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  Brian S. Wheeler

  Heritage and Shimmer

  Brian S. Wheeler

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2015 by Brian S. Wheeler

  Contents

  Heritage and Shimmer

  About the Writer

  Heritage and Shimmer

  Brian S. Wheeler

  “It’s amazing to think about what all this brown land used to look like before the alien attack, how green it must’ve been. Amazing and heartbreaking all at the same time.”

  Jayce Gorman removed his right hand from the steering wheel and set it upon his fiancé’s knee. “Well, Bev, all that land was never as green as most people imagine it was. Some of the fields were just brown and tan during the years a crop could still be harvested.”

  Beverly sadly smiled. “Oh, I know. And you always tell me the land was as flat then as it is now.” Beverly sighed at the barren landscape scrolling outside her passenger’s window. “Some people say that the land fell into ruin because too many crops emptied the underground aquifers, and some people say so many pesticides finally created an irresistible bug.”

  Jayce snorted and shook his head. “That sounds like something an alien apologist would say. I can’t understand why those people keep trying to place the blame for this planet’s hardships everywhere but where it truly belongs – at the clawed feet of those aliens.”

  Beverly closed her eyes and focused on the sound of the car’s strained engine. They were driving across the heartland to reach the home of Jayce’s mother nestled in the mountains. They would have such little time for a honeymoon following the simple wedding ceremony waiting for them in that stone cottage, and Beverly didn’t want to waste a moment fretting about those horrible aliens. But she couldn’t help it. The aliens had inflicted such harm upon their world that a soon-to-be bride couldn’t be faulted for worrying.

  “Do you think the aliens will come back?”

  Jayce softly squeezed Beverly’s knee. “They’ll be back. We have to assume they will be so that we’ll be prepared. They might return tomorrow, or they might not return for another century. Sooner or later, they’ll be back, and we’ll be ready for them.”

  Beverly returned Jayce’s hand to the steering wheel before resting her red locks of hair upon the shoulder of his uniform. He looked so handsome in his Starwatch jacket, and Beverly enjoyed imagining all the medals her fiancé would gather upon his chest as his natural talents and hard-earned skills lifted him to greatness. It had hardly been twenty-five years since those fork-tongued aliens appeared from nowhere and attempted to wrestle Earth away from humankind. Thanks to a small community’s sacrifice and defiance, humankind had barely repelled the invasion, but the carnage of that attempted conquest pushed the planet to the brink of a collapse from which civilization might never have recovered. The climate continued to warm due to the energy weapons the aliens blasted against Earth’s armies. Oxygen continued to deplete from the oceans thanks to the poison leaking from the alien warships crashed onto the seafloor. Only a rare, sick crop grew on account of the taint the alien bombs planted beneath the soil. Nearly all of mother nature’s creatures, both timid and tame, neared extinction thanks to the infertility drugs the aliens slipped into Earth’s food chain. Beverly knew nothing about ecology, knew very little about science at all. She didn’t understand how such poisons kept harming her world after nearly three decades since the aliens had arrived to harm it. She suspected such matters would forever remain beyond the reach of her mind, and so Beverly placed her faith in the good Lord and believed that the divine creator would save them before the end ever came.

  Jayce grinned as the sunlight streaming through the windshield forced his eyes to squint. “We’re so lucky that the Patriot’s Memorial is along the way, Bev. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate my graduation from the Starwatch academy than to stop at that memorial and be reminded what it’s all about. A visit to the memorial will be a wonderful way to bless our marriage.”

  Beverly felt the tears rise into her eyes. She felt her lips tremble, and she swallowed so that the sobs would not escape from her throat. She needed to be strong. She would be the wife of a Starwatch officer.

  Jayce smiled at her. “You’ll see, Bev. We’ll share a wonderful life together, and there’s not a thing the aliens can do to prevent from doing so.”

  “Do you think we’ll have children?” Beverly whispered.

  “Of course. Three girls and a boy. Just like I always say.”

  Beverly turned her face back to her passenger window to hide her doubt. “I hope you’re right. It’s so hard for anyone to have children these days on account of what the aliens did to our water supply.”

  “You’ll see, Bev. Three girls and a boy.”

  “How much further do we have to drive?”

  Jayce peeked at his digital watch. “We should get to the mountains tomorrow afternoon. But it looks like we’ll reach the Patriot’s Memorial in the middle of the night.”

  Beverly shuddered. “Maybe we should camp in the car and wait until the morning before we visit the memorial.”

  “Come on now, Beverly Wilcox,” Jayce laughed. “You’re a grown woman. You can’t afford to be an adult child prone to superstition any more than the rest of us can, not after the alien attack. Just imagine how all those holograms are going to glow when we view them in the middle of the night.”

  “I’m sorry,” Beverly answered, “but just promise me we’re not going to see any ghosts.”

  “I promise.”

  Both of them giggled, and that laughter pulled Beverly’s thoughts away from aliens and wraiths as Jayce’s dented car coughed along the miles down the empty interstate cutting through the heartland. She entertained her driver by singing the songs her grandfather once played for her on the old stereo system he kept in the crowded apartment the government assigned to her family following society’s reform in face of the alien threat, and Jayce smiled as he listened to lyrics composed in an age when teenage love and angst seemed the world’s most pressing concerns. Later, Beverly listened while Jayce named the make and year of each rare car they encountered on the road. When night fell, Beverly concentrated on the shoulder of the highway and helped Jayce spot the nomadic families who took advantage of the cooler night to shamble a little further down the asphalt while they searched for a community that might hold a place for them.

  Beverly did her best to avoid thinking about aliens and ghosts, but no matter how proud she felt of her fiancé’s uniform, she couldn’t vanquish her worry. The night had always been a time when danger and monsters crawled out from the shadows. The aliens changed many things, but they never changed that.