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