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Reminiscence
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wrote this in january of 2004. some of it is true.
you are invited to guess which parts.
---An old man climbs the stairs into an attic, followed by a young boy. The old man sits down at an old, old desk and switches on an ancient-looking computer.---
*starts Winamp and keys up a song by 3 Doors Down, Kryptonite*
"Oh, yeah. That's the one. That song was everywhere in the summer of 2000. Some days it seemed like it was every other song on the radio. That summer was a major turning point in my life. Hell, everybody's lives. I wish i could say I saw it coming, but no one ever does, really. The lucky ones don't see it till it's right on top of them. Most of us only realize what could have been too late, after opportunity has knocked and passed on. But that song, and the endless topics of conversation that summer. Ooh, boy did we ever talk. About all sorts of things that seemed huge and consequential, and about things small and pointless. Of course, which were which is blurred now, the things that seemed so big being all but meaningless in life's rear-view mirror.
"We talked about Napster, and how Lars from Metallica was being such an asshole for no good reason. About the huge uproar over the Y2K bug, even though it never got around to causing any real trouble. About school shootings and "How could this happen?" Some of us discussed how we would have done such a better job in the place of the shooters on that one.
"There was talk about finally legalizing marijuana, and other talk about banning the sale of tobacco products. I was only just beginning to realize that the marijuana was not something I needed in my life, and that tobacco had become a very real addiction. I've kicked the one, but not the other. I was seriously considering joining the United States Army, but not to be a hero. I wanted to be a satellite radio technician. i just wanted the Gov to pay for my college, and give me job experience at the same time. It seemed like such a sweet deal, too.
"But back to that song. It was everywhere. I mean truly everywhere. You'd hear it as you drove down the freeway with your windows open, thumping out of the car next to you. It was what was coming out of the radio when I consummated my relationship with a young woman from the town I lived in at the time. For a while there, it was 'our song.' Then she turned into a jealous, possesive bitch and started campaigning for a ring I wasn't ready to give. She got dropped like a used Taco Bell cup. Oh, yes. Just like the trash she was.
"Or maybe she wasn't really trash. Perceptions are always skewed when you're in a relationship, maybe skewed the most toward the end of one. I wonder what's happened to her, sometimes. I don't dwell on it though. She was really just my 'back into the dating pool' chick. Y'know, the one that's supposed to be just a one night stand at the end of an important relationship, but always turns out to be this thing that lasts for months. Probably you have no idea what I'm talking about though. You're only twelve, right?"
*pulls out a pack of Luckies and lights one*
"Oh, calm down kid. I know they cause cancer. I'm 83 fucking years old, and they haven't killed me yet. I don't intend to start worrying about it now. Anyway, back to that summer. It was the year I turned 18, and I was working in a gas station. Eh? What? You don't know what a gas station is? It's a place for fueling vehicles that run on petroleum-derived fluids. And yes, it did smell as strong as you'd think it would. No, no. It didn't smell bad, just strong. There's actually a pleasant tang to the scent of gasoline. That's actually where I met your grandmother for the first time. I hardly even noticed her, truth be told. She had to remind me that we'd met before when we got together a few years later. But... Ah, hell. I'm rambling.
"Yeah, that was the summer I bought my first car. It was a 25-year-old busted-ass Mopar, but I liked it. Damn, did I like that car. I drove it everywhere. To the beach, to Seattle, up into the mountains more than once. It was the car that took me to and from work, and to and from the local community college. And every other damned place in creation. well, I was sitting in that car when they showed up. Yeah. Them. Come to think of it, that song happened to be on the radio when the first spacecraft passed overhead and commenced bombing Portland.
"Don't ever let anyone tell you that evil sons of bitches from another planet don't have a sense of humor. Those fighters that flew over me had external speakers, and they were blasting out Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" at full power. I'm pretty sure they'd been watching a bit too much of our TV and movies already by that point. I was already in the car, so i started 'er up and headed for my Grampa's place at full throttle. He was the sort of person who kept lots and lots of weapons around, just in case. Look around, but don't touch anything. I've sort of taken a page out of his book on that count. I just knew something was fishy about aircraft that large flying that low at such high speeds, and so... well, I went for the nearest place where i could feel safe and be well armed and fed.
