Anthem's Fall

by S. L. Dunn

  Darien floated sturdily behind Gravitas, his one good arm wrapped securely around his windpipe and his gargantuan legs wrapped around Gravitas’s lower half like constricting snakes. Darien’s massive head was pushing against Gravitas’s shoulder, and he whispered to Gravitas in a hoarse voice, “Got you now.”

  In front of Gravitas, with blurring vision as blood pooled behind his eyes and asphyxiation began to claim him, Gravitas watched Vengelis smile miserably.

  “Wow,” Vengelis called appreciatively. “Darien, you have proven yourself a worthy soldier. A true Royal Guard—our people would be proud.”

  “You . . . got . . . it,” Darien wheezed through gritted teeth.

  “As I was saying to you, Nerol,” Vengelis continued. “You are unwilling to accept that life is cold and merciless. Take your current plight for instance. Here you were, rising—quite impressively—in an attempt to save people who, if they knew of your existence, would only fear and plot against you. Look how fate has repaid you. As we speak you are being strangled to death by a vastly inferior soldier with the knowledge that I will kill many more of the people you were trying to save if I deem it necessary.”

  Gravitas heaved and pushed at Darien’s arm, but it felt like an immovable object to his quickly weakening arms and legs. He swung his head back and forth in hopes of headbutting the giant’s nose and kicked his feet back in hopes of kicking Darien’s groin. Not wanting to underestimate him, Darien was holding nothing back, and squeezing his neck as hard as he possibly could. Gravitas could feel the giant’s entire body shaking from the hold. In his fatigued and concussed state, Gravitas knew he was powerless.

  Vengelis came closer and raised a palm to his own scalp, dabbing the blood stoically and rubbing it between his thumb and index finger.

  “Anticlimactic isn’t it?” Vengelis murmured introspectively, though loud enough for Gravitas to hear. “I’ve been in your position, you know, Nerol. The exact situation you’re in right now, though against far more terrible and pitiless enemy—the true enemy. I remember the feeling of consciousness slipping into black as your whole world descends to ruin around you; the overwhelming feelings of both resentment and inadequacy rising like vomit. Atrocious, isn’t it?”

  Gravitas flailed and thrashed at Darien, but found him unyielding to any counter. He could feel Darien’s hot breath touching the side of his face as the goliath panted and shook with exertion. Gravitas stared at the blurry Vengelis with a burning hate. He tried to call out, to swear furiously at Vengelis Epsilon, but found himself only able to make a gagging sound as he frothed at the mouth. His vision became darker by the moment, and Vengelis’s description of his sentiments proved quite accurate.

  Vengelis looked at the interlocked bodies of Darien and Gravitas and shook his head grimly.

  “You are a powerful warrior. You have proven yourself, and you deserve a seat among our forefathers. But—regardless of what some might say—I am a man of principles, and I am afraid ours are simply not compatible.”

  Without another word, Vengelis burst forward, launching toward the restrained Gravitas. With no way of defending himself, Gravitas knew it would be a killing blow. Gravitas shut his eyes, and for a fleeting moment he thought of a dream that was Anthem, was Orion, was Earth, and the hopes they all once had.

  KRRRRGGGHHHH!

  Gravitas’s left ear felt like it exploded inward as a definitive collision echoed across the rooftops of the city. Eyes still closed, he felt a twitch move through Darien’s bicep and forearm. The giant’s arm then completely let go from his neck. As the pressure released from his windpipe, Gravitas gasped for breath and opened his eyes. Vengelis was floating silently a few feet from him, staring below them with an unreadable expression.

  Lowering his gaze to where Vengelis was looking, Gravitas saw Darien, his facial structure unspeakably mangled, plummeting lifelessly toward the streets of Midtown. He turned back to Vengelis and watched as the Epsilon stared wordlessly at his soldier’s body as it fell among the skyscrapers.

  With his one chance at a killing blow, Vengelis had chosen Darien.

