The End Is Nigh

Scott Sigler — THE FIFTH DAY OF DEER CAMP

“There’s a rabid badger in my skull,” Toivo said. He looked up from the bucket in which his face had been hidden for the last ten minutes. “I’m sure of it, eh?”

George tried to ignore Toivo. He took another look at his poker hand, as if somehow the cards had changed in the four seconds since he’d looked at them last: nope, still three kings.

He looked across the table. Jaco had a glint in his eye, at least as much of one as George could see behind the cabin light glaring off Jaco’s huge glasses. Jaco was a good player—as one of the top accountants in Houghton, he could do the math with the best of them—but the little guy had never been able to control his tells. The tip of his tongue peeked out from the left corner of his mouth. That only happened when Jaco had something good, but was what he had good enough to beat three kings?

You’ve got two pair, you little shit, I can tell. Your lip twitches like that when you have two pair.

Toivo let out a long groan. “Oh, jeeze,” he said. “I don’t feel so good, eh? And it’s freezing in here, did someone leave da door open again?”

To George’s left, Bernie set his cards flat on the table, set them down hard enough to rattle the empty cans of Pabst and jostle the semi-full ones.

“Holy crap, Toivo,” Bernie said. “Either get back in da game, go to sleep, or just shut up. We’re trying to play cards here.”

“A woodchuck,” Toivo said. “Rabid. I’m telling ya.”

George sighed, annoyed that Toivo’s whining was cutting into the game.

“You just drank too much,” he said. “I told you sausage doesn’t soak up beer in your belly—that’s a wives’ tale. And it’s cold in here because it’s November, you idiot. Put on a third sweater if you’re cold.”

Toivo burped. “A grown man can never drink too much.”

Arnold laughed. He was seated at George’s right. Arnold—or Mister Ekola, as he had been known when George was a kid—had been coming here longer than any of them, had once shared this place with his grade school friends. Now his son Bernie did the same, the tradition passed down from one generation to the next.

Arnold’s friends had died off over the years, the victims of age, heart disease, cancer… whatever the Grim Reaper could come up with, really. Creeping middle age made George realize, more and more every day, that the same fate awaited he, Jaco, Toivo, and Bernie. Many winters from now, which one of them would be like Arnold?

“Well, Toivo, then maybe you aren’t a grown man,” Arnold said. “Now be quiet so I can take these losers’ money. I know when my son is bluffing.”

“Screw you, Dad,” Bernie said.

Toivo put his face in his hands. “Oh, jeeze… maybe I should go to da hospital.”

George lowered his cards. “Sure, Toivo. That little access road outside is snowed shut, so you can’t take the truck. Hell, M-26 is probably snowed shut, too, so how about you take the snowmobile and drive to Lake Linden? Should only take you an hour and a half.”

“Dress warm,” Arnold said. “About ten below out there, eh?”

Jaco snorted. “Ten, hell. More like thirty with wind chill.”

“Thirty easy,” Bernie said. “And if you drive that Arctic Cat off da trail, snow’s at least four feet deep. Hey, Toivo—if you get stuck and die, can I have your thirty-thirty? That’s a nice gun.”

Toivo stared at each of the four men in turn. “You guys are dicks,” he said, then put his face back in the bucket and threw up again.

George decided to risk his three kings against whatever Jaco had. Arnold’s wrinkled old fingers were holding his cards an inch from his face, so close his bushy eyebrows almost brushed against the five faded logos of a white “G” inside a yellow oval set against a green background. Arnold didn’t like wearing his glasses at deer camp, unless they were actually out hunting, which meant he almost never wore them. His glasses—much thinner than Jaco’s heavy frames—lay folded up in front of his can of Pabst.

This scene: the game, the people, the beers, the cabin, the freezing cold, Toivo over-imbibing like he did every year, it was all part of a grand tradition. If they counted Arnold’s glory years, this group had been coming to this shack in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—the U.P., or “da Yoop,” as the locals called it—every November for over forty years. Unless any of them visited Milwaukee, which wasn’t that often, this annual two-week trip was the only time George saw his childhood friends and the only man who had bothered to teach him right from wrong. So many little rituals, from the cheap beer to cases of ammo that were never used, from opening-night bratwurst to the closing-day cleaning party, it was all to be celebrated and treasured.

