Arrival Read online

  “He might be human,” Chloe said, “but I think normal is pushing it.”

  “Okay… I guess,” Luna said, putting her chair down. She opened her eyes wide so that Phil could see. “Look, human.”

  “How?” Phil said. “I thought… I thought they got everyone but me.”

  “We escaped,” Kevin said. “We managed to get outside. How did you survive, Phil?”

  The researcher had been one of his favorite scientists, but Kevin wouldn’t have guessed that he would be the one out of all of them to come through this in one piece. Phil was too slow, too big, too nice, too… everything, really.

  “I managed to get down into the bunker,” Phil said. “I hid, and shut down as many of the systems as I could so that they wouldn’t guess that I was there. I had to wait while they… changed everyone else.”

  He hesitated over the words, looking away with what seemed like shame.

  “I should have been able to help them,” Phil said, “but if I opened the door, they would have gotten me too. I couldn’t even call for help. The aliens who are controlling our people aren’t stupid, even if the people they take seem that way. I’m pretty sure they monitor for signals and signs of life, so that they can hunt down survivors. That was why I came upstairs. I thought it might be looters going through, turning things on. I thought they would attract… them again.”

  Kevin didn’t like the thought that just turning the computer on might have started to call controlled people down on them like moths drawn to a flame. A part of him even wanted to rush around and turn every screen off, but they couldn’t. They needed to do this.

  “If you escaped,” Phil said, “what did you do next? What are you doing here?”

  “I hid in one of the other bunkers,” Kevin said. “You showed me a map, remember?”

  “You managed to find one?” Phil said. “But you’re back here?”

  “There’s another signal,” Kevin explained.

  Phil paused for a moment, but he’d worked with Kevin as much as anyone when it came to the alien messages. He must understand what it meant.

  “It has to be from the ones who tried to warn us,” he said.

  Kevin nodded. “That’s what we think. I know the coordinates for the signal, but we can’t get into the computer. I don’t have a password.”

  “I do,” Phil said, “but it’s not that simple.”

  Luna frowned at that. “What’s so complicated?” she asked. “You start up the computer, point the telescopes the right way, and we get the signal.”

  “Which would be fine if these terminals were still connected to outside sources,” Phil said. “I disconnected them all to make sure that the controlled people wouldn’t come here again, and anyway, haven’t you noticed that TV and radio and things aren’t getting any signal?”

  Chloe didn’t look happy about that. “So you’re saying we came all this way for nothing? I told you we should have gone to LA.”

  Kevin did his best to ignore the feeling that she might be right. If even Phil thought they couldn’t get the signal, then was there any hope?

  “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” Phil said. “But we’ll need to pretty much rebuild the system. I’ll need cables, and linkages… and we’ll need to boost the connection. If only I could understand exactly how the disruption is happening…”

  “It’s not just the aliens jamming it?” Chloe said.

  Phil shrugged. “I’m not sure it is. They’re obviously tracking communications, but I think it’s more than that.”

  “Wouldn’t the fact that their ships are there affect things?” Kevin suggested. “Wouldn’t they… I don’t know, be in the way or something?”

  Phil smacked his palm against his skull. “Of course. Sometimes it’s the most obvious things. They have a large ship in orbit, right?”

  “And a kind of medium-sized one hovering over the city,” Luna put in.

  “Which means that there’s no path for a satellite signal,” Phil said. “But if we reroute everything so it’s jumping from tower to tower…”

  Kevin kind of stopped understanding it there, but he knew that Phil was clever enough to build robots for fun and hack the building’s computer systems. If anyone could do this, it was probably him.

  “Is there anything we can do to help?” Kevin asked.

  “If I make a list of parts, do the three of you think you can help me to find them all?”

  “We can try,” Kevin said.

  Phil wrote his list. It was longer than Kevin expected, and he wasn’t sure he knew what all the things on it were. Luna seemed to get it, though, racing ahead of him and Chloe as they tried to salvage lengths of cable and pieces of machinery.

  “This is a lot of stuff,” Chloe said. “Do you really think he can make the computers work?”

  “I think he might be able to,” Kevin said. “I trust Phil.”

  “It must be nice, being able to trust people,” Chloe said.

  “I trust you,” Kevin said.

  “You shouldn’t,” Chloe said. “I ran out on your bunker. I’m… I’m just a mess. I’m not a nice person.”

  “You managed to get the truck working,” Kevin pointed out, “and you agreed to come here with us. We wouldn’t be here without you, Chloe.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Chloe said. She didn’t sound convinced. “I’m glad I came with you.”

  They kept hunting for parts, stealing pieces of cabling wherever it didn’t look as though it would make a difference. Kevin guessed Professor Brewster would not be happy about the vandalism, but if he was ever back to himself enough to complain about it, that probably counted as a good thing.

  They took the parts to Phil, so that gradually he was surrounded by them, a small island in the midst of a sea of repairs. He worked with crimps and a soldering iron, fastening together the components they brought in a tangle that didn’t look as though it could ever work.

  “Right,” he said. “I think we’re ready.”

