Salt of Gomorrah

by Alex Mersey

  “You can’t think like that.” She wrapped an arm around her sister. “We don’t know what happened. Maybe it’s just a section of the tunnel.”

  Allira squirreled free from the hug. “Whatever.”

  “I’m not brushing you off, Alli. I’ve thought about it, too, but we don’t know anything for sure and it doesn’t help imagining the worst.”

  The crowd edged forward a couple of feet. Either they were moving or more people had jumped down to the tracks. When Allira sank cross-legged to her butt and stuck her earphones in, Beth let her be for the moment. No one was getting anywhere in a hurry.

  The next time she tipped over the ledge to peer forward, she saw Liam jogging up. A smile tugged at her sober mood.

  “I thought you’d escaped up the hatch,” she said as he climbed up.

  “It’s a maintenance stairwell, apparently, that’ll take us into one of the MTA service buildings,” he told her with a grin. “But hatch sounds a damn side more interesting.”

  “Have people started getting out?”

  “Last I saw, yeah.”

  As he said that, Beth realized the gap between them and the others was widening at a steady pace.

  She leant over to tug at the white chord dangling from Allira’s ear. “Come on.”

  Allira pushed up, re-inserting the earphone as she shuffled into the gap ahead of them.

  “You two really are sisters, huh?”

  “Different fathers,” Beth explained as they walked. “Although it’s never felt like it. I never knew mine, unplanned pregnancy and other plans, I guess. Mom married when I was two and by the time Allira came along, he’d already been my dad for years.” She glanced at Liam with a small laugh. “Why am I telling you all this?”

  “I must be growing on you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Does that mean you’ll let me take you to dinner sometime?”

  “We fly home tomorrow,” she said.

  “I’m not doing anything tonight.” His grin snuck out. “Your baby sister’s welcome to join us, of course.”

  She tipped her head to look at him, realized he was rather cute-looking. Especially when he brought out that lopsided grin. “Maybe.”

  Liam chuckled, the humor crinkling his eyes. “I’ll take that.”

  “I’m Beth, by the way,” she threw out as she stalked ahead, glimpsing the blue light that framed the escape door. Almost there.

  He caught up. “Is that short for Elizabeth?”

  Before she could answer, they became aware of the commotion, the last of the stranded commuters bubbling around the doorway, pressing forward, and some kind of wailing siren that seemed to be filtering from above ground.

  “What now?” groaned Beth.

  Liam bent closer to be heard. “The conductor admitted they lost contact with the control room when the train first stopped. The driver stayed behind with the train, but with no comms and the tunnel blocked... That’s why I was so long. The conductor asked me to hike back there and let the driver know he might as well come topside.”

  Lost contact? That made no sense, not even if there’d been an explosion at the station. “The control room would still know something was wrong, though, if one of their trains went off-line.” She flapped a hand at the threshold of the doorway they were about to cross. “Access isn’t a problem.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Where’s the rescue team, Liam?” Her throat went dry. “Why’s the conductor acting like a one-man show and sending you on errands? It’s been close to an hour. This place should be overrun with emergency crews and medics by now.”

  Liam pushed past Allira. “I’ll go first, just in case.”

  In case of what? she wanted to scream.

  Instead, she plucked Allira’s earphones out from behind. “I need you here, Alli.”

  “I’m here,” Allira snorted. “I know exactly…” She turned to Beth, her nose wrinkling. “What’s that noise? An alarm?”

  “Sounds like it.” Beth moved around her. “Stay back a bit, okay?”

  They were the last through the door, following Liam up rough cement steps, ascending in a series of short flights that turned at right angles. The stairwell was well lit, but there was nothing to see except stark walls and the people streaming upward until they turned each bend.

  Liam threw continuous glances over his shoulder to check that she and Allira were right behind. There was no hurrying. The stairwell was too narrow to overtake, their pace set by the slowest person. For Beth, Allira and Liam, that was the Louis Vuitton woman, dragging them further and further back from the pack.

