Chapter
One
Bobby McAllister
stood facing the semicircle of adults gathered on the fringe of the green town
square. Behind him was the black iron statue of Lemuel Blackwood Tucker,
founder of Tucker’s Ridge, Tennessee. A white cloud obscured the sun, although
it was a pleasant enough August morning and a few sparrows observed from the
century-old oak tree that some said looked like a blacksmith hammering a forge
when the sun struck it at just the right angle in the late afternoon. A slight
breeze stirred the bangs from Bobby’s forehead. He was eleven but short for his
height, and the hand-me-down overalls were a size too big for him.
“That a boy, Bobby,” a few people
mumbled.
“You can do it.”
“Don’t be afraid. Just walk right
in, and we’ll pray that you’re one of the ones who come out.”
“God’s always with you when you walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,” Minister Perkins intoned in a nasal
voice from the edge of the crowd, five deep. He wore a black suit and held a
black leather-bound Bible cracked at the binding from decades of baptizing and
delivering sermons and burying townsfolk and offering comfort to lonely widows.
I suspect you’ll be needing this,”
said Ben Crick, handing Bobby a brand new claw hammer. The thin eighty-year-old
man owned the brick hardware store on Main Street which ran horizontally
directly behind the square. Crick was wiry, all elbows and knees draped with a
red and black checkered shirt, and people said he looked like a scarecrow who’d
up and left his pole out in the cornfield just to show the farmers of Tucker’s
Ridge who was boss. He was gruff and liked to scowl at little children. On the Day of Offering, however, he was more
subdued, and his croaky voice, scraped raw by unfiltered cigarettes, didn’t
convey its usual mean-spiritedness.
Bobby accepted the hammer in his
right hand, his left already clutching a loaf of banana nut bread.
Hill Richardson, the postmaster,
flicked his wrist, motioning for Bobby to turn around and commence his duty.
Bobby’s heart beat quickly as he
faced the opposite direction by moving his feet in small half-steps, swallowing
hard as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a cork being tugged by a Trout
in the stream that ran behind the mill a mile away. Bobby’s mother Samantha
raised her smart phone and snapped a picture of her son, but his father, Dom
Ray McAllister, pushed her hand down harshly, a clear indication that the event
was not one that should be memorialized. She’d just wanted to get a shot of
Bobby being brave . . . and just in case there would be no more photographs.
Aye, that was the rub. Some children
never came back again from the ceremony in that . . . thing up ahead. A few did,
and they usually had vacant looks in their eyes, as if they’d been hypnotized
or stared too long at the spinning disks and wavy mirrors at a traveling
carnival. These unfortunate kids were sometimes sent to Dr. Merwin Childress, a
retired psychiatrist who lived in a large, ramshackle Victorian house half a
mile from the end of Main Street. Childress wore a brown suit, red bow tie, and
thick glasses that magnified his pale blue eyes, and he scared children and
adults alike with his long, probing stares, as if mining for information from
the depth of the souls he encountered when he retrieved mail from his Post
Office box or did some shopping on Main Street. But did he help the children
with vacant stares, known to the town as the Lost Souls? No, those unfortunate
beings were usually sent to Bleak House, a nickname given by Charles
McAllister, Bobby’s Father, to the gray, four-story, stone building that housed
troubled or runaway kids from three adjoining counties. It’s Dickensian character
was merited, for it was a facade of masonry that was like a black hole, a
building from which no sounds emanated, and no one, neither child nor adult,
was seen walking about the grounds of the three acres surrounding the facility.
And there it was, shiny on its
underside and black on top, a circular spacecraft that had silently fell from
the sky with no more drama than a fall leaf floating to the ground. That had
been in early May, and the alien ship had been on the green behind the statue
of Lemuel Tucker ever since.
