No one is answering the boy from Kansas. Instead, they are bending to their grim tasks.
It will be many days until the dead are properly reckoned with. Felicia and the others will not stop helping until the final bodies are discovered, and all those who might survive are on their way to recovery.
But she will occasionally stop to gather strength, to huddle with the others who have been brought back, and share their energies, and communicate in ways that only they can. This new ability, this power, will never stop being a source of wonder to her. And somewhere deep inside she understands that because of it, the world will never be the same.
She pauses at one point, breathing with her human lungs, and stares off in the direction of dawn, where the black dots of further military copters approach, and she acknowledges the new day.
At that moment, her thoughts move to Nicole, with whom she’s shared a few sunrises, but she doesn’t dwell on her destroyed human shell—rather, on the bright soul embedded inside her, and she can smell her scent, and she can hear her laughter, and she can even see the mischief in her eyes. Just before she bends again to her task, she sends a final thought to her lover.
I saved you.
EPILOGUE
Rachel opens the curtains of the front room and looks out on the quiet street. It’s 6 a.m., exactly three months since the apocalyptic event that befell not only her hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado, but also Denver, Greeley, Loveland, Cheyenne, and all the other cities and towns within the irregular circle that described the circumference of the alien invasion. That’s the term the media actually used.
Alien invasion.
The focus of the attack was almost certainly Roosevelt National Forest, according to research foresters and plant physiologists who had swept in with the government to diagnose the event. Felicia tried to explain it to her in the aftermath—the focus on the chemical makeup of evergreen forestry. Felicia sees it clearly in her mind now, too, as if she has wiped the stains of age from an ancient text—about the way the pine uniquely recovered in the wake of moderate-intensity wildfire. That chemical interaction, in conjunction with the amount of time between repeated injuries, is what the strangers had craved. Whatever had been visited upon Earth during that week had been about survival. Survival in the wake of fiery devastation.
Scientists debated endlessly about that chemical interaction, wondering why an advanced civilization had been unable to synthesize what they needed for themselves—wherever they came from. Why had it been necessary to forcibly take the chemical from another world?
The answer was that the aliens had been dying—had, in fact, been drifting from their destroyed home. A thousand other drifting pods held the hope of encountering other potential worlds, programmed to send hibernating souls into promising regions.
The event took the lives of more than four million human beings, as well as countless animals, forever altering the mountain region. Even most of those who survived were loath to stay, preferring to evacuate the blasted region and relocate in other, less devastated climes. Who could tell whether it might happen again? Denver became a lost city, as did dozens of other cities and towns.
But not Fort Collins, as far as Rachel and her new family are concerned.
This is where they belong.
And Rachel knows, somehow, that they’re safe now. Maybe it’s the proximity to Felicia, or maybe she simply feels it in her blood.
She about-faces from the window and brings her apple to her mom’s favorite chair, watches dawn brighten the day. There are still rose bushes in the yard where her mom planted them, and they are still in the redwood planter that her father built for them, and they are no longer tarnished by the blood of Mrs. Carmichael.
Directly opposite this window, across the street, is the window to Tony’s house. She has memories of crossing directly over there to be with him—memories she can recall so clearly that they barely ache yet. It has been difficult to conjure the memories of Tony from before the world ended, but now, despite herself, they flood her. Their young dates, walking to Old Town. Their first fumblings, the taste of fast food in their mouths. Hormones and her braces. The knowledge that her dad never thought much of Tony, and in the midst of Susanna, Rachel’s reaction toward Tony, becoming closer to him, knowing the effect it had on her dad. Her dad didn’t voice this very often, but of course he would have preferred someone a little more clean-cut for his only daughter, a relationship not borne out of across-the-street convenience but rather out of shared academic excellence—or something like that.
She still mourns Tony, and what happened to him—that will never go away—but he seems a part of a different life. A different reality.
Funny how an apocalyptic event can pave the way for a father’s vision for his daughter to come true.
