This is the End 2: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (9 Book Collection)

by J. Thorn

  "Get it?" Otto said when he emerged minutes later.

  "Got it."

  "Wish someone could see this," the old man grinned. "Doesn't much matter, I suppose. Homer himself wouldn't have words."

  Walt caught his breath, then jogged in place until the feeling returned to his hands and knees. The remaining engines were a monotony of scooting down cold, clammy metal. When he finally finished, he flopped down on the hull, his ribs swelling like a landed dolphin's. Otto draped his clothes and jacket over him. His hands and shoulderblades burned where the skin had rubbed away. His toes were soaked and stiff and his left pinky toe pulsed like it might be broken. His head was too heavy to lift from the metal.

  "You got it in you?" Otto said softly some minutes later. "I can head in myself. Leave you with the detonators."

  The very question brought him back, marshaling his anger, his defiance, his existential need for revenge. Within a minute, he was sitting upright. He stood to put back on his clothes. They were nearly as clammy as his skin, but the leather jacket felt like steel mail on his shoulders.

  "Waiting on you," he croaked.

  Otto's groundside sketches of the ship made it easy business to reach the metal spire that marked the spot below which the landing bay doors took in and let out the jets, fliers, and dropships. Walt expected another grueling descent from the top of the hull to the bays, but Otto's crude maps didn't show the spiral ladder that led straight down to a platform clinging to the ship's dark side. They got out their pistols and entered a manual door. The well-lit tunnel led to a scaffold high inside the quiet bays. Below, landing strips led out to the cold and misty air. They huddled on the scaffold, watching. Walt didn't know the time—2 AM, 5—but the bays were empty as a midnight alley, and in the course of five minutes of waiting, a single crewman had strolled across the dim runways.

  "Any further in, we're liable to take a laser to the noggin," Otto said.

  Walt nodded. "Fuck these guys."

  Otto dug out the detonator, clicked a home-built cap off the simple switch. "Fifteen minutes." He laughed, deep chuckles that bunched his sides. "For all the good that will do us."

  He flipped the switch.

  33

  Anna advanced on Raymond, all fear of him forgotten. "You brought them."

  "How the fuck did I do that?"

  "They weren't here until you went outside."

  "Neither were the clouds. Did I bring those, too?"

  David turned from his computer, eyes darting between them. "Did they follow the radio signal? Is the radio still on?"

  Anna's eyes widened. "Of course not."

  "We must have tripped a tracking device. We have to find it!"

  "David!" Raymond shouted. The gaunt man spun to face him. "It's too late for that. How long until the nukes are ready?"

  "I'm trying to refine the target coordinates. Hypothetically, they can be launched at any time."

  Raymond crossed to the south face of the sprawling room and pried open the blinds. The blue lights blinked beneath the clouds, tracking closer.

  "Keep working. We'll try to hold them off as long as we can."

  The wild light receded from David's brown eyes. "Sir."

  Anna shook her head hard. "You have to launch now."

  "We have a single opportunity for success! If I miss by a fraction of a mile, all will be lost."

  "What if they bomb us?" She pointed repeatedly at the alien vessels closing on the base. "What then?"

  "That depends on where their bombs detonate. If it's on the building itself, we will be vaporized. If it's an air burst—"

  "Then we're stupid fucking corpses, and stupid fucking corpses can't launch missiles. Now turn those keys."

  Raymond started back across the room, hand dangling near his gun. "Wait. Keep working. If we see their missiles launch, if they start circling, you turn those keys."

  David rolled his lower lip between his teeth, gaze flicking between Raymond and Anna. He nodded. "If you see anything at all—"

  "I'll say the word."

  Anna's face blanked. She wandered to the southern windows. The jets careered closer, lights brightening, then swung out to sea, slowing until Raymond could hardly believe they could stay aloft. David's fingers clattered over the keys. The two jets turned straight for the base. Raymond held his breath. Rather than the blue triangles of the fighter jets, these two craft were fatter, almost lumbering, flattened ovals nearly the size of passenger jets. The vessels sunk lower and lower, glided past the shore, hung in the air above the far end of the landing strip, and began to descend in a dark swirl of dust.