  The siren noise didn’t increase dramatically with each bend in the stairs that took them a flight higher, as if it came from somewhere beyond the building above them. That was good news, Beth hoped.

  The last turn brought them to another door, into a passage lit with neon strobes along the ceiling and glow-in-the-dark green arrows on the floor.

  Beth had only just stepped into the passage when the walls around them shuddered.

  Dust shook from the ceiling.

  The lights flickered.

  Liam skidded to an abrupt stop. Beth put a hand out to break the impact as she slammed into him.

  A low groan cascaded into a thunderous rumble that seemed to come at them from all directions. The entire building shook violently, plaster cracked off the walls, and then all hell broke loose. Chunks of ceiling dropped and the floor above crumbled through, eating up the passage and drowning out the terrified screams.

  “Back! Go!” Liam spun Beth about and shoved. “Down to the tunnel.”

  Heart thudding in her throat, she shouted, “Go! Go!” even though Allira was already backpedaling as fast as she could, ducking back into the stairwell.

  Beth was one step behind, through the doorway, halfway down the first flight of steps when she glanced over her shoulder and stopped dead. “Liam!”

  Nothing.

  No. No. No. No.

  “Liam!” she screamed.

  He came into view, hauling the Louis Vuitton woman by the hand. “Go! I’m right behind you!”

  Beth turned and lunged down the steps, taking two or three at a time.

  The floor vibrated beneath her feet, the walls spitting bits of plaster and brick as she went. She sped around a bend, saw a crack web out over the wall like glass about to shatter, then the stairwell plunged into sudden blackness as if someone had flipped a switch.

  “Allira!”

  “Beth!” her voice came from one, maybe two, flights down.

  “Keeping going!” Beth trailed a hand along the wall as a guide, no longer able to skip steps she couldn’t see. “Liam!”

  “I’m here,” his voice came from behind, she couldn’t judge how far.

  The rumbling, shaking, blackness. The spitting, cracking, blackness. Steps crumbling as she flew over them. Solid walls falling away beneath her trailing fingertips. She wasn’t sure what was real, what was fright.

  A glow lit the edge of blackness as she skimmed around the last bend and burst out of the stairwell. The dim lights in the tunnel were still on.

  Allira waited on the benchwall, wide-eyed, mouth open in silent shock. Beth grabbed her hand, pulling her along as she ran to put some distance between them and the unholy roar nipping at their heels.

  It was real. A hasty glance back confirmed that. The building was falling through the stairwell. At least that’s what it looked and sounded like. Dust, steel and concrete exploded from the entrance, ripping that section of the tunnel apart.

  She slowed, stopped and turned, watching in horror as the rocks and chunks of manmade debris crashed, rolled and buried.

  Liam.

  The Louis Vuitton woman.

  She watched, sinking to her knees when her legs no longer seemed strong enough to hold her.

  She waited, willing Liam to emerge from the dust and rubble like some victorious hero. Sure, he’d be bruised and bloody.

  But he wou
ld come.

  There was no way she could accept that he was gone. That some goofy cute guy she’d been joking around with was there one minute and gone the next. Life wasn’t this random. Life wasn’t this cruel.

  So she watched and waited, useless tears streaking grime down her cheeks.

  - 4 -

  Sean

  The sunset was spectacular, the sky awash with blazing oranges and pinks, rich purples and deep blues. A direct result of the dust thrown up into the atmosphere.

  Beauty from ashes.

  What Sean couldn’t guess was how far the carnage spread. A strong upper wind could have picked up the dust and carried it. Or the alien ships could have churned the entire state into that kaleidoscopic sky. Maybe even the whole damn country. The whole damn planet.

  As he watched, a squad of fighter jets cut through the picturesque sky.

  He tensed.

  God, I hope they’re ours.

  “Lynn,” he said sharply without bringing his gaze down to Johnnie’s mother. They’d finally made the introductions. Not much else. “Look.”

