CHAPTER SEVEN
April 27, 2003?
Maybe?
I don't know for sure
what day it is. And I don't know what will happen next. I don't know
who's idea it was to go back. It might have been mine.
We know the truth at
last. Most of it anyway. The scariest part up until then had been not
knowing. And now that we know the truth, it's just the same. We
didn't know what was going on back in town, and that scared us more
than anything else.
I slept for a few hours.
I woke up with everyone talking quietly. The lights were doused but
our eyes had adjusted. Zack had come back inside. My guess was that
whoever was standing guard had dozed off, and we knew that we all
needed sleep.
As a matter of fact,
having someone sitting outside the fishing shack was probably more
suspicious than having it look the way it had for God knows how many
years.
I woke up with Jess still
stroking my hair. When she saw I was awake she stopped. Neither of us
said anything about it. The conversation came and went, with huge
gaps in between. We were still processing, I guess.
~oo00oo~
"What about the
Pyramids?" Pierce said suddenly.
Silence.
"What about the
Pyramids?" Jake asked, too exhausted to sound surprised.
Pierce started to explain.
"Well, I read this book once-"
"You read a book?"
Jake interrupted.
"Okay, I watched this
documentary once-"
"You watched a
documentary?" Jess interrupted.
"Fine, I channel-hopped
one night, and landed on the Discovery Channel." Pierce sighed.
"This guy seemed convinced that the Pyramids were too complex,
too advanced for a bunch of ancient guys with hand tools. He thought
that Aliens must have built the Pyramids. I thought he was nuts...
But now I don't know. What do you think?"
"I don't know, Pierce."
Jake sighed. "I really don't."
Long silence.
"What about Ghosts?"
Marie asked suddenly.
"Are you kidding?"
"When I was eleven
years old, it was Halloween, and I heard a creepy noise coming from
outside my window. I thought it was a ghost, or a vampire or
something. And my dad came into my room, and he sat me down and told
me that I was getting too old to believe in any of that stuff. He
said that no serious person believes in ghosts any more than they
believe in Santa Claus, or vampires, or Aliens from outer space."
Marie rubbed her eyes. "If Aliens exist... what about all the
other stuff?"
Jake sighed. "I don't
know."
Long silence.
"How is it possible we
didn't know?" Jess sighed. "I mean, how is it possible?"
She looked at Jake. "Stargazer, I've heard you go on for hours
about how unbelievably big
the universe is. If the odds were a trillion to one that there was
life on other planets..."
Jake nodded. "A
trillion to one odds? Space is infinite.
At a hundred
trillion to one odds, there'd still be millions of Alien species out
there."
"So why didn't anyone
say that maybe it wasn't
completely empty except for us?" Jess raged quietly. "How
arrogant can people be to say it was impossible?"
"Plenty of people said
it was possible, Jess. Everyone else laughed at them." Marie sat
up on her bed. "It's what Mayor Grady said when we first came to
him: Nobody who believes in aliens gets taken seriously. Any time
someone opens a sentence with the word 'UFO', people stop listening
because it seems like a joke to them. Any time it gets put on TV,
someone plays the Theme To Star Trek, and just like that it's a
sideshow instead of a news segment."
"Grady was a pilot. He
said that every serious pilot has seen something in the sky they
couldn't explain." Jake sighed. "But none of them talk
about it. Nobody wants a pilot that believes in Flying Saucers."
"Why not?"
"I have no idea, but
apparently Grady was very sure about it, even before this whole
conspiracy started, so I gotta assume there was a reason." Jake
said. "If an airline pilot said he saw a UFO, would anyone let
him fly hundreds of people across the world ever again?"
Silence.
"Before the Blockade
started, I looked it up." Pierce admitted. "The National
UFO Reporting Centre has their database online. They were getting
reports of anywhere between four hundred to eight hundred UFO
sightings per month. And that's just the USA, and part of Canada."
Jake looked over at him in
disbelief. "When did you... Why
did you look into it before the Blockade?"
"We were the ones that
found Doug Gunn. A kid shows up after being missing without a trace
for ten years, can't remember how to speak English and apparently
hasn't aged a day?" Pierce said it like it was obvious. "Sounded
like a sci-fi movie to me, so yeah... I looked it up."
