By LeAnn Robinson
“Oh, Jeez, Bart,” Janine shouted as her body slammed against the shoulder strap of her seatbelt, her left elbow jamming into the stacks of electronic equipment she shared the back seat of the van with. “Slow down!”
“You some kind of chicken?” he said, looking over his shoulder at her and grinning.
No, damn it, she thought. He didn’t need to be looking at her, he needed to have his eyes on the road. And Raul, sitting beside him in the passenger seat of the van, wasn’t being much help. He just had his video camera up, filming the fleeing civilians outside.
A small car veered into their lane.
“Look out!” Raul shouted.
“Got it, Bro,” Bart said, swerving again.
Raul shook his head, dropping his camera for a moment to gaze at all the people. “You think they know what it is?”
“You jus’ keep yo’ camera runnin’ there,” Bart said, pointing down the road.
That should have been my line, Janine thought. She was the producer, after all. She should act more like she was in charge. “Maybe we should stop and get someone to interview?”
But Bart didn’t seem to be listening. He waved a dark hand, shaking his fingers at the other drivers coming toward them. “Get out of the way, man!”
Raul glanced around. “I still can’t see anything. You sure we got the right street?”
Janine ground her teeth. Of course they weren’t sure, except that they were confronting a stream of frightened people headed in the opposite direction. She’d gotten the call less than an hour ago from her executive producer in the states, something about astronomers thinking the planet was being attacked by aliens, with five objects headed for the surface of the planet, one looking like it would land in the vicinity of Mumbai, India, and they just happened to be here covering an international conference on human rights. She and her team had scoured the skies from their hotel rooms, looking for something suspicious, and then they’d seen the black spaceship hovering just off Nariman point at the south end of Marine Drive. Now, they were headed there, hoping they arrived before all hell broke loose.
Sirens sounded in the distance, the strange wee-oo sound of European emergency vehicles, even though they weren’t in Europe. Still a lot of European influence here. This country had been a colony of the British for years before independence, and much of that still showed.
“Just around this corner, man,” Bart said, pointing down the curving street. Off to the right was Back Bay, water lapping at the tetrapods lining the shore, a broad sidewalk called the promenade now almost devoid of people. Everyone had already fled.
But the cars were still coming, streaming over into the oncoming traffic when the proper lanes were too jammed up to move quickly, and almost nobody was driving toward the danger, nobody but police and the crazy news people. Three cars darted into the two lanes ahead of them. Bart jerked the steering wheel to the right. The van bounced over the curb.
“Oh! Oh!” Janine shouted.
“I got it! I got it!” Bart said, grinning.
“The tree!” Raul hollered.
“No problem.” Bart swerved the vehicle again, just missing the slender trunk, while the top of the van with its satellite dish tore away several branches and threw leaves into the air. “We got this, man. We got this.”
Damned Bart was just a little too confident. Sure, you needed to be gutsy to do this job, but Bart was in a league of his own. That was why he’d been put on her team. She was supposed to rein him in, after his last cameraman had been shot when they’d gotten just a little too close to the battlefield action.
But the executive producer’s plan to stop Bart from taking unnecessary risks—put him on Janine’s team and send him to cover a conference where there was going to be little to no chance of violence—had fallen apart when the news came of an alien invasion. Not to mention that every time Janine told Bart not to do something, or that he was wrong about something, he threw an accusation of racism at her. And, damn it, his ploy had worked. It had shut her up faster than anything else she could imagine.
And it had made her think. Was she a racist? Or was it just Bart she didn’t like, didn’t trust? Was it the color of his skin, or the craziness of his actions that made her wish he was working with someone else?
“I think I see it,” Raul said, leaning so far forward that the lens of his camera almost touched the windshield.
Janine pressed against her seat belts, trying to see into the distance. They’d just come around the last curve, and the rest of the street was straight south, all the way to the end of the spit of land this part of the city had been built on, to a blob of rubble and dirt, and what had to be the now-landed spacecraft, metallic black glistening in the early morning sunlight. To the left, a pair of skyscrapers stretched into the blue, a hotel and an office building. nestled among apartment buildings of less than ten floors. She got out her phone to Google the names of the structures.
“Too bad we missed the landing,” Raul said. “Looks like it was a doozy.”
