Rick got up from the ground. He brushed himself off and signalled to Tuck that it was safe to come out. Tuck walked around the corner of the shed and raised his shotgun, pointing it at Dirk.
Dirk noticed Tuck and lifted his weapon back up, aiming it at Tuck this time. “So what,” he said. “You killed the looters so you could loot me. Get all my moonshine for yourself!”
“Tuck,” Rick said. “Put your goddamned gun down.”
Tuck sneered at Rick, hesitated, but he lowered his shotgun.
“Listen,” Rick said at Dirk. “We came here because it looked like you needed our help. Clearly, you did.”
“Yeah, I did. And now I don’t. So you can leave.”
“You’re going to stay out here in the middle of the desert?” Rick said.
“That ain’t none of your business.”
“We could help each other.”
“Help each other what?” said Dirk. “Sell moonshine? You can’t help me.”
Rick looked at what was left of the moonshine distillery. Dirk followed his gaze, lowered his head put down his rifle. He knew what Rick was trying to get at. He wouldn’t be selling moonshine to anyone soon. His home had been destroyed and if these fools hadn’t showed up, he’d be dead.
“My name is Dirk,” he said. “Dirk Glimsey.”
“My name’s Rick and this here is Tuck.” Rick pointed to Tuck.
Tuck didn’t smile.“Pleasure to meet your acquaintance,” he said. He then spit on the ground.
“What did these assholes want?” Rick said.
Dirk walked out of his house. “They wanted my distillery barrels. They were telling me that if I didn’t hand them over, they’d shoot me up. That’s when you showed up.”
“That’s all they wanted?”
“As far as I know,” Dirk said. “Before them there was another group. But they were peaceful. They were like you.”
“What do you mean?” asked Rick.
Dirk pointed to Rick’s jacket. Rick looked down at his jacket. A small SpaceForce insignia was on the left side of his chest. “They were SpaceForce?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Dirk. “There was about thirty of them. They were nerdy. They said they were coming from Mission Control or something. Said they were headed to Colorado.”
“What!?” said Rick.
“You deaf?,” said Dirk. “There was about thirty of them. They had a dog with them, too.”
Rick didn’t believe it. “Why weren’t they at Mission Control?”
“They said it was destroyed.”
“Destroyed?”
“You must be deaf,” said Dirk. “An alien ship, one of them motherships appeared over top of their base. The whole thing is destroyed. They were the only ones to make it out alive. Said they were headed to Colorado to a secret bunker or something.”
“The dog,” said Rick. “What did it look like?”
“It was black and white,” said Tuck. “Had a red collar, I think.”
Did Domino get out of SpaceForce Mission Control alive? Rick fell to his knees. Fuck. What was he going to do now?
Tuck was getting impatient, he said, “Hey, Rick, what does all this mean?”
Rick looked at Tuck and frowned. He didn’t know what to tell the old man. He looked back at Dirk, who was still holding his rifle. Whatever happened now, it wasn’t going to be easy. The survivors he’d picked up outside of Los Angeles, he’d have to take them. Rick didn’t respond to Tuck, he turned back to Dirk and asked, “They were going to Colorado?”
“Yeah,” said Dirk. “They said there was some bunker base or something outside of Denver in the Rockies. They asked me to join them, but I told them no thanks.”
“What does this mean?” said Tuck, growing more impatient.
“It means a change of plans,” said Rick. He got up from the ground and turned back around to check on Manuel and Jose.
“Change of what?” said Tuck. “Change of plans?”
Out in the distance, back behind the rock he had dragged Jose, Manuel emerged. He didn’t look good. Manuel was shaking his head. Jose was dead.
Tuck stopped bothering Rick when he saw Manuel’s face. He ran up to Manuel and gave him a hug.
Rick turned back to Dirk. “So what are you going to do now?”
Dirk shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Come with us,” said Rick. “We could use someone like you.”
“What do you mean someone like me?”
“We’re going to find the SpaceForce scientists you saw,” said Rick. “We will find the bunker base you said they were going to. It will be the safest place on the planet. You will need us. And we will need you.”
Dirk looked Rick over. Could he trust this guy? He looked at the old man in the distance and the other man who was crying. He almost died out here. It would be stupid to travel alone. “Alright,” he said.
“You’re coming with us?” asked Rick.
“Yes,” said Dirk.
Chapter 22
They’d travelled for weeks. They’d walked miles. Sandra looked at Bobby. His running shoes were worn down. They wouldn’t last much longer. It wouldn’t be long before he was bare foot like Claire, who had been such a trooper. She’d even helped Sandra skin the last few squirrels and birds they’d caught. Before the invasion, Claire wouldn’t have touched a dead squirrel, let alone skin it. Now she was a pro.
They were still within the boundaries of the national park and the sun was starting to set. They’d need to set up camp here tonight. They were trying to make it to the north exit of the park. They still had a couple more days of travelling to go before they got there. All three of them settled down. Sandra pulled out her map of the national park and her compass.
