Red the First (23 page)

It suddenly occurred to him why nothing
appeared to happen at 6 am. It was the launch that was scheduled
for 6:00 am; the missiles would take a few minutes to reach their
targets. He delighted at the thought that the Celeruns were trapped
on the third planet from the sun, unable to stop the missiles in
flight. He probably wouldn’t see a mushroom cloud, because anywhere
a bunker was located had been scratched off as a direct target. He
remembered Iowa on the general’s map. There were no bunkers there,
and due to it being prime farmland, he knew that the Hawkeye state
would suffer hundreds of direct hits.

Red couldn’t feel anymore triumphant if
he had tried. As his vision began to gray, his smile
widened.

“
We’ve won,” he
whispered.

The aliens held a heated discussion
until all eyes fell on their captive.

Their weapons were useless, so the gun
they had confiscated from him was pushed against his skull. He
didn’t flinch when an alien squeezed the trigger, just held his
breath, but was sorely disappointed when the gun jammed.

He gestured for his weapon, trying to
get them to understand that he only wanted to fix it. To his
surprise, the alien emptied the chamber and handed it over. Red
willed the bent pin inside the gun to straighten. When he returned
it to his executioner’s hands in working condition, he could swear
the allegedly humorless aliens were now laughing at him.

First, they shot Zena in the head, and
then kicked her limp body at him. Red kissed her furry head and
hugged her tight, bracing for what was coming. An alien shot him
through the chest. The pain was less than he had expected. Red
figured they wanted to see him linger, but the world became a
curtain drawing back. Kay and his three children were standing on
the other side. Their faces were aglow with indescribable joy, as
if light emanated from a place inside of them.

Incredible thirst dried Red’s throat.
He couldn’t move or even swallow, but the love and beauty pouring
out of them was like a long sip of cool water. How he longed to
drink more!

A colorful Ferris wheel turned in the
background. Music from the carousel wafted to his ears. His mother
and father were there, too. Old friends and siblings formed a line,
waving at him, encouraging him to join the fun.

Kay’s smile filled him with longing.
Piper knelt on one knee, opening her arms wide. “Come on, girl.”
Zena looked at Red, tail wagging excitedly, reluctant to leave his
side, but desperately wanting to go where called. His teenage son
encouraged Zena further by patting his knees. “Treat!”

Red nodded and she bounded off into
waiting arms, where she was showered with hugs, kisses and
laughter.

The ground itself began to tremble,
bringing Red back to the school yard. He clutched the photo from
his pocket. “Home,” Red whispered. Giving up his spirit, his body
slumped over Zena’s.

..............................

The aliens looked at one another,
bracing their feet, struggling for footing as the earth shook
beneath them. Something was amiss, but they didn’t know what.
Returning to their hovercrafts, they discovered nothing worked.
None of them recalled total failure of all equipment, but nothing
had gone according to plan when it came to settling this world
drifting through the Milky Way.

Whatever the technical glitch, the
engineers in the mother ship would fix it, just like they always
had. If Celeruns were anything, they were patient, so waiting for
further instructions after everything came back online was the
rational choice. In the meantime, they would spend their time
enjoying the rich spoils of the Earth, rooting for nourishment in
delicious dirt, reproducing under the life-giving star the humans
had called the sun.

As they waited, one of the Celeruns
commented on the serene look of the human they had just killed. The
oldest Celerun swore the dead man was staring right at her. She
pondered how most humans believed that a divine being had created
the universe and everything in it, and had stayed around to watch
over them.

A Celerun with a head full of wispy
white seeds couldn’t pull her eyes away from the dead body. “Why
would a god endow humans with immortal souls and not us?” she
asked.

“
None of that belief is
true,” the Celerun with red eyes said. “If gods like that existed,
they would never have let humanity be destroyed.”

The Celerun who had posed the original
questions covered the dead man’s face with a piece of
cloth.

Two days later, their communicators
still remained silent. The hovercrafts refused to start and their
weapons wouldn’t fire. Worried, the Celeruns on the ground kept
checking the horizon for any sign of the fleet, but nobody showed.
On the third day, green-brown clouds of dust blew in from the west.
The aliens raised their instruments to take a reading, but without
power, the instruments were useless. The Celerun hurried to the
fields where they had planted their children. The stalks that had
nurtured their infant offspring had turned brown, and the
sproutlings’ delicate green skin had taken on a ghastly gray
pallor, though the cobs’ husks remained firmly wrapped and the cobs
themselves still on the stems.

Frantic, they tried to shield their
sproutlings from the tainted winds, but by the end of the day, the
sproutlings had wilted away, even the stems withering under the
blast of that mysterious wind. The Celerun soldiers wandered back
to the green sphere, stooped by grief, wondering why their
superiors had abandoned them. By the next morning their bodies were
cramping, nausea overtook their digestion, and they huddled
together, waiting for those further instructions that would never
come.

Chapter 24

Above Earth’s atmosphere, inside the
daughter ship, a smaller version of the mother ship, the Celeruns
in charge of operations were called before the High Leader. The
unthinkable had happened. They had lost a mother ship and everyone
on board it.

Who was supposed to have been
responsible for securing the planet’s skyways? How was it that
primitive human governments had hidden such a vast network of
nuclear devices from their scanners? Why weren’t the missiles
intercepted in time? Who had authorized the mother ship’s landing,
despite knowing Earth hadn’t been fully cleansed of
humanity?

Excuses were made, but the truth was
that no single Celerun was responsible. Mistakes had been made at
every level of command.

