An End tst-2

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “You don’t need to speak, Jean. Just see.”

  Fingertips brushed his cheek with the touch of ice, sandpaper brush of something not human, yet in human form. He felt the silver teardrops solidify on his cheeks, so cold, so alien. They fell from his face, mercury pellets. He blinked and saw for the first time in

  “Hannah?”

  She smiled. “Not this time, Reynald. Call me Maire.”

  “What is…Why am I—”

  “I need the code.”

  “I don’t know any—”

  She struck out, slicing a fingernail into Reynald’s neck. The wound wasn’t deep, but a line of crimson slid down his neck, clavicle, puddled in supra-sternal notch before winding into the hair of his chest.

  Maire leaned in close, looking directly into Reynald’s eyes as she licked a bit of blood from his neck. She pulled back, tasted her lips.

  “That code, Jean. Genetic code.”

  “Commander, what is it?”

  Reynald did not have an answer for his subordinate. Windham stood beside him, in awe, weapon still held before him, as if a projectile weapon would be able to stop the enemy. The human forces were alive at the whim of the projected.

  Reynald cleared his throat, tapped the side of his neck twice to activate the direct connection to Command. “We need aerial reinforcement. Align satkills to our coordinates.”

  The connection responded in his ear. “Wait for orders.”

  The atomic had created a beautiful blast crater in the countryside, dozens of miles across, at least a mile deep. The strike had been intended to destroy the entry point of the projected enemy, but the visual confirmation revealed otherwise.

  “It goes deeper than we thought.”

  Deeper was an understatement, Reynald thought to himself. They had assumed that the projected were coming out of an alien vessel under the surface of the planet. They had assumed that bombing the entry point would destroy the vessel and end the enemy threat.

  At the bottom of the blast crater, Reynald saw the twisted and burned edge of a circular hole, an immense silver cylinder sinking into the earth. Their atomic attack had blown the top off of a tube that someone had built into the center of the planet.

  Someone.

  The projecteds were standing at the edge of the tube, androgynous, motionless. Some of the men had taken to calling their enemy “angels.” Reynald and his soldiers were among a very select group who had survived more than one engagement with the projected humans. He suspected that this would be the last encounter. He could feel the end of this war approaching, and something in his gut told him that it would not be an end beneficial to the human race.

  “Orders, sir?”

  Reynald impatiently raised his hand, silencing Windham. He looked at the crater’s floor with his implants, magnifying his field of vision until he could make out the individual faces of the projecteds. So uniform. So emotionless.

  “Satkill offline. Reinforcement unavailable. Hold your position and wait for orders.”

  Reynald shook his head. If those projecteds decided to attack, his forces would be outnumbered and slaughtered by the angels.

  As if reading his thoughts, the angel within Reynald’s magnified layer of vision turned its head and started walking toward him. The hundreds of other projecteds began to follow.

  Windham slammed another EM pack into his weapon, brought the scope up to his eye. Reynald placed his hand on the top of the weapon, pushed it down to aim at the ground.

  “This time, I think they want to talk. Hold your fire.”

  “I knew you would understand, Jean. I knew you were different than the hot-blooded men in suits who thought they ran the world.”

  “Why the blood, Hannah?”

  She grinned at his insistence in using that misnomer for this level. “It will be a gift, of sorts, to those who sent me here.”

  “A gift?”

  She leaned in close, whispered. “A child. We’ll send them a child of

  silver is my favorite.”

  He grumbled under his breath as Jo spoke to the jeweler.

  “Jemie?”

  “Jo?”

  “How can you afford this?”

  He shrugged. “I can’t afford it.”

  “But I thought—”

  “I can’t do it, Jo. You know we can’t afford it right now.”

  “But James, I—”

  “Not now, Jo. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Her lips began to tremble and James heard sobs as he stormed out of the jewelers and into the cobblestone Paris streets.

