21

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It's a goddam stupid kid, Jim thought as the figure below threw down his weapon and shouted up to them. He pulled down his dark hood and began to walk up the incline with his hands in the air.

"Come slowly, and keep your hands where I can see them. Crazy fool, you could have killed somebody."

"I'm sorry," the boy said as he reached the chain link fence that separated the bridge from the incline. "I thought you was them."

Jack kept his pistol trained on the boy as he climbed the fence.

"How old are you, kid?" Jim asked as he holstered his own weapon.

"I'm fifteen. I'm sorry, I really am. I thought you was them."

Jim patted him down, found him to be now weaponless, and stepped back. Here's a damn kid, only barely old enough to shave and almost killing all of us.

The kid was quite tall, but his face betrayed his age, and Jim noted his wispy downy moustache and acne on his cheeks. "Okay, Jack," Jim said. "You can holster your weapon."

Jack did as Jim leaned on the silver rail and stared at the cracks in the road while he waited for his overworked heart to calm down and the stars in front of his eyes to fade.

Rhys walked back to where Jack and Gwen were picking Stephen up from the ground and dusting themselves off.

Jim turned to the kid again and said, "Right, let's start from the beginning. You thought we were who?"

"I thought you was the aliens, man. I couldn't tell from down there whether you was humans or them."

Jim noted the terror in the boy's eyes as he spoke about them.

"Where is everyone else?" Jack asked.

"Gone. They took them in the flying saucer."

"They took everyone?" Rhys asked from ten yards away. His eyes were as wide as the young gunman's, but with excitement, not fear. This was getting to be another crazy day in the story of planet earth 7.

"Yeah, this morning, they came. Three flying saucers, and boy were they big? I ain't ever seen anything so big in my life. It was around 7 a.m. They made this noise, sounded like when a ship blasts its horn. Best alarm clock I ever heard in my life."

Jim and Jack both nodded. Ship's horn, elephant's call; they had heard the sound the kid was talking about.

"I came out of my room to ask mom what the sound was, and they were gone. mom, dad, and Amy, my little sister. So I looked out the window, and there were hundreds, no, thousands of people walking down the road toward the Sundial Bridge. I thought, shit, what's going on?"He clapped a hand to his mouth. "Sorry, I didn't mean to cuss."

"That's fine, son," Jim said. "Just keep on talking."

"Well, I came out of the house, you know, to try and find my folks, but the people, they was like zombies, just walking with their eyes fixed straight ahead. I looked up, coz I could hear this buzzing sound, and right over the bridge was three of 'em. Their shadows was covering everything. It was like they were blocking out the sunrise. And they had all these lights flashing on 'em."

The group stared at the boy as he told his story. Even Janet's eyes were trained on the young man. He waved his arms about as he talked, and Jim thought his voice was a little louder than it needed to be.

"One of them came down, just kept coming and coming, and the people just kept walking toward it, across the bridge. There were thousands, just lining up. I'd have thought they were just coming to see a UFO, you know, but they had this look in their eyes and none of 'em was talking. It was like they wasn't in touch with reality. Then I saw my folks. They were down on the riverbank, right where this thing was coming down, and trees were just like, flying out of the ground and into the river as the ship was fixing to land. I looked at my little sister, Amy, standing there looking up at this thing, and she looked so tiny, man. I wondered why my parents weren't picking her up and running from it. Why was everyone except me in a trance?

"A huge ramp opened up, flattening the trees that hadn't blown into the river, and all the lights went out. Coz it had lights all over it, flashing all the colours of the rainbow – did I say that? – and when it opened up, all the lights went out. I was standing there, at the end of the bridge, and when I turned around there were thousands more people behind me. So I jumped over the rail and dropped down under the bridge so I could get out of the way of the people. None of them were, but I was ready to run if lasers started blowing stuff up. "When it opened, it wasn't like a door just sliding open or anything like that. The whole bottom half peeled away and formed like a ramp around this thing. You gotta remember that it was huge; I couldn't see the end of it from where I was standing. The other two kept watch in the sky, just like I was doing on the ground. Then, you wouldn't believe it, but the people, they started walking in. They were walking into a UFO, a real-life UFO, with aliens inside, and they didn't look scared or anything like that, they just looked like zombies."

