He wrapped his arms around Kemi, and they kissed.
"Hey, silly." She mussed his hair. "It's your last day with me. Why are you lurking in the shadows like Gollum?"
"What's taters, precious?" he asked her.
She laughed but Marco cringed inwardly. Her words lingered. Your last day with me.
"Come, you hobbit." She held his hand and tugged him. "I have a gift for you."
As she turned and pulled him toward the door, Marco winced.
Fire flashed before him.
Snow stung him.
She's fucking dead! Bullets rang and Addy grabbed his hand, yanking him. Come with me or die with her!
"Marco?" Kemi turned back toward him, wreathed in sunlight. "You coming?"
He nodded, letting those memories fade. It had been seven years since that day, and still whenever somebody pulled his hand, Marco was back there in the snow and fire.
Holding hands, Marco and Kemi stepped out of the library onto the city street. Maple trees grew along the sidewalks, and red and golden leaves rustled and glided down. Despite the chilly air, many people walked outside. It had been several days since the last scum attack—several days to breathe without a gas mask, to feel the sunlight, to live again upon the surface of the world and not in bunkers and subway tunnels. Before the Cataclysm, Marco knew, twice as many people had lived in Toronto. Twice as many people had lived in the world. These streets had brimmed with cafes, restaurants, pubs, theaters, pockets of laughter and life. Today, many of those old buildings housed garrisons of the HDF. Soldiers stood on rooftops, peered from windows, and patrolled the streets. A massive transporter rumbled down the street, carrying two tanks on its back. The city shook as a sonic boom rattled windows and silenced all sound, and a jet streamed overhead, missiles thrusting forward like fangs.
Toronto. It was past its golden age but still home to three million civilians and soldiers, among the largest cities left in the North American Alliance, a bastion of civilization and might in a crumbling world. It was the only city Marco had ever known, the city he would leave tomorrow at dawn, would not see for five years, perhaps never again.
"So where's my gift?" Marco asked.
Kemi still held his hand. She gave him that smile again. "Not yet. First we eat." She patted his belly. "It might be a while until you enjoy a good meal again, so I'm fattening you up today."
They walked through a playground, past swings, laughing children, maple trees, and soldiers with machine guns and hard eyes. She took him into Siddhartha, one of their favorite haunts. Two burly guards stood at the door, machine guns in hand. They gave Marco and Kemi cold looks, seeking the lavender curse, then nodded and stepped aside. Marco held the door open for Kemi. The scent of curries and fresh naan bread greeted them, and they entered to find a golden statue of Ganesh, artwork of the Hindu pantheon, and a smiling server in a white apron. For two hours, they ate, stuffing themselves with butter chicken, tangy mutton stew, and steaming flatbread, ending their meal with green tea ice cream.
"I'm so stuffed I won't need to eat for five years," Marco said.
Kemi nodded. "Mission accomplished."
Marco looked around him, then back at her, and his eyes stung. "I'll miss this place." He reached across the table and touched her hand. "I'll miss you. I wish that . . ." He lowered his head. "I wish we could run. Just you and me. Before you're drafted too this winter. Run to the south and—"
"Marco!" Her eyes flashed, and she glanced around nervously, then back at him. "You shouldn't—" She sighed. "I know you're scared. I'm scared too. But we're going to be amazing, Marco. We're going to see the stars."
He smiled mirthlessly. "You will. They'll send you to fly a fancy spaceship and patrol the solar system. I'll end up cleaning latrines somewhere on a desert base surrounded by inbred mountain men."
She laughed. "Good. We need somebody to defend the world from inbred mountain men." She blinked tears away. "Come with me, Marco. No fear today. No tears. I want our last day to be good. To be happy. To be a day to remember."
Bullets blazed. The scum fed on his mother. Addy gripped his hand. She's fucking dead, she—
He swallowed hard, shoving the memory aside.
No fear today, he thought. No tears.