  It was hours before he realized that he had been walking through the streets in a mindless torpor. He was on the docks, watching moonlight dance over the ripples when bright motion caught his eye from above: shooting stars, hundreds of them.

  Whistler shook his head, blinked his eyes, but the stars kept falling.

  late night and you’re driving me

  crazy. Can’t you feel it? Different worlds, different times…We’ve known each other before.”

  “I know.”

  Stars fell in that stillness, and he wished, and she wished, and they probably wished for the same thing under that void, but neither spoke and neither acknowledged that struggle.

  “I’ll make you a character in the book.” Hope felt his smile as he said that, felt her own smile as she heard it.

  “Can you do that?”

  “It’s my book. I can do anything. Fuck it.”

  “Then your book needs to include cowboys. And teddy bears. And even that Whistler guy you love so much.”

  “Me? Love? Shirley, you jest.”

  “Of course. You could never love.”

  “Never.”

  “Never at all.”

  “Nope.”

  Stillness and distance breached.

  “Keep your distance!”

  The angels kept walking toward Reynald’s men, who nervously held weapons before them, watching for the order, yearning to dispatch these non-humans with the EM pulses that reduced them to useless balls of silver.

  “Don’t fire,” Reynald broadcast through the comm implants. “Something’s different.”

  “It’s a trap, sir. It has to be.” Windham kept his trigger finger firmly in place.

  “No.” Reynald rubbed his eyes. A dull pain had begun to throb just behind them. Something was different…The angels were different.

  So close…He could feel them, feel that blank stare of inhumanity. No expressions, no weapons, no indication of hostility. They just walked up the crater, toward Reynald’s small band of soldiers.

  Windham was restless. He was a good boy, but Reynald sensed that his impatience would be his undoing. Windham wiped sweat from his eyes, adjusted his helmet’s position on his head.

  “Sir? What do we do?”

  jean

  “What?”

  “Orders, sir?”

  jean reynald

  Reynald blinked to clear his eyes, but the haze that had descended over his vision was still there, casting a lightness over the world, halos over the heads of the projected angels.

  “Stay here.”

  “Sir?”

  Reynald stood up from the rim of the crater, began to walk down the side.

  “Reynald!”

  He turned back to Windham. “It’s okay. It’s time.”

  He walked to meet the angels.

  “I’d watched you for centuries. Watched your line. I know that you were the one. I saw to it that you’d be the one at the first encounter. You and your pretty little American boy.”

  “Don’t hurt him.”

  Maire’s face clouded. “I won’t hurt him, dear Jean, but he has to be the one who goes home for me.”

  “Don’t…He has a family, a young bride—”

  “I know this. And I know what I need from him.”

  “Please, don’t do this.”

  “His son, our daughter…A perfect extinction.”

  Hunter slumped in the a
ngel’s metal grasp. He was too shocked to cry, too exhausted to feel, too old for his young life. The shield doors cycled shut behind the angel, cutting off Hunter’s view of the scene of death. He could see his mother’s body on the ground, torn apart by another wave of phased flak.

  They’re all dead out there. Mommy’s dead.

  Loud snap as the phase shield reactivated around the building. The angel gently placed Hunter on the floor next to ten or twelve other boys, all sitting in silence, all staring at Hunter. He curled into a fetal position and rocked back, rocked forth. Many of the boys did. Torn from sleep, rushed to the Complex, sitting there with that knowledge that the city was dead out there, their mothers were dead in the city and their fathers were dead or dying in the sky or in the outer.

  “Stay here, boys. We’ll be leaving soon.”

  An explosion from outside, close, hard. Each of the angels flickered to static for a moment. The lights in the chamber went out for an instant before returning as red emergency lights. The angels looked at one another, a higher form of communication resonating between their images. They all turned to look at a door on one side of the chamber.

  The door cycled open and another angel walked through, holding a little girl.

