Interest (15 page)

28

They made relatively good time until they hit Dallas, at which point the highway became a parking lot with people trying to flee the city. Motorists were panicked, honking their horns and cursing. In the southbound lane, on the other side of the divider, they saw huge military convoys heading toward the coast. Len, Natalia, and Octavia sat in gridlocked traffic for two hours before deciding to take the nearest exit to get off the highway.

“So now what?” Natalia asked as they descended onto desolate Dallas streets.

“I don’t know. Do you want to try the local roads?” Len asked.

“I think it will be same thing. Besides, what will we do when we get to border?”

Border. Right. Shit.
During Neith’s reign of terror, Texas had voted to secede from the union, and the border between it and surrounding states was quickly becoming militarized and impassable. Len hadn’t realized how contentious the situation had become until he was on the submarine the day before.

“All I know is,” Len said nervously, “if we stay here, we’ll die.”

“Then we’ll take local roads.”

Len pulled into a deserted gas station where, happily, the pumps had been left on. While Natalia took Octavia to the bathroom, Len filled the van’s tank and went into the station to find a map. He also grabbed several huge packs of water bottles, as much nonperishable food as he could find, some cartons of cigarettes, and some caffeine pills. He looked for alcohol in the coolers, but to his annoyance, he found the store didn’t carry any. He took all of the pilfered items out to the van and loaded them into the back. He unfolded the map on the van’s hood and motioned for Natalia to come see.

“Take a look at this,” Len said. “Everyone is going north, to Oklahoma. I say we go west on these little roads, toward New Mexico. The Dranthyx will probably attack the population centers first, not the little towns. So I think we should go out to the middle of nowhere.”

“That is good idea, but then what?” Natalia asked, with atypical unease in her voice.

“I don’t know. I have no idea. Maybe if we find a place up in the hills, we can hide out for a few months until the invasion is over.”

Natalia exhaled pensively and considered the options.

“Natalia, may I borrow your cell phone?”

“Of course,” she said, getting it out of her purse.

Len figured he had stayed off the grid long enough. He dialed some numbers. All circuits were busy. Len dialed again. Same thing. He dialed a third time, and it connected.

“Hello?” The voice at the other end was elderly and female.

“Ma? It’s Len. I’m still alive.”

“Leonard! It’s really you?”

“Yes! It’s really me. Don’t you recognize my voice?”

“Oh, thank God!” she exclaimed, starting to cry.

“Ma, I’m fine. Octavia is with me and she’s OK, too. We’re in Texas.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, God! I prayed every night. I knew in my heart you and Octavia weren’t dead. I could feel it. They said on the news you’d joined the revolution and died and she’d been kidnapped, but I knew they weren’t telling the truth. You can’t ever believe what they tell you. Then I saw you on the news this morning and I knew my prayers had been answered.”

“Long story, Ma. Look, I just want to say that I love you. I’m sorry if I haven’t been the greatest son, OK? Tell my brother that I love him, too.”

“I love you, too!” His mother began sobbing even harder. Then, after a pause to collect herself, she said, “Leonard, what’s going on? What are these things coming out of the ocean I see on the news?”

“Ma, they’re bad news. Don’t go outside. Stay safe, OK? I don’t know how long we’ll be able to talk, so do you want to talk to Octavia?”

“Yes. Yes!”

Len gave the phone to Octavia, who yelled, “Hi, Grandma!” and proceeded to ramble on about the submarine and Salvatierra’s house while Len and Natalia tried to figure out what other supplies they should loot from the gas station. When Octavia had said good-bye and gave the phone back, Natalia made her own emotional phone call in Russian with what Len presumed was one of her family members.

This was it. They were saying their last good-byes. The cull would begin soon.

Once they’d fully stocked up, Len put the van in drive and navigated the city streets. A few blocks in, looters were smashing store windows and pulling drivers from their cars. Len narrowly avoided a Molotov cocktail thrown at the van by gunning it past a pile of burning trash. It looked like word had gotten out that terrible creatures known as the Dranthyx were invading and intended to kill off a quarter of the human race.

