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     Six years, five months, seventeen days, nine hours, and twenty minutes since the Trippers, as they called themselves, came through the portals. They claimed to be from another universe nestled in between ours and one more that was pretty much just like the cosmic wonderland we called home, and theirs was experiencing a year we wouldn’t see here for another millennia. 

     Their scientists had long since discovered time travel was perfectly possible…with one specific hitch. It turns out that no one from our own universe will ever be able to travel back to us and keep us trucking on the best path. We can only jump through the rift into a cosmos similar to the one we come from. Apparently, we fit that bill for the Trippers who immediately set themselves to prancing through time.

     A noise from the pitch black misery of the night pulled me fully back into the present. We sat deathly still, too afraid to breathe, and listened to the stifling stillness. Silence has sound, and that was only one thing I learned in this new world we’d found ourselves in. A hum, maybe a ringing warble, but there is no such thing as absolute quietude in a universe screaming to be heard.

     I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel him beside me. He was the one who found me and offered a conviction of certainty immediately, even though trust is a damn stupid thing to give to someone in this Orwellian bullshit of a world. But oh my gods, I was so glad he broke the number one rule all survivors have. When you don’t know who to trust, you trust no one.

     The gateways had appeared in the most arbitrary of places. On the sides of buildings. In the middle of over-packed school buses. In the freezer of Milo’s Deli, that squat building that sat beside the once colorful bodega on the corner of my block. Millions of them were all over the earth, thoroughly mundane and nothing spectacular like the ones in movies. No, they were just watery shimmers that you wouldn’t even notice unless you happened to be looking real hard, just like the people who stepped through them with placid smiles and benign eyes and empty promises guaranteed to make us trust them. Trust really is such a stupid thing to give away, as if it’s not the easiest thing to destroy.

     It was a really long time, or no time at all, I can’t actually tell any longer, before I felt his hand slip into mine. I relaxed into his side, knowing we couldn’t risk a single quiet consolation even if our senses said everything was fine. But we could anchor each other and warm ourselves on the heat fear inevitably seems to provide. His leg pressed firmly against mine, and his breath was suddenly against my ear. I wasn’t safe, not at all, but somehow I always felt secure when I remembered I was not alone. Especially because I was not alone…with him. I settled in and closed my eyes. We still had several hours before the sun would rise, and they would stop looking. They only hunted us in the night.

     In my dreams, it was always The Before. It was the only time I could see the world as it was, not as it had become, and it made waking up so much harder. I wasn’t ever a morning person to begin with. He was the opposite. He liked to wake right as the light began to edge in so he could watch the shift from inky to gray to that soft illumination that let him watch the dust dancing dreamily around another morning we had survived to witness. You take your victories where you can get them.

     I would grumble as we moved out of whatever hidey-hole we had hunkered down in the night before, and he would give that lopsided smile that I couldn’t help but return. We’d find a place to wash. Then we’d briskly loot for food. Once set up with all the supplies we could carry in our rucksacks, we’d move to the vacant restaurant long since wiped clean of anything we could salvage. The one thing it offered was a clear view of the fluidic opening across the street where we could watch them entering and exiting.

He had this crazy notion that if we could gather enough information about them, we could find a weakness or something that would help us get rid of them. I couldn’t think of a single universe where we could gain the upper hand, but where he went, I would follow. We were always moving in silence; the silence that is always bellowing.

     It had been about six months into their arrival when they started dispensing some of their advances that they had promised. It was actually pretty fantastic at first. The vitamins they started doling out eradicated all sickness. No, really, all of it. Overnight, cancer patients walked out of the hospitals stronger than they had ever been. Colds disappeared. Asthma, allergies, you name it, and it was a thing of the past. Obviously, that erased all doubts from anyone who had doubts to begin with. From there, they really started ramping things up.

     It only took about another year before they had their fingers in every single industry, including the military and government. It seemed like hardly a blip in time before they had more control than any of us were comfortable with. Some of those initial doubts started wiggling back in, and humans started doing what humans do best. They started complaining without doing a damn thing to make an actual difference. But the Trippers? They didn’t know that we rarely accomplished anything beyond making a lot of noise, and whomever was in charge would be the one to make the rules. They needed us to acquiesce without fuss. As they said, they were superior. They would run our world, and all beguiling attempts at friendship disappeared in the blink of an eye.

     So they took away those nifty vitamins, and it wasn’t too long before we were a population sicker than we had ever been in our history. How were we to know they’d have been full of ingredients we couldn’t live without once we took those very first capsules? In hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have been such a gullible species. We had become so used to swallowing the most outlandish tales that vitamins weren’t such a difficult thing to choke down.

     That one little move wiped out over four billion of us in less than three years. We knew they could save us, but they decided a peaceful transition of planetary control was never going to be an option. Those of us who didn’t die headed into hiding once the Trackers started gathering people up. And we sure as hell never trusted some random stranger who claimed to be one of us. You killed them or they killed you, but no one was taking any chances. Except him. He turned a corner and ran right into me, hardly any taller but definitely stronger, and his chocolate eyes widened. He stared for what seemed like an eternity as the stillness in the air created oceans of noise in my ears. Then he held out his hand to me. I took it instantly. “Stay by my side.”

     Weeks later, after we had fallen into a steady rhythm with each other, he whispered his change of plan to defeat them; he wanted to learn their habits so we could get out of dodge, eventually, considering there were too many of them and only two of us. I found myself nodding along. We were going to die sooner or later, and I would much rather do that beside him as we gave it a good try to survive than scared and alone in the dark, waiting to be found. So here we sat in a shell of a restaurant in this carcass of creation, and we watched. We observed them moving through the world, our world, like they weren’t liars and thieves and murdering bastards who took everything away just because they could.

