“Who can tell one human from the other?” the leader said. “Do not forget yourself. I’m in charge here.”
The second alien bowed and stepped back two paces.
“We met with Earth’s leaders in hopes of working out peaceful co-existence. We showed them how we could increase the productivity of their soil and we promised to share our technology, teaching them how to create a clean, endless supply of energy, as long as they welcomed our Celerun settlers without resistance. There would be no loss of life, no war, just order and increased prosperity.
“We knew from studying your history, that humans kill each other over tiny patches of land. We wanted North America and Asia. When your leaders refused to negotiate, we realized that Celeruns and Humans wouldn’t be able to have a peaceful co-existence.”
“Damn straight,” Red agreed. “This is our world. Get out now or you will regret it.”
“Hoo-yah,” said Nate.
“By killing billions of humans today, we save a billion times a billion Celeruns tomorrow.”
Red’s nostrils flared. “You think you’re better than humans because we kill over land? Look at yourselves. You’ve wiped out man for the exact same reason—land.”
The Celerun’s eyes narrowed to slits.
“There is more to it than that,” the leader said. “Despite the War Effect, human beings were on a sure course to the stars. No intelligent life wants another intersystem war. That’s what will happen if humans go galactic.”
“You can’t know that,” Red said.
Nate nudged him with an elbow, whispering that he should flatten himself to the ground in twenty seconds. Red tilted his head in confusion. Nate returned a firm stare as he quietly started to count backwards from twenty.
“Humans are limited by linear vision of the past and future,” said the alien.
“And you are not?”
“Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…” Nate continued, barely audible.
“My kind can see time unfurling in all directions.”
The unexpected shift in conversation gave Red a flicker of hope. Apparently, humans were still around in the future, causing trouble. Red liked the idea of that very much.
“I get it,” He said. “You saw a future where the universe was filled with human beings—not Celeruns.”
The Celerun’s posture stiffened.
“Four, three, two…”
Red fell to the side and flattened his body to the ground. Blue lighting streaked over his nose, sizzling the air. The Celeruns looked like frogs hit with grenades, torn and burned and bloody. Disturbing how he’d been talking to the victims of Nate’s electric charisma a second ago, but now they were dead. Remorse crept into his heart for a second, but he ruthlessly squashed it. The Celeruns had killed his family, maybe not these particular ones, but the entire race all held the blame.
“Ha!” Nate stood, letting his bindings fall at his feet. “You can’t predict ten seconds into the future, yet alone two hundred years!”
Nate’s stunt didn’t spare the Celeruns rooting in the field either. Where there were a dozen invaders standing a moment ago, now there were none. A sweet repugnant floral-like scent tinged with the smell of freshly mowed grass filled the air. As an added bonus, Nate’s bindings were shredded. A couple of the Celeruns moaned weakly, but most of them were dead.
“What did you do?” Red gasped, still on his side, looking at the younger man as if he was more frightening than the aliens.
“I sent a power surge through the air.”
“Why didn’t it kill us, too?”
“It went through their gadgets, making them explode like bombs. I must say it worked even better than I had expected.”
“You are amazing.”
“Thank you very much.”
Red went over to stand over the alien who had so enjoyed blasting them with the heat gun. She was still alive, but mortally wounded. Yellow goo poured from her injuries. “If you see time unfurling in all directions…” Many of the wispy white hairs with the almond-like roots had fallen from her head. She frantically tried to pick them up in her gooey hands. “Why didn’t you see that coming?”
When she didn’t answer, Red kicked her in the side. In response, she moaned pitifully and tried to move away, but Nate joined in and delivered another kick. When she tried to reach for the almonds, Nate stomped on them.
