Anthem's Fall

by S. L. Dunn

  “I don’t have time for this. I am the emperor now, and I pardon you of whatever petty war crimes you committed in the past. There are more important matters at hand. You’re the son of Royalty, and our race needs a pure bloodline such as yours during this desperate hour.”

  “These are my people,” Gravitas ignored Vengelis’s outstretched hand and looked to the nearby humans shrinking away from them. “And it is to the cause of their desperation that I will rise.”

  Vengelis glared at Gravitas with growing distaste.

  “Look around you. Do you see the Imperial First Class with me? Do you see the Imperial Army razing every city on this archaic globe and the ranks of the Royal Guard standing by my side? It was just three of us—two now because of your recklessness. I will only ask once to take my hand and help us in—”

  “Leave,” Gravitas Nerol said, his voice rough and furious. “Leave this place now, and never return. I will only ask you once.”

  “Excuse me?” Vengelis smirked, though his nostrils flared in rage. His outstretched hand fell to his side as he let out an arrogant chuckle. He shook his head and regarded Gravitas Nerol with amusement and condescension as the strange Royal son held his ground. “Are you threatening me?”

  “If I must.”

  “All right,” Vengelis nodded. “We can go down this path too. You did murder my Lord General after all.”

  “Put him down like the savage dog that he was, yes.”

  Vengelis raised his eyebrows. “Not much sense of honor for the son of a Royal family.”

  “You speak of honor after ordering the slaughter of innocent people?” Gravitas asked.

  “That word you just said,” Vengelis held up a palm, “I’m entirely unfamiliar with it.”

  Gravitas Nerol inclined his head. “What word?”

  “In-no-cent,” Vengelis enunciated each syllable slowly with a grave and humorless look. “I only know of its synonym. Weak.”

  “You sicken me.”

  Vengelis shrugged his shoulders. He had been right to come investigate Hoff’s dying statement that Nerol had been on Filgaia. The concern that Pral Nerol was here or that the Felixes somehow traveled to Filgaia had now dissipated. It was time to end this trivial exchange. Remnants of his people were surely hiding hopelessly in the ruins of Sejeroreich and every city of his empire, and a scientist capable of helping him was within his grasp. He needed to get back to Kristen Jordan as swiftly as possible.

  “Look, Nerol, I don’t have time for this ridicul—”

  “Leave!” Gravitas shouted.

  Vengelis sighed. With a wave of his finger he motioned to the stream of blood trickling down Gravitas’s cheek. “I think you have something on your face.”

  For a brief moment Vengelis thought Gravitas Nerol was going to punch him right then and there in response to the slight, but he did not. Instead, to Vengelis’s disappointment, Gravitas lifted weightlessly into the air above the pavement and motioned Vengelis upward.

  “Follow me.”

  “Venge . . . he’s . . . unbelievably . . . strong . . . b-be careful!” Darien rolled over on the pavement and sputtered the words through a hacking cough.

  Without taking his upward gaze off Gravitas, Vengelis followed him.

  Gravitas Nerol rose into the sky alongside a slender skyscraper, and Vengelis ascended steadily in his wake. Once the height of the surrounding buildings fell away beneath them, the son of Pral Nerol accelerated southward with a boom, soaring high over the city and into the broad gusty autumn skies above the bay to the south of the island. Vengelis glared at the backside of Gravitas distrustfully. He did not know what to make of this Nerol, but he followed willingly in his path regardless.

  The two foreign titans left Manhattan behind and flew southward high over the cold white-capped navy waters of the Upper Bay. The influence of their immense presence was evident everywhere below, and yet the two dark dots in the sky received the attention of none. The waters underneath them were crowded with a convoy of boats and watercraft of every description. With the bridges destroyed, it seemed to Vengelis that the evacuation of the city was taking the form of water transport. Yachts with brilliant sails splashed side by side with hulking rusty barges and cargo boats. All were answering the call of the evacuation. Vengelis disapproved of the futile solidarity. It was only by his prudence that they were still alive and able to evacuate the city at all, and yet here they were—fleeing from his discretion.

