The End Has Come

THE SEVENTH DAY OF DEER CAMP Scott Sigler

“Have you been harmed in any way?”

They asked it every time, during the thrice-daily videoconferences. George had a dozen different ways to answer that question. Had they physically hurt him? No, they had not. Had they emotionally hurt him? Yes: a year gone by without seeing his boys in person, without touching his wife, without satisfying the simple yet overpowering need of spending time with his family. But that was the trade-off — those in control wanted him gone, and preventing his family from seeing him was one of the many tools they used to try and get their way. If George really wanted to see his wife and sons, all he had to do was leave.

“No,” George said. “They haven’t hurt me.”

“And are the children still alive? Are they unharmed?”

The children. That phrase used to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but since that first moment George had stood in front of a news camera, it had taken on one specific definition.

“The children are fine,” he said. “Unharmed, so far.”

George wished he could drop the so far bit, but he could not. The world was watching him. As far as he knew, he was the only thing standing between the children and knives, microscopes, autopsy tables, and secret facilities of the United States government.

“Good,” the mask said. This one sounded French. Maybe French-Canadian, George wasn’t sure. The voice changed every day, but the mask was always the same: Guy Fawkes. The symbol of the Anonymous movement, a movement that had grown to a hundred times its original size following the alien attack that had shattered cities, killed millions. A movement that had grown because of the children, because of a rampant distrust of governments, of militaries and the police, because of the world’s need to know something positive could come out of that tragedy.

Three times a day, he reported in. If he missed an appointment, shit hit the fan: Hackers from America, China, Russia and more would go to work, sabotaging targets that had been pre-selected and pre-qualified. There was no mistaking the correlation between George not appearing for an update and the instant retaliation against multiple targets from multiple sources.

And if there were no online targets, pre-programmed physical demonstrations happened within minutes: flash mobs that blocked the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel; a thousand people climbing the White House fence for a calm stroll across the lawn; bomb threats at airports; instant sit-ins at police stations with hundreds of individuals willing to be arrested, willing to go to jail, willing to take a nightstick to the head in order to send a message. That message? George was not to be touched, not to be harmed, not to be delayed from talking to the world in any way for any reason.

“Good,” the mask said. “Is there anything else you need to tell us?”

George shook his head. “Nothing else. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be back online for the next update in four hours.”

“Very well. Keep up the good work. We are watching.”

That last bit wasn’t meant for him: It was meant for his hosts. Maybe captors was a better word for them.

The screen went blank.

A strong hand on his arm.

“Mister Pelton, we will now escort you back to your quarters.”

George nodded absently. He stood. “Thank you,” he said, because he was a Midwestern boy and being polite was so ingrained in him he said such things automatically, even to a soldier who would put a bullet in his head if so ordered.

He wondered, as he always did after the check-ins, how many more days could he spend here? He wondered if he had made the right choice, if he should’ve just gone home to his family after saving those kids.

Instead, he had made a phone call. A simple call that had changed the course of human history.

In the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, George’s cell phone reception had always been shitty. One bar, if any at all, courtesy of AT&T’s weak network. But on that day at the end of the world, sealed into a room on a crashed starship with little aliens standing around him — little aliens, for God’s sake — George got two bars.

He had to do something. He had to find help. But who could he call?

The invasion had come without warning. At least, no warning that George and his childhood friends knew of. Ships from outer freakin’ space attacking major cities worldwide. One of those ships must’ve got sidetracked, or malfunctioned or something, because it crashed in the deep woods close to the tip of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula.

The hunting cabin where George and his friends had spent two weeks every November for the last thirty years had been close to the crash site, so close that a war machine or mech — or whatever you called an alien piloting a suit of powered armor — had attacked the cabin, blown it to pieces. Luckily, George, Toivo, Jaco, Bernie, and Arnold had been outside when that happened. They returned fire against the attacker, killing the alien inside the machine. From there, a hike through the deep snow and the frigid woods, following colored lights, to the crashed ship — an actual flying saucer, or at least it used to be before a high-speed impact and tumble through the woods turned it into a dented, cracked, smashed thing that had more in common with a T-bone-totaled station wagon than an interstellar vessel.

