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  I smirked at the memory and washed a sleeping pill down with a mini bottle of Jim Beam from the bar fridge in my room. I tossed the empty bottle into the corner of the room. It hit the carpet with a dull thunk. Grabbing the next mini liquor bottle from the pile on the bed beside me, I cracked it open and downed it in one gulp. Whiskey followed by a Kahlua chaser. Yuck. I fumbled for another bottle, but this time I took a moment to study the label—Tanqueray Gin. Much better. I opened it and gulped it down. Next!

  By the time I’d emptied eight bottles, the room was spinning pleasantly around my head. I felt warm and blissfully numb. Sleep beckoned, and I reached for the light switch to turn off the lamps beside the bed. Darkness fell with the switch. It was still light out, but I had the curtains drawn, so the only light getting in was a thin blue-white halo around the edges of the window. Between the alcohol and the sleeping pill I wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon.

  My eyes drifted shut and I floated off on a cloud. I dreamed that I was cheating with Kate on an associate editor from my work named Spencer. In my dreams he was the sucker who’d married her, not me. Kate and I lay in bed naked, wrapped in each other’s arms, and laughing about how dumb Spencer was. Then suddenly I found myself standing in the door to our bedroom, watching us laugh, and I had the distinct impression that somehow I had just become Spencer.

  A painful knot formed in my throat, and I tried to scream, but no sound came out.

  In the next instant, I was walking down the street in my neighborhood in the middle of the night with a powerful urge to urinate. I unzipped and started peeing on Grumpy Old Man Taylor’s lawn. He burst outside, the screen door banging behind him. He brandished a wireless phone at me like it was a gun. The phone was ringing.

  “It’s for you!” he yelled, suddenly inches from my face. Spittle gleamed on his lips as he held the phone to my ear.

  “Hello?” I tried.

  “I want a divorce,” Kate said. “I don’t love you anymore.”

  I gaped at that. Oddly enough, the phone was still ringing.

  “Well?” Old Man Taylor demanded. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

  What could I say? The phone just rang and rang. “Daddy?” Rachel’s tiny voice asked. “When are you coming home?”

  “Soon honey,” I said in a broken voice.

  My sobs woke me and I sat up in a hurry. The sheets fell away and I shivered as cold air made a cold sweat even colder. The room was dark. My bladder was bursting, my throat parched. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and my stomach roiled with a confusing mixture of hunger and nausea. Police sirens wailed in the distance, and the phone was ringing. I reached for it and winced as the movement set off a stabbing headache behind my eyes.

  “Hello?” I croaked.

  “Logan!”

  It was Kate. I blinked stupidly and stared in horror at the phone out of the corner of my eye. My dream was coming true. She must be calling to ask for a divorce.

  “Where’s your phone?” Kate demanded. “I’ve been trying to call you for hours!”

  “My phone?”

  “Your cell phone!”

  I glanced at the bedside table. My phone sat there, dark and silent. I’d forgotten to bring my charger. “The battery’s flat,” I said, and held my free hand to the side of my head, trying to keep it from exploding.

  “You need to come home right now,” she said.

  “Look, Kate, I’m not ready to—”

  “Have you seen the news?”

  Some of the cotton in my head evaporated. “No, why?”

  “Because everyone is going crazy, Logan, that’s why! People are saying we’ve detected some kind of signal from space, and that it’s headed straight for us!”

  “The signal is headed straight for us? What kind of signal?”

  “I don’t know, radio or something. They’re saying it has to be aliens. Logan, some kids were driving down the street earlier, throwing beer bottles at houses and shooting guns in the air. I tried to call 911, but the line was busy. We need you home.”

