With our new fleet of vehicles in good working order we decided it was time to try for a trip over to the beach. One of the things I was worried about was the bridges over the St. Johns River and the Intra-coastal waterway. We took Mike and Bubba as both had winches and if needed we could abandon one and still have a way home. We left early and drove into the sun on the way there.
We decided we would probably need the full day to get over and back. We had only stayed away from the bunker for one night on our previous outings and had decided to make every effort to not do that again. Our little 800 square feet of concrete was cramped, but it was cozy and it was ours. The world around us was becoming an increasingly wild place, so the security of home had its appeal.
It took an hour to get to the St. Johns Bridge. One side was intact and the other had a span in the water where some unfortunate motorist had been traveling during the attack. The overpass of I-95 was collapsed, but we were able to go up the ramp onto the interstate, cross over to the other side and then back down the ramp and onto our road again. The bridge over the Intra-coastal proved to be similar to the St. Johns. Sides of sections were collapsed, but a way across was still there.
Two hours after our journey began we rolled up to the first view of the beach and the ocean straight down a tree lined street. Even though the houses along the street were flattened the big oaks that lined the street were still there, providing a beautiful canopy.
We raced down the street, piled out of the vehicles and ran down the neighborhood gangway onto the sandy paradise. I stopped to enjoy the sand between my toes and the girls raced straight for the water. We had been so excited that we had not noticed what was up the beach about 10 miles to our left.
There was a humongous ship hovering just above the waves, about a mile out. By the time I had noticed the girls had seen it too. They stood starring and stunned, knee deep in the water. I waved for them to come back, but they just stood and stared at the craft. I felt a terror building in me that we would be spotted and that we were only moments away from certain death. The consequences that came from being seen held no appeal, so I continued to wave the girls back while using a low shout.
They came slowly at first, but then began to run and we all hustled back across the gangway to the trucks. We had parked under the trees and felt that they provided adequate cover so we took a moment to evaluate the situation.
This was our first encounter with the destructors in almost a year. We made our way back over to a dune and peered through the sea oats on top of it at a gigantic, dull gray vessel. I sent Rachel back to the truck to retrieve a small pair of binoculars. I then peered at the humongous ship for several minutes.
I guessed the vessel was probably a half mile across. It was flat on the bottom with a slight domed shape on top. Two large tubes protruded from its center, going down into the water. Was water the reason they had come here? Were we nothing more than a needed resource? I had many questions and few answers. I was most concerned by the five smaller ships that buzzed around it as if always on the lookout for any threat.
That’s when Janie grabbed my arm and pointed up above the craft and further out to sea. You could just make out the hazy outline of another round, but much much larger ship. I was guessing that it was five miles across and perhaps 30 miles off in the distance. As we watched, the smaller craft began retracting its tubes and within minutes was lifting upwards towards the larger ship. I reasoned it was perhaps with a belly full of our precious ocean water.
By that time I was convinced that we had not been spotted. Or, maybe we had been, but were not deemed a threat. Either way we felt it was a good time to leave. We backed the trucks up slowly at first and when we decided we had enough ground cover we turned around and slipped our way back down the street.
At that point we were all eager to just make our way back to our little fortress hideaway. As we turned and began our way back out of what had once been Cocoa Beach we were again caught by surprise. Two vehicles were now blocking the roadway. At first I felt panicky, but I soon had the realization that it meant someone else was alive. I would take no chances with my little family as I had no idea if these other survivors would be friendly or hostile.
We sat for ten minutes with the engines running just looking out the windows. Other than behind trees or overgrown brush there was really nowhere to hide for an ambush of any size. So, after a thorough scan with the binoculars I decided to get out of the truck.
I waved back to Janie and Rachel to stay in Bubba and patted my pistol in a gesture for them to have their weapons ready. I had taken the time to give them firearms training after we found a good stash of ammo at a collapsed gun store. They were decent shots and could defend themselves, but I was worried none the less.
