Alex listened to Masab and these words excited the soldier in him. That also meant that he could perhaps in some way get back to U.S to his surviving family. He nodded to Masab and agreed to his proposal.
Chapter 21
Life Goes On
Hampton, Virginia
March-April, 2019
It was two months since the ceasefire had been announced. Sienna still had no news of Carrie or Alex. They had notified the University office about her daughters and had made another trip to the Florida police to give them details about Alex. Carter had stayed on and had accompanied Sienna on her second trip to Florida. Carter had become some sort of a local hero, after having played a major role in their local vigilante’ group by thwarting two attempted robberies on the houses in the neighborhood.
Life in the closed enclave had moved on. Most of the occupants had returned to their houses. Even the empty ones were by now claimed by the ‘distant relatives’ of the original occupants. A lot of people across the country were homeless and therefore it was not surprising to see a lot of these ‘relatives’ turn up to claim a shelter for their own. Most of the other houses were also hosting near and far relatives who had lost their belongings and their near and dear ones. The local pastor had found an abandoned building to restart Sunday mass. The local school building had salvaged what they could and had started school, half the classes being conducted in makeshift camps. They even had a couple of marriages in the church. A young couple who were on the verge of getting married before the attacks started, deciding to tie the knot before another disaster stuck. Another couple from the enclave, who had lost their respective partners in the attacks, decided to tie the knot. In a time of collective grief, individual mourning periods dwindled and such instances, of people overcoming their grief and moving on, were collectively applauded as examples of resilience in the face of adversity.
No one had turned up for Sienna. Her parents were dead long ago and she had a few distant relatives she did not care much for. The feeling must have been mutual as none cared or enquired after Sienna in the three months after the cessation of attacks. Maybe there was no one left to care. Alex had some distant cousins but they had drifted over the years.
It was just the two of them who occupied the house, toiling through Sienna’s grief. Carter coaxed Sienna to volunteer at a community center that had opened up nearby, providing food and shelter to the homeless.
On the work front, there had been no calls to rejoin duty. Sienna had enquired and the office had said that the terms of the surrender required cessation of all military and space research activities and that government would provide suitable alternative employment to its erstwhile employees soon. They had no timeframe for that ‘soon’ though.
Sienna immersed herself in the community center and Carter had taken the lead to start a community farming project on the outskirts of Hampton. He would bring fresh vegetables and chicken from the farm and they would cook the same on a wood fire and a barbecue stand that he had set up in the backyard of the house. They would sit together and chat for hours on end about alien occupation and about what it meant for the future of the human race. They would talk for hours about their past, where Sienna would tell him tales of her family and her daughters and Carter would talk about the passion he felt for his work.
Whenever Sienna asked Carter about his personal life, he just shrugged it off saying he did not have much to tell. His parents had died early. There was then a string of relatives’ homes and then a few foster care homes for him. He had kept his head around him and had decided he would make something out of himself and he had gone ahead and done that.
One day, while discussing family around the wood-fire, Carter talked of a girl by the name of Selena, who was of a Hispanic descent and worked two floors above Carter’s office in SIDC. They had met, sparks had flown between them and they had been steady for a couple of years. Then one day, after leaving his apartment, Selena’s car was involved in a horrific pile up on the Interstate and she and two others had died on the way to hospital. Carter had taught her driving and had she had got her license just a month before the accident. Sienna heard his story
‘You should not blame yourself for her death. You know that you had nothing to do with it.’
Carter nodded but Sienna suspected that he blamed himself at some level. Sienna argued it out with him for some time and then both of them fell silent, lost in their shared grief. Finally, Sienna looked at Carter and said
‘Now, what? Are you going to live your entire life like this? Why don’t you find someone?’
Carter looked at her and replied, his words seeking a depth within her,
‘I have. I am waiting for her to come out of her grief. Surely, she is not going to live her entire life like this.’ Sienna knew he was speaking about her. But the fact that he had said the words still had a shock value for her, throwing her off her composure.
She did not know how to respond. She got up and walked indoors.
Carter looked at her get in the house and cursed. Maybe he had spoken a bit too soon. It was stupid and immature of him.
Chapter 22
Underwater
Mombasa, Kenya
30th April 2019
Alex spent the next month in Mombasa, working alongside Colonel Masab. Masab’s army against the aliens consisted of every able-bodied man, woman and child who could carry a gun and many had been recruited on a gunpoint. Many had joined the army just to have their fingers around a trigger in these difficult times. Plus, the army generally provided food and shelter, which was difficult to come by in these times. Masab had set up bases all over Kenya and Uganda and was fleeing from base to base, running along with his army, from alien ships, pods and harvesters. The bases almost always consisted of networked underground chambers, propped up with wooden beams and pillars. They had all been dug up over the past couple of months, with labor that had been hired with protection, food, favor and more often than not, coercion. The human cost had been immense and thousands had died while working on these bunkers, most of them killed by the aliens and the rest by Masab’s gun-toting militia. That was the only killing they did, making hardly a dent in the alien offence.