  My confusion vanished. “I’ll be right there.” I jumped out of bed with the phone still pressed to my ear, but tripped over the cord and fell on my hands and knees. The phone base fell on my hand, and I cursed as a sharp pain erupted there. The dial tone sang in my ear. I dropped the phone and got up on shaking legs. Police sirens were still wailing in the distance. I heard thumping footsteps as someone ran down the hall outside my door. Casting about for the TV remote, I found it on the bedside table beside my dead cell phone and flicked on the TV. CNN snapped into focus, the news anchor was in the middle of her announcement, but the volume was muted. My eyes read the news ticker at the bottom of the screen.

  BREAKING NEWS

  ALIEN SIGNALS DETECTED NEAR EARTH, SOURCE MOVING TOWARD US

  Chapter 4

  I raced down Sanford street on my way back from the Ramada. Aliens? That was the question that ran through my head over and over. I felt like I was trapped in some B movie remake. The news reports I’d seen before leaving my hotel room had said that the source of the radio signals was moving at more than five hundred miles per second, and it was already close to Earth. Best estimates gave us a year to prepare for their arrival. None of that connected to reality in my brain. It didn’t seem possible. There had to be another explanation.

  Streetlights blurred by me, each of them like a laser beam to my pounding head. I was hungover, and probably still way over the legal limit, but right now the police had more important things to do than hand out DUI’s.

  I turned right off Sanford onto South Orange Avenue. Not far now. I stopped for a red light at Oakland Terrace, maybe half a dozen blocks from my house. Someone went screaming straight through the light in the left turn lane and narrowly missed getting hit by a truck. The blast of the truck’s horn echoed in my ears.

  Pop! A car had just backfired. Pop! That wasn’t a car. My head whipped around, and I saw a dark blur running down the other side of the street with a duffel bag swinging from one shoulder. Someone burst out of the Belfort Convenience Store just behind the runner, screaming things that I couldn’t hear from this distance.

  I’d just witnessed an armed robbery a few blocks from my house. Visions of thugs breaking into my house and shooting my wife and kids for the money in our safe danced through my head. The light turned green, and I stomped on the gas.

  I cruised through the next light. Storefronts disappeared, replaced by trees and old houses. This was the beginning of the Montrose Neighborhood. I drove past the gated end of my street with the no entry signs, reached the next light, and turned right up Centre Street. My tires squealed as I cornered too fast. I was close now. My heart raced as the trees closed in around me. Historic “character” homes with red brick walls lined both sides of the street, dimly illuminated by their porch lights and little else. Deep shadows pooled on the sidewalks in the long gaps between street lights. They weren’t even proper street lights; they barely reached above the stop signs at the side streets. My mind populated the shadows with delinquents lying in wait for home owners to take out the trash or pull into their driveways. Knowing that this was an expensive neighborhood made those fears all the more pronounced.

  A flashing yellow light presided over a four-way stop up ahead. There weren’t any other cars waiting, so I did a rolling stop and turned right again onto Hamilton. The next right after that was mine—Kingman Road, a tranquil street with the other end blocked to simulate a proper cul-de-sac. My house was the second last to the right. The yellow brick walls were fuzzy and gray with the night, but every single window of my three story home was bright and glowing with light. Just past my neighbor’s house I could see the wrought iron gate that barred the old T-junction onto South Orange Avenue. That gate would do nothing to stop pedestrians from getting in, however. My mind flashed back to the armed robber I’d seen running down South Orange just a few blocks away, and my heart rate kicked up another notch.

  As I turned in
to our driveway, I watched my headlights flash over the big tree and the pair of big flower bushes flanking the entrance. I couldn’t see anyone lurking there, but there was no way to be sure. I cursed under my breath about the lack of proper streetlights in Montrose. When we’d first moved in that had seemed like a quaint bonus, but now I saw it for what it really was—a security risk.

