Eviction Notice

  Eviction Notice

  Robyn Wyrick

  Tantor eBooks

  Special thanks to Rachel Korr, Billy Fox, Sharron Lerew, my mom Carol Wyrick, and my wife Jenny for their invaluable help.

  EVICTION NOTICE

  Copyright © 2010 by Robyn Wyrick

  This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks,

  a division of Tantor Media, Inc, and was produced in the year 2012, All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Life and Death

  Chapter 2: Do Be Do Be Do

  Chapter 3: Space Traders

  Chapter 4: The VLA

  Chapter 5: The Police

  Chapter 6: Alice Able

  Chapter 7: Missing

  Chapter 8: The Survey

  Chapter 9: The Investigators

  Chapter 10: The Eviction Notice

  Chapter 11: The Morning Plans

  Chapter 12: Working it Out

  Chapter 13: The Kingpin

  Chapter 14: Investigations

  Chapter 15: Aria

  Chapter 16: The Report

  Chapter 17: The Crash Site

  Chapter 18: The Grace Period

  Chapter 19: Professor Aker

  Chapter 20: The Glen Fairy

  Chapter 21: Alien Experiments

  Chapter 22: The White House

  Chapter 23: Alterations

  Chapter 24: Bang Zoom

  Chapter 25: Disarray

  Chapter 26: Finding the Glen Fairy

  Chapter 27: Confrontations

  Chapter 28: Death and Life

  Chapter 29: A Humiliation of Zorgons

  Chapter 30: Round High Round High Round

  Chapter 1

  Life and Death

  IN the early summer after my senior year, one Friday in the middle of the afternoon, the whole world was about to come to an end. I know how that sounds from a teenager, but I'm not talking about some high school, teen angst, kid's stuff. This was the real thing. In a few short minutes, every living thing on the planet was going to be exterminated.

  At that moment, though, I wasn't thinking about such a huge thing as that. I was just trying to keep myself alive. I was struggling to run up a wooded ravine in Barkley State Park in central Iowa. The slope was steep and soft, and I was so immobilized with terror I could barely make the climb. Above me, the smoke from missile explosions pockmarked the afternoon sky. Where not fifteen minutes earlier, I had looked up to a deep blue June sky, now a dozen giant and other-worldly spacecrafts blotted out the sun with massive, dark oval shadows across the clustered trees around me.

  Driving me on was Alice Able, a woman I had met less than an hour before. She clambered up the sloping grade, alternately dragging me behind her, then pushing me in the front. As hard as I tried to master my fear, I cowered and collapsed at every rocket blast, and I lost my footing on the steep grade over and over again. The exploding air crashed in on my ears and I was helpless and petrified against my will. The only way I moved at all was that Alice was pressing me on. She was in charge.

  For her part, after what had already been an insanely demanding day, Alice was running on almost pure adrenaline. She was looking desperately for Johnny, but he was nowhere to be found. The rockets and laser fire had driven everyone apart. Alice called out to him, but it was useless. Terror seemed to suck the very air from her lungs; terror from the explosions, the engines of the twenty F16 fighter jets that had joined the battle, and the strange booming of the alien ships.

  The F16s' rockets didn't hit the spacecrafts solidly, but exploded on the outer force fields that surrounded them. But even still, the aliens weren't taking the attacks lying down. They were clearly outmatching the jets, and had already downed several. Each of the dozen alien vessels was as large as a battleship and far more maneuverable. They flipped and rolled and climbed and dove like huge whales in the sky, miraculously avoiding collision. The US jets kept perilously close to avoid the alien pulse lasers which spewed white blasts from turrets all along the sides of the massive ships. A direct hit would melt a ten-inch hole completely through whatever survived the shock of the blast and was not shuddered to pieces from the impact. Already the U.S. squadron leader was preparing a retreat until reinforcements could arrive.

