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Voyager: Chapter 3

Six Months Later

"You see them?" Crane nudged me and I brought my binoculars up to my eyes.

"Where?" I was looking down from the top of the building we had called home for half a year. It had been tough to live like this, going out each day, scrounging around like rats for our next meal, but it was our life now. The nuclear generator that Crane had stashed away broke last week. The Plutonium core may have been good for a decade, but the parts weren't. They were damaged the first day and after continued use, the failsafe kicked in and shut down the machine. We didn't even try to fix it, you couldn't just use glue and tape to fix that sort of problem.

Over the course of many months, the aliens, which neither of us had ever seen, returned twice to drop off new loads of those creatures they turned the humans they captured into. What was even more disturbing was that each time they came back, the new collectors were smarter and less grotesque. Also, they no longer needed us alive. We had watched horrified and helplessly as we saw a newer generation of collectors, with four arms, four legs and two heads, all in the right places, drag a pair of survivors out of a building and kill them. Crane's .50 Cal wouldn't have done any good, he only had a few shots left and as much as we wanted to help, we were watching from over a mile away through a pair of binoculars.

It was a down point for us. Being so helpless.

The power was out and the only food we could find was rats. It would take all day just to walk through the city to get to areas that we hadn't already looted. The time to move camp had come. Plus, the amount of collector activity around our location had increased. Crane believed that our presence was beginning to be noticed and though I was skeptical, I didn't want to stick around only to find out he was right. So, we began to plan out our next move.

For the last two days, we had been observing the collectors as they made their patrols. There was a noticeable pattern to their wanderings. They would always be out, 24/7, but it peeked right before sunset and was at its lowest around sun rise. It was evening now and we planned to move out in the morning.

Crane nudged my arm which was now healed. The nudge was enough so that the binoculars were now aimed at what he was looking at.

"Shit." It was another generation of collectors. These ones didn't even look human now. The skin was a pale, sickly green that gleamed when the setting sun hit it. On top of that, they each had oval shaped eyes holes that angled downward. Their arms were long and slender and held five bony fingers. The torso and legs retained some sort of similarity to human legs, but still had that green color to it.

"Why? Why are they doing this? It makes no sense." I muttered and lowered to binoculars. The sight of the new collectors was making me sick and turn a bit green myself. I took a deep breath to help settle my stomach.

Crane lifted his head from the scope of his massive rifle. We were both in the prone position, looking over the edge. He rested his chin on the butt of his rifle. "I don't know. Nothing seems to make sense."

"This definitely complicates things. If they're smarter than the last generation, then chances are, they're going to start actively searching the buildings instead of only going in when something makes a sound and I doubt the cat trick will work anymore." Since only people were gathered up, the collectors were quick to dismiss a sound if an animal was near the sound. It was something we had learned entirely by accident.

Two months ago, we were forced to hide inside of building during a routine food run. We ran into a patrol of what was at the time, the newest version of the collectors. It was an old department store and some cats had settled in it. Inside, we hid behind some boxes that had fallen over and spilled its contents of designer clothes onto the floor.

When the collectors were walking by, I peeked over the boxes and knocked one of them over. I barely got down fast enough to avoid being seen, but the damage was done. They came in and began to slowly and carefully inspect every square inch of the store, that is, until a cat jumped out.

One of collectors was just a few feet away from us. Crane was getting ready to fight it out. My arm was still healing then, but I did have a red crowbar that I could swing with my good arm. It would have found us if it had taken the few more steps necessary to see over the boxes. Then a cat jumped out from behind us and over the box. It stood on the top and hissed at the collector before darting off somewhere. There was absolute silence for several long and heart pounding seconds before the collector grumbled and left. The others soon followed it out and we were free to return home with a bit of knowledge.

It was only an idea at the time, but a few experiments that included a rope tied to some loose objects and cats proved that they were still too stupid to do complex thinking. If there's a noise and something comes out, it thinks that was the cause.

It wasn't hard to get a family of cats to start living in our building. Just leave out some cat food that we had scrounged up out each night and they came quickly. Never had to use it though, the collectors didn't really bother us in our own home to begin with, but it was just a bit of extra security. Security that might not even work if these new collectors were smarter.

"What now?" I asked. The plan was to move in the morning. We had everything important packed and ready to go.

Crane slowly thrummed his fingers on the ledge. "We can't stay here, we know that."

I nodded silently in agreement. There was no food, barely any water and the city wasn't the place to be anymore. It may have more cover, but we needed food. The area just outside of New York had been turned into a nature preserve. One of the few slices of land around that had genuine forests that could be dated back to the colonization of America. We planned to head for there.

