The Last Exodus

by Paul Tassi

  The discovery of the device led them to bring back ten crates in all (better safe than sorry), as the rest were scattered around the floor, where many vials lay loose or broken. They stacked them in the area where they’d entered the ship, and after the last crate was loaded, Lucas checked his readout. Twenty minutes until Alpha returned. He pushed the device and the ball rolled seamlessly down the hallway. He turned to close the storage room door behind him, but realized he didn’t know how. He waved the disc around in its general direction, but there was no response.

  “Screw it.”

  When he got to the bridge, he turned left to make the trip back to the loading area, but stopped when he saw Asha staring up at the viewscreen. She’d been waiting there after unloading her last crate, but now had found something far more interesting than nutrient packs.

  An enormous face loomed across the entire length of the viewscreen. It was a creature, and one unlike any Lucas had ever seen. It was dark, almost black, as opposed to the usual gray. Its eyes glinted with rings of bright blue. Pieces of well-polished armor could be seen around its neck, shoulders, and head, though the rest of it was out of frame. It was grunting and snarling, speaking in a language neither of them could understand. Lucas froze as the cube slowly drifted away from him. A few yards ahead, Asha stood enraptured by the imposing creature.

  It continued speaking, its voice growing increasingly louder. Eventually in frustration, it waved its hand in front of him and the viewscreen cut to black. The pair of them stood in silence for a minute until Lucas spoke.

  “What did you do?”

  Asha turned around and put her hands up, her Magnum was in one of them.

  “Nothing, I swear, I came back through here and he was just there, growling something. I tried to yell at it, but I don’t know if it saw or heard me.”

  She holstered her gun. If he had seen her, she probably didn’t exactly look like a friendly ambassador of Earth, adorned in weapons, shouting unintelligibly.

  “Are there more of these things still on this planet?” she asked.

  “None worth a damn that I’ve seen,” said Lucas. “Any I’ve come across have been on the verge of death, and I’d never seen a working ship until well, ours. That thing didn’t look like it was marooned here.”

  “Well it knows we’re here, or at least that someone is here.”

  Alpha needed to know about this.

  As the last crate was moved into the exit bay, Lucas had an idea. There were still about ten minutes left on the clock, and he beckoned Asha to follow him back to the bridge. This time, there was no creature on the viewscreen to greet them.

  “Help me with this,” Lucas said as he bent over one of the dead creatures. He began to pry loose its power armor with his knife.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Asha said incredulously, as she stood above him with her arms crossed.

  “Alpha lost his armor and gun,” he said, slicing through a strap around the creature’s ribcage. He peeled the chestplate back and threw it on the ground next to him. He set to work on the shoulder brace next.

  “And if we ever have to fight these things head on,” he pointed at the viewscreen, “we’re going to need a hell of a lot more than this.” He tapped his POLITET bulletproof vest.

  Asha was still skeptical.

  “How are we going to wear one of these? They’re enormous.”

  “Didn’t you see the chief?”

  “He was enormous.”

  “Well, I bet Alpha could work some magic and come up with something. If you haven’t noticed, he’s sort of handy with this kind of thing.”

  Sliding the long rifle out from where it was lodged under the console, he threw it onto the armor pile. Asha paused, then began hacking into a nearby body with her hatchet.

  Lucas sat on one of the cubes and checked his timer. Eight zeros were blinking on the readout. Alpha was late. Asha sat across from him, her arms resting on two piles of alien power armor. They’d excavated three in total, along with the attached weapons.

  “What are we doing with this kid?” she asked, bringing up a question he’d all but forgotten about. His mind was consumed with the dark creature and the galaxy map.

  Lucas slowly tilted his head back and rested it on the wall.

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is no place for a child. And lord knows the three of us have no business near one. Do you have any idea how to raise a kid?”

  Lucas thought back to missed school plays and baseball games, and the subsequent angry phone calls.

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “But you want to leave it here? Just throw him away?”

  Asha stared up into the hole above.

  “The world used to do that long before everything went to shit.”

  There was something in her tone that intrigued Lucas. Was this going to be some actual, personal information? But she fell silent. After a minute, Lucas pressed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “None of your business, asshole.”

  “You brought it up. And you’d think in our current situation, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to know something about each other.”

  “Oh yeah? And what do I know about you?”

  They were interrupted by a familiar roar of engines from overheard.

  “It’s about damn time,” said Asha, as she hopped to her feet. Conversation over.

  The ship came to rest above them and the blue column of light shot out and came streaming through the hole. Immediately, one of the cubes began to lift up into the air. Lucas realized that unloading would be a breeze, and began to herd the rest of the cubes into the light. They trickled up and out of the ship and into the sky above. Next came the piles of power armor, and as they ascended they hung limply in the air like they were being worn by wraiths. The guns trailed under them a short distance below. Asha didn’t wait for a “ladies first” as she stepped into the light and began to soar away. Lucas followed her up, and took one more look at the village as he rose above it. He landed gently in the storage bay, and immediately yelled into the air. He still wasn’t sure exactly how comms worked in this ship.

