V04 - Chicago Conversion Read online

  THE CHICAGO CONVERSION

  Geo. W. Proctor

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Chapter One

  Death leaped toward the Chicago sky in a profusion of color. Thousands upon thousands of children's balloons danced upward on a gentle morning breeze. For those below with necks craned to stare at the cloudless blue, the multihued array rivaled the festive displays of a hundred sporting events where humankind often offered such airborne garlands to the fleeting glory of its athletic demigods.

  Balloons—red, yellow, orange, blue, green, purple, pink—helium-filled balloons meant to be tied on a string for a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park bobbed, wove, and soared into the face of a summer morning. Never had death been celebrated in such joyous, merry splendor.

  In spite of the colorful sea of wind-bounced balloons, celebration was far from Chicagoans' minds. The balloons formed a front-line offensive as humanity waged war— global war—for its right to remain on the planet that had given it birth!

  The plump, elastic belly of each rubbery bubble lay laden with death, a common kitchen tablespoon of shifting, rust-hued powder. V-Dust, Lizard Arsenic, V-Con, Snake Pow-

  der were but a few of the names resistance fighters across the world had jokingly dubbed the substance while they prepared for this the final battle.

  Now there were no jokes.

  In deadly earnest they unleashed the virulent bacterial toxin upon the alien life form that had come to dominate Earth—a life form that had traveled 8.7 light-years across the yawning chasm of space in gargantuan ships equaling the size of a modern metropolis. From the fourth planet of the star Sirius they came, calling themselves the Visitors. With open hands they promised friendship, and with gentle smiles and soft words they offered to share their vast wealth of knowledge.

  Humanity had greeted them in peace, allowing the alien travelers open access to every small niche of human existence. The Visitors insinuated themselves into those niches, subtly, allowing their hosts time to accept their constant presence as they wove themselves deeper and deeper into every stratum of the human social structure.

  Quiet Visitor influence here and there went unnoticed, paving the way for ever greater flexing of alien muscle. Before a dazed human population knew how or why, the Visitors, with their endless units of shock troopers, had supplanted human authority. They controlled transportation, communications, law enforcement, and local and national governments. The open hand of friendship had been transformed into an iron fist of suppression!

  The human spirit did not die. Men, women, and children banded together in a global underground network of resistance fighters. Through their efforts and sacrifices, the Visitors were unmasked. The fleshlike, human makeup they wore was ripped away to unveil reptilian faces of green mottled with black.

  More horrible was the purpose of the Visitors' joumey from distant Sirius—they intended to suck Earth dry!

  the abundant waters washing over humanity's home world were a prize of immeasurable wealth to the Visitors whose own planet's landmasses dwarfed its tiny seas and the ribbonlike trickles the Visitors called rivers. Earth offered .mother abundant natural resource for the extraterrestrial Invaders—humankind itself. For another shortage—of food —existed on the Visitors' home planet.

  The majority of humanity complacently accepted Visitor domination. Gullibly they swallowed the lies the aliens spoon-fed them over their living room television sets. How easy it was to believe the lies rather than examine rumors that populations of whole cities and towns had vanished overnight, packed away like sides of beef in the Visitors' great Mother Ships. And who could truly believe that human governmental officials had somehow been brainwashed, their personalities remolded, converted until they were no more than zombies designed to carry out Visitor bidding?

  No one except the ever-expanding resistance movement. They had seen, and they knew. A pocket of fighters in Los Angeles, many of them scientists escaping the Visitors' regime, developed a bacterial toxin capable of killing the reptilian Visitors within two minutes after it was introduced into the aliens' respiratory system. At the same time, the deadly agent left terrestrial life forms unharmed. Both the toxin and an antitoxin to protect fifth columnists within the Visitors' own numbers were secreted along underground railroads throughout the world.

  It was this poison that rose to the sky above Chicago in a flood of helium-filled balloons today. The same toxin that a small armada of private airplanes and hot-air balloons showered into the atmosphere in bloody contrails streaming behind their small crafts. On the ground, armed with grenades packed with V-Dust and sandblasting equipment to spray the toxin, an army of resistance fighters swept over

  Michigan Avenue and Adams Street to storm the Art Institute of Chicago where Visitor security forces were headquartered.

