Chapter One

Sawyer Matheson sat in the quiet of his office while life as he had always known it came apart on the other side of his door.

He imagined he could hear the ugly growl of incipient chaos rumbling louder and louder outside the walls of the building.

He’d instructed his deputies to hold all calls, told them not to disturb him for anything less than the end of the world. He’d meant that last part as a joke, but who knew? Who knew anything anymore?

He was seated in his well-worn office chair at his desk, a tall man with broad shoulders, a rugged face with strong features that just missed handsome somehow, and gray eyes, the color of a winter sky before a snowstorm. In the right light, his hair looked red — a least a chestnut shade of brown. In the summertime, the sun bleached the red out of his hair and turned his skin a deep brown, creating a meshwork of fine white lines around his eyes when he wasn’t smiling.

Shoving the flotsam and jetsam of accident reports, incident reports, logs, time sheets and personnel evaluations off in a heap on the floor, Sawyer just sat, aware of the overloud ticking of the wall clock. He looked at his hands, turned them over, examined them. He was impressed that they were steady. His insides sure weren’t. They felt like that dessert he’d begged his grandmother to make to go with the hot gingersnap cookies that scented her whole kitchen a lifetime ago. The dessert had been called Jell-O. You hit it with a fork and it vibrated, like his guts were vibrating now.

But the hands that held his phone weren’t shaking. The Astral app was clearly visible and he stared at what it revealed, willing the tiny dots visible there to disappear, to vanish as instantaneously as they’d appeared. Or to break formation so it was clear they were only meteors after all and the whole world could take a deep breath, heave a global sigh of relief, laugh self-consciously and claim they never had believed it anyway.

The sheriff of McClintock County, Kentucky, believed it. He’d give his pension and his bass boat and his collection of Beatles albums — vinyl! — and everything else he owned for the sweet blessing of disbelief.

Not hapnin.’

What was it his brother Taylor always said? Even a blind cave fish could see it. Those spots Sawyer could see on his phone were—

“Alien spaceships.”

He forced himself to say the words out loud to make them real.

“Aliens!”

He burped out a sound as the word left his lips, a mangled laugh or a bleat of denial. One or the other. Likely both.

The spots were an invading armada.

Invading?

Did anybody know that for sure?

They were definitely on their way to Earth, but invade had major implications of war and battle and subjugation. How did humanity know this wasn’t the best thing that’d ever happened in all the long millennia of its history, that maybe the aliens were coming to bring technological advancement, spiritual enlightenment and—

“Riiiiiiiight.”

He said that out loud, too, but not to make it real. It just popped out, though it centered him as much as the other had. The aliens hadn’t traveled untold light years across galaxies, through black holes and worm holes and whatever-other-holes to hang out with seven billion humans who were right proud of themselves, thank you very much, for reaching out into space as far as their own moon. They weren’t toting a welcome basket from the Universal Brotherhood of Celestial Beings, complete with a magic decoder ring and a secret handshake.

Not likely.

Bottom line: you come this far, it’s to kick ass.

That realization shooed the rest of the cobwebs out of his brain and left behind what he needed to function.

Training. Logic. Common sense.

And what those told him was nothing he wanted to hear.

What happened when the aliens actually arrived might very well be anti-climactic compared to what was going to happen in the six days the world held its breath waiting for them to show up.

What would people do in the face of an invading armada of aliens?

Duh. They’d panic. They’d do stupid things. If Sawyer had learned anything in his decade in law enforcement, it was that panicked people never … ever made good decisions. The six days between now and when the aliens actually went boots-down … or tentacles down or whatever down would be fueled by panic, society devolving into anarchy. The world the aliens finally landed on would not be the one that’d been humming along on autopilot this time yesterday, when the most burning question on anybody’s mind was what was going to happen on the last episode of the remake of LOST.

In the next six days, the world would shed its very thin veneer of civilization. Sadly, he suspected it wouldn’t even take the whole six days. Humanity was what it was and Sawyer had no illusions about what it was. And he had very little time between now and when it did to put a lid on his little corner of the world.

If he chose to.

And did he? He could walk away. Nowhere in the fine print of his job description did it list protecting the citizenry against invading aliens as one of his responsibilities. He could take Noah and hole up in Matheson Caverns, the cave system that had been in Sawyer’s family for generations. Nobody’d ever find them in 250 miles of tunnels. Or he could …

He took a breath, let it out slowly. Listened to the clock tick, tick, tick.

Aliens. Seriously?

Oh, who did he think he was kidding? He might not technically be obligated to play in these reindeer games but it was his job alright. And even if it wasn’t his job … well, it was still his job. End of discussion.

Did he actually sit up straighter in the chair? He supposed he did, probably had his “game face” on, too.

What was the game? It boiled down to the allocation of resources.

What did he have to work with and where could he position what he had that would make the biggest difference to the greatest number of people?

