by Chris Lowry
His brain wouldn’t work the way he wanted. He couldn’t figure out to keep all of them safe.
He was just one man in this plan, just one man trying to get away, get back to Lt and get back to killing.
He needed his weapon, or any weapon to do that.
I’d be better out there, he told himself. Better for any one of these survivors.
I could do more good for them out there, he thought.
He realized he was trying to rationalize their deaths. When there were so few of them left, even the death of one was a big loss.
But he was just one man.
Twilight melted into darkness and the absence of ambient light made the stars pop out and twinkle against a velvet sky.
It was almost time.
Lutz tensed and clenched his muscles, first stretching out one leg, then the other. He wanted to be limber when it was time to move.
Then it was.
A glass bottle shattered at the entrance to the room, showering the wall with gasoline.
A second bottle sailed through the air, the brilliant yellow orange flame burning the back of his pupils and popping blue flashes as it seared the darkness.
It smashed against the wall, spreading more gas and fire across the wall.
Weak screams echoed through the warehouse, and Lutz felt a surge of bodies press against him as they sought to escape the flames.
He lunged into a run, pelted across the warehouse, bouncing off bodies as he ran.
The Lick soldier at the rear lifted his blaster as four bodies swarmed on top of him, carrying him down with their weight.
The laser blast was brighter than the flames, searing a red streak across his vision as it ripped through two of the men piling on the Lick.
Then he was through the door, into the darkness in a crowd of people who broke for the fence.
The hidden guard, the one Pomona had feared leaned out and began picking off the runners one by one.
But again, sacrificial lambs piled on top of him, five this time, trading their lives for an opportunity for others.
Three of them took it out of his perch, and thudded to the ground, where four more piled on top.
One of the men grabbed the alien blaster and tried to use it.
Lutz could have told him it wouldn’t work, not for human fingers anyway. Maybe it was DNA coded, they never found out. But Lick weapons wouldn’t work for humans.
The same could not be said for vice versa.
A .50 Cal machine gun opened fire on the rest of the humans as they sprinted toward the fence.
It was older machinery, the thud thud thud of the belt being fed sounding more like a movie than real life.
But the bodies sputtered, and twisted and fell, just like the movies too, the dark earth growing darker in the starlight as blood blossomed in fountains or leaked out of the fallen.
“This way,” Pomona grunted in his ear and pulled on his arm.
She led him away from the slaughter, at the head of a group of four more.
They ran around the corner of the building, ran between it and another.
“In here,” she said and hauled open a door.
Lutz and the other men surged after her, into the pitch black opening as dark as a cave.
He plowed into the back of her as she stopped.
Lights popped on in exploding brilliance, bathing them in yellow incandescence, pinning them in the middle of another warehouse.
Frozen.
Caught.
Two dozen soldiers created a semi-circle around them.
Two dozen blasters aimed at the four men.
Lutz decided to charge them. Weapon or no, he wasn’t going to die cowering on the floor. He was going to go out fighting.
He took two steps into a run.
“Excellent work,” Lick Commander hissed, his gaze settling on Pomona as she jittered to the line of soldier’s and slid through.
Lutz stopped and stared.
The men around him were dumbstruck as well.
“These are the leaders of the escape?” Lick Commander asked.
Lutz watched as he separated from the rest of the soldiers, and strutted toward them.
His yellow eyes studied each of them in turn.
“Smart?” he asked. “I do not think it smart of you to seek escape. But she knows the ways of humans more so than I.”
He stopped in front of the last man in the row. Lutz thought he may have once been burly, but now skin sagged from his too thin face, shoulders slumped at the betrayal.
“Are you intelligent human?” Lick Commander hissed. “I am told you are able to determine things.”
He made a motion with a claw and the soldiers surrounding them marched forward to drag them away.
Lutz looked around for Pomona as two Licks yanked his arms up and hauled him after the others.
Their eyes locked for a brief moment, and he felt a twinge of sadness that she didn’t look guilty or even bothered by her actions.
CHAPTER
Lt halted at the first row of tents and squinted at the vague shadows that darted among them in the interior rings.
“My name is Lt. William Bonney and if any more of you sons of bitches takes a shot at me, I’m going to come in there and kill every last damn one of you.”
He lifted his blaster rifle and sent a shot seven feet off the ground, just over their heads unless there was an especially tall man among the group, but low enough to warn the rest.
If they saw it.
He had some doubt. The laser blast was bright, but the flames were turning some of the tents into infernos, and the thick smoke was making it difficult to see.
“Herd ‘em into the river,” said Lt as the rest of his squad caught up to him.
Weber and Babe fanned out in one direction, Jake, Waldo and Renard in the other.
They worked their way around the ring, and the people inside fled toward the river.
They huddled in a mass of shivering confusion, the row closest to the water shoving back to keep from being pushed in and pushed under.
Either end of the group was blocked by laser toting soldiers in suits they hadn’t seen before, and one of those soldiers stood in front of them and addressed the group.
