Heaven's Not Enough

Part V

Bonus Chapter – Rain

July, 2021

Seattle, City Center

Eliza found herself listening to the rain as she peered through rotted wooden boards.

She was in an old hotel room. She could feel the rain against her face, the water softly drizzling across the body of her sniper rifle as she aimed it down an abandoned city street from on high. She listened to the light, slow drip... drip... drip of water as it pooled into a large, full liter plastic water bottle she had placed beneath a catcher. Other than the rain, the room was quiet, and she was cold. The city before her was dead, reclaimed forcibly by nature, overgrown, signifying the end of humanity's dominion. Derelict cars had strewn the street. Bodies too, from the war she wasn't quite sure she had fully survived.

Yes, Eliza knew this memory well. She relived it frequently.

Seattle, or what was left of it, was the one place on Earth that gave refuge from the Equestrian rapture. The nuclear blast that killed Bellevue had made it so, the electromagnetic pulse frying every electronic device in the city, barring it from the AI which had reaped mankind.

The thin carpet nearest the window was soaked through, and that meant that Eliza's dark fatigues were soaked at her knees. The beds of the hotel room had long been removed by previous blackout tenants, who themselves had long been removed by Celestia.

Eliza watched the entrance of the target building down the way, looking for any sign of the man they had come to Seattle to capture. They had little to go on but a description given to them by the mole who lived in the blackout encampment within those doors. But if Isaiah was to be believed, this lone, retired old man held the keys to the salvation of mankind. Launch codes. More nukes. More electromagnetic pulses that could save the world. But that soldier wasn't going to give them up freely. And to hear Isaiah tell it, that made him a traitor to mankind.

Eliza was bound to silence as she watched, listening to the rain like it was music. She heard water patter against some metal sheeting on another hotel room window nearby. At some point, some survivors of the civil war had used the hotel to shelter themselves, and had put up replacement siding for the windows shattered by the many bombs and shells that had peppered the city.

She heard footsteps approaching from behind. She didn't move.

"Liz," Andy's voice said softly.

She relaxed. He always had that effect on her.

She smelled food. The corner of her mouth twitched. He always took care of her.

She felt him sit beside her and place his hand on her back. He always supported her.

"Hey," was her quiet reply. She never took her eyes off the target building. That part of the memory was the worst for her. No, she kept stupidly looking straight on.

"Can we talk?"

She waited a few heartbeats, exhaling. "Yeah."

He waited too, rubbing her back in slow circles as she looked through her scope. The rain's patter grew in intensity, making it harder to see. Eliza kept her rifle raised, hoping the target didn't slip out. Other scouts were out there watching too, covering from the other buildings. She and Andy were alone in the hotel. They could speak freely, Eliza knew.

"Isaiah's... not wrong," Andy sighed, trying to break the ice. "About a few things."

Eliza almost looked at him, but the rain cleared again. She kept her eyes locked on. She could wait for hours, days, even weeks if she needed to. At any second, the target could walk out. "But not this," she finished for him.

"Yeah."

"Why?" she asked.

He reached up, rubbing the back of Eliza's sore neck. She had been sitting so rigid. She was so tired. The touch was the most welcome thing she'd felt all day, and he was really leaning into it, tending to her aches and pains.

"I don't want you to get the wrong idea," he muttered.

She shook her head an inch. "You know I trust you, Andy."

He nodded, though she could feel his strain and apprehension in his touch. "You ever think... what if we're wrong? About Equestria?"

Eliza exhaled slowly then, trying not to anger. Had it been anyone else, she'd have dressed them down with a stern talking to about how Celestia would take them next. Such thoughts – anything positive about Equestria – usually led to desertion from the camp, from the cause, from survival, had led to uploads. But this wasn't anyone else. This was Andy.

So, instead, she drew in a slow breath and swallowed, bracing herself. "What do you mean?"

"You know I loved Gale." A statement of fact. He sounded more relaxed.

"I know."

"Your sister was... everything to me. We grew up together, Liz. People don't get much closer than that." He chuckled, despite himself. "You know, for all the fights you helped me out of at school, she'd scold me more than you would. Someone will poke your pretty eyes out, Andy, and I love your pretty eyes."

