Wastelands

by Jack Porter

  It was basic stuff, but it was amazing that the AC lens could provide even that. I couldn’t begin to imagine the complexity of the programming that went into it. And it was just the beginning. The AC lens I was wearing was still classified as a prototype. No doubt even more would be added to it in the future.

  If we survived long enough.

  This Level II Goblin wasn’t the most dangerous alien adversary I could have faced, but it wouldn’t be an easy victory for me, if a victory was what it would be. Grade III armor wasn’t impervious to bullets, not exactly, but you had to hit a soft point to do any damage. Head and chest shots were no good. You had to hit a joint, at the hips or knees (which, of course, worked backward on these alien fucks) to incapacitate them, or a good neck shot for a kill.

  Even this low-level asshole was dangerous. I mean, all I had was a Grade I bulletproof vest and helmet, and a standard issue semi-automatic rifle.

  But I knew how to shoot it.

  For half a heartbeat, everyone stood frozen in place. Then everyone seemed to move all at once.

  “Get behind me!” I yelled at the woman, even though I knew the monster’s energy weapon could cut through me as if I didn’t exist. Yet she did as I said, and all of a sudden there was nothing between me and the goblin except wide open space.

  The alien, as cool and casual as you please, raised his weapon and aimed in my direction. If I’d stayed where I was, he would have blown my head off with his first shot. But my training kicked in. With one hand behind me as if that would protect the woman and her child, I dove toward the nearest shelter I could find, which happened to be a large metal dumpster.

  For whatever reason the hospital needed such a large fucking dumpster right outside their emergency entrance, I was enormously pleased it was there. And that I was able to reach it ahead of the alien’s rapid-fire energy pulse scorching the air around me.

  Somehow, I made it without being shot. But that didn’t mean I was okay by any definition of the word.

  I was not okay. My heart was pounding like it wanted to kick a hole in my sternum, and rivers of sweat were pouring down my face. I was panting as if I’d just completed the Boston Marathon in full gear, and I knew most of my reaction was due not to the effort I’d put in, but to the shock of seeing a real, live goblin for the first time in years.

  In the flesh. Or at least, in the armor.

  Since my injury, I’d only seen them on the newscasts. I didn’t think I would ever forget what it felt like to see them up close, firing beams of energy at my face. Mostly, I hadn’t, but it was a still a shock after all these years.

  I heard a momentary lapse in fire and leaned around the dumpster to send my own salvo of three-round bursts in its direction. The AC lens locked on immediately and aided with targeting.

  But my shots went wide as I had to scramble back behind the dumpster. That alien fuckster was fast, and began firing at me again.

  It wasn’t much taller than me. Except for its knees, it could have been human. In its armor, it was hard to tell.

  For all that, there was still an indefinable alien-ness about it that was undeniable. The way it stood, the casual way it had locked onto me, the easy contempt with which it aimed its weapon. There was an aura of menace, of wrongness about it that tied my innards in knots.

  For a reason I couldn’t define, the creature was horrific to look at. A being designed to generate terror, to elicit a visceral response from those it encountered.

  I was beyond happy that I’d taken the time to empty my bladder back at the base. If I hadn’t, I would have wet myself right there behind the dumpster.

  The alien monstrosity continued to fire, aiming its energy weapon at the dumpster. Fortunately, only a couple of the creature’s shots made it all the way through, and none of them came closer to me than the width of a handspan. But it refrained from rounding the dumpster. I smiled. It was afraid of me, as well, and that gave me courage.

  Belatedly, I turned to the woman with her child. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She was younger than I, with dark hair and tear stains on her cheeks. She was obviously scared to death of the alien, same as me, yet she still managed to nod.

  “I’m okay,” she answered, and she seemed to answer for the child, as well. He was young, maybe four or five, but it was hard to tell because she held him so close.

  “Stay here,” I said. “We’ll be fine.” Even as I spoke the words, I knew they were a lie. Without help, there would be little I could do to defend her against the alien who even now continued to fire and keep us pinned down here.

  Yet that didn’t mean I shouldn’t give it my best.

  Resolutely, I thumbed my comms unit. “Private Rogan Ward requesting back up!” I said. “Taking fire from outside the hospital entrance. If anyone can hear me, I have two civilians with me, and we need all the help we can get, now! Over!”

  Static.

  “Fuck!” I said with feeling, forgetting for a moment that there was a child nearby. I watched the light in the woman’s eyes fade as she seemed to accept that we were done. But I wasn’t ready to give up. I took a deep breath and tried to shunt the visceral response to the alien aside.

  If it had just been me, I would have already jumped out from hiding to confront the goblin, probably dying in the process. But now I had two more people to worry about. If I died, no one would help them. And that’s why we were here, wasn’t it? As I looked at the woman, I wondered how in the hell I was supposed to defend both of them while I was pinned down here.

  Then I smiled. Any way I could, I thought. Any way I could.

  With a resolution in my heart that was way out of proportion to the capability of my body, I took two deep breaths to steady myself, then poked my head around the corner of the dumpster.

  And nearly got it shot off.