  I didn’t bother pulling all the way up my driveway to the detached garage in the back, but instead stopped just as close as possible to the front door. I glanced over my shoulders for one last look around, but it was too dark to see anything without the car’s headlights shining in that direction. By now my headache had become a full-blown migraine, but that was the least of my worries. Taking a quick breath, I popped the door open and sprinted up the walkway to the front steps. Hurrying up those steps, I fumbled in my pocket for my keys, and turned to watch the yard as I did so. Precious seconds slipped by. I struggled to see the keys in the dim yellow light radiating from the sconces to either side of the front doors. Suddenly I regretted not installing a third, overhead porch light, or one of those motion-activated spotlights. Police sirens wailed somewhere close by—investigating that convenience store robbery? My palms began to sweat. As soon as I found the key, I spun around and opened the door on the right with the handle. The other was blocked by a siding bolt in the floor. Seeing those doors as if for the first time, I realized that they were both made of aging wood with single panes of clear glass running down their centers. It would be easy to break that glass with a rock and flick the deadbolt aside. Plus I was pretty sure that a determined thief could just kick them open. A sticker in the window of the door on the right warned the house was monitored by a security company, but I’d stopped paying for their services long ago. I regretted that decision now.

  Hurrying inside, I locked the door behind me. My thoughts went straight to the revolver I kept in the safe upstairs.

  “Kate! I’m home!” I called.

  I heard footsteps thumping around upstairs, followed by the sound of a door opening and then Kate’s voice: “We’re up here!”

  I ran to the end of the foyer, stumbling with the sudden urge to vomit. I leaned heavily on the banister to compose myself, and then used it to haul myself up the stairs. Kate was waiting for me in the doorway to our bedroom. I hesitated before entering the room. Over Kate’s shoulder I saw our kids huddled together under the covers. Flickering white and blue light from the TV flashed over their stricken faces, turning Rachel’s blonde hair white, and making Alex’s face look even paler than usual. Rachel’s face glistened with tears. She was only five. I expected that from her. Alex was fifteen, so he wouldn’t be caught dead crying, but I could see that he was scared.

  Reporters droned on about the alien signals, looters, shootings, robberies, and drunken end-of-the-world parties. It was ironic that the media was partly responsible for sparking all of that chaos and now they got to report on it, too. Someone’s buttering their bread on both sides.

  “Logan?” Kate prompted.

  I realized I was reluctant to go into the room. A lurid flashback hit me, along with an accompanying burst of anger that made it hard to think straight. Kate saw the look in my eyes and winced.

  “Did you at least change the sheets?” I demanded in a low voice.

  She nodded quickly. “Can we focus on what’s going on right now?”

  I nodded stiffly back and brushed by her.

  “Daddy, what’s happening?” Rachel asked as I walked past the foot of the bed.

  “How did you get home so fast?” Alex put in.

  “Your father missed his flight,” Kate said.

  Confusion swirled inside of me, and my brow furrowed. I glanced back at Kate. “My flight?”

  “To Chicago, to sign that author for Harper,” Kate said.

  “Right...” I said, nodding slowly. That must have been the excuse she gave the kids when I didn’t come home at the same time I usually did. Alex watched us suspiciously, but Rachel was oblivious.

  Turning around, I opened the louvered doors of my closet and bent down to type in the combination to our safe.

  “What are you doing?” Kate asked.

  Locking bolts slid aside with a thunk. I opened the door and pulled out the black case at the bottom. Cracking it open, I pulled out my double-action revolver and checked the cylinder. It was already loaded, so I left the case of spare ammo inside the safe and shut the door. Turning from the closet, I saw my wife and kids watching me with big eyes.

  “What’s that for?” Alex asked.

  “Just in case,” I said as I pocketed the gun.

  I went to sit on the edge of the bed beside Rachel. She wrapped an arm around me and leaned her head against my shoulder. Kate came and sat on the other side, next to Alex. Parents aren’t supposed to have favorites, but kids do.

  I rubbed Rachel’s shoulder as I watched the news. The anchor woman on CNN said that President Fowler was holding an emergency press conference at the White House. I nodded along with that. Aliens invading Earth certainly qualified as an emergency, but that couldn’t be what was happening here, could it?