Maybe George had moved on in life, sure. Maybe he’d worked to get rid of his Yooper accent, learned to say “the” instead of “da,” “yes” instead of “yah,” because in the big city he thought that made him sound dumb. Just because he felt the need to change, though, didn’t mean he thought his friends should. Bernie, Toivo, and Jaco looked a little older every year, but to George they would be forever ten, forever fifteen, forever eighteen, forever the ages they’d been as—together—they had discovered who they were.

But as kids or adults, what they weren’t were good card players.

George stared at Arnold, trying to pick off Arnold’s tells. Unlike Jaco, though, Arnold was damn near unreadable. He might have a full house, he might have crap—there was almost no way to tell.

Bernard smacked his cards down on the table again. “Dammit, George, you going to play or what?”

George was. These boys were about to learn a valuable—and extremely costly—lesson.

“Okay, Bernie,” George said. “I’ll see your five—” George took a five dollar bill off his pile and set it on top of the stack of money at the table’s center “—and let’s send the kiddies home so the adults can play. I’ll raise you ten.”

Arnold’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “I’m out,” he said. He tossed his cards down.

“Dammit, Dad,” Bernie said. “It’s my bet, you’re supposed to wait for me and Jaco to go before you fold.”

Arnold stood, hitched up his flannel long john bottoms by yanking up on the red suspenders attached to them. “I’m retired,” he said. “I don’t wait for shit, eh?”

He glanced up at the ratty cabin’s peaked wooden ceiling, eyes squinting as if he were looking for something. His hand blindly felt around the table for his glasses. Then, George heard something—the same sound Arnold must’ve heard seconds earlier: the distant, deep roar of a jet engine.

Arnold put on his glasses. “Assholes,” he said. “That’s all we need is some damn plane spooking the deer.”

Jaco giggled. There was no other way to describe the sound: Most men “laughed,” Jaco made a noise that would have been more at home in the body of a twelve-year-old girl showing off a tea party dress than a forty-year-old man wearing the same snowsuit he’d had on for five straight days, taking it off only to handle his business out in the woods.

“Deer should be scared of something,” he said. “They sure aren’t scared of us. Are we going to at least try to hunt this year?”

Arnold grabbed his can of Pabst. “If we run out of beer before the snow stops falling and the plows pass by, sure. Good thing we got twenty cases, eh? I’m going to take a leak. Jaco, try not to freeze to death, you damn pansy.”

The old man opened the cabin’s rickety door and stepped out into the winter night, letting in a strong gust of crisp wind and a scattering of blowing snow.

Jaco shivered. “See what I mean? Freezing my balls off when we could be somewhere insulated.”

“What balls?” Bernie said.

Jaco had more money than the rest of them combined. Every year for the last three or four deer seasons, he’d begged to get a better cabin. He even offered to pay the difference. But straying from the path was not allowed—since George and Jaco and Bernard had been old enough to drink they had come here with Arnold, and here they would continue to come when their own sons were old enough to join, and keep coming until they either died or grew so old they couldn’t handle two weeks of bitter Upper Peninsula cold.

Bernie scratched at his beard. Not even a week in and it was damn near full. The guy had some kind of mutation, of that George was sure.

“Bernie, put up or shut up,” George said. “Ten dollars to you.”

Bernie reached for his money, then paused—he looked up to the cabin’s thin, peaked roof, just like his father had moments earlier. Jaco did the same, as did George. That jet had grown louder. Much louder.

The empty cans of Pabst started to rattle like ominous little tin chimes.

“Oh, jeeze,” Toivo said. “My head hurts so bad it’s roaring.”

The cabin door opened and Arnold rushed in, stumbling from the long johns pulled halfway up his thighs, the suspenders flapping wildly.

“Get down, eh? It’s right on top of us!”

