Against The Darkness (Cimmerian Moon) (2 page)

Oh. My. God
.

“Can someone
please tell her she isn’t auditioning for American Idol,” I mutter.

Wade laughs.
His meaty arm brushes up against mine as he does.

Let the fun
begin.

Somewhere in Buford, Georgia

April 14
^th
, 2012: Day 23

F’ing alien
invasion.

I couldn’t
have made this up in my worst nightmare.

The sound of
metal against metal causes me to glance up. There’s an old billboard, with a
picture of a woman wearing a suit standing next to a red car on it, being
battered by the wind and rain. She has her hands on her hips and wears a broad
smile. “Wouldn’t you like to own one of these?” is written across the top. And
I can’t help but wonder if that woman is still alive. I can only guess that
from the way the billboard is moving it has to be hanging on by just a couple
of screws. One good gust and it’ll fall to the ground. Because I don’t want it
to fall on me, I step to the side, making sure that I’m no longer directly
under it.

In the
distance dogs bark and howl. Since their owners aren’t around to take care of
them anymore, they’ve formed packs. Their owners aren’t around for a number of
reasons. One could be that they’ve left, gone into hiding from the aliens or,
two, the aliens had killed them. The streets are practically littered with
bodies. Sometimes when we pass these dogs, a couple of them stop and assess us,
and I swear they have a look of sadness in their eyes. And those times I don’t
know who I feel sorrier for, the dogs or the people who left them. But I can’t
blame anyone for taking off and leaving as soon as the aliens had come. It
wasn’t like there was much planning that could have been done when they showed
up.

It happened the
third morning of camp, and I woke up to all hell breaking loose. Alien space
ships hovered over New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Boston,
Washington, Detroit, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, St. Louis
and Baltimore, just to name the cities in America, and it seemed as if there
wasn’t anything the government could have done about it. When the mother ships
opened, spewing smaller ships and began to rain bombs down on everything, it
was confirmed—we were screwed. So, with camp officially over, the Camp
Director and local staff high-tailed it out of there and our charter bus never
returned to pick us up. In a word, we were stranded.

Our band
teachers, Mr. Steinberg, Mrs. Franklin and Ms. Burgess had us all pack up our
belongings, whatever we could carry, and we set out, forty students in all, toward
Michigan, with a plan of following the major highways to get there. The
teachers thought we would make it home in about a week and a half, but what
they hadn’t taken into consideration were the many obstacles we had to
overcome.

Mrs. Franklin
and Mr. Steinberg are in their late sixties, can’t walk very fast and get tired
easily. Luckily we didn’t need to worry about Ms. Burgess because
she’s younger, only in her early thirties. Another obstacle was the complete
destruction of everything around us. We had seen some of the damage on the camp
television before the power went out, but we hadn’t known it was as bad as it
actually was. City streets were uprooted, highways were no more and cities and
towns we passed through were nothing but rubble. The non-stop walking was hard
enough, but add climbing over bricks and blocks of pavement and it became
treacherous. Four of the guys had to stay by Mr. Steinberg’s and Mrs.
Franklin’s sides just to help them. But I can’t blame our slow progress solely
on them. With more than forty people trying to travel together, we had more
than our fair share of arguments and fights.

But no matter
how intense the fight was, the moment we heard the whiz of a ship in the sky,
we all took our cue and ran for cover. These odd-appearing space ships weren’t
flown by humans, they were alien occupied. Although we hadn’t seen the aliens
in the flesh—lucky for us—they patrolled the sky with fervor. We
could bet on hiding from their ships at least twice a day. We could only
imagine where they were going, where they were coming from or what was in them.

When we
finally reached Atlanta and saw, with our own eyes, the mother ship sitting
above it, looking like a cimmerian moon, the teachers decided they had to come
up with another plan
. For one, we couldn’t trek our way up the
interstate and, two, we had to stay away from major cities. That’s when we came
to the realization our march back to Michigan wasn’t going to be as
straightforward as we originally thought, but it still didn’t deter us. It only
forced us to change our plan. We needed to be more stealthy—which was
going to be hard, with the amount of people in our group.

