CHAPTER 17: A VOICE IN THE DARK

Mandy woke behind the wheel of a strange vehicle, agony pulsing in her left hand.

“Oowww,” she groaned, reaching to touch the pounding back of her head. It was cold, really cold, and she couldn’t feel her feet. In front of her, the window was blacked out from fresh snow, though the vertical side windows showed snowy mountainsides. She blinked at that, completely disorientated, having no memory of how she had gotten in the stranger’s car.

Another one-night stand? she thought, feeling rather stupid. Usually when this happened, she had gotten drunk out of her mind the night before and could look forward to spending the rest of the day vomiting. But she didn't feel nauseous, which was weird... Had she been roofied? Raped? She sure as hell felt beat to shit.

Then there was her hand. When she looked at it, it was black, and it took her a moment to realize that was bruises, not charcoal or dirt.

Holy shit…was I in a car wreck?

The lonely mountainside she could see through her window offered no answers. They looked vaguely familiar, but aside from a few, most mountains looked the same to her.

She was in the driver’s seat, too. That didn’t make a lot of sense…

She squinted around her, trying to place the kind of car she was in. It was olive drab and green, and utilitarian, kind of like the military…

The military. Aliens. Earthquakes.

It all came rushing back to her in a sudden wave that took her breath away. Aliens were attacking, she’d busted her hand to shit on a rock, and she was trapped on a mountain with no way down that didn’t include freezing her titties off on a fourteen-mile hike through a snowy mountain area the government had marked ‘restricted’.

Sure, she had cut the quarantine barriers and shoved the cones out of the way, but most people would obey the cheesy government warnings of ‘avalanches’ and avoid Hatcher’s Pass like good little citizens.

Okay, don’t panic, Mandy thought. Think. So what if aliens were attacking and they’d just had the biggest earthquake on record? Humanity would pull through.

…wouldn’t it?

Desperate not to become a statistic, Mandy had to reach across with her good hand to shove the Humvee door open, then one-handedly guided herself down to the ground. Immediately, her leg started pounding, but it held as she gingerly lowered her weight to it.

She could still stand, so it probably wasn’t broken. That much, at least, was good. She took a tentative step away from the vehicle to get a better view of the snowy hillside in the dusk—or was it dawn? How long had she been unconscious?

Either way, enough snow had fallen while she was out of it that it now covered everything in a fine, fluffy layer over an inch thick. She turned to look back at the ruined lodge and its massacred cabins. The one she’d been sleeping in had burned to cinders, though it must have been some time ago because the new snow hadn’t melted, despite the light trail of smoke still rising from the charred rubble.

Immediately, she noticed that her boots had dislodged something discolored that was layering the snow, revealing pure white underneath. She squatted to get a better look.

Ash she thought. Looking up at the sky, she realized she had thought it was later in the day than it probably was, the sky darkened by the brownish haze of volcanic ash.

Damn I’m thirsty, she thought. She wondered again how long she had been sleeping. Judging by the sky, it could have been as little as a few hours, to as many as a couple days.

That wasn’t a pleasant thought. She turned to look down the hill, trying to find the alien ship out in the ash haze. She didn’t see one hovering over Palmer, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t obscured.

Time to get the hell outta Dodge. Maybe head north up to Tok or Fairbanks. Plenty of lonely old sourdoughs up there who would jump on the chance to take a pretty, helpless girl like her in in the hopes of exchanging food for sex. She was pretty sure she could do that, until the food ran out, at which point she’d probably check herself for venereal disease and move on. Maybe even take his shit, if things got bad enough or he got violent. She had a third-dan blackbelt from Okamotos Karate in Anchorage, and had been doing it since she was three, so she was pretty decent at defending herself. She’d actually spent some time in juvie at McLaughlin Youth Center for beating the everlovin’ snot out of a guy who came up behind her and tried to grope her in the school parking lot, breaking his nose, larynx, arm, knee, instep, and rupturing both testicles in the matter of thirteen seconds, then lay on the ground gagging and gasping like a dying thing—which he was—while the principal and most of Chugiak High School had been watching.

