In This New World for bluedreaming (2/2)
7. Now
It turned out they needn’t have searched very far for the brigands. They had been camped out at an abandoned diner, off the beaten path and up on a hillside-a good vantage point to survey hapless travelers. Their location was discovered by Hongbin and Hyeri, who’d been out as scouts. They made a good scouting combo-Hyeri was quick and agile; Hongbin had the muscle. At any rate, once the duo returned, it was time to talk strategy.
Hakyeon reluctantly went along, contributing to the effort given that he didn’t have a choice, and would have preferred to get this over with as soon as possible. The youths jumped into the planning with relish, while Sojin remained quietly pragmatic. In Hakyeon’s opinion, this was when she was most dangerous-not when her eyes were alight with the passion of combat or sex; firing at alien invaders or raking her fingernails across Hakyeon’s skin; strong legs snapping alien limbs beneath her boot or locking around Hakyeon’s waist. Passion, she had no shortage of. It constantly simmered beneath the surface, fierce in its release, but deadly in its restraint.
They mounted their attack at dusk, in the cover of semidarkness. With their inferior numbers and ammo, they had to be quick and clever. They would prefer to avoid direct combat, as the entire point of the operation was simply to regain their belongings. After quickly and efficiently dispatching the brigands’ sentries-no great task, since, in their blustery complacence, the men were not exactly on high alert. Once inside, the group found the other brigands eating their dinner, which consisted largely of the ramen packs and ravioli cans snatched from their latest victims.
The leader of the brigands was not impressed as the group made their presence known. “So, back for more, huh?”
“As one of your helpful sentries informed us after some light persuasion,” Jaehwan began, “we found your armory. We’ve taken the liberty of rigging this shithole with some of that dynamite you stored up. You cross us, we light this place up like a Christmas tree.”
“Our requests are simple, really,” Hongbin jumped in. “We want our stuff back. With a small interest charge for making us go through the trouble of coming here.”
“And eating our food,” Hyeri jumped in. “I really had to hustle to get all that ramen.”
“You don’t have the balls,” the brigand leader declared.
“Try us.”
A bullet crashed through the window, whizzing through the air and embedding itself in the opposite wall-courtesy of sharp-shooter Yura, positioned outside. They had needed some insurance if the dynamite bluff didn’t work. The brigands whirled to face the broken window, but saw nothing.
“Next one won’t miss,” Jaehwan warned.
The brigand leader surveyed him coolly. “You think I haven’t run into a million young blowhards like yourself since the aliens took over? Young men who like to talk big, act tough, but in the end, ain’t got the goods to go through with it. This is a new world, kid. It ain’t pretty, but it is what it is. You aren’t be the first to challenge me, and you won’t be the last.”
Weapons were drawn. It was a standoff.
“Look, we don’t want any trouble.” Startling everyone, Hakyeon stepped forward, slowly lowering his weapon. Setting it on the ground in front of him, he stood up, hands held up in a gesture of surrender. The others all gazed at him in a mixture of shock and confusion. He ignored them.
“We’re just looking to survive, just like you. All we want is our stuff back. Otherwise, we’re sitting ducks.”
“And that’s my problem why?”
“You can’t hide out here forever, robbing people and stockpiling ammo,” Hakyeon pointed out. “You’ve been lucky the aliens haven’t found you yet. But they will, and you can’t win.”
“Who says they haven’t found us?” Something seemed to shift in the man’s tone, and Hakyeon recognized the haunted look that came over his eyes. That familiar cocktail of despair, fear, grief, and rage.
“You’ve lost someone.”
“We’ve all lost someone. What’s your point?”
“I saw them die,” Hakyeon said. “My friends. Right before my eyes. I was the only one left. For a long time, I felt guilty about that-unworthy. Wondering why I got to live, and they didn’t. Wondering what the point of my survival was, and not theirs. Wondering why I was here and what the point was.”
“Son, ain’t nobody got time for your kumbaya speech,” the brigand leader deadpanned. “They died, we lived. That’s just the reality.”
“I’ve been where you are,” Hakyeon went on. “Drifting, not knowing how to live in this new world. Maybe I still don’t know. I just know there has to be a better way than this. Think about who you lost. Is this what they’d want? Would they be pleased if they could see what you’ve become?”
“Don’t you bring my wife and kid into this!” the man exclaimed. “You don’t know what they’d want. But I do. They’d want me to live. They’d want me to live as long as I can and take as many of the alien bastards as I can with me.”
“And if we work together, we can do that.”
The man’s finger wavered on the trigger of his shotgun.
“Come on, put down the gun,” Hakyeon coaxed, slowly extending his hand. “We can talk about this, have some dinner. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
His hand extended, he edged forward. The brigand leader continued to aim his gun, showing no signs of surrendering it anytime soon.