"Why didn't you say
anything back then?"
Pierce smiled awkwardly.
"Because I knew everyone would laugh at me. Crazy teenager
looking to get attention by telling the world he found a kid abducted
by aliens."
Long silence.
"Eight hundred reports
a month?" Jess repeated finally. "And those were just the
ones getting reported."
"Most of them would be
hoaxes, or mistakes." Pierce offered. "UFO doesn't mean you
see Aliens, it means 'something in the air that you can't explain'."
"Yeah, but if 99% of
those eight hundred sightings a month were hoaxes or mistakes, then
its still an unexplainable sighting in the USA every four days."
Marie sighed. "Why didn't anyone take this seriously?" She
looked over. "Why didn't we
take it seriously, until it was happening to us?"
Long silence.
"We gotta know."
Jake said finally. "We can't wait it out here. The answers are
all back in town."
Long silence. After a
moment, everyone sat up. He had said the one thing they all agreed
with, and completely dreaded.
"I was thinking about
what Jake said, about how after flying a billion light years, they
stop at the edge of our little town?" Marie said. "It
occurs to me that maybe they didn't. We haven't heard or seen
anything from outside this town since the Blockade started."
"You think this is
happening in other places too?" Jess said wistfully, almost
laughing. "God, you could be right. We haven't heard from anyone
past the Bridge in forever... Can you imagine if there was a Dead
Zone around Washington? Paris? London? New York?"
Marie gave a crazed little
giggle. "I was born in New York, Jess. You know why we moved
here? Because my dad thought a small country town would be safer."
A mirthless cackle went
around the small shack.
"Let 'em try and take
New York." Marie declared, with a touch of the old Brooklyn
accent coming through. "I mean, just let'em try."
Another laugh answered her,
getting stronger. The laughter was a release of emotion.
"They may be tough back
on whatever planet they come from, but they're just another set of
tourists in New York City." Marie went on. "They won't make
it halfway down 21st street before they get mugged."
It was enough. The entire
room cracked up, filled with the hysterical laughter that came from
having reached the limit on tension and fear that people could handle
without finding some way to let it out.
"We gotta know."
Jake said again once it faded.
"He's right."
Marie said with a sigh. "We can hold out here until our food
runs out, but sooner or later the Greys will get done doing whatever
it is they're doing. And when that happens, who knows? And that's
assuming they don't come looking for us first anyway."
Jess reached out and took
the Gizmo off Pierce. "We've got this.
We could try and find our families, get them out of there. We can do
it now, because we know how to pop the Implants out."
This proved to be a popular
idea.
"Well, hold on."
Jake said. "That thing might... I don't know, but they can turn
off a truck, a house, all of it, at a moment's notice, what makes you
think one of their own toys will keep working? And even if they don't
kill it, there might be a battery or something, and we've been using
it a lot tonight."
"He's right. We're not
on solid ground here." Pierce agreed.
"It's going to be a
tough search." Zack sighed.
"It can't be that
tough." Jake commented. "The town's the size of a postage
stamp."
Zack turned to his friend.
"Town's pretty small, Jake. But if you're talking about
searching door to door, looking under every rock for people that may
not want to be found, to say nothing of the fact that we'll be doing
it all while trying to stay hidden from God knows what..."
There was a moment of
silence as they all considered that.
"Town got real big all
of a sudden, didn't it?" Pierce rose from his bunk and reached
into his bag for the map. "Okay. Let's apply a little
intelligence to this." He spread the map out on his cot. It
still had the marks, and the circle that he had drawn to mark the
Dead Zone.
Zack got up and came over.
"Well, I'm assuming our families are still in town..."
"Why are you assuming
that?" Jess asked.
Jake answered for Zack,
knowing him well enough to read his mind. "Because if they're
anywhere outside the Dead Zone there's no point looking for them, so
let's assume they're in town somewhere."
By this point, everyone had
gotten up and shuffled around the narrow space to get a look at
Pierce's map. "Grady and Tanner will be looking for us. We know
they've got the Town Hall..." Marie thought aloud. "What
else might they-"
"That's it!"