  Hunter sat up. It was the little girl from the other side of the fence. He’d only ever seen two girl children, this one and his baby sister who had died days after her birth from the silver. Most of the boys in the room had never before seen a little girl.

  She recognized Hunter as the angel carried her by the boys. She smiled and waved. Hunter did the same, wanted to say something, but the angel quickly carried her through another door, which slammed shut with a phase shield.

  Hunter wondered if he would ever see her again.

  “What is he doing?”

  Windham put the scope back up to his eye, a fluid reflex learned from those months of war. Reynald was deep into the blast crater now, slowing his pace. He bent and placed his EM rifle on the ground, held his hands before him as he kept walking into the mass of angels. Windham saw one of the projecteds break away from the group, approach Reynald.

  He flipped the safety on the EM pack of his rifle, brought the crosshairs of the scope to rest on the chest of the projected, where he knew his pulse weapon would find the silver ball that created the illusion of the angel.

  It flickered for an instant, an intense light, and Reynald raised his arms to shield his eyes.

  “Commander!”

  “Nan, that was the—”

  “I know, little flower.”

  “But I want to—”

  “No time, Lily. You’ll have all the time in the world to meet your new friends later.”

  The angel jogged through the metal hallway. Another shield door cycled open and closed as she passed into another chamber carrying Lily. The floor stretched out as a platform into the spherical room. At its center there was a small chair with restraints. The little girl began to tremble in the coolness of the room and the fear of her situation.

  Nan slowed her pace as she walked out onto the extended catwalk to the center of the sphere. She gently placed Lily in the vacuum chair and fastened the restraint harness around her.

  “What’s going to happen, Nan? Do I have to go see the lady now?”

  Nan shook her head as she tightened the final restraint, smoothed Lily’s tousled hair back from her forehead. “No time to see her now, child. It wouldn’t be safe for you to stay here any longer.”

  “Why are they in the sky?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough, sweetness.”

  Nan leaned in close, kissed Lily’s forehead with her cool metallish lips. She squeezed Lily’s hand and walked back down the platform toward the chamber’s shield door.

  “Nan?”

  She turned, no tears on her face because of her inability to produce them, countenance now emotionless and cold because she had to be strong for the little girl, had to realize that the Catalyst was never hers to begin with. “Yes?”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “No, Lily. You’ll have a new caretaker in the void.”

  “But I—”

  “Goodbye, Lily.”

  Nan turned, walked through the shield door, which slammed shut and snapped with phase static. The little girl was left alone in the utter silence of her bubble. The sound of static increased as the walkway to the center of the chamber retracted into the wall of the sphere. The wall itself began to shimmer, and several ports along its circumference opened to allow the thick gelatin of liquidspace travel to fill up the sphere.

  Lily struggled in her restraints as the bottom of the sphere filled with mercurial phase. The level steadily increased until it washed over her bare feet, ankles, shins, knees, the hem of her lavender Honeybear Brown nightgown. She tried to kick at that cold metal fire, but was unable. The tickling, burning sensation of liquid reaching into her, preserving her biologics against the stress of Light X.

  Liquid reached the arms of her vacuum chair, covered her hands and lower arms, upper arms, shoulders, crept up her neck. She shouldn’t have panicked, tried not to panic, didn’t want to panic, but panicked nonetheless. Lily began to scream, sobbed, flailed her head around as the mercury touched her chin, her earlobes…Her wet hair sent drops of the silver cascading out as she tried to spin around.

  “Nan!”

  Caressing jawline, earlobe. Tears coursed down the child’s face, mixed with the invasive silver. Touching bottom lip.

  “Mommy!”

  Lily closed her mouth as the level rose. Upper lip, nose. She strained back in the seat but was unable to prevent the silver from pouring into her nostrils. She instinctively exhaled, exhaled, silver over eyes, clamped eyes shut, felt silver finally cover the top of her head.

