CHAPTER 10: CLINGING ON

Feeling pretty satisfied with herself, Mandy got comfortable for a long day of Watch The Aliens Destroy Palmer, because she sure as hell wasn’t walking back down the mountain to deal with the chaos of an alien attack in her sneakers. As far as she could tell, the ship didn’t seem to have any intention of landing, but it also wasn’t doing any great favors the way it was frying huge swaths of the Mat-Su.

Front row seats to the greatest show on Earth, she thought. She knew it was pretty morbid, since people had to be dying down there if the melted swath of mountainside was any indication, but she also knew there wasn’t jack-all she could do without a working vehicle or a phone. Submitting a story to the AP required phone service and internet connections, and while she’d figured out how to make the generator work, her phone was still dead.

She was disappointed, sure, but at least now nobody could try to claim that it was ‘statistically improbable’ for there to be any life in the universe aside from that of Planet Earth.

I mean, really? Mandy had discovered just the other day while researching for an article on the ongoing repairs at the Stargate Observatory in Wasilla that just the observable universe contained as many as 2 trillion galaxies, each with about a hundred billion stars. At last count astronomers had estimated there were about ninety billion trillion stars out there within viewing range, which actually meant there were probably a lot more, considering how the universe was expanding and they could only see light that was a certain age old.

And, because planets were much much harder to see than stars because they had no innate luminosity, there were theories out there that there were many, many more planets than stars even though the observable number so far had only been a few thousand.

But, even if there were only one planet per star, that was still more than ninety billion trillion planets out there to potentially evolve their own forms of life, and yet somehow all the scientists on Earth were spouting the same sapiens-centric political garbage that, if traced back to its roots, was ultimately being perpetuated by the CIA and the Pentagon—that humanity was the only intelligent life in the universe? Please. She was a millennial, but she wasn’t born yesterday.

So a bunch of government goobs had just gotten its ass handed to them by an ET. That actually made her a little warm and fuzzy inside. Maybe now they’d install some sort of world order and stop all the stupid wars, hunger, and famine. Because, obviously, any ET advanced enough to build an interstellar spaceship would only be coming to Earth to spread knowledge and peace, not conquer. Because, like a smart monkey, Mandy knew that with ninety billion trillion planets to choose from, an ET wasn’t going to risk messing around with things like bacterial contamination, invasive species, or parasites when it needed resources—it would just go grab an unused, clean planet and take what it needed. For it to be here, interacting with them, could only mean one thing:

It wanted to be friends, even if it had to fry a few machine-gun-toting thugs to do it.

Thus, she was sitting back, munching on a box of Cheese-Its from a kitchen cupboard, feet up on the dining table and grinning like an idiot as she watched the alien ship prove once and for all that humans were just self-important specks on the grand tapestry of the universe, when the black half-moon blew a hole in the middle of Palmer and the shockwave took out the front windows of the lodge in a blast of glass shards.

Mandy had just pulled her glass-covered body off the floor when the ship started pounding balls of purple-white light into the Earth at three second intervals, one after the next.

What in the hell is that? she wondered, hunkered below the window frame, shivering from the suddenly cold air and the fact that, fifteen miles from the epicenter, she had just gotten hit by a blast wave that probably leveled the whole Mat-Su. Swallowing hard, she watched the violet-white balls continue to drop from the ship into the planet’s core. Again, what she wouldn’t have done for a camera, but this time it was so she could zoom in, get a better look at what was happening down there. This far away, it wasn’t much more than a blur…

When it was obvious the pounding wasn’t going to stop any time soon—and Mandy wasn’t getting out of the mountains that night unless that ‘park ranger’ miraculously decided to come back to check on her—she decided it was time to start making plans for the night.

Tomorrow, once the sun came back up, she would try to hotwire one of those SUVs. She wasn’t great at it, and some of the newer models made it harder, but she’d seen some tools in the generator shed that she could use to get the job done. After that, her plan was to walk up the pass where the government snow-machiners had disappeared. She had a feeling if they were still alive, they probably would have followed the spaceship in a vast angry herd down out of the mountains, but aside from her own attempts to get the generator started out in the shed, she hadn’t heard the sound of a machine since that park ranger dude had left her stranded early that morning.

Until then, because she was stranded, and because it was damned cold without windows, heat, or electricity, Mandy grabbed a handful of candles from a supply closet, unhooked the keys to the cabins from the manager’s quarters, and went looking for a smaller, warmer space to spend the night. Several of the cabins had been orientated with their windows facing the mountain scenery and not the valley below, so they still had intact windows. She found one that looked comfy and let herself inside.

The guest cabin was tiny—with a small loft built to sleep four, though only enough room for two to move around comfortably—but it had a small woodstove and a small pile of spruce kindling, which she immediately put to use. After warming up, she crawled under the blankets, though she found herself staring at the wooden ceiling of the cabin, listening to the spaceship’s pounding rattle the windows with every boom.

Wonder what it’s doing down there, she thought, playing out scenarios in her mind. Her best guess was some sort of mining expedition, though why aliens would stop on Earth, when Earth’s minerals were basically shit compared to, oh, every asteroid in the known universe, Mandy had no idea.

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All we’ve got is air, Mandy thought. A working atmosphere, oxygen… Why would a group of aliens care about the Earth’s molten core when all that core contained were elements commonly found throughout the rest of the galaxy?

I spent too much time with astronomers last week, she thought, realizing she was obsessing again. It was one of her habits, and it was hard to break, especially when it was something that bothered her or didn’t make sense. Still, she knew she certainly wasn’t going to solve the mystery of the aliens’ intentions by agonizing over it in the dark when she should be sleeping, so she forced herself to roll over and think of sheep.

