Ascent

by Morgan Rice

“We won’t be able to go back,” Luna said. “Not with everything the aliens did there.”

  The energy blasts looked as though they had utterly destroyed the Survivors’ home. The scale of the blast said that the aliens had been serious about wiping out any attempt by humanity to live on past the invasion of their world.

  Or maybe it said something that held more hope. Maybe it said that Luna and the others were on the right track. The aliens wouldn’t keep trying to kill Ignatius if they weren’t scared that his formula was close to something that could stop them, would they? They wouldn’t put so much effort into it, at least not if they knew that everyone turned back would become one of the controlled again in less than a week.

  “That way,” Ignatius said, pointing.

  Luna did her best to follow the chemist’s directions, although he didn’t seem to understand the scale of some of the obstacles in the way. A sign lay on its side, neon still flickering as it blocked the road. A food truck had been dragged into the middle of the street, opened up by blowtorches like a can whose contents people were desperate to get at. The food would be running out by now, Luna realized. Even the people who weren’t controlled would be desperate.

  Some of the obstacles were too big for the bus alone. More than a couple of cars, and it simply didn’t have the power to shove them out of the way. Luna felt the bus snarl and stall as she shoved it into a cluster of vehicles, pushing like an angry bull but unable to make any progress.

  “We’re stuck,” she yelled.

  A dozen of the Survivors got off the bus to help with it, filing out and starting to push and pull at the cars. That was nothing compared to the numbers who came forward from the crowd of refugees behind them, helping even though they were no longer strong, no longer incapable of feeling tiredness or pain.

  Luna got down from the bus and moved beyond the blockage, looking for a way through. She saw a flicker of movement in one of the nearby buildings, and tensed herself to fight, yet what she saw was a girl who looked even younger than she did, looking out at them with obvious fear.

  “Hey,” Luna called. “You don’t have to be afraid. My name’s Luna. What’s yours?”

  The girl darted back into the building, and maybe the sensible thing to do was to leave her there, but that felt far too much like abandoning someone they might be able to help, and right then, Luna wanted to feel as though she was helping everyone she could before the aliens’ vapor claimed her. Besides, it would take at least another few minutes before the armored bus was free, and the way Luna saw it, she could spend that time standing there pushing, or she could do something that was actually useful.

  She set off following the girl. If it had been anyone other than a girl like her, she probably wouldn’t have done it. Luna had seen firsthand just how desperate the world had made some people. Yet the girl there had looked so scared in the brief instant that Luna had seen her, and something in Luna wanted to be able to help her as she darted into the nearest building after her, and…

  There, another flicker of movement.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” she said. “You’ve seen how many people we have outside. I want to help you.”

  She moved a little deeper into the building. Not far; just enough to try to find the girl. She came out into a large room, and there were half a dozen men waiting there, all dangerous looking and dressed in well-worn clothes that they’d obviously been rooting around in the ruins of LA in. The girl stood among them, gesturing back to Luna.

  “There, I told you I’d bring you a good one,” she said. “So our debt’s cleared, right? Right, Vern? You’ll let me go?”

  “Shut up,” one of the men said.

  He started to step toward Luna, and Luna didn’t wait. She turned and ran. Anything that men like this wanted to lure people here for wouldn’t be good. Talking about “a good one” just made it worse. She sprinted for the way out as fast as she could.

  The girl with them was faster, running after Luna and diving at her, grabbing her ankle so that Luna stumbled.

  “No you don’t!” the girl shouted. “If they don’t sell you, then they’ll sell me, and—”

  Luna kicked her in the face, breaking free, all pity gone after the way she’d tricked her.

  Then the man, Vern, was there, a gun in his hand, raised in a threat.

  “Try to run again and I’ll shoot you in the leg. The people who’ll buy you don’t need you to be able to walk.”

  Luna raised her hands, trying not to think about the times that she’d had guns pointed at her in the past…

  Bobby growled and leapt at the man, biting his arm hard.

  The gun clattered to the floor, and Luna was away running again, Bobby running at her side. She heard the sound of booted feet behind her, followed by shots, and she made sure that she never ran in a straight line for more than a few paces. Shots pinged off the walls, and she knew she’d done the right thing. She heard a cry behind her, and suspected that it might be the other girl, but Luna kept going. She’d already tried to help her, and look where that had gotten her.

  She heard the sound of people ahead, and ran for them. Behind her, the footsteps kept coming, but Luna didn’t care. She just had to—

  “Got you!” Vern said, grabbing hold of her. Luna tried to kick her way free, but the bigger man just lifted her off the floor so that her foot didn’t connect properly.

  “Help!” Luna called out.

  “No one’s going to care,” Vern said as she shouted. “This is a big, bad world. All the governments are gone. The aliens’ world is gone. It’s just us, and what we can take.”

  “We care,” a voice from further along said.

  Luna looked over and sighed with relief. Leon was there, and Ignatius, and about a dozen of the other members of the Survivors, armed with guns. Cub was there too, looking on with obvious anger.

