Author Datafile:

Book Title: enemy.
Author: Paul Hughes.
ISBN: 1-58898-047-2
Publisher: www.greatunpublished.com
Formats: Trade Paperback, US $15.00+s/h; Adobe PDF PC/MAC Version, US $7.99

Biography:

Paul Hughes was born in 1978 in Watertown, New York. Raised in tiny Philadelphia, New York, Hughes was known for his biting humor and obsessive ways throughout his days at Indian River High School and St. Lawrence University, where he recently graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Fine Arts. Abandoning an aspiration to be an art teacher after a traumatic sophomore year, Hughes instead vented his creativity into his passions of singing with the prestigious Singing Saints a cappella group, revising his never-quite-finished novel enemy, creating the popular online journal site resurrender.com, and other various activities such as carousing with dangerous women and drinking lots of booze.

Currently seeking employment as a screenwriter, Hughes hopes to successfully market his two feature-length scripts, "Of Monkey and Manny," and "Enemy," and his student filmmaking opus [resurrender]. Hughes currently resides in Philadelphia, New York with his computer, Francine, a bucket of vodka, and too many memories.

Chapter Three
Book Two: Planet of the Shadows

Nighttime.

They left the tunnel system several miles outside of Seattle, emerging into a landscape ravaged by the final chemical holocaust that the military had thought might be able to repel the Black forces. They had of course been wrong, and had paid for their mistake with their lives and their souls. Flynn and Hayes now sat in a half-demolished building that had once been a shopping mall. The storefronts on either side of them still advertised a mall-wide Summer Sale. It did not feel like summer. A meager campfire burned before them. It was reflected in two blue eyes and two gray eyes.

There was no sign of Enemy in the area; they had apparently moved on. Hayes casually removed and discarded his medical uniform, stained as it was by the blood of the innocent and the aliens alike. He also removed his dogtags and a small pendant from around his neck. He looked at the objects in his hand for a brief sad moment, and then tossed them into the fire.

Flynn leapt forward, reaching for the discarded objects. "Simon! Your cross--"

He pulled her hand back from the fire. Indeed, the pendant he had thrown was a cross, but in the heat of the fire it soon blackened and puddled as easily as his dogtags. He released her hand after an awkward silence had passed. Her too-gray eyes searched for something in his face. "Don't worry about it. It didn't mean much to me before, and it sure as hell doesn't mean anything now."

Flynn looked into the fire. "Were you a religious man?... Before?"
Before. The word hung in the air, echoing with newfound meaning. Before.

"No. It was given to me by someone who meant a lot to me. She thought it would protect me. She thought it would make everything better."

"Why did you--"

"All the old gods are dead now." He laughed, more to himself than out
loud. "They were never alive to me."

He sat down by the makeshift fire to warm himself. Flynn sat down on the opposite side of the fire, facing Hayes.

He watched her closely.
She watched him more closely.

Hayes shivered noticeably, although Flynn could not tell if it was because of the cold or the long awkward silent stare that they had shared. Her unasked question was answered as Hayes pulled a black insulated vest from his pack and pulled it over his olive-drab tee-shirt. She made a mental note of arms constructed of taut muscle, stretched over tanned skin like leather. A worker's arms. His identification codebar was all-too-visibly burned into his left forearm. "It shouldn't be this cold. It's never been this cold at this time of year here."

"Maybe because it's night--"
"No It's never been this cold so suddenly in the summer. Don't you feel it?"

"Maybe a little--"
"It's too fucking cold."

Flynn drew her legs up close to her torso, hooked her arms around the rough drab-covered surface of her knees. She looked at Hayes, who had turned away from her. A sudden breeze sent a chill through her small frame and she shivered. She pulled a blanket from her pack and wrapped herself within. Hayes ignored her and searched through his rucksack. There was no uncontaminated food here. The scent of chemical warfare still hung cloyingly in the air. Hayes strapped on an I.V. unit and injected a nutrient solution from his medikit into his bloodstream. He swallowed an antitoxin caplet and offered one to Flynn, but she refused.

"Genetically-engineered resistance?"
"Yeah, something like that."

They sat in silence.

"I'm sorry about the baby, Hayes. I saw you--"
"Don't worry about it. This is war. I shouldn't have let it get to me."

