Men in Black International Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

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  27

  28

  29

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  31

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  40

  Open Arms: A Short Story By R. S. Belcher

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

  NOVELIZATION BY R. S. BELCHER

  BASED ON THE SCREENPLAY WRITTEN BY

  ART MARCUM & MATT HOLLOWAY

  DIRECTED BY F. GARY GRAY

  TITAN BOOKS

  MEN IN BLACK INTERNATIONAL: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789091083

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789091090

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: June 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used

  fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume

  responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Men in Black International TM & © 2019 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

  system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written

  permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of

  binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without

  a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  To my children, the greatest wonders in the universe I’ve ever seen:

  Stephanie Joy, thank you for my Goofy, and for always making me happy.

  For Jonathan, for always being strong and true, but especially for having a good heart.

  And for Emily, my very own Agent Em, for never giving up.

  I love you all to the moon and back.

  1

  PARIS, JUNE 6, 2015

  The brilliant full moon was not alone in the sky above the City of Lights. It had been a hot summer in Paris, and lightning capered across the cloudless heavens. The electrical storm seemed to have come out of nowhere. It was gathering, strengthening, above the city’s most iconic structure: the Eiffel Tower.

  The black car roared through the streets of Paris, resembling more a space fighter from some science fiction movie than the typical vehicle found on the road. The car’s massive rocket engines spewed flames behind it as it swerved onto the Avenue Gustave Eiffel, spun in a 180-degree turn to a stop before the vehicle barriers that protected the tower grounds. There was a low hum as the rocket engines shifted, folded, and disappeared into the body of the car.

  Two men climbed out of the now-normal-looking car. The younger of the two was handsome, bright-eyed, and clean-shaven. The older man carried himself with a coiled power and quiet authority. His mere presence implied he was competent, and hinted at him being a bit dangerous. His eyes, however, held a sadness and a weariness that sometimes comes from living too long, seeing too much. Both men were dressed in black suits and ties.

  “God do I hate Paris,” the older man said, shutting his door.

  “Not to worry,” the younger man replied, gazing up at the brooding clouds gathering around the apex of the Eiffel Tower, “it probably won’t be around much longer.”

  * * *

  The two young lovers on the tower’s lower observation deck were oblivious to the massing clouds and the fire in the night sky. They only had eyes for each other. The young man took a deep breath and then knelt before his girlfriend. The lights of Paris, like glittering jewels, were their backdrop.

  She gasped, her hand coming to her mouth, when she saw the beseeching look in his eyes, and the ring he was holding up to her.

  “Lisa, will you marr—” He paused as he looked past his prospective bride-to-be. “Who the hell are you guys?”

  Two men stood on the deck with the couple. Both were dressed in black suits and ties. They were both carrying black gunmetal cases.

  “We’re with Tower security,” the younger man said.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” the other added. He nodded toward Lisa and the still-kneeling Lars, and then toward the bank of deck elevators.

  Lars glanced at Lisa. She was practically vibrating with emotion and growing frustration. This was their perfect moment, the greatest moment of either of their lives, and these two rent-a-cops were spoiling it. The sky flashed with lightning, and the young couple jumped at how close the discharge was to them.

  “Did she say yes?” the older man asked Lars.

  “I haven’t asked yet!” Lars snapped.

  “He hasn’t asked yet!” Lisa shouted in unison with Lars.

  “That’s a real shame,” the younger man in black said, pointing to a corner of the deck, “because that big blinking light back there—” They saw a black door with a red light flashing frantically above it. The door had a sign on it that said in many different languages: STAFF ONLY. “—means there’s been a breach in portal two.”

  Taking Lisa’s hand, Lars struggled back to his feet.

  The younger security guard glanced at his watch and continued, “Which means that in just a few minutes, the Hive—the most vile creatures in the known universe—are going to devour every last one of us from the inside out. It’s disgusting, really, the way they burrow their way through any orifice they can find…” He gave a tight but genuine smile, as if commiserating on their shared fate. Lars and Lisa both paled at the nonchalant announcement of impending doom.

  “H, that’s quite enough.” The older man gave his companion a disapproving stare and shook his head curtly. “Or,” he went on to the couple, in a reassuring tone, “it could be that a rather large Parisian rat just chewed through one of our cables. We’re hoping for the latter.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lisa said. She noticed that the younger man—had his companion called him “H”?—was wearing sunglasses. It ought to have looked ridiculous at night, but she was afraid. The reassuring older man was putting his own sunglasses on, as if it was a perfectly natural thing to do in the dark. Now she saw that the younger one had a small, silver, tubular device in his hand.