Alex had given constant company to the Colonel during the month. He had told stories of his capture and stay aboard the alien mother-ship to Masab over a hundred times in that time. Masab never grew tired of these stories. He had a million questions about the aliens – their past, their history, their journeys and their technology. Alex answered them as best has he could. When he wasn’t regaling him with tales from the alien ship, he set about training his motley group of mostly underaged militia about how to be the masters of the guns they carried. Most of them had US Army standard issue rifles and semi-automatics which had been supplied by the renegade U.S soldiers. Alex knew those guns could not save them from the aliens. The only thing that could was their ability to run and hide. Masab was visibly ticked about the ‘Hellraiser’ gun. He hoped he would get a load of those guns in the next shipment from the submarine.
After a month of hiding in and around Mombasa, the day came when the submarine emerged off the coast of Mombasa. Uniformed soldiers brought weapons, drugs, clothes, tents and other supplies to Masab’s hideout and took Alex back to the sub with them.
The soldiers hadn’t got any ‘Hellraisers’ with them yet. Alex wished luck to Masab and said that he hoped to fight along with him in the battles to come.
Masab looked at him and said
‘Me too. I only hope that in the coming days the battle becomes more equal.’
Alex nodded and left for the sub. He was ferried to the sub in a small motorboat and once on the sub, he was lowered into the belly of the mid-class nuclear powered sub of US Navy commissioned in 2010. There, he was greeted by deck officer Antoine Hutt who told him that he would be sharing quarters with him while on the sub.
Alex was asked to get some rest and food and then after a couple of hours, was led to the private ch
ambers of the Captain.
As soon as he entered the room, the captain got up from behind a desk and walked around to shake hands with Alex
‘Captain Scott Theroux.’
Alex took his hand and replied
‘Lieutenant Alex Dunbar.’ He paused and continued ‘You are German, right? How come on this foreign sub?’
‘Well you are Scottish-American, right? How come you ended up on an alien ship?’
Alex laughed at the repartee and sat in the chair across the Captain.
The Captain continued
‘No, seriously. I want to know how you ended up there.’
Alex Dunbar recounted the entire story to Captain Scott. It was more than hundred times that he had narrated the story since his descent back on the Earth. Captain Scott took great interest and asked him various questions regarding the aliens, their ship, their food habits, their technology, their past and their travels across the Universe.
‘It means that they have been at this for a long while, travelling, killing, culling and moving on. But what a waste? It is unfortunate that such an advanced race remains such a violent one. That feels me with a sense of foreboding about our future. I had always imagined that violence is the hallmark of primitiveness. Apparently I am wrong.’
Alex nodded his head.
‘Yeah I agree. They are a bunch of cosmos-faring nomads who have established a floating planet of their own. I am sure we will find evidence of their versions of art, music and theatre if we know them better. But, the problem lies with the fact that they see us as food and energy, plain and simple. We are like chicken and ham to them, our trees oil and coal to them. Our human culture has never been stunted by considerations of the rights of chicken and ham. We have no moral obligations to chicken and we do not feel guilty while partaking in a three course veal meal.’
Captain Scott sighed
‘Yeah. Chicken and ham we are to them. But these chicken and ham are going to be their undoing. We will take them down in this fight. This will be the last stop on their cosmic journey. We will stop their nomadic journey and bring them home this time. The last war for them.’
‘Maybe the last one for us too... The Last War on Earth!’
‘Well. That I am not so sure about. We have fought too many wars before, branding them to be the last war, the war to stop all wars blah blah, but it has not stopped us from getting up and being at each other’s throats time and again, has it?’
Alex shook his head nonchalantly
‘But do we have something to take the fight to them? It has been a fairly one-sided affair so far.’
Captain Scott looked straight into Alex’s eyes and smiled
‘I think we are onto a few things. No single devastating weapon but there are reports of people working on various things and I only hope that we can consolidate this effort and mount it on a global scale.’
‘What do we have?’ Alex was all ears by now.
‘I am only a soldier in this war. I do not make the strategy. We are supplying arms and ammunitions all over the world. We have circumnavigated the globe almost twice now, providing help and provisions to the various theatres of war. I have news that the Russians have had some success with Laser guns, almost similar to what the aliens have. The Chinese have reverse-engineered the American experimental directed sonic weapons and they have scaled it up a notch too. I am sure they have had help from within the U.S. Even the Indians have had some success with low-tech, cold weapons. They have brought down a couple of drones with their stuff but as soon as they touched the ground they self-destruct themselves, not leaving much information for us to glean from them.’
Alex had a lot of questions
‘How come they haven’t destroyed the subs in the water?’
‘I guess it is just some kind of weakness that they have. Their weapons are deadly on land but they haven’t been able to inflict much damage underground and underwater. I guess they have never had much need for that. They must strike terrestrial planets, do a blitz of an attack, loot and plunder resources and move on to the next one. They are hunting whales and sharks on our surface waters too, but not from within the depths. I guess the safest place on Earth now is inside its oceans.’
