Enemy

by Paul Hughes

  The desert seemed cooler now.

  The man who was Richter had not cared about heat or cold ever since he had emerged from the heavenly light so long ago...

  But the shift in climate was still startling.

  He was alone now. The group of men, women, and children he had tried to blend in with was gone now. Dead. But he had taken care of the aliens...

  A pain shot through his skull.

  RICHTER

  Temple to temple, searing agony. Richter bent over, struggling to force the voices from his mind.

  Reaching... Grasping...

  He staggered onward.

  Diablo, Wyoming.

  The last official census in America revealed that Diablo had a population of forty-seven living, breathing citizens. In the Milicom Systems installation just below the Peak, five hundred twelve soldiers and forty-five officers had been stationed in rotating tours of duty.

  It was a quiet town. Too quiet, like most conspicuously quiet towns are.

  The village was situated at the base of the eastern face of the Peak, a large projection of nondescript rock layers. The rock outcropping jutted accusingly into the air, shielding Diablo’s onetime treasure: the mine. The mine stretched to unknown depths below the village. It employed many a grandfather, father, son in the old days, scraping meager copper deposits from the rough.

  And then...

  Well, the mine had closed, and with it, the spirit of the town had died. The military had moved in and taken over the Peak, stringing the mine entrance with razorwire and dotting the hillsides with mechanized turrets and armed troops, and not just any pimple-faced-eighteen-year-old-high-school-dropout-armed-with-an-M-16 armed troops. These were highly-skilled-body-armored-jacked-in-Fury-7 armed troops. Milicom troops.

  Rumor was, they had found something down there.

  Was it plutonium? Saganite?

  No one talked. People who talked disappeared.

  The town learned to stay silent. Oh, there was still the occasional drunk old-timer at the local bar who expounded theories of “god damned governmental conspiracies” and talked of the thing in the earth, the thing that sheared off twelve feet of Old Drill Two but didn’t even suffer a scratch, but the bartender knew when to make them shut up, especially when off-duty Milicom types came into the bar...

  Diablo learned to not listen. Then the end came, along with the aliens.

  Diablo became a ghost town.

  Nighttime.

  They left the tunnel system several miles outside of Seattle, emerging into a landscape ravaged by the final chemical holocaust that the military had thought might be able to repel the Black forces. They had of course been wrong, and had paid for their mistake with their lives and their souls. Flynn and Hayes now sat in a half-demolished building that had once been a suburban shopping mall. The storefronts on either side of them still advertised a mall-wide Summer Sale. It did not feel like summer. A meager campfire burned before them. It was reflected in two blue eyes and two gray eyes.

  There was no sign of Enemy in the area; they had apparently moved on. Hayes casually removed and discarded his medical uniform, stained as it was by the blood of the innocent and the aliens alike. He also removed his dogtags and a small pendant from around his neck. He looked at the objects in his hand for a brief sad moment, and then tossed them into the fire.

  Flynn leapt forward, reaching for the discarded objects.

  “Simon! Your cross—”

  He pulled her hand back from the fire. The pendant he had thrown was a cross, but in the heat of the fire it soon blackened and puddled as easily as his dogtags. He released her hand after an awkward silence had passed. Her too-gray eyes searched for something in his face.

  “Don’t worry about it. It didn’t mean much to me before, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean anything now.”

  Flynn looked into the fire. “Were you a religious man?… Before?”

  Before. The word hung in the air, echoing with newfound meaning. Before.

  “No. It was given to me by… someone who meant a lot to me. She thought it would protect me. She thought it would make everything better.”

  “Why did you—”

  “All the old gods are dead now.” He laughed, more to himself than out loud. “They were never alive to me.”

  He sat down by the makeshift fire to warm himself. Flynn sat down on the opposite side of the fire, facing Hayes.

  He watched her closely.

  She watched him more closely.

  Hayes shivered noticeably, although Flynn could not tell if it was because of the cold or the long awkward silent stare that they had shared. Her unasked question was answered as Hayes pulled a black insulated vest from his pack and pulled it over his olive-drab tee-shirt. She made a mental note of arms constructed of taut muscle, stretched over tanned skin like leather. A worker’s arms. His identification codebar was all-too-visibly burned into his left forearm.

  “It shouldn’t be this cold. It’s never been this cold at this time of year here.”

  “Maybe because it’s night—”

  “No… It’s never been this cold so suddenly in the summer. Don’t you feel it?”

  “Maybe a little—”

  “It’s too fucking cold.”

  Flynn drew her legs up close to her torso, hooked her arms around the rough drab-covered surface of her knees. She looked at Hayes, who had turned away from her. A sudden breeze sent a chill through her small frame and she shivered. She pulled a blanket from her pack and wrapped herself within. Hayes ignored her and searched through his rucksack.

  There was no uncontaminated food here. The scent of chemical warfare still hung cloyingly in the air. Hayes strapped on an I.V. unit and injected a nutrient solution from his medikit into his bloodstream. He swallowed an antitoxin caplet and offered one to Flynn, but she refused.

  “Genetically-engineered resistance?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  They sat in silence.

