Earth Alone (Earthrise Book 1) Read online

  EARTH ALONE

  EARTHRISE, BOOK 1

  by

  Daniel Arenson

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  AFTERWORD

  NOVELS BY DANIEL ARENSON

  KEEP IN TOUCH

  CHAPTER ONE

  Marco was walking home with his mother when the scum rained from the sky.

  Fire melted the snow.

  There was a lot of snow this winter in what remained of Toronto, fourth largest city in what remained of the North American Alliance, this ravaged continental command in what remained of the world. The trains were dead again. For long hours, Marco and his mother had been walking down the streets, heading home from the gas mask distribution center. The snow assaulted them like a second invasion, piling up at their sides, swirling around their legs, beating their faces, whipping their coats, coating their eyelashes and eyebrows, and numbing their fingers and bones and souls. It was the heart of winter. The coldest, bleakest day of the year. The coldest, bleakest century of mankind.

  "Forty-three years ago," Mother had said that morning, struggling through the cold, "lights would hang on the houses in winter. A million lights all in green, red, yellow, and blue. Bells would ring and music would play, and even the trees shone with light."

  Marco shivered at her side, trudging through the snow. Some days the trains still worked, screeching, clattering, spraying sparks underground, roaring forth like great tunneling worms, their insides hollowed out and filled with parasitic commuters. But most days the underground was just full of those too afraid to walk above in the world. Those who hid in shadows. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Hiding. Waiting for the rain.

  "I don't believe you," Marco said. His cardboard box banged against his hip as he walked, hanging on a plastic strap. Every winter—a fresh cardboard box, fresh filters and lenses and needles and rubber, fresh life. "There wouldn't be enough power in the world."

  "The world was different." She stroked his hair. "The world was good."

  No, Marco did not believe it. Forty-three years ago? Before the Cataclysm? Almost nobody was still alive from that time. Marco was eleven years old; his mother was thirty-six. All they had ever known was this. Cold. Snow that stung and clung to your skin like frozen leeches. Subways shrieking and dying in underground tunnels full of huddling masses and white, terrified eyes and whispers and prayers. Aching legs. Old stories. All they had now was old stories. Lights? Warmth? Fairy tales. Marco was the son of librarians. He knew something of tales. Of lies.

  "The world was good," his mother whispered again, holding his hand as they trudged down the ruined street, moving between the snowdrifts, between the shells of old cafes, restaurants, bars, strip clubs, offices, tattoo parlors, the ghosts of old generations. Their cardboard boxes dripped water, withering away, hanging against their hips, constant companions. "The world was good."

  A mantra. A dying dream. If the world had been good, it was forgotten. Today there was only snow and fire.

  And as they crossed an icy road, the sky opened and the snow stormed and swirled aside like curtains parting on a stage. And the fire blazed. And they came.

  Across the road, the handful of others who had braved the snow paused, pointed, shouted. Their voices flowed through the storm.

  "Scum!"

  Marco stood still. The snowy wind whipped his face, tore off his hood, and streamed his hair. He stared up at them, at a sky that cracked open like a womb to spill its festering, writhing eggs. Five of the pods streamed down, pulsing, purple fringed with orange flame, ionizing the air, cauterizing the clouds, screaming, blazing with heat. One pod slammed into a building. Bricks rained. Flames roared. Creatures squealed. Another pod slammed onto the street ahead of Marco and his mother. It was as large as one of the rusty cars you could still find alongside the frozen highways. The snow melted beneath it, turned to water, then to steam. Asphalt cracked. The egg began to bloom open.

  The sky shattered behind them. Marco spun to see more fire, more twisting indigo balls falling.

  Scum. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move. Scum.

  The rancid lavender miasma seeped into the air.

