Afterburn, page 30
“Then you’re out,” Lance said.
“Tell him, Alex!” Alton cried.
“Forget it Lance,” Alex said. “Just get up here. Now”
“What’s that, boss?” he snickered. “You’re breaking up.”
The desert was dark behind him, but Alton could make out Lance’s position by his black/violet glow. He doubled back, racing to find Lance standing over Valeria, her TALOS burnt and shredded. It was just the three of them left amongst the fallen bodies. Their job done, the remaining Nieblings had fled the area.
“Back away,” Alton said.
“I can’t believe he chose you for this,” Lance said. “You always were a cockroach lover.”
Alton switched off his comms and raised his arm. Lance turned to see Alton’s EVs dialed up and pointed at his chest. The smirk dissolved from the gorilla’s face. “You got those on stun, right?”
“This is for Simon,” Alton said, and fired, exploding Lance into a shower of blood and viscera so fine it was as though his body had been strained through mesh.
He knelt over Valeria, who looked up at him glassy-eyed but still conscious.
“You’re going to be fine,” he said, looking towards the lights in the eastern sky. “Help is on the way.”
She tried to grasp his hand, but she was too weak, and he broke away.
As he neared the pad, he saw one of their people waiting for him by the open elevator. They dove into the lift and began whirring the five stories to the loading platform.
As they ascended, Alton looked down through the transparent glass of the elevator and was horrified to see Valeria crawling toward the launchpad. The moment the elevator let them out, he dashed to the platform rail.
“Go back!” he yelled down at her, knowing she couldn’t hear him. “What are you doing?”
“We need to seal the hatch, Alton.”
He turned to find Kiara standing just outside the capsule door, then looked down again to see Val, tiny and helpless, far below.
“We made it,” Kiara said. “After waiting a lifetime. Don’t fuck it up now.”
“She’ll be incinerated when we take off!”
“She’ll be a martyr to history, then,” Alex said, emerging from the capsule to stand next to Kiara. “The final obstacle we overcame on the road to a new human dawn. There are much worse things to be.”
Alex was wearing a satin Cosmost command jacket like the one Alton had treasured so long before. It felt impossible to resist. It was almost as if the jacket was a tractor beam drawing him in.
He made himself look down once more. Valeria had no love for him. She would hand him over to Áquilar, return him to the camps, kill him, whatever duty dictated. She would probably be glad to do it.
But he couldn’t rid himself of the image of Christina mangled in the smoking rubble, crimson on white, blood leaving her face. That thing that he allowed to happen. Because of his hurt. Because of his hatred for his father. Because of his hatred for himself.
“Alton.”
Alex’s voice was soft and honeyed like wood chimes on a breezy afternoon, and it drew him back into the moment.
“I have cancer,” he said, just barely over the instruments and controls powering up behind him.
“From the dirty bomb. I was too close when it went off. That’s why I look like this. The disease, the treatment . . .”
Alton looked up and down the once powerful body shorn of its youthful muscle and knew he wasn’t lying.
“Now you know why we need you,” Kiara said. “Why I need you. I told you to trust me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“None of them know either.” He thrust a thumb back toward the crew. “Who’s going to follow me to another world if they know I’m dying?”
“Even if he does live for a while, he could be sterile,” Kiara said. “And somebody has to usher in the new generation.”
He looked at her, then back at Alex, comprehension hammering him like a bullet train. “But that’s not the only reason, is it?”
“What do you mean?” Alex asked.
“First cousins don’t make for the most reliable gene pool, especially not in a community as small as this one.”
They both smiled, their ancient secret finally revealed.
One of the crew appeared behind them. “Incoming and closing fast. Looks like a whole division.”
They looked to see dozens of lights clogging the eastern sky.
“We want to keep it in the family, Alton. Kiara trusts you.”
“It will be everything you ever wanted,” she said. “Space travel, life on another world . . . and me.”
“But . . . I’m not white.”
Alex looked back to see if anyone else was listening, then said, “We can work around that.”
Alton almost laughed. “You never believed in your father’s cause at all, did you?”
“You were right, Alton. It was a means to an end. And now that end has been achieved.”
“You’re a fucking psychopath.”
He shrugged. “Most visionaries are.”
Alton took Kiara’s hands in his, smiled at her, then let them go and stepped back into the open lift, descending again before she or Alex could react. The last thing he saw of them was their stunned faces.
