by Aaron Hubble
Instinctively, Calier’s feet began to move even as he was unable to tear his eyes from the carnage that was raining from the sky. Who would do this? Who would be so bold and arrogant as to attack another city without provocation? He could think of no city in Aereas that was quarreling with another. There had been unprecedented cooperation between the cities for the last two hundred years, leading to advancement in all areas of science, art, communication, and transportation. Why would someone destroy all of that effort?
Calier didn’t know where to go, his mind a haze of confusion and shock. He choked on the dust that filled the air around him and tried to cover his face with his shirt. Without thinking he stumbled in the direction of the city park, a massive green space that dominated the entire northeastern corner of the city. He had no reason, it just felt right. It made him feel like he had a purpose.
Several steps down the sidewalk, Calier tripped. He looked down to see that he had stumbled over a pair of legs. The body of an older woman lay at his feet, her face covered in blood and her legs twisted and broken. The woman’s eyes fluttered open. She was breathing, but with great difficulty.
He knelt beside the woman and heard her struggling to breath. Calier grasped her frail hand. “Can you stand?” he asked.
“No,” she said in a pained whisper. “My legs won’t move.” Coughing wracked her broken body and her face twisted in pain. Calier could hear a gurgling sound coming from her chest as she struggled for breath. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth as the coughing abated.
She spoke through gritted teeth. “I..I was supposed to see my granddaughter today.”
Calier nodded, sadness overwhelming him. Wiping tears from his eyes he asked, “What’s your name mother?”
“Dotha,” she breathed, coughing once again. “And yours?”
“Calier,” he said.
She closed her eyes and Calier watched her struggle to swallow. Her eyes opened again and she squeezed Calier’s hand. “Will you stay with me Calier? I don’t…I don’t think I have that much longer.”
He looked around him at the destruction and the swooping aircraft. He was exposed, but did it really matter? People under cover in buildings were dying by the thousands. Most likely his time would come soon, and if it came while he was comforting someone in need, then so be it. He couldn’t think of a better way to go. “Yes, absolutely. Is there anything I can do for you?”
The woman shook her head and managed a small smile, before she experienced another coughing fit. Blood dribbled out of the corner of her mouth.
“Calier, I always imagined this would be different. That I would die with my family around me.” She stopped and gasped once again. “Today you’re my family and I thank you for being here as I leave Aereas.”
He nodded and tears fell from his eyes as this beautiful lady lay dying on the sidewalk separated from her family.
“Calier,” she said again. “You must do something for me. Survive. Survive and rebuild what once stood here. The Am’Segid achieved something wonderful, and someone has tried to take it from us. Don’t let them.”
Calier brushed her white hair from her eyes. “I won’t.”
Dotha looked into Calier’s eyes and smiled. “Thank you.”
She struggled for another breath, her chest hitched, and then Calier watched the light go out of her eyes. He saw her chest settle for the last time, never to rise again, never to draw the sweet breath of Aereas into her lungs.
He reached up, closed her eyelids and released her hand. It seemed wrong to leave her lying on the sidewalk, but he didn’t know what else to do.
Grieving, he looked down at the body of a woman he had known for only a minute. “Travel well, Mother Dotha.”
Then Calier, clutching his ribs, turned and jogged into the park.
At the small stream that wound through the park, he knelt and scooped water to his mouth and drank. Settling back onto his haunches, he looked around him. The scene was the same wherever he looked: burning buildings, debris, and death. His mind raced. He tried to calm himself and think strategically, which was proving to be a challenge.
His thoughts turned to his brother and his brother’s family. He would have been working when the attack started. More than anything, Calier needed to know he was alright. Assuming the university was still standing, there were excavation tools there that he used when he was out in the field. They would be helpful especially if he needed to dig through debris to help his brother’s family. That is, if he could still get into the university.
With a plan and a direction in mind, Calier began jogging northward along the edge of the park. He was about to turn into the city when he saw a figure sitting on the ground. It was a woman, her head bowed as she cradled the head of someone.
