Shattered Light

by Fredrick Niles

  “Get to the roof,” 49 said. “You can hold them off from up there.”

  “Wait,” Byzzie said. She had just finished gathering up her siblings and counting them off. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to go get Ritz. The Leopold should be here soon and you should be able to take off from the roof. If I’m not there when they come, just leave. I’m in contact with Kit right now so if I get pinned down you can always swing back around and pick us up.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Raquel said.

  “Oh, and Raquel?” 49 said, pausing.

  “Yeah?”

  “Take care.”

  “Yeah, you too,” Raquel said briskly and turned back toward the stairs. She felt bad about accusing him of being involved in what was going on but she didn’t have time to deal with that or anything else she had just heard in the last five minutes. As far as she was concerned, she was going to live for another hundred years and fight like that was the case.

  A crash came from nearby and Raquel spun to see a Necrosark burst through a shelf of supplies and impale one of the doctors Raquel had seen running around helping patients.

  “Go,” 49 said, sprinting in the opposite direction.

  Byzzie raised her pistol and fired off a quick three shots at the monster and it recoiled and disappeared back through the shelving.

  Feeling suddenly naked without a rifle in her hands, Raquel looked around for something she could defend herself with. What she saw though made her immediately switch her priorities. Not ten feet away was a small elderly woman lying unconscious on a cot with a bandage wrapped around her head. Deciding to forgo a weapon, Raquel sprinted forward and wrapped the woman up in her arms.

  When they reached the base of the stairs, King was already trying to hobble up them as people raced by.

  “King, I’m going to need you to move a bit faster than that,” Byzzie said as she ushered her brothers and sisters past him. The older ones were carrying the smaller ones in their arms, and Raquel’s heart broke as she noted the ones who hadn’t made it out of the cage.

  “Maybe you should carry me,” King said, picking up the pace. He was still limping on his injured leg but judging by his slow reactions and demeanor, someone had given him some pretty strong pain meds.

  “Move along,” Byzzie said, pushing him from behind. Then she turned and handed Raquel her pistol. “Here, watch our backs. There should be about 12 shots left.”

  Raquel repositioned the unconscious woman in her arms so she was hanging over her shoulder and then reached out and took the gun. “This isn’t exactly the ideal fighting stance.”

  “Yeah well,” Byzzie said. “This isn’t exactly my ideal visit home.”

  “We’re coming up on it,” Kit said.

  The jerry-rigging of the Tesla Arc into the Light Wire port had been relatively straightforward. When Byzzie had made Kit’s prosthetic limb, she had run a connecting wire from the prosthetic into the Arc Suit. In turn, his hand could be used to port into the ship. So after lugging his smashed armor up onto the bridge, Kit was able to run the Tesla Arc through his armor, through his prosthetic, and into the ship.

  “God, I hope this doesn’t blow my arm off,” he said half to himself.

  “If it does, I’m here for ya,” Nadia said reassuringly, though when he looked over at her he could see worry plain on her face. This was their one chance though. If they failed this then they failed everything.

  Kit gritted his teeth. “Here we go.”

  Seamus Clark felt like he was swimming. Something warm and wet occupied his lower half and he had the distinct feeling that he was bobbing up and down. He had thrown up once already and most of that had been a dark red color. He looked around the room.

  Blood and bodies covered the floor. Slowly, he turned his head, taking in the carnage. No one. Nothing moving. He wondered if he could stand. He looked down at his legs.

  They were gone. And not only were they gone, but they were continuing to disappear.

  The monster that was bent over his lower half was meticulously chewing on his waist. He couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel anything.

  All he felt was some deep well of sadness.

  His boy. His beautiful child had done this somehow. Clark wasn’t mad or angry. He was just sad that he’d never see his boy again. Never ask him why. Never hear his thoughts. It was over. It was all over.

  He turned his head to the side to look at the Light Wire. The throbbing magenta that had originally been there had been replaced by a dark purple. What was more was the metal at the base of the structure. It was gone.

  Something was happening to the Light Wire. The spire itself seemed to be hovering in midair. And in the space between the bottom of the spire and the ground, there was something floating. Some sort of liquid that was just now coalescing into a single tight ball of ebony.

  Clark stared and for a second he thought he saw something looking at him out of that deep black ball. There was a glint. An eyeball. It blinked.

  Then the Light Wire was engulfed in a ball of blue fire.

  “They’re coming!” Raquel yelled as she fired her weapon down the stairs. Stepping backward up them, it was all she could do not to stumble and crush the head of the woman she was holding.

  “They’re already here!” Byzzie yelled from up ahead where a group of soldiers were firing in the opposite direction. The sounds of the dying were filling the air all around them. Men and women and monsters all screaming in unison. A chorus of death against the backdrop of ripping metal and the electric thrum of energy rifle fire.

