over and rolled to the floor.
Whoever you are, the man thought in his dying moments, make it all mean something…
…Richard clutched his chest and felt the fast beat of his own healthy heart.
Yet a balance remained. More memories flooded in, memories stretching hundreds of years, generation after generation of Americans, Europeans, Africans, Asians, and more. Each contributing skills to help him fight and survive in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. Dying moments and shattered dreams; the anguish of great hopes dashed by a twist of fate; the collective triumphs and failures of his race, he made them all his own.
The third gift gave Richard-no, Trevor — everything he needed to fight on behalf of his people, and a charge to give it meaning. The weight of the world, the Old Man had warned, was coming down on Trevor Stone's shoulders. Now he carried that weight.
He had never felt so responsible. Indeed, he had never truly understood the word 'responsibility' before. Not like this. Not the way in which Presidents and Doctors felt responsibility. The responsibility of life and death; of nations and cultures; for things much greater than any one person.
For a species.
After a while, he fell out of bed. Tyr stood and watched stoically, relaying the need for help. The dogs still barked. The intruder still searched for a point of entry.
Trevor paused on his hands and knees on the thick rug. His stomach tied into a knot, his arms quivered, beads of sweat covered his body, his breath came in bursts.
The weight of the world.
He hauled himself to his feet, wavered, and then found his strength.
The first night at the estate he had not known what to think or do. By the second night, he accepted his gifts but, arrogantly, thought there no consequences. Now he realized he had much to learn. And much to do.
It would take time and it would take change. Just as the knowledge imparted to him by the third gift gave him confidence and strength, the price of that knowledge and the responsibility to be worthy of receiving it, sat inside his belly like a seed of things to come; a cold seed he would nurture with commitment, patience, and focus. A seed that would sprout and grow and swallow whole the man who had been Richard and give life to Trevor. There could be nothing other than the one purpose.
He grabbed the carbine bought for him by the man who had once owned the estate. He marched from his bedroom armed with the expertise to make that weapon precise and lethal; knowledge granted by a dead soldier.
Outside waited the first of many nightmares he must face; nightmares that haunted the long night into which he and his people descended.
6. Fugitive
Late June turned into the deep heat of July and August followed by the shorter days and chilly nights of mid September.
There should have been pep rallies and football games, back-to-school sales and a new fall schedule of prime time TV.
Instead, insects swarmed the streets drawn to and born from a legion of bloated cadavers. The airwaves offered only static and no electricity lived in the wires between power poles. Smoke drifted over disintegrated neighborhoods, the result of block fires burning unchallenged. Flipped cars littered the overpasses and silent swing sets swayed on empty playgrounds.
Mankind’s machinery and vehicles, buzzing electronic transformers and humming streetlights, made no sound. The combined chorus of humanity’s footprint had been silenced and that silence roared.
Strange creatures lived on the streets, no longer interlopers but part of an altered ecosystem of new predators and new prey. Some organized, many not.
The world of man had been cut, diced, and scattered.
– A red Corvette sped west on the Cross Valley Expressway, swerving first to avoid an abandoned SUV, then again to dodge a jack-knifed 18-wheeler, but it dared not slow.
Four smaller vehicles that could have been the bastard offspring of a Jet Ski and snow mobile pairing pursued the Corvette. These strange craft rode on cushions of air, each piloted by rugged humanoids hooting and hollering as they gave chase.
The swarm and the swarmed raced along the expressway across the Susquehanna, through the rock cut in the western wall of the valley, and into the 'Back Mountain.' They passed a bank and a gas station, fast food restaurants, strip malls, and a soft ice cream stand that suffered its worst summer in years.
The pursuers wore a material resembling leather. They worked their rides close to the ‘Vette, swinging and jabbing with their collection of primitive weapons: oblong maces, cone-shaped daggers, and straps lined with blades.
The Corvette swooped around a bend at high speed and entered an intersection linking four small roads. A mound of junked cars woven together by a sticky secretion blocked that intersection. Dusty bones lay on the pavement around what had once been a predator's nest. Vacant or not, that nest threatened to claim another victim.
Rubber smoked from the tires as the brakes struggled to slow the car and the driver fought with the wheel for control. The ‘Vette missed the mound…almost: the front quarter panel clipped the grille of a late 70’s Mercury Marquis jutting from the mountain of captured cars.
Both front tires burst as the fleeing coupe ricocheted into the curb, spun across the front lot of a gas station, through the empty pumps, and smashed sideways into the boarded storefront.
Meanwhile, the hover bikes easily dodged the nest and coasted to a stop behind the disabled Chevy.
A woman staggered from the driver's side and fell to the pavement; her hand splashed in a stream of hot lime-green anti-freeze from the split radiator.
Last spring she wore the best designer clothes, made reservations at $50-an-entree restaurants, and hung on the arm of a boyfriend who bought her a Corvette from Edgar Chevrolet.
Those designer clothes were gone, exchanged for rough jeans and muddy tennis shoes. The $50 entrees had been supplanted by cans of tuna fish and worse. The boyfriend who bought the Corvette had met his fate as lunch for something big and slithery that had battered open the door to his townhouse last July.
In the months since the world disintegrated, Sheila Evans dropped twenty-five pounds on the Milky Way and Pepsi diet. Her once well-groomed hair now lice-infested; her formerly manicured nails now jagged from nervous biting.
Her pursuers dismounted and approached.
Similar in some ways to human beings, these aliens sported two arms and two legs. They had heads, too, but their heads were less round and more oval, almost egg-shaped. A massive, oversized mouth dominated their pale faces. Tiny little eyes rested above small flaps that might have been nostrils.
'Stay back!' she held a hand aloft as if to shoo them away.
She had seen what these things do to people.
She had seen what these things do to women.
Sheila slumped against her car and cried while the gang approached with horrifying grins on their oversized mouths. The leader licked its forked tongue over serrated teeth.
That leader…fell to the ground.
No, the leader’s chest exploded, pushing it to the ground.
The other three produced bulky firearms akin to flintlock pistols.
A second creature fell as half its head exploded.
Sheila scampered on her hands and knees to the front of the Corvette and coincidentally gained a better view and a better understanding of the situation.
Catty-corner from the crash site in a bank parking lot someone-an honest-to-God-human being- propped a rifle on the hood of an abandoned car and sniped her attackers.
