A translator was shoved into Red’s face. So was the watch.
“What is this? What happened to the humans in the barn?”
Red only smiled, which earned him a kick in the ribs. More bones cracked. The pain felt like swords stabbing his lungs.
“The only reward for sacrificing yourself through your silence is pain,” the lead Celerun said. “But if you answer our questions, we will take that pain away.”
Every heave of his chest caused his sides to ripple in agony, but his burning hatred for his captors helped to crowd it out.
“What about my dog?”
“We will take away its pain, too.”
Images of his first wife and deceased children made a collage in his head.
“Answer me a question,” Red said. “And I’ll answer you a question.”
“Proceed.”
“Do you love your babies and mourn if they die?” Red asked.
“Yes,” the lead Celerun answered. “In a way that surpasses human understanding. Time does not pass for us in the same way as it does for you. When we lose someone, the pain never dulls. It remains fresh until the moment we die.”
Red leaned back with a satisfied grin.
The translator filled with static. Simultaneously, the oval devices on the aliens’ armbands clicked on. “An urgent message from the mother ship.” Red caught some of it through the translator. “Unexpected activity on the surface.” The transmission turned into garbled buzzing, undecipherable even to the Celeruns.
“What do you know about this?” A Celerun shook him by the shoulders. “What did you humans do at 6 a.m.?”
“Declared war on the Celeruns.” Red raised his eyes to the sky. A lone star shimmered in the lingering fringes of the night, just above a spreading golden sunrise. Unsure if hell was breaking loose all over the planet, he smiled hopefully. “You’re all gonna die.”
The Celerun’s backs arched and they looked up.
It suddenly occurred to him why nothing appeared to happen at 6 am. It was the launch that was scheduled for 6:00 am; the missiles would take a few minutes to reach their targets. He delighted at the thought that the Celeruns were trapped on the third planet from the sun, unable to stop the missiles in flight. He probably wouldn’t see a mushroom cloud, because anywhere a bunker was located had been scratched off as a direct target. He remembered Iowa on the general’s map. There were no bunkers there, and due to it being prime farmland, he knew that the Hawkeye state would suffer hundreds of direct hits.
Red couldn’t feel anymore triumphant if he had tried. As his vision began to gray, his smile widened.
“We’ve won,” he whispered.
The aliens held a heated discussion until all eyes fell on their captive.
Their weapons were useless, so the gun they had confiscated from him was pushed against his skull. He didn’t flinch when an alien squeezed the trigger, just held his breath, but was sorely disappointed when the gun jammed.
He gestured for his weapon, trying to get them to understand that he only wanted to fix it. To his surprise, the alien emptied the chamber and handed it over. Red willed the bent pin inside the gun to straighten. When he returned it to his executioner’s hands in working condition, he could swear the allegedly humorless aliens were now laughing at him.
First, they shot Zena in the head, and then kicked her limp body at him. Red kissed her furry head and hugged her tight, bracing for what was coming. An alien shot him through the chest. The pain was less than he had expected. Red figured they wanted to see him linger, but the world became a curtain drawing back. Kay and his three children were standing on the other side. Their faces were aglow with indescribable joy, as if light emanated from a place inside of them.
Incredible thirst dried Red’s throat. He couldn’t move or even swallow, but the love and beauty pouring out of them was like a long sip of cool water. How he longed to drink more!
A colorful Ferris wheel turned in the background. Music from the carousel wafted to his ears. His mother and father were there, too. Old friends and siblings formed a line, waving at him, encouraging him to join the fun.
Kay’s smile filled him with longing. Piper knelt on one knee, opening her arms wide. “Come on, girl.” Zena looked at Red, tail wagging excitedly, reluctant to leave his side, but desperately wanting to go where called. His teenage son encouraged Zena further by patting his knees. “Treat!”
Red nodded and she bounded off into waiting arms, where she was showered with hugs, kisses and laughter.
The ground itself began to tremble, bringing Red back to the school yard. He clutched the photo from his pocket. “Home,” Red whispered. Giving up his spirit, his body slumped over Zena’s.
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The aliens looked at one another, bracing their feet, struggling for footing as the earth shook beneath them. Something was amiss, but they didn’t know what. Returning to their hovercrafts, they discovered nothing worked. None of them recalled total failure of all equipment, but nothing had gone according to plan when it came to settling this world drifting through the Milky Way.
Whatever the technical glitch, the engineers in the mother ship would fix it, just like they always had. If Celeruns were anything, they were patient, so waiting for further instructions after everything came back online was the rational choice. In the meantime, they would spend their time enjoying the rich spoils of the Earth, rooting for nourishment in delicious dirt, reproducing under the life-giving star the humans had called the sun.
As they waited, one of the Celeruns commented on the serene look of the human they had just killed. The oldest Celerun swore the dead man was staring right at her. She pondered how most humans believed that a divine being had created the universe and everything in it, and had stayed around to watch over them.
A Celerun with a head full of wispy white seeds couldn’t pull her eyes away from the dead body. “Why would a god endow humans with immortal souls and not us?” she asked.
