by Weston Ochse
Two more EXOs ran past, heading for the other side of the store.
I finally pulled myself to my feet.
Battle sounded from behind the building. Those who’d survived the surprise appearance of the Cray ran behind the Bronco.
The EXO nearest me turned around.
Nance.
Maybe he wasn’t the wet-behind-the-ears soldier I’d mistaken him for.
I began to notice some differences on his EXO from the types of suit that I had worn— minor modifications and some streamlining. Some I could figure out, but other improvements left me wondering.
But as the third and final Cray crash landed into the walruses’ ugly, I had little time to concern myself with mechanical improvements to a battle machine. There was something much more important; we had to save the walruses.
I began to run in the direction of the screams of dying pinnipeds.
Nance passed me as if I was standing still.
The other two EXOs followed close behind.
I ran another hundred meters, then stopped and watched from afar as they joined on the Cray and dispatched it in mere moments.
Just then, the men from the long house came running. Many carried rifles, but others carried more traditional weapons like the lance I’d used on the whale. Sebastian led the way with his son, Merlin, beside him.
They stopped when they came upon me.
“Those some of the aliens you fought?” Sebastian asked.
I nodded. “These were bigger.”
“Did they come looking for you?”
I thought of the way the Cray had regarded me, then chased after me. Could they have been sent after me? It didn’t fit their behavior. Neither the Cray nor the Hypocrealiacs had ever demonstrated the desire for revenge. In fact, the human race had been shown such disregard, it was as if we didn’t really matter.
But I didn’t have time to answer. One of the other men of the long house, Oberon, pointed at Merlin and shouted, “No, it was this one who brought them here.” He turned to his fellow Yupik elders. “Don’t you see? No sooner did he kill the sacred whale than the aliens descended.”
Angry voices began to murmur in the crowd.
Sebastian stared at the ground.
Merlin stared at me, sorrow bleeding from his eyes.
Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior.
Stanislav Grof
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DYING CRAY had killed seventeen walruses and wounded nine others. While the Yupik women treated the wounded walruses, the men of the tribe removed the dead, then harvested the meat from their bodies. With the power out in the General Store, they had to put the meat in the earth, using the old ways, letting the frozen tundra act as nature’s own freezers. Nothing could be wasted.
Merlin had not been invited to join them and watched from his place on the rocky outcropping where I’d found him previously.
I gave him a wide berth and headed towards the airfield. It wasn’t much. Two hangars, a control building, and a single runway. One of the hangars was open and empty, so it was pretty easy to figure out where OMBRA had set up shop. Inside sat a gray C-130, its ramp down, the interior filled with boxes of ammunition and supplies. Five white EXOs were parked against one wall. The pilot, co-pilot and crew chief glanced at me from where they’d set up near the front of the plane. I gave the pilot a nod and he returned it. He didn’t look thrilled to be here.
When Nance saw me, he ran up and saluted. I still refused to return it and merely nodded instead. He introduced me to the other three OMBRA soldiers and we sat around a fire barrel on hard plastic chairs, chatting. They wore the same urban fatigues Nance was wearing. Two couldn’t have been more than teenagers and the third considerably older, probably in his forties. He’d removed the top and wore only a black T-shirt. His big arms held a history I couldn’t yet divine; tattoos with swords, spears, and daggers, and a lot of French. His name was Private First Class Charlemagne, whose real name was Didier Bourdon. He’d spent time in the French Foreign Legion before the invasion and had joined TF OMBRA’s Europe in Bruges.
It seemed that in the last six months EXO drivers, as they’d come to be called, had taken on a certain notoriety. Because of this new-found fame, Mr. Pink, forever my genius nemesis, had decided to allow EXO drivers to use call signs, which were then posted on public forums and tracked for numbers of kills. There were fan sites and fan clubs for the drivers.
Nance went by the call sign Inglewood and had seventy-two kills.
Charlemagne had thirty-nine kills.
The other two EXO drivers refused to give out their names, but their call signs were Obelix and Asterix, which I vaguely recalled might have been from a French or German comic. They each had thirty confirmed kills and always fought together, regardless. They barely looked eighteen. Obelix was a boy and Asterix was a girl and they appeared to be twins.
I sort of thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Call signs and confirmed kills. Next thing you knew and we’d be sponsored by whatever businesses were still around. I could see it now—This battle is sponsored by End of the World Wheaties. Maybe the EXOs would start wearing advertisements, like soccer players had before the invasion. I don’t know why Mr. Pink felt that morale was such that this sort of absurdity was necessary, but I somehow knew that I’d be having a personal conversation with him about it soon.
“So everyone has a call sign?” I asked.
“Only drivers,” Charlemagne answered.
I glanced sideways at Nance. “Please tell me that I don’t have a call sign.”
Charlemagne grinned with something like hero worship on the other side of the burn barrel.
Nance regarded me flatly. “Okay fine. You don’t have a call sign.”
I stared at him for a long moment. “But I really do, don’t I?”
He nodded.
I sighed and could only wonder what I’d been saddled with. “What is it?”
“Hero Prime.”
Oh dear God. Mr. Pink had gone off and made me a poster boy for his war effort… again.
