They came for our dead Page 2

  Who’s the crazy one here? I wondered. Him, with all his delusions, or me, for listening to the insane old bastard?

  He went on, “They’ve got everything they need, infinite amounts of whatever they want, whether its rare elements, energy, or other vast resources. To them, we’re just backwater sewage, something akin to a second-grade experiment.”

  “Maybe they just want someone new to talk to. Maybe they want to investigate our culture. If they’re so great, maybe they’re just looking for someone to help,” I suggested, trying to sound optimistic for my father’s sake but not really feeling it at all.

  Mr. Wilson sneered, then took in a great quantity of air and spat it out as more laughter. It became clear to me at that point why the man failed at least three marriages and why none of his relatives bothered to visit him. It was likely that everywhere the fat little gnome went, he had to make sure he was the loudest and the smartest in the room. He seemed to have a razor-sharp intellect when it came to math or physics, but he lacked common sense and social graces, even basic articulation. I knew his work in national defense required him to know how fast a particular particle could travel in empty space, but he didn’t seem aware that his body reeked, that his clothes were in desperate need of a wash or two, and that his long, unkempt claws were overdue for a collision with a pair of nail clippers.

  Anger rose within me as he continued his laughing lecture. Why do the brilliant in one area think themselves superior to everyone else in all things? He was no better than my father or any of the other veterans there. He was lying, neglected and ignored, in a lockdown Alzheimer’s unit because whatever family he did have would not or could not take care of him. Mr. Wilson thought himself a genius, someone who had it all figured out, yet he was disheveled and filthy, stuck in a place he could not leave of his own volition, a man judged to be crazy by the rest of the world, a man who had to be medicated for his hallucinations.

  Again, the old know-it-all gestured to the television on the wall. “See that? Look at them, falling into formation. I don’t know what they want, and they certainly don’t need any pathetic thing we worms have got, but they sure as hell are comin’ down into the atmosphere!”

  I looked, aghast, at the TV screen. The lights were no longer just random specks in the sky; they were spinning, perfectly circular saucers of spotless, gleaming metal, descending ever closer to the surface of our Earth. There were hundreds of ships, and the TV station confirmed the brevity of the invasion by cutting to many similar scenes from all across the world, some cameras zooming in on them. Along the bottom of the TV screen, a ticker revealed plummeting stock market future for Monday, along with alerts coming out of Washington and other national capitals, informing the public that reserve troops had been mobilized and were on the move.

  “My God. It’s real. It’s really happening,” I muttered as we all three watched the TV on my father’s wall, enthralled and horrified all at once. “The whole world’s on fire.”

  “They are beings of pure science, all straight lines and high math,” Brian chimed in, sounding impressed. “They must be if they can travel such vast distances through the hard reality of space. For the life of me, though, I can’t figure out what they’re here for. What do they want with or from us lowly Earthlings, huh?” he asked rhetorically, grinning from ear to ear, enjoying the moment. He seemed very proud of himself, as if he thought he had solved the mystery before anyone else, before the so-called experts even had a clue. The rest of the world was terrified at what those flying discs represented, but those UFOs stoked Brian Wilson’s ego; for once, he had solved a complex science problem, all from the comfort of his veterans’ hospital bed.

  I, on the other hand, was rooted in place, glued to the black tile floor. I could not move as my mind struggled to figure out the motives of the visitor. If they don’t want or need us or our meager resources, then why are they here?

  “They’ve come for our dead,” Mr. Wilson exclaimed, as if he had heard my questioning thoughts.

  “What!? That makes no sense,” I replied, and I would have laughed at him if I wasn’t too terrified about the fast-moving infiltrators to conjure up even a slight smile.

  “Just think about it, son. Those beings are so far beyond us. They’ve defeated all disease, all crime. They’ve already figured everything out. I’m sure they’ve got unlimited power, too, and they can obviously go wherever they want, gallivant all over our universe and others. How many times have they passed by little ol’ Earth on their road trips? Surely they’ve been picking up our massive electromagnetic crap that’s been escaping this planet since the 1940s, seventy years of TV and radio, every year expanding at the speed of light away from our Earth, another six trillion miles. They could easily gather all that up, assess all of it in seconds. They know us, maybe better than we know our damn selves, and there’s only one thing we have that they don’t.”

  “Death?” I asked hesitantly, not sure I wanted to hear his ridiculous answer.

  “No. What they’re really after is our afterlife. No matter what religion you grab on to, or even if you have no religion at all, you can’t deny that when we die, we go on. The evidence is as old as our time itself, a continuous thread through all our legends, our myths, our fables and fairytales, our stories, our movies, our history. Down through the ages, it is the one theme that holds true, that there is something there after we die,” he said, then pointed to the screen. “They must not have that. When they die, they just end. They come for our dead because that is the only thing they lack. They want to go on after they die, to prolong their lives, and they have come here to fulfill that desire.”

  “But how is that even possible?” I asked, noticing that his breathing was labored and a nervous tic was causing the left side of his face to twitch uncontrollably.

  Mr. Wilson didn’t answer. He just looked out the window, craning his neck to watch something move by the window, something only he could see.

