THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING. It leaves little room to register anything else I might otherwise already have—heavy breathing, racing hearts, the faint bumping of radio music. Everyone seems to be holding their breath.
Light flickers across the sky in the distance. A wave of cotton-ball clouds is roiling in, as is the heavy smell of warm rain. And I can't move my legs.
My gaze floats toward the general, and I just catch his gritty voice on the wind—"What the hell does this thing want?"
I'm snapped out of my stupor when I hear a familiar voice call my name: "Seleste!" Grace and Kennedy—two friends I made my Freshman year—are sprinting up behind me when I turn to look. Both of them are out of breath—I wonder if they ran all the way from campus—hair whipping in the wind.
"Bitch, we've been looking everywhere for you!" Grace grabs me by the wrist, her stubby fingers surprisingly tight around my arm. Her thinned fringe is blown down the middle, and a lock of strawberry blonde hair arches over the crown of her head. Her blue eyes flicker across my face. "Come on!"
The fog parts for a moment. "To where?"
Clenching his fingers around his thumbs, Kennedy says, "I have a friend who lives way out of the city—"
I blurt, "He wouldn't happen to have a red pickup with an American flag in the back, would he?" My words go unheard as another siren begins to blare, this one closer and only a street or two away.
"He invited me to bring anyone I choose!" Grabbing my other wrist, Kennedy starts to pull us closer to the scene. He runs his fingers through one side of his hair, though it just flops back in his face when he moves his hand away. The right half of his cream blouson is creeping out of his belt line. "Now let's go!"
"Hey!" A cropped-haired man in a camouflage jumpsuit approaches, hand out like he's trying to stop us. He has to shout to be heard. "Stop right there. You can't go any further."
Kennedy speaks for us. "We need to get to Summit." Again, Summit, the "wrong side of the tracks", but the only way out. I wouldn't be surprised if the gangsters had already invited martial law on their own terms.
The soldier shakes his head. "Summit's been shut down. No one's allowed in, so I'm afraid you're going to have to turn around—"
"But Summit is the only way out of the city."
"Right now the only open exit out of the city is Grande Hill."
There is a moment where Kennedy only blinks at the man. "It will literally take us all day," he snaps.
"Guess you'd better get a move on it then."
"Dude, we—"
The soldier lowers his hand to one of his weapons, a handgun strapped to his hip. "I don't care what you do, but you step any closer and you'll be arrested for obstruction."
Grace slides her hand between the two men, jabbing our friend in the chest with her elbow. "Kennedy." When he looks at her, she goes on, "Come on, let's just go."
"The sooner we leave, the better," I note, my eyes drifting back to the inducer of mania. The black metal exterior has a dark purple flint to it.
He clenches his fists. "Fine," Kennedy grits out. Grace is already turning away before he can.
A noise like like nails on a chalkboard roars out from the top of the ship. We covered our ears, wincing and instinctively crouching down. Others did the same, even the soldiers, even the general.
Lightning strikes a rod on The Everett building; the windows light up. The lightning doesn't come from the sky though; it, just like the sound, comes from the top of the ship.
We wait in anticipation, watching and surveying.
A hidden hinge on the front of the alien construction carefully extrudes from the main body. The clouds pass over the new opening, hiding its contents. A quick warping sound thunders overhead, and light erupts from the bottom of the warship this time. Instead of lightning however, it is a circular burst, similar to a nuclear blast.
When the clouds pass, I hear...marching?
"What is that?" Grace asks. She looks at me.
Cinching my eyebrows together, I shake my head. "Don't look at me. I have no idea."
The volume of the marching swells. The General and his comrades squint down the length of Main Street—obscured to us from our position by the rock wall he decided to have built a little less than a year ago.
I stand up straight again. Kennedy and Grace follow my lead.
"Hold!" calls out the general. He raises a closed fist in the air. "Don't come any closer."