  "Marco, your mask!" Mother pulled her box open so violently she tore the cardboard. The gas mask gazed from within, its eyes glassy and condemning, its mouth thrusting out, round and bulging like the mouths of tribesmen Marco had seen in magazines, plates stretching their lips to obscene sizes. As the lavender gas crept, Mother pulled the mask onto her head. She tightened the straps so hard she ripped her hair. Her breath rattled through the filter, and her eyes were huge, round black pools. She had become something no longer human. Something hurt. Haunted. Ancient and scared, a deity of glass and rubber.

  Fingers numb, Marco opened his own cardboard box, pulled out his own gas mask. He had worn a gas mask countless times. Sometimes he wondered which was his true face—his face of skin or this face of rubber, which eyes were his true eyes, which voice was the true voice of his childhood. He put on the mask and gasped for air. The alien pods rained down. The miasma wafted around them, the disease that withered your balls, that made your babies born with shrunken heads, that clung to your clothes and frothed your shit, that smelled like cotton candy and forgotten summers if you caught but a whiff, that turned to rot like childhood's end.

  They ran.

  They ran as the fire rained from the sky. They ran as the snowdrifts collapsed. They ran as buildings crumbled. They ran as those glowing, twisting, purple pods fell, as the smoke rose, as people fled, seeking manholes under the snow, seeking pathways into the darkness. They ran as the massive ship of the creatures blocked the sky, hid the sun, birthed its eggs, and laughed with guttural, mocking, organic engines like valves opening and closing in a throat.

  "There, ahead!" Mother's voice emerged from her mask, deep and metallic. She pulled Marco along. He slipped. She yanked him up. They ran onward. "Do you see the sign? A pathway underground! Come—"

  They were racing along the sidewalk when the pod slammed down before them, shattering and spilling its slime and smoke, and the creature emerged from within.

  Marco froze and stared.

  The scum. The scolopendra titaniae. The bastards that had ravaged the world over forty years ago, slaughtering most of humanity, that had taunted and brutalized humanity since. In the flame and smoke and steam, Marco saw only a shadow, then glimpsed rows of claws like spikes on fences, like swords in an armory, like the pikes of ancient warriors, and twisting, flailing segments all in armor, a great centipede, ten feet tall and rising, a god. A god of the darkness. A god from the stars. A god of wrath. Baal. Lord of flies. Crying out in the snow, born into the world hungry, so hungry, every twitch of it, every hiss, every clack of its mandibles screaming of hunger.

  Its fumes flowed, and it leaped toward Marco and his mother.

  "Fire!" rose a distant voice, and hund
reds of boots thudded, and machine guns blazed. Halos of flame burst around the muzzles of hundreds of guns, and jets screamed overhead, charging across the sky like dragons in old books with crumbling yellow pages. Armored vehicles rumbled in the distance, cannons firing, and buildings tumbled. Fire! Fire! Scum. Scum.

  "Mother!"

  Marco pulled her hand.

  The creature slammed into her.

  Those claws drove forth, cutting through flesh, impaling, emerging slick with red blood and steam that soon froze, wafting away, wisps of frost like fairies, like her soul fleeing.

  The scum pulled its claws free, and Mother fell onto the snow, her blood red in the white like poppies.

  "Fire!"

  Machine guns—pattering. Jets—screaming. Hot, searing metal blasting forward, and the smell of it. Of gunpowder and war and smoke. The great centipede seemed almost to dance as the bullets tore into it, cracking armored segments, bursting out with yellow blood. The arthropod fell as its comrades scuttled along the street, and the soldiers of the HDF ran and fired their guns and streamed across the sky in their machines.

  Mother . . .

  Marco knelt above her, tears in his eyes, the lenses of his gas mask fogging up. He clutched her hand. It was already growing cold. He touched her rubber cheek.

  "Mother . . ."

  The holes gaped open across her torso, four of them, a neat row like oversized red buttons. She leaked into the snow. There was so little blood this way, only poppies and frost.

  "Mother!"

