The Final Call Read online

  Not Alone: The Final Call

  Craig A. Falconer

  Not Alone: The Final Call

  © 2019 Craig A. Falconer

  This edition published May 2019

  The characters and events herein are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Some of the locations found in this book are also fictional while others have been liberally adapted.

  Reader’s note: Not Alone: The Final Call was written, edited and produced in Scotland. As such, some spellings will differ from those found in the United States. Examples of British English include using colour rather than color, organise rather than organize, and centre rather than center. An exception to this rule is the use of proper nouns, which retain their American spelling where applicable.

  At the author’s request, this book has been made available free of all DRM.

  Contents

  Books by Craig A. Falconer

  Part 1

  THURSDAY

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  FRIDAY

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  Part 2

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  SATURDAY

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  Part 3

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  SUNDAY

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  Part 4

  MONDAY

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  TUESDAY

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  WEDNESDAY

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  Part 5

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  THURSDAY

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  Part 6

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  Part 7

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  FRIDAY

  impact

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  Part 8

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  THREE DAYS LATER

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  THREE MONTHS LATER

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  Author’s Notes

  Books by Craig A. Falconer

  Not Alone

  Not Alone: Second Contact

  Not Alone: The Final Call

  Terradox

  The Fall of Terradox

  Terradox Reborn

  Terradox Beyond

  Funscreen

  Sycamore

  Sycamore 2

  Sycamore X

  Sycamore XL

  For the long shots.

  Part 1

  Time Bomb

  “Honesty is the first chapter

  in the book of wisdom.”

  Thomas Jefferson

  THURSDAY

  V minus 99

  Lake Maggiore

  Ispra, Italy

  “Hashtag blessed,” Emma Ford said, turning her back to Lake Maggiore and pretending to take a sunset selfie as the third day of her pre-honeymoon began its slow fade into night.

  With her phone and all of the couple’s other digital devices locked away for the week as part of an all-out ban on news and outside communication, Emma’s mind was as happily empty as her hands.

  Laughing loud and long, Dan McCarthy rose from his poolside sun-lounger and joined her to make the most of a picture-perfect view he would never get used to. The luxurious villa, owned by their good friend Timo Fiore, couldn’t have been nestled in a better location and truly was the ideal place for the happily engaged couple to spend a week away from the incessant attention that followed them around in the real world.

  With only this one beautiful sunset remaining before sunrise ushered in the first anniversary of Contact Day, the timing of Dan and Emma’s romantic retreat was anything but coincidental.

  Their need to escape this time around, while strong in Dan’s mind, had certainly been less urgent than prior to their previous trip to Italy. Back then, when he had been pushed to breaking point by intense and often hostile scrutiny over his decision to leak a series of controversial documents which seemingly exposed a top-level government cover-up of extraterrestrial visitation, the trip had felt necessary to protect not only Dan’s sanity but also his physical safety.

  Things had then gotten a lot more difficult and a whole lot more complicated before they got any better, but Dan’s relentless pursuit of the truth ultimately led to the epoch-defining moment when extraterrestrial beings walked on Earth in full view of hundreds of people and dozens of cameras. Three hundred and sixty-four days had passed since that moment, and not all of them had been easy.

  Dan’s highly public contact with the Messengers had evidently been enough to land him a reluctant place in humanity’s hall of fame and, even less welcomely, it had also cemented his position as a prophet in the eyes of many.

  But the direct result of that contact — the Messengers’ agreement to divert the course of the colossal comet Il Diavolo away from Earth and prevent an extinction-level impact — took the public’s adoration of Dan to even higher levels.

  Much to his own unease, many of the celebratory events scheduled to mark the anniversary of Contact Day were instead terming it Salvation Day. More uncomfortable still, the vast majority of messianic adulation was directed squarely at Dan rather than at the benevolent but far from all-knowing aliens he had successfully persuaded to act.

  “You just need to remember that this is the hardest it’s ever going to be,” Emma said, correctly sensing the direction of Dan’s thoughts. “This is the first an
niversary. Every year from now on, it’ll be less and less of a huge deal.”

  As well as having far more experience of dealing with media attention than Dan thanks to a decade spent at the top of the public relations industry, Emma also had a degree of distance from the worst of it given that she hadn’t been present at the Birchwood drive-in when the Messengers finally showed themselves.

  Emma’s earlier contact with them in Lolo National Forest, during which they had asked her for help regarding the placement of an engraved plaque designed to calm growing tensions on Earth, had been public knowledge ever since Dan desperately revealed everything in an effort to draw the Messengers back to Earth to stop the comet before it was too late. This ensured that she too remained a subject of often-overwhelming public interest, as well as often-exhausting interest from all kinds of governmental and international agencies.

  The pressure on the couple to take part in one particular anniversary event had been almost crushingly overwhelming, but Dan stood firm in his insistence that his days in the spotlight were all behind him.

  The level of global esteem in which Dan was held, not to mention the level of authority his views on this topic understandably carried, gave his words unparalleled weight. Without doubt, even a single negative word from Dan could have utterly torpedoed the fledgling and highly controversial Global Contact Commission’s attempts to position itself as the sole legitimate point of future diplomatic contact with the Messengers, or indeed with any other extraterrestrial race.

