Alien Invasion (Book 1): Invasion by Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant Page A

hours in the way time elongates like taffy inside the reverie of sleep. The dream’s only common thread from beginning to end was Piper’s ever-mounting terror. She’d woken just as they’d gone over the first hill’s top. The last thing Heather said before tipping down was, Hang on tight, baby. It gets bumpy from here .
    Then Piper was awake, vibration under her head, and no real awareness (for the first few moments, anyway) of where she was. For a crazy second, she was sure Meyer’s ex was still around. Only Heather Hawthorne would stick a running vibrator under a sleeping girl’s head as a gag.  
    She blinked, yawned, and rolled over to see Meyer still behind the wheel. He wasn’t holding it, though, and his feet weren’t on the manual pedals. The van was on auto, apparently able to handle the light traffic ahead. He’d scooted the JetVan’s luxurious leather seat back a foot and turned it slightly into the cabin. The radio was tuned to a whisper, and Meyer was tapping around on his tablet.  
    “Have you been up all night?” she said.
    “I thought we might need to run someone over.”  
    Piper assumed he was referring to the need to go manual in a moment’s notice should some pedestrian or another require running down. She wasn’t sure who that unlucky pedestrian might be (just for example) or whether Meyer was joking. He looked serious enough, his head mostly down, giving her greeting lip service without moving focus from his tablet.  
    “Where are we?”  
    “Pennsylvania.” He nodded toward the window, and what seemed to still be nighttime. A glance at the console clock showed it to be 6:23 a.m. “America the beautiful. Should I wake the kids to show them what fields look like? They look the same in the dark as they do in the light, more or less.”  
    Piper looked into the back of the van. With the blinds closed, it was easy to believe the vehicle’s name — to see it as more jet than van, and to imagine they’d somehow reached the Gulfstream after all. Trevor was closest, his head canted sideways to lean against the window, his eyes closed and his large black eyebrows less troubled-looking than they’d always seemed lately. Lila and Raj were asleep at the very back, past the faux-marble console, in a bench seat, leaning against each other like two poles in a teepee. Piper wasn’t sure she liked that. They needed each other, yes. But every mile farther they drove from Raj’s family in New York was one degree more difficult it would be for Lila to give him up. The way she was clinging to him now, the idea of sending Raj home felt like ripping a cherished teddy bear from Lila’s arms.  
    “Where in Pennsylvania?”  
    “The middle.”  
    “Not toward New York.”  
    Meyer looked up at Piper and gave her the look that had made him his fortune. Meyer Dempsey seldom wanted something he didn’t eventually get. Including Piper, who’d only meant to use Consensus rather than meet (or marry) the man who’d created it — a girl who’d had a simple goal of crowdfunding her tiny design project rather than partnering with the handsome entrepreneur behind it, and become a reluctant fashion mogul.  
    “West,” was all he said. His look was at once stern and almost condescending. He had his chin mostly down, his light-green eyes rolled up to meet hers. The grim expression of an authority — explaining rather than bargaining, asking, or attempting to justify.
    They were going on a road trip. Discussion over.  
    She decided to weigh in anyway. Straightening, fluffing her hair where the seat had flattened it, she said, “I still think it makes sense to go back to New York. What are we going to do out here in the open, Meyer?”  
    “Drive west.”  
    “You think something’s coming.”  
    “I’ve thought it for a while.”
    “Then we should be home. Not out here in the boonies.”  
    “Nobody’s going into the city right now. There’s a reason. New York is always a target. Of