George was about to ask the man what was going on, but the jet engine grew so loud it had to be right above the cabin. George dove under the table, bumping it hard as he did, sending empties and cards and money flying. He hit the wooden floor hard and lay there for only a split second before it seemed to bounce up below him, the entire cabin rattling like a big box of dry wood.

Moments later, George opened the cabin door and rushed out into the freezing night. Jaco, Bernie, Arnold, and Toivo came out behind him, all pulling on jackets or stomping feet into heavy winter boots as they walked. Falling snow ate up the sound, but the woods were even quieter than normal, as if the low-flying jet had intimidated the entire landscape into a terrified silence.

When the sun had gone down six hours earlier, the trees—both lush pines and bare-branched hardwoods—had been blanketed in blazing white. Most of that covering had fallen off, swatted away by the jet’s roar to join the thick snowpack already on the ground.

Clouds blocked out all but a dim, hazy glow of the moon. The only light came from the naked bulb above the cabin’s door.

George glanced at the cabin roof. It, too, was suddenly bare, just a few clumps of snow sticking to the weathered tin. He was a little surprised to see the cabin had remained in one piece. Pots had fallen off hooks and crashed around the wood stove, and all kinds of bat and bird shit had rained down from the old roof, but the one-room building seemed to be fine.

Jaco’s Jeep Grand Cherokee had two feet of snow on it and around it. Other than the Arctic Cat—which was so buried it was little more than a snowbank—the Jeep was the only way to go the crash victims, or to get them help.

Arnold pointed north. A wall of trees lay in that direction, but if you walked that way for about five minutes you would come out on the pristine shore of Lake Superior: untouched, icy rock beaches lining dense, snow covered forest that stretched forever, the black water reaching out so far it vanished into the night.

“The thing was going that way,” Arnold said. “Dark as it is out, the clouds should be lit up where it crashed. We’d see a fire from miles away.”

“Maybe it landed,” Jaco said.

Arnold hawked a loogie and spat it onto the snow. “Where, exactly, might it land? Ain’t no airport around here can even take a prop plane let alone that big-ass thing that flew over, eh?”

Twice in rapid succession, Arnold had said thing instead of plane or jet.

“Mister Ekola,” George said, “what exactly did you see?”

George had known the man since the second grade at Ontonagan Elementary, since the first time Bernie had invited he and Jaco home to play. Even now that George was in his forties—with a son of his own—he couldn’t bring himself to call Arnold by his first name, no matter how many times the man asked.

“Lights,” Arnold said. “Lots of lights. Goddamn big, eh? Don’t know what it was… but it wasn’t a jet.”

Bernie threw his hands up in frustration. “Dad, it was a jet. Your eyes are old as hell, remember?”

Arnold pointed to his glasses. “Had these on. Know what I saw.”

“It was a jet,” Bernie said.

Jaco walked to the cabin’s corner, taking big steps to push through the thigh-high snow. “I’ll check around back,” he said. “Maybe something out that way.”

Toivo rubbed at his temples. “Arnold is right, Bernie—there’s no airports around here. A jet makes that much noise could maybe land on da highway, but other than that, it would have had to crash, and if it crashed, we’d see fires or something.”

George pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “If it was a plane, maybe there’s news coverage. Let me see if I can get a signal.”

“Your phone hasn’t got shit all week,” Bernie said. “I left mine inside, I’ll grab it.” He turned and trudged back into the cabin.

George yelled after him: “And grab the flashlights.”

They had rushed out of the cabin expecting to see pillars of flame, had grabbed coats and boots and little else. Whatever was going on, they needed to slow down, think things through. Being outside at all in this weather could kill. If they were going to go through the woods looking for Arnold’s mystery non-plane, they had to use their heads.

George couldn’t get a signal. Being in the middle of the woods in one of the most rural and remote places in America, he wasn’t surprised. He put the phone away.

“Hey, guys?”

It was Jaco. He’d gone all the way behind the cabin and come around the other side. He was leaning heavily on the corner, as if he were suddenly exhausted. “You need to come see this. Right now.”

He ducked back out of sight. Arnold started after him, the old-timer more sure-footed through the snow than the men twenty-five years his junior.

