The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers

by Michael R. Hicks

  That was the last real defense he mustered. Alden unleashed strike after strike, short, snapping bursts that whipped the baton into the downed man’s ribs and head. Wet thumps and sick cracks echoed past the gaping workers. Alden’s mouth twisted, lips peeling from his teeth.

  Tristan read the pain on his face as clearly as a billboard. Whatever he’d suffered in the months since the aliens had snatched him away—the hurt and helpless wrath—he now turned it on the fallen man.

  Tristan launched forward, grabbed Alden’s biceps as he cocked another strike, and pulled him away. “Alden!”

  He turned on her, eyes burning, struggling against her grip. His left fist jabbed for her ribs. He saw it was her and shortened his punch, knuckles tapping her side.

  Hollister moved at the edge of her vision. She let Alden go. Hollister swung his club at her head in a flat arc. She stepped back with her left foot while pivoting toward him on her right, lashing the blade of her left hand into Hollister’s wrist. At the same time, she wheeled her right elbow across her body and into his chin. He’d been stepping into the blow and the combined momentum clotheslined him. His feet left the ground, swinging up as his head jarred back from her elbow. He thumped to the dust.

  The guard who’d radioed him in skipped sideways from the truck, rifle pointed dead at Tristan’s chest. Hollister groaned and rolled facedown. He pushed himself up, snatched up his baton, and pulled back his elbow. Tristan bent her knees.

  “Don’t!” Alden said.

  Hollister looked to the boy. The rage froze on his face, quenched by cold calculation. “Stand down, Moises.”

  The guard lowered his rifle. Hollister replaced his baton at his belt. He smiled at Tristan. “You can’t blame a girl for wanting to protect her little brother.”

  Tristan’s heart jolted. She brought down her hands to her sides. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

  “You reacted to a threat.” Hollister circled her. “Must run in the family. Alden’s got it, too. It’s going to make him a great soldier.”

  She kept her face blank. That explained his absence. They’d pulled him from gen pop to convert him into a guard. “Alden—”

  “Do you know the penalty for striking an officer?” Hollister said.

  “I don’t imagine it’s one of those good penalties.”

  “A whipping. And no, it’s not one of those good whippings.” He glanced at Alden, the mist gone from his glassy eyes. “But you’re new. You didn’t know. Things got heated. Part of good policing is knowing when to crack down and when to show mercy.”

  “Sure,” Alden said.

  Tristan smiled. “Whatever you think best.”

  Hollister considered her, confidence receding from his eyes the longer she stared back. He turned to the other guard. “Get that man to medical. The rest of you—” He twirled his finger at the crowd of workers. “Slack-jawed staring isn’t in your job description. Don’t make me come back here.”

  The guard went to the unconscious worker and dragged him by his wrists from the scattered lumber, stirring the smell of sawdust. The others bent to their tasks, boards clattering, saws sighing. Hollister beckoned to Alden and Tristan. Alden sat between them in the cab of the truck. Hollister flipped the car around toward the barracks just inside the gates.

  “What do we do with this sister of yours?”

  Alden shrugged. “She was just trying to protect me.”

  “And our laws are here to protect our way of life. Tough call, man. Very tough. That’s another angle to the job—judgment. You’ll have to learn that one on your own, out in the field.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tristan gazed out the windshield. “Did you volunteer for this, Alden?”

  “Lieutenant Hollister asked.”

  “When?”

  “The day after you got here. Why?”

  “Because your sister’s too clever for her own good,” Hollister said. “I hope we aren’t going to have any issues.”

  “Did you enjoy hitting that man?” Tristan said.

  Alden squirmed. “I don’t know. He wasn’t going to work.”

  “The laws are the laws,” Hollister said. “You don’t enforce them, how is anyone going to respect them?”

  “Are you going to make Alden hold my whip?” Tristan said.

  Hollister grinned. “Don’t tempt me.”

  “I’m not going to whip you,” Alden said.