"But this isn't war, at least not the kind of war that has ever been fought here before. And we sure as hell haven't fought aliens before. This isn't war. This is extinction."

"All the more reason to keep myself distanced and not get involved. Who knows how many more will die before this ends."

"How can you not get involved? You're a doctor."
"I'm just a soldier now."
"I guess everybody's a soldier now."

Hayes arose, paced. His hands combed back his hair, a nervous reflex. He had a headache, a dull, throbbing pain behind his eyes that had bothered him since Well, since the first days of the invasion, back when the slivers of black first began to fall from the sky. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Hayes shivered as the breeze picked up. Gooseflesh had arisen on his forearms, and he rubbed his arms to warm himself up. He could see his breath when he exhaled.

It was June.
"Tell me about yourself, Simon. Tell me about your past."

He had been patting down his pockets, searching for something. He finally found the pack of cigarettes in an interior vest pocket, ripped off the cellophane, tore off the top of the pack, expertly pulled one out with his teeth as he searched through his pockets for his lighter. He lit the cigarette, took a long draw, held the smoke in for what seemed to Flynn an impossibly long time. His exhalation brought him an obvious pleasure.

"A doctor, huh?" Flynn smiled wickedly at Hayes.
"We all have our vices. Some of us enjoy felony."

Smoking had been illegal for three years. He carefully tapped the ashes into the fire, wanting to savor every last bit of his felony contraband. He smiled guiltily at Flynn, held the pack out to her, to which she politely shook her head. Hayes inhaled again, exhaled after another blissful moment of nicotine, and grinned at Flynn. "Ms. Flynn, you don't want to know about my past."

She smiled again, a sweet disarming smile that forced Hayes to respond in kind. "Of course I do. We have a long time until daybreak. And to tell you the truth, I was hoping I could get to know my travelling partner a little better. Even if it is the end of the world. Besides, I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."

Hayes gave in. Who was this woman, and why did she have this effect on him?

He sat down directly across the fire from Flynn, wrapped himself in his own blanket. The sky overhead, framed by the ruins of the building within which they sat, was strangely absent of stars and moon. The only light came from a meager fire in a dead shopping mall and the tip of Simon's precious cigarette, the only sound the crackle and hiss of flame and the voices of perhaps the last people on earth. Hayes began, his bass voice a whisper in the night.

"Fine. You win."

Flynn drew closer to the fire, the flames flickering in her gray eyes. She listened intently, and they passed the night revealing the past. The night grew colder to the sound of Simon Hayes' history, and Ember Magdalene Flynn had listened to every word with a fascination that she had never felt before.

"My name is Simon Evan Hayes. I was born in Harkness, Michigan, ten years before War Three--"
* * *
--tore apart Eurasia and destroyed over a third of the world's population. He was not a healthy child, for reasons that no one wanted to talk about. His family denied that his mother was severely addicted to crystalline nanotech, the illegal biological interface to holotechnological realities. She had been deeply traumatized by the 2018 chemical bombing of Kansas City, in which most of her family had been killed. She used the nanotech devices to escape her reality. Simon's father was a holotech developer, eager to test out his latest programs on the overly-willing subject. It was not a match made in heaven, but it was a match nonetheless. From it, Simon was created.

Simon grew up a lonely child. He had no siblings; his parents' application for a second child license had been rejected, and his parents by law had to undergo sterilization. He was artistic, and intelligent beyond his years. One obstacle hindered his expression severely, a permanent stutter that made verbal communication almost impossible. He found his creative outlet in drawing, and his parents often found him outside sketching the warplanes that constantly flew overhead.

He always seemed happy enough, but it disturbed his parents that little Simon seldom smiled. He sometimes did, but it was a sad, sardonic smile that did not fit the face of a child. He would then wander off and draw something else. The world was tattered for the Hayes family when the Indochine Francais Pact invaded the Siberian oilfields. The world's first real nuclear conflict since the Three Days War between India and Pakistan at the turn of the millennium erupted with a fury unmatched in a century. Most of Asia and Eastern Europe were wiped summarily off the globe. Much of the rest of Europe was made uninhabitable, and the French Socialist government eagerly accepted the invitation to relocate to Quebec.

