by Paul Tassi
Fortune had favored him one day when he heard a shot ring out. He had scrambled for cover, but realized it had come from further up the road. He approached cautiously, creeping up behind dead cars. A man lay in the middle of the freeway ahead of him, his hulking shotgun lying useless beside him, blood pooling underneath his body. His pack had burst open and four giant bottles of Absopure slowly rolled down the incline toward him. And to think, they used to mock the very concept of bottled water. It was the only safe way to consume it these days.
Lucas scoured the horizon for the person responsible, seeing nothing. Surely they would come to collect their prize, and when they did, Lucas would collect them.
Then, further down the road, Lucas saw movement on the ledge of a billboard. It was an advertisement for some TV action-drama in its first season, its run cut short by the apocalypse. The figure scurried down the side and hustled toward the spot where the man lay. Lucas remained crouched behind a car some ways down the road, mapping out a possible approach scenario. He could let the sniper take the water and run, avoiding a potentially dangerous skirmish, but it had been too long since he’d had anything to drink, and he could feel every ounce of his body burning, lusting after the water that lay there. One bottle continued to roll slowly in his direction.
The sniper was nearly at the body now, approaching cautiously in case the traveler somehow survived the .50 caliber slug that had caved in his chest cavity. The man was scrawny and tattooed. Lucas wondered if he had perhaps been a gang member before the war, but as he moved closer, his torn Black Flag shirt and gauged ears implied a more musical background. His sniper rifle was military grade, presumably picked up from one of the millions of fallen soldiers scattered across the countryside. It was surely a pain to lug around, so it was no wonder he spent his time camped out in the shade of a billboard, looking through the scope.
Satisfied with his prey’s demise, he grabbed one of the water bottles and took a quick drink. Like Lucas, he was a professional survivor at this late stage in the game and knew how to savor what little moisture still existed in the world. The urge to inhale the whole thing was a hard one to resist, but veterans of the apocalypse knew better than that.
The sniper quickly scooped up the rest of the nearby bottles, and shuffled through the man’s pockets. He picked up a few shotgun shells and tossed them away. No need to carry another heavy weapon around in the heat. His gaze then shifted to the water bottle that had rolled a few yards away toward Lucas.
Underneath the car, there was a bit of a respite. The shade kept Lucas’s body cool, and he’d slept in similar places on many an occasion, the way a lizard might. Shelter was often hard to come by due to most structures having been flattened by blast shockwaves. He saw the bottle and the man’s feet approach it. He was wearing combat boots, again looted from a soldier, and they were worn and sticky with blood.
There would be no warning shot, no ultimatum of “if you leave now I’ll let you live.” Those days were long past. Lucas looked through Natalie’s scope and fired one round. The echo practically deafened him underneath the car. The sniper hit the ground, clutching his shattered shin, the rest of him now visible to Lucas in his makeshift bunker. Another round went directly through his forehead, effectively ending the pain in his leg. The Earth’s population was one soul closer to zero.
Lucas finished the last drop and put the final empty container back in his sack. Who knew, maybe one day the rain might stop being the devil’s fiery piss. But he doubted it. He felt he was probably close enough to Portland where that would be the last drink he ever needed. The last intact sign he had seen said eighty miles. But how many days ago was that? How many weeks? He had lost track, but it had to be soon, even if his pace had slowed to a crawl.
He was inland now, having left the coast to make his way toward the city. The dry beaches sometimes provided supplies hidden away in wrecked yachts or beached aircraft carriers, but mostly they’d all been picked clean. Now back on the main freeway heading northeast, it was the usual expanse of an endless automotive graveyard surrounded by the burned sticks that once made up a vast pine forest.
Trudging forward, Lucas felt that old familiar wrenching pain of hunger gnawing away at his insides. Ideally he’d stumble upon another creature and, after a short fight, could have a feast on his hands, but such ideas were only a fantasy at this point. The creatures were worse at adapting to the new landscape than the humans most times, so there were barely any still roaming about.