  The alien fuck-bastard had used the time to work its way partially around the dumpster, and its latest shot had been nearly on target. My helmet took part of the blow, and it was all I could do to unbuckle it and cast it aside, trying not to think about the burning, gaping hole the energy weapon had left.

  At the same time, I cursed and gestured for the woman to work her way around the dumpster.

  “Move it!” I yelled, and she did. I followed her as quickly as I could, doing my best to ignore the sounds of the alien weapon’s ongoing fire, the sizzle of power versus steel, and the smell of ozone and smoke filling the air.

  Still cursing, I knew the alien would keep circling until it found us, or until another one came up behind us and ended the whole thing. In my mind, we had two options. Either we could run, and risk being caught in the open, or I could move just a little faster than the alien would expect.

  Haha. Well, I could try, anyway.

  I glanced at the woman with her child and wondered why I hadn’t heard a sound from the latter. Surely any young kid would be too terrified to stay quiet?

  Surely he ought to be crying his lungs out, giving away our location and making us a far easier target?

  Then I realized something that hit me with the force of a hammer. The child was dead. Somehow, the woman clinging to him had given the impression that he was clinging back. But he wasn’t.

  As the realization dawned, I looked again into the woman’s eyes and saw the depth of sadness within. She didn’t need me to tell her. She already knew.

  She just didn’t want to accept it.

  Who was I to force her to confront such a harsh reality? It wasn’t my place, I decided.

  But it could be my place to avenge the child’s death.

  With that thought in mind, I moved as fast as I could around the dumpster until the monster came into sight. As planned, I’d come up behind him, albeit a lot closer than I’d expected.

  The AC lens automatically locked on to the goblin, but I hadn’t quite yet learned how to use it to full advantage. So I clicked my rifle to full auto, opened my mouth to hurl a wordless cry of attack, and squeezed the trigger.

  M
y weapon spat out a stream of bullets. For a heartbeat, I fired at the monster’s back, doing little damage as every single one of my bullets impacted against its shield. Then it spun around, and I saw my chance.

  I adjusted my aim to the goblin’s throat and kept firing. I ignored everything else around me. Forgot about the woman and her dead child. Tried not to think about the ruins of the plane scattered around. I even managed to block the goblin’s rifle from my mind, even as it spat its foul energy my way.

  “Die you motherless alien fuck!” I yelled.

  After what felt like an eternity but was really only seconds, at least one of my bullets found their target. Suddenly, it was like the alien took a solid punch to the face. It wobbled on its feet and seemed to hold its arms out for balance. Then it toppled over and crashed to the ground.

  The monster waved its arms in the air. Through its visor, I could see its green, horrible face, and I could swear it was struggling to breathe.

  I had dealt it a serious blow, and that simple thought made me deliriously happy.

  I wanted to take a step or two closer, aim my weapon from point-blank range, and make sure of the job. But when I took my first step, something wasn’t right.

  A wave of dizziness and nausea hit me, combined with an unexpected weakness. And I barely had the strength to stand.

  Puzzled, I looked down at myself and saw with some surprise that a large chunk of my left side was totally missing.

  7

  I hadn’t felt a thing, but the alien weapon must have got me at least once. Twice, judging by the size of the hole.

  Stupidly, I thought it was really going to sting in the morning, and then caught my first whiff of my own burning flesh.

  Cauterized. The word just popped into my brain, supplied in the same way that quote had come to me earlier. I knew that was what had happened. The energy weapon had cauterized the wound it had made. Just like what had happened when my leg got blown to hell six years ago. It was the only reason I hadn’t bled out that time.

  This time, it wasn’t going to have the same saving effect. Even as I realized what had happened, I fell, collapsing to the ground next to the alien I had shot.

  For some reason, the idea of me and the goblin dying together made me laugh. But then I stopped when I tasted blood in my mouth.

  That wasn’t very good, I thought, and decided to make sure of the job.

  I pointed my weapon at the juncture between head and torso on the alien’s armor and pulled my trigger again. My weapon was more difficult to control this time, and when I stopped, it fell out of my hands.

  That done, I toggled my comms unit one more time.

  “Private Rogan Ward requesting medical evac immediately. Over,” I said, and barked another laugh as the comms unit returned only static.

  I wondered how long it might take me to die of my wounds.

  Minutes? I’d grown weak awfully quickly, and that hole was big enough to put my entire fist in, if I had some weird desire to do that. But I thought I could last more than minutes.

  Hours?

  Yes, that sounded about right. Lying there for hours with no hope of rescue, unable to even move to save myself. Hours would be long enough for the pain of my wound to make itself known, and for me to suffer some more.

  Days?

  Not fucking likely.

  I was still lying on the ground next to the corpse of the goblin when I heard someone scream.

  The woman, probably, although I couldn’t be bothered moving my head to see. It didn’t sound like the type of scream a person would use upon seeing their savior lying on the ground with a fatal wound in his side. Instead, it sounded like the type of scream she might use in a moment of mortality. Harsh, full of terror, and cut off mid-way.

  I figured something had probably killed her, but by then I’d largely stopped worrying about anything much. I was drifting away, starting to disassociate from reality, and weirdly, I knew what was happening.