  After a moment or so, Vengelis turned back toward the city and saw the vast and glinting grandeur of Manhattan—along with the building in its center that contained his one and only hope—shrinking away under a brilliant dome of sky.

  “This is far enough!” Vengelis called to Gravitas.

  Gravitas reluctantly pulled to a stop in midflight and rounded to face him. Vengelis looked all around them, from the densely packed roofs and spires crowding the shores in every direction, to the bright cloud strewn skies, to the crowding waters below. They had plenty of room on all sides to act as their arena, and he suspected it was not by accident.

  “Let me guess,” Vengelis called. “This was a precautionary measure against harming them?”

  “It was, yes.” Gravitas shouted over the winds that blew across the water. “That, and to bring our duel out into the open so this world can watch as justice is brought against you.”

  “Ah, justice.” Vengelis nodded. “So tell me, Nerol, is it the worship of these people that drives you? The total adoration of an entire race, you playing the role of shepherd to their little flock? Do you get off on knowing these oblivious fools think you’re God?”

  A visible wave of rage passed across Gravitas’s face as the wind pushed and pulled at his unyielding shoulders.

  “They’ve never known of my existence. I’ve lived as one of them since I left Anthem. But if they are to play witness to foreign powers of torment—gods in their eyes—then I’ll be damned if they don’t get a glimpse of foreign forces of good too. They deserve to know there is balance.”

  “Balance!” Vengelis belted out scornfully. “Spare me. You and I both know there is no balance. There is strength, and nothing more.”

  “Either way, I know where I am on that scale. And right now my strength stands equal and opposite you.”

  “Fair enough,” Vengelis called. “You see, Gravitas Nerol, thanks to your father’s recent actions, your family has the blood of a genocide still dripping hot from its hands. So this little endeavor of yours into justice can’t hurt the now heinously stained legacy of the noble Nerol family.”

  Darkness passed across Gravitas as foghorns and dinghy bells sounded dimly across the open bay. “What are you talking about?” he shouted.

  “Well, I may be responsible for the death of many people today. But your father . . .” Vengelis shook his head and took some enjoyment from Gravitas’s suddenly anxious face resultant from his ominous tone.

  “What about my father?” Gravitas demanded.

  “Your father is responsible for the destruction of our entire race. Soldiers, women, children, it didn’t matter. Nothing was of consequence to Pral Nerol in all of his intellectual fortitude. Holocaust will be the last legacy of family Nerol, if anyone even lives to tell of it.”

  “You lie! My father hated your empire, but he would never have involved himself in killing innocent people.”

  “Believe what you will. I thought you would like to know that little bit of information before you died. The Nerols, their genocide, and the creation of the Fel—”

  “Get out!” Gravitas roared, his voice carrying across the waters and the gray urban horizon. The very atmosphere surrounding Gravitas seemed to rupture and disintegrate in disbelief of his power, and he charged toward Vengelis. With a matching inundation of rage caused by nothing but the sheer audacity of Gravitas Nerol’s overconfidence, Vengelis, too, exploded forward with a matching ferocity.

  For a splintering second, as the two Herculean dark dots bore down upon one anoth
er across the sky like two blazing missiles, it seemed as though time stood still. Only the deep rumbling roar of the two gods’ speed could be heard above the din of the bay and its strands of shores. And then,

  KRRRRGGGHHHH!

  The mortified upturned faces in the overcrowded vessels directly below the collision surely thought a bomb had detonated overhead. The incomprehensible crash knocked people straight off their feet and sent them careening across the slippery decks, and, in a few cases, off their very boats and into the cold swirling waters. People on the barges and sport boats screamed to one another and frantically threw out life preservers and floats; all were temporarily deafened from the impact. From the nearby crowded shores, all eyes turned in dread to the source of the terrible crash over the bay. It sounded as though the very world had split in two.

  Though they had each intended to throw a strike at one another, in their blind rage and combined speed, Gravitas and Vengelis instead collided straight into one another in a collision of limbs like two bullets meeting in space.