The door flung open at the bottom, and then he was grabbing Valeria and dragging her to one of the skiffs.
He punched it at top speed for maybe sixty seconds before the rocket engines thundered to life behind them, flooding the port with fire.
Shock waves rumbled underneath them, and they went tumbling from the skiff, rolling to a stop as the ship cleared its moorings and began its ascent.
He raised his arms and pointed his EVs at it. He charged them up to full power until he glowed like hell itself, the buzzing so loud in his ears he couldn’t even hear the roar of the engines. Hostages be damned. He would take them all down.
When Valeria grabbed his hand and lowered it, he could feel the strength in it this time. And the purpose. And she was right. He wasn’t a murderer.
He lay back. Tears flooded his eyes as he watched them fly away, the afterburn glowing in the deepening dusk. How many times had the three of them viewed launches from Cosmost and prayed for adventure? Now, his “friends” were embarking on that adventure, while he had been left behind. Again.
And yet he knew it wasn’t the worst thing after all. He had tasted the stars once, briefly soared over the lawn of the labyrinth. It had been extraordinary, but he realized now that his place was on the ground.
He felt very lucky that his wings hadn’t melted before he understood.
EPILOGUE
He had decided to look up his half brother and sister—on his request, Áquilar had discovered they were still in the Bay Area—and see if there might be a relationship to be had there. He was leaving that afternoon, but he had a visit to make before he departed.
It was a beautiful day in Los Angeles, the November light gentle on the citrus trees. He stepped through the French doors into Áquilar’s courtyard, where they had gathered in what seemed like another lifetime. He found Val convalescing on a divan.
“No peace for the wicked,” she said.
He sat down across from her. “You recovered fast.”
“Not really. They just said I was too mean to the nurses. Kicked me out of the infirmary.”
“Impossible to believe.”
They laughed.
“Sorry you had to give up on your childhood dream,” she said.
He thought about it. “Maybe it was time for me to let go of childhood.”
She smiled. “Did the boss tell you she’s running for president?”
“Yeah, she informed me of her grand plans upstairs.”
“She’s invited me to work on her campaign.”
“I thought you had no use for politicians?”
“I don’t,” she said. “But I figured there has to be another way to change the world besides shooting people.”
“I hope so.”
“Why don’t you come work on the campaign with us? Help us retire Guerrero. Get these camps closed once and for all.”
“I think I’d be afraid that Áquilar would steal my other leg.”
“So, what are your plans? A cabin by a lake, like she promised you?”
“I renegotiated my deal. Got her to give me something else instead.”
Geographically, the internment camp in southern Arizona was much different from Gypsum. The land was flatter, the mountains more distant, the environment still and scorching instead of windy and frigid.
The camp itself looked much the same, though—the barracks, chow hall, med shells, fences, command center. The only thing missing was the school.
But Áquilar had promised him resources to get one up here, and then at the next camp, and the next one, until a staffed school existed at every camp and was maintained and operated until the camps closed. He had selected fellow teachers to train, and they were there in the classroom, observing him on his first day back.
The prisoners entered, mostly Nibelungs, clutching their reading pads uncertainly. They took their seats and regarded him with curiosity but also recognition because he looked like them now, battled-damaged and scarred where his augmentation and EVs had been stripped out. A necessity to regain access to the camps, not that he had wanted to keep them anyway.
He had thought of them as sheep once, but now he saw that their eyes shone with the desire to learn, to engage with the world, perhaps even to try to be better. Or maybe they had always wanted to be better, and he was just now realizing it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Green is a writer and professor of film studies and creative writing. He grew up in Tempe, Arizona, where he still lives despite the ever more oppressive heat. There, he earned his MFA in Creative Writing and his MA in Humanities at Arizona State University.
He was weaned on ‘80s sci-fi — Star Wars and Star Trek, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Robocop, and John Carpenter’s The Thing — which still informs his vision and sensibilities to this day. Other jobs he has held include wildland firefighter, film critic, AI prompt engineer, and Domino’s delivery driver.
Afterburn is his third book after his graduate thesis, The Sepulchral City, and Escape from Aqualand, starring a roster of DC heroes, which he wrote (and illustrated!) when he was seven. He is currently at work on his next novel, which will undoubtedly win him a Pulitzer Prize.
www.michaelbodhigreenwriter.com
Michael Bodhi Green, Afterburn
