Arrival

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Copyright © 2018 by Morgan Rice. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author.  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CHAPTER ONE

Kevin slammed the bunker’s wall of monitors, partly in frustration, and partly because he’d seen it work on TV. It didn’t work here, though, and that only fueled the frustration he felt.

“They can’t just go blank,” he insisted. Weren’t these systems supposed to be designed to survive just about anything? “Not now, not like this.”

Not when they’d just seen the world all but ending, people gathering while alien ships swept in over them. Beside him, Luna was staring up at them as if expecting them to come back on at any moment, or maybe just because she was imagining her parents out there somewhere, clambering into an alien ship.

Kevin put an arm around her, not sure if he was comforting her or trying to comfort himself.

“Do you think people are all right?” Luna asked. “Do you think my parents are?”

Kevin swallowed, thinking of the people lining up to go into the ships. His mother would have been somewhere among them too.

“I hope so,” he said.

“It feels wrong,” Luna said. “We’re safe here in a bunker, while everyone else is stuck out there… how many people do you think were converted?”

Kevin thought about the vast seas of people there had been on the screens before they went blank, and the dwindling numbers of people there to report on it all.

“I don’t know, a lot,” he guessed.

“Maybe everybody,” Luna said. “Maybe we’re the last ones.”

“We should look around,” he said. “Maybe we can find a way to turn it all back on. Then we can see.”

He said it as much to try to distract Luna as because he thought they had a hope of doing it. What did they know about fixing computer systems? If one of the scientists from the NASA institute had been there… maybe Dr. Levin… but they were gone, just like everyone else. They’d been transformed by the vapor, turning into things that had chased after them and hunted them.

“Come on,” he said to Luna, gently pulling her away from the screen. “We need to look around.”

Luna nodded, though she didn’t seem to be taking much of it in right then. “I guess so.”

They set off through the bunker underneath Mount Diablo, and Kevin looked around, surprised by the sheer space of it. If they’d been looking around a place like this at a different time, it might have seemed like an adventure. As it was, every echoing step reminded Kevin just how alone they were. This was a whole military base, and they were the only ones in it.

“This is cool,” Luna said, her smile too bright to be real. “Like sneaking through warehouses.”

Kevin could tell that her heart wasn’t in it, though. She might have been trying her best to be the old Luna, but what came out was too flat for that.

“It’s okay,” Kevin said, “you don’t have to pretend with me. I’m…”

What could he say? That he was sad too? It didn’t seem like enough to encompass the end of the world, or the loss of everyone they’d known, or any of it, really.

“I know,” Luna said. “I’m just trying to be… hopeful, I guess. Come on, let’s see what’s here.”

Kevin had the feeling of her wanting the distraction, so they headed deeper into the bunker. It was a huge space, which looked as though it could have housed hundreds of people if it needed to. There were pipes and cables leading away into its depths, and signs stenciled on the walls in yellow paint.

“Look,” Luna said, pointing, “there’s a kitchen that way.”

Kevin could feel his stomach rumbling at the thought, and although it didn’t cut through the rest of it, the two of them turned off in the direction the sign indicated. They walked down one corridor, then another, coming out into a kitchen that was built on an industrial scale. There were freezers set toward the back, behind doors that could have protected a vault, and other doors that seemed to lead off into storerooms.

“We should see if there’s any food in them,” Luna suggested, opening one.

The space behind was even larger than Kevin might have expected, stacked with box after box. He opened one and found silvery, sealed packets that looked as though they would keep forever.

“There’s enough food to feed us for a lifetime here,” Kevin said, and then realized exactly what he’d just said. “Not that… I mean, we might not have to stay here forever.”

“What if we do, though?” Luna asked.

Kevin wasn’t sure he had a good answer for that. He couldn’t imagine living forever in here. He could barely imagine a lifetime, let alone one night, spent in a bunker. “Then I guess we’re better in here than out there. At least here we’re safe.”

“I guess so,” Luna said, with a look around at the walls that seemed to assess how thick they were. “Safe, yes.”

“We should see what else is here,” Kevin said. “If we’re going to be staying here, we’ll need other things. Water, places to sleep, fresh air. A way to talk to the outside.”

He counted them off on his fingers as he thought of them.

“We should see if there are other ways in or out, too,” Luna said. “We want to make sure that no one else can get in.”

Kevin nodded, because that seemed like an important one. They started to search the bunker, using the kitchen as a kind of base, going back and forth between it and the main control room, which seemed curiously silent without anything on its screens.

There was another room nearby that was filled with communications equipment. Kevin saw radios and computers. There was even something that looked like an old-fashioned telegraph machine in the corner, as if the people there didn’t trust that the more modern equipment would be there for them when it was needed.

“They have so much stuff,” Luna said, pressing a button and getting a burst of white noise in response.

“We have so much stuff now,” Kevin pointed out. “Maybe if there are other people out there, we’ll be able to communicate with them.”

Luna looked around. “Do you think there are other people left? What if it’s just us?”

Kevin didn’t know what to say to that. If he was going to be trapped as one of the last people in the world, there was no one he’d rather be stuck with than his best friend. Even so, he had to believe that there were others out there somewhere. He had to.

“There must be other people somewhere,” he said. “There are other bunkers and things, and some people will have worked out what was happening. There were people broadcasting pictures, so they must have known what was going on.”

“But the screens went blank,” Luna pointed out. “We don’t know that they’re still out there.”

Kevin swallowed at that thought. He’d assumed that the signal had just cut off, but what if it wasn’t the signal? What if the people sending it were also gone?

He shook his head. “We can’t think like that,” he said. “We have to hope that there are more people out there.”

“People who can kill the aliens,” Luna said, with a harsh glint in her eye. Kevin got the feeling that if she’d had the means to fight them, Luna would have been out there right now trying to take them on.

Kevin could understand that. It was a part of who Luna was; a part of what he liked about her so much. He even felt a part of the same anger, feeling it bubbling up inside him at the thought of being tricked by the aliens, and at everything that had been taken from him.