ONE
“Christopher, honey, it’s time to get out of the car,” my mom said for the third or fourth time.
But I ask you, why even count? I was staring into the pit of hell itself in its most horrific incarnation. Middle school. And my allegedly loving mother was about ready to set her right foot on my butt and eject me from the family car. She, who once pushed me out of her own body, was now not just willing, but actually anxious to force me into a day fraught with certain failure, humiliation, and irreversible psychological damage. And for all that, I was still supposed to buy her a Mother’s Day card each and every year? Where is justice when it is needed? Sure, it was only the first day of my seventh-grade year, but already I was the victim here. Let’s face it, I had been fully trapped into a system of my betters where they and their whims of fate ruled my existence. If I’d have known what an anarchist was, I think I’d have become one then and there.
“I think I’m sick, Mom,” I tried yet again to sell to her. “I mean I am sick,” I corrected. Gotta give this pitch some heft.
“I think someone’s just nervous about the start of a new school year.”
“No, Mom, seriously, I think I have a tumor. And the tumor’s so bad, it has a fever.”
“Well, here’s some encouraging words of wisdom, hon. That’s not how tumors work. But if you go to class and study hard, then you can become a doctor. Once you are, you’ll realize just how silly what you just said was.”
“I forgot my … my … homework,” flew from my lips unbidden. Come on, I was a panicking kid here.
“There is no homework due the first day of school, sweetie. Now get going before the bell rings.” Then, because my life only seemed like it couldn’t get worse, Mom rolled down my window and shouted to Bev Thompson as she passed by, “Oh, Beverly, hi. May I ask a favor of you?”
Some quick history. Bev and I had been in school together since kindergarten. Back then, we talked to each other some and played at the park if we ran into one another. But by fourth grade, whatever relationship we had was up in smoke. She was a girl. I was a boy. Nuf said. Now Bev was–let us agree–rapidly maturing into womanhood, while I was still swimming in the kiddy pool of life. I don’t think we’d spoken in two years. Okay, back to the complete tale of the destruction of my life.
“Oh,” Bev said with the enthusiasm of the greeter at a mortuary, “Mrs. Alan.” That was it. No, hello, or nice to see you. No, just the absolute social minimum. I slumped down as far as I could. Of course, that didn’t help. It was more an instinctive than intentional stab at a safe haven.
“Chris here is nervous about the first day,” my cheery mother continued. “Would you be a good friend and walk him to class?”
Was there a pistol in the glove box? I didn’t recall ever seeing one, but blowing my brains out sounded so good just then. I reached to check for sure, but my hand got slapped out of the air. Nice visual there, Mom. Now Bev thinks I’m a spaz as well as a loser. A loser spaz. A lopazer.
“I need to be somewhere,” Bev said, totally devoid of human emotion. With that, she marched away.
“Well, pooh, I’m sorry your friend didn’t have time to help,” Mom decried.
“No, Mom, she needs the time to go spread the word that I’m six times more geeky than I was last year to everyone else at Delta Middle School. Maybe she’s going to the office to use the PA system? She’s a very focused individual.”
“Very funny,” Mom dismissed with a slap of my thigh. “Now get out and have a great day as a seventh grader.”
Don’t get me wrong. I loved my mother. But she could be so clueless. Or cruel; I wasn’t sure yet which it was. She didn’t even know that the words great day and seventh grade cannot be used in the same sentence. Not in the same universe. I opened the door and walked away without a word or a look back. So, naturally, Mom hit the horn–long and hard. Then, when every pair of eyes in the state were then looking, she yelled, “Love you, Christophernny,” and waved as demonstrably as if she were flagging down the HMS Titanic to stop and pluck her from the frigid Atlantic Ocean.
Why wasn’t it possible to telekinetically self-immolate? I sure wished that was a thing.
And then the second bell rang. Perfecto. I was officially back in middle school, Bev was texting the cosmos that I was a pathetic moron, and now I was late. Maybe I should use the scissors my mother carefully packed in my pencil case and rip the seat of my pants open. Why leave one stone-of-humiliation unturned? Why not indeed?
I headed toward the office to get my tardy slip. Why drag it out by hoping my homeroom teacher would cut me some slack? Mr. Gibbon–name spelled exactly like the howling monkey he was–had a proven lack of compassion. Was I hoping to catch a break from the man who gave the entire basketball team detention the day of their big game? Gibbon hallucinated one day that they’d laughed at him during lunch. That caused them to miss their last game and forfeit the championship.
As I was waiting in the long line to report my guilt and beg mercy from the office staff, the daily announcements blared overhead. Darn, even getting in trouble didn’t spare me the misery of being subject to that drivel.
“Mr. Alan,” a flat, desiccated voice called me back to the lamentable here-and-now.
I looked up to see and examine the nasal passages of Mrs. Snively. She was the wizened old crone standing in an open field the day they built Delta Middle School’s office. Hence–since no one dared ask her to move, lest she turn them into a toad–she became the receptionist.
“Right on time as predicted,” Mrs. Snively condemned in her faint lower-class British accent. She ripped off the tardy slip and started to hand it to me. Of course she released it shy of my hand so it fluttered to the floor. Same scary clown, same circus-of-the-damned. “You delinquents never change,” she sing-songed as I stooped to retrieve the slip. “And that’s what penitentiaries are for,” she said once I faced her again. The lady was such a pillar of public education.
I walked away without a word or a look back. I was twelve. I did that a lot.
One silver-lining to my black cloud of a morning was that, at the time I got back to Gibbon’s homeroom, the bell rang. I had just enough time to hand him my tardy slip, experience his disapproving grunt, and then I was OTD–out the door. My bleak day would have three lowly-placed highlights. Lowlights? One was lunch. The second was hearing the final bell, releasing me from the stalag. The third was where I was presently headed. Grace Chang’s Computer Science class. Well beyond rational expectations, Ms. Chang–who always insisted I call her Grace, but I never did because she was old, like twenty five–was a great teacher and a cool woman. I know. How’d she end up teaching middle school? Some blood-debt needed to be repaid? She’d killed a bunch of people and it was this or the electric chair? Who knew? But I sure counted myself fortunate to have her as an instructor.
