It's Better This Way Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Title

  Characters

  Boring Author Stuff

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1 - The Wreckage

  I poked my head up over the rocks to get a look at the wreckage. No smoke, no signs of life. I looked over at Tony, a hundred yards away, to see what he wanted to do. Our scouts hadn’t been in this particular valley for almost six months, but that wasn’t unusual since there were no humans and there was nothing of interest to the bulls to bring them here. Except now one of the alien dropships or troop carriers or possibly even a mining vessel was splattered over a fifty yard area half a mile down the hill from us. Tony gave me the hand signal asking if I saw anything moving, and I signed him back a negative. He gave me the ‘watch while I move down’ signal and waited for me to acknowledge. I pointed to the AR-17 that was between my feet and gave him a questioning gesture. Tony shook his head vigorously before beginning his descent down the hillside to the wreck.

  I lifted my head above the rock again, just enough to be able to see everything before me. In case a bull, or an army of bulls were hiding out in the rocks lower down the hill waiting for a rescue ship. We didn’t know anything about them other than they had destroyed every single electrical grid on the planet, landed a bunch of ships, built a bunch of massive towers, and now were mining certain areas while another group of them took enormous machines into major cities like Portland and Salem to grind them up into dust, one city block at a time. The only two things we truly knew about them were that they looked weirdly like the minotaurs from Greek mythology, and they killed without warning any human carrying a gun. If you weren’t carrying a firearm or some other piece of military hardware and weren’t interfering with whatever a bull was doing, you got ignored as if you didn’t exist.

  The last time I’d ventured up to Portland, I had spent almost ten minutes walking behind a bull. I yelled at him (we assumed all are male since no one has ever reported one that looked like it might be a female), ran around in front of him making rude gestures, even threw a brick at him. The only time he paid even the slightest attention to me was when I acted like I was going to pick up an old computer tower lying in the middle of the street. As I reached down, I saw his attention shift to me in an instant, his lower right arm swinging what looked like a short-barreled gun toward me. I broke into a run, darting under his weapon, and kept going for the next five blocks or so, shrieking with hysterical laughter. Dane Bodeker told me he’d nearly pissed himself watching me mess with the bull, and that he did pee himself a little when the thing turned its weapon on me.

  Tony made it down to the first scorch in the earth. He looked back at me and gave me the ‘hold’ signal while he did recon on the area. I was a bit spooked. The bulls had technology countless orders of magnitude greater than ours. They might ignore us unless we were armed or ‘stealing’ from them, but I didn’t think they’d be too appreciative of us snooping around one of their wrecks. We’d always heard through the network that the bulls slagged anything that crashed or stopped working, down to the molecule, as if to give us a big fuck you for thinking we might be able to salvage some useful tech from it. For the first few years there was the hope of acquiring tech to burn them off the face of our world. Then it was just to acquire some kind of tech to add something to ease the drudgery of everyday life. Now it was rarely even a thought. We’d learned to do without and still survive.

  Tony gave me the ‘all clear’ sign. I shouldered my rifle and started forward. A sharp whistle from him made me look up from watching for rocks at my feet, and he frantically waved the rifle off my shoulder. Right. I propped the weapon up behind the rock I’d hidden behind and restarted my journey down to the crash site. Just in case there were some live bulls around, or some that decided to show up while we were snooping around, I would be glad I didn’t have my gun. Hopefully.

  I came around a large metal compartment that might have been a cockpit if it’d had any windows. Two seats and what looked like two desks from the old days were inside, along with about ten gallons of what had to be alien blood. It was black and crusted like it had been exposed to the dry central Oregon air for a week or more. I reached down to touch it, but Tony tapped my shoulder and shook his head. We didn’t know if it was toxic or psychedelic or just harmless like our blood. Maybe it had some killer virus that made human insides turn to bloody gelatin.

  About ten yards ahead was the first body. The bull had to have been exposed to the elements for a week or more. The sun had desiccated a good amount of the flesh, but surprisingly the body hadn’t been munched on by critters or insects. What caught our attention was the fact that this bull didn’t have his armor activated. Very few words came down the network about what the aliens really looked like without their matte-gray armor. They had two squat but powerful legs, four arms, and a single head on a huge frame. Altogether, they stood eight to nine feet tall, giants that towered over humans. Apparently the rumor was true that they were all flesh and muscle and bone with armor that could only be a millimeter thick, if that. Humans had debated endlessly about whether or not the aliens were spindly little creatures with giant heads that required power armor to function on a world with gravity.

  The dead bull’s four sunken, sightless eyes stared at a sky that was growing more cloudy by the hour, most likely one of the spring storm systems that could survive its trip over the Cascades and into the central wastelands. The alien definitely bore some kind of odd resemblance to the minotaurs I’d read about in school when I was a kid. The protruding nose and strangely shaped head were the aspects of its face that made it look like a minotaur. The four eyes and four slits I assumed were for breathing were creepy as hell, but nowhere near as weird as the thing’s mouth. The creature looked a lot more like a minotaur with its armor activated. Without the armor, it looked like an abstract painting of a four-eyed, four-jawed cow.

