At the End - a post-apocalyptic novel (The Road to Extinction, Book 1) (14 page)

The new shirt fit nicely, but the jeans
didn’t fit, so I went and found a few more pairs, smaller sizes,
since I guess I had lost some circumference. A plus, maybe, who
could say. The dressing rooms were dirty, but the last one only had
gum wrappers scattered on the floor, no big deal. I tried on the
next size down, it didn’t fit so well, a little loose, so I grabbed
the next one, two sizes down. It fit well enough.

I was checking out the waistline when I
heard a low rumble, like something caught in a throat, harsh and
gravelly. I had brought one of the OMP2s with me. I had made enough
noise that whatever it was knew where I stood. My feet halted. My
breaths started coming rapidly. I tried to calm my lungs, but they
wouldn’t slow. I bent low to examine the room outside. When my eyes
were level with the quarter-meter gap between the door and the
floor, the door busted inward, smashing against me. I fell
back.

The burst fire of the OMP2 rang in my ear.
My eyes were closed and I shot around wildly, not caring where the
bullets went. After a few moments, I noticed that nothing was
attacking me anymore. I sat, slumped against the floor and the back
wall of the changing room. The broken door was heavy on me. I
pushed. Nothing. I couldn’t get it off me. I crawled to the side,
out from under it, and the door banged against the cheap, thin
carpet.

Lying on top of the door, an alion gurgled
blood, twitching. I jumped back against the sidewall, hitting my
head against it. I aimed and pulled the trigger. Bolting to Luxury
Mattress Town, my feet stumbled into each other with each stride, a
tangled mess of effort. “We have to go! We have to go! Wake up.” I
shook the beds.

Jacob stirred first. “What is it?”

“Alions . . . they’re here . . . I just
killed one,” I stuttered, out of breath and terrified.

Jacob cursed, threw off his sheets, and
switched into a shirt he found the night before. “Where’s my other
OMP2?”

“I have it, here.” I offered him the machine
pistol.

He accepted it. “Thanks, thought I lost it
there for a second.”

I nodded. Shaking the others awake, I
hurried them along, watching the entrance, and glancing all around
the store in trepidation. “To the car,” I whispered.

Penelope checked on the shotgun.

“Jelly, take the assault rifle,” Maggy
suggested emphatically.

“I don’t think I can handle it.”

Jacob smiled. “Bro, it’s made so practically
a baby can handle it. Trust me, it will be easier on you than the
shotgun.”

“Then I should take the shotgun.” I looked
at Penelope. “Don’t you think?”

“No offense, Darrel, but I know how to use
it,” Penelope said. “You keep putting it in your gut.”

She was right. The bruises on my stomach
ached worse than any from the car crash and the bus crash. “All
right, fine.” I picked up the assault rifle, and it was peculiarly
lighter than the shotgun. “Let’s get going, before . . .”

Two alions stared us down from atop a pair
of beds.

“Run to the back!” Maggy ordered.

Jacob, more recovered now, ran ahead.
Penelope pushed her sisters towards the back. She whipped around
and fired a booming shot.

The cats dodged the spray. Félix, bags
across his shoulders, turned behind the twins and followed. Maggy
fired her pistols, leading the guns ahead of the alion to our
right. She twirled, falling in line behind Félix.

Penelope and I backed away slowly, each of
us eyeing only one of the beasts. I kept sight of the left one, and
she tracked the movements of the one to our right. “Go,” I
yelled.

“They’re mine to obliterate,” she said,
overjoyed by the confrontation. “I’ll kill ’em all!” It sounded as
if the weight of death and responsibility had melted her brain.

I fired the rifle. Jacob had switched it
into burst fire mode. The rounds exploded out of the barrel in
smooth grace, each slug flying perfectly for its target. The
bullets ripped the alion apart. Blood splattered in all directions.
Fur misted the air. Its humanlike limbs fell to the floor, blown
right off. After I saw the destruction the rifle inflicted, I
turned tail and sprinted for the door leading to the backroom. I
stopped at the doorframe and scanned for Penelope.

She fired blast after blast, hitting only
air and bedding, screaming curses at the alion the entire time.
Finally, the beast maneuvered around her, running directly at me.
Its right humanlike arms pulled out something strapped around its
right foreleg.

