Greenflies Read online

  “What the hell did we just see?!” asked Caufield.

  “Does the alien just create blood?”asked Lassiter’s aide.

  “In a manner of speaking, I suspect,” replied Barnard, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “We have seen that the alien race is capable of teleportation. Now, presuming you were an astronaut and had teleportation, wouldn’t it make sense to leave your food and air supply at home and teleport it up to your ship incrementally as you needed it? You might further use this technology on your spacesuit, so that you could perform EVA wearing an ultralight suit without bulky tanks. I suspect this alien has taken that premise to the next logical step, the integration of teleportation into its body. Somewhere in the universe, there is a heart to pump blood, a liver to purify it, and a digestive system to provide it nutrients. That blood reaches the alien through a portal in that kidney-shaped organ. It would explain the lack of other organs.”

  “It outsources its eating and breathing?”asked Caufield.

  “That’s…”

  “Unlikely? Impossible?” replied Barnard. “I’d be inclined to agree, but I found the prospect less galling than defying the law of conservation of matter and energy. I’m sure our physicist friend from DoE will agree.”

  Dr. McDowell just nodded. There was a silence.

  The Major from Lassiter’s office broke it. “A hell of a way to control your troops. Have direct control of their blood supply at home base.”

  Chapter 4: Lessons in Respect

  6:15 AM Boston, MA

  “We’ve got more incoming!”

  “Shit! I thought we closed!”

  “The other ERs are just as full as we are. There’s nowhere else for them to go.”

  The Emergency Room was full to the point that the there were gurneys set up in the waiting area. People, mostly with yellow tags on their clothes, sat against walls with buckets and sickened expressions, waiting for help. The scent of vomit was overpowering there and likely in every other departments of the hospital where the injured were being taken. If one looked closely, one could see small blisters forming on the yellow-tagged victims. Those with red tags were already experiencing open sores. So far, there had been no black tags, the triage tag given to those who had no hope, but from the trauma rooms could be heard the doctors fighting complications and occasionally losing.

  Agent James Farcus had seen similar carnage in Africa during an Ebola epidemic, so he was not stunned beyond reason as he entered. He estimated perhaps as many as fifty people were being treated in this emergency department for the same malady, in addition to the normal patients. The sight of sores and scent of regurgitation was something he’d have to get used to this morning. He still had a half dozen other hospitals to visit.

  He walked straight up to the clerk and held up his identification, “John Farcus, Homeland Security.”

  “Good for you,” came the reply as the clerk continued on the phone.

  “I need your ER chief immediately.”

  The clerk appeared to think about another snarky reply, but in the end only nodded and darted back into the maze of exam rooms.

  Agent Farcus himself was an unassuming man, wiry beneath his simple suit, but he always picked clothes a size too large. He liked to think it was his choice in style, but in actuality he simply enjoyed being underestimated. With his wire-rim glasses and badly receded blond hair, he certainly wasn’t intimidating.

  He attempted to utilize this aspect of his appearance as he approached a young woman in the waiting room, lying on one of the gurneys. She was perhaps nineteen years old, a pudgy girl with brown hair. There was a single open sore running across where her eyebrows had been, and there was distinct hair loss onto the gurney. As he approached, he saw she had a nasty sore across her left wrist too, which she was trying to hide with her right hand.

  “Hello, Miss. I’m Agent Jim Farcus with Homeland Security. How’re you feeling?”

  “Like I’ve got the worst hangover ever,” the girl, whose chart identified her as Angela, replied.

  “Yeah, that sounds about right,” he smiled, “May I ask you where you were in relation to the incident?”

  “I was watching the aliens. Right at the front of the crowd, up against the railings outside of the garden.”

  “Did you see the first two ships when they teleported in, or just the third?” he asked.

  “Just the third.” She said and then gulped deeply, “What have they done to us?”

  Farcus looked quickly at her chart, “Don’t worry, Angela. It probably feels a lot worse than it is. So, you were right up against the rail?”

  Without answering, Angela rolled up the front of her T-shirt to show her abdomen. There were sores, several vertical and one horizontal, corresponding to the shape of the metal rail she had been leaning against hours earlier. The edges of the sores were bubbling slightly as well, indicating a risk of skin sloughing.

  “And you were wearing glasses, weren’t you, Angela?”

  She nodded.

  “May I see your wrist for a moment.”

  Farcus lifted his briefcase to the rail of the gurney and popped it open. In it were several plastic-wrapped vials of medication and a small black device. He removed a stylus from the device and held it over the sore on her wrist for a moment. He glanced back at the display of the device and gave a faint smile. He returned the stylus to the device and closed the briefcase.

  “You’re going to be fine, Angela. You just took the brunt of it because you were in contact with so much metal for so long after their arrival.”

  “The brunt of what?”

  Agent Farcus noticed the clerk had returned with a flustered middle aged woman, presumably the ER Chief. He excused himself politely and walked purposefully towards her.

  “Are you the ER Chief?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “Were you treating that girl? Are you a doctor?”

  “No, ma’am. I was trained as a Naval nuclear technician.”

