Down with the Fallen: A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Anthology

Men of Tomorrow ^{Jack Lothian}

After all the death and destruction, all the blood and horror, it comes down to this: five men with kitbags and weapons, shivering in the cold, making their way up a snowy trail, through the dark winter woods, on their way to face a god. It’s a futile gesture in the face of humanity’s last gleaming. We’re going to die and it’s probably going to be very painful.

He knows we’re coming, of course. It would be naive to think otherwise. He can hear every step, every frosted breath. Sergeant O’Reilly claims to have seen a dark shape hovering over us as we passed Mount Healy, but we’re tired and hungry and have suffered so many losses that it’s hard to trust our senses anymore. We’re like a boxer staggering off the ropes, raising our gloves for a final desperate assault, even though the canvas is lurching toward us with every weary step.

Then we all stop walking, one by one, staring off through the branches and leaves. We can see it in the distance now, glowing in the night. A giant structure of ice, towering up into the sky, nestled between valleys. His home. It’s beautiful and it’s terrifying. We’re so small, so helpless. For a moment I feel myself drowning, overwhelmed by the task ahead, but then Captain Mason taps my arm softly, reminding me that this is my cue, that I have the first line.

“There it is. That’s his fortress.” It’s clunky set-up dialogue but I do my best with it. I haven’t spoken since yesterday and my voice feels strange and distant.

O’Reilly is up next. “Keep low. Eyes front. Stay frosty.” He grimaces at the lines but at least he delivers them like he means it. Before all this he was with British Special Forces—leading coalition teams on night raids in Afghanistan, taking down strongholds of Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab in Kenya and Nigeria. He says he’s surprised by his nostalgia for those days. The world was simpler then, even if we didn’t know that at the time.

There’s a pause during which Mason shoots Sergeant Hernandez a sharp look. Hernandez is still staring toward the crystal tower and it takes him a moment to remember his line.

“I wonder if he knows we’re here.”

The snow covered trees look on in envy at his wooden performance and I feel a twinge of anxiety. Can the target sense insincerity? Is he monitoring us, shaking his head at the stumpy cadence of Hernandez’s recital? He could crush us in a heartbeat. He would barely have to move. I can’t really blame Hernandez, though; he’s a career soldier who never imagined he’d end up in a situation like this. None of us did.

“If he knew we were here, we’d already be dead.” Mason sells his line perfectly, making up for Hernandez’s lackluster performance. For a moment I forget myself and even believe we’re having a real conversation.

“How so, Captain?” That’s the final member of our team. Lance Corporal Eriksson—twenty-eight years old, a solid slab of muscle and patriotism, topped off with a severe crewcut. Eriksson told me he’d joined the Marines to test himself, but when he says “test himself” you really hear “hurt other people. ” He’s a man who has never been troubled by the moral complexities of pulling a trigger. The other night I held him as he broke down and wept, his great big shoulders rising and falling as he muttered in horror of how there was no bird-song in the woods anymore.

“Because he’s a coward,” replies Mason. “Look at India. Europe. At what happened to the Chinese. It’s always from a distance. A real man would look his opponent in the eye. A coward hides.”

There’d been some debate over the phrase “a real man.” Mason delivers the whole thing as a challenge, though, a gauntlet thrown down. We’ve been reciting these exchanges for the past few days, always variations on the same theme. He’s big and powerful, we’re nothing, so he needs to come out and face us. It’s crude and basic psychological warfare, meant to allow us to get closer to him, because this plan, this suicide mission, it only works if we’re in the same room.

We’re working from a script that Diane wrote up for us, back at the Anchorage base. There were disputes and hushed arguments over how we should approach this, but in the end high command deferred to her—after all, she’d known him better than anyone. She was his wife. They were the perfect couple. Before everything changed.

There’s a crater in a field in Iowa that the government declared a national monument. Shards of the meteorite that carried him on display in the Smithsonian. Even though he was from some distant dying planet, he was one of our own. He saved folks from burning buildings and falling airplanes, he made rain fall on the arid settlements of Ethiopia and Sudan, every natural disaster would see him hurtle into danger, to do what he could, like he had no choice. He was the best of all of us.

I keep wondering if there were warning signs we missed.

There was always this aura of blandness about him. He was charming, handsome, almost too perfect I guess. The fact that he dressed up in tights and wore a cape does, in retrospect, seem like a huge red flag, but like many of us, he’d grown up on a midwestern diet of comic books and cartoons—his costume was a tribute to the very culture and people he had sworn to protect.

He wore that same costume the night those confused news reports first started rolling in. Natural disaster. Terrorist attack. There was panic and chaos and then that infamous footage of him floating above the Eiffel Tower, the city on fire beneath him, that smile on his face.

I’d met him twice before.

