Author's Note: I've had this idea in my head for a while and have just gotten around to start actually writing it. Please bear with me while it takes me forever to update! I am a slow writer, partly due to perfectionism, so don't expect updates every day or anything. Has not been beta-ed, but if you would like to and this doesn't seem like a terrible story to you, feel free to PM me! Not even sure I want a beta at this point, but it can't hurt to put it out there. Any mistakes are my own, but please let me know in the reviews of anything you feel is stupid/weird/would never happen in the show/I got wrong/etc. As long as you are nice about it, I greatly appreciate ANY feedback, positive and negative, and will take it into consideration for future chapters, or in correcting errors in chapters already out. So thanks for reading that long intro and hope you enjoy!
Oh, and I don't own Falling Skies, the premise, or the characters you see on TV, but there are a whole bunch of characters in this story that you haven't seen on the show. I do own them. Please don't use them or repost this fic without permission. :-)
They were on their way to the annual family reunion at Aunt Rachel and Uncle Todd's when they first heard about the aliens.
In the backseat of the car, Alexis had her iPod turned up to drown out whatever oldies her parents had on the radio. Head leaning on the window, she watched the scenery pass by as they sped up I-95. They had just passed Bridgeport, their unofficial halfway point, and she was grateful. The landscape kept her occupied in fits, but already she was getting restless. Six hours in a car did that to anyone – especially with her family in the car with her.
Her dad was driving; she could see him up front, rocking out to the music, reliving his younger days. Her mom was in the passenger seat, so Alexis couldn't see her, but Alexis guessed she was trying to restrain herself from strangling her husband – a good thing, too, because that might crash the car. Although at this point all of its occupants might not mind if it meant an end to the torture that was her dad's renditions of past hits. Corey had commented once that the only thing worse than his singing was a screeching cat dragging its claws across a chalkboard. They'd all laughed, but it wasn't too far from the truth in Alexis' opinion.
Corey was in the seat next to Alexis, zoned out to some handheld game. Alexis had never been into that stuff, but it was a staple of any long car ride for Corey. He was older by two years, a senior in high school, so she had long teased him about playing kids games – until she had realized all of her friends were playing them, too.
Alexis enjoyed reading over playing video games any day, but she'd already finished one book this road trip, so she was taking a break. Besides, reading and listening to loud music (the kind she used to drown out her dad with) was hard; the music was too distracting. She preferred a quiet place to read – her bedroom late at night when no one else was awake and she was long supposed to be asleep was usually it.
A smack to her arm abruptly brought Alexis out of her reverie. Scowling over at her brother, she mouthed, "What?" and pointed to her earbuds, indicating she was listening to music. She really didn't feel like turning her music down just so he could tell her which level he'd just beat on whatever game he was playing.
His face serious, he mimed at her to take out her earbuds and pointed towards the front seat. Furrowing her eyebrows at his insistence, she paused the music and took the earbuds out of her ears, "What do you want? Cuz, seriously, if I have to listen to Dad's idea of singing because you –"
"Shhh!" her mom said, turning her head to the backseat. "Listen!" She pointed, too, at the radio.
Must be important; her dad had stopped "singing" and her mom was also telling her to listen. Turning her attention to the radio, she realized she'd been talking over a man's voice.
"–no indication as of yet what the intentions of these beings might be. We do not yet know where they came from or why they came here, but efforts are underway to open a channel of communication between us and them."
"Robert," a woman's voice cut over the air, "we know there is one over New York City, but we are also getting reports in that these ships are appearing over other major cities across the nation. Do you know anything about these other ships? Can you fill us in on what's happening in other cities right now?"
"Well, Sandra, I know there are other ships in other cities, including Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Seattle, among numerous others, but at the moment we don't have any more information on them. As I said, we will be attempting to communicate with and, uh, start a conversation with whoever is controlling these ships. We will be extending a hand in greeting and are excited to see where this meeting will take us. Today marks the end of an era in which we wondered if we were alone in the universe. It marks the beginning of an era in which we can look up at the stars and know that there is more out there than we could have imagined."
"Well said, and thank you, Robert, for your time. We are all hoping for the best in this first contact."
"Thank you, Sandra."
"We will be returning in just a few minutes with Dr. Gary Sulzer from the University of Berkeley, California's Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence program, known as SETI, for an outline of the next steps of this meeting, which has long been on the minds of all those involved in SETI. In the meantime, please stay with us while your normal music program is resumed."
Suddenly some 80s metal song was blasting through the speakers again. Her dad turned it far down so that it was barely audible.
No one spoke for a few moments, each of them trying to absorb what they had just heard.
Then Corey grinned and said, "This is awesome! It's just like War of the Worlds!"
Alexis blurted out the first thing that came to her mind. "Which one? The book, the radio show, or one of the movies?"
He rolled his eyes and ignored her question, but Alexis really did want to know. There was a big difference. The radio show had been a hoax. But the book and every movie about it had been quite real (in canon, of course), and quite deadly. Neither possibility – hoax or real – appealed to her.
"George, do you think this could be real? Do you think it's really happening?" she heard her mom whisper in the front seat. Why she was whispering Alexis didn't know, because she and Corey could still hear her from the backseat.
Her dad was silent for a moment. "I'm not sure," he said carefully. "We'll have to wait until we get to Boston and check it out from there. If it's somebody pulling a prank, there'll be something about it online."