  He flipped a switch and looked up expectantly, as if anticipating that the screens would spring into life. Kevin looked up in hope too, but the screens remained blank. Nothing happened.

  “Damn it… wait, let me try this…”

  The screens flickered back to life, and now Phil was typing.

  “I need to send the signal relay to relay,” he said. “We’ll have to work with a different set of telescopes, but if I piggyback through spare server space… got it!” A window opened on one of the screens, and Phil looked over at Kevin. “Do you have the coordinates?”

  Kevin repeated them without having to hesitate. They were bright on the inside of his mind, there when he needed them. He watched Phil input the numbers on the screen, and the words “telescope realigning” flashed up on the screen.

  “I’m going to adjust things so that any signal comes through the speakers here,” Phil said. “I’m not sure the system would survive sending it to the room you used to translate things in, given everything I’ve had to botch together.”

  Kevin waited, gripping onto the side of one of the desks, hoping this would work. Then it did.

  The signal spilled out of the speakers, and words came into Kevin’s head. He knew at once that this wasn’t the aliens who had invaded; it had the warmer, more emotional tone of the ones who had tried to warn them. He translated them almost without thinking about it, speaking the words aloud so that the others could hear.

  “This will be the last signal we are able to send,” Kevin said. “They are closing in, and so we must try to tell everything we can before they reach us. They will not allow us to live, because being allowed to live free of them is an insult to everything they are.”

  Kevin could see the others watching him as he talked. Luna had her phone out to record everything he said. Phil was adjusting things on the computer, keeping the signal locked on. Chloe was looking at Kevin in amazement.

  “They call themselves the Pure,” Kevin went on, continuing his translation. “Their wor
ld was destroyed long ago, ravaged by wars among them over who would rule. They took to ravaging other worlds, stripping them of resources, taking the people as slaves and sources of new DNA. Their leaders change their followers using what they have found, becoming stronger as they go. We thought that the only way to stop them was to burn our own world, hoping to catch them in the conflagration, but even that did not end this.”

  Kevin could see the horror of it on the others’ faces. He was just as shocked by it, but he couldn’t stop. He had to keep translating.

  “When they are done with a world, they destroy it,” Kevin said. “They cannot stand to leave behind anything that is not them, that is not theirs.”

  “We know that they’re dangerous,” Luna said. “There must be more than this.”

  There was.

  “We tried to combat them,” Kevin translated. “We thought that we might stop them with energy weapons, with war, with diseases. They adapted to each thing we tried as we resisted, because they had researched our world. They had seen what we had and prepared themselves for it.”

  “So they’re telling us things that didn’t work?” Chloe said.

  “They understand all you have now,” Kevin kept translating. “So reach into the past. Seek out diseases long dead, that they have not prepared for, but that your kind are immune to. The one hearing this can deliver them to their world ship, can destroy the heart of them. You are the key, the only one who can stop the destruction that will follow. If you are hearing this, you must do what we could not. You must end this before your world and countless others fall.”

  The message ended and Kevin struggled to catch his breath. There had been so much there, so much effort to translate it all, but it wasn’t just that. It was what the message had said.

  “I’m supposed to stop it?” Kevin said. “But I can’t. I mean… I’m not some kind of hero, or a soldier or… I’m just me.”

  “I think you’re a bit more special than that,” Phil said. “You’re the only one who has been able to translate these signals.”

  “And when they tried to change you,” Luna said, “nothing happened.”

  Chloe looked at him in even more shock. “You’re immune? That’s amazing.”

  It might have felt slightly more amazing if Kevin hadn’t felt so dizzy right then thanks to the signal, or if he hadn’t had a disease eating his brain from the inside, slowly killing him.

  “What was all that about finding diseases?” Kevin asked.

  “Biological warfare makes a kind of sense,” Phil said. “And so does the stuff about finding really old viruses. Humans will have adapted to survive all kinds of diseases, but the aliens will only have prepared for the ones in today’s world.”

  “But how do you find a disease?” Luna asked. “Especially an ancient one. It’s not like you can just find it at a hospital or something.”

  “It would mean finding preserved organic matter,” Phil said. “Not just a fossil, but actual DNA. Amber preservation is an obvious source, but where?”

  “What about the tar pits in LA?” Chloe suggested.

  Luna rounded on her. “You’ll do anything to get to LA, won’t you?”

  “I’m serious,” Chloe said. “If you want stuff that’s millions of years old, that’s where you look.”

  “I think Chloe might have a point,” Kevin said. Luna gave him a slightly disappointed look. “We want dinosaur-age stuff, right? Well, where else are we going to find it?”

  “At a museum, maybe?” Luna suggested.

  Phil shook his head. “Old bones won’t cut it, and anything exposed too long would be a problem, because the DNA would degrade. The tar pits are a good idea. Of course, once you have something old enough, there’s the problem of getting it onto the alien ship.”

  Kevin thought about the ship hanging above the world. It seemed to dominate everything, but that didn’t mean there was an easy way up there. On the other hand, he was standing in a NASA center. Surely, if anyone knew about getting people up into orbit, it was them.