  The colossal impact was blinding. Vengelis barely even realized that he had ricocheted off Gravitas and careened to the side. His head spinning and his vision filling with throbbing pain, Vengelis flipped and rotated through the air. He had completely lost control of his bearings. An overwhelming sting radiated from above his forehead. Vengelis pressed his palm as hard as he could onto his swelling scalp and desperately tried to shake away the disorientation as he plummeted through the sky. After many moments of wild freefall Vengelis realized that instead of exchanging punches, they had inadvertently rammed heads like two charging bucks.

  With horrified shock, Vengelis felt a thin stream of hot blood drip past his pressed palm and trickle from his hairline. The blood passed between his eyebrows and ran down the right side of his nose. As it moved past the corner of his lips and off his chin, he could taste its salty bitterness.

  Vengelis focused on not panicking. As his vision returned, he saw that Gravitas Nerol was in a similarly discombobulated state, and had nearly fallen into the water of the bay far below. Gravitas was hovering unsteadily a few dozen feet over a giant barge with a greenish camouflaged hull; his face, too, was glistening with blood.

  Vengelis watched, his mind filling with insane anger and indignation, as Gravitas shot back up toward him.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Kristen

  For some time Kristen’s gaze lingered blankly on the empty row of windows from which Vengelis had so casually flown out. A feeble portion of her mind held on to the wish that she was dreaming, and would soon wake up in her warm bed. But that collapsing enclave of a notion was rapidly giving in to the certainty that all of this was very real.

  Kristen wearily approached the rigid and bent body of Professor Vatruvia and leaned down to check his pulse again. His neck felt stiff against her fingers, and she could find no trace of a beating heart. Beside him on the stage floor, his glasses were broken, both of the lenses cracked down the middle. It was hard to recognize him without the glasses on his face. Kristen wordlessly pushed them into the front pocket of his blazer. She was still in shock. All of this was too much to take in, and Kristen would have thought herself drugged were it not for the anchoring sobriety in her mind.

  The strange plane crash in Albany, the heightened national security level before the attack of Chicago, the glimpse of dread upon General Redford’s face as he had been informed of flying men moving across the country: all of the pieces fit into place. It was a War of the Worlds in true H. G. Wells fashion, with mighty men and their fists instead of towering tripods and their technology. Kristen could not decide which destructor was more unsettling. Of one thing she was certain. Despite the seeming familiarity of Vengelis Epsilon’s face and language, he was as unrecognizably cruel as any nemesis of fiction.

  For the moment Kristen allowed herself to languish in self-pity as she pushed her palms against her closed eyelids, half sitting, half collapsing onto the end of the stage and letting her sneakers dangle off the edge. She searched the faces of the audience for Ryan, but could not see him. Had he not been in the ballroom when Vengelis barred the doors? A desire to cry rose like a bubble in her throat as she looked in vain for him, but Kristen held it back sternly.

  She had to hold on to courage, to logic.

  Now with no treacherous otherworldly fiend forcing them into the corner, the audience of professors and researchers began to grow louder and bolder with each passing moment. Yet despite their prestigious educations, their panicked questions of how or assertions of impossible were no more intelligible than the rising screams in the streets beyond the broken windows. A macabre live news broadcast was still playing on the large projection display above the stage. The program had now split in two, with half of the screen showing an ash-covered news reporter stumbling through the devastation of downtown Chicago, and the other half depicting an aerial shot of the East River littered with floating detritus of bridge remnants and half-sunken windshields.

  Madison joined Kristen’s isolation at the end of the stage and sat down beside her. Kristen wanted to ask Madison why she had been with Vengelis when he entered the Lutvak ballroom, but she could not stir up the words.

  “Do you think he’s telling us the truth?” Madison asked her after some time.

  Kristen shrugged and cleared her throat, her voice cracking. “We have no way of knowing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Although.” Kristen ran her hands over the knees of her jeans, “If Vengelis’s true intention is to conquer the world—and based on what we’ve seen, I do believe it’s within his capability—all of these theatrics and specific demands seem rather pointless.”