  I pulled my knife from its sheath on my leg and knelt down to peel away one of its four cheeks. Tony looked like he was going to stop me, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the bull anymore than I could. I flipped the knife over and put the dull edge under a mouth flap and gave a tug. It felt like I was trying to cut leather for a moment before the cheek flipped back along the side of the bull’s face. A vertical jaw lined with a mix of sharp canine-like teeth and flat molar-like teeth greeted me. It was such a shock to see it that I jumped a little, causing the cheek flap to fall back into place along the jaw.

  This time Tony did touch me on the arm, but I ignored him and reached back down to flip a few of the cheeks back all at once. Both of us took in a sharp breath when we saw two horizontal and two vertical jaws aligned perfectly with each other. I had a sudden thought of what it would feel like to have a hand or a leg caught in a mouth like that and shuddered. I’d started wiping the knife on my pants and getting up when a thought shot through me.

  “Where is the other body?” I whispered to Tony.

  “Damn,” he mouthed silently and immediately started fanning out from the dead bull we had been kneeling by.

  For a while we thought maybe there was only one bull. Half an hour later Tony found the body up in the rocks opposite of the way we’d come into the valley. This one had his armor activated except for around his head. A chunk of this one’s face and left jaw had been ripped off by something, probably one of the many sheared metal sheets or rods littering the area around
the cockpit. Bull number two didn’t seem to have suffered the decomposition that number one had, but we didn’t know if that was because of the armor or because number two had died a long time after number one. Neither of the corpses had the death stench about them. Neither had any smell at all according to my nose.

  We walked back to the wreckage to scavenge as much as we could, if anything. Before too long both of us admitted we had the willies, that we couldn’t shake the feeling that any moment another bull dropship would come over the rim of the valley or straight down out of the sky and find us sniffing around their wreck. They might think we were defiling their dead. Or they might just feel like snuffing us out. Or worse, they might take us prisoner and do all kinds of weird shit to us.

  We found zero, nothing to take back to the Farm. Possibly humanity’s first peek inside a crashed bull ship and it looked barren. Just the two seats and the two desks. We speculated that the desks were just holographic control boards. We speculated that the bulls simply flew the ships with their minds. We speculated all way out of the valley and across Lanyard Hill to the tree line so we could make camp. We had two more days of traveling to get home after detouring into the valley just to tell Mom and the council that we’d put eyes in there so they didn’t have to for another six months.

  CHAPTER 2 - Running Back and Forth

  The aliens had appeared above our skies twenty-three years ago, and before we could even send them a greeting, they detonated multiple EMP’s over almost every square inch of Earth’s atmosphere. The effect was so strong that it blew out every circuit, every microchip, every electrical connection all over the planet, even the military hardware that was supposed to be shielded specifically against it. Humanity almost collapsed just from that one blow. Within an hour, blue-white blobs of what looked like plasma fell from the skies, and military installations all over the world went offline permanently.

  I had been fifteen and just home from being let out of school after the EMP attack. My father had come home from work, and we stood in the back yard, arms around each other, watching interstellar bombs drop from the high clouds and hit Mountain Home AFB. I remember my father’s face when he suddenly realized that Gowen Field was less than ten miles from us and was home to a squadron of the new F-39’s.

  When the blob finally came down over Boise’s airport, it was a spectacular sight. I watched it, not concerned that it might have a blinding flash like a nuclear weapon did until after the fire wave rolled out for at least a mile, consuming everything in its path. We lived up on a slight rise in the foothills to the east of the city, and the view was amazing for watching huge jets and smaller attack planes take off and land, especially at night. The view we had was too perfect to watch an entire mile of a city simply turn to dust within thirty seconds. We had to duck down and hug the back of the house when the backpressure wave came to replace the oxygen burned in the giant fireball.

  Within a week we had to leave our home and travel through the mountains. The aliens hadn’t shown any interest in us. They hadn’t even landed any ships or towers near us (something I wouldn’t even learn about until a year later). It was the humans that forced us out. With no electricity, no grocery stores, no cars, no use for gas other than burning things, Boise collapsed in less than five days. Being Idaho, it seemed almost everyone had a gun of one kind or another except my father, and by extension, me. Groups of men with guns started forming, some trying to be civilized and help restore order. The majority forcibly took whatever they wanted or needed, and they left bodies in their wake to let others know what was coming if you didn’t comply. No doubt a lot of the bodies were from those that did comply in hopes of not being harmed.

  The women had it the worst down in the city. Seeing what had become of some of them made me glad for the first time in my life that my mother had been dead for three years. That sliver of joy was immediately crushed when I thought of my sister Sandra, trapped in Corvallis at the university dorms. She’d always told me to ‘just wait until you get to college’ whenever I’d complain about how horrible high school was, how I was never going to get a girlfriend. College kids were supposedly older, more mature, and I wanted to fool myself that her dorm mates would band together and protect each other. Boise State University sat down in the valley on the eastern end of the city, and from what I could tell, those college kids were doing exactly what the other armed gangs of locals were doing… which was a lot of shooting and making a lot of women scream.

