The Persistence of Memory: America Under Attack

Part One

The rats had grown bold in mankind's absence. This particular specimen stood on its hind legs, glowing in gold and orange light like the God of Rats, come at last to lead to rodent-kind to their inevitable victory over man and the Earth itself.

The potent radiation shed by the setting sun traveled a straight, unswerving line from the center of the solar system through the vastness of space, past planets, satellites, cosmic debris and the hated Green Eye that looked down on a desolate Earth. It burned a path through Earth's atmosphere, past alien drones, countless birds, a cell tower and the stone-faced towers of downtown Columbia, South Carolina. It finally came through the slender gap beneath the flattened cardboard box taped in the window of #1 Main Street, where it transformed a thousand tiny bits of dust floating in the musty air into brief, but brilliant motes of winking fairy-light. The 94 million mile journey of the sun's rays terminated on a torn, tattered, blood-spattered, mass-produced, poster-sized print of Dali's famous painting, "The Persistence of Memory".

I never paid much attention to art. Most people would know this painting, though. It was the one with melting clocks. The title and artist's name were printed in the bottom margin of the poster, though much of the artist's name was masked in what I assumed was blood. I wondered if Mr. Dali would find something poetic in the addition of the red drops and streaks. Would he find any particular meaning in the presence of the Rat God standing near the lower right corner of the poster, shining in the day's last light as it cleaned the blood from its tiny, human-like hands?

Anyone happening upon this scene might think the rat was staring thoughtfully at the melted clocks, partially illuminated by a bar of bright sunlight, but mostly concealed by blood and deep shadows.

Its hands apparently clean, the rat abandoned its pretense at art appreciation. It crossed a short stretch of filthy, frayed carpet and stopped a few inches from my face, its beady, soulless eyes staring into mine. I didn't remember falling, but there I was: laying on my side with my face pressed against the rough carpet of a cramped, cluttered office space, staring into the black eyes of one of the not-so-meek inheritors of the Earth.

The Rat God vanished in a red explosion, having made the fatal error of ignoring the young man with the silenced rifle standing in the open doorway.

"Are you alive, Tommy?" the shooter asked.

Tommy? No one ever called me Tommy. Anyone who knew me would know that I preferred my actual name, Thomas. I allowed a couple of exceptions to this. On the baseball team, we all called each other by our surnames, so to my teammates I was just Wilson. My friend Derek Johnson and I called each other Prez, since our last names also once belonged to presidents of the United States.

Oliver used to call me Tommy, but that was different. He was my identical twin brother, and he could get away with calling me whatever he wanted.

"Still..." I said. It was barely a whisper, but it was all I could manage.

"Good," he said softly. "That's good."

I knew his voice. It slipped into my head like a ghost, igniting old memories; taking me back to a time before aliens and disease and destruction had turned me into a monster. It was my voice. My brother's voice. Sometimes even I couldn't tell one from the other.

The Rat Slayer's black-clad leg stepped into my line of sight, his shin decorated by the bright orange bar of light. He pushed my M-16 out of reach with a black boot and took my 9mm Glock handgun from its holster.

"Still. Alive," I said, more to convince myself than him. I was fading fast, though. The details of the room blended together. Light, shadow, voices, noises--all became indistinct.

He crouched by my head and jolted me back to awareness by pressing his hand against the bullet hole in my chest. My eyes opened wide and I looked into my tormentor's face. I must have been hallucinating from loss of blood, because my own face stared back at me from beneath the cowl of a dark hoodie.

The tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire reached us from outside, followed by the crash of someone forcing their way through the building's entrance. The man with my face grabbed a fistful of my hair and turned my head so he could speak directly into my ear. The sharp pain in my chest dulled as he continued to hold his other hand on the wound.

"You aren't going to die here, brother. I won't you let you..."

That voice speaking those words... I had heard them before, a long time ago. Or was it? My own memories and perception of time were as warped as the clocks dangling from tables and tree branches.