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 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.