They each took one of Hanna’s arms and lifted her to her feet. They struggled along with her as best they could, but she kept stumbling and they made slow progress. Glenda opened her eyes wide, something that was habitual now as a way to see as much as she could in the perpetual dark, and something that made her temples ache with a low throb.
She could barely see the left and right shoulders of the road. Her feet crunched through the gravel.
Hanna started crying, getting her weeping done in between her explosive coughing. The bump and rattle of Buzz’s truck got closer, the signature sound particularly noticeable on this potholed road. Glenda had the sense that she had already lost, and that dragging her daughter up this lonely rural road in the middle
of this perpetual night would be the last thing she would ever do. The futility of her situation made her want to weep, but she found that, despite these self-defeating feelings, her body kept going, as if it had an internal agenda for survival and couldn’t be bothered with the emotional fuss her mind was making.
“I don’t see his headlights,” said Jake.
“He’s behind that hill,” said Glenda. “He’ll be coming over the rise any second. Just keep going.”
They struggled and struggled, and finally came to the fallen tree in the middle of the road. The tree was huge and tinder-dry, and all the leaves had fallen off its branches.
“Let’s go around the left side,” she said.
She and Jake helped Hanna around to the left just as Buzz came over the rise. The dead branches, still thick, scratched her.
“Just push your way through. Hurry up. Hanna, lift your leg over the trunk.”
“I can’t see it, Mom.”
Glenda turned on the flashlight. “There.”
Her daughter climbed over the trunk, but it was as if death had already come to Hanna because, once on the other side, she collapsed.
“Just leave me here. Let him kill me. Maybe that will satisfy him. You two go ahead.”
“Hanna, come on, get to your feet,” said Glenda, her voice now panicked. “He’s nearly here.”
“I can’t, Mom. I really can’t.”
And she simply lay there on her side coughing, too weak to move.
“Jake, let’s drag her.”
But Jake was looking over the tree. “I’m going to take him out.”
“No, no… not with a handgun. Not from this range. You’ll waste bullets like you did last time. Just grab her and let’s go.”
They dragged her—literally—so that her jeans scraped along the gravel and kicked up a small cloud of dust. Buzz’s truck rattled to a stop on the other side of the fallen tree, and she heard Buzz open the door and get out of the vehicle. She didn’t look back, couldn’t look back, because her eyes were glued to the sky above the road, where she saw the dark shape again—huge, hovering silently, with no lights, no visible means of propulsion. Now that she listened more closely, she heard a faint hiss, like water being sucked down a drain.
The headlights on Buzz’s truck shone through the dead branches of the fallen tree, making a wild tracery of shadows all over the road. She glanced at Jake and saw that he was outlined in the branch-broken glow of Buzz’s headlights. But it was as if he didn’t care, because he was looking up at the Tarsalan vehicle as well.
“Goddamn it, Glenda, why don’t you let me kill you easy?” called Buzz.
The sound of a rifle shot rocketed through the air.
That’s when lights exploded everywhere on the Tarsalan Landing Vehicle. Shaped like a clamshell, the TLV now glowed with a mother-of-pearl mix—violet, green, silver—and this light coalesced into a single beam, which quickly pinpointed Buzz’s ramshackle old truck, while a smaller, separate beam outlined Buzz. She saw Buzz clearly in this small beam. He lifted his arm to his forehead to shield his eyes from the light, and squinted at its glare. Then a series of blue and green embers floated away from the alien landing craft and drifted, in no particular hurry, toward Buzz and his truck.
“Get off the road!” she cried.
She and Jake dragged Hanna up a small incline to the other side of a hummock. She got on her stomach and watched things unfold. As the blue and green embers got closer to Buzz they began to whine with a rising pitch until finally the sound was so painful that she had to cover her ears. Buzz figured things out quickly and, after a moment of drop-jawed scrutiny, ran away from his truck, rifle in hand, and disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road. Five embers drifted toward his truck and burrowed into it like hot little drills. A few seconds later, his truck exploded and was left a flaming heap on the asphalt.
Other embers pursued Buzz into the forest. She watched in horrified fascination. With all the underbrush dead, she kept fairly good track of Buzz. He ran from tree to tree as if pursued by a band of malevolent fairies. The embers cruised after him, closing the distance quickly. When they were a yard away, they pulled back, then dove into his body with the ferocity and quickness of bullets. Buzz cried out, an awful throaty scream. His limbs went stiff, his fingers splayed so that he dropped his rifle, and it was as if he was illuminated from within by high-voltage electricity. He shook violently. His shirt burst into flames, and he fell to the ground so that half his body was hidden behind a tree trunk, the other half still visible. Then came a small explosion and she got the distinct impression of a detached leg flying into the air. She turned away. She was saddened that it had come to this, but she was also relieved. And terrified that she now had to elude the Tarsalans herself.
At that point, the alien spacecraft descended to the road. It was wacky, a scene out of a science fiction movie, something she had never expected to see; visitors from another star at last landing on her planet, the spacecraft settling on the road like a giant glowing egg. It made a creepy sound, a sudden buzz with low-frequency harmonics that vibrated through her whole body, then that sucking sound again, like the last bit of water in a bathtub going down the drain. Then all sound faded.
In the ensuing silence, her body took over. She got her kids to their feet and helped them through the forest. Hanna didn’t have to be dragged—fear was a great motivator. Glenda got all kinds of scratches from the thick, dead bushes, but continued to cajole her kids through the dark forest past the spaceship, and finally back out onto the road. Her mind, in its own separate universe, reeled from the terror of it all.
With Hanna in such a debilitated state, it took them a long time to get the rest of the way to Marblehill.
Glenda looked at her watch in the dim glow of her flashlight, and wasn’t sure if it was one o’clock in the afternoon or one o’clock in the morning.
When they finally reached Marblehill, she looked up at the three-story mansion and saw lights burning in
four windows. In the glow of these lights she saw a helicopter sitting on the big front lawn. The building itself looked as if it had been under prolonged attack, with the east turret demolished and the rest of the various walls, dormers, and cornices badly shot up.
The three Thorndikes stood outside a big stone wall. There was a path outside the wall that led into the forest. In happier times, she had walked along this path, hand in hand with Gerry, down into the rugged limestone ravine that abutted the property where the trees used to grow. Hanna lay on the ground outside the wall. Her coughing sounded different: still persistent but not as strong, as if she had long ago ripped all her abdominal muscles to pieces and no longer possessed the muscular mechanics to cough the way she used to
“Jake, stay with your sister. I’m going to the gate.”
But beyond that? She didn’t know. What if this whole thing turned into a bust? What if everybody was dead inside?
She reached the gate and turned her flashlight on and off three times. She waited, then repeated the signal, terrified that, somewhere out in the dead forest behind her, Tarsalan refugees watched her. She repeated the signal a third time, then saw someone run from the house, across the lawn, and toward the helicopter.
As the figure got closer, she saw that it was recognizably human, with normal human proportions, not short legs and long arms like a Tarsalan. She was so overwhelmed with relief that she felt dizzy and pressed her hand against the gate for support.
The figure resolved itself into a man. “Mrs. Thorndike?”
“Yes…yes, it’s me. Call me Glenda.”
“Where are your kids?”
The man closed the distance between them, and she saw the name FERNANDES stitched above his left