  “And you think that gives you the right to treat patients in my hospital?” she replied, still quietly, but with a distinct edge.

  Farcus leaned in and whispered, “No, ma’am. I’m also trained in how to deal with a hospital full of radiation victims. I’m with Homeland Security’s Radiological Response team. The hospital chief of staff should have notified you I was coming. Do you have someplace we could speak privately? Even a broom closet will do, ma’am. I’ll be brief, and it’s good news.”

  The ER chief stood in shocked silence, then took Agent Farcus’ arm and led him to a fire door. They slipped through, and the doctor double-checked quickly to make sure no one was in the stairwell.

  “So, it is radiation?” she asked.

  “You had doubts?”

  “No one has seen anything like this since Hiroshima. Of course we had doubts but the sores, hair loss, nausea…”

  Agent Farcus replied, “Chernobyl might be a closer analogy. Better yet, Silkwood. An excellent movie. The good news is that the exposure seems to be very light, not as if these individuals were exposed to fallout but as if they were exposed to one quick burst of hard radiation. My fellow agents have already collected enough data to suggest it was the appearance of the third alien craft that exposed the crowd of onlookers. So, your first question to new patients should be how close they were to the Botanical Garden when the third craft arrived in a flash of blue light.”

  The doctor sighed. “Some of us were worried it might be biological, masked as radiation symptoms. Some kind of alien bug.”

  “There’s no sign of that, ma’am.”

  He lifted the briefcase, opened it again, and held it between them, and kept talking.

  “This is the radiation response kit we’re giving to you and local area hospitals. We were only just starting to prepare them for wide-scale dispersal when this incident occurred, so we don’t yet have enough to distribute nationally. I hesitate to say ration your supply, but…”

  She nodded.

  “The d
rug is cocktail of anti-inflammatory, nausea suppressant, and a chemotherapy drug used to stimulate stromal cell regeneration,” continued Farcus. “The indications and doses are explained concisely in the accompanying literature. It is not to be used within 24 hours of Percoset. Bad things happen. And remember, follow any treatment for radiation with antibiotics. The ones closest to the pulse have no immune system to speak of right now.

  “This is your rad meter, essentially a Geiger counter. Point the stylus at a region of the body that might have received an extensive dose, for instance, if it was in contact with a metal object at the time. Metal will shield against radiation initially, but is a hazard if they maintain contact afterward. If the reading is under 100, which I think it will be in every case, the patient or object is not a fallout risk. Discard anything with a reading over 100 and call the Hazmat number in this…”

  He pulled a small book from the briefcase, “...book. Also in here are responses for a number of complications associated with radiation. If you find you need an immediate bone marrow transplant, and you might, there is a number and code in here to automatically upgrade your status on the transplant list.”

  The doctor looked over the supplies with quiet disbelief.

  “All FDA reviewed and approved. As I said, we were preparing for wide-scale distribution. The Remsinol should eliminate your cases of pulmonary edema entirely and drastically improve the smell in there.”

  He closed the briefcase and handed it to her.

  “I’m just a little surprised to get so much help so fast,” she said.

  “Homeland Security. If we’re prepared for something so esoteric as an alien invasion, then we’re just doing our job. Now, could you ask your clerk to prepare numbers for me on the number of radiation patients that have been seen here. I’ll be down in a moment. I’m just going to climb a few floors, see if I can get a signal out, and relay the situation here to my superiors. I’ll also call for a delivery of plasma?”

  “Yes, we are low,” she replied.

  “And you’ll be lower, soon. I’ll be right back, doctor.”

  With that, Agent Farcus left her and began climbing the stairs. He withdrew his unusually large cell phone and monitored the bars on the display as he climbed. He got a signal, just shy of the roof, on the seventh floor.

  He typed in a seemingly endless set of digits then spoke, “This is Agent Farcus. Please wire me through to General Lassiter’s mobile. He’s expecting my call.… General?…From the data collected from the other agents, and what I’m seeing here, I am willing to go on the record calling this a radiological attack. The burst of light emitted when the alien craft arrive seems to coincide with a short burst of hard radiation equivalent to a small tactical neutron bomb with no fallout. Very low yield. I’d estimate the kill zone of each burst to be bout 20-30 yards, with a 50% kill zone out to 60. I expect that when we find the gardeners and the police keeping order at the Garden, they will be dead.”

  A pause.

  “Very limited range, but cumulative. A few dozen appearances throughout a city would be a powerful radiologic attack. However, it would only take a thin layer of concrete to protect a general populace completely. Urging people to remain inside while the window of alien threat is passing would be…”

  Another pause, much longer.

  “I see, sir. Does the Australian military even have radiation suits?”

  Sydney, Australia, 1:00 AM local

  Half of the national guard unit had been deployed around a single zoo. The keepers were still present, but the vast majority of the human population here were soldiers. A pair of tanks loitered in the parking areas outside the zoo, and several varieties of military vehicles were parked on the many walkways and courtyards of the zoo. A pair of old but armed helicopters were keeping their presence known overhead, and a not insubstantial air force was preparing on air fields nearby. John would have felt better if the jets were already patrolling overhead, but there was no way of knowing when within the alien teleportation window the aliens would strike here. Australia didn’t have the air refueling capability to keep squadrons of fighter bombers aloft for 12 hours. There were no doubt a few planes up there, but not a reassuring flock of them immediately overhead.

