When The Meeting At The Wharf Broke Up

 A lot of people wanted to go up to talk to Doug, so Lou and Elvin and I just sat with Buddy watching him work the crowd like he knew what he was doing.  Talk about not judging a book by the cover!

I could see that a lot of ideas were being tossed at him.  Sometimes he wrote something down in a small notebook. 

A couple of the girls were standing around waiting also.  I asked them their names and asked them how long this meeting thing had been going on.  Lacy was one.  Casey was the other.  Lacy said that they had been meeting for about six months, once a month.  Doug had started inviting anyone that he met, that he thought might be a good candidate for a re-start group.  The group was growing.  Tonight, was the largest meeting so far.  People were drifting away, solitary or in groups of two or three.

Fifty or sixty survivors out to fix the country!  Well, why not?  You have to start somewhere.

When all the people were done talking to Doug he finally came back and sat down on his chair.  He looked older and tired.  I guessed he was actually in his early twenties.  I had thought he was a high school kid at first.  I guessed Elvin might be 17.

Doug said he wanted to go outside for a smoke. Lou woke up Buddy and we all went back out into the dark.  It was getting pretty late. It was  maybe two in the morning.  I know we were all tired and hungry.  There had been no snacks at the meeting.  I thought if I ever end going to any more of these meetings that I would see about that.  I believed that lots of them had missed dinner, just like we had, not to mention Buddy.

So, we decided to go sit down at the end of a dock a good way away from the café.  There were some benches down there.  There was no moon that night, not surprising.  It was dark except for a faint glow in the clouds over the rest of the city. Doug sat down and lit a Camel.  It did cross my mind to wonder where he got those.  I could see he was tired.

Elvin was poking around in his backpack.  I thought he was probably thinking about making another sandwich.  Suddenly, that seemed like a pretty good idea.

Lou was staring up at the sky and looking like she was about to go to sleep right there on the bench, when she gave a little yell and said, “what is that!” “They’re moving! Jen, what is that?” She jumped to her feet and pointed to an area over the café.  We all stood, trying to understand what we were seeing.  The boys looked like they weren’t quite as surprised as we were.

Silently, massively, three huge triangle shapes stopped down low in the sky, really just hovering barely above the buildings.  Each one had a red light in the center and several blue lights out on their corners.  The effect was vaguely like a police arrest scene.  The lights on the corners moved around like they were looking for something.

These vessels were totally new to us.  The silence was more alarming than if they had buzzed or sounded like jets or something.  It was like the sky had come down in the form of triangle ships.

They hung there, impossibly, but there, for sure.  No one was dreaming.

And just like that the old Wharf Café blew up.  It didn’t just start burning.  It exploded and then began burning, the very dining room where we had all been sitting just a few minutes before went up in flames with a roaring whoosh.  A column of fire and sparks lifted up into the night sky.

We saw no rays or projected power of any kind from the triangles.  The place just blew up. The fire spread to adjoining buildings and began spreading all along the waterfront. Unfortunately, fire service was a thing of the past.  All we could do was watch it burn.

While we were standing there with our mouths open, the triangles began to ghost away out over the bay.  Still no sound.  In perfect formation, just like they were some legit force, in no hurry, just doing their job, ma’am.

Someone was either trying to kill these kids off or scare them off.

So much for the meeting place.

Of course we thought that someone had talked to the wrong person about the café.

We cleared out of there quickly and I thought we had better all head back to Riverside and our place.  We had room for everyone and it was going to take a day or two to recover from this night.