Ahead, he saw the collapsed remnants of a freeway overpass sign. He scanned the ground until he saw what he was looking for, a faded green sign that read DOWNTOWN PORTLAND EXIT TWO MILES with a diagonal arrow. At last, he thought, and he turned the corner. The road became steeper.
As he rounded the bend, what he saw perplexed him. The road ended. In its place was a giant pile of earth covering the street and the cars on it. A landslide? No. Then it’s . . . No, it couldn’t be. But of course it was.
Lucas mustered his last bit of strength and started sprinting up the rocky cliff, loose dirt giving way under his feet. He understood what the makeshift mountain was, and was dreading the view from the top. But he had to see it. He had to.
Above him the red sky roared with thunder and lightning jumped from cloud to cloud. The mound became steeper and he was forced to drop to his knees and climb up with his hands. Rising higher and higher, he didn’t look behind him to see the remnants of the freeway below. His muscles burned and he was almost blind from stinging sweat, but he ignored all of it. All that mattered was reaching the top.
At last, he arrived. What he saw was a familiar sight, but it shattered him all the same. He was standing on the brink of an enormous crater, looking down at the ruins of a metropolis now blown to dust and resting in the middle of a desert.
The city was gone. All of it. The devastation was from one of their bombs, because otherwise his skin would have started boiling days ago, cooking in radiation. The landscape was almost entirely bare for miles until it was bookended by the opposite crater wall. In a city of skyscrapers, nothing stood above a few stories, and what did was a mere mask, a wall or two standing as a memorial to the building once rooted there.
They were gone, like everything was gone. His fool’s errand to cross the entire country to return to them had been a worthless pursuit. He ran his hand through the dirt and ash at the top of the crater. They’re no more than this now, he thought as he let the particles slide through his fingers. He would have cried if his body had any liquid to spare. Instead his vision blurred, then blackened, and his body went limp. He cascaded down the side of crater, rolling across the smooth surface of dust until he came to a stop at the bottom. Darkness consumed him fully.
2
He woke minutes or hours later, he couldn’t be sure which. The thunder had stopped and a hot breeze blew through the sandy wasteland around him. Pulling himself upright, he found his head throbbing and his arm in a good amount of pain. Searching himself, he found no blood. Sitting with his arms folded around his knees, he stared out into the shifting sands. Nothing remained. Behind him the crater wall rose up two hundred feet. Even if he had the energy, the climb would be impossible. But where would he go? Where could anyone go with the world in such a state? He stood up and looked around. Scraps of twisted metal poked out of the black earth, but all were maimed to such a degree it was impossible to imagine what they had once been.
His journey was over. Reaching into his boot, he pulled out the picture of his wife and son. It was the one thing on him he hadn’t taken from a corpse. The photo was torn and faded, but he could just make out their smiles. It was time to join them at last.
He took Natalie off his shoulder and quickly checked the magazine. This would be her final mission: to reunite him with his family. He always knew this would be her purpose in the end. Positioning the barrel under his chin, he put his thumbs on the trigger and raised his eyes to the sky.
Above him, he saw a patch of clouds that h
ad somehow turned blue among the angry red.
He stopped. He looked down. He hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. This wasn’t some portal to the afterlife above him; the clouds were actually blue. The sand swirled around him as he looked at the mysterious apparition above. Was it something just above the clouds, or something shining up? Focusing more intently he saw trails of light reflecting off the sand. They narrowed to a focal point he couldn’t see.
He dropped Natalie from his chin and slung the rifle back over his shoulder. Marching through shin-high shifting ash and sand, he followed the path of the light. It flickered briefly, then went out. The landscape was lifeless again, the clouds red. He paused, then continued forward and the light flashed back on for a second or two before it was extinguished once more.