The frantic ear-splitting screams that followed echoed over the fields. She struggled to stand, but couldn’t, so she crawled to the remaining almonds, risking Nate’s fury. Gathering the seeds into her arms, she held them protectively against her chest as if they were precious gems. Too weak to rise, she curled into a protective ball around the almonds. Nate poured years of hatred, frustration, and grief into a shower of kicks and blows against the dying Celerun. Red held back, but fully understood the younger man’s rage, thinking that she deserved it. Odd how she seemed more concerned about protecting the almonds than her own body.
“Holy shit!” It finally dawned on Red. “The Celeruns’ hair! Those almond things are seedpods…like little uteruses or something! She’s trying to protect her babies!”
That sent Nate into a new level of hatred. Now he aimed his wrath directly against her head.
Listening to her whimpers, watching her put her children’s safety ahead of her own, took the joy out of the revenge.
“Stop it,” he told Nate evenly. “That’s enough.”
The kid refused to listen.
“Stop it!” he said louder. Nate paused, but only for a moment. Red’s hands were still bound, so rising was difficult. He managed though, and shouldered a very surprised Nate out of the way, knocking him to the ground.
“What did you do that for!” Nate was sprawled out on his back.
“I said let her be!”
“But she killed my parents, my little brothers and sisters, all my friends!”
“Did you bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Nate?” Nate looked at him blankly. “You know, the bombs the United States dropped on Japan.”
“No; I couldn’t have, and you know that! I wasn’t even alive back then.”
“But you’re American, and America dropped the bomb, so you must be responsible.”
“It doesn’t mean that I had anything to do with it…oh.”
He could almost see the light bulb go on in Nate’s head.
“This particular Celerun didn’t drop the plague on earth. Odds are she’s a good little soldier who does whatever she’s told. Let her be.”
The hatred smeared across Nate’s face dissolved into tears of frustration. He punched the air, wiped his nose on a sleeve, took a jagged breath, and quickly regained his well-rehearsed composure.
“All right, Bossman,” he said. “What do we do now?’’
“How about cutting me free?
Nate rummaged through the dead aliens’ stuff, looking for anything that might be of use. Most of the Celerun instruments had been destroyed by the surge, but he found a blade and used it to cut away Red’s bindings.
“We got to get out of here fast,” Red said. “We passed some houses along the way. If we’re lucky, we can find a car with gas in it.”
“Unlikely,” Nate said. “But there are perfectly good Celerun vehicles a hundred feet away.”
“No way,” Red said shaking his head.
“It’s the only way,” Nate assured. “The nearest house is two miles away. I could make the run in fifteen minutes? Can you? Even if you can, Bossman, do we have that much time to spare?”
“Okay, okay, you made your point.”
They ran across the field to the hovercrafts.
Red cautiously sidled up to one and caressed the warm glittering metal at the base of the seat. The hovercraft reminded him of a jet ski on estrogen—not bulky, but smooth and feminine. Thin metal running boards made up the base of the hovercraft. Every part was streamlined, except where a slightly elliptical cylinder rose out of the base. He had seen the Celeruns ride standing, straddling t
he cylinders, but they also used the cylinders as seats. Red guessed that whatever powered the engine was housed inside the cylinder.
Even when parked, the hovercrafts hovered a foot above the ground. The one he chose dipped an inch when he stepped on the running board. He swung a leg over the housing cylinder and took a seat. The top of the cylinder was coated with a cushion of gel—very comfortable. He glanced over at Nate, who was already seated on his hovercraft of choice, checking out the controls.
The steering wheel was shaped like a V. A windshield also served as the control console. Semi-transparent buttons of lights, marked with alien symbols, spread across the bottom third of the windshield like the instruments on a dashboard.
Red and Nate randomly touched the icons on the dash. Nate’s craft suddenly rose two meters into the air, but would ascend no further, and came down with a swish of air and a gyrating bump. Red pushed an icon with a symbol that looked like an old-fashioned car antennae. Instantly, a rod rose out of the seat just in front of his crotch. “Whoa, this is a bad idea.”
“Celeruns may have caught the caravan by now,” Nate reminded Red. As he spoke, Nate’s vehicle lurched forward five feet. “I got it, Bossman! The button smack in the center of the windshield is Drive.”