It was all about triage. In any disaster, you couldn’t save everybody. Fact of life. You had to determine who you could reasonably rescue and concentrate on them. The rest … well, you couldn’t let that be your problem or you’d be lost before you started. He was in charge of a lifeboat and there were only so many seats on it. It wouldn’t hold every one of the passengers and the entire crew of the Titanic. Try to load them all and the boat would sink and everybody would drown. But it would hold some and without the lifeboat, no one would survive.

He had to accept the limitations of the situation.

So, given the resources he had, who could he reasonably be expected to save?

And by save, he meant keep them from killing each other and protect them from whoever threatened them from the outside, and there would be dangerous outsiders — human outsiders. It might take a while, but they’d come. It was the nature of the beast. And the aliens, when they showed up, if they ever did actually show up in flyover country? Well, it would be what it would be. That was then. This was now.

His job now was to maintain civilization, the rule of law over … whom?

McClintock County?

Again, not hapnin’.

He had to bow to the superiority of geography. The county was too big, too sprawling and isolated. He didn’t have the manpower to hold it together over an area thirty-five miles wide and forty-two miles long.

He had to think smaller.

Jessup, then, a town five miles by seven miles snuggled into a hollow offering protection on two sides. Could he police that? He could. And any county resident who wanted to move into town — they’d be welcome. Some would do that, but not many. Kentuckians were a hardy, independent lot. They’d hunker down, stay where they were, take care of their own and protect what was theirs. And rural families had the firearms to do that.

The people he could reasonably be expected to protect and defend were the four thousand residents of Jessup, Kentucky. And it wasn’t like he’d decided to gather up four thousand strangers at a bus station. This was a community as close knit as steel wool where lifetimes of shared experiences had so marked people’s faces Sawyer sometimes thought everybody looked like family. Civility would hold with them longer than in the world at large. Out there, anarchy’s decree would reign supreme: every man for himself!

So … what was item number one on his Save Jessup To-Do list?

First, he needed to secure the most vital resources, post officers at the supermarkets and filling stations before—

There was a knock on his door. Deputy Barnhouse didn’t wait for Sawyer to reply, just shouted through the door.

“Sheriff, we just got a call that there’s a fire at—”

Fire. Sawyer missed the location, shaken to the core as he’d been for the past three years by that single four-letter word. His hands trembled then until he grabbed hold of his emotions, walled off the tangle of grief/anger/fear working its way through his belly. Fire. Yeah, that was appropriate.

And so it begins.

“Sir, it’s the Cricket Bottom Visitor’s Center at Matheson Caverns.”

Matheson Caverns was out in the county, not in the city limits of Jessup. His brother, Taylor, was the manager of the attraction that hosted more than a hundred thousand visitors a year, and he’d seen Taylor in town only fifteen minutes ago taking the boys to school. Taylor’s wife, Kelly Jo, was at work as a legal secretary. They were safe. But Noah! He’d signed a permission slip for his son to go on a field trip to Matheson Caverns with his class today … which meant he was somewhere down in the guts of the cave by now. Safest possible place to be in a fire. Noah was not in the visitor’s center. Not.

Sawyer picked up the receiver off his desk phone and punched one of the four pre-programmed red icons on the phone’s lighted display, certain the call wouldn’t go — it rang once and then he heard the voice of McClintock County Volunteer Fire Department’s Chief Anderson Black.

“Yo, Sawyer, we just got a call that somebody drove a tour bus into the visitor center—”

“Send the trucks and crews, Andy. I need you here.”

“What—?”

“Meet me at City Hall in ten minutes.”

He ended the call, got up from his desk and walked with purpose through the office and out into the parking lot. His deputies followed him out of the building and then stood motionless, arms at their sides. Waiting.

He pointed to Joe Thurman.

“Joe, I want you to go to Castor’s Supermarket. Shut it down. Lock the doors. And don’t let anybody inside. Do you understand me?”

Thurman looked surprised, but replied “Yes, sir,” and raced off toward his cruiser.

“Tyler, you and Hawkins do the same thing at Phillips’s Foodtown, Buy Low and the Minute Mart.” He turned to the remaining deputies. “Watson, get to the elementary school. Help out with traffic control. There will be a mob there. Morrison—” He looked around for Deputy Morrison.

“He’s not here, sir,” Betty Hawthorne, the dispatcher, said. She had come outside with the deputies and was fluttering around them. “He … he just left, said his wife and the little ones needed him.”

Betty mother-henned any officer she feared might have run afoul of the sheriff. “But he just wanted to check on them, said he’d be right back. He will. You know he will. Besides, I saw Franky Hardesty heading out toward his house — driving his cruiser.” Hardesty was a Jessup City Police officer, and city police cruisers were supposed to remain within the city limits of Jessup. “And—”

“Make me a list,” Sawyer said. “Who’s here, who’s not. Call in all the off-duty.”

And so it really begins.

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