"If we leave at first light, we can get out of the industrial sector before the patrol intensify." He pulled out the map we had found in one of the cars.

By the luggage inside, the people who had owned it last were on vacation. There was an antique fishing pole and the map had the nature preserve circled.

"Then we head straight west along the main freeway." He traced the massive freeway system that went out of the city, capable of handling millions each hour.

"Once we hit the suburbs, we stay the night and head north along the 87 until we hit the preserve." I finished. This was review for both of us, but it was vital that we did this right. Taking a wrong turn anywhere could spell out disaster and leave us lost and vulnerable. The suburbs, as it was still called, was a city itself. It was were the vast majority of the middle class lived. Miles and miles of apartments and condos that all looked alike, set in a maddening square pattern each block. I would not want to get lost there.

"Yeah, then we just hope the preserve is still there." Crane prayed. Who knew? Maybe it was burnt down. Maybe they aliens had scorched the entire planet and not the cities.

I slowly crawled away from the edge of the building. My arm still hurt a bit when I put pressure on it. Crane had said that a piece of bone had probably chipped off and was rubbing against the side of the newly healed bone when I had brought this to his attention. There was little we could do about it and as long as it didn't become internally infected and didn't tear anything, I was fine.

Confident that nothing below would be able to see me, I stood up and stretched my arms above my head. Watching the collectors all day was not fun. They moved slowly when they were docile, lumbering along mindlessly. Occasionally one of the really fat and ugly ones would trip and fall on one of its faces. The first time I saw it, I nearly lost it. The way it couldn't use one of its many arms to get itself upright, it would spend hours just squirming until it eventually got dragged off by others. Now, every time I saw them, I thought of who those people were.

The aliens didn't discriminate in any way. I had seen the faces of children, half absorbed into the bodies of collectors. Their eyes would dart around and their mouths would just hang open. I tried not to look at the faces, they remained too human. No matter how much the body was cruelly twisted, the faces always looked too human. That was one of the graces of the newer generations, they were becoming more refined, losing the human aspects for whatever the aliens were striving for.

"Let's head inside. We need as much rest as we can get." I said to Crane and he began to crawl away from the edge. He slowly tugged the rifle with him as well. He loved that gun, I could tell by how he carried it around everywhere even though it was large and cumbersome. Each time I saw him fire it, I felt like I was looking at some piece of art. He would slow his breathing to almost a still and his eyes would become so focused. He kept both eyes open and they stared straight ahead, only quivering the slightest. Then he would exhale and keep breathing out until he barely had any air in his lungs. The bang would quickly follow, a thunderous boom that would even make those damn hiding birds flutter form their perches. I wondered what he was going to do when he fired his last round.

Crane stood up and cradled his gun in his arms. "I'll see what supplies we have left and try to make something to eat." He walked past me and went back inside.

I stayed a bit to watch the last vestiges of sunlight disappear. A nice thing about the lack of power was the nights. Without the lights of the city to block them out, I could see the stars. There were so many and I had lived my entire life in the city. The first time I was out at night was when we had hit the mother lode of canned foods at a half buried supermarket. It was under a massive pile of rubble and we would have missed it if it wasn't for Crane's canine nose. He smelled the scent of some rotting fruit from the punctured cans. It took us all day to dig them out and ended up having to spend the night there. There was a hole in the ceiling that went up for several floors where one of the lasers had went right through.

Crane pointed them out to me. They were one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen because it was the first time I had lain my own eyes on them.

The last bit of light faded away and the stars began to come out. I focused on a reddish one, Mars. I had read about how Mars had a shade of red to it and that planets looked different in the night Earth sky, almost as if they had more substance to them.

Mars was home to close to three billion people. I held out my hand and tried to pinch it between my fingers. They were so close, I could see them, yet so far away. Maybe there was someone there doing this exact something with Earth. Some person standing atop of a ruined building, and looking at the stars. I didn't know if Mars was actually like this, but I wasn't hopeful for the red planet.

Slightly depressed from my thoughts I turned to go back inside and leave this roof for the last time. Funny, I called it a roof even though it was nothing more than the remains of the floor that used to be a home. It was three stories above Crane's own floor and the entrance to go back inside was no more than the exposed stairwell. Thank god for overly strict building codes or this entire place would have crumbled. If it did crumble in the future, at least we weren't going to be around for it to crush. In about a week and a half, we'll be relaxing with nothing but the trees around and the fresh air.