Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy (17 page)

It was the face of my wife.

How I had remembered that picture.

It had been taken the night she’d received her final promotion—the glass of champagne held up in her hand, along with that magnificent evening gown, how it had hugged her curves and made her eyes look like diamonds.

And there in the cavern, ten years after her death, my wife had managed to return to me—a luminescent angel from the other side.

Alice didn’t have to explain; I understood exactly what she and Zeke had done. Through Arcturus (which apparently served as a provider), Zeke must have been given access to the Internet. And there, Alice had gone searching for my wife through a formerly popular social networking system. I was presently looking at the picture on her main page.

“Miles?” Alice asked. “Are you okay?”

I reached my hand out again, not for my wife’s face, but toward a link that read “photos.” The image obliged as rows of pictures and text appeared in its place. I hopped from picture to picture, briefly examining each one through tear-soaked eyes, until I found a precious little girl staring back at me. Through wavy blonde locks, she met me with bright and inquisitive eyes; and through those eyes, I remembered, the world had held no bounds. And there I allowed the image to stay, suspended in the room, as I got to my feet just to fall to my knees.

It was my daughter—her beautiful little face.

And I could see no more. The image became nothing but an abstract watercolor beyond the tears that poured from me; I wiped them away, only to have them flood back a moment later. Trying to fight off a legion of her own tears, Alice took me by the arm and helped me back up into the chair.

“Watch,” she said, reaching out to press a link labeled “videos.” I closed my eyes. I couldn’t handle much more, but the voice of my daughter soon filled the cavern, her playful giggle wrenching me from the inside.

“Watch me, Daddy!” she shouted. “Watch me!”

And—like any father being summoned by his daughter—I looked up at her, as if the veil between our worlds had been parted for just an instant, allowing us this brief but beloved lapse in reality—just a moment to say
I love you
before our two worlds righted themselves again.

And there she spun before me, holding her frilly little blue dress between the tips of her fingers.

“Oh, are you a princess?” I heard myself say off-camera.

“Yeah, Daddy, I’m a princess.”

I envied that man in the video, but pitied him as well, for he’d soon be forced to watch the loves of his life slip right through his fingers.
You poor shmuck. If you only knew what hell you were in for, you poor, stupid shmuck.

“Idiot,” I whispered, burying my face into the palms of my hands. “God, I was such an idiot.”

I lifted my eyes when I heard the audio stop, and saw that my daughter had ceased to spin through that digital window to the netherworld. She’d instead been frozen in time, waiting for me to replay that ghostly clip again and again, but I hadn’t the strength for that.

“Enough,” I said. “For the love of God, that’s enough.”

And at the wave of Alice’s hand, Zeke let the image trail away. I rose from the chair, sighing deeply, and discovered that the air in the room had felt almost viscous— much harder to breathe in past the immense lump in my throat.

“I never did like birthdays,” I shrugged, moving slowly into the hallway. Alice looked as though she wanted to say something before I left. Perhaps she wished to apologize, underestimating just how emotional an event this would be for me. She watched intently as I passed the threshold.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, I no longer found myself in the mood for company. I slumped down onto the mattress in my quarters, resting my head against the cold subterranean wall, as I closed my eyes.

And there, beyond the encompassing darkness, clearer than ever, I’d found my smiling daughter, her voice still plaguing my every conscious thought. She’d be following me into my dreams tonight, I was sure of it. In doing so, she’d prove to be as stubborn in death as she was in life, listening not to the authority of her elders, but rather to the inward force that had granted her such vitality. She had been—to say the least—a challenging child. My wife and I used to say she was the terror of twins all rolled into one. And I’d loved her deeply. She was the light of my life.

And then there was that stupid social networking system, how it had just seemed like the most convenient vessel for the average narcissist. How I’d despised those who couldn’t eat a meal without prodding through their glowing portable Internet devices, searching for some tasty piece of gossip, or perhaps just something to complain about.

But that social network had become an overnight epidemic—the daily ways we’d lived becoming molded to fit that shallow instrument. It was a vast change—whether it was social evolution or de-evolution, I wasn’t quite sure; but before I knew it, by society’s standards, it was I who had become the social outcast.

“You mind if I join you?”

Breaking my train of thought, I looked up to see Alice poking her head in through the fabric partition separating my room from the hallway. Her face was heavy with sympathy. I could tell she felt terrible.

“I don’t mind.” I waved her in. “C’mon, it’s a pity party.”

She split the curtain further as she entered, coming to take a seat next to me. Putting her back against the wall, she let out a deep sigh.

“I’m sorry, Miles. I was stupid to think that would be anything other than heart wrenching.”

I shook my head, “It’s okay, Alice. It was just unexpected. Maybe if you’d given me a little warning—some time to prepare myself.”

“And I should have known that. I feel horrible, Miles.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, brushing it off with a wave of my hand. “I’m okay now.”

She leaned over to rest her head gently on my shoulder as the two of us sat in a brief silence.

“They really were beautiful,” Alice added, “just like you described them.”

“I know.”

She lifted her head slowly as I felt her dark hair sliding across my skin. Then she looked me in the eyes.

And I was transfixed—completely helpless.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“It’s fine, Alice.”

She scooted closer, leaning in with her body, and keeping me locked within the magnificence of her green eyes.

I breathed her in. She smelled amazingly sweet.

“Alice ... ” I’d started, but whatever thought I had deemed important, whatever else I had wanted to say was cut short the moment she pressed her lips to mine.

And, quite suddenly, nothing else in the world mattered anymore. Everything just vanished in a great flash of emptiness. There was no one left on the planet, except for me ... and my Alice.