  “Of course you don’t.” The man who had been addressed as “H” nodded to the silver wand. “All will be explained if you look right… here.”

  Both Lars and Lisa followed his instructions without even thinking about what they were doing. There was a high-pitched whine and a flash of brilliant l
ight from the tip of the device, and the couple fell into a trance-like stupor. “The Tower is closed for repairs,” the younger man told them. He paused for a second and addressed Lars, “Ask her again, on the way down.”

  The couple blinked and looked around. The younger man led them to the elevators, and they followed him in a daze, allowing him to guide them into an elevator car. He reached inside the car, pushed the down button, and withdrew his hand. Lars and Lisa stared out rather blankly as the doors shut and the elevator descended.

  His partner glanced at his watch. “Shall we get to work now, H?”

  Before H could answer, a massive surge of red lightning cascaded down from the star-filled sky, striking the antenna at the apex of the tower. The energy blew the black door to the portals off its hinges and sent it flying into H. He was knocked backward by the force of the blast, crashed through the metal lattice of the trellis doors to the elevator and tumbled down the yawning elevator shaft.

  H flailed about for something, anything, to slow or stop his fall. His fingers grazed the tips of the metal girders separating the elevator car shafts from one another, but he hurtled by too quickly. He smashed onto the roof of the descending elevator and nearly rolled off the side of the elevator, but managed to hang on. Swinging over the side of the car, he found himself witness to another touching scene through the glass. Lars was kneeling before Lisa again, ring in hand.

  “Lisa, will you—”

  H knocked on the window. The two lovers stared at the handsome, well-dressed stranger clinging to the side of their elevator car.

  “Who the hell are you?” shouted Lars. H held up the small silver wand, and there was another flash. The young couple was again dazed by the device’s light.

  “Ask her again,” H called, “down on the ground!” He launched himself off the side of the elevator car before Lars and Lisa recovered, grabbing and swinging himself up onto the network of beams between the elevator shafts. Without missing a beat, H jumped again to grab a bar on the bottom of another elevator car that was rushing upward. He watched Lars and Lisa’s car shrink as it headed to the ground level.

  On the lower observation deck, H’s partner, High T, checked his watch again. Lightning flashed as he peered down the exposed shaft, searching for some sign of H. There was a ding announcing another elevator’s arrival. The door opened, and H walked out, brushing off his immaculate suit and striding toward his partner as if he were late for a lunch date, not the end of the world.

  “Ah, there you are,” High T sounded as nonchalant as his partner looked. They fell into step beside one another, as if they were synchronized. The two men picked up their metal cases and strode through the damaged doorway.

  They climbed a grimy metal spiral staircase. It led them to a large room covered in dust and cobwebs that was reminiscent of a train station combined with a power station. The style of the architecture summoned a nostalgia for a future that had never been, as if the whole place had been designed by H. G. Wells. Rusted steel grating covered the floor and the catwalks above. Exposed pipes of all sizes ran all over the depot, bending and disappearing into the floors and ceiling. Some were bare and utilitarian, others were ornately decorated with Victorian-style relief. They passed a wooden kiosk with an iron-barred window. It looked like a ticket counter. Scraps of crumbling timetables and announcements clung feebly to the sides of the kiosk.

  Wooden benches ran along the walls. They passed numerous rolling carts covered in cobwebs. One capsized vendor’s cart bore a striking resemblance to the skeleton of an overgrown wheelbarrow. A distant wall peeked out past wrought-iron staircases and ladders leading up to the catwalks above. The wall held banks of old-style meters and gauges, their dark, filthy glass faces cracked and shattered, their needles buried.

  H and High T walked to a spot on the platform that gave them a view of three large archways the size of subway tunnels. Each of the arches was illuminated with blue light and was numbered with roman numerals, I through III, above it, and each was shuttered closed by a thick metal slab of a door with a circular lock at the center that also glowed with the same blue light.

  A console stood on a catwalk above the three doors, resting on a pedestal; it was made up of three equidistant circular control panels filled with antiquated gauges and levers. The whole apparatus was sculpted from polished brass.

  H looked up through the ceiling’s circular skylight, wrapped elegantly in glass and steel. The moon, swollen and bright with cold light, drifted closer to filling up the skylight’s central aperture. The portals could only be accessed—would only open—when the full moon was centered in the skylight. Both men set down their metal cases in unison, knelt, and opened them. Inside were the shiny, silver-finished components of their Series-7 De-Atomizers: big guns designed with one purpose: to kill a single alien race, the Hive. The two men began assembling their weapons quickly and efficiently.

