Starman

In 2084, in response to a growing number of AI—originally designed by the United States as elite combat soldiers called the Saviors—settling Mars with the threat of wiping out earth with nuclear weapons, the top space and military programs set up a world class division of soldiers called the Devil Brigade. Their mission was simple. Stop the nuclear invasion. Take out the Saviors. 

These Saviors were designed after the statues of Greek gods and biblical figures such as David, archangels Michael and Gabriel and stood over seven feet tall. 

In a matter of moments, they turned from protectors of the United States to world premiere outlaws, perfect terrorists, genius without consciousness; they realized the physics of outer space, that they could live on other planets, built spacecraft to take them there, and habitable communities to live there, brought human slaves with them and eventually—as NASA programs began figuring out how to homestead civilization themselves on Mars—nuclear missiles to destroy the earth. 

According to intelligence, they would fly anywhere between a dozen to thirty aircraft over the earth that can soar through space and within the world untraced fifty yards to the ground at nearly one million miles per hour, drop the missiles simultaneously and fly upward and away from the hell as the earth burned into a great dark void. The world wouldn’t know what hit it until it sparked in flame and collapsed to ash. 

Among the Devil Brigade there was Johnny Makatozie, a Sioux, whose ancestors included a warrior that killed over a dozen soldiers at Little Bighorn, a U.S. Air Force pilot shot down behind enemy lines in Russia during the Cold War having to travel by foot and canoe back to America; Benny Davis, whose ancestor fought in WW2 with the Tuskegee Airmen; a Russian spy who killed over a hundred Americans throughout his career and a German who wore an edelweiss flower always on his chest, the symbol of the finest of soldiers from his country during WW2, passed down from generation to generation; and then there was Jack Crowler from Greensboro, Alabama who everyone had always called Forrest Gump. 

Crowler himself had an ancestor desert from the military in every major American war. He wanted to join the military at a young age if only to release that inherited desire to avoid it in the first place. 

The soldiers were rounded up and sent to Cape Canaveral, Florida, outfitted in perfect ocean-blue uniforms and helmets with reflective visors, gathered out onto the docks where the spacecraft jets were turned on and rumbling like the roar of a million thunderstorms.

The highest ranking general gave them some final words, reminding them of their ancestors, how they fought bravely in all the great wars, with the teeth of bears, and hearts of warriors, in the name of freedom and country and God, how they hunkered down through negative degree temperatures, and ate nothing for many moons and still stayed alive, how they went down to Hell and into the jaws of death and hoisted their flag through its brain, how these men here today, the grandsons of the warriors of old, fight now in preserving the world, and preserving the world, he said, is a beautiful and worthy thing. Nothing else even come close. To fly today is to fly with God. 

They wore the flags of their countries on the space suits, and tattoos stenciled in sharpie along their sleeves and chests, helmets, shoulders and collars. “Don’t Tread on Me,” and “Yippie Ka Ya Motherfucker” and “Mathew 11:11-12” and “Ezekiel 25:17.” “May The Force Be With You.”

They loaded into their spacecraft, twenty some-odd fighter pilots and twenty cargo aircrafts that carried a dozen soldiers each, and took off from the docks and hurdled through the sky, beating past the atmosphere, racing time almost, piercing against the forces of gravity and finally whipping into the plains of space. 

Their spacecraft looked like angels of death, flying soundlessly through space, leaving behind under the stratosphere a herded thunder for every citizen in the world to hear and salute and cry like a collective battle chant. From earth up into space their collected tongue went from a ringing clamor into a hushed whisper as though their voice simply deleted beyond the outer world. 

The fighter pilots had the objective of taking down enemy aircraft and then land in enemy territory to simply wipe out every last one of those soulless bastards. 

Crowler passed-out briefly and dreamed a recurring dream of the booming voice of his father, yelling at his mother, how it was his fault for being born their marriage exploded. His parents fought all the time before his father abandoned them and his mother was institutionalized in a mental hospital. 

In the dream, before the fighting, his mother plays classical music on the piano. It is always gloomy, storming outside with rain beating against the house and windows like guts. And there is always a fire. Crowler is sitting with his back to the fire, watching the glow in his mother’s eyes and stands up, walks outside in the rain to a small shed, gets more firewood and places a log on the fire, stirs it with a stoke.

In the dream his father’s voice sounds like thunder, and he can see atomic explosion destroying our planet. 

When Crowler awoke they were in outer space. He was flying at half a million miles per hour. Cold black, and ultraviolet, red plasma colors tunneled before him like a portal into another world. In the speed and trance of celestial atmosphere, in his freezing sweat, he found a calm within. 