The paramedics had saved him, but he’d never been able to walk without a limp or talk louder than a whisper ever again. The judge had ruled that, as a decorated martial artist, Mandy had used excessive force, regardless of the kid’s intent, and she got kicked out of Okamoto’s program and her rank effectively revoked. That was back when she had been living in Birchwood with her parents, who immediately forgot she existed once her dojo abandoned her and the government sent her to juvie for ‘attitude correction,’ the public shame too much for them to bear even though this was fucking America and not the Old Country.

Pfft.

She went back to the site of her boulder assault, scrubbed around in the ash until she found her tools, then went back to the unlocked Humvee.

Mandy was one-handedly climbing back into the Humvee and getting ready to start tearing apart the steering column in an attempt to hotwire it, when she realized there was an ON/OFF switch off to one side.

No way, Mandy thought, pausing to stare. It couldn’t be that easy… All this time, she’d been looking for keys, not even bothering to look at the ignition…

But sure enough, when she primed the glowplug knob and turned the ON switch, the engine roared to life. Easy as that, no keys required. God bless the grunts, Mandy thought, giggling. Back when she’d been on the hunt for keys, she’d actually flipped back the dashboard wondering what happened to soldiers that were in an ambush who couldn’t get to their keys in time, or if they fumbled and dropped them, or when the driver died three hundred yards back and they had to run back and grab his keys, the whole unit just standing around as they grabbed their gear. Made sense to just have a switch, once she thought about it.

Then again, it also left the equipment up for grabs to any stranded millennial who happened to pass by.

They were up there screaming, Mandy told herself, fighting off guilt. If they were going to come back, they would have…

Besides, there were three Humvees, and still some SUVs left. Enough to get people out, if nothing else.

Refusing to feel bad, Mandy climbed inside, ready to head anywhere but the cold-ass mountains and its shitty generator and no cell coverage. Somebody down there had to have a working phone, and she was going to call headquarters, tell them everything she’d seen, and get her damn hand to a hospital.

Humvee roaring, she awkwardly used her good hand to steer the oversized vehicle out of the parking lot and started it back down the road to Palmer, wipers sloughing the volcanic ash to either side. She’d only been traveling a minute when something hard hit her windshield like a wet lump of clay.

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She couldn’t be sure, but it looked black and moving. Then it was flung aside by the wipers and she could only sit there, frowning at her windshield, Humvee purring slowly down the road, wondering if it had been a bird, a bug, or something worse.

Considering the current predicament, her vote was something worse. Fiery magma, maybe?

Probably a good time to stay in the vehicle, she thought, as she took another hairpin curve.

But, as she rounded the corner, the landscape changed. Violently. Whereas behind her, the world had been fluffy and snow-packed, now the road ahead of her was covered in fallen trees, broken boards, yard ornaments, roofs, cars, boats…

What in the fuck… Mandy thought, slowing the vehicle. It went on as far as she could see in either direction, hundreds of yards of random debris clogging the mountainside like a high-water-line.

Then she saw her first corpse.

It was the body of a man, twisted and broken, hanging over one of the busted birch trees like clothes from a line. Beside him, a moose was similarly mangled, upside down and twisted so that its head was hidden under the ash.

Or was that a cow?

Realizing it was a cow, not a moose, Mandy began to get a sick feeling in her gut. Cows were grown in Palmer, not Hatcher’s Pass.

With that sinking understanding that something very horrible had happened while she lay unconscious in the Humvee, something that it was beginning to look like she alone had survived, Mandy turned the engine off and stared through the window of her borrowed vehicle, trying to piece together her world.

