The Fate of Nations Book II The Harvest (10 page)

Thirty minutes passed before the first rat came into sight. From where Kevin sat, high up on the flight of steps that led up the side of the apartment building, he could see the back of the dumpster clearly.

The rat sniffed around the pile of snacks and grabbed the half eaten moon pie. “That would've been my first choice, too, buddy,” Kevin whispered aloud and smiled. Three more rats slowly crept into Kevin's view and the small pile of food quickly vanished.

Kevin smiled to himself. He didn't know why feeding those rats made him so damned happy. All that he knew was that it did. With one last look down at the dumpster, and his new friends, Kevin walked back into the apartment.

The Harvest

Day 1-

Leslie walked up the driveway to her house. A newspaper lay in her yard. Every yard had one today.

The Journal had made sure to canvass the entire city with a free copy of the paper. She picked up the paper and unlocked the front door. Her cat, Mystery, greeted her. She was perched atop the small end table that sat near the door. “Hey bunky,” Leslie said and scratched her chin affectionately. She tossed the newspaper on the table and picked the small gray Himalayan cat up. She hugged her gently.

The wail of sirens in the distance registered only momentarily in the back of her mind as she walked into the kitchen, still holding Mystery,“Who wants a snack?” she called out. Two more cats came racing in from the bedroom where they had been enjoying their afternoon naps, shaking their sleepy heads as they lithely ran. They stood, looking up at her expectantly, as she pulled the bag of cat treats down from the cupboard. The sirens wailed, sounding a little closer than they had just a moment ago. Leslie listened to their approach. She smelled something that she didn't immediately identify. It was an electric smell. The air seemed suddenly charged with electricity and a bolt of electricity shot out of the wall socket in the kitchen. It leapt out three feet, singing the roll of paper towels that she kept on the counter. W
hat the hell was that?
She thought looking around her wildly. She smelled hair burning,
one of the cats?

She looked for the cats but they had bolted into the bedroom after the electricity shot out of the wall.

She felt of her head. Her hand fell on a hot smoldering patch of hair. She smacked at it and ran to the sink.

She still smelled something burning. Her hair had been soaked down in the sink. She knew it wasn't her.

She ran into the living room. The wall socket had been blown off. The wires sizzled and smoked in the square insert in the wall. “Fuck!” She shouted. Grabbing a towel, she went to smother the smoldering wiring. Just before she made the fatal mistake of touching those sizzling wires, Bene, one of her cats, ran under her feet, and he tripped her. The towel flew from her hands and landed on the couch. The wiring smoldered for a second more and then a flame erupted. It was enough to remind Leslie that those were live wires.

She ran quickly into the pantry where the breaker box hung on the wall. She cut the main power and grabbed the small fire extinguisher that had hung in there, unused, since she bought that house. She only hoped the fucking thing was still charged.

Leslie read the instructions on the extinguisher quickly, and pulled the pin. She aimed at the wall socket and squeezed the handle. A fine white foam covered the wall, coating the exposed wires. She quickly checked the rest of the house, finding a fire just beginning to burn steadily in her bedroom. She aimed the extinguisher's hood low and squeezed until the last few bursts of foam were expelled. She hoped that was the last fire she'd have to deal with because that extinguisher was useless now. She walked back into the pantry and placed it on the floor against the wall. The sirens blared out into the afternoon.
It would seem,
she thought,
I'm not the only one with a fire.

Leslie surveyed the damage in the bedroom and living room from the small fires, then flipped the breaker to restore power to the rest of the house, leaving the two areas switched to the off position until she could get an electrician to repair the wiring. The radio blared into life with an urgent message on the emergency broadcast system. “This is not a test.” It blared over and over. “Remain in your homes, do not go outside, do not, I repeat, do not go outside. Alien ships have appeared in the sky in this area. Do not go outside. Remain calm, remain in your homes. Do not attempt to contact the alien ships. For your own safety, remain indoors.

Further instructions will follow as we get more information.” The message was repeated continuously.

