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  FREEDOM’S FIRE

  Book 1 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

  A novel

  by

  Bobby Adair

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  Text copyright © 2017, Bobby L. Adair

  Chapter 1

  It’s up there right now, slowly killing my wife.

  I hate it.

  I mouth the words in silent syllables. I think them loud and feel them hard.

  In my mind, I’m wrapping my hands around that thing’s doll-sized ankles, swinging it like a bowling pin—bashing its head into the sidewalk, coconut skull cracking, splattering cerebral gel across the yard.

  I savor the violence, like I’m doing it for real.

  But I remain in my downstairs office, inert at my desk in the glow of a salvaged computer screen.

  I want to stomp its spindly arms and grind them into the concrete. I imagine breaking its bones, though I know it has none to make the satisfying crack I yearn to hear. Its limbs are bendy-resilient like green twigs. They won’t snap.

  At least it bleeds sticky amber sap when its gray, dolphin skin splits.

  There’s that.

  I hear a noise upstairs, small and shuffling.

  I drive my criminal thoughts back to the dark place I keep in my soul, a hole so deep nothing can see inside. It’s where I veil my secrets, hide what I am.

  The mask the gray things see when their big black eyes scan across my face is servile. I look away. I fake a tremble. I gasp when I need to. And when they probe with their alien minds, they feel my weakness. They think my charade is as real as the power they lord over every hostage human on this earth.

  They see a cog in their machine. A slave in all but name.

  My disguise runs deep.

  I look at the clock. Half past one.

  It shouldn’t be awake.

  The things stay on a tight diurnal schedule set by the spin of the planet on which they evolved—three hours awake, three hours comatose. It’s rare for one to deviate from its sleeping pattern, especially one so young. Ours is three-and-a-half, still eighteen months from maturity.

  Light feet are coming across the loft outside the room where I used to lie in bed with my wife, feeling her skin sticky against mine, hearing her breath hush across my ear.

  Some memories sweeten with time.

  Wood creaks.

  A foot on the first stair.

  Leech.

  Tick.

  Parasite.

  I have more thoughts yet to hide.

  When they awarded us the privilege of rearing one of their hatchlings, Claire was just as normal as the next wife down the block, but prettier—always catching the ire of those kinds of girls who like to envy. A wide smile and teeth so perfect you just knew they were fake. Corn silk hair flowed over her shoulders. A seductive curve traced from her waist down to her hip.

  The way her breath would catch in her throat when I unbuttoned her jeans.

  Memories I shouldn’t be indulging.

  Instead, I recall her eyes—plastic ice, blue and false—showing me for a time that she and I were the same, two imposters, each behind a façade, each with an aspiration buried too deep to see.

  The wood of another stair bends.

  I cock my head.

  Is it that thing?

  Full-grown they only weigh about forty pounds. Ours is maybe twenty-five. It likes to creep through the house on fairy feet that grow more silent every day, trying to catch me unawares, suspecting my truth and wanting to get close enough to feel my deception.

  I kill the contraband video I’m watching, eject the fingernail-sized memory card, and slip it beneath my keyboard. I alt-tab to a mindless game, focusing on colors of red and black while filling my head with hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs.

  More squeaks on the steps.

  Its pace quickens, caution gone.

  I don’t look through the wide doorway between the first-floor office and the living room where the staircase stands in the night shadows. I don’t want it to know I’m aware. I know it thinks I’m a dexterous monkey with rudimentary mental capacities and a dependence on sound for communication, no better than an ant secreting hormones into the air for all to sniff, incapable of hiding my plots.

  The most believable lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

  Still, it sneaks.

  “You still up?”

  Startled, I look, and instead of that thing, I see Claire, standing on the landing halfway up the stairs, her wrinkled skin drooping off sinewy arms, crackly gray hair, and eyelids hanging tiredly away, exposing pink flesh beneath. Surrounded by whites veined in red, her irises have turned to haze.

  As I imagine cold air drying out those eyes and making them sting, I sympathetically blink.

  She doesn’t.

  It’s like she’s unaware, protected from the world’s rough touch by an opioid addiction that casts every day in a numb blur.

  Naked and Holocaust-thin.

  I’m thirty-three. Claire and I were born at the same hospital just a few months apart. Now, only the rows of faultless teeth assure me she’s the young woman I married just ten years ago, and I know there can’t be eighteen months of life left in her.

  Worms of guilt burrow deep into my soul, biting and pissing, affirming the cost of my mistakes.

  We all have sins to pay for.

  “He’s asleep.” The girlish lilt of her voice has long since gone. Now it sounds like tearing paper modulated into words.

  I look into the darkness above her, toward the bedroom. “You’re not supposed to be away from it while it’s asleep.”

  “I need you.”

  I hide my cringe. The thing upstairs has aged fifty extra years out of her.

  She caresses one of her sagging breasts and licks her lips. She shows me those glistening teeth as she stretches a smile. “Don’t you think I’m still beautiful?”

  I hide the NO in the dark part of my mind with the rest of my secrets. I can’t let her see my truth because if she comes to know my feelings, then that thing will know, too.

  I stand and wheel my chair away from the desk as I reach up to loose the buttons on my shirt. “Come.”

