The Arrivals

They found the first one in the backseat of a yellow taxicab in New York city. The driver was interviewed by Ellen and Oprah – 15 minutes of fame as they replayed the viral video again and again. He leant back in their deep couches, his silk shirt open at the neck, black hair sprouting over the top like a 70’s porn star. He threw his arms around wildly as he performed for their cameras – feigned surprise at the baby appearing where a moment before there had been none. The audience laughed, lapping it up. Critics accused him of trickery – was it staged? A CGI effect, perhaps, or an accomplice off-screen? His interviews added nothing to the story – the simple fact was, he didn’t know. Nobody did.

The baby was taken to the nearest police station, the driver spending an uncomfortable night in a cell while they verified his story. A harried looking woman from CPS arrived for the child, her arms full of paperwork and little interest in the background info.

“It’ll be meth,” She said as they signed her forms. “It’s always meth. They probably haven’t even noticed they lost him yet. I see it all the time. City’s going to hell.”

There was precious little to go on for the cops. One infant, male, approximately six weeks old. Naked, not even a diaper. Only identifying item a small locket on a chain around his throat. They tried opening it, but it wouldn’t budge. When they bagged it up for evidence they noticed it left a heart-shaped burn mark on the baby’s chest.

The cops on duty had to fill out his info on the CPS papers. They named him Noah – because they had ‘no-a idea’ where he came from. Noah Lockheart, for the pendant that was all his worldly possessions.

And then he became a part of the system, lost in the vast bureaucracy of underpaid and overworked social workers, passed from facility to facility like a lost package in the mail. Usually babies were a hot commodity, easily adopted out. For some reason Noah got passed over time and again. Something about the way he stared at people, unblinking and in complete silence, unnerved them.

A second infant was less lucky. It’s mid-winter arrival in a sparsely populated research station in Greenland went unnoticed until the next morning, when a scientist made the terrible discovery. The real mystery was how a baby could come to be there in the first place – the research team were all male. They were unable to trace any footsteps leading away from their habitat and the poor frozen child wore nothing at all to protect her from the arctic winds. They named her “Beloved” because surely someone must have loved her, to place the locket around her tiny throat.

It wasn’t until the third child appeared from nowhere that the media attention went wild. This time she was a toddler, about two years old. No clothes, just like the others. She spontaneously materialized in a small fishing boat off the coast of India, terrifying the crew, who jumped overboard in their hurry to escape. After a while, when the child did not explode or even move, they cautiously climbed back aboard and took her to their home. The elders declared her a miracle, and people began flocking from all over the country to leave offerings and accept her blessing. They were entranced by her white-blonde hair, and the perfect heart shaped birthmark on her throat. They named her Atiya, meaning ‘gift’, and indeed she brought great wealth to the previously impoverished fishing village, though they couldn’t help feeling unnerved by the way she never made a sound.

In the following months more and more children arrived. The media took a darker tone in their reporting, concerned about the possibility of an alien invasion or time travelers messing with the past. By the time the thousandth child materialized a decision was made by the United Nations – they would be sent to an asylum center where they could be monitored by scientists and doctors to be sure there was nothing wrong with them. It was billed as a happy learning environment, the press were sent videos touring the brightly painted nurseries. Smiling nurses and teachers in rooms with rocking horses and art easels went a long way to ease the concerns of Joe Public.

The staff knew better, of course. They were under no illusions about their work. Dormitories had heavy bolts on the doors, and the children spent most of their time lying silently in their cots, staring at the ceiling. It was a surreal sight. They whispered about it in the staff room during their breaks, how eerie it was that the babies never cried.

The older kids, those aged 3-6, were taken to the day nurseries so their behavior could be observed. They showed little interest in their teachers and caregivers, but when given brushes they would eagerly paint disturbing images. Male ID. 398 covered his paper with large red circles, then splattered white dots all over them. He did it over and over, only stopping when they changed his paint-pot for blue and yellow. Then he sat staring at the table, his hands lying still on the blank paper before him.

Female ID. 793 drew rows of stick people, each one with black crosses where their eyes should be. She creeped the staff out so much that they took all her art supplies away, giving her a doll to play with instead. She worked diligently until she had pulled the eyes out of the plastic head, then lost interest and sat perfectly still, waiting for the bell to ring that signified bedtime.

