A fan fiction story by Melpomene based on the characters and backstory of "Roswell" and composed without permission. No copyright infringement is intended and no monies have been earned.
She sat quietly on the mesa, watching the dusty crash of the wind as it strips slowly the landscape of desolation that surrounds her.
Not a single creature crept upon the ground, no winged creature soared through the sky. All was quiet and motionless. Everything was dead.
She remembered another desert, one alive and thriving; another time filled with hope, another realm of existence. A life where terror and hatred didn’t reign supreme. A time when smiles and laughter were common things, when friends weren’t liabilities and lovers were sacred.
Those times, those places, lived on only in her memory. Destinies and fates and a thousand or more ‘what ifs’ conflict with her thoughts and strive to pull her down into the pleasant illusion of half-forgotten daydreams.
Faces smile out at her from those places, beckoning her to join them once again. And she will, but she will do so in the same manner in which she lived: on her own terms.
Her own terms. That is the only thing ‘they’ haven’t been able to steal from her. They took her home, her family, her friends, her planet even, but they were never able to take from her her spirit or determination.
They arrived only days after she had graduated from college, full of hopes and plans and dreams. Her future had been bright until they had overshadowed the very sun, blotting out everything she had striven for and sending her running with those same friends she now longed for.
Running had been hopeless; they knew it but still had to try. Giving up had never been an option; they were survivors. By the end of the chase they were nothing more than victims. Victims of the destiny they had so ardently refused to accept.
She had watched them all leave her, one by one, until she was the only one left. The last one who knew the truth. And soon she would be gone as well.
“Let me explain it to you,” she said to no one, there was no one left to tell but she needed to speak the words aloud, to remind herself that it mattered. Her voice was harsh, strained by tearless sobs and lack of moisture, but it didn’t matter. Truth was the only important thing any longer. And soon she would be dead, taking the truth with her.
“We tried to survive even when it was hopeless. We hid our fears from one another, trying to be more than we actually were. ‘They’ were the enemy, sent to Earth to get rid of the royal four. They had no qualms about destroying anything that came between them and their objective.”
“Roswell itself was the first to feel the fury of their hunt. It went up in a cloud of smoke and fire. It was almost like the mushroom clouds we used to see in science class whenever we discussed atomic weaponry. No one who had been within the city limits was spared. Our families, our other friends, were all destroyed in one fail swoop.”
“Next was Marathon. A lot fewer lives were lost there, but it was an atrocity all the same. We kept running, the prey remained one half-step ahead of the hunter.”
“They blasted a path across the country, no one could stop them. The military, even with their super-secretive weapons, only irritated them slightly. The military was destroyed as well, every wave of troops picked off like they were nothing more than a pesky mosquito or a swarm of aggravating gnats.”
“We lasted a few months without casualty. By the time winter came we were so exhausted from the chase that we became careless. That was when we began to die as well. Slowly, one at a time over months and years, we succumbed to their treachery. They were able to catch us separate from the others, slowly destroying us.”
“We never knew exactly what happened to those who were lost to us. We hoped they died quickly but there was no way of discovering the truth. All we knew was that they were no longer with us. They were gone.”
“When there were only two of us left, we headed back here. We wanted to be back home, even if home had become as foreign a concept as aliens had been at one time. It had taken them five years to shrink our number to two.”
“What we had known as our home, our country, is failing miserably. The population has taken a sudden drop with the city bombings. Entire states have been demolished. New York and Texas are now nothing more than barren wastelands. Half of California has dropped off in to the Pacific due to their bombs there that set off a domino effect along the fault lines. I guess the scientists were right after all but I never expected to see it happen in my lifetime. The last time I heard, experts speculate that the good ol’ US’ population is down by seventy-five percent. And that’s not to mention the rest of the world where our ‘visitors’ paid calls.”
“I don’t expect they’ll let anyone survive in the end. They keep saying they only want to control their enemies but they’ve already taken or killed or whatever they do to people, the royal four and isn’t that who they are supposed to be after?”
"We were never their enemies anyway. How could we be? Even the others had no knowledge of this intergalactic battle, their part in it. Perhaps in some other life, some other existence, the people they had been were aware of it all, but they weren't."
“I saw the ship pull away from the surface last night. I know what they intend. I don’t care any more. They’ve taken away all that I once had. Even taking my life would only come as a blessing now.”
She fell silent, no more relieved to have spoken the truth aloud than she had before she began. She sat in the deep silence waiting for the ultimate price of having been the friend of extra-terrestrial life forms. The energy wave would hit with the sunrise, just like they had so many years earlier.
Death was a small price to pay for relief, she decided. It was interesting though, she had always thought the world would die fighting, not cowering.
Watching the sun begin its ascent into the desert sky for the last time, she remembered part of a poem she had been forced to read in high school…
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper...
She guessed the poet, whose name was long past lost to her, had been right after all.
the end