They Came
Chapter One:
Regan University
Washington DC
December 21st, 2012
Though the dorm was supposed to be as quiet as the grave during finals week, one wouldn't know it from the volume. Since the university was in its infancy, having only opened in September, there weren't any hall directors with enough experience to get the kids to adhere to the noise policy. On the bright side most students, Andy included, had already taken their finals and were now packing for winter break so few people were actually being disturbed.
My soldiers march tonight in the city of your dreams
This beautiful army's tearing at your seams
Down on your knees, cure this disease
I'll take it all, everything I see
Oh, can't your hear this symphony?
Behind these walls we'll watch it fall
As our union crumbles into hell
It's not the end of the world now, baby,
So, c'mon, dry those tears
It's not the end of the world now darling,
But I can see it from here
"-on Earth?" Jordan, Andy's roommate, shouted over the Lostprophets song he had blasting. The majority of Jordon's music collection was too obscure for anyone, including Andy, to have ever heard of but they did share an interest in this particular band so Andy didn't mind it being loud. Mostly.
However, he had no idea what his roommate was saying, so he reached for their stereo and turned it down. "What did you say?"
"I asked if you have any special plans for your last night on Earth," Jordan repeated.
Andy grinned at him. "My last night on Earth? I'm not the one who has to get an A on a geology final to pass, so why would I be the one whose parents killed him over break?"
"No, not that, man," Jordan said, shaking his head hard enough to make his hat fall over one eye. Andy liked the guy, but his wardrobe meant people could make him for a hipster at 20 yards. "Tomorrow is the end of the world for all of us. At least according to the Mayan calendar."
"Oh that," Andy said with a smirk. He bit his tongue to keep from blurting out his father's alien invasion theory. "You don't really believe that crap, do you?"
Jordan shrugged. "How do you explain all those fish died otherwise?" There had been a news report earlier in the week of thousands and thousands of fish washing up on beaches, all dead.
"Not to sea turning to blood," Andy said shortly. "It'll turn out to be a red algae bloom, just watch. There was a reasonable explanation for those birds dying last year, and it'll happen again here too."
Jordan began to laugh. "Andy, you've got to lighten up. It sounds like you've had run-ins with true believers."
"Well..." Andy squirmed inside, if only Jordon knew. As much as he was glad that he was going to be going home tomorrow, he wasn't looking forward to "waiting" for an alien invasion. He was pretty sure that his father wouldn't take being proven wrong very well.
"I only brought up the end of the world because there's a party with that theme tonight. Wanna come? It's about time we find you a nice girl."
Andy tried not to cringe - Jordan's idea of what made for a nice girl was miles apart from his own. "Sorry, I better finish packing. And then I have a paper I still haven't turned in. Maybe next time."
"Okay," Jordan said as he clapped him on the shoulder. "But you're going to regret it if the world really does then tomorrow."
"If the world ends, I'll add missing the party to my list of regrets," Andy promised. "But if we all die, how will we have regrets still?"
Jordan shrugged. "The prophecy says that the world ends, not that no one lives through it. Maybe we'll be the lucky ones."
"How lucky."
"And on that cheery note, I'm out." Jordan smiled before grabbing his coat. "Later, Andy."
"Later."
As soon as Jordan left, Andy pulled his sock drawer open. He'd never admitted to his roommate, but he was relieved to be going home. College both fun and a challenge, but he was more than ready to let his family fuss over him for a few weeks.
Meanwhile...
Virginia
When William was a baby, Jim and Dee had hung a white buffalo mobile over his crib, perhaps with a vague hope that he could develop a shared interest in animal husbandry. By the time he was three, however, they had given up on that because it was abundantly clear that William's true passion was the stars. So they redid his room with deep blue walls and decorated the ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars. And as soon as he was old enough, they bought him a child-sized telescope.
Now that he was eleven and already five feet tall, that telescope had been outgrown. One meant for an adult now stood in its former place of honor by his window. He used it several nights a week, and the night of December nineteenth was no exception.
William peered through the long barrel, checking out the familiar celestial bodies, once again wishing that average people could access all the power of the Hubble telescope. With the Hubble he might be able to clearly make out the suggestion of movement in the distance.
He was about to leave the telescope and look at the likelihood of a meteor shower when he saw something that made him shout in alarm. "Mom! Dad!" he watched transfixed as a film of red spread across the entire eye piece.