Len believed that anyone naïve enough to think the human race had evolved past being howling, shit-chucking monkeys hadn’t been to any of their town’s planning commission meetings. Human civilization was only about twelve thousand years old, which made it a thin, brittle veneer on four billion years of evolutionary nastiness. Contrary to our comforting delusions of safety and security, he thought, the human capacity for utterly ruthless violence didn’t suddenly disappear from our DNA once we figured out indoor plumbing. Len found modern society especially tenuous, with its heavy reliance on technology and services performed by others. In the absence of that assistance, many people would have no idea how to find water or make their own food. Cut off the food, or stop the water from flowing through the pipes, or cease delivering fuel, and civility would evaporate in a matter of hours as everyone downshifted straight into survival mode. The Tchogols might have been killed off, but humans were still animals, and still capable of acting like it under duress.

A lot of close calls later, they were on a local road headed out to the suburbs of Fort Worth. Octavia had fallen asleep on one of the bench seats in the back. After an hour or two of driving through more rural areas, Len’s jitters had subsided a bit.

“Are you OK? You’ve been awfully quiet,” he said to Natalia, who was staring out the window at the Texas countryside going by.

“What the hell do I say? One minute I’m doing my thing, and next, octopuses trying to kill us.”

Len didn’t mean to laugh, but he couldn’t help himself. Natalia had a certain kind of blunt eloquence.

“I’m sorry, it’s not funny. But yeah, you’re right. Hey, I think we’re pretty close to Abilene. We should probably find a place to stay for the night before it gets dark.”

“We need protection. We are too vulnerable,” Natalia said.

“What do you mean?”

“Guns. We need guns. Also, we need to find high ground.”

“Where will we find guns?”

“Len, we’re in Texas. Guns are everywhere!” Natalia exclaimed, suddenly upbeat. “Leave to me, this is what I do.”

Len pulled in to an old motel as it was getting dark. Amazingly, it was open, and there was vacancy. Natalia dropped Len and Octavia off, then took the van and drove off to find weapons.

“Escaping the coast?” asked the greasy, odd-looking man behind the front desk. He seemed a little on edge.

“How’d you guess?” Len asked.

“Don’t know if you heard, but they only came inland five miles. They just stopped.”

“What? Why?”

“No one knows,” the desk clerk said. “Maybe they changed their minds. Damnedest thing. I think it’s the Chinese. You can’t trust those Commies.”

In the room, Len turned on the TV. Almost every channel showed the same thing: a continuous line of purple spheres, following the coastlines and exactly five miles inland. On one side of the line was untouched human civilization; on the other was nothing but blackened debris. There they sat, unmoving. The scene cut to a split screen with two people on a satellite link.

“Have they made any demands, Geoffrey?”

“Nothing. We have no idea what they are, where they came from, or what they want…”

While Geoffrey was speaking, they played a video of the invasion earlier in the day, video footage of an engagement between the military and the Dranthyx orbs. The Dranthyx roasted tanks like marshmallows and incinerated jets midflight. Then a shot from a helicopter over downtown Manhattan. The camera zoomed in on the streets below. Huge purple spheres were rolling down the streets and avenues, crushing cars, blasting buildings with balls of lightning. Then one by one, skyscrapers started collapsing like dominoes in spectacular plumes of dust. Another video cut, this time to Manhattan a few hours later. Flattened. The great city looked like a bed of hot coals, producing enormous columns of smoke stretching toward the stratosphere. Len lit a cigarette and watched the world burn on TV.

Natalia came back a few hours later, bursting through the door like the Kool-Aid Man, stinking of booze and wearing a cowboy hat.

“Welcome back. Find anything?” Len asked.

“Hell yeah,” Natalia yelled. “God bless Texas! My kind of place. Come see this!”

Len walked out to the van and swung open the rear doors. To his utter amazement, the entire back of the van was full of weaponry. Natalia had somehow managed to find four assault rifles, three handguns, ten cans of ammo, three Kevlar vests, a grenade launcher, several grenades, and an M60 machine gun.

“Oh yeah, I got pizza too!” she exclaimed. “Mushroom, my favorite.”

“Holy cow! This is incredible! Smells like you found some alcohol, too.”

“Whole case of Applewood Forge. Now we are ready for anything! How do you say in America? Oh yeah—I don’t fuck around.” She giggled at the expression and almost lost her balance.