  John Murray was a private, having joined the army on his mother’s advice to pay his way through college later. Now that there was an alien invasion, college was a little more far-thinking than John thought appropriate.

  He was a skinny kid, but what wasn’t skin or bone was muscle. A tanned and tawny blond kid, he would have fit in better on the beaches of Australia than in its army. That was the case for most of the soldiers here. They weren’t the best and brightest. They were the troops being trained close enough to Sydney to position them with a few hours notice.

  “…The line must be drawn…”John could hear the prime minister droning from the cab of the APC below him. He was in the machine gun turret of an armored personnel carrier, parked in one of the footpath junctions in the zoo. There were a pair of men in the cab listening to the prime minister on the vehicle radio with one ear and mobilization order from HQ with the other.

  The prime minister was addressing the nation on the need for this stand. The news from Auckland was still staggered and unclear. The bursts of radiation from the Greenfly attack there had disrupted communications somewhat, but the picture was bleak. The Greenflies had changed tactics, appearing not as scattered individual transports but as a group of… well, John had no idea how many. HQ was telling them to expect as many as ten, all at once, with three or four aliens in each one. When the Greenflies were done here, the group of ten would teleport together someplace else in the their teleportation window. Someplace further north, like a grid pattern. Or maybe it was different group of ten. No one could tell the difference.

  The radiation issue hadn’t stayed secret for very long. Dozens of men, women, and children were dead in Auckland, New Zealand. Hundreds more were sick and wouldn’t survive the night. There was a zoo in Auckland, with animals unique to the Kiwi Island. Almost all of the transports had appeared at the zoo, but everyone who had been on the street through the city had paid the price. It was a mild winter. Had the weather been colder, maybe more of them would have been huddled inside.

  “…all efforts at communication have failed,” the prime minister was saying, “The aliens are either unaware that their appearances are causing harm or they are aware and it does not concern them. We are the first armed force capable of interdicting them since the radiation threat was exposed. If we do not give them pause, they will continue to endanger civilian lives across the globe…”

  But soldiers’ lives in a friggin’ zoo were just fine to endanger, John thought.

  He was crouched in the turret, so as to get the most protection from the raised rim of the turret as possible. It sheltered him both from the chill wind and presumably from the radiation when the alien transports would appear. Half the troops, those with any exposure to the outside, were wearing white plastic suits with dark visors. They had been hurried here by jet copter from one of Australia’s few nuclear reactors. John himself had one and found it the most uncomfortable thing he had ever worn, too hot on his head and too cold everywhere else. It also constricted his head in a way he didn’t like. Without the helmet, John felt this would have been an excellent time to start smoking.

  “…international intelligence agencies agree that the Sydney zoo is a certain target. Our nation’s rich natural wealth has made us a target to these creatures, and their teleportation technology, whether knowingly or not, has put us at risk. If the radiation levels are equivalent to those seen in Auckland, Sydney residents will be at significant risk unless they seek shelter. Remain indoors, in the most interior part of your home, or within a basement. Police and civil authorities are announcing and posting directions for residents to shielded locations, for those who do not feel their homes are safe. As stated at the beginning of this conference, the standards for safety are considered…”


  John tuned out again as the prime minister began sounding like a building inspector again. John’s dad had been an architect, and he had inherited a few of the prejudices about inspectors, contractors, and generally anyone else who worked on a building besides an architect. It’s what John was planning on for college himself.

  “…we are not alone in this. The nations of the world respect the stand we are taking, making an effort to force communication, to stop these radiation attacks, to make our presence known. The forces in Sydney are prepared to make every attempt at communication within human technological capability. If that fails, the world is willing to stand by us. Half of the United States Pacific Fleet is on its way here. The Chinese Air Force, the largest in the world and the source of many headaches for the South Pacific, is now being mobilized to protect it. This crisis is bringing us together. All humanity will respond to this threat, not just…”

  Blah, blah, blah, John thought. This was going to end badly.

  John thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye, something in one of the moats surrounding an animal enclosure. A small spark of blue in the water. The radio turned staticky, and the prime minister’s voice turned to noise. There was no time for people to fret that this was it. There was no time even to huddle deeper into the APC turret. The spark in the water, the noise on the radio, and the ten blue flashes and thundercracks appeared within an eye-blink of each other.

  One moment, the sodium lamps set up around the park were drowned out by blue glare, and the next there were ten hovering alien craft in the zoo. There was no single space in which they would all fit, so they were strewn about. One was sitting in the center of the elephant enclosure. Another floated between a pair of Humvees some fifty meters from John, as casually as if it had been there all along and no one had noticed. Most ominously, a transport had appeared at the top of an artificial cliff-face in an exterior ape enclosure. That one most likely had a view of most of the park. The other alien transports had appeared out of John’s view, although he had seen the blue flashes.