  Above Washington, the President sat with his top defense and national security team aboard Air Force One, uncertain what course of action would best protect the country, uncertain if this aggressive engagement might not draw a more deadly assault by the aliens. But this was the course they had chosen. They hadn't waited for the aliens to strike first or attempt communication. As soon as it had become clear that alien ships had entered Earth's atmosphere, the US forces went into action. Now, until reinforcements arrived from Offutt Air Force Base, all they could do was listen to the moment by moment radio reports from the squadron battling the alien spacecraft above Iowa.

  Little could the President or his military have imagined that, as dangerous as the aliens might have appeared at that moment, the infinitely greater danger waited upon an Interstellar Galactic Council ship in orbit around Jupiter. If they had known the power and casual evil that ship possessed, if they had known the scale of the apocalypse it was poised to unleash, they might not have wasted time dog fighting this band of marauders now above the trees in Iowa. But then again, if they had known what peril they really faced, what could they have done about it? What could any human do to prevent an attack from so far away?

  The only two humans who really did understand the peril, and who were desperately trying to do something about it, were Alice Able and Sheriff Johnny Crebs. But even as Alice dragged me up the valley slope, and the alien blasters ripped up the forest like machine gun fire in a china shop, Johnny was on a completely separate side of the valley, his shouting lost in the chaos.

  Johnny was a determined eye in a storm of calamity. He looked everywhere to find her, but Alice was lost in the smoke, dust, and fire that rained down upon him and rose up from the ground with each exploding rocket or laser blast. It had been Alice who first found out about Earth's peril, first tried to tell the President and the Secret Service, first tried to tell him. But as soon as the assault had started, Johnny was separated from her, driven back with the force of the initial attack.

  The smoke and noise were overwhelming, and eventually he found himself alone and dove for cover under a large oak tree. He called out her name, but couldn't see anyone, and couldn't hear anything above the pandemonium. They were all gone in the tumult: Alice and the girls, the two teenage boys who had such incredible abilities, the investigators, and even the two strange aliens. The roaring and crashing made it difficult for Johnny to focus, and focus right now was absolutely necessary. He had to steel his mind against his terror. Time was running out.

  Suddenly, a barrage of blaster bolts from an alien ship smashed into the treetop above him and splintered it from the base. Almost crushed by the plummeting trunk, Johnny managed to dodge away from the worst of the danger. He pulled himself from the branches and finally saw Tyler in the distance.

  Tyler stood a monstrous eight feet tall, but in this mayhem, his white fur, four arms, and dust-covered clothing were little more than a bestial haze in the distance. Johnny ran to him and found that he stood with Clayton: human-looking, unafraid and untouched by the destruction surrounding them. Johnny asked, but neither of them had seen where Alice went. “She took one of the girls,” Clayton said, but Johnny could barely hear him over the roar of engines, the explosions, and the ringing in his own ears.

  Clayton could see that Johnny had no protection out here amid all the violence, and he told him they should go. But as Johnny fiercely shook his head, and was about to say, “Not without Alice!” a sudden rush and blinding light t
old him that it was over. He was too late. There would be no chance to find her. They were both too late. There would be no more chances ever again, for anyone.

  Alice had warned him about the eviction beam. She had struggled to get him to believe her; begged him to help her stop it. She told him it would scour the Earth of all life forms and reduce the planet to a barren stone. The Galactic Council Cruiser sat off one of the moons of Jupiter, and had been counting down through the day to the zero hour, till the moment it would evict every human, and all the other life on Earth, into deep space to die in the infinite cold and dark. Clayton had confirmed it. He had said that the eviction beam would be sudden, final, and absolute. Nothing would remain on land, in the sea, or in the air. It would be complete sterilization.

  And this had to be it. The power of it bore Johnny to his knees in anguish and astonishment. He tried to force himself to hold onto life, but the blinding light penetrated his tightly closed eyes. The rushing noise deafened him and engulfed any other sound. His skin tingled and he was sure that it would rip from his bones at any moment. Momentarily, he noticed that the feeling was surprisingly painless and seductive, as he was now certain death would be, and he railed against it all the more. He forced his eyes to open for part of a second, just enough time to see Tyler and Clayton vanish entirely. Of course, he realized, they had been taken by the deadly light. And he would be next.

