In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  Afraid to so much as breathe, Allison backed slowly around the corner, then turned and ran.

  Terrified as she had been, she came back the next night and made it into the town proper, sneaking down the alley behind the town’s small theater.

  She paused a moment near the back door, remembering how the theater’s owner, Mr. Bernson, always gave the kids free popcorn during the matinees. Allison knew that he was almost certainly dead, and the thought brought with it more sadness than she’d expected. Mr. Bernson had been a very nice man who had loved the town’s kids. She would miss him.

  On a whim, she tried the door handle. It was unlocked. Opening the door just a few centimeters, she looked inside, but couldn’t see anything. It was pitch black.

  She waited a moment, listening for any sign of movement, then quickly stepped inside. She pulled the door closed behind her, wincing as it clicked shut.

  Then she waited, trying to muffle the sound of her own breathing as she listened. She was in the small store room where Mr. Bernson kept the supplies for the refreshment stand. Flicking on the pocket flashlight she’d brought, she saw that she was surrounded by neat stacks of cups and containers holding popcorn bags and candy.

  With a vague sense of guilt, she reached out and took a package of her favorite candy from one of the boxes. Then two more.

  The store room had another door that led to the main hall where the refreshment stand and the entrance to the theater were. As she was pocketing the candy and considering taking more, she heard something out there.

  Whispers.

  Quickly switching off her light, she moved to the hallway door, which stood ajar.

  She heard something else now, too. Footsteps on the carpet beyond the door. Slow and stealthy.

  Allison had no weapon. She had looked near where Race had been killed, but hadn’t been able to find her hunting rifle, and her father hadn’t been able to afford a separate set of weapons just to store in the shelter. The guns had all been in the house, and had been lost when the house was blown up.

  With the furtive sounds of the footsteps growing steadily closer, she backed up behind the door next to one of the stacks of boxes.

  The door was pushed open, very slowly. A dark shape, then another, came into the room, illuminated by the ghostly starlight glow from the theater’s front windows down the hall.

  “It should be in here,” one of the shadows said softly, just above a whisper.

  It was Vanhi, a girl from her school. She was only eight, but Allison had spoken to her a few times in their small school’s cafeteria. Vanhi had a very distinctive singsong voice that Allison instantly recognized. The other shadow with her, about the same size, must be her twin brother Amrit. They lived on a small farm on the far side of town, and had only arrived on Alger’s World a year ago, immigrants from Earth.

  “Vanhi,” Allison whispered, reaching out a hand to touch the girl’s shoulder.

  Both Vanhi and Amrit screamed in fright, jumping away from Allison to crash into a floor to ceiling stack of plastic cups that clattered to the floor.

  “Be quiet!” Allison turned on her flashlight and held it up to the ceiling to provide a little illumination without blinding any of them. It was a trick her brother had shown her.

  “Allison?” Amrit’s voice trembled, his dark brown eyes wide with terror.

  “Allison Murtaugh?” Vanhi lay on the floor amongst the jumble of cups, staring up at the older girl.

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Allison reached out her free hand to help Vanhi up. “It’s okay. But we’ve got to get out of here. Now.” She knew that the racket they’d just made would have alerted any Kreelans who might be nearby. “Come on. Follow me.” Reaching into a box of chocolate bars, she stuffed a bunch into her jacket, then took Vanhi’s hand.

  Allison pushed the outside door open just a crack, then looked and listened for any signs of patrolling warriors. There was nothing.

  “You’ve got to be really quiet.” Allison’s whisper broke the silence of the darkened alley, and she quickly glanced around.

  They were still alone.

  Behind her, the twins nodded their heads side to side in a way that some of the other kids in school had thought funny, but that Allison had always found endearing.

  Allison led the way out, with Vanhi holding tightly to one of her hands, and Amrit holding onto Vanhi’s other hand to make sure they didn’t get separated in the dark. They followed Allison down to the end of the alley.

  Once there, she had the twins sit down and gave them each a chocolate bar from her pocket. She was shocked to see how they both ripped off the wrapper and devoured the bars in but a few bites.

  “We’re starving.”

  Allison could barely understand what Amrit said, his mouth was so full of chocolate, but the message was clear. She gave them both a couple more bars.

  The twins sat right next to each other as if they were freezing, even though it was a warm spring night. Allison sat cross-legged across from them, and their foreheads almost touched as they leaned in close to talk.

  “What were you doing in there?” Allison asked.

  “Looking for food.” Vanhi’s singsong voice was flat, desperate. “We haven’t had anything to eat since the aliens came.”

  “Nothing at all? Didn’t your family have a storm shelter or anything?”

  “We didn’t have a chance to get to it.” Amrit’s voice quivered, and Allison reached out a hand and took his to reassure him. “One of the alien ships landed right next to the house. Our parents...”

  Vanhi let out a quiet sob, and it was a moment before Amrit went on in a raspy voice. He was a small boy, no bigger than his sister, but he didn’t lack for courage. Allison had seen him stand up to one of the class bullies once. The older boy had nearly beaten Amrit to a pulp before the teachers could intervene, but Amrit had stood his ground.