Inside that ship, bodies. Non-human bodies. Pieces and parts all over, living beings torn to shreds by a crash that gouged a fifty-foot-wide trench through snow-covered ground, pines, and the birches. So many bodies, so many dead. But not all dead, as George found out when he opened a sealed door. Inside, a room clearly designed to withstand such crashes: the evidence for that being a dozen alien children, alive and well.

It started out as a dozen, but that number dropped to eleven when George’s friend Toivo shot one in the head. Toivo wanted to kill the rest of them — as did Bernie and Jaco — but George put himself between the children and the barrel of Toivo’s hunting rifle.

George still wasn’t sure why he’d protected the alien kids. Maybe it was the fact that they were helpless. Maybe somewhere in his head he knew this was a history-changing event, and that the sane thing to do was preserve these eleven alien lives even though the aliens’ kin had probably killed millions of people.

Or, maybe, it was the crash seats.

He stood in a room with the eleven alien children. The same room with the crash seats, or chambers or whatever they were, that had kept those children alive during the crash. The grownup aliens had seen to the kids first, safely strapping them in — just as George would have done for his own children.

His friends were elsewhere in the ship. He knew Bernie was probably tending to Mister Ekola, keeping the old man warm as winter slowly and surely stole the heat from the ruined hull. George didn’t know what Jaco was doing. Rooting through the ship, probably, because it was an alien ship, and would he ever get a chance like this again? The one that worried George, though, was Toivo.

Toivo, who had already killed one of the alien children in cold blood.

Toivo, who clearly wanted to kill the rest of them as well.

Toivo, who had never left the area, who still spoke with the Yooper accent George had shed years ago. Da instead of the, ending every other sentence with the rhetorical eh? If George hadn’t moved away, would he still have that accent? Would he have wanted to shoot the children? So hard to know if his urge to save them was something he was born with, or something cultivated from living somewhere other than this remote, homogenous culture.

A silly time to worry about nature vs. nurture.

The phone buzzed in George’s hand. One bar . . . it had reconnected to the network.

He could dial 9-1-1. But would anyone answer? Had the attacks hit Milwaukee? Detroit? And if he did get through, what would he say? I’ve got an actual ship here, with survivors. Who would respond to that? Who would be dispatched?

George looked at the eleven alien children.

Paralyzed with indecision, he imagined how things might play out. If he called 9-1-1, the local police station, or any government office — and he got through — word would quickly go up the ladder. George knew where that ladder ended: the Army.

The military would come. These children would be taken away. Hidden. Studied. Interrogated.

What if someone did that to his children?

George looked at the phone. A sense of panic crept over him, lodged in his chest, burrowed in his heart. What if he did the wrong thing? A call could get the children killed. Not calling could mean they might die, because what the hell did he know about goddamn alien children? What did they eat? What needs did they have?

He was a fucking insurance salesman, for Christ’s sake.

Then, the phone’s single bar blinked out.

Zero bars.

No connection.

George started to shake. He’d missed his chance. How long until the cold pushed its way inside this shattered ship, started to freeze the very children he wanted to protect? Not just them: his friends would freeze as well, the boys he’d grown up with. And the one man who had helped them all understand what it meant to actually be a man? Mister Ekola was hurt; he needed help.

One bar re-appeared.

Maybe a chance to make only a single call before that bar blinked off again.

His thumbs worked the smartphone, bringing up a web browser. He had to get a number and get it fast.

One call . . . maybe he could save Mister Ekola and the children both with one call . . .

The guard escorted George to his room. Maybe ten minutes to himself, tops, then George had to get to the ship and check on the children. He always had to check on the children.

The children.

The goddamn children.

They had become his entire life, at the expense of the life that had been his before all of this started. Yes, a year ago he had been a simple insurance salesman. Now the face that looked at him from the mirror happened to be the most-recognized face on the planet.

What was it now . . . four billion YouTube views and counting? The interview had been downloaded and re-uploaded so many times no one really knew for sure just how many total views there were. A million views the very first day, he was told. Within two weeks, the interview had passed by that Korean guy with the funny glasses — and that one pop-singer girl who wore crazy outfits — to become the most-viewed video in the history of mankind.

The guard stopped at the door to George’s small room. Seemed like a nice enough kid, but he didn’t say much. None of the guards did. They were ordered not to, probably. Loneliness, lack of communication with other people — just more tools for the government to isolate the thorn in its side.

George entered. The guard stayed at the door.

