The wheezing was coming from her right. She stumbled through the darkness by the sick light of the moon, straining her eyes, searching. There, to her right, she saw something moving. She turned and ran again.
Gomer was dead. Oh, he was still breathing, but there was nothing anyone on earth could do to help him. He lay on his back, his head thrown forward, his arms tightly pressing down on a dead Digger's jaws.
Those jaws had almost bisected Gomer. They were shut around the man's crotch and hips and were the only reason that the alien air hadn't so far killed him. The jaws made an imperfect seal, letting only a bit of the poison bleed in and allowing his suit to function. A trio of bullet holes in the thing showed how it had died. Gomer's gun, its work done, lay next to him on the hard, cold ground.
"Oh, Jesus, Gomer," she said in a whimper, kneeling down next to him. The tableau was obscene, as though the two figures, man and monster, had melded into some kind of hideous chimera. "Jesus Christ."
"I'm...not..." he wheezed, forcing the words out through clenched jaws and heavy breathing. "Not...religious. Remember?"
Bess snorted, making a sound of laughter combined with a wail of anguish. "Hold on, man, I'll get Sandford."
"Too late," he said "I've lost...lost too much...blood. Was just...waiting...for you."
"Oh, man," she said, reaching out and grabbed his head, leaning down to cradle it against her chest. "Oh, Gomer."
"Blaze..." he started, and then gasped. He shook in her arms as the poison air started to creep into his suit, into his mask. "Blaze..."
He looked at her, pleading with his eyes. She bent down and touched her faceplate to his, their noses almost touching, and she saw tendrils of yellow air beginning to cloud his face.
"Don't talk, Gomer," she begged. "Hold your breath."
"Blaze," he said again, and smiled.
"Blaze of...glory."
And then he died.
When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
Revelation 8:1 "What happened to him?" she asked, looking down at Sandford.
"A nail through his suit," said Curtis, leaning on the ARM cart. "Through his suit, through his arm, and out the other side. We tried to patch it up, but there was so much blood..."
Bess could see that. Curtis had laid the man down on his back, arms folded across his chest. One sleeve was red and sodden, blood pooling in the elbow of the plastic fabric, tugging it down. The dead doctor's face stared up at them, eyes wide with a frozen look of sheer panic.
"Do you...do you want to bury them?" asked Curtis hesitantly. He looked drawn out and exhausted, as though some vital spark had gone out of him. Bess could sympathize-she felt like a rag doll herself, all stuffing and cloth and no life. She'd watched so many deaths over the last few days that she felt numb and dead herself. There were no tears left, not even for Gomer.
"We can't," she said dispiritedly. "Vibrations, remember? We start churning up the earth with shovels, it's like a 'dinner's served' sign."
"I know," said Curtis. "It's just that...I don't know. You've been through a lot."
"I'm fine," she said. "What do we do now, go back for help?"
"We have to get the Bomb there ourselves," he said in response. "We're too close to turn back."
"We can't do it," Bess said. "You and I can't get this damned thing there ourselves."
"We have to," he said simply. "If we turn back, go back to New America, there's a real good chance that we'll get eaten on our way there."
"Fuck that," she said. "We can travel fast and light, we won't have to slow down for anything, and we've got plenty of ammunition..."
"There's another reason," said Curtis slowly. "It's something you haven't thought of yet."
"What?" she asked, and then it hit her.
"Aw, no," she said, feeling her stomach turn to jelly. "No."
"We don't have enough air," he said quietly.
She knew he was right. They'd carried liquid oxygen with them in tanks, but those tanks were now all gone-the Diggers had devoured them all in their feeding frenzy. Food and water they could do without for a while, but the only breathable air they had was on their backs. They weren't going to make it all the way back to New America before it ran out.
"We hook the Bomb up," she said, inspiration striking her. "It starts turning the alien air into breathable air..." She stopped as he shook his head.
