Unfiction

by Gene Doucette

  They weren’t all hiding, he decided. And they hadn’t all fled. They were missing.

  This was just one absurd detail in a series. The rain was, indeed, faintly vinegary. It made Oliver both question his sanity and crave cabbage. Rain such as this had never—to his knowledge—existed in the real world. Its only appearance was in an unfinished story he wrote. Likewise, the impossible weapon on his back and the impossible tech built into his impossible helmet only existed in that story.

  If he were dreaming, fine, great, he could live with that. But this wasn’t a dream.

  “Hold on,” Minerva said. It was effectively an order, so he took it that way and slowed to a stop.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, although there was so, so much wrong.

  She turned around slowly, scanning the road behind them. The ambulance was still in sight, as they had run straight down the middle of Dot Ave., between the cars. Oliver didn’t care where they were running, and Minnie perhaps didn’t know. It was all absurd anyway.

  “Something’s coming. Get down.”

  She ducked down and put her hand on the butt of her cannon. He was wearing his, but at this moment, preparing to actually use it was a step too far. Oliver could tolerate the emptying of the streets and the impossible rain, but the minute the pulse cannon on his back turned out to be a real weapon was going to be a point of no return.

  Unless the aliens turned out to be that point.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, just get down. Something.”

  Whatever instinct she was relying on worked pretty well, as something was indeed coming. A yellow light reflected off the glass facades of the buildings at the corner of Dot and Common, an indication that a vehicle of some sort was making its way down Common. The problem was that the traffic on the street was so utterly gridlocked, it was simply not possible for anything to be moving rapidly in that direction. Unless, of course, that thing was flying through the air.

  “This is a prank, isn’t it?” Oliver said, his voice almost at a whisper. The first time he tried speaking to her through the comms when they were outside, he shouted, which she did not at all appreciate.

  “What? Is what a prank?”

  “I don’t know what else this could be. All I do know is this can’t really be happening.”

  “Well Oliver, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe one of the aliens can explain it. Soon as we see one, we’ll ask. Now shut up.”

  The source of illumination was a ball of light, or what was presumed to be a ball at the core. It was too bright to look at directly, so it could have been a square or a triangle in there. Even the visor with the special filter didn’t help.

  The technology on display was clearly advanced. As he watched, the light came to a standstill several feet above the intersection, froze there for several seconds, and then headed down Dot.

  Oliver held his breath and froze, as the object passed a few yards from their position and down the street, where it disappeared around the bend in the road.

  “Did it see us?” he asked.

  “No idea. Not sticking around to find out. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  She looked down at the inside of her wrist. There was apparently some kind of portable computer on a wristband, although from his perspective it just looked like clear black plastic. She pushed a spot on the band, then sort of stared into the middle distance for a second or two.

  “Rendezvous point,” she said, pointing. “Two klicks that way.”

  “Who are we even meeting? I thought we were looking for Ben’s treasure.”

  “I don’t know who we’re meeting; we’ll find out when we get there. Can you run or do I have to carry you?”

  “I can run.”

  They ran. He had many, many questions, but it was becoming obvious that Minerva either didn’t know or wasn’t willing to provide any answers. And once he accustomed himself to the idea that as much as none of this could possibly be happening, it was, he started to see the things the way she did.

  For one thing, the little ball of light—a probe, clearly—was silent. It wasn’t what had been making the metallic grinding noise earlier, and it wasn’t what everyone had been running from. They had not yet encountered the thing responsible for the noise, but the longer they stayed near the intersection of Dot and Common, the more likely it was they would. And it didn’t sound at all like something they wanted to meet.

  Running, then, made a lot of sense.

  “The military copter,” he said, after they’d gotten a few blocks.

  “What?”

  “It’s what I… it’s what was in the story. They took out the aerial defenses first. This is what you meant, that nothing in the sky was a bad sign.”

  “You’re catching up.”

  “And you knew it was going to rain.”

  She stopped.

  “Get your head in this,” she said. “We’re losing the sun, switch to night vision and pop your headlight.”

  “What?”

  She hit a button on the side of her helmet, and turned on the light attached to the front of her armor. He mirrored her actions, and discovered that for some reason it all felt familiar, like he knew which buttons to hit and switches to throw.

  Oliver looked at the panel on his own wristband. The plain black plastic didn’t look like plain black plastic through his visor; it looked like a keypad and a series of command buttons. Without thinking, he started punching buttons, and a second later a 3-D map of the city was overlaid atop the actual city as he saw it through the visor. There was a flashing beacon some distance away, with the path leading to it traced out in red. It was the rendezvous point.

  I don’t know how I did that, he thought.

  “We good?” Minerva asked.

  “We’re good, let’s move.”

