By 6:30 a.m. they were on the road. Clive's brother Bruce had still been asleep when they’d left, but as Dr. Altmayer reversed his black Mercedes out of their driveway, Clive noted that Bruce’s car (a Toyota) was already packed full of stuff, so Bruce was surely leaving soon too, just as their dad had predicted. Going back to NASA. The only thing Clive wondered was where precisely Bruce would go: Florida, California, Texas? Maybe New York. More than that, however, he just hoped he would see his brother again.

As they merged onto the highway, Clive's hometown was still blissfully asleep. Most lights in most houses were off, and the people in them were slumbering, unaware of the alien threat that was already on the ground, and maybe not even capable of imagining the scope of the events unfolding in outer space.

Dr. Altmayer put on the local radio and let it play until they were too far away for the car’s antenna to catch it, then he shut the radio off.

Clive didn’t say much and neither did his dad.

At 9:45 a.m., they stopped for breakfast at a diner just off the highway. It was a rural place with a few muddy cars parked out front. Inside, a lady came by with a laminated menu and the news they’d have to pay cash because the credit card machine wasn’t working. After they ordered and she left, “That is by design,” Dr. Altmayer told Clive. “You will soon hear about a kind of glitch or malfunction in a security software, or something similarly vague. Many systems will be affected. The cyber-security company will be named but you will never have heard of it before. If the internet works, searching the name will show a presence appearing to stretch years into the past, but it shall all be fiction, of course. This is standard procedure.”

He stopped speaking when the same lady returned with their pancakes. Clive smiled at her and she smiled back. She seemed sweet, but he couldn’t stop picturing her being mauled by a pack of space lizards.

After she’d left, Dr. Altmayer continued, “There have been several test runs in the past. You will perhaps remember one or two. I remember a good deal more.”

“But what’s the point? No one can stop the flow of information,” said Clive.

“Delay and control, my boy. Information cannot be prevented from flowing, you are correct—the current technology does not allow for it. But the same technology makes plausible the interruption of information, and makes possible the control of its flow. The inherent complexity of the technology is what makes people believe in its vulnerability with even the most superficial explanation. The strategy is rather simple. First, one neutralizes as many of the decentralized information and media sharing systems as possible, so that regular people cannot share between one another. Second, one routes the desired misinformation through the few centralized, controlled networks. Social media and credit cards do not work, but CNN, my dear boy, remains on air.”

As if on cue, someone in the diner turned on the TV hanging in the corner. The network was showing a reality show about tractors.

Then something caught Clive’s ear from a few tables away.

“...all nineteen sheep dead,” a man was telling another, “and how! Haven’t ever seen a thing like it. So many bite marks, and they were all drained of blood.”

“Wolves, foxes?” said the other.

“No. I’ve seen enough of those to know. This was something else entirely.”

“You know, I heard about something once…”

“Oh, yeah?”

“It was down south. Way down. Guys were seeing their herds killed much like the way you’re describing, Sam.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Did they ever figure what did it?”

“Not officially. Not that I know about, but several of them guys swore on their own mothers it was a creature called the Chupacabra.”

“The Chupa-what?”

“Chupacabra.”

“What in the devil is that? Predator?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking. This thing, it was unnatural. Some said it’d come from a military lab, some kind of mutation gone wrong. Experiment that escaped. A few others said it was a species that was old—real old, like the Loch Ness monster.”

“And it drained blood?”

“Oh yeah, Sam. The thing killed animals to drink it.”

“But that was down south.”

“Yeah. Way down.”

“They got their own problems down there, I figure. So I don’t think we got any Chupacabras up here.”

“You’re probably right, Sam—but I wonder: you got any better explanation?”

Clive had no doubt the two men were describing an attack by the same space lizards he and Ray had encountered yesterday. His eyes had widened as he’d listened. Perhaps the space lizards had evolved since then. Perhaps the ones that had attacked the farmer’s livestock had hatched earlier.

“Soon it will all spread by word of mouth. There is no control over that, “ said Dr. Altmayer. “But until that happens, many reasonable people will be called by many synonyms of insanity. The hope is that by the time we acknowledge the obvious, we shall have a plan in place to deal with it.”

They finished their pancakes, paid and returned to the highway.

By noon, traffic had picked up.

“How soon until people with telescopes start looking up at the sky at night and seeing one of those three objects heading for us?” asked Clive.

“It is difficult to say with precision,” said Dr. Altmayer. “Assuming they do not re-cloak, I would hazard a guess of five-to-seven days. However, keep in mind that although I know more than maybe only a dozen others on Earth, I still do not know much at all. We are working on a scattering of factual dots connected by lines of most-probable speculation. I expect to know more tonight, after the meeting.”

“Will you… tell me what you find out?” asked Clive. He wasn’t used to pressing his dad in any way on his secret government knowledge, but at the same time he sensed that the current situation was so fundamentally different than any previous that the old rules and old decorum did not apply.

“I will share with you what I can,” said Dr. Altmayer.

By afternoon, most radio stations appeared to have been knocked out. Cell phones didn’t work. From the few stations that remained on air—the “centralized, controlled” ones—they learned (or “learned”) that a security update had caused a massive, planet-wide shutdown of “vital electronic infrastructure.” The problem had already been identified and the company that conducted the update was already attempting to fix it. There was no ETA on the fix. In the meantime, social media networks, airports, banks and other institutions were temporarily out-of-order. Flights were grounded. Money could not be withdrawn. There was no need to panic, the news announcer said, reading a statement prepared by the government. People should stay home until the fix was done. Refraining from putting extra stress on the temporarily broken systems was a civic duty.

In Washington, D.C., the streets were clogged. Dr. Altmayer spoke the address of a hotel—the Hotel Spire—into the car’s GPS system, and they crawled along its chosen route. Once they’d arrived, they parked and walked into the hotel.

Almost immediately, a man at the front desk began to say, “Good evening, sir. I am afraid that due to the current global situation, it is impossible for us to—”

Dr. Altmayer pulled out his CSA I.D. card.

“My apologies,” the man said. “Please, follow me,” and he led them into an elevator, then up to the Hotel Spire’s ninth floor, where he showed them to a room at the very end of the hall. Passing other rooms, Clive heard rather frantic conversations going on. He understood that this must be a floor for government officials.

Once inside, Dr. Altmayer quickly unpacked, changed into a fresh suit and bid Clive goodnight. It was a nice, spacious room, with a good view of the city, which sparkled with lights and movement, not unlike a spaceship itself, though Clive.

“Nothing goes without saying,” Dr. Altmayer said while heading out the hotel room door. “So I shall say it: Wait for me here, Clive. Do not leave the hotel. Do not speak to anyone. Does your cellular phone work?”

Clive checked. “No.”

“Turn it off.”

“Any idea when you’ll be back?” asked Clive.

Dr. Altmayer shook his head, sighed. “It may be a lengthy meeting. In fact, I presume it must be. There is almost too much to discuss and undoubtedly too many people who wish to discuss it.” He hesitated—his mind obviously processing something else to say, but, in the end, he said only: “I must go now.”

Then Dr. Altmayer shut the door, and Clive was left alone, sitting on the bed in a hotel room overlooking Washington, D.C., where in the next hours a conversation would begin whose topic would likely be the preservation of the human race.