"I don't think those damned aliens really knew what they were letting themselves in for when they attacked humanity, because they came loaded for bear. When they should have been loaded for tyrannosaur. They landed in the bombed out ruins of cities all across the world, and tried their damndest to set themselves up as our eternal lords and masters. You know how it really went, but I don't think those history books you have to read in school really communicate how near a thing it was there for a while, or the sense of urgency that so many of us lived with for 8 years.
"Well, when i got to my grandparents' house, they had the shortwave out and were picking up scattered reports from Radio Free America and the BBC. It was already clear that aliens had landed, and they weren't all that fucking friendly. My grandfather was passing out the assault rifles he'd had hidden all over his outbuildings for just such an eventuality to all of his kin. I showed up just barely in time to make sure i got the AR-15 with the scope mounts that had my name engraved into the stock. Then it was work. Lots of hard work, gathering in the vegetables from the garden, even though most weren't ready to be picked yet. We couldn't be sure we'd have a chance later, y'see.
"Gathering in easily 1200 pounds of vegetables is not the work of only one day, not with hand labor and switching guard posts every half hour to make sure that everyone shared equally in the work. After we brought 'em in, we had to preserve them, and that meant canning. We couldn't use the air conditioning unit in the house, because that would have raised the load on the generator, and we weren't at all sure when we'd be able to get more diesel for it. So we canned in the heat of August with the windows and doors wide open and a fan placed at one door that was powered by an old exercise bike. I spent most of that time up in the fir tree that towered 120 feet up from the middle of the front yard, wearing camo and greasepaint, watching the roads and skies for possible invaders.
"About 4 days after the first landings, i spotted a pair of tanks coming up over the hill, and shouted for everyone's attention. Everything that made any sort of loud noise was turned off, including the generator. It got awfully tense there for a few minutes, watching a pair of armored killing machines sit hull down over the low rise between the house and the end of the road. We all had assault rifles and hunting weapons trained on them, but we knew that would only draw their attention if we had to start shooting. The machine gun nest concealed behind a pile of scrap metal, and my oldest uncle lying belly-down on the roof of the shop with one of our precious RPG's were our best bets. Even with snipers up trees, we couldn't be sure of taking out so much as one tank commander, much less the fighting crews of two battle-ready tanks.
"To our intense relief, when they started forward we saw that they were Abrams tanks. Ours, thank the gods. As I was the highest up, and therefore had the best view, I was able to let everyone know before someone got itchy fingers and did something stupid. Well, my grandfather walked out into the middle of the road with his rifle in hand, and waved the tanks down. He told the commanders that they'd be dead instantly if they did anything stupid, but they were welcome to stay and get fed and sheltered if they happened to be cut off from their respective commands. They stayed.
"We hid both tanks in the main shop building, even though it was a tight fit, and convinced the crews that we were in charge. Let me tell you, that took some doing. They didn't agree to work for their keep until we demonstrated that we were far better at killing things whilst outside an armored fighting vehicle. One of my cousins ended up married to the loader off the second tank, a guy named Lorenzo. Her father hated the idea of her marrying a hispanic guy, but my aunt convinced him that it was OK on the grounds that 'at least he's a nice Catholic boy.'
"After the tankers joined us, the neighborhood had a serious militia-esque quality to it, not least because my grandparents were far from the only people on that section of road to have family end up there, and everyone was armed. I mean damned near everyone, of course. No one under 14 got a rifle. Also like a militia, we were a bit skewed on the male to female ratio. There were 23 unmarried guys over 16 for a grand total of 15 unmarried gals in the same age group. I am not proud to say that we remedied the situation through raiding neighboring areas.
"I saw my first alien invader late that winter, in January. It was an ugly little thing, all tentacles and teeth on first glance. It really was not a pretty sight, and even less so once i blew the center out of its torso. How was i supposed to know that a bullet that might or might not stop a man would rip one of the big bad monsters from outer space into bloody shreds? Luckily, this happened during one of our infrequent forays into the vicinity of Beavercreek, and so did not bring them down on our heads. That time.
