A Depraved Blessing by D.C. Clemens

Author:D.C. Clemens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, aliens, sci fi, space ship, infection, apocacylptic

Chapter Twenty

Reunion

A few hours passed with my pores oozing a heated odor. The best the soldiers could do was inform us that only about half the refugees were accounted for. Some were able to escape with the help of helicopters, but the majority were on vehicles heading for various camps or towns, meaning it would be some time before they could relate who had escaped and where they were relocated to. During the next few days, as communications were reestablished in their respective sites, some names would be announced to reveal the scattered survivors who were privileged enough to have lived another day. On the first light of the fourth day, I heard four names I did not expect to hear: Neves’, Yitro’s, Bervin’s, and my own. We walked up to the soldier who called us with a blend of confusion and nervousness.

“You the guys?” the soldier asked as he looked up from his clipboard with a scrutinizing eye when we met him under a command tent.

“Yes,” I answered. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve been ordered to take you to our base in Glenfar,” he replied, sounding and looking indifferent to our presence. “Your families are there.” He looked back down at his clipboard. “Delphnia, Siena, Lizeth, Dayce, and Eloram, right?”

“Yes!” Bervin said spontaneously. “That’s them! Thank the Spirits they’re alive!” He took an eager glance at each of us, then, noticing what the rest of us had already realized, he turned back to the soldier and said, “Hold on! Valssi and Kaya, where are they? What happened to them?”

He examined his notes once more, but his expression didn’t change when he said, “Sorry, I don’t have their names here.”

There was sadness for the two names that were abandoned from the soldier’s auspicious list, just as two names were discarded in ours, however, there was more relief on hearing the names of Liz and Dayce. Nothing else mattered, but even so, I could not prevent a gloom from veiling my cheerier sentiments. I couldn’t answer the question as to why we had the honor of a precious reunion while everyone else could only beg for such an opportunity. A peek at Yitro told me he was thinking something similar. We did not ask the question aloud however, as if acknowledging it would suddenly remove the unforeseen privilege. Neves still was not in the best of spirits, but the mention of his family’s names brought a spark of life in his eyes.

We followed the same soldier to a truck after hastily gathering the few belongings from the tents I was glad to leave behind. After a short drive in a truck, I saw a mid-sized, single rotor helicopter waiting for us on the helipad on top of a small hospital. We used the fire escape to climb the three stories to the roof. The chopper had just enough room for all of us.

“How long will it take us to get there?” I asked the pilot.

“Three hours,” he answered, looking a bit perturbed I was asking during the takeoff sequence.

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