I first walked ten and then 20 feet out in front of the truck. I set my weapon down and began to shout for whoever was out there to come out. We were friendly and just passing through. A figure emerged from the brush on the other side of the blocking vehicles. They were holding a rifle.
After another minute of me with my hands slightly raised as a non-threatening gesture, they began to make their way towards me. I was tempted to raise my binoculars, but felt it might send the wrong signal, so I waited.
When the figure reached the cars I could make out that it was a male teen. I gestured to the girls to continue to wait in the truck and to keep an eye out on their surroundings. I then began a slow walk towards the boy while leaving the security of my pistol on the ground behind me.
I was stopped with a warning about 50 feet from the cars. We talked for nearly half an hour before the boy let down his rifle and came out from behind the vehicles. His name was David and he had been swimming in the Intra-coastal with a friend when it all went down. His friend had run for home while David stayed in the water, hiding up under a bridge.
For a year he had scavenged and survived on his own. I remembered how happy I was to see other living people after only a couple months, so I knew David was probably about to burst inside. He kept a cool yet skeptical demeanor during our conversation.
He had been living in the back of a Humvee under a camo net in the trees several hundred yards away. It remained from National Guard troops who had perished in the initial action. I didn’t want to take the time to hot-wire the Humvee as we weren’t in need of it at that time, so we left it where it was, hidden from view. I waved the girls to come down out of Bubba and they made their way over.
I could see a gleam of interest in David’s eyes as the girls approached. Not only did he now have people to talk too, but he had girls that were close to his age. I would have to keep a close eye on him because 17 year old boys generally have only one thing on their minds. And, although I already felt a great deal of empathy for this poor kid, that empathy was not yet mated with trust. We invited David to come with us back to the bunker and he jumped at the chance.
He rode with me on the way back and told me what he could about the activities of the alien ships. The ships came down, dropped the tubes in the water for several days and then pulled up and headed back to the larger ship. From what David had observed there were two of the water ships and one of the large ones. They usually stayed much further up the coast, but had chosen that spot that day.
Each of the water ships carried a compliment of what he described as the concussion fighters. He was witness to a number of attempts by our military to take down these attackers. The first attempts at defense were missiles launched from the ground, probably the local National Guard units. The fighters seemed to also use the concussion weapons as shields.
As a missile approached a concussion wave was generated and it was like the missile hit a wall in the air, never making it near the fighter itself. Even bullets seemed to meet with the same fate, never reaching their target.
The second defensive actions were from our own fighter jets. Their missiles and cannons met the same fate as well as many of the planes and pilots themselves. This was the same thing I had seen nearly a year earlier with the jet remains in Orlando. It was as if it had hit a wall in mid-air.
David said, virtually everything he saw, led him to believe we were way outmatched militarily by whoever these invaders were. He too had been monitoring the radio waves up until the point at which his scavenged stockpile of batteries finally ran out. He had not heard a peep since the second week of the attack. I could only believe that there was a large number of the huge ships scattered across the globe.
Since there were at least four of us who had survived in Central Florida, I believed that there must be others out there too. Perhaps small communities were already forming elsewhere. With having not seen a single scout ship I wondered if maybe we were no longer considered threats. If so, we would be able to move around much more freely.
We arrived back at our little paradise with an hour of daylight remaining. I gave David a tour of our garden, pasture and chicken coops. We sacrificed another one of Janie’s hens so that David could have his first real meal in more than a year.
The excitement of the day and all that had transpired kept him up and talking well past midnight. The girls were all too happy to have someone closer to their age to talk with. I didn’t mind though. David seemed like a good kid making me the now proud stepfather of three.
We awoke the next morning and immediately after having a breakfast the girls went about handling their daily tasks. I decided to put David to work on building us a large camouflaged shelter where we could park all the vehicles without arousing suspicion from above. I had often wondered if they were not watching our tiny colony and discussing our odd behaviors amongst their anthropologists. Keeping myself busy at the survival game went a long way towards keeping those kinds of thoughts out of my head, but they inevitably made their way in anyways.