  Suddenly, a blaring, whirring sound came from the intercom in the hallway, a noisy alarm, and the lights and television started to flicker. Footfalls followed, running feet, then pounding on distant doors. Out the window, hordes of people were leaving the building, hurrying to their cars with panic-stricken looks on their faces, fumbling with their keys as they ran.

  “I-I don’t know,” Mr. Wilson finally replied. “I’ve not figured that part out yet. Maybe they’ll analyze us and use their advanced science to reason it out, to somehow reproduce and emulate our afterlife. Maybe they can reverse-engineer it, implement it into their existence or… Hey, sonny, tell me, wouldn’t you wanna do something like that if you could?”

  “Like what?” I asked, confused and too petrified to think clearly.

  “Don’t you wanna go on after you die, instead of your life just ending?”

  I gave my father’s hand a squeeze and glanced into the hallway. A lone nurse remained, jotting something down on a clipboard. I hurried out into the corridor and found no one else there. Back in the room, I ignored Mr. Wilson’s continuous rant and said to my father, “Dad, c’mon. Let’s pack your stuff and get outta here.”

  As I grabbed my father’s duffel bag and began stuffing his six hanging outfits in it, a distant humming sound wafted into my ear, getting louder by the minute.

  “Look!” Mr. Wilson yelled, pointing out the window near his bed. “There’s one now, a saucer, right above the tree line over there!”

  I walked to the wide window and raised the blinds. Several hundred feet away, a motionless saucer hung in the sky, hovering just above the tallest tree. It was completely silent, even though the wind around it was moving wildly, jerking the treetops from side to side. It had to be over 700 feet across and 60 feet tall, completely smooth and seamless, the metal so shiny that I had to look at it from an angle to keep from damaging my eyes from the glare. As I stared at it obliquely, the thing began to pulse in a bluish hue.

  “They doing that all over the world,” Mr. Wilson yelled, pointing at
the TV set.

  The new reporter was speechless, for once, as the video showed countless saucers lowering, stopping just a few hundred feet above the surface, pulsing with military precision, in perfectly choreographed synchronicity.

  “Based on the calculations of the experts,” the reporter finally announced, “each saucer appears to be approximately 300 feet above Earth, with about 120 feet between them. It appears they are forming a grid of some type.”

  School closings began to scroll across the ticker, and a special announcement was made by the president of the United States, announcing that martial law was officially in effect. “All non essential personnel should head home and stay there,” the president said. “More troops will be called in, as well as our National Guard.”

  Scene after scene of panicked chaos erupted on the TV screen, people running the streets, screaming and crying, looting and driving like maniacs, accidentally starting fires and wreaking havoc on friends and neighbors and co-workers.

  I froze with one of my dad’s shirts in my hand, absolutely uncertain of what we should do. When I found the courage to move again, I opened the door and looked left, then right down the corridor. The nurses’ station was still abandoned, and the main door that was almost always locked was wide open. The intercom continued to scream, so loud that I could not make out any other sounds or voices, but I did see several elderly patients stumbling about, some in small circles, like confused zombies.

  “Come on, Dad! Forget your stuff. We’re leaving. I’m taking you to my place.”

  “Wait!” Mr. Wilson said, rustling about behind the curtain on his side of the room. “I want to come too. Please don’t leave me here.” He frantically began stuffing dirty clothes and some of his dog-eared paperbacks into his pee-stained sheet, a makeshift knapsack. .

  “I’m sorry, but we’re not from around here and… Well, we just don’t have room for you,” I replied.

  He stood and stared at me in his filthy underpants and dingy white-gray t-shirt.

  I gathered up my father’s pictures and irreplaceable belongings and eased him out of the room, supporting his body as we slowly moved along. Behind us, Mr. Wilson followed, whining and complaining, trying to reason with us; for the first time, I was thankful for the blaring alarm, because it drowned out the sound of his voice and his pleading.

  When we finally stepped outside, the air was electric, so much so that I felt the hairs on the back of my neck and on my forearms stand at attention. It was a strange sensation, but even stranger was that everything in the close proximity of the flying disc was completely still. The cars beneath the alien craft were abandoned, as no one dared to get close enough to claim them.

  Crack!

  Suddenly, the air seemed to split beneath the saucer. A dark line appeared, three or four feet above the tallest blades of grass. The crack soon became a larger one, and it continued opening, till it formed a chasm.

  Slowly, I moved my father along, with Mr. Wilson in tow, and the three of us headed toward my car, which seemed insanely far away. I kept my eyes on the dark cavity that began to shimmer with a blackish power directly beneath the spaceship.

  Without warning, something emerged from the rift, something that smelled even fouler than the hallways of that facility. Death came with it, spoiling the air. The figure was humanoid but very dark. Monstrous claws adorned its hands, and its eyes were unearthly red as it leaned its head back and released a vile howl at the sky. Somehow, it bore expressions, conveyed emotions, but if it was ever human, all humanity had left it long ago. The earth and grass blackened beneath its feet.