The Hayes family sat outside each night for two months, Father slowly sipping a dry martini five parts vodka one part vermouth two olives on a plastic cocktail sword and when he was feeling festive perhaps one of those little umbrellas that looks decidedly uncouth sticking up from a martini, Mother's hand always absently wandering to the holotech interface behind her left ear that she kept hidden from view by wearing a stylish and retro bobbed coiffure tucked coyly behind her ears in little-girl style even when she quickly approached the age of hot flashes and the cessation of natural fertility, watching the orbiting nuclear deterrent systems destroy the hundreds of ICBMs being launched at Canada and the United States by the remnants of the corporate Japanese-backed Siberian Alliance. Simon remembered his mother's tears and hushed conversations that his parents didn't want him to hear. He heard, and understood far more than they knew.

America took a passive stance in the war, not launching any weapons, just shooting down missiles launched at them. The hope for a diplomatic resolution to the war was a long shot, and became an impossibility when a four-gigaton fusion weapon overshot its intended target of Toronto and airburst over American soil, wiping most of western New York off the map.
America was in the war, and with a vengeance.
American pilots went on scalping runs around the globe, scouring Siberia,
Japan, and the remnants of the French Indochinese Alliance. The war was quick, efficient, and bloody. America secured itself as the only remaining world power, sweeping out and annexing those territories that it had not entirely devastated. French officials looked on in terror from their secure bunkers in Quebec as America took its revenge for being dragged into a war that had not been its own.

By the time the dust of the war had settled and life returned to a semblance of normalcy, Simon was on the verge of adolescence. He was still a quiet young man, and his introspection became a great concern for his father. His mother spent most of her days in an alcohol and holotech-induced haze. The shock of the war had been too much for her, and she found solace in the blissful artificial worlds created for holotech. When Simon's father took his own life, no one was terribly surprised. He had been a successful businessman, and when the war broke out he began dealing in communications holotechnology. When it was revealed that his company had been a major supplier of crystalline holotech to the French, the government began an investigation. He would have been executed before long if he had not taken his own life. There were many executions in the years after the war. The Allied States of America were ruled with brutal efficiency.

Simon turned his creative energies to writing during middle adolescence, penning wonderful examples of naïve teenage angst. He wrote to escape: there was nothing to do in Harkness, a tiny fishing village where the only excitement was the Saturday night bingo and dance at the American Legion downtown. He wrote a novel that he was rather proud of detailing the destruction of the planet by alien forces. It was trite, it was overdone, it was brilliant. "Deus Ex Machina" was rejected by twelve publishing companies before Simon burned it in anger. He watched the pages blacken one by one and die like his unborn children in the fire.
At age eighteen he discovered the opposite sex seriously for the first time. Oh, he had had girlfriends, or rather, he would go out on dates with girls. None of them seemed to understand the enigma that was Simon Hayes. His stutter didn't help. She had been different; she had listened, at least for a while. Her name was Brigid, and she shamelessly tore out his heart and threw it into the dust. Simon blindly pursued her for over a year before witnessing Brigid and his best friend in a more-than-just-friendly embrace. On a trampoline. Naked. It was then and there that Simon decided to become a poet.

He had his share of internal strife. More than his share, in fact. Simon more than simply concerned his mother anymore when she came out of her fugues. He frightened her. She once questioned him about a notebook of poems she had found scrawled in his eccentric handwriting. How could he write such dark poems? Sure, they had their problems, the war, the death of Simon's father, the de-ratification of the United States Constitution and the dissolution of the Union, the police state that the Allied States of America had become, the Almost-Second Civil War that had been narrowly avoided when the President selected his political rival Cervera as his Secretary of Defense, but why write about such sad things? Life was good. We had won the war, hadn't we? Cheer up, Simon! And who is this "Brigid" girl anyway?

The look Simon had stabbed at his mother silenced her, and an abrupt and awkward silence followed. In fact, she never asked about his poems again. They talked very little after that incident. Simon graduated at the top of his class, but he did not know what to do after school. The government was collecting volunteers for the colonization of Mars, but that did not interest Simon. Anyway, he knew it would not work. Humans were not meant to leave this planet. And, as he had predicted, the colonists died in transit when a meteor the size of a soup can punctured and depressurized their vehicle. Mars would remain uninhabited, and the space program would be largely abandoned for the time being.