  After hitting the same intersection the probe had disappeared around, they cut left and into the neighborhoods again. This time, Ollie felt none of the confusion he experienced when piloting the ambulance down the same streets, because he had a map in front of him and because it felt like he had a much clearer grasp of the city layout now. He was pretty sure he knew where they were going, and what the beacon represented. He still didn’t know who they were going to find when they got there, but as Minnie said, that was something they could worry about once they’d arrived.

  The neighborhoods were jammed with row houses behind chain-link fences. Nobody was on the streets, and if the people were inside—it really felt like there wasn’t—it was behind drawn shades. They encountered more cars, abandoned in the middle of the road only without congestion. That was curious. He could understand if someone got out of a car and ran if there was no place to drive and there was something they needed to escape on its way. This was different. It was like everyone in town had engine trouble at the same time.

  “Where are all the people?” he asked.

  “Gone.”

  “Yeah, I see that. The city’s abandoned, where did they go? Were they taken? Is this an abduction scenario?”

  “You tell me.”

  “No, I really don’t know. They’re not hiding.”

  “I don’t think they are, no,” she said. “I have a theory, but you won’t like it.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I think… hang on.”

  Minvera stopped. They’d been running for about fifteen minutes, which was longer than Oliver could remember ever running at one time in his entire life. He didn’t feel winded. It was surreal.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Heard something.”

  They were standing in the center of the street in the middle of a block of low-rent housing in a neighborhood that sat halfway between Dot Ave. and Newton Street. He was pretty sure the beacon was on Newton.

  It was a terrible place to stop. The roofs on both sides were flat and the buildings were forty feet tall, and they had no cover aside from a couple of parked cars. This was an ambush
point. The only reason stopping there made some measure of sense was that it hardly mattered where one stopped; the whole place was one big ambush waiting to happen. City planners, he reflected, rarely concerned themselves with the potential for snipers.

  “This is a bad place to hear something,” he said. “We should keep moving.”

  Then came an ear-splitting screech. It was something out of the same library of sounds as the earlier roar—a metal-to-metal grinding quality—but more urgent, and much closer.

  “Where is it?” he asked. His cannon was already out, an action performed automatically. It gave a little whine as it armed.

  Minnie was also armed, and spinning slowly.

  “Not sure,” she said.

  The thing—it was an alien, most assuredly, but Oliver wasn’t going to be calling it that until he saw it—let out another cry. It came from behind him, and above the ground.

  “It’s on the rooftops,” he said.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They broke into a sprint down the middle of the street, far more concerned about what was chasing them than with the possibility that a car driven by a human might show up ahead.

  The thing on the roof followed. He heard it running.

  I count six legs, he thought.

  The rooftops weren’t contiguous, so there were periodic gaps in the footfalls as it jumped—and perhaps flew—between them. There was something like flapping going on back there.

  “It has wings,” Minnie said.

  “I hear it.”

  They were about to negotiate the turn at the end of the road. Once around the corner they’d be on a street with fewer buildings and fewer roofs, so there was a sense that if they reached the crossroad, they’d be okay.

  The creature on the roof must have agreed, because just a few steps away from that turn, there was a rush of air and rainwater and an audible whoosh as something large and capable of flight passed directly over their heads.

  Once past, it flew straight up to a height of about twenty feet, and then allowed gravity to take it to the ground directly in front of them.

  It was… a giant bug. There was no other way to describe it. It had six legs, bulbous eyes, a mouth with four pincers and something that looked like it could be a beak, almost. It had four wings on its back, segmented somewhat like those on a butterfly.

  It stood on four of its legs, while the other two were raised like weapons, with sharp talons.

  It shrieked at them. When it did so, its mouth seemed to double in size.

  Minerva fired her pulse cannon while the bug was mid-shriek and jumped behind a parked car in anticipation of a return volley. The blast struck the alien in the thorax and knocked it several feet backward.

  Ollie was about to fire as well, except that he still thought this was a stupid attack, and this bothered him. The alien could have landed on them instead of flying past and presenting itself as a stationary target. They were missing something.

  “Shoot!” Minnie shouted, while upping the energy level on her cannon. The alien took a blast that would have killed a human and was still standing; more force was needed.

  Ollie could have maybe finished it off with a second shot. Instead, he turned, and checked the sky. Two more aliens were inbound.

  “Check your blinds!” he shouted, firing his cannon at the nearest airborne alien.

  He’d only touched an ion pulse cannon for the first time in his entire life about a half an hour earlier, but when he took the shot it felt like something he’d done a thousand times before. The recoil—far more gentle than with projectile weaponry—was exactly what he expected, and his aim was true.

  The blaster setting wasn’t high enough to be lethal, but it didn’t have to be; he just needed to stun the thing and knock it off course. The shot caught the side of its face and carried into the wings. It plummeted to the ground ten paces away.

