Chapter 1

Part 1

            The silver starship coasted into orbit above the dull gray planet.  With its sleek lines the ship didn't seem built so much as carved from some giant piece of ore.  Only the black streaks along the hull marred the beauty of the scene.

            The reason for these streaks soon came into view.  Unlike the silver ship, this trio of vessels were ugly, blocky shapes, nearly as dark as the space around them.  From the blisters along their craggy hulls came bursts of red energy that rained down upon the silver ship.  The blue lines of energy from the silver ship did little to deter the black vessels in their pursuit.

            The silver ship rocked violently, flame mushrooming from its port side momentarily.  After the flames dissipated came bits of debris and even humanoid figures clad in bulky spacesuits.  These figures flailed against the planet's gravity, but there was no escape.  They were pulled down to flare as briefly in the atmosphere as the initial explosion.

            At first the silver ship appeared to shrug off this damage, plowing ahead unhindered.  Then the orange drive lights on the engine blisters along the side of the ship faded to black.  The silver craft continued to float ahead on momentum until like the doomed crewmembers in their spacesuits, the ship began to descend towards the atmosphere.

            The black ships didn't give up their pursuit.  Like a pair of vultures they swept down on their prey, continuing to rain down bolts of energy at an even more frantic pace.  Beneath this withering barrage, the silver ship's previously smooth hull rent in dozens of places until it finally broke open.  Many more figures were hurled into the atmosphere, where they faced certain death.

            In its last throes, the silver ship ejected what seemed at first like more debris.  But as tongues of blue leapt from behind these chunks of debris it became clear they were escape pods to ferry the crew safely to the planet below.  A few of these managed to safely enter the atmosphere before the black ships became aware of the tiny craft.

            They opened fire.

            "Will!"

            "Yeah, Dad?"

            "Are you getting ready?  We need to get moving."

            Will Denton pressed the stop button on the remote control.  Nothing happened.  The tape continued to play, the vicious black ships blasting the escape pods as if they were clay pigeons.  Will tried the button again without results.  "Must be out of batteries," he grumbled.  He pushed off the couch to hit the stop button on the VCR.  Finally the image faded from the screen.

            He ejected the tape to put it back into its cardboard sleeve.  He studied the sleeve thoughtfully for a moment.  He had seen all three Space Empire movies at least two dozen times, but he couldn't remember ever seeing the battle that had just played out on the screen.  Maybe his father had somehow gotten a hold of a director's cut version.

            His father appeared in the doorway at that moment, his arms folded across his chest.  "Will, didn't you hear me?  It's time to go.  I've got to get to work."

            "Sorry, I was just taking out the tape.  Is this new?"

            "It's the same copy you watched the last six times you came over."

            Will thought about the strange battle again.  "You mind if I take this home?"

            "Sure, if you promise to get your keester in gear."

            "All right.  Don't have a cow."  Will had already taken the precaution of packing his duffel bag with his dirty clothes; the bedding he would leave for next weekend.  He tucked the videotape into a pocket of the bag and then held up his hands.  "Ta da.  All done."

            "Don't get smart with me.  You're not so big that I can't still whoop you," his father said, the menace belied by his smile.  He put an arm around Will's shoulder to lead him out to the garage.  Will chucked his bag into the truck's bed before hopping into the cab.  His father waited for him to buckle in before backing down the driveway.

            As usual during their drives home, they didn't say anything.  They had already exhausted all the pleasantries and mundane topics like school and Will's love life—or lack thereof—at the start of the weekend.  By the end of the weekend they had nothing left to discuss.  They let talk radio fill the silence, a pundit vehemently declaring that electing Clinton would lead to the country's destruction.  Will's father nodded along with each point the pundit made.  Politics was another area where his parents disagreed, his mother having slapped a Clinton bumper sticker on her car the week before, probably after seeing the Bush sticker on her former husband's truck. 

Will tuned out the radio, not seeing any point in worrying about an election he couldn't vote in.  He leaned back in his seat to stare out the window as the tree-lined streets of Preston went by.  At seven in the morning there wasn't much to see except for the occasional middle-aged jogger or elderly dog walker.

            The ride lasted only five minutes, long enough to cover the three blocks that separated Will's parents.  And yet this distance felt as vast as the galaxy in the Space Empire films.  As his father pulled into the driveway, Will felt as if he had completed a monumental journey.  He yawned as a weariness set into him, a weariness not due entirely to having stayed up all night watching videos but the weariness of another parting.

            Will stared straight ahead a moment, making no attempt to move.  "You want to come in?" he asked, as he did every time, still hoping against the odds to foster a reconciliation.

            "Afraid I don't have time."