"It doesn't work that way," he said. "We can't just turn it on, bend over it and start sucking up good, clean air. It's...it's a processor, but not an instant one. We need a lot of these things working before we will see a difference."
"So we're going to die out here," she said, letting it sink in. "There's nothing we can do."
"We can get it to the alien atmosphere processor and turn it on," he said simply. "And we can leave a record of what happened to us. Others will come and continue the work."
"We're going to die out here," she said again with resignation, looking around.
Corpses and pieces of corpses lay everywhere. Huge holes in the ground, like exploded land mines, dotted the landscape. Dead Diggers lay like grotesquely huge intestinal parasites, bleeding their jelly-like ichor onto the dirt. Guns lay broken. She saw a silver flask shining in the carnage. She saw a crucifix on a chain.
This would be the world she died in.
"All right," she said finally, tamping down her panic and her sense of hopelessness. "let's see if we can find that road you were talking about."
The next few hours were the hardest of her life. Although she had humourlessly thought of them as her last hours, barely acknowledging how hard they were. It took them forty-five minutes to wrestle the Bomb downhill to the flat area in front of the farmhouse where a rural lane had once been. Another hour and a half of curses, barked shins and short tempers to shove the thing forward until they discovered the road that would lead them to the alien atmosphere processor. A grade of five percent would have defeated them, but through luck or God's grace (luck, she thought, remembering Gomer and his atheism) they never had to deal with that kind of obstacle. Indeed, they were going a bit downhill, which made their task easier.
Of course, easier is a relative word. It was backbreaking labor and required horrible, never-ending vigilance, looking out for every divot, every lump or clod of earth that could stall the cart. Sometimes they got a hundred yards before the thing lurched to a sudden halt, other times as little as three feet. Yet, as the hours wore on (and their awareness of just how little oxygen they had left grew), they made progress. On a curving stretch of road bound by the largest of the alien trees they'd seen, they came to a jolting halt as another hummock of buckled ground stopped them. Bess was crying with frustration by this point, but she stepped back, rubbed her aching arms and bent to her task...
"Bess," whispered Curtis. She slowly looked up.
Just visible around the curve was a structure. An alien structure.
She stepped away from the cart, moved forward. Curtis did the same. They took another few paces, moving around the clump of trees that had been shielding the installation from view, every step bringing more of the thing into sight.
It was perhaps fifty feet tall-by far the tallest structure Bess had seen on their journey, even in her entire life. Black, gray and silver, a pyramid of metal and what looked like organic matter mixed together, like some hulking cyborg giant from a nightmare. It was about a hundred feet across at each of its five roughly-equal bases. From the bases the material sloped up to an apex at which a silver globe rested. Fungus growth covered the building, spreading yellow and brown, cancerous in its aspect. Demons whizzed through the air around the building, frantic with energy and motion. Worst of all, the air directly above the globe was bilious, shimmering and opaque.
They were watching the poison being born.
"The Demons," she whispered. "There are hundreds of them. We'll never..."
"We don't have to," said Curtis, collapsing to the ground, exhausted. "We're close enough, now."
"We don't have to interface the Bomb?" asked Bess, confused. "Hook it up to the alien machines?"
"No," said Curtis. "We're close enough. Sit down, Bess. Take a load off."
"Jesus, Curtis," she said, excitement in her voice. She was going to die in-she checked her air supply-thirty-five minutes. Before she did, she wanted to see the machine in motion. She allowed herself to fantasize for a second about what it would look like, that hideous pyramid, as the ARM started working, as the killing process started to slowly reverse itself. Would the Demons notice? Would they panic?
Would they detect the source of the disturbance and home in on them?
"Sit down, Bess. Really. I've got to tell you something."
Bess slowly sat beside him, never taking her eyes off the swarm of dancing Demons above the alien construct. Had she said hundreds? There were thousands of the damned things, specks against the yellow morning sky, a whirligig of activity...
"The Adversaries are here."
She whipped her head around.
