horizon as they walked, forearms held over their eyes to protect their vision from the atomic war being waged to the west.
“General, how are you doing, sir?”
“I’ve…I’ve been better, West.” His chest heaved, and a line of dark fluid trickled leisurely from the general’s mouth and nose. He gasped, body wracked in pain.
West tried to overlook the wound, but his eyes were led back again and again by some grisly fascination. He shuddered.
The general had been cut apart, cleanly sliced by a beam of light in a diagonal path that cut off his left arm and leg and the lower half of the right leg. Neatly cauterized intestines spilled from the gaping hole in his body. More disturbing than any of the exposed tissue was what was consuming it, a spidery, tendril-like silver substance that was replacing the flesh that it touched with a metallic copy. Bates was being turned into a silver husk. It was incredible that he was still alive.
“Well, it looks like you’ll be in charge soon.”
“Nonsense, General. We’ll get you patched up—”
“Cut the bullshit. Let me die in dignity.”
“Sir, I—”
“Hear me out.” Bates coughed. More blood.
“Yes, sir.”
“West, I want…I want you to take the men…”
Lots of blood.
“Sir?”
“Take the men and run. Get as far from these…things as you can…Live to fight another day…”
“But General, Wind River’s gone, Satcom’s gone. We have to make a stand, just like when we took Montreal. Remember that? Eighth Assault won the war because we wouldn’t give up. We have to fight—”
“No…” Bates had a body-wracking coughing fit. “You stand and fight, and you’ll die…West, live to fight another day…These things aren’t human…”
“Of course not, General. Now try to rest.”
Blood flowed from Bates’ eyes.
“…run and live…”
“General, try to rest.”
Bates’ hand grasped up and secured a weak handful of West’s fatigue sleeve. He pulled West close, whispered into his ear. “I know what you are, West. I know you can destroy them.”
West blinked and frowned. General Bates released his already faint grasp on West’s sleeve.
His body slumped. West closed his eyes.
“Rest in peace, General Bates. Bag him.”
On the horizon behind them, the night sky was torn open by the flash of a large atomic. Lasers flickered the sky like so many fireworks. The drone of gunfire began again, and more warplanes flew overhead.
“Doc, how are the rest of the wounded?”
“All seventeen critical. Not a chance. Those weapons—”
“Kill them. Put them out of their misery so we can move out. Understood?”
Hesitation. “Yes, sir.” West turned back to the horizon. Sunlight was waking in the east. Faint sunlight. “What the hell will today bring?” he asked to no one. He faced the scene of destruction stretched before him. The earth shuddered as the fleet of warplanes fell from the sky, enveloped in a web of silver, erupting their payload uselessly on the ruins of suburbs: playgrounds and tract housing and drive-in movie theatres where children had laughed and families had dreamed and teenagers had been teenagers in the back seats of their father’s cars.
It was the dawn of a new day.
Weeping.
She awoke to the sound of sobbing that drifted to her from the stifling black.
Pain wracked her body and she adjusted the bandage that encompassed the left side of her face. She gently traced the gouged path of flesh that someone had stitched back together as she had been passed out. A thin line of fire was imprinted from just above her left eyebrow to her cheekbone. What had once been her left eye was now a throbbing ball of agony. She vaguely remembered a nearby explosion and shrapnel filling the sky and falling to the asphalt that smelled of poison and blood, her face greeting the ground with a brutal slap.
Why am I still here? How am I still alive?
She surveyed her shelter with her good eye.
She was beneath Seattle, in a decrepit sewer tunnel left over from the era before the New America program. The tunnel stretched away in both directions, the ceiling thirty feet above her. The dank smell of old sewage had permeated this sanctuary, but it was better than the caustic chemical atmosphere on the surface.
“How’s your eye?” A voice, gentle, quiet, masculine. The man facing her was dressed in a military-issue medical uniform. A pale green glow emerged from the chemlite he carried. Similar glows could be seen throughout the stretch of tunnel visible to her. She shrugged, touched her throat, grimacing.
“Throat’s still bothering you? I’ll bring you something for it.” He gently began to remove the bandage from her face. “Let’s take a look at that eye.” She grew uneasy.
The medic removed the steripad from the left side of her face. It was a deep flesh wound. Thankfully there had been no nerve damage, but she would never regain sight in her left eye without a transplant, and there probably would be a terrible scar, especially with the current state of medicine being practiced. It was wartime, after all. Unfortunate, the medic thought. She really was an attractive woman. Very intriguing…He hated to see her face contorted in pain.
“Try to open your eye.”
She hesitated…
“Go ahead. I won’t bite.” He grinned.
Slowly, tentatively, she opened the eye. She could see only black with the left eye, but with her right she searched the medic’s face for his unspoken opinion.
He tried to conceal his shock at what he saw in her eyes. The right one was a lucid emerald green. A man could become lost in that gaze, he thought.
The left eye was what had surprised him. The iris was a cold, impossibly gray orb. The wound snaked through the iris in a leisurely path of scarlet.
Impossible, the medic thought. She’s a Styx.
She noticed a hint of distress in his eyes…
He knows. She contained her panic. He knows.
He simply misted the wound with an antisept spray and gathered up his things in the ghostly green light.
“I’ll bring a biotic for your throat. As for your eye…” He looked through his kit, took out a small round container. “Let’s see if this will help it heal.” He withdrew a round green disk from the container. He opened the lids of her left eye and covered the wound with the medlens.
She blinked and looked at him in silence. Aside from the red vertical line bisecting her left eye, she was the picture of beauty.
With two green eyes.
“I’ll be back later.” He reached out and patted her bruised hands gently. “Try to get some sleep, okay?”
She smiled at him. He blushed as he walked away.
He knows.
“Our father, who art in Heaven…”
The faithful, in their terror, turned to prayer. Words of hope, learned by rote in the sunlight of forgotten youths, floated up from the assembled mass.
“Hallowed be Thy name…”
Sounds of humanity: coughing, groaning, weeping.
The church had become a refuge for the prey.
“…the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory…”
The building shook with the force of a nearby explosion. A candelabra tipped over at the entrance.
“…forever and ever. Amen.”