“No shit,” Bart said. “Tore up the whole street.” He pressed harder on the accelerator pedal, pushing Janine back into her seat.
And then the top of the tallest building bloomed into a ball of light.
“Oh, shit!” Bart shouted. “What the hell was that?”
“It came from above,” Raul said, his finger pointed upwards. “Not from the landed spaceship.” He lowered his camera and started pressing buttons.
“Don’t’ re-wind,” Bart barked. “Just keep shooting.” He gunned the engine, as if they weren’t going fast enough already.
Janine gasped. “Stop the van. Stop it!”
Bart shook his head. “We gotta get closer.”
Janine pulled in another breath. “We can interview someone here, right?”
“You ain’t afraid, are you?” Bart said, tossing her another grin.
“No, but… can’t we stop?” She closed her eyes for a second, trying to gather some inner strength, or at the very least a commanding tone that would tell him she was in charge, and he needed to follow her orders. Hell, she should never have been given this promotion, not to mention she shouldn’t have been assigned the most difficult reporter on the payroll.
“These people don’t know nothin’,” Bart said. “They just running.”
“They’ve seen something, don’t you think?” Janine asked.
“Oh, hell, man,” Raul said, “is that a body?”
Bart stopped the van with a screech, then leaned forward in his seat, hands on the steering wheel. Through the windshield, Janine could see an overturned car, laying sideways across the pavement, the thin metal roof crumpled, all the windows shattered.
“Would you look at that,” Bart said. He turned off the engine and opened the van door. “Come on, man. Right there.”
Janine breathed a sigh of relief. At least they weren’t going any closer. She climbed out the side door, then surveyed the damage, suddenly aware of why Bart had stopped driving forward. It wasn’t just one car lying in their path. Trees and large chunks of concrete littered the road, and a small truck and three more cars blocked the passage of any more vehicles.
At that point, the entire team went into autopilot, Bart finding his mark, selecting his angle, while Raul put himself where the reporter indicated. “You got me?” Bart said.
In the meantime, Janine turned on all the equipment, contacting the studio via satellite, testing out the sound equipment, making sure the satellite dish hadn’t been damaged from its encounter with the tree. Everything seemed to be working,
The studio was waiting anxiously. Sounded like the guys from Tokyo had already filed their first report, but Janine was hoping to get something spectacular here, something to make her team’s report stand out from all the rest.
“Ready,” Bart said, nodding at her.
“Go.”
Bart turned to the camera, now propped up on a tripod: “We are standing on Marine Drive in Mumbai, India, where one of the alien shuttles has landed in a mass of confusion. Looks like they snow-plowed the center island planter thing here, throwing up dirt and bushes and making a real mess. And over there… You see what they’re doing?”
Janine kept her head down, the sound feed from Bart coming into one ear, instructions from the studio into the other. A screen on her control panel showed the feed from Raul’s camera, showed how he swung the camera to the side, following Bart’s pointing gesture, to where a flurry of activity was happening around the alien shuttle.
“This is amazing,” Bart continued his narration. “I think we just saw our first aliens. Man, they look almost human, and they’re wrapping the building in some kind of plastic wrap.” He paused for half a second as the camera swung back to him, then he pointed down the street. “Come on, man. We gotta get closer.”
Janine looked up from her control panel with a gasp. They were close enough. They could see the action just fine from here. She had to find some way to stop Bart. But he was already making his way around the rubble, Raul following.
Shit. Janine hopped out of the van, then ran to the sidewalk opposite the bay, where an older woman in a pink and red sari shuffled north on the sidewalk next to the buildings. Janine ran up to her. “Excuse me, ma’am, can you come over to speak with our reporter?”
“No,” the woman shouted, waving her hands excitedly. “No!”
Well, no help there. Then she spotted another pedestrian, this one a man in a blue and yellow striped shirt. “Sir, do you speak English?”
“No!” the local man said, rushing past her.
Damn. What had these people seen that frightened them so much?
Janine looked down the street, where Bart was walking toward he alien craft, still several hundred yards away, and her heart thudded. There was a very thin line between getting close enough to get a good story and getting yourself into trouble, and she wasn’t certain where the demarcation was. “I think we need to stay here,” she hollered to him.
He didn’t even look back at her.