“Hey, ma’am, do you need help?” Calier asked as he slowed his jog and walked closer. He saw that she was cradling the head of a man in her lap. The man was dead, a jagged piece of metal protruding from his chest. She made no acknowledgment of Calier’s presence
He moved closer and knelt beside her.
“Do you need help?” he asked once again.
The woman made no move and did not answer.
She was obviously in shock. Calier placed his hands on either side of her face and turned her head toward him. The left side of her face was covered in blood, and the ear of the same side had been mangled. A cut ran from her ear all the way down to her chin.
She stared at him blankly.
Calier looked her over and couldn’t find any other serious injuries. Opening his pocket knife, Calier cut a strip of fabric from the dead man’s shirt, not sure if what he was doing was okay, but considering it necessary. He pressed the cloth to the woman’s face and applied pressure to the wound.
“You need more medical help than I can give you,” he told her, looking into her eyes. “Your wound is pretty bad. Can you walk?”
The woman touched the face of the dead man and spoke in a raspy whisper. “Winnet needs to come with us. He’s hurt.”
Calier groaned. Would she leave the man behind? He grasped her by the shoulders and told her, “Let’s get to the hospital first, and then send someone back for Winnet. I’m afraid if we move him it will just make things worse.”
The woman nodded absently, and Calier helped her to her feet. He had to support her as she wobbled, weak from shock. Thankfully, the hospital was only a short distance away, nestled into a wooded nook of the park. If he could get her that far, then the doctors could take care of her while he went in search of his family.
The woman could barely stand. Whether it was from the loss of blood or from the shock, Calier didn’t know. He did know that she needed care he couldn’t provide.
Thankfully, she was a small woman and it was easy for Calier to support her weight. Her head leaned against his shoulder, her raven hair falling over her golden eyes, and Calier noticed that she wore a silver bracelet on her left wrist. He groaned silently and ached for the woman. The man she had been sitting beside in the park - Winnet, she had called him - had been her betrothed, the man she had intended to marry.
The senselessness of her loss struck Calier like someone punching him in the stomach. That feeling was all too familiar to him. If she survived this, Calier knew that the healing process from losing someone who was almost a spouse would be hard. It might have been the dark hair or just the flood of memories, but this mystery woman reminded him of Halom. He’d thought he would never get over the loss of his wife, and that loss had nearly pushed him to the unimaginable, but somehow he had made it through. This woman would need to do the same.
Assuming she made it through this day alive.
A deep rumble came from the the city and screams echoed through the park. Was this what it had been like to live before the Great Peace? How did the ancient Am’Segid live under the constant threat of invasion, death, and destruction of everything they had worked to build? There was no textbook, no ancient writing, no dig that Calier could have gone o
n that would have taught him the lessons he was learning right now. He felt like his very heart would burst, unable to take anymore sorrow, anymore hurt. Everywhere he looked, all he could see was death, and death of this kind was ugly and unnatural.
Am’Segid look after each other. They thought of the other person first, so how could someone do this to them? Calier’s mind was reeling. The grief threatened to take control of him and he wanted to give up out of despair, but that was something he couldn’t do. This woman was depending on him. From somewhere deep inside, he drew up a little more courage, a little more fortitude, and remembered that someone else needed him to be strong. He saw the hospital tucked into the stand of trees at the edge of the park - it looked, for the most part, untouched by the attack. Calier assumed its fortuitous setting had something to do with that, as the hospital would be almost impossible to see from the air.
He guided the woman around several large chunks of debris and through the hospital doors, which appeared to have been forced open. The inside of the hospital was dimly lit by the emergency solar lights; the main power must have gone off line during the attack. Calier pulled up short when he saw the hospital was packed with people whose injuries ranged from cuts and scrapes to traumatic head injuries. To his left, two doctors worked frantically on a man whose arm had been severed, blood pooling next to his body.