I looked from one EXO driver to the other and all regarded me with reverent stares. Even the twins, who I still had to figure out, gave me a look as if they’d like to eat me in order to become me.
“That’s a little over the top, don’t you think?”
Charlemagne shook his bald head. “Not at all. We’ve seen the video feeds from Kilimanjaro. Your tactics are part of the curriculum. I’ve studied your moves backwards and forwards. They called you—”
“Hero of the Mound,” I said, finishing the appellation. That name was the first time Mr. Pink had used me as an inspiration to fight.
“Then there was the Battle for L.A.,” Asterix said.
“You discovered the vector for the zombie fungus. You blew up the hive,” Obelix added.
“Then, of course, there’s the number of your kills,” Nance said, beaming.
I’d never really considered counting the number of aliens I’d killed. It just seemed like a waste of time. To think that OMBRA had somehow kept track made me wonder what other things they’d kept track of.
“Don’t you want to know how many Cray you’ve killed?” Nance asked.
“Not really.”
“Seriously,” Nance added, as if it were some magic word like abracadabra.
“None of that shit means anything. How many aliens someone killed means nothing if someone dies on a mission. This is the fate of the planet we’re talking about, not some rack and stack ranking system meant to make the last few survivors feel good about themselves.”
“Easy for you to say,” Obelix said.
“Yeah, easy for you to say,” Asterix mimicked.
I glared at them until they looked away. Snarky fucking teenagers. That’s exactly what they were and the last thing I needed at the end of the world. Frankly, I wanted to punch them in their faces. Instead, I
changed the subject.
“What do you think brought the Cray here? There can’t be a hive within a thousand miles.”
“You should really listen to Captain Ohirra’s briefing,” Nance said.
I nodded. “Lay it out for me. Tell me what you know.”
Nance glanced at the others, then began speaking. “OMBRA tracked communications from the Russian Spetsnaz using some sort of high altitude UAVs. Several ships have fallen from the sky over their country. Initial reports were that the ships were some kind of advanced space craft. But what intrigued OMBRA most were the references to the human aliens.”
“Human aliens? That’s odd.”
Nance nodded. “Exactly. We thought the same thing.”
“So what are you doing here?” I asked.
“The easternmost crash site is less than five hundred miles from here on the Chukotka Peninsula. It’s literally in the middle of nowhere. As of this moment, the Russians haven’t made it there. Our mission is to swoop and scoop. Too easy.”
I shook my head and laughed. “Nothing is ever that easy. I left the CD with the briefing back in my hooch.”
“That’s okay, we have another master copy.” Nance asked, “Are you ready for the briefing?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “Sure.”
Nance went over to his pack and rifled inside of it until he came out with a tablet. He dialed up the briefing and handed it to me. I grabbed my plastic chair and took it inside the aircraft so I could be alone. I put the chair down, sat facing the OMBRA crew who were all watching me, and pressed play.
Ohirra’s stern face appeared on the screen. It had been less than a year, but it looked as if she’d aged ten years. I remembered when we’d both been young, living in the shadow of our own dead, long before Earth had been invaded.
“Mason, I’m not going to mince words. We need you. I need you. Things are happening fast and I don’t have the right people in the right places to handle the things that need handling. If what we heard from the Russians is right, it’s a major game changer. Bottom line is that high altitude surveillance drones intercepted some Russian coms, reporting that several spacecraft had crashed in their area with человека инопланетяне aboard, which was translated to mean ‘human aliens.’ We can’t be sure what that means, but my intelligence staff and Mr. Pink believes it might be the other shoe dropping. We’ve always wondered about the Hypocrealiacs. We’ve known they’ve had purpose-made alien species taking our planet. From the Cray to the Leviathans to the kudzu to the zombie fungus, they’ve been systematically taking away our planet. What we never knew was why. We’d surmised it was because of some intergalactic war, but we could never be sure. Now with actual spacecraft littering the landscape, we can maybe see who’s been doing the fighting.
“I know you’ve been on a much-needed sabbatical. I totally get why you needed it. I was there, remember? I was on the L.A. mission and at Kilimanjaro. I’ve been with you since the beginning.” She paused and I couldn’t help but feel a little selfish. She was right. She’d been through most everything I’d been through. She deserved the same break I’d had. “But now I need you back. I’ve sent Corporal Gordon Nance and his team to your location. My intention had been to leave you alone, but then this happened. We need you to go and investigate the Chukotka crash site. We need you to retrieve bodies so we can take DNA samples. And of course bring back as much technology as you can.
“This is probably the most important mission you will ever have. If we fail to get to the site in time we’ll be in the dark, a place we can’t afford to be. We need to find out who was piloting the craft and figure out if they are the good guys or the bad guys… or both. Like always, we don’t know what we don’t know, and we need you to tell us what that is.”
She leaned in close to the screen.
“Mason, for this last bit, if someone is listening to you right now, get them out of there. This is for your ears only.” She waited ten seconds. “Okay. I know the team I sent you is a mixed bag, but they are the only ones I can guarantee have no agenda. Pink has had more and more closed door meetings lately. Something is going on. You’d think their senior intelligence officer might be a part of those meetings, but they’re blacking me out. We’ve always known that he’s known more than he lets on. It’s only getting worse.
