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  “It was a mistake,” the nurse said, defending the doctor.

  “It was gross negligence,” Jackie replied, pulling off her mask to reveal an attractive, angular face with more lines than seemed right for someone who was only thirty-three years old. She moved closer to the baby who was silent, no blood on it, no mucous, no amniotic fluid, no nothing. “She’s not crying.”

  “Batteries are dead I think,” the nurse said, cursing in Spanish. She held up the “baby” to reveal that it wasn’t a real child at all, but a very lifelike infant mannequin, a high-tech simulator, the kind used to train physicians and nurses.

  Lights flashed overhead. Jackie turned and waved at a wall of black, one-way glass. A metal door hissed open and a group of young residents, older physicians, and nurses streamed in.

  The first man to greet Jackie, tall, broad-shouldered, with a long, wolf-like face was Doctor Emilio Hernandez. “That could have gone better,” Doctor Hernandez said.

  “Understatement of the century.”

  “How much would this case be worth back in the States, Jackie?”

  Jackie stroked her black ponytail. “Depends on the jurisdiction of course, but I could see a D.C. jury handing out ten million very easily for a brain-damaged little girl.”

  Doctor Hernandez groaned. “Which is all the more reason to get out ahead of these issues. We need to make sure that best practices are followed not only here in Mexico City, but out in the colonias and beyond.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “You want to manage risk, you call the best,” Doctor Hernandez said, summoning a smile, grasping Jackie’s hand with both of his. He was her liaison at the Hospital Medica Sur, the man who’d brought her down from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore on a temp assignment to help the hospital revamp its risk management policies and procedures. He was a good man with a hearty laugh and a naughty sense of humor, and reminded Jackie an awful lot of her father.

  “Speaking of risk,” she said.

  Doctor Hernandez nodded. “You’ve got five hours to make it over the border before it’s sealed for good.”

  “Did the President address the nation?”

  The doctor took Jackie aside. “He addressed the world, Jackie.”

  “Any new developments?”

  “A few. More of those, how do you say? Black towers, spires? Twelve more have appeared along with other things. Structures in the air. Laberinto. Mazes, what some are calling dungeons in the sky…”

  “Anyone actually see them?”

  “It is all over the internet.”

  Jackie’s face went wooden. “I still can’t believe this is happening.” This wasn’t necessarily true of course. Jackie had seen things, boxes and grids, flashing before her eyes occasionally like some video game heads-up display. Things that she’d only told one other person about before.

  “Nuevo mundo valiente.”

  “Brave new world,” Jackie mused, translating the words.

  Another nod from Doctor Hernandez. “You go on now. Go home to your family and we’ll be in touch once the madness, once this…game is over and things go back to normal.”

  She hoped to God that he was right. It had been two weeks since it had happened. Jackie refused to refer to the incident as anything other than it, although others were using “The Revelation” or “La Llegada,” “The Arrival,” or a half-dozen other phrases that began with “the.”

  It was either a worldwide hallucination, Jackie thought, a kind of mass psychogenic illness, or the potential end of the world as everyone knew it. The arrival of a new species, an alien empire that called itself the Noctem. Jackie hugged Doctor Hernandez and then exited the training room, hooking a right, walking briskly down a long corridor, trying not to think about how messy the world could be even before the arrival of alien entities.

  “Doctor James,” a voice called out, pulling her back from escape.

  Jackie stopped and looked over her shoulder to see the young Mexican doctor who’d delivered the brain-damaged silicon baby. Doctor Guillermo. He wasn’t going to let this go, and she knew it. She’d have to massage his self-worth a bit to keep him from becoming a suicide patient later in the day.

  “I want to say – about back there. I’ll do better next time,” Doctor Guillermo whispered. “I fucked up.”

  “We can’t fuck up. Ever,” Jackie snapped. Do better? She wanted to be helpful, understanding, but fuck that. There were no do-overs, resets, or extra lives if you have extra quarters to throw in the machine. In their line of work, it was life or death. It was harsh, but he didn’t deserve to be coddled for his mistakes.