He was accepted at a quite prestigious local university, where he studied literature and art. He met people, he made friends, he fell in love, he made love. He lived what he thought was a good semblance of a normal college life. He tried to keep in touch with old friends. He saw things fall apart. He realized he never wanted to go home. After he graduated from the university, he spent a summer walking across the country with nothing but two of his best friends, a guitar, quite a few cigars, and a small wad of money kept laced tightly into his left boot. He ended up in Seattle and lived the starving artist life, replete with long hair, goatee, gesso-spattered knee-holed jeans. He found some satisfaction in the "Purple" series of paintings he produced for his landlady in lieu of rent; she had had an abstract-expressionist lover in the glory days of her youth, and although he had long gone the way of the Fletcherists and she had grown more wrinkled and worn than she had been when she was an impossibly smooth-skinned nude model he portrayed descending a staircase perfect even with the small brown beauty mark that graced her supra-sternal notch and its companion that guarded her left breast, she had retained her love of the finer things in life, most notably paintings. For Simon, there were months where going out to dinner meant buying a box of macaroni-and-cheese and as a treat perhaps some ketchup to accompany it at the local supermarket and seeing a show meant watching the scarlet sun burn its way into the western horizon. The news of his mother's nanotech overload and subsequent death did not disturb him. He knew that she would be happier that way, hopefully forever within one of her heavens.

The Quebec War came with fire and fury and the destruction of Washington, and Simon knew what he had to do. He enlisted, hoping to get placed on the front lines, retaking the cities of New England from the French, but instead Milicom saw his untapped potential and placed him in military intelligence, medical division. His research team helped to devise a new vaccine for cobalt radiation sickness, a vaccine that saved thousands of American troops in the Adirondack campaign. When the war took a turn for the worse he had finally been sent to the front lines as a medic with the Fourteenth Assault group in Ontario, retaking Brockville, Kingston, and Ottawa from the French. The only time he had actually set foot into Quebec was during the Montreal cleanup operation after the war. There had been so very few wounded, so many dead. His medical training was quite useless when day by day he was simply required to help dig the mass graves outside of the city that the countless war dead were dumped into.

The war was over, and Simon found the restlessness crawling back into his mind. He tried to write, but everything sounded somehow empty. His earlier penchant for poetry was replaced with a disdain for the medium, and he wrote several reactionary poems of a distinctly DaDa nature that amused his friends but only fueled his angst.

Oh my goodness! Golly gee!
There is a rhinoceros in bed with me!
He was not here last night at ten.
(I can't believe he's back again.)
He visited me a year ago
And jumped out my bathroom window
And now he's here again I see
To make a nervous wreck of me--
* * *
Maggie laughed out loud, her face illuminating their encampment with a brilliant smile. Simon paused, intending to let her laughter run its course, but instead he found himself joining her. It felt good to laugh like that, something he had not done in so long. She covered her mouth with her hand, and Simon noticed for the first time that she had dimples. When they were done laughing, Simon found himself looking into Maggie's eyes for a too-long and silent moment. He stuttered a few syllables and eventually succeeded in telling her that--
* * *
--he had tried music; it had the same result: he was restless, apathetic. He would write a song, play it for hours on the guitar, but never be satisfied with it. Simon had a bad habit of obsessing over the minute details. For months at a time he would play the same chord over and over again, sitting in almost a trance state, hoping for inspiration for the next chord. He resigned himself to serving in military medical for a few more years, and then perhaps travelling the world. Milicom Systems paid well enough, and the prospects of entering the workplace in the shattered and rebuilding real world did not appeal to Simon. Somewhere out there he hoped to find the source of his unrest, the cause of his sleepless mind. And perhaps another Brigid was out there as well. He cherished the cross that she had given him, even though he always said it meant nothing to him. He wore it with his Milicom tags, and never took it off. As for religious significance, it held little for Simon, whose overly-analytical mind simply could not fathom either a divine being or an afterlife. But still he wore it, the last link to a time and place and woman now long dead.

