by Paul Tassi
As they watched, the doors of the building opened and a hulking bear of a man walked out. Or was it a creature? The probe zoomed in further, and it looked like the giant was wearing stitched together pieces of alien power armor, and he was toting a matching massive energy weapon. How he managed to assemble such a suit to fit a human and still have it function after all this time, Lucas had no idea, and judging from how long Alpha lingered on him, he was intrigued as well.
Men began running through the streets down toward the bay, and Alpha shifted the probe’s view to follow them. There was nothing to see at first, but after zooming out, it was clear what all the commotion was about. A party of about fifteen cannibals was returning to camp with six other humans in tow. Two were smaller, scraggly men of unknown age, the others were four women who looked badly battered.
The men near the wall swung open a part of it that doubled as a gate. As they did so, Lucas saw two pikes protruding from either side, one skewering a human skeleton while a creature’s bones rested on the other. So this is what “society” looks like in this world now? Even with all he’d seen, the existence of a place like this made Lucas feel nauseous.
The captives were shoved inside the gate. They were lead through town as other men jeered at them from the sides of the road. The men were immediately dragged over to vacant Y-stakes in the town square. Two cannibals lifted each of them up and, after raising their arms, shoved something sharp through each of their wrists, pinning them to the wood
Guess they ran out of rope, Lucas thought as the men screamed in agony while blood ran down their forearms.
Meanwhile, the four women were stripped of their remaining rags and thrust into the nearby church. Lucas caught a glimpse of other figures inside before the door was slammed shut and a wooden slat was threaded through it to ensure they stayed put.
He could see Asha seething on her monitor.
Alpha flipped a switch and the view from the probe went thermal, or something like it. Inside the hut they could see about two dozen huddled glowing figures, with some appearing to have their arms chained to the walls and others lying prone on the floor. A harem of sorts? The thought was sickening, but as only men wandered around outside, it seemed the likely answer.
Lucas thought that through for a moment, instinctively attempting to formulate a rescue plan for the captives in the church and on the stakes. But it was entirely possible, if not probable, that these prisoners were every bit as dangerous as their captors. They had to be to have survived this long, and they were merely stripped of their weapons and clothing, overpowered by superior, more organized foes. And this many men, all working together? Such a thing was unheard of since the early days of roving bands of rogue police and marine patrols, but those hadn’t existed in the US for months. He wondered how long this miniature fortress had stood here at the base of the wrecked colossus. Asha had some thoughts of her own about the village, which she relayed through the monitor.
“I bet they came here in search of creatures to eat, because they must have been pouring out of that thing at one point, and I’m sure many stuck around. But when they ran out of meat they started eating their weak, and eventually sent out raiding parties to bring back more.”
“Why haven’t they turned on each other by now?” Lucas asked.
“Their system works, so why mess with it? They have food, shelter . . . women,” she said, gritting her teeth. “There’s no reason to kill each other.”
It made sense, but trust was something Lucas thought had vanished from the world completely. Though looking at his two new compatriots in the monitors, he supposed that under certain conditions, that wasn’t exactly true. Was it possible to eat your fellow man and not go insane?
Alpha spoke through the monitor. “There is no time to waste; we must obliterate that installation and make our way to the ship’s core.”
“I like the sound of that,” Asha said.
Lucas looked up at the monitor and watched flames engulf the recently executed man, now mounted on a spit. He liked the sound of that as well.
The aerial assault plan was drawn up quickly. Lucas would strafe the ship over the town while Asha rained down fire and brimstone from her cannons until everything was rubble. If the main gun was online, they could have obliterated the entire village from three miles out, but Alpha insisted it was beyond repair, and even if it wasn’t, it could irreparably damage the weakened ship that made up the north wall of the encampment.
Lucas asked if they could just hover above the fray while Asha unloaded, but Alpha said that in the ship’s unstable state, concentrated small arms fire could damage vital systems. The assumed leader’s appropriated alien weapon could actually tear a hole in weaker parts of the craft if it was fully charged. They would have to do a few fly-bys and hope that Asha would be able to eliminate enough ground targets so their subsequent entry would be easier. Lucas couldn’t imagine storming the gates on foot. Despite what the tatters of the uniform he wore might indicate, he was in no way prepared for that kind of combat. A few bandits or cannibals was one thing, but a city full of them? Impossible.
The probe returned and Lucas dialed the ship up to cruising speed once more, making landfall a few minutes later. The village at Kvaløya was only a hundred or so miles ahead, and Lucas took manual control of the craft for the first time since launch hours earlier. Lowering his altitude, he weaved through mountain valleys the way Alpha had steered the probe, but the ship felt like it was made of lead. Sure, it was no fighter jet, but it felt far more cumbersome than the equivalent virtual model in training. Lucas couldn’t tell if that was a flaw in the simulation, or if the damage done to the vessel had altered the way it was supposed to fly.
“Prepare for contact,” Alpha said through the monitor.
Asha clenched her fists tightly, each wrapped in holocontrols. “Ready.”
“Ready,” Lucas said as he brought up a screen of Asha’s turret view so it floated in his field of vision. He’d have to concentrate on flying, but needed to make sure her shots were lined up as well. This had been the stage in the training program he was flying through when Alpha interrupted him. Hopefully he’d learned enough.