  Tristan gestured back toward the lumber yard. “If that man recovers and still won’t work—”

  “Enough,” Hollister said. “More than enough. One more word, and I’ll void your contract for sedition.”

  Tristan laughed bitterly. “What’s the penalty for sedition? Beheading?”

  “Sedition goes straight to Daniel Morgenstern.” Hollister slowed, tires grinding the gravel in the barracks lot. “Last kid convicted hasn’t come back.”

  He rolled from the cab. Tristan got out and waited while Hollister clapped Alden on the back and pointed him inside. “Great job out there. Get you to Sergeant Fredricks. And don’t worry, I’ll go easy on your sister.”

  “Thanks,” Alden grinned. He jogged inside.

  Hollister turned on Tristan, jaw tight. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “You started it.”

  “Inside.” He gestured her through a door further down the barracks. It opened to a spacious office. A poster of a blond woman draped over a red convertible hung from the wall. A space heater grumbled from the corner. Hollister didn’t offer her a seat. “I have decided not to whip you.”

  “I’m jumping for joy,” Tristan said. “Inside, of course. Wouldn’t want to threaten you with sudden movement.”

  “I should put you on your knees and shoot you. This isn’t the first time you’ve tried to betray me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’ve lied to me since you washed up at the gates. That was no accident. You came here to find your brother.”

  She tipped back her head. “Did you put it together yourself? Or did he have to tell you?”

  “You never meant to stay. Signing that contract meant nothing to you. The rules, the law, this fragile light in the darkness—you’d sweep it all off the table if it meant taking him away with you.”

  Hollister moved around his desk and smiled in her face. “Well, he’s mine now. And if you try to take him—if you try to leave—I’ll give him a choice: shoot you in the head, or I’ll kill you both on the spot.”

  33

  Ness couldn’t catch his breath. His head went light. He felt himself stagger.

  “Ness?” Kristin grabbed his arm, helped lower him to the floor. “You okay, Ness?”

  “Dizzy,” he heard himself mumble. The spots receded from his eyes. Somehow, he’d seated himself. The three others watched him from above, Kristin’s eyes flicking between his, Shawn’s creased with annoyed impatience, Sebastian’s froggish and unreadable. Ness found his feet and shoved Shawn in the chest. “What’s your problem?”

  Shawn caught himself on Kristin’s dresser. “What’s yours?”

  “What do you care whether these people live or die?”

  “Plenty of these people are no worse than you or me. They’re just here doing their thing, trying to grab hold of a little peace.”

  “You’re such a piece of shit.”

  Shawn laughed in disbelief. “For wanting to save their lives?”

  “You’ve been a dick to me your whole miserable life. Just when I found a little peace, you bust through the wall and try to get me kicked out of Mom’s.”

  “I didn’t try to get you—”

  “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?” Ness shoved him again. Shawn’s lips went white. Ness flinched but held his ground. “Don’t fake like you care about them. You don’t even care about your own brother. All you care about is looking like the cool guy.”

  Shawn sidestepped another shove, tugging his jacket back into place. “How about we shelve the
family drama until a time when we’re not about to eat a nuclear inferno?”

  “There you go again. Oh, look how rational you are. I’m sure Kristin’s real impressed. The alien who can’t even fucking hear you is surely about to hold out his pad for an autograph.”

  “Stop it!” Shawn stepped forward, clunking his forehead into Ness’. “You think I liked seeing you hide out in your room all day? Snickering over your computer? You were supposed to be at college getting laid and learning to make those games. What happened?”

  “I don’t know!” Ness shouted. “Maybe if you and Mom weren’t always breathing down my back! How am I supposed to go anywhere when she won’t let me go and you’re always pushing me back down?”

  “You mad, bro?” Shawn said.

  “What do you fucking think?”

  “Good.” Shawn grabbed him, hugged him. “That was what it was all about. Getting you mad enough to do something about it.”

  Ness wriggled, fruitlessly trying to escape. “That’s why you moved into my room, huh? Not because you lost your job and your house?”

