He closed the email without replying. As the weeks rolled on, there was less and less to say. In his head he knew he was doing the right thing, that he was standing up for the faceless masses who didn’t trust their governments, their police, their military. He was preserving a cultural touchstone that wouldn’t come again in his lifetime, in his children’s lifetime . . . perhaps in all the human lifetimes to follow. It was important. In his head he knew that, but in his heart, he was just a man who desperately missed his family.
And if he left this place to see them, he would never be allowed to return.
George rubbed at his face.
It was time to check on the children.
He left his room. The guard turned sharply on one heel, knowing where George was going and leading the way without being told. George followed, amazed as always that this had all begun with one simple phone call.
George finished his call. Or, rather, the call finished for him when the signal dropped. The bars vanished and didn’t return. He was pretty sure he’d given good directions before he’d been cut off. If so, he would find out soon enough.
Through the hull’s cracks, the wind eased from a howl to a moan. The storm died down, like all storms do.
He heard Toivo arguing with Bernie. George couldn’t make out the words. Toivo sounded pissed. Maybe he was campaigning for the others to join him, to murder the children.
Exactly how far was George willing to go to stop that from happening?
“Don’t know what to do,” he said.
The children didn’t answer.
“You guys are a big help.”
The words turned to white as they left his mouth.
Temperature dropping. Winter’s fist was slowly squeezing tight around the wreck, snatching away what heat remained.
The children . . . they were shivering.
From the cold? Maybe. Or, maybe, from fear.
He terrified them.
Which was fine, because they terrified him.
A human shape that could never be mistaken as actually human. Two arms and two legs, but thin, so thin, tree branches come to life with fluid motion. Black eyes — three, not two — set in heads too big for the deathcamp-skinny bodies. And those mouths . . . George did all he could not to look at their mouths.
An hour passed.
A banging on the door. The sound reverberated through the room, bounced off the twelve crash chambers, or shock seats, or whatever the capsules were that had kept these children alive while their parents had been turned into paste. The children flinched at the sound, huddled together, made noises that sounded frightened and pathetic.
George unslung his rifle. He held it nervously in both hands. He thought of slinging it again — was he going to threaten his lifelong friends or something? The pounding came again. George decided to hold onto the weapon.
He pushed the door open.
There stood Toivo and Jaco. Toivo, who had already executed one of the children, and Jaco, little Jaco, who had shown more bravery than George and the others combined.
“Give me your phone,” Toivo said.
George didn’t move.
Jaco stared past George, at the children. He hadn’t seen them yet. The man seemed oddly calm in light of the situation. George wondered if Jaco wanted to kill them, just like Toivo did.
“The phone,” Toivo said, holding out a hand palm-up. “Bernie’s phone ain’t got shit for signal. Mister Ekola isn’t doing great, we need to try and get help.”
George nodded absently. “Already called someone,” he said.
That caught Jaco’s attention. “Who?”
“Ambulance,” George said. “That’s part of the deal.”
“What deal?” Toivo said.
George was suddenly unsure if he’d given enough info before the call cut off. Did they know where to go?
“I had a signal but it’s gone,” George said. “I made a call. Help is coming.”
Toivo’s eyes hardened. “For the last time, Georgie — give me your phone.”
Any pretense of friendship had evaporated. Three decades they had known each other, come here every year to reconnect, shared all the experiences life had to offer. It was all gone. If George had raised his rifle as Toivo had, if, together, they had slaughtered these helpless beings, that friendship would have been strengthened beyond any measure — but George had chosen otherwise.
He pulled the phone out of his pocket and handed it over. Jaco and Toivo huddled over it as if it had a secret warmth that might chase away the encroaching winter.
“No bars,” Toivo said. He looked at Jaco. “And it’s almost out of power, eh? What are we gonna do? How do we get Mister Ekola to da hospital?”
Jaco stared at the phone for a moment, perhaps hoping for a connection to suddenly appear. He shrugged.
“I dunno, eh? Maybe we can see if da snowmobile made it through da explosion?”
The three men — and the eleven alien children — fell silent. In that void, the sound of the wind, dying even further, from a moan to a whisper. And through that whisper, another noise. The faint, growing whine of a distant siren.
Jaco and Toivo looked at George.
“You called an ambulance?” Toivo said.
George nodded.
Jaco shook his head. “There’s a fucking alien invasion, and you got an ambulance to come out to da middle of nowhere? How? And da roads are snowed shut — how did you pull this off, Georgie?”
George shouldered his rifle. He felt nervous without it in his hands, naked, as if his friends might suddenly aim and fire, taking more innocent lives. He glanced at his friends’ weapons, at them, until they got the hint. The attitude of both men had changed: Somehow, George had got help for the man who had raised them all.
They both slung their rifles.
“Let’s get outside,” George said. “It will take us at least thirty minutes to hike back to the cabin. We need to be there when they come, or they might drive on by.”
George would later learn that the alien attack had failed within the first twelve hours. Ships had appeared out of nowhere over the skies of the biggest cities in the most-advanced nations: Beijing, New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Mumbai, Berlin and more.
Trouble was, the most-advanced nations had the most-advanced militaries. Air-to-air missiles blew flying saucers out of the sky, turned them into flaming wrecks that plummeted into the cities below. Some US pilots said it was like shooting down a space shuttle — a target that couldn’t dodge, that exploded easily and spectacularly. Others used more colloquial terms: It was like shooting flaming arrows at hydrogen-filled fish swimming in a barrel of jet fuel.
Maybe the plan had been to take out the strongest first, in hopes that the weakest would then surrender. Whatever the reason, it turned out that the great military minds of the attacking aliens weren’t that great. Some guessed they weren’t military at all. Sociologists theorized that the invasion was more religious than military in nature, that it was more the covered wagons of armed civilians crossing the great plains than it was the landing craft of D-Day.
One thing seemed certain: The ships that attacked were not built for battle. Now it was assumed that the aliens had gone to war with what they had, because they had no place else to go. The children were proof that their species could breathe just fine on Earth. After some trial and error, they were able to safely eat many kinds of food. The aliens, so the theory went, had to abandon their own planet, and Earth was the only place they could reach.