Mikkel sunk his teeth into a hunk of human thigh, which had recently finished cooking on the fire. It tasted even worse than the last one, which was likely because the wanderers they dragged in were increasingly nothing more than skin and bones.
He began to hear a low whine, which steadily increased, and then he watched as the empty shell casings started to dance on the table near the fire. He turned to look behind him and saw a sight he hadn’t witnessed in a long time. Grabbing his rifle, he cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted with a deep, booming voice that would have shook the snow off the mountains if there was still any left.
“Alarm! Frem med våpen!”
He turned, raised his gun, and was instantly blown into a dozen pieces.
There was fire in Asha’s eyes as she tore through the village with her first volley. Her monitor indicated five confirmed kills, though she’d only seen two of them explode on her viewscreen. Her shots ripped up the street and blew large holes in nearby stone buildings. The incendiary shots set ablaze anything remotely flammable, and she watched with delight as a man stumbled out of a house fully engulfed in flames. As Lucas steered the ship past the camp, she swiveled around and kept firing, her canister shells igniting a few more rooftops before she was out of range. Asha’s heart pounded and sweat poured from her brow. A small smile crossed her lips.
“Circling around,” Lucas said on the monitor.
The ship was far too bulky to do anything resembling a vertical turnaround, so Lucas banked hard right until the craft, moaning and creaking as it went, made a full loop and had the village in its sights once again.
This time around the cannibals had armed themselves, and Lucas heard gunfire pelt the hull of the ship. Readouts said that no actual damage was being done, but he was still waiting for the glass of the viewscreen in fr
ont of him to shatter from a bullet. Though it’s probably not glass, is it?
Asha fired back with another volley from her cannons as Lucas roared by. This time her blasts tore through the center of town, incinerating a dozen more hostiles and several of the prisoners tied to stakes. The ones she missed scattered like roaches in every direction.
Suddenly, an alarm sounded.
“What the hell is going on?” Asha shouted into the monitor as they flew past the town and into the mountains once more.
Alpha frantically went back and forth from control to control in the engine bay.
“The guns are overheating the ship’s weak core. We will soon have enough power to fly or fire, but not both.”
“So what does that mean?” Asha yelled over the sound of the alarm.
“This next pass will be your last,” Alpha said as his metal hand flittered through readouts.
“Make it count!” Lucas said as he veered the ship around once more. He slowed down his approach to give Asha more time to fire, should she not get the opportunity again.
Once more she lit up the town, ignoring the blaring of the alarm in her ears. She watched the shells eat through the clock tower where two men were blown out of the top before the rest of the structure crumbled. On the ground, scores of cannibals sprinted for the gate. Focusing her fire on them, she tore across the ashen sand, catching eight of them in the open before her fire blew a hole in the forward wall near where the gate stood. It was hard to make out if any of them had successfully fled, and if they had, they were too far under the ship to target. Asha quickly focused her gaze back to the village, when a rocket-propelled grenade whizzed by her turret and struck the underside of the ship. Attempting to return fire, she was greeted by a flashing red error message in loosely translated English. NO FIRE, it said, and judging by her unresponsive controls and the smoke pouring out of the gun barrels, she knew what it meant.
Lucas felt the engines sputter a bit, and the craft dipped suddenly as it left the smoldering town in its rearview.
“Alpha?” he yelled worriedly.
“Systems are overheating and we suffered a direct hit to the [garbled] from that explosive device. Weapons are offline, engines at 43 percent.” There was a hint of panic in his voice.
“What do we do?” Lucas asked over the blaring of the alarm.
“We must land, immediately.”
Lucas brought up a topographic map of the area and scanned through it. The region was quite mountainous, and the computer indicated the best place to land in the area would be . . . the bay.
It hadn’t seen water for years, and the sands were vast enough to accommodate the relatively large craft. At least the walk to the mothership would be short. The life detection readout, flickering on and off, revealed there were still plenty of people alive down there, though he couldn’t tell which were cannibals and which were prisoners. Their bombing run of sorts had softened them up, but there was still more work to be done.
Lucas wheeled the ship around, and when he glanced down at the monitors, he saw that while Alpha was still playing with the flickering controls in the engine room, Asha was no longer in her turret.
He turned back to the viewscreen, and approached the bay, which fed into the walled entrance to the village. There was no sign of movement on the ground, only smoke rising from flaming buildings and crisp bodies. Had they forgone fleeing to start hiding? Where had they gone?
Lucas easily recalled the landing sequence procedures from training, thanks in part, he assumed, to his external neural enhancements, and performed the operation like it was second nature. The ship touched down softly in the sand, though it moaned one last nerve-racking time before Lucas shut the engines down on Alpha’s command. In the viewscreen ahead, he could see the town’s wall up at the top of the sandy shore and smoke rising in front of the massive wrecked ship that loomed behind it. Above it, the same angry red clouds were present that Lucas had found all across America. Transfixed by the scene of extraterrestrial devastation, he didn’t even notice Asha, until he heard the bolt click.
Shit.
