J.M. Dillard - War of Worlds: The Resurrection (2 page)

Forrester sat on the edge of the narrow bed and reached forward to snap on the nightstand lamp. The wood and metal base formed a pistol, a six-shooter with its barrel aimed at the ceiling. It was Harrison's before the invasion; the Blackwood house was one of the few left standing, unscarred by the attack. Its inhabitants hadn't been so lucky. Before that time,

Harrison had been crazy about cowboys and Indians, had even owned a tin sheriffs badge he often tried to wear to bed, and babbled on about shooting bad guys. Lately his interest in such things had flagged.. ..

And who can blame him,
Forrester thought,
after his brush with the real thing?

The boy stopped shrieking and poked his head out to peer owlishly at Forrester. His light blue eyes were huge and far too serious to belong to a five-year-old. Harrison fought unsuccessfully to keep his lower lip from trembling, but was still too young to stop the tears that coursed down his babyishly plump cheeks. "I'm . . . sorry," he gasped between huge, gulping sobs.

"It's all right," Forrester said as soothingly as such an idiotic phrase could be said. He stroked the boy's forehead, patted the soft, dark blond bristles of his crew cut. The December night was chilly, cold enough for the ancient furnace to kick on, but Harrison's forehead was hot and moist from sobbing under the covers. "It's all right," the older man repeated.

Harrison calmed under his touch, but it was far from all right. James Blackwood—Forrester's colleague, Harrison's father—and his beautiful wife, Sarah, were dead. And at the age of five, their son was already learning not to cry. When Forrester had first taken the boy in, Harrison had called almost every night for his parents, had angrily demanded them. Now he called for them only in his sleep, and apologized if Forrester should hear.

What kind of world,
Forrester thought bitterly,
demands so much of f
i
ve-year-olds?

He pulled two white tissues from the box on the nightstand. "That's better," he said as Harrison's snuffles ceased. "Think you can blow your nose for me without help?"

Harrison nodded, still with that too-adult, too-serious expression, and sat up. He looked very much like his father. He took the tissues, applied them inexpertly to the general area of his nose, and blew. Forrester helped him wipe.

"Good boy." He tossed the tissue into the trash can. "I'll bet you could use a glass of water."

"Yes," the child lisped. And then, as an afterthought, "Please."

Forrester stood. The boy tensed instantly. "I'm only going across the hall," he said lightly. "Back in two seconds."

He stepped across to the bathroom, in the dark found Harrison's yellow plastic cup, and rinsed it out before filling it up.

The screaming incidents occurred less frequently now; there was a time, only a month or two before, when Forrester felt like the father of a newborn, when Harrison had wakened terrified, yelling, not just once but two, three, four times a night. He was sure then that the boy had been permanently scarred by the incident, would never be able to sleep in a room by himself. But the child showed a remarkable resiliency —more than Forrester himself. With all his training in science, Forrester had found he was abysmally ignorant of the workings of his own mind. As long as Harrison needed him so badly, he was able to keep himself sane, sane enough to at least take care of the boy. He prided himself on his ability to stay in one piece while others around him cracked up.

But now that Harrison was recuperating, his new father was slowly falling apart. Through it all, he'd never had bad dreams. Now most nights he awakened at least once with the sensation of something huge and crushing on his chest, or, even worse, three soft, featherlike fingers being drawn lightly across the back of his neck. . . .

They're here, my God, they've come back—

He straightened at the sink and took a sip from Harrison's bathroom cup. The water smelled faintly of chlorine and plastic. There were times, such as now in this bathroom where everything was just as it had always been, when Forrester felt sure the invasion had all been a psychotic delusion. Aliens. Death rays. The stuff of a child's nightmares.

On nights like these, he came close to envying Sylvia—-the woman who had endured the invasion with him, the woman he loved and had intended to marry—for her ability to forget all that had happened. He could not grieve for her, only for himself— because Sylvia remembered no loss. She was well cared for, happy, unaware that she was institutionalized, and lived in the blissful past, well before the time of the horrors she and Clayton Forrester had suffered together. On most of his visits, she failed to recognize him. Perhaps, Forrester told himself, Sylvia's solution to the problem was the best of all.