“We can’t stay here,” she warned, suddenly serious. “Dranthyx won’t stay still forever. I met some militia men. Nice guys. They say they read your story and are very excited to meet you. They are headed to compound in…” Natalia unfolded a piece of paper with an address. “Culberson County. Up in hills. They invite us.”

Not having a better plan, Len carried sleeping Octavia out to the van, laid her on one of the bench seats, and then loaded the rest of their stuff into the vehicle. Natalia stuffed her face gleefully with some pizza, then curled up on one of the other seats in the back to sleep off the whiskey. Len looked at the map and suddenly realized how enormous Texas was. The van’s GPS calculated the destination as being about six hours away. If he made good time, they’d get there by sunrise.

29

Len drove for miles in the moonlight without seeing any other cars or man-made lights. He was exhausted, but caffeine pills and the will to survive kept him going.

As the sun crested the horizon, Len pulled up to what the navigation system indicated was the address. They were on a dirt road about fifty miles west of Pecos. Len got out of the van to take a look around. He could see for miles in every direction. Nothing but sand, sagebrush, and distant hills.

Culberson County was way out in the mountains of Western Texas. It was about twice the size of the state of Delaware, with fewer than three thousand people calling it home. To an Easterner like Len who’d grown up on the narrow, row-house-packed streets of Pittsburgh where he could hear his neighbors farting and fighting over whose turn it was to pay the electric bill, the vast desolation was both breathtaking and terrifying. West Texas was the sort of place where a person’s car broke down in the desert heat, they died of dehydration, and no one found the body until months later, after it had been picked clean by vultures.

There was no sign of any militia compound. Natalia had been drinking; maybe someone told her to come out here as a prank. Len sincerely hoped that wasn’t the case. He decided to wake her up in the hopes that she’d know something.

“Good morning! Hey, I think we’re here, but I don’t see it.”

“Ugh. I need water.”

Natalia chugged a bottle of water. Then, bleary-eyed, she pulled her cell phone out and dialed a contact.

“Hi, it’s me, Natalia. We’re here.” She paused, listening. “OK, we will wait. Bye.”

“What’d they say?” Len asked.

“They are coming to get us.”

About thirty minutes later, Len saw a cloud of dust on the horizon, a vehicle approaching on the dirt road. As it drew nearer, Len could see that it was an old military jeep with a machine gun mounted on top. Inside were two men wearing desert camouflage and cowboy hats.

“Are you Leonard Savitz?” one of them asked.

“I am.”

“I recognize you from your photo. Sir, it’s an honor to meet you.”

“It is?” Len couldn’t help but be suspicious. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone over the age of five had been happy to see him.

“Absolutely,” said the larger of the men. His face was big, round, and red. His eyes were like two cool blue lakes on Planet Tomato. “My name’s Donald Travis. This here’s my fellow man-at-arms, Ross Templeton. Follow us. I don’t think that van has four-wheel drive. You might want to take her easy.”

The dirt road led across a large valley to the side of a mountain, with a smaller but well-traveled dirt road going up the side of it. The road’s switchbacks and lack of guardrails were somewhat terrifying, especially considering that Len hadn’t slept in over a day and was not at his sharpest. At the top of the mountain was a large, flat area completely clear of scrub brush and trees, from which rose an enormous layered structure studded with antiaircraft weaponry. It appeared to be ten stories high and easily two acres in area. Next to it was a parking lot that contained at least a hundred different pickup trucks and military vehicles. Len pulled in and parked.

“What is this place?” Len asked the militiamen while stepping down from the vehicle.

“This is the Freehold,” Donald said, smiling proudly.

The Freehold was a special sort of ugly, a fortress of brown concrete brutalism. It looked like the kind of swirly monstrosity that one might crap out after eating a Thanksgiving turducken and some laxatives.

“This is our pride and joy,” said Ross. “The Texas Defense League began building her thirty years ago with contributions from our members, and, well, here she is.”

“Wow, Daddy, is this a castle?” asked Octavia.

“I think it might be!” Len answered, trying to stay positive so she wouldn’t be scared. “Do you want to go inside?”

“Yes!”

“Let me get some of the boys to help y’all bring your stuff in…holy smokes, I see you brought your own weapons!” Donald was practically drooling over Natalia’s hoard in the back of the van.