  “We’ll find a way,” Luna said, a hint of her old optimism creeping back into her voice. “We’ll find a way to get up there and the aliens won’t know what hit them.”

  “We?” Kevin said. “The signal said—”

  “If they think that I’m going to let you go up there on your own, they don’t know anything,” Luna said, and Kevin could see that she meant it. He was glad to see that, even after everything that had happened, Luna was still ready to fight off the whole world if it messed with her friends.

  “How we deliver the virus is a few steps down the line,” Phil said. “We still have to find suitable organic matter, and that’s the point when we can start worrying about how to get it to the aliens.”

  To Kevin, that sounded like a lot. Maybe too much. How were three kids and a scientist who didn’t look as though he could fight anything supposed to do all of that? If they didn’t, though, who would? The message had been right—Kevin had at least a couple of advantages when it came to the aliens, so maybe it had to be him.

  “We have gear for extracting samples and analyzing DNA,” Phil said. He went off into the facility for a minute or two, coming back with a collection of devices. He started to work on them, taking parts of one, adding them to another, and wiring it together into something that looked like a combination between a syringe, some kind of water pistol, and the remains of a small computer.

  “Okay,” he said, “I think I have it. If we can find a suitable sample at the tar pits, all we do is stick the syringe in to extract any organic DNA that’s left, and the computer analyses it against the little that we know about the aliens. If that screen goes green, then we’ve found something that might be suitable to take onto the alien ship to—”

  An alarm rang, and Phil pulled out his phone, staring at it ashen-faced.

  “We’ve run the computers too long,” he said. “I set up proximity sensors to give me some warning if they came back, and now they’re going off the charts.”

  “What does that mean?” Chloe asked.

  Kevin knew the answer to that. “It means the aliens are sending the people they control here. A lot of them.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Run to the bunker!” Phil yelled, hurrying to pull the plug on the machines. Around them, Kevin could hear the crashes as the people the aliens had controlled made their way through the building, The destruction they wrought as they went was the only sound.

  “Run,” Kevin said to the other two, and it seemed that Chloe and Luna didn’t have to be told twice.

  They all set off through the Institute, rounding its twists and turns as they looked for a way to safety. Kevin could hear the crashes and slams of bodies shoving aside anything that was in their way, the occasional crack of breaking glass and the banging of doors against their frames.

  He glimpsed a group of them then, following around a corner with a relentless speed that meant Kevin had to throw himself into one of the labs, ducking under a table as one of them lunged for him. He sprinted out of the far door, slamming it shut behind him and hearing the controlled people smash into it as he rejoined the others.

  “This way,” Phil said, leading the way down to the lobby. Kevin and the others followed, while a crowd of people came along behind them. One of the creatures lunged for Luna and Kevin stuck his foot out, tripping it. They kept running.

  A hand grabbed at Kevin’s shoulder, yanking him back. Kevin turned and found himself staring right into the face of a construction worker, his pupils the bright white that said he was controlled. He looked at Kevin as if studying him. As if recognizing him. He pulled back a hand, a wrench clutched in it as a weapon, and Kevin braced for the blow that was to come.

  Chloe picked up a fire extinguisher and sprayed the converted man full in the face. It didn’t hurt him, but the sheer pressure and surprise of it was enough to make him let go of Kevin, reeling back as he did so. They turned and ran again, slamming the doors to the lobby be
hind them. Phil did something with a keycard to lock them, and Kevin heard bodies slamming into it from the other side.

  “That won’t hold them for long,” Kevin said.

  “Long enough,” Phil replied. He pointed to the elevators. “Quick, everyone to the bunker.”

  Thuds came from the doors as the controlled people pounded on them.

  Kevin shook his head. “We can’t. We have to make it to the tar pits. We have to at least try to undo all of this.”

  “We can wait until they’re long gone before we do,” Phil said.

  The pounding was getting louder now. Kevin suspected that the doors would break open at any moment.

  “And what if they wait?” Luna shot back. “What if they decide that they’re done with the world, and destroy it?”

  Kevin heard Phil sigh.

  “Look,” he said, “the truth is… well, the truth is that I’m not a brave guy. I’d like to come with you to save the world and everything, but the truth is that I’m too scared to. Look at me now. My hands are shaking from just a little running away from the controlled people.”

  “Mine shake all the time,” Kevin pointed out, holding up his hand in evidence. Phil was an adult, and one who wasn’t suffering from a condition that might kill him. “We need your help.”

  “You don’t need me,” Phil insisted, while in the background, Kevin heard a crack. “I’m too fat to run properly, and I’m only any use when there are computers around. Here…” He pushed the device he’d made for them toward Kevin. “This will do everything you need.”

  “So you’re leaving this to us?” Kevin demanded.

  “Unless you want to come down to the bunker and wait this out?”

  Kevin shook his head. “We have to do this. But you… we need your help.”

  “I’d just slow you down,” Phil said.

  “Leave him, Kevin,” Luna said. “He’s right. He’d just slow us down.”

  “Good luck,” Phil said. “I really hope you succeed. And if you ever need to come back here…” Another crack came from the door. “Well, good luck.”

  He hurried off in the direction of the elevator.