The Domestic Terrorist - Eight Short Stories

EIGHT SHORT STORIES
21 November 1999

I can feel the Apocalypse coming. It’s in the air. It’s in the road maps. It’s in the clouds. It’s in the ground. It’s in everything. I can see it in everything. Everything is connected in the end. Rivers, seas, clouds, concrete, city buildings : all part of one whole.

All connect and interact, with the action of one part reacting with another. What happens on the other end of a phone line in Tahiti or in a field in California can change the course of the world. What happens when a butterfly flaps its wings the other side of the world? Sometimes it influences tidal waves. Sometimes nothing. Imagine what would happen if a squadron of butterflies flapped their wings? World chaos.

The air is different today. It shimmers. I can feel an almost imperceptible, invisible humming at the edge of the molecules. The rhythm of the air has shifted. There’s something out there. Somewhere. Waiting. And waiting. Whatever it is, it could be immortal, infinite. Forever. One thousand of our lifetimes are less than a blink of an eye to whatever he, she, it is.

As a race mankind reigns in and controls nature by defining the passing of events as time. Normally this is due to the fact that man is aware from the moment of his birth of his impeding death. In a vain attempt to measure and order and estimate the length of life left, periods of light and darkness are called days, allocated with prefixes and numbers, time battened down, fixed with nails to the rhythm of a forecoming death.

To that something, somewhere, immortal, time is meaningless. When there is no end, no death, there is all the time in the world. There is no death. There is no hurry. No rush when there is no chance of time running out.

I can feel the Apocalypse out there. Waiting. In the air. It has all the time in the world. We Don’t. Not even a tomorrow. Not anymore.

The day started like any other. An alarm clock, an exhausted yawn, a bad record on the radio. I’ve deliberately turned my radio to the worst, most offensive, bland, moronic station I can find. That way I have to get up just to switch it off. Otherwise I may never wake.

I jammed my eyes tight for a second, trying to keep the day out for a fragment longer, hoping it will go away, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. The bed was empty but too big not to share. I was lost inside it, but not for long enough. I threw it off, not even trying to hide my erection. It shrank from the cold as I sat on the toilet and watched the morning paint the tiles.

I ate breakfast, read the paper, left the house to go to work. I began walking to the car, noticing as I did everyday, the dread rustle of my suit, tie and polished shoes, the jingle-jangle of my keys, which kept me in the jail of work. Keys meant responsibility. I lifted the key fob and in a rare moment of Bondian style, deactivated the alarm. The car flashed at me in deep joy. I was taking it for a walk. What to do when the batteries ran out? Break into your own car? Now that could keep you pondering for some 20 or 30 seconds later.

There was traffic, as per normal, jammed up on the motorway. Tailbacks, delays, delays. Typically, I paid this no attention. What’s new? What’s changed from normal? Nothing. But the absence of traffic in the road, the absence of car horns and smoke, exhaust fumes, children playing on the way to school, should’ve warned me. Something was wrong. Most people crave tranquillity, peace and quiet. That’s why they move to the country, retire, tend sheep, and moan it’s an eight mile round trip to the post-box.

But I’m a city boy. I’m not happy unless I’m in the hub of chaos. When someone isn’t screaming, when police sirens aren’t distantly shouting, that’s when I know something is really wrong. That’s when I get really worried. For even the stillest water, if deep enough, can drown. I couldn’t see anything wrong. That is, until I looked up. The sky was black with metal. The sun was shut out. We are not alone.

3:
They’re here. Just like he said. Just like he foretold. They are here to take the elect and chosen away, and remove the pure from the corrupt, the healthy from the cancerous, and the detritus that is consuming this planet. I could tell as soon as I saw them.

Most people had left the city, but some had stayed. I wasn’t going anywhere. I reasoned, unlike most, that if these had come all this way – crossing the universe – from wherever it was they came from, then therefore since that was a long fucking way indeed, that driving to some obscure village hundreds of miles away to your obscure relatives, who were – in all probability – boarding up all the other relatives you couldn’t stand, was pointless. Those few hundred miles could be crossed by them in seconds, and they were coming to get you anyway. Upper Nowhere pop. 40 was no more than a very slight detour anyway to whatever it was up there.

I dropped my case and my keys remained silent, frozen in my hand. It was enormous. I couldn’t really see the sky for it, except when I looked down. It covered the sky and hovered miles into the air, but below the established cloud base. I couldn’t make out any details whatsoever, except that it was a dull grey, unpainted probably, and enormous. There was markings, ridges, turrets, hangers, something up there. It certainly wasn’t a flat shell, but I couldn’t tell whatever it was each section did. It was silent.

I pulled my mobile out my pocket and flipped over the keypad. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I looked at the sky and dialled my work number. It rang out. “I’m sorry I’m not coming into work. There’s an alien spaceship hovering over my house.”

Except of course, nobody answered. I could just about get a signal. Great. They’ve cut our communications. The precursor to an invasion. They’re just preparing their armies to attack. There’s bound to be millions of monsters inside those multimile radius discs, just waiting to pin a two-legged badge to their insignia. What the hell kind of extraterrestrial economy could produce on an assembly line stuff like that all the time?