As he progressed further, the winds died down. The sand and soot stopped swirling, and he could now see more than a few feet in front of him. But there was nothing around but charred rubble. The clouds lit up again as the light reappeared and he saw exactly where it was coming from.
Along the side of the crater wall, a few feet up from the ground, there was a hole. The light shone brilliantly from it, then went out again. Lucas could hear some sounds that resembled electrical fizzling. Looking around, he walked toward the opening. The light remained off, but he could now hear mechanical whirring coming from within. He approached the hole and peered over the top with Natalie leading the charge. He hadn’t seen anything with power in months. What the hell could this be? With nothing to lose, he climbed in the hole, Natalie at the ready for any snake that might be lurking there.
The light turned on again and engulfed him with its radiance. He had to shield his eyes from the blinding whiteness of it, and his retinas felt like they were on fire. When the light dimmed again, he could see nothing but red blotches. As his vision slowly returned, he looked to his left and saw an offshoot tunnel. The fizzling and whirling spooled up again, and he jumped inside. The light shot past him unimpeded out into the sky. Can’t go that way, he thought, at least not without my Ray Bans. He laughed. It was the first time he had done so in recent memory. This strange new mystery had reinvigorated him. Lucas forgot how hungry he was, how much his muscles ached, and even about his family, now a part of the dirt that surrounded him. The light had transfixed him.
He started down the alternate tunnel, and after a few moments in blackness, saw a blue glow. It paled in comparison to what had just blinded him, but it at least allowed him to see through the darkness. At the end of the tunnel, he approached an open, metal doorway and immediately knew what he had discovered.
The room he entered was a cathedral of machinery, and not any of this world. In front of him loomed two giant objects with a familiar blue glow at one end. They pointed at an upward angle into the sand. The glow amplified. The objects were producing the brilliant light.
Of course, he should have recognized that light. The engines of the creatures’ crafts had soared past him many times, but always at supersonic speeds. He’d encountered many a crashed ship in his trek across the wasteland, but none that were operational. What normally was unrecognizable when dashed into a million pieces on the side of a cliff was here fully formed, and, apparently, fully functional.
Outside of the two rear engines there were panels lining the walls of the room. The interfaces were holographic, and Lucas ran his hand through the closest one. He half expected a missile to fire or a self-destruct sequence to initiate, but the ship didn’t seem to recognize his presence and kept whirring along, spurting out occasional flashes of light from the engines.
Lucas approached stairs that led to the upper deck. He could see a door leading to what looked like an engine room, where a red light was flashing overhead. With the craft apparently working, there had to be someone, or something, inside it. Was there really a crew of creatures still alive to resurrect the behemoth? Lucas clutched Natalie feverishly. Sure, the pair of them had taken down straggling creatures before, but they were starving, delirious, and lacking equipment most times. But here? On their home turf with their armor and weapon systems possibly as operational as this ship? He wasn’t taking any chances. In a craft this size, there could be dozens. But how had they survived for so long?
His eyes and barrel constantly darted to every creak and beep coming from inside the room. Then he heard a sound he recognized instantly. Gunfire. The popping noise was unmistakably an automatic weapon of some sort, judging by the frequency. Sticking his head back out into the dark tunnel, he thought he could hear voices as well. Creeping back through the blue glow of the passageway, he saw the bright flash of the engine light in the main pathway up ahead. He turned his back to it, and hoped his silhouette wouldn’t give him away.
As he approached the lip, he dropped to his stomach and peered out into the crater. The scenario he saw unfolding in front of him was something he hadn’t witnessed in a long while. A trio of people, together, not tearing each other apart, but working as a unit against a common enemy. An enemy that was the eight-foot-tall creature slowly backing up toward the hole where Lucas lay prone.
The creature’s head turned back and forth frantically, and he ducked as another volley of shots was fired over his head.
“What’s wrong frogman? Where are all your buddies?” a man wearing goggles holding the light machine gun called out to him.
Another stood to the right, clutching a shotgun.
