The Apkallu Protocol 5
Chapter 5
Fifty-one and mostly retired, Devon Schmidt sat at the corner table in the stark white kitchen of his Wisconsin retirement home. He knew things were coming to a head, but wasn’t sure what that head would look like.
At his feet, glaring up at him, was his trans (male-to-female) border collie Wilbur, who wanted to go out.
He’d bought the home, an old refurbished farm house, four years earlier, and had moved up from Tucson with his two daughters, Rita, 17, and Meghan, 21. The house wasn’t energy efficient, but that didn’t matter, given the settlement he’d gotten from the Air Force.
Schmidt had been an Air Force mechanic, a good one, but he’d permanently lost the use of his right arm when a plane collapsed on him. The injury was to the brachial plexus, the accident the fault of a smart aleck newbie who’d forgotten to put a safety pin in place while lubricating the landing gear.
He’d never liked Tucson, and now the place only reminded him of his ex-wife. She left him a year after the accident.
He grew up here, in Belleville, Wisconsin, his mother and brother still lived here. So he decided to decamp from the desert of Arizona and return to his relatively lush Midwest hometown.
“Girls, how would you like to live in a greener place, with lakes and forests?” he’d said to his teenage daughters one evening over dinner.
They wouldn’t, as it turned out. Their cell phones worked just fine in Tucson. But they were both minors then, and given his ex-wife’s drug problem and that escapade with her yoga teacher—the guy ended up doing time, Denise was lucky she got off—he had custody. They were in Wisconsin two months later.
“This washed-up one-armed man beat all four of your arms!” Schmidt remembered yelling at Denise, referencing her and her would-be fraudster yoga guy.
Schmidt glanced down at Wilbur, who whined softly. But Schmidt wasn’t about to get up. The dog had just gone out before dinner.
The kitchen is the best place to think.
He used to sit outside in the evening, sit in the dark on the small patio, but now that was problematic. He wondered why outside he sat in the dark, but in the kitchen he wanted the light on, making everything stark white.
Shifting in his chair, he used his left hand to reposition his lifeless right arm in its sling so that it sat right. He wondered again whether his eldest, Meghan, was really the source of the bizarre happenings of the past few months. But wonder was the wrong word. He was sure she was the source, though he didn’t blame her for it.
When Meghan was five and had just begun kindergarten, back there in Tucson, she began telling them of the “friends” that visited her in her room at night. Rita was a baby then. He and Denise thought Meghan was just imaginative, or was inventing things to get her parents attention. They thought she was jealous of all the fuss being paid to the newcomer, her baby sister.
But Meghan’s descriptions of the nighttime visitors were uncanny. Schmidt recognized it from the start, though he played it down. Denise, who wasn’t exactly stable at the best of times, was actually getting a bit frightened by the girl’s stories. Schmidt had to find a way to defuse the mounting drama.
“Honey, you can tell me about your friends, but don’t talk about them to your mother anymore, okay? She doesn’t like to have visitors in the house at night. Me, I don’t mind. So just let it be our secret, between you and me. Okay?”
And he winked, establishing a pact with his daughter.
It worked. The girl stopped mentioning her friends over breakfast, and since he drove Meghan to kindergarten on his way to the base, she could tell him in the car.
Not that there was anything very interesting in what she said. Her friends never talked. They just stood near her bed looking at her. When he’d ask her what they looked like, she always said the same thing. They had red eyes and were very thin. They had only four fingers, which she repeated almost every time she talked about them. “Four fingers is the best!” He asked her to explain, and it became clear that they had thumbs, but only three more fingers on each hand. If he asked what kind of clothes they wore, she’d say she didn’t know.
“They aren’t like clothes,” she said. “It’s just their bodies.”
Their bodies were kind of gray.
It was usually two that visited, but sometimes just one, and sometimes three.
He asked her how she could see them. Did she turn her light on? It was dark in the room at night.
“They bring their own light,” she said.
It became clear that they didn’t carry any sort of device to cast light, but that when they were there, there was a kind of dim light in the room.
“Why do you think they visit you, honey?” he asked.
“They like me!” she said proudly.
Schmidt remembered one night waking up suddenly, thinking of his daughter. It was 3:20 a.m. He knew something was happening.
He quietly slipped out of bed and tiptoed down the hallway to her door. He swung it open. The street light coming through a kitchen window behind him cast a faint penumbra into the room. He was shocked to see his daughter sitting upright against the headboard, her blanket and sheet folded neatly on the side of the bed.
