The Shattered Ones Excerpt

Twilight came to the valley with a dusty purple sky, thunderheads illuminated in the distance by occasional flashes of lightning. My shift long over, I sat out under a desert willow, recorder balanced on the cast-concrete bench next to me. Deadeye’s German accent drifted from the device into the evening air as I transcribed my latest interview into my red notebook. I’d always had a fondness for stories, but collecting them from the squad members was a new pastime. Once I’d realized that the heroes of my childhood were achingly, genuinely human under their formidable reputations, I couldn’t bring myself to let the old veterans’ stories fade into obscurity.

No, Deadeye’s not old. I corrected myself—and my notes. She’s not even forty yet. Of the dozen or so troopers assigned here, only Deadeye, Captain Espinoza, and our doctor Josephine Flores had been directly fighting this war since its inception more than ten years ago. All three of them had worked personally with the founder of the EDF; the powerful telepath who’d been the first to rally the struggling human resistance against the occupying xeno forces. They’d seen Shattered power wielded in battle, faced off against creatures that I could only pray to forget—

“C’mon, Gabriel, focus.” I shook away my distraction, crossed out a line, and backed the recording up a few seconds to try again.

Deadeye’s voice repeated the last sentence, “—wanted us out of the way, once everything was said and done. Some of the new senators even wanted to court-martial Michael, on account of the lives lost once the dampening fields dropped and the population went ape.”

“But he wasn’t responsible!” I mouthed the exclamation even as my own voice came over the recording. Michael. It felt wrong for me to even think of a hero who’d saved humanity in terms of his first name, but Deadeye talked about him like he’d been a friend. “W-was he?”

“Of course not!” Deadeye’s offense was as palpable now as it had been while she was telling the story. She’d stopped tinkering with her office chair to glare at me with her good eye. “The xenos were losing control of the fields—everyone could feel it. Or, you know, as much as you could feel anything back then.” She’d given a fierce twist to the screwdriver. “You grew up under one—you remember.”

I’d squirmed, the memories twisting in the back of my mind like a dream viewed through fog. While experiencing the population ‘going ape’ from the inside, the stories of the fearless saviors of earth had been one of the only things that kept me going. “I just remember being really tired as a little kid.”

“Be glad that tired was all you felt.” I couldn’t hear the creaking of Deadeye’s chair through the recording, but her expression had been suspicious as she sat down. “We adults experienced it much worse. You’d know your friends and family were disappearing, but it was like you couldn’t even bring yourself to care; not properly, anyway. That type of pain can’t stay buried forever. Everyone knew when the fields finally went down, and I understand why so many people lost their minds underneath it all.”

Yeah. I paused the recording and clutched my fingers around my pen. And not everyone lost their minds in a ‘lay down and die’ kind of way. A flash of red splattered across the interior of my mind, a familiar scream lancing through the deepest parts of my memory. For some, the fields falling meant a chance to take back power in the most violent way possible.I sighed and told myself out loud, “Of course they wanted someone to blame.”

“It was just convenient to pin all the blame on Michael,” Deadeye’s voice said as I started playback again. “The Defense Force—all of us who he recruited to help him along the way—did what it needed to, but not everyone liked the cost that victory came with.” She’d snorted and dropped the screwdriver into her toolbox. “Michael knew that everyone who’d fought with him would be in danger. He got word to us to scatter, so we did.” The recording blurred into static for a moment, her next words almost lost in the digital filters I’d added to make playback clearer. “He died only a month later. The rest of his organization got rolled into the government’s forces as the new Earth Defense Force.” She sighed. “Some of us returned after a while. It was all we’d known, so it was hard to stay away.” Her good eye had gone glassy, and she’d blinked hard a few times before confessing, “I don’t even know how many of the others are still alive.”

I switched off the recorder and set my notebook aside. Twirling my pen between my fingers, I stared at the western horizon. The sky had long gone dark, and the lights of one of our communication towers blinked in the distance on the far peaks.

They restored humanity’s hope, and we just shoved them aside. No one will ever know what they gave up so we could be free.

Get the rest of the story Summer 2024 in ‘The Shattered Ones’ from Yarrow Leaf Press!