The Takeover, page 28
“You two have had a rough day,” President Talbert said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you Madam President,” they both said in unison.
“But we don’t have time to mourn, do we, so please bring me up to speed.”
“Aren’t you going to bring in your own advisors, ma’am?” Lametti asked.
“I may eventually, but there’s no time for that now. The whole world could go poof in another hour, so there’s not much point in changing up the furniture, is there? Or the décor, as it were, which includes you two; you practically live here full-time, from what I understand.” She eyed the quarter-full bottle of Lagavulin and their loosened ties with skepticism.
Lametti sat up a bit straighter and straightened his tie while he was at it. “Sorry, Madam President,” he said. “We’re both a little beaten up after what happened last night.”
“You have every right to be. Now, tell me what’s what.”
“No jumps that we know of anywhere in the world so far—that’s the big news, Madam President. Another few hours and we should be in the clear.”
“That’s great news, isn’t it, boys?”
They both nodded.
“Normally I would say we should hope for the best and prepare for the worst, but the worst is so bad in this case that there’s no point in preparing for it. So—we may as well go ahead and plan for the best, right?”
“Right, Ma’am.”
“Which is to say, let’s assume we’ll all be alive tomorrow, and outside the dome walls rather than inside them, like Jonah in the belly of the whale.”
“That seems like a good thing to plan for, Madam President,” Lametti said.
“Then let’s roll up our sleeves, boys,” President Talbert said, “because we have a lot of work to do between what’s left of today and tomorrow.”
She glanced over at the Resolute Desk with an irritated expression. “And can one of you get me a pair of scissors? That yellow tape has simply got to go. The Secret Service can arrest me if they want.”
Chapter 33
January - May 2042
Ten days after what was being called No Jump, the dome walls changed, shifting from their usual iridescent soap-bubble appearance to a glassier look.
The following day the walls turned pink, as if they were reflecting the hues of sunset—except it was midday. The walls continued to redden throughout the day, as if they were developing a bad case of sunburn. It was still possible to see through them, but it was like looking through a red haze.
On the third day, objects inside the dome began to catch fire. Underbrush and anything made of paper went up first, followed by gas explosions that rocked entire city blocks. Wooden buildings and trees burned like kindling, and there was no one left inside to put them out. Forests trapped inside the domes fell victim to raging wildfires that blazed so fiercely, scientists began to wonder if the air inside was somehow oxygen-enriched instead of oxygen-poor.
Black smoke billowed up from all the burning trees and structures, wafting towards the domes’ ceilings—but instead of exiting as it would have before, the smoke lingered there, swirling and blackening, growing thicker and thicker until drones and helicopters could no longer report on what was going on inside. It was as if each dome had a black stormcloud towering overhead stretching for some twenty-four miles in all directions.
Scientists speculated that the domes must have entered a new phase, one in which the oxygen hadn’t been eliminated; otherwise the fires wouldn’t have been burning at all. The domes had become, in effect, giant convection ovens—ones left on for too long, until the roasts inside had blackened beyond all reckoning.
By the fourth day, whirlwinds were forming inside the domes, whipping the tongues of flame into something that seemed almost living. The skyscrapers in New York City caught fire, and the entire skyline burned.
Spectators who witnessed it firsthand never forgot it, especially when the Empire State Building tottered, then came crashing down like a giant tree felled by an ax. Even more gut-wrenching was the 1,776-foot-tall One World Trade Center, which stood taller than any other building in New York City and was invested with more emotional weight than any other skyscraper in America. Its demise was nothing short of spectacular. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Bridge caught fire, burned brilliantly for about an hour, then tumbled into the East River. Lady Liberty, who was on her own little island, held out longer than most, but finally she, too, toppled over in a smoldering heap into New York Bay. Her torch was lit with actual flames as she fell, along with her upraised arm and crown.
By the fifth day, every landmark that had ever been associated with New York City had vanished behind a thick pall of smoke. Reporters could no longer see within to report on what was happening. The show was over; a black curtain had come down over the stage, and the rest of the tragedy played out behind the scenes.
What happened in the Manhattan Dome happened everywhere else around the world at essentially the same time. Architectural wonders went up in smoke inside every dome across the planet. Much of the cultural heritage of the world disappeared overnight. Whole cities, massive cities—Mexico City, São Paolo, Istanbul, Mumbai, Tokyo, Shanghai, London, Paris—burned to the ground. Cities built of metal and steel lasted the longest, but they were no match for the incinerators the domes had become.
By the sixth day, underbrush outside the dome walls began to smoke and catch fire. People couldn’t get within a hundred feet of a dome without feeling like they were standing in front of an open furnace. Firefighters tried to put the fires out but to no avail. Some homeowners whose homes stood just beyond the walls—who had thanked the heavens just days before for their apparent salvation—now cursed providence as their homes burned to the ground.
By the seventh day, the dome walls were encircled by rings of fire on the outside, a pale mimicry of what was occurring on the inside. Each dome was like a blazing sun surrounded by a corona of light and heat. Humans had no choice but to back away and let things burn.