“Which one of you is the leader of this hear outfit?” Lt drawled.
He cocked the blaster rifle on his hip and let it drift over their heads.
“Come on, step up now and don’t be shy. Sure as shit wasn’t shy about shooting me with a damn bow and arrow a minute ago.”
“Cross bow,” a skinny man with a gray beard stepped from behind an even thinner woman, pushing her scrawny frame aside and resting his hand on a pistol worn cross draw.
“That so?” Lt squinted at him.
“Are you really Billy the Kid?”
“Fuck you,” said Lt as he let his blaster drift lower. “Don’t call me Billy the Kid. My name is Lt. Bonney. For your purposes, you can refer to me as Lt. Bonney, though I will still answer to Lt, if we get along.”
The blaster stopped as it reached an angle with the man’s face.
“We are going to get along, aren’t we?”
The man stared into the bore of the laser and gulped, his beard bouncing up and down, black eyes half glaring as if he was trying to decide how much a smart remark would get him shot.
Then he nodded.
“I don’t think the folks in the back can hear you,” said Lt. “Are we going to get along?”
“Yes,” the man stuttered. “Yes!”
He glanced over his shoulder at the people around him.
“Don’t cause them any trouble,” he turned back to Lt. “I thought you were only fighting the aliens, not people just trying to survive.”
“That what you call this?” Lt fingered the gash in his chestplate. “Surviving?”
“We didn’t know you were humans.”
Lt looked at Weber and Babe. They didn’t look human. Humanoid maybe. With the visors down, they were certainly
intimidating.
“Now I’m a reasonable man,” Lt said.
He let his eyes drift down to Jake, Renard and Waldo.
“I can see where you made a mistake thinking we were something we were not. But now that you know what we are, just men in body armor, you can admit you were a wrong.”
Lt locked eyes with the gray bearded man, trading squint for glare.
“Takes a big man to admit when he is wrong and apologize.”
“You want me to apologize?”
Lt just stared at him.
“To you?”
“You did shoot him,” said Babe.
He kept his blaster locked into his shoulder, and aimed over the crowd.
Ready. Just in case.
“He was shooting at us,” the gray beard squirmed. “You all were.”
“Were we?” Lt called out. “Chief, you shoot off first? How about you Babe? Waldo?”
A chorus of no sirs echoed around the silent crowd.
“Alright then, that’s what I thought,” he motioned the gray bearded man forward.
After a moment, the man complied.
“I ain’t here to play the blame game or even to blame you for trying to kill me,” Lt said, leading him away from the crowd.
“It was a simple case of mistaken identity. Live and learn. I think that’s a good lesson to walk away from in this.”
The older man nodded.
“But, I did come to ask you a question,” Lt continued. “If you’re in charge here, did you give the order to torch that town back there?”
The man tensed, eyes going blank. His lips compressed in a thin line, and Lt knew that whatever he said next was going to be a lie.
“There’s a village back there?”
Playing dumb.
“That’s pretty much what I figured you would say,” Lt sighed. “Seems like you don’t like to do nothing the easy way.”
“We’re just trying to surviving in this world,” the gray beard said.
“Yeah? At what cost?”
“Excuse me?”
“Seems like we should be united in our fight against the Lick,” Lt said. “Not killing off the few of us left.”
“My people are hungry.”
“Did you ask them to share?”
“Who?”
“The town back there. You called it a village, but I think the population was enough to call it a small town, so that’s how I’ll refer to it. And you killed every last one of them.”
“I’m responsible for their well being,” gray beard pointed at the people huddled by the river.
“Oh yeah? You got them fishing for food? You got them hiding under trees? Out here in the open like this, seems like you would be ripe picking for the Lick patrols that use this road.”
“They leave us alone,” the man answered.
Lt snorted.
“How’d you manage that?”
“An arrangement,” said the man.
Lt watched his hand drift to the pistol he wore on his belt., nervous fingers scratching the scarred wooden handle of an ancient Colt Peacemaker.
“What kind of arrangement?” Lt murmured.
“We don’t have guns like you,” gray beard said. “We’re reduced to using whatever we can scavenge or build on our own.”
“What kind of arrangement?”
“We just want to be left alone,” he said. Fingers wrapping around the butt of the pistol and releasing. Spit flecked on the corner of his lips.
“Out here in the open, right next to a Lick corridor and you think you’re alone.”
“They leave us alone,” the man explained.
“The arrangement?”
Gray beard nodded.
“What do you have to give up to get that bargain?”
No answer.
“That town? Others like it?”
He didn’t nod. That would be too much of an admission. But his head moved. He breathed out and his fingers gripped the pistol again.
Trying to work up to something.
“How many?” Lt growled. “How many survivors have you killed? Traded?”
“As many as it takes,” the man glared back.
He didn’t draw though. Lt wanted him to do it. Wanted him to try to fight, try to make a run for it. Even if it wouldn’t do him any good.
Bonney stuck the barrel of his rifle under the man’s chin and pulled the trigger.