  Even as human and alien fell beneath the blasts of armor-piercing bullets or the blue pulse beams of energy weapons in Chicago's heart, the country surrounding the great metropolis erupted in a brilliant burst of color. A second wave of toxin-laden balloons danced into the sky.

  Jeff Stevenson balanced precariously amid the upper limbs of an ancient cherry tree in Lake Zurich, forty miles northwest of Chicago's Loop. He hefted a pair of army surplus field binoculars and peered toward the city.

  "Can you see anything, Jeff?" his wife, Linda, called from the ground below.

  A smile lit Jeff's deeply suntanned face while he watched a distant black spot maneuver beneath the nose of the monstrous Mother Ship hanging over Chicago. The dark dot, no larger than a gnat through the binoculars, left a broad trail behind it in the air. Like the smoky contrail of a skywriter it spewed V-Dust in the form of a single letter, a gigantic red V—the international calling card of the resistance. V for Victory!

  Jeff's mouth hardened. A blue bolt of sizzling light shot from the saucer-shaped end of the Visitor craft. The gnatlike dot vanished. Yanking the field glasses from his eyes, he slammed them back into a case slung at his waist.

  That was only one of us, he reassured himself. The V remains. That's what's important—the V remains!

  "Jeff?" Linda called out again. "What can you see?"

  Jeff Stevenson smiled down at the petite redhead staring up from below as he began to scramble toward the ground. "The Mother Ship ..."

  "And the balloons? Can't you see them?" Linda frowned when he dropped to the ground.

  "Like flies swarming up from the city." Jeff's grin widened. "It's unbelievable! I've never seen anything like

  It!"

  Linda's right hand dropped to her slim waist. Steel hissed against leather. The long steel tooth of a silvery hunting knife slipped free of a sheath hung from her belt. "Let's add a few more flies to the ointment!"

  With a wink, she pivoted and ran toward an open field stretching north of the tree. Jeff slid a similar blade from a scabbard dangling behind a holstered .45-caliber automatic perched on his right hip. Gaze lifting to his wife, he trotted ;iIter the slender redhead.

  Through waist-high weeds covering a field once used to grow sweet corn, they moved. The husband and wife stopped when they reached a lumpy, shifting mound at the center of the clearing. This close to it the camouflaged taipaulin appeared blatantly obvious, Jeff thought. But, lhen, the tarp was never meant to deceive ground troops but to conceal the deadly cache beneath from the occasional Visitor squad vehicles that flew reconnaissance over deserted Lake Zurich.

  Linda's head turned to Jeff, her emerald eyes agleam. He nodded. Without hesitation the two bent. The honed edges of their hunting knives slashed two of the staked cords that held the tarpaulin to the ground. The canvas quivered as though something beneath it—something alive—were straining to be
free of the confining weight.

  Again the man's and woman's blades lashed out, and again. At an equal pace, they worked around the edges of the tarp, slicing each cord solidly staked into the fertile earth. They halted when only the last side of the canvas remained secured to the ground. Standing straight, Jeff and

  Linda Stevenson smiled at each other while they resheathed their blades.

  "Time to set those flies loose!" Jeff tilted his head toward the opposite end of the tarpaulin.

  Linda's smile widened and she nodded in reply before stepping to the open end of the canvas and grasping a corner. Jeff reached down and took the opposite corner. Together they wrenched the tarp back. A thousand brightly colored balloons leaped toward the cloudless sky, each bearing another tablespoon of red toxin into the air.

  "There it is." Linda's voice came soft and solemn when she stepped to her husband's side and pointed to a Day-Glo-red orb adorned with the smiling face of Mickey Mouse.

  Jeff found his wife's hand and squeezed it. Mickey was special; he was for Carla. The Walt Disney creation had been Carla's favorite cartoon character.

