The End Has Come

* * *

George would later learn that the alien attack had failed within the first twelve hours. Ships had appeared out of nowhere over the skies of the biggest cities in the most-advanced nations: Beijing, New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Mumbai, Berlin and more.

Trouble was, the most-advanced nations had the most-advanced militaries. Air-to-air missiles blew flying saucers out of the sky, turned them into flaming wrecks that plummeted into the cities below. Some US pilots said it was like shooting down a space shuttle  — a target that couldn’t dodge, that exploded easily and spectacularly. Others used more colloquial terms: It was like shooting flaming arrows at hydrogen-filled fish swimming in a barrel of jet fuel.

Maybe the plan had been to take out the strongest first, in hopes that the weakest would then surrender. Whatever the reason, it turned out that the great military minds of the attacking aliens weren’t that great. Some guessed they weren’t military at all. Sociologists theorized that the invasion was more religious than military in nature, that it was more the covered wagons of armed civilians crossing the great plains than it was the landing craft of D-Day.

One thing seemed certain: The ships that attacked were not built for battle. Now it was assumed that the aliens had gone to war with what they had, because they had no place else to go. The children were proof that their species could breathe just fine on Earth. After some trial and error, they were able to safely eat many kinds of food. The aliens, so the theory went, had to abandon their own planet, and Earth was the only place they could reach.

They could have tried to communicate, but instead they declared war, and they paid dearly.

The conflict had been so fast, so decisive, that the only alien ship left intact was one that hadn’t fought at all  — the one that crashed not far from George’s hunting cabin. Some assumed it was destined for Chicago before the malfunction that brought it down. Every other vessel had been engulfed in flame, then hit the ground like a bomb. End result: very little material remained intact. Very little material, and no survivors  — save for George’s eleven charges.

Through the thrice-daily interviews, George had learned there were no known alien survivors except for “the children.” That made them beyond important, an immeasurable resource. If there were other survivors, they were locked up tight in some secret government location. People speculated that was true. George was one of those people.

The invasion changed the world, but not in the way scifi authors or great intellectuals might have predicted. Governments didn’t come together. If anything, they were more divided than ever. What changed was the people. The people came together, ignoring racial and cultural divides. They came together with one common interest: absolute distrust of authority. Among the countless conspiracy theories was the top dog of them all: that governments knew what had been coming and hadn’t warned their people. Theories like that weren’t new. They’d been part of the populace since governments had formed. What was new was a technology that no government could completely control. The Internet. Cell phones. Local networks. People organizing, encrypting, working together as one against anything that smacked of authority. In the years before the invasion, people had come to fear their governments. Now, the governments feared the people  — and with good reason.

* * *

George, Toivo, and Jaco stood by the ruins of a hunting cabin that had been the centerpiece of their friendship for three decades, the centerpiece of Mister Ekola’s relationship with his own childhood friends for the two decades before that. Over half a century of tradition, now nothing more than shattered timber and scattered camping supplies.

The wind’s ebb hadn’t lasted long. Whitened treetops swayed slightly. The woods were here before people. The woods would be here after people were gone. The woods just didn’t give a shit about any of this. Those trees bracketed a long stretch of white: the road, thick with snowdrifts three feet high, motionless waves in a snapshot of a frozen ocean.

And coming down that road, a moving spray of snow rising up in grand arcs, crashing to the sides in puffing clouds of white that caught the morning sun. Through those clouds, a pulsating orange light.

“Ambulance lights are red,” Toivo said.

“Not an ambulance,” Jaco said. “It’s a goddamn snowplow. Let me guess, Georgie  — an ambulance is right behind it?”

George nodded. “I sure hope so.”

The flashing orange light came closer. As it did, the three men could make out the cabin of the snowplow itself, highway-maintenance orange seeming to surf on a flowing, crashing wave of snow.

Toivo turned to George. “How’d you get a snowplow to come out here, eh?”

Jaco laughed, the first time that sound had been heard since the alien ship had torn open the night sky with a boom so loud it shook the ground.