  “Didn’t you see us coming through?” Luna said. “Or were you too busy hiding away, hoping your bait would bring people to you?”

  “I could still kill you,” Vern said, stepping back and pointing his gun at her. He’d obviously retrieved it from the floor before running after her.

  Luna’s mind flashed back to thoughts of the crazy guy at the press conference. This time, she wasn’t just going to stand there and be a victim. This time, she was in control of things.

  “You have one chance to keep living, Vern,” she said. “You can put that gun down, turn around, and run fast enough that when my people come after you, they don’t catch you. Otherwise, when I count to three, they’re going to shoot you, and I’m going to take my chances. I don’t think you’ll be able to fire before all of them, personally.”

  “You think I won’t do it?” he demanded. “You think I won’t shoot you?”

  Luna shrugged. “One… two…”

  He threw down his gun and ran. Luna was… not exactly content to let a man like that go, but was at least glad that he was going. She turned back to the others.

  “So,” Leon said. “We’re your people, are we?”

  “Yes,” Luna said with a sigh of relief. “Yes you are.”

  ***

  They kept going deeper into the city, and now Luna caught flickers of movement among the broken-open stores and the empty houses. No one attacked them now, but she had the feeling that if there hadn’t been so many of them, then they might have been. It frustrated her a little that people might revert to that kind of thing the moment the situation got hard. The coming of the aliens had changed even those people they hadn’t succeeded in transforming with their vapor.

  “Come down!” she yelled up to them, Bobby at her side. “Come and help us win this! Don’t you want your world back? Don’t you want to fight?”

  There was no answer from above. Maybe they were too scared to come down. Maybe they just didn’t care. Luna hated the thought that, even at the end of the world, there might still be people out there who weren’t prepared to help one another.

  All their convoy could do w
as keep going, and hope they would be able to make the world better for everyone. They pushed through the streets, moving obstacles out of the way or driving around them, heading for the university’s campus.

  As they reached it, Luna tried to imagine what it would be like in normal times. The buildings there were big and varied, obviously built to different tastes at different times. There were plenty of open spaces between them, although now those were starting to get overgrown with weeds.

  Luna pulled the bus up right in the middle of one of the main plazas, not caring that normally it wouldn’t have been allowed. They needed to be as close to it as they could get if they had to run again. She really hoped they didn’t have to run again. She got out with Bobby next to her, and the others started to gather around. Leon and Barnaby gathered with the other Survivors; Ignatius was further away. Cub had decided to stand with the people they had turned back from the controlled into humans.

  “We need to find the materials labs,” she said, trying to sound confident that she would know what those looked like when she saw them. “We’re looking for a very specific substance.” She looked around at Ignatius. “How will we recognize it?”

  “I can identify it,” Ignatius said, “and so can Barnaby. If we get it under a microscope or into a spectrometer, we’ll know it.”

  “So we have to go through every single sample a university possesses until we find the right thing?” Luna said. She was no expert, but she was pretty sure that somewhere with a whole lab full of different materials would take a while to search.

  “Unless you have a better idea?” Ignatius said.

  Luna didn’t, which meant that they had to get started. She looked around until she found a signpost, and while Bobby stood sniffing it, she picked out the direction of the materials laboratories.

  “This way!” she called to the others.

  She could make out the building now, dark and empty like so many of the others, modern and silent as their group made their way over to it. The doors were locked, but with so many of them there, it was an easy thing to pick up a bench to use as a battering ram.

  “Ready?” Luna called. “One, two, three!”

  They smashed their way inside, and Luna picked her way through the debris with Bobby, ahead of the others.

  “We need to spread out,” she said. “Find anything that’s different, or isn’t clearly labeled, or… I don’t know, just see what you can find.”

  She knew it was too general, but what else could she do? They had to start somewhere, so she set off searching with the others, picking a room and starting to go through the materials there in search of the one that they wanted.

  The problem wasn’t finding things, it was that there were far too many things that she could find. Even a minute of searching revealed a hundred different glass slides, each presumably containing a sample of some kind of substance. Luna took all of them across to the lab where Ignatius and Barnaby were already starting to look through microscopes at possible samples.

  “No,” Ignatius said. “Not that one… not that one either…”

  “I have more,” Luna said, running in with Bobby close behind her. “Maybe it’s one of these.”

  “We don’t need more,” Ignatius said. “There are too many to identify as it is.”

  Luna shrugged. “So it will take a while. For a way to stop all of this, it’s worth it.”

  Ignatius shook his head. “It won’t take ‘a while.’ For the number of samples there are in here, we’re looking at weeks. That’s too long.”

  Luna wanted to argue with that, wanted to tell Ignatius to just keep working, but she knew he had a point. They didn’t have the kind of time it would take to find what they were looking for. She didn’t have that much time. By the time they had found it, all of the people helping them would have reverted to being controlled, and so would she. And that was only if the aliens didn’t destroy the world outright.

  “What do you have in mind?” Luna asked.

  “There will be a system for cataloguing samples,” Ignatius said. “If we just fire that up—”

  “No,” Luna said, thinking of the NASA institute. “You don’t know what that will do.”