  “I’m sorry about the baby, Hayes. I saw you—”

  “Don’t worry about it. This is war. I shouldn’t have let it get to me.”

  “But this isn’t war, at least not the kind of war that’s ever been fought here before. And we sure as hell haven’t fought aliens before. This isn’t war. This is extinction.”

  “All the more reason to keep myself distanced and not get involved. Who knows how many more will die before this ends?”

  “How can you not get involved? You’re a doctor.”

  “I’m just a soldier now.”

  “I guess everybody’s a soldier now.”

  Hayes arose, paced. His hands combed through his hair, a nervous reflex. He had a headache, a dull, throbbing pain behind his eyes that had bothered him since… Well, since the first days of the invasion, back when the slivers of black first began to fall from the sky. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Hayes shivered as the breeze picked up. Gooseflesh had arisen on his forearms, and he rubbed his arms to warm himself up. He could see his breath when he exhaled.

  It was June.

  “Tell me about yourself, Simon. Tell me about your past.”

  He had been patting down his pockets, searching for something. He finally found the pack of cigarettes in an interior vest pocket, ripped off the cellophane, tore off the top of the pack, expertly pulled one out with his teeth as he searched through his pockets for his lighter. He lit the cigarette, took a long draw, held the smoke in for what seemed to Flynn an impossibly long time. His exhalation brought him an obvious pleasure.

  “A doctor, huh?” Flynn smiled wickedly at Hayes.

  “We all have our vices. Some of us enjoy felony.”

  Smoking had been illegal for three years. He carefully tapped the ashes into the fire, wanting to savor every last bit of his felony contraband. He smiled guiltily at Flynn, held the pack out to her, to which she politely shook her head. Hayes inhaled again, exhaled after another blissful moment of nicotine, and grinned at Flynn
. “Ms. Flynn, you don’t want to know about my past.”

  She smiled again, a sweet disarming smile that forced Hayes to respond in kind. “Of course I do. We have a long time until daybreak, and to tell you the truth, I was hoping I could get to know my traveling partner a little better. Even if it is the end of the world. Besides, I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

  Hayes gave in. Who was this woman, and why did she have this effect on him?

  He sat down directly across the fire from Flynn, wrapped himself in his own blanket. The sky overhead, framed by the ruins of the building within which they sat, was strangely absent of stars and moon. The only light came from a meager fire in a dead shopping mall and the tip of Simon’s precious cigarette, the only sound the crackle and hiss of flame and the voices of perhaps the last people on earth. Hayes began, his bass voice a whisper in the night.

  “Fine. You win.”

  Flynn drew closer to the fire, the flames flickering in her gray eyes. She listened intently, and they passed the night revealing the past. The night grew colder to the sound of Simon Hayes’ history, and Ember Magdalene Flynn listened to every word with a fascination that she had never felt before.

  “My name’s Simon Hayes. I was born in Harkness, Michigan, ten years before War Three—”

  —tore apart Eurasia and destroyed over a third of the world’s population. He was not a healthy child, for reasons that no one wanted to talk about. His family denied that his mother was severely addicted to crystalline nanotech, the illegal biological interface to holotechnological realities. She had been deeply traumatized by the 2018 chemical bombing of Kansas City, in which most of her family had been killed. She used the nanotech devices to escape her reality. Simon’s father was a holotech developer, eager to test out his latest programs on the overly-willing subject. It was not a match made in heaven, but it was a match nonetheless. From it, Simon was created.

  Simon grew up a lonely child. He had no siblings; his parents’ application for a second child license had been rejected, and his parents by law had to undergo sterilization. He was artistic and intelligent beyond his years. One obstacle hindered his expression severely, a permanent stutter that made verbal communication almost impossible. He found his creative outlet in drawing, and his parents often found him outside sketching the warplanes that constantly flew overhead.

  He always seemed happy enough, but it disturbed his parents that little Simon seldom smiled. He sometimes did, but it was a sad, sardonic smile that did not fit the face of a child. He would then wander off and draw something else.

  The world was tattered for the Hayes family when the Indochine Francais Pact invaded the Siberian oilfields. The world’s first real nuclear war since the Three Days War between India and Pakistan at the turn of the millennium erupted with a fury unmatched in a century. Most of Asia and Eastern Europe were wiped summarily off the globe. Much of the rest of Europe was made uninhabitable, and the French Socialist government eagerly accepted the invitation to relocate to Quebec.

  The Hayes family sat outside each night for two months, Father slowly sipping a dry martini five parts vodka one part vermouth two olives on a plastic cocktail sword and when he was feeling festive perhaps one of those little umbrellas that looks decidedly uncouth sticking up from a martini, Mother’s hand always absently wandering to the holotech interface behind her left ear that she kept hidden from view by wearing a stylish and retro bobbed coiffure tucked coyly behind her ears in little-girl style even when she quickly approached the age of hot flashes and the cessation of natural fertility, watching the orbiting nuclear deterrent systems destroy the hundreds of ICBMs being launched at Canada and the United States by the remnants of the corporate Japanese-backed Siberian Alliance. Simon remembered his mother’s tears and hushed conversations that his parents didn’t want him to hear. He heard and understood far more than they knew.