  “Alpha, don’t leave yet. There’s something you need to see.”

  After being told what they’d experienced on the bridge, Alpha turned ashen—even more so than usual—and immediately headed down into the ship to view the transmission for himself. Lucas and Asha stayed on the bridge while the ship hovered in autopilot. Alpha had warned them not to touch anything while he was gone, and Lucas thought that might be for the best as he didn’t want to be swirling through a random console menu and accidentally dump all of their water.

  On the floor, the child was awake and squirming uncomfortably, but still not crying. Asha scooped up one of the bottles from the holotable and placed it in the baby’s tiny hands. He began sucking at it profusely. He was so thin Lucas swore he could almost see the liquid trickling down into his stomach. Asha watched him solemnly for a while, then spoke.

  “My mother was a whore in Mumbai.”

  Lucas jerked his gaze toward her, caught off guard by the unexpectedly frank revelation. Asha continued, ignoring his surprise.

  “She was forced into it by her father, who took every cent she earned and fed her with scraps. When he died, she was stuck in the life as there were other men who took his place and wouldn’t let her out.”

  Lucas was stunned she was sharing something so personal. He kept silent to avoid saying anything to cause her to seal up again. Her eyes were fixed on the child as she continued.

  “A white American businessman who had recently moved to the city got her pregnant. It was an unspeakable shame, and by the time she knew it for sure, her dishonor was doubled by the fact that the child was a girl. Her friends pleaded with her to abort, the men who owned her threatened to kill her if she didn’t. She didn’t listen. She fled to Murud, a nearby village. When she had me, the women there told her to throw me in the jungle and leave me there. One even tried to stea
l me in the night and do it for her. I was a bad omen, a cursed child.”

  She absentmindedly spun around the cylinder in her Magnum as she spoke, never making eye contact with Lucas.

  “She refused. Instead, she went back to Mumbai and tracked down the businessman. She found out who he was. Someone prominent. A captain of industry. He was shocked and horrified to learn of my existence. At first he refused all contact with her, but after she threatened to tell his family and his company the truth, he offered her fifty thousand dollars to never see him again. She demanded a hundred. She got it.”

  Flinging the loaded cylinder back into the gun with a snap, she paced around the baby’s makeshift bed as he continued to inhale the contents of the bottle.

  “She used the money to escape to America, to buy a home for us, to send me to the best private schools. She worked as a maid and saved every penny she could for my future. She was at my first runway show with tears in her eyes. She framed my first contract and hung it on the wall. She died before I landed my first TV pilot, but I know she would have been on set with a plate of tandoori chicken for the cast and crew.”

  She finally turned her eyes toward Lucas.

  “Ten million girls in India were aborted or executed over the past twenty years. My mother said no.”

  She looked at the child.

  “I have to say no too.”

  Lucas was amazed by this entirely new side of her. But it was short lived.

  “So you better not let this goddamn kid die or I’ll slit your throat and feed you to Alpha.”

  Lucas paused.

  “I won’t.”

  He turned to face her.

  “I had a boy once,” he finally admitted. “I wasn’t the father I should have been. The least I can do is to try and take care of the last son of Earth as best I can.”

  If the child wasn’t the youngest person on the globe, he had to be close. And if all went according to plan, soon he would in fact be the planet’s last infant.

  Lucas walked over to the child and, for the first time, picked him up. He was shocked at how light he was, and it felt like he almost weighed less than his usual companion, Natalie. The child dropped his empty bottle, which rolled across the floor. He stared into Lucas’s eyes curiously, but neither smiled nor screamed.

  Glancing up at Asha, Lucas realized that her story explained a great many things about her. Her iron will, her constant resourcefulness, and her eternal will to survive. It even explained her exotic looks and how she was able to convincingly pretend to be a wounded damsel in distress on the road. She’d been an actual actress.

  Some people were born survivors. Lucas wasn’t. He was made one. He had no such backstory to give him that sort of steel constitution. Strength was something he’d found only after the world ended.

  He looked at the child. What sort of strength would he have, should he survive? The offspring of a cannibal rapist and his slave in a crumbling hell? At least he didn’t have to spend all that much time there.

  “What should we call him?” Lucas asked, suddenly realizing another question they hadn’t addressed. “We can’t just go around calling him ‘the kid.’ And it’s not like he came with a collar with a name on it.”

  “We probably couldn’t even pronounce it if he had,” Asha replied. She hesitated.

  “We’re not parents, you realize that?”

  “Of course not, but ‘guardians’ is probably more of an appropriate term now than it ever was.”

  After thinking for a moment, she spoke.

  “What about Noah?” she said.

  “The one who survived the flood?”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “You’re religious?” Lucas said, surprised.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Me neither, but it’s hard to deny that it fits.”

  He held the child out in front of him.

  “Noah, huh. Well there you go.”

  Noah had no opinion about his new name, and stared over Lucas’s shoulder to the lights of the holotable while chewing on his hand. His burns looked less angry, but were still noticeable. Lucas set him back down in the cylinder. They really were going to have to figure out a better place for him to sleep.