George fell in behind. Bernie came out of the cabin, one flashlight in his right hand, another under his right arm. He waved his left hand; the glowing cell phone screen he held seemed to blaze like a comet.

“Told ya,” he said. “AT&T works in da big city, Georgie, but out here Verizon gets full signal. Hey, where you going?”

“Come on,” Arnold snapped. “Jaco saw something.”

George followed in Arnold’s footsteps, which was easier than plunging his feet into the thigh-deep snow. Bernie followed behind, putting his feet in the same spots. He handed George the extra flashlight. George turned it on, pointed the beam out in front of Arnold. The old man moved like he had the place memorized—he did, but the snow was deep and who knew what fallen log or stick might lie below the surface?

George felt a little embarrassed that the snow here was untouched save for Jaco’s fresh prints—he and his friends had barely left the cabin at all. Deer camp wasn’t really about deer; it was about drinking and sleeping and playing cards and telling stories, about making fun of each other, about hanging out with the people who had made grade school, junior high, and high school a great experience.

The four men turned the corner, saw Jaco standing between two towering pines, not even fifteen feet from the cabin. A lone set of footprints showed his path through the snow. George and Bernie’s flashlight beams spotlighted Jaco, and the fluffy white that came up almost to his crotch. He had his back to them. He stood still, yet he was shaking, and somehow George knew it wasn’t from the bitter cold.

Jaco looked down, looked at the lit-up white around him, then turned so fast George took a step back. The flashlight beams lit up his glasses, making him look like a movie android about to unleash a death ray.

“Turn off da damn lights,” he said in a snarling hiss.

Out of nowhere, little Jaco, the runt of their litter, had transformed into the scariest person George had ever seen. That wasn’t like Jaco, not at all—he was terrified.

Bernie’s flashlight blinked out. George fumbled with his own, then clicked it off. The entire world blackened for a split second, plunging George into a cold, dark, silent void. His eyes quickly adjusted—and the first thing he noticed was a glow coming from deep in the woods.

A green glow.

His friends had become reverse shadows, their faces and clothes spots of less-dark that moved and turned, all facing that strange light. They walked to Jaco, feet crunching loudly on undisturbed snow until they stood next to their friend.

George stared. He couldn’t tell how far away the lights were, exactly, but through the trees and the thick underbrush he could almost make out a shape. Not the shape of a big jet, like a 747, or even a prop plane for that matter, but instead a thick rectangle, the upright edges maybe twenty or thirty feet high. The lines parallel to the ground were much longer, maybe a hundred feet, maybe more.

A rectangle… or, the profile of a disc.

“That’s not a plane,” George said.

Arnold nodded. “Told ya.”

“Oh, jeeze,” Toivo said. “What da hell is that thing?”

Bernie shook his head in wide-eyed disbelief. “Sorry, Dad. Sorry. Guess there won’t be any news stories about a crashed plane.”

Arnold nodded. “Yah, that’s fine. Maybe you should look anyway, though. Check one of those news sites.”

Toivo crunched over to Bernie. “CNN? That’s a good one.”

Bernie stared, dumbfounded, at Toivo. “CNN?”

“Your phone,” George said. “You got signal, right?”

His own voice seemed oddly normal, when he knew it probably should have rang with panic. Something was very, very wrong, but Mister Ekola was standing right there and Mister Ekola was calm as could be.

Bernie twitched like someone had stabbed him with a fork. “Oh, shit, right.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out his phone. The screen blazed, lighting up slowly billowing cones of breath.

“Oh, jeeze,” Toivo said. “Turn down da brightness, eh?”

Bernie ripped off a glove and tossed it down, not even bothering to put it in his pocket, then stabbed at the screen with the tip of his finger.

Arnold put his arm around Jaco. “Son, are you all right?”

Jaco shook his head. “No, sir. I don’t think I am.”

“Yah, I suppose that’s to be expected,” Arnold said.

George stared at the man. How could he be so damn calm? George knew he should be the one to say something, to get things organized, but all of the sudden he was twelve again, and so was Bernie and Jaco and Toivo; Mister Ekola was the adult.