“Go on and blow us all up, then,” he declared, “because that’s when I’d ever-“
A shot went off. Blood sprayed across the front of Hakyeon’s shirt and over his chin and jaw. Eyes wide and unseeing, mouth still open in mid-sentence, the brigand leader slumped to the floor was red blossomed across his shirt and pooled at Hakyeon’s feet.
Hakyeon’s head snapped up. Sojin stood before him, shotgun held high, a look of steely resolve across her face. Hakyeon stared at her, but she seemed unfazed.
“He wasn’t going to back down till one of you was dead,” she said. “I’d rather it not be you.”
Without any further commentary, she lowered her gun and walked away.
8. Before
Night had fallen over Los Angeles, the balmy summer breeze wafting through the mansion, which had soon grown uncomfortably warm-power was on the fritz again, and so was the ceiling fan suspended above the bed that Hakyeon and Sojin shared.
He woke to find her side of it empty, as he often did, but the sheets still felt warm. She hadn’t awakened long ago. Swinging his feet off his side of the bed, he tugged on his jeans and and a black singlet, padding out of the room on bare feet.
No one else in the mansion seemed to be awake-at least, he didn’t hear anyone. Hongbin and Yura were sacked out on the plush leather couches in the living room, with Hyuk asleep in his bedroll on the floor. They were sharing night watch detail with Won-shik and Taekwoon. Out on the patio, Hakyeon spotted a familiar flash of red.
Tiptoeing around his sleeping friends, he made his way outside to join Sojin. She sat on one of the patio chairs donning Hakyeon’s shirt over a pair of his boxers, her feet bare and her legs long and pale in the light of the waxing moon. She had a bottle in her hand-merlot, not even bothering with a glass-and was gazing over the inky expanse of the valley, only a few scattered lights breaking through the darkness. There was a time not long ago when the valley would’ve been alight even in the middle of the night, the city lights casting a soft amber glow on the horizon.
The sky was mostly clear, a few clouds drifting across the indigo backdrop and the occasional pinprick of stubborn starlight glinting against it.
“You still can’t see the stars out here,” she remarked. “Looks like the apocalypse only made the smog even worse.”
“Those aliens are not abiding by air pollution laws.”
Sojin didn’t smile, just took another long swig of wine.
Hakyeon took the bottle from her and did the same.
They sat in silence for a while, gazing up at the sky, trying to remember a time when the stars didn’t turn into massive alien ships that blew up cities and massacred half the human population.
“I wonder if they fucked up their own planet,” Sojin remarked. “Maybe they polluted it and strip-mined it so bad they had to find another one.”
“If that’s true, they picked some damaged goods.”
Sojin shrugged. “We still exist.”
“Maybe they made their own doomsday weapon and now their planet’s in pieces,” Hakyeon suggested. “Or it got sucked into a singularity or something.”
“Or maybe their planet’s still fine, but they just wanted to go invade another one because they could.”
More silence.
“We won’t make it easy for them.”
“Won’t we?” Sojin countered. “When it’s this hard just to survive, how are we ever going to get our shit together to actually do some damage?”
“We can’t be all that’s left,” Hakyeon insisted. “There are others. We just need to find them. We just need time.”
“What is even their point?” Sojin wanted to know. “What is their endgame? Why don’t they just kill us and finish the job?”
“Maybe they can’t. Maybe we’re like that house on Hoarders, you know, the one with all the rats. Even when the animal rescue people got all the rats they could see, there were still a ton more, hiding in the woodwork and stuff. It took a long time to ferret them all out, and we’re smarter than rats.”
“Debatable.”
That, Hakyeon had to smile at.
“And you know, they’re not the interstellar humane society. They don’t adopt us out to loving alien families after catching us.”
Hakyeon was silent. So was she. They each helped themselves to more wine.
“They didn’t kill my husband, you know,” she said. “I did.”
Hakyeon gazed at her.
“They captured him. But then they sent him back to me. He was….” Her voice trailed off.
No one Hakyeon knew of had lived through capture by the aliens. This was the first time he’d ever heard of them releasing someone.
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
She shook her head, gathering strength and taking another long pull of wine. “He… I thought he escaped. He was mute. I thought he was traumatized. I wasn’t going to push him. I thought he’d be OK until I saw… until I saw his eyes. They weren’t human eyes.
“I knew right then that he was gone. The man I knew was gone. He wanted to take me back with him. I said no, but he wouldn’t accept it. So I killed him. Shot him right between the eyes with the very same gun I’ve been taking out aliens with.”
Her gaze was fixed straight ahead. Hakyeon reached out instinctively, curling his hand over hers and resting both of their hands on her knee. She didn’t pull away.
“It was self-defense.”
She shook her head. “I told myself that. But in truth… I couldn’t see him that way. He was one of them… one of them wearing my husband’s skin. He wouldn’t want to be that… thing. So I ended it.”
“You did what you had to do.”
She shook her head again, but this time she didn’t reply.