As I neared Room 222, my stomach, against all odds due to its already low position, sank further. The Line of Shame, it would seem, had been re-instituted this year since it had been so fun the last year. The Line was where ten to fifteen jocks lined up either side of the entrance outside Room 222. Their self-appointed mission was to razz, torment, and otherwise make miserable anyone nerdy enough to be enrolled in Computer Science. Unfortunately, Grace, bless her heart, was a bit too … um, out-of-touch … to even notice there was a gauntlet outside her classroom. And so it goes …
“Well, well,” sniped Ernie Severide, the rather large and ill-tempered lineman for our football team. Think a bull raised to fight in the arena that had just had a rope tied around his testicles. That was Ernie at his core. “Look at the snowcakes this glorious year has brought us.”
Ben Pender, his wingman since second grade, leaned in to Ernie’s ear. “It’s either snowflake or cupcake, dude. Ya gotta choose.”
Ernie roughly brushed him off. “I call a snowcake a snowcake if I wanta. Back off, queer.” Yeah, it was pretty much impossible to see the kid succeeding in life. Then Ernie returned to his duties serving The Line. ” Hey, Ph … Ph … Christofairy,” he sprayed. I tried unsuccessfully to shrink into a black hole and disappear. “Gonna kiss your girlfriend,Ms. Chang?” I know, I know, it was such a lame taunt. But we’re talking Ernie Severide. When pigs fly, they don’t go very far, and when Ernie articulated, he didn’t do so very much.
As I passed him, Ernie reached out and slapped the stack of books I carried under my arm. They crashed to the floor and, man, was that ever hilarious. Not. But Ernie and his Band of Chumps sure thought it was. They brayed like the jackasses they were.
The bell rang, so The Line broke up at a trot, and the last kid in our room closed the door. Peace at last.
“Hey, guys,” Grace began with joy in her voice, “welcome back. Great to see the old faces as well as the new ones.” She smiled ear-to-ear. “First, I want to say that this is a Judgment-Free Zone. We will all value everyone else’s questions and opinions. As of today, we’re all best friends, even if we don’t know each other yet.” She giggled at her own funny. Man, was she a beacon of hope to geeks like me.
Pretty soon, the class had split off into groups of four to work on the day’s assignment. Well, everyone but me. Grace pulled me aside and then sat down beside me at one of the benches. We’d worked all summer on a special project and she wanted to have me complete it before she integrated me back into the mainstream classroom. I guess I should say that the computer class was both for newbies and pros like myself. It was also both about programming as well as computer design. Like any class, most kids put in the minimum and, in turn, got out the minimum. But last year, Grace recognized that I was kind of a stud at this computer thing. Accordingly, she allowed me to learn at my own pace, which was a first ever for me.
The upshot was that over the summer she’d help me learn Python. That’s a super-powerful language that emphasizes code readability and can manage tons of data. And before you say no way, let me tell you yes way, this kid was able to use, if not master, the language pretty quickly. I was employing that tool to build up some basic parallel programs. Now, we lacked a supercomputer to run them on, but the point was the learning, and I was having a blast and a half. Grace confided in me that I was much more of a natural at programming than she was–quite the compliment for an awkward preteen.
“Christopher, I really think you can get a scholarship to a top-notch university if you keep at this,” she praised. “I know that’s pretty far off on your horizon, but, hey, a dream is a good thing to have.”
I had no idea that, at that moment, any hopes, plans, or dreams of my having a great college experience–or any kind of a normal life–were quite literally about to go up in smoke.
Before I could blush and say something stupid and clumsy, the floor shook. The first wave was subtle.
“Did you feel that, Christopher?” Grace asked me with a frown.
And of course my thoughts–as a sexually obsessed but brain-dead kid–went directly to, OMG, she wants to know if I felt a something that passed between us too. The woman’s hot for me. Never mind that Grace had on a wedding band and pictures of her beautiful wife and young children posted on any open space in the room. No, I fancied she was falling for me … falling hopelessly.
I was awakened to reality–or not far from it–when the building shook violently. Grace shot an arm to cover mine. “Was that an earthquake?” she screeched, horror in her eyes.
I scanned the room, uncertain how to react. The building did jerk around a good bit more than I’d have liked it to. “Ms. Chang, I don’t think we get earthquakes in Spokane.” I was pretty sure that was a true statement. I’d never felt one anyway.
Any doubt that something very big and very, very bad was coming down was laid to rest definitively when most of the windows exploded inward and east-facing walls started to fracture.
“Students, this is Mr. Gordon,” came the loud and shaky voice of the principal. “Duck and cover immediately. There appears to be a nuclear war or something. Duck and cover immediately.”
In retrospect, if there was anything humorous involved in the demise of our civilization–and trust me, there was precious little there–it was Principal Gordon’s announcement that last morning of normalcy. You see, Philip Gordon was in his late sixties. He’d grown up in an era that feared global nuclear war was just around the next calendar page. As a consequence, school children back in his day were taught the ludicrous duck-and-cover drill. I mean, if a fifty-megaton device just went off within your personal horizon, you were gonna be as dead as dead could be. Vaporized-toast dust. There was no maneuver that would keep a child safe in their doomed classroom. Anyway, duck-and-cover drill faded out in the 1980s. So, it would seem, did Principal Gordon’s sensibility as well.
To a student, we were even more confused, and hence, terrified by his command. Fortunately, the fire alarms went off, the sprinklers hissed to life, and we all ran screaming into the halls–teachers included. The thunderous raging of explosions increased in both frequency and severity. The school structure was clearly about to fail. I briefly considered a leap out the nearest window, but settled for a sprint along the top of the lockers that lined the halls. The stairway was another story. Swirling death. The student body was flowing in one terror-stricken current. I doubted I’d survive entering the river as it surged.
Then, for whatever reason, I flashed on Grace. One moment, we were talking Python, and then next, I bolted along with the other scared little sheep. Shit! What a jerk. She was sort of a friend. I needed to make sure she was okay. Now the only set of events that needed to take place were that Grace was indeed still back there, that the building didn’t collapse on me, and–most critically–that my mom never learned that I tried to pull off this stunt.
