On the third day after fleeing the drones, and with no sign of pursuit, he stepped over the scorched, pale stones of a very old low wall. Being inside the compound, no matter how open it was, made him feel safer somehow. He searched the area in the glow of moonlight and found an old, rusted sign welcoming him to some kind of military museum, unable to shake the feeling that he was being watched.
Chapter 6
Alec
Alec slowly closed the door as he moved inside the warehouse. How could he be so foolish to think the bracelet from Tom would actually work? The Seekers were the first line from the Overseers. They were always seen hovering in the sky, day and night, looking for anything out of the ordinary, and more specifically, Roamers. From what Alec knew, they would scan you, retrieve your ID, and if you were in an unauthorized region, they’d notify the Trackers, who were less than friendly.
Alec had seen the thigh-high robotic animals tear a human to shreds, and that was after they’d unleashed twenty rounds of high caliber bullets into him.
He waited, hoping it was just a random patrol Seeker and not the Overseers seriously searching for him. He found an open window across the room, stuck his head beneath it, and listened for signs of a Seeker. There was the whining noise, but it was fleeting, disappearing as the drones moved on.
He sat on the concrete floor and rested against the hard wall as he tried to convince his heart to calm down. He couldn’t keep doing this. The next time would probably be his last.
Waiting another five minutes for good measure, Alec eventually tiptoed outside, and when he saw or heard no sign of the Overseer’s creations, he ran along the building, careful to stay in the dark shadows as long as he could.
It took twice as long to return to his bunk as leaving had, but he made it, and with only four hours before his shift in the plant started. He fell to the thin mattress, not bothering to change his clothes. Even after his exciting night, he found sleep after only a few deep breaths.
Three new workers arrived at the plant on his shift the next day. They were the hardened faces of people that had been through it all, but still kept working endlessly. Alec tried not to stare, but it was difficult. They hadn’t brought any new blood to the site for at least five months, and the ones Alec worked with were either too brash or too meek to survive much longer.
The group stuck together, and Simon had them working on the far-left corner of the contraption they were building. The sweaty bald man made eye contact with Alec, forcing Alec to quickly look away. He wasn’t going to give the man an excuse to be riled up today.
“Bring the sheet, I’m ready,” Darnel said without averting his stare from the metal walled structure.
Alec hefted it up and pressed it in place, glad to have gloves on as the solder began to drip beside him.
By the time the siren sounded, Alec was exhausted and wanted to sit and eat their meager dinner with Beth. The newcomers ambled over and arrived in line behind Alec. The man at his back was a big guy, six two, at least two forty. His head was shaved like everyone else’s, but on him, it looked natural, like he would choose it anyway. Dark stubble covered his cheeks and chin.
“Hey. Name’s Crash. These are my friends, Monet and Jackfish.” He motioned to a tough woman. Piercing dark brown eyes met his, and she smiled, showcasing sparkling white teeth.
Jackfish was a skinny kid, probably only twenty, and his eyes darted around like he was afraid something was coming for him.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Alec,” he said, moving ahead in line. “Where you from? Haven’t seen you before.”
“Just got in. They brought us over from Denver. Guess they liked our work,” Crash said this with a chuckle, and the others laughed with him, leaving Alec out of some sort of inside joke.
“Sure. Guess so.” Alec turned and saw it was his turn. He stuck a palm out, getting a full dinner chit, and kept moving.
When they were in line for dinner, the big man moved close to him, so close he could feel the hot breath on his ear. “We know who you are. We’re friends of Tom’s.” Then just like that, the man had turned and was speaking quietly with Monet.
Alec’s heart was racing as he tried to understand the words. Tom? How could they be friends of Tom’s? And Denver, that was a long way away from Detroit. He’d never heard of anyone being transferred that far.
“Next,” the usual woman said, piling his gruel in the center of the white bowl and shoving it toward Alec.
“Thank you.” He tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth twitched nervously. He put his head down and glanced at Crash, who was doing his best to ignore him. It was clear he shouldn’t eat with them tonight, and he kept moving, seeing Beth by herself at the table.
She worked in a different part of the old car manufacturing plant, one that always let its workers out a few minutes earlier than Alec’s crew.
“Hey, Beth,” Alec said. She peered up from her plate, her eyes half-closed. “Is everything okay?”
“I don’t think so. I haven’t been feeling well, and they won’t do anything for me. I caused a bit of a scene today and got a half-chit.” She nodded to the tiny portion of food on her plate.
Without thinking, he grabbed her plate and swapped it with his.
She tried to switch them, checking to see if anyone had noticed his rule-breaking.
“Just eat it, Beth.”
“You had a half serving last night. You need the food,” Beth said quietly.
“Don’t worry about me.” Alec scooped up the gruel, eating quickly as he watched the three new workers join another pair at an empty table. Crash glanced at him, then averted his eyes.
“Who are they?” Beth asked.
“No one.” Alec had to find a way to talk to Crash. Alone.
“What’s bothering you? Stomach again?” Alec asked.
“Stomach… nothing new,” she answered, her head hanging low as she ate the food, her right arm circled around the plate protectively.
