. Suddenly, overnight, the whole world had experienced a huge shock to the system, and the results were being played out all over.