  Madison nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “So, I guess I’m not sure. His actions lead me to believe he really does need our help. That said, I do think he’s partly lying, or at the very least not giving us a full picture of his intentions.”

  “What do you think those machines, the Phoenixes or whatever he called them, did to his world?”

  “Felixes.”

  “Yeah, Felixes.”

  “I can only guess,” Kristen said. “If the Felix technology and Vatruvian cell technology really are one in the same, and if my limited knowledge of the Vatruvian cell is accurate, then the Vatruvian replications are definitely more powerful than he is. But I don’t understand what he is.”

  For a while Kristen said nothing and merely listened anxiously to the profound roaring struggle of the city outside.

  “I don’t understand it,” Madison said. “I saw Vengelis run face first into an eighteen-wheeler to prove his strength. Face first. You wouldn’t believe the impact. The truck was demolished. I mean . . . demolished. His shoulder . . . flesh and bone . . . crumpled the steel like it was made of paper. Then there’s what happened in Chicago. I mean, for god’s sake they can fly! None of it is possible.”

  Kristen shook her head sternly. “According to our laws of science, our constructed reality, it isn’t possible. But science is based in observation of the world around us, and in that sense, our witnessing of their power proves it to be irrefutably possible.”

  “But flying . . . ?”

  “I would imagine a higher civilization’s technologies are always first perceived as unattainable or fantastical when first witnessed.” Kristen looked at Madison intently. “Imagine explaining to someone from the Dark Ages not only what the moon in the night sky really is, but that man has walked—hell, played golf—on its surface. So I’m not dealing in any absolutes here, I’m trying to keep my mind as open as possible. Modern knowledge might be able to provide no answers, but science can. Vengelis said their extraordinary power is inherent, that it lies within their genetics. If that’s true, then mechanisms of science bestowed that power there. There is nothing impossible or supernatural about them, they are simply foreign to us.”

  By the windows in the far corner of the ballroom, a small group of scientists had given up on att
empting to pry open the blocked doors or sinking into a folding chair and fruitlessly lamenting their situation. Now, wearing white undershirts and tank tops, they were roaming the ballroom and collecting any heavy shirts or blazers people were willing to give up. Two men were tying the arms of the various articles of clothing together to form a makeshift rope. Kristen immediately recognized they were planning to climb down to the street from the shattered windows; they would rappel out of the ballroom.

  But where were they hoping to escape?

  Together, Kristen and Madison hopped off the stage. Hands buried in the pockets of her sweatshirt, Kristen cautiously stepped across the shattered glass and approached the broad windows overlooking Times Square. She leaned against the window frame and looked out on the city as cool air touched her face. With the breeze came a shiver and a vision that shriveled her soul. Neither she nor Madison could come up with words as they looked out upon the avenue.

  New York City was unrecognizable.

  If Kristen had thought the dreamlike roar of the riot rising from the streets below was unsettling, the sight of the vast sea of people under her second-floor vantage point was outright nauseating. Midtown looked more like a despairing third-world refugee camp than a metropolitan hub. People were crowding shoulder to shoulder across the entire width of the streets as far as the eye could see, their bodies pushing and leaning in an attempt to move toward the north. The very cars lining Broadway and Seventh Avenue were buried under the cover of humanity, and provided the appearance of rising swells and undulations in the crowd. With nowhere else to occupy their bodies, people were standing on the depressed hoods and caved in roofs of abandoned cars and taxis. Some had even climbed atop street lamps, where they perched with hands held to their foreheads peering northward into the endless bottlenecked multitudes. The first floor storefronts looked looted and mangled. Restaurant and retailer signs hung dangling by wires, and broad awnings were tattered to shreds.

  Individual police officers, firemen, and SWAT members were scattered here and there throughout the crowd, their gear lost and their uniforms serving no better purpose than costumes against the incalculable horde of the Manhattan populace. Kristen watched a young man about her age wildly swinging a thick riot shield with the words NYC SWAT over his head, the shield now a mere relic of what it once symbolized.