They walked outside again, passing by more soldiers, by civilians carrying their cardboard boxes, by schoolchildren who ran and laughed, by racing dogs. Several days since the last attack, and on a cold autumn day, the city flourished. Marco tried to imagine what it had been like here before the Cataclysm, before Earth's first contact with an alien species, before the scolopendra titaniae—the scum from space—had slaughtered sixty percent of the world's population and plunged humanity into this war. It must have looked, he imagined, a little like this fall day.
Marco and Kemi were walking by an old movie theater when an orange blaze filled the distant sky.
Sirens blared.
They froze, opened their boxes, and pulled on their gas masks. Across the street, people pulled back manhole covers and leaped into the public bunkers. Every city block these days had a public bunker. Soldiers wore their own masks and loaded their guns. Kemi made to race underground, but Marco held her hand.
"Wait." He pointed. "It's just three pods. Far. By the lake."
They stood together outside, only soldiers remaining around them. The sirens still wailed, rising, falling. The first pod streamed down toward the city and fell with a crash that shook the streets. Even here, a good two kilometers away, the buildings trembled and the ground cracked and Marco's ears rang. Another pod slammed down. Another. Windows rattled and one shattered nearby, spraying glittering shards. Gunfire sounded in the distance, and fighter jets streamed overhead.
"Just three pods," Marco said again. "Just three scum inside."
Across the streets, the soldiers' radios crackled to life. The deep, soothing voice emerged, that voice Marco had grown up with. He heard snippets. Three centipedes. Battle raging. Casualties. Fifty-two civilians breathed the miasma. Twenty-three civilians and four soldiers slain. Battle raging. Battle raging. All the scum are dead. All is clear. All is clear.
Across the city, the siren smoothed out, becoming a long wail with one note, then fell silent. All was clear. The people emerged from the bunkers. The city lived on—harder, quieter, colder now. Twenty-three people fewer. No more laughter sounded.
"It was five days," Kemi said, voice strained, and her hand tightened around his. "It was five fucking days they gave us. They couldn't even give us a week?" Her eyes dampened. "For once, they couldn't give us just one week?"
Marco stroked her hair and kissed her cheek. "Remember what you told me. No tears today. Today is for us."
She nodded, sniffing, and embraced him. "Today is for us."
They walked on through the city's oldest cemetery, many of its graves dating back to the nineteenth century. There were no parks in the city anymore, not like in the old days. They had all been converted into military bases. Mount Pleasant Cemetery was the only green lung left in Toronto, and countless trees grew along its pebbly paths: purple Japanese maples, rustling elms, birches and ash trees with white bark, twisting oaks, proud pines, and many other species. Statues of nymphs and angels frolicked between the ancient graves. Those slain in the war rested in smaller, crowded cemeteries outside the city. Here was a place for old souls, old ghosts from long before humanity had ventured into space, had found terror among the stars. Aside from the library, it was Marco's favorite place in the city. Like the library where he lived with his father, here was a place of old stories, old lives, memories from a better era.
As Marco walked, holding Kemi's hand, he thought about the tales the elders told. How the scum had ravaged the world in a massive assault, bombing and gassing city after city, wiping out billions—a year of inferno, of death, of humanity hurtling toward extinction. The elders still spoke with pride of how humanity had scrambled, bonded together, and launched their own warships into space. How ship after ship had
perished until one intrepid pilot, the hero Evan Bryan, had launched a nuclear bomb against the scum's homeworld, slaying millions of the centipedes. The Cataclysm had ended that day. Humanity had emerged from the flames stronger, a civilization with the power to ravage distant worlds, to face its enemies in the depths of space and defeat them.
That day, the genocide had ended, and the long War of Attrition had begun.
They don't dare destroy entire cities anymore, Marco thought, looking around at the trees, trying to imagine that day when the fire had lit the world. They know we'd nuke them in retaliation. They know that if they destroy us, we'll destroy them. So they simply hurt us. They torture us. Week after week, year after year, decade after decade, they decimate us. They cannot stab a sword into our heart, so they will torment us with ten thousand smaller cuts.