  “The aliens killed them and set fire to the house. We were playing in the barn.” He paused. “We saw everything.”

  “I’m sorry.” Allison couldn’t think of what else she could say. After a moment, she asked, “How did you get away?”

  “There is a big pipe under the drive between the barn and the main road for water to run through.”

  “We hid there for two days,” Vanhi added. “We got some water from a sprinkler line that still held some water, but that was all. Without power, the well pump stopped working.”

  “Since then we’ve been trying to get to Mr. Bernson’s theater, because we knew there would be some food and things to drink there. And we wouldn’t have to go far into town to where the restaurants are.” Amrit paused. “Because there are lots of them there.”

  Nodding, Allison understood their reasoning. She had noticed that, too. After the initial battle, the aliens seemed to have concentrated in the center of Breakwater. She’d heard strange things and seen weird lights, like flickers of lightning coming from the town square area, but she hadn’t yet mustered the courage to investigate any further.

  “Well,” she told them, “you won’t have to worry about a place to stay. I want you to come back with me. I’ve got lots of room in a nice shelter back at our farm.”

  “You have food and water?” Vanhi’s voice had taken on more of its singsong quality, and it made Allison smile.

  “Yes, I’ve got plenty for all of us.”

  * * *

  Over the next week, Allison’s optimistic appraisal of the food situation radically changed as she found seven more children, all younger than herself, who were desperate enough for food to brave the dangers of being caught by the aliens. All of them had been starving, and one had been so weak that she’d had to carry him to the shelter on her back.

  Ravenous as they were, they had quickly eaten their way through most of the food supplies in the shelter. Allison had gone to look for food at the adjoining farms, but without exception the houses, barns, and any other buildings had been destroyed.

  Foraging in town was the only option. Dec
iding that they needed something more than the candy in the town theater (and the popcorn was useless, as she had no way to cook it), she began to explore deeper in the town. While many of the buildings had suffered heavy damage, the contents were still largely intact, especially the market and the hunting store, which had prepackaged food they could eat. She had tried to get a gun at the hunting store to replace the rifle she’d lost, but had given up. While she could get to the guns in the display cases, the ammunition was locked in a big safe.

  While gathering food and looking for other children had become her main goals in her nightly forays, Allison’s expeditions into town also made her feel like she was doing something useful. She didn’t have a weapon to fight back, but just learning what she could of the aliens and finding out what they were up to, aside from simply killing humans, made her feel good.

  But it wasn’t easy sneaking past the Kreelans who had set up their main base in the town square and the warriors constantly moving in and out of the area. Like the third night after the attack when she had run into a group of warriors who had just let her go, she was sure that warriors had seen her more than once on her nighttime runs, but had simply ignored her. They must have only been concerned with older humans. Every once in a while she heard the distant sound of gunfire, so she knew there were still people fighting back.

  While the aliens didn’t seem all that interested in her, she wasn’t taking it for granted. She did everything she could to move unseen and unheard.

  Now, almost two weeks to the day since the attack, she was deep into the town, moving down an alleyway, probing toward the town square. It was the focus of whatever the aliens were doing here, and she wanted to know what it was.

  She paused, then put her back against the wall as a pair of Kreelans walked by a few meters away, their black armor and talon-like fingernails glistening in the bonfires that the aliens kept burning at the center of the town square each night. They strode right past her, unaware that two hateful young eyes were boring holes in them, wishing them dead and gone back to whatever hellish world had spawned them.

  The two warriors had just reached the end of the alley and Allison took a step away from the wall when she heard the aliens make a slight gasp. Quickly backing up to the wall again, she saw that the warriors were rooted to the ground, their eyes staring up at the sky, as if they could see something among the stars that was invisible to Allison’s gaze.

  A moment later the two warriors turned around and ran back toward the square, and Allison could hear alien cries and the sound of more running feet and the clatter of weapons and armor as the entire Kreelan garrison came alive.

  This can’t be good, she told herself. Deciding to take advantage of the situation, she darted into the market and stuffed her backpack full of packaged food, napkins (that were used mainly for toilet paper), and the short list of other essential items she had come for.

  Back out in the alley, she paused. The Kreelans in the square, hundreds of them, if not more, were making a lot of noise in their guttural language. She hadn’t seen them act this way before, and knew that whatever was happening must be important.

  Reluctantly setting down her backpack and concealing it in a pile of empty boxes, she crept down the alley toward the end that opened onto the main street and the square beyond to see what was happening.

  The aliens had formed themselves into a military-style formation, the warriors arrayed in semicircular rows facing an open area of the square. There were hundreds of them, maybe even a few thousand. It was hard to tell. She hadn’t realized there were so many, and an involuntary shiver ran up her spine at the sight of the orderly ranks of alien killers.

  A warrior who stood in front of the formation bellowed a command, and the warriors fell silent and stood ramrod-straight.

  Allison looked up as she heard the growing roar of an approaching shuttle, and watched with slitted eyes as it settled to the grass in the square, its hover engines blowing dust and debris in a swirling cloud that swept through the Kreelan ranks.