Twelve feet by twelve feet. A twin bed. A small desk with a computer that let him send and receive screened email. Email, and nothing else. The irony was hard to process: the Internet’s most popular person wasn’t allowed to use the Internet.

He checked email. Like clockwork, the daily missive from his wife, Mary. This one started the way all of her emails started. First line, two words: Come home.

Then, a picture of the boys. Dressed in spandex singlets this time. Youth wrestling must be starting up. God, but they were so beautiful.

Michael and Luke had grown so much. When George had left for his two-week hunting trip, Michael had been six, Luke, eight. Now they were seven and nine. George had missed an entire year of their life. A year and counting that he would never get back.

Luke had stopped smiling for pictures. George wasn’t sure when. A year ago, the boy had been all giggles and squeals. Now every shot of him showed a scowl, a frown. Was that normal for a growing boy, or was it because his father was gone? Mary said it was a phase, but George knew the meaning behind her words — the phase wouldn’t have happened if George had been around.

After come home and the picture, the usual update. The boys’ grades were slipping. Luke had gotten into a fight at school. Both of them were being more and more disrespectful at home.

How much of that was boys growing up, and how much of it was Mary, unintentionally easing up on the reins, letting the boys run wild because it would carve at George, make him want to give up this fool’s quest and come home? He hoped he was wrong about that, but he had been with Mary most of his adult life; deep down inside, in the places he tried to ignore, he knew of his wife’s expertise at subtle manipulation.

He closed the email without replying. As the weeks rolled on, there was less and less to say. In his head he knew he was doing the right thing, that he was standing up for the faceless masses who didn’t trust their governments, their police, their military. He was preserving a cultural touchstone that wouldn’t come again in his lifetime, in his children’s lifetime . . . perhaps in all the human lifetimes to follow. It was important. In his head he knew that, but in his heart, he was just a man who desperately missed his family.

And if he left this place to see them, he would never be allowed to return.

George rubbed at his face.

It was time to check on the children.

He left his room. The guard turned sharply on one heel, knowing where George was going and leading the way without being told. George followed, amazed as always that this had all begun with one simple phone call.

George finished his call. Or, rather, the call finished for him when the signal dropped. The bars vanished and didn’t return. He was pretty sure he’d given good directions before he’d been cut off. If so, he would find out soon enough.

Through the hull’s cracks, the wind eased from a howl to a moan. The storm died down, like all storms do.

He heard Toivo arguing with Bernie. George couldn’t make out the words. Toivo sounded pissed. Maybe he was campaigning for the others to join him, to murder the children.

Exactly how far was George willing to go to stop that from happening?

“Don’t know what to do,” he said.

The children didn’t answer.

“You guys are a big help.”

The words turned to white as they left his mouth.

Temperature dropping. Winter’s fist was slowly squeezing tight around the wreck, snatching away what heat remained.

The children . . . they were shivering.

From the cold? Maybe. Or, maybe, from fear.

He terrified them.

Which was fine, because they terrified him.

A human shape that could never be mistaken as actually human. Two arms and two legs, but thin, so thin, tree branches come to life with fluid motion. Black eyes — three, not two — set in heads too big for the deathcamp-skinny bodies. And those mouths . . . George did all he could not to look at their mouths.

An hour passed.

A banging on the door. The sound reverberated through the room, bounced off the twelve crash chambers, or shock seats, or whatever the capsules were that had kept these children alive while their parents had been turned into paste. The children flinched at the sound, huddled together, made noises that sounded frightened and pathetic.

George unslung his rifle. He held it nervously in both hands. He thought of slinging it again — was he going to threaten his lifelong friends or something? The pounding came again. George decided to hold onto the weapon.

He pushed the door open.

There stood Toivo and Jaco. Toivo, who had already executed one of the children, and Jaco, little Jaco, who had shown more bravery than George and the others combined.

“Give me your phone,” Toivo said.

George didn’t move.

Jaco stared past George, at the children. He hadn’t seen them yet. The man seemed oddly calm in light of the situation. George wondered if Jaco wanted to kill them, just like Toivo did.

“The phone,” Toivo said, holding out a hand palm-up. “Bernie’s phone ain’t got shit for signal. Mister Ekola isn’t doing great, we need to try and get help.”

George nodded absently. “Already called someone,” he said.

That caught Jaco’s attention. “Who?”

“Ambulance,” George said. “That’s part of the deal.”

“What deal?” Toivo said.

