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They didn’t have much of a chance. But that was how these things tended to go.
All the best chances were slim, after all.
Des had learned that lesson well and early.
***
He remembered this really old, classic movie he’d watched once as a little kid, with his grandma before everything went to shit. It was called Space War or something like that. Only two things from it had stayed with Des decades later. The first was the bad guys. He distinctly remembered that at some point during the film—in some innocuous scene that he didn’t recall clearly except he knew it was otherwise irrelevant—he’d realized that the bad guys, in their weird white, black, or red suits of armor, were actually people. Before that, he’d assumed they were robots or aliens or monsters, because that’s what bad guys were supposed to be. As a little kid, he’d thought it was a pretty impressive plot twist. When the invasion started, he’d decided it was stupid. Sure, there were some bad people out there, but how could people be the ultimate bad guys when there really were monsters trying to kill everyone? Only now he’d come to understand that, while monsters were definitely real, people could also become bad guys.
The second thing he remembered about the movie was the princess. Before she was taken captive, she’d hidden a secret the good guys needed to win the war in a robot that looked like a trashcan. That scene had stuck with him: the idea that it could all come down to some little secret that could blow everything wide open. Literally, if he remembered the movie’s end. He’d been so impressed with the princess, because who would ever suspect a trashcan robot of carrying a secret that could save everyone?
He held the datachip in his hand and really wished he had a trashcan robot that could deliver it safely where it needed to go.
***
The Recreant had been people once, Des knew that. But it was hard to see them that way now. A Runner brother, Eli, had named them, finding the word in a book. It was a complicated-sounding word (an “SAT word,” one of the older Planners had joked, but Des hadn’t understood), but like it had an air of foulness to it. Recreant. Everyone agreed it fit. The book said that “recreant” meant “apostate” (another one he’d never heard before) but also “cowardly” and “faithless.” Des thought it sounded right for betrayers, for those who would turn against being people. They’d taken Them instead for their new faith. As scary as They were, the Recreant were somehow worse, because they’d chosen to be such, rejecting hope and family. Des hated them, but he also felt pity, because people still had a chance and when they succeeded, the Recreant along with Them would be no more.
***
There were seven Quick Runners on this mission—the seven best, the fastest and with the most endurance: a relay team to pass their prize, one to the next, so that none tired and fell before succeeding in carrying it further. (He remembered relay races, from his few bright shining years in school, before everything ended. They were part of gym class. A class devoted to running! The idea was hilarious now, the thought that people once needed to go to class to learn how to run. The only thing people needed to know about running was what would happen to them if they stopped.) The first two Runners, closest to the Recreant Center likely wouldn’t make it out alive after delivering the datachip to the next Runner. This was known and accepted. The cost of this chance. Des was fifth. The two after him would bring it home. After passing the prize off, he’d have to find somewhere to hide, to recover his wind, until he could run again. He knew his life was at risk in this, but he so wanted to find out what happened if they succeeded. If the prize really could change everything. He’d find a way to survive.
He spotted Runner four in the distance (no names for Quick Runners on a mission; it was simpler that way). She moved over rubble as though she were flying, every footfall landing surely before springing off again, her arms carving through the air for balance and rhythm. She reached him, clearly exhausted and breathing hard but with a snarled smile of triumph on her face.
“Brother,” she gasped, as she caught her breath.
“Sister,” Des responded, clasping both her hands in his. Her left hand passed the datachip into his right. He took a moment to look down at it—such a small thing to put all their hopes onto.
He looked back up at Runner four. Her eyes blazed with the mission, with the chance. He knew if he hadn’t been there, she would have kept running forever, until her feet gave out and maybe not even stopping them. It was a fervor that drove them: hope. The possibility, every time they ran, every mission, that this one might make things better.
“Run,” she said to him. And so he did.