  America took a passive stance in the war, not launching any weapons, just shooting down missiles launched at them. The hope for a diplomatic resolution to the war was a long shot, and became an impossibility when a four-gigaton fusion weapon overshot its intended target of Toronto and airburst over American soil, wiping most of western New York off the map.

  America was in the war with a vengeance.

  American pilots went on scalping runs around the globe, scouring Siberia, Japan, and the remnants of the French Indochinese Alliance. The war was quick, efficient, and bloody. America secured itself as the only remaining world power, sweeping out and annexing those territories that it had not entirely devastated. French officials looked on in terror from their secure bunkers in Quebec as America took its revenge for being dragged into a war that had not been its own.

  By the time the dust of the war had settled and life returned to a semblance of normalcy, Simon was on the verge of adolescence. He was still a quiet young man, and his introspection became a great concern for his father. His mother spent most of her days in an alcohol and holotech-induced haze. The shock of the war had been too much for her, and she found solace in the blissful artificial worlds created for holotech. When Simon’s father took his own life, no one was terribly surprised. He had been a successful businessman, and when the war broke out he began dealing in communications holotechnology. When it was revealed that his company had been a major supplier of crystalline holotech to the French, the government began an investigation. He would have been executed before long if he had not taken his own life. There were many executions in the years after the war. The Allied States of America were ruled with brutal efficiency from the Wind River complex.

  Simon turned his creative energies to writing during middle adolescence, penning wonderful examples of naïve teenage angst. He wrote to escape: there was nothing to do in Harkness, a tiny fishing village where the only excitement was the Saturday night bingo and dance at the American Legion downtown. He wrote a novel that he was rather proud of detailing the destruction of the planet by alien forces. It was trite, it was overdone, it was brilliant. “Deus Ex Machina” was rejected by twelve publishing companies before Simon burned it in anger. He watched the pages blacken one by one and die like his unborn children in the fire.

  At age eighteen, he discovered the opposite sex seriously for the first time. Oh, he had had girlfriends, or rather, he would go out on dates with girls. None of them seemed to understand the enigma that was Simon Hayes. His stutter didn’t help. She had been different; she had listened, at least for a while. Her name was Brigid, and she shamelessly tore out his heart and threw it into the dust. Simon blindly pursued her for over a year before witnessing Brigid and his best friend in a more-than-just-friendly embrace. On a trampoline. Naked. It was then and there that Simon decided to become a poet.

  He had his share of internal strife. More than his share, in fact. Simon more than simply concerned his mother anymore when she came out of her fugues. He frightened her. She once questioned him about a notebook of poems she had found scrawled in his eccentric handwriting. How could he write such dark poems? Sure, they had their problems, the war, the death of Simon’s father, the de-ratification of the United States Constitution and the dissolution of the Union, the police state that the Allied States of America had become, the Almost-Second Civil War that had been narrowly avoided when the President selected his political rival Cervera as his Secretary of Defense, but why write about such sad things? Life was good. We had won the war, hadn’t we? Cheer up, Simon! And who is this “Brigid” girl anyway?

  The look Simon had stabbed at his mother silenced her, and an abrupt and awkward silence followed. In fact, she never asked about his poems again. They talked very little after that incident.

  “Poetry.”

  “What about it?”

  “You wrote poetry?”

  “A little.”

  “Can you recite any of it for me? I used to love poetry. I still love poetry, just haven’t had any time to read in… well, years.”

  “Ms. Flynn, it’s been a long time.” He
said it seriously, but with a sly smile.

  She persisted. “I bet you still remember some of it. Especially the poetry about Brigid.” She enunciated the word like a hypothetical annoying younger sister would, taunting her older brother about his first date. Briiiii-giiiiid.

  “You won’t like it, Ms. Flynn.”

  “Call me Maggie. And let me be the judge of that!”

  “Fine. You win again, Maggie.”

  He thought long and hard, and then began to recite.

  Shadowroom:

  She was here once I

  Remember so so long

  Ago many weeks months

  Years (How long?) since

  The essence of her the presence

  Of her pervaded these walls

  Lavender walls within which

  Hell is contained she

  A constant for so long held

  On to the phone right here

  On that summer night and talked

  Me back while the music

  Played its dirge from

  The happy past under false

  Pretenses it played and she

  Sang and I SNAPPED at

  The voice so like beauty

  Thoughts of emerald eyes

  Burning in the dark on

  That special night when

  Hopes and dreams became.

  This room is.

  A reminder of her essence to me the feel flaxen

  Radiance of sunlight hair

  Gold painting the impossible

  Beauty shine light waves upon

  Waves sent to me scent to me

  Her scent in these walls

  In the shadows in the light

  Lilac scent of lilac

  A flood of memory.

  I am trapped here.

  These these walls hold me

  In altered form a drawing

  Of her she laughed when

  She saw it and loved me

  Somewhat, I’d say, or the

  Dumb little gifts with

  Which I drew closer to

  Her, stuffed animals, a

  Valentine made from

  Fruit-Roll-Up, strawberry,

  Carved: “I love you,”