  She could remember what it had been like, with the controlled fighting to get in, having to run desperately, barely making it out in time.

  “There has to be another way,” she said.

  Ignatius shook his head. “Not that I can see, and I do know what will happen. The moment we connect any kind of signal, the aliens will spot where we are. They’ll come here in force.”

  “But we can be prepared,” Barnaby said. He sighed. “I think that’s our best chance, Luna. Ignatius is right: we’ll never get through all of these samples in time by hand. We can tell the others, give them time to hide or build barricades.”

  Luna hated the idea of having to do things that way. She had seen what it could be like when the aliens came. So had everyone else, though. The Survivors had all been there when the aliens attacked their home. Ignatius had been followed by the aliens wherever they could find him. The people who had been controlled… well, they knew better than anyone what could happen.

  “All right,” she said. “But anyone who wants to leave gets to leave.”

  “Including me?” Ignatius asked.

  Luna fixed him with a stare. “Would you really leave when there was a chance to end this?”

  Ignatius stood there for a moment or two. Then he sighed. “No, I guess not.”

  “Okay,” Barnaby said. “I’ll tell Leon and the others.”

  ***

  Luna hit at nails with a hammer, trying to make sure that the barricade they were building would hold together. Around her, dozens of other people worked with her, bringing out furniture and heavy pieces of equipment with which to build obstacles. The ones with weapons, from the dart and vapor guns to the real kind, sat working on them, getting them ready. Bobby sat by Luna’s feet, looking out as if he would guard her from whatever was coming.

  Barnaby came up. “Leon says that if we’re doing this, we should do it now, before it gets dark.”

  That made a kind of sense. Facing aliens was bad enough. Facing them in the dark, when they could come from any angle and looked just like people… that thought was too horrifying for words.

  “Okay,” Luna said. “Show me where we’re doing this.”

  Barnaby led the way inside, and Luna followed. Ignatius sat there in front of a computer that was currently blank, no power running to it.

  “Once I start to power this up, they’ll know someone is here,” he said. “Once they see what I’m searching for…”

  They would come with everything they had. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they would be lucky, and the aliens would miss what they were doing. Luna knew that they couldn’t trust that to happen, though.

  “Be as quick as you can,” Luna said.

  Ignatius nodded, and then powered up the computer.

  “Okay, it’s booting up and logging in. Open access. We need a search engine for materials. Come on, why don’t academics ever put things in a sensible order?”

  Silently, Luna found herself counting the seconds, her hand buried in Bobby’s fur for reassurance.

  “I’m into something called ChemFind,” Ignatius said. “Now to describe the molecular structure…”

  “Work quickly,” Luna said. The seconds kept ticking away in her head.

  “This isn’t easy, you know,” Ignatius said. His fingers tapped away at the keyboard, each movement seeming too slow, seeming to take too long.

  “We need to stop before they see us,” Barnaby said.

  “Almost got it,” Ignatius said.

  “We need to stop,” Barnaby repeated.

  “Almost… there. I’ve found it!” Ignatius looked almost surprised. So surprised that he didn’t seem to think to shut the computer down. Luna did though. She darted forward and pressed the shutdown button, hoping that it would be in time.

  “Whe
re?” Luna asked. “Where is it, Ignatius?”

  “There’s a meteorite museum on campus, full of samples people have collected over the years,” the chemist said. “We want sample 542/R.”

  “Then let’s go,” Luna said.

  She didn’t wait for the others, but instead ran across in the direction of UCLA’s meteorite museum, Bobby keeping step with her as she ran.

  “Sample 542/R!” she yelled as she passed Cub. “We have to find sample 542/R!”

  Cub ran with her, and they headed into the museum, past exhibit after exhibit that consisted of carefully displayed rocks. If Kevin’s meteorite had proved to be what the aliens had claimed, would it have ended up here? There was no time to think about that; they had to find the right sample.

  Even with the sample number, it wasn’t easy, because there were so many different exhibits. Many of them were just the meteorites, with plaques saying who had found them, where, and when. Some had clusters of crystals beside them, or metal samples, representing some unusual composition. To Luna, it all just looked like rocks.

  They headed up onto the next floor, looking at more samples that gave no clue as to why they should be up there and not downstairs with the others. Luna risked a glance out of one of the windows, and saw the people below standing ready at the barricades. They had to get this done soon, or—

  “I found it!” Cub called out. “Here! 542/R!”

  Luna ran over, half expecting the rock in the exhibit to be glowing. Instead, it was blue-gray, maybe a little larger than a football, with a collection of grown crystals down beside it.

  “This is one of a collection of meteorites that fell to earth in the 1920s,” Luna read from the plaque. “The mineral composition appears unusual.” She laughed to herself. “You can say that again, card writing person.” She looked around for a way to open the case, found that it was locked, and picked up a fire extinguisher. “Here goes nothing.”

  She hit the case and it shattered in a way that would probably have triggered an alarm if the whole building hadn’t been powered down. As it was, glass crashed and crunched as it hit the floor, leaving the meteorite there on its stand.