George was suddenly unsure if he’d given enough info before the call cut off. Did they know where to go?

“I had a signal but it’s gone,” George said. “I made a call. Help is coming.”

Toivo’s eyes hardened. “For the last time, Georgie — give me your phone.”

Any pretense of friendship had evaporated. Three decades they had known each other, come here every year to reconnect, shared all the experiences life had to offer. It was all gone. If George had raised his rifle as Toivo had, if, together, they had slaughtered these helpless beings, that friendship would have been strengthened beyond any measure — but George had chosen otherwise.

He pulled the phone out of his pocket and handed it over. Jaco and Toivo huddled over it as if it had a secret warmth that might chase away the encroaching winter.

“No bars,” Toivo said. He looked at Jaco. “And it’s almost out of power, eh? What are we gonna do? How do we get Mister Ekola to da hospital?”

Jaco stared at the phone for a moment, perhaps hoping for a connection to suddenly appear. He shrugged.

“I dunno, eh? Maybe we can see if da snowmobile made it through da explosion?”

The three men — and the eleven alien children — fell silent. In that void, the sound of the wind, dying even further, from a moan to a whisper. And through that whisper, another noise. The faint, growing whine of a distant siren.

Jaco and Toivo looked at George.

“You called an ambulance?” Toivo said.

George nodded.

Jaco shook his head. “There’s a fucking alien invasion, and you got an ambulance to come out to da middle of nowhere? How? And da roads are snowed shut — how did you pull this off, Georgie?”

George shouldered his rifle. He felt nervous without it in his hands, naked, as if his friends might suddenly aim and fire, taking more innocent lives. He glanced at his friends’ weapons, at them, until they got the hint. The attitude of both men had changed: Somehow, George had got help for the man who had raised them all.

They both slung their rifles.

“Let’s get outside,” George said. “It will take us at least thirty minutes to hike back to the cabin. We need to be there when they come, or they might drive on by.”

George would later learn that the alien attack had failed within the first twelve hours. Ships had appeared out of nowhere over the skies of the biggest cities in the most-advanced nations: Beijing, New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Mumbai, Berlin and more.

Trouble was, the most-advanced nations had the most-advanced militaries. Air-to-air missiles blew flying saucers out of the sky, turned them into flaming wrecks that plummeted into the cities below. Some US pilots said it was like shooting down a space shuttle — a target that couldn’t dodge, that exploded easily and spectacularly. Others used more colloquial terms: It was like shooting flaming arrows at hydrogen-filled fish swimming in a barrel of jet fuel.

Maybe the plan had been to take out the strongest first, in hopes that the weakest would then surrender. Whatever the reason, it turned out that the great military minds of the attacking aliens weren’t that great. Some guessed they weren’t military at all. Sociologists theorized that the invasion was more religious than military in nature, that it was more the covered wagons of armed civilians crossing the great plains than it was the landing craft of D-Day.

One thing seemed certain: The ships that attacked were not built for battle. Now it was assumed that the aliens had gone to war with what they had, because they had no place else to go. The children were proof that their species could breathe just fine on Earth. After some trial and error, they were able to safely eat many kinds of food. The aliens, so the theory went, had to abandon their own planet, and Earth was the only place they could reach.

They could have tried to communicate, but instead they declared war, and they paid dearly.

The conflict had been so fast, so decisive, that the only alien ship left intact was one that hadn’t fought at all — the one that crashed not far from George’s hunting cabin. Some assumed it was destined for Chicago before the malfunction that brought it down. Every other vessel had been engulfed in flame, then hit the ground like a bomb. End result: very little material remained intact. Very little material, and no survivors — save for George’s eleven charges.

Through the thrice-daily interviews, George had learned there were no known alien survivors except for “the children.” That made them beyond important, an immeasurable resource. If there were other survivors, they were locked up tight in some secret government location. People speculated that was true. George was one of those people.

The invasion changed the world, but not in the way scifi authors or great intellectuals might have predicted. Governments didn’t come together. If anything, they were more divided than ever. What changed was the people. The people came together, ignoring racial and cultural divides. They came together with one common interest: absolute distrust of authority. Among the countless conspiracy theories was the top dog of them all: that governments knew what had been coming and hadn’t warned their people. Theories like that weren’t new. They’d been part of the populace since governments had formed. What was new was a technology that no government could completely control. The Internet. Cell phones. Local networks. People organizing, encrypting, working together as one against anything that smacked of authority. In the years before the invasion, people had come to fear their governments. Now, the governments feared the people — and with good reason.