  "I'm going downstairs," Anna said. "I'll fortify the doors."

  Raymond exhaled. "Good luck."

  "Lock the doors behind me."

  He nodded. She drew her pistol and ran down the stairwell. Raymond clicked the lock, wedging an office chair beneath the door handle. Anna's footfalls faded away. He bent his knees and grabbed hold of a filing cabinet. Metal squealed across the tile. David glanced sideways, annoyed, then returned to his monitor. Raymond shouldered the cabinet in front of the doors, swept a desk clean, then flipped it on its edge and shoved it some twenty feet from the entry, broad side facing the doors.

  Out the window, white lights flooded the tarmac. Dust blustered away from the grounded vessels. Aliens descended short ramps, waggling claws and tentacles in the pale spotlights.

  Straight below, a dark figure raced from the base of the command center, hunched down in the night. Anna rushed into the lee of an outbuilding, paused to peer at the aliens, then bolted north for the open fields.

  "God damn it," Raymond murmured.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Get ready to wrap it up. We don't have long."

  An open buggy bounced down the broad ramp. It hit the pavement and peeled out, veering north. Four aliens jounced from its back. A fifth manned a spindly turret mounted at the nose. Raymond pressed his face against the cold window, breath fogging the thick glass. A floodlight spilled from the buggy's front, silhouetting Anna as she sprinted across a dirt road bordering the airfield. Her tiny figure stumbled. She picked herself up, firing a spray of blue lines over her shoulder. The buggy's turret opened fire. Thick, strobing light seared across the cold field. Anna's upper body tumbled away from her churning legs.

  The buggy swung to a halt, dust whirling in its floodlight. The grounds were still. An alien leapt down, padded over the dirt, and fired three blasts from a hand laser into the dark grass. It remounted the vehicle. The buggy circled back, rendezvousing with a squad of creatures just beyond the nearest outbuilding.

  Raymond resumed piling chairs, desks, and computers against the doors. With the room's furniture all but completely rearranged, he bunkered up behind the upturned desk, sweating, chest heaving. Several stories below, a loud bang rattled through the building.

  David stood, cracking his knuckles. "I suppose that's my cue."

  "Is the missile locked on?"

  "Well, you have to ask yourself, exactly where is their ship? Right over the bay, yes, but we can't say for sure. I checked with the network's satellites, but they're all dark." David rubbed his nose. At the bottom of the stairwell, the doors burst in with a metallic clang. "I decided to get creative. Why launch one missile when we've been graced with three? Assigned each a different airburst coordinate, varying the heights and X-Y plots of the bursts, should allow us to cover quite a lot of ground. Or air, as it were."

  "Meaning?"

  The man shrugged his narrow shoulders. "If they're anywhere in that bay, they are not going to be very happy about it."

  Raymond let out a long breath. The air tasted sharp and piercingly sweet. He crossed to the control board, its knobs and flat screens. The two keys waited in their steel circles beside unwinking red lights.

  David reached for one. Raymond gripped the other. The cold metal seemed to cling to his fingers. Appendages smacked up the staircase. Through the eastern windows, the rockets sat ready on their pads.
>
  "The true ultima ratio regum," David said. "Ready?"

  "Fire away," Raymond said. David began a countdown. Beneath the count and the tentacles hammering against the doors, Raymond tipped back his head and whispered, "I love you."

  They turned the keys.

  The missiles were silent. Raymond tried and failed to twist his key further. "What's the matter?"

  "Is your key turned?"

  "As far as it goes." The doors thunked, rattling against the mounded files and desks. A chair jarred loose and crashed against the floor. "Are all the...buttons pushed?"

  "They're pushed." David blinked peevishly at the board. "Perhaps I missed something. A last level of security."

