antitoxin caplet and offered one to Flynn, but she refused.
“Genetically-engineered resistance?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
They sat in silence.
“I’m sorry about the baby, Hayes. I saw you—”
“Don’t worry about it. This is war. I shouldn’t have let it get to me.”
“But this isn’t war, at least not the kind of war that’s ever been fought here before. And we sure as hell haven’t fought aliens before. This isn’t war. This is extinction.”
“All the more reason to keep myself distanced and not get involved. Who knows how many more will die before this ends?”
“How can you not get involved? You’re a doctor.”
“I’m just a soldier now.”
“I guess everybody’s a soldier now.”
Hayes arose, paced. His hands combed through his hair, a nervous reflex. He had a headache, a dull, throbbing pain behind his eyes that had bothered him since… Well, since the first days of the invasion, back when the slivers of black first began to fall from the sky. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Hayes shivered as the breeze picked up. Gooseflesh had arisen on his forearms, and he rubbed his arms to warm himself up. He could see his breath when he exhaled.
It was June.
“Tell me about yourself, Simon. Tell me about your past.”
He had been patting down his pockets, searching for something. He finally found the pack of cigarettes in an interior vest pocket, ripped off the cellophane, tore off the top of the pack, expertly pulled one out with his teeth as he searched through his pockets for his lighter. He lit the cigarette, took a long draw, held the smoke in for what seemed to Flynn an impossibly long time. His exhalation brought him an obvious pleasure.
“A doctor, huh?” Flynn smiled wickedly at Hayes.
“We all have our vices. Some of us enjoy felony.”
Smoking had been illegal for three years. He carefully tapped the ashes into the fire, wanting to savor every last bit of his felony contraband. He smiled guiltily at Flynn, held the pack out to her, to which she politely shook her head. Hayes inhaled again, exhaled after another blissful moment of nicotine, and grinned at Flynn. “Ms. Flynn, you don’t want to know about my past.”
She smiled again, a sweet disarming smile that forced Hayes to respond in kind. “Of course I do. We have a long time until daybreak, and to tell you the truth, I was hoping I could get to know my traveling partner a little better. Even if it is the end of the world. Besides, I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
Hayes gave in. Who was this woman, and why did she have this effect on him?
He sat down directly across the fire from Flynn, wrapped himself in his own blanket. The sky overhead, framed by the ruins of the building within which they sat, was strangely absent of stars and moon. The only light came from a meager fire in a dead shopping mall and the tip of Simon’s precious cigarette, the only sound the crackle and hiss of flame and the voices of perhaps the last people on earth. Hayes began, his bass voice a whisper in the night.
“Fine. You win.”
Flynn drew closer to the fire, the flames flickering in her gray eyes. She listened intently, and they passed the night revealing the past. The night grew colder to the sound of Simon Hayes’ history, and Ember Magdalene Flynn listened to every word with a fascination that she had never felt before.
“My name’s Simon Hayes. I was born in Harkness, Michigan, ten years before War Three—”
—tore apart Eurasia and destroyed over a third of the world’s population. He was not a healthy child, for reasons that no one wanted to talk about. His family denied that his mother was severely addicted to crystalline nanotech, the illegal biological interface to holotechnological realities. She had been deeply traumatized by the 2018 chemical bombing of Kansas City, in which most of her family had been killed. She used the nanotech devices to escape her reality. Simon’s father was a holotech developer, eager to test out his latest programs on the overly- willing subject. It was not a match made in heaven, but it was a match nonetheless. From it, Simon was created.
Simon grew up a lonely child. He had no siblings; his parents’ application for a second child license had been rejected, and his parents by law had to undergo sterilization. He was artistic and intelligent beyond his years. One obstacle hindered his expression severely, a permanent stutter that made verbal communication almost impossible. He found his creative outlet in drawing, and his parents often found him outside sketching the warplanes that constantly flew overhead.
He always seemed happy enough, but it disturbed his parents that little Simon seldom smiled. He sometimes did, but it was a sad, sardonic smile that did not fit the face of a child. He would then wander off and draw something else.
The world was tattered for the Hayes family when the Indochine Francais Pact invaded the Siberian oilfields. The world’s first real nuclear war since the Three Days War between India and Pakistan at the turn of the millennium erupted with a fury unmatched in a century. Most of Asia and Eastern Europe were wiped summarily off the globe. Much of the rest of Europe was made uninhabitable, and the French Socialist government eagerly accepted the invitation to relocate to Quebec.
The Hayes family sat outside each night for two months, Father slowly sipping a dry martini five parts vodka one part vermouth two olives on a plastic cocktail sword and when he was feeling festive perhaps one of those little umbrellas that looks decidedly uncouth sticking up from a martini, Mother’s hand always absently wandering to the holotech interface behind her left ear that she kept hidden from view by wearing a stylish and retro bobbed coiffure tucked coyly behind her ears in little-girl style even when she quickly approached the age of hot flashes and the cessation of natural fertility, watching the orbiting nuclear deterrent systems destroy the hundreds of ICBMs being launched at Canada and the United States by the remnants of the corporate Japanese-backed Siberian Alliance. Simon remembered his mother’s tears and hushed conversations that his parents didn’t want him to hear. He heard and understood far more than they knew.
America took a passive stance in the war, not launching any weapons, just shooting down missiles launched at them. The hope for a diplomatic resolution to the war was a long shot, and became an impossibility when a four- gigaton fusion weapon overshot its intended target of Toronto and airburst over American soil, wiping most of western New York off the map.
America was in the war with a vengeance.
American pilots went on scalping runs around the globe, scouring Siberia, Japan, and the remnants of the French Indochinese Alliance. The war was quick, efficient, and bloody. America secured itself as the only remaining world power, sweeping out and annexing those territories that it had not entirely devastated. French officials looked on in terror from their secure bunkers in Quebec as America took its revenge for being dragged into a war that had not been its own.
By the time the dust of the war had settled and life returned to a semblance of normalcy, Simon was on the verge of adolescence. He was still a quiet young man, and his introspection became a great concern for his father. His mother spent most of her days in an alcohol and holotech-induced haze. The shock of the war had been too much for her, and she found solace in the blissful artificial worlds created for holotech. When Simon’s father took his own life, no one was terribly surprised. He had been a successful businessman, and when the war broke out he began dealing in communications holotechnology. When it was revealed that his company had been a major supplier of crystalline holotech to the French, the government began an investigation. He would have been executed before long if he had not taken his own life. There were many executions in the years after the war. The Allied States of America were ruled with brutal efficiency from the Wind River complex.
Simon turned his creative energies to writing during middle adolescence, penning wonderful examples of naive teenage angst. He wrote to escape: there was nothing to do in Harkness, a tiny fishing village where the only excitement was the Saturday night bingo and dance at the American Legion downtown. He wrote a novel that he was rather proud of detailing the destruction of the planet by alien forces. It was trite, it was overdone, it was brilliant. “Deus Ex Machina” was rejected by twelve publishing companies before Simon burned it in anger. He watched the pages blacken one by one and die like his unborn children in the fire.
At age eighteen, he discovered the opposite sex seriously for the first time. Oh, he had had girlfriends, or