“Yes, I bought from your friends in Abilene,” said Natalia, getting out of the van.

The men tipped their hats and couldn’t help but stare at her.

“Ma’am,” said Ross.

“You must be Natalia.” Donald beamed. “You’re even prettier than they said you’d be!”

“Thank you,” she said coyly, shaking their hands. “This is lovely fortress!” Len struggled to contain a smirk as he watched Natalia charm their bolos off.

Donald gave them the tour. The inside of the Freehold looked like the community center of a megachurch. There was a firehall-type kitchen, classrooms for the kids, a massive chapel, a gym, a TV room—everything you’d need to start your own doomsday cult.

“All eating is communal here. This is the dining hall. Breakfast is at six, dinner is at noon, supper is at five.” Donald walked briskly for a man his size. “This wing is where the unmarried men sleep. But you two are married, ain’t ya?”

Len and Natalia shot each other glances.

“Yes, of course we’re married,” Len said, answering before Natalia had a chance to. He’d left out details about himself and didn’t mention Natalia at all when he wrote the manuscript they’d all downloaded. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

“Well, good. We’ll put you up in one of the family suites on the second floor—one room for Mom and Dad and one for their adorable little girl.” He patted Octavia’s head.

As Donald turned his back to continue the tour, Natalia shook her head and covered her mouth, trying not to laugh.

After a boring tour of the Freehold’s water recapture system, where Len learned that they were drinking each other’s distilled piss because of the lack of water in the desert, Donald finally showed them to their family suite. Once Donald had taken his leave of them, Len took note of the crucifix on the wall and the painting of the Aryan-looking Jesus.

“Natalia, I have a feeling they might make us go to church.”

“Better than being killed by Dranthyx!”

Len wondered which would be less pleasant, then decided to sleep on it because he’d been up for about thirty hours straight.

He woke up a few hours later around dinner time, which was disorienting. After the communal dinner in the great hall with Natalia and Octavia and everyone else, Octavia went off to play with the other kids living in the Freehold, Natalia went to the computer lab in the basement to get some work done, and Len went outside onto the ramparts to watch the sunset by himself.
People who can entertain themselves are the best company,
Len mused.

The western sky was ablaze with purple and orange. The dry air cooled off quickly, but the ground still radiated the day’s heat in a way that Len found pleasant. He was a free man again, after weeks of servitude and captivity. If he could help it, he would die a free man. He lit a cigarette, enjoying the fleeting stillness. He couldn’t help but wonder if that’s all his life was: fleeting moments of blissful, quiet stillness, like pearls separated by and strung together with the shrill cacophony of life’s demands.

As if on cue, a rather obese fellow came waddling over to Len and bellowed, “Hey, come on inside, it’s happening!”

“What’s happening?”

“They’re moving! The Dranthyx are beginning their assault!”

Len stubbed his cigarette out and followed the man to the TV lounge, where everyone had gathered. On the screen, the purple orbs had indeed begun moving again. They were pushing inland in a line, but this time without shooting. The video feed cut to a different helicopter, this one flying over a beach somewhere in the daylight. A different time zone. The text at the bottom was in Korean. From the water came other objects that were similar in color but not in shape. An enormous flat one rose out of the waves and kept rising into the sky, followed by what appeared to be hundreds of others like it. Compared to the objects they moved past, they appeared to be over a thousand feet in length. Slowly, ominously, and casting long shadows, they moved toward the shore.

There were easily fifty people crowded around the TV set. They sat wide-eyed, terrified, utterly silent.

The camera swung around to the horizon. Rockets burst from the surface of the ocean and propelled themselves into the sky. The camera followed one until it became too small to see, and it reminded Len of one of the old space shuttle launches. Another rocket came out of the ocean, then another. Then the TV went dead. Black. Someone got up to check the cables and the satellite dish. The problem couldn’t be fixed.

Len ran outside to see it for himself. From the Freehold, perched on top of a mountain in the clear desert night air, he could see for an eternity. On the horizon, looking east and west, he saw little white lights slowly ascending into the night sky like distant meteors moving in the wrong direction. They pulsed and arced against the spin of the earth. Then, at certain altitudes, they twinkled in the sky and disappeared.

