Griff Mason saw her coming in the rear-view mirror, headlights cutting the low hanging fog between them. He hated when he got off shift first.

She was on his bumper in seconds. Her car swerved out around him, getting so bad now that she didn’t bother to use her blinker when she pulled in front of him.

She knew full well it was him. They were the only two out on the country roads at midnight. She closed up the diner about the same time he closed his shooting range. It made him take to his lock up tasks like a turtle. Hoping to avoid the maddening burn that started at the base of his neck each time she broke a half dozen traffic laws to pass him.

He squeezed the wheel as he watched her tail-lights shrink in the distance.

Kate Green and her little white beamer.

Both prettier than they had any right to be. Both daring karma with their recklessness and…

The explosion took him by surprise.

The blast reached him a second later.

Pickup tires skidded over pavement; their squeal drowned out by the sound of something colliding with the inky hills on the horizon.

The violent thrash of the pickup hurled his chest against the seatbelt. Compressed his lungs and he gasped for air. Took a full minute to recover when everything went still.

Strange mechanical screams howled against the canyon. A jumble of noises impaired his hearing, his skull throbbed and the trickle of blood felt warm on his cheek. The world outside shattered into fragments. He blinked. Realized the fragments were webbed cracks in the windshield. Long, thin lines obstructed his view but not his mission.

Kate Green was up there somewhere. Caught in the blast.

He turned the key but the engine revved and then sputtered out.

“Come on!”

Griff pushed strands of hair from his eyes. Felt the sting of the cut on his forehead, pumped the gas, and tried again.

Under his brute force, the pedal cracked. Griff had a lot of power in his legs and arms, something he kept up since his days in the military. Training cadets in survival tactics. Teaching them to keep themselves and their peers alive.

No way he was letting Kate die on his watch.

The engine rumbled to life and Griff tore down the highway, dodging potholes and pockets of burning debris.

It took an instant for him to stop the truck and tear off his seat belt. He seized the tool kit from behind the seat and raced to the mangled beamer like a doctor on his way to emergency surgery.

The car was tilted at a thirty-degree angle against a ruptured piece of pavement. The front tires dangled in mid-air and the hood had torn loose exposing the engine to the sparks and fire burning all around them.

Kate’s head was propped against the driver-side window. Her eyes were closed and strands of her dark mane had fallen from a pencil secured bun.

There was no time to feel or speak.

The metal of the car door was hot, burned Griff’s fingers when he tried to open it.

Welded shut by the impact.

Griff pulled out a crowbar and started banging.

Kate stirred. When she fully came to, she released her seat belt and started pushing the door from the inside.

Griff stepped back; his boot splashed into something wet. He looked down the pavement to a trail of gas leaking from a hole in the tank.

They had seconds, if that.

With a growl, he jammed the crowbar into the seam in the door and tore it loose with primeval strength.

Kate tumbled out into his arms. She panted then looked up and said, “what took you so long?”

An explosion from the distance made them both shelter in place from raining debris. She smelled good, like pancakes and vanilla and it cut through the stench of gas and fumes.

He started to pull her away from the car.

“You have any guns with you?”

Odd question.

He nodded.

She stretched out her body with the grace of a feline and reached across the passenger seat. He scolded her and blinked when she pulled a 9mm from the glove box.

Not your basic 9mm. The kind professionals use.

He took her hand and they raced away from the car, ducked behind his pickup just before the entire area erupted into another blast loud enough to leave his ears ringing.

“Get your guns and let’s go.”

She checked the mag, released the safety, and slipped her gun into a holster beneath her teal uniform jacket.

He had known her for two years, this Kate Green.

Smart, irritating, beautiful, obnoxious, Kate Green.

Never once had she come to his shooting range.

“And where are we going?”

She tucked her hair back into its bun then looked at her watch.

“To save the world.”

There was a trace of mischief on her lips.

“A waitress from a diner in the middle of nowhere? Saving the world?”  

Her mirth only deepened.

“Looks like it’s up to one waitress and one really bad tipper. The world might be doomed.”

She took off into the heavy, tomblike darkness of the plains beyond the highway. Didn’t leave him a chance to argue.

He was not a bad tipper.

He grabbed his guns, then sped up for several strides—six feet to her five foot four—and caught up to her where a brush fire chased away the creeping fog. Good thing it was a wet spring. Flames spread rapidly, even in the wet desert, and he followed the embers up the winding cliffs. Higher and higher.

In one astonishing instant everything practical that mattered vanished, swallowed by the mirage on the cliff.