Why weren’t they doing that in a surgical ward?
A man lay slumped against a wall cradling a bleeding child. Above the cries and groans of the injured, doctors and nurses were shouting out instructions and requests to anyone who could help them or retrieve what they needed. It was chaos, and Calier was sure that a lot of these people, no matter how valiant the efforts of the doctors were, would die before darkness settled over Gadol City.
On his right, a woman in a blue uniform was bandaging wounds, buzzing around each person offering words of encouragement as well as physical help. She glanced up and saw Calier. She beckoned with her free hand for him to come over, while instructing a man with burned arms how to use a tube of burn ointment.
“Put this on your burns and keep them clean. Here.” She handed him a couple rolls of gauze. “This should keep you covered for a couple days. Come back when you need more.”
The man thanked her and then moved out of the way to allow Calier to bring the raven-haired woman closer. The woman in the blue uniform began to probe the cut on the mystery woman’s face.
“Oh, darling, that’s a nasty cut.” She looked at Calier. “Are you her husband?”
“No, I don’t even know her name. She was sitting in the park, holding onto what I think was her fiancé. He was dead.” Calier gently lowered the woman down into the empty chair. “I need to find my own family, so I thought I could leave her here with you.”
The woman gestured around her, “Sir, we don’t have a place for her. Her wound isn’t life-threatening, so she wouldn’t receive any treatment for hours.”
Calier sighed, “What do I do with her?”
The woman reached into a large container of medical supplies and handed a packet to Calier. “The best thing you can do is treat her yourself. Wash the wound with this water and antiseptic, close it up with this adhesive and keep the wound covered with this salve and bandages. There’s nothing we can do for the ear except keep it clean and hope it doesn’t get infected.”
Calier’s head was spinning as he tried to grasp what she was telling him. “I don’t have any medical training.”
The woman smiled. “Neither do I. I’m a cook in the cafeteria, but today I’m a nurse. If there was ever a day to pull together and do what needs to be done, it’s today.”
Calier nodded absently. “Thank you.”
The woman turned and began attending to the next wounded person.
Calier looked around him, taking in the carnage. Truly, he had never seen anything like it before. So much broken, so many people who wouldn’t see another sunrise.
He guided the catatonic woman toward the doors of the hospital, then stopped suddenly. Through the doors he could see men in black uniforms wearing visored helmets. The uniforms were foreign to him. The men stood in formation before the hospital.
The blood froze in Calier’s veins. Each of the men held a weapon and the weapons were trained on the hospital.
CHAPTER FIVE
Regaining the use of his legs, Calier dove behind the heavy reception desk, pulling the young woman with him a split-second before the men outside opened fire.
The roar of weapons drowned out the voices of the injured. Boxes and containers of medical supplies exploded, their contents sent careening through the air. Wood paneling splintered and a stone sculpture was reduced to dust. People tried to get out of the way, but there was very little cover in the wide-open lobby. Screams of agony filled the room. Calier watched as his Am'Segid brothers and sisters were shredded mercilessly. Innocent people, good people, brutally murdered in a place that symbolized help and healing.
The weapons dealt death with no mercy or compassion. It was an execution, Calier realized, an execution where the condemned never knew the charges leveled against them.
After what seemed like an eternity, the shooting stopped abruptly, leaving behind a strange silence. It was like the silence after an especially loud and violent thunderstorm, where the calm that follows is the world recovering from the storm. This silence was like that, only there would be no recovery.
Calier heard the men talking and he strained to hear what they were saying. Their words were incomprehensible; he had no clue what they were saying. It wasn’t a dialect he had ever heard before. There were very few places in Aereas that used a dialect other than Aerean standard, and those that did, also knew the dominant language of the land. The tongue the soldiers were using was quicker and clipped, unlike the sonorous, lilting pace of Aerean standard. Calier strained to hear more, trying to grasp a familiar word or phrase, but it wasn't there. This was an entirely foreign language.