“It’s not your fault,” Hakyeon insisted. “None of it is your fault. They did this to us. You did what you thought was right.”
“But what’s right anymore?” Sojin demanded. “What kind of world is it where killing a man is doing the right thing?”
“He wasn’t a man anymore.”
“What kind of world is it where a man isn’t a man anymore?”
That, he had no answer to. “I don’t know.”
They lapsed back into silence after that, while, far off in the valley, one of the lights went out.
9. Now
The group took no time to regroup from their temporary setback. They set off promptly the next day, having replenished their food, medical supplies, and ammo supplies. The remaining members of the brigand gang were left in peace at the diner, with the food and ammo they’d originally had before robbing the travelers-well, a little less, as the latter group had seen fit to charge some interest for their troubles.
Hakyeon rode beside Sojin at the front of the pack. He hadn’t spoken to her yet except for impersonal, necessary communication about the journey. She’d done what she had to do, and she’d been right. But it would take him a while before he forgot the cold, numb look in her eyes as she did the grisly deed.
“Everyone, be on high alert,” Hakyeon announced. “We’re heading into alien territory.” According to the remaining members of the brigand group, bands of alien troops had been sighted in the area.
The group stopped at midday for a rest and a meal at an abandoned service station. The adjacent convenience store had been mostly picked clean, though the group managed to recover some items. As Hakyeon enjoyed a meager meal of fritos and some beef jerky, he noticed Sojin sitting several feet away, tinkering with her radio. She was still working on that thing?
She saw him watching, and shrugged. “Might as well. If the militia is listening, they’ll know we’re coming.”
“You get anything yet?”
She shook her head. “Sent out transmissions in four languages. Nothing yet.”
“You speak four languages?”
An arch smile flashed on her face, the first time he’d seen her smile since… the incident. “I’m a complex woman.”
That’s for sure, Hakyeon thought.
“About the diner thing….” He fidgeted, hesitating to meet her eyes. “You made the right call.”
“You did your best.”
“I know.” It just wasn’t enough. “You saved my life back there. Thanks.”
“You’d have done the same for me.”
Would he? Did he really have the capacity to kill someone ? Killing aliens was different-they’d come to Earth to conquer, and would cut him and anyone else down without a second thought. With the aliens, it was kill or be killed. He wondered, briefly, if there were any who didn’t feel that way. Any who didn’t care to exterminate the humans, but were just doing what they were ordered to do. The thought disturbed him. Though he was sure the aliens had a way of communicating amongst themselves, he had never seen any discord in their ranks. For all he knew, though, the ones attacking them were low-level grunts. None of the group had ever encountered one of the higher-ups before. The troops all seemed singlemindedly focused on one thing only-kill or capture.
But humans… he’d never killed a human before this war. He’d actually never killed a human before this day. Even when he was scavenging in the city, he’d kept to himself before falling in with Sojin and the group. He’d seen other humans kill each other over scraps in the debris of a ruined convenience store. But he’d never done it. He couldn’t bring himself to.
But has he looked down at Sojin, skilled fingers tinkering with dials on the radio, brow furrowed in concentration… he’d do anything for her.
Suddenly, shouts rang out from the opposite side of the camp. Hakyeon and Sojin craned their necks to see Won-shik running toward them. “Aliens. Hongbin and I spotted a mess of ‘em while on patrol. About a dozen, I’d say. They’re heading this way.”
10. Now
“Shit,” Hakyeon cursed under his breath. To the rest of the group, he announced, “Incoming hostiles, everyone take cover and be ready for combat.”
The group scattered and got into battle position, waiting. Hakyeon ducked down behind a dilapidated and half-rusted pickup truck alongside Sojin, Jaehwan, and Hyuk. The youth’s eyes glimmered with barely-concealed adrenaline; he shouldered his rifle with purpose and zeal. Hakyeon could not share his excitement. The kid relished combat in an unsettling way, particularly given how little combat he’d actually seen. That was probably why he relished it. Hakyeon almost envied the kid his innocence, but did not envy him the moment he would lose it.
It began with shouts and an explosion of gunfire. A small company of alien troops, they could handle. Hakyeon and Sojin took out one the troops with a bit of teamwork; even Hyuk got in a lucky shot or two. The three of them then aided Jaehwan in taking out another. The aliens were being knocked over like rolling pins. A shiver of uneasiness slid down Hakyeon’s spine. This is too easy.
Suddenly, more gunshots exploded through the air-and those shots were coming toward them. “The hell?” Jaehwan yelled, his head swiveling wildly about to find the source of the gunfire. It wasn’t any of their own.
“The bandits!” Hyuk exclaimed. Sure enough, Hakyeon recognized the motley crew advancing upon them in trucks and jeeps-followed by alien troops in their own strange land vehicles. He’d encountered them a few times before, and they were like nothing he had ever seen-reminiscent of tanks, but sleeker, more streamlined. Coated in a glossy metal alloy, their shape seemed vaguely biological, curved like muscle and sinew and infinitely stronger. Bullets bounced off the hull like they were made of rubber, including the narrow window curving around the front of the vehicle and the other up in the turret. The windows must have been made of a transparent metal alloy, because they sure didn’t shatter like glass.