            "Right."

            As Will opened the door, his father patted him on the shoulder.  "Have a good week, champ.  Call me if you need anything."

            "I will."  With that he hopped out of the truck.  He reached into the cab for his duffel bag and then stepped back.  His father gave him a wave before backing down the driveway.  Will stood there until the taillights faded away completely.

#

            The usual procedure was for Will to come home on Sunday morning to face his mother's inquisition over breakfast.  Though he had been making these weekend visits for the last four years, his mother still didn't trust her former husband.  She asked Will where they ate, what they ate, how late he stayed up, and if he brushed his teeth.  Every week he told the same lies, saying his father took him to the Country Kitchen for meat loaf and green beans, they went to bed at eleven o'clock, and he brushed his teeth twice a day.  In reality they usually ordered a pizza, stayed up until falling asleep in front of the TV, and never brushed their teeth.  That she never saw through these lies he chalked up to her self-delusion more than his ability to lie.

            Only this time things were different.  He found a note taped to the door.  Something had come up at the hospital and so his mother had to cover another nurse's shift.  "There's waffles in the freezer," she had written.  "I'll be back this afternoon.  Be sure to feed Carl."

            Carl was Will's goldfish, the only pet his mother would let him own—and only after he won the fish in the carnival three months ago.  Out of patriotism he had named the goldfish Carl after gold medal-winning track star Carl Lewis.  That Carl was also his father's name had not occurred to him until it was too late.  His mother had grimaced at first, but she made no protest.  Will imagined she talked about it during the next trip to her therapist.

            He dumped a few sprinkles of dry food into the bowl.  The goldfish darted up to the surface to lap up these crumbs.  "Easy on those or you're going to get fat."

            Having fed the fish, Will decided next to feed himself.  He opened the freezer to take out the box of waffles his mother had generously left for him.  While two of these toasted, he rifled through the pile of mail on the counter, sorting through the promises of winning a million dollars if he bought a magazine subscription and those of politicians to clean up the government if he voted for them.  He frowned as he tossed aside the last envelope; Tom had not answered his letter after two weeks.

            The waffles popped from the toaster.  Will tossed them on a paper plate to eat while sitting at the counter so as not to get crumbs in the living room.  That would drive his mother into a fit, leading to a grounding or loss of his meager allowance.  He could clean up the crumbs, but somehow she always found the one he missed.  "You're going to attract ants or mice," she would say.

            After finishing his breakfast, Will checked the clock.  He still had a few hours before he needed to start his homework.  More than enough time for him to get in a little nap and then maybe watch the end of his movie. 

            First he made sure to empty out the duffel bag.  The dirty clothes he dumped into the hamper for his mother to wash after she came home.  When she thought he wasn't watching, she would sniff the clothes to make sure Will and his father hadn't been smoking marijuana or something worse.

            In his bedroom, he went over to the telescope in the corner.  On occasion he did use the gift from his Aunt Mary to gaze at the heavens to watch a meteor shower or comet or the rings of Saturn.  More often he leveled the telescope at the backyard of the neighboring house to catch a glimpse of Jessie McCormick.  The thought of her floating on the surface of her pool, clad in only a red bikini, haunted his nighttime fantasies. 

            At the moment he didn't see anything nearly so arousing.  Jessie's mother, a tiny woman with the same dark hair as her daughter, watered the flowers next to the house.  Jessie was probably still in bed, sleeping peacefully, like an angel—

            He tilted the telescope up to stop himself before anything happened.  With a weary sigh, he sank onto his bed.  A glimpse through the telescope was about as close as he could get to Jessie these days.  Only in his fantasies could he hope even to touch her.  To think just four years ago they had been riding their bikes around the neighborhood—with Tom. 

            Will pulled the covers over his head and rolled over to sleep.

#

            He awoke hours later to a crash.  Sitting up in bed, his bleary mind identified the sound as coming from the closet.  He climbed out of bed and opened the doors to inspect the damage.  As expected, something had fallen from the top shelf, an avalanche of old stuffed toys diving like so many lemmings to the floor, taking board games and Legos with them.

            Will picked up a stuffed gray dog with brown ears.  Spot Mangy Mutt II, he had named the dog despite its obvious lack of spots.  Around Spot lay some of his kin:  his sons Spot III and Spot IV, his wife Marshy, and brother Jeremiah.  "Trying to get out?" Will said to the toys.

            He stuffed the Mutt family back into the garbage bag.  Every year he considered giving them away to charity so some child might actually love them.  But then he would think of Spot II ending up in a Dumpster or a pile of rubbish at the dump, like what had most likely happened to his predecessor, Spot Mangy Mutt I.  So another year would go by with the stuffed toys of his childhood sealed in the garbage bag, waiting perhaps for the day he might give them to his children—his and Jessie's children.