Pierce snapped his fingers. "That's what I've been missing."
He moved his hand over the map, sweeping the whole area slowly. "You
see how the circle was off centre? This side of town, the Dead Zone
includes a lot more open space, part of the river, some of the
farmland, yadda yadda?"
They looked at the map and
nodded.
Pierce went over to the
Fishing Shack's shelves and searched for a moment, coming back with a
pencil. "Jake, give me that diary of yours, I need an edge."
Jake handed it over. "It's
a Journal." He corrected.
Pierce used the edge of the
journal as a ruler, and drew a line from the top of the drawn
boundary of the Dead Zone to the bottom, then he drew a second line
flat across the widest point. A neat cross that pointed to the exact
centre of the Dead Zone.
It was the Town Hall.
"Well, I'm not really
surprised." Jake commented.
Marie snapped her fingers.
"Yeah, but that's not what he means!"
"It's not?" Pierce
and Jake said at the same time.
Marie nodded. "In fact,
Pierce just gave us exactly what we were looking for!"
"Of course I did."
Pierce said modestly.
"You have no idea what
she's talking about, do you?" Jess challenged him.
"No." Pierce
admitted. "But now when she says it, I already got the credit."
Marie grinned. "When
you want to give an area cell phone reception, where do you put the
Cell Tower to be most efficient?"
"In the middle of the
space you want to be affected." Jake answered, then snapped his
fingers. "That's it!"
Zack and Jess shared a long
suffering sigh. "I hate to break up the Brain Trust, but would
someone fill us in?"
"The Dead Zone isn't
drawn in a circle around the town, it's drawn in a circle around the
Town Hall. If the Hall was at the edge of town instead of the middle,
what do you want to bet that the mists would cut the place in half?"
"So... what are we
saying here?" Pierce asked. "The Dead Zone is... what,
being projected
from the Town Hall?"
"It makes sense."
Marie nodded. "The Town Hall is used by lots of people, but the
only two people who actually work there full time are the Mayor and
the Sheriff, both of which are in the Greys' pocket. They'd have the
run of the place."
"And if that's the
center of the whole mess, then that's where they're based from."
Jake finished.
"I don't know, Jake;
that's a long shot." Zack shook his head. "They're from
another planet, they could be based on the moon
for all we know. Like you said, a Cell Tower covers an area, but the
phone company isn't run from there."
"If anyone has a better
theory, speak now." Jake suggested to the whole room.
Long silence.
"Zack, I know you're
scared..." Pierce began.
"Damn right I am."
Zack nodded, matter-of-factly. "I mean... they're Aliens.
Honest-to-God, not-of-this-earth creatures.
If our families were here right now, they'd be saying that our safety
is the most important thing. They'd be saying that right now, we're
not being tracked, we're not being held prisoner, and we're out of
the firing line by being away from town. Our families would call that
a good thing. They'd say to keep it that way, rather than go running
back into the thick of it without any clue of what we're going to
find... or what we're going to do when we get there."
Nobody had an answer to
that, because every word was true.
"But I can't ask my
father what he thinks, because he's gone. They
have him." Zack continued. "They have all our families,
they have our whole town." He turned his gaze on Marie and Jake.
"And if you two think I'm going to hide under the bed while you
go off and try to get my dad back? I'm not brave, but I ain't that
selfish. I would just like us to have a plan."
Marie beamed, Jake smirked,
like he'd known that would happen all along, and Pierce and Jess look
embarrassed at having underestimated him.
"Okay." Jess said
finally. "So we gotta have a plan."
They all turned back to the
map and stared silently at it, as though a plan would emerge from the
paper and reveal itself to them.
"All right, look."
Pierce said finally. "We're assuming that we're not being
tracked because the Implants are gone. Maybe that works, maybe not.
Either way, five people are a pretty big group. We should split up,
come from opposite directions. If they could track their toys, they'd
have us by now. Even if they see us all coming, they won't know which
of us has the Gizmo."
"Twin offensives to
opposite ends of a defensive line. Make them think that one offensive
will have the ball while the other one gets it." Jess summed up.