Red hunted for it and saw a symbol that looked like a rider leaning forward on a hovercraft. He pressed the button and twisted the handle forward. The vehicle moved forward. He twisted the handle toward him, and the vehicle moved backward. Simple enough. He discovered squeezing both sides of the housing with his knees made the craft slow and stop.
“This is so much like a motorcycle, it’s not even funny,” Nate remarked.
“Good design is universal.” Red said. “I like it.”
Nate swished a hand. “After you, Bossman.”
“Try and catch me.”
Red accelerated softly until he got the feel of the craft between his legs. It didn’t take long. He leaned forward, increasing speed, swooping over the ground, feeling like a young stag leaping over the meadow. The engine purred like a kitten, barely audible, and the aerodynamics of the windshield were so refined the wind barely made a sound. A guy could get used to this…he closed his eyes for a minute, and pretended that he was in a different world, sailing on a sea of glass toward paradise.
Chapter 18
Hewego’s mayor and its drag racing champion drove full-throttle on the alien hovercrafts for twenty miles, slowing at a place where thick branches hung over the road, creating a living hallway of oak trees. Nate brought his craft to a stop, motioning for Red to do the same.
“Do you hear that?”
Red strained his ears. Pop, pop, sounds bounced off the trees.
“Is that gunfire?” Nate asked.
Red’s mouth went dry. That could only mean one thing. “The caravan’s in trouble.”
They raced ahead, not slowing down until they spotted the fleet of yellow buses at the side of the field, surrounded by other familiar vehicles. A huge structure, a corporate cattle barn made of gray cement blocks and sheet metal, stood in the distance. The sign was still out there, Pringle’s Corporate Dairy. Before the plague, he’d passed this place at least a dozen times, never giving it a second thought. If only he’d known it held the kind of secrets that conspiracy theorists drooled over. The main entrance to the Galatians Bunker was hidden inside that barn. The secondary one, two miles away, was marked by a fading billboard.
Over seventy Celerun hovercrafts were parked along the road at the edge of an overgrown meadow. The general’s plans had mentioned that if military fleets arrived ahead of the Hewaygoans’s evacuation down into the bunker, the humans would have hundreds of thousands of Celeruns to deal with, and once the mother ship arrived, millions. The low number of hovercrafts was a good sign that the mother ship hadn’t touched down on earth yet, and that the military fleets were still in space.
A long drive led to a wide gravel parking lot that appeared to encircle the barn. Celeruns were dug in behind small rises in the land, up and down the lane and the surrounding fields. The aliens had positioned spotlights to shine on the barn, turning the gray of dawn into full daylight.
The not-quite-set moon, one day past full, illuminated the field with a silvery glow, making it more difficult for both humans and aliens to conceal themselves. Red watched two Celeruns hiding behind an old Allis Chalmers tractor. Their demeanor seemed casual. They talked freely to one another, like two women on a lunch break, totally unaware that someone in the weeds was contemplating their deaths. If he had his gun, he would take them out in a second.
On the short side of the barn, beneath the peak of the roof, were double-wide doors. Knowing the building’s true purpose, Red figured the government had brought big equipment in and out through those doors over the years. Smaller garage doors were spaced in even intervals along the long side of the building.
Red’s heart sunk at the sight of seven charred human bodies smoldering on the ground outside the barn. He saw Nate’s expression twist and darken as he struggled with the sight before his eyes. Neither of them said a word, praying that their nearest and dearest weren’t among the dead. They ditched the hovercrafts to crawl through the overgrown meadow on hands and knees, hoping to get a better look.
Suddenly, a round of shooting came from inside the barn. The two aliens by the tractor stopped talking to fire their orange lightning guns.
