“What
“Maybe shrapnel,” Jason shrugged, too happy to be clear of the attack to care. “We need to…” His statement was rudely interrupted by the camo-clad arm that crashed through the remnants of the driver’s side window and grabbed him around the throat.
Valerie shrieked in terror, staring wide-eyed at the visored helmet that peered down at her from the windshield: somehow, one of the invader troops had clung to the rear of their vehicle as they passed by the enemy position, and had climbed across the roof. Jason fought with one hand to keep the rover from crashing into the trees that lined the road, while his other pried futilely at the steel-strong fingers that had wrapped themselves around his windpipe. The invader’s hand squeezed like a mechanical press, as inhuman and cold as the faceless visor that stared dispassionately into his eyes from outside the windshield. McKay knew that his trachea had another few seconds before the thing ripped it completely out of his body, so he braced against the dashboard with both hands and stomped the brake pedal to the floor.
The landrover jerked to an abrupt halt on its front tires with a squeal of synthetic rubber on plasticrete. He could hear Valerie cry out as she was rolled out of her seat, and the invader was thrown quite a bit further. Jason thought his throat would go with the armored figure as it flew off the roof of the vehicle and sailed into the street thirty meters in front of them with a clatter of alloy plating, but he found as he felt at his neck that he had only lost a little skin to the iron hand.
Incredibly, the invader, despite being thrown to the concrete at over a hundred and fifty klicks an hour, was struggling to its feet, apparently unhurt. A snarl coming to his lips, McKay punched the accelerator and felt the rover lurch forward as the flywheel whistled with the sudden burst of power. The rover slammed into the armored invader at over seventy klicks an hour, sending the creature flying onto the hood and crashing into the already-cracked windshield. One of the creature’s hands clamped onto the edge of the hood and it held itself in place with desperate strength, despite the clearly-visible section of crushed and bloody armor at its hip—red blood, too, a part of Jason’s mind noted.
Keeping his right hand on the control stick and the accelerator pushed down, McKay pulled his pistol from its shoulder holster left-handed and fired through the windshield at the invader’s head. The powerful 10mm sounded like a nuclear blast inside the enclosed cab of the rover, setting Jason’s ears to ringing, as the hypersonic ceramic projectile grazed the invader across the side of the helmet, tearing the armored headgear off.
“Oh, my God,” Valerie murmured, clambering back into her seat, eyes glued to the face before her.
It was humanoid, to be sure: two eyes, a mouth, two ears and two nostrils. But it was definitely not human. The eyes were protected by a bony ridge that extended down over the wide, flattened nose; and the whole face seemed blockier and larger-boned than any human could be. And then there was the fact that it had blue skin. Jason had seen cases of cyanosis before, both in vacuum training and as the result of riot-control masers, and this creature’s skin had the same, pale-blue, sickly look as a human who’d been breathing too-thin air for most of his life.
But the most alien thing about the invader was its eyes. On the surface, they seemed almost human, with the normal combination of iris and cornea; but they were dead and unfeeling somehow, like a shark’s—black, cold and emotionless. Staring at the thing’s eyes, Jason almost found himself hypnotized. But not quite. He squeezed the handgun’s trigger again and felt it buck as the heavy slug punched through the alien’s forehead and blew off a large section of skull in a spray of blood, bone and brain. The invader’s grip finally came loose and it tumbled off the hood to bounce lifelessly onto the pavement as they accelerated away.
“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” Valerie was whispering over and over to herself.
“It’s all right,” McKay assured her, putting a hand on her shoulder and wincing as the movement brought new feeling to the grazing wound on his right arm. “We’re all right.”
“They’re not human,” she moaned, not looking at him. “I can’t believe it… they’re not human…”
“So much for ‘where are they?’” Jason muttered. “They’re here.”
“What are we going to do?” she asked him, seeming to come out of the daze she’d fallen into. “Where are we going?”
“Into Kennedy,” he told her. “The Marine Reaction Force is quartered at the CeeGee armory—if anyplace could hold, that would be it.”
“You’re hurt,” she noticed for the first time, staring at the bloody line across his bicep.
“Just a scratch,” Jason said with a shrug, but had to wince as she gently probed at it with her fingers.
“Let me bandage it,” Val insisted, reaching for the tail of his shirt to tear off a strip.
“No,” he said, raising a hand quickly. “Wait until we get somewhere we can clean it off. Till then, it’s better to leave it alone. Could you do me a favor and check in the back and see if there’s water or blankets or anything useful back there?”
“Sure.” She unbelted from her safety harness and climbed over the seat into the back of the rover. McKay heard her rummaging around in the storage compartment and took the opportunity to allow himself to slip from the controlled face he’d put on to keep both of them calm. The air went out of him in a gust and he felt the blood drain from his face.
This was, he concluded, entirely too much. Most people, even in the active military, experienced perhaps thirty seconds of actual danger in their life, and most of them only realized it after it was over. He must be making up the average, he reasoned, for all the cloistered accountants and librarians in the universe.
“Hey!” Valerie called from the rear of the vehicle, “There’s a couple cans full of water back here. And I think this is some kind of emergency survival pack. Maybe there’s a first-aid kit.”
“Good,” he sighed, bringing his breathing back under control. “We’ll need the water, if we can’t stay in the city.”
“Jason,” Valerie interrupted him, eyes fixed on something off to the right. “What’s that glow?”
He followed her gaze, noticing as he did that it followed the rightward curve of the road around a hill. In the distance, he could see a glow reminiscent of the halo of distant city lights, but colored a much deeper, reddish hue. It was a sight he’d seen before, and he was very much afraid he did know what it meant.
“That’s Kennedy City,” he told her grimly. “It’s on fire.”
Jason slowed the car as they rounded the gentle curve, and Kennedy came into view, laid out before them in the valley below. It wasn’t an encouraging sight. The perimeter of the city, where the wealthier immigrants had built their own businesses and residences from native materials, was engulfed in a ferocious blaze. From over two kilometers away, neither of them could see if there was anyone left alive in those streets, but there was surely activity near the center of town, where the Colonial Guard armory squatted in ugly blackness.
Tracer rounds crisscrossed from the building to the invader troops Jason knew must be surrounding it, but the ratio of outgoing to incoming fire seemed pretty even, which was a positive. With the advantage of the armory’s protection and at least even odds, the defending forces should be able to hold out indefinitely.
Suddenly, from somewhere beyond their line of sight, an incandescent trail of fire shot out of the streets around the armory and slammed into the building with enough impact to shake the ground under the rover. A huge cloud of black smoke rose in a mushroom above the structure, and the firing from the armory died abruptly, along with Jason’s hopes of finding asylum there.
“My God,” Valerie murmured, her voice filled with awe at the explosion. “They couldn’t have survived that, could they?”
“No,” he answered, voice catching in his throat. It wasn’t the thought of the deaths of all those men and women that so affected him—he’d been numbed to that aspect since accepting the idea that Shannon and the others were dead. No, it was the fact that the two of them were very much alone, both for now and the foreseeable future—more alone than McKay had ever felt.
Jason pulled back on the steering yoke and pushed the accelerator, sending the rover jerking backwards into a three-point U-turn and heading them back the way they had come. At the curve where the road twisted toward the mansion, he kept the car headed straight, off the pavement and onto a barely-existent dirt trail northward. The car’s suspension creaked with the effort as the surface beneath them changed from plasticrete to rough and rutted soil and rock, and a cloud of dust rose to mark their passage.
“Where do we go now?” Valerie’s voice held the full load of hopelessness and despair that he felt.
“Away,” was all he could come up with by way of an answer. “Away.”
