by Bobby Adair
At least half the alien slaves are down.
He lifts his grenade launcher, aims, and fires at the remnants of the mob.
Like the bullets, the grenade is deflected and disappears into space.
Kane aims at the aliens’ feet and fires again.
The round explodes and cuts a swath of death through their ranks.
Garcia’s rifle is flashing at a steady pace. Ronson and Mitchell are firing, roughly from the mob’s left. Their fire is effective.
Harney and his men are nearly at the ship’s door, but they come to an unexpected stop.
“Harney,” Kane calls. “What’s up?”
Looking for the cause, he sees movement through the wide door on the side of the Grays' ship.
Another mob of alien slaves, armed just like the first ones, comes rushing out.
Harney’s men start shooting.
Into the comm, Kane says, “LT, Harney’s men are under attack. I’m going to redirect fire toward the door.”
“Do it,” Garcia tells him. “We got this bunch.”
Kane shoots the next grenade toward the ship’s open door, right into the midst of the horde massing just outside it.
The grenade finds its mark and explodes with full effect.
Slave soldiers are down by the dozen. Others are up, but with tears in their protective suits, spewing precious oxygen into the void.
They won’t last long.
Kane rapidly fires twice more, and then carefully aims a fourth, trying to get it inside the open door.
He pulls the trigger.
The grenade deflects into the mob outside.
That damn field again.
Kane takes another shot just as he sees a familiar streak erupt from one of the behemoth’s batteries.
Before he can think to duck, it blazes past his head and impacts the ground somewhere behind him.
He feels heat through his helmet, and the rock beneath him shudders.
Kane takes a wild shot at the battery that fired on him. The round goes wide.
The aliens shoot again. The streak comes at him at impossible speed and impacts the stone under his feet.
Chapter 13
Kane opens his eyes and sees a black sky dotted with a billion tiny stars and thousands of twinkling shards, all that’s left of earth’s mighty armada.
He’s on his back.
His comm is silent.
Pieces of shattered ships move across the sky, every one in a different direction at a different speed. Some spin and shimmer like jewels in the sun’s stark white light. Others are dark, and only reflect enough light to cast hints of their size.
In the next days or weeks, those artifacts of humanity’s last grasp at freedom will be caught in the moon’s gravity and fall. Others will burn up in the earth’s atmosphere. More might slip into solar orbits and follow an elliptical path around the sun for a million years.
Earth is out there in the void, a quarter million miles away, half-blue, smeared with white clouds, half-black, with continents traced in artificial, gossamer light—earth’s cities, sewing life in the darkness.
Kane sees the twinkling outline of the California coast, and sees the country’s eastern seaboard just crossing into morning. Dawn’s early light crawling across the world.
Soon, his wife will be up. She’ll be getting ready for work, and she’ll be watching the news. Every channel will be talking about only one thing, the fleet that went to the moon, and the brave few who took the journey, sacrificing all they had for the freedom of earth’s people.
Kane talks into his comm and gets no answer. The ever-present static tells him it’s functioning, but no human voice carries on the electromagnetic waves.
He tries to move, and realizes he’s pinned beneath the wreckage of the ship that brought him to the moon. Scattered around lay the bodies of his men, many of them.
He wonders if Garcia and Harney killed enough of the Grays’ slave army to get inside the behemoth and detonate their explosives.
They were close. The numbers looked bad, but the battle was going their way.
Kane can’t move his arm, so he can’t see his watch to see how long he’s been out. He can’t even check his oxygen to know how long he has left to stay alive. It might be minutes. It might be days. Garcia might have succeeded and he might be coming to the rescue.
Or I might be the last of the armada.
Kane struggles against the weight pinning him and realizes it’s not the weight keeping him down. The problem is worse than that. He can’t move his arms or his legs, and he can’t feel them.
Not like this.
Please, God. Not like this.
A rescue he hoped for just moments ago, he now doesn’t want to come. A life of paralysis is unbearable for a soldier.
Kane’s doesn’t want his son to grow up pushing his father’s wheelchair and changing diapers.
Despair comes easy now.
Kane chokes on tears.
He curses himself for his weakness.
In truth, he’s not likely ever to leave the moon alive. He won’t face his end like a coward.
He breathes deeply and accepts the fact that everything is out of his hands. All he can do is watch the beauty of earth so far off in space, and pray that his wife and soon-to-be-born son—Dylan—will live free.
The dawn is past the Appalachian Mountains now, and the sun is edging its way over the Mississippi.
