Under Darkness (A Sci-Fi Thriller) (Scott Standalones Book 1) Read online

“They fell down together, and Matt broke his nose on the pavement. Beth claims that it was an accident, but Matt says she deliberately smashed his face into the ground. Fortunately for your daughter, witness accounts are conflicting, so she won’t be expelled. She is, however, suspended until next week.”

  “Aren’t they doing midterms this week?” Bill asked. “She can’t afford to miss those.”

  “She should have thought of that before assaulting a fellow student. I’m sorry, but Beth started it, and I have to tell Matt’s parents something. The other students need to see that there are consequences. Beth is very lucky she’s not being expelled.”

  “What about him? He punched my daughter in the face!”

  “After she provoked him,” Mr. Kalani said.

  Bill stood up, his face turning red. “So instead of kicking her out, you’re going to make her fail the tenth grade? How is that any better?”

  “She still has plenty of time to make up her grades, and some of her teachers may be willing to provide make-up tests.”

  “She’s skating by as it is!”

  “Expulsion is still an option, Mr. Steele. If you believe that would be a more suitable outcome...”

  Bill smiled thinly at the principal. “No, thank you. Now if you’ll excuse us, I have another crisis to deal with back at the resort.”

  Mr. Kalani smiled tightly back and gestured to the door with one of his small, fat-rounded hands. “Good luck.”

  Chapter 2

  “You’re grounded,” Bill said once they were both sitting in his car. “No parties, no surfing, and no lounging by the pool. If I even see you looking at a swimsuit, you’ll be on the next plane to LA to live with your mother. Oh, and no TV either.”

  “What?” Beth shrieked. “You can’t do that! What am I supposed to do all week?”

  Bill arched an eyebrow at his daughter as he pressed the button to start his car. “Homework?”

  “I don’t have any; I’m suspended, remember?”

  “Then read a book. There are plenty in the lobby.”

  The car ride home was long and quiet, which was just fine with Bill. He needed time alone with his thoughts. With these recent troubles he was seriously beginning to think Beth should go back and live with her mother in LA. He’d miss her like crazy, but the resort demanded his full attention, and she was almost never around anyway. He could count the number of hours they spent together in a week on one hand and still have three or four fingers left over.

  When they got back to the resort, Beth grabbed her backpack from the backseat and went straight to the elevators without having to be told, while Bill went to check in with his manager. The lobby was crowded with irritated guests, and the pool and poolside bar were equally full. Bill shuddered to think of what all those drinks were doing to toilets and urinals that couldn’t be flushed.

  “Tell me there’s good news,” Bill said as he walked behind the reception desk.

  “The plumbers arrived,” Eric said. “But then they left to get supplies.”

  Bill buried his face in his hands. “How long have they been gone?”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Is that a question?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I want them back here now.”

  “Yes, Mr. Steele.”

  “And where’s Sean?” Bill cast about, looking for the day clerk. The reception area was empty.

  “He went to get more water for the guests.”

  “We’re out already? What about the restaurant?”

  “We’ve been using it to flush toilets, and—”

  “Bottled water to flush toilets? Are you insane?”

  “They were starting to stink.”

  “So get ocean water!”

  “But the sand would clog the pipes.”

  “Ocean water without sand in it, Eric! You just have to wade out a few extra feet to fill a bucket with clean water!”

  Eric’s lips curled and his nose wrinkled. “Me, sir?”

  There was a reason Eric was so pale. The ocean and all the creatures that lived in the reefs terrified him. “Not you,” Bill said. “Get the waiters to do it, or the porters, or some of the cleaning staff.”

  “But they’ll wet their uniforms.”

  Bill used his index finger to prod Eric in the chest. “That’s the least of our problems. Figure it out, or you’re fired, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Storming off in no particular direction, Bill’s feet seemed to move of their own accord. He needed a moment to clear his head, somewhere away from his floundering business and the domestic problems with his daughter. His feet carried him past the pool full of splashing, squealing children. Adults lay tanning in the sun with their noses buried in books or chatting loudly at the cabana bar. The resort with all its noisy tourists faded into the background as he followed the footpath to the beach.

