At the End - a post-apocalyptic novel (The Road to Extinction, Book 1) (9 page)

“Yeah, or some solar panels,” I said.

Félix hadn’t said much, and I didn’t think
he was going to; he looked pretty uncomfortable. I think he knew
that I had seen them, or at least had some idea what was going on
between him and the girl I had talked non-stop about for the last
few years. It was hard to sit there, quiet. But I didn’t know what
to say to him either. Maggy on the other hand was great at
pretending everything was cool, she always had been.

We rode along for a long while, nothing but
quiet. The freeway wasn’t far away. We were still in Bellingham.
There were three more on-ramps before the gaps between them started
to widen. The second level of I-5 was deserted compared to the
fourth. It still made for awkward driving.

I got sick of the silence. “Do you think
we’ll see other people?”

“What?” Maggy asked. She was focused on the
road.

“Along the road, do you think we’ll come
across others?” I placed the shotgun between my legs, the barrel
sticking out of the lowered window.

“We saw people in Bellingham, I bet we’ll
see people on I-5. I just hope they’re not crazy,” Maggy replied.
She slowed and nudged a ’42 Sun Charger out of the way. It was a
slick ride, but impractical. It would be useless on these dead,
overcrowded roads. She accelerated when we passed.

“What’s the time?” Jacob asked. He had been
staring out the window with tired eyes. He needed some rest, that’s
certain.

“2:30,” Maggy responded. “It’s going to be
slow going, that’s certain. Hopefully we can get to Seattle before
sunset. There might be a lot more people there since it’s so much
larger.”

He didn’t say anything more to her, and she
didn’t press him.

I looked over at him. “Why did you want to
know the time?”

He shifted in his seat, sighing in pain. “I
didn’t, really, just a habit I guess.” He returned his gaze to the
landscape outside.

I guess habits wouldn’t die that easily. I
had a habit of eating, and I was hungry. I put the urge down.

Time crept by. Maggy pushed hundreds of cars
out of the way. At least it seemed like hundreds. After every
twenty minutes, I glanced at the clock on the console. It was
torture, absolute torture.

The Seattle skyline came into view around
5:30, and by 6:30 we had a great panorama of the city. Under the
setting sun, the orange sky was fading into a soft red glow. The
buildings shined with lights, lit up as if a normal Wednesday
night. A normal night with a spaceship looming above the
skyscrapers, repositioned since Félix and I saw it on the news.

“I can’t believe it’s real,” Jacob
commented. “It’s really there.”

I squinted at the monstrous craft. “I had
forgotten about it. I don’t think anyone can believe it’s real.” I
saw the crimson gas jet out the butt of one of the six sections. It
was spooky to view.

“Why are the lights still on?” Maggy asked.
She peeked out the window at the Space Needle and all of the
skyscrapers that towered high above it.

“Did you turn the lights off in your house?”
I observed the beautiful horizon and the enormous buildings.

“You got me there, bromigo.” She understood.
“Everyone was taken so fast . . .” She pulled over to the shoulder,
so that we could study the spaceship better, and eat our delicious
jerky and granola bars.

It was too hard to make out anything
significant on the ship from our position on I-5. Still, we sat in
silence and gazed at it as it hovered, suspended in the skyline
like a mountain, dark and ominous, waiting to erupt its destruction
on the land.

“What do you think they are doing up there?”
Maggy asked.

“I don’t want to think about it,” Félix
replied. “It can’t be anything good.”

“I wish we would nuke them already,” Jacob
remarked. “Blow them up out of the sky.”

“Nukes . . .” Maggy whispered. “Have you
guys thought about what happened to the Planetary Defense?”

“That it didn’t work?” Félix shifted his
eyes towards her.

“That we had no warning . . . that we didn’t
fire a single thing at them . . . almost like we let them in . .
.”

I shuddered. “Let them in, are you crazy?
Why would the governments let them come kill us?”

“I didn’t say they did, I just said it was
pretty easy for them to disable our defenses. They passed all of
those missile and laser satellites, the launch bays on Earth, the
long-range scouting ships and relay stations. I mean, it was like:
POOF—here we are, we instantly shut down all of your weaponry, nice
try, suckers!”

“It does seem that way. Maybe we did try to
attack. Maybe the satellites did fire on them, and they were just
too many, or too powerful for our stuff to matter,” Félix said.