The pounding stopped sometime after midnight, which allowed Mandy to finally fall asleep.

By dawn the next morning, she was just starting to stretch and open her eyes when she was thrown out of bed with the screaming fury of a hurricane.

Avalanche, she thought, scrambling to get to the door to the tiny cabin. Unable to stay upright, she hit the wall, which hit her back hard enough to knock her straight to the floor.

I guess they weren’t bullshitting after all, she thought, stunned that the government, for once, had been telling the truth. Mandy started crawling towards the exit, just knowing that the avalanche had hit the building and was carrying it down the mountain in a massive river of snow.

It was over relatively quickly, but by the time the rumbling stopped and Mandy pulled herself back to a sitting position, the potbelly stove had come loose of its restraints and spilled soot all over the inside of the cabin as it rolled. The bed had lunged away from the wall, and the floor of the cabin itself was at an odd angle, like it had fallen off a foundation post.

The cabin itself, however, was built like a brick shithouse, and despite taking an avalanche full-on, it wasn’t worse for wear. Thank gawd for old-timer Alaskans, Mandy thought, using the ash-shovel to scoop the few glowing embers back into the potbelly stove so she didn’t get roasted like a marshmallow while trapped inside a snowslide. Then, once she was certain the ash that was left wasn’t going to ignite around her, she went crawling to the front door to begin the task of digging her way free.

When she pushed on the door, it opened to the same driveway where she had left it, with the same black SUVs sitting gleaming and snow-free in the parking lot.

That’s…weird, she thought, frowning. Had it been an earthquake?

Several other cabins were at angles, having fallen from their supports, but, like the first, they had rolled before they crumbled. Due in part, Mandy thought, because they were built to withstand twelve feet of snow each year.

That was a big earthquake, Mandy thought, once she had determined it wasn’t an avalanche. What in the hell? She put on her shoes and coat and went down the now-slanted steps to drop to the ground below.

Looking up the hillsides around her, she saw that there had been avalanches, one of which had come within two hundred feet of hitting the cabin. Swaths of dirt on the mountainsides in all directions told of violent snowslides.

And then there was the boulder. It was just sitting there placidly in the middle of the parking lot, between two SUVs, minding its own business.

Mandy squinted at it. Was that boulder there before? she wondered, at first thinking maybe she was caught up in some elaborate hoax, some Houdini bullshit that her colleagues had decided to play on the poor, deluded coworker that believed in aliens. She squinted at the magic boulder, trying to calculate where it had come from. She couldn’t be sure, but she was pretty confident it hadn’t been, because it was essentially sitting in the same place that the park ranger had been standing when he’d held the gun on her.

Just for good measure, Mandy walked up and touched it just to make sure it was a real boulder and not a movie prop made out of foam.

It was real. And hard. And cold.

Okay, this is starting to creep me out, Mandy thought, glancing up at the now-dirty mountainsides. Aliens she could handle, but avalanches scared the shit outta her. She crossed the yard to get a screwdriver and a wrench from the generator shed.

The second earthquake hit as she walking back across the parking lot to attempt to hotwire a government vehicle, ten times harder than the first. This time, the quake threw her from her feet, and Mandy fell to the ground and stayed there, unable to move, as all around her, buildings, boulders, and SUVs bounced around her like rubber balls in a children’s trampoline playden. And kept bouncing. The Houdini boulder rolled on her hand as she lay there on the ground, then bounced away again a few moments later as she screamed herself hoarse.

Mandy didn’t know how long it lasted, because after a few minutes, something heavy slammed into her head as she was trying to sit up, knocking her out cold.

When she woke, Mandy’s left hand—which had taken the boulder’s impact full-on—was black and blue, and she knew from the odd way her fingers were dangling that at least a couple of her fingers were broken, if not all. She felt bruises everywhere, and she was pretty sure her right leg had been run over by a SUV, because she found herself lying under one, straddling a wheel.

Pulling herself out from under the vehicle was like trying to climb the Himalayas. She hurt, hurt bad, and she was shaking, dizzy, and unable to put weight on her leg.

Concussion, she thought. She pulled up a pant leg to get a look at an ugly red-black bruise spreading over approximately a tire-sized chunk of her fibula. Maybe broken leg. Shit.

In the grand scheme of things, however, she realized she got off lucky. Eight of the fourteen SUVs had actually been bounced off their tires and were in various states of upside-downness on the slopes below. The semi had fallen over on its side and stayed there. The three Humvees were about the only things unfazed, sitting on the hill as serenely as the day before.

Behind her, the main lodge was completely flattened. Only two of the fifteen cabins remained standing, and only one of them was still upright. The other was at a dangerous cant, while eight others had simply fallen onto their sides and stayed there. The five remaining were utterly destroyed, nothing but broken boards poking through sheet metal. Her chosen cabin was one of those, and even then, smoke was starting to billow up in a dark line against the March blue sky where the coals must have re-ignited.

That couldn’t have been earthquake, she thought. Nothing—nothing—she’d ever heard about lasted that long. A nuclear attack, then? Something worse?

Rather than go take her chances inside the last remaining cabin or spend any longer than necessary near the rollie-pollies, Mandy painstakingly climbed into the one Humvee that wasn’t locked and watched her former cabin smolder burn through the window as the shock and adrenaline wore off, leaving her with dull, agonizing aches in her hand, leg, and sternum.

Despite the pain, however, she felt herself drifting off.

Don’t fall asleep, she thought, considering the conventional wisdom on concussions. First thing they say is don’t fall asleep, it can kill you.

But the lure of sleep was stronger than that of a drug, and despite a powerful will to stay conscious, Mandy felt herself losing the battle.

World’s fucked anyway, she realized. What’s one more casualty? Unable to keep her eyes open any longer, she passed out.