Day of Reckoning

by Isaiah Lee

  The cut on her forehead had nearly stopped its bleeding now, with only the occasional drip from her nose. Karen panted and managed to say, “Yeah.”

  Jason, who was covered in James’s blood nearly from head to toe, crept toward the opening. They would have to cross another fifteen feet of unprotected sidewalk in order to gain access to the hopefully unlocked offices.

  Jason urged Karen to run first. She was unarmed and the aliens knew not of their position. Her movement would garner their attention, but they probably wouldn’t have time to react. Jason’s movement likely wouldn’t go unnoticed. By the time he ran, he would have caught all the attention.

  Chapter 45

  Karen sprinted across the opening. Several of the nearest alien soldiers spotted her form as it crossed their vision. As Jason readied himself for his turn, four aliens opened fire on his location. The whi whi of the energy weapons dared Jason’s advancement from his position. The shots were persistent. He held the pistol above cover and blindly fired twice. His shots went unsurprisingly wide.

  A group of survivors nearby spotted Jason and Karen and began working their way toward the pair. They opened fire on the Qspolians; the attack provided Jason the split-second he needed to cross the sidewalk. He threw the door open and entered behind Karen as two of the survivors were fatally wounded.

  Jason began dragging anything he could find in front of the door to the building. The mostly-glass door was protected by steel framework that would have deterred criminals from attempting to break in. After a few back-breaking seconds, two computer desks, six office chairs of the cheap and dilapidated sort, and a large, half-empty filing cabinet were stacked against the entryway. It probably wasn’t enough to stop even one of the creatures, but the effort offered a little much-needed comfort.

  Karen made a point not to watch out the barred façade of the office building as the other survivors were mowed down without remorse. There was just enough sunlight beaming through the barred windows in the foyer to light up the hallway leading to the elevator. Power had been off in the building for days now; the temperature inside was just as unbearably cold as outside, minus the breeze.

  On the far end of the hallway was the doorway leading to a stairwell. Jason walked first, with Karen close in tow. He held the pistol in front of him, sweeping it left and right as they climbed. The movements were strictly for show, an effort to ease Karen’s nerves. In reality, Jason couldn’t see a damned thing and wouldn’t know it if a Qspolian were three inches from his nose. He didn’t know if she could see him.

  They stopped on the second-level landing and listened intently. Outside, the war raged on. Concussions from incessant explosions and gunfire rattled the fragile, frozen windows throughout the structure. Hearing nothing immediately lethal, Jason began climbing again. He palmed the handrail with one hand, helping to guide himself up the black enclosure.

  Upon reaching the third, and final, floor, Karen stopped Jason before he could open the door leading into the offices. “Jason…” The building shook again as an explosion sounded right above the building.

  Jason listened intently to their surroundings, barely hearing Karen’s plea. “Yeah,” he answered automatically.

  “Jason, in case we don’t make it…”

  He turned around now and faced her – or in her general direction, anyway – and stopped her in mid-sentence. “Nothing is going to happen to either of us,” he assured her.

  Karen sighed in frustration. “We don’t know that, Jason. Now, shut up and listen to me. It’s important.” She gave a quick hiatus in case Jason was insistent on interrupting again. “Jason, I need you to know something.”

  He pulled her close into an embrace that nothing could have broken. Nothing human, anyway. “What’s up?”

  “You know, we’ve spent a lot of time together. I adore you, Jason. You asked me to marry you. If we…”

  Jason stopped her there with a gentle finger over her lips. He was thrilled he hadn’t missed in the darkness and gotten her broken nose. “We will make it out of this. I promise you that.”

  She grinned wide, a single tear falling against her freezing cheek. “When we make it out of here… We need to finalize your proposal. I want us to get married.”

  Jason agreed. “Absolutely.” The enormous creature outside screeched and the ground shook ever so slightly. His tone turned worried. “First, let’s get out there and see if we can do anything to help.”

  He kissed her before pushing open the door for the third floor offices. As expected, there was not another soul around. It appeared the place had been ransacked; computers were smashed and desks overturned. Files were strewn around the cubicles and personal knickknacks had been destroyed or otherwise defiled. A collectible, stuffed puppy had the blunt end of a pencil rammed right into its hind-quarters.

  Most of the windows on this floor had blinds that were pulled. Natural light poured in, illuminating everything. Jason and Karen were visible as well. From their elevated level, the battlefield became clearer.

  It also became much more frightening.

  On the horizon, hundreds more enemy ships were working their way toward the current battle. It was unclear what these ships were; all that was clear was that they were incoming, and fast.

  Several of the satellite healing ships had been destroyed. There were only three remaining around the monster. Tanks and helicopters alike began running out of ammunition. They had zero chance of escape after losing the ability to defend themselves.

  Mounds of dead human and alien soldiers dotted the battlefield. Streets were scattered with bodies and destroyed vehicles. Frozen patches of blood colored the otherwise barren landscape.

  Human forces were dwindling. All but one fighter jet had been destroyed; the one that remained was currently taking fire and performing evasive maneuvers. There were only about a thousand human soldiers left in fighting condition. Thousands had already fallen.