Couldn’t tell if it was real.

A shimmery kind of dust coiled around towers of unnatural rock formations. Glowing fragments of glass encased massive stone steeples, reflecting light from an approaching storm with a malevolence that made Griff cling to his guns.

What the hell were they?

Kate sped toward them with an unknown urgency. The closer they got the more Griff could tell that the glass and stone had not been carved by millennia of winds and tide. No, they had been forged in an instant, flung out of the earth by the violent explosion that almost killed Kate.

Moonlight and distance didn’t allow Griff to see more when they reached a steamy pall in the cracked desert cliffs. From the fissures, hot streams ejected themselves in a broken chorus of danger.

They followed the crack in the desert, hunting for a place to cross, half scalded each time they drew near.

Kate went for it.

Jumped through a wall of steam and vanished.

Griff secured the strap of the AR-15 and paused for the right moment. Timing mattered.

The earth groaned like some giant lay asleep beneath, rumbling the foundations as it tossed and turned.

Griff pushed through. Crossed the gap. Felt his skin sting against a wall of heat before he broke through.

Boots landed in something sticky.

More strangeness.

A twelve-foot sphere of bubbling goo.

Kate’s delicate fingers on his arm pulled him back from splashes of slime.

“They pull in all kinds of space debris when they land. Best to keep your distance.”

The path half twisted upward and into the shadow of the towers. Griff felt the violence of their creation—the straight, almost transparent planes of the structures a warning to trespassers that death awaited.

The sight of it made his body go absolutely electric.

Ivory light quivered up the spine of the pristine campanile, stars twinkling at intermittent diamond ridges as if sucking down the fabric of time and space—swallowing all reason and truth inside.

He felt more alive, more fearless than ever. Its magnificence of line and form went beyond anything he’d ever seen.

Kate slapped his face.

Hard.

“Hey!”

“The longer you look the easier it is for the abneuma to overtake you. It’s why we have to hurry. Soon we won’t be able to see them at all. They will become part of the landscape.” She glanced at her wrist, skipped over the explanation he required, and return to the climb. He went through the motions beside her but anticipation made him miss a step, and doubt his grip on reality.

“How do you know all this?”

She turned back to him; pretty eyes narrowed in a way he remembered when she knew exactly what his order was before he even said it.

“I used to hunt these puke-weasels before I retired.” She extended her hand. “Toss me that magnum.”

Griff pulled one of the two guns tucked in his belt, tossed it and she plucked it from the air.

They climbed together through loose dirt and gravel. He watched his boots crush the land beneath them and relished the sight of the imprint he left behind. Wondered if this was how they felt walking on the moon for the first time.

The battle between his muscles and the terrain started to wear him down in that satisfying way. He missed long survival hikes in the mountains with his cadets.

The emptiness inside his strained muscles was soothed by the sprinkling of alien light that covered them once they neared the top of the cliff. It took all of Griff’s willpower to focus on the climb and avoid staring up at the glorious spires.

Kate slipped on a mound of rock and Griff caught her by the elbow. She glared at him then pulled her arm away and continued upward.

“This reminds me of that horrible date.”

Great, she brought it up again.

“It wasn’t horrible.”

They climbed side by side now, both trying to outdo each other as they propelled toward the base of the tower.

“You took me to a gravel pit.”

“I didn’t know it was going to rain. I checked the weather that morning.”

“I’m surprised I didn’t end up murdered.”

“No, but you will be when you finally tick someone off enough with your driving.”

She stopped at the entrance to the tower and folded her arms, lips pressed and jaw locked, a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead.

“I happen to be an excellent driver.”

Griff scoffed.

“I happen to be an excellent first date planner.”

He hadn’t meant to say that.

It wasn’t true.

He hadn’t had that much practice but for her…

For her, he tried.

Hard.

He planned a picnic dinner but the restaurant was closed for unexpected repairs so they were starving all night. Threw him off and made him forget to tell her not to wear heels. The climb up the pit was rough on her feet. Then, it rained.

“The only thing you’re excellent at is eating mountains of pancakes.”

She pulled out the magnum with one hand and her 9mm with the other.

“You going to knock or what?” He asked and swung the AR-15 around. Secured it between his hands.

Subscribed

She sighed then moved into the elaborate glimmering archway. Beams of light cut across her body as the doors opened on their own.

“Try not to die on me,” she said and disappeared inside.

Griff shook his head and squeezed his brow.

“Puke-weasels?”

It was descriptive.

He decided he liked it.