Without taking my eyes off, I picked up my case and went inside. I was going to change into my shorts, crack open a beer, ring my girl on the landline, sit in the garden, turn the TV on so we could watch the end of the world as we know it from the patio, get one last fuck – sorry, make love for the last time in my grubby life, and wait for little green men to turn me into smoking orange space dust.

I’ve seen this before. Everybody said it was the end of the world, but I doubt that. I’ve seen this kind of scaremongering before. In the end it’s just a collection of atoms and I’m not too attached to it. I didn’t originally believe it. I thought it was some kind of prank, like that Orson Welles radio thing when I was young. Maybe a marketing prank for the new Star Trek, or Star Wars, or Pierce Brosnan film. It worked. They said it was the end of the world like those Nostradamus predictions. They said it was the end of the world with those Comets a few years ago. They said it was the end of the world with genetically modified food, global warning, that AIDS thing, Ebola, Saddam Husseins war, that Agent Orange stuff, Three Mile Island, the year 999, Hiroshima, Nagasaki…….

Yeah everyone would be dead in six months if the Russians had one of those. Commie Bastards. We’d have to duck and cover, but we’d be alright. I knew it then. It wasn’t the end of the world. I looked out of my window. The cows in my field weren’t that bothered. They ran from trains, but not Alien Life. They were only destined to be burgers anyway. The roaches weren’t either, come to think of it. Even if they really were right, and these were the Four Spacemen of the Apocalypse, at least then I’d get to see her again. It’s been so cold, and lonely without her. I’d love to see her again.

6:
“Mummy! The Martians are coming! They’re Here Mummy! Can we go on board one of their ships?”

I can’t believe its that big. At altitude – 9,800 feet – I’m roughly parallel with the mothership above the city. Though another 676 ships have been reported above the major cities of the world, ranging from Brisbane to Birmingham, Moscow to Bangkok, the very fact that even one of these gargantuan things could be produced, let alone hundreds, probably thousands, is proof to me instantly, in the existence of ghosts, aliens (well I am looking at one of them now), ESP, God, and Ewoks.

I’m listening to the base radio as we approach the ship. We’re under orders to do nothing except orbit the ship, make no military moves whatsoever, nothing that could provoke this machine into action. We keep the camera clicking away, looking for weakness, signs of life, intelligence, design. It’s so fucking huge. I can hear Connor in the T-21 breathing deep and muttering much the same. It must be six miles in radius at least, 36 square miles of metal (or whatever metal-like compound the aliens use), and a mile or so tall, three thousand feet, capable of intergalactic space travel or teleportation. I don’t know.

From the little I have been briefed on, they mysteriously appeared – warped in to the exact co-ordinates above each major city of the world – at about 6:15am GMT this morning. Here it was about 1:15am. Nobody noticed apart from air traffic controllers, insomniacs and stargazers. The news spread globally across Television, the Internet, newscom faxes and hastily-written Presidential statements in minutes, if you didn’t feel like getting out of bed and sticking your head out of the window.

The military immediately went to Special Black alert and unveiled the long-in-need-of-revision Project Elixir : the military plan of operation in event of alien invasion. Last re-written seven years ago, and sporadically updated, it certainly gave the military top brass the shits when they were awoken from slumber this morning by frantic phone calls. What do we do? The scientists and top authorities immediately improvised an alternative plan. Don’t do anything to provoke them. Monitor transmissions, observe, learn and act then. Transmissions of a sort – a random series of number broadcast at ultrahigh frequencies between ships was detected – but so far nothing could decode them.

My plane, a fellow T-21 like Connors, orbited the ship, transmitting images to the military base, operating at a distance of one kilometre from the hull. I could see hangers full of what looked like smaller ships, figures of a sort passing by in a blur, insignia in languages indecipherable, weapons installations, transmitters, and smooth, inpenetratable sheen’s of alien metal.

To my left, I could see, from nowhere, two small craft, 16 feet by 16 feet, 16 feet, or so, circular, marking us, at the exact same speed, some 500 metres or so distant, watching, watching, waiting. Connor and I reported them to each other. Wondered what to do. “Abort, Abort.” Came the command from ground control. I moved the stick away, but it didn’t respond. I called to Connor but couldn’t transmit or receive a signal. The mothership became bigger and bigger. I remembered the T-21, like Connors was still armed in event of confrontation. What good they were I don’t know, but in the haste of this morning, the technicians hadn’t had time – or orders – to remove the weaponry. A plume of smoke headed towards the main hull, then veered away and harmlessly exploded

So here in my deserted garden, since the neighbours are all in traffic jams trying to get out of the city, I’m lying on the recliner, with an ice cold Voddy and Coke next to me, and I’m looking up at the incontrovertible sign of alien life above me. I can see two small dots approach the ships, then flashes of what appear to be white flame. I can feel her lips around my penis, that warm, reassuring touch of her body, her hands across my stomach, my hand in her hair, stroking her, and as the first bolt of thick, warm, pulsing blue light beams down to the planets surface, I’m thinking…. So this is the declaration of war, so this is the end, and this is the woman I love and want to spend the rest of my life with.

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