The Invaders (The Visitors Saga, #1)
By Jay Ford
Copyright 2014 Jay Ford
© 2014, Jay Ford
[email protected] ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Chapter One
I rolled out of bed on the last normal afternoon of my life.
I stumbled into the bathroom, and looked at myself in the mirror. I ran my fingers through my short brown hair and grabbed my toothbrush. I stared at myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth. It was a beautiful Saturday in Boston, which meant I had no school and no plans whatsoever.
“Charlie!” My mom yell up the stairs.
“Asleep!” I yelled back.
“You left the dishes in the washer! Come get them out. Now!”
I grumbled an okay under my breath, and went downstairs to the kitchen. I turned on the TV, wanting to watch something to keep me entertained as I unloaded the dish washer.
Little did I know that the second before I turned the TV on, would be the last normal one of my entire life.
The flat screen TV flashed to life, and I stood in horror at what I saw before me.
“Mom! Dad!” I yelled.
Mom came running out of her office, while Dad came from the living room.
“What is it?” Dad asked.
I couldn’t say anything. I pointed at the television screen in horror.
“Oh my God!” Mom shouted.
I turned the volume on the TV up. A large male reporter stood in front of the camera, his black hair whipping around in the wind. He did nothing to keep the fear out of his well defined face. “As you can see behind me,” he began in a shaky voice, “what looks as some sort of aircraft has appeared above the White House. There has been no contact made that we’re aware of, and there’s nothing on the aircraft that identifies which country this ship originated from.”
I tuned out his words. I stood in awe of the piece of engineering artwork that hovered above Washington D.C.. The sleek black ship shone in the early afternoon sun. It’s engines screamed very loud, causing the reporter to yell in order to be heard. The ship spanned twice the length of the White House, and looked to be a few stories tall. I couldn’t tell its exact height, but I could tell that it towered into the sky. It cast a shadow that covered the White House in darkness.
I heard my dad let out a frustrated sigh, jolting me out of my hypnosis. “The phones aren’t working! I can’t get ahold of Jesse.”
My heart sank as I realized that my Aunt and Uncle lived in D.C. along with my cousin Alex. “I thought they were on vacation?”
Dad shook his head as he continued to try and call. “Just Allen. On Business.” He ran his fingers through his hair as a robotic voice came from his phone. We’re sorry, but all— Dad hung up before it could finish its patronizing tone. “I’m going to go see if I can get a better signal outside,” Dad said over his shoulder as he walked out the door.
I turned my attention to the screen. Disbelief covered me like a blanket. I began going through a list of countries that could’ve posed the technology to build something like that. I thought of a new country the second I thought of the last. I tried to think of a reason as to why they would do this. Was it to display their power? Building a ship like that and then parking it above the White House was pretty powerful.
Maybe it the U.S. were the ones behind it, showing the rest of the world that they weren’t to be messed with. I hoped that had been the reason, because I was actually kind of scared. It’s hard for me to admit; I’ve always been the tough, smart alec kind of guy, but this was nothing like I’d ever seen before.
“Mom,” I began.
“Yes?” she replied, looking up from her note pad for two seconds before returning her attention to it.
“What are we going to do?”
She began chewing on her thumbnail as she peered into the distance trying to think of an answer. “I don’t know,” she said in a somber tone. “Hopefully this is just a display of power,” she said echoing my earlier thoughts. “If we were going to be attacked, they’d have done it by now. The real question though is why they haven’t been blasted out of the air.”
“Why would they—” then I realized. If an airplane, much less whatever the thing above it, came anywhere near the White House, it would’ve had some F16 and Americas finest escorting away or shooting it down from the sky.
Mom interrupted me by placing a hand on my shoulder. Her warm comforting gaze softened my fearful one. “It’ll be okay, Charlie. We’ll be fine.”
Somehow, I doubted that. Then I thought of a question that I couldn’t help but say aloud. “What if they’re going to attack us using biological warfare? They could be attacking us right now.”
A very fearful look came across her face. “Oh dear. I hadn’t considered that. That would be very bad, very bad indeed. We need to stock up on Germ-X, gas masks, disinfecting wipes, gloves.” I heard her continuing her list as she walked to her office. A few moments later, she walked out of her office with her purse and car keys in hand. “I’ll be back!” she announced.
I looked back at the television at the chaos that began to erupt. I knew that I couldn’t let my mom go to the store alone. I didn’t want to go, but we would need those supplies. There wasn’t going to be another chance to go. “Wait!” I called out to Mom before she closed the front door. I grabbed my cell phone off the counter as I walked out of the kitchen. “I’m coming with you,” I told her.
She smiled a nodded her head. “Thanks,” she said as she walked towards her car in the driveway.
