Ashes (Of the Earth Series)

Chapter 6.2

I prepared to tuck and roll, but it was too late. They tell you that falling makes it seem like time slows down. Those people are fucking liars. I didn't have time to process anything at all. The force of my jump had thrown me off balance and instead of a perfect roll, I found myself flailing and crashed ass first into the bush.

I tore right through the flimsy branches, my hands stretched out behind me, fingers clawing desperately in the thick gravel. With a sickening crunch my left wrist and two of my fingers snapped on impact. I screamed from the pain.

Gripping my broken hand tightly to my chest, I rolled to one side and lay there, each beat of my panicked heart sending new bolts of pain lancing through me. I watched the flames above me dance, allowing the agony wash over me until it faded to a dull ache.

But only in my arm I realized. Nothing else hurt too terribly. I was a little scraped, a little burnt, a little sore. But alive, and remarkably well considering what I'd just lived through.

I pulled my legs out of the branches and stared at the now demolished little plant and smiled at it gratefully through tears of pain and relief despite my situation - six points of contact with the ground had saved me - two hands, two feet, one ass, one bush. I was luckier than most.

Slowly I stood, keeping my injured arm held against my stomach. Teeth gritted against the pain, I walked away from the fire-ravaged apartment building and into the dawn, explosions booming behind me as the hungry flames found new gas lines to feed their fury.

"Michael..."

The town was quiet. The flames hadn't reached this far. Brightview had never been a loud sort of place, but even so, the silence was overwhelming. Twice I thought I heard the sound of life emanating from buildings, but each time I went to investigate, I found nothing but death. Every home I entered carried with it a new story of terror and despair that filled me with dread.

The first, I found a family of three, a mother, father, and young boy - the three of them dead in a puddle of blood on the kitchen floor, their faces contorted in a final expression of terror and despair.

As far as I could tell, I was alone. In the stillness of the air, framed by the towering old oak trees off Main Street that had stood there since before the industrial revolution, I could almost imagine that it had all been a bad dream. I stopped and called out, but there were no replies.

Again, passing by a home, I thought I heard sounds of life - I went into the home to look for what I was sure the sound of people moving around, but each time I called out, there were no replies.

I stepped into the building and wandered through each room, searching for signs of life. As I passed through the kitchen, I spotted a sandwich sitting on the table. Two tiny bites had been taken out of it. Child sized bites... Toddler sized bites. My heart broke.

I could feel the pain of another broken home and desperate family as my stomach rumbled. I took the sandwich, and bit into it. The stale crust scratched my tongue, but I choked down the dry meat and cheese as quickly as I could, not having realized how ravenous I was until I bit into it.

Still desperately hungry, I opened the fridge and cupboard and found the means to make another sandwich, but not much else. This family had not been well off. A pang of guilt hit me, I felt like a thief, but I needed the food and I could not go much longer without sustenance. I slapped as many ingredients as I could find between two pieces of bread and stood alone in the kitchen, taking bites and washing them down with milk which had expired days before.

As I munched away at the sandwich, my eyes roved over the empty walls and bare surfaces, looking for some clue to whose food I was eating, but there was nothing to see.

I put together one last sandwich, and then opened the fridge door to begin putting things away, but was met with an unexpected wave of grief as I realized it was pointless. Tears burned my vision as I hung my head and stumbled away from the open fridge, turning through the open door and back into the outside world.

I shivered as I reached Main Street and heard terrified shrieks floating through the air. My heart clenched with fear as I murmured under my breath. My mind flashed back to that girl's lifeless eyes,

I glanced up at the horizon, but found no more helicopters or alien fighters, just the endless, intimidating mass of the alien ship. The size of it was mind-boggling. From where I stood, I was at least 15 miles away, but it still covered at least a quarter of the horizon.

And... It had changed.

Instead of a mottled gray color, it now shone menacingly in blues and silvers, now more closely resembling the fighter ships which had erupted from it. Towering blue spikes glinted menacingly in the sunlight, stretching into the sky like daggers of broken glass, their sheer size defying comprehension. Jagged gashes carved their way through its hull and revealing mysterious inner chambers filled with alien metal. With a thunderous roar, entire chunks of the hull collapsed, plunging into the depths of the ocean like grain in an hourglass, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

"Not hull," I realized. "Buildup."

What had appeared to be a vast, impenetrable hull was nothing more than an accumulation of cosmic dust and debris that had formed around it.

A thick layer of material had formed around the ship, hundreds of feet thick in some places, leaving its surface encrusted with dense matter. The spikes extending from the body of the vessel had caused its armor to slowly fall away, revealing the actual ship beneath.

The genius of this system of protection was undeniable. By allowing the interstellar journey to generate a thick layer of material, one could travel safely without having to worry about maintenance and repairs. Didn't matter if you collided with an asteroid at cosmic speeds if you had a surface layer that was a thousand feet deep. The ship itself would remained untouched.

I wondered whether the substance itself contained properties that would attract even more particles along the way, if the design was intentional, or simply inevitable when crossing interstellar spaces.

As I pondered, the magnitude of what their act meant struck me like a hammer. To think they'd discard such a massive and powerful defense, as if it were nothing more than a child's toy, demonstrated just how little respect they had for humankind's technology.

A chill passed over me as I wondered what else lurked behind that rocky exterior. If this was their defense, and they could afford to shrug it off so easily, then what did their offense look like? What colossal weapons would they unleash? What power did they possess that allowed them such confidence?

Unable and unwilling to contemplate the complexities of the alien's motivations any longer, I took one final look at the sky-spanning craft and then continued on my way down Main street.

I trudged through the desolate wasteland of death in a trance-like state, my senses assaulted by the sheer horror I encountered. The first few times I'd hopped over a pile of rubble and slipped in a puddle of gore, I'd vomited, but as time went on, I found myself become more and more immune to the carnage.

Everywhere I turned, there were more corpses - mangled, shredded, cut apart, skulls burst open on the pavement and strange burn wounds covering their bodies. An unearthly silence filled the air, broken only by my ragged breathing and stumbling, uneven steps.

Finally, I could make out the college in the distance, and it spurred me onwards with renewed purpose - I knew Michael had to be there somewhere. But as I drew near, dread filled my veins at what I saw.