Maggy eyed him. “If we did attack, why would
the news not report it, something so global . . . so
threatening.”

Félix frowned. “I don’t have an answer to
that.” His voice was full of gloom.

“Hey, you guys see that? By the ship.” Jacob
pointed to a dot moving across the darkening sky.

“It’s moving fast. Too fast to be a bird,”
Maggy noted.

“It could be a fighter jet, here to blow
that big bastard up,” Jacob said, hopeful.

The dot grew into a triangular shape,
crimson gas spitting out its backside. It flew low, closing in on
us, deadly quiet.

“Oh, god. Oh, god—you think they spotted
us?” I said.

“Duck!” Félix yelled.

We all kissed the floor. A minute or two
went by, nothing. Félix investigated the scene. “It’s still out
there, but now it’s circling the city.” We resumed our perches,
watching as the smaller ship orbited the skyscrapers. Then I saw
two rectangular objects launch from the alion craft. They rocketed
right for the Space Needle. Each exploded where the beams converged
to form V-shapes. The iconic flying saucer descended to the city
streets below. Upon impact, it burst apart, as small infernos flew
up like fireworks, and a thunderous echo ran through the city.

I sat there, stunned beyond dismay. Debris
soared higher as the ship continued to circle the city. The bag of
inhalers rested between Jacob and me, so I seized one and started
shaking it. I shook and shook and shook. Then I pumped it into my
mouth. I pumped a second. And a third. And a fourth.

“Jelly, stop,” Maggy yelled when she saw
me.

And a fifth.

“Grab the inhaler!”

Jacob reached for it, but his body was slow
and damaged. Félix was much quicker. He snatched the inhaler from
my clutch.

I let out a breath, woozy. “We’re not going
to make it . . .” I said.

Félix and Maggy turned their attention to
some movement out the back window. I rotated around and spied
people. People were fleeing, running down I-5, trying to escape the
madness that had become the world. They ran right by our car.
Another group of four, they sprinted right past our windows.

Maggy sprang out the door. “Wait!” she
cried. “Wait!”

They all turned, shocked to hear human
voices. They were clad in warm clothes and burdened with bags. Two
looked about the same age as us, and the other two were young,
probably not even in their teens.

The oldest looking of them, a man of late
teens, maybe early twenties, stepped towards us, squinting. “Are
you real?” he asked.

“Real, and well armed,” Maggy replied. Her
words were a test, to see if he played Our Descent.

“Assets of a soldier,” the older girl spoke
up.

The girl passed. Maggy laughed. “That’s
certain. Is the company of eight better than four?”

They looked at us, wary. “It could be, but
people aren’t the same, some are melted, some are wicked, out for
their own survival, or their last pleasure before their death. You
touch my sisters and I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

Maggy eyed her, amazed. “There is no threat
from us, I assure you. We’re going south to Pasadena, to see if we
can find answers and safety down there.”

The girl smiled, her thick luscious lips
stupefying my brain. “I’m Penelope.” She was a bit taller than
Maggy, maybe by five centimeters or so.

Félix and I got out of the car. I stared at
Penelope, and her beauty melted my body . . . brain, stomach, and
heart . . . all of it. Copperish hair that verged on rufous flowed
mid-back, thick and layered, but greasy from sweat mixed with
product, combined with no shower. Her face drooped with exhaustion,
her body looked to be on the edge of total collapse. Her deep brown
eyes possessed an endurance that a rare few could claim.

“I’m Maggy.” Maggy shook Penelope’s hand.
“This is Félix, Darrel, and the one still in the car is Jacob; he’s
pretty banged up.” She didn’t use our nicknames.

“This is my cousin, Mike, and these two
little ones are my sisters, Jane and Amanda.”

“Little ones, I’m not little. I’m a
centimeter taller than her,” one of the girls exclaimed, pointing
at the sister of equal age. They were black-haired twins with blue
eyes.

“Still shorter than me, which makes you
little,” Penelope said.

“Why do you think Pasadena is safe?” Mike
asked, abrupt. He was tall and fit, with dirty blond hair. His
green eyes burned holes through us.

“Jacob’s father works down there at the Jet
Propulsion Lab, we didn’t know what else to do or where else to go,
so we just figured we should start there.” Maggy hoisted her axe
onto her shoulder. “Where are you going?”