  “I—I can’t . . .” Gravitas coughed and hacked as he massaged his reddened neck. “I can’t . . . believe—”

  “Don’t,” Vengelis said, his tone more a request than a command, as he drew his wearied and bruised gaze away from the falling body of Darien and met Gravitas’s stare. “Just don’t.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Kristen

  The skyward crashes expelled any chance the Lutvak ballroom had at regaining its composure. Much like the open avenue outside the tall windows, the boulder of rationality within the ballroom had been tipped over the precipice; now it rolled out of control with seemingly no end in sight.

  “Maybe we’re winning,” Madison said. “Maybe the Army or—or the Air Force is fighting them.”

  Kristen shrugged, her hands intertwined against the belly of her sweatshirt. “It’s possible, but I seriously doubt it. I think it’s safe to say Vengelis and his people are powerful on a scale beyond our reasoning.”

  They were standing in the sunlight near the windows, their attention turning from the unspeakable madness out in Times Square to the news broadcast on the projection screen above the stage that was now reported failing infrastructures and widespread rioting in every major city in the United States. Every so often an Emergency Alert System message would disrupt the CNN studio. It advised people to stay in their homes, to lock their doors, to think of their own survival.

  Still there was no sign of Vengelis.

  “I know what you said about us not being able to comprehend technology of a more complex people,” Madison said slowly. “But Vengelis and those giants aren’t technology. They’re people. How can people be so strong?”

  Kristen acknowledged that Madison had a point; it did not seem to make any sense. Vengelis had told her technology itself was inferior when compared to his inherited abilities. The nature of his power was inescapably far more complex than anything she knew, but that did not mean it could not be understood.

  “He said their power was derived within their heredity, that it’s in their very genome. Sejero genetics, he called it. He was hesitant in discussing it, guarded, like he didn’t want to reveal too much to me.”

  “You would really want to know more?”

  Kristen turned to Madison skeptically. “You wouldn’t?”

  “Well, yeah, I suppose I would. But as you said, it’s technology beyond our reasoning. What does it matter?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m not so sure about.” Kristen stared expressionlessly across the arguing researchers in the ballroom. “What if it isn’t so much advanced technology as it is a foreign technology?”

  “It’s not technology at all,” Madison insisted. “Those monsters brought down the buildings in Chicago with their bare hands. I cannot bring myself to believe that’s the result of technology.”

  “Maybe,” Kristen said. “But think about it. An ant can lift something five times its body weight over its head, and drag something twenty-five times its own body weight. That would be equivalent to, say, a human lifting something one thousand pounds clear over her head with ease, and dragging around something that weighed over five thousand pounds.”

  Madison rolled her eyes. “Yeah but—”

  “All I’m trying to say is that disproportionate body weight to strength ratios do exist, even here. So does flight, along with any number of the other things we’ve seen them do today, albeit not on their scale. But evolution works by fostering diversity, and it isn’t a directed force. Vengelis’s people have obviously found a way to tamper with genetics and expand their possibilities on a grand scale.”

  “How could they go about doing that?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve spent the majority of the last few years figuring out how to replicate genes, not figuring out how they came to exist in the first place.”

  At that moment, a windowpane beside them shattered, and Kristen
recoiled in alarm. A heavy yellow pedestrian crossing sign clattered to rest among the splintering shards of glass, its frayed wires hanging out of its exposed innards. It had been wrenched from the side of a lamppost and thrown up through the window. Within the ballroom, the entire audience partook in a singular self-pitying bawl of torment, as though the infiltration of the violent unrest into the Lutvak ballroom was an inevitability.

  “Are you okay?” Madison said and pulled Kristen away from the glass smithereens now strewn across the floor.

  “Y-Yeah.” Kristen ran her gaze and shaky palms over her body to check for cuts. The heavy yellow box had missed her by a foot, and the window had shattered at her feet. Powdery specks of pulverized glass were clinging to Kristen’s shoes and the bottom of her jeans like little diamonds. Beyond that, the shattered pane had done no damage to her. Don’t Walk was still flashing in flagging letters on the crossing sign.

