Adopted Son (34 page)

“Yes Sister.”

“Well, they know it, why don’t you? Don’t be so stubborn about it. You were always a stubborn child, now is the time to learn and grow up.”

“I... I don’t know Sister, there’s so much hurt inside, so much pain that cries out for vengeance.” He wanted to collapse into her arms, bury his head into her chest, and quietly sob. But he had to keep up appearances. He was still the leader of millions of people. He balled his fists and turned from her.

“I know my child, I know. But today the healing begins. Today is the first day of a world united.” She held him for a long time.

One hundred and forty two years after the alien missiles first fell. Brittany, France

There would be no milking of cows today. The chickens wouldn’t get fed, the pigs wouldn’t get slopped. Today was her last day. It wasn’t that she had been doing those things recently anyway. Once she had become old and ill some of the local boys stopped by her farm to help her. She was alone on the damp fields far outside of town. Alone both literally and figuratively. Her husband had died many years ago, and she had since become a bit of a recluse. It was strange for her to go to town these last few years. Everything was so different. The people looked different, the world was filled with wonders that she could have never understood, even if she hadn’t been almost a hundred. Sometimes she wondered where the other people were. Not those little elf-like things that constantly ran around and drove in silent flying machines, but the people. Ones like her– pink and tall with a mane of dark brown hair. They didn’t appear on television anymore, none of the advertisements that made their way to her mailbox featured pictures of people like her. Only a few of these elf-people spoke any Brittany at all, so she was isolated by language as well as appearance. “It was ok,” she thought to herself, snuggled under a wool blanket at night, “they scare me anyway.”

She had no idea of course that she was the last human on Earth. She wasn’t the last one born; that honor went to Emmanuel DeHocha of Lima, Peru, who was almost twelve years her junior. But Mr. DeHocha died of dysentery in his teens, and over the years the few remaining humans quietly lived their lives and died unobserved and unnoticed in a world that had passed them by. Veronique St. Germain had been born in a small fishing community on the northern coast of France. She grew up outside of town, on her parents’ farm. She had been a pensive child, who never played with others. It was difficult for her to go to school in those days. The people were mostly farmers and fishermen with little contact with the big cities. She was one of the few humans left in her village. There were no human children born in that part of France after her, and she was looked at as a curiosity by her schoolmates. It made her nervous, and she would spend hours just sitting in her room, playing with her dolls, imagining a world in which she wasn’t such a freak of nature, a world where everybody looked like her.

In her teens she met Henri Delacroix who was a sheep farmer in the nearby town of Fougéres. Although he was almost ten years her senior, she fell for him immediately, and he felt likewise. The loose tongues in town claimed that it was just because they were the only humans left in the area, but there was a deeper bond between the two lovers, and they spent almost fifty years together, in comfort and happiness until Henri finally succumbed to a long illness. The two never had any children, although they had tried in earnest for many years. Through a cruel twist of fate, Veronique was barren due to a bout of scarlet fever in her teens. It was too bad, because she carried the same immunity gene that was carried by the population of that tropical island, although she never had any inkling, and was never tested.

Not well educated, she worked on the farm her entire life, selling her produce in town or to the occasional merchant. Nights she spent knitting, and her shawls and bedspreads were highly regarded amongst the people who like that sort of thing. The house was far from the main road, and for many years, they had no electricity, never mind television. By the time they were hooked up, most of the world had stopped speaking the Brittany language, and she never bothered to learn more than a smattering of French. She never really understood why all the people had changed into these elf-things. She never heard about the First Interplanetary War or what happened afterwards. She never really benefited from the new technologies that were developed once Earth joined the interstellar community. She had been told about the Earthling colonies on Mars, Europa, the moon, but she dismissed the tales as nothing more than fantasy. She was a practical, God-fearing woman after all who didn’t have time for fancy.

