B. Larson - Swarm

The night before the invasion, the whole sky looked wrong somehow. It was the color of it, I think. The sky was purple-rather than blue or black. It was as if the sun never completely went down that night, but instead turned a dark umber and lurked beneath the bottom rim of the world, lighting up the heavens ever so slightly. Only a few shreds of cloud moved along the horizon, over the Sierra Nevadas to the east. Each strip of cloud was tinged a deep red, the color of wet rust or dried blood.

Other than the strangely hued sky, it felt like a typical Central California night in late spring. It wasnt stormy, but a cool breeze came down from the foothills as the evening deepened. In the fields around my farmhouse, a thousand stalks of ripe corn rippled.

Jake, my oldest, performed his usual shrug when I asked him if he had completed his list of chores. His short, black hair was as shiny as a crows feathers. His eyes were blue and piercing. He looked so much like me his sister sometimes called him my evil twin.

When I took my son out to the stable to prove he hadnt shoveled the stalls, the horses were uneasy, shuffling about and sidestepping. They showed the whites of each big eyeball and tossed their heads, but didnt shy when I reached up to stroke them. Frowning, I joined Jake and we finished the shoveling. He looked at me, surprised to get help with a chore he loathed. I pretended nothing was wrong. But truthfully, I didnt want to leave him alone out here.

Afterward, we came out of the stable to find the moon was rising. The fields were rustling and the smell of ripe corn and fresh-cut alfalfa hung thickly in the air. I kept looking over my shoulder, up at that strange sky. Wed bought this place, my wife Donna and I, as part of a back-to-the-country dream. My colleagues called me the gentleman farmer and theorized I must be commuting through cow herds each morning to the University. I loved it out here and even after Donna died I refused to move back to the city. But in all my years out here, Id never seen a sky like this one.

Jake ignored everything that was wrong with the night and headed upstairs. He would spend the evening surfing the web, twiddling with his headphones and pretending to do homework. My second child Kristine, however, knew the moment she saw me that something was different tonight. Shed always been more intuitive.

Whats wrong, Dad? she asked, looking up from her algebra paper. She was thirteen, with a new womanly shape to her body that I found upsetting. She looked like her mother-except she was skinny and wore braces. To me, she was perfect.

I shook my head as I tapped her algebra book. Nothing Kris. Dont get distracted.

Kristine went back to her homework, and I went back to gazing out at the strange purple skies. Nothing changed, so I headed for the computer in my study. I had a lot of grading to do, but fortunately most of that was online. I logged into the University website for the last time and began answering emails and grading lab projects.

Teaching online wasnt as easy as it sounded. Computer science students asked hard questions of their professors and typing in comments was often more work than simply discussing things in person. Sometimes I missed the simplicity of a pen and paper. Even scribbling notes in the margins of printouts was better than typing everything. Red-penned circles and Xs were wonders of communication that wed lost somehow, over the years.

That night, I dreamt of my wife Donna, who had died nearly a decade ago in a car accident. Wed hit a chain link fence and gone right through it. The steel posts had whipped around the car as the chain link wrapped us up like a net. One of the posts had come through the back window and impaled Donna.

She looked at me from the passenger seat. I saw her eyes in my sleep. Her lips moved, trying to tell me something, but her staring eyes were the eyes of the dead.

It was the eyes that woke me up. I sat up in bed, gasping.

Ill always wonder what it was Donna had been trying to tell me. If I had stayed asleep one minute longer, could I have heard her voice? Maybe everything would have gone differently if I had.

The second night-the bad night-started off good. Both my kids were in a fine mood. School was out next week, and the excitement of the coming vacation had caught up with them. We went to bed late, after watching movies over the net and eating popcorn. It was one benefit of growing up without a mom. There was no one around to tell Dad it was a school night.

The ship came to loom over my little farm sometime after midnight. It caught Jake first. I dont know why, perhaps because his room was on the eastern side of the house. I heard later they had come from the east, following the darkness around the world in a wave.

I was asleep at the time of the ships arrival. The walls shook, and my TV fell off the top of the armoire. Thats probably what woke me up. The TV crashed and broke and I threw myself out of bed, believing we were in an earthquake. I shouted for the kids, ordering them out of the house. This quake seemed like a bad one.

In movies, when they come for you, there are always lights in the sky beaming brightly into your windows. There were no bright lights at my house. In fact, the entire farm was bathed in deep shadow. This only made sense, I realized as I ran down to the window at the end of the hall in my tee-shirt and underwear, because there was a huge ship looming over us. It blotted out that strange, purple sky. I saw it hanging up there without a sound. It was maybe a hundred yards long and half as wide. It was completely dark, with no lights or visible engines. As black as pitch at the bottom of a well, my grandmother would have said. I paused and stared in amazement for several seconds.

I heard another crash, in Jakes room. I ran down the hall, calling his name. There was no answer. His bed was empty. His window had been smashed inward. Shards of glass and a torn out black screen lay on the floor. Jake hadnt even screamed, as far as I could recall. Then I looked out the broken window and my brain froze over for a second or two.

Jake hadnt been taken away by some kind of magic beam. Instead a thick, cable-like, multi-segmented arm had reached down and plucked my boy out of his bed. It resembled the body of a two-foot thick snake-long, sleek and black. Was there someone up there in the ship working a joystick and collecting specimens? That was my first stunned impression. I got the feeling that to them, we were things that crawled under rocks at the bottom of the sea. They were the scientists who had come down to our world to poke about and disturb our tiny existence.

When Id gotten over my shock enough to move, I ran out front. Kristine joined me on the porch. She stared up with me at the ship with the snake-like arm. Jake was in the grip of the hand. He still wasnt screaming, but he was squirming, so it hadnt killed him yet. As we watched, he disappeared with the arm up into the ships belly.

Kris mouth hung open, full of braces. Her eyes blinked in horror. What do we do, Dad?

Get in the car, I ordered.

What about Jake?

Ill get him, I said. I had no idea how to perform such a miracle, but I was determined to try. I raced back into the house and snatched up my keys and my Remington 12-gauge with a box of shells. I was going to blow off that snake-arm, or at least blast away at the ship. What else could I do?

I ran back outside. The screen door had latched itself shut. I straight-armed it and the flimsy aluminum thing snapped off the frame with the sound of ripping wood. Kristine sat inside the car looking out the passenger window, terrified. I thought to myself, in a disconnected moment, that Jake would be angry when he found out she had taken the front seat. He was the oldest, and since time immemorial in our family, the oldest kid had always gotten to ride up front with Dad.