  It took an outright threat of this nature for Dan to get the GCC’s powerful members to stop bothering him, with the likes of US President Valerie Slater and the organisation’s Chairman William Godfrey ultimately deciding that it was better to accept his position as a neutral observer than to keep aggressively pursuing his endorsement when doing so might have pushed him towards a hugely damaging public disavowal.

  Dan hoped Emma was right — that this first anniversary would be the hardest — and he nodded slowly in acknowledgment of her efforts to ease his mind.

  “Do you think they’re watching us?” he asked a few minutes later, catching her by surprise as the night’s first stars became visible.

  Emma hesitated. “I think they’re watching Earth,” she eventually replied. “But I don’t see why they’d be watching us.”

  Again, Dan nodded very slightly. It wouldn’t have bothered him if he knew they were watching him — there might even be a degree of comfort in it — but nor did he think there was any reason they would be.

  In the past three hundred and sixty-four days, Dan McCarthy had experienced as much and as little contact with the Messengers as everyone else on Earth: none at all.

  He hadn’t had any dream-time visions, he hadn’t made any sleepwalking trips to the cornfield at Stevenson Farm, and most happily of all he hadn’t felt any searing pains in the back of his neck.

  The neck scar where such pains had previously been felt, and which was initially brought about by the Messengers having twice physically connected a cable-like communications interface to Dan’s person, was now almost completely invisible. There would have been no ‘almost’ if the scar hadn’t been the focal point of so many of the occasionally invasive medical tests Dan still endured at the hands of government doctors every month, but to the best of his knowledge the doctors and analysts had never learned anything meaningful from their obsessive study of the scar.

  The sound of a car pulling into the long driveway at the front of the house tore both Emma and Dan’s eyes from the stars, but there was no concern in either of their expressions. Christophe, Timo’s driver of many years, had left an hour ago to procure a pair of wireless headphones Emma had requested to replace the old ones that had quit on her the previous day. For security reasons she couldn’t receive any deliveries at the house or leave the premises, as per Timo’s cautious insistence, and Christophe was glad of having something to do.

  “That’ll be the headphones. Do you want to do day two of your goals thing?” Dan asked, referencing the decades-old personal development program Emma had found in Timo’s media drawer. The ancient program was CD-based and could be played via the TV’s Blu-ray player, which allowed her to listen without breaking the ‘no personal devices’ rule that was in place primarily to keep Contact Day related news at bay. The TV signal had also been disconnected at their request, so there was no scope for slip-ups even if curiosity got the better of her.

  The headphone problem had prevented Emma from listening to the second seminar early in the morning like she had the previous day with the first, but she told Dan she would just write the day off and get back to it when morning came again.

  She walked through the house and out to collect the new headphones from Christophe, who politely asked if that was all she needed for the night.

  Emma always felt more than a little awkward being waited on like this — it was neither something she was used to nor something she particularly wanted to get used to — but Christophe was a personal friend of Timo as well as an employee, and he clearly enjoyed his job. This perhaps had something to do with the flat 100,000 euro salary Timo paid him despite only utilising his services for a month or two each year, and Christophe’s level of salary was likely why he insistently refused to accept tips.

  Emma warmly expressed her thanks and confirmed that she didn’t need anything else, at which point Christophe turned the key to bring his limousine-like car back to life. A news reporter’s voice blared through the open window, coming in mid-sentence:

  “… know that tensions here in Buenos Aires were already extremely high, but the tone of these latest comments from Chinese Premier Ding Ziyang is likely to draw a firm response from Chairman Godfrey. At a time when the regular citizens of Earth are unified in relief and gratitude over what happened on that fateful day in Birchwood one year ago tomorrow, the political chasm between East and West appears to be reaching a point where, sooner rather than later, something really does have to give. For ACN Radio, this is Norman Holt.”

  “Forgive me, Ms Ford,” Christophe said, shutting the radio off as though suddenly becoming aware he’d been listening only when the news report ended. “I know you have both been trying to stay away from all of this.”

  Having been similarly entranced, Emma blinked and exhaled sharply right after the report ended, regretting that she hadn’t covered her ears or asked him to hit mute as soon as it began. “Not your fault,” she said, smiling and waving him off before she walked back to Dan and the majestic lake view.

  For Dan’s sake, Emma kept the news report and its implications to herself. The imminence of Contact Day nevertheless made this night different to the two they’d enjoyed in Italy so far, with an unspoken understanding that each of them both did and didn’t want to talk about it.

  They opted not to, finding effective distraction in the enormous master bedroom.

  Sometime after 2am, however, Emma accepted defeat in her battle to fall asleep over the ceaseless pondering of her mind. She got up, quietly enough not to wake Dan, and unpacked her new headphones.

  The sight of the house’s locked safe provided a challenging distraction, a siren call for her to check her phone — just once — to see exactly what was going on with China. The radio reporter’s comment that tensions were high was an understatement if ever she’d heard one, and an escalation was the last thing the world needed.

  But a promise to Dan was a promise she couldn’t break, so her phone stayed where it was and she instead connected the wireless headphones to the TV and placed her CD inside the Blu-ray player. She poured a drink and stepped out into the mild Italian night, leaving the outside door open so Dan would immediately know where she was if he woke up concerned by her absence from the bedroom.

  The energetic voice of her new favourite motivational guru quickly distracted Emma completely from all thoughts of Buenos Aires and Beijing, but the goal-setting workshop that began after a few minutes proved to be the most challenging she’d ever unde
rtaken.