EnEmE: Fall Of Man (12 page)

“Ok,” I said, looking at Kiebler.

Hauer gave me an appreciative look and dropped the tough guy façade for a moment.

“I meant what I said out there.” Hauer looked me in the eye. “I want you to co-lead. It’s one thing for my men to follow military chain of command; it’s another to expect that kind of discipline from a group of civilians. I need someone to help manage them that they can relate to and look up to. I appreciate you letting me order you around.”

“N…No problem.” I stammered in surprise, watching a big grin crossing Kiebler’s face.

“Now get your asses moving,” Hauer said as the pace of his step picked up. “We haven’t got all night!”

Hauer’s crew moved off. I turned to look over at how Lacy and the others were doing. Braden was hovering next to her, not wanting to interrupt her instruction. He set Wendy down and stepped closer.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” asked Braden.

Lacy looked up from the pieces that she had just busted apart from a cell phone, pulling out a wire and a microchip.

“Yes, we need more metal for this to work. Take a couple others and look for some. A lot of these cars are abandoned. The gas cap panel would be the perfect size for a jammer.”

“Sure...sure, no problem,” Braden said, grabbing Wendy’s hand and looking for familiar faces to join in his scavenging mission.

“Oh, and Braden?” Lacy called out.

“Yeah?” Braden turned nervously.

“Thank you for sticking up for me.”

The wide smile that had once belonged to Lacy crossed her face from ear to ear.

“Don’t mention it,” Braden managed before carrying on with his mission.

Kiebler and I looked at each other, and then turned and walked into the hallway toward the patient rooms.

Half an hour later we had assigned several of the larger rooms to families that had come to the hospital in cars and who didn’t have the luxuries of a motor home. They clutched their belongings and thanked us as we directed them to their rooms.

We rounded a corner and found ourselves in the private care wing. The rooms were much smaller, meant for one or two people. These were the rooms where the wealthy sick had stayed, willing to pay the extra cost to recover from whatever was wrong with them in privacy and with a few more creature comforts.

We went into one of the darkened rooms. Kiebler quickly strode toward the curtains, opening them a little to let the light in. Then she turned nervously and broke the silence with the subject we’d both been avoiding.

“I’m glad you made it back,” she said.

“Me, too,” I chuckled, attempting to brush off the emotional moment.

She didn’t let it pass the way I had hoped, though.

“No, I mean, I was really worried. When I saw you leaving down that tunnel, I thought I’d never see you again. I’ve never felt that way about any other patient,” she said.

“Well I mean, you have been a family friend since before I even…” I stammered, looking for words to hide behind.

“Stop it!” she said firmly. “I really care about you. I really worry about you and I know you feel the same way, too.”

I couldn’t think of any smart comebacks.

“I have to face the reality,” Kiebler continued. “It goes against every code of ethics in my line of work, but that doesn’t really seem to have much validity in the world now. We both need to admit that the way we are, the way we feel for each other, went well past any doctor-patient relationship. Probably long before any of this insanity broke out. We’ve just been denying it because of what we were told was acceptable.”

I was silent for another moment. I was looking for an excuse to hide behind, but my emotional walls had just been crumbled to dust by a few words of truth, from a woman that I felt a very deep attachment for.

“You’re right,” I said, looking back up from the floor to meet her gaze. “You’re right.”

I was mentally searching for the next words to say. The meaning behind the feelings, a way to explain the unexplainable, but she beat me to it. She stepped forward and grabbed the lapels of my jacket. Then she pulled me forward and kissed me. Hard.

In seconds the world was a blur of heated breath, lips, tongues, hands, and soft murmurs of passion. Belt buckles hit the floor. We tumbled onto a hospital bed. I lay flat as she helped me shed my pants. The smart psychiatrist exterior was gone as she pulled the pins out of her hair and let it flow down freely. She removed her glasses and set them down on the side table. Then she leaned forward and kissed me deeply again.

We soon decided this would be our room.

Weeks passed. We formed a strike team to make calculated strikes on enemy points, as well as raids for food and supplies when necessary. The hospital was fully stocked when we began squatting, so the need for supplies hadn’t become pressing yet.

The strike team was led by Hauer with Freeman, Lacy, Banya, and I as the other members. A squad of ten or fifteen men and women from our survivor camp were experienced in combat or firearms, so they usually came with us, too.

Banya was an odd duck. Definitely not the man his uncle had been, especially with the outbursts, but he was driven by the desire to avenge his uncle. Since Kiebler and I would have both been dead or turned if it hadn’t been for Dr. Banya, I respected his nephew and gave him some leeway for his odd behaviour. To be honest, the way he talked, I was never sure when he was having an episode or when he was just being himself. I suppose the two weren’t so very different.