We broke for lunch about one in the afternoon. Lunch usually lasted until about five in the afternoon during the summer’s heat. I had checked on David just before lunch and noticed that he had made no progress whatsoever towards constructing the shelter.
Since this was his first day back around other people, I wasn’t too worried and was willing to cut him some slack. I had given him plenty of instruction on what I had envisioned, but I wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to jump right in to that type of project. Especially having just come out of the isolation he had been in.
After the third day with no progress I began to worry. I could have given this project to either of the girls and they would have been all over the front loader clearing the ground under the desired tree and moving any needed timbers into position. I couldn’t tell at the time if the issue was that he was just not interested, I felt he certainly seemed capable.
After talking to him about it he revealed that he didn’t know how to drive and was too embarrassed to admit it after watching the girls speed around in Bubba. I chuckled which did not help his self-esteem. He was the newcomer here and it seemed everyone was already so sure of what they were doing that he didn’t want to make a fool of himself. He was also in fear that if he didn’t measure up he would be asked to leave. I spent the rest of the day with him teaching him to drive the front loader. By the end of the day we had the ground cleared.
By the end of the first week with, us David was finishing the roof over our new parking garage. After a years of salvaging runs we now had Suzie, Bubba and Mike, two four wheelers and the front loader to garage. The structure wasn’t the most attractive, but it was sturdy and well hidden from the skies.
We could now safely store our fleet and David now had a sense of accomplishment and belonging to our little colony. As a sort of celebration and official welcoming, the girls baked a cake and I made some homemade ice-cream with the ice-cream maker Rachel had previously found. We were all in good enough moods to watch a video. This time Rachel, Janie and I were not overtaken by the sadness of what had once been. For David, he was just excited to be around other people.
The following week I showed David my coil gun. He was fascinated and I was thrilled that I finally had someone else I could discuss the technology with. David was not much for mechanical things, but he had been somewhat of a computer geek in his previous short life. When not at school, he had spent most of his waking hours sitting at a keyboard exploring the world of cyberspace with all it had to offer.
Hours upon hours had been spent in online gaming with his cyber friends from around the globe. His father had been an engineer and had peaked David’s curiosity in cyber kinetics. His dream for college was to get involved in programming robotics so that he could one day dominate the world, the same dream that many a young man who had spent too much time gaming in cyberspace had probably had. What he didn’t know at the time was that he might one day be headed down that very path.
The coil gun project had stalled at having the ability to poke a hole in a road sign. I was excited at the thought of having someone on-board who had some computer savvy. My PC was several years old, but would have plenty of power to handle the delicate timing the coil gun needed. I could handle connecting the electronics to the computer, but I didn’t have a clue as to how to make the computer control them. David did.
He was consumed with the coil gun from the first day he had seen it and of course at having the chance to get on a PC again. He had no online buddies to chat with or other worlds to conquer, but he now had a project that he could really get his skull into.
As it turned out he was not much of a farmer and had caused the girls some grief whenever he attempted to help with their tasks. Rachel was very patient with him, but Janie would just lay into him whenever he was slowing progress or outright messing something up.
He still lacked a little confidence around the girls because they seemed to always know what they were doing, and they were having to tell him what to do at nearly every turn. The coil gun was his escape. I would often have to force him to leave it be because we had issues to deal with in keeping our colony going.
After one such incident he became irate and began yelling at me about how I wasn’t his father and he could do whatever he wanted. Had he acted that way to me 20 years earlier I would have given him the beat-down of his life. I had once punched a guy because he had sneezed just as Renee and I had been walking past him.
The sneeze had given a little jolt to my manhood and I wasn’t going to let anyone do that when she was around. Back then, I would have punched him even if I had been by myself. I was a much more patient person now and in no need of puffing up my chest over some kid’s temper tantrum. With a little understanding I was able to calm him down without firing a shot.