  Robbed of senses, completely submerged, pain in her chest from a heart attempting to tear itself out, lungs on fire. A chamber spins, a chamber resonates. Liquid to fire, fire to space. A child’s mind falls into the silence of fear complete.

  peu de fleur

  a voice and

  “If you’ve no more use for me, just end this, Hannah.”

  Her jovial smile fell from her face. “Don’t call me that here.”

  Reynald grinned. “You will never win this war.”

  She struck out again, letting more blood spill from the wound in his neck. “I’ve already won it, human.” Reynald gasped in pain as Maire dug into his flesh with her silver nails. “You were the perfect flux, the perfect medium…You’ve done your part already. You’ve spread the sickness further than you could ever imagine.”

  Windham broke from the line of soldiers and ran down the side of the crater, weapon held before him, trained on the angel closest to Reynald. He pulled the trigger, watched the magball tear through the angel’s chest. The image dissembled, the silver projector falling harmlessly to the ground.

  Reynald spun around. “No! Windham, don’t—”

  Angels were scattering, and more human soldiers descended from the rim of the crater. EM slugs flew into the mass of angels from the soldiers’ weapons, but did very little damage to their numbers. Windham chambered another slug, brought his weapon up to fire.

  “Joseph!”

  joseph windham

  “Don’t do it!”

  don’t

  Windham squinted and shook off the painful tug of the voice that seemed to come from behind his eyes. He shot from the hip, knowing by instinct and experience that his aim was true, and the angels closest to Reynald would be destroyed.

  The slug struck out at the projecteds with that slurping crackle of the EM wave, but it was struck down in mid-air by a field of light projected by the hands of an angel. A flicker in time and it was right there before him, androgynous face only remotely suggesting human origin, eyes not burning with the fury that combat should brand into the eyes of an opponent, but simply staring back with an emptiness that transcended his comprehension. The angel knocked the weapon out of Windham’s grasp, threw him back
on to the ground.

  don’t

  All around the interior of the crater, EM slugs were being knocked down, soldiers were tangling in metallish embrace with angels in hand-to-hand combat. The humans were already outnumbered, and more projecteds were emerging from the exposed entrance to the tunnel. The fighting was fierce, the din of battle a mixture of human screams and piercing snaps of static.

  “Reynald?”

  Reynald walked over and helped Windham up. The sound of battle had disappeared in just those seconds, and the two men surveyed the scorched expanse of the crater. There were hundreds, thousands of the projecteds standing in silence, the bodies of Reynald’s forces laying at their feet. The angels made no move to harm the two remaining men.

  “Shit. Oh shit.” Windham unsheathed the knife from the front of his armored vest.

  “Put it down, Joe.” Reynald looked toward the metal entrance of the tunnel at the bottom of the crater…

  “Commander, they’re going to—”

  “No. They could have killed us already.” The angels were looking at the crater’s bottom as well. “They’re waiting for something.”

  “We can’t just—”

  “Drop the knife, son.” Windham followed the orders, stood restlessly amidst the thousands of silent angels, completely unarmed. The knife echoed against the rock as it hit the ground. It was the only sound besides the wind.

  A humming, an undertone. They could feel it more than hear it, but it was undeniable. The transport vessel arose from within the tunnel sunk into the earth with a cloud of dust and grit. It hovered above the entrance for a moment before humming horizontally toward Reynald and Windham. The angels silently moved out of its path as it passed through the assembly.

  A man stood upon the boxy, saucer-ish transport, holding nonchalantly to a guardrail with one hand and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette with the other. He tossed the cigarette overboard as the vessel slowed to a halt. A stairway materialized and descended. He wasted no time in walking down, the folds of his black robe sweeping out behind him.

  His hair fluttered in the breeze, an unruly coif of uncertain design and personality. A fine white tangle graced his hairline, adding contrast to a man who was almost entirely composed of dark.

  Reynald sensed Windham tense beside him, preparing himself for anything. Reynald himself was more confused than scared at this newcomer from the tunnel in the earth.