  “Are those… planes?”

  “Grey Eagles,” he said as the formation of six F-15 Eagles dived over the bay in a trail of vapor and thunder.

  If Lynn said anything to that, he wouldn’t have heard. If there’d been any buildings left in the area, this noise generated by the jets would have shook them to their foundations.

  The formation soared and split into a choreographed display of graceful art and raw power. Pride thickened Sean’s throat, bloomed his chest. It didn’t matter that the two jets that had broken away to swoop toward the mothership looked like pinpricks going up against a sword.

  We’re still standing.

  We’re fighting back.

  Three of the jets spread and soared into the horizon, maybe going after the smaller battlecruisers that had blasted their path of destruction out of view a good while ago. A fourth jet targeted the lone battlecruiser that had stuck near the mothership over Brooklyn.

  Sean’s gaze tracked the pair of Eagles focused on the mothership. They split paths again, firing missiles as they bypassed over and under the mothership. Blue electricity crackled at the missile strike points, nowhere near the actual ship. A defense shield of some sort? If the missiles made it through, caused any damage, Sean couldn’t tell.

  The jets arced high in a wide loop and came in for another pass. Except this time they didn’t fire missiles and there was no bypass. The jets flew straight at the ship. An attempt to fly through the shield? Fire their missiles on the other side of the barrier? They hit the shield with those crackling blue sparks and…disappeared.

  Sean watched another minute, then another, but there was no way of knowing if they’d made it through or if the shield had vaporized the jets like the pulse-beam alien weapons had done at ground level.

  With only one Eagle left in the sky, the noise had decreased.

  He glanced at Lynn. She’d wrapped her arms around the kid, squished her hands up to cover both his ears, but Johnnie had still managed to get his head turned out from her breast, his eyes glued to the fight above.

  Sean followed the kid’s line of sight over Brooklyn. The battlecruiser and the Eagle were engaged in one-on-one combat, translucent white-blue pulse-beams against rapid bursts of close fire.

  The Eagle arced and swooped, tipped its wings and rolled, out-maneuvering the continuous volley of pulse-beams as it drew in close each time to fire. Then it swerved wide to lock and aim a missile. The short distance didn’t give the battlecruiser much opportunity to deflect or evade.

  Sean’s breath caught.

  The missile hit—or rather, glanced off the rear section. There was an explosion, a small blast cloud infused with red flames. When the cloud dissipated, a chunk was missing from the rear.

  “Yes!” Johnnie shouted.

  Sean’s eyes teared. After all the devastation he’d witnessed these last few hours, lived through, this one small victory felt like a turning point. The battlecruiser wasn’t destroyed, but it could be hurt.

  That overwhelming relief was short-lived.

  Black arrows swarmed from the battlecruiser’s belly. He couldn’t count how many, maybe two dozen, probably more. The Eagle was just coming in for another swoop and pulled vertically to avoid the blue-white fire as the black arrows engaged.

  What were the black arrows?

  Tiny alien fighter jets?

  The Eagle pilot drew the arrows away from the battlecruiser, over Manhattan and out over the Jersey side. The Eagle was faster, cutting through the air with near-sonic speed, giving the pilot time to loop and come in on the arrows with Gatling guns firing as the plane thread a dangerous path between the blue-white return fire.

  The dusky sky lit with mini-blasts. Sean watched a black arrow explode. Another tumbled to the ground in a white spiral. Whomever—whatever—piloted the black arrows lacked the skill and lightning fast reflexes of the American pilot, but they made up for that in numbers.

  At least a dozen black arrows went up in smoke before one of them finally tagged the Eagle. That didn’t stop the pilot. Smoke billowing from the left wing, the Eagle performed another tight loop, taking out more black arrows before another hit sent it into a freefall dive. The jet hit the ground somewhere over Jersey in a fireball.

  Lynne gasped, whimpered in distress. As if that one life mattered more than the millions already lost.

  Maybe it did.