A
nd to think, just ten years before:

I’d been downtown, rummaging the city blocks in search of supplies and other whatnots, filling my Jeep with whatever I thought could be of use. Even though the government would not form itself in the heart of the city for another couple years, it was still a very dangerous place to be. So I had to be quick, which meant not lingering in one area for too long, and not putting too much distance between me and my escape vehicle. I’d been rolling up some old papers for fire fuel, when I’d come across something that stopped me dead.

It was a young woman.

She didn’t see me right away, which gave me some extra time to observe her, for she was undoubtedly different—her hair was jet black, and her skin a glossy red beneath the afternoon sun.

I watched as she pondered her surroundings in a state of childlike wonder, viewing this new and magnificent world with a set of fresh eyes, and—through them—exercising an insight that I couldn’t have grasped if I’d wanted to. She’d looked on, in what appeared to be pure astonishment, whereas my perspective, emitted from a place racked with guilt, would never warrant such an implausible excitement.

She was a member of the new species I’d recently heard about, delivered to this planet in order to surpass the human race upon our inevitable extinction. It was a gift that had promoted much anger and hatred among the remaining survivors.

And there, discovering the young non-human woman, I wondered just how she’d gotten so far from her drop-off point. Her kind had been set on this Earth just the day before, miles away on the other side of town; and yet there she was—all alone, walking the streets in what little clothing she’d had when she’d walked off that freighter. It was barely anything.

I was still somewhat unsure of the massacre to come—or at least the sheer magnitude of it, but there had already been whispers of such an occurrence among the survivors.
Abominations
, they were being called, and even that was one of the nicer titles that we humans had so graciously given them.

She looked up and saw me from some distance away, and did not seem at all troubled by my presence there; in fact, she’d seemed relieved by it. I watched as she smiled at me, a lovely smile; and in that smile I witnessed a deep and profound kind of purity—and with that, the burning intensity of an underlying ignorance. It was like seeing a kitten that had accidently climbed into a hyena enclosure.

She should not have been there. No matter how well her kind had been designed to survive the apocalyptic conditions of this planet, I was certain that she could not defend herself against Earth’s truest adversary, against Earth’s most ferocious predators, because she had yet to be properly introduced to the wickedness of mankind.

As she turned and picked up her pace—making her way in my direction—her smile didn’t falter for an instant. That was when she was seized by the wrist and yanked violently inside a small building. I heard her shrill and sharp cry, and then the chilling silence thereafter.

Despite the dropping of my heart, I had initially turned away, deciding that her welfare on our planet was not my business. It was foolish for those beings to have left them here, and in no way should it be my responsibility to look after her; she wasn’t even fully human anyway, right?

But with every step I took, I felt an anger filling me, an anger that I couldn’t force myself to ignore, and one that had proceeded to call me
coward
again and again. It came with the thought of my recently deceased daughter. How I used to tell her I could protect her from anything, be it ghosts in her closet or monsters under her bed; but now she was gone, just ripped from me when there had been nothing I could do to save her. And now, by some extraterrestrial twist of fate, it seemed I’d been given a chance to set something right. And it was a chance to make my baby girl proud of her ol’ man again, wherever she was.

And it was right, I was sure of it. The end of the world had stripped me of a great many things. But I had to make sure that my humanity (at least the good part of it) remained intact.

So, I pulled my loaded revolver from my waistband, let out a quiet expletive, and cautiously entered the building. Once an old, family-owned hardware shop, it had since been wiped clean of nearly all its contents, removed by those of us that hadn’t yet been claimed by the war. We’d in turn been left to fend for ourselves, and in the raw game of survival there’s hardly room for a gentleman’s rules; this is why I saw several splatters of dried blood throughout the place, splashes of arching crimson where it had been bludgeoned from someone’s body. The shelves within the store were now dusty and bare, and each gleaming bracket protruded without a single tool suspended on it.

There was not a soul within the patron’s side of the store, but I could hear a rustle from somewhere down the hallway—and there were voices also, the deep and jumbled jargon of two men talking back and forth. What their conversation entailed, I could not distinguish.

I ran my hand along the wall to my right, wishing for something blunt and heavy, but it was my foot that had come into contact with an object as it rolled and clanked gently against a rack of shelves. I pointed the gun toward the back of the store, waiting for someone to come and investigate the minor clatter, but after another moment I decided I was still in the clear. I reached down to retrieve a one-and-a-half-inch diameter pipe, about three feet long, that had either been overlooked, or just left behind because of a lack of purpose.

Well, I had a purpose for it. And I thought it would do nicely.

That was when I first heard her muffled and desperate scream—and quite to my dismay, it sounded entirely too human. I entered the hallway, one fist gripping the revolver, the other wringing out the end of the pipe. I passed the restrooms and came to a door marked: “Employees Only.” The door had been left slightly ajar. I tried to peek in, but it was very dark; still, I knew the noises were coming from inside.

I heard one of the men say, “She feels human, doesn’t she?”

The other man laughed as she tried to struggle.

I passed the door completely, pressing my back against the wall, and threw the pipe back into the shop. It made a terrible metallic racket as it bounced and skipped, making contact with a couple shelves before it finally came to settle on the floor, rolling off and out of sight.

With the pipe’s raucous arrival, the men shuffled within the room, allowing the woman a momentary shriek before I saw the first man step warily into the hallway.

I wish I could describe this man to you, but the physical memory of him has been reduced to little more than nothing over the years; possibly because, at this misfortunate time of our crossing paths, I’d viewed him as sub-human.

And as he entered the hallway, leading his stride with a gun of his own, he managed to overlook the man with the revolver just behind him.

I watched as he made his way slowly toward the sound he’d heard within the shop, keeping his weapon forward and at-the-ready.

And that was when I shot him in the back of the head.

I tore open the employee door before the first man had buckled completely over. Letting daylight spill into the back room, I found the other man—his filthy hands over the girl’s mouth.