"Add a forward pass from the quarterback and you've just
described the same trick you used when you played Arizona State."
"We won the game,
didn't we?" Pierce shot back.
"Hang on." Jake
raised a hand. "There might be an easier way. Mayor Grady went
ballistic when he realized one of us had stolen the Gizmo. Obviously,
whatever the Greys are doing, the Gizmos are needed."
"Well sure, if they're
after us, then that's what the Implants are about." Zack nodded.
"The Gizmo let us control the Implants... and make the people
who had them sleepwalk."
"We gotta think of a
better name for this thing." Marie sighed.
"So if they're using
the Mayor, and the Sheriff to work their plan... It would stand to
reason that they would have been issued Gizmos by the Greys."
Jess grinned, suddenly
realizing. "So if we can get another one, we can split up. And
if the Gizmo we've got does have a power source, then we have a
backup if it runs out."
Pierce's face hardened.
"That's my job. I'll take care of it."
Everyone glanced at each
other awkwardly. Pierce had just volunteered to take on his own
father.
"Two groups." Jake
said, getting them back on track. "Jess and I will take the
Gizmo we've got and try sneaking into the Town Hall."
Jess nodded.
Jake turned to the other
three. "You guys, you track down the Sheriff and see if he has a
new Gizmo. Pierce, he's your dad, and let's face it, you've got a
better chance of taking him than we do, so it'll be your call."
"What do we do if he
doesn't
have a new Gizmo?" Zack asked.
"Nothing heroic."
Jake told him, and pointed at the map. "All right. The Town Hall
sits at an intersection. If they're watching, they've got a straight
view up and down Main Street, as well as along the cross street.
Avoid the big streets, stick to the backyard routes."
"Why are we
going with Pierce?" Marie asked.
"I'll answer that one."
Pierce volunteered. "Because I won't let anyone else take on my
father without me, Zack won't go anywhere without Marie, Zack and
Marie are fighting about Jake so having him with them may be a
problem, and Jake and Jess are finally getting their act together and
making out like responsible teenagers so they're sticking together,
even at a time like this." Pierce said all this with a cool,
collected matter-of-fact tone. Everyone was suddenly staring at their
feet, looking awkwardly caught out.
"I was trying to... not
make that specific." Jake offered.
"Oh, I'm sorry, was
that awkward for anyone?" Pierce said smugly. "It's nice
being the only single guy on the team."
"I'm feeling good about
it too." Jess needled.
Despite the sniping,
everyone was grinning at each other. Fear had turned to electricity,
hesitation into action.
"All right, that's the
plan." Jake summed up. "But we should wait until morning
though. With the whole place under Curfew, anyone moving will be
obvious until-"
"Wait." Pierce
interrupted. He looked completely perturbed. "Something's
wrong..." He tried to think about it for a few moments before
realizing. "What time is it?" He asked suddenly, and
everyone just stared at him, not comprehending. The Footballer
started counting on his fingers. "Jake got the photo at two in
the morning... It took another half hour for you all to wind up in
jail. Another half hour for Zack to come get me. Another hour after
that for us to come back for you and get the Implants out of your
heads... We've been asleep or dozing for at least three hours..."
Jake looked at the others
and with one thought they all ran to the door. It was still night
sky, glowing with the same faint Aurora.
"Guys..." Jess
said, her voice oddly thin and strange. "Where's the sun?"
~oo00oo~
Of all the horrifying
things that had come and gone through my town this week, the sun not
coming up was the top of the list. We waited another couple of hours
to make sure, but Pierce was right: The Sun wasn't coming up.
It was impossible to
cover up, impossible to hide. Jess was right. Whatever the Greys have
been building to, it's happening today.
Tonight.
Soon. It's hard to know what to call a day without the sun.
But we decided to go back
anyway. We agreed that if we were going to get our families out of
danger, we'd have to do it quickly.
Truthfully, I think there
was another, deeper reason. Grady was right about one thing. We're
part of this town. It's not like Marie with New York. Small Towns are
tighter than that. We're part of Curtis Creek, but it's part of us
too. If Curtis Creek is facing disaster, we want to be there with it
when it does.