I’m not getting through that, she thought. Without a chainsaw and a month of clearing the road, she’d just get her Humvee stuck. Then again, this was March, and if she waited another couple months, she could simply drive through the Pass and out the other side. Assuming, of course, that whatever happened in Palmer hadn’t happened out near Willow.

Something hit the window again, and this time, she got a good look at it. A writhing black maggot, four-jawed with skin like a basketball, unlike any maggot she’d ever seen. It stayed there on the window-shield, only inches from her face, allowing her to get a good look as its toothy little mandibles groped at the air like something out of Predator.

That’s not something from Earth, she thought, watching it through the glass. That’s an alien. It’s raining aliens.

Her mind, already in shock from the other events in her last twenty-four hours of consciousness, took that in placidly, chewing on it. Then she calmly started the Humvee and turned it away from the debris pile.

She was in the middle of a hairy three-point turn in the middle of the narrow, icy road when she saw something move in the debris pile off to her right. Squinting at it through the dim hail of ash, she nonetheless brought the hummer to a stop and waited for it to move again.

Whatever it was, it was small. Dog-sized. Or child-sized, she admitted. But whatever it was, it was oddly-shaped, bulky, and huddled in the bottom of the rowboat, moving only slightly now and then, like it was hiding from her.

…or dying.

Reluctantly, Mandy rolled down her window. “Hello?”

The thing in the boat brushed away some ash and slowly sat up, making her heart stammer at the strange, inhuman shape…

It was a kid wearing a bright orange life-preserver, looking delirious.

“Oh shit!” Mandy cried, turning off the Humvee and jumping out. “Kid! You’re a kid!”

The child didn’t try to respond, only looked at her like she was talking Greek. His lips were blue. He didn’t look like he could focus on her directly. In fact, he gave her an almost casual perusal, then lay back down on his side, in the fetal position.

Mandy ran to the kid then, scrambling over the dead cow and mashing her broken hand on debris to do so. The idea that there was anyone—anyone—to talk to, to share this shit with, was something she grabbed with the enthusiasm of the drowning grabbing for a flotation ring. She snagged the kid by the wrist—it was cold—and one-handedly pulled him from the boat.

“Hey kid, can you walk?”

No response.

Awkwardly, with only one working hand, she squatted and tugged him over her shoulder. “Come on, we gotta get you somewhere warm.”

The kid groaned, but whatever he tried to utter was unintelligible.

“Don’t worry,” she said, twisting to climb the debris back to the Humvee. “We’ll get you warmed up.” The pain in her leg didn’t bother her, now, for she was running on pure adrenaline. She climbed back over the debris, once again using the dead cow as a bridge to get back to the road. The frozen meat felt hard and stiff under her feet, making her think she’d been sleeping a lot longer than she’d initially estimated.

“There’s a heater,” she said, as she piled the kid into the passenger side of the Humvee. “Don’t worry, kid. Got a heater.”

The kid didn’t sit up straight, instead slumping to one side on the seat. Mandy shut the door, got back in the driver’s seat, and fired the Humvee back up. She maybe hit the road back up the hill a little too fast, but at this point, she wasn’t thinking, only acting.

Back at the decimated resort, she parked in front of the only cabin left standing, cranked up the heat to max, left the car running with the kid inside, then went to get the fire started. Like the first cabin, the potbelly stove had dislodged from its moorings and rolled across the floor, so she had to drag it back, rearrange it, and replace the chimney before she could get a fire started.

Half an hour later, she went out and shut the Humvee down. Checking the kid’s face, she felt it to be warm, but his upper body, insulated from the heat by the snowsuit, was still cold. I gotta get him out of this, she thought, desperate. Hastily, she dragged the kid inside the cabin.

“Hey kid,” Mandy said, peeling him from his black snowsuit. “You’re gonna be okay. Right?” No response. “Can you even hear me?”

Nothing.

The snowsuit was more or less dry, but the kid’s body was ice cold, even that vital place under his armpits. How long did he spend lying in the bottom of that boat? she wondered.