He heard Harrison sniffle and crossed the hallway into the bedroom. The boy was on his feet now, and as Forrester sat back down on the bed, he climbed on his adoptive father's lap. Harrison had grown the past four months, to be sure. The hems of his Roy Rogers pajamas, which not so long ago had dragged along the ground, edged their way up toward his ankles. But he was still such a little kid, with his head seeming too big for the rest of his skinny body.

Forrester handed him the cup. It was hard to say, cxactly, who needed whom the most. He was becoming convinced that it was an equal exchange. He probably would have become as mad as Sylvia if he'd had to stay alone in this house at night.

Harrison took a few noisy slurps of his water, then paused, clutching the cup in both hands, and stared at Forrester with those pale, somber eyes. "Are you going to be my daddy now?"

Forrester smiled and stroked the boy's head. "Yes, I'm going to be your daddy now, Harrison." The child had been the one good thing to come out of all this. Forrester had already filed the adoption papers, and it was only a matter of time before Harrison would legally be his son. Even so, Forrester insisted that the child's name remain Blackwood, to ensure that James and Sarah's name would continue.

"You aren't going to die, are you?" Harrison asked suddenly, reproachfully.

Forrester did his best not to look startled by the question. "No, Harrison, I'm not going to die."

"Promise?"

Forrester nodded, realizing rather guiltily that he was making a promise he might not be able to keep. But Harrison needed some certainty in his life now, even if it meant lying a little. "I promise," Forrester answered, raising his hand solemnly as if taking an oath. "But you must promise never to forget your parents."

"I can't forget them," the boy said with sudden fierceness. "I can't forget any of it."

"I know. I can't either, son."
God, sometimes I wish I could.
He could see the father in the boy's face, could remember how, when the attack had begun in earnest, James had said,
If anything happens to Sarah and me—

Forrester hadn't let him finish. No need to. He'd been friends with James before Harrison was born and knew what was coming next. And already he knew the child well enough to see the man: others might try to forget, but Harrison would always remember. Forrester would trust him, train him to carry on his work.

But others had already forgotten. Forrester had seen the idiocy of the government at work. He and other scientists at the Pacific Institute had begged for more money to do research, to study the aliens in detail, to discover where they had come from, why they had attacked Earth, how their ships and weapons worked. He had gone to Washington, D.C., and argued with members of Congress, with representatives of the military—all to no avail. The government wanted the "war of the worlds" forgotten. The hundreds of thousands of alien bodies remaining were stuffed into barrels and ignored. As he was now being ignored. And ignorance would triumph. The memory of what had happened would be actively forgotten, hidden from future generations, until, at last, no one remembered. ...

Except Harrison Blackwood. Forrester patted the boy's shoulder. "Come on, cowpoke, finish your water."

Harrison took two more sips and handed the glass back to him. "Can you stay a little while?"

"Sure. But you've got to get under those covers and let me tuck you in."

"Okay." The boy's face brightened. Just relief, not quite a smile; he hadn't smiled in six months, and Forrester expected it would be at least as long before he heard the boy laugh. Here it was, the week before Christmas, a time when kids were supposed to be eagerly awaiting a visit from Santa. With the solici-tousness of a new parent, Forrester had carefully wrapped and hidden away toys, even put up a five-foot pine tree in the living room. But Harrison wanted none of it. He showed no interest in helping to decorate the tree, refused to even acknowledge the fact that the holiday was approaching. Perhaps, Forrester reflected, because the boy knew that the one thing he wanted most in the world could never be given back to him. Harrison was not the only one to ignore Christmas. Not a single home in the neighborhood was strung with outdoor holiday lights this year.

Harrison jumped into the bed with childish energy and pulled the covers up. Forrester tucked him in, then got a chair from the corner of the room—a comfortable adult-sized chair put there for just such emergencies—and settled into it. "I'm going to turn

the light off, but I'll still be here, even though it's dark."