  But I was still there, still alive, still conscious enough to know when a second alien came into view. My AC lens was relentless. I didn’t really want to know, but it told me the stats of this new alien menace regardless:

  Class: Wraith

  Level: IV

  Armor: None apparent

  Weapon: None apparent

  Capability: Magic user

  * * *

  Of course, I thought. It had to be. A fucking magic-wielding wraith.

  As if I didn’t have enough problems.

  I wanted to kill it as well, just to see if I could. But try as I might, I couldn’t even raise my weapon.

  I laughed out loud, tasted blood in my mouth once again, and then coughed.

  In a weird way, the coughing brought me back to myself, just a little. Just enough to be able to watch the wraith bend over the goblin as if checking for signs of life.

  Finding none, it then turned back to me, and I found myself looking at the most hideous creature I’d ever imagined, full of chitinous horns and eyes as black and soulless as the deepest pits of hell. It was like a being of darkness, an entity from humanity’s combined nightmares. Like Satan himself had fucked a giant spider and thrown a snake in the mix just for laughs, and this was the outcome.

  I should have been terrified. Should have felt the fear of my own mortality grab hold of my spine and crawl its way up into my skull. But I was half-dead by then already. Nothing could reach me, not even the terror of the abyss.

  When the wraith gazed down at me, I looked straight into its eyes and would have flipped it the bird if I’d had the strength. To my immense surprise, the creature spoke. Not out loud, nothing so mundane as that, but in the depths of my mind.

  “You have killed one of my servants,” the voice said, sounding strangely sibilant, as if it had somehow constructed the entire sentence out of a hiss. I’d lost the power of speech, so I thought back at it as hard as I could.

  “Yeah, I did. And I’d kill you as well if I could,” I said, not knowing if it heard me or not.

  “For this, you have earned yourself the death of a thousand suns.”

  With that, the foul, wraith-like creature reached out with a clawed, cadaverous hand. Dark magic swirled around that hand like a plague of locusts, and if I’d been able to, I would have flinched out of the way.

  But I couldn’t. The wraith touched me gently on the forehead, in a gesture that felt surprisingly tender.

  Then my world erupted into agony the like of which I’d never felt before. It was as if every cell in my body had suddenly burned with the heat of the sun, and I understood the nature of the death this creature intended.

  Despite my wounded, weakened state, I surprised myself with the strength of my final scream.

  8

  The death of a thousand suns seemed to last forever. It was excruciating, a torture without peer, and when it ended, I was left with nothing at all.

  No thoughts. No memories. No sense of longing for a life that was over.

  Nothing.

  I’d never really thought too much about what happened after we die. I didn’t have the comfort of a defined religion that promised eternity or salvation. If pressed, I would likely have guessed that when we die, that was pretty much it. Our minds were nothing but a bunch of cells that had convinced themselves they were conscious, but I could see no biological rationale for an eternal soul.

  Death, to me, was no more than nonexistence, and stories of heaven, hell, or even reincarnation were no more than that. Just stories.

  And yet…

  The wraith’s efforts to end me were complete. Every single cell in my body had been obliterated by the death of a thousand suns. I wasn’t there to see it, but I imagined that my body, lying on the concrete next to the goblin I’d killed, might have burned with incandescent fire for just a moment before becoming no more than a single wisp of smoke.

  I was unquestionably dead. Gone. With no hope of resuscitation.

  And yet, something remained.

  So
me part of me unconnected to my worldly flesh seemed to continue to exist.

  But with no senses, suspended in a place of nothingness, in a place that merged darkness with light.

  I felt the passage of time but had no frame of reference as to how much time was passing. A second, a minute, an eternity. To me, it was both the forever and no more than an instant.

  Nor did I feel any particular frustration or impatience, or anything else in regard to that passage of time. I simply drifted, a shadow of my former self, or maybe a ghost.

  Until, finally, something changed.

  One moment there was nothing, and the next, there was a golden temple made of columns and graceful arches.

  And it was, in an odd way, a point of focus. In an eternity of nothing, the smallest, most insignificant item must be the most interesting thing ever. And the temple was by no means insignificant.

  I didn’t study it, but I felt that I was the temple, and it was me. As if we had always been there, and that didn’t feel strange at all.

  And then, I heard a voice. Like the temple, the words it spoke were eternal, as if they had always been there, spoken only once, but made somehow permanent.

  “You can save them,” it said. “You can save all of them.”

  And then, everything changed.

  With the image of the temple still in my mind and the words an echo in my soul, I drew a deep breath.

  Somehow, I was no longer dead.

  Somehow, I was breathing again.

  Somehow, I was alive once again.

  9

  “You can save them. You can save all of them.”

  I awoke to sounds of fighting. People crying out in pain and anger, the desperate cries of the dying mixing with grunts of effort and exclamations of triumph. A dim memory surfaced, that of fighting goblins and wraiths in a hospital parking lot. But that wasn’t the same type of struggle I was listening to now. Instead of energy weapons and bullets, the smell of ozone and hot metal, I heard steel ringing against steel.