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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WINDSOR, ONTARIO, CANADA
August 24, 4:50 AM
"Babe, are we going to evacuate? The traffic from the border isn't so bad now." I dragged my eyes from the computer screen displaying camera feeds of the bridge between Detroit and Windsor and rose on my knees to search for Fraser. Our eyes met and his scowl had me taking a deep breath, trying to relax the tension gripping my body.
Highway traffic had been bumper-to-bumper since the alien ship appeared twenty-nine days ago. Its enormous ebony mass blotted out the sky, turning day to permanent night, and hung overhead like an ominous doomsday poised to squash us in seven days. Even when I couldn't see it, the knowledge of the craft's oppressive presence pressed with a claustrophobic heaviness that didn't seem to bother my boyfriend or my brother. Not even the glowing countdown number in the sky worried them. If we hadn't run out of food, I'd never have gotten them to leave our apartment, despite the supposedly mandatory evacuation ordered days ago. It's not like I could have predicted gravity would start going wonky and we'd get stranded.
This wasn't my fault, damn it.
"Dylan isn't back from checking that auto shop yet. We need another wheel to get out of here. You know that," Fraser grumbled as he shoved another mattress out of the way from where it had fallen when gravity returned last night.
Anything not tied down during the twice-daily episodes tended to crash. Like our jeep into the industrial paving scrap yard nine days ago as we'd braved the barely moving log jam of vehicles, half of them stranded when they ran out of fuel. We'd been lucky it was only our tires receiving the rebar puncture make-over in that first chaotic gravity shift. Taking refuge in the abandoned furniture store had given us plenty of soft padding to cushion our ten-minute floating sessions and an office with a fibre-optic internet connection—the only kind that worked now.
His scowl deepened. "I'm not fucking walking six hundred kilometres out of the twilight zone, Charity."
I rolled my eyes and held in my snort. As if I didn't know that. "I'm just saying that we should try for Sault Ste. Marie instead of Montreal. It's half the distance and time." The ominous number seven in the sky—seven days remaining until who knew what—sent a chill through me every time I glimpsed it. I tried not to see the damn thing when we went outside, but I couldn't ignore it.
Fraser's eyes bugged out. "Hell, no." He shook his head violently and chopped his hand through the air. "We'd have to travel the entire length of Michigan. Do you have any idea how many guns, wacko militia, conspiracy theorists, and other nuts we'd have to get past?" His deep baritone voice rose into an uncharacteristic squeak.
Guns were one of the few things that disturbed the usually amiable Fraser. Understandable, given his dad killed his mom, then himself in a murder-suicide. A teenaged Fraser found the bodies when he'd returned home from the movies.