Shit, shit, shit.
“So what, they’re alien sympathizers now?” Jaehwan wanted to know.
“No.” Sojin’s face had drained of color as she gazed upon their new set of attackers.
“They turned them,” Hakyeon explained hastily. “When they capture us, they make us one of them.”
“But how?” Hyuk wanted to know. “Brainwashing?”
“It’s the eyes,” Sojin murmured. “When they come closer, you can see their eyes. They are not human eyes.”
“Well, we’re not letting them get that close,” Jaehwan declared. “Everyone, open fire!”
They did, though Hakyeon recognized the futility of the order even as he fulfilled it. From her expression, he knew Sojin did as well. They were screwed. They were outgunned, outmanned, and outmaneuvered. Even as the group retreated back into the cover of the gas station, he knew it was only a matter of time.
Jaehwan knew it too, but he wasn’t going down without a fight. Neither was any of them. He fired maniacally until he was out of ammo, switched weapons, and fired some more while Hyuk reloaded for him. Sojin ran out of ammo on her rifle and now brandished two handguns, firing simultaneously. The bandits fell one by one-they might have been turned, but they were still human, with all of the human weaknesses and vulnerabilities. But before the last one fell-a man, barely older than Hyuk-he got close enough for Hakyeon to see his eyes. They were inhumanly wide, pupils black and dilated, blank and utterly, terrifyingly empty.
These people were not human anymore.
The aliens were overtaking them, now that their human cannon fodder was mostly taken care of. Still, Hakyeon kept fighting, firing round after round. He thought he saw Hyuk go down beside him. He was out of ammo. Sojin was still firing. It wouldn’t be long until she ran out.
So Hakyeon did the only thing he could think to do. Throwing himself between her and the approaching alien attacker, he fought viciously, first with guns then with his knife. He felt the satisfying slide of metal against alien flesh as the blade sunk into his assailants vulnerable neck, but then his vision blurred, large red dots spreading until they all blended together. He thought he heard Sojin screaming. But the red was overtaking him, fading into black, and finally into nothing.
It was over.
***
“If he lives, I’m going to kill him.”
“Sojin….”
Viciously, she yanked the soiled bandage across her own leg, flinching at the pain. “We have to go get him.”
“You know firsthand what they do to their prisoners,” Jaehwan reminded her.
“We have to get him,” she insisted. Her eyes were wild, red-rimmed, flashing with terror and desperation. Her memories of the final moments of the battle were hazy, but enough to recall Hakyeon being the foolhardy asshole he always was and throwing himself in front of her as she emptied the last of her two clips. She wanted to help him-was ready to plunge into the fight-until Jaehwan grabbed her, dragging her back. She fought him with the ferocity of a lioness, and eventually Hongbin had to come over and help him. Hyuk’s prone body lay next to Hakyeon’s, and the surviving aliens were dragging the two of them back to their vehicle.
Still fighting her two friends, Sojin eventually passed out, likely from blood loss from a wound in her leg she hadn’t realized she had. It turned out to be a phase burn, not so severe it was life-threatening, but enough to knock her out for a bit and cause her to walk with a limp now that Taekwoon had fixed it.
“They got Hyuk, too,” Jaehwan reminded her, his own eyes clouding over at the loss of the young man he’d all but taken under his wing. “But we need to face the possibility that our people… might not be themselves if we see them again.”
“We won’t know unless we get them.”
“And I agree,” Jaehwan reasoned. “But we can’t just go rushing in half-cocked. We need a plan.”
“We need him.”
A silence fell over the two of them. The others were busy licking their wounds and regrouping as best they could in the cover of the convenience store’s stockroom-fortunately, they’d recovered some goods that could be used for first aid. Sojin was only interested in the bottle of cheap vodka that Taekwoon had used for the double duty of disinfection and anesthesia.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered.
“What for?”
“Your eye.”
“My eye? …. Oh, that. It’s nothing,” Jaehwan assured her. A deep bruise had blossomed above one eye, part of the damage Sojin had done while struggling against him. “Remind me never to piss you off.”
“Too late.”
Neither of them laughed at the joke.
“We’ll get him,” Jaehwan assured her.
***
“We are human survivors of the alien invasion, currently in… shit, I don’t even know where the fuck we are anymore. Somewhere in central Cali south of the bay. If anyone can here us, please answer.”
The radio’s speakers responded with nothing but the dull hum of static.
