Tennet said, “You would be surprised what They can cover up.”
I said, “You call off the planes, and he’ll let you go. No charges. You get out of the country, change your name and go retire in Argentina like Hitler.” I looked at Falconer and said, “Right?”
Falconer said, “Yep. Absolutely,” in a way that did not convey an ounce of sincerity.
To the spacemen behind us, Tennet said, “On the count of three, if he does not release me, start shooting. If you can get him over my shoulder, that would be nice. But if you have to shoot through me, so be it. This is bigger than me.”
Falconer withdrew his arm from around Tennet’s neck, grabbed something small and black from a pocket and held it in front of Tennet’s face.
“Do you know what this is, shitbird?”
I didn’t, but Tennet nodded.
“And you know what happens if I push this button?”
Tennet didn’t answer. But he knew, and didn’t like it.
“Yeah, I know more than you fucking thought, don’t I?”
To me, Falconer said, “Look to your right. See that big-ass monster truck thing with the huge wheels? We’re all going for a ride.”
Falconer put an arm around Tennet’s neck and dragged him toward the vehicle that did in fact look like an armored monster truck. Amy and I followed. John took off the other direction, then came running back with the furgun. Through all of this, the spacemen kept their weapons trained on us, waiting for an order that never came.
To John, Falconer said, “Can you drive this thing?” and before he finished the word “thing” John was already behind the wheel. Falconer forced Tennet into the passenger seat at gunpoint, then took the backseat so he could keep his gun pressed to the back of Tennet’s skull. I went around and slid in next to Falconer, Amy jumped in beside me and slammed the door. John made the engine of the monster truck rumble to life, and a hundred miles away a seismologist saw the needle on his machine twitch.
Amy mumbled, “I cannot imagine the penis of the guy who designed this thing.”
John said, “Where to?”
Falconer answered, “Right down there, past the barricades. Inside the blast zone. Let’s see if that motivates this asshole to pick up this radio and call off the planes.”
With no hesitation, John rumbled down toward the area that was about to be bombed into scorched rubble. Somewhere, the ghost of Charles Darwin smiled and lit a cigar.
16 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
There was a road. John did not take it. He tore diagonally across the cornfield, tearing through broken cornstalks toward the mass of angry humanity at the Highway 131 barricade.
The spacemen were winning. There were a lot of them, and they had taken cover behind their vehicles, rattling gunfire into the crowd. We rolled to a stop just short of the mayhem. I heard a stray bullet ping off the grill of the truck.
To me, Falconer said, “Watch this.” He told John, “You see that button there, marked ‘loudspeaker’? Punch that. Turn that volume knob all the way to the right.”
John did. Falconer pulled the little black box from his pocket.
“Open the mic. Click the—yeah. Hold it there.”
Falconer reached up toward the mic mounted on the console and pressed a button on his little gadget. I could almost hear the noise the little gadget made. In the cab of the monster truck it felt more like an irritating vibration, like if you pulled a long strip of crinkled aluminum foil between your teeth. I saw Amy wince.
But the effect on the spacemen was immediate. They flinched, or fell to a knee, or dropped their guns. Some collapsed entirely. The longer the tone played, the more debilitating the effects.
Several of them turned their guns on the truck and opened fire, bullets plinking off the armor and leaving white bird shit–like pockmarks in the bulletproof windshield. Then the spacemen charged the truck. One of them climbed the front bumper, and I realized he had found the loudspeaker on the roof. Others reached the doors and clawed at the handles. I flinched at the sound of something crashing against the window next to me, and saw a spaceman rearing back for another blow on the glass with the butt of his rifle. He slammed it again, and made a crack. Amy ducked.
Meanwhile, the guy on the hood was going after the loudspeaker, smacking it with the butt of his own rifle. But none of the men had a fraction of their usual strength. Falconer kept his thumb on the death buzzer, and the spaceman collapsed onto the hood, landing right in front of the windshield, his faceplate shattering with the impact.
Amy gasped.
Two open, dead eyes looked back at us. The eyes were different colors, one brown, one blue.
The rest of the face was gone. What was left was a skull, held together with pink tendons and ribbons of fraying, decaying muscle. Running all through the skull, twitching between the gaps in bone and sinew, were ropes of something that looked like spaghetti, twisting and pulling and, I was sure, reaching down through the ruined body of the former man inside, operating him like a puppet.
The spaceman outside my door had also collapsed—the ground around the truck was now littered with them. Falconer let off the buzzer. The battle had gone silent.