  Kristen felt a strange swell of heartbreaking sorrow as the flickering words on the sign guttered out and disappeared. What chance did the architecture and unity of the civilized world have against the peril of such supreme adversaries? Maybe it was the initial shock of her quandary waning, or a sudden realization of the worldwide implications of the events occurring around her. Regardless of the cause, the sudden sadness for the vulnerable integrity of her world allowed her mind to focus on the bigger picture.

  “Maniacs. I swear they’re going to cause more damage than those giants did to Chicago,” Madison said, and turned to the window farthest from them. Some of the audience members were lowering their improvised rope out of an opened window and tying the other end securely to the leg of a heavy table.

  “Where are you planning on going?” Madison called out to them.

  “Anywhere!” one of the men yelled back. “We’re not waiting for that goddamn demon to come back, and the Emergency Alert Broadcasts are saying for people not in safe locations to make for the Hudson River.”

  Kristen cautiously approached the window to get a glimpse of the street below, taking care to keep herself protected behind the broad framework between the windows in case any more projectiles were sent her way. The crowds outside actually seemed to have pacified slightly, and many of the people crowding around the abandoned cars and ruined sidewalks were not partaking in the anarchy. Instead they were staring skyward and shielding their eyes from the sun’s glare. They were pointing in disbelief into the sky between the tall buildings.

  “What are they looking at?” Madison asked behind her as she, too, approached the open window.

  “I don’t know.”

  They exchanged an anxious glance, and, after scanning the people below for any throwing weapons, Kristen leaned out the window. She craned her neck and squinted up past the long height of the glinting Marriott Marquis. Something was falling through the bright sky. It was the unmistakable shape of a body falling silently from the heavens. The body was gargantuan, its hulking limbs hanging loose in the air. Kristen stared up at the falling being. Although it was plummeting in freefall, the body had a surreal and tranquil look to it as it descended silently toward the earth. Then she saw the familiar glint of armor. It took only a moment for Kristen to recognize the slowly spinning and rotating form.

  “Well? What is it?” Madison asked.

  Kristen looked back into the ballroom, her expression bewildered. “I don’t understand. It’s—”

  A strange thud sounded from the intersection outside and rose over the hubbub of the riots. The impact was reminiscent of a slab of meat smacking down against a butcher’s block.

  “What the hell was that?” Madison frowned and stepped forward as Kristen also turned back to look out the window.

  A little ways down the avenue, prostrate and still against the pavement, was the body of one of the giants Vengelis had introduced to Kristen. It looked as though in the last moment, the people in the body’s trajectory had managed to move out of its path. A generous width of pavement separated the massive corpse and the surrounding circle of dismayed bystanders. Kristen could not bring herself to comprehend the sheer size of the man—if the giant could indeed be called a man at all. The grotesquely thick legs and arms took up nearly half the street, and the mass of his unmoving chest and midsection was analogous to the girth of the cars adjacent to his lifeless body. The giant’s neck was angled in an unnatural position—as though his spine had been snapped—and it looked as though every bone upon his bloody face had been broken.

  “What . . . the . . . hell?” Madison breathed, horrified, as she looked down at the body. This sentiment seemed to be the consensus of the avenue below, as everyone seemed to take a momentary respite in order to stare at the monstrous body and then turn to look into the sky.

  Kristen stared, her mouth hanging open. “I have no idea.”

  “Is he dead?”

  Kristen shook her head numbly as she looked at the corpse. “I don’t know. I think so, right?”

  “I don’t understand,” Madison said. “I thought they were invincible? We must have figured out a way to kill them!”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “We must have figured out a way.”

  Kristen could not look away from the beaten giant. She did not know what to make of this, and she recalled the trace of fear that had claimed Vengelis before he left them. “Vengelis said they were invincible to our technologies.”

