For those that stuck with it from the beginning. What'd you think? I've already started the cleanup and transferring process to script format. And another question. Going forward, please vote... Highlander: The King and I (based on the TV show) Aftermath 120K word sci-fi novel just finished writing (need reactions)
The porch light was the first thing I noticed, three streets out, before I could even see the house it belonged to.
"Did somebody upgrade the wattage on that thing?"
"I did," Jacob said, from the driver's seat, not remotely embarrassed about it. "Considerably."
"It's visible from orbit, Jacob."
In the seats behind us, Rachel and Naomi laughed. David burped.
"I am aware of exactly how visible it is. That was the point." He didn't elaborate further, and he didn't need to. I understood it the same way I understood everything else about my brother lately — some decisions don't need to be defended out loud, they just need to be made, and lived with, and occasionally driven past at night so you can see for yourself that they held.
"Hold!"
The word hit that field like a hand closing around every throat in it at once. Every instrument stopped mid-motion, and I mean stopped — not slowed, not hesitated, simply ceased, the way a recording stops when someone lifts the needle, and in the sudden absence of forty bodies still trying to finish us, I heard my own ragged breathing for what felt like the first time all night. Then the despair washed over me and I knew who and what it was. Control over my bladder became a real battle.
He came up out of the fog itself, or the fog came out of him — I have turned that sentence over a hundred times since and I still don't know which direction the causality actually ran. Not a voice from a cold room this time. Not a presence you had to take Naomi's blood work or a…
I want to tell you we had a plan. I want to tell you that somewhere between the envelope and the fountain, one of us had produced a strategy worth the name, something with contingencies, something Curtis would have approved of if he'd been standing there with his laptop instead of standing amongst six other bodies on the other side of the park. Jacob and I had built off the bones of Curtis's working notes in an afternoon neither of us had wanted to spend that way, and between the two of us, whatever was left of thirty years of learning how to fight.
It was not enough. I want to say that plainly, up front, because I spent most of that night discovering exactly how not enough it was, one wave at a time.
They didn't run at us. That was the first wrong thing, worse somehow than if…