The laser blast seared a hole through the top of his head, misting the air with a puff of blood and smoke.
Gray beard stood up straight and stiff as the electrical impulses in his brain went into overdrive and shut down in an instant.
Lt reached out and gripped the Peacemaker, lifting it out as the man fell.
“I shot first,” he said as he turned to his squad. “When you retell this story, it’s always I shot first.”
CHAPTER
“I don’t have a stomach to kill all of these people,” Weber said and lowered his rifle.
Lt shoved the procured pistol into a pocket on his backpack and sniffed.
“I don’t aim to kill ‘em all,” said Lt. “They ain’t Licks.”
“But you killed that man,” said Weber.
“Yeah.”
“Do you think they’re going to stand for it?”
“You know what these people are, Weber? Slavers. They kill and capture their own people to give to the Licks to do God knows what with. But it’s as good as killing them once they give ‘em over.”
Weber let his eyes travel over the cowering crowd.
“There are women and children in there,” he said in a voice just above a whisper.
Lt sighed.
“I’ve got a woman and child up there. One’s a soldier, one’s an orphan,” he jabbed a finger at the crowd. “Made that way by them.”
“You can’t kill them,” Weber stated. “It makes us no better than them.”
Lt nodded.
“I don’t want to kill ‘em,” he said. “But I can’t leave them out here to block me when we come back with Lutz.”
“I hate this,” Weber groaned. “You should have just left us in the mountain.”
“Send ‘em back to the base,” Babe suggested.
Lt stared at the corpse with a hole in its head he had left several feet away.
“Might be like sending the fox into the henhouse, Babe.”
Babe shrugged.
“We can’t take a kid on a rescue mission, and we can’t leave these people here. They might not have real weapons-“
“Get shot with a giant crossbow and tell me how fucking real it feels,” said Lt.
“I meant ones that can hurt us.”
Lt tapped his chest.
“Fucking hurts Babe. Gonna leave a mark and everything.”
“You gonna let me finish or keep busting my balls, Lt?”
“I know where you’re going with it big guy. We spent way too much time together. Hell, I’m practically a mind reader now.”
Babe smirked.
“Tell what I’m thinking right now?”
“And fuck you too buddy. Listen up,” he turned to Weber and motioned the others to circle up.
The rest of the squad pulled a semi-circle around him, blasters ready for the crowd if they needed it.
“You two,” he pointed at Weber and Renard. “Get Crockett and take this bunch back to the base. Oakley’s gonna go with you, do the babysitting of that rugrat til you get there.”
He eyed Babe.
“That what you thinking Babe? Split our forces so we can do twice as much?”
Babe nodded.
“Chief, Waldo, Babe and me are gonna go get Lutz,” Lt continued. “And find you a fucking bat. You don’t look right without one.”
CHAPTER
Lutz was third in line as the Lick Commander led them into the bowels of the facility.
The base had once housed a military installation, but the invasion scoured the humans and their defensive measures upon arrival.
Lutz had no idea where they were, but he realized the small warehouse that held hundreds of people was just a fraction of the base. He had been kept on the periphery of the grounds.
Now, he tried not to gape.
The facility was composed of a giant building, built around a massive spaceship.
It looked like a cross between the space shuttle pictures he had seen, and a massive cube.
Lutz had never been in space, and the last rocket to Mars the humans had sent was years ago. There were no televised launches back then, as if the world leadership wanted the population to forget an invading force was one planet over and a few years away.
Launches were done in secret, as was most of the weapons development used to fight the invaders.
Those weapons had been sent to the Red Planet, Lutz knew. And when the Licks made it to earth, they destroyed everything else.
Humans were reduced to fighting with rocks. Not literally, he knew, but in a practical sense. The drones were gone. Aircraft gone. Every thing more advanced than an RPG, disappeared or stopped working, along with cars, electricity, running water.
Hell, humans couldn’t even use horses and wagons any more. Lick patrols zeroed in on anything that moved faster than a run.
Now, here he was, staring in wide eyed wonder at a marvel from beyond the stars.
When it didn’t blast off into space in a roar of flames and the smell of rocket fuel, he got bored with it.
Sure, it was an impressive structure. Large and intimidating, it dominated the landscape, squatting like, well, like an alien structure that didn’t belong on the planet, thought Lutz.
Besides, it looked like a small skyscraper he had seen pictures of, and who could be scared of a building.
Even a building filled with seven foot scale skinned lizards.
He’d killed plenty of Licks to not be scared of them.
The man in front of him started moaning.
“Hey buddy,” Lutz whispered to his back. “Just be cool. Don’t attract their attention.”
But the man kept moaning.
“Shit,” Lutz groaned. “This is not good.”
It wasn’t.
The man launched himself at the Lick Commander’s back.
He was able to latch on, wrap his arms around the thick lizard neck and start squeezing.
Then his head vaporized, leaving a smoking stump on his neck and a scorch mark on the wall.