In the span of exactly ten minutes, the Dranthyx had taken global communication back to the shortwave-radio era as rockets destroyed thousands of man-made satellites. Simultaneously, worldwide Internet connectivity came to an abrupt, undignified end as hundreds of transoceanic fiber-optic lines were severed deep below the surface. North America and every other continent were now data islands incapable of working together to repel the attack. Even the most basic of military hardware would no longer work without the aid of GPS satellites.

The militia called a meeting in the main auditorium. Over five hundred men and women were present.

“Brothers and sisters of Sacred Texas,” Donald said gravely into the microphone at the podium, “the Great Tribulation has begun.”

The crowd murmured anxiously. Some bowed their heads and quoted Scripture.

Donald continued, “Now, it is by no small coincidence that the very man who prophesized to the world that the End Times were upon us, and that Satan himself would come from the ocean, is here with us tonight. There are no coincidences in the kingdom of God, are there?”

People emphatically said no and shook their heads.

“Leonard Savitz, would you please stand up?”

Len, suddenly self-conscious, rose hesitantly. The assembly began clapping.

“Leonard, we are truly grateful that our Lord Jesus Christ has sent you here. His light shines through you. Please come up here and tell us what you have been sent here to tell us.”

Len hated public speaking. Hated it. Further, Len had grown up Jewish but was an ex-Zen-Buddhist-turned-agnostic, about the furthest thing imaginable from being a Christian fundamentalist. He had no idea what to say to these people, especially considering they were already grossly misinterpreting what was happening. Len walked down to the pulpit and adjusted the microphone.

“Thank you, Donald. Folks, I’m not sure what to say, and I’ve never been good at public speaking. There’s a reason I went into print journalism instead of television or radio.”

Some people actually chuckled at that, which Len didn’t expect, given the circumstances. The crowd was looking at him with the doe eyes that groupies gave a rock star. These people thought he was important. In a way, it emboldened him to keep going, even if he had to say things they wouldn’t want to hear.

“I heard the word ‘prophesized,’ but I assure you, I’m not a prophet. I’m human like the rest of you. I just happened to learn the fate of humanity by being in the right place at the right time.”

“Sir, you were chosen!” someone yelled from the back. The people in the audience nodded their heads in agreement.

Chosen, right. There’s no reasoning with true believers.
Len figured he’d better get to the heart of the matter.

“Look, folks, here’s what I know. These objects you saw coming out of the ocean on TV? They are the advance landing force of a terrible race of beings who call themselves the Dranthyx. They live in the oceans and they are descended from…” Len stopped himself, deciding not to bring up evolution. “Well, they look like octopuses. But they can also disguise themselves to look like humans. They walk among us.”

“Second Corinthians eleven fourteen!” a woman shrieked.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means. Anyway, here’s the deal,” Len continued. “These Dranthyx run the world. They control our governments and our financial institutions, and they claim ownership of the human race. They have no conscience, no ethics. They are about as evil as you can imagine. The flu that went around not too long ago killed off all their human helpers…”

“The White Horse!” “Pestilence!”

Len was getting kind of annoyed at all the inane interruptions.

“As I was saying, the Dranthyx are here because they intend to kill off billions of people to maintain control of the human race. They will probably attack the big cities first, then the smaller towns. I imagine they will come here to the Freehold eventually. We can try to fight them, but I warn you, they have extremely advanced technology, and fighting them may be counterproductive.”

A young man yelled, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle!” The crowd cheered.

“Well, I think that’s all I have,” Len said, giving up. “Thank you.”

The room burst into applause as though Len were some great orator. They hadn’t heard a word he’d said. Len walked back to his seat, palms cold and wet. Donald got back up and took the podium.

“Thank you, Leonard. You are indeed a blessing to us.”

Dammit, Donald,
Len thought to himself,
I’m no blessing and you’re going to die.

“Folks, we’ve been rehearsing our battle plans for weeks now,” Donald said, his huge red face glistening under the stage lights. “We’d been expecting the Yankees to invade our nascent republic, but it appears we’ll be dealing with something even more sinister. As we have seen from the television news, the Tribulation is now upon us. As promised in Revelations, the devil himself has come up from the depths of the abyss.” Donald paused, looking around the room. Then he exploded, “But we will not go down without a fight, will we?”