Bobby McAllister bravely took a step
forward, and then another. Then two more. After thirty seconds, he was dead
even with the statue. He glanced left and frowned at the metallic likeness,
which he regarded as a sham. Tucker had allegedly been an Army hero lost in
World War One while fighting the Battle of the Marne in France. He’d never
returned, not even as a dead body in a coffin, and rumors had been spread over
the years that Tucker was a myth, a figment of the collective imagination of
Tucker’s Ridge, a man who gave pride and purpose to a small town not far from a
ridge that overlooked a green valley that rolled for miles. The town librarian
and archivist said that she couldn’t find any birth certificate for Tucker or,
for that matter, any records at all for a family named Tucker within a hundred
miles of Main Street or the square or the flagpole near the bandstand, it’s
rope and metal hooks clanging against the steel pole when a winter wind whipped
through the town. Bobby had written as much in the essay writing contest a year
earlier, and the principal of his school had wadded the paper into a ball and
thrown it into the corner trashcan of his classroom, telling him that it was
wrong, unpatriotic, disgraceful to shame his town, his roots, his heritage.
Lemuel Blackwood Tucker was a hero. Mr. and Mrs. McAllister had promised the
principal that Bobby would be more respectful in the future.
“You’re nothing but crap,” Bobby
muttered, talking to the statue as his legs carried him an extra step before
craning his head to look at the expectant, nervous, watchful faces of the crowd
behind him. There were, of course, no children present. No one under fourteen
ever attended the Day of Offering unless it was his turn, girls being excluded
from the ritual. But Bobby saw them in his mind’s eye nevertheless, the tall
ones and the bold ones and those who could cut the wind like a knife when they
played sports or catch or just horsed around in the schoolyard.
Go
away, runt!
Still
wearing your older brother’s overalls?
Look!
It’s the kid with two left feet.
Bobby was never picked for any of
the teams when Tom Windhoven and Carl Buck chose their baseball teams on
Saturday afternoons at the sandlot behind the feed store. “he can’t throw or
bat or catch,” Tom claimed. “At least not very well.” Bobby was only chosen if
somebody was sick or had a broken leg, and he was always put into right field
where he couldn’t do too much damage unless the left-handed Carl Buck hit a
long fly ball. Sometimes Bobby caught it, but more often than not he dropped it
since he was forced to use his big brother’s oversized glove.
He turned around and stared harshly
at the citizens, their nervous, hopeful eyes fixed on him, a boy, who was being
asked to do a man’s job. He was always picked on, so why did he draw such an assignment? Why not let
Eddy Bricker or Andy Pine, two hulking boys who played varsity football for
Tucker High, bring the alien what it wanted. Both boys—and many more—were as
solid as telephone poles or tree stumps.
He faced forward again, angry. The
alien had communicated with townspeople telepathically ever since the ship had
landed. It said that its craft had been damaged upon entering earth’s
atmosphere but that it couldn’t leave its ship, a detail that it obviously
didn’t wish to explain. It had asked for various bits of hardware from Crick’s
value Hardware and electronics from Will Payne’s electronics store, which sold
smart phones, computers, and all things digital. The parts were allegedly to
help the extraterrestrial repair its ship.
There had been no military invasion
of the town—no men in Black or CIA or Air Force brass to investigate the
visitor—since the unseen being in the saucer had obviously used its telepathic
powers to block anyone from entering Tucker’s Ridge. Cars pulled up to point
five miles out of town on State Highway 12 and stopped, passengers getting out,
scratching their heads, and muttering, “No, I think we should turn around. We
must have taken a wrong turn. We certainly don’t want to go through that Godforsaken town.” Some claimed to
have heard warnings about a medical quarantine of the town or a deadly chemical
leak from a rail car passing on the tracks skirting the north end of the
hamlet.
The alien’s mental powers could also
cause electronic havoc since no radio, cell phone, or television signal could
get in or out of the town. It was as if Tucker’s Ridge existed in dead air
space. Many people had stood on their green, manicured front lawns, looking
skywards, but they saw no enclosure or dome such as the one in the story
written by that fella in Maine who wrote the long books. No, the alien had
severed contact with the rest of the world using the same telepathic powers—and
who knows what other kind of alien mojo—that enabled him to place his thoughts,
always in the form of demands and warnings, into the minds of Tucker’s Ridge
inhabitants. The requests weren’t frequent, and were reminders that children
should bring it the parts to repair the parts as well as food. No adults need
apply, and that had become obvious when Sheriff Vernon Gimble had tried to
enter the craft, not that he’d had the courage or moxie to get put down his
donuts, get off his ass, and walk up to the craft and take a look-see at the
craft. The mayor and townspeople had insisted that he act like a sheriff for
once in his life since he mostly functioned as the school crossing guard in a
town that hadn’t seen a crime committed since someone stole a few chickens from
Mrs. Watson’s henhouse sixteen years earlier. Vernon had been thrust backwards
on his derriere by . . . well, he didn’t know what had thrown him
unceremoniously backwards fifteen feet when he’d climbed the sloping ramp that
led into the ship. He foolishly said it had been an atomic ray, but that was
Hollywood B movie parlance, and nobody believed it. What they did accept was
that adults weren’t welcome and that something powerful and kept Vernon from
trying to enter the spaceship.