~oo00oo~
"Okay. Are we sure of
the plan?" Jake said calmly.
"We drive back into
town and split up before anyone sees us." Pierce said. "Then
I go play cops and robbers with my dad, while you and Jess go be
idiot heroes."
"There's gotta be a
better plan than that."
Jess was looking up at the
sky like she was expecting it to fall on her. "We can try and
find Tracy. If she's still in town after you got her Implant out,
then she probably knows what's been going on back there. People must
have noticed the Sky by now."
"Which means we gotta
hurry." Jake agreed, scribbling a final note quickly in his
Journal.
~oo00oo~
It's entirely likely that
we won't be coming back. I'm keeping the Journal in the fishing
cabin. In the event that I don't survive, this will still be here. If
you find it, then it means I am dead, or worse. If you're here, then
you probably know more about what happened to the town than I do.
I don't know if you'll be
able to find them, but please take this Journal to my family. Tell
them that I love them. If you can find them.
Jess kissed me before we
left. She's almost worth the whole damn thing.
~oo00oo~
They all climbed into the
Jeep, Pierce and Zack in the front, the others in the tray.
"All right."
Pierce went through their supplies again. "We're leaving the
clothes here. We've got wirecutters, assorted tools for the Jeep,
duct tape, three rolls of assorted fishing line and a flare gun from
the fishing shed, a pump action shotgun, three cartridges left, my
dad's backup service revolver, only six shots, no reloads... Pens,
notebooks, and fourteen matches."
"I can't believe you
counted the matches." Jess said with a smirk.
Marie held up a hand. "Hold
on. You hear that?"
Everyone froze, listening in
worry.
"No." Jess said
after a moment.
Marie was looking in the
direction of the road with a suspicious glare. "Damn. I think
I'm getting jumpy."
"Can't imagine why."
Pierce deadpanned.
"Now. A reminder."
Jake told them, not for the first time. "We can't risk taking
anyone along with us if they're marked. We don't know what we'll find
when we get back in town. We might need the help of someone or other,
but if they have an Implant, then The Greys have got them, no matter
where they go. We use the Gizmo sparingly, unless we can get another
one, preferably not at all until we find our families. Once they're
free, we can go nuts and spring the whole town if we can get away
with it... but before that, be cautious."
Everyone nodded.
"And guys, don't
forget." Jess told them. "Mayor Grady has an Implant too,
probably the Sheriff."
"I'll be good."
Pierce promised roughly.
"Wait!" Marie held
a hand up again. "I'm not imagining it."
They all listened. There was
a slight humming sound in the air. It was a sound none of them
recognized. The humming intensified a moment, and a shape became
visible above them, drawn against the green glow. It was flat and
round, and was made of a material so dark that it seemed to draw
light into it. It moved through the air with a hum, still very quiet
for an aircraft, and it shone a light down on the ground. The light
was aimed at a point none of them could see, at least a hundred feet
from the shack. The light was flat and moved back and forth, more
like a scan than a spotlight. By it's glow, they could all see a
strand of trees in the distance.
The humming faded into
silence, and the craft moved silently toward the trees, before
scanning its light over the shack. They all ducked away from the
light instinctively, but had nowhere to run. The craft didn't seem
that interested in them.
Without making a sound, the
craft moved toward the trees.
Dead silence.
"Get away from the
shack." Jake hissed. "Get away from the shack. Get away
from the shack. Get away from the shack. Get away from the shack. Get
away from the shack!"
Pierce dropped the Jeep into
gear and floored it, driving away from the small fishing shack as
fast as he could while keeping every light off. They headed in the
opposite direction from the shack and Pierce found a place to hide,
pressed against another tree with low hanging branches. From the air,
they were out of sight, but nobody was willing to say they were safe.
"Get out of the Jeep!"
Pierce said sharply, and everyone bailed out, grabbing their packs
and running down to the edge of the water. There were tall grasses
and taller reeds, and if they spread out, they'd be less obvious.
"That was a flying
saucer!"
"It's only five feet
across. Gotta be a drone or something!"