I was still standing atop a locker, so I reversed direction, made it back to Room 222, and hopped down. I was careful to avoid the still-surging mass of tumultuous teens. I kept my back pressed to the wall and slid into 222 without being crushed to death. Wow, I considered that a major success. A quick scan told me no one was left in the classroom. So much the better. Grace had made it to …
Somewhere … out there … someone was softly crying …
It was coming from the far corner of the room. Not so much a sob, just a wet, jerking sound of fear. I dashed over. Grace was squatting in the corner, drawn into a tight ball, a fist crammed into her mouth. He eyes were closed and I could tell her eyelids were as tightly shut as was humanly possible. I approached her slowly. I didn’t want to freak her out additionally, if that was even possible given how bad she seemed.
“Grace,” I said softly between the tremendous impacts still peppering the ground outside.
Nothing. The poor woman stayed curled up, whimpering.
“Grace, it’s Christopher. Grace,” I said more firmly. “We have to get out of here. Come on.” I extended a hand she couldn’t see.
Still nothing. I crouched down next to her and braved resting a hand on her shoulder. “Ms. Chang, you need to let me help you. We have to go now.”
Whether it was the physical touch or my stronger words, I’ll never know. But Grace did finally lower her fist from her mouth and cracked open her eyes. She looked at me like I was a talking memory speaking to her from a million miles away.
I slipped my hand around the back of her neck and grasped her far shoulder. Then I smiled at Grace as warmly as a scared shitless twelve year old boy taking direct enemy fire could possibly ever have. “Come on, Ms. Chang,” I tugged at her gently, “let’s get to safety.”
But even as she continued to consider me with expressionless eyes, she was an immovable object, a petrified Grace Chang. Very not helpful. Though the school had yet to take a direct hit of whatever the hell was demonically raining down on Greater Spokane, I had a feeling our luck wasn’t going to hold.
“Grace,” I repeated firmly, “we gotta go.” I shook my hand in front of her.
Finally, the perverse spell she was under began to break up. “I … I can … I can’t move, Christopher. I … I’m too scared.” Then, with both hands, she locked onto my shirt, balling it up in her tight fists. “I cannot move. I am afraid to move. Leave me. I’m … I’m not going to make it, Christopher.” She burst into tears, moaning wails of utter abandonment, and a complete surrender to the madness that had seized us in its talons.
I mumbled a quiet “Shit!” I thought, What the hell, Grace, I’m the kid here. You should be … And then … then it was like someone silently slipped a thought into the back of my head. My mind quieted and I knew what to do, or, well, at least what to try next. I smiled at her like we’d just bumped into each other at a festive party. “Grace, you have to come with me. Molly needs you. Felicia needs you, and Farrah too, a whole lot.” Those were her wife and two daughters. I shook my head in amazement. “Grace, I know as a fact that Betty Boop needs you now more than she needs anything else in this world.” That was her pet name for Farrah, her eleven-month-old bundle-of-energy kid.
How Farrah got the nickname, I had no clue. She sure didn’t look like a Betty Boop to me. But, then again, I wasn’t her mother. I suppose there must’a been a good reason. But me, I was stoked. What I’d just said worked! Grace gave me a wet chuckle through her cascading tears and nodded just a tiny bit. I stood and she let me help her to her feet. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest move for a mother wishing to return to her daughter in a time of crisis, but Grace gave me a strong, brief hug. Yeah, I’d have to get her that memo about encouraging, even at a minuscule level, a hormonal slave of twelve.
“Come on,” I encouraged. And we headed for the door.
The fortunate aspect of Grace’s decompensation was that the flood of people had ended. Only stragglers bouncing off the corridor walls shot past us. With my arm around her shoulders, I walked an unsteady Grace down the stairs and finally out into the open. It wasn’t a moment too soon. Good old Delta Middle School was in its final throes of joining the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World as crumbled dust and debris.
As they say, we were out of the frying pan but very much now into the fire. At least I could lay eyes on the problem. Straight bolts of white light were lancing through the atmosphere and slamming down to earth. Where they touched down, massive explosions followed by mountains of debris were being launched skyward.
“Oh, my God, Christopher, someone’s nuking us,” Grace screamed.
But that wasn’t it. Something else was trying very hard to kill us, but I knew we weren’t witnessing missile strikes.
“No, Grace, it’s some kind of energy beam. Maybe plasma. I don’t know. But those aren’t ICBMs.”
She pointed at the latest burst. “But there’re mushroom clouds.”
And there were. “A mushroom cloud is just the swiftest way for huge amounts of extreme heat to dissipate upward. The energy beams are causing them.”
She studied me slack-jawed. “How do you know that?”
I shrugged. “I mean I don’t, but it seems to be a logical explanation.”
Grace just kept staring at me.
I lived just a few blocks away and was inclined to sprint the distance in one breath. But I still felt compelled to help Grace. She’d recovered some, if you’d call not crying as loudly and now being able to move on her own power a form of recovery.
She gestured toward the teachers’ lot. “My car’s over there.”
I glanced over but shook my head. “I don’t know, Ms. Chang.” Another set of explosions boomed way too close by. “I bet the roads are torn to shit … I mean shreds. And if the road’s passable, the traffic’s gonna be at a standstill. Your place is close. I say we walk there.” Another detonation struck the ground so close, we both nearly fell over.
“Christopher, who are you?” she asked, apparently genuinely interested in my response.
“You know me. I guess I’m … what do they call it?”
“Precocious?”
I snapped my fingers and pointed at her. “That’s the ticket. I’m precocious.”
She leaned in and kissed my cheek. “You’re right, I should hoof it. But you are not escorting me home. You have a family to get back to also.” She pushed me away gently. “Now shoo. Go!”
“Okay, but you let me know if you need anything.”
Her expression grew very serious. “I do need something. Two things actually. Thank you so much for rescuing me. I honest … I don’t know if I could have made it without you.”
“No prob …”
“Christopher, as your teacher, I need to tell you, this is the point where you say you’re welcome. You don’t go all shy or teenage freaky. Got it?”
I grinned. “Yes, ma’am. Got it.”
“And the other thing is this. Why did you come back for me? Why did you risk your life for me?” I must’ve started to speak. She cut me off if I had. “And don’t say I’d have done the same because I wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have. I was frozen with fright and no good to anyone.”