He was stationed in Seattle when the black shapes fell from the sky and took away what was left of the planet's soul. He fought, he tended to the wounded, he was forced to retreat into the tunnels beneath the city. He treated the chemical burn in the throat of a beautiful woman with a biotic field that he himself had invented four years prior to the invasion of the planet in a lab buried beneath the city with technology that most certainly could not have been human. And he found himself sitting before a meager campfire watching the sunrise with the same woman listening to the story of his life unfold like the blackening pages of his adolescent novel
* * *
The night had grown colder as Simon told Ember of his past, and the already struggling fire had choked and died while he was speaking. Neither of them noticed it until Simon stopped talking. There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment. Flynn broke the silence by sitting up and grabbing a handful of the ashes. Her hands flickered and the embers began to glow once more. She put them down and a roaring fire grew from them.

Simon watched in silence.
"Your turn."
"Hmm? For what?"
"For explanation."
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything. Nothing. Just talk. I've talked all night long, and bored you with the details of my life. Now it's your turn."

Simon caught a glimpse of an inward smile that broke through the placid surface of Flynn's face and then disappeared as quickly as it had emerged. It had been a smile of contemplation. A smile of quiet reticence.

"Simon, you haven't bored me at all. Telling me--"
"Ember, I--"

"Maggie. Please don't call me Ember." Simon was not sure, but for an instant he swore her eyes had flashed with a silver fire, but then it disappeared. "She is gone now. Ember was my Styx designation. Maggie is my name. Please don't make me wake her up again."

There was another moment of silence. Flynn's hand flickered. Hayes saw with some concern that two lines of teardrops slid silently down her face, the right tear winning the race because of the very noticeable cleft of skin on Maggie's left cheek that blocked the course of the left tear, diverting it towards her chill-reddened ear, where drained of kinetic energy, it simply came to rest. The display was somehow heartbreaking, and Simon began to stand up, to go to Maggie's side, but he sat back down when she began to speak, looking into and through the fire. "There was a time when I was just Maggie Flynn, a time between the wars, before the annexation, when I was just a stupid young girl in New Belfast. A girl who took great pride in her green eyes and her curly red hair. A girl who got caught up in the wrong crowd and did some foolish things for what she thought she believed in. At least that's what I tell myself; it's been so long that I don't remember what I really lived and what was just a dream anymore There was a time before I became Ember "

The tears continued their slow voyage down Flynn's face, and Hayes went to her, held her. The fire had been the intermediary, bisecting their night of revelation of dead histories into a precise one hundred-eighty degrees each. Simon now violated the unspoken boundary established by the fire and held Maggie close. She shivered in his awkward embrace. "Go ahead, Maggie. You can tell me. Please, tell me."

Her shaking eventually calmed, and she sat up from Simon's embrace. He sat back, looked into those gray eyes, but remained on her side of the fire. She reached up to wipe the tracts of wetness from her face, winced as fingertips brushed the unfamiliar sensitive wound of her left cheek. She held out her hand and placed it on top of his, which rested on his knee.
Maggie cleared her throat, and began to speak in that voice that melted Simon's composure and broke his heart. She spoke to him, but somehow spoke through him in a way that Simon could not explain. Soft, lilting, hypnotic.

"I was a member of the--
* * * B--Blood Army, are you?"

Confusion. A dark room, a bright light. Sudden, cold, alone.
"Wha What?"

A nightstick crashed into the table in front of her, and the legs of the chair upon which she sat flew out from under her. She fell to the floor, her head connecting squarely to the cold stone beneath her in a way that made her bite down on her lip. Warm coppery blood flooded her mouth.
"You didn't have to do that. She--"

"Bloody hell I didn't have to do that. Get up, you!" She wiped the blood from her mouth, or attempted to wipe the blood away, but it was everywhere, stippling the floor at which she looked, coursing down over her chin and soaking the front of her white shirt. She was dizzy, her head a confusing swirl of pain and stars. "I said get up!" She found herself being lifted forcefully from the floor by her shirt collar and thrown at the table while the chair she had been sitting on was righted behind her. She was then thrown back into the chair, and at last she could look at her attacker.

"Fucking Bloodies. Fucking bombing all over Old Belfast again. The war ended twenty fucking years ago, but still you have to bomb the innocents, don't you?" An older man, dressed in a dark gray suit with black pockets and black gloves and a nameplate that said "Connelly" and a nightstick that he was presently swinging down at the table again--

"Let's try this again" he intoned after the crashing sound from the impact of the nightstick had echoed for a short time. She noticed two very painful-looking fresh dents in the metal surface of the table at which she sat. She reached out, fingers tracing the outline of bent metal.