  She slinks down the remaining stairs and crosses the floor, closing on me in a sultry rush of grinding knees and wheezing breath. Her fingers find my skin, and I smell the odor of the thing upstairs seeped into her wrinkles, a urine-soaked diaper left to ferment for an August week in the back of a car.

  She fumbles to get my pants down and pushes me onto the couch. She climbs on top of me, her body desperate for pleasure.

  I don’t resist.

  I participate—enough.

  She puts my hands where she wants them.

  She tells me to squeeze, to caress, to kiss. She always liked to be in control.

  We wrestle rhythmically.

  Thankfully, not for long.

  She gets where she’s going and howls loud enough to wake the neighbors. Then stops, gasping.

  I pretend to get there, too, get caught in the lie, tell her I’m tired.

  Too much pressure at work.

  Afraid for friends who’ve gone off to the war.

  Last week’s shrinking rations.

  Too many problems. Not enough room for all of them in my head.

  She doesn’t care. She only wants a fiction she can pour into the void that grows inside her as her body wastes away.

  Leaving me on the couch, she crosses the shadowy room, mounts the creaking stairs, and balances herself with the railing all the way up. She crosses the loft and goes back into the room we used to share, gently closing the door behind.


  More soft steps.

  The bedsprings meekly groan as they take her weight.

  She’s under the covers, cuddling that thing warm again, content to let it leach the last of her life away.

  I exhale my guilt into the cold house and peel myself off the couch, leaving my clothes on the floor. I cross to the kitchen, and open the fridge. I find a beer way in the back. I pop the cap and gulp it to wash the taste of her out of my mouth.

  It’s all I can do.

  I’d like to shower and soap the smell away, but I can’t. She’ll hear the water running, and the insecurity she fosters will make her ask why I had to clean myself so quickly after we’d made love. I’ll have no answer, and she’ll suspect the truth of me not wanting to feel her touch. That will lead to a more painful truth I have difficulty admitting. Disgust. And then she’ll churn the truth out of that feeling and she’ll see my hate.

  I can’t afford hate—not from her and not from that gray thing upstairs.

  I won’t waste my years of deception when finally I’ve reached the eve of the beginning.

  Elfin monsters like the one wrapped in my wife’s arms don’t belong in my house, not in my town, in my country, or on my planet.

  Before the sun sets tomorrow, I’ll cease being a disgruntled servant accepting those twiggy things as my overlords. I’ll stop researching, and learning, and practicing, and wishing. I’ll stop recruiting and scheming. My cocoon of lies will split open and I’ll emerge a man who’ll never have to face his masters again without a weapon in his hands and murder in his eyes.

  I’ll live for the dream of freedom and I’ll fight for a single cause.

  Revolution!

  Chapter 2

  The cold morning air bites my skin as I look up at the sky.

  Fitting. It’s gray.

  I check my bike’s tires for air. They’re worn smooth. Replacements are almost impossible to find. In the three decades of the Grays’ dominion over the earth, they’ve allowed very few resources and little manufacturing time to be set aside for products that only serve to make humans happy. Every item available on the black market is either salvaged from things built before the Grays arrived or is creatively surplused out of their supply chain.

  With the new war in our solar system in its second year, those surpluses have dried up, and most of the salvagers have been drafted into the Solar Defense Force. The rest snuck away into the mountains with their families, hiding from a world that changed too fast, hoping to ride out the hostilities in safety.

  Good thing the bike only needs to make one more trip.

  I pull the garage door shut on a car built before I was born. It runs well for its age. I’ll leave it for Sydney, Claire’s sister, who lives in our basement. She won’t be able to barter for much gas, but I’ve left seventy gallons in cans lined along the back wall. My job at the grav factory affords me a fuel ration for my commute, but not much more. In the spring and summer, when there wasn’t snow piled on the roads, I biked to work and saved my ration. Some of that is in the cans. Some of it, I used to drive down to the illegal market on the south side of Denver and trade for things I wanted.

  Back when things were good with Claire, I’d occasionally burn some of my saved gasoline to cruise up one of the old mountain roads. She and I would find a place with no one around for miles. We’d shuck off our clothes, lie in the grass, and revel in the pleasures of being young, wrapped in each other’s arms. Afterward, with the breeze blowing cool across our skin, we’d look out over the trees and watch the clouds float above peaks stretched to the horizon.

  We didn’t care then that the earth was ruled by little gray creatures from a faraway star.

  We were living what seemed like a romance story from the pre-siege videos.

  We were in love.

  At least, I thought so at the time.

  Throwing a leg over the bike, I shrug my backpack into a comfortable position, slip my gloves on, and zip my jacket all the way up. Rotating my neck for a good fit, I can’t help but look at the gray ribbons tied into bows on the limbs of the fir tree in our front yard. Some of them are crisp and shiny. Most are dull and frayed, there since the day Claire brought the hatchling into our home.

  The ribbons piss me off.

  They’re pointless offerings of respect and solidarity. Tokens from neighbors to honor Claire’s sacrifice for the good of us all.

  Residual sighs of relief—better your wife than mine!