His first thought was that someone had poured ink into his prized telescope, not that who might have done it came to him beyond a vague suspicion against the weird kid down the street. William pulled away, ready to examine the telescope for signs of tampering when he saw it. There was nothing wrong with the telescope, so no inky prank was necessary to account for what he had seen.
The moon itself was the red of blood.
December 22nd, 2012
Jordan had left three hours earlier, so Andy found himself bored as he waited for Mulder to come and get him. Mulder wasn't late, but the lonely quiet had Andy anxiously checking the window often, even though the odds were even that Mulder might not park within view. All there was to see was the snow that had already begun to coat most surfaces.
Eventually, one of his periodic checks just after dark rewarded him with the sight of his father climbing out of his SUV. Excited as a small boy, Andy hurried out into the dorm's lobby to greet him. "Dad!"
"Hey, Andy. I take it you're ready to go?" Mulder's lips twitched with good humor.
"You bet."
"Let's grab your bags then. This snow is suggesting that we don't dawdle."
After they stowed Andy's bags in the vehicle, Mulder held up the keys. "How about you drive? I could use a break from it."
"Sure," Andy replied in time to catch the keys when Mulder tossed them. Mulder and Scully had made sure that he could drive in the snow when he was learning, so Andy had no fear about the inclement weather. "How is everybody?" Andy asked, sliding behind the wheel and starting the SUV.
"Well... excited about how the moon turned red last night." Mulder pulled on his seatbelt, and Andy thought about teasing him about being worried about his driving, but didn't. Both Mulder and Scully made sure that both sons wore their seatbelts every time they got into a vehicle.
"Yeah? I bet William has several astronomy-related explanations about what caused it." The moon had already come up for the night, and was back to its normal color, at least as much as it could be seen through the snow.
Mulder nodded. "He sure does, and he's been telling everyone he can get to listen what they are in exhaustive detail."
"I'm sure I'm next," Andy groaned.
"Probably." Mulder smiled faded. "Your grandmother, however, has a much more alarming theory."
"What's that?" Andy asked, wondering what Maggie Scully might have said.
"She called your mom up last night and asked her to seriously consider returning to the church. Apparently she's concerned that it's a sign of the biblical end of days."
"How mad is she that Mom flatly refused?"
"You guessed what she said, did you? Not mad, 'disappointed.'"
"Oh boy."
Mulder yawned. "Needless to say, it was a rough night. So, please don't be insulted if I nod off."
"Don't worry about it," Andy said cheerfully. "I can handle your snoring without it distracting me from driving."
"Thanks," Mulder said sourly.
As he warned, Mulder fell asleep less than halfway there. Andy didn't really mind, though, he was just glad to be headed home.
All of a sudden, twenty miles before their house, something loomed up in front of the car. Even though it was quite a distance from them, it seemed to fill up the windshield.
It wasn't possible, and Andy's fingers tightened involuntarily on the steering wheel when his eyes rejected his brain's rationalization. "Dad!" he yelled, pushing on Mulder's shoulder before quickly returning his hand to the steering wheel - it suddenly felt like that if he didn't use both hands he'd lose control of everything.
Yawning, Mulder opened his eyes and saw what had startled his oldest son.
Low in the sky and iron gray, a massive ship drifted overhead as slowly and sedately as a swan on a pond. The falling snow obscured it some, but there was no mistaking the sickly golden glow it threw over the car for anything else.
"Holy shit," Andy whispered in horrified awe. "All this time I thought you were joking."
Andy continued to stare through the windshield. In the four years since he'd legally become Andrés Cristiano Mulder, his second set of adopted parents had tried to prepare him and his brother both for a day like this one. The end of his childhood, and the middle of William's, had been filled with art lessons and soccer practice, learning target shooting and survival techniques, visits to natural history museums and bunkers. Both boys had taken the odd mishmash of family activities in stride, but William had believed that they were getting ready for something real... and Andy hadn't. Now he wished that he had taken things more seriously.
Turning his head for a quick glance, he saw that his father's face was grim. "We saw a ship once before, your mother and I. Later, she wouldn't ever admit that it was what we saw."
"She will now."
"I think so. I think she just wouldn't admit it to me…" Mulder trailed off shaking his head. He pulled out his phone and aimed it at the thing in the sky until it suddenly zoomed off as if it realized someone had been watching it.
"You know, Will is going to mob you as soon as you walk through the door," Mulder said as they pulled into the driveway. "Don't tell him about what we saw tonight until I've talked to Mom, okay?"