"Our satellites are all gone, Bess. We haven't had any new information from them in weeks. The last images we got were of alien ships landing at various spots around the globe, and then-nothing."
"Oh my god," she breathed. "Are they...is that..."
"No, they're not right here," he said with a slight smile. "They're mostly on the coasts, from what we've been able to determine."
"Dear lord," she said. "Dear lord in heaven."
"We lost, Bess," Curtis said. "The planet is theirs."
She sat in stunned silence, looking at him. He looked back, his eyes sad yet determined. He nodded.
"But the mission..."
"Is done," he said, reaching down to boost himself up. "We turn on the machine, and then it's over."
"The machine," she said, comprehension dawning. "It's not an atmosphere processor."
"No," he said. 'It's not."
She looked up at him, thinking furiously. Finally, something clicked.
"The air," she said.
"The bad air," he nodded. "The alien air. It's heavier than our atmosphere was. It's got different elements in different combinations. And it's flammable."
She rose as well. They stood looking at each other. "The gunfire?" she asked. "Plenty of sparks, plenty of flame."
"Not hot enough," he smiled. "Not nearly hot enough. You'd need something like a nuclear weapon, and you'd need to bring it within a mile or so of one of the pumping stations, where the concentration is heaviest."
"What would the range be, on an explosion like that?" she asked, her mouth dry.
"Planet-wide," he said. "A chain reaction. It would start here and spread, getting hotter and hotter. The sky would burn, Bess. The planet would burn."
"The planet," she repeated, imagining it. A mushroom cloud, feeding on the yellow, almost-solid air. Spreading, in fiery tentacles, across the sky, like God's own lightning, burning everything beneath and above. Such a furnace, would fuse the earth itself into glass.
"And New America?" she asked, already knowing the answer. Knowing now why they hadn't been able to reach them on their radios after the first encounter with the Demons.
He shook his head, and tears sprang to his eyes. He kept shaking his head.
"It's already gone, isn't it?" she asked gently.
"There was no hope, Bess," he said. "None. We couldn't adapt quickly enough. Three days ago the aliens found us. They homed in on us from the satellites. They were coming, Bess."
"You opened the doors," she whispered.
"I did," he said. "As soon as we left, as soon as we were clear, I triggered an explosion in Level Six. A cavern collapsed and New America was open to the elements."
"How many thousands?" she asked.
"Six billion people, Bess," he said. "And they were the last."
"No," she said. "We're the last, aren't we?"
He nodded, tears streaming down his cheeks. "We are, Bess. We're the last humans left on Earth."
Bess checked her air. Thirty-two minutes.
"So how do we do it?" she asked. Strangely, she didn't feel any terror or pain anymore. All she felt was a sad pride. Samson had been shorn, his tormentors circled him, mocking and triumphant, and there was nothing left to do. Nothing, of course, except to bring the goddamned temple down around their hateful heads.
Earth was theirs, dammit. It was humanity's planet. It belonged to her and Curtis, and if the only way they could prove their ownership was to destroy the whole fucking thing, so be it.
"There's a thirty-minute delay," he said. "All I have to do is push a button, and then we can sit here and wait for the end."
"Push the button," she said, low urgency in her voice. "Push the button and then let's start walking."
"We can't escape," he said. "You know that, right?"
"I know," she said. "But we can walk down there and stand in front of that building and laugh at the bastards when they come for us."
Curtis still wept, wept for his imminent death, for the death of his race, for the death of his planet, but a light shone behind the tears. "That sounds good, Bess. That sounds really good."
He moved to the machine and opened a panel. He hit a couple of keys, turned a dial. Bess moved up to join him.
"Which one?" she asked. He pointed and moved his finger over a button. Bess extended her own finger. They looked at each other, crying and smiling, the last man and woman on Earth.
And then, as though they shared one mind, shared one heart, they pushed down.
There was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
Then there was a flame that outshone the heavens themselves.
Phrenetic.