  Another barrage of blows assaulted the doors, the hardest yet. At once, the aliens stopped their attack, leaving Raymond and David in thudding silence. Raymond didn't know whether to laugh or scream.

  "It was a trap," he said. "Why would they do that?"

  "Eh?"

  "You really think those things would leave functional nuclear missiles two hundred miles from one of their main bases?"

  "I hardly think they know the location of every warhead on Earth. Anyway, what would be the point?"

  "David, they're aliens. The thrill of the hunt. Religious ritual. Maybe it's a super clever plan to draw out the most cunning and ambitious survivors. Whyever they did it, they left everything we needed to hope—and now that it's time to launch those rockets, they're standing there like dead trees."

  "How...how rude."

  Rude. Perfect. Like life is a job at a call center and every day brings nothing but threats, complaints, and insults from strangers who don't give a shit about you. That, ultimately, was why Raymond couldn't feel particularly angry or frustrated or tragic about their failure. Mostly he just felt forlorn. If it's all rudeness, the only thing is to find a few people who love to know you as deeply as you love to know them. To cling to, enjoy, and protect each other. The callers on the other end sure the hell won't. He hadn't known Walt, not really. He sure didn't get to know Otto or Anna or David—not unless being aware the former professor could give you a dozen different recipes for stewing mutton counted as knowing him.

  Searing light flared from the top of the doors, tracing a white-orange line through the metal. Molten droplets hissed on the desks below.

  He'd taken a gamble with them because he couldn't face how hopeless it all really was. They'd been conquered. By aliens. That was it. Time to pack up the blankets and go home. Time to light out for Colorado with the one person left alive who cared whether last night's dreams were good or bad.

  After cutting horizontally through a foot-wide stretch of door, the blinding force cut a sudden line straight down.

  He'd chosen to chase delusions of glory. The weed-dealing. Security for Murckle. The commando nonsense in the city. His reward was to die beside a stranger. He couldn't argue with that. He had his pistol in his hand. He didn't intend to use it.

  The arc light cut 90 degrees again, tracing the third edge of a square, then jogged up, completing the shape. The smoking metal square jangled against a file cabinet. A fist-sized ball hurtled through the hole in the door.

  Raymond closed his eyes and remembered a 4th of July weekend when he and Mia watched the moonlight on the waves of the Oregon coast.

  Light filled the room.

  34

  Cold wind stirred the cavernous landing bay. Eighty feet below and two hundred feet away from their place on the catwalk, a conveyer hummed into life, drawing a dark, pilotless jet into a massive tunnel and the storage cells beyond. White lights blinked alongside the tarmac, leading the way. Two of the creatures stood near the slowly moving vessel, exchanging gestures Walt could barely see. He leaned forward. To the right, another spiral ladder descended to the bay floor; the catwalk continued across the walls, disappearing into shadow.

  "Given how fucking ludicrous this is," Walt whispered, "I don't think any strategy is off the table."

  "Bridge is front and center," Otto shrugged. "Literally, I mean. I figured we'd just mosey on that way."

  "Through a foreign ship a half mile wide."

  "All roads lead to Rome, don't they?"

  "Shit." Walt glanced down the catwalk. Mist gleamed on the metal. "Suppose we'd better stay out of sight as long as possible."

  He crouched forward, gaze switching between the far-off aliens and the web-like walkway ahead. There were no handrails, probably because those things didn't have hands, but the path was at least wider than human-normal, nearly six feet across, and Walt was able to largely pretend there wasn't eighty feet of open air between him and the runways below. Otto shifted behind him, shoes squeaking. The conveyor finished hauling the jet into the depths of the bay. The two aliens followed it out.

  Walt hurried on. A black door opened off the catwalk, tall and ovoid. A recessed silvery circle sat in its center at neck height. Walt pushed the circle. The door cracked down the center, the two halves retracting into the walls. Beyond, lights flicked on noiselessly, dim but more than enough to make out the rounded, high-ceilinged hallway that extended for dozens of feet before gradually curving out of sight.