  He reached the Surf and Snorkel hut with its surf and boogie boards resting against the wall and noticed that Toby, the surf instructor, was nowhere to be seen. Typical, Bill thought. He would have fired him ages ago, but the seventeen-year-old high-school dropout wasn’t as stupid as he looked. Dating the boss’s daughter was a rare form of job security. When they’d first started dating, Bill had assumed it wouldn’t last; Beth would catch Toby flirting with one of the tourists and that would be that, but Toby had been on his best behavior ever since they’d met.

  Kicking up sand in his brown leather boat shoes, Bill stared fixedly at the sparkling cerulean water. It drew him in like a riptide. He kicked off his shoes and pulled off his socks as he reached the smooth, darkened slope of wet sand leading to the water’s edge. In seconds his ankles were covered by the warm, lapping waves. Gentle currents pushed and pulled, making him sway, dragging the sand out from under his feet and tickling his toes.

  Dark bands of coral wove through the greens and blues of clear, shallow water. Snorkeling was a popular activity on resort beaches with their glassy water and colorful fish darting through the reefs. Bill imagined floating out there, face-down and staring at the fish, his ears wrapped in the blessed silence of the water, nothing but the rhythmic sounds of his breathing and heartbeat to impose on his senses.

  Investing in this resort had been a mistake. He should have just used his millions to live at one as a guest, or to become a beach bum like Toby, but with a mansion in Princeville. That would have been the endless vacation he’d pictured. Screw purpose and having a reason to get out of bed in the morning. What he really wanted was to sleep in every day with room service after a long day at the beach. But in that alternate life his daughter wouldn’t be with him, and maybe he’d have taken up surfing and become good buddies with Toby, the moron.

  Bill sighed. But who was he kidding? He wouldn’t last more than a week with nothing to do. The problems with the resort would pass.

  A dark shadow passed over the ocean, rolling in swiftly to sweep away his bright, sun-soaked fantasies.

  Bill’s brow furrowed, and he glanced up, searching for the dark cloud that he imagined to be passing in front of the sun, but there weren’t any clouds in the sky, and the sun winked out before he could even find it. “What the hell?” Bill muttered as the shadow swept over him and twilight fell, leaving him blinking stupidly and waving his hands in front of his face to make sure he could still see them.

  Sudden blindness. Was that a thing? Maybe he was having a stroke. But then he heard and vaguely saw the snorkelers in the water splashing frantically as if they’d all suddenly forgotten how to swim. Sunbathers on the shore sat up, screaming and pointing at the sky. The darkness deepened from twilight until it was as thick and black as crude oil, and coating everything in sight. An eclipse? he wondered. Why hadn’t he heard anything about it on the news?

  Then he spotted a familiar crescent hovering above the horizon, shimmering silver on the water. Terror coiled in the pit of Bill’s stomach, and acid bubbled into the back of his throat.

  Whatever this was,
it wasn’t an eclipse.

  Chapter 3

  Bill ran back up the beach barefoot and spraying sand, having forgotten all about his shoes. He heard his guests screaming and yelling long before he reached the pool. Everyone was out of the water and staring up at the sky. Hurrying by them, Bill heard some babbling about the end of the world, others sobbing or screaming. One man was taking advantage of the bartender’s inattention to pour himself shots. “To the end of the world!” he said, raising the first of several glasses, and downing it in one gulp.

  Bill recognized that man as the husband of the rail-thin matriarch who’d tried to lecture him about running a family.

  The matriarch stepped in front of him with hands planted on her waist. “Mr. Steele! Why weren’t we told there would be an eclipse today?”

  Bill tried to dart around her, but she side-stepped to block him once more. “Well?”

  “This is not an eclipse, ma’am.”

  “Not an eclipse? Then what on Earth is it?”

  A rising orange hue suffused the black sky, followed by a thunderous boom and rapid-fire echoes of it, drawing screams from the pool goers and drowning out any possibility of an answer.