"We were left pretty much to ourselves for almost 3 years after First Contact, and learned to get along well enough. We had to supplement our own farming by falling back on our Viking heritage from time to time, but even that became routine. I got engaged to a young woman from Colton, and she moved into the compound with the rest of us. Not long after, she came up pregnant. This was June of 2003.
"As I'm sure your teachers have told you, the second attack came on June 21st of that year, and it was not confined to the cities this time. The godsdamned Hii'irEffa, little bastards, sent major convoys down all the intersates and highways in the country, and there was an intersection of one state highway with another just a mile away from our compound. We couldn't let them that close to our home, so we coordinated with all the neighboring groups who were well armed and set up an ambush far enough away from all our homes that we felt it should be safe for the older women and young children who were staying hidden. All of the older women, some of the old men, all the small children....and anyone who was known to be pregnant. They all stayed home.
"Apparently, our ambush was an attempt repeated a thousand times over, all across the world on that day. The response to each and every one of them was a single bomb, on a randomly chosen area farm. We could not have known this at the time, but when the fighterbomber streaked overhead, I was sure it was headed for the school down the road. It was, after all, the most logical place for a large group to set up housekeeping, and had been appropriately semi-camouflaged, semi-decoyed to look as if it were being used in just that manner. Instead, it went three quarters of a mile farther down the road and dropped a weapon with a yield that has by all accounts been estimated at just over 50 tons of tnt. Right on the roof of my home.
"We never even found teeth to bury. My grandmother, all four of my aunts, 3 of my female cousins, all pregnant or recently delivered, one of my uncles who had a bad knee, several of the older men and women from the neighborhood, and 31 children, many of them relatives of mine, all vanished in a blast of fire and smoke.
"None of us knew what had happened, but we all fell back, and the aliens stopped their touring of the countryside for the rest of the year. When we returned to the compund late in the evening, and saw what had happened, we all went a bit nuts. All of our food stores, our ammunition, our familes were simply....gone. I didn't even think about it. I headed for Portland. My fiancee was dead, so many of my family and friends had gone with her, my only chance for a family and children of my own was gone. At least that was what I thought. I came back to myself just as I was about to step out onto I-205 just south of Gladstone. I'd walked more than 20 miles in a single night, all without even thinking about where i was putting my feet. I realized what i was doing in time to dive into a thicket of blackberries just as a car rolled past. 'A car,' I thought stupidly, before i realized that the only people who would have cars still operating after 3 years of hostile occupation would be collaboraters. They would surely have reported an armed man walking along the road.
"That was when I came up with my new plan. If there were people who could stand to work for and with such disgusting creatures, who could handle knowing that they were helping to destroy all chance for freedom their fellow humans had, well. They had to die, of course. All of them. I'm well aware that I was not the first to come to that conclusion, nor the last. I was not even among those who did it best. But I did do it thoroughly. Not only did I kill those who collaborated, I killed their familes, every single one that I could reach. After all, it was only right that they should have to suffer as I was.
"I kept it up as long as my ammunition held out, then I raided a compound not unlike the one my family had maintained before it was bombed, armed only with a knife, for more ammunition, and a rifle to utilize the different caliber I found. Instead, I met your grandmother. She raised the alarm, as well she should have. Somehow, I managed to convince them to not shoot me when they all woke up. When I told them my story, they offered to give me a good hunting rifle and 500 rounds for free, as well as some food and water, provided I go away and do my dirty work somewhere that would not draw unwelcome alien attention down on them.
"Instead, I stayed. I had had enough of killing. It was April of 2006 when I married your grandmother, and we were never apart for more than a few hours until she died five years before you were born. I haven't fired a weapon except in target practice since I met her, even though it was a full two and a half years from that day to the one when the aliens were finally driven off our world. I pray I never have to pick up a gun in anger ever again. And I pray you never have too either.
*shuts off the computer*
---old man and boy walk down the stairs again---
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