“The kid will live, right?” Derek Temple asked himself as he stumbled along another trail that switchbacked up the side of a steep slope. “He’ll live. Fifty-fifty, I say. He’s smart. He’s young. Fifty-fifty.”
Fifty-fifty was the flip of a coin Derek reminded himself. Would he put his life on the line for fifty-fifty?
“Nah, it’s really eighty-twenty. I mean, he could do something stupid, so there’s some chance he’ll die. We all die, right? Everyone dies. So really, there’s a hundred percent chance of him dying. But he’ll live until then. He’ll survive. What is it they say for cancer patients? Oh yeah, what their five year survival rate is. The kid’s is eighty-twenty.”
“Mine on the other hand,” he said to himself as he hoisted the rifle up higher on his shoulder, “is more like twenty-eighty. Twenty-eighty. Sounds like really bad eyesight.”
He hoped he’d find a spot to camp for the night with water nearby. He never wanted to run out of water again.
“Twenty-eighty. Who you kidding, Derek? More like ten-ninety.” Or a zero-hundred.
The thought made him stop. He looked up at the dark skies, thick black clouds shrouding the Earth, and at the path ahead of him. Was he really up for a suicide mission?
He thought of everything he’d been taught in boot camp, everything about terrorists who strapped bombs to themselves and walked among others and blew themselves up. That was a suicide mission. Or pilots who crashed their planes into the decks of enemy battleships. That was suicide.
Snipers weren’t on suicide missions. He could survive. Shoot a few aliens, run away, hide, crawl back, shoot a few more. He could do that until he ran out of ammunition, then he’d just run away. He’d find water somewhere, a place to hide, to reload. A place to continue bringing the fight to the aliens.
He was Marine Lance Corporal Derek Temple.
Semper Fi!
Ooh Rah!
He topped the ridge and looked in the dark at the expanse of mountains in front of him. He had no idea where Hearst Castle was.
“It sure was easier tracking Eva when she went running in the dark,” Juan whispered to his partner while they both stared through infrared night vision binoculars. Mark leaned against a rock and held his with his one hand. Juan tried to sweep the areas he knew Mark couldn’t see.
“If it were easy, everyone’d be doing it,” Mark whispered back.
They hid by day, watched for signs of Eva at night, and checked for messages. They occasionally crept closer at night and watched over Hearst Castle, noting guard placement and vehicle activity.
They hadn’t heard from Eva since she’d hid the microrecorder in the tree while they watched from four miles away with their infrared telescope. Director Marceline had commandeered the thing from an observatory and even though it was heavy, it was effective. They used it often, but tonight they’d moved closer for a better look. Juan was worried for Eva and he knew Mark worried about her also.
Jim’s death had been a blow. They’d hoped she could use the dog to pass messages back and forth. Juan broke the news to Jim’s owner and the woman had howled, beating on Juan’s chest.
“You promised,” she said over and over again and it was true. Juan had promised.
Seeing her sobbing, Juan vowed never to make another promise he couldn’t keep.
“What’s that?” Mark hissed, bringing Juan back to the here and now.
“Where?”
He tried to follow the direction Mark pointed.
“It’s gone,” Mark said.
They both stared in that vicinity and Juan saw a flash.
“Probably a coyote,” he whispered. He didn’t know how good Hrwang sound sensors were, and they tried to keep it down when they were within a couple of miles of the castle.
“Only if it’s a coyote walking on two legs,” Mark replied. “It’s probably Sasquatch.”
Juan chuckled.
“Let’s get closer,” he suggested. “Although if it’s an alien taking a leak, we’re in trouble.”
“We’ll get pictures if that’s the case,” Mark said. “See if they really are human. Of course, I’m sure Gilliam knows all about their anatomy by now.”
“You’re disgusting. Carry your own pack.”
Mark had a hard time carrying a pack and a weapon and Juan usually helped out. But not after a comment like that. Juan loved Eva and tried not to think of the things she did with the aliens. He focused on his mission and buried that part of her mission deep, to keep it out of his thoughts. Way deep.
He owed Eva everything and he would do anything for her. But he didn’t like what she was doing. He hoped it was worth it.
After they’d returned the microrecorder to Palmdale, the Director had told him it was. They knew more about the aliens than they ever would have any other way. She admitted to Juan she was debating passing on a kill order to Eva, but they still didn’t know how to fight the aliens. Killing one at the top probably wouldn’t make a difference. Juan and Mark just needed to be there to collect whatever intel she gathered.
Only she hadn’t communicated any more since then. Juan didn’t even know if she was still alive.
“I see him,” Mark said.
How was he walking with the binoculars? Juan looked back and the man had a backpack and a rifle balanced on one shoulder, and held up the binoculars with his only hand while he walked.
“You’re gonna kill yourself. Give me that.”