"You're gonna wreck your furniture before long if you keep hittin' it like that, Soldierboy." She attempted a smile, revealing blood-reddened teeth and a freshly split lip. His face turned a noticeably deeper shade of red as he rushed across the room, open-hand slapping her face with black leather-gloved palm. A fresh agony arose as her nose gave way to the blow. More blood soaked her shirt. She glared at Connelly, but said nothing for the time being.

"The next time it'll be the club hittin' your face, not my hand, you fuckin'-"

"Connelly, just get on with it." Head spinning, broken nose pulsating with agony, she looked around for the source of the voice, finally located a shadow standing in the darkened back of the room. The speaker walked forward, joined Connelly in the light. He was dressed in a similar suit, the same gloves, but his arms were crossed and he was holding a black leather folder in one hand.

"Fine." Connelly's eyes glared. "Fine." He tore the folder from his companion's hand. He opened the folder, spilled its contents onto the tabletop. Several blurred photographs, some nondescript sheets of paper, and a microdisc, which he gingerly picked up and slid into a video projector on the wall of the dark room. A series of images began to flicker across the wall. "Magdalene Flynn. Is that your name?"

She looked at the images of blackened, burned car wreckage. Another shot of a collapsed storefront. She took her time wiping the now-congealing blood from her upper lip with the back of her hand.

"You are Maggie Flynn. Correct?"
"Aye. I'm Maggie Flynn, Soldierboy."

Connelly uttered a sound that eerily resembled a growl, but the other man stepped forward, placing his hand on Connelly's shoulder. Connelly moved to the back of the room, submitting grudgingly to the other man's authority. The images continued upon the wall, but now they had switched from depictions of bombed wreckage to photographs of Maggie with various groups of people. Images that must have been taken in public places, when she did not know she was being watched.

"Maggie, how old are you?" His nameplate, now visible, said simply "Smith." His voice was not like her own, or Connelly's. His was the voice of an American.

"What the fuck does it matter to you, Yankee?"

He smiled, shook his head. "It doesn't matter anything to me, Miss Flynn. It matters to you. It matters because some people think you're just a kid caught up with the wrong crowd. It matters because other people think you should be shot in the morning, like the rest of your group will be."

She became visibly upset for the briefest of moments, and then her face returned to the stoic, defiant demeanor that so infuriated Connelly, eyebrows drawn to a frown, chin held high with youthful pride. "What group?"
"Oh, I think you know who I'm talking about, Maggie."
"Well, I was a Girl Scout a few years back--"
"Are you a member of the Northern Irish Blood Army, Maggie?"

She did not reply, but the sudden and intent interest in her hands on the tabletop was all the answer Smith needed. Her face had taken on a pale, drained sheen.

"Jesus. How old are you, sixteen? Seventeen?"

She studied her hands in silence. Smith turned to Connelly, who looked through his papers. "Sequencing says she's seventeen."

"Seventeen. Hell, when I was seventeen I was working at McDonald's and saving up for a new car and trying to find a girlfriend to keep me company in the back of that car. You're seventeen and you're blowing up buses and churches."

She began wiping her blood from her fingernails. "They're going to execute you for that last bombing, you know, Maggie. The war ended twenty years--"

"The war never fucking ended as long as his troops are in my country!"

She pointed out at Connelly. "Collaborating bastards! If they hadn't If they " She started coughing forcefully, her hand reaching to grasp her right side. Smith frowned and looked back at Connelly, who shrugged his shoulders. Smith leafed through the papers on the table as Maggie continued coughing, her face turning a violent red.

"Did you see this report?" Smith held out a paper and Connelly took it, looked it over, glanced up at Maggie, and then looked back at the physical report. "What could have caused that? I've never seen anything like--"

"Pearl."
"What?"

"She's a fuckin' Pearl addict. It's a drug the Bloodies use to control their younger members. Keeps them loyal And addicted. Makes them think they're invincible."

"And when had you planned on telling the ASA about this?"
Connelly shrugged his shoulders again. "We assumed MSI knew about it. We thought maybe MSI created it."

Maggie had stopped coughing, but lay face down on the tabletop, hand still grasping her side.

