A terrifying mix of fury, despair, and something deeper, some emotion she did not want to acknowledge, for the fear that any human could possess it and remain human. Then he blinked his eyes and it was gone.
“Come on. There’ll be more.”
They ran.
Walking, walking, walking.
West traveled by night. During the day, he usually slept in the all-too-numerous abandoned buildings. He encountered no living people, although he did find a building, a bingo hall to be exact, where over two hundred people had committed mass suicide. Cyanide. The sign posted outside the building had proclaimed that they had gone to Heaven with their Reverend and Savior Billy Denver and the rest of the congregation of the Church of the Joyous Apocalypse. West shuddered.
He could see the black shadows circling the planet all day now, even at night. The sun was colder still, and at night there were less stars in the gauzy sky, he thought.
Who were they, the invaders? Who were they?
The alien vessels flew overhead constantly. They landed where Chicago had been, waited, took off again in billowing clouds of dust and violet light.
What were they doing?
Sometimes he stood in plain sight just to see if the vessels would notice him. One human must not have mattered enough to land for, but still…
West thought he could handle the aliens if they landed for him. When they landed for him.
He had to find others. There had to be others.
He walked on.
The desert seemed cooler now.
The man who was Richter had not cared about heat or cold ever since he had emerged from the heavenly light so long ago…
But the shift in climate was still startling.
He was alone now. The group of men, women, and children he had tried to blend in with was gone now. Dead. But he had taken care of the aliens…
A pain shot through his skull.
RICHTER
Temple to temple, searing agony. Richter bent over, struggling to force the voices from his mind.
Reaching…Grasping…
He staggered onward.
Diablo, Wyoming.
The last official census in America revealed that Diablo had a population of forty-seven living, breathing citizens. In the Milicom Systems installation just below the Peak, five hundred twelve soldiers and forty-five officers had been stationed in rotating tours of duty.
It was a quiet town. Too quiet, like most conspicuously quiet towns are.
The village was situated at the base of the eastern face of the Peak, a large projection of nondescript rock layers. The rock outcropping jutted accusingly into the air, shielding Diablo’s onetime treasure: the mine. The mine stretched to unknown depths below the village. It employed many a grandfather, father, son in the old days, scraping meager copper deposits from the rough.
And then…
Well, the mine had closed, and with it, the spirit of the town had died. The military had moved in and taken over the Peak, stringing the mine entrance with razorwire and dotting the hillsides with mechanized turrets and armed troops, and not just any pimple-faced-eighteen-year-old-high-school-dropout-armed-with-an-M-16 armed troops. These were highly-skilled-body-armored-jacked-in-Fury-7 armed troops. Milicom troops.
Rumor was, they had found something down there.
Was it plutonium? Saganite?
No one talked. People who talked disappeared.
The town learned to stay silent. Oh, there was still the occasional drunk old-timer at the local bar who expounded theories of “god damned governmental conspiracies” and talked of the thing in the earth, the thing that sheared off twelve feet of Old Drill Two but didn’t even suffer a scratch, but the bartender knew when to make them shut up, especially when off-duty Milicom types came into the bar…
Diablo learned to not listen. Then the end came, along with the aliens.
Diablo became a ghost town.
Nighttime.
They left the tunnel system several miles outside of Seattle, emerging into a landscape ravaged by the final chemical holocaust that the military had thought might be able to repel the Black forces. They had of course been wrong, and had paid for their mistake with their lives and their souls. Flynn and Hayes now sat in a half-demolished building that had once been a suburban shopping mall. The storefronts on either side of them still advertised a mall-wide Summer Sale. It did not feel like summer. A meager campfire burned before them. It was reflected in two blue eyes and two gray eyes.
There was no sign of Enemy in the area; they had apparently moved on. Hayes casually removed and discarded his medical uniform, stained as it was by the blood of the innocent and the aliens alike. He also removed his dogtags and a small pendant from around his neck. He looked at the objects in his hand for a brief sad moment, and then tossed them into the fire.
Flynn leapt forward, reaching for the discarded objects.
“Simon! Your cross—”
He pulled her hand back from the fire. The pendant he had thrown was a cross, but in the heat of the fire it soon blackened and puddled as easily as his dogtags. He released her hand after an awkward silence had passed. Her too-gray eyes searched for something in his face.
“Don’t worry about it. It didn’t mean much to me before, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean anything now.”
Flynn looked into the fire. “Were you a religious man?… Before?”
Before. The word hung in the air, echoing with newfound meaning. Before.
“No. It was given to me by… someone who meant a lot to me. She thought it would protect me. She thought it would make everything better.”
“Why did you—”
“All the old gods are dead now.” He laughed, more to himself than out loud. “They were never alive to me.”
He sat down by the makeshift fire to warm himself. Flynn sat down on the opposite side of the fire, facing Hayes.
He watched her closely.
She watched him more closely.
Hayes shivered noticeably, although Flynn could not tell if it was because of the cold or the long awkward silent stare that they had shared. Her unasked question was answered as Hayes pulled a black insulated vest from his pack and pulled it over his olive-drab tee-shirt. She made a mental note of arms constructed of taut muscle, stretched over tanned skin like leather. A worker’s arms. His identification codebar was all-too-visibly burned into his left forearm.
“It shouldn’t be this cold. It’s never been this cold at this time of year here.”
“Maybe because it’s night—”
“No… It’s never been this cold so suddenly in the summer. Don’t you feel it?”
“Maybe a little—”
“It’s too fucking cold.”
Flynn drew her legs up close to her torso, hooked her arms around the rough drab-covered surface of her knees. She looked at Hayes, who had turned away from her. A sudden breeze sent a chill through her small frame and she shivered. She pulled a blanket from her pack and wrapped herself within. Hayes ignored her and searched through his rucksack.
There was no uncontaminated food here. The scent of chemical warfare still hung cloyingly in the air. Hayes strapped on an I.V. unit and injected a nutrient solution from his medikit into his bloodstream. He swallowed an