“None of that belief is true,” the Celerun with red eyes said. “If gods like that existed, they would never have let humanity be destroyed.”
The Celerun who had posed the original questions covered the dead man’s face with a piece of cloth.
Two days later, their communicators still remained silent. The hovercrafts refused to start and their weapons wouldn’t fire. Worried, the Celeruns on the ground kept checking the horizon for any sign of the fleet, but nobody showed. On the third day, green-brown clouds of dust blew in from the west. The aliens raised their instruments to take a reading, but without power, the instruments were useless. The Celerun hurried to the fields where they had planted their children. The stalks that had nurtured their infant offspring had turned brown, and the sproutlings’ delicate green skin had taken on a ghastly gray pallor, though the cobs’ husks remained firmly wrapped and the cobs themselves still on the stems.
Frantic, they tried to shield their sproutlings from the tainted winds, but by the end of the day, the sproutlings had wilted away, even the stems withering under the blast of that mysterious wind. The Celerun soldiers wandered back to the green sphere, stooped by grief, wondering why their superiors had abandoned them. By the next morning their bodies were cramping, nausea overtook their digestion, and they huddled together, waiting for those further instructions that would never come.
Chapter 24
Above Earth’s atmosphere, inside the daughter ship, a smaller version of the mother ship, the Celeruns in charge of operations were called before the High Leader. The unthinkable had happened. They had lost a mother ship and everyone on board it.
Who was supposed to have been responsible for securing the planet’s skyways? How was it that primitive human governments had hidden such a vast network of nuclear devices from their scanners? Why weren’t the missiles intercepted in time? Who had authorized the mother ship’s landing, despite knowing Earth hadn’t been fully cleansed of humanity?
Excuses were made, but the
truth was that no single Celerun was responsible. Mistakes had been made at every level of command.
In the aftermath of the plague, human technology crumbled and humanity’s communication systems had gone silent. Over time, the Celeruns in charge of monitoring such activities grew lax. Those in charge of the ground control had underestimated the desperation of the last remnant of humanity. Eager to land the mother ship, those at the top were so set on staying on schedule, they were too impatient to wait for confirmation that the last human had been eliminated. The Celerun believed that nothing could go wrong, as nothing had gone wrong in all their previous conquests, but everything that could go wrong, had already done so when the skies of Earth suddenly burst into a frenzy of activity. From space the Celerun fleet could see thousands of nuclear blasts over every single continent, but it happened so quickly, and at the worst time possible—during the landing of the mother ship—they were helpless to intervene. Most of the Celerun fleets were grounded and couldn’t respond fast enough.
Afterward, ships could not enter the poisoned atmosphere without being themselves contaminated by radiation. Powerless to help, the ships circled the world, with the horrific knowledge that below them sproutlings were dying, and sproutling parents would linger, suffering untold agonies before death released them.
Those in space lamented the great loss of life, as well as the destruction of such an unmatched planet. Celerun scientists estimated that the surface would not be hospitable for twenty thousand years if ever.
The stunned leaders sat in the control deck, watching as the humans destroyed the planet they had called home for thousands of years.
“They destroyed their world, rather than let us take it,” the Celeruns recorded in their journal. “Their selfishness is unfathomable.”
A slave from another world dared to speak. He was allowed to exist only because his species’ unparalleled engineering skills kept the ship in prime condition. “I call it glorious,” he said. “The humans have accomplished what no other species has ever managed to do—drive off the greatest empire ever known.”
“Yes,” the High Leader said. “But at a terrible cost to themselves.”
“That’s what made them so effective,” the slave said. “Desperate humans do not count the cost. I stand humbled before their determination.”
The High Leader gazed through the portal at Earth, which was covered in a swirl of white, blue and brown mist.
“Let us hope that we have seen the last of them.”
“This planet was called the Forbidden Garden for a reason,” a Celerun expert in Earth religions said. “I tried to warn you.”
“Enough!” The High Leader gripped the edge of her chair. “Delete all records of this planet and of what happened here today.”
“But…” the ship’s recorder tried to protest.
“Do not question my orders,” she said. “From this day forward, any mention of how the humans thwarted our plans to settle their planet will result in immediate death. I do not mean to be harsh, but it’s for the sake of universal peace.”
The recorder tipped her head to acknowledge the leader’s words, while the slave silently vowed to tell the tale of humanity’s final triumph to the subordinated enslaved races on every planet where he set foot. If such a primitive species could defeat the Celeruns, why couldn’t they?
Epilogue
I was only a boy the day I followed my adopted mother down the steep ladder, deep into the bowels of the planet. It seemed like we climbed down the ladder for hours before we touched the ground again. The room into which we’d come was long and narrow. Dr. Patel called it The Hatchway, as he studied the blueprints my mother had given him.
I remember being scared, but my mother was so busy I didn’t dare bother her with my own concerns. When Blanche took my hand, and gave it a squeeze, I looked up at her with deepest gratitude.
“This way,” Mom said, motioning for the rest of us to follow. We had entered a network of passages. Artificial lights dotted the walls. I remember Dr. Patel yelling out the directions. “Left. No, right!”