I fell back with a shock to my left leg. A
bizarre tingle crawled up my shin to my spine, then to my brain; it
was cold and nauseating.

The alion spun 180 degrees and shot the same
thing at Penelope, who was chasing it down, shotgun raised. She
fired as the object struck her.

The scattered shots pierced the alion all
over, blowing off its right shoulder. It collapsed, twitching and
gasping.

“Are you all right, Darrel?” Penelope called
to me.

“Yeah, I’m okay. How about you?”

“I feel cold. I was hit by something.”

“Me too. I feel dizzy and sick, but I’m not
bleeding or anything,” I told her. I reached for my leg where the
iciness emanated. “There’s a silver device in my leg.” I tried
removing it, pinching into my skin. “I can’t get it out.”

“Neither can I.”

Then, all of a sudden, I saw a blue
flash.

Then darkness.

I awoke to a thrumming, low and soothing. It
filled me with tranquility and terror: tranquility because it
sounded so peaceful, and terror because I couldn’t stop it. I
opened my eyes, and across from me in a black shiny pod with a
transparent white door, lay Penelope, suspended. I tried to move my
arms, but they didn’t respond. Nothing responded, except for my
thoughts that continued to spring out of nothingness. The thrumming
relaxed me as I attempted to fight against it. But the harder I
fought, the more relaxed I became, as if drugged into submission. I
felt absolutely nothing.

I scrutinized Penelope’s pod in
semi-awareness: the black material reminded me of obsidian,
polished and without rough edges, ground faultlessly. Three lights
lit up her cage, two at her temples, and one above her head. Her
eyes shifted around, as if examining my pod.

Without warning, a sound, harsh and deep,
boomed into my ears: RAWRK . . . RAWRK . . . RAWRK. The lights
inside Penelope’s pod started flashing, as if malfunctioning. Then
the door unlatched with a pressurized sound. A blue fog drifted out
of her pod and into the room. She fell forward and landed on the
black grating between the pods. She lay there for a while, though I
didn’t have a sense of time, so it could have been only a couple of
seconds.

She clambered to her feet, using my pod as a
prop. Pounding against the door, she yelled: “Can you hear me?”

I blinked twice.

“Good. I’ll get you out of there.” She
fiddled with something off to the side of the pod, out of my sight
range. She darted her head to her right, and her eyes popped in
horror. “No!” She backed up a step, spun around, then sprinted
away.

A moment later, a big blurry patch of fur
ran by, heading for Penelope. I heard a clang. Silence overtook the
curious room.

She staggered back into my view, gasping out
of control, no inhaler in sight. Wobbling, she planted herself on
the grating, her back resting against the pod she had emerged from.
Closing her eyes, she calmed her breaths. Collecting herself, she
stood, staring at me. “I’m okay . . . I’m okay,” she panted. “There
are some buttons over here that I think open these, so hold on,
I’ll be right back.”

I blinked placidly.

She headed off to her right.

I heard a pressurized noise as the door
abruptly unlatched. The same blue cloud engulfed the area as it
floated out of the pod. Penelope stood in front of me, lugging me
over her shoulders, then she gently planted my butt on the
grating.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

I smiled. “Groggy.”

“That’s certain.” She shut both of the pod
doors and ran over to a station with blinking lights. She pressed
buttons at random.

“You know what you’re doing?” I asked, my
voice grinding.

“Course not.” The doors resealed,
pressurizing. “I just hit the same button that I did to open it. I
thought mine might be the button next to yours and it was.” She
smiled.

“Why didn’t the other doors open?”

“Don’t know, dude. They seem to be locked.
None of the others will unlatch.” She walked back over to me and
helped me stand.

“How did you open your door?” I asked.

“I didn’t. I guess it was an error. I don’t
think they intended it, especially that alien I killed.”

“Alion,” I corrected.

“Right, alion, whatever. It seemed pretty
surprised that I was out and about.”

I eyed her, exhausted. “How did you kill
it?”

She opened her jacket and revealed a
well-hidden knife. “I took it from your stockpile. I hope you don’t
mind.”

I smiled. “I surely don’t.” I cleared my
throat. “What about these?” I pointed to the object stuck in my
leg. “I can’t get it out.”

