by Justin Bell
Looking across the street, she saw a parade of cadets jogging themselves, strapping young men in tight t-shirts and military pants, hoofing it along the sidewalk and for a moment, she caught a couple of them looking her way. She smiled softly, realizing that she was at least twelve years their senior, but feeling like she still had a little kick to her step. Her cheeks flushed slightly as she caught one of their heads turning and watching her as she picked up speed down the hilly approach to her house. She’d gotten six miles in this morning, and had a craving for more. It had felt like forever since she’d been out for PT, since she’d trained to do what she felt like she was born to do… serve in the United States Marine Corps.
Her first tour with the USMC had ended once Scott had been born, which was now almost thirteen years ago, and for every single one of those thirteen years, she’d been itching to get back to the Corps, to get involved in that daily military life once again.
It wasn’t long ago that a woman couldn’t even serve on the front lines with the United States Military, though that had changed within the last decade, and Marilyn Gregory had been among the first to take advantage of it. With all of that came countless regulations surrounding serving with kids, being on reserve duty versus active duty and everything that went along with it. She’d been close to the end of her time with the Marines when she’d become pregnant, and the timing had worked out well.
Until she’d started getting that craving again.
Marilyn knew at her age she’d never be parachuting into Afghanistan or carrying ruck in the jungle, but she longed to once again serve her country in some capacity, and she was getting close to returning. She could feel it. And while she may have been stuck on desk duty, she wanted to be every bit as physically proficient as the men, so she had resumed her running routine with force. Now, as she crested the hill and began trucking down toward her house, she ramped up the speed, letting her legs take her, feeling the wind in her face, her muscles working in effortless concert with each other. Morning was her time, and her adrenaline charged through her, and for that brief moment, she felt like she could take on anyone in Pendleton. Man or woman, by the time she was done, she’d be a faster runner, a better fighter, a more accurate shooter. She’d prove to any of them that just because she had kids, and just because she was over thirty, it didn’t mean her life as a Marine was over.
Her house drew up on her left and she smiled. She was going to keep on running, she wasn’t going to stop at six, she’d run right on by. Maybe she’d even hit ten before she came back. Could she push thirteen? It had been a while since her last half-marathon, but she thought she could hack it. She wanted to hack it. Smiling, she tossed a wave at her house in case anyone was in the window and continued running on by, her lungs surprisingly unimpeded by her rapid pace. Just ahead the road dipped into a gradual upward slope and she buckled down, picking up speed, determined to take it at a flat sprint.
She never made it.
As she started cresting up, a severe, twisting knot formed in her stomach and she half stumbled, half scrambled toward the side of the road, dropping into an almost kneeling position, grasping for the grass. Her guts surged as she dropped to her knees in the grass, using the hand to support herself. She knew what was coming, and looked to her left, focusing on her house, wondering if she could make it there. Moving left, she started to stand, then felt the lurch again and buckled, finally giving up and letting her early morning breakfast vacate into the green grass at the side of the road.
Her eyes watered as she picked herself up and started to make her way toward her house, her stomach still convulsing, hands pressed tight to her belly. This feeling… she knew this feeling. She’d had it before.
Twice before.
“No,” she said quietly as she looked up and saw her husband bursting from the door to her house. “Oh no.” Marcus headed toward her, but he didn’t need to ask, he already knew what was happening.
***
Now.
Monday, June 29th.
The deserts of Arizona.
She felt the feeling again, only this time it was slightly different. Her stomach clenched with a unique and distinct tightness, the familiar tightness of guilt. The same guilt she felt when she’d realized she was pregnant, yet also realized that maybe she didn’t want to be. Only this time her guilt was more significant, a feeling that she had somehow let her children down. It had been her responsibility to protect them, and she had failed. This time her husband wasn’t there to help her into the house. Not that she needed his help, but she longed for his arms at this very moment, his face, his warm embrace and quiet words telling her it would be okay.
But it wasn’t going to be okay. It might never be okay again.
She sat on the hard rock, jagged edges digging into her tailbone and back, her narrow body wedged tight between two rock ledges. Rocking slowly back and forth, Marilyn couldn’t stop looking at the shattered and crumbled rocks, now scattered about sixty feet below the cliff edge. The edge that had been solid rock at one moment, then disintegrating into tumbling shards the next. Smashing, falling, and taking two of her children with them.
“Mom?” Scott’s voice was small and quiet as he approached, stepping carefully over loose rock to her left, reaching out and touching her shoulder. “Mom? Are they… are they okay?”
Marilyn didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She simply shook her head slowly back and forth, the words not forming on her moving lips.
“Mom!” Scott shouted. “Stay with me!”
Marilyn snapped her head around, the loud voice breaking her out of her miniature trance.
“I’m… I’m sorry, Scott,” she said. “They were there one minute, then just… gone. They’re both gone.”
“Hold it together, Marilyn,” Lieutenant Drake said, making her way over, stepping around fallen and broken rock. The ledge they were on had been shaken by the impact of whatever it was hundreds of miles away. Whatever it had been had activated a fault line.