Stepped inside.

The smell invaded his nostrils like a nasty and unwelcome wet diaper surprise.

He gagged on the thick must and understood her reason for the nickname.

The door sealed shut behind them and for an odd moment, his eyes drank in darkness, conjuring flashes of imaginary light.

Faint red streamers came into focus.

Solid. Real.

Lines webbed the walls with snowflake intricacy until they morphed into giant computer circuit boards.

Kate’s shadow moved against them, a quality of the impossible radiating from her silhouette. He followed; weapon raised with the precision of a trained soldier.

The red lines pulsed, light pumped down the walls, burning in contradiction of complete darkness. A dozen, then two dozen, laser stripes sprang from under their footfalls. Traveled away from them and intersected in a meeting point that twisted into a glow bright enough to see by.

Glass walls surrounded them—trembled with authority—and inside Griff saw endless copies of his shadow reflected back. The vibration of revving engines was answered by a faint echo from deep below them, hinting at hollow tunnels and terminals filled with the unknown.

More lights cascaded together—collided in an eruption of stars that fell into a pool on the ground. The pool mounded up, bubbled like hot lava.

“Get ready,” Kate said with guns pointed.

The magma altered its shape, the simple blob transformed into something more complex. Griff watched as a head, shoulders, arms drew themselves up out of the liquid. He opened fire. Bullets splashed into its skull and were absorbed inside.

“Not yet,” Kate took a step toward him, “there is only one stage you can destroy them.”

They stood back-to-back, surrounded by creatures rising from the hellscape. A soft moaning accompanied their growth, though from the creatures or the ship, Griff wasn’t sure.

The first molten leg stepped out of the lake of fire, as soon as its toeless foot landed on the platform steam hissed around it. The other leg landed and the molten crusted over into a dry loam. Between cracks in the fire-baked shell red laser lines revealed flashes of the robotic skeleton beneath.

“Now!”

Kate fired.

Hit the creature between its craterous eyes.

It shrieked—a high-pitched wail that reminded Griff of his pick-up tires squealing against pavement.

Clumps of rock were blasted away by the bullet and unearthed a sleek, silver-cast skull that distorted their reflections as it stomped toward them.

It must have weighed a half-ton.

A dozen more came at them and the ground shivered.

Griff hesitated, disgusted with himself but unable to do anything but gawk. Kate’s intricate series of attacks tore away the rock shielding and he saw the enemy.

A mechanical drone, hollow in the center, with some sort of thing inside a glass casing—tuning the controls, glaring at them with demon eyes.

It was formless—a sun star floating in the ether.

Or was it?

Griff shielded his eyes from the brilliant glow.

No, it had arms, legs—a thin, bantam mouth that was nightmare inducing.  

A bullet broke through the glass, struck the small, quivering body.

The robot fell.

The luminous ball inside the lifeless body coiled up through the broken shards of the fallen drone and reunited with the laser lines in the walls.

Kate took out three more.

Griff stood like a dolt. This wasn’t something he saw every day. Took a moment for him to overcome his shock and fear.

Then, his training kicked in.

He was born for this.

His skill made them easy targets.

He blasted away the rock shielding of two of them then rolled out of the reach of a third.

Where he was big and powerful, Kate was clever and deliberate. She worked in tandem with him, downing the monsters a split second after he made them vulnerable.

He stepped back, out of the reach of the drone and his foot landed against a pool of lava. His shoe caught on fire. Kicked it off at one of the drones and then blasted the glass command center inside the torso.

“They are fragile when you see them for what they are,” Kate yelled above the ringing of the gunfight.

“Freaky little glowing bat-mites?”

She shot down a drone over Griff’s left shoulder. Pebbles hit him in the back of his neck and stung.

“Watch it!”

She dropped the empty mag from the 9mm and reloaded.

“You’re welcome.”

She sprinted down the corridor and shouted over her shoulder.

“Hurry, not much time now.”

He followed, more annoyed at her than ever but also more in love. Damn it.

Small pinheads of light flared up near a hole in the ground and then Kate vanished inside. He climbed down from the summit, a rough descent on broken rungs into the better smelling bowels of the ship.

An even, glowing light beckoned them down the corridor, a small pool of it leaking from beneath a mammoth bulkhead.

It felt ancient—like its light had radiated inside the edifice for thousands of years. 

“This is the tricky part.”

Kate touched some of the red lines on the walls and a control panel appeared. As she worked to hack the door open, Griff looked around.

A few of the bat-mite drones followed them, lurked in the darkness, watched them.