A light flashes in the dark part of the country where Kane guesses Montana should be.
The light is bright and sudden, disappearing like a flash of lightning.
But it doesn’t go away completely.
At its center, a circle of fire, yellow-orange, shrinking down to a blot of red.
Kane prays he’s just witnessed the eruption of a volcano, but he knows even as the thought materializes in his head it’s a wistful lie.
As if to confirm the lie, the ground beneath him shivers.
A streak of red shoots into the sky.
It’s a shot from a railgun, one of the big ones the Grays built into the moon’s rock.
Kane watches the enormous projectile shrink as it speeds away, growing dull as it cools. As large as it is, as fast as it’s moving, it’ll impact earth with the power of a nuclear bomb. And it’ll look just like the one that hit Montana a moment ago.
Earth’s first great space armada is now only sparkly space junk.
The lunar expeditionary force has failed.
Kane failed.
And earth is being bombarded in a rain of artificial meteors that will continue to fall until the Grays have killed enough innocent people to break earth’s will.
Then the planet’s governments will surrender.
Seven billion humans, arrogantly sitting at the pinnacle of their achievements, are soon to be the conquered slaves of just eighteen effete Grays who parked themselves on the moon with a few technological advantages in their possession.
My son will grow up a slave.
Kane wants to cry out in rage.
How could we be so self-centered-stupid?
Had earth just prepared, had people stopped killing one another for just awhile, they might have seen this coming. They might have done something.
Even in high school, Kane knew there were a septillion stars in the universe.
A septillion, a number so large it’s beyond comprehension.
To imagine it, Kane has to think of stars like eggs, a million to a carton.
If he took a billion of those cartons and put them on a really big pallet, and then put a billion of those pallets in a warehouse, then he’d have one septillion.
A billion, billion, million.
With so many stars, and so many planets orbiting them, how could anyone believe earth to be unique—life, unique.
The universe had to be teeming with civilizations.
Another spot on the earth flashes bright and slowly shrinks to a pool of red.
It was never a question of whether the aliens wer
e coming. They were always coming.
THE BATTLE BEGINS
Freedom’s Fire, available now!
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Cover Design
Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz
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Editing, Proofreading, Book Formatting
Kat Kramer Adair
Super Special Thanks
Mike & Ré Kramer
More about Bobby’s other writing…
Slow Burn Series (9 books), a best-seller!
Slow Burn is Bobby’s flagship post-apocalyptic zombie series, but so much more than a zombie book. Follow the adventures of Zed as he wakes up one morning to find that something’s a little different in the world. As the world is going to shit, Zed meets up with Murphy, and they try to navigate their new reality through a world of the “slow burns” before they are completely consumed by the virus. Great reviews, with over a million books sold, readers LOVE this one.
The Last Survivors Series (6 books)
A collaborative series with fellow zombie author T.W. Piperbrook, this series has a little more of a Sci-Fi feel, popular with folks who like Game of Thrones. It explores what happens 300 years in the future after the apocalypse, when man has rebuilt and gone back to an almost medieval society.
Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (trilogy)
A really great terrorism thriller with awesome reviews. It focuses on the devastating Ebola outbreak and the possibility of weaponized Ebola by terrorist organizations and nationalized resources like blood with Ebola antibodies. A more in-depth and complex observation of the real world. This series follows an American college student teaching in Uganda as the country comes under attack from the deadly virus as he tries to make his way back to the safety of his family back in the United States.
It’s also historically and medically accurate, so you’ll learn a little about the history of the disease as well…did you know that Ebola has been airborne in the US in the past? Or that it can survive in semen for 90 days or more after a person is declared “Ebola-free?” (This is Kat’s favorite!)
Black Rust, Black Virus (first two in a series)
A newer series from Bobby that also deals with a different post-apocalyptic reality. Christian Black is a bounty hunter charged with hunting down the infected…a “Regulator.” When caught in an unsanctioned kill, Christian sets about to clear his name. A fairly deep character, whose flaws are an important backstory to his adventurous life.
Dusty’s Diary: One Frustrated Man’s Zombie Apocalypse Story (first in a series)
Fun and crass…be careful if you’re easily offended! Has some great advice about what to pack in your post-apocalyptic bunker (don’t forget the porn!). Dusty’s Diary has an uncertain future…people like it, so I’ll probably write more in the future. This is a short story.
Text copyright © 2017, Bobby L. Adair & Beezle Media, LLC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.