The statue to a man who probably
never existed, Vernon Gimble’s cowardice and lies, the bullying from
classmates—all of these things made Bobby mad, mad as hell. He breathed fast as
he turned one last time to look at the faces of people sending a boy to do a
man’s job—to hell with the alien’s demand. He was ready to shoot fire from his
eyes and thunder obscenities if he’d had a louder voice, but the voice within
was loud and he decided he didn’t give a lousy damn what or who was inside the
ship. If he never came out, that would be fine by him. Whatever was inside,
even if it tortured kids, couldn’t be worse than living in Tucker’s Ridge.
Bobby turned one last time to look
at the faces of the people sending David to face Goliath, a group of people
huddled together and gawking as if the terrible event was almost recreation, a
reprieve from the daily routine of their lives that was purgatory since living
in a small town in the digital age had left people restless and unfulfilled and
longing for bright lights, big city. He saw Joe Nighthawk, the Native American,
standing on the edge of the crowd, playing cat’s cradle with Seamus, the town
drunk. Joe had told a group of children huddled around a campfire one summer’s
night that the earth and the planets and stars—everything, in fact—were just
specks of dust caught in the Sky Father’s web, like flies caught in the
intricate filaments spun by arachnids. He said that this was his tribe’s model
of creation, and that the reason he constantly played cat’s cradle was because
the string—flexed and angled and crisscrossing between two sets of hands—reminded
him of a spider’s web.
Joe paused, looked at Bobby, then
smiled and nodded.
Bobby was still mad—mad at the town
and mad at life—but he thought Joe Nighthawk knew a thing or two about life,
and Joe often talked to the boy when things weren’t going so well. Bobby could
sit and listen to Native American wisdom for hours, knowledge passed to Joe by
the elders of the Cherokee and Chickasaw.
Bobby walked forward confidently,
his heart no longer hammering against his ribs like a blacksmith’s hammer. The
silver ramp of the craft slid forward from its belly as a door slid upwards, a
black, ominous rectangle beyond.
Clutching the hammer and bread,
Bobby entered the ship. He walked down a corridor for ten yards—the craft
seemed so much larger on the inside than he thought possible, leading him to
think that the n three dimensions were somehow being stretched inside the round
ship—and came to a round chamber with the creature sitting in a well at its
center. It was a monstrous, gelatinous eye, ten feet tall, and it sat on the
brown, rubbery body from which extended a dozen tentacles, thirty feet in
length, that played along the sides of the craft, working its controls and
causing thousands of lights to blink. The eye was periodically covered, bottom
to top, by two large transparent membranes. Its black pupil rotated this way
and that, dilating and shrinking as it surveyed its surroundings, but only a
few seconds passed before it focused on Bobby McAllister.
Put
the hammer and loaf of bread at your feet.
The words appeared magically in
Bobby’s mind, and this was the first time that he personally had been in
communication with the giant alien eye or octopus or whatever it was. The
voice, the words were like the clashing of symbols, waves breaking on a shore,
the echo in a large auditorium. So loud! But the words were intelligible, and
Bobby knew exactly what was being asked of him. He placed the banana bread on
the floor, and within seconds a tentacle snaked over a railing protecting the
ship’s inhabitant and snatched the food and brought it to a slit in its brown
body, where the loaf disappeared immediately.
I
don’t like the taste of human flesh. I’ve tried it. It’s nasty and doesn’t
nourish me. Now give me the hammer.
“Why does an advanced alien need
hardware and electronics from twenty-first century earth. It’s not to repair
your stupid ship!” Bobby spit out the words as he flipped the finger to the
awful, dreadful, monstrously large eye. “No, I won’t give you the hammer, you .
. . freak!”
