After the Fall: Tria’s Tale (excerpt)
Posted By GL Drummond on April 6, 2009
Filed Under Excerpts, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Leave a Comment
In 2078, Earth was invaded. After the Fall tells the stories of that time.
© GL Drummond, 2008-2009
Excerpt:
The Journal of Katria Stevens
I was thirteen the day the world as we knew it ended. The day the aliens invaded.
I suppose I was fortunate, in that both my parents were employed by the government. The public was fed a story about a terroristic threat to explain the presence of armed troops. I met a few of those soldiers as they stood guard outside my school. Since I was at an impressionable age, just entering puberty, I thought the leader of those who waited by the outdoor patio was very handsome. His name was Jack Monroe.
My mother arrived to pick me up, and one look at her face told me that it wasn’t terrorists. As I waved good-bye to the soldiers, I wondered if they knew what was really happening. The look on Jack’s face as he returned the wave made me think they did.
We waited out the initial bombing and rushed exodus. For two days, we stayed in the small, reinforced room that was our basement, listening to the panicked radio reports. After the bombing had quieted, my father decided it was safe enough to leave. My parents knew more than I’d realized; our vacations had been spent learning survivalist skills. Preparation for the very event we found ourselves facing. We weren’t completely unprepared, as we crept through the devastation.
Even so, it wasn’t enough. Only the scrape of a clawed foot gave warning, and my father was killed instantly. My mother told me to run as she fired at what looked like an upright crocodile. That was the only shot she got off before it was on her.
I didn’t run. I went for the gun my father had lost. The Drac, as I later learned they called themselves, was hissing as it rose from my mother’s corpse. It was laughing at me – a human child that dared to face it.
Firing, I backed away, only to trip and fall into a slight depression in some debris, which saved my life as the Drac collapsed on top of me. The last bullet went into its throat. I was trapped under it for what seemed like eternity, the rubble keeping it from crushing me.
Voices roused me from the stupor I’d fallen into. I blinked as a newly familiar face peered into my tiny shelter – Jack Monroe. He and the four soldiers still with him were jubilant they’d found a survivor; once they’d freed me, I sat and reloaded the clip while listening to them try and decide where to go. I knew where to go – the abandoned campground up in the mountains my parents had selected.
Two more things happened that night: I privately swore to fight Dracs for as long as I lived, and Jack Monroe called me his girl.
I learned how to kill Dracs, and I fought. I was Jack’s shadow for five years, until I turned eighteen and he finally looked at me, realized that I was no longer a kid. We were lovers for a single, wonderful year; then the bastard betrayed me.
During one of the private times we’d set aside for ourselves, he drugged me and turned me over to the Dracs.
They viewed the fact I’d killed so many of their warriors as an insult. Dracs don’t believe in the equality of the sexes, and an ‘egg bearer’ taking the lives of 117 of their warriors had infuriated them. Surprisingly, they didn’t execute me on the spot.
No, they had another way to make me pay.
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