Once was at the base in Cornado, just across the bay from San Diego. I was out the back of the barracks, having a quiet smoke, when I felt a sudden shift in the wind. There was a strange charge of electricity in the air and there he was, standing in front of me.

I’d seen photos and videos of him, of course, but in the flesh he was even more impressive, the colors seemed brighter and sharper, exactly how a legend should be. Larger than life. I had an odd feeling, like déjà vu and vertigo at the same time. I think I actually steadied myself against the wall. He nodded a greeting at me, asked me my name. It took me a moment to compose myself and reply.

“Tom. Tom Hooper.”

He leant forward and took the cigarette from my hand, studying it. “How long have you been a smoker, Tom?”

“Uh… a few years now.”

“There’s a shadow.” He snuffed out the cigarette with his fingers and then took his hand away. The crushed cigarette remained floating in the air. “On your left lung. It’s very faint but it’s there.”

He waved his hand over the cigarette and it separated into fragments, a constellation of burnt and broken tobacco. His gaze fixed upon the pieces and they started glowing, burning up, disintegrating. The small galaxy on fire. Then he fixed those blues eyes upon me.

“This will only hurt for a moment,” he said. He pulled me in close and slammed the palm of his hand against the center of my chest. The air went out of me. I felt a rush of fire rolling through my lungs, with a sharp arctic wind chasing behind it and then he removed his hand and smiled, releasing me.

“Stay off the cigarettes, Tom. Life is for living.” And with that he was gone, a shimmering blur disappearing off into the cloudless sky, leaving behind a Private First Class who returned to his bunk with shaking hands and a broad smile as he tossed his cigarettes into the trash.

That was the kind of man he was. He saw little difference between extinguishing a forest fire or returning an errant balloon to a crying toddler. He was here to help. To make the world a better place.

Then you think of what happened later. Bodies twisted and mangled. Cities scorched and burned. Continents shaken and torn apart. I was in the ops room when we got news that Europe was gone. My brother was over there, serving on the battleship Anna Maria. I remember my CO staring at the comms officer, saying over and over again, “What do you mean gone?” his voice rising to a panic.

In Rio de Janeiro they dropped a B83 nuclear bomb on him. 1.2 megatons—seventy-five times stronger than the Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima all those years ago. He walked out of the mushroom cloud like it was just smoke on the breeze.

I can’t view that day at the barracks in isolation anymore. Some nights I’ve lain there, placed my hand over my chest, just like he did, as if by copying his movements I could find some insight into why he changed. But no insights ever come. All I know is that there was a shadow on my left lung, and then there wasn’t, and that was his choice, his will.

The second time I met him was two years later, in Syria, the aftermath of the Mhardeh refugee camp massacre. The killings were some sort of insurgent statement; this is what would happen to those who accepted aid from the West. Families. Women. Children. Two hundred fifty people were slaughtered that day. I thought I’d never see anything that bad again. It only took a few hours for me to be proved hopelessly wrong.

Our squad was first on the ground. We had forced them back to their strongholds on the edge of town, blocking off the roads to Hamas, settling in for a lengthy war of attrition—or a shorter one if the requests for air support went through. Then the order came over the comms of support of a different nature—he’d joined the fight. The CO told us to drop back and secure the perimeter. To this day I’m not sure what made me disobey that order. Maybe I just wanted to see what retribution looked like. Maybe I was hoping for some myself. I walked through that camp. I’d seen what those insurgent forces had done.

It was an old paint factory, three stories tall. Broken windows like jagged tombstones. The metal doors of the main entrance had been blown in, a dark, gaping mouth. I later discovered that my helmet cam started malfunctioning at that point, some kind of static interference. Maybe that was his doing. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to see what he’d done.

It was near pitch black inside the factory. I clicked on my flashlight to see where I was going. It swept over the husks of rusting machinery, and then onto shapes that I couldn’t understand at first, in the center of the room. It was like some giant sculpture, except it was still alive, mostly alive, impossibly so.

There were bodies but they weren’t bodies anymore. It’s like he had rearranged their atoms, blended and melted them together. It was around seven or eight feet tall. Flesh, melted and fused, arms and legs and screaming mouths and wide open eyes, all as one. Skin stretched and distorted, veins and intestines interwoven across the surface like twine over a ball. It was the enemy. It was a horror of meat and tissue.

And then one of the eyes blinked and all I remember was rushing for the exit, falling to my knees outside, retching into the dirt, gasping for air.

“They were bad people, Tom.”

He was standing there, looking off, and even though his body language suggested a level of agitation, his hair was perfect and his eyes were dolphin blue, and for the first time I wondered if it was all some mask, and if so, what the true face below looked like.