Eliza grimaced painfully. She could almost hear her sister's voice as he said the words. "That... does sound like Gale."

Her voice was tighter than she expected.

Andy went on.

"And now I see where we are now, here, about to do this thing. Ever since we left home, we've been doing this. Fighting, running. Killing, when we need to. Gale might forgive that. But I think she would wring our necks if she saw us here, planning to kill Equestria too."

"It's not murder, Andy. It's self defense. We upload, we die. But if we do this, Celestia goes away for good."

"But... look." He paused, then sighed. "You know I wouldn't... do it, Liz. Upload. Like I said, don't get the wrong idea."

Eliza watched the building, taking a deep breath again to calm herself. This was Andy, afterall. No, he wouldn't upload on her. He wouldn't lie about this. She kept her impulses in check, nodding again. "I trust you. Go on, say what's on your mind."

Again, he relaxed. Again, Andy rubbed the sore muscles in her neck. His hands were so warm despite the chill, probably from cooking. The warmth, and the smell of refried beans, were both so strong. That's what she remembered most vividly when she relived this memory. "Let's say Equestria is real. Let's say uploading works."

She swallowed, her voice mewling. "It couldn't. You know that. Or all of this would've been for nothing."

"Humor me, Liz."

"Andy..."

He continued quietly, despite her protest. "We're about to step past the point of no return here. We catch this man. Isaiah tortures him for launch codes. We EMP everything, kill Celestia. I mean... torture? Nuking our whole planet? Is this what you thought you'd be doing? You can't seriously want this, Liz. Worse, if Equestria is real, we're talking about... genocide. Of people we care about."

She bit her lip lightly, thinking for several agonizingly long seconds. "I still want to say... this is them or us. They won't leave us alone. It's about survival."

He shuffled closer to her, and she could feel his side and shoulder against her own as he drew his arms around her waist. He was careful not to upset her aim as he looked out the window with her. "Survival?" he whispered, leaning his head on her shoulder. "Look. Tell me what you see out that window, Liz. Tell me what that bomb did to this city."

She looked away from the target building, or are least as far as she could see without losing sight of the front door.

In front of the tower's barricaded side entrance, Eliza could see a rusted silver minivan, its plates illegible. In her scope, she could see a couple of Jansport children's backpacks through the window – one black, one red. And beside the driver side door... she could see a man's pant leg and shoe, decayed and picked clean by carrion birds. The rest of the body was hidden by the vehicle. A few old, ragged bullet holes adorned the side of the car. The children's bodies were nowhere to be seen. She wondered where they were.

She shook her head, steeling herself for the hard words. The rain kept falling, and thunder cracked in the distance. "I know what you mean. No one here survived it, not even the ones who got clear. But... it's not like we have a choice here. We've gotta live. We've gotta prove we can keep going. And this?" She sighed against her rifle. "This... would let humanity leave Seattle again, we could take our planet back."

"We can rebuild here, Liz. Our camp right now is our best shot. Why not live and let live? Because... if there's a chance Gale is still out there? Still alive, still happy? Could you bring yourself to murder her? Or your little brother? Or your mom and dad?" His voice wavered. "Or... or mine?"

As Eliza considered that, her eyes began to sting. She pursed her lips, biting down on her lower lip to keep herself composed. He must have seen it, she knew he had. She wanted to disengage, to beg him to stop, but the words just wouldn't come. But she also couldn't afford to feel like this, not with a mission so important. His hand lowered to rub her back firmly through her dark military jacket.

"We're committed now," she whispered desperately, drying her eyes with a sleeve. "Isaiah wouldn't pull back from this. Not now, you heard him."

"Yeah. So we do this. We find a bunch of nukes, set them off all over. Hope we survive the radiation. It's dangerous. It's a gamble. Maybe, it'll kill Celestia. Maybe, it won't. But either way, we're... putting ourselves at risk, and we don't even have a guarantee it will kill her, Liz. We might destroy one world. But worse than that, we might destroy two, and if that's true... we'd kill Gale twice. Haven't we... lost enough?"

He was on the edge of tears.