Anyway, our ranks grew as we rescued more survivors and as word spread that there was shelter in the ruined-looking hospital.

The jammers worked, and since nearly everyone had a cell phone, it was easy to make sure we were all covered. Number one rule of the camp was to make sure that your battery was always charged. Amazing how easy it is to remember to charge your battery when your life literally depends on it.

For reasons we didn’t fully understand, the power grid had not been entirely shut down. We figured that it must have been because the Tenachai were using it as well. Or maybe they had just overlooked it. There were rolling brownouts at different times of the day. Luckily, being a hospital, there was also a back-up generator system. The strike team had also salvaged a number of gas generators on a supply raid. Those were a last resort, as we knew fuel would become scarce once the nearby gas stations ran dry. Despite having plenty of energy sources in the present, we planned ahead. There was a strict lights out policy after 9 pm, to avoid detection, and by default, priority was always given to the power outlets to make sure that the cell batteries for the jammers were charged. Everything else was secondary and optional.

When we weren’t raiding, scouting or executing a measured strike, I was also the
de facto
director of civilians in the camp. My crew of assistants there were Braden, Brian, Alex and Max. I had Kiebler to manage and oversee things when I was busy away from camp with the strike team.

Hauer didn’t seem at all surprised when Kiebler and I came out as an item. The first time he caught us holding hands was a couple days after we’d chosen our room. He gave me a huge grin and said, “It’s about time.” Kiebler blushed and turned away, embarrassed that we’d been outed.

It was a half-secret that we weren’t really trying to hide. The fact that we were openly sharing a room meant that it would be obvious enough before long.

What did surprise us all was the other “new couple.” In camp, Braden and Lacy had begun spending a noticeable amount of time together when they weren’t busy with their duties. It was obvious that he doted on her. He hung on her every word and movement. He needed help watching the child he’d been stuck with, and she needed to look like one of us to keep the rest of the camp from grumbling too loudly about the fact that she
wasn’t
one of us. But there was more to it than that. As the weeks passed, she seemed to be learning how to be human, something that Braden seemed to enjoy teaching her. In her down time, she seemed to have a genuine joy for re-discovering the simplest things, like making a salad or cooking a hot dog. Things that we take for granted. Their friendship was the talk of the camp and a scandal to many. I was thankful for the fact that some of the attention was being taken off of me as the reluctant hero of the human cause.

Every few days Lacy would make a hike far away from the camp and then turn off her jammer. Sometimes Hauer and I went along as protection, because her mind could get lost when reconnecting to the hive, making her unaware of her immediate surroundings, and opening her up to the risk of ambush.

Thanks to the intelligence Lacy provided, the strike team was on fire. The Tenachai forces were at their wits’ end, frustrated with our surprise attacks, executed with all the stealth and precision that would be expected of a Navy Seal Team. Even our own people didn’t know where we would strike next.

We made over a dozen strikes with very few casualties or wounded on our side, but which continued to cripple the alien efforts to assimilate the populace.

It was after one of these communes with the hive that Lacy’s mind came back with some very key information.

“The leaders are coming,” she turned and said to us, breathless as if she’d been running.

“What does that mean?” demanded Hauer.

“It means that this battle has caught the attention of the home world,” Lacy explained. “The Tenachai have never had this much of a challenge in assimilating a world. It’s shocking to them. They had no reasonable expectation to think that humanity would put up such a resistance.”

“Well, we’ve had a little help,” I replied with a sly grin.

“You don’t understand,” she said.

My grin faded.

“The ruling class, the elite, they’re frustrated with the efforts. They blame the competency of the Gammas assigned to this sector. They feel that the invasion would go better under their direct control,” Lacy explained. “A giant armada from the home world is coming. They are set to land in two weeks. It will be a force comprised of the ruling class, the home world’s most accomplished science officers, and the greatest tacticians of the entire empire. There will be a million more soldiers.”

Lacy looked at us frightened and desperate.

“They will roll over us. They will flatten the entire Earth in order to crush this resistance.”

After a slow and silent trek back to the camp, we shared the news with our teams. We looked around at each other silently for a few moments afterward.

“Well, ah don’t think the way ta handle it is my losin’ hope like all you FANNY toss pots seem to be doin’.” Banya broke the silence with his own unique outlook.

“What can we do?” Freeman chimed in. “Go into hiding? Spend the rest of our lives living underground?”

“There’s got to be…there’s got to be something.” Kiebler said, gripping my hand for reassurance.