It was there
the
teachers also came up with the scouting plan. Two students would leave at five
every morning and head north, avoiding high-traffic areas—meaning other
people
, what used to be roads, and mainly the aliens. The scouts
carried pedometers to clock the miles walked. If anyone ran into aliens or
someplace where it appeared aliens had been, the scouts would find different
routes.

The idea was
to scout out roughly twenty alien-free miles and then return
to
wherever we had made camp for the day. Then, when the night fell, the scouts
led everyone else back on the same route taken earlier. It’s been working this
way, but was grueling on the scouts. Especially since the teachers only trusted
this job to the seniors.

This is my
second time on scout detail and my second time with Wade Hill. The first time we’d
gone out we didn’t get far because Wade was heavier and slower then. Because of
him we were only able to scout seven miles and he struggled to make it back
from that short walk.

This time we
only covered about fifteen miles before Wade wanted to turn back. I wanted to
cover more, but he said we had gone far enough. I think the downpour of rain
was the real reason he wanted to stop. On top of that, it’s cold and chilly. I’m
miserable, but I could have gone farther. The only reason I hadn’t pushed the
issue was because I could hear him wheezing, even from five feet behind me.

Another
failed scouting mission
.

Fat rain drops
come down so hard my face and body feel as though I’m being pelted with rocks.
How the bun Mia put in my hair this morning is still holding up is a wonder to
me. I’ve learned to embrace her messing with my hair, since I didn’t need it in
my way. It’s long, going well past my bra line, and is a mop of waves and
curls. Some strands are red, some blonde, but mainly light brown. It’s a hodge-podge
of my African-American and Caucasian heritage.

Some say it’s
unique, just like me, while I find it too cumbersome to be bothered with. So
every morning I grit my teeth as she rakes through it, twisting it into a tight
bun or braid down the middle of my head. This is a necessary evil, as I equated
survival to being able to see where I’m running to and what I’m running from.

I pull the
hood of my sweater up over my head. It’s soaked and dripping water, but at
least it’ll stop the rain from pelting my head. I shiver as a chill runs
through me. Packing my parka would have been a good idea, but with limited room
in my backpack, it hadn’t made the list—something I’m regretting right
about now.

We make our
way through an open field, which makes me uneasy. Without protection from
overhead, we’ll be sitting ducks if a spaceship comes this way. I look up,
wiping the rain from my eyes.

All clear
.

I pull my
scarf from around my mouth. The smell isn’t so bad out here, where there aren’t
any dead bodies. When we we’re going through the residential areas the scarf
was a much-needed commodity. The smell of rotting flesh is enough to make me
want to puke. And the flies and animals feeding off of it? Urgh. I always try
to avert my gaze when we pass them. I can’t look at them anymore. What’s the
use? I can’t save any of them.

I hear Wade
stomping through the grass, his shoes making a sloshing sound with each step. I’m
irritated. I’m irritated that it’s raining, but most of all I’m irritated that
I have to go back to camp and let everyone know that we didn’t hit the twenty
mile mark, but barely scouted out fifteen. Michael and Aaron did twenty-five
miles yesterday. I shake my head. We’ve come up short again.

This is
hopefully my last time ever ending up with Wade Hill.

“Keep up,” I
say, my voice coming out in a harsh whisper. I don’t mean to sound the way that
I do, but I can’t keep my irritation to myself.

I can hear his
heavy breathing behind me, the wheeze with each breath he takes, how dry and
labored it has become, and a pang of guilt begins to surface. He hasn’t told me
so, but I’ve put in enough hours at my mom’s clinic to know he must have some
form of asthma. He doesn’t complain about the pace I’m setting, and didn’t the
last time we went scouting either. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember one
time he’s complained—ever. Realizing this, and with guilt fully formed, I
stop and wait for him to catch up.