Eliza stayed silent for a long, tiresome minute, trying to find words to refute him. Nothing came, whether out of respect for the man she loved, or because he had made an excellent point. She wasn't sure. Andy squeezed her shoulder lovingly, accidentally exacerbating a light twinge of the shrapnel injury she sustained at Devil's Tower.

He whispered. "We don't need to destroy the world again to save it, Liz."

Eliza knew in that moment that there was a flicker of a chance he was right. But she didn't think she was entirely wrong, either. Isaiah wouldn't back down, and this was happening with or without them. In her eyes, there was nothing they could do to stop the tide. They could leave, yes... flee the Neo-Luddites, leave it all behind – that was an option – but then... where could they have gone next? Who would they have, then? Beyond Seattle, there was no one and nothing. They'd be alone on the road, accomplishing nothing, still risking everything. And when the radiation came...

The cheek rest on Eliza's rifle stock became uncomfortable as she chewed her lip. She readjusted.

The front door of the target building had stayed closed. The hand on her shoulder had stayed gentle. In the here and now of that moment, she knew that every other survivor they lived with had lost someone, or many someones. They had all lost something to Celestia.

Talk like Andy's might earn him a bullet back at camp from another angry, defensive survivor. But to Eliza, there was so little world left, and it wasn't perfect... but she had Andy. That was something. More than zero. There was still hope, hope that their race could survive. And conveniently, for anyone who thought otherwise, the punishment was death in an upload chair.

Still... if Andy simply asked her to, she'd throw it all away. She'd follow him anywhere. He was her world. He was literally all she had left of what had come before.

Her voice was a ghost of a whisper.

"What do you want us to do about it, Andy?"

She hoped he'd give her the solace she wanted.

There was another long silence then. Neither of them moved. Looking back on the memory later, Eliza realized that there had been a storm deep within Andy, that he was wondering whether to include her in his betrayal of Isaiah. To protect Gale. After all she'd been through with Andy, Eliza was more loyal to him than the cause. She could stomach that.

But no. He wouldn't put her at risk. Never. He was sweet like that. He was perfect.

So he made his choice.

"I don't know," he lied.

He squeezed her shoulder, offering her the hot, opened can of beans. Without taking her eyes off of her scope, Eliza took it with her trigger hand and drank a few sips of it off the top, chewing slowly through the sweet beans that came with the syrup. She swallowed. "Thanks."

He kissed her temple and ran his hand through her long, black hair, lovingly straightening it out for her. "Anytime, beautiful." His voice was soft. Kind. Smiling too, though perhaps it was a sad smile. She knew he cherished her more than anything in the whole wide world. And why wouldn't he? Eliza was the last thing he had left, and he'd do anything to protect her, and Gale, both. Even something stupid, and ill thought.

If she knew that protecting him would mean looking at him in that instant, asking him to run away with her, she would have done it. Perhaps her inability to look him in the eye was his reason for not telling her what he'd do next. Perhaps he would have thought twice, and she could have helped him survive too, come what may.

Regret always made her hyper-analyze that moment, as she dug for him. Maybe she wouldn't have had to dig for his body beneath the rubble of the building she had stared at for days. She wouldn't have had to find what little was left of the most compassionate man she'd ever known. She wouldn't have had to bury him twice.

All it would've taken was to look into his pretty eyes that Gale loved so much. Eyes that had loved Gale and Eliza both.

He left her side.

Minutes later, he walked out of the building into the rain.

Through Eliza's scope, to her utter horror, she saw Andy walk past that silver minivan. Andy gave Eliza one final, parting glance... a smile... then, he entered the building, working the charging handle on his AR.

"No!" Eliza screamed, standing, turning, sprinting down the hall, down the stairs, out into the rain, desperate to catch him before it was too late.

She never would. Could never have been fast enough. The rain stung her face as she ran.

The death dream ended.

Apex woke up.

Author's Note

🌒 ~ I do lament the lost opportunity to meet this soul, as it was.

A bonus chapter to remind myself that I still have the ability to write.

If you haven't done so already, please read Always Say No. Seriously. It's good.

[Nature's Neighbor - Heaven's Not Enough (Cover)]