He shot two of them and the others were swallowed into the shadows. Not comforting.

He checked his ammo.

“I hope we are about done because I’m almost out.”

She sent him a sidelong glance. It was brief but it was enough to tell him she was worried too.

“What’s up with this place anyway? What’s its deal?”

Kate bit her bottom lip while she twisted two wires together.

“We’re not sure. Some kind of artificial intelligence from deep space. Cities where the abneuma was able to embed itself are now slaves to an unknown master. It’s why I moved to the country. Many cities have fallen. Alien overlords roam the streets and no one can see them.” Kate’s shoulders went slack as if her memories of imprisonment among the living dead carried a physical weight.

Griff fumbled morosely with the gun, aiming it against the darkness but failing to neutralize the chill in her words.

“We don’t know its goal but the abneuma is almost impossible to cure once it infects.”

The wires sparked. Kate cursed when the heat hit her fingers. The bulkhead cracked open. He started for it but Kate put a cold hand on his arm, observant eyes seemed to say she knew he didn’t belong.

“We won’t have much time in there. You don’t have to do this.”

Griff shifted the rifle from one hand to the other.

“And let you have all the fun without me? I don’t think so.”

Her face lit up the room whenever she smiled. All the locals said so, even the no-nonsense Harley bikers. It’s why the customers kept coming back to the diner. It’s why Joe, the head cook and owner, begged her never to quit.

To be the cause of that smile…

Griff just about felt like he could save the world.

“Don’t look into the eye.”

He had been carried away by the thrill of discovery but her warning subdued his rising exhilaration. Both of them leaned forward against the steel mass, his forearms gave him tight control over the bulkhead but his senses went wild. A new adversary seemed to mock them as tension on the door relented and the two of them stumbled inside.

Wedged between the four narrow walls, the marbled perfection of a command console—copper plated wiring and lights flashing in streaks of color—made him dizzy.

Kate pulled a small black box from her pocket and looked at it with a special attentiveness he couldn’t define. She knelt near the base of the console, where the plating looked thinnest.

“What is that?”

“Nitro.”

“Nit—” Griff ran a hand through his hair, sticky with the damp air. “You just happen to carry nitro with you?”

Kate ripped off the backing and attached the box with impersonal deference over some kind of symbol stamped in gold on the console.

“You never know.”

“You can’t just carry—it’s not stable.”

She looked up at him, corner of her mouth curved.

“This kind is. It’s left over from my—”

“Secret agent days?” He said it with just enough sarcasm to make her porcelain cheek turn the slightest shade of pink. 

“Something like that.”

While Kate set the timer, something odd captured Griff’s attention. Above them, from the depths of a mounted switchboard, a slender tube snaked down the room. It was made of the same clear crystal as the outside of the ship and its movements enthralled as it dropped down to Griff’s level. The head of the tube swayed, twisted remnants of light between metal slats on its neck glowed with frightening intensity.

Griff leaned into it and felt his capacity for understanding grow in the light.

The metal peeled back.

An eye appeared.

A large formless mass floating either in the room or his imagination, he wasn’t sure which. It was everything and nothing.

All that he desired and all the emptiness in the world wrapped into one staring orb of Mediterranean blue.

“The pancakes!” he heard Kate screaming.

Why that and why so urgent he wasn’t sure.

He felt her tugging on his arm.

“That’s why you should have left me a better tip. I always gave you a double order and had Joe make them the way you like them.”

Her face was pale and worry lines around her eyes aged her unfairly in the bright light.

Must be the eye she was talking about.

The eye that frightened her.

No big deal.

Griff lifted the rifle and shot the dangling snake from the ceiling.

It curled up in unexpected agony and dropped at his feet, shriveling between contortions.

Kate stood, motionless and gawking.

“What?” He asked.

“You shouldn’t have been able to do that. Very few people are immune to the abneuma.”

Another malevolent snake dropped from the ceiling and Kate shot it with the magnum before it reached her.

“I am too.”

After their date that left her cold, hungry and soaked, he thought she was some rigid dullard not worth his time.

He was wrong.

She was perfect.

“What is this about the pancakes? Are you playing favorites with the customers?” No way he was letting that pass without teasing her.

“We have ten minutes to get the hell out of here.” She sprinted for the ladder, pretending to evade monsters and not his question.

She didn’t fool him but they only had ten minutes.

Ten minutes to climb up the rungs.

Ten minutes to take out more puke-weasel robots.

Ten minutes to race down the hill, past the gooey space blob, and across the steaming fissure.