In her later days, as she toiled in the fields, she often had young people come around to stare at her from the road. They were quite curious to see this ‘throwback’ to another day and time. She was always polite to the elf-people, if not overtly friendly. She never said a bad word about anybody, and when her husband became ill, she allowed elf-doctors to treat him, even if she wasn’t comfortable with the idea.

As she grew older and older, and the number of humans alive fell to a mere handful, she had attained a bit of legendary status in the region. People came from all over to visit her. She never quite understood her popularity, or why she was so special. When told by onlookers that she was probably the last human on Earth, she scoffed and said that there had to be more somewhere. But in her mind she knew. She saw the writing on the wall. She understood that a new era had been dawning for some time now, and that her time on Earth was almost up.

In the last decade of her life, dementia and forgetfulness began to set in, and she became too infirm to look after her garden and her livestock. Village teens stepped in and helped her with her daily activities. It was such a thrill for them to experience the way life used to be, when farmers still tended to their garden by hand, and knitted their own sweaters. Anthropology students from the local college came to study her, although they never called it ‘studying’ to her face. She thought that they were just interested in her wisdom and stories as an elder member of the community. With her deteriorating mental state she never quite grasped the fact that she had done no farm work in years. She maintained until the end that she was a vigorous and independent woman.

No one knew for certain that she was the last human on Earth. Most suspected though, and as she lay on her deathbed, many, many visitors from all over Brittany came to have one last glimpse of this newly extinct species. But on her last day, only one person was with her, the local priest who maintained a vigil as he did for all of the people in his parish. He reported to the local paper that her last words were, “So, this is how the world ends,” but he was unable to say for certain if she was referring to the extinction of her species or simply her own impending death.

The day Ray Johnston revealed the secrets of Hangar 18. Stuttgart, Germany

Johannes Handel was only fourteen then, barely a man. He was frightened. As the first of his species, he had always lived in fear, he had always hidden in the shadows. Unlike those who came after him, he had no one to turn to. He had no support system. His parents tried to keep him happy. They tried to provide a good social structure for him. They sent him to a special school for the disabled, where he formed friendships with other children who had visually unpleasant deformities. As long as he thought he was just a disabled freak he could live with himself. He was the same as all the others in his school, and despite their differences, they could all bond because they all had similar social issues.

But, as information began to leak out about the canisters from space and alien plots to pollute the human gene pool, the other children at the school started to look at him differently. Parents of even the most deformed children warned against playing with the alien invader. Rumors grew about how Johannes would eat them with this sharp pointed teeth, how he had a laser gun hidden underneath his bed, that he had dangerous psychic powers. It seemed that the more implausible the rumor, the more easily it was believed. Over time, Johannes spent more and more time alone, confused as to what was happening, and how he was a freak even amongst freaks.

There were more like him of course, younger, smaller. Every year the Handels heard more reports about how so-and-so just gave birth to a baby that looked exactly like him. But instead of bringing him closer to the community, it made him more of a pariah. The locals somehow considered him to be the contagion. They figured that he was somehow responsible for this plague, as opposed to recognizing his status as its first victim. Before long his entire family were social outcasts. It was generally believed that whatever little Johannes had, it was contagious, and that just being near him, could cause you to produce a deformed, alien child. Several times, windows in his home were broken by vandals hoping to scare the family into leaving town. Johannes’ father, a banker, couldn’t believe that in this day and age people still acted this way, that they still could be swayed by outrageous rumors and mob mentality. He refused to leave the city of his birth, he refused to go into hiding, to run from the uneducated boors that were increasingly more threatening. In retrospect, this turned out to be a tragic mistake.

When the news broke that the Americans had found an alien spacecraft, and that the plans for an alien invasion had been confirmed, friends called the Handel household and pleaded with Johannes’ father to take the family to safety. The father refused, “This will all blow over in a few days,” he said. “We still live in a country of laws after all. They are all fearful cowards, all they do is shout and bluster. They have no bite to match their bark.” He was concerned though, and as news reports that evening began to show scenes of escalating violence throughout the world, he began to feel that leaving the city for his mother’s house might be prudent. As the family went to sleep that night, he lay in bed awake for some time, eventually deciding to begin packing in the morning.

