Even before the first spaceship set down in the field off Ferry Road, the city went dark. Lights flickered in homes, restaurants, shops and offices. Then darkness descended for good.

Televisions screens went blank. Radios went silent. Computer monitors darkened with feeble groans.

The intense force field from the arriving ship overloaded circuits and caused transformers to pop all over the city. Sparks flew. Power lines burned and fell to the ground, igniting small fires everywhere.

Inside their homes in the early evening, men, women and children were startled and confused. They picked up phones to call neighbors but the force field had disrupted the lines.

At the Lewiston police and fire stations, generators roared alive moments after the lights went out. The last, garbled transmissions over digital and analog radios were the voices of harried dispatchers. They shouted about an emergency on Ferry Road before all communications ceased.

The landing was under way.

That ring of fire

The enormous, crown-shaped spaceship descended through clouds and eased its way to earth. Thousands of lights blinked and glowed. Blinding white rays shot from the bottom of the craft, scorching the ground below and igniting a ring of fire.

The arena-sized spaceship landed smoothly in that circle of flames, like a balloon floating to a burning floor. The low, electromagnetic hum became a throbbing beat that killed birds in mid-flight and dropped small animals dead from trees.

Before word of what had come among them even began to spread, people were in a panic. They fled their houses in nightclothes. They ran past fires or tried to drive down streets that were already becoming littered with wrecks.

A fleet of firetrucks raced to Ferry Road. All of Lewiston’s police cars were en route, and sheriff’s deputies were coming from all directions.

Within a half mile of the landing though, engines failed. The vehicles stalled in the center of streets or glided uselessly to the sides of roads. Dazed cops and firefighters picked up their radios to call for help. But the radios were silent.

By now, Washington had been notified and the president had declared martial law. The Constitution of the United States was suspended. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was given broad executive powers. Among them: The power to detain any person suspected of conspiring with the arriving aliens, to mobilize civilians into work brigades and to seize control of the media.

Then FEMA, the shadow government, headed to southern Maine at once.

The military was also on the way, along with the CIA, the FBI, NASA and all other known and unheard-of government entities. But for now, the city was protected against this extraterrestrial threat only by the agencies that protect it every day.

Good news, sort of

Officers from the police and fire departments, without functioning vehicles, began to advance on foot. They were frightened and ill-equipped to face this threat from above.

Gallant, if unprepared.

These brave crews advanced into uncertainty. For how would they respond to invaders from a world unknown to us? What could they possibly achieve against technology they could not begin to understand? Was this the end? Was annihilation imminent?

Good news, Earthlings.

The fire department for years has been in possession of a FEMA-approved handbook titled “The Fire Officers Guide to Disaster Control.”

Chapter 13 of that book, thank heavens, is “Disaster Control and UFOs.”

I may have made up a few details about the alien invasion, but I am not inventing this book. It does exist and most major fire departments have a copy.

The guide instructs fire crews on the perils of radiation from a UFO, force field impact and the danger of fireballs, among other things.

It provides all of the information a firefighter needs to lay the groundwork until the military arrives.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that while Lewiston Fire Chief Michel Lajoie recalls seeing the handbook around the station, when pressed, he could not put his hands on it.

“I’m kind of worried about it,” Chief Lajoie said this week. “It would be just my luck to see one of those things now that I’m looking for the book.”

That was Tuesday night. Lajoie planned to ask around about the book and get back to me. I never heard from him again and I’m a little concerned. Did our fearless leader go snooping around? Did he ask one question too many?

The truth is out there, friends.

But where is the chief?

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.

Copy the Story Link