Enemy tst-1

by Paul Evan Hughes

  They moved on.

  Morning?

  Hayes rolled up his sleeping bag, which had remained vacant the night before. The campfire had sputtered itself to a weary death at some point during the night; neither he nor Maggie had noticed. They had been warm enough.

  There was no wind, but the air was brisk enough that Simon pulled the collar of his thermal vest up around his neck. He could see his breath quite easily with each exhalation. Mid-June. The planet was dying.

  His sleeping bag rolled tightly and strapped to his rucksack, he looked over at Maggie, who was engaged in similar business. She smiled quietly at him, and touched his mind briefly, warmly. He walked over, draped his arms loosely around her hips. He bent down and touched his forehead to hers, kissed the tip of her nose. Her smile widened, and her dimples made their appearance. Simon picked up Maggie’s pack and kissed her neck as he stood back up. She slung the pack over her shoulders and took Simon’s hand in her own for a brief moment.

  It was time to walk. They had a long road ahead of them, and neither knew how much time they had left. The planet was dying.

  They began.

  broken by a silent question

  WHAT IS IT((?))

  THE UPLOAD OF THE POPULACE IS COMPLETE. WE HAVE DONE ALL THAT WE CAN WITH THE PLANET. WE HAVE SALVAGED ALL OF THE PATTERN THAT WE CAN.

  THE STAR((?))

  WE HAVE FOCUSED ALL ENERGIES ON THE COLLAPSE. WE CAN DO NOTHING BUT WAIT NOW. THIS WHEN HAS BEEN DRAINED OF OMEGA’S LIFEBLOOD.

  THEN LEAVE ME. SALVATION AWAITS US IN THE PURPOSE. WE WILL AWAIT THE COMPLETION IN THE SILENCE AND THE STILLNESS.

  YES. THE STILLNESS.

  the black sleeps. the black parts.

  How many days?

  They returned to the alien vessel beneath the mountain at least once each day, whether to reassure themselves that the orb was still there or to hope that it had disappeared, neither knew. It floated at the center of the spherical chamber still, day by day growing a little brighter. Satisfied or perhaps disappointed, they always returned to the surface.

  They had completed their survey of Diablo. They found food, but neither was truly hungry. The days and nights blended together into a sinuous progression of time. The sky remained hazy and gray. Did time still progress? No wind, no sunlight, no movement. Just cold. Static. Dead.

  July? Maybe.

  What were they waiting for? Was this to be the end of the world, a calm, cold, freezing cessation of movement and breathing and life? Was this all that there was to death? Sometimes West wondered if they were dead already… He did not want to discuss that with Patra.

  Is this heaven? Hell? What dream suffocates us?

  He could sense something… Somewhere out there, the almost imperceptible touch of the thoughts of others. They were coming as fast as they could. He would wait here with Patra as long as they could. He would—

  “West?”

  He looked up at her glimmering face, which was canted diagonally beside him at a seemingly impossible angle. They sat on a swing set in a laughable excuse for a playground in a laughable excuse for a park in the middle of Diablo. If the miners and soldiers had possessed no need for a case of Pepsi, then surely these playground toys had not seen any attention since at least the turn of the century. Had there ever even really been children in Diablo? They sat on fragile, cracked black rubber straps hung from rusty antique chains which themselves were suspended from a creaking, somehow dangerous-feeling metal frame. Patra swung noisily, leisurely back and forth, her legs kicking out, body swinging low and then high and repeating. She had been swinging for hours, it seemed. West sat on the swing beside her, motionless, arms wrapped around the chains and hands sitting lazily on his bent knees. He had been studying the dusty scratch of dirt before him with quite some interest when Patra interrupted his visual geological survey.

  “What?” He looked over, his gaze following her swinging, childlike movement.

  “Do you have a first name?”

  She had a silly grin on her face. He smiled, laughed, shook his head. “How long have we been together, walking around this ghost town? A week, two weeks?”

  “I don’t know. A month, maybe? I can’t tell anymore.” Swing back, swing forth.