A mother came walking down the pebbly path toward them, pushing a stroller. Inside drooled a baby with vacant eyes, his face the normal size but the head too small, the skull tapered. Those who breathed the gas that emerged from the pods often gave birth to these poor souls. Yet even these parents were the blessed ones. Usually, if you stood close enough to a pod to inhale the fumes, the scum's claws got you long before you could give birth. Marco knew that all too well. He knew that every night as he awoke washed with sweat from his nightmares.
Every hour the scum take a life somewhere in the world, Marco thought. They kill us. They deform us. They dare not trigger mutual destruction, but oh, they can hurt us. He inhaled deeply and raised his head. And tomorrow I will learn how to hurt them.
Marco and Kemi bought giant cups of coffee topped with whipped cream, and when it began to rain, they ran toward Kemi's apartment building. It rose ten stories tall, its bricks brown and its balconies white. As jets screamed overhead, they took the elevator to the top floor. They entered an apartment, elegant and clean and sparse. A family photo hung above the leather couch, showing a gray-haired man in a suit, a radiant woman in a red dress, Kemi in a sweater vest, and her older brother in his HDF uniform. Windows stretched from floor to ceiling, showing the city skyline. Smoke still rose by the lake where the pod had landed, where twenty-three people had died only an hour ago.
"My parents are in Colombia again," Kemi said, her voice quiet yet seeming too loud in the silent apartment. "It'll be four years this Tuesday."
Marco looked toward a bedroom off the hallway. Inside, he could see a poster of the Toronto Blue Jays, a globe, and a model of a Firebird fighter jet, the model Kemi's brother had flown. Marco had never met Kemi's brother, but he had walked by his room many times, had looked at the photograph of the handsome, uniformed pilot whenever he visited the apartment. Ropo Abasi now rested in a military cemetery in South America with hundreds of other soldiers who had died that horrible day four years ago, their base attacked by a rain of scum plasma.
"You didn't want to go with them this year?" Marco said.
Kemi shook her head. "I went the first three years. I only have another two weeks until I myself enlist. And I only have this last day with you." She held his hands and kissed him. "I wouldn't miss it."
Enlist, she had said. Not drafted. Enlist. Every year, the HDF drafted millions of youths across the globe. Those who refused service were cast into a prison cell for their five years of service. Marco wasn't going to enlist tomorrow morning. "Enlist" implied a choice. Marco didn't want to fight. He didn't want this endless cycle of violence: attacking the outposts of the scum, blasting their organic starships like floating sacks of meat, firing at their pods whenever they landed on Earth. He wanted to remain in his library, to keep working on Loggerhead, his novel, to mourn his mother rather than avenge her.
He wanted to say all of this to Kemi. But he felt like a coward. He felt like a traitor. He knew that she wanted to fight, to carry on the family legacy, to excel in the military like she excelled at school, like her brother had excelled. So Marco said nothing. She smiled and kissed him again.
"What about that gift you promised me?" he said, voice a little too low, a little too hoarse, and he hoped she didn't hear the pain, the terror of what awaited him tomorrow, the mourning emptiness of losing her for five years.
Kemi pulled him down the hallway, past the bedroom with the Blue Jays poster, and into her own bedroom. Classical music from the late twentieth century was playing—her favorite era of music, one all but forgotten by now, nearly two centuries later. She pulled the curtains shut, then pulled off her sweater vest, collared shirt, and trousers. She stood before him in flaming red undergarments that crackled like real fire, and by all the stars above, she was beautiful. She was so beautiful that it hurt him. She was so beautiful that Marco could barely breathe.
She kissed his lips. "I am your gift," she said. "I want us to finally do it. To finally make love. I want to send you off with this memory."
Marco had kissed Kemi many times since meeting her three years ago, since that day in math class when she had helped him with his equations. Over the past year they had begun to make out under the blankets, naked, always shying away from the full act. Today they kissed hungrily, and he pulled off his clothes, and he stroked her cheek and gazed into her eyes. She smiled at him, eyes damp. Her playlist reached an old favorite of theirs—"Lavender" by Marillion—and the irony of its title, the same color of the scum miasma, did not evade Marco.
"I'm scared," Kemi confessed, naked in his arms.
"You're the most beautiful woman in the world," he said. "And I love you."
She caressed his hair. "I love you, Marco."