"It's an inhalant. It burns their lungs away if they take it long enough. Looks like she's been hooked for years."

Smith knelt down beside Maggie, his face inches away from hers. He brushed back her hair, looked into eyes too green, eyes too old for her face. "Are you addicted to Pearl, Maggie?"

"Fuck you, Yankee." She unceremoniously spit into his face, or rather, attempted to spit at his face. The destructive nature of Pearl had begun its work on her salivary glands. Nonetheless, Smith pulled a pristine white handkerchief from within his jacket and patted down the area of his right cheek where her feeble attempt at real spit had landed.

Smith stood up, hands placed on hips, pacing slowly back to the other side of the table, returning the folded handkerchief to his jacket interior. "I'm trying to help you. We can save you, you know. In the ASA we can rebuild your lung in just weeks. Hell, we can give you a matched set of clones if you want in a day or two."

Connelly stepped to Smith's side. "What the hell are you talking about? This little lady isn't going to see another sunrise once we get what we need from her."

"Step aside, Connelly." Smith's eyes took on a sudden frigid quality. Your government isn't running the show around here anymore, remember. I don't really care about your centuries-old little war you've fought either. And I don't even care if this young woman was involved in yesterday's bombing. I've been sent here for one purpose, and I have found my objective." He walked around the table again and placed his hands on Maggie's shoulders. "Her."

"You-- She's directly responsible for the deaths of eighteen people in that bombing! Women and children. And she was involved in other attacks. We have evidence that--"

Smith extracted the microdisc from the wall unit, snapped it in half, and pocketed it. "What evidence?"
"You won't get away with--"

"Connelly, I need this young woman more alive than you need her dead."
"What for? Is the ASA using Pact tech now to--"

"Let's just say that Milicom needs some fine young men and women for a project we've been working on. We need Maggie, and she is ours now. Let us deal with her."

Smith walked behind Maggie's chair, bent down to speak directly into her ear. She looked blindly ahead, not at the tabletop but through it. She could feel Smith's gaze upon her. She did not trust him, or the way he was looking over her young body. His presence was nauseating: the audible inhalation and exhalation, the scent of some American cologne and American shampoo and American toothpaste and mouthwash and chewing gum. Smell of leather as black gloves reached out, paused, gingerly swept back long curls of sanguine hair from pale white ear not pierced for fear of paternal retribution ironic because she was a terrorist but her father might still beat her if she got her ears pierced and white because of the gray skies that were filled with rain not sunshine and the beach was too cold to swim like the Americans did anyway she wanted to laugh but she shook with fear as this ASA brute looked at her profile. His black glove lifted up her chin and turned her face so that he could look into her eyes. His other hand gently wiped away the sticky coagulating blood from her lower lip. His eyes were black, and when they looked into her own green eyes she felt paralyzed. Black and then silver for an instant she was not sure she had seen.

Connelly, forgotten for the moment, threw the black folder from the tabletop, and it spilled its contents across the floor of the room. Smith calmly looked up, his eyebrows drawing into a frown. "Is there a problem--"

"Fuck you, Yankee. She's all yours now. The ASA can go to hell. Fuck you and fuck your Bloody too. Don't come home again, Maggie. You come back and I will see to it that you die, young lady. Let the fucking Americans take care of you now. ." Connelly knocked over a chair and slammed the door behind him. Smith was left alone in the room with his prisoner. He turned back to Maggie with his coal-colored eyes. "I can give you a new life. I like you, Maggie. There's something about you There's a fire inside of you, an ember burning deep down. We can use that ember, Maggie. We can save you from execution. Would you like us to build you a new set of--
* * *
"-- lungs. They saved me from execution, and from Pearl addiction. I was a member of the Blood Army; I did kill those people, but it was for something I believed in. When the ASA annexed the UK, it just brought back all those feelings that we had hoped had been buried after the Civil--"

"Maggie, you don't have to explain yourself."

"I sold my soul to Milicom for a set of lungs and freedom from Pearl. That's why I'm here, in Seattle, in a Milicom uniform, and not at home, buried in the ground."
"The special project It was the Styx project, wasn't it? They needed young people like you to experiment with."