She takes a bite out of her apple, thinking about Joel and Kayla. She thinks about them all the time, yes, but this morning she’s thinking about them in terms of the weeks following the event. Rachel and Joel married quietly in a nearly empty courthouse in order to officially adopt Kayla, who was left without any family in the wake of it all. Rachel’s thoughts about her husband and daughter are so strong and proud and ebullient that she frequently weeps, but today she is fine to be away from them. This is her once-per-month ritual, and it is hers alone.
With their money from the government, they have purchased a large home in Old Town and have partnered with Felicia to re-open the Fort Collins Food Co-Op in one of the surviving sections of Old Town—actually, in the space formerly occupied by the Stone Lion Bookstore and later Beau Jo’s Pizza. She’s proud that she’s helping Fort Collins rebuild. The twins, Zoe and Chloe, have also stayed in town, and they’re spearheading the downtown library project, renewing and rebuilding the place where the battle turned. The government money gave that a big start, too.
As for her father’s secret money, which has been instrumental in all these projects … the government doesn’t need to know about that.
Rachel has stayed here at the house, alone, on five occasions since everything happened. It has become her way of remembering and honoring the way her life was before. But the first time she revisited this house, it was to direct medical personnel inside to remove the bodies of her father and Susanna and begin the processes of respectfully laying them to rest. That was two days after the aliens’ ending.
The next day, she ventured inside the still-stinking room to retrieve the mystery money from her father’s open safe and hide it deep inside an innocent corner of her own bedroom, behind her old games and dolls. It remains there to this day. Well, what’s left of it.
She hasn’t given a lot more thought to where the money came from. She will never know the answer, so why bother? Whenever she begins to ponder it, she recalls the moment Felicia came up to her one day at the Co-Op, putting her arm around her. At that moment, Rachel had been lost in thought, staring out onto the streets of Old Town, thinking about that cash. Thinking about what her dad had been doing, piling all of that up for no discernible reason. Had it been crime? Something shady? He’d kept secrets from her. These thoughts were not new, and they had been festering since her discovery.
Felicia had leaned into her. “Hey.”
Rachel had smiled. “Hey yourself.”
“He saved it all for you,” she said. “For your future. He was trying to get it to you. That’s obvious, right?”
Rachel had stared at her in shock, and Felicia had simply walked away, back to work stocking the store with government-purchased foods.
“What?”
Felicia had only winked at her over her shoulder, almost solemnly, and nodded.
Rachel had watched her go, her mind rapidly trying to connect the dots. Had Felicia known what she was thinking at that moment? Rachel and Joel had become convinced that Felicia was privy to the thoughts and feelings of those around her, resulting from what she had gone through, but they were never sure of the extent of that ability. Did she see glimpses of actual thought
s? Vibrations of feelings? Rachel had asked her point-blank one time, and Felicia had dodged the question, talking in vague terms and not wanting to delve too deeply into painful memories.
Rachel never said another word about it, to Joel or Felicia or anyone.
Her dad had left her the money for her future. It was that simple.
And her future is now.
She takes another bite of her apple and sighs, lost in the silence.
When she thinks of her future, she mostly thinks of Kayla, that beautiful kid. But she also thinks of her new business partner, Felicia, and what she has become. She doesn’t spend a lot of time at the Co-Op, even though Rachel knows that was Felicia’s own dream of the future. She is far more often in the company of the alien survivors, as the media has dubbed them. There are more than a thousand of them living in the southeast part of town, over by the abandoned Mormon temple. Felicia is occupying a ranch-style home in that neighborhood, a home that has become the center of activity for these survivors.
There’s something brewing over there, and Felicia hasn’t been exactly forthcoming about it, but she exudes optimism and energy when she talks vaguely about the shared-experience bonds the community feels.