That time never came though. At about midnight, the fear and hatred in the community boiled over. A large mob made their way to the Handel residence. This time they threw no rocks or shouted angry slogans. The first sign that the Handel Family had that something was about to go horribly wrong was the sound of several bullets shattering the downstairs glass. Johannes’ father awoke immediately and descended the steps in his dark crimson bathrobe. He walked straight out of the front door and told the mob to go home, to leave him be. He threatened to call the police. From the crowd a rifle was leveled and he was shot in the chest. As he lay on the ground dying his fading eyes could see the mob rush forward and with Molotov cocktails set fire to his beloved home.

By this time the rest of the family was awake and watching from the windows. Johannes’ older brother rushed to the front door to assess the situation. The fire was spreading rapidly. His mother would die that night, overcome by smoke as she tried to rescue his little brother from his crib. Johannes’ older brother would also be shot that night, trying to get the crowd away from the house. Johannes’s older sister took him down the back stairs, and through the dark, black smoke to what she hoped was safety in the backyard. She was wrong. The leaders of the crowd had set the fire in hopes of forcing the alien out, and they were ready. As soon as the children cleared the choking smoke, he was grabbed by the crowd. His sister never saw him alive again.

Many conflicting reports of that night’s activities surfaced in later years. A parliamentary commission looked into the events almost two decades later and formally apologized to his surviving relatives. To most accounts, the child was taken, still in his pajamas, and put on a mock trial for his so-called crimes against humanity. To a screaming crowd of onlookers the cold, scared boy was accused of horrible crimes, accused of genocide against the human race, accused of sneaking into sleeping women’s bedrooms at night to impregnate them with his vile seed. He was quickly sentenced by the crowd to death for his crimes. From the large oak tree that grew in the park two blocks from his home, from the very branches that he had climbed not a week ago, Johannes Handel was lynched. His head was removed from his body and paraded through the streets of Stuttgart along with the heads of whatever other alien children that hadn’t been able to escape the violence. By the next morning, sanity had returned to the city, but neither the body nor head of Johannes Handel was ever found.

Fifty years to the day after the alien missiles first fell. The communications room of the White House, Washington, DC

“Contact has been confirmed Mr. President.”

“Astronomers at Berkeley are estimating almost a dozen primary vessels, all just outside of Saturn’s orbit. There may be smaller, secondary vessels as well, but our telescopes can’t resolve that level of detail until they get closer.”

“At their present speed and heading they should rendezvous in Earth orbit in about two months.”

The voices of his advisors circled around him. Everybody seemed to have something to say.

“The Vice President is on television right now breaking the news to the American people. In six minutes they’ll switch to you for your statement.”

“You’re sure that the Pliedians will hear what I have to say?” he said to his science advisor.

“Well Sir, we can’t be sure that they’ll have their radios on, but if they do they’ll hear. We’ll be broadcasting from the most powerful telescopes we have, right at them, at the same frequency they called us on twenty-five years ago.”

“Plus, they’re probably expecting a statement from us,” added the National Security Advisor.

“Good. Let’s synch up with the Vice President.” A monitor was switched on. They heard what all of America was hearing, what all of the world was hearing. That positive evidence of an alien interstellar fleet had been detected in our solar system, headed towards Earth; purpose unknown.

As the advisors listened, and the makeup artists put the finishing touches on his face, President Miller tried to go over his speech. It had been written years ago, ready to be pulled out for this eventuality. He tried to go over the words, to ensure that it was still accurate, that it still reflected the will of his constituency, but it wasn’t the words that worried him, it was his attitude. He knew that this contact would set the tone for all future relations. He knew that the world’s people would be looking to him to provide the courage, the moral foundation to survive the coming days. He knew that his father, old and frail in Tyler, Texas, would be watching. Jim didn’t want to disappoint him. He didn’t want to disappoint any of the people who had helped him on his way, any of the people who were counting on him.