"Something like that." Her hand shifted, going from flesh-colored to translucent, flickering, waves of color lighting up Hayes' face as he looked on. She studied her shifted hand. The shimmers illuminated her face.

"How the hell do you do that?"

"What?"

"How do you--" He made a waving motion with his arms, frowned. He reached out to take her shifted hand, at which she pulled it quickly away. It flickered, solidified.
Maggie reached out, took Simon's hand in her own.

"Sorry, but-- Well, you shouldn't touch me when I am shifted. It's too dangerous for solid matter to touch shifted matter."

"Shifted matter. That's how you killed the-- the things. The black things. The enemy."

"Yes."

"How do you go right through them?" He held up his blood-spattered fatigues. The Enemy's blood. "And how do you start fires with your hands?"

"You mean shifting."
"Yes. Shifting."
"Well, I--"

"The medical journals were faked, weren't they? Styx aren't genetically altered. Where did Milicom get that kind of tech?"

"A little town called Diablo."
"It's not human technology, is it?"

"It's You could say they stumbled upon it. There was a mine. The workers found something down there..."

Their eyes locked. She pointed up. "One of those. An alien vessel."

A vessel of black and silver and nightmares and everything that little kids feared at midnight cruised silently over them in the starless morning sky.
* * *
Desert. Arizona.

His black rubber-soled boots crunching over sand and grit and spiked desert plants the only sound besides the constant, dry, coughing wind. His black cloak flew out behind him, swirling the dust into a whirlwind behind him. The sky was not as bright and the desert was not as hot as it should be. He casually brushed encrusted salt and sand from his face. The grit was somehow cleansing. He whistled a song he had once danced to in a life and a place that had been erased from his heart long ago. Dry tongue attempted to wet dry lips. The song continued. How did that song go? Something about shaking hands and unraveled kingdoms and flying dishes and awful aim.

Richter stopped walking for a brief moment as one of the massive black forms flew almost directly overhead, impossibly stopped in mid-air and turned on an unknown axis, presumably now facing him. The amorphous object made discernment of spatial orientation almost impossible, as it changed its form almost constantly, like some hideous black airborne tumor. It began to move again, changing form, and sped away from him. One human must not have warranted a landing to pick up.

Richter made time stop for an instant and his fiery silver eyes illuminated his world. A rage of energy built within him.

He reached out with his mind and tore apart what he assumed were the aft drives of the vessel. The enormous ship thundered to earth and crashed half a mile from where he nonchalantly stood. It rolled end over end, finally coming to rest after littering the desert floor with shards of black. He walked toward the wreck, whistling to the beat of his bootsteps. What was the name of that song? He frowned, shook his head to no one, smiled bemusedly. It was going to be a great day.

* * *
West followed the shore of Lake Superior until Chicago lay before him, or rather, where Chicago should have been. It was no longer recognizable as the Windy City. The wind remained, a cold, harsh breeze that did not belong in June that seemed to emanate from where Chicago used to be. In what appeared to be a blast crater that was quite a few miles across, there were very few vestiges of the city that should have been there. The only feature noticeable from the rubble was the huge black spire standing in the center of the crater.

So this was the hub.

He had realized that the Black vessels that cruised overhead had to come from somewhere, and apparently, this was it. The sky was black with approaching and departing vessels, descending and landing within the blast crater.

No. Oh god no.
People.

Ringed by the black demons, large crowds of people surrounded the spire. A group was being forced into the black tower as he watched. So this is where everyone was.

What is in there?

There was a sudden flash of silver light. Must be dissent in the ranks, West thought. A rebellion against the aliens? Apparently not successful.

West walked on, toward the edge of the crater.

* * *
Richter.

The Black that survived the crash were wary, on edge. They saw him coming, and moved to intercept him. He calmly kept walking. He saw that the vessel had held a cargo of human beings. He saw their remains among the spreading flames. Their bodies were quickly consumed by silver, dissolved.

The Enemy rushed at him.

He studied the aliens with mild interest before he tore them apart with his mind. Limbs flew.

Too bad he couldn't have saved the people.

And then...

Something crawled over his mind, icy fingers grasping for his soul. He forced the thoughts from his mind, and went to find the cockpit.

The Gateway to
enemy

Paul Hughes' Alternate Gateways

enemy Copyright (C) 2000 Paul Hughes
All Rights Reserved