End

Author's note: Enjoy.

END

DAWN, YEAR 2204. SOMEWHERE OFF THE EAST COAST OF THE NINTH NEBULA ROCK.

There was a plan. This was the plan. They’d wanted this for years; worked for it. Detective Inspector James Garter walked down the grey corridor. Confined. Orange-white light streamed in from the hole glaring at the corridor’s end; it fell onto the wall. Garter’s rifle led the way. Behind him moved the Drudge – the police. The floor was dusty under his heavy plastic boots as they strode onwards, almost shuffling, towards the light.

            Garter threw his hand up and his fingers flapped forward. The Drudge stopped dead in their tracks behind the DI. Garter’s green eyes pierced through the blinding light that had glued to the walls. So many walls. So little space. He could see nothing. Everything he saw told him nothing was there. Every sound had ceased to exist. But he felt it.

            ‘There,’ DI Garter whispered over his shoulder and pressed a single index finger half way up the wall to his left. There should be nothing – that was the plan – but something was there. It must be.

            One of the Drudge came up behind him and took a satchel off its belt. Garter’s rifle was still raised towards the light but his finger didn’t move. There, there, there. The Drudge placed the satchel, blue and oily in texture, over Garter’s index finger. Once it was securely against the wall, Garter slipped his finger from underneath. The Drudge retreated robotically back down the way they had come. Garter followed them. He paced backwards as quietly as his heavy boots would allow him. His eyes never left the satchel, not until he reached the top of the stairwell. It was then he ran. The Drudge swept out in formation before him when they reached the baron world outside, smoothly gliding at an inhuman pace. Garter ran after them, suddenly enveloped into the orange-white light. He pulled away from the building fast.

            In the corridor the oily blue satchel burst open. Out of it poured millions of tiny robotic bugs. They ate through the old aged plaster on the left hand wall, ravaging through the wood and brick which stood in the middle, before devouring the final layer of plaster on the other side. The other side. There a man and a small child – Garter guessed a little girl – lay sleeping. Unknowingly to them, millions of robotic bugs were riddling over their flesh. Their fine, pin legs left the dreaming two completely in the dark to their presence. In the wake of the dawn orange-white light the bugs feasted. The flesh slowly consumed; born from it were more Drudge. After all, this was their plan.

            Outside, many kilometres away, Garter rode a glide-bike alongside the senior police Drudge, Six-G.

            ‘Sat reports show mission complete, Detective,’ Six-G computed. The Drudge had slowed its pace to the speed of Garter’s glide-bike. ‘Human population now accounts for the nine hundred and ninety-nine Approved, with sixty-five outstanding survivors. You have successfully taken down two hundred and thirty-four in the last week. Congratulations, Detective.’

            Garter nodded as the dusty winds flew threw his hair. This was the plan; it had always been the plan. He looked down at the console on the glide-bike. Sixty-four survivors’ co-ordinates had been pin-pointed and listed. The sixty-fifth, Doctor Louise Burberry, was newly added – the sat had yet to find her. The Doctor used to be, after all, one of us. One of the Approved. One of the thousand.

            Garter needed a drink. What was the point? After three years since plan ‘End’ had been activated, there was no chance of water anywhere; at least nowhere rural. How can water survive on an Earth half bitten by a long-dead Nebula rock? It can’t. Not unless you were the one who stored it there, comforted in the knowledge it was you, yes you, who brought the Nebula rock into a collision course with Earth. Only if it was you tracking down the survivors of the half-beaten world in which you once lived so well; tracking them down and converting them into the Drudge. The Drudge; emotionless slaves at the hands of all the Approved. Even the Approved were existent for the pure purpose of repopulating Earth; every end must have its restart. That was the plan: kick start the Earth. How can you kick start something you have made dust? It was their plan.

            Garter turned to Six-G.

            ‘Go back to Metropolis Capital, Six-G,’ Garter ordered. ‘I need to go lay in the sun. I shall be back by dusk. Please notify the Commissioner.’

            ‘Yes, Detective,’ buzzed the reply. ‘What will be your whereabouts?’

            ‘The bike will be on sat,’ said Garter and departed from formation. The dust flicked up around the glide-bike’s thrust. The Others disappeared into the orange-white light with phenomenal speed.

It was approaching noon when he was nearing the Under Dome. Garter hadn’t been to the Under Dome since he was ordered to clean it out of survivors. He’d actively murdered seventy-three that day; he had ordered the conversion to Others of over four hundred other survivors. He wished every day he could feel something for what happened that day. He wished for guilt, but guilt never came. DI Garter had been part of the few who planned this, hadn’t he?

            Garter dumped the glide-bike two hours walk away from the Under Dome bunker. Noon was looming. He flung on his temperature suit, ready for the blaze, and set to running from his bike to the Under Dome bunker. Garter’s heavy boots slugged their way over mounds of dust. He threw them up the hills and down the gradients on the other side, sometimes sliding on his back to reach the bottom even quicker. He held a helmet tightly in his right hand, which was gloved in white insulation. In the other hand his rifle swung by his hip. The glide-bike was far behind. The sat would think he stopped in the middle of nowhere and had been consumed by the blaze storm. The Drudge would suspect he was burnt alive. The temperature suit wouldn’t last long now. The storm was coming.