Red recognized the portly form of Farmer Morningside as he stepped out from one of the side doors to get a clear shot at the invaders. A Celerun crouched in the grass caught a bullet in the forehead. She slumped to the grass on one knee. Yellow blood dripped down her face, filling her nostrils, but she was still alive. A human would have died on the spot, but her comrades reached out from the grass to pull her into the cover of the field.
Farmer Morningside wasn’t through. He sent a spray of bullets over a group of Celeruns who slunk deeper into the grass, before he ducked back behind the door. A survivor from Last Haven flung open the loft door above the large-equipment sliding door, showering the Celeruns from on high, forcing them to retreat further into the field where Red and Nate were hiding.
The Celeruns rose out of the weeds long enough to return fire, but their beams were ineffective against the porous cement-block fortress. Where the concentrated light hit the walls, nebulous glowing blobs burned for two seconds, spreading throughout the brick, and then harmlessly dissolved.
“I don’t understand,” Red mumbled. “Why hasn’t Elizabeth taken them through the secret entrance?”
“And why are the aliens’ guns so lame?” Nate asked. “What kind of game are they playing?”
“General Moore said that landing the mother ship would be a drain on the Celerun power supply. That’s why we timed our evacuation to coincide with its arrival. Even though it puts us in a time crunch, for a while it levels the playing field.”
“Mayor Wakeland?” An unexpected voice from the weeds made him jolt. He reached for his gun, but the Celeruns had taken it. The dark face belonging to the voice was that of Dr. Patel.
“Doc?”
“Mayor?”
A second voice exclaimed, “Honey!”
It was Elizabeth. Something akin to joy bloomed in his chest, but it quickly wilted in the presence of fear. What was she doing out here, exposed in the open, separated from the barn, far away from the doorway of hope?
She crawled to him, practically tackling him as she straddled his torso and lavished anguished kisses on his face, alternating from cheek to cheek, not letting up until Michael appeared on the scene to squeeze between them. The boy clutched Red tightly and placed a soft cheek on his chest.
“Dad,” he said sweetly. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
Red stroked his soft hair. “You’re a good kid, Michael,” he said, fighting the urge to turn tail, run away with his family, and say the hell with everybody else. The thought of losing his second family so close on the heels of losing his first was too much for any
man to endure. If only God would come out of His gold box and lend a hand.
“No matter what happens.” Michael squeezed him tighter. “I want you to know that I think you’re a great dad.”
That hadn’t always been true. Red had many regrets. In his pre-plague life, he had hardly paid any attention to his children or his wife. The business had taken all his time. Michael and Elizabeth were his second chance. It was bittersweet knowing he’d done better with Michael than he had with his biological children.
Michael squeezed out from between Red and Elizabeth to scamper through the weeds. “Zena, girl, where are you?”
“Get back here,” Red called after him.
“Red,” Elizabeth said. “God knows you have enough on your mind, but I rethought my decision not to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
She was still straddling him when bullets rang out against metal. She flattened herself against his chest and whispered in his left ear. “I’m pregnant.”
He could feel the strength drain from his body.
She wasn’t thinking straight if she thought this was good news. This baby was doomed to die by the end of the day or live its years out underground in some dark dank bunker. This was horrible, no matter how she sliced it.
Elizabeth rolled off him. Deep disappointment was reflected in the sag of her expression. She could read his thoughts, so there was no hiding how strongly he resisted the idea of bringing another child into such a miserable world. How many regrets could a man hold inside him without tearing at the seams and leaking away?
Nate ended the awkward silence by rudely sticking his head in between them. “Uh, the Celeruns are getting closer to the barn. What do we do?”
“Nate—is that you?” A voice came from the weeds. Everybody turned to see a young blonde woman in a pink sweater crawling commando-style over clumps of clay. Red noticed the way Nate’s breath quickened at the sight of Blanche and the way Blanche’s eyes danced at the sight of Nate. He didn’t know if the two young people had ever pursued anything beyond friendship, but it was clear that they cherished one another. It saddened him to think they might not get the chance to allow their relationship to grow into something more.
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