  Oliver didn’t have time to make sure it would stay down, because the other one was still inbound. It had its legs—with the sharp hooks on the end—spread open in an attack formation coming right down on him. With practiced skill that he never practiced, Oliver cranked up the power level on the cannon and fired right between the legs at the naked underbelly. It was covered in a carapace, but the pulse blast was energetic enough for that not to make a difference, especially since he got off the shot when the thing was barely fifteen feet above.

  He dove to the side at the last second, as the creature crashed to the ground right where he’d been standing, and shattered like a piñata, if the piñata was a giant cockroach.

  “Good news, they can be killed,” he said.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Minerva said. She was checking other parts of the sky. “We gotta get out of here.”

  The one in the middle of the intersection had shaken off the initial blast, but was still presenting as a nice easy target, so Minnie shot at him again. This time the force was adequate, because the alien’s head exploded.

  “There’s our opening,” she said.

  They got moving. The third alien—the one clipped by Oliver’s first pulse blast—screeched, but didn’t give chase. Ollie thought maybe he’d damaged the wing. He had a bad feeling about that screech, though.

  “I think that sound is a request for reinforcements,” he said.

  “I think you’re right. Set perimeter.”

  He thumbed open the option on the wrist console. The visor display added a grid in the top left corner. It was a quadrant grid, nine squares in which he was always the center square.

  “Set altitude to thirty feet,” he said, not to Minerva but to the computer embedded in his helmet. A blue light flashed a silent confirmation of the order. He now had eyes in the back of his head, and those eyes would be looking for aerial attacks.

  “Done.”

  “Good, set the cannon to seven and aim for their mouth; that seems to do the trick.”

  “Already on seven.”

  “Show-off. Let’s move.”

  She found another gear, and then they were sprinting down the road.

  The beacon was only a half-klick away, but to get to it they’d have to negotiate a couple of narrow side streets.

  “We need cover,” Oliver said.

  “I know. An armored helo or two would be great about now. Too bad they shot them all out of the sky.”

  “I’d settle for a bunch of trees.”

  “Trees? I can get you trees. Follow me.”

  When they got to their left turn, Minerva continued straight, which caused the map on his visor to have a tiny seizure for a few seconds, until it rewrote the red line he was supposed to be following. Then they ran past the next street, and the next, and he was expecting the computer to start swearing at him. Instead, the bottom left square of the perimeter grid lit up.

  “Seven o’clock,” he said. “Twenty-five feet.”

  “I see it,” Minnie said. She stopped in her tracks, turned around, took a knee, and fired once. Oliver ran past her without checking to see if the shot hit its target.

  She started running again immediately, and now he was on point, which was fine except he didn’t know where they were going.

  “Console wants me to take a left here,” he said.

  “Don’t. Three more blocks.”

  They made it two before his grid lit up again.

  “Four o’clock, coming in low,” Minerva said.

  “I see it.”

  Oliver planted his feet and spun around. The pavement was smooth, and slick from the rain, so he allowed his momentum to carry him into a skid while he oriented himself toward the alien. It was on a flat trajectory a few feet off the ground, and coming right at him, which made for a pretty easy shot. He took it, as Minerva passed and retook the lead. He watched long enough to see the head burst, then got moving.

  The street where they finally turned left—to the immense relief of Oliver’s in-helmet computer—was wider than the others, with a thin strip of
grass down the middle and trees lining both sides. He followed Minnie past the grass strip to the far sidewalk.

  “Better?” she asked.

  “Better, but now we’re pretty far off the mark.”

  “Picky.”

  The treetops played a little havoc with the perimeter alarm in his helmet, but it unquestionably made things worse for the aliens who showed a preference for attacks from above. Twice, they heard a tree behind them suffer from an impact, followed by a tremendous flapping noise as the aliens fell back. They were probing the foliage for weaknesses, which was fine with Oliver. The trees might have had a few complaints about it though.

  Their way was clear all the way to the corner, where another left turn would be needed. The rendezvous point was only another couple of blocks from there, but without any more cover.

  Minnie came to a stop at the trunk of the last useful tree.

  “What do you think?” she asked. They could both hear the consternation from above. Ollie’s perimeter grid was busily losing its mind because at least four aliens were in the air overhead, and he imagined hers was doing the same. As soon as they broke in the open they were going to have to be faster than an alien in flight. That was a big ask.

  The beacon on his visor map was bouncing up and down over the now-visible rendezvous point: the Candle Square subway terminal, which was a collection of polished steel and glass that stood on an island just before the convergence of three main roads. It was one of those places that looked like an architect’s name should be attached to it somewhere. It always made Ollie a little uncomfortable. Some days it looked like a larger building had collapsed into a large hole. Other days he thought of something erupting from deep in the Earth.

  “Do you think we’re the only ones to make it this far?” he asked.

  Minerva looked surprised.

  “You mean, other soldiers, running around town?”

  “It’s a rendezvous point. The clear implication is that we’re meeting up with someone there. You’re the one who’s been calling it that, I’m just taking it to the logical conclusion. So do you think there are others?”