June 2009

Jessie saw the silver flash out of the corner of her eye as the figure bounded off a collapsed roof, and she screamed as she dropped herself flat over Aaron. Leticia yelled something unintelligible as the whistle split the air. Jessie gripped the rebar with both hands and rolled over, swinging the heavy metal hard. The lithe alien landed almost beside her, gun in hand, his legs bent to spring away. His beady gaze flinched as a melted hunk of asphalt bounced off his helmet, and that was the distraction Jessie needed. She began to pummel the creature as Aaron shrieked and Leticia screamed and the alien wailed. Her shoulders roared in pain from wielding the rebar, but she forced her muscles to repeat the strokes again and again. The dart gun clattered to the ground, but she kept hitting, aiming for the soft junctures of his suit. The neck, the armpits, the high juncture of his bird-like legs. Green fluid seeped forth and flooded the cracks and rivulets in the cement. Jessie bent over her knees, heaving, as the rebar dropped. It was too heavy to hold anymore. The alien was prone and still, his black eyes glazed within the bubble of his helmet.

He was dead. He wasn’t the first. He wouldn’t be the last.

Aaron quaked as he stopped screaming. She parted the sheet to check on his ruddy face, and smiled. He was okay. Then she turned, calling, “Leticia— ” and saw her companion spread out on the rocky rim of the crater, her face already purpling, a large rock still curled in her hand.

“No, no, not you, too.” Jessie said as she collapsed beside her friend.

Leticia’s lips worked for a few seconds before sound emerged. “Do it,” she said, the words strangling as her throat swelled. “Then take my camera. You have my picture already. Please. Go. Run.”

Jessie nodded, glancing at the other body. It wouldn’t take long for the others to arrive. Another could stumble upon them at any second as they fled the other melee. She yanked the camera bag’s strap over Leticia’s head and arm. The woman’s backpack was a lost cause pinned underneath her body. As the camera fell into place against Aaron, Jessie unsheathed the knife at her belt.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and struck fast, driving the knife into Leticia’s heart. The woman arced and sighed, deflating as blood and poison spurted and trickled from the wound.

It was mercy. The alien’s toxic dart made the human body swell purple and bloat so round that clothing burst off, but they would still survive in prolonged agony. They could live for hours like that as organs exploded and skin burst like an orange in the sun. The poison only required a wound the size of a paper cut, and death was ensured, eventually. God had to let mercy exist somewhere in this damned world.

Jessie ran. She ran with Aaron silent and bouncing against her chest. Around the crater, around the heaps of supermarkets and apartments and lives, always with the ghost of the sun at her shoulder. Her heavy soles pounded and grasped for hold. If an alien had pursued, she wouldn’t have heard, not over the roar of her breath and the grinding of the warped pavement under her feet. The ground flattened, and she spared a glance over her shoulder. The whistles and blasts were fainter. The hills were ahead, and somewhere beyond the permanent cloud cover lay Mount Rainier. There would be no shelter there, and no food. She didn’t know how to hunt, and the rebar remained where it had fallen.

She pressed herself into the forest, past the scorched periphery, deeper, deeper until the sky darkened. If nothing else, it was a beautiful place. Trees still lived and thrived, even if humans didn’t. She tripped through a burbling stream before she fully registered what it was, then looped back to collapse beside it, her back against a coarse pine. Jessie’s sweater was soaked by sweat, seeped breast milk, and dyed by different shades of blood. Her legs quivered and burned. She worked Aaron out of his sling, and he stared at her with wide eyes.

“Bat a tat a ta,” he said, reaching for her chest. He smelled like crap.

She drank from the stream first to satiate her burning throat. She then scraped out Aaron’s swaddling sheet with a stick and leaves before binding him again in layers of cloth. It would have been nice to stay beside the water and rest, but they dare not. The fighting was still too close. The fleeing militia would offer only a different death than the alien darts. She spared two minutes to open up the camera case and pull out the digital camera. She turned it on and switched it to view the images on the card. Her face and Aaron’s stared back at her first, hollow reflections of who they used to be. She scrolled back one. Leticia’s weary grey face smiled back at her. Jessie opened the little notebook scrawled with a hundred entries and rough locations, and in a shaky pen added her own notation.

“#143 — Leticia King. Owner of camera. Died in alien attack, Tacoma area. 3/10/2009.”

She stared at her friend’s face a moment more before shutting the camera off. The battery needed to be preserved. It was mercy, she told herself, but she couldn’t wash Leticia’s dried blood from underneath her jagged fingernails.

Onward, onward, she urged her limp legs. Aaron protested as she replaced him in the sling, and her shoulders and neck burned from his weight and that of the camera. She knew he was hungry, but they couldn’t stop again. Walk and keep walking. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. Just go south. No more backtracking, no more circles. She found a sturdy walking stick and leaned heavily on it as she half-slid down the duff of a hill.