“South, out of Seattle. That’s as far as we
got in our planning. We just gotta get out of here,” Mike
answered.

“Well, you’re welcome to come with us,” I
spoke up, looking at Penelope.

“We’ll be fine on our own,” Mike declared.
“Just fine on our own.”

“Mike, what are you talking about? It’s been
horrible on our own. We’d love to join you. We don’t have a plan,
and it sounds like you do. Something we could use.”

“No,” Mike objected, openly distrustful of
us. “It’s safer with just the four of us. We don’t know them.”

“Are you killers?” Penelope asked, directing
her attention on to me.

“Just of alions,” I replied, not thinking
that they wouldn’t have a clue what I meant.

“Alions?” Her voice inflected to a curious
high.

Maggy smiled at her. “Well, if you’ve seen
them, they look like lionesses. So I called them alions instead of
aliens.”

“We have seen enough of them to make your
stomach rebel, that’s certain,” Penelope said. “Alions is pretty
clever. I never thought about labeling them anything but
monsters.”

“We’re not killers,” Félix spoke up. “That’s
all we can say for you to trust us.”

“Which is good enough a reason not to,” Mike
said. “Come on, Penny, let’s get out of here.” He motioned with his
thumb southward.

I heard tapping on a window in the car,
turned, and saw Jacob poking the glass. “Guys! Guys! The craft is
coming this way!”

I darted my eyes to the city. The aircraft
flew right for us.

“Get the guns,” Maggy ordered.

I had left the shotgun resting on the seat
cushion. Scooping it up, I ran to the other side of the car, in
front of Jacob. Maggy and Félix lined up beside me, as if to
protect the SUV. I was swallowing, all dry, painful swallows.

Just as the aircraft was about to fly over
I-5, the bottom unlatched and dropped down like a mouth opening for
a bite. Sliding, the alion shot through the air, descending like a
cannonball, with a trajectory aimed at our level. By the time it
reached the height of the fourth level, it uncurled. Immediately
its four paws lit up with tiny bursts of white flames. Within a
short, stifled breath it landed on a car, skidding across its
roof.

I stared at the alion, rigid. A strange
silver metal covered its paws like gloves. Through slits in the
metal, five claws sunk into the neo-plastic of the car, a death
grip by any standard. I had watched a nature show on lions a few
years before, and I remembered that the forepaw of a lion was
strong enough to break a zebra’s back in one swipe. I didn’t want
to think about what this beast was capable of. Probably strong
enough to break an elephant’s back.

It pounced onto a car two lanes over from
ours, quick as a lizard’s tongue catching a fly. The shotgun
rattled in my grip. I couldn’t steady it to save my life . . . and
I needed to.

The alion was beyond intelligent. The four
newcomers appeared to be unarmed compared to us, and it knew it; it
knew we had projectiles, coming straight for us first.

Félix fired off a round and missed. The
alion dashed out of the way, as if sensing the bullet coming. Maggy
aimed and pulled the trigger, much to the same effect. I couldn’t
do it. My finger hesitated on the trigger . . .

It sprung from the car to the one behind
ours. I stepped back, terrified. No air was going down my throat,
and my lungs were starving as I wheezed. Suddenly it leapt at
me.

Just then, Jacob exploded out of the car,
knocking me back with the car door. With the two OMP2s clenched
between his fingers, he shot off four rounds in burst fire,
centered on the alion’s large, muscular chest. It sounded like a
tongue rolling: RRRR, but mechanical, precise, and lethal. The
bullets and the alion greeted each other in a mortal embrace, the
bullets passing through the beast without care of their quick
meeting. In complete indifference, they continued on, out the
sturdy back of the monstrous cat. Jacob spun out of the way. Maggy
yanked me back, to the front of the SUV’s hood. It struck the open
door, breaking it from the hinges, landing on the shoulder of the
freeway. Blood pooled like a puddle forming in a rainstorm.

“Let’s go,” Jacob said. He walked up next to
the alion and smirked. “Gotcha.”

Without warning, the alion swung a paw up at
his legs, but missed, tapping the bottom of the SUV. Its last
attempt to kill one of us drained it of what remaining energy it
possessed. The alion’s aircraft had flown on by, and now it circled
around, heading for the main ship that clouded the city.