I smiled warmly. “Because I had to save you.” What? Where the hell did that come from and how could I say such a dumb thing?
“Well, Christopher Alan, thank you for saving me.”
“No problem. It’s what I do.” Then I quickly revised that remark. “Now, I mean. Now I save people.”
Grace’s face puzzled up. “Do you hear that?” she asked.
I heard nothing. “Hear what?”
“The bombs … or space rays. They’ve stopped.”
Sure enough, the semi-regular pattern of explosions that had burned itself into my short-term memory confirmed that fact. The bombardment had stopped.
“I think that’s either very good, or very bad,” I said nervously.
“Bad?” she giggled hysterically. “How could that possibly be bad?”
“Because of what might come after the air attack, Grace.”
TWO
I did sprint nearly all the way home. Maybe my desire for speed was overmatched by the lousy shape I turned out to be in. But I got there in a personal best time for me. It was right around 10:30 am. Mom and Dad’d be at work and my younger sister, Penny, would be in school. I’d tried to reach either parent as I was running home, but, not surprisingly, the cell network was for shit. One minute, I’d get a signal but couldn’t place a call, and the next minute, it’d just be dead. I remembered that a few years back our family’d made an “emergency plan” for an occasion like this. Well, maybe not one as catastrophic as this was looking to be, but there were words exchanged. Unfortunately, we hadn’t reviewed or updated the plan since it was first hatched. Backup rendezvous points were out at the grandparents’ places. My dad’s family lived maybe fifty miles away on the other side of town. Mom’s parents were living the life in sunny Florida, so me getting there on my own was a nonstarter. Otherwise, we were to regroup at home. It only took me a few seconds to confirm I was the first one to make it. Sly, our German shepherd, was there, of course. Poor guy was scared out of his doggy wits. I had to drag him forcibly out of his igloo to get him inside.
I started running through my options. I kept trying to call anyone I knew, but the cell system seemed to be KIA. I wasn’t even getting bars anymore and the home internet hub was flashing a yellow light. I recalled we had an old landline. It came with the home entertainment package and there was a small plug-in phone in the kitchen. I dug it out from under years of overlaid junk and clicked it into the outlet. Whoa! Instant dial tone. I banged my father’s work number with a modicum of hope. That was instantly blown to smithereens. I was trying to reach his cell. A quick check showed similar failure to communicate with Mom.
Then it hit me. Grandparents were throwbacks! I punched out the local set’s number from the book my parents kept in a drawer.
“Hel … hello,” Grandma Brandy said tentatively. I guess she never expected their phon-o-saurus to actually ring.
“Grandma, this is Christopher. Are you guys okay?”
“Oh, Christopher, honey, it so good to hear your voice. Put your father on, please. Something terrible is happening.”
“Dad’s not here, Grandma. I just ran home from school. I’m scared too.”
The line was quiet–way too quiet. “I … I’m afraid your grandfather is dead.”
Oh, no. That couldn’t be true. Not Ed Alan. No way he could be dead. The man lifted weights all the time and drank that revolting smoothie with a raw egg every morning. “Are you sure, Grandma?”
There was an even longer, even more ominous pause. “My Eddie was pulling out of the driveway … he said he wanted to stop by the hardware store to pick up some steel wool. He wanted to refinish … refinish that old chest we have on the back porch. Do you remember the one, honey?”
“Yes, Grandma,” I moaned, tears streaking down my cheeks. “Grandma, you said you’re afraid he might be dead. Please stop with the hardware store, please.” I was edging close to complete decompensation and my grandmother was having a senior moment.
“As my Eddie was pulling away, a great big light from the sky crashed right down on the Buick.” I heard sniffing and then her blow her nose. “And that was it, honey. I knocked on the neighbor’s door so they could get the garden hose. But Bob Clein said the heat was too … it was too …”
I heard the handset hit the floor of the countertop. “Grandma! Are you still there? Grandma!“
I stayed on that line for two or three minutes waiting for her to pick up again … but she never did. I hung up and called back, but all I got was a busy signal. Funny. I’d never heard one before, but I knew in my heart that’s what it was.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
I tried the Florida grandparents, but that call didn’t go through. Looked like I was on my own. What to do? What to do? I could start organizing supplies. That’d help. I could turn off the gas. But that’d be hard since I didn’t know how to. I remembered hearing a lot about gas turning off in emergencies. Oh well.
I would run over to my sister’s school and make sure she got home! Sure. No way the buses’d be running with the roads blown to pieces. And I’d take the red wagon. That way I could run back with her and she wouldn’t slow us down. Perfecto. I scribbled a quick note and dropped it on the kitchen counter, ran to the garage and pulled the wagon out from under a bunch of crap. It was filthy and squeaked like hell, but I had me a plan. I closed the door and started to run, but decided to jog back and lock up first. Things might be getting real strange, real quick. And I was off. My old grammar school was only five and a half blocks away. I was hardly out of breath when I rounded the corner from Elm to Maple Streets. I know, real imaginative naming in my suburb, right?
I was stopped dead in my tracks by the heat. It singed my face, causing me to throw an elbow up to cover my eyes. I basically fell back onto Elm and crash-landed on somebody’s lawn. Once I regained my senses, I crawled to what was left of the hedge that obscured my view of the school.
Towers of flames whipped at the clouds high above in a diabolical dance of lust. The fire was so hot, there was very little smoke. Not sure how I knew that. Maybe Boy Scouts? What I couldn’t see through the flames and the blinding heat was Park Elementary School. I went numb all over–every part of me was dead.
I hoped it was fast for Penny. God, I couldn’t bear the thought that she might have suffered.
As my face began to scorch, I could make out that there were at least three separate direct hits to the school and the surrounding area. Whoever was trying hard, and succeeding well, to kill us down here sure had poor targeting control. Or maybe they just didn’t care where their bolts of death struck home? Huh. Yeah, if you’re hellbent on genocide, why take careful aim?
Whoever they were, I hated them more than I knew how to hate back then, that black day. The last one of my childhood. Later, I learned how to hate them much better. Then I learned a whole lot more. It wasn’t the college of hard knocks for me. It was the life of endless knocks that followed.
