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Dedication

Dedication

Terry Costales

AcknowledgmentsSpecial thanks must go to my wife Terry Costales who read through the many drafts of this book without complaint, and who provided inspiring insightful feed­back. Thanks to George Jansen whose own writing has inspired me so much over the years. Final thanks to Allison Wright who provided a professional edit within my budget via fiverr.

Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.

William Shakespeare

“Julius Caesar”, Act 2 scene 2

Prologue: Origin Of Angels145 Days Since the Invasion

Wind whistled in my ears with the sound of a waterfall, yet not a drop of water was in sight. Just dry, cracked and crevassed dirt —the result of another oven heated day. Sand skittered and rattled metal hard against an ancient, dry, faded-red, gas pump, the price still a cheap $159.99 per gallon; a hand written sign still held with yellow tape to its face. The old station had collapsed into red, white and dirt, abstract metal wreckage. Bullet holes, signs of rust and that black­ened charred smell of bygone fire. The highway beyond the station was still paved, but with thin brown weeds growing tall through almost mathematically parallel cracks.

My feet ached from too much walking in worn shoes, step after step, trudging too far for too long, alone.

Sure, I feel sorry for myself, but —well, there had been Nancy in Needles, ten years older than me and sick with the Cough, soft and warm she was, and good to make love to until she passed. Now me, suffering from an infection in my finger because of a damned cut I got when I pounded her cross into hard dirt using a two-by-four with rusty nails. I couldn’t think of a thing to say over her grave there at the edge of town among so many other nameless graves; among the anonymous dead, among the no longer remembered, among those who should probably have never been born. Her grave was embarrassingly shallow, dug in desert dirt too hard to dig. It must have been over 115 degrees that day, so hot even soaking in the muddy Colorado River brought no relief whatsoever. I used my dirty hand to wipe sticky sweat from my forehead and pulled my straw hat back down to protect my head. The sun behind me cast a long shadow.

My eyes were sharply peeled for rattlesnakes, the nasty green ones. I noticed something in the distance moving toward me. It looked like a robot. It was walk­ing, no make that trudging, east in the earliest of amber morning light. The robot walked on eight legs like a spider. Silver and shiny in places, but mostly rusted overall with faded lines of blue and mustard safety yellow. Two arms, one raised in greeting. Botched, I thought, when I saw pieces missing as it drew near. “What are you?” I asked. I was ready to run. The spider was the size of a car.

“Traffic control unit 23,” it stopped walking and said, once again in English, then once in Spanish, once in Chinese, once in guttural Russian.

“Just speak in English,” I said.

I heard something tick inside it, or maybe that was just the sound of metal changing shape in the morning heat.

“Okay, English,” it said, and with a whir it settled to the ground. “I run low on power.”

Eight equally spaced legs folded. Each foot had once been padded, but the padding had worn off leav­ing a patch of shiny metal between two thin patches of rubber. Its body was cobbled together from parts of computers and metal salvaged from assorted machines. I noticed an old iPhone inside a tangle of wires. A huge phone so much larger than the iRing I got for my 45th birthday, the day before all those airlin­ers crashed, the day before all those people were shot on the streets of DC, the day after that alien ship landed. Before everything fell apart. Before the Cough.

“There’s no power where I came from,” I said, uncertain if I should speak to the eyes or not, because the robot had no obvious ears.

“Are you a threat to me?” the robot asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m just glad for any conversation at all. I will help you find power if I can.”

The robot whirred again and rose on its legs. “The man that built me warned me to say I was a traffic control robot and to say I was running out of power to avoid threats from bad humans. But I have seen zero humans at all for two weeks. You are the first one I have found alive.”

I walked around it to see what else I might find. Old coffee tins, headlights off cars, dials from an air­plane cockpit, and parts from a precision machine shop. Here and there I smelled something like spices or weeds. “You mean you were playing possum?”

“What’s a possum?” it asked. Its voice seemed to always come from the side closest to me. Its voice was high-pitched and crackly as if from small speakers.