They're here... I gulp. My life flashes before my eyes. I've lived through a lot—sure, not as much as some people but certainly more than others—but it seemed like there would be so much more to look forward to years and years of success and good luck and friendship. Maybe not a family of my own—I don't think I've ever wanted that sort of thing, and I'm not sure if that would even be possible...
But it doesn't matter now. The world is over.
"Seleste?"
I turn to Grace. "I think we should hurry up."
"Attention, attention," a female voice on a loud intercom calls out from somewhere in the distance. "Please drop everything you are doing. Attention, attention. Please drop everything you are doing."
"Citizens of Earth," another voice goes on. This one is lower, neutral. This one is more solid, not just some disembodied recording. "By order of the High Commander, from this moment forward, your planet is under the governance of the Ani'ira Fal Dominion. Your autonomy is now considered null and void. Resistance is futile. Yield your weapons, and you shall know mercy."
Of course they know English. How convenient is that.
Someone runs up to the General with a stark white loudspeaker. He has one hand in his pocket. His voice, carried on an opportune gust of wind, crackles through the air as he says, "If you turn around now and go back to wherever the hell it is you came from, we'll show you true American hospitality."
"Who voted for this guy?" Grace snaps.
"I was just thinking the same thing... Let's go."
As the words leave my mouth, the ship whirred to life, the body turning as it surges skyward. The lights in the windows turn a bright, glowing purple, and a different siren blares, bouncing around my skull like the sounds of firing pinball machines at a casino. Its gentle hum makes it sound like it's whirring to life.
The second voice speaks up again. "Your response has been recorded."
A bright ray of light zips down the street, striking the general in the chest. He yelps, falling back into his colleagues, and then...disappears in a pillar of smoke.
Standing in his place is a horrified looking goat.
One of the other officials gives a high-pitched scream; the goat makes a dash for it, bleating all the way; another commands the soldiers to fire. They do. Auto-fire down the road; rocket launchers at the ship. The lights on the war jets turn on, the same glowing purple, and soon enough they're zipping around too. I can't tell what they're doing though.
The ground shakes, and Main Street rips down the middle—at least the part we can see—rock and asphalt bursting through the air, sending the soldiers and the administrators flying to either side.
"Let's go, Seleste!"
My feet feel locked in place, as if I were thrown into the sea with ball chains around my ankles. Grace and Kennedy grab one arm each, dragging me up Newbury Hill. We reach the top of the hill where a flood of people from the finance quarter hog the majority of the street.
Kennedy tries to pull us through in an attempt to go against the grain of frightened people, but someone shoves us out of the way, asking us the rhetorical question of what the fuck we're doing?
"We'll have to go around!"
"All the way around?"
I inhale sharply, words of the mouth coming to me again. "There's no way you expect us to go farther into the city just to get to Summit—they're already there. How're we going to get around them—sneak through the shadows?"
Grace's eyes focus in the distance. The highrises in the city seem to be crumbling, just like fragile sand castles in the wind. "She's right, Kennedy. The city's destroyed."
"It's not."
"It's going to be," I quip.
Ambulance sirens grow and fade in the distance. The smell of sheared metal drifts on a breeze that's surprisingly cool.
His eyes dart back and forth. "So what would you two suggest?" He turns a pointed glare at the both of us. His jaw is tight.
I sigh. "Fine. If you really think Summit is the way, I won't argue."
"No, you're right. If they're catching people..."
No more words needed to be said.
"We should follow the herd for now," Grace advises.
Kennedy doesn't wait for another word; he pulls us into the crowd, ignoring the furious protests of finance bros. We make sure to stay at his side. He leans in so we can hear him better. "If we move along a few blocks, we might be able to pass the army guys and cut across the field."
"Cut across the field?"
"Yes, is something wrong with that?"
"We'll be making targets of ourselves," she tries to reason.
"It's our best bet..."