And then a local police officer rushed up to Bart, waving hands and pointing back up the street. “No closer. You stay here.”
There. The police agreed with her. She smiled to herself. That would show Bart who was in charge, who knew what the right decision was. Except she wasn’t certain it was the best decision. She was just scared, and she had to admit that.
But Bart had relented. He had Raul set up his tripod there, and now he was talking into the camera again, narrating events like it was some old radio drama.
Bart turned back to the camera. “Okay, we got the police closing in on the shuttle,” he said as the local police officer and his partner walked past Bart, pistols drawn. “I tell you what, this is pandemonium here. Nothin’ like what you would imagine, and these aliens aren’t asking to meet with our leaders. They’re not making any contact at all.”
A loud siren wailed behind her, and Janine turned to see a large red vehicle barreling down the street, lights flashing. “We’ve got a fire truck coming,” she said to the guys.
Bart wasn’t paying attention. He’d gone on to wax lyrical about what he was seeing, a continuous monologue that Janine wasn’t certain the studio would even be able to use. “Hard to say what the aliens are doing there, but if you ask me, looks like they’ve blocked off all the exits, so when the people are fleeing the burning building, they have no place else to go but the shuttle. Looks like a big kidnapping operation. Maybe they gonna sell all these people in some inter-galactic slave market.”
Just like Bart to come up with the idea of slaves. Janine shook her head. “Stick to what you know, Bart!”
“The fire department has arrived now,” Bart said then. Had he heard her complaint and was he following her directions? She doubted it. Bart continued. “Pretty tall building to be putting out a fire on the top, but let’s see what they can do here.” He’d started walking across the street, toward the promenade on the ocean side of the wide boulevard, where they could get a good view of both the shuttle and the hulking fire engine. Raul picked up the camera and tripod unit and moved with Bart.
Janine hurried up to them. They needed to stay here, closer to the fire truck, not running up to the alien space vehicle, not flirting with becoming the next victims of whatever horrible thing the aliens were doing. “Let’s move back over there.”
Bart frowned at her. “You been tryin’ to hide from everything too much, bitch. We got us a job to do here.”
Goddamn. Now he was calling her names? That was it. That was the last straw. When they got back, she was going to have him fired. They had probably only hired him to fill some damnable quota, anyway. They would probably be glad to have an excuse to get rid of him. Damned son of a bitch.
But she also had to stand up to him now. She couldn’t just wait until they got back. Because if she didn’t put her foot down, they might not even get back. “I don’t appreciate that kind of language,” she said.
“There’ll be a lot of language you don’t ’preciate when I tell everybody what a coward you are. You gonna be lookin’ for a new job, sister.”
“Let’s just cover what the fire department is doing,” Janine said, pointing to a spot on the wide promenade beside an abandoned food truck. “Raul, over here!”
“I got this,” Bart said, pointing to his chest. “And that ain’t where the action is.”
Whump.
The entire world turned white, and a wave of heat slammed into her, almost knocking her off her feet. Janine coughed, burning hot air filling her lungs. She couldn’t see, and her skin screamed. Was she on fire? She dropped to the pavement and rolled a couple of times, coming up next to a tree whose charred leaves were floating to the ground like black snow.
She ran a hand over her head. It came down with clumps of singed hairs between the fingers, all frizzed and bent.
Damn. Her team!
She looked around, found them huddled behind a blackened food truck. Didn’t look like they’d gotten as badly burned as she. Her skin was still complaining about the hot clothing pressed against it. Her mind didn’t seem to be working anymore. The world was a blur.
“What the hell?” Raul said, looking at her. “You all right?”
“Mother…” Bart said, then cut himself off. He turned to Raul. “Hey, your camera still working?”
“Looks like it,” Raul said, turning back to his work. “Hell, that was close.”
“Did you get it?” Bart barked. Man, he was driven. “You get it on camera?”
“I think so.”
Bart nodded, standing in front of the burning remnants of the fire truck, its flames still reaching skyward. “Put me on again.”
Raul righted his camera and started filming.
Hell, Bart was right. They needed to get this. Janine rushed back to the van to check the sound equipment, the recording devices, the connection to the studio. Her body still tingled. Her knees jittered back and forth inside her jeans. A glance in the rear-view mirror told her that all her hair was gone. No eyebrows. But the skin was just red. Hopefully, it would stay that way, just a first-degree burn. Because she still had a lot of work to do.
