Kyle West - Extinction

Ashton nodded. “Yeah. It did happen. You’re still a kid, you know? But you don’t act like it. None of you do. You are as much adults as anyone I knew. That’s what scares me. It’s not normal and never will be, in my mind.”

“It’s normal now,” I said.

“What about Anna, though? Don’t you love her? Would you go to the end and die, even if she didn’t want it?”

That made me go quiet. Ashton had pinpointed something that had been troubling me greatly. He waited for my answer, and I had no idea what to say.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said. “I don’t want anything to happen. I…I do love her. Admitting that is hard, because I know what it means. I’m convinced that I’m the only one who can stop this. The Wanderer said that much. I know Anna will never be okay with that. I don’t know if I am. But I see no choice. The other choice is the world ending, just as every world the Radaskim have invaded has ended. I can’t let that happen. I mean, what would you do?”

Ashton sighed. “No matter how old you get, kid…there’s always going to be questions that can never be answered. Sometimes, age just makes the questions all the more perplexing. I worked my ass off, raised my family, all to make the questions go away. I buried myself in work. And they always remained, those questions, haunting me like ghosts. Most people ignore them and just go on with their lives. That’s what I tried to do. Your question, about what you should do…I don’t have the answer. You don’t have the answer. Even the goddamn Wanderer didn’t have an answer. Didn’t you ask him that, when you and Anna went to go see him? What did he say?”

I smiled. “A whole lot of nothing.”

“See? If a god doesn’t know, doesn’t that tell you something? It all rests on you to figure out the rest of the riddle. Whatever happens, I wouldn’t blame you either way. When you go to the heart of darkness, when you are facing down Askala, it’s just going to be you and her. And you’re not going to know anything more than you know now.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“Some answers just don’t come, kid, no matter how much you ask them, no matter how much you think about them. Take it from an old man.” He held up the thermos. “More coffee?”

Ashton refilled my cup, and we stared out into the starry night. After a while, he turned off the lights, so that we could see the stars more fully. The stars were bright before, but now they were magnificent.

“The Wanderer said something,” I said. “He said you were supposed to look to the stars when you were in a hole. That’s all I feel I can do. I have to hope, even if there’s no reason for it. People need hope like the lungs need air.”

Ashton slurped on his coffee. “Aye, you’re right about that. What are you hoping for, Alex?”

I took a sip of coffee, and thought for a moment. “I’m just hoping I don’t mess anything up. I hope, when the end comes, I can figure out how to save my scrawny hide. I hope I can find a way to make Anna happy, and take away all her worry and pain.”

Ashton said nothing — he only listened.

“I know,” I said. “There are some things you can mess up, and some things you just can’t. There are the doors you can’t come back from.”

I looked at the clock on the dash. It was 04:00.

I stood to leave the bridge. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Where you off to?”

“Breakfast.”

I just couldn’t talk about what I had to do anymore. I’d have plenty of time to think about that in the coming days.

We landed in the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Morning had just dawned, casting the eastern clouds a dull red.

We left the ship, stepping out into the cool, dry air, finding the streets a chaotic mess of rubble, ash, and purple blood. Corpses of dead crawlers lined the streets, some still twitching. Severed limbs and spindly legs were scattered among the refuse. Behind our landing site, the once-white U.S. Bank Tower rose into the morning air.

“Augustus is in there with the Reapers now,” Makara said.

“Is that where we’re headed?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah.”

Everyone walked toward the tower, picking our way through rubble and monster remains. Radaskim dragons swooped the sky above, from time to time, still placid. It seemed as if the creatures had turned to our side for good from the Wanderer’s sacrifice — it wasn’t just temporary. Or at least, that was what I hoped. They could switch back at any moment. If they did, there wasn’t much we could do about it.

We entered the wide glass doors of the building, finding ourselves in a dim lobby. There, Augustus and Black stood face-to-face, deliberating in the center of the lobby floor. Praetorians lined up behind Augustus, while Black’s elite guards backed him up. The Reapers, however, were without weapons. It looked as if Augustus was having his way with Los Angeles after all.

Char stood next to me and spoke in his low voice.

“Come on, kid. These talks will be long.”

He led me out from the lobby of the building, stepping through the open door and into the red-lit street outside. I wondered what he wanted to talk about.

The formed-up legions parted for us as we headed east down rubble-strewn streets. Parts of the tall buildings of downtown had crumbled, forming piles of debris. Many buildings’ sides were wasted and black, the result of a fire long ago. Even the sides of the white tower had been charred, though it seemed to have mostly escaped the damage. Sand covered much of the street. In places, asphalt and faded yellow paint showed through the dirt.

Random streets and intersections had been blocked off — either in preparation for the Radaskim’s attack, or from some earlier time. Beneath a pile of rubble lay some large bones from a creature I couldn’t identify –they’d been there for a while. Toward the east, brown mountains walled in the Los Angeles Basin. Their tops were lost to thick red clouds.

A few blocks to the east, an enormous dragon wheeled above some buildings, settling on the precipice of a crumbled freeway. Another dragon screeched in the air, settling nearby the first. The large one — almost as big as Chaos had been — was dark gray, almost black. The smaller dragon was crimson in hue. Their long, serpent-like necks turned toward us.

“What are we going to do about these dragons?”

That was something we had to figure out. “We might want to get closer.”

“It’s like they’re waiting for something,” Char said.

“Or someone,” I said. “Maybe they’re looking for the Wanderer.”

“The Wanderer’s gone. They’re looking for you, kid.”

“I know,” I said. “Somehow, this is working differently than we expected. The dragons have stayed on our side.”

“They could turn any second,” Char said. “That’s what the Wanderer said, isn’t it?”

Yeah, that was true.

“Alex!”

The sound of footsteps came from behind. I turned to see Anna sliding to a stop, kicking up a cloud of dust.

“Couldn’t wait for me, could you?” she asked.

I shrugged. “You snooze, you lose.”

She forced a frown. “I don’t think that saying really works in this situation.”

“You know what I mean.”

Char just watched both of us, shaking his head.

“Whatever,” Anna said. Her eyes gazed ahead to the dragons. “I want to see one of those things up close. Plus, you need your bodyguard.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard,” I said.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

Before I could respond, Char cut in.

“Shall we?”