The mob on the other side of the barricade was frozen, baffled by what they were seeing. They weren’t even celebrating. Even if it meant winning the battle, this was a group of people who absolutely did not feel like seeing any more weird bullshit today.
Amy opened her door and yelled to them, “We’re the good guys! Don’t shoot!”
John said, “Look! What the hell?”
Something was going on with the face of the dead spaceman on the hood of the truck. One of his eyes was twitching. Then the eye started pushing forward out of his skull, oozing out like a snake. The other eye did the same.
Amy said, “What? What is it?”
Out from the spaceman’s dead skull crawled two spiders, each as thick as a bratwurst, each covered in tiny legs, each ending in a single, lidless, human eye.
From outside the truck, I heard glass breaking. Faceplates on dead spacemen were cracking and bursting open. Out from each crawled a pair of the eye spiders.
John yelled, “OH FUCK! TENNET TELL THEM TO BOMB THIS! RIGHT HERE! NOW! SHIT!”
The spiders raced through the grass, toward us. And there was Amy looking right at them, out of her open door, because she couldn’t see them.
I lunged across her and pulled her door closed right as one of the spiders leaped, wedging itself into the gap at the last second before I could get it all the way closed. Amy screamed, because now she could see it, now that the thing was writhing in the gap of the partially closed door a foot away from her face. Its legs were thrashing as it frantically tried to press its way inside, the single, human eye twitching, looking all around the cabin of the truck.
The hood man’s eye spiders had crawled onto the windshield. Others had joined them, the skittering parasites hopping onto the truck, running across the hood and windows. Soon a dozen disembodied human eyes were staring in at us, hungrily looking for new skulls to occupy.
They skittered over to Amy’s door, toward that few inches of gap the first spider was holding open with its body. They crowded around and started forcing their way in, a mass of disembodied eyeballs on black parasite bodies. I pulled with all my strength, trying to crush the little bastards. But they were too well armored and I wasn’t strong enough.
One finally pushed its way in, flipping onto Amy’s lap. She shrieked. Another followed it. Then it was a torrent of the squirming creatures, pouring into the cab of the truck.
One leapt at John’s face. He caught it, cursing.
Falconer, who couldn’t see the invaders but who could easily guess what was happening, yelled, “OPEN THE MIC! OPEN THE MIC AGAIN!”
John, fighting with the parasite trying to burrow into his face with one hand, found the loudspeaker button with the other. Falconer pressed the button on his gadget. The hum filled the air. The spiders shrieked.
One by one, they exploded, splattering the interior in a spray of yellow goo.
Finally, the pained shrieks died, and all that was left was the soft drumming of the rain.
I wiped eyeball spider guts off my face.
John said, “Seriously, just, right here. All the bombs. Right here in this spot. We’ll wait.”
I said, “I agree.” Amy was too traumatized to say anything at all.
But to John, Falconer said, “We’re running out of time. Drive.”
He did.
12 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
John rolled over bodies of spacemen—going out of his way to do it, it seemed—and rolled past the carnage of the pitched battle that had been raging just minutes ago. He knocked aside REPER vehicles and pushed through the damaged barricades on the highway. The mob in front of us fell silent, parting as we rolled slowly into town, into the blast zone of the bombs that even now were riding in the bellies of planes just over the horizon.
“That’s far enough.”
John stopped, and Falconer yanked Tennet out of the truck. He reached back into the cab and grabbed the mic for its radio and pulled it as far as the little coiled wire would let it. Falconer put his gun to Tennet’s head and said, “All right, shitbird. This is ground zero. They drop those bombs, you get flash fried just like the rest of us. Now get on this radio and tell them to abort.”
Tennet looked at him with genuine disdain. “What you are threatening me with is the best-case scenario if I fail in my task. How are you failing to understand this?”
A huge, blue, extended-cab pickup truck emerged from the crowd in front of us. It had a wood chipper in the bed, and out from the driver’s seat stepped a guy in a cowboy hat and absurdly tight pants. From the passenger seat emerged Owen, still in his quarantine-issued red jumpsuit. The cowboy had a shotgun, Owen had his pistol. They looked like the stars of an eighties’ era show about loose cannon undercover cops. Called something like O-Funk and the Cowboy. From the backseat of the pickup stepped Dr. Marconi. I tried to imagine the conversation the three of them had on the way over and my brain just spat out error messages.