  “You had it easy since the day you were born,” Shawn said. “You got so shook-up when Dad left that Mom never had the balls to give you a kick in the ass. She never tried to send me to college. Know what she said to me when I turned eighteen? ‘You can pay rent to me or you can pay it to a stranger. You got two months to figure out which.’“

  “That’s so cool of you to take it out on me.”

  Shawn released him, stepping back and gazing at the floor. “I won’t deny it. I resented the hell out of you. That was part of it. But most of all, I didn’t want to see you get lost.”

  Ness stared down, too. For all Shawn’s protests, not all of his spite had stemmed from a Fight Club-ish, “Boy Named Sue”-esque strategy to goad Ness into angry self-improvement. More than a few of Shawn’s taunts and punches had come from the mean-spirited glee of knocking little brother down one more peg.

  But he’d never seen Shawn talk like this, either. Except, perhaps, after their mother had died. He’d been as hurt then, too. As humble. As willing to let down the walls. No longer too afraid of looking dumb to be honest or to trust.

  That was his own flaw, too, wasn’t it. Except where Shawn turned it outward, he turned it inward. Shawn hid behind bluster; Ness, a computer. He was trying to hide away again. To let the aliens take care of it for him. To erase this place. To salt its fields with spent uranium. While he dissolved into nothing.

  Himself at sixty, alone in a chair, the cold light of a monitor piercing the darkness of the room.

  Ness bent over his notepad, scribbled, held it up to Sebastian. “I need you to understand this. We’re going to stop the meltdown.”

  The alien gestured frantically, waved its pad. “NO CAN’T”

  “Yes we can,” he wrote back. “Kristin knows how. Do you know what Daniel and Roan look like?”

  “YES PICTURES”

  “We’re going to stop the meltdown. Then we’re going to kill Daniel and Roan. For all they’ve done and all they’d do in the future. Do you understand?”

  The alien stiffened its body, limbs shaking like a tree on the fringe of a storm. Ness forced himself not to step back. To keep his eyes open. To stay present.

  “TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADERS,” its tentacle waggled. “KILL DANIEL ROAN”

  “No way,” Shawn laughed, glancing from its pad to Ness. “Does it know—?”

  “They probably didn’t decide to kill us until they spent the whole trip watching our TV.” Ness hoisted his rifle. “If you two are too stupid to let this place die, let’s get going.”

  Kristin arched her eyebrows. “Glad to hear that saving my colleagues is stupid.”

  “How about the part where we’re running toward the nuclear meltdown?”

  “Okay, yeah. That part is stupid.”

  Despite all their yelling, the hallway was still empty. No one had even pounded on the wall. Probably hadn’t wanted to tempt trouble with the maniacs. Ness led the way down the metal stairs, holding up his palm as he exited into the moonlight. Still no sign of security or alerts. He gestured the others out and they jogged to the control building, sticking to the walls of the buildings along the way.

  Security cameras watched them from above the door, but if anyone was at the monitors, they didn’t protest as Kristin scanned her card, punched her code, and ushered in two traitors and an alien killer.

  “This makes no sense,” she whispered in the concrete entry. “If there were a meltdown in process, the security systems would be going nuts.”

  “Maybe the systems don’t know about it,” Ness said.

  “Whatever’s happening, we need to get to the control room. If something’s up, we need to drop the rods in the reactor and shut it down right now.”

  “We’ll hop right on that,” Shawn said. “Or how about you do it while we stick a gun in everybody’s face.”

  A black-dressed guard stuck his head around the corner, frowning hard. Sebastian’s claw flicked up. A blue stream appeared between its pistol and the man’s head, which popped with a burst of pink steam.

  Kristin screamed and clamped a quivering hand to her own mouth. She turned on Ness. “You can’t let that thing loose in the control room.”

  “All it cares about is Daniel and Roan,” Ness said. “As long as your friends stay calm, they’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll just tell them to ignore the eight-foot crab-monster.”