George, Toivo, and Jaco stood by the ruins of a hunting cabin that had been the centerpiece of their friendship for three decades, the centerpiece of Mister Ekola’s relationship with his own childhood friends for the two decades before that. Over half a century of tradition, now nothing more than shattered timber and scattered camping supplies.

The wind’s ebb hadn’t lasted long. Whitened treetops swayed slightly. The woods were here before people. The woods would be here after people were gone. The woods just didn’t give a shit about any of this. Those trees bracketed a long stretch of white: the road, thick with snowdrifts three feet high, motionless waves in a snapshot of a frozen ocean.

And coming down that road, a moving spray of snow rising up in grand arcs, crashing to the sides in puffing clouds of white that caught the morning sun. Through those clouds, a pulsating orange light.

“Ambulance lights are red,” Toivo said.

“Not an ambulance,” Jaco said. “It’s a goddamn snowplow. Let me guess, Georgie — an ambulance is right behind it?”

George nodded. “I sure hope so.”

The flashing orange light came closer. As it did, the three men could make out the cabin of the snowplow itself, highway-maintenance orange seeming to surf on a flowing, crashing wave of snow.

Toivo turned to George. “How’d you get a snowplow to come out here, eh?”

Jaco laughed, the first time that sound had been heard since the alien ship had torn open the night sky with a boom so loud it shook the ground.

“Because it ain’t just da plow and da ambulance,” he said.

George hadn’t called the police. He hadn’t called the military (not that he would even know how to call the military, or if such a thing was even possible). And, he hadn’t called an ambulance — not directly anyway.

He’d called Channel 10.

The attack had hit major cities. As far as George knew, Houghton and Hancock — the closest cities of any size at all — hadn’t been hit. The hospitals wouldn’t be flooded, the ambulances wouldn’t be swamped. He hoped that if he acted fast enough, he could put someone to work getting the resources needed to help Mister Ekola.

Not knowing how long his connection would last, George had talked fast, not caring who answered the phone, hoping that whoever it was could remember all the info.

He’d been so nervous he’d been shaking. He’d known, somehow, that he was committing himself to something big, something long-term. The words had rushed out of him. He’d heard his own voice as if there were two of him, one speaking on the phone, the other listening to every syllable.

I don’t have long, so take notes. My name is George Pelton. I grew up around here. An alien ship crashed near my deer camp. It came down during the storm. No one saw it, but you don’t have much time before the major networks and the military come. I can show you the ship. I have alien survivors — I can put them on camera. If you want this story, you need to get here as fast as you can. The roads are snowed-in — find a way to get here. You have to bring an ambulance, and no police. If there isn’t an ambulance, I won’t show you. If there are police, I won’t show you. One reporter, one cameraman. I’m giving you three hours to get an ambulance here, or I’m calling Fox News.

George had given the cabin’s address, then the signal had dropped. Even if he’d had a full cellular connection, how many calls would he have had to make to try and get an ambulance and a snowplow out here? Would anyone have even listened to him? Maybe, maybe not, but a reporter, a motivated reporter, would do anything in his or her power to make it happen. That’d been George’s guess, and from the way things turned out, he’d guessed right.

Paramedics worked on Mister Ekola. George was still in the room with the children, but had caught a few snippets of conversation, enough to know that Mister Ekola would be all right. George’s friends clustered around the old man and the paramedics. Other than a smile from Bernie, knowing nods from Toivo and Jaco — the three friends’ way of saying thanks to George — they didn’t give a damn about the reporter, the cameraman, or the alien children.

George stood in front of the children, who clustered together, cowering. Maybe they didn’t know the difference between a rifle and a camera. How could they? The last time a human had pointed something at them, one of their friends had died.

Surprisingly, George recognized the reporter — a woman named Nancy Oostergard. Even though he didn’t live up here anymore, he’d seen her faces on billboards in the area. That was because she wasn’t a “reporter” at all — she was the nightly news anchor. Maybe the anchor of a small-town station didn’t have a lot of pull on the national scene, but she had enough to be the one that drove out on the freshly plowed road to do this shoot.

“Mister Pelton, are you ready?” Nancy asked.

George nodded.