It wasn’t unusual for his friend to feel unwell, and they never did anything about it. Occasionally, they’d inject a sick person with a shot, but Alec had no idea what it was. Could be something to help or perhaps make them worse. Alec didn’t think the Overseers cared much for sick workers. He’d seen more than one person with a lingering cough pulled away from the job site, never to return.
Alec didn’t think they were visiting a farm upstate. He wasn’t naïve, not anymore. He’d seen friends disappear, people killed on the job site for minor infractions, and worst of all, Tom had left him there alone.
“Try to get a shot. Some medicine. Talk to your site supervisor tomorrow, or someone on his team that seems a little more sympathetic. These are humans after all.” Alec hoped one of them would help Beth. Even though they were people, the ones working directly for the aliens seem to have forgotten that. The workers, the slaves, were nothing more than animals to them. He didn’t understand how they could do that to their own kind.
“I will.” The siren rang, the lights flashing to indicate their short meal time was finished. Back to the bunks. Alec stayed there as long as he could, getting into the rear of the line. Beth was ahead, near the front, and he noticed her plodding steps. She’d given up. If he didn’t help her escape soon, she was going to end up dead.
Crash and his friends were four people ahead, and Alec tried not to stare at them. He glanced at the big man’s hand, seeing a piece of paper flash out from his palm, then back into his grip. Had that been a signal?
The line moved through the cafeteria, past the entrance to the job sites, and outside, into a rainy night. The wind was calm, the fat drops of precipitation falling straight to the ground, and in a matter of seconds, Alec was drenched. The line moved slowly, a depressing march to their rows of bunks. He watched as they neared the line of metal walled units, each with a number painted in white digits. Something fell from the newcomer’s hand, and the four people in front of Alec stepped by it, not noticing.
Alec bent low, sw
iftly picking up the paper, and without looking at it, he shoved it deep into his pocket. Crash turned at unit seven, and the three headed to a different hall than Alec’s.
His heart was beating so fast, he thought someone was going to hear it, and when lightning flashed in the distant open sky, Alec jumped with it. Eventually, he made his way to his unit, a small metal door with a much smaller barred window. He arrived inside, no guards nearby, and he wished he could lock it.
No one had ever come into his room, his cell, but he still worried. Alec pressed his back against the door, knowing he’d at least be alerted if someone tried to enter. He waited until he heard no more shuffling or feet from the hall, and finally, he stuck his hand into his pocket, pulling out the wet piece of paper. Alec wiped the note against his coveralls before unfolding it.
Hand off at eleven sharp tomorrow.
Go to McCook, NE
That was it. No names. No other directions. McCook, NE. Nebraska.
His heart was hammering in his chest, and Alec heard heavy footsteps clanging down the hall’s floors. Without a second thought, he tore the note in four, and shoved the pieces of wet paper into his mouth, chewing quickly, and swallowed the evidence.
He sat on his bed and closed his eyes, trying to picture Nebraska on a map. It was somewhere west of Detroit, that much he knew.
Tomorrow, his life was going to change.
Chapter 7
Lina
They traveled as far north as they could until the cover of the trees ran out. There were six of them, ranging from twice her age to half of it, yet in spite of the fact that Lina was by no means the elder in the group, they all looked to her for guidance.
“We can’t go on any further,” one of them moaned in a voice far too loud for her liking. “The children can’t keep up.” Lina peered at the youngsters, seeing confusion on the face of one of them. They seemed to be coping with the pace over the rough ground just fine. It was the adult who was struggling.
She watched through a narrow gap in the treetops, making a judgment call. “We keep going until we find water,” Lina declared, “then we stop for the day.”
Barely half a mile later, their path crossed a bubbling brook running down the mountainside towards the lakes in the valley where they’d lived. They drank, washed their faces and hands, and settled for another uncomfortable night on the damp forest floor and whatever small amount of food they’d either brought or found along the way.
Lina had nothing other than a handful of berries she’d seen earlier in the day. They weren’t quite ripe enough and had started a twisting, nagging cramp in her stomach after she ate them. One of the children, a boy of perhaps twelve, the son of the man complaining about the exertion, sat beside her and held out a piece of dried meat. She smiled, whispering to him that he should eat it himself.
“I took it from my father,” he said, nodding at the man trying to light a fire without much success but refusing to allow anyone to help him. “He always keeps double for himself.”
Lina was annoyed on principle, feeling that a parent should go without so that their child should have more. She took the tough meat and chewed it, thanking the smiling boy, who slunk away to watch his father fail to light a fire.
“Keep it small,” Lina reminded them. “We don’t want them to be able to find us.”
“I know what I’m doing,” snapped the man as he rounded on her. “The trees will cover us.” Lina bit back her answer, knowing that he would never agree with anyone but himself. That was the kind of man he was. The sharp twist in her gut doubled her over in sudden pain. She stood, mumbling her excuses to the others nearby and scrambling almost desperately down the slope beside the stream until she couldn’t hear or sense the presence of any others.