I don’t know how long I lay there on that person’s lawn. Maybe a few minutes. Maybe several hours. The funny thing I do remember–like it was yesterday–was that I didn’t cry. Not for my incinerated sister, my blown-up school, or even my own personal losses. No. I lay there and stared like I was as dead as Penny.
I didn’t save her. I’d told Grace that was my thing now. It would seem I pretty much sucked at it.
Finally … later, I stood up, wiped the mud off my face, and staggered home. To the home that could never be the same. I left that damn red Flyer wagon there on that person’s lawn. I never wanted to see another one of them for as long as I lived.
After a block or so, I started jogging. I had business I needed to do. Somehow, someday, maybe even today, I was going to run across the devils who killed Penny. I needed to prepare myself to start evening the score.
No, Christopher. No! There was no evening that score. They burned your little sister. There was no ledger to be balanced. She was gone. But I would make them pay. If they were capable of regret, I wanted them to feel it for what they did. If they couldn’t feel regret, I wanted to be the first to teach them how to know it in their bones.
I was back in the kitchen before I realized I was home. I shook off my fugue and checked my surroundings. The note was where I left it. There was no sign anyone else had returned. Sly was whimpering softly in Dad’s recliner. Okay, I was on my own. Suddenly, I had a vision of what I needed to do. I was on my own. Make yourself count, Christopher.
I walked to my room and located my Scout gear. I dumped the contents of my backpack out. Whatever was in there had been put there by a kid who was going camping at a site with hot showers and electricity. The new me was headed who-knew-where. I needed to be a different kind of ready. My first stop was Dad’s gun safe. My dad wasn’t a survivalist nut job. No, he was the real deal: A retired Marine Master Sergeant. He’d proudly tell anyone who was interested–and anyone who wasn’t interested, for that matter–that he’d served in the 1st Marine Regiment. You know, the same one as Lewis “Chesty” Puller. If that person didn’t know who Chesty was, well, that was the end of the conversation. Oorah!
Naturally, the man liked his weapons. They were integrated into his DNA by then and he’d taught me well. For my entire life, he drilled into me one credo of gun use. “Safety first,” he’d grunt, “but then make damn well sure you hit what you’re aiming at.” I stood there looking up at the rifles. Obviously, I would have liked to take them all. But I had to plan that I’d be lugging the guns all by my lonesome. Weight mattered. But so did killing power. Dad had a sweet pair in the rack. A Weatherby Mark V DGR with .416 magnum loads. You could hunt cape buffalo and know you were good to go with that baby, but it weighed a ton. There was also a Bergara B-14 HMR .308, but that sucker was also a beast-and-a-half. I settled for his Springfield Model 2020 Redline with a .308 load. It was light, he’d taught me how to break it down for easy carrying, and–sexy plus here–it had a suppressor. It was, in short, dude-tastic!
Along with a multi-tool survival knife, I wanted a hand gun. I wouldn’t need to carry as much heavy ammo for it since it was basically for emergency use in close quarters. I’d be letting my Springfield do most of my talking for me. Between his Sig P938 seven-plus-one, Glock 43 six-plus-one, and the S&W M&P Shield eight-plus-one, I chose the Smith & Wesson. It held the largest number of rounds, was light and compact. Once I had my loadout, I gathered other basics. My father, the ex-Marine that he was, had a ready supply of everything the family could possibly need on hand. So right into or strapped on to my backpack went:
Sleeping bag
Poncho
Gun cleaning kit
Fire starter
Compass
One My Medic IFAC with basic meds
Paracord
Water filters with replacement cartridges
Head lamp
Binoculars
One tarp
Smell-proof dry bag
Two-pound survival tent
Stack of freeze dried meals and a few MREs
My cell phone and a solar charging unit (come on, I’m twelve. I need my games)
Several pairs of socks and a couple changes of loose-fitting clothes
I didn’t bother to weigh my total kit, but, though definitely noticeable, I was sure I could handle all the stuff. I hoped and prayed I’d reunite with my parents and wouldn’t actually have to carry all the necessities for hours on end. But I had to be ready for life on my own.
As I was preparing all my gear, I began to notice an unusual sound. It started off so faint and indistinct that at first I paid it no real mind. But as the noise rose in decibels, I could no longer ignore its oddness. Great, I reflected, what else was going to shit on my life? Clearly I’d decided that anything new was bad. It sounded like it was coming from outside the house, not inside, so I went to the front yard to check on it. Scanning up and down the street showed nothing unusual. I turned my entire body in a circle in an attempt to localize the disturbance. That didn’t prove helpful. It seemed to be coming from every direction.
Then I looked up. Crap, more weirdness. It was a clear day with only scattered clouds, typical for that time of year. But there was an unusual blackness to the sky. As I continued to watch, I noticed that the dark areas swirled, like a massive flock of blackbirds. Though I couldn’t make out any individual spots, I knew for certain that this new phenomenon was completely unnatural. I ran back into the house and retrieved the binoculars from my backpack. When I focused in on the black clouds, I was able see that they were composed of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of individual units. Maybe there was stuff falling out of orbit due to the massive bombardment that had just recently stopped? But the swarms looked too ordered for that.
After a couple minutes, I went over to the fence and rested the binoculars on top of it. With less movement artifact, I got a clear look at the separate subunits. Oh, boy. They were spacecraft. And they weren’t from NASA. They were honest-to-goodness flying saucers. Perhaps a million of them. There were certainly too many to count. My worst fears, the ones I’d alluded to with Grace, were coming true. Whoever had dealt death from above was now moving to Phase 2: A full scale invasion of Earth.
I started to hyperventilate. This could not be happening. At that very moment, aliens were descending to conquer our planet. There was no other explanation. No nation, even the USA, could have produced that many air ships. The sheer number of craft coupled with the technology needed to produce the aerial bombardment meant only one thing. Humanity was under attack by a superior force of hostile aliens. The fact that I’d witnessed no counterattacks whatsoever–not even weak or futile resistance–strongly suggested that we were a sitting duck to whatever horde was coming. The only limit on how fast they could either kill us off or completely dominate us was how quickly they could disembark from all those shuttles. I bet that at that moment in time, the human species was looking at its last half hour of freedom, or possibly its extinction.