Might have worked, except Kate skidded to a dead stop just before the exit.

There, in the burning red glow, a hulking drone blocked the path.

Griff lifted the rifle.

Kate pushed it down.

“No,” she shook her head, “It’s fully formed. Nothing we do can stop it now.”

“I can stop it.”

He squeezed the trigger but again the fiery little waitress stopped him.

“Save your ammo and optimism to blast open the doors.”

Griff flipped the rifle behind him.

“Fine.”  He raised his fists. Knew it was hopeless but maybe the creature didn’t. “Come here, you moron. Say hello to lights and out.”

He thought he heard Kate scoff. Or was that a chuckle…

Wham!

Griff gave into an odd sensation, weightless, soaring and then falling.

Falling.

He hit bottom.

Impacted with so much force he went unconscious for a second or two. Sweat beaded on his head and neck under extreme heat from something sweltering. He jerked awake next to a red pool of molten, the liquid inches away from swallowing him whole.

The bat-mite drone packed a punch. Griff rubbed his arm as he stood and spotted Kate out-maneuvering killing blows from two sharp swords in the mechanical hands of the drone.

The robot was fast and Griff’s first instinct was to save the woman. Then he realized she taunted the drone on purpose, drew it away from the exit doors.

He seized the moment and opened fire with everything left in the semi-automatic. A crack split the wall. A sliver of moonlight painted a lone pillar across his torso.

The drone shrieked and Griff turned to find it on his heels, dragging Kate by the collar of her uniform, sword swinging in his direction.

Nothing we do can stop it.

That’s what Kate said.

He refused to believe it. At that moment he was reminded of something he had forgotten long ago.

I never used to give up, he thought.

Ever.

Bolting out into the fresh air, inhaling the delicious dry dust, he stumbled down the cliff and prayed the drone would follow.

Shadows of midnight concealed treacherous crannies and hidden stones. Took all his concentration to keep ahead of the speeding demon. Waited to breathe until he heard Kate’s cries of pain as the drone pulled her along. As long as she was alive, he found the strength to stay one step ahead.

His descent turned reckless, flying down the cliff instead of running, skipping every third step in danger of losing all control.

The drone took precise steps. Never faltered. Momentum building.

Griff only had seconds before the blade caught up to his neck.

He dove, caught himself on a boulder, lucky his leg didn’t break. Momentum kept the drone gliding ahead then sailing past him—odd silver head cocked sideways to watch him on its way down.

Griff latched onto Kate’s arm. The fabric of her uniform ripped and she crumbled next to him, bleeding and out of breath, but alive.

She lifted her head, moonlight reflecting over eyes filled with confusion.

Griff grinned and peered over the cliff.

The drone landed in the bubbling space debris with a splat.

Griff wasn’t sure what he expected, he could only hope his plan worked.

The sphere slurped up the drone like a thirsty lion in the desert. Arms and legs struggled to break free, all the while its skeletal core of metal melted into ooze.

Griff watched a beam of light from the creature inside float to the surface just before being swallowed back down. Its light flickered and then vanished in a single gulp.

The sphere bubbled more ferociously and Griff half expected it to belch.

He turned to ask Kate if giant space blobs ever got indigestion but her expression was somber.

“Run.”

She didn’t have to explain.

The ten minutes were up.

He lifted her by the elbow and they stumbled off the cliff, around the space debris, and through the fissures of steam.

They dropped behind a desert boulder just before the towers erupted into an explosion with a sudden flash of wind in its wake.

Pieces of ship and mountain shot into the sky in a thunderous roar probably heard for fifty miles around.

Griff stepped out from behind the boulder to watch the distant spectacle.

Trails of shooting debris and embers painted colorful bands across the midnight heavens.

“This is what I planned for our date.”

He felt Kate turn to look at him. Kept his eyes on the carnage above.

“It’s why I wanted to go so late. There was a meteor shower that night out by the gravel pit. They said it’s spectacular. It’s got nothing on this.”

Her gaze turned upward to the sky. They stood, side by side, watching as glittering particles fled over a blanket of distant stars.

Griff laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, “I just never planned on saving the world with a waitress.”

“Goes to show, you should never give up.”

He turned and found her looking up at him with eyes that sparkled like the stars.

“Never.”

Griff Mason kissed Kate Green like he should have done on their date.

“Neither should you. Retirement is over. Time to go puke-weasel hunting,” he said, gun hoisted and feeling triumphant for multiple reasons, “and we’re taking the blob with us.”