James Decker - Fallout

“Get ready.”

The crowd gasped again as the sudden shriek of a jet grew to drown out everything else in seconds, and a dark shadow rocketed past above the dome. It zeroed in on the haan ship with a contrail stretching out behind it.

“They’re attacking!” someone screamed. “The foreigners are attacking the ship!”

I stared, not sure what to do. There wasn’t much I could do. An array of phones were held up over the heads of the crowd, all angled up toward the jet, trying to record it. Near the wall, I saw a robed gonzo, a young man, clasp his hands together and press his knuckles under his chin as he watched, terrified.

“Call someone!” a woman shouted, trying to be heard above the rising screams. “Call someone, they’re attacking the—”

The crowd gasped again as a heavy boom shook the sidewalk, and a bright light flashed from somewhere up in the sky. A hole parted in the clouds, and through it, just for a second, I saw one of the distant, floating hexagonal plates that made up the defense shield. A huge beam of energy burst through the hole, wriggling like a live worm, then struck the jet.

I thought it would explode, but it didn’t. Instead, it pulled up at the last second and debris flaked off the jet’s undercarriage. The shockwave slammed into it, and sent it spinning out of control, back toward the square. Back toward us.

The crowd fell quiet, then began to shout and scream as the plane grew bigger and bigger in the sky above us. A piece flew off, and something came rocketing out. At first I thought it was a missile, but it wasn’t—the pilot had ejected. The plane, now a several-ton hunk of falling junk, broke in half and came screaming down toward the street.

Panic erupted, people scrambling to get inside as the shadow grew above us.

“Sam, Vamp, come on!” Dragan yelled, grabbing my arm. He pulled, trying to drag me away just as another light appeared in the sky, this time from the haan ship. The faint blue glow struck one half of the jet and a bubble of light formed around it. The second half, which had been whipping straight toward the square, stopped midspin, then halted. It had gotten so close, you could see the Western characters stenciled along the wing. Then it flipped back, end over end, and collided with the first half. The two hung there in the sky, and slowly crumpled together into a ball of metal.

The ball hovered, suspended in the field for a few more seconds, and then blasted away as if it had been shot from a cannon. It dwindled to a small dot in the blink of an eye, arcing out toward the ocean.

The flow of bodies slowed, stopping here and there as people realized what had happened. Fingers and phones pointed up toward the now clear sky where all that remained were clouds of black smoke, carried on the wind.

Then someone cheered. It set off a wave of cheering and fists pumped in the air around us, but when I looked at Vamp, he wasn’t cheering. The guards weren’t, either, along with some of the others. They looked concerned, and I understood why.

The implication that the foreigners might attack had been there for a long time, but now it had actually happened. Not a bombing carried out by one person or a few people, but an actual military strike. A foreign military jet had actually entered our airspace.

Looking around I could see a lot of people weren’t sure what to make of it. The foreigners hadn’t attacked us, directly. They hadn’t gone after a military target or a feedlot. They’d gone straight for the haan. The defense shield, built by the haan, had destroyed the jet. To most people’s understanding, the haan had, for the first time in recorded history, just killed a human intentionally, or tried to.

“This is bad,” I said, watching to spot where the jet had crumpled. The hole in the clouds had begun to slowly close in the current of the wind. I turned to Nix. “Nix, I—”

The air had already begun to ripple around him. As the air began to crackle, he gave me a quick nod.

“I have to go,” he said. “Your truth will come soon. I hope it suits you.”

He vanished. The air rushed in to fill the empty space with a loud clap, like thunder.

The air rippled again, more intensely, and again the wave of disorientation hit as the sounds of additional approaching jets began to grow. A series of booms echoed from offshore, followed by overlapping hisses.

“Let’s get inside,” Vamp said.

“No. I want to see.”

Several bright points of light appeared in the sky, arcing up over the building tops. They were missiles, streaking toward the haan ship.

“Sam, Vamp’s right. We should get off the street,” Dragan said.

But before I could answer, a woman screamed.

At first I thought she had screamed because of the missiles, but she hadn’t. When I located the source, I saw a middle-aged woman standing near the mouth of an alley. She clutched her face with her hands, eyes bugged out as she stared toward a big metal trash bin. Something stood next to it in the shadows, swarming with scaleflies. What looked like tar, or pitch, had been splattered over the bin’s metal surface, leaving splotches on the ground and the brick wall behind it.

The woman sucked in a breath, and screamed again as the shape retreated into the darkness. I turned back to the street as more screams came. I didn’t see any haan, they’d all been smart enough to make themselves scarce when they realized what had happened, but I could hear the sounds of alien voices, low, overlapping hisses with an undercurrent of insect clicking. They came from the haanyo ng.

I looked across the street and saw a young couple backing away from a dark shape. Unlike the haan I’d seen without the benefit of their disguise, it had a vaguely human outline but its torso was too long… its neck too thin and its head too large. It had tar black skin, and it walked toward them with an unnerving, shivering gait. Draped over what might have been its shoulders were the remains of a security uniform, as if it somehow had felt compelled to put it back on even after shedding its human skin.

The couple ran as others around the thing began to scream. The whole street began to scream, then the whole block. The sound grew until it sounded like all of Hangfei might be screaming. The haanyo ng turned to face the terrified people around it and something about its body language almost felt familiar. It seemed confused, and a moment later I did feel a pulse of shock, or confusion through the mite cluster. Rather than advance toward any of them, it did the opposite. It turned, and ran away.

…they often don’t even realize the change has taken place. They sometimes cling to their old identities for weeks, even months, before they realize what they’ve become.

It doesn’t know, I thought. The haanyo ng’s imitation had become so complete, its disguise so convincing, that it still believed itself to be its host. It had fallen back on instinct, trying to calm the crowd like the security officer it had been, only to have them react as though they’d seen a monster.

“They’re real,” Vamp said, staring. “It’s all real.”

People ran, shoving their way down the sidewalk and across the street in panicked streams as more and more haanyo ng appeared, seeming as frightened as everyone else. Gunshots went off somewhere down the street, and I turned to see several human security officers firing at a dark shape on the sidewalk. Over the chaos, the sounds of the missiles began to lower in pitch as they plunged down toward their target.

I turned to Dragan.

“Dragan, we…”

A dark shape stood where Dragan had been only a moment ago. It stood, its too-big head angled down toward me as its long, limbs shivered. Black eyes, a cluster of them in the center of where a face should have been, seemed to focus on me, and I heard a low rumble of haan speech.