As she crouched to relieve herself, she slipped and fell into the flowing brook. As the icy water ran around her, she finally felt the stress and loss hit her hard. She sobbed uncontrollably, rolling out of the water with her soaked pants clinging to her, and cried long and hard until all of her energy was sapped by it. She shivered, face blank and emotionless as her eyes stared without focus. Slowly, as her senses returned to her, she stripped off her clothes, wringing moisture from them, before methodically placing them back on her exhausted body.
A sharp whine, moving faster than any insect she had ever heard, zipped above the treetops. Suddenly alert, all sensation of exhaustion and cold forgotten, she set off, returning up the rocky slope of the stream, desperately trying to reach the others and warn them. A bark echoed all around her like two pieces of heavy metal hitting one another to produce an almost musical sound. It was answered by another, further away, but the echoes seemed to be singing a terrifying duet.
A scream, loud and guttural, sounded close, and Lina, to her eternal shame, turned and ran in terror.
She broke through the trees during the night, feeling the wind whip past her face so forcefully and suddenly that it made her stop in fright. She panicked, wasting valuable time in the open where she could be seen. She ran in the first direction she chose, following a gentle slope downhill and stumbling as she ran tripping on tufts of stiff grass covering the uneven, rocky ground.
She didn’t know how far she had traveled by the time day began to break, but her terror at being out in the world beyond her valley drove her onwards toward a smudge of distant gray on the horizon. When she reached it, she found a broken-down strip of stores with heavy boards rotted away from the smashed windows they’d once covered. She crawled inside the first one she could fit into and sat under a long counter to hug her knees then cried until she finally succumbed to exhaustion.
Lina woke, breath coming fast and her heart beating fit to burst clean out of her chest. She jerked to life, banging her head on the underside of the counter, forgetting where she was for a few terrifying seconds.
When the memory of the last few days hit her, her mind and body gave out so that even fresh tears would not come. She crawled from her hiding spot, stiff muscles cramped and stretching painfully as she stood to her full height. She slid the pack from her chafed shoulders, having been too delirious with fear and tiredness to remove it before, and took stock of herself.
She had no food. She had water for another two days at most. She was wearing dirty clothes, which had dried stiff and rubbed her skin painfully. She still had her pack of medical supplies and a small knife. Lina wouldn’t let herself think about her people she’d left behind. There was no helping them, not when the metal creatures arrived.
“Water,” she told herself through numb, cracked lips. “Water, food, shelter, fire.” She recited the four basics of survival, somewhat interchangeable depending on her environment, and decided to change the order. “Water, food, fire,” she muttered. “I have shelter.”
But she realized that she knew little about hunting or trapping, and without a safe and plentiful lake to fish in, she didn’t know where to find food. Especially not in an environment as alien as she found herself now, all alone and without guidance or help.
A life spent in a close community, sheltered from the outside world, meant that she knew very little about the remains of the lives she saw all around her. Those lives from before their arrival, from before the occupation, before the wars that made humanity an endangered species.
She wandered around the dusty interior of the place, running her hands along the wondrous constructions she’d never seen before. A large machine sat on a counter with pipes and spouts of bright metal beneath the layer of grime and dust, which fell away to her light touch. She had no idea what it was, but the stack of dust-covered cups beside it made her think that it made drinks for the people of the old world instead of them having to boil their own water over a fire.
She marveled at it, turning a full circle to take in the other details of the gloomy interior. She stepped closer to the walls to wipe away the layer of filth and expose pictures of what she’d seen in the old magazines. There were cars. Motorcycles. Airplanes. Pictures of men and w
omen dancing together, wearing clothes of bright colors.
A word tickled her memory from a story she had been told years before by one of the elders. She’d used a word to describe a place like that, saying it was where she and her friends would sit and drink something called a soda until boys came in to do the same. They wouldn’t talk, but they would sit apart and send each other messages on things called cellphones. She had called the place a diner.
A noise made her creep towards a gap between two boards still in place over the windows. Outside were the rusted hulks of two vehicles with no tires, making them look sad and incomplete. She tried to hold her breath to hear better, but her pounding heart drowned out any noise from outside until movement through the crack caught her eye.
She gasped as her gaze caught the source of her alarm and held her breath as a small dog-like creature froze to stare in her direction. The two of them held a motionless competition until the dog loped away, looking as though it used as little energy as possible to move.
Releasing her breath and allowing her chest to heave, Lina gathered herself to search the diner for anything she could use. She found big cans that appeared to be food, only when she tried to rub the years of dirt off to read the labels, they crumbled away to leave her without a clue of the contents.
Deciding to risk it out of desperation, she used her knife to pry open the edge of the lid of one. It popped open, hitting her with an unpleasant wave of dry air that held hints of both rotten and stale odors. She replaced the lid quickly without looking at the desiccated contents, coughing to clear the smell from her nose, and looked at the shelves again to try and find a different kind of can.
She found one, taking it, and instead of rubbing it, she tried to blow the dust off without much success. She turned the can over in her hands and thought she could make out a few letters, one of which was a capital M, and figured that the worst that could happen was another repeat of the last can. She set it to the side, using her knife to level it open as she had before, and this time the smell that hit her wasn’t as unpleasant.
Occupation: A Post-Apocalyptic Alien Invasion Thriller (Rise Book 1) Page 4
