compartment. Most of the Eagle air ships included another row of seats on the other side but this was Eagle One; a command ship modified into a mobile tactical control center. Individual chairs paired to work stations for communication, data, and asset tracking replaced that second row of seats, although on this trip those stations sat empty.
Trevor Stone waited alone with the exception of the Norwegian Elkhound named Tyr; his family dog since long before Armageddon.
The steady drone and thump of the pumps continued as the refueling process dragged on. Trevor drummed his fingers on his thigh in an anxious fit; he did not like sitting around doing nothing, not with so much going on. The Hivvan front dominated his thoughts but many things competed for attention. Every step forward created new issues and as the sole authority governing humanity’s comeback, those issues rested on his shoulders.
He tried to think of other things, pleasant things. He thought about the Eagle air ships and how humanity now built their own, improved versions of the craft. The “Eagles” were now better armed and fitted with upgraded communications systems.
The ‘humanized’ version of those ships originated from the old naval shipyard in Philadelphia. In the last two years, that facility manufactured nearly two dozen. With their vertical take off/landing capability, the Eagles provided a unique mode of transportation that did not tap fuel supplies and could be modified to serve a variety of purposes.
Of course, none of that would be possible without the re-opened and re-configured steel facilities in Bethlehem, PA. Those haunted old plants operated again thanks to matter transfiguration machines stolen from the Hivvans, first from a crashed ship in Pennsylvania and then larger units from facilities in Washington and Richmond.
Now that Raleigh had fallen, more of the machines would be at their disposal but the victory also meant thousands more people to feed and shelter, which meant the supply trains needed to run even faster but with so many attacks on stations and tracks in recent months that was hard to The side door slid open, mercifully breaking Trevor’s frustrating circle of thought.
Four soldiers wearing the best available equipment-green fatigues, body armor, and M16s-walked inside and found seats.
A fifth man entered wearing a blue flight suit, blond hair, and glasses.
“Thought you’d like something to read,” Rick Hauser-Trevor’s personal pilot-said as he handed his boss a crude newspaper.
Trevor accepted the paper and consulted his watch. He figured they would be at the estate sometime shortly after nightfall, meaning Jorge would still be awake and hence Trevor could tuck his son in to bed tonight.
Hauser disappeared through the cockpit door just as the drone and thump of the refueling process ended. A few moments later, Trevor heard the hum of spooling engines, then felt the craft effortless lift into the air thanks to the anti-gravity circuitry in the undercarriage.
He held a copy of The Baltimore New Press, one of a half-dozen fledgling newspapers that joined an on- again/off-again AM band radio station and a couple of regional television outlets as the rebirth of the news media.
It was today’s edition: August 18. Five years and two months since the first monsters and aliens came to his world.
The paper spanned ten pages printed in broadsheet with grainy photos and error-filled prose. Still, Trevor admired their tenacity and, admittedly, found he liked this post-invasion version far better than the old world’s media. The new press included hard reporting and lots of hustle but no damn stories about rock stars marrying actors or sex scandals in Hollywood.
The headline blared: “RALEIGH IS OURS!”
As of this morning, Raleigh, North Carolina belongs to mankind once again. The First and Second Mechanized divisions smashed through the perilous city defenses and routed the Hivvan garrison. Word has it that the one and only “Stonewall” McAllister led the assault on horseback. More interestingly, the imposing enemy gun emplacements and their defensive walls tumbled moments before the main assault. Rumor has it that the same mysterious commando unit that assassinated the Hivvan regional governor in Richmond last year was behind this sudden strike.
The alien army that once ruled all of Virginia and North Carolina continues to retreat as the fighters of humanity strike yet another lethal blow against the invaders. Some of the soldiers chanted “On to Atlanta!” Atlanta being the heart of the Hivvan holdings on Earth.
Trevor smiled and imagined how the LA Times or NY Post would have covered such a story years before. The first paragraph would have speculated about undo civilian casualties, openly wondered if the Hivvan strength had been overstated, then provided a military “expert” to lash out at the tactics and strategies used.
Things had changed for the better, to Trevor’s mind.
He never tried to influence the press. Even if he wanted to, he simply did not have the time. Nonetheless, the new media remained supportive of the cause, probably because that cause had freed many of them from slavery or starvation.
Stone paused as he remembered one exception to the ‘supportive’ rule. Still, he would not let that bother him. He read on and enjoyed the glowing report of rescued slaves, crushed enemies, and the bravery of his soldiers.
Another page in the Baltimore New Press offered a rough sketch of the eastern third of what had once been the United States.
The areas liberated by Trevor’s armies were colored white in the sketch, including all of Pennsylvania, all but the northeastern parts of New Jersey, the southern half of New York state including key spots along the Hudson, all of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia west to the Appalachian Mountains. The northern most third of North Carolina was now white, too.
That slate of white gave the impression humanity firmly controlled all that area, but Trevor knew the truth. No organized opposition existed within the new nation’s boundaries, but the people lived in isolated pockets with vast tracks of wild lands between.
Dangerous alien animals hid in the mountains, forests, and abandoned buildings. Travel between cities and towns meant heavily armed convoys. Life in the settlements bore little resemblance to life in the old world, due to constant shortages of food, medicine, clothing, power…the list went on. Only housing remained in great supply; plenty of vacant homes waited to replace ghosts.
On the map, a gray area marked the lands controlled by the “Grand Army of the Hivvan Republic.” That included the balance of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Big question marks rested over Alabama and northern Florida where the map cut off.
Trevor liked how the Baltimore New Press handled their war coverage. At the bottom of the same page, a statistic printed in bold gave meaning to the effort.
People liberated: 563,241.
That number, Trevor knew, came from his ‘Census Bureau.’ That number also sounded incredibly big. To have found so many people over the years seemed improbable. Yet Trevor knew that the areas they now controlled had once been home to 36 million people. This roughly translated into a 1.5 % survival rate, meaning more than 35 million people in those areas died during Armageddon.
That accounted for the large patches of vacant towns and untraveled roads inside the ‘liberated’ zone. The number of saved people sounded large, but in reality was frighteningly small.
The 1.5 % included large numbers of slaves freed from invaders who had beaten and worked them nearly to death for as long as five years.
Trevor felt a gentle shove as the Eagle increased speed. He hoped Rick would make good time. He wanted to get home fast; he had not seen his son for nearly a week.
During the first year of survival, Trevor thought he managed to grasp the rules of the new world: alien monsters lurking in every shadow and extraterrestrial armies trying to carve out zones of control. The key to victory, he knew, lay in finding survivors in the ruins and freeing hostages from alien captors.
Then came the curveball that challenged his understanding of it all: the 1.5 % survival rate also included