‘You were saying something about the lasers and the sonic weapons?’
‘Yes, you have noticed the way they strike down our missiles and our bullets. They have an insanely advanced tracking and interception system. But how do you track and intercept something as diffuse and as pervasive like sound waves. And if we are successful in weaponizing sound and light, it may give us the big advantage that we seek against them.’
‘It’s a big ‘if’ and a big ‘may’.’
‘And these ‘ifs’ and ‘mays’ are all that we have.’
Alex nodded at those words
‘Yes, we have to make them work and then there are the rest of us, who are going to fight the hell out of our skins against these alien bastards.’
‘Hear hear! Well, all I can say is that we are glad to have you onboard with us.’ Captain Scott got up and shook hands with Alex. Alex had one more thing he wanted
‘I need to make a call to my wife and daughters back home. Is it possible? They probably think I am dead’ he paused for a bit and then continued ‘as I sometimes think they are.’
‘Well, that maybe a bit difficult. I will see what I can do. You can stick around with us. We will be reaching the U.S coast sometime in the next couple of months. I will spread news across the curtain to see if there is some news about your family.’
Alex mumbled a thanks, left details of his family with Captain Scott, and then walked out of the room.
Chapter 23
Moving On
Hampton, Virginia
30thMay 2019
Sienna looked around the room. Carter slept on the bed, his arm in a bandage, held in a sling from a makeshift stand on the bedstead. A little bit of blood had seeped through the bandage and was mildly spotting the dressing. He was on a mild sedative and on a heavy dose of antibiotics. The bullet had taken half of his deltoid but had narrowly missed the bone and the brachial artery, the major vessels of the arm.
If it wasn’t for Carter, Sienna would be dead or worse today.
Sienna had felt awkward about his hinted proposal, slightly offended too. The next few days had been awfully awkward between them. They had been very formal with each other, dabbling in social conversation. Carter told her stories about the farm and she told him about the Church and the shelter-home where she was volunteering. She volunteered as a grief counselor in the church and it made her sad and depressed at the end of the day, hearing heart rending stories of loss, hopelessness and loneliness. There were numerous cases of suicides and there was an urgent need to do something about that. The Church was encouraging young lonely people to get married and elderly lonely widows and widowers to get re-married. It was slowly coming to be accepted as a celebration of life in times of adversity and the church had largely written off periods of mourning prior to remarriage. She found herself counseling people that finding new love did not lessen or blemish the love that they have had for their previous spouses and partners.
Sienna and Carter were seen in their community pretty much as a couple although their status was known to those closer to them. Sienna’s friends had urged her to formalize her relation with Carter, when they came to know of his interest in her. Sienna said that she could not think of it, when she had still not given up hope for Alex. Her friends placed the facts before her and begged her to accept the reality.
‘You cannot go on loving a ghost’ they had said, almost in unison.
Sienna did not know what to do and their relationship hung in a limbo as they carried on with their lives. Carter never hinted on anything thereafter.
What changed that for Sienna, happened two weeks to the day Carter made a rather clumsy proposal to Sienna. Carter was sleeping on the couch outside when he heard a noise inside the house. Having been on duty in the nei
ghborhood watch had made a light sleeper of him. He instinctively grabbed the gun by the side of the couch. The thieves realized that he was awake and jumped on him. Carter fell off the couch and grabbed one of them by the lapel of his shirt while the other stood over both of them, kicking Carter in the gut again and again. Carter’s gun had slipped out of his hand and the goon who was standing over them grabbed it. Carter tried to get away but he was too late. The gun went off in the goon’s hand and found Carter in his left arm. The gun’s rapport was quite loud and it raised almost half of the colony.
Sienna came rushing from the other room. By then, the thieves had realized that they could not possibly get anything from that house and they decided to cut their losses and make a run for it.
The neighbors were there in a jiffy and they gave pursuit. They managed to get their hands on one of the hoodlums. He was fourteen. His partner was fifteen.
The gash on Carter’s arm looked bad. He had bled a lot and Sienna didn’t think he will make it. The city had just about managed to start three hospitals running with a skeletal staff and seeing out-patients and dispensing a few essential medicines. There was a single night-shift doctor in one of the hospitals who bandaged Carter’s wounds with a tight bandage, hoping to stop the bleeding. Sienna felt the pulse and felt the artery pulsate at the wrist, although feebly. That was a good sign, an arterial pulse below the injury site, ruling out a vascular emergency. They loaded Carter up with analgesics, to keep him from repeatedly passing out from pain. There were no in-patient beds yet and Carter was shifted back home.
Sienna kept up the whole night, nursing and tending for Carter. A few of the neighbors kept watch with her in turns. Mrs. Willoughby, who had retired as a nurse a few months earlier finally declared Carter to be out of the woods in the morning. He looked awfully pale though. They managed to get a doctor from one of the hospitals to come have a look the next morning and he brought a clutch of antibiotics with him. He inspected the wound and washed it with iodine and sutured it up loosely.
Exodus (The Domus Series Book 2) Page 13