"Maybe it's bigger on
the inside."
"Oh please, this is
reality!"
Away from the Shack, they
had a clearer view of the sky, and saw the Saucer come back around.
It didn't move like an aircraft, or even a helicopter. Aside from a
very few lights around the centre, it was completely featureless.
Even after everything he'd
seen that night, Jake felt a chill go straight up the back of his
neck. The Saucer was iconic. Every movie, every cartoon with Aliens
in it... at some point there was a Flying Saucer. The creatures were
real. The stories were real. The blurry internet photos that everyone
laughed at were real. And they were not stories that had happy
endings for everyone. The five of them pressed against the ground and
trees, quietly
sobbing,
trying to be invisible.
The Saucer hovered, and
hummed again, before another spit of gleaming red fired down, this
time much further away, closer to the stream. It fired again, and
again. There was an explosion, out of sight but only a hundred feet
away, toward the base of the trees it had scanned. Jake saw the shape
and the sound of it, and realized it was a bigger, heavier version of
whatever the Greys had been firing at him earlier that night.
"It's not shooting at
us!" Jess hissed. "It's just... here. I think it's hunting
something else."
"Or someone."
Pierce observed. There was a tiny moment of hesitation, and he was
suddenly up and running toward the scene of the explosions.
"Pierce, don't be
stupid!" Jake hissed, but a moment later he was off and running
too.
"What the hell are they
thinking?" Jess demanded.
Marie shook her head grimly.
"They're thinking that if there's something upstream that the
Greys want dead, we might want it alive."
The Saucer hovered over the
site of the explosion for a moment, before turning and gliding away
smoothly, back in the direction of the town... when suddenly, from
the site of the explosion, something rose quickly. Something was
firing back at the Saucer-Drone. Everyone ducked, waiting to see what
it was, but if the sound hadn't tipped them off, the familiar flash
of light and color made it all too clear.
It was a firework. It
flashed up from the ground like the rocket it was, aiming for the
Saucer... and it missed completely. The rocket exploded into a shower
of light, low enough to startle everyone, high enough that the Saucer
wasn't knocked off target. Bright green sparks skittered off the
Saucer's hull harmlessly and faded to nothing.
"Fireworks? Really?"
Jake hissed.
"It's Curtis Creek,
Jake." Marie hissed back. "Where exactly do you buy a
grenade launcher around here?"
The Saucer was apparently
feeling a little more confident now, and came lower as it set up for
the next shot. In that instant, another blast came up from the
ground. First one rocket, then two, and in quick succession, almost a
dozen. They were fired tight enough together that it covered a wider
area, in the same way as a flak cannon. The Saucer was struck. Once,
twice, enough that when the rockets exploded, the Saucer was caught
in the blast, nearly flipping over.
Pierce was up and running
immediately, the shotgun in his hands. For whatever reason, the
others decided to chase after him.
One more firework came up
and caught the reeling Saucer-Drone dead centre. It didn't bounce off
or explode on impact. Instead, this one stuck to its target, lodging
in the metal skin. The charge erupted, knocking the drone down out of
the sky.
The blast was bright enough
in the unnatural night that Jake was blinded for a long moment. He
slowed to a stop, trying to rub his eyes clear, when he heard
Pierce's voice. "That last one was a lucky shot."
"Ha!" A sharp
voice snapped back. "Luck! I make my own luck!"
Jake grinned, relaxing a
little as he recognized the voice. "And your own Fireworks."
He called as his vision cleared. "And now I know why."
Maggie Gunn stalked out of
the trees. Her wild hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was wearing
camouflage clothes and her usual crocodile skin boots. A rifle was
cradled in her hands, and she had a large collection of homemade
fireworks strapped to her back. "Funny thing." She called
jovially, as she strode toward the crashed Saucer. "But when you
start phoning gun-shops for Anti-Aircraft guns? You get noticed by
ATF, the FBI, and at least a few other three letter crowds. I had to
go out of town to find one of these."
She hefted the rifle. "Making fireworks is the only way I could
arm up."
"We thought you were
outside the blockade." Jess commented as they all gathered
around the wreckage. "Nobody's seen you since the day everything
went offline."
