Морган Райс - Arrival

“Emergency Evacuation Procedure begun. Opening doors. Please exit the base in an orderly fashion.”

“What?” Kevin said. “Chloe, what have you done?”

“What’s she doing now?” Luna asked, as she ran into the room. She had a backpack over one shoulder that she’d obviously been using to collect supplies, still half open because of the hurry to get there. She didn’t look happy.

Not as unhappy as Chloe did, though. “You were going to leave me behind here like some kind of… of prisoner ,” she said, and her tone was frantic, angry, and scared all at once. “You’re not going to keep me here. I’m going to my cousin. I’m going to find out what happened to him. Then I’m going to the Survivors.”

Behind her, the great door to the airlock was swinging open. To Kevin’s shock, so was the outer door, both of them opening at once in a clear path to the outside. Kevin could see the mountain road outside, and the trees. Worse, he could see figures moving out there, turning toward the sound almost in unison.

Pretty much as soon as the way was clear, Chloe darted through the doorway, out onto the mountain. Kevin was too shocked by it all to try to stop her, and Luna was pulling on her gas mask in a hurry, obviously still unsure about whether to trust the air outside or not.

“The door, Kevin!” Luna yelled as she hurried to put it in place. “We need to close the door.”

Kevin nodded. “I’ve got it.”

He hoped he had it, at least. He could see the people outside advancing toward the door, more of them than he could have believed given that the aliens were supposed to have taken the people. There were soldiers and hikers, whole families moving in a kind of stilted, silent coordination.

Kevin pressed buttons on the computer, hoping to undo whatever had been done. Nothing seemed to have any effect. It didn’t help that he didn’t have a clue how the computer system here worked. It wasn’t as if everything was labeled for anyone who wanted to try using it. Besides, he suspected that an emergency door opening like this wasn’t supposed to be easy to undo, in case people got trapped inside. He mashed at the computer’s keys, hoping to find some combination that might do something.

None of it worked. The doors stayed open, a clear path standing to the outside, and now, along that path, the people controlled by the aliens were stalking forward.

They were coming.

And if they reached the bunker, Kevin was terrified of what would happen next.

“Run!” Kevin yelled as the people the aliens had converted closed in on the bunker. Luna already seemed to be taking his advice, running back into the confusing depths of the place, so fast that Kevin had to push to keep up.

They’d always been good at running away. Whenever they got into trouble for being somewhere they shouldn’t be, they always managed to keep ahead of whoever was following them. Well, most of the time. Well, at least better than half. This time, though, Kevin suspected they would get something a lot worse than a stern warning if the creatures behind them caught up.

He could hear the thud of their feet on the bunker’s floor as they followed, the sound of their pursuit silent except for the clatter of boots against concrete. They didn’t call out in their pursuit, didn’t screech or scream or demand that Kevin and Luna stop. Somehow, that made it all scarier.

“This way!” Luna called out, still leading him deeper into the base. They passed the armory, and now Kevin did wish he had some kind of weapon, simply because it seemed like the only way they were going to be able to get out of there in one piece. Since he didn’t have one, he settled for knocking over whatever he passed as he ran, pushing a cart into the path of the advancing people, closing doors behind him. Crashes told him when they slammed into the obstacles Kevin was putting in their way, but so far none of it seemed to be slowing them down even a little.

“Quiet now,” Luna whispered, pulling Kevin into another corridor and slowing down to a tiptoe. A crowd of hikers and soldiers hurried past just a second later, moving with all the speed and strength that seemed to come from being controlled by the aliens.

“Why are they so fast ?” Kevin whispered back, trying to catch his breath. It didn’t seem fair, them being that fast. The least you should be able to expect from an alien invasion was to be able to run away from it properly.

“The aliens are probably just making them use all of their muscles,” Luna said, “not caring if they hurt them. You know, like when grandmas lift cars off people.”

“Grandmas can lift cars off people?” Kevin said.

Luna shrugged. With her gas mask on, it was impossible to know if she was making fun of him or not. “I saw it on TV. Have you got your breath back yet?”

Kevin nodded even though it wasn’t exactly true. “Where are we going? If they’re smart, they’ll have left people by the entrance.”

“So we go to the other entrance,” Luna said.

The emergency exit. Kevin had been so busy thinking about the bunker being overrun that he’d pretty much forgotten it. If they could get to it, then maybe they had a chance. They could get to the car and drive to NASA.

“Ready?” Luna asked. “Okay, go.”

They scurried along the corridors, and somehow, not seeing the controlled people was worse than seeing them. They were so quiet that they could have been around any corner, waiting to grab them, and if they did, then what happened next wouldn’t be worth—

“Run!” Luna called out as an arm grabbed for her from around the next corner. It succeeded in getting hold of the cloth of her shirt, and Kevin slammed forward, throwing his whole weight against the arm like he was trying to tackle it.

The grip broke free and he and Luna were running again, taking twists and turns at random to try to lose their pursuers. They couldn’t run faster than them in a straight line, so they had to look for spaces where the controlled people couldn’t follow, and try to use the maze-like layout of the bunker against them.

“It’s in here,” Luna said, pointing to a doorway.

Kevin had to take her word for it. Right then, he felt so lost that he couldn’t even tell someone the way back to the control room. He plunged into the section of corridor after Luna, then shut the door behind them, grabbing a fire extinguisher and trying to use it to jam the door shut. It looked as flimsy as cardboard compared to the controlled people’s strength.

Now they just had to get the escape hatch open.

Kevin put his hands on the wheel, trying to turn it. Nothing happened; it was so stiff it felt as though it might have been made from rock. He tried again, his knuckles going white with the effort.

“Maybe a little help?” he suggested.

“But you seemed to be having fun,” Luna shot back from behind her mask, before gripping onto the locking wheel with him and hauling at it. Still it was stuck.

“We need to try harder,” Luna said.

“I’m trying as hard as I can,” Kevin assured her.

“Well, unless you want to go ask one of the controlled people for help, we need to do more. On three. One…”

A clang came at the door Kevin had barred.

“Three!” he said, pulling at the wheel with every scrap of strength he could pull together. Luna seemed to have the same idea, all but hanging her weight off the thing.

Finally, as a second clang came from the door they’d barred, the thing shifted. They spun it open while Kevin’s muscles complained, and then Luna dove inside headfirst, not waiting to see if Kevin wanted to go first. He hurried after her, shutting the hatch behind him in the hope that the corridor would just look empty to anything following.