I would try to explain the plot, but really I haven't figured out a lot of it out yet and the rest pretty much explains itself. So I hope you enjoy it, and review as much as you possibly can!
BLUR THE LINES
PART ONE - ALIGNMENT
CHAPTER ONE
The night sky was suddenly split open by a million shafts of blazing light as the Mach Ones blasted over the deserted streets and derelict houses of Annandale, North Dakota. The air was filled with the screeching of flight and the cracks of a thousand sonic-booms. A single stray dog looked up laxly before returning to his steak bone, gnawed to the core days before. A pair of newborn kittens whimpered, curling against their mother who watched the dancing shapes in the sky with the wary eye of a protector. A snake winding its way through an abandoned power plant, looking like just another strand of wire, peered questioningly at the source of the unique vibrations. And the few people that remained in the ruined city stared in blatant horror as the demons of the Capital closed in on their destination. Mach Ones they were called, because they could break the speed of sound a thousand times over without wearing a single bolt, but they had gained another nickname through fear and power. They were called Exterminators, and that was what they did.
The first of the fleet of seventeen, marked on the side with the Capital’s symbol, pulled into an upward roll over the center of the city and then finally coasted into a slow, steady curve over the once magnificent city hall. The rest of the group dispersed, surrounding their leader in a close yet loose circle, covering the city to the surrounding wall. For three minutes they circled, ensuring that each of their partners had gained their position. And then the captain gave the order.
Seventeen hatches opened in the hull of seventeen planes and out fell seventeen elongated capsules, each painted in alternating stripes of black and red. They dropped the thousands of feet in seconds, watched by the terrified few, each person hoping that they were figments of a mass dream. They all touched the ground at the same instant, exactly as was intended. There was a simultaneous crash, one second of suspended disbelief, and then the warheads exploded in a blast powerful enough to blow the leaves from trees fifty miles away, completely obliterating any sign that the city of Annandale, North Dakota, had ever existed. The planes, Mach Ones, Exterminators, circled for another minute, each pilot carefully watching the ground for the remotest sign of life. And then, one by one, they turned and shot back across the sky, creating a series of shock waves heard around the world. The Exterminators had finished their work, and were returning to their hangar until they were called upon again.
CHAPTER TWO
Around the world those thunder-cracks were heard with a mixture of apprehension and relief. People with relatives in other cities immediately picked up their telephones and dialed their numbers with shaking hands. Others logged onto the remains of the once proud Internet, trying to find the government report detailing what had been eliminated. Still others flipped on their flat-screen televisions, remnants of a past time, switching frantically between channels to find where the Exterminators had paid their visit. In the next few hours peddlers in the streets would sell hundreds of bogus newspapers, each claiming that every city from Los Angeles to Tokyo had been wiped off the map, each earning enough for him or herself to live on until at least the next extermination. And inside his one-story house, amid the screaming of tens of young children and the groans of their older caretakers, Xavier closed his eyes and tried to break through the haze of terror falling upon his city.
Eventually of course he could no longer block out the raucous screaming from inside and the frantic shouting from outside, so Xavier headed for his hideaway. Most days it was an ordeal sneaking across the kitchen, but as there was no reason for the cooks to be exempt from the uproar he knew it would be easy. As he peered into the room he saw each of the five in some state of shock, and it was no trouble for him to slide five feet to under the sink in the near right corner. The crawlspace was where it always was, hidden in the junction of corners and blocked from view by a janitor’s cart that hadn’t moved since the day Xavier had first arrived. However what had once been an easy fit had become a tighter squeeze as the years had gone by and Xavier thought with dejection that very soon he would be too large to fit through this particular crawlspace. Well then, I’ll find another way. He thought. It wasn’t as if anyone would notice a random teenager wandering aimlessly through the halls of the dormitory, the caretakers had enough to worry about. But he pushed that from his head as he slipped deeper and deeper into the bowels of the building, the space around him gradually widening until he was in more of a tunnel than a crawlspace. Slowly the walls transformed from cheap sheet-metal to old and crumbling brick as he left the area under the building and entered the long-unused sewers of the city. Ironically, what had once been the city’s waste disposal system was now cleaner than the streets themselves. Waste was now incinerated… it was more productive, and the sewers had been left in disrepair. Now the water that ran through the underground tunnels was cleaner than most of the drinking water, and the only evidence that anything fouler than frogs had once inhabited these passageways was the subtle odor of forgotten decay. The light was low but still substantial, created by strange bioluminescent fish that glowed with a soft yellow hue like fireflies. When he had visited the sewers in his younger years Xavier would stare in wonder at these fish for hours on end, entranced by their simple ability to create something that he had been taught only God had the right to create. Still, in what he thought was his sixteenth year; they fascinated him and afforded him a sense of wonder in a world where any kind of wonder was short-lived and fabricated. They were his secret, his lighthouse in a sea of crashing waves. They were the proof of a lie, a lie taught to him and everyone he had ever known. And in its own strange way, that gave him hope. And in a world where Exterminators roamed the skies and greed ruled the streets hope was a rare occurrence.