Sojin wanted to throw something, but she valued both the radio and the bottle of vodka beside it too much, so she settled for slumping back against the wall of the stockroom and draining the last of the bottle. She’d been broadcasting the message in every language she knew for the past half hour or so, though the broadcasts got steadily more nonsensical the more she drank. The phase burn on her left leg throbbed mightily, the angriest of the aches and pains she’d accumulated from the battle She’d forgone any painkillers more potent than the vodka, as Taekwoon needed them to treat those more seriously injured. She had to keep going. She had to keep doing something.
She had to stop seeing Hakyeon staring at her as her husband had, his eyes the same empty pools of black.
She threw the now-empty vodka bottle.
“Whoa, easy there. It’s just me,” a male voice piped up.
Through the haze of alcohol and her pounding headache, Sojin glanced up to see Jaehwan standing before her, concern etched across his handsome features.
“You OK?” he asked.
“Peachy.”
“You’re right; it was a stupid question.” Sidestepping the broken glass, he slowly sank down beside her. “No luck with the radio, huh?”
She didn’t answer. The others were resting, tending to their wounds, trying to regroup as best they could. Sojin let them do it without her. She’d been leading this group with Hakyeon for too long. They’d gotten them this far. They’d gotten people killed and he, among others, abducted.
Real bang-up leadership job there.
“He’s tough,” Jaehwan tried to assure her. “It’ll take more than an evening to break him.”
“How would you know?” she fired back. “We have no idea what they do to them. We don’t know how they turn them or how to turn them back, or if we even can.”
A longer stretch of silence. She felt Jaehwan’s eyes on her, sensed his sympathy, his helplessness. It made her want to scream.
“I can’t do this again!” To her horror, a sob seemed to catch in her throat on the words. She forced it back. “Not to him. Not to Hakyeon.”
Jaehwan seemed mildly startled by her outburst, not knowing what she meant-she’d only ever told Hakyeon about her husband. Jaehwan didn’t ask her, though. “You won’t have to. If… if it ever comes down to that, which it won’t, I’ll do it for you.”
“No, I have to do it,” Sojin insisted, despite her earlier words. “It has to be me.”
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Jaehwan said. “We’re all in this together. You and Hakyeon got us this far. Now, let us fight for you.”
“We got you into this mess.”
“Hey, we all decided, remember? We chose to find the militia. You have got to stop taking responsibility for everything, Sojin. You are not our sin-eater.”
“But I am,” she mumbled. “It’s the only thing I know how to do. Hakyeon’s the hero. I’m the sin-eater.”
“No, you’re not.”
But Sojin was too tired to argue anymore. She was rapidly succumbing to the vodka and the headache and the injuries and the all-consuming, numbing, oppressive exhaustion.
She barely noticed as Jaehwan tucked his folded-up jacket under head as a makeshift pillow and pulled her own tattered coat over her prone form.
11. Now
It was dark. There was a buzzing noise, like the distant hum of bees. The buzzing grew louder, closer. Deeper. Harsher. Then the buzzing was in his head, pounding in his brain, pushing against his skull and trying to explode outward.
Hakyeon’s eyes flew open. Light lanced through his retinas like white-hot blades and he flinched, squeezing his eyes shut against the onslaught. As he cautiously cracked one open again, he realized the light was like nothing he’d seen before. It wasn’t sunlight, wasn’t any artificial light invented by humans. It was hard for him to describe. It was just different.
It was alien.
Everything hurt. His limbs ached; his head throbbed, a combination of a splitting headache and a sharp stabbing external pain. His hair felt plastered to his forehead; sticky and wet. He tried to raise a hand to push it aside and realized he couldn’t. Pain shot through his arm as he tugged; both wrists were bound at his side with something freakishly strong. He wiggled his legs and found his ankles also bound. A hard, cool surface bit into his back, and he concluded he must be bolted down to a table or slab.
At least he could still move his head. Turning to left, he saw another table a few feet away from him, a man also bolted to its surface. Hyuk. With a shiver of dread, Hakyeon peered at the table beyond Hyuk and saw a female figure there. Blood matted the locks of short hair falling across her cheek, but he recognized Hyeri. Turning to his other side, Hakyeon glimpsed another man, Won-shik. Even further beyond Hyeri were more humans, but he didn’t recognize them.
They all lay within a cavernous and windowless room, which seemed to pulse and hum like a living thing. The light glaring into Hakyeon’s eyes prevented him from getting a look at the ceiling, but he did catch get a glimpse of the walls. They seemed constructed of material resembling living tissue, coated in some kind of thick hide. Heavy beams of metal alloy were threaded among the tissue, snaking their way up to the ceiling. Hakyeon almost retched. A seamless blend of technology and biology. It was grotesque and beautiful.
Even his restraints seemed to be made of this living tissue, and actually seemed to tighten the more he struggled. His hands began to tingle from the circulation being cut off, and he reluctantly relaxed his body. After a moment, the blood rushed back into his limbs, stinging like a thousand tiny needles.
He tried to call Hyuk’s name. His voice came out hoarse and barely audible. His mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton, his throat parched and rough as sandpaper.
