The Green Gyre by Saul Tanpepper Read Free Book Online

THE SPACESHIP  that arrived on that bathwater-warm spring day and squatted itself down over Midtown Manhattan for all of thirty-eight minutes wasn’t just big. As one linguist put it: “The vessel’s Brobdingnagian proportions were way beyond the ability of our puny Lilliputian brains to process.”

    In the weeks that followed, as we struggled in vain to comprehend the enormity of that inexplicable event, words like colossal and titanic were dismissed out of hand. Ginormous , it was decided, was simply too frivolous a term, and mind-blowing made the close encounter sound like the product of some high school social media mania or a hippy hallucination. Such feeble depictions could never do the object justice — much less the experience — at least for those who had actually been there. And certainly none of the reputable news reporters who later waxed editorial about it would have dared to use such an inadequate word as huge .
    But that’s what the alien ship was: huge, colossal, mind-blowing.
    And, yes, maybe even ginormous.
    When the alien juggernaut came and parked its vast ass over New York City and defecated all over Central Park, it didn’t just blot out the sun or fill the too-small sky. It eclipsed them, consumed them.
    Obliterated them.
    Mark Williams was on his cell phone prowling one of the park’s compulsively-manicured walkways and crowing like a farmyard rooster when the ship’s umbra swept stealthily over him. It was one of those cloudless days in early June, humid as all get out but not the least bit hazy, and the sun, as it typically did at this time of day, was approaching its zenith. The hottest hours of the afternoon still lay ahead, but Mark was creating his own mini desert climate zone on the ground and, as such, was too preoccupied to notice when the quality of light abruptly changed or when the breeze faltered and died like the last gasp of an expiring Bactrian camel.
    Neither did he notice the sudden hush that fell over him when the park’s highly fecund denizens ceased their incessant chattering (which is how he’d always thought of the disease-ridden vermin, especially the freeloading, overpopulating squirrels with their flippity tails and their infuriatingly stupid squeaking, which always seemed to charm the nuts off the never-ending stream of camera-toting tourists). He’d woken that morning to find his entire existence had crashed down around him during the night, and he was now desperately trying to reconcile how something like that could have happened and what he could do to salvage even one eensy little piece of it.
    Even though he knew deep down that the damage was already too widespread, too irrevocable.
    So it was perhaps coincidental, on that particular day of the alien visitation, that the suffocating sensation which flooded through him with such tidal force was one of unfathomable foreboding: the world was indeed about to end— not just figuratively, but literally as well. It was a situation to which he had no prior exposure, and thus possessed no immunity against.
    As he stepped off 79 th Street and rampaged into the park, it was all he could do to tune everything else out, both the irreverent and irrelevant.
    “Everything’s shot to hell!” he screamed into his new four-hundred-dollar smartphone. He hadn’t yet made the first payment for the thing because, frankly, the corporate coffers had been as empty as a robbed grave for at least the past month. When he’d retired last night in a cognac-induced haze, he’d fully expected them to be overflowing this morning, tomorrow at the latest. Instead, he’d woken to a disaster.
    Which meant he was talking on borrowed time as well.
    I’m ruined.
    Those two words had hit him with such brutal finality that all he could think to do was vent his rage. At the moment, the most convenient target happened to be Adam Dauphin, his Veep of Operations.
    Some of the starry-eyed park-goers around him turned their vapid faces upon him