The Green Gyre Read online

  But Mark didn’t answer, for at that moment a clap of thunder crashed down upon him and shook the ground. He dropped, scuffing a hole in the knees of his pants.

  Ruined! he thought, hysterically. Three-fifty for these slacks!

  The rumble seemed to have no end. He threw his hands to his ears to block out the noise. The cell phone bounced away down the walk, this time permanently forgotten.

  Above him, a crescent of darkness appeared in that vitreous surface, forming from an invisible seam in the belly of the ship. He stared into it, felt himself falling into it, as if it were the vacuum of space itself.

  The aperture expanded with surgical precision, became a dark crescent. This was accompanied by a terrifying ratcheting noise and a series of tremendous booms. The percussive blasts continued until the opening formed a perfect circle, a hole large enough to engulf the entire park and several of the surrounding neighborhoods. This was marked by an ear-splitting screech as the portal’s titan gears braked to a stop and locked into position with a terminal thud which shook the trees.

  Finally, blessedly, silence.

  Except the world wasn’t exactly silent. Mark became aware of someone screaming, pulling on his arm. He found that he was fully upright again, though he didn’t remember standing up, and the person tugging on him was yelling into his ear: “Run! Run! It’s an invasion! Get the hell out of here!” He looked numbly down, but the person had already abandoned him before he could tear his eyes away from the ship.

  He blinked, slowly regaining awareness of himself, of the chaos surrounding him. The acrid stench of melting plastic and oxidized metal filled his nose— not from above, but from somewhere nearby. His eyes burned. In a small pocket of sanity in the far recesses of his splintered mind he realized that there’d been a car accident out on the street. More than one probably.

  Something flashed by close to him on the bridge, a body. Then another, and immediately after that, several more, all of them shouting incoherently as they streaked past. His brain registered the colors of their clothes and the terror in their voices, but was incapable of parsing what any of it meant. Buried in the chaos was the rapid pop pop pop of scattered gunfire. It didn’t seem real. None of this seemed real.

  Still he didn’t move. He was too terrified to do anything but stare, too shocked to process a single thought. All sensibility was gone. The lost investments and the lies which had been written about him and the company he’d founded? Vanished.

  None of these things concerned him anymore, even though a couple minutes ago they had so consumed his entire existence that he’d been prepared to crawl through the phone and sacrifice someone, anyone, even if it was his most trusted friend Adam, if that’s what it would’ve taken to return sanity to the world. But now he didn’t think about Adam or radio stations or exploding cars or even his own sanity. His mind had been completely emptied, and the space was now filled by the inchoate roar of the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unbelievable.

  Above him. Crushing him. Drowning him.

  From out of the depths of the dark opening a massive structure had begun to appear, a shaft of some sort, or maybe landing gear. Lowering. It was at least a quarter-mile wide. On the bottom surface was a curious repeating spiral design, scaly, reptilian. But it wasn’t simply a pattern on the surface, it was the edges of some kind of lens-like opening. The seams took on a greenish tinge. Then something began to trickle through and was starting to fall toward him.

  Sanity — or maybe its polar opposite; he couldn’t tell — began to take control of him then. “Oh, dear God,” he whispered. If the shaft reached the ground, he and half the park would surely be crushed beneath it.

  Run! RUN, YOU IDIOT!

  He listened and obeyed. He ran as fast as he could into the park, caroming off trees and people and benches like a ball on a crowded billiards table. His heart slammed against his chest and threatened to explode through his neck. Above him a clattering clanking grinding noise had begun, and it was growing louder by the moment. He didn’t need to look to know that the end of the tube was opening. What? his mind screamed, managing somehow to break through the singular imperative of survival which now fully occupied it. What’s going to come through? Alien soldiers? Airships firing lasers? Robots? Bombs?

  Or maybe nothing would come out; maybe, instead, it would suck him and everything around him up into the ship, beam me up, Scotty, set a course for home, warp six. These aliens had come here from some far off planet, to Earth, to New York City of all places, to collect samples.

  Why couldn’t it have been Atlantic City instead?

  They were going to take him away to their distant home to be poked and prodded, dissected, turned into a slave or an object of amusement. Or food. Or—

  His mind, already fractured, nearly exploded then.

  Thoughts of abduction spurred him to run ever faster, and yet he realized as he threw a horrifying glance upward that he had stupidly run the wrong way. He would never be able to escape that gaping hole and that descending vacuum tube. He should have run out of the park, where things weren’t so open. Where there were buildings and cars and hundreds more people — if not thousands — and the likelihood of his getting singled out compared to someone else who deserved it more was much, much smaller.

  He turned and nearly fell as something crashed into his side, spinning him around and disorienting him for a moment. There was a flash of blond hair, a tangle of sweaty bare arms and legs and bright red sexy short shorts. A screech. The smell of fear. He tore himself away from the screaming jogger-turned-sprinter-turned-human projectile and felt a burning pain in his hand. He looked down and saw a pair of earpods, the wires twined and cutting into his fingers, an iPod dangling from the end. He didn’t bother to see if the girl wanted them back. He just kept running.

  He needed to get inside—

  No! Not inside! Buildings collapse and fall on you during alien invasions!