“I think we have to dig it out,” she
said.

“What? Are you melted? I can’t take a knife
to my own leg.”

“We’ll have to do each other’s,” she said,
serious. She slid out the knife from the sheath secured to her
ribs.

“Uhrm. No way. Won’t do it.”

“You have a better idea?” Her face looked as
bad as I felt, tired beyond recuperation.

I hung my head. “I don’t think I can do it,
Penelope.”

“You have to. We don’t know what these
things do, but we both know it’s nothing good. I’ll take yours out
first, okay?”

I nodded. We sat down on the grating.

“You have to lie still, though. Don’t shake
on me, I don’t want to cut more than I have to.” She rested the
blade’s tip to the side of the object. “Ready?” Before I could
react, she dug the knife into my leg, underneath the object, and
flipped it out, blood flying with it.

I screamed a terrible scream that would make
a four-year-old proud. I started to wheeze uncontrollably.
“You—didn’t—wait—for—me.”

“And you can’t wait for me.”

“I—can’t—do—it.” I was breathing far too
fast. Red spots started appearing in my eyes, then large black
gaps, then I was out.

I came to as Penelope belted out a cry of her
own.

“You’re much braver than I am,” I told her.
The hole in my leg was barely even a wound, oozing a tiny amount of
blood.

She shook her head. “You’re braver than you
give yourself credit. You saved my sisters, on more than one
occasion. You stared out that broken window, knowing that a beast
was going to pounce right through it . . . you stood your ground.”
Her voice was warm and consoling. She smiled sweetly. “We should
get going.”

“And go where?”

“Do you want to stay here?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“I don’t know where to go, but I think we
should look for a hangar bay, you know, for smaller ships.”

I squinted at her, dizzy. “You want to fly
off of here?”

“Yeah, dude. We’re probably on the ship
above Seattle, so if we find one of those smaller crafts, we can
land it in the Sound. I have to get back to my sisters, they need
me.”

I nodded in understanding. “Why in the
water?”

“Do you know how to land an alien
craft?”

“Good point.” I saw that it would probably
be easier to crash in water than on land. “What if we don’t make it
that far?”

“I’d rather crash and burn than die aboard
here,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

I nodded. “I suppose so. Which way do you
want to go?” I looked around for the first time. Two columns of
pods lined the room, opposite from each other. The long room went
on and ended at a blue door. The end of the room opened up to
another walkway.

“That door looks sealed, so let’s go this
way.” She pointed to the walkway.

Standing to our feet, I noticed the hole in
her leg, it was even smaller than mine. We emerged into a larger
room that our room seemed to be a small section of, built in
layers. I leaned against a railing, scanning down. Rows upon rows
of pods layered the room. I looked up and it was the same. Across
from us, hundreds, possibly thousands of pods lined the wall in
tiers, facing outward, toward us, with a single walkway on each
level. The pods were everywhere, and resting within each pod was a
human: men, women, teenagers, little boys and little girls.

“I don’t see any infants,” Penelope
observed.

“I hope we don’t.”

“I hope we don’t see a lot of things I think
we might see up here.” Penelope surveyed up and down. “But I don’t
have any good feelings crawling up my spine.”

“Uhrm. You think my parents are up
here?”

“If they are, it would be impossible to find
them,” she answered.

I didn’t like that. I squirmed against the
rail. “Don’t you think we should try?”

“If I knew where to start looking, I would
say let’s give it a go, but look at all of those people. It would
probably take weeks to inspect every one.”

“Then we have to figure out a way to release
them all,” I said. I inspected the walkway across from our
level.

An alion spotted us, patrolling the walk. A
deep roar echoed in the massive room.

“Run!” Penelope shouted. She headed in the
opposite direction we had come. We stopped at the sealed door. “Do
you see anything that looks like it opens it?”

Up and down the wall to the side of the
door, colored buttons buzzed, waiting to be pressed. “Green means
open, right?” I smacked the green one. A beep signaled our
incorrect answer.

“It’s probably a combination,” she said.

I cleared my throat. “That could take years
to figure out.” In a panic, I began to press every one down the
strip of colors. Once that failed, I tried combinations. The entire
time the roar neared with every second wasted.