  The ribbons are wasted resources when everything is in short supply.

  A reminder that I’m the bastard to blame for her choice, although adopting the baby Gray was solely her decision.

  “To hell with you people.” Nobody’s outside to hear me mutter.

  I stand on the bike’s pedals and roll down the hill.

  I ignore the guilt, and the wind numbs my face as I pick up speed.

  The hill curves with the shape of the mountain. Tall pines line the road and fill the gaps between the old ski condos. I make my way to the south end of town before turning north for a last trip past the nineteenth-century buildings on Main Street. Breckenridge is dead so early in the morning.

  On the flat, empty boulevard, I pedal hard to get my blood flowing, and trace the center stripe on the road with my tires.

  I’ll warm up soon.

  The old timers still talk of what a bustling town Breckenridge used to be back when it was a ski destination. Before the Grays.

  I realize then, too many of my thoughts carry that before-after qualifier.

  Before the Grays. After the Grays.

  Before the siege. After.

  Human history ended an era and spawned a new one three decades ago when those rubbery imps arrived to claim us as their property.

  Before, tourists flew in on commercial jets from all over the country. Three hundred people at a time, coddled on cushioned comfort in aluminum tubes that guzzled jet fuel by the ton, burning more gas in a minute than I’m rationed for a month, just to tear across the high atmosphere and vacation far from home. I’ve never even seen an old gasoline-powered airplane fly, let alone one big enough to carry three hundred people across the continent.

  It strains the imagination—so much wasted back then when we have so little now. If only we’d not lavished ourselves in frivolities but spent our efforts preparing for the inevitable.

  And contact was inevitable.

  Too many stars in the boundless void for it not to be.

  The only thing in the sky these days are the gravity lifts hauling shipping container loads into orbit, and an occasional battle cruiser rising out of the shipyards down in Arizona for her maiden voyage around the moon.

  Or rushing to the war.

  The war is everything.

  It’s bleeding our planet of people and resources. Hell, they’re even pulling up the rails the trains used to run on. One hundred and fifty thousand miles of tracks, sixteen million tons of steel, just lying on the ground. We don’t use the railroads anymore, but the fact we’ve become desperate enough to dismantle them frightens me.

  A day will come when there’s nothing left.

  A worse day will arrive when these new invaders set their Neanderthal feet on earth’s sacred soil and massacre us all.

  And it’s because of the Grays.

  They’re the true bastards in every tragedy, intimate or grand, on this weary planet. They’re the ones my neighbors should point their accusing fingers at. But the ribbon-hanging bumpkins on my block, like most people I know, are too brainwashed by the Grays’ lies to see the truth.

  Maybe they’re too lazy to look for it.

  Maybe they’re just afraid.

  I’m out of the city as I lose feeling in my ears. Downtown Breckenridge is only eight blocks long from end to end, but it’s colder this morning than it seemed when I got on the bike.

  The road down the valley to Frisco won’t be busy. Still, I jump a crumbling curb and bounce down an embankment to access the old bike path close to the
edge of the river. There’s no ice in the water this time of year, but the peaks on both sides of the valley are tipped in snow left over from last year, and this season’s blanket is already starting to build.

  Water gurgles over the rocks as I fly past. I feel like I’m racing it down to the reservoir, but mostly I’m listening. It’s my solace, and has been for all the years I’ve sweated through twelve-hour shifts in the grav factory.

  Near the marshes at the shallow end of the lake, the bike path curves around the old high school. I reflexively gag. The whole building was converted into a hatchery for the Grays back when I was a kid, and stinks up this end of the valley. Like the grav factory, the hatchery runs twenty-four hours a day, six days a week.

  Everybody is allowed one day off.

  It’s an alien labor management protocol. As little as the Grays value humans, they don’t work us to death. They want us energetic enough in our free time to produce more little versions of ourselves that’ll grow up to serve their insignificant empire.

  Insignificant?

  Do I dare call it that?

  Yes.

  That’s been the rumor this past year with the war going so badly. The Grays are an insignificant life form in our end of the galaxy.

  And whatever crumbs of pride we humans fostered in our hearts after the siege and before the new war started have now turned to self-loathing, because thirty years ago, the insignificant Grays conquered us.

  Once past the hatchery, the bike path runs up a hill through the pines on the west side of the lake. Along the crest, a condo complex had been under construction back when the Grays laid their siege. It was never completed. Now it’s a maze of culverts, concrete walls, rusting rebar, and thin, white-trunked aspens covered in quaking golden leaves, ready to drop.

  Between the trees, I see the little town of Frisco a few miles ahead, also on the west bank. Tiny Dillon is on the east. Silverthorne, not much bigger, spreads into the valley below the aging dam. Heading north, the spaceport’s warehouses, barracks, admin buildings, and launch pads fill every flat space between the mountains as far as I can see.

  Grav lifts are setting down in the spaceport, loading and launching back into the air in quick turnarounds. Many more than usual. They climb in the shade between the summits. Through the low-hanging clouds they drag trails of mist, catching the sun shining over the peaks as they ascend. For a few moments, they glow like escaping stars. They accelerate at altitude and the sonic booms echo down as they blast past the speed of sound.