The curious scientist in him wanted to learn more, but he didn't think the men were the type to give him an impromptu speech lesson.
The rumble of explosions and the screech of aircraft streaking across the sky drowned out the voices. When the noise died away, he heard boots crunching on broken glass and stone. The group was moving closer to their hiding spot. The men were coming into the hospital. He heard several move down the hallway to his right and several more turn left. There was a lot of shouting and more gunfire. Calier held his breath and closed his eyes as he understood they were deliberately moving through the hospital room-by-room and executing everyone they found. He had to get the woman out of the hospital now, before the men came back.
Calier began to push himself off the filthy floor. His breath caught in his throat as he heard one more pair of boots walking through the wrecked lobby. One of the men had stayed behind. Calier looked around him, but there was no place to go. He tried to think, but the thoughts flew through his mind at such a pace that he was unable to grasp one, much less work out a coherent plan.
Through the space between the floor and the bottom of the desk, Calier was able to catch a glimpse of the boots. They moved around the lobby slowly. Taking pains to stop at the bodies, the boot nudged each one. Then the boots moved out of Calier’s field of vision. He could still hear them moving, a predator on the trail of its prey.
He glanced at the woman beside him and saw that she was curled into a ball. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, locking her in her own personal hell. At least she was quiet.
To Calier, it was becoming increasingly clear that these men were trained soldiers and this was an invasion. There was no way he would win a one-on-one fight with a skilled soldier. Calier had no training in self-defense, had never even been in a fight and hated violence of any kind. The only thing he had on his side was surprise. If he and the woman were to have any chance of surviving, he would need to surprise the man and somehow incapacitate him quickly or the fight would go badly…soon.
The sound of the boots drew nearer, and he once again saw them moving toward the desk. Calier silently rolled to a crouching position, ready to spring at the first opportunity. The man stopped at the desk, and Calier held his breath as he heard something softly thump on the high counter of the reception desk. He hoped it was the soldier’s helmet. There was a brief pause and then the boots began to circle the desk again, getting closer to the opening between the desk and the wall. Calier knew this needed to be quick and quiet.
Swallowing hard, Calier pushed himself upward with all the force his weary legs could muster, launching himself into the man. The contact was good and solid. Calier's shoulder took the man square in the chest, which was much harder than Calier had expected. The force of the impact sent the two men crashing into the wall and rolling to the floor. Calier managed to maintain his grip on the man and began striking his exposed face and head. All of the misery and destruction he had seen today seemed to flow through and out of him, coalescing into a blind rage. The man struggled and tried to shield himself from the blows, but the impact must have stunned and knocked the wind out of him because after several blows his body went limp.
Breathing heavily, Calier stopped hitting the man when he noticed there was no more struggle. He was unsure how long he had been striking the soldier; the rage had completely consumed him. The want and need not only to survive, but to exact vengeance for all the lives that had been taken in the hospital, had been fierce and primal.
Shaking, he stood, and felt pain in his hands. There were cuts on his knuckles that now matched the cuts on his palms. Had he really just beaten another man unconscious? While his mind told him it had been necessary for his survival, he felt sick to his stomach at what he was apparently capable of doing. He took a step backwards, gasping from the intense pain in his ribs.
Looking away from his hands, he looked at the man for the first time. He could have been an Am'Segid; much of him looked exactly like anyone who lived in this city, yet there were striking differences. This man was very pale. Calier had never seen anyone with that skin coloring before. It was not the typical reddish-brown, but a very light pink. The soldier’s hair was cut short and there were no streaks of color shooting from the temple to the back of the neck that almost all Am’Segid possessed, often in bright, vibrant colors that matched their eye color. On his right cheek were markings that Calier could tell weren't drawn on. They seemed to be part of the skin. They reminded Calier of an old Aerean tradition among the warrior class in a certain city. Those soldiers would tattoo designs on their body using ink that they would put under the skin with a needle to commemorate great battles. That was what this looked like.