  "Pray we don't run into Darth Vader," he muttered. He stalked forward, pistol in hand. Doors passed on either side. The tunnel unfurled further and further, curving leftward with each step. Behind them, the lights faded to nothing, leaving them in a perpetually advancing circle of illumination and granting Walt no way to tell how far they'd traveled.

  "You tell which direction we're headed?"

  "Starting to get off track," Otto murmured. He tipped his head at one of the featureless oval portals. "Want to see what's behind door number three hundred?"

  Walt shook his head and continued on. Too easy to get lost down a rabbit hole, to stumble into the main barracks. Their only hope of reaching the bridge was, like Otto implied earlier, to follow the big roads—which, of course, meant risking run-ins with anything else putting them to use. If so, no big loss. Alive or dead, the bombs would go off in another twelve minutes.

  Finally, the tunnel branched, a six-way intersection with a steeply pitched hexagonal ceiling. Glyphs played on its high walls, providing useless instructions. Walt glanced at Otto, who pointed down the rightward-veering branch. This kept on like the previous tunnel until suddenly widening into a bright lobby. To one side, windows overlooked a wide and dark room, sparsely furnished with perversely tree-like metallic chairs and stands with as many limbs as the aliens themselves. Walt skirted past. Far down the curved tunnel, lights flicked into being.

  "Back," Walt hissed. He jogged back to the lobby, Otto beside him, and knelt beside the doors to the gym-like room. Otto extended his weapon. The soft smack of feet and treads filtered down the hall. The light followed, first as faint as starlight, but quickly advancing to something he could have read by.

  A pair of aliens padded into the lobby, lightly dressed in glyph-marked straps. Their fat, ovoid heads swung toward the two humans. Surprise flashed in those watery, oversized squid-eyes. Walt opened fire.

  Otto's target dropped in an instant, smoke curling from the dime-sized hole between its eyes. Walt's leapt back in a confusion of limbs, yellow fluid pattering from a scorched hole beside its mouth. Walt fired off five more shots as fast as the pistol would let him. The thing dropped, tentacles flapping against the smooth floor.

  The hallways were dark at both ends. Otto gestured toward the gym. "Try the doors."

  They opened easily, swinging outward in conventional fashion, so long as you overlooked the apparent total lack of hinges. Otto grabbed hold of a mess of limbs and dragged the body for the doors, the alien's tentacles still twitching, claws opening and closing dumbly. Walt went for the other body, stashing it beside Otto's in the corner of the room of metal trees.

  "Ought to pick up the pace." Otto palmed viscous yellow blood onto the thighs of his pants. "Right now surprise is the only advantage we got."

  Walt didn't argue. They jogged onward, dogge
d by the lights, soon passing another vast room thoroughly filled with stools and roundish things that could have passed for tables. At its far end, creatures stirred in dim light, metallic bowls flashing in their tentacles. The windows to the cafeteria began at knee height; Walt flopped to his belly and wriggled along, Otto army-crawling behind him. When the tunnel once more narrowed around them, they rose and hustled on.

  Past a pair of retracting doors, the tunnel expanded into a massive hangar of wide-open spaces and canyons of freestanding shelves forty feet high. Black machinery rested in the walls and dangled from ceilings too high to see. Metal clicked on metal. A hundred yards down an alley of shelves, an alien carefully selected a steely rod from a drawer of identical pieces. Walt aimed his pistol and edged on. The alien didn't turn.

  Emptiness, stillness, and desertion, as if the ship were a closed museum, a place that no longer was. It could have housed tens of thousands, even millions, but Walt had seen no more than a skeleton crew, the ushers left to sweep the stadium after the game has finished. Were they that low on manpower? Were these creatures interstellar Pilgrims, a handful of outcasts gone far to sea for a new home? No reinforcements, then, no swarming billions with lasers clamped in their claws and knives clenched between their beaks. Just a small sect with a good idea: let the virus do the fighting for us. Bound by strict scriptures and baffling beliefs. And when they'd arrived and found a few of the locals still kicking—now what?