Then she saw the searchlight flicker to life.
Jet held her breath, watching it as a mouse watches the stalk of a cat from where it crouches in a hole.
The shockingly bright beam seemed to follow a random path at first, rolling over the ground near where Jet had been walking. It paused in that general vicinity briefly, maybe to try and scare her, to flush her out. Jet exhaled only when the swath of white light moved on, glancing over nearby buildings and a metal drain cover before it searched the other side of the street with equal care, lingering under the eaves.
Then the sharp beam flickered directly towards her.
It roamed the nearby walls, then abruptly fell to almost exactly where Jet stood, even as she inched away from the range of its glow.
Jet cursed.
They’d seen her.
They were toying with her, looking at her with heat sensors most likely. They’d been trying to get her to run by skirting near to her, but they’d known where she was all along. Which meant they were probably hunting, looking to bring someone in.
Either way, she had no choice, not once they had her in their searchlights.
Leaping to her feet, she ran, full out, down the alley.
She nearly slid on the slick ground, even with her heavy boots.
Jerking herself upright, she forced her mind back on the terrain, picking out the driest parts of the stone to lay down her feet.
The paving stones were slick from monsoon rains.
Moss covered the hard slate, along with just enough water that when she hit a patch, it was like trying to run on ice. Jet tried desperately to remember where the nearest manhole opening into the sewers lived, but the only ones she could remember were too far away, and in the opposite direction.
Today, she was walking outside her normal stomping grounds, deep in the ruins of downtown Vancouver.
She should have mapped the route to Everest’s new place with more care, or taken a longer stretch of the underground passage, even with the rats, the toxic fumes and the rot of the monsoon.
She should have had Anaze highlight a few more safe zones.
As it was, all she could do was head for the narrowest streets and nooks and alleys she could find, and hope she lost the hovercraft before it could trap her somewhere in the open. When Jet reached the end of that first alley, she sprinted across the main street as fast as her legs would carry her, aiming for another fissure between buildings on the other side.
She did that a few more times, trying to zig-zag as much as possible.
She stuck to the narrowest streets she could find, looking for open doors, for broken windows, but only in the largest buildings, buildings where she might reasonably disappear. She looked for sewage grates, too, but only when it meant staying off the main street, or any street wide enough for the hovercraft to get over her.
Despite the water running everywhere, bleeding through brick and cement walls, the day was already heating up under the heavy cover of low-hanging clouds.
Jet left the longhouse while it was still dark, but now the sun warmed the eastern side of the city, heating up the air and water even through the thick cloud cover overhead.
Within seconds of breaking into a full sprint, Jet’s clothes were drenched with sweat.
Her nylon pants clung to her skin like an oily paste.
Her breathing got thicker, too.
She ran harder, trying to ignore the pounding in her chest, wishing she’d drank more water as she’d been walking down the road.
Jet was in the habit of conserving there, too, only drinking what she absolutely needed and no more. Clean water was hard to come by, especially these days. Water could be even harder than fuel, since it took so much water just to stay alive. With all the bacteria and other problems, anything they left sitting for more than a few hours tended to grow dangerous, too. Fresh water didn’t stay fresh for long, even when they boiled it.
The hotter it got, the worse their problems were, until even drinking it an hour or so after boiling left room for doubt.
These days, they boiled every liter of water they used.
They rarely used it for anything but drinking and watering these days. Cleaning bodies and clothes, latrines, kitchens, floors, sleeping areas… they’d had to find dry ways to accomplish all of those, saving precious water for life, for living another day.
They boiled water more frequently during the monsoon, when all the water tables rose high enough to mix with the contamination in the ground soil.
It also mixed with runoff from the sewage.
Since the Nirreth had come, the weather had gotten worse.
Her mother told her monsoons didn’t happen at all in Canada when she was a child.
She said monsoons used to happen only in faraway, exotic places––Thailand and Sri Lanka, India and Laos.
Before the Nirreth came, the only monsoons her mother ever heard of in North America happened in the deserts of the Southwest, and those were just thunder storms––nothing like the mold-soaked madness that came now, the toxic rain dumping down in buckets, day after day, heavy enough that an umbrella was useless, heavy enough and hard enough to wear away rock and soil and asphalt and make even the concrete sprout ferns.
By the end of the three- to five-month season every summer, they all felt like they lived in a massive petri dish.
They lost people every year too, from the sickness that inevitably swept through the longhouses, each strain more deadly than the last.
Every year, it was hotter, too.
But even the ruin of their planet didn’t keep them safe.
The Nirreth liked it hot.
The increasing temperature only brought more of them.
It was enough to make the remaining humans wonder if the Nirreth were engineering the atmosphere to be more like that of their home planet. They now had processors everywhere, even this far north, where it remained borderline too cool for their thick skins.
The Nirreth claimed to be “fixing” the Earth’s atmosphere, of course, from the damage done to it by humans over the years.