“They could be fine, okay? They may have just slid down to the base of the rocks. We need to keep going, make our way down and around, and we might find them down there, okay? Are you with me on this?”
Marilyn’s eyes widened. “I can’t leave them,” she said, her hand pressing more tightly to her stomach. “They could be down there.” She gestured toward the pile of shattered rock.
“They went over before it collapsed,” Drake said softly. “We saw them, okay? They’re not underneath.”
“How do you know?” Marilyn asked. “You don’t know. You’re just trying to get me off this rock. I won’t leave them buried here. Abandon my children. I won’t do it.”
Private Juarez walked up to her and crouched down, balancing precariously on the rocks.
“Nobody’s asking you too, sweetie,” she said softly. “But if there’s a tremor… an aftershock. Things will get bad here. Very, very bad. We need to keep moving and hope that we’ll find them at the base of the ledge, okay?”
“No, that’s not okay,” she replied, pushing herself to her unsteady feet. Rocks shifted beneath her as she stomped toward the edge of the cliff, then bent down as if she might try to climb down the sheer face of the rock that had been shorn away by the sudden quake.
“Don’t!” shouted Drake, stepping toward her.
Marilyn wasn’t listening, she was lowering herself down, dangling dangerously, looking down, considering the drop. A drop that would, at the very least, break her legs, but might even kill her if she dared make it.
“Mom!” Scott screamed at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing throughout the rocky surface of the ledge.
Marilyn hesitated, halfway crawling over the edge, and looked back up at him.
“Mom,” he continued, his voice a quiet, hissing insistence. “Mom, I need you. I know you want to save them, but I’m right here, and I need you right now.”
She felt tears sting her narrow eyes as she sat there in a half crouch, bent over the rocky ledge, p
reparing to go down. Looking straight into the panicked eyes of her seventeen-year-old son, her oldest child, one who had not cried out for his mother in nearly a decade. He was there, reaching for her, his own cheeks streaked with wet tears, his mouth pleading.
“We will find them, Mom, okay? I promise we will. But there’s only one safe way down and we have to take it. We have to take it now.”
She shook her head sadly. “Don’t make me choose, Scotty,” she said quietly. “Please don’t do that to me. I can’t.”
Scott dropped into a lower crouch, getting closer, extending his hand toward her. His fingers touched her wrists and she paused in her climbing position, tilting her head slightly, looking him square in the eyes, both of them crying freely.
“Little Vera,” she whispered. “I never wanted her before she was born. When I found out I was pregnant, I cried. Not because I was happy, because I… I didn’t…”
“Mom, don’t.”
“I can’t leave her. She has to know that I care. That I love her. That she’s more to me than our mistake; that she never was a mistake.”
“You can tell her when we find her,” Scott replied, his voice firming, and actually deepening, sounding too close to his father for her comfort. “We will find her.”
Marilyn let her head drop, her eyes dissecting the broken stone near the precipice. She released his hand and pushed back, starting to fall.
But she was so focused on Scott that she didn’t see the other Marines, she didn’t see Drake, Juarez, Percy and Boskwin. They had flanked Scott on each side and they moved in quickly, and even as she pushed off, yanking free of her son, they converged on her, each grabbing her arm, tugging and pulling, holding tight and lifting her up.
“No!” she screamed, struggling, “I can’t!”
She was enveloped by the Marines, who came together into a wriggling, thrashing mass, gathered around her and hauled her from the edge, bringing her across the rock-covered terrain and toward the downward slope, kicking and crying all the way.
Chapter 5
Now.
Monday, June 29th.
Mountain View, California.
Darla didn’t dare hope that perhaps she might make it to her office undetected, but she knew as she proceeded down the narrow, somewhat dimly lit alleyway that SETI was only a short walk from where the passage spilled out onto one of the perpendicular streets, and she was currently only about ten minutes from her destination.
As she’d moved carefully from the shadows of one building to the next, she’d heard some commotion here and there. Slapping feet on pavement from people running, the small spatter of a breaking bottle and some muffled shouts from several blocks away. But none of it had gotten close, and none of it had felt particularly real or threatening. The relief was a physical presence as she approached the end of the alley, keeping low, her shoulders aching from the weight of her two bags. On her right shoulder the laptop bag was far smaller than the clothes duffel she carried on her left, but the technical gear wedged tightly within it weighed it down far more. Both of them together forced her into a struggling crouch, moving slowly and awkwardly, but certainly moving forward, which was the most important part. Once she reached SETI, she knew she’d be safe, and her offices even had comfortable couches, running water, showers, and all manner of other amenities, which made her believe she might actually be able to stay there for the short term.
Dare she dream it would be that easy?
Things were never that easy, especially not for her, and especially not at the precipice of Armageddon.
“Well, well, what have we here?”
Darla froze as she vacated the alley, half in and half out of the enclosed passage, coming out into daylight, the voice burning deep inside her from behind. She turned, looking over her shoulder and saw two men approaching, coming slowly around the corner of the building, eyes narrowed and focused on her.
She glanced left and could see the front entrance to SETI through a narrow grove of trees, just across the street and a few hundred yards away, but her two bags were weighing her down and the two men were moving more quickly than she thought they had been, only a few yards away now.
