Thirty days.
The countdown has started, North America shivers under the shadow of a massive alien spacecraft, and humanity is hurtling toward an unknown future that lurks at the end of the timer. Somewhere, somehow, the heroes are making their plan...
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JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA, USA
August 17, 8:32 PM
Crouched in the back of his boat, Cletus Mac knew two things for certain: the big dark alien ship of impending death in the sky had shifted its number from fifteen to fourteen and his wife Beth had left him to screw one of those darn alien creatures. They probably had a forked tongue and two dicks. What human could compete with that?
He had to reach past Perch, the baby alligator he'd found as a hatchling in his retention pond, to grab his wrench. Perch opened his maw and made a sound that sounded like a blaster in one of those video games his nephews had made him play.
"Hush." He waved his hand at Perch, dismissing the gator's thoughtful contribution to how he might have sped things along. "I'll be done soon."
Perch squawked at him again.
"I'll feed you before we leave . . . What's that?" Cletus looked at his watch. "There's plenty of time." There were still over three hours till midnight when he had to be in position to take advantage of the witchcrafty thing the gravity did every night.
As he hooked the wrench around a bolt, the static sounds of a radio drifted through the quiet night. He was used to hearing bugs chirping, having them buzz around his forehead and arms. But over the past few nights, those sounds had softened until he rarely heard them now. The radio waves carried the voice of the cult leader who had enraptured his wife. Cletus had told her not to listen to the man who called himself Pippin. He had turned off the radio each time he'd caught her, but then one morning, she was gone.
Cletus jerked his elbow side to side as he tightened the bolts, attaching the poles onto the back of his boat, and Perch crawled along the rubber boat's edge to avoid Cletus's deadly elbow.
Cletus rolled his eyes. "I wasn't gonna hit you, but maybe if you didn't practically sit on top of me when I worked, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place."
Perch made the gruntiest of grunts, a disgruntled one, and glared.
Cletus glared back for almost a whole minute before returning to work.
The edges of the wrench pressed into Cletus's calloused palms, but he hardly felt it. Pain didn't matter if he got Beth back. When he had realized she was gone, he'd immediately gone to the cult's compound but was told his wife wasn't there—that she had already gone to find her way to the aliens.
Above him, attached to the poles was a yellow canvas that blocked out his view of the alien ship. The hang glider had belonged to his wife, though she had never used it. Positioning it on the boat had been difficult as he had had to avoid the propeller he had salvaged from his buddy's abandoned airboat.