  “Neither can I.”

  They sat in silence for a while, West remaining stationary, Patra traveling in an ever-decreasing arc beside him. Eventually, she stopped swinging and came to a rest beside him, kicking up a small cloud of dust that settled back to the ground a little too fast for her comfort. The air was dead, oppressive, freezing. West was quietly thankful for the cessation of the rusty creaking sound that had been grating through his head at Patra’s every motion. Now at rest, the sound stopped, much like the landscape stretched before them, a world at rest, silent.

  Is this heaven? Hell? Drowning in this…

  He felt her looking at him, and he turned to face her in his swing. She still had that silly grin on her face. He had long ago gotten over the initial shock of being near a metal human, and he found her smile quite intriguing.

  “You never answered my question.”

  “What?”

  “What’s your first name?”

  “Oh… I don’t have one anymore.”

  She frowned. “What did it used to be, then?”

  He saw that she was not going to give up. “Don’t laugh.”

  “I promise I won’t laugh. How bad can it be?”

  “Adam.”

  She blinked once, then her smile widened, and she began to snicker. “Adam West? Wasn’t that the guy who played—”

  “Shut up, Cleopatra.” He said it playfully, but before he knew it she had stood up and pushed him out of his swing onto the cold dusty ground. She stood over him with her smiling face an image of silver fire. “Batman my ass.”

  With that, West kicked her legs out from under her and she fell not gently to the ground, landing mostly on top of him. “Egyptian queen my ass.”

  They laid in a pile on the ground, laughing loudly, appreciating the echoes their laughter made down the mountainside. Neither questioned the moment. They laid on the ground, looking up at the gray shell that was suffocating the planet, laughing about dead African queens and dead American television actors because their reality was too terrifying to laugh about. Patra was on top of West’s arm, so he pulled her over and they hugged each other in an only slightly-more-than-friendly embrace. West felt like a child, invigorated, refreshed. The swing floated back and forth above them; his right leg was still ensnared in the metal and rubber device. Patra’s attack had caught him off-guard indeed.

  The sky moved above them. They knew not what it was that strangled the earth, and neither wanted to discuss the suspicion that eventually the atmosphere would be consumed by the silver web and they would suffocate. Day by day, the silver web seemed to inch closer to the surface. For now, they were content to lay on the dusty earth at look at the sky like children.

  Lying on our backsides, just waiting to convert, the sky’s an open wound when the clouds resemble our ex-lovers.

  The thought struck West suddenly, unexpectedly. He thought for a brief moment he heard whistling, or whistling of a sort, but then it was gone. James Richter used to whistle like that. All the time.

  He felt Patra’s gaze again, and when he turned to face her, she looked down guiltily. “What is it, Cleo?”

  She quietly smiled, face not exactly as lithe as once it had been. She quickly turned to him, leaned over, gave him a quick kiss on the lips. She searched his eyes for approval, and found it tenfold.

  She stood, took his hand, helped him up. They brushed the sand and dust off of themselves. West was about to wrap his arms around her when she grabbed his hand and began pulling him back up the mountainside, toward the mine entrance.

  “It’s time to check on the orb, Batman. We can play some more after dinner.”

  He was not sure if she was alluding to sitting on the swing or something infinitely more playful, but he knew that
it would be an adventure nonetheless.

  Mountains, or the precipitous lack thereof.

  “What do you think happened?”

  Simon looked across the expanse and shook his head.

  Where once the Rocky Mountains had thrust into the American sky, now an impossible stretch of flattened earth lay, littered with shards of the Enemy web that had fallen to earth. The landscape was devastated as far as they could see. One rather disturbing addition to the scorched earth that they had not encountered before was the presence of hundred, perhaps thousands, of dead Enemy vessels that had been knocked out of the sky by the web breach. They most likely had been mining the mountains in one large infestation when the end of the upload generator came, and the writhing bodies of the vessels had fallen lifelessly to the great gouge in the earth they had created when the spire had erupted, spilling their precious uploaded lifeblood into the atmosphere.