He turned her room light on.
“What are you doing sitting up in the dark?” he asked in a nervous whisper.
“They were here,” she said, also in a whisper. She was fully awake.
“If they were here, where did they go?”
“Stupid!” she teased. “They knew you were coming.”
He glanced round the room. Nothing. He came in and sat on the side of the bed.
“Why did you uncover yourself?” he asked. He noticed the bottom buttons of her pajama top were undone, revealing her belly.
“They like to see me!” she said.
He looked round the room once more, got up, checked that the window was closed and latched.
There was nothing.
“You need to sleep for school tomorrow,” he said. “Button your pajamas.”
“Okaayy!” she griped, as if he was being a pain. She was imitating her mother’s “annoyed” voice.
The girl unfolded her sheet and blanket and got back under the covers. He stood in the doorway awhile, looking at her. Finally he tiptoed back to bed.
He figured she was in first grade then.
By second grade, she told him they visited less often. Now she said that they came to her because they knew she could “hear” them.
“Do they talk now?” he asked, surprised.
“No, but they can talk to me in my head,” she said.
“What do they say?”
“Everything will be better soon. When I’m older. They’re going to change everything.”
“What will they change?”
“The whole world. To make it better.”
“But how are they going to do that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They didn’t tell me.”
By third grade, they’d stopped coming. She told him she wasn’t sad, because she knew they’d come back.
“They told me they will. When I’m older.”
She never drew pictures of them. He often asked her to—to draw them just for him—but she refused. Which was surprising. Because she was very good at drawing. And she loved all kinds of complex toys, and devices. She was always trying to use his computer, and whined endlessly that they wouldn’t get her a phone.
By fifth grade it became even clearer how smart she was. She aced most everything, and was always busy with projects: art or science projects. She had friends at school, but few. She was a weirdo.
When Meghan was finally in eighth grade, he tried to have a serious talk with her about her visitors. She wouldn’t talk. She said she knew they were real, that she didn’t tell anyone about them, except for him, and that she knew they’d be back. But she refused to say more.
By that time, she was often online reading into things about aliens, and the universe, and alternative theories about everything.
Her little sister Rita worshipped her. And tried to imitate her. But Rita wasn’t quite as sharp, although she had her own ways and was content to play second fiddle. She knew her sister was special.
Meghan was accepted into the University of Southern California in LA, and began in the fall of 2026. She planned to study animation and special effects. Rita was upset her sister had to move away, but they’d both flown out to visit her during semester.
The summer of 2027, when Meghan came back to Wisconsin for break, nothing strange happened. She worked on her computer projects, was online most of the time, and told Rita plenty about every topic under and the sun, including life in LA. Rita was already into making short videos and posting them on TikTok, which Schmidt didn’t like, but what could he do? At least it wasn’t the perverse stuff other kids were posting.
It was the following year, a few weeks before Meghan’s return home that summer, that things started to go awry. Rita was anxious to hang out with her sister again, and was often out and about making videos, editing and uploading them.
One late afternoon in mid-April Rita came home almost in a fit. He remembered her dashing into the living room to show him something on her phone.
“Dad you gotta see this! It’s sooo strange, I don’t know what it is, I just saw it in the woods. Look at this!”
She was breathless, and he remembered feeling odd that she first came to him with it. She was a teenager after all, 16, and had started becoming distant, too cool for Dad. He remembered feeling almost appreciative that, whatever it was, she was running to bring it to him. Like a little girl.
Plopping down next to him on the sofa, she held out her iPhone, clicked on the video.
It was in the forest, she was filming something through the trees. At a distance of about thirty meters, something glowing. It was large, maybe ten feet tall, ovoid, and it glowed white. It seemed to be sitting there, or floating just above the ground. It was silent. He could hear her breathing being recorded along with the object.
Then the video shifted. She’d changed her footing, took some steps to the right, in order to get a better angle. Yes, the thing was a perfect egg shape. Glowing. What the hell was it?
“Finally I got scared, so I moved farther away,” she said, calling up the next video.
The object was still there, in the same place. Seen at more of a distance, it looked even stranger in the forest, surrounded by the damp brown tree trunks and muddy spring ground.
“How long did you watch it?”
“I watched it a little longer, then came back here.”
“That’s the forest right around the corner, yes?”
“Yes,” she said. “Where we saw that big buck by the road.”
“Let’s go there.”
“Now?”