Her head spun, while outside, Bart began his next narration of events into the camera. “Hey, the shuttle just shot at the fire truck, and now you can see the devastation.”
Hey? What kind of newspeak was that? Sounded like Bart was also being affected by all the danger, and it was making him forget how to talk into the camera.
“The fire truck is nothing but a blackened hull,” Bart continued, “and all the firemen… I don’t know if you want to see that.”
Janine listened to the directions she was getting from the studio, then turned to Raul to pass on the message. “They want you to get a shot of it.”
“Moving in,” Raul said laconically, pointing his camera at a couple of blackened lumps.
“These alien bastards are not holding back,” Bart went on, even though the camera was not pointing at him. “And they look like they’re going to be pretty hard to fight.”
More directions came in from the studio, and for a moment, Janine was so busy she almost forgot about the danger.
“Okay, now,” Bart’s voice sounded in her ear, “something else’s happening. Over there, you can see those two local police officers approaching the building. Can you see it? Yeah, they’re cutting the wrapping around the building. Hot damn, they gonna rescue everybody.”
Janine keyed her microphone, which she knew would feed into Bart’s ear only. “Code switching, Bart.”
“Come on,” Bart said, waving Raul forward. “Let’s get closer.”
“You need to stay here,” Janine said into the mic. “I can’t extend the connection.” Well, that was probably not true, but she wasn’t about to tell them.
“Figure it out!” Bart said. Then, he switched on his broadcasting microphone. “Oh, look! They got it, and people are streaming out! Come on, man, now we got someone to interview.”
Janine jumped out of the van and held her breath as streams of people flooded the nearby sidewalk and poured out into the street.
Bart ran up to the escapees, shoving a microphone into the face of a graying man with a cane. “Can you tell us what happened?”
The man swatted Bart with his cane. “I have to get away!”
Bart spun around to another fleeing person, this one a woman with a baby wrapped in her arms.
The woman stopped, her dark skin gone chalky, her arms clutching the blanket that swaddled her child. “Those aliens are trying to force everyone into that spacecraft.”
Bart spun around to the camera then. “Did you hear that? You got that?”
And then, out of the same spot where all the people were escaping the building, five men in uniform appeared. Well, Janine wasn’t certain they were uniforms in the human sense, but they were all dressed alike, brown shirts and black pants, and they were grabbing the escapees and pushing them back inside, forming a humanoid wall to replace the plastic wrapping. And then another alien appeared, this one with a red shirt. He ran forward, then pointed what looked like a handgun at the police officers who’d destroyed the barrier.
“Gun!” Janine shouted.
Raul spun his camera around just as a bolt of fire leapt from the alien’s handgun, hitting the police officer with the knife. His head exploded in a spray of red droplets.
“Shit!” Bart said, right into the microphone.
Janine screamed.
Oh, God, this wasn’t happening. The world had gone into slow motion, bits of the man’s head and brains spewing out into a fireworks like flash of red, then bending toward the ground.
The second police officer ducked, then scrambled away. But not fast enough. His head ballooned into a mass of red, then his body dropped to the pavement with a plop.
They were all as good as dead now. Too close.
And Bart didn’t even seem to care. “Did you get that?” he shouted to Raul.
She had to stop this before someone else got killed. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Bart spun to her, an indignant expression on his face: “Hey, we the press, man. Nobody shoots us.”
“You’re not invulnerable,” she shouted at him. “And you don’t know what they’ll do.”
By now, the stream of escapees had dwindled to nothing, and a second band of plastic had been pulled around the building.
Bart shrugged, then turned back to the shooter, who was already backing away, toward the shuttle, like he was ready to duck inside. “Hey, Mr. Alien, can you tell us what you’re doing?”
God, she couldn’t understand this man. Was he crazy? Or just addicted to adrenaline? Maybe he had a death wish. “Bart! Get back here!”
The alien swung his pistol around and pointed it at Bart.
“No, no, man!” Bart shouted, his voice gone up an octave. “Don’t shoot! I’m no danger to you.”
Janine’s gut was hollowed out. She could hardly stand. “Bart, get back here!”
And then the alien cocked his head and smiled. “You want to come inside?”