I knew how she felt. We had just started our lives together and I wasn’t ready for it to end this way either.

“Where do they plan to land?” Hauer asked Lacy.

She sighed.

“The majority of the armada plans to land at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis County. The Rulers will convene there with the Scientists and the Gammas to prepare before they move out in a final wave against the resistance,” Lacy explained.

“Why there?” I asked.

“Because it’s nuclear,” Hauer interjected. “It’s the only nuclear power plant in operation in California. It’s dangerous to them if we hold it and find a way to use it as an energy source or a weapon against them. If they take it they can prevent us from using it while they decide if they want to use it as a weapon themselves or just shut it down before they take down the rest of the plants that run on coal, hydro and natural gas.”

“So we take the station first,” I replied.

“No,” said Lacy. “With the size of the force that’s coming, even if we moved the entire camp there, they’d still take us out in about fifteen minutes. It’s one thing to make precision strikes against the forces here. It’s another entirely to try and make a stand against the entire Tenachai Empire.”

“So you’re saying we’re screwed?” I blurted in disbelief. “We may as well just lie down and die?”

A silent look passed between the people gathered.

“Nay, where is yer imagination?” Banya retorted, using his gift of shattering silence. “What if we just take the GOBSHITE fuckers out before they can land?”

We all looked at each other and then at Lacy.

“There is potential. The armada ships are incredibly massive. The density caused by your gravitational pull alone would cause a ship that size with a disabled engine to crash into the Earth and collapse in on itself. It would implode. The survival rate of those aboard would be 0%.” Lacy explained, a hint of excitement on her face.

“It’s brilliant!” Hauer explained, jumping up and grabbing Banya by the shoulders. “That cracked Aussie head of yours is brilliant. We take these suckers out before they set foot on our planet.”

“We start planning now,” Hauer said as he turned to the group. “There’s a military base in San Luis. We gather the biggest force possible and go there first. When we see what all resources we can gather there, we’ll make a final plan. If we’re lucky, we’ll find personnel still on the base who can help. Maybe someone who can fly some of the birds on the ground there.”

“You have to take the ships down
, though.” Lacy said sceptically. They will be heavily armed and loaded with defenses.”

“I know it isn’t much of a plan, but it’s better than not trying at all,” said Hauer. “If this is the shot we’ve got, then this is the shot we take. I’ll be damned if I have to watch the Earth get steamrolled. I’ll take any chance I can to stop it.”

“Then let’s do it,” I said.

“Get the rest of the people together and tell them the news. We’re going to need to build the biggest strike force we can. People are going to have to learn to fight, use weapons and work as a team if we’re going to pull this off.”

“I’m going, too,” said Max, speaking up for the first time.

“I don’t think that’s a great idea, Max.” I said. “I know you want to help, but you don’t have any experience with guns.”

“I didn’t ask,” Max replied firmly. “I’m going, too. You’ve been risking your neck this entire time while I stay here and make sure that there are enough beans and hash browns ready in the cafeteria. I need to take part in this. I need to help fight for our way of life.”

I looked at Hauer.

“Don’t look at me,” Hauer grumbled. “The man saved my life once already; he can do whatever he wants.”

I looked at Max and grinned although the extension of my hand was reluctant.

“Welcome to the team, brother,” I said.

It was a good firm handshake that Max used to pull me into a tight, but manly, brotherly hug.

Bolstered by the macho bravery and new hope for survival
, Braden stood upright, trying to look as confident as he could, puffing out and posturing for Lacy.

“I’m going, too,” he said, “and no one can stop me.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Lacy said with a smirk. “You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

“I don’t care! I’m a man and I fight for what I care about!” he responded.

And with that he grabbed Lacy, surprising her long enough to pull her in for a deep and passionate kiss. Stiff and awkward at first, Lacy’s muscles slowly relaxed and melted into Braden’s arms, returning and stretching the kiss to a length that was beginning to feel awkward to bystanders, before Lacy finally pulled away.

“Okay
,” was all she said, looking smitten momentarily, before her standard cold expression began to crawl back onto her face.

With that, the basic course of action was decided, and the group split off to perform early preparations or spread the word to the rest of the hospital residents.

Braden and Banya started gathering and taking inventory of our existing arsenal of guns and ammunition.

“So ye know that Ranga Bird is still an alien, right?” Banya said sceptically.

“I don’t care. She’s still a person just like you or I,” Braden said. He looked increasingly agitated with each word. “And I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I care about her and I’ll go toe to toe with anyone that gives her trouble or bad mouths her.”