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They started out walking along the road, then kind of jogging. A car passed them, the driver giving them a quizzical look. Within three minutes they were there. She led him into the forest toward the spot. They began walking up a slight incline. Over a small rise, and then … it was gone.
“It was right there,” she said, pointing, frustrated.
He scanned round, then scanned the treetops. Nothing.
“You were standing here. Yes?” he asked.
“You can see my footprints.” She pointed down at the prints right next to them.
“Okay, so you know exactly where the thing was. Show me.”
They made their way the remainder of the distance.
“It was right between these two trees, right here,” she said, indicating a space about ten feet in front of them.
He scanned the soft forest ground. The object had made no marks.
“There are no marks on the ground,” he said. “If the thing was sitting here, there’d be marks.”
“It was floating.”
He stepped forward until he was standing right in the spot. He looked up again to the treetops, then felt a kind of dizziness. He looked back down, and felt a wave of something move through him, moving up into him from the ground.
“Whoah!” he called out, steadying himself.
“What?” She stepped forward to grab his arm, to steady him. Then she felt it too. A force of some kind.
“What is it?” she asked, frightened, clinging to him, glancing about at the ground around her feet.
“Move!” he said, staggering forward, bringing her with him.
They were now about thirty feet away, and the power was gone.
“What the hell!” he said, huffing.
“What was that, Dad? I could feel it like inside me!”
“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.” He looked her over closely. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Let’s go home.”
That evening he had a hard time convincing her not to upload the videos. Understandably. But he insisted she let him copy the videos onto his MacBook, and that she keep them to herself. For now.
“We will wait until your sister gets home, then we’ll discuss it with her. You have to promise.”
That day was the real beginning of all the trouble. He started having the dreams that same night: sometimes people he knew from his past, sometimes even from his childhood—all of them trying to tell him something. They were trying to convey something but couldn’t. He’d dream of an elementary school teacher, Miss Nielson, and he’d be standing with her out in the Arizona desert, and she’d be lecturing him, a kind of worried pleading in her eyes, but she couldn’t say what she needed to say. Then he’d dream of Meghan, who wasn’t lecturing him, but was working away at huge computers, some kind of system. He’d try to get a word in, but she’d shush him, insist that he wait, that he be quiet.
Then, some five weeks after Rita had made the film, he was driving alone down a road a few miles distant from the house, when he glimpsed something in the forest nearby. Glowing. He stopped the car, craned over a bit to see. It was an egg. He got out of the car and stood by the side of the road. Watching it. It was silent, about fifty yards away. He grabbed his cell phone. He filmed it.
Meghan arrived home from school three days after that. He gathered the two girls in the living room that night. Said they needed to talk. He turned his MacBook to face Meghan and played Rita’s videos.
“Rita filmed this in the woods just down the road,” he said, keenly studying his elder daughter’s reaction.
She watched the videos, glanced briefly at her sister. There was a bemused smile on her face. Then he showed her his own video.
Meghan clearly knew.
“Eggs,” she said. “They’ve chosen eggs.”
Rita didn’t get what was meant by They’ve. He did.
“Now you’re going to tell your sister Rita about your childhood friends,” Schmidt had said.
A week after that, with Meghan’s approval, they’d put the videos online. Of course the whole town thought they were lying, that it was a hoax. Then he sent a copy of the videos to a former air force superior, asking for his assessment. A mere three days after that they had visitors from Washington. Then more visitors from Washington. He told them what he knew, but didn’t talk about the dreams. He and the girls agreed not to tell them about Wilbur’s lactating, or what the vet said after the X-rays. Meghan, he could tell, was being especially cagey with them. Pretending to tell them everything, but clearly not.
Heck, she won’t even tell me everything.
Wilbur whined more sharply, snapping him out of his revery. He looked down. He’d forgotten the dog was there. And the dog was quivering slightly, he could see it.
He rubbed his eyes. It was around 9:00 p.m., he figured. He felt the tingling at the spot near his neck where the plane’s weight had crushed him to the tarmac. That was a sign too. He knew they’d be outside.
He sighed. He stood up slowly, his back aching, and turned himself about. He glanced through the kitchen window that looked out over the back yard. It was dark. Beyond the yard and to the left of the tool shed, just behind the tree line, he saw them dancing like big fireflies. There were two of them this time, about the size of footballs. Eggs. Glowing white eggs.
When is chapter 6 coming out? I finally got a chance to read chapters 1 through five and can't wait to see what happens next…