***
He knew he was an unlikely hero, not what people would imagine as someone trying to save the world. He certainly looked nothing like the heroes he remembered in those movies from when he was a kid. Des was short and scrawny. He could fight okay, because you kind of had to to survive these days, but he wouldn’t want to go toe to toe—or toe to improbable appendage—with one of Them. But he was quick and small and didn’t take up much space. He was hard to notice and quiet, almost silent when he moved. Those qualities had turned out to be more important than looking imposing. This wasn’t a world you wanted to stand out in anymore.
Not everyone could run, though. The Planners and Runners divided the immediate work of survival. Planners figured out where to scavenge, where to find info, where the prizes were. Runners were those who went and got it and brought it home, whatever it might be. Those who could do neither—Helpers—lived with them too, keeping their home and just being among them. They were all people, after all.
***
Des ran faster than he ever had before. He sprinted through flat terrain and leapt over the rubble of the world that was. The world of his childhood, reduced to broken bits of concrete and metal now. He ran until his legs ached and his lungs screamed. Just a little further to the next Quick Runner, just a bit more and then he could hand off the prize and hide and rest. And hope nothing tracked him while he was too tired to run.
He scrambled up a mound of what had once been a building, knowing that the handover was supposed to be just on the other side. What he found stopped him cold, sudden fear replacing the exhilaration of the run; there was nothing there. No Runner six waiting for him. No trace they’d ever been there. Just, nothing.
Des looked around in alarm, fearing an ambush, but everything was quiet in a normal way, not in an enemies-about-burst-out way. If Runner six had been captured, it hadn’t happened there.
There was a contingency plan for cases like this (contingencies were often necessary in the world now, just to get by). Every Runner knew the location of the rest of the handovers, just in case one Runner fell and needed to be skipped. Except it seemed nearly impossible. The distance of a run was already the maximum of what they were all capable of; to do it twice was so daunting Des couldn’t quite imagine it. But there was no other option. No one was going to swoop in and rescue him from this; he had to do it because it was him or nothing. Des just had to make it to Runner seven, and then he could rest. He gathered all of his strength and will, telling himself he could do it, he could make it just those many miles more, then the final Runner would bring the prize home, and he could come limping in at his own pace, recovering in celebration at what they had all accomplished.
He eyed the horizon in front of him, as though he could see all the way to the next handover, and then he ran.
***
A Planner sister, Em, had given them this mission. She had found something, on the Recreant’s wires—a word, a hole, a weakness—that had given them this chance. People couldn’t communicate directly with Them, which made intelligence difficult to come by. But the Recreant had a way, a result of being changed from people to Recreant. Whatever they were now, they could talk to Them, but talked amongst themselves using ways that people used. Those could be found out and gotten into.
The results were now on the datachip he carried.
***
Des approached the next handoff spot at a slow jog. He told himself he was being cautious, advancing slowly in case there was trouble, but the truth was he was wiped out. He didn’t think he could run another step.
When he found Runner seven, he wanted to collapse from more than just exhaustion.
Des went to his knees in front of his brother. There were blood and burn marks everywhere: the effects of Recreant weapons.
His brother opened his eyes, and Des saw only despair and pain in them.
“The Recreant. They found us. They told Them. We failed.” Runner seven gasped, his words halting and broken.
Des held his brother’s hands. “No, my brother, we have our prize. I will make it back home. For all of us.” Des hoped the words he spoke were true.
Runner seven looked stricken, forcing his final words out. “The Recreant know home. They go there now. They are already here.”
Des tried to make sense of this. For the first part, home had defenses, strong ones. It could hold off the Recreant for a time. He would just have to make it through their ranks and deliver the datachip. That might be enough, if it was the prize they all thought it could be. Just get it home, and everything could change. He could do that; he could make it.
With his brother’s last sentence, Des had the horrible feeling that “They” did not mean Recreant.
He deliberately didn’t look around him, feeling the approach of something terrifying.
