The End Has Come

He wondered, as he always did after the check-ins, how many more days could he spend here? He wondered if he had made the right choice, if he should’ve just gone home to his family after saving those kids.

Instead, he had made a phone call. A simple call that had changed the course of human history.

* * *

In the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, George’s cell phone reception had always been shitty. One bar, if any at all, courtesy of AT&T’s weak network. But on that day at the end of the world, sealed into a room on a crashed starship with little aliens standing around him  — little aliens, for God’s sake  — George got two bars.

He had to do something. He had to find help. But who could he call?

The invasion had come without warning. At least, no warning that George and his childhood friends knew of. Ships from outer freakin’ space attacking major cities worldwide. One of those ships must’ve got sidetracked, or malfunctioned or something, because it crashed in the deep woods close to the tip of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula.

The hunting cabin where George and his friends had spent two weeks every November for the last thirty years had been close to the crash site, so close that a war machine or mech  — or whatever you called an alien piloting a suit of powered armor  — had attacked the cabin, blown it to pieces. Luckily, George, Toivo, Jaco, Bernie, and Arnold had been outside when that happened. They returned fire against the attacker, killing the alien inside the machine. From there, a hike through the deep snow and the frigid woods, following colored lights, to the crashed ship  — an actual flying saucer, or at least it used to be before a high-speed impact and tumble through the woods turned it into a dented, cracked, smashed thing that had more in common with a T-bone-totaled station wagon than an interstellar vessel.

Inside that ship, bodies. Non-human bodies. Pieces and parts all over, living beings torn to shreds by a crash that gouged a fifty-foot-wide trench through snow-covered ground, pines, and the birches. So many bodies, so many dead. But not all dead, as George found out when he opened a sealed door. Inside, a room clearly designed to withstand such crashes: the evidence for that being a dozen alien children, alive and well.

It started out as a dozen, but that number dropped to eleven when George’s friend Toivo shot one in the head. Toivo wanted to kill the rest of them  — as did Bernie and Jaco  — but George put himself between the children and the barrel of Toivo’s hunting rifle.

George still wasn’t sure why he’d protected the alien kids. Maybe it was the fact that they were helpless. Maybe somewhere in his head he knew this was a history-changing event, and that the sane thing to do was preserve these eleven alien lives even though the aliens’ kin had probably killed millions of people.

Or, maybe, it was the crash seats.

He stood in a room with the eleven alien children. The same room with the crash seats, or chambers or whatever they were, that had kept those children alive during the crash. The grownup aliens had seen to the kids first, safely strapping them in  — just as George would have done for his own children.

His friends were elsewhere in the ship. He knew Bernie was probably tending to Mister Ekola, keeping the old man warm as winter slowly and surely stole the heat from the ruined hull. George didn’t know what Jaco was doing. Rooting through the ship, probably, because it was an alien ship, and would he ever get a chance like this again? The one that worried George, though, was Toivo.

Toivo, who had already killed one of the alien children in cold blood.

Toivo, who clearly wanted to kill the rest of them as well.

Toivo, who had never left the area, who still spoke with the Yooper accent George had shed years ago. Da instead of the, ending every other sentence with the rhetorical eh? If George hadn’t moved away, would he still have that accent? Would he have wanted to shoot the children? So hard to know if his urge to save them was something he was born with, or something cultivated from living somewhere other than this remote, homogenous culture.

A silly time to worry about nature vs. nurture.

The phone buzzed in George’s hand. One bar . . . it had reconnected to the network.

He could dial 9-1-1. But would anyone answer? Had the attacks hit Milwaukee? Detroit? And if he did get through, what would he say? I’ve got an actual ship here, with survivors. Who would respond to that? Who would be dispatched?

George looked at the eleven alien children.

Paralyzed with indecision, he imagined how things might play out. If he called 9-1-1, the local police station, or any government office  — and he got through  — word would quickly go up the ladder. George knew where that ladder ended: the Army.

The military would come. These children would be taken away. Hidden. Studied. Interrogated.

What if someone did that to his children?