  He felt the earth beneath him buckle and groan, and knew instinctively that all life was being found, isolated and readied for destruction. Even the last microbe was being ripped from the soil itself, stolen from the deep roots, which heaved upward, exposed to the horrible disinfection. All the Earth would die. His head swam, and at any moment he too would vanish. Alice would be lost, and his hometown, and his family. The noise of the rushing blast would cover every corner of the Earth. His heart pounding desperately in his chest, blackness finally overtook him.

  I know all of that sounds bad. What's worse was that it was my fault. I had designed the beacon that started all this calamity. It was an accident. I wasn't trying to cause any harm. And I certainly never imagined that anything like this was possible. I was just a girl in high school. I was nobody, just Sarah Jones. And sure, I thought I might move to New York someday, and that would definitely kill my dad, but I'd never hurt a fly. I was never into all that science fiction stuff, and super powers, and space aliens. But here it was. And by the time Johnny was blacking out in the blinding, golden light, I was already dead.

  Chapter 2

  Do Be Do Be Do

  IT all started in my hometown of Ogden, Iowa. Ogden is admittedly pretty podunk, even for Iowa. We've got about 2000 people, and almost everybody's white except for some migrant farm workers that come through every year at harvest. Ogden's an agricultural town, bordered on the north by McClatchy's farm – corn and soybeans. East and you get Bailey's farm – corn and soy. About two miles south is my house – corn and soy of course, and rapeseed. Go west and you get my uncle Jake's farm – corn, but also a bunch of other stuff, because he does organic. Being right near town, he's started trying to supplement his sales with a CSA. That's Community Supported Agriculture, where he sells member shares of his annual vegetable harvest. Every week, as they come in, he boxes up the greens, fruits, tomatoes, and some vegetables I'd never heard of, like Kohlrabi and Turban Squash, and something called Pak Choi. Then he delivers them to his members in an old Ford truck. He's kind of a black sheep, like my mom, and dad says he'll go broke, but the CSA seems to be pretty popular in town.

  If you want adventure, or at least scandal, there's Jorgensen Foods about twenty miles up. They have one of those huge ponds of pig sewage you can smell for miles around. Three years ago they had one of their ponds break open and release into a nearby lake. It nearly flooded into the Des Moines River, which would have contaminated the drinking water for a hundred miles downstream they said, not to mention how it would have smelled. Folks say Jorgensen's got big friends in the State House, so they didn't even get a slap on the wrist.

  In town, there wasn't much. The Bike Barn, that's alright. People come from all over to get their bikes fixed, which is kind of cool. But I don't have a bike. And then there's the roller-skating rink. It's cool for kids and corny grownups. So, maybe our town didn't have a lot to offer like some other places, but it was good enough, as these things go. But there was one thing the Ogden High Bulldogs had really excelled at over the years. For as long as people could remember, the graduating class always had at least one amazing senior prank.

  The legend goes that when Felix Ogden first set foot in these parts, the Indians were nomadic and they would come into town once a year and play pranks on the local townspeople. My dad says that's baloney. There never was anyone called Felix Ogden. He says that inventing a legend for the prank was actually someone's prank in the 70s. They had planted the story in the school newspaper, and faked town records. The tradition really started back in the early 60s as some big rebellion, protest, generation-gap stunt. But it stuck. He says that when he graduated in the 80s, he and a friend drove his neighbor's Chevy truck onto the school roof. So every year at least someone comes up with a good stunt. Sometimes we get a few different pranks – it's an open game. There is one rule though: it has to be after finals. Oh, and no one gets hurt – but it has to be after finals!