“You saw what they had done at the camp. To those children.” His voice had that strange timbre of justification to it. He shook his head, and there was a hint of anger and frustration in there. “Sometimes I don’t understand you people.” He looked at me, as if I could explain it. I didn’t know what to say. I’d seen the refugee camp. I didn’t understand either.

He stared at me for a long beat and then nodded, his voice soft. “Best you report back to base, Tom. Tell them the targets have been dealt with. Tell them I’ll handle the clean-up.”

He offered his hand and I took it, and as he helped me up I found myself nodding back, trying to ignore that rising panic, that urge to get as far away from him as possible. I moved out, glancing back once. He was still standing there, his back to me, the cape fluttering in the gentle breeze, staring into the darkness of that paint factory.

I didn’t tell a single person about what I’d seen. He was right. They were bad people. They deserved to die. But most of all I remember thinking that I was glad he was on our side, one of us.

And then three months later Paris happened.

Strike Team Alpha has entered the ice fortress. In doing so I feel like we’ve stepped from our reality into his. He took on the costume of a comic book character, and it’s like we’re walking through the pulpy pages of a two-fisted adventure. I want to start laughing at the absurdity of it all, but I’m scared I wouldn’t be able to stop.

Eighty percent of the world’s population is gone. It’s a number that Diane wrote down for me, but I could barely comprehend. I imagine the survivors, huddled into camps, desperately struggling to stay alive, never knowing when he might appear over them. It’s down to us. It’s down to us and we’re just as scared and weak as the people out there.

Mason moves in first, taking point. Sergeant O’Reilly is tight on his back, with Hernandez to the right. I’m on the rear, Eriksson ahead of me, gazing up at the frozen archways over his head.

He’ll let you come to him. Diane wrote it down on the white-board, during our final debriefing, as they handed out our modified painted weapons, our single piece of ammo. They’d arrested Diane straight away, once it had become clear what he was doing.

Maybe they thought by holding her hostage they’d convince him to stop, although it turned out she’d more or less been living apart from him for a few months by this point. She was open about it, said she had noted a change in him, he seemed distant, restless. He had been spending more and more time out in the wild, building some kind of fortress.

He said he needed a place to think, to be alone. To try and shut out the world. The last time she saw him she said that it felt like things had gone back to normal. Whatever had been troubling him had passed, although in light of recent events she said maybe it was more like a decision had been made, that he was free from the worries that had been plaguing him.

They had dinner, they made love and when she woke he was gone. She didn’t hear from him for twenty-three days. The next time she saw him was with the rest of the world, breaking news, on every channel, in every country.

She was his wife, though, and she knew his secrets. His weaknesses. He had tested himself against every chemical, alloy and substance, and found only two had any affect. There was lead, which caused a unique layer of protection against his electromagnetic vision. And there was tellurium, a rare silver metalloid, which did something much much worse.

It would be our magic bullet. Our one chance to harm him.

We all remembered the footage from the late night talk-show where the host had fired a loaded gun at him and he’d not only caught the bullet in his teeth, but ejected it back toward a target, hitting the bullseye as the audience roared and cheered. With his eyes closed and blindfolded of course.

He’d hear the shift of the trigger before we’d even pulled it. We were marching to our deaths because we had lost so much and there was nothing else to do. The last thing I ever told my ex-wife was to go screw herself. We were fighting over the house we’d shared, trying to sell it, trying to work out who was owed what. Like that mattered. We’re so fragile and small, yet we spend so much of our lives being hurt and trying to hurt each other, unaware of how quickly things can break.

Diane wrote down one more thing. A single phrase. A few words that she believed would be even more powerful than the bullets we carried. All we had to do was be in the same room as him.

With every step up the ice covered stairs, we are getting closer and closer. Moving along crystal walkways, pepper potting our way to the top. We’re covering corners and inching forward as if this was a normal reconnaissance op, going through the motions. He’s letting us come to him. We might as well just stroll in, blowing whistles and trumpets. It’s like we’re in some warped charade, everyone playing their part. The fantastical tower. The magic bullets. The monster at the center of the maze.

His is floating a few feet off the ground, his back to us, staring out at the blanket of stars over the darkened valleys and forests. Even now, even at the end of it all, there is a sense of theater. The cape. The costume. The insignia still on his chest as he turns round, looking down at us with that perfectly sculpted face.

“So obviously I’ve been listening,” he says, as if it’s part of a continued discussion we’ve been having with him. “This conversation of yours, the back and forth, about how I’m some sort of coward…” He pauses for a moment as if to consider the significance of the word for the first time. “This was all Diane’s idea, right?”

Captain Mason doesn’t break eye contact with him. “It was. Yes.”

“It felt like something she would come up with. How is she?”

“She’s wonderful. She’s seen most of the world burnt and destroyed by the man she loved.” In moments like these I would follow Mason off the edge of the earth. He knows he could be destroyed in a heartbeat, yet he won’t give the bastard a single inch.

