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Reflections: Day One
Posted By: Elysion<sword.roland@gmail.com>
Date: 14 January 2008, 5:12 pm
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The crowd was stampeding like a spooked herd of wildebeest. Savannah struggled to keep a clear head amidst the noise of human panic rising to the shriek of the alien fliers passing overhead. Someone knocked her to the ground and pain flashed across her face. She had to get out of the crowd or she would be trampled.
Through the passing people, she could catch glimpses of an alleyway off to the side of the main thoroughfare. Flowing with the crowd, she struggled to move toward the space. Just as she was a few feet away from safety, Savannah felt a wave of heat at her back, then the thunderclap of an explosion.
The crowd surged away from the smoking crater, screaming.
Fleeing men and women shoved her roughly aside, propelling her further and further from the alley. For an instant, fear took hold of her and she became part of the crowd, pushing, biting, scratching, all to get away from the aliens. She could find shelter somewhere else. She had to keep moving.
Blue fire cut through the crowd in front of her with a demonic hiss. The man who had been running in front of her just a heartbeat ago lay in a melted heap on the ground. Savannah tripped over his body, and fell, but from this new perspective she spotted a shattered concrete pipe lying in a ditch off to the side. She sprinted for it, not caring if she stepped on outstretched bloody fingers. A desperate moan rose from the bodies of those not yet dead as the iridescent fliers rounded for another pass. Twin blasts rocked the pipe as Savannah curled up in a ball inside it. The smell of smoldering flesh stung her eyes.
But she had survived. Only 12 years old, and she had survived. All she had to do was keep surviving.
* * *
The lion cub mewled helplessly beside the bodies of her parents. Savannah turned to her father. "Why won't you help it, Daddy?" she asked. Her father looked at her and smiled sadly, ruffling her hair. "There's nothing we can do for her," he said, "not without interfering."
It seemed like everything was conspiring against this tiny lion, even her father. "That's not fair."
Her father picked her up and sat her on his lap. She took comfort in his voice, the smell he always carried of long grass baking in the hot African sun. "Savannah, you're getting to be a big girl now, and this is one of those choices we have to make," he explained, "You see, if we began to take care of that lion, she'd become dependent on us. Before long, she wouldn't be a lion anymore. She'd just be a housecat. Is that really being fair to her? If we gave her everything she needed, we would wind up taking away her lion-ness.
"Don't you think that's unfair? Taking away her lion-ness?" Her father never raised his voice, never used any tone of voice besides his typical laid-back drawl, but Savannah knew she was being chastised. "Besides, that's just not what we do. We're trying to get this place back to its natural state, not change it even more."
"So she'll just have to survive on her own?" she asked, perhaps beginning to understand.
Her father's tone was earnest.
"Don't we all?"
* * *
Consciousness returned to her like a tidal wave – unexpected and all at once. Savannah hadn't even remembered falling asleep inside the pipe. She shook the last of the dreams from her head, shoving aside the memories of her past, and tried her best to think things out like her father always had said to do.
She was alone. Her parents were probably dead, along with everyone else she had ever met. She would have to find food, water, and somewhere to sleep. She would also have to deal with the invading aliens. She could try to get out of New Mombasa, but doing so might just get her noticed. Perhaps it might be better to lay low until they lost interest and moved on.
She'd lived within easy distance of the city all her life and knew the city well, so she could think of plenty of ways to meet her basic needs. The aliens, however, she would need to be smart about. She knew nothing about them except that they were set on killing every human being they could find. She had only one advantage over them: they weren't looking for her, yet. She'd have to learn as much about them as she could before they started looking for her, so she could outsmart them when the time came. She'd spent all her life watching and studying animals. How different were the aliens, really?
She sat up as best she could in the small pipe, ignoring the pitted concrete scraping against her scalp. A breeze began to stir outside, just a small one, but the tight confines of the pipe channeled it into a storm. Stale wind whipped Savannah's face, bringing the scent of the burned bodies just out of view, and howling like the alien fliers. Her heart began to beat faster as she remembered, almost relived, the horror she'd experienced.
She felt like crying, but the tears never came.
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