  Someone shouted, “They’re here!”

  Bill looked up and shaded his eyes against the glare of at least a dozen streaks of light, each of them limned and wreathed in fire as they rocketed down over the island. A meteor shower?

  “They’re here!” someone shouted. “We’re not alone!”

  Those objects weren’t burning up in the atmosphere, and one of them looked to be headed straight for them.

  “Everyone get inside!” Bill said. Chaos erupted as people pushed and shoved to be the first ones up the path from the pool. Visions of a tsunami wiping out his hotel flashed through Bill’s head as he followed his screaming guests up to the lobby.

  Crowding through the sliding glass doors with the others, Bill scanned the luxurious chambers, searching for Eric. He found his manager at the computer station, surrounded by a knot of cleaning staff, porters, and waiters from the restaurant. Bill ran over there with several of his guests. Everyone crowded around a single monitor, watching a live news report from KITV Island News.

  “This just in,” the anchorwoman said. “The entire island of Kauai has suddenly and inexplicably plunged into darkness in the middle of the day. Meteors are raining down all over the island, and planes flying into Lihue Airport have reported a dark shadow spreading across the water as far as fifty miles from the shore. Eyewitnesses say they watched the sun vanish as if a curtain were being drawn across the sky.

  “We’re going live to the scene now with Curtis Chapman in Lihue. Curtis?” The scene cut to show a man with thinning brown hair standing on a hill, his comb-over threatening to take flight in a stiff breeze. Spotlights blazed, revealing every wrinkle on Curtis’s tanned, leathery face. In the background, a flaming meteor streaked down, heading straight for the city lights below. He held a microphone with the KITV Island News logo on it and stood there blinking at the camera, waiting for an unseen cue to speak.

  “Hello, Katy,” Curtis said. “As you can see behind me, right now one of the meteors is falling directly over Lihue. It’s hard to tell how much of a threat it represents at this point, but as we pan the camera—” The camera began to slide away from him. “—you can see other meteors raining down all over the island and dozens more appearing with every passing minute. To the southwest, you can see several of them headed for the city of Koloa, and several more for Hanapepe and Waimea.”

  “Koloa—that’s us, right?” one of the tourists standing behind Bill asked.

  He turned to regard the man. It was Angry Tourist, James Lucas, the one who’d been complaining about the shit water and demanding a refund. “Yes, that’s us,” Bill said.

  Their gazes met, and Bill saw that James’ eyes were glassy from one too many cocktails.

  “What could possibly blot out the sun?” someone asked.

  “They said it’s spreading,” another added.

  “What is? What is spreading?” a woman asked in a terrified voice. She stood close to James, clutching his arm while two young children hugged her legs.

  “Shhh! Everyone be quiet, and maybe we’ll find out!” Eric said.

  “The first wave of meteors are touching down now!” Curtis said from the computer’s speakers.

  Bill expected muffled explosions to crackle out and light up the night in the valley behind Curtis, but that didn’t happen. In fact, nothing happened other than the meteors disappearing and more raining down.

  “That’s strange...” Curtis said. “The impacts appear to be causing only minor damage as if these meteors are either very light or somehow slowing themselves as they fall.”

  “Thrusters,” James suggested.

  “So they’re not meteors?” his wife asked.

  “No, they’re landing craft. It’s aliens.”

  Worried murmurs spread through the crowd, a crowd which was growing fast as elevators dinged open, bringing more guests down to the lobby with every passing minute. Bill traded worried looks with Eric and then turned to address his guests. “Calm down, everyone! We don’t know what we’re dealing with. If this were an invasion, don’t you think someone would know something about it? NASA would have seen them coming.”

  “You don’t know that!” someone yelled.

  “We’re all going to die!” another person wailed.

  “Maybe it’s some kind of sunspot activity,” Eric suggested.

  “Sunspots? Are you crazy?” James bellowed. “Sunspots don’t block out whole sections of the sky and rain meteors that magically slow down before they hit the ground!”