The tentacles began whipping about
in a frenzy, Bobby ducking on rolling on the titanium deck plate, at times
rolling forwards as if he were maneuvering a modern obstacle course. One
tentacle slipped around his ankle, pulling him off his feet, but Bobby,
adrenaline flowing like a river at crest through his bloodstream, tore the
soft, fleshy skin of the limb with the claw of the hammer. A sound like a full
orchestra—pain—exploded in the boy’s head. Another tentacle chased him, and six
smaller tentacles, like fingers, grew from its parent groping and groping for
the wrist of the elusive, stubborn human.
It was during one of Bobby’s tumbles
that his eyes aimed at the dome of the ship, glowing like a fluorescent dish
turned upside down. His eyes widened, but he drove away the terror with sheer
willpower as he beheld twenty of the town’s youth, stuck to the dome as if
magnetized. Their forms were plastered against the glowing surface, arms and
limbs and heads contorted in grotesque poses. The looks on their twisted
features spoke of pain, fear, consternation. The boys, many of whom had been
merciless as they mocked Bobby McAllister, looked like flies stuck to flypaper,
their eyes, bulging and white, pleading with the boy below to do
something—anything—to free them from the hell of being trapped inside the alien
spacecraft. And yet no words were uttered by the captives, not even a grunt or
a groan, their hair spilling over their ears and foreheads. The creature was
muting the speech centers in their brains by whatever mental powers enabled it
to do all it did while its craft was parked on the town square of the backwater
known as Tucker’s Ridge.
But the creature also needed to keep
the boys alive, and Bobby noted that one of its tentacles was dedicated solely
to feeding morsels of bread and vials of water to its captives high in the air.
Bobby had an epiphany. His senses
were razor-sharp, his mind working faster than a computer. In an instant, he
knew that the creature needed some form of sustenance, and hence the bread and
vegetables and fruit pies the children brought it, like offerings to a god, but
it couldn’t digest meat or flesh and blood and bone, not animal, not human.
What offered it the most sustenance was fear—pure, full-out, terror and fear.
If it could send out thought vibrations, then it apparently could receive them
as well, and in the case of the gigantic, all-seeing eye, it wanted the
vibrations of horror and fright. It thrived on them and drew strength for
whatever alien physiology it possessed. Bobby grinned, squeezed his eyes
tightly, and sent waves and waves of contempt of hatred to the being, and it
responded by thrashing its tentacles more wildly than ever. It didn’t like hate
or courage or cunning—no, not in the least—and the eye spun rapidly, like a
roulette wheel, its ugly eye blinking and blinking in confusion, its tentacles
reaching for the young human on the circular deckplate in vain, missing by feet
and even yards with each swipe and swoosh.
“What’s wrong you stupid bastard?”
Bobby called. “Don’t like what I’m feeding you? Are you choking? Am I
impossible to digest?” he broke into laughter, which enraged the creature all
the more.
Stop!
Now! I command you!
Waves and cymbals and tubas and
trombones and rocks tumbling down in a landslide. The sounds Bobby heard were
these and others for which he had nno comparison, but they filled his mind as
he continued to dart from one place to another, weaving in and out of the wild,
swaying tentacles.
The membrane no longer blinked over
the eye, which was fully dilated. The entire round, jelly-like orb pulsed, nd
Bobby felt or heard—he didn’t know which—a heartbeat.
“I guess I’m raising your blood
pressure,” Bobby cried out scornfully, brandishing the hammer like a sword.
“Well, good! Do you hear me? I want to kill you, you bastard!”
Bobby glanced at the dome? Was that
hope he saw in the eyes above him, in the eyes of jack Smith, who regularly
shoved him to the dirt in the schoolyard? In the eyes of Bill Rooter, who
called him booger head at lunch?
“Ah well, now, the shoe’s on the
other foot now, mates! But I’ll make a pack with ya. If I defeat this bug-eyed
son of a bitch, you’ll treat me better, now won’t you?”
Bobby intended to do battle either
way, but thinking now at the speed of light, he thought he would leverage the
situation to his advantage. He would kill two birds with one stone. He would be
king of the hill, Bobby the dragon slayer.