  “I know that,” he said, hanging his head.

  “We don’t damage lives,” Jackie said. “We save them.”

  “I know that too,” Doctor Guillermo replied. “I’ll do better next time.”

  There it was again. ‘Do better next time.’ She was exhausted and preoccupied about getting out of Mexico while she could, but nevertheless summoned a huge smile. “I know you will,” she replied, really wanting to believe that he would.

  Before the doctor could respond, footfalls echoed. Jackie cast a sideways look down into another hallway where emergency medical personnel were carrying bodies in. Some of the bodies were splotched red and a few appeared to be missing limbs.

  Boxes and grids flashed before her. She blinked, then screwed her eyes shut, hoping that they’d go away. When she opened her eyes, they were still there, reordering. The boxes highlighted the bloodied bodies and the persons carrying them in.

  The first time she’d seen the boxes Jackie believed she was losing her mind. She still wasn’t completely convinced that she wasn’t. There were things inside the boxes and icons, words like “vitals,” “kills,” “class,” “species,” “health,” “chattel,” and a blinking cursor that asked: “Do you have questions?”

  Mentally, she screamed, “No!” as the words and boxes disappeared.

  “They say it’s already started,” the doctor replied, causing Jackie to flinch. “Almost like…a dry run.”

  “What?” she asked, still reeling from the sudden onslaught of information overload. “They say what has started?”

  “The Melee. Of course, it hasn’t formally begun, but people have already started playing out on the streets, the countryside, everywhere. People are killing people.”

  “Why?”

  The doctor looked at her with a perplexed expression, as if she should know the answer to her question. “They say it is…for points.”

  Balance

  Melee Mexico Chapter Two

  Unnerved, Jackie exited the corridor in a hurry and shuffled down a stairwell, picking up the pace. Screams echoed from somewhere far overhead, but Jackie didn’t stop. She’d witnessed enough in emergency rooms to know that humans didn’t need much of an excuse, let alone an alien incursion and some kind of worldwide mandatory deathmatch game to unleash their worst selves.

  She rushed out of the stairwell, shouldering open a door, and breezed into an inner courtyard where a tall, lean man with a closely cropped beard and an open, guileless face, waited. Will Sadler, her long-suffering boyfriend, tapped his boot and adjusted his hipster glasses. He was every bit the part of an intellectual mixed haphazardly with a gruff free spirit who could adapt to any situation, and she adored him for it.

  “You’re a little late,” Will said.

  She wasn’t late. She’d forgotten actually. Being an introverted, intuitive, thinking, and judgmental genius hadn’t done much by way of her social acumen. Will, on the other hand, somehow managed to be charming without losing any of his brilliance.

  “Sorry, hon, I was kinda busy helping the hospital avoid a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.”

  “Bad baby?”

  She nodded and Jackie pulled out her phone. She’d promised her father that she’d text. Yet, she couldn’t get a signal. “Fuck,” she spat. “What the hell…”

  “I checked and everything’s down,” Will said. “Even p
orn sites.”

  He winked at her and she stuck out her tongue and bumped him affectionately with her shoulder. Doctor Guillermo and the nurse who’d botched the faux delivery strolled past. Jackie waved, but they simply acknowledge her by tipping their heads. They whispered amongst themselves and moved in the other direction—either intimidated, angry, or embarrassed, but Jackie didn’t really care what they thought.

  “Were you playing nicely in the sandbox?” Will asked, glancing from Doctor Guillermo to Jackie.

  “I’m not supposed to be besties with them, Will.”

  “Nobody was asking you to be…”

  “I’m tough on them, but one day they’ll thank me.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket said.”

  Jackie held his look. “Was that supposed to be funny?”

  “Yep.”