Jet hadn’t yet seen anything that would make her actually believe that.
The reality was, they could be doing anything to their world, really.
No humans she knew understood Nirreth technology, so all the skags had to go on were the Nirreth’s lies and the stories told by rebels and bandits.
No one seemed to know the truth. No one knew what was really happening.
Or if they did, they weren’t talking.
Either way, the heat crawled inexorably up the map.
That started before the Nirreth too, according to her mother, but it seemed to happen faster every year. The last of the summer ice had gone nearly twenty years earlier from southern Canada and the northern United States.
Now ice barely formed at all, even in the deepest throes of winter, even for a few weeks, as far north as Alaska and northern Canada.
Those weeks grew shorter, too.
Of course, the rebels claimed that the Nirreth were trying to cook them out, killing off the last of the skags by making it too hot for humans to live outside the shelter of the Nirreth enclaves. Jet didn’t know why they’d go to so much trouble, though.
If they really wanted the skags gone, they could probably bomb them to oblivion in a matter of weeks.
Anyway, sometimes it seemed like the rebels knew a little too much about those mythical Nirreth cities.
While Jet ran, she wasn’t thinking about any of this, though.
Instead she thought about how long she’d have these narrow alleyways to duck into before she ran into a warehouse district, a freeway, a rotted city park, one of the business areas, or the lapping water of the sound or one of the lakes.
She thought about how long she could keep up this pace before her legs or her lungs gave out. She thought about how much time she would have before they landed the hovercraft and came after her, if she stopped in one of the smaller alleys and looked for an
entrance to the underground.
While Jet ran, it was difficult to listen for the culler.
With its nearly-silent engines, the ship could be hovering just out of her peripheral vision, nets hanging over her while the Nirreth grinned from the open hatch.
She couldn’t hear anything but her own breath, the slap of her rubber-soled boots on the wet stone, the jostle of her pack and the curved sword against her back, the flap of the long coat she wore. She’d tied her long, black hair in a knot at the base of her neck when she left the longhouse that morning, but now found herself wishing she’d tied it with leather instead, as the knot slowly began to unravel.
Given all of this, Jet had no idea how close the craft was to her now.
She wasn’t about to slow down enough to look, either.
If they really were using heat-sensing to locate skags, they were likely trying to drive her to open ground where they could more easily pick her up with their nets.
She had to get off the road, and now.
Thinking this, Jet forced her legs faster, wishing she’d left the backpack with her barter materials and tools on the ground back in that alley. Everything but the sword, she could afford to lose and replace. She had those few seconds of breathing time; she could have come back for it later, maybe, if someone didn’t happen along and take it.
Or she could have just let it go. It was just stuff.
The sword was different.
Swords were difficult to come by.
Anyway, her sword was different.
It was a part of her… an extension of her hand and arm.
The old swordsmith who made it, Mishio, died in the monsoon the year before, from complications around breathing too much mold and having bronchitis and asthma and a bunch of other things.
He’d been one of the last who really knew how to make a good sword, at least of the smiths Jet knew of in Vancouver.
If she lost it now, she had no idea how she’d ever replace it.
Her sword even had a name.
She called it Black.
Kind of a stupid name really, unless you knew her name was Jet. That, and the handle was blackened steel wrapped in black-dyed leather grips.
Before he died, Mishio told her the name “Jet” meant black in Latin.
But the pack, even with her knives and her tools, she could have replaced. Really, it just showed how complacent she’d gotten, that it hadn’t even occurred to her to dump it.
Either way, Jet was unwilling to try and fling the pack or the heavy coat off her shoulders now. The extra movement would only slow her down, make her lose her balance. The mere fact of removing the bulky weight couldn’t help her enough to make up for the ground she’d lose in trying. She needed speed, yes, but she needed those extra seconds more.
She looked up at the tall buildings on either side.
Some were brick, but those of course were boarded up, and most would be impossible to break into quickly enough to make her escape. Even if no one was using this particular row of warehouses as shelter, most had been contaminated during the first cullings, and there was no guarantee any particular one she chose would have an entrance to the underground.
The truth was, she didn’t know this side of town well.
She should have brought Anaze with her, like he wanted.
Anaze knew this part of the city like the back of his hand, having lived here for a spell in his teens while his mother followed Richter. Anaze offered to come along with Jet to see Everest that morning, but for some reason she’d said no.
It wasn’t Anaze himself; she liked his company well enough. He was one of her best friends. Most days they went trading together, or mapping out new routes in and out of the orchards so they wouldn’t be caught growing.
He was okay with a sword too, but even better with a bow.
And Anaze was a lot more into the gardening stuff than Jet ever would be.
She was much more interested in finding ways to build new tunnels and structures underground, or learning how to crack the few pieces of Nirreth tech that came her way.
So, in retrospect, Jet didn’t really know why she hadn’t invited him along.
Maybe she’d just wanted the time alone.