  They were closing in. And for the hundredth time that day, Raquel felt helpless. It was all too big. The odds too great. The crushing currents of reality smothering her and all the other tiny things as they shifted. If she didn’t die now then she’d die later of cancer. She had been faced with the choice to die peacefully or fight hopelessly before and she had chosen to fight hopelessly. She had used the Light Core they had stolen as a weapon and had expected to die while doing it.

  In a way, she had.

  Time seemed to flow together for her and she wondered what the accumulation of a thousand moments like this might look like. Would it be Hell? If she had experienced that many of them, then surely they made up the majority sum of her life.

  And then, with a sickening feeling, she realized that she had been here before.

  On the ship, when she had passed out, she had seen this along with a million other horrible and hopeless scenes. They had all played out like a reel and she felt like she had inhabited each and every one of them. It had felt like infinity then. And it felt like infinity now.

  One of the Necrosarks clanged up the metal stairs, as fast as if its feet weren’t touching anything at all. Raquel fired her weapon once. Twice. Three times.

  Then it clicked empty.

  Vanessa had barely made it clear when what looked like a Tesla round leveled the Light Wire facility. Blue fire and electricity erupted and painted the jungle around her, making her feel as if she had been dipped into the very sky itself.

  At some point, the sun had begun to set and the jungle around her had begun to squeeze her with its dark hands. Still, there was enough light from the burning facility to make out the shapes of dead corpses around her. Most of them had the jagged edges of smashed combat synths.

  The synths had likely been deployed as soon as the fighting had started and then been cut down along with everyone else. But they weren’t the only bodies on the ground. Four or five Desian civilians lay on the forest floor with darkly glistening holes in them made either by energy rifles or the stabbing limbs of the monsters.

  Something had happened here.

  Whether these people had been killed by the creatures or the PUC, their lives had amounted to the same end. Living breathing human beings with hopes and futures and secrets about themselves that they had yet to unravel. Dead and forgotten out in the jungle.

  The scene was so grim that it almost brought her t
o her knees.

  Suddenly, the jungle exploded with purple light. Vanessa swung her head back toward the flattened Light Wire facility and this time she actually did fall to her knees. It was another pulse wave. The song wasn’t audible this time but it was there all the same. In her heart and in her bones.

  And in the dead bodies that had just begun to lift off of the ground around her.

  They had destroyed the Light Wire but it hadn’t been enough. Whatever was powering it had forged a connection with this place and no longer needed the machine itself. Another wave would hit and another one would hit after that.

  And with it, every dead body would rise up and walk the earth with the serrated limbs of mindless monsters. An endless army sent to transform this and every other world into its own living Hell.

  Lucas Clark sat in his own Light Wire facility and considered what it meant to end the world.

  In his right hand, he held a small .38 revolver that he had taken from his dad’s gun cabinet back home. He thumbed the safety off, displaying the tiny red dot indicating it could be fired. He thumbed it back on again. Such a strange thing. A tiny tool designed to throw a little rock through the air. A spark. A bang. Then nothing. Like the big bang but the opposite. An anti-creation.

  He had heard the sounds of much larger guns outside and even a few down the hall but still nothing had found him yet in this room.

  So this was it. This was his revelation made real. He hadn’t expected it to look like this, but he wasn’t particularly surprised either. He knew it would be something along these lines. Something…brutal. Something final.

  Night had descended overhead and the stars could be seen through the thick bulletproof glass above him. He looked up at them and tried to count. He lost track and started again.

  Someday they’d all be gone. Those big and burning lights would flicker out, along with everything else. Nature would have run its course. Billions of species would have lived and died their natural lives without the horrid interference of mankind. And then everything would return to the way it was before. All darkness and black. Nothing.

  Same thing with a person. When they died, they would be returned to that infinite blackness, never having known they had existed in the first place. No one to question it. Just simple nonexistence. The most basic and natural state of reality.

  It was strange to him that anything even existed at all. Why? Why was there this brief and temporary glimmer of being in the first place? Why not nothing? Forever?

  It would be nice returning, he thought to himself. Nice to return back to wherever he was before he was born. No stress. No worrying about finishing assignments or pleasing his parents. No feelings of powerlessness and impotence as he watched the world fall apart through the lens of a computer screen.

  Lucas watched as something streaked across the sky overhead. Maybe a comet. Maybe a ship fleeing the planet. Maybe even just an illusion caused by his brain fighting desperately against what he was about to do.

  No matter. Nothing could stop it.

  Lucas reached up and put the gun beneath his chin, smiling one last time as he thought about the world he had created.

  Then he flipped off the light.

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  Also by Fredrick Niles

  Ash Above, Snow Below

  The Omen Tree

  About the Author

  Fredrick Niles is the author of Ash Above, Snow Below and The Omen Tree. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota where he writes fiction, bartends, and sells board games. In his free time he rants about movies, lurks in bookstores, and practices introversion with his wife.