I needed to calm the hell down. Panicking would only get me killed. Then it hit me. I needed to run. Population centers were the obvious targets of the ground forces soon to land. Now the bombing from above fell into context. They’d softened us up with the primary assault and were now beginning either a round-up or a genocide by going door-to-door. Logically, they would start with the larger cities first and move on to the smaller targets. That was unless there were so many ships descending that they could cover the entire surface in one swift stroke. If it was possible to elude whatever fate they intended for humankind, that safety would only be found in the mountains. The more rugged the terrain, the higher my chances of staying free would be. I did not have a second to waste and I sure as hell couldn’t hang around to see if my parents would arrive before the bad guys did.
Dad, being the outdoorsman that he was, often took us all camping up in the nearby Rocky Mountains. The area past Lake Pend Oreille was our usual stomping grounds. And Pops only believed in real wilderness camping. No RVs or Coleman stoves for his family. He believed in bust-your-balls survival. If you didn’t bring enough cold-weather gear, then you froze your ass off. And entertainment? That consisted of chopping wood, setting rabbit traps, and fishing for your dinner.
My earliest memory of family time together was us camping in a small clearing with snow still on the ground. So I knew the quickest way to get to a familiar location would be to take Highway 95 north to Ponderay and then go southeast following Gold Creek. There were lots of campgrounds strung along that route. From anyone of them, I could make my way up into the high country and relative safety. The problem I faced was painfully obvious. I was a kid on foot. That journey took two to three hours by car and my father was a speed-demon. He never encountered a speed limit he respected. Even if I had the brass cojones to steal a neighbor’s car, I had no driving skills whatsoever. It would be more humane of me to let the aliens kill me rather than die in a fiery crash of my own making.
I had an electric scooter I sometimes took to school. But that had a maximum range of, what, fifty miles? And those were around-town miles, not ones climbing to three thousand feet of elevation. Oh. Oh, yeah. The dirt bike! For Christmas, my parents bought me a bitchin’ Yamaha WR250F, and it was hanging right there in the garage. For a road trip of one hundred fifty miles, my butt’d be worn-out sore and I’d need to carry extra gas, but I could manage that trip. One real consideration was that if those weren’t invading aliens and my Pops got his hands on me after pulling of a stunt like that, well, I would be, let us just agree, just as dead. But a coward dies a thousand deaths and a hero dies but once. I had a plan!
I rechecked the skies. The swarming craft were definitely closer, but they were still a long distance away. I went to the garage and pulled my bike down. I checked the oil and gas levels. Topped off. Sweet. There were several five-gallon gas cans nearby. I grabbed a full one and set it next to my ride. Then I dashed into the house to retrieve my gear. Halfway out the door, I realized I needed to leave a note. But how would I join up with my parents? I’ll be in the Idaho Panhandle National Forests would hardly be specific enough for a hookup. I had to assume my cell phone’d be useless from here-on-out, so them calling or me providing them GPS locations was not possible. Oh! Some trips, especially when I got real rambunctious, we’d stop in the tiny town of Trout Creek, Montana. There is a small school there with your basic playground. My father would leave my mother and us there for my sister and me to burn off some steam while he refilled the car.
I set about composing my message. I told them that I was well and heading for the mountains. If humanly possible, I would wait for them every Friday at sunset for the next four weeks. Dusk would provide me with enough cover that I could sneak around safely. As a backup, I said I’d tape a note to the bottom of the slide, giving them more details in case we didn’t cross paths in person.
And then it hit me–hard. I needed to tell them about Penny. In the confusion that would overtake the world, they might otherwise have no way of knowing what happened to her. I could spare them the wasted time of searching for someone who was already gone. But how do you tell your parents their precious daughter …
No time for sentimentality. I wrote what I saw at the school and when I did. They could draw their own conclusions.
Lord, I hoped they were alive to read this note. If they weren’t, then I really was alone and on my own. That prospect, given this alien invasion … it ripped my heart out.
I laid the note on the kitchen counter, lugged my gear out to the garage, and I left. And as to Sly, our dog? No way I could put him on the dirt bike and travel all that distance. I reluctantly put him our back with all the bagged dog food we had. Between that, the pool, and the open gates, I’m afraid he was on his own now.
I, Christopher Alan, was now a twelve-year-old without a license speeding away from the only life I’d known. Forty-odd pounds of camping gear, twenty-five pounds of weapons and ammo, and a five-gallon can of gasoline strapped to my back.
What could go right?
THREE
I’d ridden my Yamaha a lot off road, mostly in the rolling hills outside of the city. I will confess I took my bike out for a few spins around our neighborhood when Dad said it was okay and Mom wasn’t home. But now, here I was flying down the main streets. I just wished there wasn’t a calamity occurring. On any regular day, my friends would have seen me and that would have been so cool. But, alas, the apocalypse precluded my having any fun. And though I started off zipping down the street, pretty soon I hit the unmoving traffic jam of people trying to flee the city. I’d seen some movies, like Independence Day, so I knew to expect it. But let me tell you, living through the chaos was a lot less fun than watching it on screen.
For better or for worse, I was twelve and I did not possess the requisite judgment to be legally driving. So when traffic was at a standstill and horns were blaring, I drove either on the sidewalk, between cars, or on the wrong side of the road. It was outstanding fun, I must admit. And, even if a cop bothered to care about my antics, there was no way he was going to catch me with his squad car. Plus, realistically, the constabulary had much bigger fish to fry than to enforce the vehicle code as it applied to unsupervised children. Alien invasion. Hello!
I made fairly good time in the city, and even more so once I got to the multi-laned Highway 90. The problem was–duh–the gradually descending flying saucers. It wasn’t hard to keep track of their progress. In fact, the sky was so crowded with them, they were impossible to ignore. By the time I was on the freeway, I could make a pretty good guesstimate as to when they’d touch down. I also began to see a pattern in their distribution. The bulk of the spacecraft were heading for the city proper, with less dense groupings directed toward the outskirts. That made good sense. But it meant that no matter how far out of Spokane I got, there would be hostile alien boots-on-the-ground all around and even far ahead of me. No way that wasn’t going to become a major issue. These guys clearly meant business, and, when it came right down to it, I was just another human scurrying around like a troublesome bug.