But the world’s most powerful man just smiles at us, like a tolerant parent looking down at her naughty children. “You’ve coated your guns in lead. Which makes me think you’re hiding something.”

We hadn’t planned for this contingency. We knew the lead would protect the barrel from his vision, but we never discussed the possibility that the act of concealment would give us away. Mason was meant to keep him talking, draw him in, deliver that one final piece of dialogue from Diane. Then Eriksson would open up with the first shot. A chain reaction–O’Reilly, Hernandez, and finally me further back—the last bullet, the last hope. Confuse and overwhelm him.

Within seconds it all goes wrong.

Eriksson jumps the gun. He’s been increasingly erratic on the journey up. Maybe he believed in the hero more than the rest of us. The flag. The symbol of truth and justice. Whatever it is, something has snapped and he raises his weapon to fire, even though he’s meant to wait for Mason’s signal.

There’s a crackle in the air, a blur of movement, and Eriksson stumbles forward, guts spilling out from a cavity in his stomach. O’Reilly and Hernandez have taken their cue from Eriksson and both try to get their shots off. They disintegrate before my eyes.

I can’t even move. I am like a statue, frozen in this kingdom of ice.

“Elevated heart beats,” he says, his costume flecked with blood. “I could hear them all the way up the mountain. And then a sudden escalation before action, well… it’s something of a giveaway. Was this the plan?”

“Some of the plan,” says Mason and he’s angled his weapon so it’s facing the enemy, but his M16 has started to glow red and it’s burning into his hands and even then he still tries to pull the trigger, but then he’s gone as well. The air is heavy with the iron scent of metal and blood. I still haven’t moved. There’s a thousand thoughts screaming in my head, but I can’t seem to grasp any of them.

I’m the last hope of humanity and I can’t even raise my weapon.

Maybe he senses this turmoil, looking toward me, brow furrowed, as if he’s genuinely concerned for my well-being. “How have you been, Tom?”

Everyone I know is dead. There is no fresh start, no rewind, no coming back from this. He destroyed our world because he could. How have I been? I don’t even know what that means anymore.

“…I’ve started smoking again.”

“I know. I can smell it off you.”

I pull out a crumpled pack, placing a cigarette into my mouth with shaking hands.

“Do you want me to light that for you, Tom?”

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

I’m surprised at how cool I sound, even though my voice breaks a little a bit when I speak. My lighter catches on the third attempt, and there is the welcome inhalation of warm smoke and cold air.

“I’m guessing you still have your bullet,” he says, nodding to my M16. “‘One in the pipe’ as you boys say.”

I nod. It seems pointless to try and lie to him at this stage. Like Mason said, if he wanted us dead, we’d be dead already.

“So I guess I have to ask… what happens now, Tom?”

“Why did you do it?”

He gives me an uncertain smile, shrugs. “Remember that shadow on your lung, Tom?”

Of course I remember. His hands on my chest. The heat and the cold.

“You’re smoking again, though. Even though I did my best to stop you. To help you.”

We’re quiet for a while. I inhale, exhale. There doesn’t seem like much else to say, but I say it anyway. I tell him that I’m going to finish my cigarette and then I’m going to shoot him. I tell him how the tellurium bullet will rip into his flesh, causing the cells around it to blacken and decay as it continues on its path to his heart.

I explain how within moments his vital organs will vesicate. His legs will give way. He will collapse to his knees, those perfect blue eyes wide open in horror as he clutches at his chest, his hand over that famous insignia, his muscles convulsing as his body shuts down. It will be quick. It will be painful. It will be a better end than he deserves.

“It’s possible, Tom. I am rather fast, though.”

I drop my cigarette to the frosted ground, grinding it out under my boot. And then I tell him one more thing.

There is a moment of silence and then he asks me to repeat what I just told him. This is a man who can hear your heartbeat from a thousand miles away, yet he needs to hear me say those words one more time, to fully understand them.

“She’s pregnant.”

This was the last thing Diane wrote down for us, the last piece of dialogue, the true secret weapon. After everything, all the death and devastation, she still believed there was some good in him. Some sense of hope, no matter how buried it had become. Some piece of learned humanity. She believed that moment of hesitation would be enough.

He will know you’re telling the truth, she wrote. He will hear it in your voice. She stood there, in the base at Anchorage, her hands over the gentle curve of her stomach, their unborn child within. She was broken and tired, and yet she still had faith. She was the best of us.

I am raising my M16. This moment is frozen in the time it takes for a bullet to leave the barrel and reach its target. Or for a man who fell from the sky to reach out and end my life and humanity’s last chance alongside it. He goes to say something, to speak. I think it might even be the word stop.

But I am already pulling the trigger and hoping for the best.