“Where you heading, cutie?” one of them asked, jerking his head toward her bags.
“Heading? Heading nowhere. Going to work.”
“Work? Get outta here. It’s the end of the world, you wanna die at your desk?”
“Better than dying out here with you,” she replied sardonically before she could catch herself. There went that dang internal filter again.
The man’s face hardened into an angry scowl. “Excuse me?”
“Sorry,” she sputtered. “I’m sorry. That was rude, I apologize. But please, I need to get to work. I’ve got important stuff to do. Stuff that could—”
“Stuff that could what?” the other man spat, sarcastically. “Save the world? You some sorta special scientist or something? Gonna invent some crazy gadget to keep that crap from falling down on us?” He flailed his hand skyward and instinctively, Darla followed it and saw that debris and formless streaks still filled the sky above, a constant orbit of shattered and shattering debris. She remembered studying Kessler Syndrome, and studying it pretty heavily, and in some of their models the destruction got so severe that it put into place a perpetual blockage of debris so thick and pervasive that it altered weather patterns and created global chaos.
The reality of Kessler Syndrome had seemed less extreme when she’d peeked at the data before everything went dark, but down on the ground, the reality had been far quicker to reach critical mass than even their starkest projections had been.
Of course none of their projections took into account the fact that kinetic bombardment devices would begin firing randomly upon planetary targets.
That was a new wrinkle. A wrinkle that she was, in spite of herself, very intrigued by. A wrinkle that she wanted to peel back the layers of and explore.
What kind of person did that make her? On the eve of possible planetary destruction and she had no desire to seek out friends or family or accomplices, all she wanted to do was to find out why it was happening. To satisfy her curiosity so she could learn something from it.
Learn from it and be smarter from it for the limited time that she was still alive.
For a moment, she felt disgusted by her general apathy. But then she saw the men in front of her, saw what they had already become, and decided that apathy was preferable to whatever this was.
“Again, I’m sorry,” she reiterated. “I need to go.”
“Like hell you do,” the first man growled. “Nothing you do is gonna make a bit of difference, girl. You might as well enjoy your last days on Earth, huh?” he extended his arms as if his filthy, torn t-shirt wearing, paunchy form was the very dictionary definition of enjoyment.
Darla bit her lip to keep from laughing out loud, and instead just shook her head softly.
“We all have different definitions of enjoyment,” she said, as politically as she could. “I’ll be going.”
She felt the cool touch of his fingers on her arm even before she was fully turned around, the grip tightening, pulling at her skin and closing further.
Darla didn’t think. She didn’t stop to wonder what her next move might be, she simply cocked her waist, whirled, and swung her duffel bag, letting it plow headlong into the man’s face and chest at a tight arc.
The duffel had been filled with mostly clothes, and was really pretty soft, like a huge, canvas wrapped body pillow, but the force of the swing and the unexpected impact had been enough to spring his fingers loose and send him stumbling backwards, confused.
“You crazy—” the second man hissed, moving around the swaying bag and lunging for Darla. She swiveled and kicked, throwing an awkward foot out at a strange angle, but missed him cleanly, throwing herself off balance. Her hand was still hooked around the strap of the duffel bag and the first man recovered and grabbed it, pulling her toward him and moving in, his arms
spread, lunging as if to embrace her. Darla back-pedaled and let go of the bag, sending him fumbling backwards as his friend moved in again. She let her laptop bag slide from her shoulder, wrapping her forearm in the canvas strap and swinging it like a purse at full tilt. The corner of the laptop bag struck her assaulter in the chin, snapping his head to the side and throwing him into a stumbling sprawl, his feet getting tangled and him falling face first onto the pavement.
The first man threw the duffel rough to the ground, snarling.
“I’m gonna mess you up, lady,” he snarled. “There ain’t no cops around to stop me.”
Darla took a few uncertain steps backwards as he advanced, his hands closing menacingly into angry, vein-covered fists. As they came into the light, she got a better view of him, a tall man with broad shoulders, wearing the torn-sleeved t-shirt she’d noticed previously and grease covered jeans. The delicate etchings of ornate tattoos stretched out along his bulbous flesh, shifting as his muscles clenched, closing the distance between him and her.
Holding her laptop bag at her right side, her eyes caught the duffel that seemed so far away, and finally she admitted the obvious. There was no way she was getting it back. Deciding discretion was the better part of valor, she spun on her heels and dashed forward, crossing from the street to the sidewalk, snaking between narrow trees, the man close behind her. She could hear his feet slamming on the pavement, then digging at the grass and dirt, and he was fast, very fast, closing on her quickly. Up ahead she could see the window-covered ground floor of the SETI building, the two glass doors glaring back at her like rectangle eyes. She brushed another tree with her shoulder and kept moving, dashing across the expanse of green grass, leaping over a hedge, hearing the man just behind her. Striking the concrete walkway leading to the double doors, her ankle shifted, twisting and she grunted in pain, adjusting the direction of her run, bolting toward the front doors.
Finally she reached them, extending her arms, grabbing the handles and yanking.