They kissed again—a kiss that tasted of her tears, and their bodies pressed together, and they did what they had never dared, joining together on this last day. Marco could never afterward remember how long it had lasted, whether they had sex for two minutes or two hours. It passed in a heady blur of heat and lust and nervous laughter, and when it was done, they lay side by side on the bed, the blanket pulled over their nakedness, and sweat coated them.
"That was amazing," Marco said.
She gave him a sidelong look. "You sound surprised."
"Whenever you hear stories about the first time, it's about how awkward it is, how it never works, but that was . . . amazing."
He lay on his back, and Kemi rolled onto him and stared into his eyes. She cupped his cheek in her palm. "When you're out there, Marco, no matter what happens, no matter how scared you are, no matter how hard things are, remember this time we had. Remember my kiss." She kissed his lips. "Remember we had this last good day." Her tears fell. "Goodbye, Marco."
Marco frowned. Journey's "Separate Ways" came onto the playlist, the bass and drums pounding.
"Not our last good day," Marco said. "We'll have many more good days. This isn't goodbye forever."
She looked away from him, a tear on her cheek. "Oh, Marco. I love you so much." She looked back into his eyes. "Listen to me. If you meet another girl in the army, you can love her like you love me. You can make her happy, like you make me happy."
His frown deepened. He rose in bed, and she rolled off him. They sat side by side, still naked, the blankets around their waists.
"Kemi, what the hell?" He held her hand. "I'm going to make you happy. I'm going to love you. I don't want anyone else. It's goodbye for now, but you'll be joining the HDF in just two weeks." He attempted a smile. It tasted sour. "Who's to say we won't be stationed on the same base?"
Her long, curly hair hid her face. She spoke softly. "There are three hundred million soldiers in the HDF, Marco. The odds of us meeting there aren't good."
"So we'll wait five years." He took a deep breath. "We'll write to each other. We'll talk on the phone whenever we can. When we're out, we'll only be twenty-three, and—"
"Marco." She leaned against him. "Marco, I have some news. I was accepted to Julius Military Academy." She glanced up at him, half-afraid, half-excited. "I was in the top five percentile of applicants. I won't be enlisting with everyone else."
Marco's eyes widened. Julius was among t
he most prestigious military academies in the North American Command. They had trained most of the famous officers, generals, and war heroes. Few were accepted to Julius. Fewer graduated from it.
"That's fantastic," he said. "I'm proud of you."
She blinked, eyes damp. "If I graduate from the Academy—and I will graduate, Marco—I'll be an officer, not an enlisted soldier. I'll have to serve for a minimum of ten years. Maybe even twenty." Her tears flowed again. "I'm sorry, Marco, but . . ." She embraced him. "We may never see each other again. I'm so sorry. I love you so much."
Marco stared at her, silent, and outside the jets screamed, twenty or more, racing past the window, ripping through the sky, roaring, howling, booming, and the windows rattled and the shelves shook and a book fell, and the music drowned under the roar. The lights flickered, vanished, flared again with white, searing intensity like sunlight on knives.
Marco rose from the bed. He dressed quickly, fingers numb.
"Marco." Kemi rose to her feet, the blanket wrapped around her. "Please. Don't leave mad."
He left the bedroom. He walked through the apartment, passing by the photo of her family, of her brother who had fallen in the war, of the family he had wanted to join, of a life ending, his life—his old life, who he had been for years, torn away in the searing light, washed away in the sound and fury.
When he reached the front door, Kemi caught his arm. She stood wearing a long T-shirt showing Hendrix in purple haze.
"I love you," she said.
He wanted to leave. To storm out. To walk down the street, empty, leaving the shrapnel of his heart here in this apartment like shards of glass, to let her step in them, cut herself, forever hurt for what she did to him. But he looked into her dark liquid eyes, and damn it, he shouldn't have looked, because now all his rage melted away, and damn it, he loved her, and damn it, he couldn't breathe again, and damn it, it hurt too much. Too much. He held her close, and she wept against him. He kissed her forehead.
Earth Alone (Earthrise Book 1) Page 2