Nancy stood by him, her left shoulder almost touching his right, a microphone in her hand.

The cameraman re-settled the camera on his shoulder, then switched on the lights mounted atop the rig. The small room lit up. The children squealed in fear, clutched at each other even tighter.

“Four . . . three . . . two . . .” the cameraman said.

Nancy took a slow, deep breath through her nose, let it out even slower through her mouth.

“This is Nancy Oostergard, reporting live from near Eagle Harbor. I am inside a crashed UFO, the same kind that has laid waste to cities all across the planet. This ship has actual alien survivors, the first we’ve heard of through the sporadic reports coming from across the planet.”

George watched the cameraman step to the side, trying to get a shot of the children. The children saw this — as a huddled, mewling pack, they moved to keep George between them and the camera.

“Yes, these are actual aliens,” Nancy said.

The camera swung back sharply, locked on Nancy and George.

“They were discovered by this man, George Pelton,” she said. “He was here on a hunting trip with his friends. Mister Pelton, could you describe what you saw the night this ship crashed?”

The camera’s small light burned brightly, nearly blinding George. How did reporters stare into that night after night? Was he on local TV? Or was this signal carried across America? Across the world? He shouldn’t be doing this. He should be in the other room with his friends helping get Mister Ekola through the deep woods and to the ambulance waiting by the cabin.

“Mister Pelton?” Nancy said. “This is a live signal. I’m told we’re being watched all over the globe. Can you describe what you saw?”

George took one look behind him, at the children. Cowering, terrified. He looked at the walls, at the crash seats the children’s parents had used to keep their beloved little ones alive. And in that moment, something deep inside of George awakened.

Awakened and took over.

He looked dead into the camera.

“These kids haven’t done anything to anyone,” he said. “They’re helpless. They’re innocent. Everyone watching this, we can’t let the government get them, cut them up, study them. What if they were your kids? Would you want your babies butchered?”

The cameraman moved again, tried to get an angle. The children were too many to fully hide behind George, but they tried anyway.

George took one step toward the camera, leaned toward the lens.

“They’re just kids,” he said. “I’ll stay with them, try to keep them safe, report to the world however I can, till we know they won’t be killed for some experiment. I’ll stay with them. The government lies — I don’t.”

If only he had known the way the world would interpret his words. If he had, would he have said them?

“Mister Pelton, ready to go in?”

George stared at the airlock door, at the guard standing next to it. Behind that door lay the ruined ship. In a matter of days, the Army had built a huge pole barn around the wrecked vessel; within a week, they’d built a second building inside the first, one that covered the alien vessel like a shell. That was where George was headed now.

The dead bodies had been removed, the debris cleared away, and the wreck had been scanned for radiation, poisons, gasses, anything that might harm a physiology humans knew very little about. Nothing dangerous had been discovered. Not knowing what might hurt the aliens, the government scientists had decided to leave them in their own ship.

“Mister Pelton?”

“Yes,” George said automatically. “Thank you, I’m ready.”

Thank you . . . ever the Midwestern boy.

The guard nodded. He wouldn’t be coming. Another guard would be waiting inside, this one in a hazmat suit. Everyone entering the wreck wore one. Everyone except George. The children had been exposed to him, after all, and he’d been exposed to them.

George knew that if he left to see his own children, he wouldn’t be allowed back in because of potential pathogens he might bring with him. New bacteria. Contaminants. The government would have a reason to cut him out of the picture, to tell the world that he was now a potential danger to the children instead of their protector.

If not that reason, they would find another. If he left this place, it was over.

George often wondered why he’d said the things he’d said when that camera light flicked on. He’d never been very political, never believed in any conspiracy theories. At least not before this had started. He’d never been involved in local government. He hadn’t even watched the news. Yet that diatribe had flown out of him almost as if he’d written it in advance. It had made him a global sensation: the brave, selfless protector of alien children.

It also made him very much alone.

The airlock door opened. As expected, inside awaited a hazmat-suited guard.

George knew the children would be happy to see him. They would cling to him as they always did, ask him questions in a language he didn’t understand. The few words he’d learned weren’t enough to convey thoughts of any complexity. But he didn’t need to be fluent to understand what they wanted — they wanted to know when they could go home.

Trouble was, they were home. They were never going to leave.

If George stayed true to his word, neither was he.

He stepped forward. The airlock door closed behind him.