  Jeff closed his eyes to stem the welling tears and to blot out the memories of a night six months ago. He and Linda had left their four-year-old daughter with a babysitter and driven into nearby Barrington to catch the latest Steven Spielberg flick. Goosepimply from the director's newest collection of special-effects crawlies and beasties, they had shared a double scoop of daiquiri ice at Baskin-Robbins, then had driven back to Lake Zurich.

  Only, there was no Lake Zurich, just empty houses and buildings. They found a dying policeman, collapsed among garbage containers in an alley, his chest seared by a blast from a Visitor energy rifle, and from him they learned of the horror that had transpired in their few hours of absence.

  A fleet of Visitor shuttles had dropped out of the night sky. From each swarmed an army of shock troopers in their red uniforms, black boots, and helmets. In a matter of two hours every home and building in Lake Zurich was emptied. The population of a whole town was herded like cattle into the waiting shuttles. When the craft vanished into the night, . had four-year-old Carla Stevenson.

  Jell shook his head and opened his eyes, staring at the i loud of soaring balloons. A resistance reconnaissance team who entered Lake Zurich the next morning revealed the gruesome purpose of the Visitors' raid. Since then Linda and he had only thought of their young daughter in the past tense. Though she might still be alive aboard one of the monstrous Mother Ships—they had heard rumors that a similar thing had happened to the son of the Visitor-hunted newsman Michael Donovan—they could not live on false hope, on a dream that might never be.

  Instead they fought. At the side of others who realized the late of humanity was at stake, Jeff and Linda Stevenson had helped the Chicago area resistance movement establish a headquarters in a deserted hotel along the shores of the small lake from which the town took its name. They did so (hat other four-year-old children might live. And they waited until they could avenge the daughter who had been taken from them.

  Today Mickey will make the snakes pay! Jeff thought while the unleashed balloons floated higher.

  The internal pressure of each colorful orb had been carefully calculated so it would explode within a specific portion of the atmosphere. There the virulent bacteria released would multiply. With each gentle rain, each booming thunderstorm, it would fall to the earth, contaminating the water, becoming part of each living organism, weaving itself into every tiny niche of Earth's food chain, making the whole planet poisonous to the human-disguised reptiles who sought to suck it dry!

  For Carla! Jeff silently cheered as he squeezed his wife's hand again. "We'd better head back to headquarters. Things will be poppin' soon."

  A pained grimace played across Linda's lips in reaction to her husband's unintentional pun. She leaned forward and tenderly kissed his mouth. It was a kiss, Jeff realized, that was as much for Carla as for him.

  "Have I told you how much I love you?" he asked. She shook her head and he smiled. "Remind me to do so when we have more time."

  Linda's right arm rose; her fist balled. Before she could deliver a playful punch to his arm, she froze. Her eyes went wide. A piteous whimper escaped her lips.

  Jeff's head jerked around. Five Visitor squad vehicles silently darted from the sky in delta formation. The tip of that„tight V dipped toward the field.

  "Run!" Jeff shoved Linda toward the cherry tree while he yanked the .45 from its holster. "Take cover!"

  Her questioning look lasted just a split second before she pivoted and darted for the relative security of the cherry tree's leafy boughs. Her legs carried her but two bounding strides before blinding blue bolts of pulse-beam energy erupted from the triangular nose of the lead craft.

  Linda's scream rent the morning silence as the first sizzling blast ripped between her shoulder blades, ending her life.

  "No!" Agony tore from Jeff's chest and throat. Linda's lifeless body collapsed, swallowed by the jungle of weeds covering the field. "Nooooo!"

  First Carla—now Linda! His sanity frayed, then snapped. The lizards, the damned lizards, had taken all from him, robbed him of his reasons for living.

  Both hands about the .45, he swirled and jerked the automatic high. Stiff-armed, he held it into the faces of the approaching Visitor shuttles. He curled a finger around the trigger and squeezed.

  Glaring, globelike balls of blue energy crackled from the noses of all five ships. Before a single shot barked from the pistol, Jeff Stevenson died, his living flesh instantly transformed to smoldering charcoal.