So it was that the domes continued to wreak havoc even after the final jump day. Predator and prey alike fled from burning forests and stood trembling out in the open, not knowing where to run or where to hide. Refugee camps stationed just outside the domes were abandoned in such haste that many of the government-supplied tents that had served as shelters of last resort went up in smoke. The sick and injured were rushed away on makeshift pallets as the flames engulfed first aid stations and field hospitals alike. The loss of life was small compared to what had come before, but the losses to property continued to mount, and that was no small thing in the midst of a cold winter.
A pall of black smoke from all the peripheral fires rose to the heavens and hid what little sun remained in early February. The world turned colder, even as the domes themselves continued to burn like bonfires. But scientists were quick to point out that if the noxious fumes inside all sixty thousand domes had been allowed to escape into the atmosphere at once, things could have been far worse. A nuclear winter of sorts might have set in, with smoke-filled skies blocking the sun for years to come.
By the eighth day, the heat from the domes finally began to dissipate. The rings of fire around each dome burned themselves out, leaving behind rings of scorched earth. The dome walls themselves faded from scarlet to red.
By the ninth day, the walls softened from dull red to pink.
By the tenth day, they returned to their glassy look, and people could approach them again without getting sunburnt themselves.
For the next ten days and beyond, the smoke continued to swirl around inside the inverted ash trays the domes had become. People being people, they were deeply curious to know what was going on inside those domes, but of course the domes didn’t oblige. They hadn’t been obliging since the very beginning, so why should they start now?
The curtains remained closed for a long time to come.
Chapter 34
May 2042 – Oval Office, Philadelphia
President Talbert stared out of her Oval Office window during a rare moment of solitude. Since the Oval Office was on the top floor of the tallest skyscraper in Philadelphia, the view looked nothing like it had back in D.C. She actually preferred this view because it was so expansive. It gave her the sense of floating above the world, making decisions from on high—like a god, if she were being honest, because that was what it felt like being President sometimes.
But what no one ever told you was what a pain in the tush it could be being a god. Nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble. For one thing, her power to effect real change was surprisingly small. Sure, she made decisions that could affect millions, but those decisions were implemented by others, and somewhere between the ordering and the doing a lot of the good got lost. For another thing, her fellow gods (or demigods, anyway) in the House and Senate continually battled amongst themselves and with her, apparently determined to make sure she never got anything meaningful done.
No, the Greeks had the right of it: the gods were a contentious lot who thought better of themselves than they deserved.
From her perch on high, she could see one distant dome to the northwest. It was still opaque, as it had been for months now. It looked like a tick latched onto the skin of the Earth. She imagined it sucking out the Earth’s lifeblood, day after day, until it became engorged and bloated. It was a parasite that didn’t belong here, and she longed to pluck it off.
If she had been a real god, she could have done just that; but alas, she was a mere mortal playing at being god, and that was the difference. Mortals wished where gods acted.
Now the aliens…they might be gods. They spoke and it was so. “Ticks shall descend upon the Earth and suck the lifeblood out of it.” And behold, it came to pass. To her, the aliens’ invasion plans seemed as immutable as the Ten Commandments themselves.
That was the fundamental problem: she was up against gods.
Gods, she suspected, couldn’t be defeated outright, only deflected from their path. They needed to be tricked out of their inheritance, the way Jacob had tricked his father out of the blessing meant for his brother Esau.
But it was hard to trick a god. The only thing it was easy to do was bow down and worship a god.
Was that what these aliens wanted? Their subservience and obedience? After taking half the Earth without even bothering to show up, did they think themselves so invincible that humans would bow down before them and say, “Command me, oh lord?” Well, they didn’t know humans very well if they thought that.
Humans were a troublesome lot: they might swear fealty to you with one hand while holding a dagger behind their backs with the other. Patricia’s own career in politics had taught her that much. She knew just how devious humans could be when it suited their purposes—and that was a characteristic that might stand the humans in good stead once the aliens arrived.
Personally, she had little doubt the aliens would arrive, but it would be in their own sweet time. Everything about this invasion suggested a calculated approach: not rushed, not exposed, not risky. It was all being done step by step in an orderly, systematic fashion: first the invisible seeds, then the immovable ovates, then the impregnable domes, then the relentless jumps every ten days like clockwork.
Each dome was exactly the same size as all the rest. Each dome proceeded in lockstep with all the others, like well-trained soldiers—synchronized, efficient, precise. Whatever was happening inside the domes at present, she guessed it was the final step in the meticulously thought-out process that was meant to precede the aliens’ long-awaited arrival.
To her mind, the only thing that seemed disorderly about the invasion was its genesis: the seeds appeared to have fallen randomly, and that bothered her, because everything else spoke of strict adherence to a plan. But perhaps, if the scientists were correct, with some fifty million seeds having fallen from the skies, the probabilities themselves spoke of order on a grand scale, their sheer numbers guaranteeing the outcome the aliens desired.
