Darren Wearmouth - Critical Path

Sacrifice isn’t the end of something; it’s the beginning. Denver knew this before his father, Charlie, gave up his life to bring down the two alien ships. But Denver wasn’t so naïve to believe that the work was done.

On the contrary, the real challenge was still ahead of them.

He wiped sweat from his brow. The salty liquid made his tanned forearm shine in the morning sun. It was no more than 0800. Charlie had taught him how to tell the time from the sun’s position when he was just a child. Over the years, he’d built up an almost unnatural ability to know it instinctively, analyzing the length and direction of shadows.

He stood in a dappled clearing five kilometers north of their new base—Freetown, a repurposed croatoan farm that remained inactivated due to it being farther north than their terraforming operation. The shadows from the crumbled remnants of a wooden hunting shack covered the damp, loamy ground.

Mildew glistened like a silver mist across the tips of the long grass. The place had a fresh scent to it. Since they destroyed most of the root growth, the orange tint to the atmosphere became less visible.

Earth seemed to be healing itself, returning to normal.

Wildlife grew in number—rabbits, squirrels, deer, and varied birds were now more visible and less sickly than before. Despite that, Denver knew it would take years for the damage of the root to the ecosystem to be fully repaired.

The cold dampness seeped into the fabric toes of his boots where the gaffer tape covering had come away during the trek. Thorns had snagged at his boots and jeans as he, Layla, and their new friend, Khan, parked their appropriated hover-bikes and descended on foot further into the woods in search of a downed escape pod.

Layla stood five yards in front of him.

She wore the now-familiar farm outfit: a form-fitting gray and blue cotton one-piece with a zip running at an angle from her right shoulder to her left hip. Her shadow stretched westward, covering a dark, scorched section of earth.

A cool breeze made her ponytail sway and the small hairs on the back of her slender neck shimmer. Despite her real age being somewhere in the fifties, she looked no older than mid-thirties, the root consumption keeping her young, as it did Gregor and Charlie.

Layla lowered to her haunches and inspected the scar in the earth, created by a fallen escape pod.

The scar cut a ridge into the ground some three meters wide and over a dozen long. The interesting feature, however, wasn’t the scar; it was the complete lack of pod. Someone, or something, had taken it away.

While they waited on Khan, a young tracker who had made his home in Freetown before they had re-established it as a base, Denver couldn’t help but think about Layla.

Being at a crash site of one of the pods wasn’t enough to distract his thoughts away from her completely as she made notes on a tablet device—a leftover piece of equipment they had learned to work and reprogram for their own uses.

The aliens on the various farms abandoned their duties and their influence over the human population shortly after the ships crashed to Earth. Denver suspected that when the pods landed they must have sent out a signal across the croatoans’ network.

Within days the aliens left the farms in a great migration to the north.

Since that time, Layla had led a diplomatic program of integration, bringing dozens of farms together, working towards one goal: reuniting humanity into a force that could not only defend themselves and live freely, but also thrive.

From the south, the croatoans still held a great number of farms, and the humans from the northern facilities would often have to defend against them.

The aliens were losing, however, their attacks coming less frequently.

The ‘cattle’ were educated and trained. The men and women subjugated by Augustus and the croatoan council to run the farms were now setting up communications and developing real farms, growing vegetables and more importantly—destroying the vast tracks of root so that the ground wouldn’t be poisoned any longer.

Where Gregor tried to use aggression and intimidation to reunite the various workers, Layla’s use of empathy and understanding brought quicker results.

She’d become their de facto leader almost by accident. Something that didn’t sit well with Gregor, but then he always was an instigator.

“It can’t be far,” Layla said, turning to face him. The golden light of morning reflected off her face, making her eyes glint.

Denver caught himself staring and looked away before casually glancing back as though he too was inspecting the crash site. “Khan’s a good tracker. I’m sure we’ll find it.”

“The implication of it being moved probably suggests that who or whatever was inside is now out in the open.”

“Or already dead,” Denver added, although a part of him hoped that wasn’t the case. He wanted to do that personally. He wouldn’t be happy until every last turtle-looking alien no longer set foot on Earth.

“Perhaps. Though I’m not so sure. One thing I’ve learned is that those at the top of their hierarchy have an uncanny skill in surviving. They’ve been here on this planet for so many thousands of years, waiting, in the ground… I won’t rest until I see them dead with my own eyes.”

Denver readjusted his backpack and shuffled the alien hunter rifle to his left shoulder. “You’re starting to sound like me.” His cheeks warmed with a blush, which made him feel even more ridiculous.

Although out in the wild, he was afraid of nothing and could comfortably survive in almost any conditions, conquering his feelings towards women was something Charlie had never taught him.

“I don’t think that’s such a bad thing,” Layla said with a smile. “Could be worse. I could end up sounding like Gregor.”

“And we can definitely do without that.”

“One’s bad enough, eh?”

“Something like that.”

“You look better like that, by the way,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The beard, or lack of it.”

One of the men from Eastern Farm Twenty, now renamed to Freetown, had given Denver a cutthroat razor and showed him how to use it.

It was the first time in his adulthood that he was clean-shaven. All the time he ran around with his dad, he’d kept a beard and only trimmed it with a knife when it got too long.

“Thanks,” Denver said, giving her an awkward smile.

He broke eye contact, unsure how to react with the way she was looking at him as though he were one of her subjects of study. He brought his thoughts back to this clearing, noticing how the trees to the south of it were damaged, their branches snapped and their trunks leaning over, wrenched from the ground.

On a tip-off from Khan they had learned of this crash site.

Gregor, being his belligerent self, refused to come, preferring to stay back at one of the facilities with Maria, whose new role was to help reorientate the men and women whom the aliens used for cattle and… food.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what Gregor’s motivations were.

Beyond the clearing, a shadow shifted.

A pair of rabbits dashed through the long grass, their khaki-coloured ears flattening against their heads. They hopped over thick redwood roots and disappeared into burrows at the edge of the dilapidated shack.

The wooden posts that made up the stanchions were rotten and jagged, the surface colonized by an empire of white and gray fungus.

For a brief few seconds, Denver shifted his weight to his toes with anticipation. He pursed his lips, readying to whistle for Pip, his dog, but he rocked back on his heels as the realization dawned on him that no, this wasn’t Pip.