Where the hell were they?
Suddenly screams-human screams-rent the air. Harsh and animalistic, they were the kind of agonized screams that sent chills down Hakyeon’s spine and wrapped around him like icy fingers. If he were religious, he would have prayed for it to stop, for this poor soul to be delivered in whatever way he could be, even death. But the screams kept going, the seconds stretching out interminably, until finally the voice grew hoarser and softer and mercifully stopped.
Hakyeon heard clicking noises sprinkled with a few low grunts, sounds he’d come to associate with their alien invaders. The sounds were getting closer. He closed his eyes and kept his head immobile, hoping if he still appeared unconscious they’d pass him by.
Footsteps. They were too light, too regular, to belong to the aliens. The latter tended to lumber along when they weren’t in combat-then, they became terrifyingly quick and agile given their size. No, these were human footsteps. Hakyeon partially opened one eye, peering through the narrow slit between his eyelids. The sight before him almost made him recoil. There stood a man, a stranger, who surely should have been dead-his arm was broken and twisted at a grotesque angle; blood matted his hair from a gaping head wound. The man turned, and Hakyeon could see his eyes-pupils huge and dilated and pitch-black, devoid of all humanity. The whites were bright crimson, blood oozing from the corners of the eyes and cutting grotesque tracks through the grime on the man’s cheeks.
Grunting like one of the aliens, the man grasped his injured arm and, without even flinching, yanked the joint back into place with a sickening crack. Over the course of barely a few minutes, the limb seemed to regenerate, bones mending and flesh knitting. What the hell had the aliens done to him?
The human turned, not seeming to register Hakyeon on his radar, and walked straight ahead without a second glance. Hakyeon momentarily sagged with relief. If this man could do what he’d done to himself, he didn’t want to imagine what he’d do to someone else. More clicking. Through his partially open eye, Hakyeon glimpsed another alien. Out of its armor, it looked almost like an extension of the fleshy part of the walls-hunched, hulking, grotesque. It donned a kind of drab robelike garment, a hood pulled over its large head and partially obscuring its face. A hand emerged from one of the sleeves, freakishly long, talonlike fingers curled around a container of some kind. Pausing beside the human on the table beyond Hyeri, the alien reached into the container and pulled something out.
The thing was long and stringy, almost like a worm. Holding the hapless human’s eye open, the alien dangled the worm thing over it. Hakyeon watched in horror as the worm thing slithered right into the human’s eye, followed by another as the alien dropped more of the worms onto its victim. The man’s other eye flew open, and then the screaming began.
Forgetting himself, Hakyeon started to struggle again. The restraints tightened, viselike, around his limbs, cutting into his flesh and becoming slick with his blood. He was going to die in here. He, Hyeri, Hyuk, Won-shik… they were going to die, and it was going to be more horrific than anything he could have imagined.
He hadn’t seen Sojin or Jaehwan anywhere. If they’d gotten away, that meant others might have escaped, too. At least they’d be spared this fate. That is, provided they didn’t try to play hero and rescue them.
If they were smart, they wouldn’t come. They would give us up for the lost cause we are. They wouldn’t be that foolhardy. Sojin wouldn’t be that foolhardy.
Except that she would be, and Hakyeon knew it. It was probably why he loved her.
The bitter irony struck him that it took being bolted to a table in some creepy alien lab, about to die horribly, for him to have this realization.
He loved her enough to pray that she wouldn’t come for him. He loved her enough to pray that when he did return to her, that she would find the strength to save them both and land a bullet right between his vacant black eyes.
12. Now
As Sojin lay in the convenience store stockroom, mired down by a deep, drugging sleep, the radio beside her crackled to life.
***
The town of Monterey, California, was known for two things: a tourist destination, and a military base. The base had been leveled in the initial invasion, but the site where it once stood had been repurposed. It served as the landing site for one of the aliens’ grander aircraft. The vehicle was small and streamlined enough to cut through the Earth’s atmosphere with ease, yet large enough to house a fully functional lab, transport several terrestrial vehicles, and pack enough firepower to light up a city, if it must. Vehicles similar to these had brought the aliens down to Earth after their orbiting military vessels took out the military bases and major population centers from space. Though the humans were still reeling from the mass destruction, the invaders could not afford to take chances.
As it was, the remaining stragglers of the humans’ military had gotten in a few lucky shots and downed a couple of the alien shuttles. However, most of them made it to the surface unscathed to begin the aliens’ ground campaign. They were in the habit of adopting human military sites as their own bases of operation, with an overlord on site issuing orders to his subordinates. What little remained of the infrastructure after the bombings could be co-opted by the alien forces to defend their shuttle, though even grounded it still had the capacity to blast any incoming charges to kingdom come.
Which was why the rescue mission had to be clever. Tracking down the base had not been difficult-the aliens didn’t seem to care how much damage their vehicles did to the terrain. However, once the group discovered the base, infiltrating the seemingly impregnable fortress would be another matter. But eventually, they did find a way.
