*
Sam saw UNKNOWN light up in the caller ID but answered the phone anyway.
“Hello,” she said, hearing the hum of a vehicle whirring on the other end of the line.
“You’re not safe.”
“Alex?”
“It’s okay. I’m headed back there now. There’s still time.”
“Time for what?”
“Same thing, Sam, to save the world,” Alex told her. “But we need to save you first.”
FROM AN ANONYMOUS JOURNAL
WHEN I LOOK BACK on those days, I try to remember when I actually realized my life was never, ever going back to normal. That the routine that had so long defined me and provided a respite for my dreams was finished, that those dreams were over too. A door had been opened that could never be closed.
Langston Marsh and his Fifth Column weren’t going anywhere. Alex had destroyed the ash man’s projection, but back from wherever it emanated, he and countless others like him were still there. Beyond that, Alcatraz was hardly the only place they were building their army to turn us all into slaves. We’d managed to destroy one wormhole, but others were certain to open, bringing with them the means to enact a destiny mankind had been created to fulfill. They looked at us as the only means to ensure their own survival, prisoners, in that sense, of the way they’d built their world. So they couldn’t stop, would never stop.
The means to defeat them, the mystery in all this that remains unsolved, lies in the chip inside Alex’s head. That is, if it doesn’t kill him first. We need to harvest the data contained upon it, we need to stop the leakage before it kills Alex.
But what did the ash man mean when he told Alex his parents were still alive and where would that lead? What did he mean about Alex’s true destiny and that we had far worse things to worry about than the threat from his planet?
So much we didn’t know, couldn’t see yet.…
My family went to Florida on vacation once. We rented a car and my dad was driving on one of the big interstate highways when we got caught in the smoke from one of those brushfires that had drifted over all eight lanes. The road was there and then it wasn’t. All my dad could do was throw on his flashers and cut his speed to a crawl. That’s what my life turned into. I couldn’t see anything in front of me, had no idea what lay ahead in the next day or even hour.
The life we’d led up until just a few days before was over and there was no going back. We’d won a battle, not a war. I never wanted to become a hero and don’t consider myself one now. I look back on all of this a lot, looking for something I could’ve done differently, but there’s nothing. My decisions weren’t really conscious ones; I did what I had to do in each respective moment and regret none of those decisions. So if I had it to do all over again, would I?
The answer is simple: I didn’t have a choice then, any more than I’ve got one now. Not if the rising of a new world, committed to the destruction of the old, is to be stopped.
You don’t know who I am, and you don’t need to. This isn’t my story.
It’s Alex’s, because he’s our only hope.
The survivor.