In the aftermath of the plague, human
technology crumbled and humanity’s communication systems had gone
silent. Over time, the Celeruns in charge of monitoring such
activities grew lax. Those in charge of the ground control had
underestimated the desperation of the last remnant of humanity.
Eager to land the mother ship, those at the top were so set on
staying on schedule, they were too impatient to wait for
confirmation that the last human had been eliminated. The Celerun
believed that nothing could go wrong, as nothing had gone wrong in
all their previous conquests, but everything that could go wrong,
had already done so when the skies of Earth suddenly burst into a
frenzy of activity. From space the Celerun fleet could see
thousands of nuclear blasts over every single continent, but it
happened so quickly, and at the worst time possible—during the
landing of the mother ship—they were helpless to intervene. Most of
the Celerun fleets were grounded and couldn’t respond fast
enough.

Afterward, ships could not enter the
poisoned atmosphere without being themselves contaminated by
radiation. Powerless to help, the ships circled the world, with the
horrific knowledge that below them sproutlings were dying, and
sproutling parents would linger, suffering untold agonies before
death released them.

Those in space lamented the great loss
of life, as well as the destruction of such an unmatched planet.
Celerun scientists estimated that the surface would not be
hospitable for twenty thousand years if ever.

The stunned leaders sat in the control
deck, watching as the humans destroyed the planet they had called
home for thousands of years.

“
They destroyed their world,
rather than let us take it,” the Celeruns recorded in their
journal. “Their selfishness is unfathomable.”

A slave from another world dared to
speak. He was allowed to exist only because his species’
unparalleled engineering skills kept the ship in prime condition.
“I call it glorious,” he said. “The humans have accomplished what
no other species has ever managed to do—drive off the greatest
empire ever known.”

“
Yes,” the High Leader said.
“But at a terrible cost to themselves.”

“
That’s what made them so
effective,” the slave said. “Desperate humans do not count the
cost. I stand humbled before their determination.”

The High Leader gazed through the
portal at Earth, which was covered in a swirl of white, blue and
brown mist.

“
Let us hope that we have
seen the last of them.”

“
This planet was called the
Forbidden Garden for a reason,” a Celerun expert in Earth religions
said. “I tried to warn you.”

“
Enough!” The High Leader
gripped the edge of her chair. “Delete all records of this planet
and of what happened here today.”

“
But…” the ship’s recorder
tried to protest.

“
Do not question my orders,”
she said. “From this day forward, any mention of how the humans
thwarted our plans to settle their planet will result in immediate
death. I do not mean to be harsh, but it’s for the sake of
universal peace.”

The recorder tipped her head to
acknowledge the leader’s words, while the slave silently vowed to
tell the tale of humanity’s final triumph to the subordinated
enslaved races on every planet where he set foot. If such a
primitive species could defeat the Celeruns, why couldn’t
they?

Epilogue

I was only a boy the day I followed my
adopted mother down the steep ladder, deep into the bowels of the
planet. It seemed like we climbed down the ladder for hours before
we touched the ground again. The room into which we’d come was long
and narrow. Dr. Patel called it
The Hatchway
, as he studied
the blueprints my mother had given him.

I remember being scared, but my mother
was so busy I didn’t dare bother her with my own concerns. When
Blanche took my hand, and gave it a squeeze, I looked up at her
with deepest gratitude.

“
This way,” Mom said,
motioning for the rest of us to follow. We had entered a network of
passages. Artificial lights dotted the walls. I remember Dr. Patel
yelling out the directions. “Left. No, right!”

I’d long since lost all that remained
of my sense of direction or of where we were, when we went through
a doorway. It was like exiting a dark cave and stepping into a
sunny forest. Birds cheeped, bees buzzed, and a soft breeze touched
my face. The glass walls went up and up to a ceiling so high it
seemed only a glittering haze far overhead. A lazy creek bubbled
near my feet.

“
This must be Biosphere
Three,” my mother said. Her voice was stressed and I sensed that
time was our enemy. “The hallway to the control room is located on
the northeast wall. What way is northeast?”

“
That way!” Dr. Patel
pointed. I wanted to stay by the creek, but we scrambled across a
grassy knoll and came to a metal door in a thick cement wall. More
dim passageways beyond were illuminated with artificial
lights.

Keeping up with the adults was
difficult. I kept glancing, worrying about my father, and Zena, but
I knew they would never join us. I had dreamed of their demise more
than once. That’s why I never liked to talk about my dreams of the
aliens. I knew they would come and take my father’s life. Zena’s,
too. The dream always started with me searching for Zena in a
cornfield. It ended with me…

“
Michael!” My mother turned
around to scold me. “Quit dragging your feet.” I wasn’t used to her
being so short with me; I felt like crying, but I didn’t want to
make things worse.

Everything was a blur. We took a hard
right and skidded to a stop in front of a door with a handle like
the steering wheel of a ship. My mother pressed buttons on a keypad
located on the wall. She spun the wheel and pulled the door
open.

A long room full of computer screens
and blinking lights came into view. Two skeletons sat in front of
one of the screens. I wrapped my arms around Blanche’s waist. She
let out a stifled scream, but seemed more interested in the
computer equipment.

My mother ran to the far end of the
room. I followed behind the adults. They gathered in front of a
panel that looked like a car’s dashboard. The computer equipment
was a strange mixture of old technology and new, knobs and touch
screens, VDT monitors and others I couldn’t recognize. Mom ran her
fingers over knobs and buttons, apparently hunting for something in
particular.

Hundreds of television screens lined
the wall. The names of cities across the world were printed beneath
their screens. The pictures were of really boring things, like
decaying cities, and quiet countrysides. Still, I hadn’t seen
technology in a long while, so I stood there mesmerized.