  “Is that what this is? Our ark?” he said as he looked up at the ceiling and all around the bridge with his arms spread wide.

  “Now the ship needs a name?” Asha asked with a sneer.

  “Didn’t you ever name your car?”

  She shook her head.

  “I guess it’s a guy thing. Your gun then?”

  “No, why, what’s yours named?”

  He glanced at Natalie’s barrel over his shoulder.

  “Never mind.”

  The Ark. But one with only two species of animals onboard.

  9

  Asha busied herself cleaning her newly acquired gun and Lucas played around with the holotable controls. They didn’t even hear Alpha enter the room; Lucas merely spotted him out of the corner of his eye. His gray form was stiff and rigid.

  “You saw it?” Lucas asked hurriedly.

  “What did it say?” said Asha, standing up from the ground, which was littered with submachine gun parts.

  “The message . . .” There was a twinge of something resembling emotion in Alpha’s voice. “The message was for me.”

  Alpha threw a flat disc like the one he’d given Lucas on the holotable. An interface appeared and he waved it over in the direction of the viewscreen to transfer the image to it. It was the dark creature. The video began to play. It was the same series of aggressive grunts and growls they’d seen on the mothership’s bridge.

  “It’s for you?” Lucas asked. “How is that possible?”

  “As I said previously, any ship I operate is tagged with my unique biological signature. When we activated the ship, they were able to locate me and deduce I was alive with a working craft. They contacted the [garbled] ship when you boarded it as they tracked the transport’s signature to this location. This is a short-range transport vessel and does not have a long-range communicator, so they looped that message through the [garbled] ship in hopes that I would see it when I came here. They know what I am planning.”

  “And they were trying to contact you, specifically? Why?” asked Asha.

  Alpha paused.

  “I have not been entirely forthcoming about my position in the [garbled] combat force.”

  The video continued to play, the menacing creature taking up most of their field of vision behind Alpha.

  “I am a scientist, tasked with mainly military projects to aid the cause of my race. My father was also a scientist, and possessed the greatest inborn intelligence quotient of anyone across our entire system. I was sent here as punishment for a time when he disobeyed a direct order from him.” He motioned to the creature on the screen.

  “Who is he?”

  “High commander of the fleet. I will not even attempt to tell you his actual name. Refer to him as . . .”

  He stopped to try and think of an identifier.

  “To use your own simplistic alphabet once again . . . ‘Omicron.’”

  Lucas didn’t bother to correct him that the alphabet he kept citing wasn’t even one Lucas knew. But perhaps he knew that. Lucas couldn’t even picture what a Greek omicron looked like.

  “He is an extremely important military figure, and he decided sending my father’s youngest son into battle was the best way to keep him in line with the cause.”

  Alpha looked toward the commander’s face on the viewscreen. The volume was low so the grunts and growls were muffled.

  “The message says that my father is dead, my brothers and their families along with him. How, I do not know. He says it was a [garbled] strike that killed them, but I am . . . unsure.”

  Lucas didn’t know whether to say he was sorry, but the words escaped him. Asha was silent as well.

  Alpha continued, though his voice was much lower than usual. Grief ? Pain? It was hard to tel
l. He paused the video, and the commander stared intensely at all three of them.

  “The sum of the knowledge my father had was vast, and he taught us everything he knew about genetics, electronics, physics, [garbled], and [garbled]. Our clan was highly revered for our scientific contribution to the war effort.”

  “Why did they send you here in the first place if you were so valuable?” Lucas asked.

  “As I said, a lesson to my clan. But I was never supposed to be in actual combat. I rode on a transport ship and was merely tasked with scientific research of your planet. My commanding officers were killed and I was assigned new overseers who were not well enough informed of my station. I was forced into battle and subsequently imprisoned. The situation would have been resolved had the war not ended abruptly.”

  Lucas thought back to the hologram video when he’d first boarded the ship, how Alpha had pleaded not to be sent into combat.

  “Omicron states in this transmission that they are coming to collect me, and my reported treason during the Earth campaign is forgiven. He says I must continue to serve the [garbled] the way my clan has for generations.”

  “But you don’t believe him . . .”

  “How or why my clan was killed, I do not know. Either they were exterminated accidentally as they say, and they want me to spend the next few centuries slaving away to rebuild the scraps of my father’s military work, or they were killed purposefully and I am being hunted down.”

  “Why would your family have been killed by your own people?” asked Asha.

  “I do not know. My father frequently sparred with his superiors over the applications of his work, which was used to cause much harm and suffering. But it must have been something of incredible significance or danger for my entire clan to be slaughtered.”

  Lucas finally found the words he felt were required.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Alpha’s expression didn’t change.

  “It matters not. Escape is now more important than ever. I wish to be neither a slave nor a corpse, and I must begin work on the [garbled] core immediately or they will intercept us in a matter of days. I presume it does not even need to be said that as humans you would be summarily executed on the spot if we are caught. Even the child.”