            The orange-white sky screamed as it tightly tugged from left to right in the horizon. The sun began to shoot fire against the dusty baron lands of the Earth. This scavenged Earth which was full of so much death; an Earth which they had planned to be a Heaven. In every direction the urban Approved settlements shot up their bright blue shields, translucent against the dusty hot winds. The sun began to fry the Earth – the everyday cremation had resumed.

            Garter had to keep running. It was minutes before his suit would melt into his flesh and the white insulation would become stained upon his skin; skin which would very quickly blacken in the wake of the storm. His thigh muscles burned; his nerves tightly scrutinised every ounce of him. He gritted his teeth. Garter had to keep running. Death, death, death. It had happened to so many. It would not happen to him. The orange-white light had become a blinding white; it filled the horizon’s every corner. What had they saved? What had they done? How could this have ever been Garter’s plan?

            The exterior of Garter’s suit began to bubble; its high-carbon density began to fry in the blinding white. The heaven was burning him for his sins. It was their plan. He could feel the suit burn against his toes, his fingertips.

            He could’ve melted alive. Yet DI Garter made it into the bunker. He ran deeply into its intertwining corridors and stood in the warm, abandoned lobby about fifty metres in. Tons of high-density plastic and concrete had crafted it all. Garter flicked on his torch; his green eyes looked around the black lobby.

            ‘I know you’re here, Doctor,’ Garter called. ‘I know. You must be.’

            Silence. The heavy air hung in the blackness. Silence.

            ‘Doctor!’

            Silence.

            ‘You shouldn’t have come here, James,’ a voice whispered from over the bunker’s ancient tannoy. ‘I told you to stay away. I’m the survivor not on the sat, James. I’d like it to stay that way.’

            An EMP thumped in a drone-bass through the bunker. It tore a wavy fluorescent blue through the darkness. Garter’s torch went dead. Alone he was plunged into darkness. The complete black took him; the warm air felt like it was drowning him. Garter fell to his knees.

            ‘I need to know, Doctor,’ Garter pleaded. ‘Please, Doctor. I need to know. I’m not here for any other reason. Just to know.’

            ‘Know?’ the Doctor’s voice came over the tannoy again. It buzzed. The hollowness echoed as if Garter wasn’t alone.

            ‘The End. The plan. Our plan.’

            The Doctor’s breath came over the tannoy. It was deep and slow. Garter’s green eyes were blind in the dark. He knew his DI life was dead; he wouldn’t survive dishonouring the Commissioner. The answer was all that mattered. He needed to know why he couldn’t feel the guilt he longed for; he needed to know why he didn’t understand any of this. He didn’t feel anything.

            ‘It was never our plan, James. We just told ourselves it was. We were told by others who had told themselves. The plan wasn’t activated three years ago, James. I found out. The Commissioner had come to me for a check-up. Something was wrong. We’re drugged James. The Drudge – it’s them. They made the plan. The plan started one hundred and ninety years ago. 2014, James. That’s when the Drudge landed on Earth. We never pulled the Nebula Rock here. How could we? We’ve never had that ability. We’ve barely ever understood space. The Drudge fooled us into thinking we were in charge. They turned us against ourselves. They even bred us in a world we believed was a mere three years dead. I found out.’

            ‘How? How did you find out? I need to know. I must know.’

            ‘Come on, James. As soon as I’d found out I was being drugged – that even the Commissioner was being drugged – I knew how. Who provides us our meals? Our energy? Eh, James? Yes, that’s right. Them. It’s all them. We believe servants are supposed to do everything for us – but it is then they control us. Isn’t that obvious?’

            ‘But why?’ Garter breathed.

            ‘If you want to track down humans, you get humans to do it. They don’t know everything about our nature; they were far too quick to destroy our society. You see that, James? It was the only way for them to cleanse the Earth of us. They wanted to colonise us, but how do you control humanity? We’re as eager for power as any other species we knew, and probably as much as the Drudge, these aliens, if not more. It was their perfect plan.’

            ‘Me,’ Garter whispered.

            ‘Yes, Detective, you. The best servant of all.’

            Garter’s mouth dropped. He was hit by all the guilt he’d ever longed for. He felt so human, but so doomed. How could anyone be used like this? The Drudge had been so meticulous, so perfect.

            ‘Doctor, what do we – ’ Garter started, but was interrupted.

            The DI’s acute hearing had heard it. There had been the delicate padded thud, the shuffling of the heavy warm air around the swooping sound of a faint glide. They were here. The satchel was already on the wall. Garter cursed.

            ‘James, get in here now,’ the Doctor yelled over the tannoy; a loud beep boomed through the hollow lobby and a heavy concrete-plastic door opened at the other end of the room, revealing a white light. Garter sprinted through it. He reached a series of corridors he followed instinctively and pulled himself into a large underground hangar at the very end of the final, very narrow corridor. He had been here before; he had been the one killing the survivors – now he was hunted.

            Doctor Louise Burberry stood at the far end of the room holding an automatic rifle up towards the entrance from which Garter had sprinted. Garter flung his up and pointed it in the same direction. When he reached the Doctor they didn’t speak a word. End.

            The bugs came streaming in. They were metal with a bright blue light running down their backs, like mini striped scorpions. They came in their hundreds. Then in their millions; layered, mounted, rushing. The Doctor grabbed Garter’s hand, the rifle in her other. For the first time in almost two centuries two of the Approved humans smiled. The bugs came.

            The Doctor fired.

            Garter fired.

            ‘End’.

            It was their plan.