  “No, I will,” Shawn said. “And they’ll listen. Now can we get on with it?”

  Kristin let out a shaky breath. “You realize this is ridiculous.”

  She jogged down the hall anyway. Ness caught up, rifle in hand. She bypassed the elevator, slipping her card into the stairwell lock instead. It went green. She held the door, turning her head as Sebastian clattered past. At the door to the upper floor, she pressed her palms to her forehead, composing herself, and entered the control room.

  “I need everyone to stay calm,” she said to the handful of faces turning her way, the skeleton crew keeping an eye on the monitors through the midnight hours. “Because everything is crazy enough as it is.”

  Shawn swung through the door. “In other words, stay seated and shut up.”

  Ness followed him, sweeping his rifle across the workers. One man and one woman screamed. Ness pointed the gun at the ceiling. “We’re not here to hurt anyone. We’re here to stop the meltdown.”

  A bald man wrinkled his forehead. “There’s no melt—”

  Sebastian ducked through the doorway, tentacles writhing. The bald man’s eyes rolled back and he fell as if he’d been shot. The woman screamed again.

  “Next time we leave the alien at home,” Shawn grumbled.

  “It’s not here to hurt you,” Ness said. “It’s the one that told me about the attack on the plant.”

  A thin woman stood from her blinking panels, eyes wide enough to swallow her own head. “Okay, well, first I’d like to note that it’s generally against protocol to let space aliens inside the master command of a nuclear reactor. Second, everything looks perfectly fine.”

  Kristin threaded around the desks. “Let me see.”

  The woman moved aside. Kristin bent over a monitor wedged full of small green figures and pressed her palm to her forehead again. “This is current?”

  “It better be. Wouldn’t do us much good to work with yesterday’s figures.”

  Kristin straightened, glanced across the room at a man in wireless frames. “Miller?”

  The man hunched his bony shoulders. “Acceptable parameters over here.”

  She gritted her teeth and sat down at a monitor next to a panel of levers shaped like upside-down Ls. Her fingers weaved over the keyboard. She shook her head, first slowly, then hard enough to knock things over.

  “Everything’s fine, Ness.”

  He tried to ignore their stares. The ones that made him feel so small. Ears burning, he wrote on his pad and held it up for Sebastian. “Th
ere’s no meltdown.”

  The alien shook its head. Miller laughed in shock. Sebastian gestured at its pad. “BLIND”

  “You can’t see?” Ness wrote. It shook its head again. Ness wrote, “The sensors?”

  “YES THEY SEE THE OLD”

  Ness turned to Kristin. “You sure that’s current?”

  Kristin spread her palms. “Like Zooey said, the only reason to display yesterday’s numbers is if you want to spend today barfing up what used to be your lungs.” She went white. “Oh. Shit.”

  She bent over the keyboard, fingers clacking. Her mouth dropped. She hit another string of keys, pounding the last one three times.

  Every one of the green figures changed.

  “What the fuck,” Zooey said.

  “What do you want to bet that’s not what the reactor looks like, either?’ Kristin nodded to a vast screen on the far wall. Ness had thought it was an abstract picture, but now that he focused on it rather than the scared faces of Kristin’s coworkers, he saw it wasn’t static. Water shimmered over concentric circles of blue, green, and yellow. The image looked like a neon subway tunnel, but after a second, his perspective shifted—exactly as if he were staring at the random dots of a 3D picture as it coalesced into a schooner or a sunset—and he saw that he was looking down into the water-cooled reactor rumbling deep beneath their feet. A circle of steely rods sat at its very bottom, their pattern matching the abstract grid shown on a monitor in front of Kristin.

  She typed more. The image on the screen shifted to a mess of steam, condensation dripping from green-blue walls that had appeared submerged an instant before.

  “What the fuck!”

  “I’m dropping the rods,” Kristin said. Miller rushed at her. Ness lifted his rifle. The skinny man cringed, pointing to the seat beside her.