Invasion

4

Reno sat in the back of the transport with his elbows on his knees and his head buried in his hands. His legs shook and he gasped for air, so he closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, but it didn’t block out the screaming, explosions, and gunfire erupting all around him.

You can do this. You can make this work.

“You alright there, buddy?”

Reno looked up at the soldier sitting next to him. He shook his head, and leaned back against the wall. “I don’t know.”

“You better be fucking alright,” a soldier sitting on the other side of the transport said. “We’re rolling out of here and risking our lives because you’re supposed to know how to stop this.”

“Hey. Fuck you, Leonard,” the soldier next to Reno said.

He looked back to Reno and rolled his eyes.

“Don’t listen to that prick. He thinks he’s a hard ass, but he has a Care Bears collection.”

Reno laughed, wiping beads of sweat from his brow.

“The name’s Beckett.”

“Reno Harvey.” Reno shook Beckett’s hand.

“Good to meet you, Harvey.” Beckett leaned in close. “Now, you do know how to stop all this for real, right?”

New sweat broke on Reno’s forehead. He forced a slight smile and nodded.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Beckett said, looking around at the other soldiers. “We’ll be home in time for Leonard to watch The Bachelor.”

Most of the soldiers laughed, except for Leonard. He flipped Beckett the middle finger.

“No thanks,” Beckett said. “I’m too busy with your sister.”

Gibson turned for just long enough to glare back at them from the front of the vehicle. “Alright. Knock it off,” the squad leader said. “We’re just about there, so prepare to move out.”

As an EMT, Reno had been in plenty of tense situations. But those scenarios had normally determined the life of only one person. This one could mean saving the lives of millions.

“You ready, Harvey?” Beckett asked.

Reno curled his bottom lip in and stuck his chin out. “Yeah. I’m ready.”

“Just stick by me and everything is gonna be fine. I can handle explosives the way I do Leonard’s sister. And believe me, I handle her all night long.”

Beckett laughed and slapped Reno on the shoulder. Reno forced another smile and turned his attention to the back of the transport. He made eye contact with John, who sat near the back. The cop gave Reno a respectful nod before moving the rifle he’d been given by the squad into a ready position. He looked plenty prepared to leap from the transport and enter the fight.

The transport came to a stop and Gibson was the first to exit the vehicle.

“Let’s move! New guy always carries the explosives. Now go!”

Reno stood as the men jumped out of the truck. He threw a bag full of PE-4 onto his back as one of the soldiers pushed him, urging him to hurry out.

As his feet hit the concrete, though, Reno stopped cold. The fires had continued to rage throughout the city, fed by broken gas lines and an inability of the emergency responders to battle so many flames at one time. Dust and ash filled the air and each breath tasted like burnt plastic, searing Reno’s throat and stinging his eyes. Bodies lay everywhere, some in the middle of the street and others twisted inside hunks of the melted plastic of abandoned cars. The almost constant screams of the injured and dying began to wear Reno down almost immediately, pulling him into a self-reflective state of despair.

A hand grabbed hold of his arm and he turned to see Beckett.

“Come on! This way! Stay with me!”

Reno nodded as he ran with Beckett. John and Rodriguez stayed with them while the other soldiers fired at the aliens. Reno ducked, trying to block out the war raging around them as he followed Beckett.

They ran up a hill and entered Centennial Park from the east side. Flames engulfed the park, forcing them to dodge burning trees and smoldering cars. On top of everything else, Reno had his injured ankle to worry about, but he pushed through the pain. It would all be worth it if he could execute Jack’s plan.

“Why aren’t they firing on us?” John asked.

“I don’t know,” Rodriguez said. “But let’s keep moving.”

Reno figured that their proximity to the obelisk was forcing the aliens to hold their fire. The obelisk and generator keeping the dome up seemed to be holding, but they’d been damaged. It was possible that the aliens didn’t want to risk an errant beam that could further jeopardize the obelisk’s stability. And it wasn’t as if the soldiers’ bullets hurt the aliens—they just seemed to slow them down. If they could just keep from getting pulverized and not draw too much alien fire, Reno believed they might be able to get close enough to the obelisk to blow the generator. But then again, if the obelisk was so important to the aliens, why would they let any humans get that close? Reno sighed, realizing that if they survived this invasion, there would be more questions than answers for a long, long time.