  “Do you think it’s safe? What if there are survivors in those wrecks? There’s so many of them.”

  “It’s safe. Nothing could’ve survived this. Let’s go.” He grasped her hand reassuringly, not feeling at all reassured himself about the monstrous vehicles, aliens, whatever that littered the landscape all the way to the horizon. The expanse looked as if the world’s largest toddler had strewn his toys carelessly across the countryside. Simon felt sick. America was forever gone, regardless of what they found at Diablo.

  “Simon?”

  He looked at her, eyes windows to the heartbreak he felt at seeing his once-proud nation reduced to an enormous quarry. She embraced him, kissed his cheek tenderly.

  Hands joined, they walked into the valley of the dead.

  Dirt.

  Hmmm…

  Hadn’t there been mountains here at some point?

  Richter quizzically surveyed the bleak expanse of gouged earth before him. They certainly had been thorough. At least it would make the journey quicker; he had only hills to traverse now, it appeared. He wondered sardonically what the save-the-rainforest types would think of this mess. Of course, they were all now part of the monster that had killed the planet themselves. What irony, to be consumed by the consumer, to become one with that which had destroyed your beloved blue jewel in the night between the stars.

  We will never reach the stars.

  How very sad. As a boy, he had hoped to be an astronaut, and as a pilot coming out of War Three, he had almost lived his dream. Almost.

  Something about clouds, and ex-lovers, and unraveled kingdoms.

  A beautiful song, if only he could remember how it went. Didn’t really matter; his lips were too dry to whistle. Had been for weeks.

  Richter walked on, kicking a small stone before him.

  Kick, clatter skitter clatter. Kick, skitter clatter skitter. How joyous were the sounds of life’s simple pleasures. How joyous any sound became in this mute dead world. Kick, clatter skitter clatter.

  Clink.

  Orb. Night? Maybe. Gray.

  Clink.

  The orb was brighter by the day; what that meant, neither knew. It did not reach out for them. Apparently the fact that they had both been into the light nullified any threat of the light reaching out for them. It had tasted their souls already; apparently it did not need a second bite.

  Patra took another spoonful of tepid vegetable beef soup and guided it to her mouth. Clink. They had found quite a supply of canned food in the mostly-demolished Diablo Grocery, and although neither ever really felt hungry, they ate, probably because it took up time and it truly felt strange to not eat. So vegetable beef soup it was.

  West looked up at each spoonful that Patra delivered to her mouth, not because he was interested in her table manners, but as a reflex. Clink. Each time she placed the spoon to her lips, it made a subtle metal “clink” as her non-flesh lips made contact with the stainless steel spoon. They had not felt metallic when she had kissed him.

  She smiled when she noticed his gaze, and looked sheepishly down at her utensil. “Sorry.” She pushed the bowl away. “Can’t really help it.” She snapped her silver fingers and they made a distinctive peal. “Just call me the Metal Woman, Batman.”

  West shook his head, put his soup bowl down next to Patra’s. “You aren’t going to give that one a rest yet, are you?”

  “Not yet. I figure I can get a few more days out of it before you get too annoyed with me to speak to me anymore.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  They sat as best they could with their backs to the curved wall of the room, facing the orb. The swirls of light leisurely played on its surface, turning the sphere into an obscene, hypnotizing disco ball that illuminated the expanse in splashes of luminescence. If only there had been music…

  West stood, grabbed Patra’s hand, and pulled her to her feet. She frowned in surprise, not sure of what West was doing. Her silent question was answered as West placed his right hand on her hip and raised her left hand into the air, then spun her around and dipped her low to the floor.

  “Do you dance, Ms. Jennings?”

  She laughed. “It appears I do now.”

  They moved as one around and around the orb, dancing a ridiculous impression of a tango to silence, neither caring about the fact that there was no music and the planet was dying and it was the end of the world.

  They journeyed.

  Days. Weeks. Whatever. Now that the aliens no longer swarmed across the sky, they had no fear of capture. They walked across the scoured, blackened face of the once-great nation. Ghost towns. Suburbs of the dead. Flattened cities. Hopes and dreams and tomorrows that would never be.