  Marco tore off her gas mask, exposing her pale face, her staring eyes, and her hand was frozen in his. He tugged her hand. He pounded her chest.

  Wake up. Wake up!

  Dead. Dead.

  In the snow ahead, creatures stirred. Creatures rose. Two of them, claws sinking into the snow, long as swords, curved, moving together, propelling forward on segmented, armored bodies, mandibles dripping. So hungry. Moving toward their prey. They would scavenge if they could not hunt. They approached.

  Marco rose to his feet, breathing heavily through his gas mask. He stood over his mother, fists clenched.

  "You will not take her." His voice shook, and tears clung to the lenses of his mask. "You will not eat her. You will—"

  He gasped as something grabbed him from behind. He spun around, heart leaping, and saw her there. A girl in the snow, perhaps eleven like him, maybe twelve, tall and skinny and blond, peering at him through a gas mask.

  "Come with me, idiot." She pulled him.

  He recognized her. Addy Linden. A girl from his school, one from the "troubled children" classroom, that room at the back the other students feared. Her father had just come out of prison, they said, a truck driver who had crashed while drunk, killing two kids. Addy was wild and troubled, a girl who laughed too loudly, who fought in the halls, who smoked in the bathroom, who always bled from skinned knees and elbows and made others bleed.

  "My mother—" Marco began as the creatures scurried closer to the corpse.

  "She's fucking dead, you idiot." Addy yanked him. "Come with me or die with her."

  He slipped in the snow. Addy pulled him onward, moving away from his mother. The scum scuttled toward the body, ready to feed, and their claws rose, and their mandibles descended, and Marco cried out and tried to free himself.

  "Addy, I need to go to her." He tried to run back. "She might still be alive. She might still need me. She—"

  "They're dead." She slapped him hard, cracking the lens of his mask. "They're fucking dead. All of them. Our parents are dead. Come with me. Come with me and live."

  And then Marco saw them behind Addy, only a few feet away. Two corpses, tall and burnt, their skin peeling and fluttering like scraps of charred paper, their gas masks melted, their blond hair caked with blood. A dead centipede lay beside them, ten feet of armor and claws, curled up and riddled with bullets.

  Her parents.

  Marco nodded. Hand in hand, Addy and he ran.

  They leaped over strewn bricks, fell into snow, rose and ran again. Above, the dark ship vanished into the clouds, the last of its eggs spawned onto the world, but the jets of the Human Defense Force still screamed, and their missiles still streaked down like comets. Another building fell, and soldiers in white uniforms ran, firing their guns, tearing down another scum, and a man shouted, "One missing! One fled down 7th!" And a hundred soldiers ran. And Marco and Addy ran the other way.

  A sign rose ahead from the snow, red and blinking and glowing like those lights from the old stories. The snow had melted to reveal the stairs plunging underground. Marco and Addy ran so quickly into the darkness he slipped on the wet steps, would have fallen had Addy not held him up. At the bottom of the staircase stretched the tunnel, the place where the trains sometimes ran, where thousands now crowded together, thousands of rubber faces with glassy eyes, thousands of round mouths, thousands of breathing damp souls in gas masks, staring, the flickering neon lights reflecting in the lenses.

  Addy and Marco wormed their way through the crowd. They stood against a wall, waiting, silent. The people pressed against them, silent too. A radio crackled to life. A man spoke through speakers on the ceiling, comforting, voice deep and smooth, the man Marco had grown up with, the man he had never met, the man whose voice he had heard more than his own.

  "Fifteen pods landed on Yonge Street, Toronto. Fifteen scolopendra titaniae exterminated. All clear. All clear." Following his voice sounded a long, mourning wail like a life-support system after the patient had died. All clear.

  The people pulled off their gas masks, faces and hair damp with sweat. A few laughed. Two teenagers kissed deeply, pawing at each other, and an old man grumbled. A couple of women in ragged cloaks chattered in a foreign language and argued over a bag of clams. A few people climbed back into the world, and a train screamed along the tracks with a fountain of sparks and light and smoke and rust, and hundreds boarded. Life resumed in the cold, in the heart of winter, in what remained of the world.