The boy paused in his tale. The group listening was rapt in the story. Jim noted that the boy had begun to tremble as he relayed the events of a few hours ago, and he chose his question carefully.

"So, did everyone go inside?"

"Yep, everyone," the boy answered. He shook his head as he spoke.

"Everyone in Redding walked into an alien spaceship?" Rhys asked. "Everyone?"

"Everyone," the boy answered forcefully. "Well, except the guy who got killed down the road." He gestured back the way they had come to where the huge Coca-Cola truck and the Ford had crashed.

"Son," Jim said. "There's something else I want to ask you."

"Yeah?"

"What's your name? Mine's Jim."He extended a hand to the person who had tried to kill him a few minutes earlier.

"I'm Eugene," the boy answered. "Eugene James." He shook hands with Jim.

"So, we're talking about a hundred thousand people – the entire population of Redding – walking into a spaceship?" Jim asked.

"Yeah, everyone."

"So why didn't you walk in with them?" Owen asked. "From what you say, people were hypnotized by this thing, but somehow you weren't?"

"I don't know, man. But I had my senses. I know why they came, and I wasn't gonna fall into the trap."

A terrified-looking Ianto had taken hold of Stephen's hand and led the boy away from the group. They stood about thirty feet away, staring out over the Shakespeare River's flowing blue water.

"You know why they came?" Jim asked.

"Yeah, the government knows, they've been communicating with them for years. Ain't you seen the chemtrails in the sky?" Rhys and Gwen shook their heads. Rhys continued to stare open-mouthed at Eugene. He had read about chemtrails and even heard about them on Alex Jones's radio show. He thought they were biological agents meant to control people. "I've seen them," he said.

Eugene turned to Rhys. "Well, I figured it out. The government's drawing maps in the sky for the aliens to 's what part of the chemtrail is. But you never just see one of 'em. You always see lots. Some of 'em are map trails, and some of 'em are the chemicals that turned my folks, and everyone else in Redding, into zombies. But I must be immune from the chemicals, coz I ain't become a slave like the rest of 'em."

"That's an interesting theory, son," Jim said, inwardly thinking, the boy's gone crazy with the stress.

"It's the truth," Eugene answered, a look of steely determination replacing the fear Jim had seen earlier.

"I got no reason not to believe you, son," Jim said.

"Well, I gotta be telling the truth. If I ain't, then what happened to all the people? If you walk down a mile or so you'll see where it landed – all the trees are ripped up and stuff – then you'll believe me."

"I already told you, son, I believe you. But what happened after all the people walked into the ship? Did it just take off into the sky?"

"Yeah, pretty much. The bottom of that thing just rolled back in on itself until you could never have known it had an opening there at all. Then it took off. But before that something even stranger happened."

"What?" Rhys asked. The story was killing him with intrigue, and now there was one more strange revelation waiting to be made.

"Well," Eugene said. "After all the people walked in, one of the aliens walked out and looked all around. I thought it was looking for me, so I hid behind the bridge. It stood at the edge of the ship, and just looked around. I was hiding, and waiting for something to happen, like, I don't know like what. Something bad I suppose. But it never did. It just stood there, looking around for a couple of minutes, its eyes glowing red, then turned and went back inside the ship. Then it took off. They flew north, one of them with my folks and my sister inside."

Jim pondered a moment. He slipped his right hand into his pocket, and felt the bunch of keys he probably no longer needed but would keep out of habit. Habit was a hard thing to break.

"Cochlear implants" Ianto said after a while "He has implants. Is naturally deaf. They couldn't reach him, he didn't hear the pied piper music the rest did."

"I am deaf" the boy said with surprise as Jack swung to check his ears.

Yep.

So they did work on sound?