I don’t turn
around to watch him come to me. I can hear his steps quicken through the tall
grass. When he reaches me, he doesn’t stop, but continues on. It takes me a
minute to realize that he passed me, as I watch his retreating back.

“Thanks for
waiting for me,” I say sarcastically.

I adjust the nylon
sack on my back. The material is lightweight and water-proof, enabling me to
keep it rolled up in my larger school backpack when I don’t need it. It’s
serving its purpose right now. I have it filled with a couple bottles of water,
bread and crackers, thinking we would need the snacks after our long trek. We
hadn’t. I begin to walk again, this time following him.

He turns his
head to the side, but doesn’t face me. “I didn’t ask you to wait for me. I’m
not slow. I was bringing up the rear.”

I snort.
Yeah
right
.

I could have
told him exactly what I thought of him “bringing up the rear” but I clamp my
mouth shut. Getting into it with Wade won’t get me any closer to home. I watch
him as he walks. Since he’s lost a ton of weight he isn’t bad looking. Some
girls might think he’s even cute, if they were into the
farm-boy type.
He’s a hulking figure, who stands just about six feet tall, with
shaggy brown hair and weighing somewhere close to two hundred and fifty pounds.
Without a razor his facial hair is becoming thicker every day. His skin is
tanned and always seems tanned, even in the winter time. Not the kind of
complexion you would find at a tanning salon, but the kind you would find on
someone who worked outdoors year round.

His jeans are
looser than before and his shirt is hanging off of him. I don’t know exactly
how much weight he’s lost, but what else can be expected? We’ve been rationing
our food for the past twenty-three days and for the past two weeks we’ve been
walking fifteen to twenty miles a day.

I glance down
at my legs to see if I’ve lost weight as well. Yes. I’m wearing sweatpants, so
they’re supposed to be baggy, but not enough for me to have rolled the elastic
waistband down three times. But, unlike Wade, I didn’t have any extra weight to
lose. I was always thin, or as my mother used to call me, her “tenth
percentile” child. No one outside of my mother and her friends would have
probably understood what it meant. My mother is…was…or maybe still is a
pediatric nurse practitioner.

She used to
fuss over my eating habits and how much I weighed because I was always at the
bottom of the height and weight scale pediatricians use to plot how well, or in
my case, how not well, a child was growing and how they stacked up to other
children in their age group. I wasn’t growing to her liking. For some reason I
couldn’t break out of the tenth percentile, hence the reason for my nickname.

I assess Wade
again. He’s probably in the one-hundred percentile even with his weight loss. I’m
taking a guess that his parents hadn’t worried about his weight at all. That
must have been nice growing up.

His steps are
slower than mine, but his stride is longer. I’m only five-foot-one, with short
legs, and weigh about one-hundred and ten pounds. I find that I’m working
double-time in order to keep up with him.

Maybe he
was
bringing up the rear?

He’s not
walking so fast that I’m in danger of him leaving me behind, so I don’t worry
about that. Even if he did decide to leave me I think I could find my way back
to camp, since it’s only about five miles south of here.

I follow him
in silence. It’s quiet out here, but that doesn’t surprise me. The only sounds I
hear are the dogs some distance away and his steps and mine. Later it will
sound like a trampling horde as we lead the others back through this way. But I
prefer how it is right now. It’s easier to hear the space ships zipping through
the air. Usually they can be heard miles away, giving anyone in earshot ample
time to hide.

I keep my ears
peeled to both the sky and the ground, though I don’t expect to see anyone.
Running into people is becoming less and less common, as everyone is avoiding
high-traffic areas or hunkering down into hiding holes. The last time we saw anyone
else was a day and a half ago. It was a group of fifteen, the largest group we’d
seen besides ourselves. They weren’t going home like we are. Their homes had
been destroyed. They were looking for someplace to hide and ride out the
invasion is what they’d said.