He instinctively reached for Natalie, propped up against the ship’s command chair, but the weapon was already gone. Asha was standing behind him, pointing his own gun at his head with a stern look on her face. Looking down, he saw she was barefoot, and he had to applaud her for doing a damn fine job sneaking through the CIC unnoticed. However, he was disappointed in himself, as he would have never made such a mistake in the wild even a few days ago. He slowly turned the chair to face her.
“Hello,” he said flatly.
“Give it,” she replied, motioning toward him with the raised rifle.
“Give what?” he asked, bemused.
“It’s saved my life more times than I can count, and if we’re going out there I need it, along with my other supplies.”
He noticed that she had already picked up her pack, which had been sitting forgotten at the base of the central console. Lucas was still perplexed.
“You want . . . what exactly?”
Asha looked exasperated.
“The revolver, idiot.”
Though it had once been creating quite the annoying sharp pain in his lower back, Lucas had forgotten about the gun he confiscated from her when they first met. Well, second met.
“Oh you mean this?” he said as he took the revolver out of his belt and quickly pointed it at her with the hammer already drawn. She raised Natalie and took one step forward.
“That’s the one.”
“And why would I let you have both guns, just like that?” he asked, trying to remain calm and playful.
Asha raised an eyebrow. “Because you still have one in your boot, and you can have this thing back once I get mine.”
“You’d just give me my gun back? Trade a fully automatic machine gun for a six shot revolver?”
“The way I see it, there are only about six of them left out there anyway, and that’s all the shots I need. And let’s just say it has . . . sentimental value.”
Natalie had sentimental value as well, but Lucas would be damned if he was going to say that out loud. He had to resist referring to it by name during their conversation out of force of habit. It had been the only one who had listened to him during his long trek these last few hard months.
“So how do you want to do this then?” he asked, letting his grip loosen on the Magnum just a bit.
“Exchange on three?” she said, as she drew closer to him.
“Alright.”
They both began counting.
“One . . .”
As they spoke, Alpha marched straight into the room from the lift corridor. Walking right up to them, he promptly snatched Natalie from Asha and the revolver from Lucas before either knew what was happening. He walked over to the holotable and threw each gun on it. They were both so stunned they couldn’t speak.
“The time for dissent has past,” he said plainly. “We must take inventory of all our weaponry for our approach to the ship.”
After Asha and Lucas recovered from the shock of the sudden end to their standoff, the table soon became piled with weapons and ammunition. Natalie had about four spare clips left, while the revolver had thirty odd shells, despite Asha’s insistence she wouldn’t need them. Lucas put his boot pistol on the table, which only had the clip that was in it, and his buck knife. Asha had her two grenades and a hatchet, but no other firearms. Alpha had spent the last few minutes attempting to activate his old power armor and gun with his spindly mechanical fingers, his other hand clutching another sort of alien power tool like the one Lucas had seen earlier. Finally a few lights came on in the suit, with fewer lit on the gun.
“Will that thing work?” asked Lucas.
“The [garbled] is only at 18 percent power, but it will function well enough for our purposes. The material alone will make me largely bullet resistant.”
“Great, and what are we supposed to do?” lamented Asha.
“Do what you ha
ve done previously,” Alpha said as he strapped the armor over his chest. “Survive.”
After suiting up, passing around a can of tuna fish and downing a few ounces of water, they exited the ship through a port Lucas hadn’t seen before as it had been about a hundred feet underground when he first boarded the ship. After they left, Lucas turned back and saw the vessel he was flying for the first time in its entirety. He’d seen many swooping overhead during the war, but none this close, and he felt a strange kinship to the ship despite only having flown it for a few hours. Some of the plating was heavily damaged, but the jet-black surface was unscathed near the top, and the arcing lines and flickering blue lights made it look impressive, even if it was a mere transport.
Out in the open, he found the air felt different here. It was still stuffy, but not suffocating, and it was certainly hot, but not hellish, as Lucas remembered they were north of the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter. Even if it was milder, a familiar problem presented itself. The whole area used to be filled with bays, inlets, and islands, but now it had transformed into a desert like the rest of the world. If Alpha was correct, it would be uninhabitable within a month or two. Judging by how fast he’d seen temperatures rise recently, Lucas believed it.
His clothes were soaked in sweat, partially because of the heat, but mostly due to the task at hand. Looking up at the camp’s wall, Lucas wondered what condition the survivors were in, and how many would pose a threat. It was the first time he could remember feeling actual fear in months. He thought he’d just grown numb to it, but the pit of his stomach told him otherwise, and he had to steady his hands as they clutched Natalie with white knuckles.
He looked to his left, and saw Asha holding her Magnum in both hands with no signs of tremors. Her hatchet was threaded through her belt loop, and she trudged through the sands in her ripped black pants and knee-high combat boots. Two grenades jangled on her belt like keys.
On his right, Alpha looked far more impressive than he ever had, now that he was fully encased in power armor. It may have been cracked and half functional, but the plating still made him look imposing, and he carried himself with far more confidence than the slouching scientist Lucas had seen in the holoscreen recording earlier. He supposed Alpha had seen and done a lot since then. They all had.