It had been three months since David had joined us and he was in need of a break from the project. So, I decided that we should take a trip over to the coast as a sort of surveillance run. There were multitudes of questions about the aliens that I wanted answers too. What were they doing? How many of them were there? What did they look like? Did they ever come out of their ships? And a slew of other items that needed answers.
We packed heavy for the trip and decided to try for Daytona and a closer observation. We loaded Mike with the two four wheelers and set out for the coast, David road with me while Rachel and Janie once again took Bubba.
I had been noticing a little gleam in David’s eye and a returning one in Rachel’s for several weeks. She had blossomed into quite the looker over the course of that first year and I was a little worried about them being kids and being curious. David had so far been quite the gentleman and Rachel a bit shy. I could only guess that the only thing that had kept them apart was that neither one had a clue as to what they were doing. David had been a teen computer geek and Rachel had not reached the age where she or most of her friends for that matter, were allowed to date.
They were evidently experiencing a bit of those awkward teenage years and I was quite happy for it. With a little knowledge they would be two that would get in trouble before they were able to handle the responsibilities that the trouble brought with it. My thoughts were that I hoped they would feel awkward for as long as possible.
It took nearly three hours to reach Daytona. The roadways were in worse shape in the area and the overgrowth was really taking hold. We found cover for the vehicles in what had once been a park about a mile from the beach.
We unloaded the four wheelers for the last mile and made our way out to the beach. As we approached A1A we began to try to move quickly behind any cover. We dismounted the four wheelers and climbed up on a pile of debris to get a look.
A water ship was about a mile offshore, just as we had seen before. But this time we were directly inland from it. The ship was humongous and looked surreal floating just above the water. The five smaller fighters were circling close by it in a seemingly random pattern. I almost began to wonder why the fighters were there at all after they had destroyed everything else so completely. I reasoned that perhaps they were just being cautious.
We watched all day as the water ship just sat there with the two big tubes in the water and its fighters buzzing around it like so many flies. We had decided to make this an overnighter and had set up a camo tent in some nearby brush, using the cover of a good sized tree. We had plenty of food, water and other supplies and with it being late September the temperature was tolerable enough that we could sleep outside without our precious air conditioning back home.
Just as the sun was about to set the water ship began spewing a fog out of one side. It was green in tint and after ten minutes I noticed the small cloud was slowly drifting our way. I got a sudden chill when I realized that Chlorine gas was greenish in color and if we got caught up in that haze we could die a painful suffocating death.
We gathered everything we could with haste and began our way back towards the vehicles, all along the way dodging from one piece of cover to the next. By the time we reached the trucks the green fog was already coming ashore. We made our way back out of Daytona and back on the road to our fortress.
As we drove I explained to David that the green fog was likely Chlorine gas. My guess at the time was that they were taking in seawater, extracting the salt, separating the Sodium from the Chlorine and then expelling the Chlorine.
I finally had a reason to let roll around in my head as to why they had come to this planet in the first place. They were here for the Sodium. The reason they were in need of Sodium was not as important as the knowing of why they were here to begin with. David then let me know that on several occasions, when he had still been in Cocoa Beach, that the air had become difficult to breathe and that it had burned his eyes and throat.
I let him know that he was lucky that the clouds had dissipated enough by the time that they had reached him or he would have been dead. He said it was quite painful when it happened and the affects lasted for weeks after hitting. Again, I let him know that he was lucky to be alive. It was funny, but I remember that incident was the first time since all of this had happened, that I really had felt happy to be alive.
We were unable to reach home before sunset and were not brave enough to use headlights, so we pulled off the side of the road under some trees. We had managed a sufficient distance from the green cloud that I was no longer worried about its danger. We had some camo covers that we pulled over the trucks as extra disguise and we then settled in for the night in our cabs. It had been a strange but interesting day.