This seemed to satisfy her mother, at least for the moment. Alexis wondered if it was a hoax how anyone could pull anything like this off. Not spaceships in the sky – she had yet to see one of them. If this was a hoax, most likely it was just someone hijacking the airwaves – still a feat, but certainly not alien spacecrafts. Then it would be like the radio show. But if it were like the book, or one of the movies…
The car was void of discussion for a while after that. They kept the radio on in case there were more updates, though that was mostly for her parents. Alexis' attention was trained on her phone, only barely keeping an ear open in case anything interesting came over the radio. Her phone's internet connection kept cutting in and out as they sped up the interstate, the phone trying and failing to keep up with their pace. She'd get a signal for a few seconds before it would cut out again, sending her phone back to searching for a signal. Alexis sighed in frustration as yet another one of her texts failed to go through.
One of her friends back home, Bethany, had mass texted everyone to tell them about a ship over Philadelphia. Apparently it was hovering over Center City, and it was massive. Not a hoax, then, Alexis thought, a thrill of excitement running through her. Opening her facebook page, she saw that almost every status update on her news feed from the last half hour was about the ships. Some of her friends and classmates were saying how it was all a big hoax, but others were posting pictures of the supposed alien ships. One came from a friend who had moved to Colorado last year, and another from a friend in Spain.
"Hey, guys! Maria says there's one of those ships over Madrid."
"CNN says they're in every major city across the world," Corey informed her, holding his phone up. "As you would say, that was so five minutes ago!"
Alexis gave him a sour look. "I haven't talked like that since 3rd grade, nitwit."
"Whatever, nerd," he said, turning back to his phone.
Alex rolled her eyes and was about to go back to her own phone when she realized that the woman on the radio was talking again.
"And now we go live to Washington, D.C., where representatives are discussing what the United States' – and Earth's – response to these extraterrestrials should be. Jerry?"
"Thank you, Sandra. While no one has yet seen the ones piloting these ships, all experts are agreeing there can be no doubt that these are not of terrestrial origin. The president has called…"
Alexis spent the rest of the ride half-listening to the people on the radio prattle on, half-reading things on her phone. She found more pictures and a few short videos of people closer to the ships, and she didn't know what to make of them. Some of them were from farther away, so you could see the whole ship, but it was so far away that you couldn't make out any detail. She found a few that were from people right underneath the ships, and they showed lots of edges and contours in the hull of the ships, but Alexis didn't really know what she was looking at. She'd always been a sci-fi fan, but she didn't know what a real spaceship looked like. No one did.
The whole situation had her hooked. She tried to imagine where these aliens might have come from, what they might look like, why they might be here. Astronomy and anything to do with space was one of her obsessions, so she spent the ride trying to recall any pertinent facts, like stars close to Earth that could have inhabitable planets.
They were somewhere past Hartford on I-84 when the ship entered their view. At first Alexis didn't even know she was looking at it. It was a blob barely above the horizon, and it was impossible to see any detail, but that she could see it from this many miles away spoke to its size. From here all she could discern was a long, thin structure, its length maybe about half the diameter of a full moon.
Alexis watched it as they drove up I-84, thankful she was on the passenger side, which allowed her to keep an eye on it out the window. By the time they hit I-90, it had grown a little in size, but it still wasn't even as big as the moon, and she certainly couldn't see any details. And then once they turned onto I-90, they were moving towards it almost head-on, so it was hard to get a decent angle to see. Every left curve of the road had Alexis jerking her head up to catch a glimpse of it through the glass.
Slowly but surely it grew larger on the horizon and she began to make out some of the features she'd seen online earlier. She still didn't know what to call anything, but she took it all in, memorizing everything she could. They were crossing I-495 now and while it had to be twice the size of the moon, it still clung stubbornly to the horizon. Too far away to get any decent pictures or video, she contented herself with imprinting their approach to the ship hovering over the city into her memory.
As they hit I-95, her dad announced nonchalantly, "Crossing over Yankee Division now; we should be there in about a half an hour."
Alexis stared at the back of his seat uncertainly. Didn't he see that they were approaching an alien spaceship? He must really be stressing, she decided finally. He used to announce different points on their trip when they were younger, but he hadn't done it in quite a few years. Apparently he was reverting back to their elementary school days in wake of the news that aliens were real. That or he had simply forgotten how old his children were.
Turning back to the ship, Alexis realized that it had grown to almost the size of the Andromeda Galaxy. It was frustrating how large it now loomed yet how far away it still was. She didn't have control of the car and she knew her parents would never go to see the thing. They were the ones who sat at home and watched the news, not the ones on TV making it. Thinking a bit further, though, she realized she should be able to persuade her aunt to take her.
Mind made up to get a closer look at ground zero, Alexis took one last glance out at the ever-larger ship in the sky over Boston, leaned back in her seat, and smiled. It would be a weekend to remember.
A/N: Boring first chapter, I know, sorry. Just trying to get everything set up. So…what do you think? Obviously nothing much has happened yet, but please drop me a line with what you think if you can! It means more than you know! Just please no flames. If you didn't like it, please tell me why, but there's no reason for your review to leave me in tears. ;-) Thanks!
Also, if you didn't know, the title of this chapter is from the introduction to Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" radio show. I'm fascinated with it and highly recommend reading the transcript, which can be found a couple places online (alas, I seem unable to put a link here *sigh*).