Leslie looked out of her window into the early afternoon sky. Looming overhead was such a surreal sight that she gasped. Her legs gave out from beneath her. She sat down hard on the floor of her house and stared in disbelief at the behemoth of a ship that was just hanging in the sky, covering over half of the entire skyline above Norfolk.
This can not be happening,
she thought wildly, and even though she had helped to write the article about the impending approach of the ships, she could not believe what she was seeing. Her mind could not accept the solid steel reality of the alien ship overhead. It hovered there at over ten thousand feet up in the clear afternoon sky, soundless, motionless, a colossal gleaming machine of extraordinary proportions. Even from where she sat, on the floor of her living room, looking up, she could see the strange writing on the ship. It was covered in strangely configured symbols made up of lines and dots, much like cuneiform script, she thought.

Sirens blared out into the evening air and people began to crowd the streets in front of her house, looking up into the sky, pointing excitedly, some were crying, and some were screaming.

Leslie stood up shakeningly and closed the living room blinds. She walked deliberately and slowly into each room and closed each blind, locking the windows tightly as she did. She gathered her candles and pulled some quilts out of the closet and placed them into her bedroom. She went quickly to work filling every container she could find with water, filling the bathtub last. She made a quick phone call to her son, and then to her neighbors before switching the breaker back off again. She listened long into the night to the sirens, the screams and the shouts as the colossal ships hung silently in the night sky.

Kevin read the daily paper in disbelief. “Is this some sort of fucking joke?” He asked Carla, placing the paper on the table between them. They sat at an empty booth after work at Starters, sipping fifty cent coffees that Kevin had splurged for. “I don't think so Kev,” she replied, her face showing the first signs of the panic she felt. “I saw something on the news about it too.” “Why am I just hearing about this?” Kevin asked amazed.

“Dude,” Carla replied in exasperation, “You've had your head buried in a lab book almost every night this week and you wear those damn earbuds at work all the time, and then you ask why you haven't heard anything?!” Kevin looked at her sheepishly, “yeah, well, I had a midterm to study for, and I wear earbuds so I don't have to listen to a bunch of assholes chewing the fat all day while I'm busting my ass cleaning the tables in here.” “Well now you know why you haven't heard anything Kevin, Carla jabbed, “but seriously, what do you think about all this?” Carla said, pointing to the headline of the Journal, her hand shaking as she held the paper.

Kevin read the article again, not wanting to believe that it was true, “It's got to be some kind of practical joke the Editor is playing on us, Carla,” Kevin stated matter of factly. “I mean, this is so bizarre, it just couldn't be true.” Carla tilted her head to the side. “Do you hear that?” she asked, her eyes wide and fearful.

“Hear what?” Kevin replied, not looking up from the paper. “Sirens,” she said shakily. “I don't hear anything..” he began, then the whooping of a fire engine's siren erupted down the street, coming closer.

Carla and Kevin looked at each other and then jumped up from the booth and ran to the front window of the restaurant to see what was going on out there. A smell of electricity charged the air around them and Kevin watched in utter terror as the light fixtures blew off of the wall followed by a three foot bolt of blue electricity that shot out of the scorched sockets. The old wood framed building that housed Starters began to crackle and burn. In less than ten minutes the entire dining room had filled up with black choking smoke.

Kevin dropped to his knees and pulled Carla down beside of him. “We have to get out of here,” he shouted over the wailing of the sirens outside. He crawled on his hands and knees towards the front exit with Carla holding onto his shirt and following behind him. The cloying black smoke stung his eyes and nose. He gulped in the last fresh air near the floor and wriggled out of the front door as the dining room ceiling collapsed in flames. Carla lay just inside the door. She wasn't moving. Kevin pulled his shirt up over his nose and mouth and crawled back inside the doorway to pull her out. He managed to pull her outside and away from the building onto the side lawn. That's when he saw the first ship.