They were on the right path. They’d tried leaving the national park a few times already, but each time they were greeted by the sights of dozens of motherships floating around the horizon. New ships also appeared. Unlike the flying AOJs, these new ships hovered only a few feet above the ground. They were big, bulky and had two giant prongs in front of them, kind of like a forklift. From what Sandra saw, they’d use the prongs to destroy buildings and structures and then scoop the debris into a large mouth at the front. There were thousands of them out in the cities and along the roads leading out of the park. Bobby joked that they looked like the clean up crew. Claire called them harvesters because of the way they’d pull the material into their mouth. They’d have to stay in the woods until they found an exit that was free from alien ships. It felt safer in the woods, even if they were being hunted.
And they were being hunted. Quinton’s camp followed them for a few days. Sandra could hear their shouting, their gunfire. If they stopped running or put their guard down, they’d be caught and brought back to the camp, where Quinton would kill them. She knew that for certain.
The night she left him knocked out in the forest she was frantic. She made her way back to the cabins and tried to act as natural as possible. She walked up to the cabin where Bobby and Claire were sleeping and casually told them to get their things. The children were confused, but they could see the panic on their mother’s face. They knew when to listen to their mother. They got up from their beds and grabbed their things and followed her out.
They left the camp without anyone suspecting a thing. For days, they walked. Sandra couldn’t risk stopping. They didn’t sleep for over forty-eight hours.
And it had been like that for a while now. Every now and then, they’d see a new group of survivors walk past them. After her experience with Quinton, Sandra was weary about joining up with anyone else. They stayed far away from other groups of survivors.
Sandra closed her eyes and tried not to think about anything other than what they had to do to survive. In the morning, they’d made their way down the north side of the hill they were on. They’d check the national park on the north side of Knoxville. If it was empty of AOJs, they’d leave the Smoky mountain range and make their way north. After that, s
he didn’t know what they’d do.
When she opened her eyes, she was greeted by the tranquil sounds of birds chirping and a soft gentle breeze that swayed the branches above her. The morning light made everything look heavenly. A thick fog had settled over the hill they were sleeping on. Thicker than anything she’d seen out in the Smoky’s before. She woke up Claire and Bobby. The two children got their stuff together and they all made their way down the hill.
The fog got thicker. It was so thick that they could only see a few feet in front of them.
“What’s with all this fog?” said Bobby.
“I don’t know,” said Sandra. “It’s strange.” She turned to Claire and said, “Stay close.”
Claire rolled her eyes. She’d learned her lesson with the bear. She wasn’t going to go anywhere.
They walked like that for a couple hours, then the fog started to change color. A strange, eerie greenish glow filled the atmosphere at the bottom of the hill.
“This is really strange,” said Claire.
Sandra agreed. She’d been hunting out in these woods all her life and had never seen anything like this. She motioned to her two children to stay quiet. Until they got to the clearing and got out of the fog, they’d have to be cautious.
The green fog grew more thick with each step toward the bottom of the hill. As they reached the bottom, they began to hear strange sounds. It sounded like trees falling. All three of them stopped moving. They still couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of them.
“Look,” said Bobby.
Out in the distance, Bobby spotted the source of the green fog. He ran toward it. Away from his mother and sister and into the dense fog. Sandra lost sight of her son.
“Bobby!” she screamed. She jumped up and ran after the boy. Claire followed.
He hadn’t gone far. They found him quick. He was stopped at a small ravine. Inside, were tiny cubes. They were glowing green with a bizarre intensity. Their were hundreds of them.
“What is this?” said Bobby,.
“I don’t know,” said his mother.
Bobby picked one of the green cubes up.
“Don’t do that!” said Claire. “You don’t know what it is!”
“It’s cold,” said Bobby. “Feel it.” He threw the cube to Claire. She caught it.
“Hey,” she said. She looked at the cube. It was cold. She dropped it on the ground.
The sounds from beyond the fog were growing more intense.
“Come on,” said Sandra. “We need to get going. Something big is close by and I don’t want to find out what it is.”
All three of them made their way to the north exit of the national park. What Sandra didn’t see is Bobby grab the green glowing cube that Claire had dropped on the ground. The boy stuffed it in his jacket pocket and followed his mother and sister.
Chapter 23
5 years later…
The battle for Earth was over. Humanity lost. The survivors that were left stayed far from the cities and any signs of civilization. World governments splintered into a fragments of their former selves. It was a dark time.
Rick still led the caravan of survivors he’d picked up outside of Los Angeles. He’d guided them from the deserts of Nevada to the rolling foothills of Colorado. Dirk said the SpaceForce scientists were headed to someplace called StarPeak Mountain.
The journey from Nevada to Colorado was difficult. The long stretches of highway made it clear how widespread the devastation was. Every city they’d pass was covered in motherships. Even some of the small towns had a mothership or two nestled above them. Anywhere there was a hint of civilization, there was a mothership.