I shut the door behind me. People all around packed up their cars. I didn’t know where they planned on running to, but I secretly wished we were doing the same. I got into the car as Mom started it. I reached over and turned on the AC.
“Let’s get in and get out as fast as we can. I don’t want to be gone for long,” Mom said as she put the car in drive and pushed the button to open our security gate.
I nodded my head in agreement. “I bet it’s going to be crazy in the stores.”
That was an understatement.
****
We parked and began our long walk towards the store entrance. From the outside I could already tell that this was not going to be a simple trip. People were coming out with baskets filled with supplies, while others were outside selling stuff they had just bought for an increased price.
“This reminds me of one of your books, Mom,” I told her as we walked. Mom was a bestselling author with all sorts of movie deals. She had a ton of books out, and was working on three that I knew of at the time.
“Let’s hope it’s not like one of my books!” She said with a laugh. “If it is, keep an eye out for werewolves.”
We continued walking, and as we reached the store, we realized just how crowded it was. It was like Black Friday times a hundred. People were everywhere, loading their baskets up with everything they could find.
Mom and I grabbed one of the last baskets there were, and began to make our way through the crowd. “Let’s get to the water first.”
“If there’s any left,” I said.
Mom ignored my pessimism, and we inched our way to the water isle that was at the back of the store.
People everywhere were shouting and arguing over supplies. I stayed on guard, ready for anything. No telling when someone would snap and start attacking another person.
We reached the water isle, and it was completely deserted. There wasn’t a single drop of water anywhere down the isle. Or so I thought.
“There’s a jug over there,” Mom said. She pointed to where one had fell underneath the isle.
I jogged to get it, but somebody else had entered the isle and made a dash for it the same time I did. My senses went on high alert, and I prepared for anything.
I reached the jug first, and picked it up. The man reached it just moments after I did. He was wearing a business suit that looked tattered and worn.
“Hey kid,” he said. “Give me that.”
I looked at him like he was crazy. “Sorry, I got it first.” I said, trying to hide the fact that my voice was shaking. I turned around and began walking towards Mom. The man grabbed my arm and turned me around.
“I said give me the water.”
“Hey!” my mom shouted. “Get your damn hands off my son.”
The man looked up at my mom and scoffed. He looked back at me. “Give it here!”
I shook my arm free from his grasp. “Get your own water, asshole!” I yelled at him.
His eyes flared with anger. He grabbed me with both of his hands and slammed me against the empty isle. The metal jammed into my back, causing me to wince in pain. I struggled against him, but he had a tight grip.
My mom ran up to him, and nailed him with a hard punch to his face. The man let go of me, and stumbled side ways, gripping his chin.
“Bitch!” he shouted.
Anger boiled inside of me. I dropped the water, and jumped onto the man, tackling him to the ground. I punched him hard in the face, but he was able to get a hand on my chest, and pushed me off before I could hit him again.
I slammed into the ground, and the breath rushed out of my body. I coughed and struggled for air. I sat up, preparing for him to attack me again, but Mom got to him first.
She pulled out her pepper spray, and shot a stream of it directly into the mans eyes. He shouted and howled in pain, clenching his eyes.
I got up as fast as I could, and grabbed the water. Mom and I ran back to our basket, and got out of the aisle as soon as we could.
“I’m not leaving since we’re already here,” Mom began, “but we need to hurry about and get out of here.”
I nodded in agreement. “It’s probably only going to get worse.”
Chapter Two
“Your Aunt Jesse is going to be spending a few days with us until the government figures out what’s going on,” Dad said as Mom and I walked in from the store.
Ah, Aunt Jesse. She was Dad’s sister, and had been adopted from China. She was pretty cool, and really funny too. “Yeah, okay. What about Alex? Is he coming too?” Alex was my cousin. We were both the same age, but we were’t that close. I hadn’t seen him in forever. Although, from what I could recall, he mostly kept to himself.
“Well, if Jesse is coming, then obviously he’s coming too,” Dad said sarcastically. He is where I got my sarcasm from. It irritates me when he uses it on me though. He can be Mr. Sarcastic, but when I’m sarcastic, all of the sudden I’m being disrespectful.
“When are they getting here?” I said, ignoring his remark. I let out a deep sigh, trying to show my irritation, but in the least “disrespectful” way.
“They’re on their way now,” Dad said, ignoring my pitiful sigh. “They should be here in about eight, eight and a half hours.”
“All right, cool.” I turned to go back up the stairs to my room.
“Charlie,” Dad called up the stairs. I turned around and looked down at him. He had a stressed look on his face. “I love you.”
“Yeah, okay.” I sighed and went to my room. When my dad said something like that, it meant he was scared or really stressed out. My guess was both.