A week ago, Felicia—under the influence of some cheap wine—spoke to Rachel in measured tones about Philip, about how he and other saved children might embody the next step in the evolution of the species, but then she stopped talking, as if she realized she was saying too much. It was an odd moment, full of portent, and it made Rachel flash back to the scene at the edge of the forest, when the military had finally and firmly established its stronghold in the Event’s aftermath. Army personnel had detained the exhausted survivors till late afternoon, and waves of government interrogators had questioned them endlessly. Medical and science technicians had run them through the wringer, too, quickly separating Felicia and Philip, as well as Linda and Julia, for further scrutiny. In fact, Rachel hadn’t seen those four until several days later when they were ultimately released to family. She had hugged each one of them and sent them on their way to teary long-distance relations, and they had all glanced back at her, acknowledging what they had gone through.
She had never heard another word from anyone—least of all Felicia—about whether anything was found inside them. Any remnants of the alien infestation. Whatever was there was ephemeral.
But Rachel is convinced it’s there.
And that no longer scares her.
The phone rings, and Rachel stares at it there on the wall. The same phone where she attempted to make that 911 call on the first day of the event. She knows it’s Joel. He’s the only other person with this number. She hops out of the chair, finishing a big bite of apple.
“Hey J,” she says into the old familiar receiver.
“Hey girl, knew you’d be up.”
“Just having breakfast.”
“Figured.” He clears his throat. “So how are things going?”
“Feeling good. Like maybe I won’t need to come back here much anymore.”
“Lot of bad stuff happened there, but I wouldn’t blame you if you felt the need to go back now and then.”
“I know.”
“You up for some real breakfast? Kevin is helping the twins get Lucille’s back up and running. He says there’s biscuits happening.”
Rachel looks at her apple, then tosses it in the trash can by the wall.
“I’m in.”
“Meet you there in twenty? Your daughter is salivating at the prospect of real food.”
She smiles at the thought of Kayla. “I’ll be there.”
They hang up, and Rachel sighs easily, walks into the living room. She casts her gaze about, taking it in. Then she walks back to her bedroom, looks around. It seems so small! She thinks her dad would be happy about how clean it is. She laughs at that thought, throwing a kiss at her stuffed bear, front and center on the bed. She closes the door and goes to her father’s bedroom. She reverently closes this door, too, as if shutting the ornate door of an elaborate and worshipful tomb.
“I love you, Daddy,” she whispers.
Then she exits the home, onto a desolate street, and the October trees are yellow and falling, and a crisp breeze is in the air.
Acknowledgments
Big gratitude to my family, as always: to my wife Barb and my kick-ass daughters, Harper and Sophie, who are growing up way too fast and gearing up to face a world increasingly populated by villains—perhaps even tougher to face than the ones in the Blood saga! Like Rachel and Felicia in my girl-power saga, all of the women in my life are up to the challenge and provide daily inspiration. To the ever-enthusiastic cheerleaders among my family and friends—you know who you are!
Major shout-out to Rob Leininger for his help getting this book in shape. Robert’s powerful neo noir Killing Suki Flood is one of my favorite books of all time, and I’m amazed this hero author took the time to mentor the likes of me. It goes without saying that Blood Dawn is better because of him.
Thanks to Kirk Whitham, James W. Powell, Mike and Rebecca Parish, Justin Bzdek, and Doug Powell for their sharp observations during the early reading phase, and to Christopher Nowell and Kirk Whitham for the cover art, design, and layout. And finally, cheers to the authors who took precious time from their own writing schedules to read this book and provide excellent cover blurbs: Robert Devereaux, Joshua Gaylord (Alden Bell), Rob Leininger, and John Dixon (Bill Braddock).
About the Author
Jason Bovberg is the author of the Blood trilogy—Blood Red, Draw Blood, and Blood Dawn—as well as The Naked Dame, a throwback pulp noir novel. He is editor/publisher of Dark Highway Press, which published the controversial, erotic fairy tale Santa Steps Out and the weird western anthology Skull Full of Spurs. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife Barb and his daughters Harper and Sophie. You can find him online at www.jasonbovberg.com.
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