As I entered Coeur d’Alene and looked to head north toward Lake Pend Oreille, I could see the saucers touching down. And, man, if they weren’t worse drivers than me. Aside from the fact that I didn’t see any land on the sides of buildings or the roofs of houses, they really didn’t care where their flaming bulk came to rest. They plopped down right in the middle of the stopped traffic, in backyards, and after plowing through overhead power lines, I was thinking they didn’t plan on reimbursing anyone for the damages, the sons of bitches.
And once the invasion force was on the ground, the population began to panic in earnest. People ran screaming hither-and-yon out of their vehicles. Some ran into structures, while equal numbers ran out of buildings. And pity anyone unfortunate to fall or be caught up in the swell. The crowds were merciless. No, I guess the population was just beyond all reason or potential for compassion. But I saw many folks get trampled, especially children and the elderly. To me, weaving in-and-out of openings, it seemed like I was getting a preview of what hell must look like. And it was unforgivably grim. But I pushed ahead. I knew that if I stopped to help, I’d be swept along at best, or become a hapless victim myself. It was mindless mob rule, period.
When I was just leaving the city, I could see that the northward traffic was absolutely paralyzed where the roadway was normally pretty clear with two lanes in both directions. But now, not only were the lanes themselves bumper-to-bumper and stopped, so were both inner and outer medians. Highway 95 was a four- or five-lane parking lot. And any hope of a resolution to the standstill was bashed since so many people abandoned their cars and took off on foot. Again, to my dismay, they ran in every possible direction. I mean, why run back the way you fled? Or out into an empty field?
I’d come to a stop also. I stood on the pegs of the dirt bike, trying to plan a route to get me through the nightmare before me. That was why I didn’t see when a man exited the right side of a car and came running at me holding a baseball bat over his head. But, because he was the only object moving fast in my field of vision, I noticed him quickly. Apparently, it had not escaped his notice that my dirt bike was a valuable means of transportation in the present crisis. He wasn’t in the mood to ask nicely or negotiate either.
And that was where all my fantasizing and practice was put to excellent use. Remember my Dad, the ex-Marine? Well you have to know he’d only buy the most badass equipment. Fortunately for me, that included a super-fast thumb release level-2 holster. And yes, I’d practiced with it a lot. Come on, what kid didn’t want to be the fastest gun in the west? So I whipped out my Smith & Wesson in one fluid motion and put a red dot on the guy’s forehead faster than he could lose bowel and bladder control. Dude skidded to a stop with a slide and nearly fell over in the process. I was, of course, annoyed. I didn’t even have time to shout, Freeze, or Do you feel lucky. My one big chance and this chicken pulled up short. I assumed he was being overly cautious, seeing the pistol trained on what little gray matter he possessed..
I reholstered my pistol and, looking him straight in the eyes, grumbled, Fuck you. Then I spun the bike with a flare of dirt and sped away. That part felt good. But my high was cut short. For whatever reason, nobody exited the spaceships when they first landed. But, before my would-be assailant could even look down to see if he’d peed himself, every craft in sight opened up. It was like the Sci-Fi movie classic, with a bivalved hatch going up and down with a ramp forming on the lower segment. And out marched … well shit, I thought, what the hell were those?
Picture a Toyota Forerunner. Now add four legs and a forest of antennae. And where the front bumper would be, there was a spherical head on a swivel. And this Toyota Forerunner was covered in shiny metal armor over its entire exposed surface. Yeah, metallic bug monsters from space. I nearly vomited. They were horrifying and completely unnatural, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Well, until they started swinging ten-foot-long metal rods in the air that shot out bolts of blue light. Yeah, that was terrifying enough to get me moving again–pedal-to-the-metal.
The metal bugs chased after the people on foot. At first, I couldn’t tell if they were killing them, herding them, or some sick combination of both. But everyone being chased was scared beyond all reason or control. Quickly, the aliens forced the people into loose swarms of screaming humans. As I pulled off the freeway and flew along the side streets and open fields, I could see that once a certain volume of humans were corralled, most of the aliens would break off to round up more frightened runners. A few remained behind to keep those presently captive from escaping. Trust me, no one was too anxious to challenge the clicking metallic abominations. Once in a while, someone would stray or be pushed past some invisible line, and the aliens would swat them with the rods. I never saw anyone rise up after being struck, though I admittedly never hung around too long to see how things ended up.
Lots of cars tried to crash through fences to escape. They were immediately run down by the very fast-moving aliens. When the rods came within range, the cars exploded. I didn’t need to look to be certain that no one inside the vehicle survived the impacts. I guess because I was smaller than the cars and trucks, the aliens seemed to ignore me. I knew that wouldn’t last, so I raced off the roads and sought anonymity among the now-rolling hills. I have to say, I didn’t believe I had a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving my flight. But no way was I surrendering.
My luck took a turn for the better when, however belatedly, an organized military response finally showed up. Back over central Coeur d’Alene, a mixture of fighter planes–mostly F-16’s, I think– and attack helicopters appeared in the sky. They seemed to be delivering hell-from-above to the aliens below. Almost all the metal bugs chasing the humans around me stopped that pursuit and ran with impressive speed toward the human offensive display. That gave me time to slip farther away. But I had a feeling the airborne efforts were going to fall way short of occupying the enemy for very long. Again, I never stopped to look back and follow the action. But it didn’t take long before I heard less and less massive explosions behind me. In fact, within five minutes, the only sound I heard was my own engine.
That reminded me. I pulled up behind a barn in the middle of some field and refilled my tank from my gas can. Lucky I did, because the tank was almost dry. All my bobbing and weaving was using a lot of gas in spite of my little engine. I restrapped the can to my backpack and took off again. While I was stationary, I heard only an eerie quiet from where I’d come. God bless them, I knew our air personnel had failed miserably in their attempt to stop the invasion. That fact wasn’t too surprising. The bugs had such a superior technology that our best efforts were probably just minor annoyances to them.
I decided to chance returning to the main road, Highway 95 north. It was still likely to be jammed and it was still a logical target for the aliens, but it was also the quickest way to travel. Maybe halfway up to Lake Pend Oreille, the road narrowed to undivided two lanes. That was a break for me, since I could swing off onto the soft shoulder or even someone’s front yard to slip past the stopped traffic. I kept a sharper eye out this time for would-be motorcycle thieves. As a result, I made good time all the way up to Ponderay, the last town of any size before I hit the back country. I saw ample signs of the initial aerial bombardment as I had all the whole way. I could also see a few alien spaceships on the ground, but unlike before, I didn’t see any indication of bugs-on-the-ground. Not complaining, but it was different from what I expected.