     He and I both slouched low in the booth in the corner, the one with the sagging upholstery and the most cover from enemy eyes, and we trained our binoculars on the alien assholes traipsing around like they owned the damn place. Which, I guess they did, but I sure as hell didn’t like watching them flaunt it. The hours would trickle by while he made little notations in the fancy leather journal he documented everything in, one of the first things he collected when everything fell apart. A perk of a societal collapse is being able to creep into any store you could get into and pocketing whatever you want. It’s a piss poor consolation prize for losing everything else, though.

     When the sun slid to the west, we’d gather everything up, look around before risking extra movement, then crouch like frogs as we inched our way through the kitchen and to the back door that led into the alley still full of dumpsters and not much else. There were two windows for movement now; early morning and late afternoon. We hadn’t any idea why, but they disappeared at both times. The streets were fully empty as he opened the door a crack, and the silence pressed down. That didn’t mean we stopped being cautious. We didn’t know what they did with the Earthlings they caught. Earthlings... no longer just a funny word from cartoon Martians.

     “Stay by my side,” he mouthed, and we made our way to an old motel that we could reach by navigating the alleys. It was a gamble, but we really wanted to sleep in a bed that night. The evening patrols from the Trackers seemed spaced out a bit; probably because they were super cocky and thought they’d fully cleared this city of our ilk. Like I did every day, I wondered if there were more survivors hiding somewhere nearby. Maybe in the library on Maple Avenue, or tucked away inside the old warehouses down by the river, where barges used to run products up and down and out of sight. And then I would wonder what they did with the people they caught. I shivered and threw the thought away. No good would come from scaring myself more than I had already been since it all crumbled around us, most of us toppling right along with civilization.

     We had made it into the motel that night with at least an hour left before dark. He went in first. I trailed behind him, and the door to room 111 shut with the slightest click, blocking out the light and enveloping us in gloom. These were the few moments of the day I actually looked forward to. We could speak in low tones over our beef jerky and gummy fruit snacks, but we’d never talk about what to do when the supplies petered out. I thought about it all the time. I thought about a lot of things without saying them out loud. Instead, I watched him chewing and contemplating life, what there was to it, and would make the afternoon count.

     “Think it’s safe to try to escape the city now?” I asked. His eyes slid towards mine and considered me. A brief mental acknowledgement that he so rarely considered me flashed through my brain before he spoke and made me forget again.

     “Maybe. Maybe we will wait a little longer.”

     His voice always carried a raspy, husky tone, and I wondered for the hundredth time if it was the voice he had before or if it was just the voice he had after so many months of swallowing it and holding it in his throat, trapped and impotent.

     “We never see them leave the city. We can lead an actual life if we find a farmhouse or something.”

     “You know there are no places to hide in between here and literally anywhere else. Just the forest to the East.” He chewed a little more slowly and stared at the table as if he could see right through it. “We need to make sure they’ve stopped their patrols. Maybe we will watch from the comic book shop for a bit. It's as far at the edge of everything that we can get.”

     We ate in silence then, while the evening descended on the other side of the wall. I crawled into bed on autopilot and listened for any movement outside, a healthy habit to develop. As his body curled around mine, the dip in the bed from his weight rolled me closer to him. When his breathing settled into a steady stream of warm air across my neck and the deafening silence revealed no dangers, I let myself succumb to sleep as well. It should have felt a lot nicer being in a bed for once, but one luxury would never be enough to erase the struggle.

     That night, I dreamed of a farm, me and him, and a goat. I don’t even like goats. It was the first dream of the future I’d had in the last year and a half since the Trippers had established full control. I normally dreamt of everything I had lost, everyone who was gone, like nothing had changed at all, and I had learned a way to time travel, too. But morning always burst that happy little bubble, and we would grab our stuff and watch. This morning was no different. We concealed our wrappers under the mattress, restored the bed to its original state, and exited the room after we had covered our tracks. Left at the ice machine. Right at the laundry room. Another right into the alley and a part of the city we hadn’t explored.

     Everything was quiet, just like it always was at this hour, and we made it to the shopping plaza faster than I’d been expecting. I could see the posters still clinging to the intact glass in between all the other stores with broken windows. I guess comics weren’t a necessity in an apocalypse. Then the world collapsed a second time, just as unexpected as the first, and the alarms blared in sync with the boom of boots hitting the pavement like a herd of hippos. Months of moving undetected ended before the sun cleared the top of the low buildings lining the street. So we ran. Of course, we ran. Humans have two core qualities. Audacity and an innate desire to survive.

     We rounded the walkway to the side parking lot which hid us from their view, and the miles of forest stood tall and proud, one of the few things in the world which remained unchanged. My heart beat painfully, my lungs burned, and my legs tried to keep up with him. It was only a few more steps before we hit the grass, and I slid across the morning dew on worn-down soles before landing on my hands and knees and sending shockwaves through my bones.

     He held out his hand, and I took it instantly. I glanced over my shoulder right as we slipped in between two of the trees in front and felt shadows fall over us again. They hadn’t made it around the corner yet. His hand was as warm as it ever was, and he gave me a little tug. This was it. If we didn’t make it now, it was over. He turned his head and met my eyes, and I felt a little more brave. “Stay by my side.”

     The trees were our portal. Maybe we would make it to a home far away, but, really, wherever he was, I was already home, and I’d accepted that the day he found me. I set my eyes on his back, and we ran deeper into our future.