            He rebuilt the pile of board games he had once played with Jessie and Tom.  Like the stuffed toys, he couldn't bear to rid himself of the games either.  They wouldn't have any value to anyone else with pieces missing from Monopoly and Life and mustaches drawn on the female Clue characters.  These relics of his childhood would only be junk to someone else. 

            After settling the garbage bag on the board games, Will surveyed the closet to make sure he had found everything.  His mother checked the closet at least twice a week at random intervals to make sure he wasn't smuggling drugs or weapons or anything else.  Not that he had done anything to make her paranoid; she just didn't want him to end up like Tom, the failure of four years ago continuing to haunt her—and him.

            He went back to the living room, putting the Space Empire video into the VCR.  The scene with the silver ship and its black pursuers had faded away.  In its place he were the scenes remembered of Captain Tadd Iceslinger and his band of freedom fighters landing on a planet covered in lush jungles, battling terrifying snakes to reach the enemy stronghold to blow up the control center for the dreaded Mechanaut army.

            Just as Tadd planted the final charge, the synthesized voice of the evil Warlord said, "There will be no escape for you this time, Iceslinger."  Will braced himself for the climactic battle between Tadd and the Warlord, their crystal swords flashing like lightning.

            Instead, the scene cut away to another shot of space.  Once again Will saw the bulky black ships from earlier in the morning.  This time there were dozens, maybe even a hundred of them cruising into orbit around a blue planet not so different from Earth.  A few swept-wing fighters similar to the silver ship he had seen before fired on the black vessels.  They were quickly eliminated in a hellish blaze of energy.

            Then the black ship turned their weapons on the planet below.  As Will watched, oceans boiled away from the planet's surface, leaving vast deserts.  Forests became infernos, unfamiliar animals running in all directions, though there was no escape.  Vibrant cities as large as New York or Los Angeles turned to blackened rubble.  This wasn't enough for the black ships, who unleashed a second volley and then a third.

            "What is this?" Will said.  He picked up the remote control to hit the stop button.  As in the morning, nothing happened.  He tried again.  It didn't seem likely that the remotes in both houses had gone dead at the same time.  He took out the batteries and then reinserted them, but still the tape would not stop. 

            Will finally lurched across the living room to press the stop button.  The counter on the VCR stopped and yet the scene continued to play.  The world that had been blue and tranquil only minutes before had now turned a mixture of brown and black.  A flotilla of triumphant black ships descended into the atmosphere to mop up anything that remained.

            "What the hell is going on?"  Will turned the VCR off.  When that didn't work he unplugged the machine.  Still the scene continued to play.  In desperation he changed the channel.  He flipped through every channel on the TV, but every one showed the same image of the black ships coming in for a landing.  He finally turned off the TV, sighing with relief when the scene faded.

            He didn't dare try turning it back on, afraid of what he might find.  Am I going crazy? he wondered.  There was no way what he had seen could be a director's cut of the movie.  It couldn't be a movie at all for it to show up on every channel.  Maybe someone was messing with him, somehow beaming signals to the antenna on the roof.  One of the clowns from school, though he couldn't think of any with the expertise for such a prank.  Or maybe it was an overactive imagination from too little sleep.

            Will decided to get a few more hours of sleep.  When he woke up things would make sense.  The TV would function normally and when he played the tape in the VCR it would be the epic duel at the end of the Space Empire movie.  If not, he might have to place an emergency call to his mother's therapist.

            Opening the door to his bedroom, he saw he hadn't put away all of the stuffed toys from his closet.  Though how Ricky Raccoon had managed to bounce from the top shelf of the closet onto Will's desk he couldn't fathom.  But that was the only explanation unless someone had climbed in through the window to put the toy there.  After all, stuffed animals couldn't walk.

            Will picked up the stuffed raccoon, stroking its soft brown fur.  His father had bought Ricky for him from the gift shop of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.  That had come only days after the demise of Spot I; Ricky had been meant to soothe Will for the next two weeks as the family drove to Florida and back—the last time they went to Florida as a family.

            Turning the raccoon over in his hands, he noticed something different.  Where had the black leather belt beaded with silver cases come from?  And was that a sword on the raccoon's back?  Maybe it wasn't the same stuffed raccoon.  Will flipped the toy over to see the name, 'Ricky' scribbled on the tag in blocky, childish letters.  He turned the raccoon over again to look into its glassy eyes.

            "Greetings, Will Denton," the raccoon said.

            Will screamed.