Then I saw a barrier coming that caused my stomach to sink like the proverbial rock. Outside of Ponderay, there’s a fairly broad marshland where the small Pack River empties into Lake Pend Oreille. The highway was elevated, so the wetlands weren’t a problem. But right on the first bridge over the river stood a particularly large alien bug. It was like it was stationed there for the specific purpose of preventing anyone from slipping out of the populated area and into relative safety. I must have been hidden from its view by the ubiquitous abandoned cars and trucks on the roadway. In any case, as I slowed to a stop, the alien didn’t move. That was great, but now I was faced with a major dilemma. I wasn’t going to sneak past it. No way it wouldn’t notice me. So I was either facing a major detour or would have to backtrack several hours to bypass the sentry.
Those options sucked for several reasons. First off, there could easily be more aliens behind me now, and they could be better organized in doing whatever the hell it was they were planning to do to my species. Second, I was running low on gas. Sure, I could siphon off some from any of a thousand cars. But all I knew about siphoning was that you sucked on a tube until the liquid was flowing, then you put it in some container. The thought of a mouthful of gasoline was impressively unappealing to me. Finally, I felt in my bones that the longer I dawdled gave my enemy all that more time to prepare their efforts to round us up. I hated to lose precious time delaying my movement into the back country.
As I studied the scene ahead of me, I noticed one potential good alternative. There was a railroad line passing about a half mile to the south of the main highway. It was conceivable that the alien bug would see me traversing the rail right-of-way. I had no clue how observant they were, what sensors they employed. If it did detect me, would it abandon its post and chase me? Maybe it had fellow metal bugs to back it up? One thing was clear. If I was observed way out there in the open, the jig was up for me. Even if I raced to the far shore, there was no obvious cover or twisty paths to allow me to elude them.
I eyeballed the distances involved. The rail bypass was one-half to three-quarters of a mile long. If I walked my bike the entire way, I’d move quietly, but it’d take me maybe five minutes out there completely exposed. With all my gear and pushing a dirt bike would definitely make for slow going. I made up my mind. I couldn’t risk going back or search out a detour. I needed to slip by here or die trying. I know, bold talk for a small kid, right? Maybe they’d just catch and release me out of respect for my valiant attempt? It could happen.
I reversed course and found a reasonable spot to access the railroad tracks. Then I killed the engine and began easing the bike across the dry spit of land. If I could have, I would’ve crossed all my fingers and toes for good luck. As it was, I settled for a quick, silent prayer. The initial portion of the rail line were still obscured by the vegetation along the river, so I was less scared spitless than I might otherwise have been. Pretty soon, however, I was out there in plain view to any alien bug monster with a keen eye, or whatever they saw with. I stayed between the steel tracks, bouncing over each and every wooden tie, since the gravel outside the rails was so loose, I tended to plow into it. That took more effort and would slow me down too much. So it was crunch-bump-crunch-bump, wash-rinse-repeat.
Halfway across, I noticed that up ahead the railway narrowed to cross a wide spot of the river via a short bridge. Somehow that seemed ominous, though I couldn’t say for sure why it bothered me. But there was no turning back, so I crunch-bumped onward. The entire time, I kept my eyes fixed on the metallic guard bug. It seemed completely oblivious to my progress, but, as I said, I had no idea how they sensed the world, so there was zero reason for me to feel confident.
The bug’s oval head suddenly whipped in my direction. As far as I could tell, it looked directly at me. Yeah, a real oh-shit moment for me. Then, in one frighteningly swift and fluid movement, it jumped off the raised road and dove into the muddy slop that separated the two of us. I’d seen these guys move like greased lightning before. Fortunately, whatever they were designed to do, it wasn’t to plow through gooey muck. It didn’t exactly sink, but it definitely flailed a lot.
I restarted my engine and hopped on. I gunned the throttle. And oh, my, wasn’t the crunch-bump now instantly changed into a pound-Christopher’s-crotch bucking bronco ride. We must have been quite the sight to anyone covertly watching us, the bug sloshing and me bouncing. But, damn it all, it was closing the distance between us rapidly. I wasn’t even to the short elevated bridge when it hauled itself onto the dry spit and bolted after me.
I was so dead! I kept my neck craned around to follow its progress, knowing that I was still going straight because the horrendous pounding I was taking didn’t ease. Man, it was fast. I’d be lucky to make it to the bridge before it was on me. Then it raised two of those damn metal rods above its head. Oh, crap, it was going to fry me. I’d seen them transform entire semi-trailers into hot dust with one smack of those rods.
Almost without thinking–because if I had, I wouldn’t have–I skidded to a stop just after I crossed the short elevated bridge. I threw my backpack on the ground, ripped the half-empty gas can off, and hurled it at the charging bug. I take credit for aiming at one of the energy rods, but, in actuality, I doubt that my aim was worth shit. But when the bug was fifteen yards away, the can struck a rod and burst into flames. I think it being half full of air helped with the force of the explosion. While I had no clear notion how the idea came to me to do what I did, and I had no reason to believe flames would have the slightest effect on a spacefaring alien, I was in luck.
The instant the canister exploded, the bug ran full speed off the bridge. I mean, it literally flew into the air and landed in three feet of murky water. It began running–very inefficiently, I might add–in a wide circle, forcing itself ever deeper into the muddy bottom of the marsh. I did not wait to see how my handiwork would end. Curious I was, but also I was not a fool. I jumped back on my bike and took off as fast as I could. I did chance a look back as I bumped from the railway back to the road. I had to smile for the first time that day. The stupid bug was nearly submerged under the dense mud and was still making an irregular circle. Maybe the flames fried its antennae and it was functionally blind. I would never know, but I liked my theory.
As I sped south, I worried a lot that the sentry bug might have called for help. I was still very exposed on a narrow highway. But the fates were with me, it would seem. That lone bug was the last alien I saw that day, and that was just fine with me.
FOUR
Three years later …