The Alpha Deception

Prologue

The town of Hope Valley died without protest.

Sunday morning dawned lazily, with the sun sneaking over the mountains of Oregon unseen by the one thousand residents who had gone to bed expecting rain. The first rays fell upon the black roads and neatly manicured lawns set between driveways complete with basketball hoops and two-car garages. A layer of dew coated those vehicles left out to bear the elements and, after negotiating a dozen lawns with papers tucked under his arm, a lone newsboy found his high-tops soaked through to the cuffs of his jeans.

The Sunday edition was by far the most cumbersome of the week, its bulk bending his bike’s twin steel cages outward, with the overflow jammed in a sack over his shoulder. The boy kick-stood his bike and padded toward the next door on his route, sneakers sloshing through the grass and then squeaking on pavement as he climbed the front steps. The paper landed with a thud that sent color ad-inserts flying into the air.

The end came before they had a chance to drift to earth.

In his last instant of life, the boy had time to register an explosion of light like that of a flashbulb that didn’t vanish with a click. A bluish-white beam poured from the sky in a moving arc across Hope Valley. It had impacted first at the town’s western perimeter. By the time the boy’s mind recorded it, a cloud of charcoal-black dust had already formed, following the beam as if attached by a leash and swallowing everything in its path.

The wind picked up fiercely, whipped up like a whirlpool tossing about the remnants of ruptured buildings with ease. At the last, the boy’s ears caught the sounds of crumbling and crackling. He was about to scream when all the breath in him was sucked out. His blood, flesh, bones, even his clothes turned to dark dust and joined the spreading black cloud as the town of Hope Valley vanished into oblivion.