Maggie nodded. "I've
got a small shack just inside Town Limits. I've been laying low.
Doug's with friends of his mother. They'd be better parents for him
than I would anyway." She kicked aside bits and pieces of the
flaming debris with the toe of her croc-skin boots, before spitting
on the metal and turning away from it pointedly. "I figured
sooner or later they'd try something."
"You've known about
this, then? What they're planning?"
Maggie nodded. "They're
shrimping for us. The boat is here to scoop up the quota."
Jake reacted. "'Quota'
is the word Mayor Grady used. What do they want us for?"
"Who knows?"
Maggie shrugged. "Maybe they want workers, maybe they want lab
rats, maybe they want hamburger meat. Either way, they picked their
time and place."
"Why here?" Pierce
demanded.
"Why not?" Jake
answered him. "Remember what we were talking about the night
Doug showed up. If you were going to pull off an invasion or a raid,
why not pick a place that's isolated? They cut off the radio and the
road, and just like that we were at their mercy. In Washington, or
London or whatever, we'd have laboratories, big populations, military
reservists... hell, military bases even. Curtis Creek? Nice out of
the way spot they can play with."
Maggie nodded. "Yup.
They were here years ago, looking for places like this. They don't
need much, and they weren't in a hurry. This place was everything
they needed."
"I don't get it."
Marie thought aloud. "If they eat meat, why not snatch a lot of
cows? It'd be faster. If they need workers... if they can handle
space flight then surely they can build robots or something..."
"Maybe they don't like
robots?" Pierce guessed, and they all just looked at him.
"What?" He said defensively. "Who knows what these
things would care about?"
Jake turned back to Maggie
and shared what they knew. "Eddie Sisko had a list of who had
been Implanted and who hadn't. He figured about a third of the town
was still free."
"Could be." Maggie
nodded. "I only saw the trackers once, but I'd bet that number
is smaller than a third. Sometimes the trackers don't take. I have no
idea why, but they don't. Just sometimes. If Eddie was able to find
that many of the 'unmarked', you know the Greys will too."
Jess took in the whole
conversation and asked the only question that she cared about. "Is
my family alive?"
Maggie snorted. "Kid,
your family delivered themselves up like a free lunch. Drive-Thru,
from what I hear. You don't fish, but when a half-decent fish jumps
into your boat by itself, you don't send it back just to be
sporting."
"So you've known about
this for ten years." Marie challenged Maggie. "You got a
plan?"
"I don't exactly know a
lot."
She snapped. "But I've had ten years to get things together,
think it through. Here's what I figure. Their... devices, their
energies,
need a power source."
"How do you know that?"
Jake asked.
Maggie reached into her pack
and pulled out another Gizmo, identical to the one the kids had. The
five of them stared at the older Gizmo, almost buggy eyed. "Because
that thing stopped working after a few weeks. The Implants, the
Blockade, the Signal Jammers... they can be left on their own for a
while, but they wear out. The same thing happened when my family got
taken. We were stuck for a while after they left. But sooner or
later, it all faded out and everything went back to normal." She
waved at Pierce's Jeep. "That thing still work?"
"Yes." Pierce said
carefully.
"Good!" Maggie
growled eagerly. "Because I've lost my wheels thanks to that
damn Saucer. I got a lot of homemade explosives hidden near the
creek, and I intend to ram them all straight into the heart of this
thing."
"The Town Hall."
Pierce breathed.
"Oh good, you spotted
that too." Maggie grinned like a crocodile. "It was a
pretty good guess, but I like to have someone check my work."
Jake looked back and forth
between Maggie and Pierce. The two of them both seemed charged and
eager, ready to go inflict some destruction.
"Not to put a damper on
this, but... Aren't there people in town?" Marie offered. "You
know, people who might get caught in the middle of a great big
explosion going off in the middle of things?"
Maggie sent a swift gaze to
the sky toward town. It glowed green, and was starting to boil and
ripple, as though a windstorm was whipping the Aurora around. "Not
for long!" She growled sharply. "Let's get to work!"
~~/*\~~~~/*\~~~~/*\~~