  As the shuttle’s engines spun down, a ramp extended from the rear. Allison had a clear view, as the ramp faced directly toward her, and watched in frightened awe as the Kreelan warriors knelt and hammered their right fists against their left breasts as one, the sound of their armored gauntlets against their chest armor echoing through the square.

  * * *

  Ku’ar-Marekh stepped down the shuttle’s gangway into the smoke-shrouded square. She had chosen to arrive in the shuttle because she knew that many of the warriors found her more accustomed means of appearing out of thin air…disturbing.

  She looked upon the ranks of kneeling warriors with silver-flecked eyes, her gaze taking in everything, missing nothing.

  Unlike the peers who knelt before her, the porcelain-smooth blue skin of her body bore not a single scar. Scars were considered a prize among her people, trophies of combat or great deeds done in service of the Empress. Ku’ar-Marekh had seen more than her share of battle from the time she was a young tresh learning the Way of Her Children, and had gathered an impressive collection of scars through the cycles before she had become a priestess.

  But the Change that took place when her mentor had passed on her powers to Ku’ar-Marekh had stripped her skin bare of her trophies. While she still wore a sword and dagger, and three shrekkas on her left shoulder, the powers she had inherited when she became a priestess had made combat by sword and claw largely irrelevant.

  She looked out upon the warriors the Empress had put in her care, and could barely see them through the swirling dust kicked up by the shuttle’s engines.

  With a gentle wave of her hand, the gusts of air stilled, and the tiny particles fell to the ground in a silent rain. Some of the warriors bowed their heads even further, for they could sense the power of her spirit in their blood like a great, frigid wind.

  Ku’ar-Marekh could of course sense the warriors, but she also sensed something else, and stopped at the bottom of the ramp, casting her second sight into the world around her.

  A human.

  While the blood of the animals did not sing as did that of Her Children, priestesses such as Ku’ar-Marekh could see beyond the senses of the flesh. She turned to stare at the creature, which cowered in the shadows of a nearby building. It was plainly visible to Ku’ar-Marekh’s eyes, for her race could see well in the dark. She knew that the warriors could only have overlooked the tiny human simply because it posed no challenge to their skills. Killing it would have brought no honor to the Empress, and no doubt they thought it better to leave it die of starvation.

  Ku’ar-Marekh was not concerned with honor, but thought instead that killing the human would bring the Empire one step closer to exterminating these unworthy animals from the universe. Its blood did not sing, so it could not be the One the Empress so eagerly sought.

  Staring at the creature, Ku’ar-Marekh reached out with her mind, seeking the human’s heart. She could feel it, beating rapidly with fear in the tiny chest, and in her mind she imagined her fist gripping the pulsating organ, her talons sinking into the muscle. Then she began to squeeze...

  * * *

  Allison felt a shiver pass through her as the warrior walked down the ramp. The Kreelan looked much the same as the others, but there was something about this one that was different. She didn’t know why, but a sudden surge of fear swept through her.

  The alien stopped and turned to stare right at her.

  She can see me! Allison realized, and her stomach fell away into a dark abyss as terror took hold and she turned to run.

  It was then that she felt an uncomfortable pressure in her chest. She gasped as the sensation turned into icy needles that speared her heart, and she collapsed to the ground, gasping in agony.

  She felt as if her heart was being torn, still beating, from her chest.

  * * *

  “My priestess?” Ri’al-Hagir said quietly. She was to serve as the First to Ku’ar-Marekh, to act as her right hand in all th
ings. She had never before met the priestess, although she had heard many fearful tales from other warriors, and of course could sense the priestess through the Bloodsong.

  Ri’al-Hagir glanced at where the human child writhed, perplexed as to why one such as Ku’ar-Marekh, who stood twelfth from the throne among all the souls in the Empire, would trifle with such a thing.

  “We decided to leave the pups be,” she explained as the human writhed in torment. “We have hopes that those that are resourceful may survive to be warriors worthy of our attention, as the adult human animals of this planet have been.”

  For a moment she was unsure if Ku’ar-Marekh had heard her words, for the attention of the priestess remained fixed on the human child, whose struggles were rapidly weakening. Ri’al-Hagir could sense the power flowing from the priestess, and was not so proud to admit, at least to herself, that it caused her fear such as battle never had.

  Then, with a barely audible sigh, the priestess turned to look at her, and Ri’al-Hagir quickly lowered her gaze.

  “I meant no offense, my priestess.”

  “Had any been taken, you would now be with our ancestors in death.” Ku’ar-Marekh barely breathed the words, but every warrior kneeling before her heard them. Each and every one bowed her head even lower. In a louder voice, cold as any machine could be, she went on, “However, I honor your wisdom. If such as that can grow to pose a challenge to us, then I shall allow it to live.”

  * * *

  Allison heaved a desperate gasp of air into her lungs as the icy spikes that had been crushing her heart disappeared. She lay on the hard pavement of the alley, her body wracked with tremors as her heart sluggishly returned to its life-sustaining duty.

  She managed to turn on her side just before she vomited.

  Looking up, spitting the awful taste from her mouth, she could see the Kreelan who had come on the shuttle, moving through the ranks of warriors, who still knelt before her.