  She playfully elbowed him. Will was annoyed and had every right to be. She’d originally planned to leave three days earlier, to use up a few sick days and make sure they had enough time to get back across the border before it was closed for good. But she didn’t and now their window of opportunity was closing.

  “You hate me, don’t you?” she asked, as they moved toward an exit door

  “I’ve grown to dislike your dedication to the job,” he said with a wink. “Or at least what you think is the job.”

  “I don’t know why I do it. Maybe I should tone things down a little. I could use a break. Maybe we can take a week or two off until this nonsense in the sky passes.”

  “You do what you do because it actually matters, Jackie,” he replied. “You’re not like me, jockeying a desk, pushing papers from the left side of my desk to the right. You actually save lives.”

  “Yeah, I help ensure babies are brought safely into a world that might soon be snuffed out.”

  He stopped. “You don’t actually mean that.”

  She could feel her cheeks flush hot. Why did he have to be so caring? Why couldn’t she be more like that? Because doctors weren’t supposed to be like that. Cool, clinical, detached. Save the warm and fuzzies for nursing, at least that’s one some of her instructors had said. “I don’t know what I mean anymore,” she finally replied.

  “It’s all bullshit, Jackie. Mass hysteria, the aliens, this friggin’ game. For all we know it could be caused by something the Russians sprayed in the air, but one thing I’m certain of is that it won’t simply pass like a kidney stone in a week or two. We have to take this seriously.”

  “I saw them again,” Jackie confessed, despite her better judgment. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but…”

  “The boxes?”

  She nodded. “I should probably get that script for Xanax…”

  “You don’t need it. Besides, you’d risk losing your edge. And we both know that would be worse than a panic attack.”

  She did her best not to take his oversimplification as an insult, not that a panic attack would be something she should be ashamed of. It was just that she didn’t want to lose her belief that she could overcome anything with the proper amount of meditation, research, healthy diet and exercise, confidence, effort, and wine. Lots of wine. “What about you?” she asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Have you seen them? Did you hear the voice?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he finally said, breaking her gaze.

  Jackie tapped her fingers up Will’s arm, lingering and taking her time as she shifted the mood. “It’s a man’s voice, low, kinda smooth, like someone whispering over your shoulder—”

  “Jesus Christ, Jack, do we really have to talk about—”

  “Reminds me a bit of Jeff Goldblum.”

  “The actor?”

  “Yes.”

  Will made a face. “So, Jeff Goldblum is now an alien voice implanted somewhere in your mind?”

  “All signs point to yes.”

  “Maybe you do need that Xanax…”

  She swatted him in the shoulder. “See, this is the reason why I suggest we not talk about this.”

  “Right, ‘cause ignoring things always makes them go away…”

  “How about we focus on happy things,” he said.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as this, girlie,” he replied. Will held up his phone to show her a QR code. The same kind that you scan at airports to board flights.

  She beamed. “Holy mother of – you did it!”

  “Yes, ma’am I did. Two flights to San Diego.”

  “How?”

  “I pulled a few strings.”

  “You don’t have any strings to pull.”

  “Okay, so maybe I don’t. But my old man does. Came through twenty minutes ago, right before the ‘net went down.”

  She clapped her hands and hugged Will tightly. It was the first good news they’d had in a very long time. “When?”

  “Good news, bad news. Which do you want first?”

  “I hate this game,” she sneered, as she slipped her arm around his. “Just give it to me like a plastered drunk who’s out of cash and doesn’t want to spend the three bucks for lube.”

  “You do realize how the things you say don’t exist in a vacuum and that people attach them to the person speaking?”

  She smiled, he didn’t. “The good news is we have a way out. The bad news is that the flight leaves in an hour and twenty minutes.”

  Jackie tripped as she took in the news. There wouldn’t be any tying up loose ends before leaving. Picturing the rush and crowded airport caused her heart the skip a beat. She wasn’t looking forward to this despite how much she was looking forward to getting somewhere familiar. Maybe she did need that Xanax after all.

  Melee Mexico