  Mr. Wilson halted and dropped his belongings. “That’s no little green man,” he whispered, staring at it as several bags of candy, cans of Pepsi, and boxes of cookies and cigarettes fell onto the well-worn, cracked sidewalk.

  “What is that?” my dad asked. “What’s happening? Where, in God’s name, is your mother?”

  Without answering my father, since I really had no answers for him or anyone else, I just pushed him along, a bit more roughly than I intended. “Hurry, Dad! We just have to go…now!”

  “Wait!” Mr. Wilson suddenly yelled. “I know him! He was on my floor just last week, but he… It’s impossible. He died,” he said, pointing at the dark figure as, for just a moment, the face and body humanized.

  Almost instantly, the thing resumed its dark form, and it began wheeling toward us with the gait of a quick, shambling thing with animalistic tenacity and instinct.

  “What’s he doin’?” Mr. Wilson asked, staring at the creature, its arms akimbo and its mouth releasing a horrible, ear-piercing yell that overshadowed the noise from the saucer it charged.

  I opened the car and shoved my father into the passenger seat, fastened his seatbelt across his chest, then hurried to the driver side. I thrust myself into the seat and started the car, praying my ignition wouldn’t fail me as they always did in every horror movie I’d ever seen.

  Brian Wilson, meanwhile, had given up on trying to gather his worldly possessions that were splayed across the grounds. He was running now, with the creature only a few feet behind him. Not at all used to such excitement or exertion, he was panting and sweating profusely by the time he reached my vehicle, and he began to pound furiously on the window when he realized the doors were locked.

  Much to my dismay, the rift gave way to another creature, then another, and cruel howling filled the air. Somehow, the aliens were pulling the dead back among the living, allowing them to walk the Earth again. I imagined that macabre scene happening all over the world, hundreds or thousands of alien ships freeing multitudes of the dead from their graves. As for the reason, I had no clue.

  Even more unsettling than all of that was that the only guy who seemed to have it all figured out, even after the endless months of speculation, the twenty-four-hour debates and news reports, was mere inches from me, violently beating on my car window. Mr. Wilson’s glasses were steamed up from his frantic snorting, and his face was contorted and twisted in wild panic.

  Finally, I released the lock, and Mr. Wilson ripped the door open and climbed in. As he labored to maneuver his oversized body into the seat, it took a few seconds longer than it would have for most people, and that delay gave the predator all the time he needed. Mr. Wilson’s cries of agony nearly burst my eardrums as the thing grabbed his leg and shredded his flesh, spurting blood all over my car door. The vehicle rocked on its shocks as the man begged for mercy, his pleas falling on deaf, dead ears.

  I glanced over at my father, but he sat nonplussed, staring into space, oblivious to the mayhem happening around him and behind him. In fact, he was quietly whistling a happy song to himself, as if he was joyful to be freed from the facility and was eager to be reunited with his wife who was already dead, in a home he no longer owned.

  I shook my head at him, then opened my door and grabbed the tire iron from under my seat. The dead thing, consumed with its rage against Mr. Wilson, completely ignored me. I was sure it was feasting on him, draining his blood or some other such Hollywood nonsense, but it was really just raking him again and again with those long claws, tearing his body apart. Mr. Wilson fought with the strength of the insane, kicking at it with his good foot, hitting it with his hands and trying to close the door, fighting for his life, however pitiful it was.

  I crept behind the fetid thing’s back and nearly passed out from the stink. It was grotesque in every way; it looked as if particles were falling off it as it moved, leaving a trail of black dust in its wake. In brief flickers, a human face and body appeared, but the creature of dark nature occupied that space most of the time. I raised the iron over my head and brought it down with enough force to break any normal man’s back, but it didn’t move. Brian kept smashing it with the SUV door, doing his best to fend it off with his bloodied legs and arms, using the massive weight of his fat body to smash into it, but that only seemed to annoy the creature. Soon, it tired of Mr. Wilson’s antics and grabbed the door, scraping the metal
with what sounded like iron-hard talons. I brought the tire iron down again and again against its head, but it did not even seem to notice as it assaulted my vehicle, till the door groaned under the pressure and inhuman strength.

  “Just get in and drive!” Mr. Wilson shouted.

  I hopped back in the driver seat and threw the SUV into reverse. As I did, I heard the door being ripped off its hinges, and I saw it land some twenty feet away after the frightening being gave it a toss. The thing somehow held on to the vehicle and came again at Mr. Wilson, but I managed to swerve just in time to knock it loose and run it over. We were all delighted when crunching sounds came from my front tire, then my back one, and I ran over it once more for good measure.

  “I’m hurt real bad,” Mr. Wilson said with a whimper as I drove on and the excitement and adrenaline began to wear off.

  When we were what felt like a safe distance away, I pulled the SUV over and gave my stowaway a onceover. Mr. Wilson’s legs were bleeding, with severe laceration near his ankle. Dark lines appeared on his skin, slowly moving up his leg.

  “Hold on,” I said, then hurried to the back of the SUV. I quickly retrieved my first-aid kit, Dad’s old green Army blanket, and some plastic bags Sue and I planned to reuse the next time we went grocery shopping. I threw everything on the seat beside Mr. Wilson.