  He ran through the strange sepia twilight, blasting his way through the madding crowds thronging the street, and his mind filled with utter nonsense as he went. He found himself jabbering: “Slithy toves! Slithy toves gyre and gimble in the wabe. Gyre and gimble! GYRE AND GIMBLE!”

  His large body tucked as he weaved from side to side, bucking and cursing with each collision. He willed himself onward, forcing the nonsense from his head. Ignoring the anguished cries of those who had tripped and fallen, the ones getting trampled beneath the feet of the stampeding feral mass of humanity, he ran. His ankle twisted and he nearly fell over a body. He grabbed something fleshy, pulled himself up, kept going. He needed to escape the—

  bandersnatch

  —alien ship.

  He was determined to at least make it to the road. His size was both help— longer legs, better vantage, more leverage — as well as hindrance. Height made him top-heavy, and should he fall, he’d have more time to accelerate before he hit the ground. Most of all, he was painfully aware of how conspicuous he was; he could almost feel the aliens’ sights focused on him, on the top of his head and the expensive hair plugs, on his shoulders rising up above the crowd.

  Where the hell’s the military? Why aren’t they here?

  The timber of the noise above him changed and there came another deep groan from the massive machinery. He felt the rumbling beneath his pounding feet, felt it on his skin, on his face, inside his head. The people around him gave a collective gasp and he knew it was already too late. Whatever was going to happen was starting.

  He didn’t look to see what it was.

  The noise above him abruptly vanished and in its place his ears were filled once again with the muted sounds of the city in panic— sirens and whistles and yells. Sweat poured down his neck and into his collar. He tore off his jacket and flung it away behind him. It was an Armani, twelve hundred dollars, his billfold in the left pocket. It didn’t matter; he was down to his last twenty anyway. His bag with the tablet computer was gone; he couldn’t remember dropping it. His phone was gon
e, too.

  Adam? It should’ve been Adam here!

  His three-hundred dollar shoes were trashed.

  Everything was ruined.

  But right now he didn’t care about any of it. He didn’t care about his company or the lost millions. All he cared about was getting away, saving himself.

  A woman stumbled in front of him. Without thinking, he reached down and yanked her up by the hair, releasing her to the side as she found her feet. He barely slowed. The woman ran off in a different direction, still screaming.

  Not even a thank you!

  He realized he was screaming too, screaming and crying and still uttering gibberish.

  Strands of her hair had tangled in his fingers; the earphones were gone.

  Another metallic groan thrummed the air, and then, without warning, everything turned green; the liquid he’d seen dripping from the shaft moments before had turned into a torrent. Except it wasn’t exactly liquid; it was some sort of globular gel or . . . .

  He didn’t know what it was. Hydraulic lubricant, maybe. He felt it touch his head, his cheeks, his shoulders. It came faster, denser, the nearly weightless blobs so numerous that they threatened to suffocate him. The thick, green rain drifted leisurely down about his feet, piled up; soon it was up past his ankles, then halfway to his knees. It was in his face and his hair. He ran through it, swiping, repulsed by the rubbery coolness of it on his skin, expecting it to burn and yet finding it didn’t really feel like much of anything at all. He kept expecting the squishy sacs to burst and release—

  What?

  Acid? Maggots?

  He thought he could see something slightly darker twitching inside them.

  Now he was wading knee-deep through it— swimming through it where the drifts were higher. The blobs were light, almost buoyant, and yielded easily before him, giving way as he desperately leaned forward and pushed it away with his hands. They went as effortlessly as if they were little more than bubbles. But they returned just as fluidly in his wake.

  He sensed that many of the people around him had stopped running now. They crouched, cowering insensibly on the pavement as the green flood fell upon them. They huddled beneath trees and awnings, babbling nonsensically, unable to move because of their terror.

  He kept going, weaving through those who were still milling about. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand, afraid to breathe in that fog-mist-sleet, yet also realizing how unlikely it was that any of it would get into his lungs. Each “droplet” was roughly the size of a plum.

  When they landed on him, they didn’t break, as a bubble might. Rather, they seemed to yield, to absorb into his hair and clothes, run through them, then reform and settle to the ground. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know if it was meant to kill him or ensnare him or inseminate him. He just wanted to get away from it.

  Eggs, he thought madly. They reminded him of eggs and the things inside them were the developing fetuses, and he shuddered and nearly collapsed at the thought. If so, the ship had released millions upon millions of them into the center of Manhattan.

  He ran straight up 79th Street, heedless of the wrecked and smoking cars, ignoring the flames and screams, yet aware, somehow, that none of the objects seemed to be affected at all by the heat. They simply sat in the flames and didn’t burn.

  People were cramming into the doorways of buildings, trying to get in them. Idiots, he wanted to scream. Don’t go inside! But he instantly realized that if he did and they heeded him, there’d be more people on the streets. More people to fight his way through. More blocking his way.

  More for the aliens to choose from!

  Underground. He had to get underground, as far away from that ship as possible, remove himself from the equation. Underground, he’d be able to escape. Surely the aliens wouldn’t be able to reach him there. He’d regroup then, figure out what to do next.

