“My sister’s kid loves the aliens,” one of her older friends said. She sounded stunned, as stunned as the rest of them. They had all read the posted blogs, they all knew about the discrepancies in the alien statements, and yet… learning that they might all be lies was shattering. “He was talking about joining the Witnesses after they set up a recruitment booth on campus.”
“I suggest you don’t say anything to your sister,” Jayne said, firmly. “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to follow the money; we’re going to find out who is benefiting from the alien presence and why. And then we’re going to try and figure out what they actually want on Earth.”
It had only been a few decades since the Soviet Union had tried to manipulate the Western media into convincing the West to let down its guard. Jayne had been a child when the Berlin Wall fell, but she’d heard about it in the years she’d studied journalism. So many had been profoundly shocked when Communism had fallen apart and its moral bankruptcy had been exposed for all to see. And so many had refused to believe the truth.
“And then…”
She shook her head. “God knows what we will do.”
Chapter Twelve
Near Mannington, Virginia
USA, Day 20
Toby was long gone by the time the Colonel returned from his wife’s grave.
His mind was spinning, both with the realisation that his country was under threat — and that his son had trusted him enough to bring him in on the counter-conspiracy. Maybe he hadn’t gone so badly wrong in raising Toby after all. The thought didn’t last long; if half of what Toby said was true, he’d endangered his old man and hundreds of other people. His entire clan of survivalists could have been targeted because Toby had unwittingly led the aliens right to their base. Not all of them had volunteered to be targeted by the aliens.
Night was falling rapidly and the stars were coming out. The Colonel remembered when his father had told him about the day they’d looked up and seen a Russian satellite crossing the heavens, high overhead. They’d felt naked that day; naked and defenceless, even though the Russian satellite was hardly dangerous. And now seventeen alien starships orbited the Earth, poised to do… what? The uncertainty was far more worrying than discovering that they were facing the Death Star; no one, but no one, knew what weapons the aliens might have to use against a defenceless world. It begged belief that they would be defenceless. The idealists might believe that the Galactic Federation was peaceful and war was a thing of the past, but the Colonel knew better. The key to survival was beating one’s enemies and he found it impossible to believe that the Federation had never had to go to war. If nothing else, they might have encountered a race so alien that communication was impossible and the only option was war to the knife. No one had any right to survive in an uncaring universe.
An object was moving across the heavens. The Colonel shivered, wondering if it was one of the alien starships — or perhaps the International Space Station, a bold effort dreamed up in the days before the aliens had taught the human race just how inadequate its imagination actually was. He stared at the blinking light, wondering if the aliens were looking back at him, before shaking his head and entering the farmhouse. The die had been cast the moment he’d agreed to allow Toby to speak to him and a handful of his most trusted associates. He could no more refuse to help form the resistance than he could refuse to serve his country in its hour of need.
Bob Packman met him in the sitting room. The others would have gone to eat — the Colonel’s daughter had promised them a feast and had been disappointed when Toby hadn’t stayed — but he’d waited for the Colonel. He looked haunted, his eyes constantly glancing around like a man with a guilty conscience — or a man who felt terrified beyond belief. The Colonel couldn’t blame him. The CIA trained its officers to look at the big picture and the big picture was terrifying. How could anyone hope to stick a spanner into the alien plan to take over the Earth? And what did the aliens really want?
“I’m terrified,” Packman admitted. The Colonel shrugged. He’d been terrified back in the Gulf, when Saddam had looked like a viable threat and the pundits were touting the Iraqi Republican Guard as the latest version of the Waffen SS. And then Desert Storm had rolled over the Iraqis and Saddam had survived by the skin of his teeth. The only thing preventing the Allies from removing his vile regime right there and then had been politics. “What do they want?”
The Colonel sat down beside him, ignoring the smell from the next room. A memory rose up inside his mind, mocking him. Every time she’d given birth, Mary had insisted on a full Thanksgiving dinner the moment she’d recovered enough to cook it. It might have been nowhere near Thanksgiving, but the Colonel had known better to disagree with her — and besides, she had cooked a wicked turkey. And then she’d died in childbirth and the Colonel had ordered the Turkey they’d bought for the feast thrown out, knowing that there was little to give thanks for. Mary had deserved better than to die giving birth to her youngest son.
“It isn’t what we prepared for,” Packman said, softly. “We told ourselves that when the Crash came, we’d run away up here and hide from the chaos. We had guns and ammo and food — enough to ensure that we lived through the first few months. And we told ourselves that the only things we had to fear was mutant zombie bikers and government agents coming to take our food to feed the starving grasshoppers from the big cities, the fools who depended on the government to take care of them. How we laughed when we thought about lynching the government agents, hanging the fools who tried to tell us that the Second Amendment didn’t apply to us — and standing in judgment over who we would let into our new paradise.
“We told ourselves that by running away and hiding, we would inherit the Earth,” he added. “And now there’s nowhere to hide. No hiding place down here.”
The Colonel didn’t disagree. In truth, there had always been a degree of fantasy surrounding survivalist preparations, but having the ability to imagine the disasters that might consume the nation was a vital part of the survivalist mentality. And running away and hiding? There were some disasters so great that the only thing one could do was bunker down and hide, waiting for the chaos to subside and the vast starving hordes to die off. The Colonel’s Christian faith told him to help the helpless, but not at the cost of one’s own chances of survival. And besides, he had no faith in the vast masses who depended on the government for their daily bread to behave when the government fell apart.
“Look at us,” Packman said. “We’re just as dependent upon modern society as the rest of the world — and that makes us vulnerable. Every single goddamn cell phone is a potential spy. Anything we post on the internet — anything we download from the internet — becomes something they can use to track us. They can probably slip into our databases and alter details as they see fit, making it impossible for us to even remember the truth. How can we fight when we can’t even trust our own weapons or memories?”
He shook his head. “They’re carrying out a goddamned soft coup and half of our population is probably quite prepared to welcome the New World Order,” he concluded. “And what’s going to happen to us then?”