While he’d been lost in his fantasy
of ruling the schoolyard, of slaying the hideous strength before him, a
tentacle, puffing out to twice its normal size was whistling through the air,
aiming straight for his head. Bobby ducked and let the appendage fly over his
scalp like the blade of a fan.
He was on the mound, and it was the
bottom of the ninth. The bases were loaded, but if he struck out the batter,
then the visiting team would be crushed, defeated. Bobby cocked his right arm,
fingers curled around the rubber grip at the bottom of the shiny steel shaft of
what was now a weapon. Eyes squinting, he raised his left leg, inhaled, and
brought his right arm forward with all the strength he could muster. He
released the hammer, which went tumbling end over end, a blur, straight at the
creature.
Smack!
The hammer struck the eye dead
center with a swishing, gurgling sound as the orb began to hemorrhage. The
entire ship vibrated as, one by one, children began falling from the dome to
the deck, dazed and crumpled. The tentacles vibrated, as if the monster were
having a seizure, and shards of the dome fell to next to Bobby’s feet. They
looked like glass but were as heavy as iron or steel. Their jagged sides were
sharp, like the blades on his father’s safety razor, and Bobby acted
instinctively, knowing without premeditation exactly what he wanted—what he
needed—to do. He bent over and clutched a piece of the broken dome and sliced
the end of the nearest tentacle with a horizontal motion, his arm wheeling
through the air again and again until he’d cut the ends of half a dozen
appendages, all of which oozed green and yellow liquids.
Death.
I’m dying. No, Not death. Light years only to die? No . . . no . . . no. Come
back, children. I die.
Boys stumbled and staggered to their
feet, dazed and unsteady on their feet, watching Bobby swing his terrible swift
sword like a ninja or a knight in battle. For a few brief moments, the boy
bullied by the youth of an entire town witnessed a killing machine as Bobby’s
anger, pent up and raw and vengeful, attacked the creature that had kept
Tucker’s Ridge as hostage.
Bobby was nearly spent as he saw
Odie Huff fall from the dome, land, and stand up, staring at his liberator.
Odie was the one boy, ten years old and four inches taller than Bobby, who hung
around the young McAllister and admired him for his intelligence and ability to
mput up with so many butt holes, as he termed it.
“Pretty amazing,” Odie mouthed
silently. “Awesome. Thanks.”
Smiling, Bobby looked at the
collapsing eye as its vitreous humor oozed in all directions. The pupil had
collapsed to a pinpoint, and its membrane—Bobby presumed it was an eyelid of
sorts—peeled away like the petal of an orchid bending over in decay. The eye
was shriveling, growing smaller by the minute, its inner crescendo of a voice
now mute. The alien was dead.
Bobby surveyed the interior of the
spacious craft and knew exactly what he would do in the coming minutes. He
would do it for himself, he would do it for the town. And he would do it for
his persecutors, all of whom had been unjustly imprisoned. He threw down his
makeshift blade and picked up a chunk of tentacle three feet long. It was soft
but not slimy, as he expected it would be. Tiny pores littered its surface, and
whether these had allowed the creature to breathe or were the places where its
small fingers had grown was not something Bobby could discern, nor did he
really care. That was for someone else to figure out. Maybe Professor
Truebridge at the small city down the road could figure it out.
“Come on, boys!” Bobby cried.
“Follow me!”
The young hero, swelled with
deserved pride, led the band of ragtag boys from the saucer as he held the
severed appendage, not a sickly gray color, high above his head. He marched
triumphantly, and no other boy dared break ranks or run ahead of his leader.
The
semicircle of townspeople at first drew back in apprehension, not sure of what
they were witnessing. Was it an illusion? What was the young McAllister lad
holding in his upraised hands? And were the children following him really their
own, or were they ghostly apparitions, for, in truth, most parents had given up
their young for dead. A collective gasp escaped their throats as they carefully
edged forward again, realizing that these were indeed the lost citizens of
Tucker’s Ridge.
As
Bobby and his smiling, freckled brigade passed the statue of Lemuel Blackwood
Tucker, he spoke in a loud voice. “The alien is dead.” He paused for dramatic
effect. “I killed it.”
The
crowd of adults parted as the procession drew closer, allowing Bobby to throw
his trophy from battle down on the green grass. It was as if the Red Sea had
parted, an entire nation having been freed from the oppression of Pharaoh. And
then the jubilation could be contained no longer as children and parents rushed
at each other, producing tears and embraces and cries of joy and surprise.