  "An unexpected but useful check of the squad's weaponry, don't you think, Captain?" Gerald's words reverberated with a sibilant hiss as he forced his forked reptilian tongue to accommodate the alien syllables of English.

  "A waste of a fine feast," the shock trooper captain answered with a wistful shake of his head. He turned a lielmeted head from the dead man and woman below and glanced at his blonde, blue-eyed human-disguised companion in the squad vehicle's pilot's couch.

  "But a waste of which Our Great Leader would approve, frank." Gerald eased back the controls. The craft leveled and nosed toward a sun-glinting lake that lay directly ahead. Gerald tapped a yellow button on the left arm of the control couch. Intership communications opened. "One minute to touchdown. Prepare your troops for evacuation and immediate engagement of the enemy."

  "Our Leader will approve of every death that comes this morning, as will Commander Alicia," Frank agreed. "Nor will your part in breaking the back of this bothersome human resistance go unnoticed." Frank's approving smile vanished beneath the gas mask he fitted over mouth and nostrils. His face then disappeared when he lowered the dark smoked faceplate to his helmet.

  With cool restraint, Gerald repressed the smile that sought to lift the corners of his human-shaped lips. When he had volunteered to infiltrate the fifth columnists within Alicia's Chicago Mother Ship four months ago, he had been a lowly lieutenant, a faceless soldier among the thousands aboard the huge vessel. His exposure of twenty-five traitors within the Mother Ship's hull two weeks after he undertook the assignment brought the first promotion.

  Since then he had soared to the rank of high captain—a notch above Frank, who had been his superior a few short months ago. His work among the fifth columnists aiding the human resistance had first caught Commander Alicia's eye. After all, he was the one that first brought her word of the "secret weapon" the humans intended to unleash this morning.

  In a few minutes his military prowess would draw the attention of the invasion's supreme commander, John. With the 250 shock troopers he commanded, Gerald would annihilate the Chicago resistance force and their headquarters before they had the opportunity to employ their secret weapon.

  With such a victory, who knows what rewards will come my way. A hint of a smile touched his lips. Military commander? Captain of Alicia's personal security force? The last prospect was particularly intriguing, since Alicia shar
ed her bed with the present commander of security.

  "Any report on the purpose of these balloons yet?" The muffled reverberation of Frank's voice shattered Gerald's bedroom fantasies.

  "Nothing solid." Across the lake Gerald saw the white form of the abandoned hotel in which the resistance fighters hid. "Command believes they are an ineffectual attempt at confusion, or perhaps a signal of some sort."

  Silently the squad vessel and its, sister ships shot over the small lake. Gerald hovered in midair a moment, then eased forward on the controls. The craft and its four companions drifted down to settle in an empty parking lot behind the hotel.

  "Red unit, hit the main structure." Gerald gave the final instruction as he thumbed the yellow button on the couch's arm to life again. "Blue unit, concentrate on the ten cottages along the lake's shore. Resistance communications are housed in the fifth cottage. I want that knocked out as soon as possible!"

  With that, Gerald flipped a switch opening the doors to the belly of the shuttle. The scramble of booted feet came from behind him when he turned and nodded to Frank. Together they shoved from their couches and followed the fifty armored and helmeted shock troopers who darted into the hotel parking area.

  Outside red-uniformed troops poured from the five shuttles. In precise formation the rifle-clutching soldiers divided into two units, one running for the hotel's main building, the other swinging toward the white cottages along the lake.

  "Not even a guard posted," Frank said as his helmeted head turned to Gerald. "I think we caught them napping. They haven't woken up yet!"

  Not we—me! Gerald already tasted the sweetness of Alicia's lips, the coolness of her body against his scales— her real body, unencumbered by an awkward human disguise. I never thought it would be this easy! His gaze surveyed the peaceful scene around him. Never this easy.

  "High Captain," a voice crackled from the earphone plugged into Gerald's left ear, "Red leader here. First floor secure with no resistance met."

  "No resistance?" Gerald's eyes widened beneath the near-black lenses of the sunglasses he wore. "That can't be! The hotel was packed yesterday. Over three hundred humans ..."