Kevin smacked at Carla's cheeks, trying to get her to respond and then gave her mouth to mouth, warily eying the overhead ship as he worked to revive his friend. Carla coughed and then vomited onto the soft green manicured lawn of Starters as she came to. After a coughing fit that lasted two or three minutes, she followed Kevin's gaze to the overhead ship and screamed. “Oh my God Kevin!” she screamed shrilly, “We have to get out of here!” Kevin's eyes were fastened to the ship, watching as smaller ships began to detach from it. “Kevin!!” Carla screamed in terror, “Come on!!” She pulled at Kevin's arm, almost pulling him on top of her in her panic. “Calm the fuck down,”

Kevin yelled back, trying to loose himself from her death clutch. “Carla!” he shouted, then saw the wild terrified look on her face.

Kevin had never hit a girl in his life, but Carla was starting to look hysterical. Kevin raised his hand and smacked her hard across the face. “Carla!” he shouted, “you have got to calm down!” Carla looked at him like she had never seen him before, her terror had taken her mind somewhere else. She let go of his arm and stood up quickly. Kevin jumped to his feet and Carla bolted across the street towards a crowd of people on the corner that stood gawking up at the ship. Kevin started after her then saw something that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Just as Carla reached the throng of people on the corner, the entire group of them, probably a hundred or so in all, Kevin thought, just flew up into the sky towards the gargantuan ship parked overhead. It looked to Kevin like someone had turned on a huge vacuum cleaner and just sucked them up into the sky.

Kevin instinctively backed away and then turned to run. He ran to the opposite end of the street where a convenience store sat tucked in between two tall buildings. Kevin flung the door open and ran inside.

Ten terrified people stood at the windows of the store looking out and up at the pervading image of the enormous ship just hanging in the sky over the city of Norfolk. Kevin saw that the sky was darkened by black specks rising upward and realized what he was seeing.

Thousands of people were being pulled into the ship.

Kevin's legs gave way beneath him and he sat down hard on the cool tiled floor of the store. He put his hands over his face and wept.

Day 24—

Leslie read her tattered Bible by candle light, her nose pressed close to the pages of the worn book, lost in the ancient story of Noah and the Great Flood. Her bedroom was dark except for the small warm light of the candle flame that cast larger than life shadows of her and her cats on the opposite wall.

Some nights, to pass the time, she made shadow puppets, entertaining herself and giving the cats something to chase. Tonight, she was bent studiously over her Bible, pouring over the story of Noah, engrossed in ancient times and the lives of ancient people.

Bootsie was curled up contentedly on her lap, and the other cats were perched at the window. They sat at the window every night, or roamed the house on silent patrol. They padded along on whisper quiet feet, roaming ceaselessly.

She glanced at her two cats who now sat

guardedly in the window beside of her and then stiffened. Their ears were laid back and a soft growl had begun to form in their throats, low at first, but gaining volume as they watched some unseen horror outside.

Every nerve in Leslie's body tensed. She listened intently, her head tilted to one side, her eyes wide and alarmed. She stared at the window, as if expecting Satan himself to come leaping through it. She sure had picked one rotten fucking time to quit smoking.

Leslie Watts was alone, except for her three cats, in the small two bedroom house she had lived in for the past ten years. She had been inside for almost a month now. Every day, she carefully marked a line through the pale blue number, marking off each day of her survival on one of the old wild life calendars that hung on her walls.

During the daylight hours, she heard a cacophony of screams and shouts, of metal clanging and the screech of metal against metal. At night, it was the sound of a mournful wind sighing through the trees and whistling through the eaves of her house.

She knew the Grays couldn't come inside of her house,
hadn't she helped to write that article in the
paper?
, they couldn't. She stared at the window and nervously bit her lip. She knew that they never came to the surface at night either. She reread the front page article.
Yes, I 'm right, it's right here,
she assured herself, as if she hadn't written that article, herself.

They didn't come to the surface at night. Leslie wanted to believe it was the truth, but she knew that her sources could always be wrong. It was better not to take chances.
Stay quiet
, she told herself,
stay hidden
. It was the only way she would make it out of this alive.
Stay
quiet, stay hidden
. She had to be careful, everything was getting so crazy now, so fucking crazy.