Why am I still here? How am I still alive?
She surveyed her shelter with her good eye.
She was beneath Seattle, in a decrepit sewer tunnel left over from the era before the New America program. The tunnel stretched away in both directions, the ceiling thirty feet above her. The dank smell of old sewage had permeated this sanctuary, but it was better than the caustic chemical atmosphere on the surface.
“How’s your eye?” A voice, gentle, quiet, masculine. The man facing her was dressed in a military-issue medical uniform. A pale green glow emerged from the chemlite he carried. Similar glows could be seen throughout the stretch of tunnel visible to her. She shrugged, touched her throat, grimacing.
“Throat’s still bothering you? I’ll bring you something for it.” He gently began to remove the bandage from her face. “Let’s take a look at that eye.” She grew uneasy.
The medic removed the steripad from the left side of her face. It was a deep flesh wound. Thankfully there had been no nerve damage, but she would never regain sight in her left eye without a transplant, and there probably would be a terrible scar, especially with the current state of medicine being practiced. It was wartime, after all. Unfortunate, the medic thought. She really was an attractive woman. Very intriguing…He hated to see her face contorted in pain.
“Try to open your eye.”
She hesitated…
“Go ahead. I won’t bite.” He grinned.
Slowly, tentatively, she opened the eye. She could see only black with the left eye, but with her right she searched the medic’s face for his unspoken opinion.
He tried to conceal his shock at what he saw in her eyes. The right one was a lucid emerald green. A man could become lost in that gaze, he thought.
The left eye was what had surprised him. The iris was a cold, impossibly gray orb. The wound snaked through the iris in a leisurely path of scarlet.
Impossible, the medic thought. She’s a Styx.
She noticed a hint of distress in his eyes…
He knows. She contained her panic. He knows.
He simply misted the wound with an antisept spray and gathered up his things in the ghostly green light.
“I’ll bring a biotic for your throat. As for your eye…” He looked through his kit, took out a small round container. “Let’s see if this will help it heal.” He withdrew a round green disk from the container. He opened the lids of her left eye and covered the wound with the medlens.
She blinked and looked at him in silence. Aside from the red vertical line bisecting her left eye, she was the picture of beauty.
With two green eyes.
“I’ll be back later.” He reached out and patted her bruised hands gently. “Try to get some sleep, okay?”
She smiled at him. He blushed as he walked away.
He knows.
“Our father, who art in Heaven…”
The faithful, in their terror, turned to prayer. Words of hope, learned by rote in the sunlight of forgotten youths, floated up from the assembled mass.
“Hallowed be Thy name…”
Sounds of humanity: coughing, groaning, weeping.
The church had become a refuge for the prey.
“…the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory…”
The building shook with the force of a nearby explosion. A candelabra tipped over at the entrance.
“…forever and ever. Amen.”
The doors blew open.
“Hold your positions! No retreat, no surrender! We aren’t going down without a fight they’ll remember!”
His supply of bad war movie cliches exhausted, West readied himself for the attack. What were these creatures?
A dull ache was starting to form at the back of West’s head. He checked his weapon and was disturbed to see that his eyes would not focus properly.
He blinked and shook his head. It was as if some terribly powerful force was trying to pry its way into his mind…Tangible, maddening.
West and the other soldiers crouched behind a crumbled wall. They came from many different backgrounds: career military, civilian militia, and other men and women who just owned a gun and wanted to live. One thing united them: they all had the look of a trapped animal.
He could hear, feel the approach of the Enemy forces.
They would draw the line here.
With eyes that blazed cold gray light, he jumped over the wall, his automatic rifle blazing armor-piercing rounds into the Enemy midst.
It began.
Soldiers poured into the church.
“Everyone get down! They’re coming! Get down!!”
The soldiers took up defensive positions and trained their weapons on the entrance. The faithful prayed; the fearful wept. The soldiers waited.
The light outside the door dimmed.
The preacher continued with the sermon, shouting to make his voice heard over the roar of nothingness from without.
“I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him…”
The building shook.
“…the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth…”
Wails of grief.
“And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondsman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?”
The Enemy swept into the church.
The old gods did nothing to protect their flock.
The faithful were judged.
Nightmares.
She was trapped in their power. Her dreams always haunted her, bringing up memories of a past she still struggled to forget.
But she was a Styx.
Memories.
falling. falling. endless. darkness. a child. blood. mercy. merciless. a flickering of images. an orb of stars. flashes of light. bodies. massacre. judgment. a shift. terror.
loss of humanity.
the light oh god the light. heaven and hell and the stillness between.
a weapon: slaughterer of innocents—
She snapped upright from where she had been sleeping and stifled the urge to scream. Her breath came hard, fast; she was bathed in sweat.
Vertigo. Where am I?
Then she heard the weeping and the moaning of the wounded. A child cried out for his mother, began to sob. Other voices joined it in abject despair. She saw the dim glow of the chemlites.
She was still in the tunnel.
Someone was there.
She sensed someone staring at her from the darkness. She tried to speak, but her voice was still a harsh whisper. There had been chemical warfare on the surface.
She found her flashlight and turned it on to see who was watching her. Time was distorted in the tunnel, but she sensed that it was nighttime on the surface. Most of the refugees in the tunnel slept.
The medic sat watching her from the shadows.
“I’m sorry…Did I wake you?”
She shook her head, looked at him questioningly.
“Good. I brought a biotic for your throat.”
He came closer and sat down next to her against the wall. Someone screamed; whether in sleep or in the waking state she could not tell.
“Open up.” She obeyed, and he activated the biotic field, sweeping the back of her throat. She gasped as the human-engineered biological organisms attacked the infection.
“Don’t fight it. It’ll burn for a while, but you’ll be better in a few minutes.”
She smiled and looked down at his name tag. Hayes.
He noticed her gaze. “Simon Hayes. Chief Medical Officer of the Fourteenth Assault. Born and raised in Harkness, Michigan.”