"Sure."
As if responding to their father's prediction, the front door flew open and William ran out to greet them. He began talking less than a second after Andy opened the driver side door. "Andy, you're home! Come on, I want to show you the remote control helicopter I bought with my allowance," William said eagerly.
"Cool, what color is it?" Andy asked, allowing himself to be led into the house.
Scully brushed past them in the hallway, and headed towards Mulder. He didn't like the worried expression on her face. "Mulder, the news..." she trailed off, eyes dark with concern.
He pulled out his phone and thrust it at her. "Watch this video."
"You took this?" she asked, looking up halfway through.
"Driving home tonight." He sighed. "Obviously the date I saw at Mount weather was right. We're being invaded."
"Now what?" she asked more calmly than he thought he might in her shoes.
"We gather together people who will fight-" he stopped when he noticed her hard stare. "What?"
"We're not doing that," she said coolly.
"Aren't we?" Mulder asked, hoping that his voice didn't betray his surprise. He had always assumed that they were both on the same page. But now...
Reality came crashing down when she asked, "What do you propose doing, sitting Andy down and saying 'Andy, we love you and we're been very happy since you joined our family. We know you'll look after Will when we get ourselves killed.'?"
He didn't say anything.
"You must've realized, you must've known we could be parents or lead the resistance, not both," she insisted.
The truth was that it had been something that was easier not to think about. When William was born, they hadn't known that there would be an invasion, or the date. And when William lived with the Van de Kamps it had seemed more than ever that they'd be the ones to find themselves on the frontline, fighting the good fight because they had someone to fight for even if he never knew it... Later, when they'd gotten William back, Scully had let him teach both boys how to defend themselves, so he'd allowed himself to believe that they were still casting themselves as people who would make a difference when it mattered.
Now was the time when it mattered.
"So when they come for us, you want us to just be helpless victims like everyone else?" he asked shortly.
"No." Scully's eyes flashed dangerously. "I'm not suggesting that we simply allow ourselves to be enslaved or killed, Mulder."
"Then what?"
"We'll fight back, if it comes to that, but there's no sense in going to look for trouble."
It was all he could do to keep from laughing in disbelief. How could she refer to mounting a defense of humanity as 'looking for trouble'?
"We can't do it to them, not again." Scully's voice dropped, making him have to strain to hear her. "We can't let them lose another set of parents to this terrible agenda."
He sighed, realizing that he should have known that her objections would circle back to the deaths of Dee and Jim Van de Kamp. In the years since the murders, they'd been able to piece together what had happened by connecting the dots that Andy and William occasionally exposed without knowing. As best as they could tell, the couple had become aware that someone was watching their home during the months leading up to their demise. It seemed highly likely that this awareness had come about not long before Mulder and Scully had agreed to help the FBI, and it was a cold comfort that it seemed to be merely coincidental timing.
After the news stories showed the former agents in a positive light, Dee and Jim began to talk to Andy about how they'd become worried that someone was targeting them for unknown malice, and that William's biological parents should be reached out to if a real move was made against the family - from what Andy had said, they'd believed that they'd be able to get in touch with Mulder before anything terrible happened.
Unfortunately, Jim and Dee had figured on being stalked by human predators, and hadn't realized that the former FBI agents wouldn't be able to save them by leaning on the local PD to provide surveillance or maybe help them get a restraining order more quickly, so the couple had gone to their graves without ever having learned the true nature of the "men" who had broken into their home to kill them, and perhaps kill or kidnap the boys as well. Thanks to their conversations with Andy, however, the boy had already been convinced that Mulder was the person to run to if there was trouble.
Mulder knew that there wasn't any sense in reiterating his belief that the couple hadn't hastened their deaths by snooping, since he'd said it before only to have her say that there was no way of knowing if they might have survived if they hadn't tried to learn something about both the two of them and the shadowy figures watching their home. He'd once asked her if the happy ending there would have been William just being kidnapped, but had regretted the question instantly.
Rather than regret another question, he bit his tongue to keep from asking her why the potential sadness of their two children was so much more important than the rest of the world's. It would only start a fight than neither of them could possibly win. "If we're not making a preemptive stand, what are we doing?" Frustration laced his voice. "Tonight. Running?"
Though he never imagined a future in which they didn't fight, he had given some thought to what they might do if, upon discovering that resistance was in fact futile, they needed to lay low. His original vision of this involved the two of them hiding out in a cabin adjoining a desolate windswept beach. When they got the boys, he mentally added rooms to that lonely abode.