  Chapter 5

  I watched the scene switch to a lectern flanked by the flag of the United States and the flag of the president, each hanging from a brass pole. The signature blue and white placard of the White House was on the wall behind the lectern. The camera panned to show President Alison Fowler walking in from the side to stand in front of the cameras.

  “Good evening everyone,” President Fowler began. “I want to begin by reassuring you that aliens are not coming to invade our planet.” Nervous laughter from the press followed that statement, and she flashed a laughing smile for the cameras. That smile looked fake to me, but maybe she was just tired from a long day—like me. “I repeat, the mysterious radio signals we’ve detected are not alien in origin.”

  “Thank God,” Kate breathed.

  “Aww man,” Alex said. “I knew it was too good to be true!”

  The president went on: “...signals are being generated by a previously undetected, dark celestial body. It is widely known by the scientific community that planets and stars can emit radio waves as a part of natural processes. Until recently we were not able to detect the source of these emissions, but by cross referencing the radio wave data with infrared data from our James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have discovered a cold, dark star racing in from outside our solar system—a so-called rogue, named Greenhouse’s Star after the scientist who discovered it.”

  My brow furrowed at that, and I glanced sharply at Kate. “Doesn’t your brother work with NASA?” I asked. She nodded slowly but said nothing. Her maiden name was Greenhouse. Her brother worked with telescopes and all that space stuff down in California. Was that just a coincidence?

  “We have been able to confirm that this star is moving at a high speed, but it does not represent any threat to us here on Earth. This is a remarkable scientific discovery, but nothing more, and certainly no reason for anyone to panic.”

  The president looked up from her lectern. “If you are listening to this broadcast now, please know that there is nothing to fear. As to the deplorable actions that some have taken while under the influence of their fears—rest assured, these people will be found and dealt with promptly by local authorities. Until then, it would be best to stay in your homes and wait for the commotion to settle down. Thank you, America, and good night.”

  The scene switched back to the talking heads. I reached for the remote on the bed at Rachel’s feet and hit the mute button.

  “Time to go to bed,” I said. A flash of disappointment went through me at the abrupt return to normalcy, and I realized that some small part of me had been relieved for this crisis to take the attention off my own personal one.

  I got up from the bed and dropped a kiss on Rachel’s head. “You three should sleep in here tonight. I’ll sleep on the couch downstairs and keep a lookout, just in case.” For tonight, at least, I had a good exc
use not to sleep in the bed that my wife had defiled.

  Kate crawled out from under the covers. “Let’s go brush our teeth and change into our pajamas. Come on.” She ushered Alex out next.

  I ran into him at the foot of the bed, gave him a hug and said goodnight. Rachel raced in from the other side, making sure that Alex wouldn’t steal too much of my attention. “Night, Daddy,” she said. I kissed her on the head again, and tightened our embrace. Kate caught my eye over our kids’ shoulders. A broken smile trembled on her lips, and she wiped a tear from the corner of one eye.

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?” Rachel asked.

  More tears broke loose, and Kate’s smile shattered as she wiped them away with a shaking hand. “Nothing, sweetheart. I’m just relieved, that’s all.”

  Another lie for the steaming pile. I left the room ahead of my family and headed downstairs while they filed through the bathroom that we all shared on the second level. This was a century-old home. En-suite’s were a modern invention. Ironically, however, there was an en-suite on the third floor attached to the smallest bedroom of six. The logic of that had escaped me for the past ten years.

  As I reached the foyer and saw the flimsy front doors—ancient wood painted blue with their fragile glass centers—my thoughts turned to more pressing concerns. How long would it take for all the real and wannabe criminals on the streets to get word of the president’s address? Aliens might not be coming for us, but that didn’t mean the danger had passed. I felt for the gun in my pocket. I wasn’t worried about accidentally grazing the trigger and shooting my foot off. Triggers are surprisingly hard to pull. I’d figured that out when I was just ten years old and learning to shoot for the first time on my grandfather’s farm. Back then I’d needed both hands to pull the trigger. Now I could do it with one, but certainly not by accident.