They had made this discovery by accident while patrolling the area. Hongbin and Yura had stumbled upon a line of captured and turned humans, guarding the perimeter with their alien weapons. They came back to report their findings, and an idea took shape among the remaining group members. They’d hijack a small group of turned humans, incapacitate them, steal their alien weapons, and wait until another group came along to follow inside the compound.
The catch was, of course, that nobody would think to look at their eyes, and that none of the turned humans would recognize the imposters in their midst.
But did they have any choice?
The plan also gave them time to familiarize themselves with the alien weaponry. They carried rifles similar to those that humans did, but they fired laser beams instead of bullets. The alien rifles were much lighter than human ones, didn’t require reloading, and were fairly intuitive when it came to firing. The different settings took some figuring out (the group took out some unfortunate tree branches in the process) but they soon felt comfortable enough to use them if necessary.
Once inside the compound, the mission was simple-get their people, and get the hell out of there.
None of the survivors dared to voice the fear they all privately harbored-that they might see one of their people among these brainwashed human soldiers.
Getting in went according to plan. It was actually surprising how oblivious with aliens were within their own sanctum-so confident were they that humans wouldn’t find their way in unless they were brought there, they didn’t think to check for interlopers. Sojin suppressed a shudder as she and Jaehwan passed through the cargo bay door of the huge shuttle, marching past row upon row of the terrestrial vehicles before arriving at a massive lift.
She reacted to the ship’s inside with simultaneous awe and revulsion-the mechanical engineer in her marveled at the complexity and brilliance of the biomechanical hybrid; the human in her recoiled at the walls of skin, metal, and tissue. Jaehwan walked in front of her, and though he kept his poker face on, she saw the full-body shudder he gave as he took in his surroundings.
Once off the lift, they continued to follow the other turned humans, mentally clocking every turn and corridor. They came to a stop outside of a door where the line of humans waited. A moment later the door slid open, and an alien donning a robelike garment appeared in the doorway, luminescent eyes narrowing as it scanned the line of humans in front of it. The eyes came to a stop on Sojin and Jaehwan.
They’d been made.
“Showtime,” Jaehwan muttered.
***
Hakyeon stopped struggling.
At some point, he had begun to realize the futility of the gesture. His wrists and ankles bruised and bloodied and no closer to freedom than before, he forced himself to think. He had to do something. He couldn’t let his people fall victim to this horror.
The alien stopped in front of Hyeri. Gripping the container, it plucked a worm out and dangled it above her eye.
“No!” Miraculously, Hakyeon seemed to find his voice. “Not her! Take me first!”
The alien glanced up, mildly startled, most likely because it wasn’t used to its victims waking up before the grisly procedure. Its glassy eyes narrowed. It made some vague clicking sounds as it regarded him, then began walking toward him.
As the alien loomed above him, Hakyeon realized with a sinking heart that he hadn’t really done anything for Hyeri but postpone the inevitable. So he’d get turned first. The poor young woman wasn’t even conscious, let alone in any position to escape. But he’d cried out in desperation, on impulse.
At least he could make it as hard for this asshole as possible. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“No!”
His eyes flew open at the sound of the shout. Phase fire whirred about him, one beam flashing above his body and slicing into the arm of the alien standing over him. The alien gave a sharp screech of pain and dropped the container, worms wiggling across the floor and a few scattered stragglers falling on Hakyeon. He struggled vigorously as the worms slithered across his body, trying to find any possible orifice to crawl into. His black t-shirt shirt was tucked into his pants and covered his torso, but it wouldn’t take them long to make their way up to his neck.
More phase fire. The alien standing above him went down. Suddenly, the pressure on his ankles was released, and then on his wrist. He swiveled his head to behold a vision so welcome he’d have wondered if it were the afterlife, if the painful rush of blood to his feet weren’t so very real. Sojin stood beside the table, her knife slicing through his restraints, which emitted haunting shrieks of agony and as the severed bits wiggled about. She grimaced, briefly shaking drops of their greenish blood from her fingers. With his free hand, Hakyeon swatted away the remaining worms while Sojin freed his other wrist.
“I’d say you were a sight for sore eyes, but….”
“Still making bad puns. You’re fine.”
Sliding his legs off the table, he grasped her arm as he stood up. “Hyeri….”
“Jaehwan’s got her. Hyuk too. Hongbin’s freeing Won-shik now.”
Phase fire still flew about the lab as the group gathered up the last of their people as well as the remaining unturned humans.
“Where’d you get the alien gear?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“I’m holding you to that. Don’t suppose you’ve got another for me?”
Sojin withdrew a pistol from her boot and tossed it to Hakyeon. “You think I’d only show up with one firearm?”
“You’re a regular girl scout.”