  That one man was a symbol. In death, the brave heroics of the pilot had given them hope.

  The remaining black arrows returned to the battlecruiser.

  Above, the sky went silent in its spectrum of glorious colors.

  Sean brought his gaze down again, settled back against the concrete slab they’d taken shelter by.

  “They can be defeated,” he said soberly.

  Johnnie squirmed free from his mother’s grip. He really was a scrawny kid, skin and bone, big blue eyes and a mop of brown curls.

  He looked up at Sean with those big blue eyes. “Will they send more planes?”

  Kids and their awkward questions.

  “I don’t know,” Sean said honestly. In his job, he’d learnt that lies did more harm than good. “But we do know the military is still functioning. I’m sure they’re working on a strategy to annihilate these—” bastard “—aliens.”

  Johnnie digested that, then nodded and hobbled off to investigate something laying in the rubble.

  Lynn’s gaze followed him and softened.

  She was somewhere around his own age, Sean stabbed a guess, early thirties. The same blue eyes as Johnnie, short blonde hair that feathered at her chin. There was a fragile, vulnerable look about her, but Sean had already seen some of her steel core. So when she rubbed the back of her head tentatively and winced, he took note.

  He pushed to his knees. “Let me take a look at that.”

  She stiffened, quickly dropped her hand. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you always this stubborn about accepting help?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s just me?”

  She looked at him a long moment. “It’s not you, it’s the situation.”

  “What? You have a policy about not accepting help during an alien invasion?”

  A smile touched her lips, there and gone.

  “Alien invasion.” Her gaze lifted to the mothership over Brooklyn. “Do you seriously believe that?”

  “As opposed to?”

  “God knows,” Lynn sighed. “But it’s not like humans aren’t capable of creating weapons of mass destruction.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Every government had secret military research programs, armies of dedicated scientists, buried in their country’s wastelands.

  But Sean shook his head with a ragged laugh as he stared up at the obsidian beast, at the concentric silver ridges beneath that rippled like mercury. “This is different. Other-worldly.”

  “Alien invasion,” she said softly. “We are
not alone.” She rubbed absently at the back of her head again. “We’re living through a bad movie script.”

  Sean shuffled forward on his knees. “Let me take a look at your head.”

  Her gaze dropped from the skies to him. “I don’t want your help,” she said sharply.

  “Because?”

  “Because I won’t help you if—when—you need it. Johnnie is the only thing that matters to me right now. I would sacrifice you to save him. I wouldn’t even have to think about it.”

  Well. Okay.

  “I appreciate the brutal honesty,” Sean drawled.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, the hardness drained from her tone. “But I do mean it.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s good to have the heads up.” He closed the gap to reach her side. “Now that we’ve gone through the terms and conditions, may I have a look?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, ran his fingers gingerly through her short hair, parting it to see when he found the swollen lump. “Is it tender?”

  She craned her neck, pulling her head away. “Would you know what to do if it were?”

  Jesus, this woman was difficult.

  And right.

  “No,” he admitted. “But you should probably get some rest, take it easy.”

  “Sure, I’ll just curl into a ball and sleep for a week.”

  “Or one night,” he shot back.

  They’d crossed through Lower Manhattan and made ‘camp’ one leveled block from the Hudson. He planned to find a way across the river, head inland. But not until the morning. The entrance to the Holland Tunnel was buried. Even if there was a way inside, Sean wasn’t sure he’d trust the structure after what he’d seen happen with Williamsburg Bridge. Assuming the tunnel wasn’t already flooded with the Hudson. No, they needed to find another way across, preferably something that hadn’t taken a damaging hit.

  Lynn dug into the backpack and brought out a pill bottle.

  “Is there anything you don’t have in there?” Sean said, though he was impressed. They’d already shared a bottle of water from that bag, to quench their thirst and wash the grit from their throats. It had also produced a bandage roll, to bind Johnnie’s ankle properly and give Sean back his t-shirt. And they’d checked her cell phone for a signal. Nothing.