“Once you tell us what you got stored in that glowing cave of yours, you’re gonna make a real nice dinner.”
The third figure was hidden from view by the backside of the creature. But a woman’s voice spoke.
“He can’t understand you, idiots. Just shoot him and we’ll figure it out ourselves. I’m starving anyway, and I’d really rather eat him than you.”
“Aw, we’re just having a little fun aren’t we?” Goggles said. “He’s not going anywhere.”
And indeed he wasn’t. Despite his working ship, the creature had no power armor or guns. Instead he was clutching a glowing cylinder, which didn’t appear to be a weapon, or else he would be using it.
Thoughts raced through Lucas’s mind. Presumably if the trio murdered this creature and found him inside the hole, they wouldn’t exactly welcome him into their merry gang. From the looks of the two he could see, they had the crazed tremors of cannibals. He still couldn’t make out the woman.
Lucas made a judgment call. Hell, did consequences really matter anymore? As Goggles raised his rifle to finish his game with the creature, Lucas raised his. He fired one slug that passed directly through his eyeball, and by the time he hit the ground, Lucas was trained on the shotgunner. As the man whipped to the right to see what had happened to his partner, Lucas fired a spray that ripped up through his tattered outfit and sent him tumbling to the earth. His shotgun veered upwards and fired a blast into the sky.
At that point the creature stumbled and fell on his back, looking side to side, unaware of what was going on. In front of him, Lucas saw the woman with a raised .45 Magnum. It was pointed at the creature, but she quickly shifted its focus to Lucas when she saw him in the hole behind the downed alien. Lucas fired, and so did she. Her shot buzzed by Lucas’s ear, but his found a soft target in her flesh. She screamed and lurched backward, her gun flying from her grip.
Lucas exited the hole and made his way toward her. The other two lay motionless, with mortal wounds, but he could hear her gasping in agony ahead of him. He passed by the creature, who looked up at him and instinctively scrambled backward, away from the additional human threat.
Lucas reached the woman and kicked her Magnum further away. He had hit her in the arm, a pretty far distance from her head, which was where he’d been aiming. She was clad in torn pants and a black tank top. A checkered cloth was wrapped around her nose and mouth, as was true of her two cohorts. It was probably to avoid the whirling sands in this area, but it made them look like Old West outlaws. He raised his rifle to finish her off and saw the woman’s wide eyes staring at
him, anticipating her final moments. Her brilliant, green eyes. Wait. Had he . . . ?
His thought was interrupted by a sharp crack across his back. The creature was on his feet and had struck him from behind. Lucas rolled over and raised Natalie but the gun was swatted from his hands and cartwheeled across the sand. The creature swung at him with a three-clawed hand, and Lucas rolled left and right to avoid it, though one swipe grazed his face. He brought his knee up into what he thought would be a solar plexus, and the creature reacted accordingly, crying out in pain. Lucas then got a foothold on his chest and pushed the beast over the top of him, and he landed with a muffled thud beside the woman, who was now on her feet and staggering over to her Magnum. Lucas veered over to tackle her before she got there while the creature lay on his back moaning. He swung his fist and struck her, knocking her out cold, but as he raised it again, it was grabbed by the creature’s claw. He was pulled up and off of her, and flew into the sand as the creature loomed over him. He kicked the creature in the stomach and went to his boot for his pistol. The creature lay sprawled on the ground, then slowly sat upright and held his arm up in a submissive manner. His left arm didn’t have a claw. In fact, it had nothing but a stump where a claw should have been, the wound long healed over. Lucas saw the sign of defeat, and hesitated.
“Is this your ship?” he yelled over the roar of the wind.
The creature just looked at him and made no sound.
“Is this your ship?” Lucas repeated. He leaned in closer, brandishing his gun. The creature made a guttural sound and nodded.
“Can you understand me?” Lucas asked in a cracking voice. He had never thought to try and talk to these things before; he was usually too busy barbecuing them.