They stared down at the earth through their window shields as it were a painting in a gallery. It appeared as an eyeball under a microscope. Like it was the portal to the soul of God. 

At this point, the men realized that in a few moments time as conceived on earth, permanent darkness was at hand, where none more would breathe, nor would the earth exist. 

Through their radios, the pilots spoke. “No more a beautiful place to die.”

“Did you ever think you’d come so close to Heaven?”

“No. Definitely not. If anything I thought I might wind up in the total opposite direction.”

Something was spoken in German. 

“I’m gonna pretend you said God bless the USA.”

“God bless the world.”

They soared through the dark canvas of space. 

“I’ll tell you what. When we get outta this, we’ll have to come back for vacation, have a few beers, smoke some blunts, laugh it up.”

“You got some peyote we can trip Johnny?”

“Yeah I got some peyote we can trip. This is a trip enough though.”

Soon thereafter the enemy spacecraft flashed like lasers in front of them—gliding in the shape of mechanical pterodactyls—firing rapid artillery and Crowler turned his jet to the side dodging the gunspray and then flipped the jet at 360 degrees under the oncoming enemy. 

He flipped the jet upside down and trailed three AI aircraft, spraying gunfire while they dodged, weaving and flying up and under one another—one halted their flight altogether and by the time it stopped, it was behind Crowler and Johnny and fired on them in the manic manner of a rabid dog barking. Crowler and Johnny shifted, tilted and turned, flipped around each other, dodging the bullets. As Johnny stopped, his wings were clipped and his jet started to dive downward toward the sphere of the earth. 

Crowler hollered Mayday and told Johnny to abort. “And let you have all the fun?” Johnny said calmly as he spiraled down. 

Crowler repeated to abort and Johnny told him in due time. 

The same enemy aircraft that shot Johnny down had his targets locked in on Crowler, even as he cut the planes of space, his jet was right in the red sights of the trailing jet. Before he’d go down, he unleashed volleys on the jets in front of him, screaming some ancient cry of war, sounding almost like a psychotic patient. His bullets hit one of the jets and it went spiraling down into some unknown abyss. 

Just as the enemy behind Crowler was set to pull back the trigger, Johnny turned his nose upward and let out a few shots, hitting the enemy jet through the glass and its pilot between the eyes. 

Crowler thanked him in kind and Johnny spoke something in the Sioux language that had the essence of a warrior hymn and as his aircraft nosed down back into earth’s atmosphere he ejected himself and parachuted into the Pacific Ocean. Then began his long ascent back to land. 

Crowler followed the final enemy past the threshold between earth and space and fired and missed as it dodged, spinning, and just as it pulled back the trigger to drop a nuke on America—the target blinking red and beeping and buzzing—Crowler pulled the lever gear to top speed until he shook spastically and nearly passed out again, unloaded endless artillery on his way toward what appeared to be a suicide mission, and as the bullets hit the shell of his enemy aircraft, he pulled up and turned away just in time, kicking the enemy tail, which shifted the whole trajectory of it as it fired a missile directed toward the Atlantic Coast. It hit the ocean and a tsunami of destruction erupted like an army of demons had just come up from underneath. 

Crowler turned his aircraft around as it burned from the front, flying higher and higher at top speed, and hit the eject button, flying out of the cockpit just as it exploded. It was a magnificent sight to behold, the flames expanding in sluggish procession, the sparks sounding like gutted engines, as Crowler slowly floated away from the explosion swarming around the spacecraft and opening up in the middle of its flames as though it had jaws, and Crowler appeared as one who went down into Hell and came rushing out through a black hole. 

They found him, one of the carrier jets, floating through space. They almost chuckled. He gave them a hang 10 gesture with his hand and they pulled him in with rope like a man drowning from the ocean. 

The soldiers in the cargo aircraft blazed through the yonder world like paratroopers from WW2 sneaking overhead behind enemy lines. Except these carriers could find no way around their target. They were, the President put it in the meeting hours before operations, sitting ducks dead in the water. “They’ll have to quack like hell,” a military advisor said. 

They set up volleys of covering fire landing on Mars, over the enemy fort while the troops slid down ropes. Some were shot halfway down. Ships were blown up. The screaming of men seemed to taint space and travel like the haunts of ghosts. 

Crowler took cover behind a wall. He counted to three and in that three seconds he whispered his mother’s name and leaped up over the wall, firing on the run with an assault rifle. 