Harrison seemed satisfied. "G'night, Daddy."

Forrester smiled at his new title. "Good night, son." He turned off the pistol lamp. It wouldn't be the first time he'd spent the night in this chair ... or the last. Sometimes he sat and read Harrison stories; most of the time, the boy, with his quick, restless mind, became bored with the predictable plots and asked questions about the real world. Forrester discovered to his delight that the boy was brilliant, a born scientist, like his parents. Most of the questions were typical bright-kid questions about the color of the sky, about why it rained .. . sometimes, less often, he asked about the aliens. Why did they look so funny? How did their machines burn everything up?

And somehow trying to explain them to Harrison made talking about them possible, provided Forrester himself with a means of dealing with what had happened. Science took the scariness out of it, made the fact of the invasion more tolerable . .. until Harrison asked a question Forrester couldn't answer, such as why the aliens would want to hurt his parents.

Forrester sat in the darkness until the boy's breathing became regular. He was grateful to have a hand in raising Harrison, to have the chance to teach the child everything he, Forrester, had learned about the aliens. The world was going to need scientists like the one Harrison would become.

Because deep in his bones, Forrester knew that it wasn't over, wasn't over at all. It had scarcely even begun. ...

October

1988

ONE

Urick sat in the tractor-trailer's cab and watched the dark landscape fly by. Next to her, Chambers held the rig at a steady fifty-five; no point in tempting the cops by speeding. There was nothing to see in the desert at night, and after Urick's initial terror subsided into restless impatience, she began to find the drive boring, to become eager to reach their destination.

The plan was in motion now. She glanced over at Chambers and thought,
What would happen if I asked him to pull over, if I jumped out of the cab and hiked my way back to town?
Would she go back to being the same person she had always been: Lena Urick, perennially broke, overage college student, always pushing back graduation another year because she had to work overtime to pay the rent? Was there still time to stop this before things went too far?

You've already gone too far. You've broken the

law—stolen a truck, carried a weapon without a license—and then there's conspiracy . . .
There was no going back to the way things used to be. And there was no point in lying to herself—she couldn't back out if she wanted to. Chambers wouldn't let her go. She thought of the Uzis hidden behind their seats; an image flashed in her mind of her fleeing from the rig into the desert, of Chambers calmly pulling the Uzi from the backseat and taking aim....

Would he kill you? Could he really kill you?
The answer was undoubtedly yes, and in Urick's mind he would be entirely justified in killing her: she would not have respected him if he were not prepared to kill for the cause. Yet another part of her—the weaker, timid part of herself she thought of as Lena, her old self—felt the opposite.

Urick thought of her former self, Lena, as another person, no longer a part of Urick, free soldier of the People's Liberation Army, but someone else, a coward, always afraid. She insisted her comrades call her only by her last name, Urick, and Urick was cool, dedicated, unafraid, just like Chambers, who radiated perfect calm sitting there next to her. She considered for an instant that he might be as frightened as she, but dismissed the idea as ridiculous.

She'd been through their route a thousand times before, but she pulled the map from the glove compartment and unfolded it, leaving the compartment open so that she could read by its faint light. She didn't even consider asking Chambers to turn on the overhead. The less seen of their faces, the better.

She stared once again at the route underlined in red:

cast, into the desert, though the map was unnecessary; she could have drawn it from memory. She looked down at her watch, the one present from her father she'd ever permitted herself to keep. She would have thrown it out the window right then if she hadn't needed it to carry out the plan. No point in anything lying her to the past, to the old Lena, and certainly not Jo her father. Besides, it was expensive, gold, a symbol of everything she stood against now. When Lena was fifteen, her family had left Germany to come to the United States; her father, a working-class man, a firm believer in the capitalist dream, had opened a deli... then two, then three, until he was a rich man who owned an entire chain. Nothing narrowed a person's mind faster, Lena learned, than the acquisition of wealth.