  “Well, clearly he lied!” Madison said.

  Kristen strained her eyes to see the giant’s mortally wounded face. The mangled features looked more like it had received a blunt trauma impact, like it had been bludgeoned. “I can’t imagine what could have done that damage to him,” she said. “It looks like he was beaten to death.”

  “Kristen,” Madison exhaled. “Look.”

  Kristen hesitantly moved her attention away from the giant body, and she immediately noticed every face in the avenue was staring into the sky. Their upturned expressions made her suspect that whatever it was, it would not prove heartening. Resigning herself to whatever she was about to see, Kristen threw back her head and looked skyward.

  Just over the skyscrapers, which cast shade over Times Square, there hovered two dark figures. Kristen squinted at the two dots against the bright blue sky. “What are those?”

  “They look like people, don’t they?”

  “It’s Vengelis,” Kristen said.

  With the undivided attention of the entire city block, the two moving figures suddenly shot toward one another and collided.

  KRRRRGGGHHHH!

  At once, Kristen and everyone else registered what the thunderous crashes had been: a battle between titans was raging over the city. The realization did not have a pacifying effect on the crowds below, but Kristen could not take her eyes away from the two darting figures above the buildings as she winced with each deafening boom caused by their impacts. She was all but certain that one of them was Vengelis, but who was the other? It was not a giant; the sizes of the two forms looked similar.

  “It has to be Vengelis,” Madison gasped.

  Kristen nodded.

  “But who’s the other one?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  The ballroom rattled and shook from the brawl overhead. Back and forth the two bodies soared across the sky, disappearing and reappearing behind the mirrored sides of the skyscrapers. Kristen could barely follow their movements, and quickly lost track of them.

  “Oh my god!” Madison suddenly shrieked. Kristen looked to where she was pointing and saw that one of the figures had been thrown straight through the top floors of a skyscraper up the avenue. Like a bullet, the dark body pierced a narrow hole through one end of the building and erupted in a pluming wreckage of rubble and dust out the other end. Kristen pulled back from the window frame and slumped down against the wall, feeling dizzy as the blood drained from her head. What they were witnessing looked so unreal, so impossible, and yet even as she tried to steady her breathing she could hear bits of the falling rubble hit t
he street some way up the avenue.

  “It’s okay. I think the building is going to hold!” Madison called over the rising cries engulfing them.

  Kristen tried desperately to control herself as she looked up and watched the rampant chaos unfolding around her. At the far end of the room, men and women were frantically clambering over one another to grab hold of the makeshift rope of clothing and rappel awkwardly down the side of the building to the street. The news broadcast on the projector screen was depicting footage of the gaping hole upon the side of the building just to the north of them, with the word live blinking in big letters. Kristen could see the Marriott Marquis among the other skyscrapers in the background of the broadcast. They were in the center of a warzone. The storm of screams rising from the street was now so shrill that Kristen could barely hear her own thoughts. She raised her head and peeked out the window to see the corpse of the dead giant on the pavement. It was as though the corpse was magnetically charged, and repelling the people nearby. They understandably kept their distance, in fear that the monster would awaken at any given moment and start rampaging through the avenue.

  “We can’t . . .” Kristen said to no one in particular, her voice drained out by the shouting. She interlocked her hands on top her head. “We can’t be powerless like this. We can’t be defenseless.”

  “Who could Vengelis be fighting?” Madison shouted into Kristen’s ear, her eyes still staring intensely out the window.

  “This . . . this can’t happen.” Kristen unsteadily rose to her feet and looked at the body of the giant. A not quite tangible idea was beginning to surface in the back of her mind. “Sejero . . .” She murmured, unheard.

  “What if this building collapses?” Madison asked as she recoiled from the terrified insurgence outside the window. The researchers were now pouring down the makeshift rope, obviously concerned of the same threat. “What if the hotel isn’t safe? Kristen what should we do?”