I’d long since lost all that remained of my sense of direction or of where we were, when we went through a doorway. It was like exiting a dark cave and stepping into a sunny forest. Birds cheeped, bees buzzed, and a soft breeze touched my face. The glass walls went up and up to a ceiling so high it seemed only a glittering haze far overhead. A lazy creek bubbled near my feet.
“This must be Biosphere Three,” my mother said. Her voice was stressed and I sensed that time was our enemy. “The hallway to the control room is located on the northeast wall. What way is northeast?”
“That way!” Dr. Patel pointed. I wanted to stay by the creek, but we scrambled across a grassy knoll and came to a metal door in a thick cement wall. More dim passageways beyond were illuminated with artificial lights.
Keeping up with the adults was difficult. I kept glancing, worrying about my father, and Zena, but I knew they would never join us. I had dreamed of their demise more than once. That’s why I never liked to talk about my dreams of the aliens. I knew they would come and take my father’s life. Zena’s, too. The dream always started with me searching for Zena in a cornfield. It ended with me…
“Michael!” My mother turned around to scold me. “Quit dragging your feet.” I wasn’t used to her being so short with me; I felt like crying, but I didn’t want to make things worse.
Everything was a blur. We took a hard right and skidded to a stop in front of a door with a handle like the steering wheel of a ship. My mother pressed buttons on a keypad located on the wall. She spun the wheel and pulled the door open.
A long room full of computer screens and blinking lights came into view. Two skeletons sat in front of one of the screens. I wrapped my arms around Blanche’s waist. She let out a stifled scream, but seemed more interested in the computer equipment.
My mother ran to the far end of the room. I followed behind the adults. They gathered in front of a panel that looked like a car’s dashboard. The computer equipment was a strange mixture of old technology and new, knobs and touch screens, VDT monitors and others I couldn’t recognize. Mom ran her fingers over knobs and buttons, apparently hunting for something in particular.
Hundreds of television screens lined the wall. The names of cities across the world were printed beneath their screens. The pictures were of really boring things, like decaying cities, and quiet countrysides. Still, I hadn’t seen technology in a long while, so I stood there mesmerized.
“The key! Who has the key?” my mother said frantically.
“You do, Elizabeth,” Blanche said, pointing to the key hanging from a chain around Elizabeth’s neck.
“Good grief,” she said, entire body trembling. “I’m so stupid!” She glanced at me, then to the television screens, then back to me, biting her lip. “Somebody take him out of here.”
The next thing I knew, Blanche was dragging me out of the room, despite my protests. She took me away, through a dimly lit passage, back toward the biosphere.
“A little bird told me that this place has round-the-clock electricity. And there’s a movie theater, a school, skateboarding rink, and every video game ever made.” That’s when I noticed Blanche’s bottom lip quiver. The lights along the wall began to blink red. An alarm sounded all around us, making me feel panicky.
“Oh, Michael!” She suddenly broke down, hugging me tight, crying into my shoulder, stroking my hair. “It’s happening.”
“What’s happening?” I wanted to know. “I don’t understand.”
“Blanche!” a voice made us both turn with a start.
There was Nate. I tried to peer behind him, looking for my Dad. Blanche dropped me like a hot potato, and flung herself into Nate’s arms, kissing him all over his face.
“My Dad?” I asked. Even though I already knew the answer, I had to hear it out loud.
Blanche pulled away from Nate to look at me with deep concern.
“I’m sorry, kid
.” Nate said quietly. “He didn’t make it.”
“His sacrifice will be remembered,” I said. Even then I knew that was a weird thing for a kid to say, but the dream had showed me as much, and how to say it. “Uh, does anyone know if Father Bob is here?”
Nate and Blanche shook their heads. I had given the priest something of mine on the way out of Hewego, something that wasn’t important now, but which dreams had shown me would be of value in the far future.
..............................
My dreams show me bits of pieces of things to come, but most of the details are left out. That’s why I was stunned to learn that my mother had nuked the entire world. Normally, that’s not something a kid would brag about, but all the grownups made her out to be a hero. I was proud of her, in a way, but she was always quick to point out that she hadn’t acted alone.
If it wasn’t for the loss of Red, I’d have remembered those first days in the bunker as the beginning of a pretty nice life. But I had loved him as my own father. Zena’s absence only worsened my despair. She was a good dog.
Deep inside our bunker, artificial sunlight illuminated projected skies, ever-changing billowing clouds dotting the false sky as if they were in truth blown by the world’s winds, now forever forbidden to the living. Lakes filled with frogs, catfish, eels, salmon and trout left little to be desired, especially when the huge fans were blowing during the fake thunderstorms. Zena would have loved to romp in the woods. Trees from different climates grew inside the different biospheres—the deciduous forest of Biodome Three was my personal favorite—especially the apple orchard. The biospheres were even programmed to mimic the position of the sun’s angle throughout the day, giving way to a starry-night sky, and different phases of the moon. The facsimiles weren’t as good as the originals, but were better than anyone had hoped for.
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