“Look,” Rollo said. “What are those?”

  I remember focusing, turning to stare at the TV again. Openings appeared in the vast starship. Was the network using a satellite to image this? Big ugly…missiles, they must have been missiles, darted out of the ship. They moved like hungry sharks, showing long exhaust tails. The missiles dived into the Earth’s atmosphere and headed in different directions— for different cities, it turned out.

  The next few minutes of TV showed a medley of shouting, panicked confusion. I witnessed Patriot missiles lofting, trying to shoot down what we found out later were thermonuclear annihilators screaming toward U.S. targets. Another brief report told us that the Chinese had a laser defense system that no one had known about. None of it mattered. Earth tech wilted against the alien battleware.

  Beijing vanished in the biggest mushroom cloud the world had ever seen. Los Angeles disappeared. So did New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, Cairo, London, Berlin, Moscow, Bombay and Ho Minh Chin City. As if that wasn’t enough, the aliens dusted the planet with a bio-terminator. It was the last thing I witnessed on the TV, a big drone spraying black spores into the air. That proved the aliens must have known about humanity ahead of time in order to create a biological weapon to kill the survivors. Either that, or that’s what they’d been perfecting for the last thirty-seven hours.

  In the blink of an eye, Judgment Day came to us. It started with Mad Jack Creed and ended with over ninety-nine percent of humanity dead and gone. The nuclear holocaust killed hundreds of millions. The bio-terminator proved worse. Billions choked on black gunk bubbling in their throats, most drowned to death in their own fluids. The few the nukes and mutated spores missed succumbed to radiation poisoning or the horrifyingly new weather patterns.

  The aliens proved to be more like Darth Vader than ET. And that might have been the end of humanity.

  What chance did the final one percent have—actually, less than one percent? The survivors remained in places like Antarctica, where we were.

  I took my rifle out of my locker that day, and never put it back. I yearned to kill aliens. Survivors were left on oil platforms in the Arctic Ocean, in submarines, on deep-sea transports and in Siberia and other remote places. Out of billions, a few million shocked and scattered individuals waited for extinction. A high proportion of them were military or in high-risk occupations. That meant far more men than women survived.

  In the aftermath—although no one knew it yet—women became the most precious commodity left. If Homo sapiens were to escape the Dodo bird’s fate, the last females were going to have to bear plenty of healthy children. Otherwise, in one generation there would be no human race.

  I’d like to say we rose up—the last humans—pitched in together and overcame every obstacle with our native pride, stubbornness and cunning. No, it wasn’t anything like that. It was grimmer, darker and included low-down killing, the kind where we wrestled in the slime, gasping for breath, enduring agony and deep cuts. Our prize was the opportunity to stick a knife in our enemy’s guts.

  Maybe that’s too metaphorical. I don’t know. The thing is the aliens in their monstrous starship made a mistake. They should have finished their filthy deed, exterminating the last of us as if we were cockroaches. Instead…yeah, maybe it’s time to tell this in a direct, linear fashion.

  Before I start, I should add that the last humans were the rough kind: the risk-takers, the lucky, the mean and the tough bastards who worked hard for a living. I was one of them, and I wasn’t a wall-flower nice guy. Not that I was bad—misunderstood most of my life, yeah, but not evil.

  The best place to start would be that fateful day in Antarctica when I met the aliens face to face. I remember it all right. It happened like this…

 

 

  Vaughn Heppner, The Lost Command (Lost Starship Series Book 2)

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on GrayCity.Net
Share this book with friends