Then, as abruptly as the phenomenon started, it stopped. No new arrivals were reported after December 2019, and people put the strange events out of their minds. The world was abuzz with other problems - the United States edging ever closer to civil war, while famines, terrorist attacks and myriad other disasters filled the News.

Meanwhile, testing began in earnest at the facility. Bloods were drawn from each of the Arrived, tested and processed to check for anomalies. The blood-work yielded little of interest – all of the kids had type O blood. There were other similarities too, but nothing to explain where they had come from or why.

Covid hit the headlines in February 2020. Until then it had been a small story, some sick people in China, something to do with a bat in a live market. Nobody really paid it any attention. Some of the kids in the facilities were drawing things now. Strange things. People running from supermarkets with their carts piled high. People in blue masks. The scariest picture showed a hospital, with white coated doctors lying dead on the corridor floor. Psychological tests were ordered for the children, though little could be learned since none of them would speak.

It hit the Facility in May 2020. The janitor coughed violently as he mopped the empty hallways, his eyes red. The cafeteria staff were decimated, barely able to provide peanut butter sandwiches for the residents. Even the scientists were struck down, despite their careful hygiene routines and masks. The disease swept across the world showing no mercy, particularly towards the elderly or overweight.

Yet none of the children caught Covid. It didn’t seem to matter how much they were exposed – they remained healthy as ever, lying in their beds without a worry in the world. It drove one of the nurses into a rage.

“What ARE you?” She yelled, shaking Male ID. 187 hard, his head whipping back and forth like a rag doll. It took two doctors to drag her away. Everyone was starting to lose it.

Dr. Sven Erikkson was a physicist. He had been working for months now on trying to open the lockets most of the children were found wearing. Nothing had worked – strong magnets, pliers, heat, cold… they remained closed no matter what he tried – it was beyond frustrating. He was just going to the safe to swap one out when he felt a light click inside his hand. Looking down he realized the locket had opened, by itself! Inside the safe, all the others were open too, as though they had been chrysalises just waiting to hatch. His hands trembled as he pulled apart the two halves, suddenly worried about what it might contain. There was just a small glass vial, barely a centimeter long, filled with a clear fluid. He was about to open it when a Matron threw open his door, and he dropped it, the glass shattering into pieces on the tile floor.

“Damn it woman, You could have killed us both! Who knows what’s in these vials?”

“Sorry, Doctor. It’s just… the children. They’re talking!”

“What, all of them?”

“Yes, sir! Even the smallest ones!”

He hurried out of the office, running towards the first of the dorms. “Well, unlock it then!” He demanded, and she swiped her keycard over the lock.

Inside the room he was used to seeing the rows of tiny beds, each one holding a catatonic child. It was creepy, but somehow less scary than this. Now the roomful of toddlers turned to face him as one, their eyes unblinking, chanting ‘vaccine, vaccine, vaccine’ over and over like broken robots.

“My God,” he said, slamming the door closed and leaning against it to catch his breath. “Can it be possible?”

***

Many were reluctant to try the vaccine at first. How could they trust it, this weird DNA altering mystery medicine from who knows where… after all, there was no way to be sure it wouldn’t course some other problems down the line. Perhaps Covid was a biological weapon released by an alien culture, and the vaccine was the first step to enslaving the human race?

The first to risk it were the doctors and nurses.

Around the world they had fought battles impossible for most people to imagine. Their days had been filled with the horror of death and dying, of dragging husks of people away in body bags to be thrown into freezer trucks because the morgues were all full. They were done with losing, with trying everything only to have it fail again and again. They queued up fearlessly, offering their arms for the first doses of the mystery vaccine.

When the results came back a few weeks later, the whole world rejoiced. The vaccine worked! Scientists around the world took samples to work on, recreating it in massive quantities in their labs. Within days the first shipments were being sent out and distributed. It was a miracle.

But not the only miracle. As soon as the vaccine was approved and the first doses delivered, the children all abruptly woke up. Not like robots, but truly awake – crying, laughing, playing, complaining. All sign of the weird behavior disappeared completely, the only sign that they had ever been one of the Arrivals in the heart shaped scars on their chests. One by one they were released from the Facility, placed in safe and loving foster homes. And this time none of them were returned.

One day maybe we will find out the truth of the children and their true identities, whether they were sent by our descendants to save humanity, or by some other benevolent being. Till then we just have to accept, the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.