Eric Brown - The Serene Invasion

He activated his softscreen and attempted to access the web, but connectivity was down. He tried to phone Sally, but the line was dead.

He took another long drink of water, consulted the map he’d pre-loaded on the ’screen, then began the long drive north despite the receptionist’s alarmist warning.

HE WAS SOON out of Entebbe and the sprawling outskirts of Kampala, driving away from the conurbation on a motorway that for the first ten kilometres was well-lit but after that turned into a darkened road barely wide enough to contain two lanes of traffic. The only other vehicles he saw heading north through the sultry darkness was a convoy of military trucks — but the flow in the opposite direction was substantial. Trucks, cars and motorbikes jammed the road for kilometres, cacophonous with blaring horns and shouted curses. He wondered if these people too had heard rumours of the vile Chinese imprisoning towns under dropped domes…

Two hours later he was barrelling through parched grassland at a steady fifty miles an hour, and the flow of traffic heading south had dried to a trickle. There was no sign of any other military vehicles. He tried to find a news station on the car radio, but all he picked up were several music stations playing European rock classics and Baganda music.

A couple of hours later the sun came up with tropical rapidity to his right, revealing a seared landscape of stunted bushes stretching to the flat horizon. He reckoned he had another three hours to go before reaching Kallani and decided to find somewhere to stop for a rest and food.

He thought of Sally as he drove. She’d booked a five-day leave period, and said she’d take him west, to the Murchison Falls National Park. Zoologists there were working to reintroduce elephants back into the wild, and this was the reason his magazine had sent him out here. He’d spend the next few days catching up with Sally and taking a little time out to shoot the elephant story.

And in May, she had promised, she would leave Africa and come back to England, and they would set up home together somewhere in London.

The thought was still fresh enough to amaze him.

He was still thinking of Sally Walsh, half an hour later, when he saw his first dome from the ground.

It perfectly encapsulated a small town to the right of the road, perhaps two kilometres away. Its parabolic curve caught the light of the sun, its modernistic architecture striking him as bizarre out here in the African bush.

He decided to take a detour and turned along the sandy road that headed towards the town, steering around huge potholes in the approach road. Ten minutes later he braked suddenly and stared through the windscreen.

The wall of the dome cut across the road, effectively barring the way. A truck had halted before the sheer transparent wall, along with a couple of motorbikes and a battered police car. A dozen bewildered Ugandans stood before the rearing wall, staring through at the town.

On the other side, perhaps a hundred citizens, men woman and children, stared mutely out, imprisoned.

He opened his holdall, retrieved his camera, and took a dozen shots through the windscreen, then climbed out and approached the dome, stopping to take more shots.

He halted a foot from the glass — or whatever material it was — and found it to be perfectly clear, allowing him to see through without distortion. He reached out and laid a hand on the warm membrane, then knocked on it experimentally. It was not like knocking on a thin pane of glass — a window, say — but seemed much more solid, substantial. He looked down, then knelt and dug a trench in the fine sand at the foot of the dome. He reached the depth of a couple of feet, and still the membrane continued.

He’d thought the idea of the Chinese dropping them from the air ludicrous, but it seemed even more so now that he had seen a dome with his own eyes. And yet how to explain the phenomenon?

A young girl, perhaps ten years old, approached him on the other side of the glass. She stood mutely, watching him as he knelt beside the hole he’d dug. He reached out and splayed his fingers on the glass, and she laughed suddenly, silently, turned and ran away.

“Hello there!”

A portly Ugandan police sergeant was waddling across to him, smiling. “Good day to you, sir. You want to go to Morvani?” he asked, gesturing through the dome.

“Kallani,” Allen said.

The sergeant shook his head woefully. “Bad luck, sir. Kallani just the same. All towns and villages north of here the same. All covered by these…” He reached out and slapped the glass.

Allen shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

“Not impossible, sir. Here they are. It has happened. Radio reports say that the Chinese dropped them on all our towns, but I tell you that is not so.”

“No, of course not.”

“No, my friend here saw what happened. Akiki!” he shouted towards the gathered Ugandans. A bare-chested old man in baggy shorts trotted across to them on stick-thin legs, bobbing his head at Allen. He clutched a malnourished brown goat on a length of twine.

The police officer quizzed him in the local language, and the man replied.

The sergeant translated, “Akiki says he was out here at dawn, looking for a goat that had escaped. He came into the bush, then turned to look back at his house. And he saw between himself and his house this thick glass wall. It appeared in seconds with no noise at all. In seconds …” The sergeant laughed. “And Akiki is most upset, for his wife said that his breakfast is ready and she will eat it if he does not return by noon.”

Akiki gestured to a toothy, fat woman on the other side of the glass.

The sergeant said, “Akiki says that he has not eaten since midday yesterday, and he is starving. He says his wife does not need the food.”

Allen backed away from the dome and stared up at the great rearing bubble. It stood perhaps five hundred metres high at its apex, and was approximately a kilometre in diameter. It appeared to contain the town neatly, as if positioned with care to include every building within its circumference.

The policeman called, “Akiki thinks it’s a sign from god.”

Allen looked at him. “And you?”

The Ugandan shrugged. “Who am I to know, sir? Perhaps Akiki is right.”

Allen waved in farewell, climbed back into the car and U-turned. He rejoined the main road and continued north.

As he drove, he could not dismiss the fantastic notion — which had occurred to him while the policeman was speaking — that the arrival of the domes and his episode aboard the plane were in some way related.

Over the course of the next couple of hours he made out a dozen other domes, near and far, scattered across the face of the Ugandan bush. They were of differing sizes and shapes; some, like the ones he had seen from the air, were classically-shaped geodesics, perfect half-spheres, while others appeared lower and wider, more resembling watch-glasses.

Despite telling himself that there had to be some logical explanation for the sudden appearance of the domes, he could think of none. A one-off dome he might have put down to some elaborate and expensive art installation, though quite how it might have been achieved was beyond him. But this mass endoming of entire towns and villages, stretching from the Sahara in the north, thousands of miles south to Uganda…

Do not be afraid … the voice — no, the thought — had appeared in his head, along with the visions…

TWO HOURS LATER he arrived on the outskirts of Kallani.

It was a sizable town of some six thousand citizens, its population swelled by the influx of Red Cross and UN aid workers. It was also one of the poorest centres of habitation in an infamously poor region of the country. A collection of two story sand-coloured buildings, a mile square, comprised the town’s centre, but a wave of slum dwellings constructed from flattened biscuit tins and hessian sacking extended south for a couple of kilometres.