“I had techs put a special black box in your EXO. Not only has it got a special crypto that will allow me to contact you as long as we have high-altitude drones in the vicinity, but it will also let you tap into the Global HMID Network. I know that’s the last thing you want to do, but there might come a time when you need to. If so, don’t let the lives of your team rest on the hatred of the process… or of Thompson.
“That’s it. Trust Nance, he’s good. And get what we need. It just might save us all.”
Then she pressed a button I couldn’t see, and the screen went blank.
I leaned back. Realizing I’d been holding my breath, I released it in a slow, steady stream.
I wasn’t surprised at all that Mr. Pink was up to his old shenanigans. Although his name was Wilson, I’d been calling him Mr. Pink ever since we met because of his uncanny resemblance to Steve Buscemi’s character in Reservoir Dogs. In fact, I’d known the moment that I’d seen the alien HMID in the bowels of the Hollywood Hive that he’d known so much more than he let on. That our HMIDs so closely resembled the alien’s communications box meant they’d somehow captured one shortly before or after the invasion, and then succeeded in reverse-engineering it.
I closed my eyes as an image of Michelle slid past my defenses. It was from Kilimanjaro, when we’d found a private moment behind the generators before the big battle. The way her eyes shone in the light, both of us full of wonder and terrified because of our love. Then the image dissolved, only to be replaced by the image of her the last time I’d seen her, right before I’d killed her.
“I’M SO TIRED of it now.” Her voice was tiny and breathless.
“Even heroes need the chance to rest,” I told her.
She’d smiled. “Is that what I am? A hero?”
“Of course you are.”
“I’m not a monster?”
I ached at her even having to ask the question. “Never. You did what none of us would do. You’re far braver than I ever was.”
She smiled. “But you’re the Hero of the Mound.”
I stroked her head. I felt a thin layer of fuzz beneath my hands. “And you are the hero of us all.”
She closed her eyes and sighed, finally holding me with her withered, useless arms.
I closed my eyes.
I wasn’t sure how long we held each other, but when I finally noticed the others trying to get in the room, I knew we didn’t have much time.
“I’m really quite crazy,” Michelle said suddenly.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yes, you are. But then so are we all.”
“What now?” she asked.
“I came to take you home.”
Her eyes snapped open. “Thank you. Oh, thank you.”
I fought back emotion as I saw my hand reach down her body and pull out each hose until the only thing that connected her to the infernal machine was the cable attached to her neck. I folded her into my arms, so that her hips were over one arm and the other held the back of her neck. I leaned down, she opened her eyes and we had a final kiss, even as her fluids drained away.
She looked me in the eyes. She tried to speak but she couldn’t, but I heard her words in my mind.
“I love you, too,” I said. Then I pulled the main cable out of the back of her neck.
Her eyes snapped shut.
Her breathing hitched.
And sometime in the next few seconds she died.
I KEPT THE image of that moment in my mind for a minute, then swallowed it away along with my tears. And to think that Ohirra wanted me to communicate to the—what did she call it—the Global HMID Network? That was never going to happen. Fucking HMIDs we
re the worst thing we humans had ever invented. An image of Michelle’s ravaged body spiked through my head, causing an instant migraine.
I got up, walked down the ramp, and handed the tablet to Nance.
“You listen to it?” he asked.
I nodded.
“You going to come with us?”
“Probably.”
I headed toward the exit. Halfway there, I stopped. “Just out of curiosity,” I asked Nance, “how many kills do I have?”
“Four thousand, seven hundred and sixty-six.”
I nodded again. “Must have been a busy man,” I said, then walked into the cold Arctic night.
Anyone else worried about this New United States of North America? I hear they’re conscripting anyone and everyone, but for what reason? They’ve cleared all of their major cities of Cray. They’ve all but pruned away the vines. Hell, the skies are black with the smoke from their great pyres. So it begs the question, if they’re creating a force, then what is this force for? Trust me, I’m not a fan of complete and utter chaos… a little order is a good thing. But a return to an iron-fisted government, over taxation, and government lackeys peeking into my everyday business is not what we need. This was supposed to be a reboot. This was supposed to be a chance to do it better than before. So why, I ask you, is the New United States of North America building an army instead of rebuilding the infrastructure?
Conspiracy Theory Talk Radio,
Night Stalker Monologue #1742
CHAPTER FIVE
MY SENSES WERE heightened. My skin sizzled in the cold wind. My eyeballs were on fire and took in everything and nothing, hyper-aware of my surroundings. I hadn’t felt this wired since the day I’d arrived. Part of me reveled in it, the part that forgot how absolutely tiring it was to be switched on all the time. Another part of me hated the hyper aware state PTSD encouraged. I’d been so relaxed the last few months I’d actually let my guard down, and in doing so, had found myself enjoying life and those around me. I wasn’t constantly establishing various threat levels for everyone I came in contact with. I hadn’t been seeking out and logging the best avenues of egress every place I found myself. I hadn’t been developing A, B and C plans for operations upon contact.
