Anamnesis

 

ANAMNESIS

noun

1. Recollection, in particular. 

   the remembering of things 
2. from a  previous existence.

 

 

I wish I could say I lived with out regrets. I had always wondered what my last thoughts would be, what it would be like in those final moments. I wondered if I would think about her. After all, I had spent the near entirety of my life since her death fighting to honor her.

I remember it vividly still.  It was late spring.  It had been a long winter and the cornfields near her home had just been planted.  I had parked my car near the end of the bridge that lead to her parent’s property.  It they were to hear or see me driving up, it would be all over.

I trekked through nearly a quarter mile of woods and fields to reach her house. It was cool, but not unpleasant.  It was refreshing. This was it. I had spent all day waiting for right now. There she was, standing under the bedroom window she had just climbed out of. Sarah.

Her Botticelli curls hugged her face from spending the last hour pretending to sleep, if her parents only knew.  I took her hand, pulled her close and pressed her cheek against mine. Sarah always felt so warm.  As if there were no life in me until I felt her touch, she always warmed me. To this day I’ve never felt such warmth.

Near the pond behind her home was an old concrete structure.  Neither of us ever knew what it was. She said it had always been there. Maybe four of five feet tall, it was little more than an empty concrete box. But when we lay on top of it, staring up towards infinity, it was like a pedestal raising us up to our rightful place in the stars. It was our sanctuary.

We had spent many nights there. I remember one night Sarah had an argument with her parents earlier that night.  Those days it was usually about me. She spent the night crying in to my shoulder as we lay there. I had never felt such pain, such guilt, such responsibility for another’s suffering. In fact, that may have been the last time I felt anything but a burning hatred and emptiness.

Sarah’s tears soaked through my shirt, it felt like a tidal wave. I tried desperately to comfort her.

“Sarah, look!” I said, pointing to the sky as a meteor shot through the darkness. She looked up, wiping tears from her cheeks.

“So beautiful,” she said.  So beautiful, her voice echoed in my head even now.

Soon after the first meteor, a second followed, then another four. Then seven.  Suddenly there were too many to count.  It was beautiful. Dozens of brilliant lights ripped through the sky above.  One exploded and split into several more. We both sat up, our attention completely captured.

“I’ve never seen so many,” I said to her.

“It’s amazing.”

One of the meteors, larger than the others, it must have been closer, disappeared behind the tree line and a huge flash of light followed.

“Did that one just hit the ground?” she asked.

“I don’t know.  That looked kind of close.

The rain of fire only increased in intensity after that, until one streaked by directly over head. A ball of fire crashed just over the tree line to the west of us followed by a massive flash of light blooming in to the night sky. The roar echoed all around. Sarah grabbed my arm so tight. With in moments her home exploded as the impacts shockwave tore across the landscape. For nearly a decade afterwards I could not remember what happened next. It wasn’t until we have captured enough of their technology and reversed engineered it were the advances in memory recall sufficient enough to bring back that night I had lost so long ago.

As I lay there in the grass beside what used to be our sanctuary, my ears rang, my vision blurred, and my hands searched for Sarah. I could hear her whimper in the distance. I called to her. I screamed to her.

“Michael!” she cried. The pain in her voice was more horrific than anything I could have imagined.

“Michael! Please!”

I managed to get to my hands and knees.  My eyes burned.  I would learn later that a piece of Sarah’s unicorn collection had ripped out my left eye during the blast. My face was covered in blood. Finally I found her. She had been tossed into the corn field several yards away. I grabbed her hand, barely able to see it.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

She wasn’t okay. She was hurt, badly. Without a word, she took my hand and placed it against her stomach. A large splinter of wood was sticking out of her.

“Oh god. Oh god!” I cried. I wished I had been stronger for her then. My vision got worse. I pulled her into my arms, pressing her cheek against mine.

“I’m here.  You’ll be okay.”

I must has said those words a thousand times as I rocked her in my arms. I was only seventeen then, Sarah sixteen. We had so much to dream about that night.

When the sun rose the next morning I was still holding her, but her warmth had faded. Her cheeks were cold and I was weak. I had lost a lot of blood over the night and was near blind. It was Sarah’s brother found us. His bedroom was in the basement. He managed to survive the shockwave with only a few scratches. Sarah’s parents weren’t so lucky.

Over the following weeks I learned that the meteor shower took place all over the world, and the objects weren’t meteors. That night was the night the aliens ripped my life away from me. They took away the only warmth I would ever know, and it was with that newfound cold vengeance I began to pursue them. The nation’s militaries put up one hell of a fight. They beat them back, but the aliens dug in. And so it fell to us Freelancers to track down the stragglers.

Jason, Sarah’s brother, and I were among the best Freelancers. Between the two of us we had rid the world of over 8,000of the monsters. That’s what lead me to my current situation.

Two nights ago, Jason’s team had scanned down a mining facility at the edge of the district.  Heat signatures suggested aliens, and a lot of them. The plan was fairly simple. Pump gas in to the mine shafts and collapse the entrance. But that’s not how it went down.

What went wrong, I guess I will never know. But here I lay, next to the headless corpse of my closest friend and an alien pistol aimed at my face. Yes, I had thought about how this would end many times in my life.  I wondered if I would think about my family, my past mistakes, Sarah. But as that alien’s gnarled finger squeezed the trigger, I had only one thought.

“I’m going to kill you mother fu-“