Read Online Red the First by C. D. Verhoff - Free Book Online

crushing on
Blanche a while now.”
    “ I know,” Elizabeth
said.
    “ Is it mutual?” Red
asked.
    “ Blanche likes him, thinks
he’s cute, but she has reservations about making it more than a
friendship.”
    “ I don’t have any
reservations,” Red said. “Let’s go home.” He whispered something
naughty in her ear about what he planned to do to her once they got
there.
    “ Your mind is a dirty
place,” she said, giving him a playful tap on the head. “That’s why
I don’t like to go in there without a broom.”
    “ C’mon, you like me that
way,” he said, pressing his body up against hers, feeling very much
in the mood.
    “ Before I had my ability, I
never realized how much men think about sex. It’s not just you—all
of them. Even the old farts. As a gender, you’re really quite
brutish.”
    “ So, do you want
to?”
    “ Okay,” she said. “But on
one condition.”
    “ Name it?”
    “ We dance three more
songs.”
    “ I can do that.”
    During the second song, Michael and his
friends came up from the back room carrying a metal box,
interrupting all the adults.
    “ Hey,” he said. “Look what
we found!”
    It was a two-way radio equipped with
antennas, levers and curly cords. Jerome urged them to set it on
the center table.
    Everybody gathered around as Blanche
fiddled with the controls. “My grandpa was an avid ham radio
operator for decades—he kept a filing cabinet full of fuses and
wires and switches and stuff, with one drawer just for contacts
he’d made around the world all written in that old-fashioned
Spencerian handwriting. My dad too; he had one just like this,” she
explained. “I used to play with it when he wasn’t
looking.”
    Static, hisses, and pops came out of
the speaker, but no speech, no voices. People quickly lost
interest. The music resumed. Red opened a bottle of wine and was
serving it around when Blanche cried out, “I got
someone!”
    “ Shh! Shh!” Nate said,
motioning everyone to be quiet.
    Blanche had tuned in, apparently in the
middle of a broadcast. A man with an eloquent southern flair spoke
with calm confidence. “The plague was supposed to wipe out all of
humanity,” the man said. “But they miscalculated the resiliency of
the human race. When their scouts first set foot on our world, they
realized we wouldn’t go down as easily as they had hoped. But make
no mistake about it, the Celeruns have targeted Earth, and they
won’t rest until it’s theirs.”
    Some of the partygoers
giggled.
    “ This guy is a loon,” Jerome
said.
    ‘ Who are the Celeruns?”
someone asked. “Wasn’t the plague a natural phenomenon?”
    “ I picture him wearing a
tinfoil hat,” Nate added, causing sputters of laughter.
    “ Quiet!” Red said moving his
ear as close to the speaker as possible. The reception was bad and
the static was getting worse. “Let’s hear him out.”
    “ On other planets, the
Celeruns have rarely resorted to violence, but make no mistake
about it, they are hostile invaders. They come in phases, first the
scouts, then the military fleet, and finally the mother ship. The
scouts are already here. Intelligence puts the mother ship in our
solar system by the end of the year…” The broadcast broke up.
Blanche worked the dials and raised it again. “They destroy native
inhabitants by crowding them out within two or three generations.
The United States, Russia, China and the UK have been preparing for
their arrival since World War II, but our governments never
expected a biological attack.
    “ The Celeruns want nothing
less than total human extinction, but we will not go down without a
fight. There is still a way to keep them from stealing our planet.”
The static took over, blocking out the broadcast.
    “ Don’t lose him,” Red said
urgently. “See if you can raise him. I want to talk to
him.”
    Blanche clutched the microphone in her
hand so hard her knuckles whitened. “Ten-four, uh, guy on the other
end of the line.”
    More