The sun began to go down, casting an eerie red glow on everything outside. I looked out my window, trying to see if everything was still chaotic. I couldn’t see much since my room faced away from the street, but I could hear endless honking of horns as people both fled and entered the city.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Earlier I wanted to leave as soon as possible, but now I was feeling safe inside my home. If the store was to be any indication of how things were going to be, I wanted to stay right where I was: at home with my family, safe.
I looked at the clock. 7:30 blinked on its electronic screen. Alex wasn’t going to arrive for eight hours, so it would be around three-thirty/four o’clock in the morning before he got here.
I turned from the window, and walked downstairs. Mom was in the kitchen unloaded the groceries, while Dad watched the news.
“What’s for dinner?” I asked Mom.
“I don’t know, find something. I’m not feeling like cooking anything.”
I nodded my head. “I’ll make something.”
I preheat the oven, and threw a pizza in when the oven was hot. I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and checked my Twitter. I tapped on what was trending worldwide, and unsurprisingly, everybody was talking about the ship.
There was one that caught my eye at the very bottom of the list: Aliens Over America.
My heart skipped a beat, and I felt a chill go down my spine. I clicked on it, and the a spinning circle came up letting me know the tweets were loading. I tapped my finger on the back of my phone, and impatiently whispered for it to hurry up and load. It felt like it was taking an eternity.
Connection Error. Check your connection and try again. Twitter may also be down.
I sighed, frustrated. I knew our internet was fine, so it had to of been that Twitters servers were overloaded. I leaned back on the kitchen counter while my mind swirled with thoughts.
What if it was aliens? I shook my head and chuckled. “You sound like a lunatic,” I told myself. I tried pushing the idea out of my mind, but the seed of the thought stayed back there. I just couldn’t shake it. It seemed so absurd, and yet it actually made a bit of sense.
I turned on the TV in the kitchen. It was still on the same news channel as it had been earlier. There were shots of the ship from every angle as it hovered over the White House, unmoving. I paused it, and scanned every inch of its shining black hull. There was no identification on it. No flag painted on, no sets of numbers, nothing. If this was some country trying to make a power play, they would’ve had at least a flag painted on it in order to let people know who they were. If not, they would’ve come forward and said they were the ones who did it.
I hit play, and the news reporter repeated the same things he did earlier. It just showed up, hasn’t move, and no one has any idea where it came from.
I heard the TV in the living room on a different channel, but the female reporter was saying almost the exact same thing. I walked in there and sat down on the couch next to Dad’s chair that he was leaning forward in, watching the television with unblinking eyes.
“Any ideas?” I asked.
He shook his head no.
“Have you talked to any of your Air Force buddies? They give you any inside info about what is going on?” I asked him. Dad had been in the Air Force for fifteen years, but he left when Mom started making enough money from her books so we could settle down somewhere and he could be a teacher like he always wanted.
“Nope. The ones that are still in the Force are way too busy dealing with this to talk to me, and the ones out of it are calling me asking if I know anything.” He sighed and looked out the window at the setting sun.
I thought about whether or not I should bring up the alien idea so he could tell me I was crazy and there was no way that it could be true. But I was afraid that he would say the oppos
ite. “What country do you think built it?”
Dad waited a moment before responding. “Honestly? I can’t think of a single one. We had nothing in development anywhere near the size of that thing, and I can’t imagine another country could build something like that without there being a leak, or at least rumors.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Or what I wasn’t hearing, rather. It was sounding like my dad was coming to the same conclusion that I was grappling with.
Before I could work up the courage to ask Dad if he thought maybe it was alien, the oven timer went off. I got up from the couch, and got the pizza out of the oven.
I cut it up, grabbed a Dr. Pepper from the fridge, and sat down on the living room couch.
The news cut to a shot of what was probably thousands of people surrounding the White House fence. Police were trying to break the crowd up, but people were starting to get resistant.
My stomach twisted, and I began to get really hot. “Are they about to start a riot?” I asked.
“They’ve already started,” Dad said.
The news cut to a shot of people attacking a wall of police officers, while the officers threw tear gas into the crowd, trying to calm them. There weren’t nearly enough officers, and the rioters broke past them, and began to shake the White House fence. It swung and swayed as Secret Service members began to raise their guns at them, yelling at them to stop.
I held my breath and clenched my fists, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Enough people pilled onto the fence that a section of it fell down, and people began to stampede onto the White House lawn. The Secret Service began to fire shots into the crowd, trying to stop the horde of people, but there were too many of them. The charged past the agents, trampling them beneath their feet. They busted down the White House doors, and flooded inside. The news helicopter lingered on them, until it quickly panned to the roof where people began to storm onto. They started shouting at the ship indiscernible things. All of them had a crazed look on their face.
I couldn’t believe what was before my eyes. People stormed the White House, overpowered the Secret Service, ran atop the roof, and were now yelling at the ship that hovered fifty feet above their heads.