During the journey, a few new survivors joined them. Like the ones that had joined in Los Angeles, they were people in need of help. They weren’t the cream of the crop. Many of them either too old, too young, or too sick to help out much. Rick didn’t like the idea of adding more people to the group, but he couldn’t say no. He was an asshole, but he wasn’t evil. Plus, he figured once they found the bunker base, he’d drop them off and be on his way. He figured finding the bunker would be easy.
It wasn’t.
For the better part of five years, they’d been stuck looking for the bunker in the Rockies. Turns out, StarPeak mountain wasn’t on any map. It’s hidden. A fucking mountain. Hidden.
If it wasn’t for Dirk’s moonshine, Rick would have gone crazy a long time ago. Between that and Tuck’s fireside stories at night, Rick maintained some semblance of hope that they would find the missing bunker. It was that faith that kept everyone’s hopes up. They all believed that if they kept pushing, kept looking, they’d find it.
Since they didn’t have any idea which mountain was StarPeak, they decided to search one at a time. This made looking for it time consuming and difficult. They’d spend months in one region, then move to the next and spend months there. Once they were positive that they’d checked everything, they’d move on.
Each location that they’d stop at, they’d build a small camp. This made it easier to defend themselves against gangs of hostile humans. And they were attacked. Quite frequently.
They’d had a couple run ins with hostile groups on their trek to Colorado, but its when they settled down and began their search that they realized they would need to build some sort of fort to protect themselves. The weekly attacks were a lot harder to fight out in the open. They needed some walls. They needed something.
So they decided to build a fort, comprised out of the materials from the vehicles they’d travelled to Colorado in. The bulk of the wall that surrounded the fort was made out of components ripped from Tuck’s trailer. The wall was twelve feet high and circled the camp. The structures that lined the inside wall of the camp were used as storage houses, crafting stations or makeshift homes that camp members would live in. When all was said and done, they only had one vehicle left. It wasn’t Rick’s Charger. He was pissed off about that. It was a truck that was big enough to transport most of the materials that made up the camp’s structures from one location to the next. They needed to use that truck so they could reconstruct the camp in the next region that they decided to look for the bunker in. There was a big open area in the middle of the camp. In the center of it was a giant fire pit that they would use to cook their meals and sit around during the cold winter months. Considering it was constructed out of car parts and cut down trees, the camp’s walls held off attacks well.
The current camp location was nestled atop a small hill in a valley between three large mountains. It was surrounded by tall pine trees. It’s location was intimidating and was a big reason why they hadn’t been attacked in several weeks.
While the numbers of the camp swelled during those first few years, they’d been lowering over the last couple. The winters, sickness, and hunger were taking their toll on the camp. At its height, it was about sixty-five people strong, now it was thirty-two. One of those to lose their life was Tuck’s wife. Last winter, she’d contracted pneumonia and died. Tuck hadn’t been the same. He was still a bull in a china shop, but he had gotten more of a chaotic edge to him. He spent almost every waking moment with Dirk working on weapons. The two of them got along real well.
The other camp members busied themselves with the daily tasks that were required to keep the camp functioning. Some would go hunting, others would repair what needed to be repaired. But the majority of them would join Rick on excursions far outside the walls of the camp. They’d look for the bunker, turning over rocks to look for secret entrances, scaling mountain bases to look for anything unusual. Patricia and Manuel were still part of the group, but they kept to themselves. The two of them had bonded over the last several years and even asked the camp members to hold a rudimentary wedding ceremony for them. It was a big waste of time in Rick’s eyes, but he let it happen. Morale was important. The small ceremony seemed to keep people happy. Rick used it as an excuse to get drunk on Dirk’s moonshine.
Rick was at the fire pit, he was sitting on
a log. He was going over a map, trying to figure out where the next region they should look for the bunker was, when one of the camp members yelled out, “We’ve got some newcomers!”
Rick jumped up. His chief duty, aside from running the camp, was ensuring that everyone inside was safe. Newcomers might mean trouble. They might be scouts from the nearby camp of cannibals Dirk said he spotted when he went out hunting. When Rick heard what Dirk described it made his stomach churn. Cannibals? Had people stooped to such a low? Was food that scarce?
He climbed up one of the ladders that led to the lip of the camp wall. When he was at the top, his mouth dropped open. He thought he saw a ghost.
It wasn’t a ghost.
It was Sandra Connor and two kids.
Chapter 24
Sandra slapped Rick in the face. Did he think a simple apology was going to satisfy her? She remembered what he did, what his father did. She wasn’t going to forgive him. Not now. Not ever.
Rick stumbled backward, rubbed his jaw, which was glowing red, and made his way to the fire pit. Sandra wasn’t in the mood to listen. She’d arrived at the camp two days ago now and she’d refused to talk to Rick, which made things difficult since he was the leader of the camp.
Tuck, Dirk, and Manuel were sitting on tree stomps surrounding the pit. They were each roasting a dead squirrel. The smell of the roasting rodent didn’t help ease Rick’s pain. He wanted to eat something other than squirrel tonight.
“She knows you, eh?” Tuck winked at Rick. “You old sea dog!”
“I didn’t know her like that,” Rick said. “I knew her husband. She thinks my father killed him.”
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