The group made their way out or the lab, sidestepping bodies of aliens and turned humans. Hakyeon’s stomach churned violently, but there was nothing they could do for them now. The alien ship had been alerted to the rebels’ presence, and troops had amassed in the corridor ready to open fire.
“You guys got anything else up your sleeves?” Hakyeon wanted to know. “Now would be the time.”
“Only this.” Jaehwan produced a grenade and lobbed it at the approaching troops.
“I take it this base doesn’t have metal detectors?”
“Seriously? My high school had tighter security.”
Turning and running as far as they could in the opposite direction, they hit the ground as the blast razed through the corridor behind them. Unfortunately, the debris blocked their path to the lift, and the group was forced to find another way off the ship. They hadn’t made it far when they encountered another wall of alien troops. They were trapped.
“I don’t suppose you have another one of those?” Hakyeon asked Jaehwan.
“You don’t even want to know where I had to hide that one.”
“We’re surrounded, aren’t we?” Sojin asked.
Hakyeon turned to her. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid time?”
Gripping her rifle with one hand, Sojin reached out with her free hand. Hakyeon shifted the pistol in his other hand and reached for hers. Clasping hands, they raised their weapons, looking not at the aliens but at each other.
So he was going to die today after all. But at least this way, it was on his own terms, as his own person, with the people who had at some point in the past several months become his second family. With the woman he loved. If their fate was to go down in a blaze of gunfire together, well, it would have been worth it.
She’d saved him one last time.
They fired.
They were still firing when they realized that no one was firing back. Startled, their hands still clasped tightly, Hakyeon and Sojin looked up. The alien troops were falling like dominoes, the corridor echoing with the staccato burst of mass gunfire. Through the increasingly thinning wall of alien troops moved a new set of fighters-human, not turned. They donned human-made clothing and sported human-made weapons. The figure in the front, strikingly tall-almost as much as the aliens-signaled toward the group. “Time to get the hell out of here.”
They ran.
13. Now
“Don’t you ever do that to me again, or I swear I’ll kill you!”
Eyes flashing almost as brilliantly as her hair, Sojin jabbed a finger in Hakyeon’s direction.
He blinked innocently. “Do what?”
“You know what!” She moved toward him, her finger poking him right in the chest. “That hero bullshit. And don’t you tell me you’re just trying to protect me.”
“I think I might be the one who needs protection here.”
Retreating momentarily, she glared at him. “I mean it. You could’ve been killed! You could’ve been….” Her voice trailed off.
“But I wasn’t.” Closing the distance between them, he captured her hand and folded it between his own.
“But what if you were?” she persisted. “Don’t you dare leave me to do this without you.”
It was the closest to vulnerable he’d ever seen her. It startled him. Humbled him.
“You know what the only thing on my mind was the whole time I was there?” he asked. “Coming back to you-as me, not one of their… you know.”
“I do.” There was no escaping the haunted look in her eyes at the mention of the topic. Maybe it would never go away, just as the vision of his friends and colleagues dying before his eyes never would. But he and Sojin were both still here. And as long as they were, there was still something to fight for. To live for. To die for. It wasn’t enough to merely stay alive in this strange, violent new world. There was no point in humans surviving if humanity did not.
They were now in the bedroom they shared at the militia’s underground stronghold. It was far from luxurious, but it was the safest and most secure place they’d had to lay their heads since this all began. The Dragon himself had intercepted Sojin’s radio signal and come to their aid, following the group to the alien stronghold and moving in when things went sideways. Though the battle had been won, the war was far from over. But for the first time, Hakyeon finally allowed himself to feel something he thought he’d forgotten how to.
Hope.
“I’m in love with you, Sojin.”
She blinked, clearly not expecting that. “It took a near-death experience to realize that?”
“Oh, that’s how you respond when I pour out my heart to you?”
“I thought it was stating the obvious.”
He frowned, dropping her hand. “It’s that obvious, huh?”
A hint of a smile tilted her full crimson lips. “You’re not subtle.”
“Oh, really? How’s this for subtlety?”
A shriek escaped her lips as he suddenly snatched her up in his strong arms, carrying her across the room while she halfheartedly kicked and struggled. He tossed her onto the bed as unceremoniously as a sack of ammo and, in a smooth movement, pinned her to the mattress beneath his lean and powerful body.
“Is that supposed to impress me?” she quipped, breathlessly.
“I was hoping for a proper response to what I said earlier.”
“But it’d be under duress.”
“Yeah, you’re really under duress.”
Abruptly, she pushed against him and rolled them both over, so now he lay flat on his back while she straddled his waist. “That’s better.”
He grinned, the woman above him nothing short of a vision in cargo pants and a black singlet, brilliant red hair streaming around her shoulders and backlit by the room’s sole lamp.
“So if I tell you I love you,” she drawled, “do you promise to behave yourself?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then I’m not telling you anything.”
Her smile bloomed, warming him more than the blanket beneath his back. She didn’t have to say it, but he could wait. They had time.