  As far as I have ever heard, last year was the best. Kenny and Scott Dickers got their dad's pressure washer and blasted big letters on the side of the auditorium,

  To be is to do – Socrates

  To do is to be – Sartre

  Do Be Do Be Do – Sinatra

  It was amazing: twenty feet high, and stenciled so sharp and white on that old weathered stucco that it looked as if they had painted it on. But since all they did was wash off the fifty-year-old grime that was already on the wall, nobody could do anything to them. There's no law stopping you from cleaning the school. They made such a show of it. They got a photographer from the Ogden Reporter to come down and take a picture of it and everything; stood in front and signed autographs. And since it was clever, and didn't have any cuss words – and it would have cost an arm and a leg to clean the rest of the huge old grimy wall – the school just kept it.

  So the thing is, how do you top that? Coming up with a really good senior prank in our school was no easy task. The time was long gone when you could just have the Senior Class show up to graduation on their tractors and riding mowers. You had a lot to measure up to. It was going to take class and imagination, and frankly, most kids in my year didn't seem to have a lot of either one.

  I was the one who came up with it. I had read something on how crop circles were believed to be the signs of supernatural intelligence or alien Close Encounters. I mentioned it to my friend Gary, who said it was a great idea. He said they were all really bunk, but people sometimes took them for the real thing.

  So we pulled my best friend Jenny and my cousin Barnaby into this big conspiracy to make a real crop circle out in Eller's field. Full size.

  Gary's really smart, so he took the lead. I said at least it would be the largest senior prank on the books – but Gary didn't think that was true, because in 1987 the varsity cheerleader squad added day-glow pink, fabric dye to the town's new sprinkler system during prom weekend. It made town hall look like Malibu Barbie had puked electric Kool Aid all over it. There was no doubt that it was epic, but there was disagreement about whether it counted because it was before finals week.

  Gary wasn't taking any chances. Our prank was going to be by the book, and almost 300 feet long. And it was going to have a huge impact because he had a whole media strategy and he was sure we'd get into the news. Of course, Calvin Eller was going to be mad, but his field would be famous, and he's on the school board and kind of a jerk, so we didn't feel too bad about it.

  The week before graduation we finished up our exams and nailed down our plan. Gary figured out how to make it.

  “The trick is,” he said, “we have to do it wi
thout a tractor. If they find tractor tracks leading into the circle it'll just look fake. No credibility.”

  Gary gave everybody a job. I came up with the design 'cause I'm artistic like my mom. I get good grades, and liked doing all the research for the design. Jenny was going to have to call the papers the next day. Her dad had a friend with a two-seater airplane, and she had gotten him to agree to take her for a flight where she could take a picture of it from the sky. Barnaby provided the brawn. I love my cousin and all, but he's no Einstein. He's big and loping and I think his head looks like a thumb: small features, blond shaggy hair, and a too-thick neck. Probably, if it wasn't for Jenny, he'd have flunked English, and that's the only language he speaks.

  Barnaby and Gary have been friends since forever. Gary's nice. Kind of quiet. He's one of the only black kids in my grade. Jenny says that Barnaby and Gary gab it up all the time and talk about everything together, but when we're all in a group he doesn't seem to have much to say. Before Barnaby had Jenny to help with schoolwork it was probably Gary who kept him from flunking. I think if he and Barnaby hadn't met in elementary school they'd never have been friends. It's not a race thing or anything, but the big football jocks in our school usually weren't friends with brains like Gary. I mean, he's not a geek or anything. He runs track, and he's almost as tall as Barnaby, but you can tell he's really smart, and the jocks usually just hang out together.

  Barnaby and Jenny started going out together in Junior year. And with Jenny being my best friend, the four of us make a pretty great team. Jenny's one of those rare people who's really nice and smart and tough all at the same time. And she's good looking, a lot better looking than me. She has one of those small gymnast figures that the guys go crazy for. I thought she should have gone out for cheerleading or something but she seems to love hanging out with me instead, and I don't go in for sports.