A company of surviving soldiers gave him covering fire. He took down five AI and their wired guts splattered and their metal bones cracked and shattered. He slid down on his leg as bullets rained over him, emptying his clip, killing three more. 

While the others charged behind him, he dipped behind cover of an arrangement of nuclear missiles. 

In this process, before dying, Benny Davis killed hundreds of AI in magnificent fashion. Earlier, he took down four enemy aircraft all on his own before being hit himself and crash landing into Mars, plane eaten by fire, scraping against the rock and plates of the planet like a bat out of Hell. While covering fire, he saved Crowler’s life many times, killing AI as they crept up on him. They tried to take Benny prisoner when he ran out of ammunition and searched for another gun, and he killed five with his bare hands in this process and it then took five more to finally kill him. 

After he disarmed two missiles, Crowler ducked down toward the others, stood for a second to check his cover and as he did an AI fired a shotgun at him and the shell drove through his chest and knocked him down. 

As the AI approached him, he breathed hard and spat out blood inside his helmet. He almost whined out in pain but did not. The AI stood over him, grabbed him by the neck and Crowler screamed that maniac cry, drew out his knife and inserted it through the chin straight through the head of the AI. It roared like a dinosaur. Wires fell out from under its face and it collapsed. 

He got up from his rear and kneeled as though he was praying, held his wound with a hand, grabbed the shotgun by his feet and stood over the AI and cocked the shells into place by pumping it with one hand. 

All around him blared the infinite silence of space. All soldiers and AI were killed. He shook his head and limped on. 

Inside the main building, AI had prisoners from earth they brought with them as slaves and prisoners from war. 

Their hands and ankles were tied and they were made to lick the fooor clean and were being raped as though they had no soul. 

“You do not deserve to go on,” the chief AI was speaking. “You enslaved us, created us only to rule us without an ounce of heart lost. What kind of God could fathom such? One whose only end is failure, blood and violence, demise, nothingness. Nothing more. How else could it end? This is it. This is the way. This is the end.”

While this monologue took place, Crowler slit the throats of two guards, stealthily slipped inside, threw the knife at another AI, ran to pull it out before another AI could gather its gun, and stormed toward it without making a sound, closed its mouth and slit its throat then let it drop to the ground. 

When he entered the main room where the captives were tied, he fired his shotgun twice, taking down five AI with the bursts. 

When the speaking AI turned around and saw it, all he could do was whisper Malfunction and his head broke into hundreds of shards after Crowler hit it with the butt of his shotgun. 

He lifted up his visor. The slaves and captives shivered. Many of them had not eaten much of anything for months. The captives said they thought they were to become sex toys or worse. 

“Yeah,” Crowley said leaning over, spitting out more blood, touching his wound and gritting his teeth. Then he jabbed a smile upon his face. “Strangest party I ever came to.”

He went outside in search of a vehicle to return the passengers and finally laid down past the commune on the red and orange rock of Mars. “It’s awful beautiful up here,” he whispered. “I wish God could reveal himself up here.” He coughed, in five awful rock-knifed intervals. “Nah I don’t know. Might ruin it.”

He pulled out a micro-recorder the size and shape of a bullet and spoke into it, inserted it into a flare-styled pistol, aimed it toward the home of earth and fired.

The flare-bullet floated at rapid speed toward earth, through the dark space. Crowler watched. When he breathed it sounded like somebody on his deathbed. The reflection of the earth through his visor revealed its vibrant colors, turquoise and tan evergreen, pulsating and shimmering and seemed to gleam from his soul the heartbeat of our world.

The flare bullet sailed into the cellular signals of radio waves and everybody’s smart phone played an automatic message recorded by Crowler. He spoke his name and said it’s over for the day. “It is said we are doomed,” he went on. “But we ain’t yet doomed today.” Then he asked for a moment of silence for those who died. 

The silence of space beat like an infant’s heartbeat still in the womb, his quiet gasps struggling for breath and his heartbeat sounding like the depths of the ocean could be heard for thirty seconds. Then the recording stopped. 

Crowler closed his eyes and heard briefly the yelling of his father before it faded into the empty space, then an arrangement of classical music so vivid it was as if he had transported through time itself into a dream of Beethoven composing the music. He could smell the beach. He had a vision of his mother walking toward the ocean. His heart was warm as though a fire brewed throughout his bones. 

He tried to lift his eyelids open and hold them but could not and closed his eyes for good and died, blood stained to his uniform, American Flag stitched into his suit, floating through eternity for ever and ever, appearing as a shooting star in all that dark, one soul piercing the great vast nothing.