  This gang or that gang finally started roaming the foothills around the city, knowing that most of the houses were upscale and likely to have something valuable like guns, food, or women. We got out just in time and made our way up to Idaho City on foot with not much more than a pair of hiking boots, a coat, a few pairs of socks and underwear, and a couple of knives. Idaho City didn’t want us or anyone else coming near them, and had set up a roadblock on Highway 21 about ten miles from the city limits. There were at least twenty rifles pointed at us as we approached. A loud voice called out for us to halt about two hundred yards from the jumble of worthless automobiles and pickup trucks they stood behind.

  A group of five came around an old Chevy truck and walked towards us, guns leveled at us from their hips the entire time. When they were fifty feet away, the leader of the group told us to turn around and go back to Boise. My father begged with them to let us go on, at least go through their small mountain town so we could continue on to the next and see if they would offer us refuge. The leader wouldn’t budge. My father started yelling at them, alternating between insults and pleading with them to at least take me in. Instead, the man in charge gave us thirty seconds to turn around and head back the way we had just come from.

  At twenty seconds, the five rifles that had been pointed at us from the hip switched to their shoulders, five eyes sighting my father along the barrels. I turned and started walking back down the road, grabbing my father’s coat sleeve to get him to follow. He shrugged me off and when I tried to grab his arm again, he turned on me and shoved me down, going on about how it just wasn’t right that these people wouldn’t take us in, we could work, we were useful. He rounded back on the five men and began walking towards them screaming like a madman. I sat with my ass on the asphalt, shocked to watch my father falling apart before a whole gang of men with guns and hard looks in their eyes that promised they’d make the hard choices without thinking twice.

  The count reached zero and I watched five guns unload bullets into my father from twenty feet away. He danced a sickening little pirouette before falling over on his side. He was dead before his head cracked open on the pavement. Five rifles swung around towards me. I closed my eyes and felt hot urine flood my Levi’s. Instead of the sound of gunfire, I heard the leader start counting down from thirty again. I ran at least ten miles, snot and tears congealing on my face. I finally had to stop when my thighs were on fire from the friction of cold urine and rough denim rubbing back and forth.

  CHAPTER 3 - Thoughts of Home

  I woke from the nightmare that has plagued me since the day it happened. The fire had burned down past coals and was growing cold. Tony stirred for a few seconds then went back to as relaxed a sleep as one can get on cold, rocky ground. I flipped over onto my back to stare at the sky. Twenty three years after light pollution became a faded memory, the sky was still the most breathtaking thing I had ever witnessed. As a kid, my dad, Sandra, and I would go up into the Sawtooth Mountains and do some sky gazing on an old telescope that he’d had since he was a kid himself. We had to travel farther and farther each year to find true dark as Boise continued to expand.

  It was funny in a way to think that in the span of about ten minutes, the skies once again became the same as when Plato, the Israelites, and even the first men had looked at them. The line of the Milky Way always made me think of the bulls, wondering where they had come from. If they could find us, could there be other alien beings within the bright cluster of stars I could see every night, looking for them? For a yea
r or so after it happened, I fantasized that some benevolent race would come and help us fight off the invaders. After another year, I had made up my mind that since the bulls ignored us as if we were insects, they must be obeying some galactic law, which meant none of the other powers within the galaxy were going to do anything about it.

  I could see the glow of dawn coming, so instead of trying to sleep anymore I got out of my bag and rummaged around for firewood. By the time the first fiery line of sunlight broke over the central wastes, I had water boiling and the last scoop of coffee brewing. Anytime one of our scavenger crews found the stuff, it got locked away in the main pantry of the big house. It was worth more than gold these days. The only people who were given a coffee ration were the scouts. A few of the citizens probably grumbled about how they deserved it, as well as a few of the crew members who had unearthed it by chance somewhere. Scouts needed to be the most alert and sometimes had to walk or run for hours. Bulls were easy to spot, but other humans bent on taking what you had were sneaky, clever animals. Besides, the penalty for filching goods, especially coffee, was banishment. The same as for stealing it from anyone else on the way back to The Farm or stealing it once it had been locked away in the pantry.

  I cringed at the thought of banishment. I’d seen it more times in the nine years I’d been a citizen of The Farm than I liked to remember. I’d voted for it against others that had stood accused of some crime or other more times than I wanted to think of as well. The terror in their eyes as they were stripped completely naked and marched down the road for a mile before being told to get lost would give me nightmares for a week or two after. The escorts would never shoot the banished either, no matter if attacked. It was the severity of being forced out naked and not even being humanely killed that served as a warning to everyone else. Over the years scouts and crews and more than a few farmers and ranchers found the naked corpses of those that didn’t have what it took to survive with absolutely nothing. Which was most of them, I’m sure.