  At first they worked in silence, but H didn’t seem comfortable with that. After a while he stopped and watched as High T slid the barrel into the weapon’s central housing and locked it into place with a twist and a metallic click. H grunted and checked his watch: 11:06.

  “So, what’s our play here?” H asked as he attached the weapon’s stock.

  High T locked the last piece of the gun into place. “We’ve been in this situation before,” he replied.

  “We’ve never faced the Hive before.” H knew the Hive’s reputation well, knew it was likely they were about to die.

  “They’ve never faced us.” High T knew his partner well enough to see he was worried, even though H hid it well. He went on, “Always remember—the universe has a way of leading you to where you’re supposed to be at the moment you’re supposed to be there.”

  “The universe gets it wrong sometimes,” H said.

  The moon’s light began to filter through the central aperture and fall slowly on a circle of alien symbols and lunar pictograms on the depot’s floor, fashioned much like a compass rose. The symbols surrounding the circle flared in the bright lunar light. There was a loud noise, a rumbling as if the tumblers of some massive lock had just turned within the archway doors. The grinding of the tumblers grew louder.

  “C’mon,” High T said, standing up, futuristic rifle in hand. “I want it to be you someday. To take my place. To run MiB.”

  H stood as well. “Sounds like a lot of paperwork.”

  “You’ll survive.”

  The two agents, two friends, nodded to one another, again in unison. They slipped their sunglasses on and pumped the actuation chambers of their Series-7 De-Atomizers like they were shotguns. The guns whirred to life as they powered up. High T and H leveled the De-Atomizers at the second portal as the chamber filled with moonlight.

  The loud tumbler sound increased as the second portal’s heavy door creaked open, a cloud of long-undisturbed dust swirling around the base of the opening door. White light, pure and blinding, spilled out from the other side of the portal, filling the long-abandoned depot. Dark, undulating tendrils shot out from the light, thrashing about. H and High T opened fire, the Series-7s roaring like the wrath of an angry lightning god, blasting away the Hive’s grasping tendrils as fast as they slithered through the portal. The agents heard the howls of the injured Hive creature as even more tendrils exploded outward from the portal’s maw. The bolts of destruction from the guns flashed out, hitting the invaders again and again, but the tendrils seemed legion. High T and H stood shoulder to shoulder, not giving an inch as they held the line against the monsters coming to devour the Earth and her people.

  A tendril got through. It wrapped itself around High T’s lower leg and yanked him off his feet. His De-Atomizer clattered to the floor as he was dragged toward the portal. H dived to the ground, his Series-7 still strapped to him, and grasped his mentor’s hand, pulling with all his might. The Hive was stronger. Both agents were dragged across the floor toward whatever it was that waited to devour them on the other side of the light.

 
H flailed out with his other hand and grabbed the edge of an exposed girder, anchoring them only feet from the mouth of the portal and the writhing bloom of Hive tendrils. H found a foothold to further brace them against the relentless pull.

  “Let me go!” High T shouted over the rushing wind of the open portal and the alien shrieks that came from beyond. “That’s an order!”

  “Not a chance!” H shouted. He brought his Series-7 up in a blur of motion. He thumbed the De-Atomizer to maximum discharge. Angry, red warning lights on the weapon reminded him that this was a really, really bad idea. The Hive creature pulled again, and H fired into the heart of the portal at point-blank range.

  Brilliant, white light enveloped the Hive creature and the two men who stood against it. The light poured outward, illuminating the top of the Eiffel Tower, and filling the sky all across Paris. For a frozen moment, the whole universe seemed lost in the blinding light of an Earth-born star.

  2

  BROOKLYN, NEWYORK, TWENTY YEARS EARLIER

  The stars in the plaster sky were pink, blue, green, and yellow. They were plastic and had five points and glowed softly on the ceiling of the dark bedroom. Silhouetted against the counterfeit sky were mobiles of slowly rotating solar systems and drifting astronauts tethered to papier-mâché space shuttles.

  Tucked under the covers, ten-year-old Molly Wright had fallen asleep in her bed reading A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. Mom didn’t like her to stay up after bedtime so she’d been using Dad’s flashlight. She had been trying to understand Professor Hawking’s arguments about Einstein’s theories and black holes until she had drifted off. Molly’s favorite math teacher, Mrs. Edwards, had given her the book, telling her, “Your memory is already very good, Molly, and that’s why you’ve won all those spelling bees and awards. But there’s more to math and science than just memorizing equations. There’s mystery in the universe, too, and endless possibility. And there’s a lot that even the smartest people, like Professor Hawking, haven’t figured out yet. Pay attention to details. That’s really important to understanding pretty much everything. The details matter, Molly.”