Jaco’s dad had died when he was just a toddler. George’s dad had left when George was eight, had never come back. Toivo’s dad had beaten the shit out of him more often than not, had sent Toivo to school with long-sleeved sweaters to hide the bruises on his arms. That had happened since at least the fourth grade, when Toivo’s family moved in, until the summer after the fifth grade, when Arnold had paid a visit to Toivo’s house and given Toivo’s dad a lesson on how to dish out a real beating. After that, Toivo’s dad walked with a limp; he also never laid another hand on his boy.

Arnold Ekola and his wife hadn’t just raised Bernie, they’d basically raised three more boys as well. For George and Jaco and Toivo, Arnold wasn’t their biological father, but he was their dad.

Mister Ekola knew what to do—he always had, he always would.

Bernard looked up from the phone.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Oh, god, Dad… it’s everywhere.”

Arnold squeezed Jaco’s shoulder, pointed out at the green lights.

“Jaco, can you keep an eye on that thing for me?”

Jaco nodded. “Sure, Mister Ekola. I can do that.”

“Good boy,” Arnold said. He turned to Bernie. “Exactly what is everywhere?”

Bernie pointed to the lighted rectangle. “That is. I mean, those are. Milwaukee, Boston, New York, it even says there’s one in Paris. It’s fucking aliens, Dad. That’s what CNN says.”

Toivo nodded. “Was bound to happen someday,” he said. “There’s lots of stars, dontchya know.”

Bernie pulled the phone closer to his face. “They’re landing all over the world. They’re attacking, killing people in the cities. Air Force is fighting them, Army’s been mobilized… Dad, we’re being invaded.”

George took two steps toward Bernie, snatched the phone out of his friend’s hand. They weren’t being invaded, that was ridiculous. There was some other explanation for this, shit like this didn’t happen.

One glance at the web page confirmed what Bernie had said. George tried to poke the screen, realized he, too, was wearing gloves. He tore them off and threw them down. The cold sent needle-stabs into his hands, the same way it had been stabbing his neck and face—he just hadn’t registered it.

George tried Fox News. Top story: New York On Fire, London Destroyed.

He looked at Yahoo: It’s Not a Movie: Our World is Invaded.

NBC: Invaders Overpowering Militaries Worldwide.

George’s eyes fuzzed; the screen blurred into nothing. He was at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, so deep in the woods there weren’t even paved roads. He was 370 miles away from his family.

My son, my wife… I have to get to Milwaukee.

George handed back the phone.

“Bernie’s right,” he said. “I don’t know why this one landed in the Yoop, Mister Ekola… but that’s an alien ship.”

Arnold nodded. He hawked a loogie, turned and spat so it wouldn’t hit any of his boys.

“Yah, I figured,” he said. “Let’s get back inside da cabin. Dress warm, get your guns, and make sure you have as much ammo as you can carry.”

The five men turned away from the green lights and walked back to the cabin, their feet crunching in the snow. Bernie slid his phone into his pocket, cutting off even that small light.

They walked into the cabin and silently went about their business, Arnold’s calming influence somehow stopping any of them from freaking out. They all had families to get back to, yet without saying a word they all knew that wasn’t going to happen right away. It felt like at least one of them should go crazy, scream about how he had leave, right now, and the others would have to wrestle him to the ground, but that didn’t happen. They all knew they had to wait until morning, at the very least—going out at night was to fear death from the cold just as much as fearing anything the aliens might do.

Still, George wasn’t completely free of crazy. As he put on a second sweater, then a third, he kept one eye on his Remington 700 rifle, and couldn’t help one thought from repeating in his head over and over:

Maybe it’s good we didn’t shoot at any deer—we might need all these bullets.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

New York Times bestselling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of the Infected trilogy (Infected, Contagious, and Pandemic), Ancestor, and Nocturnal, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing; and the co-founder of Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his Galactic Football League series (The Rookie, The Starter, The All-Pro and The MVP). Before he was published, Scott built a large online following by giving away his self-recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans, who named themselves “Junkies,” have downloaded over eight million individual episodes of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each other in the social media space.