  Jason pressed the button on the radio and began to speak. “This is Jason Carter, aid to the President of the United States. It is my unfortunate duty to report that President Neil has fallen in battle. President Neil instructed that either myself or Karen Pierce, the other presidential aid, give further instruction. “Enemy reinforcements are inbound and should be upon us within fifteen minutes.”

  At that moment, the giant wavered. It took a step and found its footing was less than sturdy. The creature leaned forward, almost falling to the ground. It quickly regained its composure, but not before Jason saw it. In the center of the creature’s head, an exposed membranous region the same shade orange as its eyes had been. When it called for reinforcements with the energy beam, the creature damaged the armor on its head. Had he been on the ground, surrounded by destroyed buildings and other debris, he would have never seen the weakness for what it was.

  “Aim for the head! On top, right in the center! Aim for the exposed orange spot!” Jason was ecstatic for once. He knew not what the region was, but for the sake of argument, surely the orange membrane was susceptible just as the creature’s eyes had been. “If we can fell the creature, we can win this war!” He didn’t know if it would really help, but it was the last hope with the current shape of the resistance forces.

  Jason and Karen watched helplessly as the fleet of helicopters and the single intact fighter jet began pummeling the creature’s head with every bit of firepower they had left. Similarly to its destroyed eyes, orange goo began to pour from the wound as the armor began to crumble. The giant began to stumble as a low sound began to emanate from somewhere inside it. There was no pained screech as before. Only the low vibration that seemed to shake the Earth around it.

  With another volley of missiles aimed directly into the chasm, the creature fell. A spasm shot through the tentacles as they flopped downward lifelessly to the ground. Instead of folding its body under the massive cranial disc, the creature simply crashed into the ground in a broken heap of armor and seeping orange liquid.

  The three satell
ite ships fell first. They stopped following a rotation. The curative energy beams ceased to exist. They simply dropped from the sky, exploding from the impact with the Earth. Next, the fighter ships began to follow suit. They plummeted downward, crashing into whatever was below them. Whatever direction they were headed in as the creature fell is the direction in which they crash landed.

  “Cease fire!” Jason called into the radio as he watched with delight from the office building. His head was pressed against the freezing glass, right beside Karen who was mimicking the motion, as if that effort could get them closer to the action. Or, more appropriately, the lack thereof.

  In the distance was the fleet of alien fighter ships. They were much closer than Jason had anticipated when he gave a fifteen minute window. They, too, crashed to the Earth. Whatever had controlled them ceased to exist with the death of the creature.

  The remaining alien foot soldiers did not simply fall over dead. They stopped in their tracks and ceased firing; the reaction was one made of shock and fear. Weapons began to lower; some even tumbled to the ground. The eerie, green glow that each and every alien weapon once possessed had faded to a dull grey. Their energy was gone, proving the weapons useless.

  The resistance army took full advantage and took no prisoners. They decimated the residual alien forces within minutes.

  Chapter 46

  With the death of the giant, which had been dubbed Tiny in typical ironic fashion, alien forces around the globe began to crumble. All living foot soldiers were destroyed quickly. Alien fighters and troop transports crashed into the Earth, utterly useless. Green-flamed explosions dotted every continent and every country. Enemy soldiers found themselves stranded without anything to defend themselves except for their brute strength and speed. Even still, they were quickly and efficiently destroyed.

  It was unknown whether Tiny acted as a queen over its brood, a living base of operations, or whether it had some other sinister position in the Qspolian world. What was abundantly clear, though, was that Tiny had some sort of control over all Qspolian technology. With its demise, each weapon and every ship instantly failed to operate.

  What followed was a flood of theories, most unprovable. Some speculated that the aliens communicated on a level of telepathy and that Tiny provided a hub of sorts that relayed and transmitted these signals. Another theory was that it emitted radioactive signals that controlled the aliens like drones in a beehive. This was the most widely accepted theory, although it remained totally unproven since most technology had been thoroughly destroyed.

  What was also known worldwide was one glaring fact that couldn’t be denied. Without the destruction of Tiny, the human race would not have survived the onslaught.

  Over twenty of the survival bunkers on the west coast of the United States alone had been compromised. Being caught off guard, every person in the bunker was killed, regardless of age, sex, or any other identifying factor. Thousands of people were needlessly murdered in this fashion. Aliens somehow learned of the entrance into the bunker and either blasted their way in or took over a human’s body in order to trick their way in. As with Amy Yun and her crew, humans who acted as host to an alien were completely believable until cover was blown. The disguise was always given up deliberately, and by that point it was too late to save the occupants of the unsuspected bunker.

  A couple of months after the initial ship crash-landed in Shepherd Park, communication infrastructure had been repaired between most countries. Power remained out in most places, save for overly-prepared survival bunkers and a few businesses that were equipped with natural gas-operated backup generators. These businesses were converted into shelters and refugee camps.

  Final casualty numbers were disheartening to say the least. Early casualty numbers were relatively close, considering communication had been knocked out. Of the nearly 7.7 billion people in the world, ninety-two percent had been annihilated from the Qspolian invasion. A little over six hundred million people remained scattered around the globe. Of those, another twenty million would die over the next six months from starvation and complications due to untreated medical issues. There simply weren’t enough doctors alive to meet the current demands. Destroyed crops had to be replanted and reworked, but eventually a mostly-stable food supply had been reestablished.