  Remembering that there was a station on Lexington Avenue, he skidded into the corner of the street, then hurled himself to the right.

  The subway entrance! he thought, straining his neck and looking for the telltale railing. He swiped furiously at the sweat dripping into his eyes, and another of the green blobs squished beneath his fingers but didn’t pop. He shuddered and let out a sharp utterance which was lost in the noise. Where the hell are the stairs?

  The alien rain had slowed. Or thinned. Now he was plowing through drifts of the stuff as high as his waist; they soaked into his clothes, yet left them dry. The objects bobbed gently into the air as he passed before drifting back down again.

  He chanced a look up and shuddered at what he saw: the yawning diaphragm of the ship squeezing closed. A spiral sphincter. An insectile ovipositor. The last remnants of the green slime slipped out and floated down toward him.

  Water balloons. They’re like water balloons, except lighter, different.

  They were nothing at all like water balloons.

  By now he’d found the subway entrance, but it was all wrong. The stairwell was flooded. More of the green blobs were pouring into it from the sidewalks like runoff into a drain after a heavy storm. They whirled into the depths, roiling as the people who had been caught belowground emerged, wide-eyed and gasping for breath. A couple burst through, laughing giddily and pulling on each other hand-in-hand, as if what was happening was some kind of grand, elaborate fraternity prank. They stopped when they saw the ship, and the smiles slid off their faces as readily as the green blobs slid from their hair and clothes.

  Mark turned, unsure of what to do. Inside, his mind finally conceded. Get inside a building. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t! His feet refused to move. He was frozen with indecision.

  Something hit him hard on the back, throwing him to the ground, submerging him beneath the green tide. Scrambling back to his feet, breaching through it into the air above, he saw that the mob had stilled, and he followed their hypnotized gazes skyward one final time. The hole in the underbelly of the alien vessel was nearly fully closed now. The ship was beginning to move away, the world it had painted green now rippling over its mirrored skin.

  A woman somewhere down the street started screaming. Mark couldn’t make out the words at first. But then she was right there in his face, gripping his shirt, pulling herself up his body, climbing him as if he were a ladder. Her knees and knuckles were bloody and snot was bubbling from her left nostril. He tried to pull his face away from her, revolted by her touch, by her appearance. By all of her.

  “Come back!” she screamed, reaching a hand out toward the receding ship. “Take me with you! Don’t gooooooo!”

  He flung her away from him then, and the woman plunged into the green ocean at his feet and disappeared.

  A minute later, the alien craft was gone, returned to the darkness of outer space, beyond the ken of our strongest telescopes. Back, presumably, into the black abyss which had spawned it. It didn’t even leave behind a vapor trail.

  The unmarred sky shimmered as it had before the intrusion and the golden sun continued its trek over the face of the void as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  But the familiar deep blue of the Manhattan sky was now gone. Instead, it had turned the palest shade of aquamarine.

  * * *

  In the immediate aftermath of that terrifying event, the inhabitants of planet Earth responded much as one would expect when an uninvited alien ship arrives and inexplicably lays a billion egg-like objects on the planet. Many people prepared as if they expected something even worse to happen any day now, hastily erecting and stocking apocalypse shelters to survive the inevitable invasion, selling off all their worldly possessions, heading north to become Canadian citizens. Others cowered in fear, figuring nothing could possibly thwart such a powerful and determined enemy.

  The president ordered martial law, and the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut sent in their National Guards to quarantine the island and surrounding areas. These efforts were abandoned almost as soon as
they were rolled out, for while the Guard managed to keep the people inside the city in and the people outside of it out, the alien green blobs themselves refused to behave like civilized alien objects. Because of their buoyancy, they proved to be completely refractory to even the most aggressive containment procedures. Once the breeze returned following the ship’s departure, they were quite easily picked up and transported outside of the quarantine zone.

  Many people simply carried on as they had before, refusing to accept what had happened, as if by denying that there could be such things as giant chrome spaceships and parasitic green rain they could actually bend reality to suit their needs. Within the greater New York metropolitan area, only the most seriously deluded managed to accomplish this with any success; after all, you couldn’t turn around without being reminded. For the rest of the world, however, denial came much more easily.

  The stuff soon became known as Greenies. Nobody knows for sure where the term originated or when exactly it was coined or by what genius, but it caught on and spread with the same viral efficiency as the objects themselves. In time, Greenies would come to refer equally to the mysterious substance and the unseen alien guest which had left it behind.

  When an attack wasn’t immediately forthcoming and martial law was cancelled for lack of interest, New Yorkers, ever ready to show off their world-famous sense of irony, quipped how unfair it was that celestial visitors always seemed to focus their harassment on their fair city. Granted, this was the first time it actually happened for real, but when you counted all the times it happened in science fiction movies, New York was apparently the Israel of the universe. Why couldn’t the ship have gone to Lubbock, Texas, instead? Or Peoria, Illinois?

  Nobody mentioned Atlantic City. This time, New Jersey was simply too close to home.

  Not everyone took it so nonchalantly. After all, the implications seemed dire enough: The aliens would eventually return. And when they did, what would they do next? What would we do?