Mothers fell to their knees, holding the cheeks of their sons in their hands,
looking into their eyes as if to say, “It’s really you! It really is!”
As the
reality sank in that the nightmare was over, that there would be no more days
of offering, that children would not be sent to Dr. Childress or Bleak House,
at least not because their town had been chosen as prey by an alien invader,
their attention turned to Bobby McAllister, who stood tall, his mother and father
flanking him, hands on his shoulders.
“That
a boy, Bobby,” said someone in the rear of the assembly.
“Nice
job, son.”
“Always
said that boy would amount to something.”
“That’s
what I call bravery. Yesiree.”
Bobby
looked back at the craft. He now felt more sober about his accomplishment. He
was proud—yes—but he could have been killed. He had acted nonetheless. He
suspected his peers would give him more respect now—that was almost a given—but
even if they didn’t, he knew how to hold his own, how to act, how to stand up
for himself.
Parents
and children cheered and whooped and hollered and applauded, and Bobby knew
that it was for the town’s newfound freedom as much as it was for him. That was
okay. He’d done his job and risen to the occasion, and then some.
He
turned and looked over his shoulder at the craft. Already, in the absence of
telepathic powers or some invisible shield around the town, Army jeeps were
roaring into town circling the saucer, military men I dark green jumping out
and forming a perimeter around the craft. Unmarked cars followed, with men in
dark suits and short hair mingling among the townsfolk, taking names and
interviewing them about events of the past months. In the hours and days ahead,
everyone would be interviewed—debriefed, in military terms—and then interviewed
again by people without names, people who scribbled in pads or typed on phones
or took photographs. Cell phones would be collected and wiped clean of any
pictures of the craft that had dominated life in Tucker’s Ridge. And there
would be warnings to tell no one what happened. Indeed, the town would be
quarantined for three months and supplies would be brought in by the military
while tests were run. Soil samples would be taken, and people’s blood would be
drawn, and men with electronic equipment far more sophisticated than that sold
by Ben Crick would check for radioactivity and God knew what. There would be no
media, no film crews. As the men in dark suits, the event had never happened.
But
these events would unfold in their fullness in the days ahead. At present,
Bobby examined the jeeps and men in military fatigues and knew that they would
want to speak with him first and foremost since he’s the one who had slain
Goliath with a slingshot and a rock, a claw hammer and a little pluck.
The
town square and Main Street were emptying quickly as people returned home for a
celebratory supper and welcome home parties and general relief or jubilation.
The children had been lost but were now found, had been dead but were now
alive, and live was now good again. Life would be normal, and farmers could
harvest while people would gossip on the loading dock of Tuckers Seed and Feed.
People would get haircuts and go to school and mail letters.
Bobby
saw that the Wicked Woman, dressed in red as she always was, stood stock-still,
as if hypnotized, gazing from the spacecraft to Bobby and back to the
spacecraft. She’d been in town as long as he could recall, but people shunned
her for reasons he didn’t understand. He supposed it had something to do with
sex, which Odie had explained to him two years earlier.
Ben
Crick had turned away, muttering “Bunch of foolishness is all it was. Nothing
more, nothing less.” His gangly arms and legs made their way across Main Street
like a spider extending its legs here and there to move across a surface. As he
did so, Hill Richardson ran Old Glory up the flagpole, something he sometimes
forgot to do on the days of offering. Minister Perkins leaned against a
sycamore tree fifty yards away and sipped from a silver flask before returning
to his parsonage.
The
play was over, the curtain had come down, and Bobby had not taken a bow after
his initial victory march from the craft. People had shaken his hand and rubbed
his hair as if to say “Way to go,” but that was over now.
Lemuel
Blackwood Tucker, of course, had seen it all, the way he saw everything that
went on in town. He stood motionless, a piece of black metal that looked
dispassionately at everyone and everything. Whoever he was, whoever he had
been—if, indeed, he had been anyone at all—he was always there, watching,
watching.
Bobby,
with his parents, started walking home under the afternoon sun. From the corner
of his eye, the boy spied two figures at the edge of the square. Joe Nighthawk
and Seamus were still playing cat’s cradle.
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