The rubble at the base of the obelisk looked to have come from the news footage Reno had seen when an earthquake had devastated a third world city. The pile of concrete, twisted metal, and body parts made his stomach lurch. He instinctively began to navigate through it, climbing into dark crevasses and under nests of copper wire. As the soldiers followed him, he also realized that the aliens were too large to fit through the openings, and blowing the debris out of the way would risk an accidental shot at what remained of the obelisk.

He pushed on, using the light of the burning rubble to get down to the base of the obelisk. Reno stood over a massive, round chasm with the circumference of a small auditorium. Like the high ceiling of an ancient cathedral, the base of the obelisk covered the enormous hole burrowed into the ground beneath what had been the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park. A cold current of air carried an earthy stench up and into his face and he immediately understood what Jack had been talking about. The aliens—thousands or maybe millions of years ago—had drilled deep beneath the surface and dropped a generator that ran off the Earth’s geothermal heat. He noticed pulsing black lines running up from the unseen depths and along the sides of the chasm which had been carved from the limestone bed sitting beneath most of the Tennessee Valley.

Supply lines from the generator.

“What now?” Beckett asked, appearing on Reno’s right.

Several of the other soldiers had climbed through the debris and now stood on the edge with Reno. The air coming from far below seemed to moan, as if it could sense what was about to happen.

“How far down does it go?”

Reno thought the question had come from Rodriguez, but his brain had fogged over. He pictured Maya and Jack in his head, and they seemed to be urging him on—urging him to blow up the generator as quickly as possible. And at the same time, he thought he heard voices in the darkness, all of them pleading with him not to destroy the obelisk.

“Dude. What the fuck?” John grabbed Reno and spun him around. “You blowing this thing or what?”

“Yeah, yeah. Of course.”

Reno slid the bag of explosives from his back. Rodriguez wired the PE-4 and rigged it to a series frequency and timer, using a technique he’d learned on active duty in the Army. He crimped the safety fuse to the blasting cap before handing the detonator to Reno.

“Your plan. You get to detonate it.”

The other men had run the detonator cord and PE-4 to several other spots at the base of the obelisk.

Rodriguez signaled to the other men before screaming at Reno. “Do it!”

Reno pushed in the timed detonator and looked at Becket.

“Thirty seconds. Let’s go!”

The four men turned away from the chasm and ran, climbing through the debris as quickly as they could. Reno wasn’t confident that thirty seconds would be enough time for them to get back to the transport and he had no idea how much damage the generator would cause when the explosives hit it. But if Reno died while in the process of bringing down the dome, then so be it. It wasn’t like he had a choice.

It was as if the aliens knew what Reno had done because they’d all taken flight now, buzzing through the sky and surging into the aperture of the ship docked at the top of the obelisk.

That strange feeling came over him again—the same kind he’d experienced while standing on the edge of the chasm a few minutes before. The aliens knew what was about to happen and that Reno was the one who had caused it. Somehow, they knew.

Reno grimaced as he reached the transport, trying to keep the countdown timer in his head.

Ten seconds? Maybe less?

He threw himself into the vehicle, his ankle hot and swelling tightly against the wrap as John and Beckett pulled him fully up into the seat.

“Everyone’s here!” Gibson said. “Go! Go!”

Five seconds?

The transport sped off, heading back toward the National Guard checkpoint. All of the soldiers looked out the back of the vehicle, staring at the obelisk and waiting.

Zero?

Shit. The explosives didn’t—

The ground shook the transport and Reno saw the flash before he heard the thunderous concussion. At first, the top of the obelisk broke away from the ship, and then the bottom of it collapsed into the depths, burying the destroyed generator beneath tons of rock and debris.

The transport stopped as all of the soldiers inside it watched the obelisk collapse to the right.

The darkness above flickered, and then, as if God had hit the light switch, Reno saw the golden light of the rising sun on the eastern horizon. It had already begun to paint the sky in wide, luscious brush strokes of crimson orange. High, fluffy clouds floated overhead and the sight of them made Reno cry.

The aliens who had been in mid-flight when the dome dropped fell from the sky, plummeting back to Earth like hunks of a splintered comet. The mothership hovered, and for a split-second Reno felt as if it had marked him. It knew he was the one who’d brought down the dome over Nashville. And it wasn’t happy about it.

The soldiers cheered, a few jumping up out of their seats and others high-fiving and hugging each other.

Reno exhaled as the mothership ascended, presumably returning to deep space or whatever distant galaxy it’d come from.

Beckett put his arm around Reno. “You did it! You son of a bitch, you did it!”

Reno shook his hand, then turned to John. John winked at him.

Exhaling again, Reno sat back against the wall of the truck and closed his eyes.