Flip a coin once and the result can go either way. Flip a coin a million times (or fifty million times) and the results become highly predictable. And if the coin is even slightly weighted to fall one way rather than the other—say, onto urban areas more than rural ones—then, the results can seem downright predetermined.
So perhaps there was order in the invasion’s genesis after all, even though the seeds’ distribution seemed random from the perspective of someone on the ground.
President Talbert reckoned these careful, deliberate aliens wouldn’t know what to do with true mayhem and disorder. If the aliens had been watching over the past few months, she wondered if they felt any dismay at just how chaotic and troublesome their soon-to-be-subjects could be.
Could humans be troublesome enough to drive them right off the planet? She certainly hoped so. She needed to believe these aliens could be defeated—or if not defeated, deflected.
Let them lay their tick eggs on some other world.
Chapter 35
June 2042
It took four full months for the domes to clear of smoke. When they finally did, and people could look inside for the first time, what they saw took their breath away…because there was literally nothing to see.
Not a single structure was left standing. All that remained was a thick coating of ash covering the floor of each dome. It looked like black volcanic ash that had been laid down after a major eruption.
Whether some kind of disintegrating acid had been added to the smoke-filled air during those four months was an open question. No scientist could get inside to take an air sample, but it seemed the aliens must have done something to break down any remaining structures and level them over the course of the intervening months. Stone and steel wouldn’t have disappeared so completely otherwise. As it was, no trees, no vegetation, no buildings, no ruins, no debris of any kind survived—just flat, fallow ground stretching for twenty-four miles in all directions inside each dome.
New York City had been reduced to ashes, along with nearly every other major city and monument in the world. All of it was now incorporated within the three to six feet of ash that lay at the base of each dome. Spectacular natural wonders had also been reduced to nondescript dust. The Yosemite Valley looked like a slash-and-burn field. Yellowstone, when seen from above, was now pockmarked with circular dead zones. Outside the dome walls, all looked as magnificent as ever, but inside, every distinctive land feature had vanished altogether.
One can be just as surprised by what is not there as what is. Not seeing the New York skyline where it was supposed to be was just as jarring for most people as seeing an alien dome for the first time. Many were shaken to the core because it meant there was no going home now, not ever. Hometowns had been obliterated, leaving former residents feeling untethered from reality. Piles of rubble, at least, would have signified something had stood there once upon a time, but even the rubble was gone.
From the Amazon to China to Yosemite to New York, the terrain had been bludgeoned into submission. One half of the Earth’s surface now looked as barren as the surface of the moon, pulverized into lunar-like dust. The aliens had somehow managed to achieve uniformity across sixty thousand domes spread across the entire surface of the Earth.
They’d also managed to piss off every single human being on the planet.
*****
On June 5th, 2042, the glassy surface of the domes gave way to the familiar soap-bubble look the world had grown to know and hate so much. However, for the first time, not just water but air was flowing regularly through the dome walls. This immediately became apparent as huge amounts of ash inside the domes began to disperse into the world at large.
Winds whipped through the domes, tossing the ash out into the world in blinding dust storms. In other places, heavy rains turned the ash into viscous mud that oozed out of the dome walls and into nearby towns and cities, creating a disgusting mess. In still others, tornadoes tore through, flinging stupendous amounts of ash into the atmosphere and spewing it for miles.
Besides natural weather events, the domes otherwise remained empty and unchanging, simply taking up space that could no longer be used by human or animal. At least there were no new jumps to worry about; the only real annoyance was the “moondust” that blew everywhere and did no one any good.
People in refugee camps slowly began to regain their footing. Now that the camps could stay put, it was easier to truck in food and supplies. Skeletal survivors of what some were calling the second holocaust started to put on weight and look almost human again. Many of these unfortunates had been forced to fend for themselves in the so-called dead zones on the far sides of domes—barren expanses remote from any food or water. Those who hadn’t died outright had come stumbling into the camps looking like famished wretches straight out of a concentration camp.
After a horrific stretch in which one third of the human race was estimated to have died, things started to settle down and reach a new equilibrium. The worst of the violence was quelled, some semblance of law and order was restored, state and local governments showed hopeful signs of life, and supplies began to trickle into their intended destinations. Here and there, cooperation replaced hostility, and the better half of human nature began to reassert itself. Some optimists even claimed compassion and empathy were making a comeback.
Meanwhile, pessimists had their own take on things. They suggested humans had been beaten down on purpose so they would be too weak and distracted by their own problems to mount any kind of meaningful resistance to an invasion—which meant one was coming any day now.
The world held its collective breath as July 4th approached—the one-year anniversary of the first arrival of the seeds on Earth.
Chapter 36
July 2042
Independence Day celebrations were subdued or nonexistent that year, except in the nation’s new capital, Philadelphia, where an attempt at patriotic pride was mounted. The fireworks went off as scheduled, but after the horrors of the past few months, it felt like there wasn’t much to celebrate.