  But not for us. Not for my mother.

  Marco's eyes swam with tears. Addy pulled off her gas mask and glared at him with hard red eyes, but then her lip quivered, and she pulled him into her arms. They held each other in the subway station, nearly crushing each other, eleven years old and lost as the world clattered and grumbled on.

  CHAPTER TWO

  He walked through the library on his last day of freedom, seeking a book to take into hell.

  He was eighteen. He was that horrible age. He was that age they all dreaded, the birthday nobody celebrated, the number they whispered with the voice of mourners. Eighteen. Two syllables. A breath at the back of the mouth, a tap of the tongue on the palate, a shiver down your back. Eighteen. The day they came. The day they took you away. The day you left home and entered the inferno.

  Marco walked between the bookshelves here in his library, the last library in Toronto, among the last in the world. For eighteen years—that horrible number again—he had lived in the apartment above this library. He and his family were stewards to these books, generational librarians like an ancient dynasty tasked with maintaining a crumbling kingdom long past its golden age. The bookshelves stretched alongside Marco, forming canyons in the shadowy hall. Books stood on the shelves like soldiers, like the soldier Marco would become tomorrow. Small, dusty paperbacks. Heavy hardcovers with torn jackets. Leather-bound tomes with golden spines. Most were from before the Cataclysm fifty years ago, before the skies had opened, before the scum had ruined the world. Marco had read hundreds of these books, had spent his life reading them. Most books written before the Cataclysm were funny, exciting, scary, delightful. Those written in the past fifty years were mournful, tears watering every word like rain brings forth every flower.

  He walked, passing his hands over the familiar book spines. It was Sunday. The library was closed. The library was almost always closed, even when the doors were unlocked, even as the world rolled by outside and light shone and some semblance of joy filled the ci
ty. Barely anyone read books anymore. They stared at their phones and listened to their headpieces and looked through their glasses of augmented reality, and mostly they forgot. Forgot what it meant to be human. To have humanity. Some days Marco barely knew the difference between the normals and those born to parents who had inhaled the miasma of the scum, born with shrunken skulls, dead eyes, pendulous lips.

  "A funny book." He paused by a shelf. "A book full of jokes and anecdotes and life and laughter. I'm going into hell. Let me bring a little piece of heaven."

  Hell? He inhaled deeply, thinking of those he had seen come back from that realm, five years older on paper, five centuries older inside. Some had returned missing limbs. All had returned missing their joy. Many never returned at all. Hell? Yes. The HDF. The Human Defense Force. The global military created to fight the scum. The gauntlet all humans from every last corner of this ravaged Earth entered at eighteen, then spent five years in the fire.

  Marco inhaled deeply and placed his hand on a book. Five years? How to choose one book—just one title—to carry in his pocket for five years? How to—

  The library doors creaked open, and sunlight washed the library.

  "Marco?"

  He turned around and saw her enter, bringing with her the sun and air. Within an instant, Marco's anxiety faded, the visions of war retreating under her light.

  "Kemi," he said, walking toward her.

  She smiled at him, her teeth bright, her cheeks dimpled, the smile he loved. The granddaughter of Nigerian immigrants, Kemi Abasi had soft brown eyes and a mane of curly hair. She wore a gray sweater vest over a white collared shirt, charcoal trousers, and the necklace he had bought her last month for her own eighteenth birthday. The silver amulet was shaped as the Greek letter pi. He loved words; she had always loved numbers. He was writing a novel; she dreamed of charting the distant galaxies. Her cardboard box, containing her gas mask, hung against her hip. She had painted it blue and decorated it with golden stars. Most youths their age decorated their government-issued boxes, turning them into elaborate cases that shone and jangled. Marco's was still plain cardboard.