  There were no people, no bodies, no sign that anyone had survived the invasion at all. They were surrounded by the total absence of life. The Enemy had indeed been thorough.

  They talked. And talked. Never before had Hayes known someone with whom he could be so open. They shared many a laugh under the faded western skies. He found Flynn to be an amazing individual. Someone he could have fallen for in a different world, in a different time. Someone he was falling for now.

  They walked in silence, the only sound their boots crunching through the black crystalline earth with which the destruction of the generator had salted the continent. They had found warmer clothing; they had been lucky. The air was frigid; they could see each exhalation as a white cloud of breath, and each inhalation was cold enough to be painful if not first filtered through their scarves. Simon looked over at Maggie, and her beautiful eyes smiled at him through the gap in the fabric around her face. How could she remain so calm and content when the planet was dying before their very eyes?

  How much colder would it get before the end?

  How are we going to get off this corpse of a world?

  And where are we going to go?

  He wished that they could watch the sun set on a beach or the stone breakwater in Harkness that extended into Lake Superior, where he could hold her hand as he had held Brigid’s. He wished he could tell day from night. He wished that he could love her.

  He forced the thoughts deep into his mind. Buried and forgotten. It was easier that way. He could not love her here, now, inasmuch as he knew that he wanted to, needed to. It was how he had lived his entire life. Bury your shattered dreams.

  Slowly and coldly the miles to Wyoming counted down.

  Fourteen days months? years? after West and Patra emerged from the Shadow, Flynn and Hayes crossed the Montana-Wyoming border. Four hours days? weeks? later, Richter entered Wyoming from Utah, humming the nameless song that tortured him incessantly, kicking before him a small stone that had been his sole companion through the entire state. In the heavens of silence, the Enemy waited for the sun to die.

  They converged.

  “Judas Golgotha Simon, you’re cleared for departure.”

  ((affirmative, command.))

  “Good luck, Simon.”

  Indeed. Good luck. He chose not to acknowledge the blessing of Judas Commander Hannah Kilbourne.

  ((engaging shadow drives.
))

  The massive vessel flickered, faded from existence. Simon strongly suspected that he would never again see Program Seven.

  “Judas gunships Malachi, Shiva, you are cleared for immediate departure on preset contrail coordinates.”

  {malachi concurs.}

  [shiva concurs.]

  “Watch him. Watch him closely. You’ll receive your orders when it’s time.”

  The stiletto shapes of the crafts ceased to exist.

  They would watch, and they would wait, and when the time came, they would see to it that Judas Simon would not unravel the most important plans ever made. With Magdalene gone, Simon was the weak link now.

  “What’s that?” She spoke into the hollow of his neck with her metal voice.

  West opened his eyes to a swaying spherical world that he was creating by slowly dancing around the now-silent orb chamber with Patra. “What?”

  “What song was that? You were humming something.”

  West frowned, stopped moving, looked down at Patra. “I was? Sorry. I don’t remember.”

  “It was beautiful. Whatever it was.” Her hand still rested on his side. West turned away from her, walked a short distance.

  “They’re getting closer. I can feel them. Hell, it was probably Richter humming that song, not me. He always hummed or whistled. It annoyed the hell out of me.”

  “You’re sure it’s them?”

  “It’s them.”

  “How many are coming?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Two, maybe three. I can’t tell… There should only be two others, unless MSI released some of the prisoners without telling us.”

  “Prisoners?”

  “The Styx who were placed on Santa Fosca. The ones we didn’t kill after Chicago.”

  “Chicago.”

  “Yeah, it was a small town in Illinois, population forty-two million, home of the Bears and the Bulls and my kind of town. You’ve heard of it, right? I believe you were sightseeing in that lovely city when first we met, Miss Jennings.”

  She gave him a very dirty look and sat down against the wall of the chamber. The orb illuminated her face with slivers of light and shadow. West sat down next to her.

  “What happened in Chicago, Adam?”