Just as he was about to suggest that, she spoke up. "Where would we go?" she asked, laughing helplessly. "Unless you've got an ally of off-world, I don't think there's any place we could go that would make us any safer than staying right here. Less comfortable, certainly, but safer?"
Mulder only realized that he had begun to grind his teeth when his jaw ached. Unclenching, he said, "we'll have to go downstairs, then." They'd reinforced the house's storm cellar, concerned with making impregnable to force rather than nature.
Looking afraid to shoot down any more of his ideas, Scully nodded. "Okay."
"Before we do, I'll give Lewis a call to see if anyone has seen anything in the area," he said, referring to Lewis Black, the head of the local police department. He had made a point of getting to know the man over the past couple of years.
"Sure... but try not to use the words 'spaceship' or 'UFO,'" she said, smiling weakly. "Right now he finds you charmingly eccentric, but mentioning aliens could push his opinion into thinking you're-"
"A nut?" He finished for her.
"Well..."
"I'll just say that I promised Will that I'd ask about that thing he saw with his telescope. A stray hot air balloon or a blimp, maybe."
"Right." She squirmed. "I guess we'll call the boys to tell them what's up..."
It was on the tip of his tongue to object to being left out of that important conversation, but he realized that he have to give a little too. "Good idea."
When the kids came into the room, William was still talking about his new helicopter. She still could not figure out the appeal of the thing. They collapsed on the couch and gave her an expectant look which she reciprocated with an uncomfortable smile. "Um, we need to talk about what Dad and Andy saw on the drive home tonight."
"What?" William asked eagerly. "A bear? A moose? Oh, a mountain lion? Those are really rare, so that would be pretty neat."
"Not an animal, buddy," Andy told him.
"Then what, was it-"
"Do you and Dad want me to tell him?" Andy interrupted asked.
Scully sighed, wishing that Mulder was finished with his phone call. "Why not."
Andy turned to his brother. "We saw spaceship tonight."
"No way!" William cried. He jumped to his feet.
"Where are you going?"
"To get my gun."
"Why?"
"To shoot aliens, obviously."
"'To shoot aliens," Andy scoffed. "When our hunting safety class went on that deer hunt, you never even fired your gun."
"Neither did you," William retorted.
"Yeah, but I'm not the one who thinks he's going to be shooting aliens, now am I?"
"Besides," William said impatiently. "Deer are nice animals. They don't plan on attacking us."
"That we know of," Andy said ominously.
Sick of their bickering, Scully threw her hands up in the air. "Boys!" They both stopped talking and looked at her. Once she had their attention, she didn't know what to say.
"We're going down stairs," Mulder announced, making them all turn their heads to look at him. He was still holding his cell phone. "Go get whatever you want to bring with you, since we're not coming back up here tonight."
William slipped off the couch. "Good thing we've got a bathroom down there."
"Yeah, chamber pots are so passé," Andy said with a smirk. He followed his brother out of the room, knowing from the sound of plastic crinkling that the younger boy was gathering snacks.
When Scully looked up at Mulder, she noticed a frustrated look on his face. "What?"
"Do you suppose they'll insist on bringing some DVDs down with us? To go along with the chips and things they're loading up on?"
"Mulder."
He shook his head. "I'm just concerned that they don't fully grasp the gravity of this situation."
"You should be glad that they don't," she retorted. "Would having them be terrified, huddled down there clinging to their guns, be better?"
"No." Mulder sighed.
"Exactly. Let's save acting like it's the end of the world for the proper time." She offered him a weak smile. "What did Lewis have to say?"
"Nothing. No one has reported seeing the ship or anything else strange."
"You were half an hour from home still, weren't you? Maybe it never came this way," Scully suggested. It would be nice to think that they'd be spared that, but if there really was a ship out there...
"Maybe."
The boys came back into the room, weighted down with bags full of snacks, their laptops, and as predicted a handful of DVDs. Mulder sighed as he watched them head down to the basement. "I'm going to grab my radio. They can watch movies, but someone has to listen to the news."
"Sure," she agreed, hoping that nothing was really going to go wrong, and that they'd sheepishly emerge from the basement in the morning, just like the people who had been so certain May the year before that the rapture was about to happen.
The end date had arrived, but word domination was still unthinkable. Wasn't it?