Neither of us can argue that. If he really wants to try to get to Summit Hill—or at the very least, as close as possible—we should probably cut across the half-mile-long field to the side road and into the woods.
"All these people are going to safehouses," he goes on. "We shouldn't have any trouble getting there once we reach the other side."
"Why did the chicken cross the road again?"
I look at Grace. "Grace, now is really not the time."
"Sorry."
We do as Kennedy suggests, only following the flow for a few blocks—which, despite everyone being in a rush—before cutting off on our own. We're given strange looks for our sudden diversion of the path, but nobody says anything to us.
We make a run for the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. Just as he said, we're past the military barricade. The barrage is still ongoing, American fighter jets booming overhead. An explosion sets somewhere far past our right side, shaking the ground and launching the roof of a government building in the air. Brick particles fly at us; they're mostly small, fended off by our arms crossed over our faces.
I glance down Main. Beyond the firing militia, a grey smog obscures the back end of the obsidian vessel, and even though we're farther from it than we were before, somehow the alien warship seems bigger than before. Immense and intimidating, for sure, and so foreign to my eyes that I'm almost willing to believe this is all a dream and I'm still tucked away under my covers; that I never got out of bed to try to write some of my paper; that I didn't witness a man get turned into a bleating goat.
I swallow around a lump in my throat.
The glowing purple of the construction seems to swell, and the more I look at it, the brighter it gets. The purple clouds the edges of my vision no different than the light of the TV screen playing in the dead of night. White noise fills my ears. The blood behind my eyes pulses with the rhythm of the lights.
And I can't move...
Figures part through the fog donned in shimmering purple armour with black-glass visor helmets and no visible weapons. Upon first glance, they all look human, and—unless my eyes deceive me—have slim feminine frames. Six figures exactly, all seeming to be replicas of one another.
A seventh figure follows. A taller figure. This one is not wearing a helmet. A face as white as a cloud and hair blacker than the night itself. Black as the ship.
More figures follow; dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands, but they all have the same helmets and similar dark purple armour. The others are of various heights though, but they all seem to be quite tall.
In my periphery, something is flying toward us. My arms jolt to life, and I swing Kennedy and Grace out of the way, stepping away myself. But I wasn't expecting an explosion.
The sound rips through my ears. My mouth opens, and my throat bubbles with a scream, but all I hear is ringing. My hands are pressed to them in hopes that the agony will fade away. Somehow I'm on my knees.
Reeling in pain, I double over, tapping my forehead to the ground as I cringe. I hear my name like I'm underwater, and then not a second later, one of the armoured vehicles—toppled on its side—comes sliding toward me. I just barely dodge out of the way, glancing over my shoulder to make sure Kennedy and Grace are alright. The vehicle eventually skids to a stop.
But they're across the field. Faces twisted in fear, they desperately wave me over. "Come on!" Their mouths shape the words, but I barely hear them.
How long had I been standing there?
My ears still hurt like hell, but I'll have to deal with that later. Clenching my teeth, I struggle to get up to my feet as I try hard to ignore the pain.
And though I also try to stop this, I'm unable to quell my curious eyes. The pale-faced one steps beyond the six in the front. A few soldiers, realising the futility of the situation drop their weapons and run. But all are stopped in their tracks, freezing stiff and plummeting flat on their faces, arms at their sides.
The wide-eyed government officials are running toward me, the corners of their mouths pinned back in horror. The soldiers suddenly lower their weapons, and those who were not already kneeling, do so.
The officials skid to a stop, pointing past me. I glance over my shoulder; the armoured vehicle which I'd just evaded is barreling toward me yet again, and because I hadn't been able to hear it, is so close the only thing I can do is huddle over, the way school kids do during tornado drills. I can only anticipate the impact while preventing as much damage as possible...
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Finally! Here is PT II of "The End Only the Beginning"; PT III will be out next Wednesday 5PM CST.
Thank you for reading and have a lovely day.