  “So it is aliens,” one of the waiters said.

  Worried murmurs grew to a frenzy, and Bill began to fear that the crowd would tear his hotel apart. Bill pushed past James and jumped up on an empty desk beside Eric. He raised his hands for attention. “Everyone listen to me!” No one did. “Settle down!” Still no sign of calm.

  Bill whistled as loud as he could between his fingers, and a brittle silence fell. All eyes turned to him, and suddenly they could hear the news again, but Curtis Chapman’s terrified speculations weren’t helping.

  “Eric, shut that off!” The manager did as asked, and Bill went on, “Thank you. The safest place for any of you to be right now is in your rooms. Whatever this is, the authorities and the military can handle it. We’re in one of the most heavily militarized states in the entire country, so if aliens really are invading, you can bet there’s an entire fleet sailing toward us right now. In the meantime, all we can do is sit tight and stay calm. Draw your blinds and turn off your lights. We’re going to do the same thing here in the lobby and everywhere else in the resort to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible.”

  “What do they want?” someone asked.

  “We still don’t know that we’re dealing with a they,” Bill chided. “There could be a perfectly natural explanation for what’s happening right now.”

  “Like what?” James demanded.

  “Like... a large asteroid skimming through the upper atmosphere and eclipsing the sun. Pieces would break off and rain down just as we’re seeing with these meteors.”

  “That’s a transitory event,” James replied. He pointed to the darkness outside. “The sun would be back by now.”

  Just then, the night peeled away with a bright flash of light.

  Heads turned, eyes wide and hopeful, but it wasn’t the sun. It was a meteor streaking down on a tail of fire. It landed in the ocean with a muffled roar.

  Guests screamed and scattered, tripping over each other as they ran for the stairs and elevators. Bill froze, staring across the pool in horror, waiting for a tsunami to come and wake him from this nightmare. His thoughts turned to Beth in their suite on the third floor of the resort, and he hoped to God that would be high enough.

  “Dad?” a familiar voice cut through his daze, and he saw Beth striding in from
the direction of the pool with Toby, the MIA surf instructor. “What’s happening?”

  Chapter 4

  Bill jumped off the desk, grabbed Beth by the arm and ran for the stairs. “Let’s go!” he shouted.

  “Ouch!” Beth complained.

  “Hey, Mr. Steele, let her go, brah.”

  “Shut up, Toby!” Bill tossed a worried look over his shoulder as he ran, but the dark wall of water he expected to see bursting through the lobby windows never came. Not wanting to risk it, he didn’t slow down. Phones rang insistently at the reception desk, but no one was there to answer them. Sean had probably been on his way back with the water when the darkness fell. They reached the stairs behind the last of the screaming guests from the lobby. Bill took the stairs two at a time, dragging his daughter up.

  “Braddah, this is lolo!” Toby said as they reached the second floor.

  Beth stopped resisting, and Bill let her go. They continued up the stairs to the third floor and then started running down the inner hall to their suite at the end. A small crowd of guests was running up ahead, periodically stopping to swipe their key cards and slam their doors.

  Arriving at their room, Bill stopped and swiped his own key card. A solid beep sounded in time to a thunk, and a green light snapped on above the lock. Turning the handle and pushing the door open, he ushered Toby and his daughter through, and then followed them in and locked the deadbolt. He drew the chain across the door for added security. Bill strode through a brief foyer, past a kitchen table, and into the living room. Toby and Beth were already seated on the couch, Toby reaching for the remote. Bill went straight up to the ocean-facing balcony with its sliding glass doors and drew heavy blackout curtains across the glass. That done, he turned to face his daughter. He could see that she was wearing a bright red bikini under her crop top and denim mini shorts, but now wasn’t the time to discuss it.

  Toby turned up the volume on the TV, and Curtis Chapman’s terrified voice returned, but faintly and coming in and out. Bill watched the camera bobbing to keep up with Chapman as he ran down a darkened path. The reporter periodically glanced back at the camera to make frantic exclamations.