  Upon learning of President James Neil’s death, Vice President George Lewis became the forty-sixth president of the United States. With Washington DC having been completely blown off the map, survival bunker WDC2 surprisingly hadn’t been touched after President Neil and his soldiers left. The capital of the United States was moved to Lexington, Virginia, which had nearly completely evaded the onslaught. The town offered enough protection for the reforming government while most buildings remained unscathed. The Virginia Military Institute proved a suitable enough replacement for the White House.

  Once the battle was over, Jason and Karen hitched a ride back to WDC2. They wanted to share James’s story firsthand, to let his wife, Susan, know how valiantly her husband had fought. Susan immediately broke down when she realized her husband wasn’t in the return party. Jason and Karen followed Susan back to her room and shut the door. Everyone would soon know the fate of her late husband; she wasn’t sure that she could face the pitiful stares and worrisome expressions quite yet.

  “Your husband,” Karen started quietly, “he fought bravely to the end. He wouldn’t just stand back and give orders. He was determined to fight alongside his soldiers.”

  Susan sniffled. “Sounds like him. He never was one to point and direct. He always wanted to be hands on, in the middle of whatever was going on. He always said, ‘what kind of leader would I be if I won’t get my hands dirty?’ He is… was… a wonderful leader and such a sweet, caring man.” She seemed to consider something, then managed to ask, “Did he suffer?” She dreaded the answer, but it was something that would haunt her if she didn’t at least ask.

  Jason shook his head. He sat down on Susan’s opposite side, doing his best to console the distraught woman. “James… it was quick.” Jason wasn’t about to tell the woman that her husband’s throat had been cut and that he had literally bled out one heartbeat at a time. There was nothing that could have been done to save James Neils’s life. That was clear when the wound happened. No need to worry her over it.

  Thankfully, Susan buried her face in her hands and sobbed instead of seeing the grotesque expression that Jason’s face had twisted into. He relived those terrifying moments in the APC, when the blast occurred. Watching his friend die. Watching as blood spurted from his destroyed neck. Lying underneath the dying man.

  Even still, nothing could compare to the panic when he saw Karen’s face, smeared with fresh blood. In an instant, it felt as though his heart had stopped. As if his entire world had ceased to spin. The wounds proved superficial with only a broken nose, laceration across the forehead, and severely busted lower lip. She suffered a blackened eye and bruised jaw, but was otherwise unharmed.

  Fortunately, it seemed most of the injuries sustained by Karen and Jason since the invasion began would prove non-life-threatening. The bullet that passed through Jason’s left arm left a hellacious scar, and story to go along with it; he was lucky, given all the grime and otherwise foreign objects littering the battlefield, that infection never set in.

  Susan Neil, James’s widow, and their children were offered permanent residence in the Virginia Military Institute. She was told “It’s the least we can do,” although the gesture did little to appease her grief. She and her two daughters, Isabelle and Rachel-Ann, eventually found permanency in a refugee camp about a hundred miles north of Washington DC.

  All civilization had been annihilated; the camp, dubbed Camp Hope, was home to nearly three-hundred other survivors. An unspoken rule, which was one that Susan was happy to abide by, was that nobody asked about other survivors’ losses. Nobody asked where her husband was or where the girls’ father was; it was a given that if a man didn’t walk among them that he had pro
bably been killed in the invasion. If a grieving person wished to talk through their pain and share their stories with the others, it was at their discretion and their own initiation.

  Another unspoken rule was that everyone who resided at Camp Hope would pull their own weight. It did not matter what their profession was before the start of the new world. Each and every person coming into the camp was to fill in whatever job requirements needed filled at that time. If, later on down the road, there were two people who were better suited for the others’ job, they could, at their own discretion, swap job assignments so long as they were still productive.

  Many refugee camps around the country, and eventually the world, adopted the same rules and guidelines. Although bartering was widely sought after, each camp was to be as self-sufficient as possible. Stocks of cryogenically-preserved food sources, such as seeds and sprouts, were divided and distributed according to population.

  Those who opposed society banded together and eventually formed civilizations full of raiders and other general ne’er-do-wells. Opposing factions fought for control of territory and supplies; Refugee camps became the sole source of supplies and other necessities for these raiding parties. Soldiers ended up having to guard the camps to keep survivors from other survivors. Building crews set out to fortify refugee camps and build walls and fences as necessary.

  As for Jason and Karen, they left WDC2 soon after giving Susan the unfortunate news of her husband. The thoughts of being confined – underground of all places – was unbearable. She made a point to gather her belongings from her room in the bunker, but only after catching a few hours of sleep. They were both exhausted beyond belief from the exertion and sleep deprivation of war.

  Once thoroughly on the road, at least two hours away from WDC2 and with no pit-stops in sight, Jason finally had to ask. “What is on that flash drive that is so important, anyway?” He hadn’t paid much attention to it when she first packed it. But now, after having essentially survived an apocalypse, Jason was dying to know what she valued so highly.