“Very well,” the alien said. He straightened up. “I am the Inquisitor. As is my right and duty, I find you guilty of heresy, treason, and activities that risked the lives of the warriors…and those of your race who have converted to the Truth. The sentence is death. You will be taken to a public place, where you will be burned alive.”
Joshua said nothing as the alien guards grabbed him and marched him out of the room. They had to have received orders, somehow, because they didn’t hesitate, but took him right out of the complex and into one of the hovering trucks they used for transport. A moment later, the truck started to move, gliding out through the streets towards one of the soup kitchens, established in the remains of what had once been a building. Austin seemed almost duller now, drabber…the remains of life slowly being extinguished as the occupation took hold. He looked, desperately, for some sign that there was still an insurgency, but saw nothing. He was alone.
They’d already prepared a bonfire and a stake, almost like something out of one of the Salem Witch Trials. The humans who had been at the kitchen watched, their faces betraying nothing, as Joshua was hauled out and marched over to the stake. The guards lashed him to the stake and stepped back, one of them producing a small lighter-like device and bending down to the wood. Judging from the odd smell, the wood had been treated somehow to allow it to burn faster and hotter…
“I commend my soul to God,” Joshua said. He didn’t know why he’d said it. It just seemed like the right thing to say. The crowd, growing larger all the time, watched him, perhaps wondering what he would say next. He wanted to pray, but somehow all the prayers he had known had deserted him, even the alien prayers. His mind was calm, composed…and accepting. He was going to die. “You bastards, burn in hell.”
The alien clicked on the lighter…
And then there was a shattering explosion from the other side of the kitchen.
– Jim Collins
The report on the President’s desk had taken nearly two weeks to compose and, by then, was probably partly out of date. Compiled by a team of Beltway Bandits, who had been feeling the pinch as the economy collapsed, it was a grand survey of the entire United States and the results of the alien invasion. It didn’t make pleasant reading. The aliens had, deliberately or otherwise, interfered with an economic system that had worked fairly well for years…and, in doing so, had brought most of the world to its knees. The United States might well be on the verge of being defeated – completely. That had never happened in history, not since the Revolutionary War; the destruction of the White House during the War of 1812 had been a minor pinprick.
Now, however…the aliens were carefully hacking the remainder of the United States apart. They were targeting everywhere, but one case was particularly bad. They’d picked off a handful of bridges across the Hudson River and virtually cut New England off from New York. The net result was mass starvation, despite careful rationing and an evacuation program that had relocated hundreds of thousands of people. If it continued, the population would soon become so desperate that they would convert to any religion, even Satanism, just to be fed. The report had suggested that defeatism was actually growing in parts of the country, despite the daily reports of atrocities from the Red Zone in Texas and the Middle East.
Worse, almost all of the food coming into the northeast corridor, where nearly two-thirds of the population lived, including Washington, came by truck. The aliens, as they had figured out more of the American system, had started to pick off additional vital bridges and interchanges in Pennsylvania, as well as a handful of trucks, picked almost at random. The cumulative effect, the report suggested, was that vast sections of the population would be facing starvation – and a complete social collapse – fairly soon. The stockpiles of food and supplies were running low…and, worse, there was almost no oil coming in from outside. The US could, and did, pump up some from within its borders, but even so, getting it somewhere was proving difficult…