Juan took the backpack and the rifle and even in the dark he could see the agent smile at him.
“Let’s go find who’s traipsing around these hills at night.”
Derek reluctantly drank the last of the water in his canteen and fell asleep on the trail, his pack still on his back. He never saw the two men climbing up the hill after him, never heard them until a hand clamped over his mouth and a red flashlight shone in his eyes.
“Human or Hrwang?”
“Human,” he tried to mumble through the hand clamped around his mouth. He didn’t struggle because he also saw the muzzle of a rifle a foot in front of his face.
“You make a noise and my partner here will blow your head off before you can sneeze. He ain’t killed anyone in a couple of days and he keeps whining about his finger hurting.”
“I’m not whining,” a hispanic accent whined.
“You think you can answer our questions quietly?” the first voice asked.
Derek nodded slowly.
“Okay. My hand’s coming off.” It did. “Who are you?”
“Marine Lance Corporal Derek Temple,” Derek whispered.
“He can’t be an alien,” the hispanic voice said. “They got nameophobia.”
“He could be a spy. What are you doing up here?”
“I was part of an armored attack out of Twentynine Palms. Half our unit got torched in LA, the other half down the highway a bit. Me and another guy were the only survivors.”
“The Hrwang searched that area for hours. We swept through at night. There were no survivors.”
Derek chuckled a little. “Our tank went into the drink. We sat, underwater, for what seemed like hours until we had to get out. Air, you know. Then we swam out and got away.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I brought a rifle. Someone’s gotta bring the fight to the aliens.”
“I fired bigger rifles in the Boy Scouts.”
“It’s all I got.”
“Marine, how about I make you a better offer?”
“Sir, I gotta kill me some aliens.”
“Fighting’s good, Marine. But we gotta be smart. We gotta figure out what makes them tick, what they need and how to take it away from them, how to really put the hurt on them like they put the hurt on us.”
A hand reached out. Derek grabbed it and was pulled to his feet.
“Y
ou in, Derek?”
Derek thought about his empty canteen.
“You got water?”
The hispanic voice chuckled.
“I’m Mark, by the way. And this is Juan. Don’t ask me what his last name is. Poly something or another.”
“Polycarp de la Serda”
“Whatever. Look, son. Let’s go figure out how to fight the aliens. The smart way,” Mark said. He looked disdainfully at Derek’s rifle and Derek shifted it out of view. He noticed Mark’s missing arm.
“Aliens do that to you?” he asked.
“Nope. Humans. But I don’t hold it against ‘em. Aliens are the real enemy. Aliens are the ones we gotta fight.”
Derek snapped to attention and saluted.
“Lance Corporal Temple reporting for duty, sir.”
“Good man.” Mark’s arm went around Derek’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”
The aliens are the enemy, John Cathey tried to remind himself. If only people would quit shooting at his people and would shoot at the enemy instead, it would be easier to believe. Since the mission where they’d been saved by the tank, he’d lost five more to ambushes and at least twenty, with their weapons and ammunition, to defections.
The city was dog eat dog and the people with John didn’t want to be a part of it.
He stared at a half destroyed building out of the window of the thirtieth floor conference he occupied, alone. A month ago, he’d hidden on an upper story of that building across the way and fired a Stinger missile at a point just a few floors above the one he stood on now. How things had changed since then.
He stared at the destruction the aliens had wrought on the apartments he once hid in, walls gone, windows gone where walls still stood, apartments gaping into the void, their floors sagging without load bearing walls keeping them up. The place needed to be condemned and demolished. No one would live in it again.
Would anyone live?
John was tired. His muscles ached, his eyes burned, his neck throbbed, his feet cried out, and yet he couldn’t sleep. He had to save those who followed him.
He didn’t want to walk two thousand miles across the country.
The Three kept pushing for it, kept telling him that there was safety in a mystical place called Zion. He’d always thought Zion was a Jewish country but they assured him Christians understood what Zion was also. One told him of the city of Enoch, a place that was on the Earth and became so righteous that God took it up into himself into heaven. To everyone else it looked like they just disappeared.
John replied that they sounded like Hrwang. No one laughed.
He rubbed his head now. They’d given him an ultimatum without giving him one. They had a plan. If he wouldn’t agree to it, they wanted to put it to a vote. Let those who wanted to follow the plan do so, and let the rest fend for themselves. They had to keep the plan secret, so only those who went could know.
And the plan wouldn’t last forever. The Mormon bishop on the Three said they had two days, tops.
John told them he was against it. Until this morning when someone had reported a burning tank found in an alleyway four blocks from them. Without the protection of the tank, which they didn’t even know they’d had, they were sitting ducks.
Just like he’d been in the building with the gaping wound he could see now.
He rubbed his face in his hands again. He hated being a leader. That was officer’s work. He couldn’t be an officer.
His parents were married.
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