That was probably all it was.
She never got a moment’s peace these days, living in the cramped, underground spaces of the longhouse, or even the wider settlement.
It only got worse every year, with the dangers multiplying aboveground and more people migrating north to get away from the heat and the burgeoning Nirreth enclaves. It was part of the reason why Jet and the other builders kept trying to find ways to heighten the caves, and to grow more real plants down there.
They knew at some point, they might not be able to leave the caves.
They might need to stay down there and survive on what they had.
They might need to stay down there for weeks, even months at a time.
Not only did they have the Nirreth to worry about, but also the Richters of the world, as well as the rebels and new immigrants. In the realm of more mundane worries, the list got even longer: bad water and soil, rats and snakes and feral dogs, diseased animals wandering into the camps and poisoning the water, parasites attacking the few crops that would still grow, the occasional bout of acid rain or wind blowing poisonous gasses in from the ocean.
Jet understood why she’d wanted to be alone.
With that hanging over all of their heads, people took every chance they got for a little quiet.
Now she wished she’d made an exception for Anaze.
Jet glanced up at the metal towers that also lined the streets.
The brick buildings were preferable, if only because they were older and more likely to have an underground entrance, but the glass and metal structures might do in a pinch. Being inside their metal skeletons made it hard for the Nirreth to use the culling nets.
They’d have to come down for her, and might not want to bother.
Not for one measly skag.
Either way, she had to make a decision.
She couldn’t keep running down these alleys forever.
The metal buildings were infinitely easier to break into, if only because so few of their green-tinted windows remained. The rest had been smashed to powder or knocked out by the sonic waves of passing Nirreth ships. Those windows that managed to stay intact in their metal frames stared out like oddly reflective eyes, looking almost sentient.
The Nirreth had promised to rebuild the human cities, too.
But like with the environment, Vancouver looked roughly the same as it had when she’d been born, nineteen years earlier.
Jet was trying to decide if she should dart into the next of those rusted giants, find a place to hide in the pock-marked walls and charred furniture, when she saw a flicker of movement.
Her eyes jerked left.
A light.
Someone or something was signaling her.
Jet tried to find the source with her eyes, but everything in front of her looked gray and green. Even here, in the swath of metal buildings and concrete walls, moss and mold covered every corner of the buildings. Overgrown trees and plants poked through the walls. Black and rotting plant matter covered most of the street. Ceilings sagged from water damage, trickling brown water from monsoon rains. Shards of broken glass covered the curbs and streets in a few places, but most of the buildings looked like the twisted skeletons of long-dead beasts.
Jet could just see the remnants of rooms inside one or two of the larger metal towers.
Mostly, though, all she saw was sky framed by rusted metal, worn into odd shapes by sea water and rain.
Darting down another alley, she ran across a normal-sized street and into a narrower one, paved with cobblestones. The cobblestones were slippery, but the road might be too narrow for the culler ships.
About a hundred yards ahead of her, the flashing light repeated.
Whoever it was, they were following her, likely using the se
wers.
On the second set of flashes, Jet located the source.
Unfortunately, reaching the opening in the ground where it originated meant breaking cover. It also meant stopping, fully visible for at least a few seconds, in one of the widest of the main thoroughfares.
Jet wondered if it could be the Nirreth.
It might be a trick.
They might be trying to lure her out into the open.
They might be luring her into a net.
Still running, Jet glimpsed a cracked doorway leading into the ground.
Pale, ground-dweller fingers lifted a metal cover a bare few inches.
The fingers of a skag.
Whoever it was, they lifted the manhole cover just enough to leave a dark, circular crack, and for her to see a pair of eyes reflecting up at her.
She could see no other part of their face.
“Over here!” a voice whispered urgently. “Jet! Come here! Quick!”
A man’s voice.
A familiar-sounding voice, but Jet couldn’t be certain, not with everything else.
It didn’t matter. She would have taken shelter from Richter himself at that point, even if it cost her more than a few apples.
That being said, Jet knew full well that she couldn’t trust strangers among the skags.
Richter, the worst of the human bandits who regularly raided their settlements, was certainly a case in point. He seemed to view the arrival of the Nirreth as a personal business opportunity. Anaze told Jet that while his mother had run with Richter’s men, he found out that most were ex-cons and ex-military who’d survived the wars.
Most had fought back during the first rounds of culling by the Nirreth.
According to Jet’s mom, those first rounds were what had really thinned their numbers down to the bone.
Since then, the Nirreth took a few, here and there.
They went out on patrols, maybe every couple of months.
Richter’s men never let go of their hatred of the Nirreth.
Neither did Richter himself, if rumors could be believed.
Disillusioned with their chances following that aborted war, they’d gone mercenary in the aftermath, seeming to blame the other humans for their failure as much as they did the Nirreth. Richter’s men viewed the rebels with scorn, along with the skags and anyone else unfortunate enough to have survived.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 2