“You hear that?” Bart said into his microphone as he took a few steps closer, then waved at Raul to approach with his camera. “They got some kind of translation device, because that was perfect English.”
She had to stop this craziness. She started toward Bart, shaking her head. If he wanted to endanger himself, fine, she wasn’t about to stop him. But he didn’t need to get the rest of the team killed. Now, all she had to do was figure out how to stop him.
Then, she saw the alien looking at the camera. He raised his handgun and pointed at Raul.
“No!” Janine shouted, rushing forward until she was right behind Bart. “It’s not a weapon! It’s a camera.”
The alien stared at Raul for a few seconds, appearing to think, then lowered his gun.
And that seemed to be all the irrepressible Bart needed. He pressed the microphone toward the alien. “Hey, man, can you tell us what’s going on here? What you want?”
“You want to come inside?” the alien said again. “I’ll show you our ship.”
Bart looked so excited he was about to start hovering. “You gonna show me? You answer some questions?”
“I’ll let you talk to our leader, if you want,” the alien said, turning toward and open door to the shuttle, just in front of the plastic wrap. “Come on.”
“Bart,” Janine growled, “don’t even think about it.”
Bart didn’t seem to be paying attention. He probably hadn’t heard her. “You let me talk to your captain?”
“Sure. He’d be delighted to talk to you.”
“You hear that?” Bart said, now looking into the camera lens. “An interview with the captain!”
“Come this way,” the alien said, pointing toward the door.
Bart’s eyes glistened with excitement. Janine watched him, and it was like her internal zoom lens had pulled into him, concentrating on him. She could see the individual pores on the thick skin of his broad nose, the drizzle of sweat running down the crease between his nostril and his cheek, the blue vein lifting his skin, snake-like, over his temple.
And there was a memory of the photo he’d shown them earlier in the week, a lovely young woman grinning into the camera, his fiancé. He’d talked about what they planned, the family they were going to have, “three point five kids,” he’d declared with a laugh. “But no goddamned picket fence. We gonna live in an apartment. Let somebody else take care of the yard.”
Inside that crazy chest, there was a heart beating. He took a step forward, toward the alien.
Janine tucked her head into her shoulders, then leapt at him, ramming him with her entire body in her best imitation of a football tackle, timing the hit so it landed just as he was in mid-stride. As they collided, a dull pain encompassed her head and neck, radiating out her shoulders. The air exploded from her lungs. But the resistance his body posed quickly evaporated.
“What the hell?” Bart shouted as he landed on his side on the pavement.
She bounced on top of him, then rolled toward his back, a wave of dizziness descending on her.
In an instant, he was scrambling to his feet, the dark skin on the side of his forearm marred with a blotch of shimmering red.
Damn it. He probably wouldn’t be taken by surprise again. There was no way she could stop him a second time.
“Bart,” she gasped, palms on the pavement, trying to get her bearings. Maybe she could grab him by the ankles.
Bart took a step forward.
Then something sounded like gunshots. A bullet whizzed overhead.
“Duck!” she shouted.
Bart’s knees buckled and his head came down.
When she looked up again, the alien was gone, and police were approaching at a run. But they stopped when they got about as close as the burnt-out fire truck, ducking behind cover, clearly not wanting to suffer the fate of their headless brothers.
Bart straightened adn spun around, hands on his hips, looking down at where she still sat on the hardtop. “Why’d you do that?”
Janine looked at him with frustration. Not even a thank you. “Sometimes, I’m not exactly sure.”
Raul came over to them, reaching out a hand to Janine. When she’d come to her feet, Raul looked at Bart. “They wouldn’t have let you back out, Bart. You know that, right?”
Bart looked at the shuttle, and then his expression changed, like he suddenly realized what was happening here. “Yeah,” he said, letting out a disappointed breath. “Thanks, Jan.”
“Right.” She swallowed. “Now, get back to work.”
Bart nodded, and for the first time, she thought she saw a glint of respect in his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”
LeAnn Robinson is the author of The Proctors of Earth science fiction series. LeAnn’s writing career began in the forth grade, when she sold her first book, a hand-drawn, hand-lettered edition, on folded 8 1/2 by 5 1/2″ paper for ten cents. Then, there was a large lull, while she worked a day job and studied the writing craft.
Show Your Work 