She had gotten the boy peeled down to his undergarments before she realized that ‘he’ was actually a ‘she,’ and probably only eight or nine years old. Wrapping the little girl in a blanket, Mandy held her by the fire—blanket open to let in the heat—and started babbling about who she was, her history, and what the newsroom at the Anchorage Daily News probably looked like now that the ocean had carried cows up into the mountains.

The girl, for her part, didn’t say much in response.

In fact, it was hours later, with Mandy constantly checking the temperature of her armpits and back, until the girl even started to stir. When she did, the first words out of her mouth were, “Where’s Daddy?”

Mandy’s heart broke on the spot. How to tell a little kid that her dad was dead…

“His dead body, I mean,” the girl added. She looked up at Mandy and matter-of-factly said, “He’s dead, right?”

Mandy opened her mouth to lie, then just nodded.

The girl nodded. “Thought so.” There was a long moment of silence before the girl said, “Are we going to die, too?”

Mandy forced herself to smile.  “Everybody dies.”

“Not everybody gets eaten by aliens,” the kid observed.

Mandy snorted.  “We’re not gonna get eaten by aliens.”

The girl gave her a really long look, then said, “The first one tried to eat me, but Mean got it first.  They made her paws bleed but she kept killing them.  Then, when I was awake and she was sleeping, I'd throw them out of the boat so they couldn’t get back in.”

“Mean?” Mandy said, thinking she was talking about some kind of dog.

“We call her Mean,” the girl said, gaining a little pep.  “She’s not mean, though.  She’s really sweet.  She was keeping the aliens off me so they didn’t eat me while I slept.”

“Maggots don’t eat people,” Mandy said, deciding to nip that in the bud.

“Aliens eat people.  My brother said so.”

“These aren’t aliens,” Mandy blurted.  Then, because the lie was already started, she continued with, “They’re bugs from China.  Invasive species, have a nasty bite.  Don’t worry, though, they’re harmless to people.”

“Oh,” the girl said innocently.  “That’s good.”  She cocked her head.  “Was my cat in the boat with me?”

Mandy hadn’t seen a cat.  “Uh, no.”

The girl look crestfallen, but not surprised.  “I think she went looking for Mom and Dad and Derrick.  You have any food?”

Mandy thought of the kitchen buried under the rubble of the lodge and grimaced. “I think I can find some. You stay here and get warm, okay?”

“Okay,” the girl said cheerfully, like they were on a camping expedition.

Then, because it was expected, Mandy lit a candle and went to the door. Outside, the world was already fading into darkness, so they had been on the later end of that two day timeframe, not the earlier. She had begun to suspect as much, especially with how thirsty she was.

Need to grab a pot and some clean snow too, she thought, stepping out onto the porch.

Behind her, the kid said, “Mandy?” Then she hesitated. “Your name is Mandy, right?”

Mandy nodded. She’d said her own name enough times when mimicking old confrontations with her boss, just to keep herself talking to fill the awful silence.

“I know they’re aliens, Mandy,” the girl said. “Please don’t lie to me. Dad lied to me. He’s dead now.”

The girl’s words left a cold spot in Mandy’s gut. “What did he lie about?” she whispered.

The girl gave her a long, solemn look. “He said he’d be right back, that he was going to get my mom and brother.”

Mandy opened her mouth, but didn’t have anything to say. She nodded. “Your daddy was a brave man.” It felt awkward, but she felt like she had to say something to this little kid who had just lost her family.

“I’m hungry,” was the little kid’s reply. “And thirsty, too.” She turned back to the stove, staring at it pensively.

“Yeah, me too,” Mandy said. Candle in hand, she took a deep breath and stepped out into the darkness to go search the lodge’s remains for something edible.

She was maybe two feet past the entrance when she heard the unmistakable sound of a government-issue pistol’s slide being racked.

“Looks like it’s just the two of us, chink,” the cracker’s unsteady voice said.