Des gave the rest of his water to his now barely conscious brother, knowing it was pointless even as he did it. There was no way to save him. But all the kindness hadn’t been driven out of people just yet, and maybe that mattered more than anything else.
***
He sometimes thought about what life would be like if They had never come. It wasn’t something anyone liked to dwell on, but sometimes the thoughts appeared, nonetheless. He wondered if the Recreant would still be people, capable of turning on their own but hidden among people instead of showing their true colors openly. He didn’t like that thought. As for people, would Runners still run and Planners still plan and Helpers still help without Them providing the motivation? He liked to think so, in some way at least. People were good at getting things done when they all worked together.
***
As his brother died, Des stood and looked around.
There were three of Them. That wasn’t good. Even after so many years, his eyes still wanted to skirt away rather than look at Them full on. When the invasion started, the first news reports (the last news reports to ever air) called Them insect-like. That wasn’t true. They weren’t like insects, or reptiles, or dinosaurs, or anything that lived on the Earth. They were alien. But even that only meant that they came from space. What Des had realized the first time he saw one was that they were monsters. That’s why people had never found an adequate name for Them; no words of people could capture just how much They didn’t belong. They were nightmares that no one had ever had before. They were the things that children hadn’t even known they should be afraid of.
They were a bit taller than people but not significantly so. They had roughly the same mass as people did. But there the resemblance ended. They didn’t have faces, and it wasn’t clear how they sensed things or communicated with each other. It was assumed to be something like telepathy, and that people could be changed the way the Recreant were to communicate similarly. They had limbs, or what seemed to be like limbs, but too many of them and with endings that resembled nothing on Earth. They weren’t hands or paws or hoofs or claws or flippers, but they gripped the ground and propelled Them forward in an awkward lope. It made people wonder if Their world had much different terrain than the Earth that They were actually meant for.
Thankfully, that awkwardness translated to comparative slowness. People could outrun Them, when properly motivated.
***
He’d always hoped one day that he would be like the princess from the movie and save everyone even if it cost him being captured or worse. It would be a pretty heroic way to go. Except there was no trashcan robot to deliver his secret, because trashcan robots didn’t exist; they never had and probably never would. (If he was being honest, he wasn’t actually sure about that part. Des remembered his parents had a vacuum robot and a lawn mower robot when he was little, he had toy robots that could learn tricks, and there were service robots in some stores. It seemed possible that trashcan robots had existed too, even if one wasn’t going to magically appear next to him at that moment.) If he was going to get the prize out, he’d have to do it on his own. He’d have asked himself what the princess would have done in this situation, but he didn’t need to; he already knew the answer. And so he fought free, and he ran.
***
Des slipped past Them, weaving around appendages and trying not to think about how close he came to touching one of Them. The very idea made him want to shudder in horror. They didn’t make a sound as They reached for him. He ducked under one limb-like structure and jumped over another. Once out of grasping range (if grasping was even the right word for might happen if they caught him), he took off like a shot, new energy coursing through him as he fled for his life. But not only his own; he still clutched the datachip in his hand. He carried hope with him and refused to allow anything to stop him from completing his mission. Not horrible monsters or former people turned traitors or even his own body begging him to stop. He didn’t look back.
He felt the wind rushing by him as he pushed himself even faster, ignoring every part of his body that was already past its limit. He remembered the snarl of triumph on Runner four’s face and felt his own mouth twisting similarly. He didn’t quite have the triumph part yet, but he could picture it, a few miles further, beyond the enemy, and back home.
He jumped over a dead tree branch and for a moment wanted to close his eyes, to feel like he was flying through the air, no longer connected to the ground, no longer needing to be. But he resisted the urge, keeping his eyes open and locked onto an end point he couldn’t yet see. This wasn’t the time to hide away from the world around him. He couldn’t afford to miss a single detail, in order to finish this run and deliver the prize. He had to do it, because there was no one else.
Just him. Just a few more miles. Just one last run. He was almost home.