In the end Xavier had no idea how long he had sat in that one spot in his secret home, watching the fish of wonder flutter back and forth through their watery adobe. All he felt was the sudden spike of hunger stab through his gut, and he attempted to rise. Yet it took him three times before his spine became loose enough for him to move, and he heard at least twenty cracks in his back before he managed to stand again. I’ve spent at least a day down here. He thought, his conviction real. Maybe more. In reality he had been sitting by the underground river for only around ten hours… but in this world time had become as blurred as the lines that bound it and a complete rotation of the Earth no longer defined the standard unit of time. Days had become meaningless. Hours were unknown, unkept, uncared for. Minutes had ceased to matter. Time was relative to the mind that controlled it, and as Xavier crawled back up the rusted ladder to the hole that would take him back to the dormitory it could have been ten hours or ten days since he had last traversed the stretch of broken concrete and dust that had lain undisturbed, except by him, for decades. And as he prepared to return to that world where the lines had been blurred beyond recognition, he turned back just once to regard the strange and wondrous creations that swam through their underground city. And, even if it was just his imagination, he knew that he saw the fish blink their lights softly, as if to wish farewell to their only companion for the long and lonely days and nights in their stretch of river. Elated slightly by the thought, he smiled, and crawled back through the passageway. Goodbye. He thought, something that in another time may have been considered childish for a sixteen year-old. Yet in this era Xavier was just one of the masses, neglected by the world itself, who had never grown up in spirit. He was alone among many, a stranger among strangers. The old lines had been blurred, erased, fogged beyond belief. New lines had been drawn, by the Capital and by the world, and now they themselves were becoming blurred not with age but with disregard. The world was falling apart, and no one seemed ready to save it.
CHAPTER THREE
Chaos attacked the streets of Houston like a rabid animal as one of the only remaining old world cities was surrounded by the blasting whir of helicopter rotors and the shrill ringing of police sirens. Terrified people dashed through the streets, throwing themselves into buildings that seconds later exploded with the sound of millions of firecrackers. Those that could not were plowed down in hundreds upon hundreds by impartial, sweeping gunfire. The world was in an uproar, and the Capital had sent troops to moderate. A weak rebellion had arisen and before it could so much as spread its wings it had been quelled. It’s leader, a middle-aged man named Abraham, had been shot with a hollow-point round, his head exploding like a grapefruit in the midst of the charge on City Hall, his followers scattering like confetti in a breeze. Now they scrambled along with the masses, everyone paying the price for the attempted insurrection. Policemen dashed through the streets, shooting anything and everything that moved. People expired on the burning asphalt, staring up at the smoggy sky and wondering what they had ever done to deserve such a death.
However none of the policemen noticed a young girl dashing through the backstreets, leaping over rubble like a gazelle and dashing through alleyways faster than her worn sneakers could bear. She didn’t look back; doing so would waste precious time and even more precious breath. The scenery around her was in a blur, sooty factories and dilapidated buildings passing by in a mixed palate of muted color. The sirens grew fainter and fainter in the distance until they faded altogether, and the menacing slicing of the rotors became background noise. Only then did Esti finally stop running, nearly falling over as sudden exhaustion and fatigue set in. The best she could do was lean against a building, panting crazily, trying to suck in as much air as her hyperventilating lungs could process. She hardly remembered any of the crazed moments before the charge; it was all a collage of incoherent images quickly fading from his mind, the chants, the insanely giddy feeling of elation and achievement that came with the idea of the rebellion. The only clear instant was the moment when the hollow-point round, shot by a policeman standing on the steps of City Hall, had smashed through Abraham’s head. That image would be fixed in her mind forever, as the last moment of deranged sanity before hell set in.
And then she had been running… running… knowing that any moment she would feel a searing point of pain as a bullet pierced her body yet still pulling at all the energy she could muster to keep going. And in the end she had beat the odds. She had survived. She… had… survived… … …
Minutes passed by with agonizing slowness as Esti struggled to remain conscious, knowing that if she were to faint here she would probably never wake up. Before her eyes the world swam in an out of focus, blurred to the point of unrecognizability and then sliding back into perfect alignment, angles sharpening to the finest points and changing the world into a mass of blocks and geometric shapes. More than once she felt it slipping away from her, and it was only with every ounce of mental power that she was able to rope herself back in. The moon had risen fully in the sky overhead, a sight unnoticed as she leaned against the wall, her only refuge from the hurricane of darkness attempting to sweep her away. You cannot fall. She thought doggedly, pulling at fleeting scraps of resolve. You cannot fall. If you fall you will die. If you fall you will die.
Still she sank down into a crouch; the futile energy left in her system not enough to sustain her body’s needs. She closed her eyes, clenching them shut, and then struggling to open them. Her eyelids felt as if fifty pound weights had been stapled to them, impossible to keep from sliding shut. Exhaustion had nearly overcome her. Her lungs ached. Her heart still pounded. Every inch of her body was being assaulted by pain of every kind. She had run miles through dark alleys trying to escape, falling more than once and always getting back up. And now it was returning to haunt her. Esti’s last memory of the city of Houston was of that bleak backstreet filled with the decrepit remains of houses and burnt out shells of factories, and of a tall, dark, menacing figure walking toward her as everything else dissolved into darkness.
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