Stepping Stone

The sky was on fire.

Ash speckled the sky like a sick imitation of stars, glittering as they fell into the void that was the flames swallowing up the street. Homes used to exist there. People had lived and loved and now died on the street that had meant so much to them.

John stared up at the false stars with a grimace on his face, waiting for the pain in his abdomen to fade into oblivion just as he would do soon. The battle had been gruesome. He had done his best to escape; packed up his car and made his way to the end of his driveway before the sky had fallen in.

He could remember the scent: burnt despair and flaming hopelessness. Salty tears from the eyes of the dying and the metallic tang of blood tinging the smoky air. His overly mundane reverse signal felt wrong in the environment. Windshield wet with blood and wiper fluid, he did his best to keep his own tears from leaving his eyes. This wasn’t what he was meant for. 

John had fled from his car when one of the alien bodies had fallen onto his hood. The look in its eyes continued to haunt him in his last moments.

The creature had looked so sure, even in death. So sure that they would win, so sure that they would gain both the upper hand and a victory for their planet. 

The same self-assured look in his hero’s eyes.

As John had run to safety, a stray tentacle wrapped around his ankle and tugged. John’s nose hit the ground with a sickening crack. Hands coming up to touch the tender skin, he paid no mind to the looming shadow cast over his vulnerable figure. 

He saw it before he felt it.

A pool of what felt like syrup began building up beneath him, and his frazzled mind instantly wondered who had begun making his favorite breakfast food in the middle of the apocalypse. It was only when he looked down that he saw the spear protruding from his abdomen.

A visceral, gut-wrenching scream left his mouth when a force shoved the pole all the way to the side, tearing through tissue and bone and muscle and everything inside of him. A boy, no older than John himself, had used the spear to catapult himself onto the guilty alien’s back and shove a dagger through its neck.

Mason Marvel even had a hero’s name. Classic, timeless, something that will go down in history as the name of their savior. The one who beat the alien colonizers, the one who saved them all.

Who would care that he failed to save John Ingle?

John didn’t have a hero name. He had a full-time job, divorced parents, and had been on a few good dates with a nice girl. He was no hero. He wasn’t even a supporting character. He was a minor plot point in an epic story.

John had always thought of himself as the stepping stone in people’s lives. The one that got them the promotion because he was just below par, the one that longed for the girl only to lose to prince charming in the end. 

A jolt of pain from the spear in his stomach made him groan soundlessly. Mason was still fighting the alien leader, blood on his unusually handsome face and a determined look plaguing his eyes. John looked up to him, both literally and figuratively. The young boy had been on television for weeks, news stations plastering his face everywhere as he strived to defeat the alien race that he had almost been stolen by. It was common knowledge after a while that Mason had been born as an heir to the alien leader but had been hidden away by his mother after she learned of a plan to use Mason as a sacrifice to end the human race. It was their fairy tale. The only difference was, they might not get their happy ending.

The aliens- no one knew what they were called, they didn’t speak the same language, after all- had a vengeance against the humans for ruining the Earth. They had truly trashed it, to the point where water was scarce and food sources were littered with poisons. John couldn’t blame them, really. They had royally messed up their planet and had no intentions to save it.

He was a hero.

John was not.

So as he lay there, a party of victory being thrown for the boy who had just saved their world, John smiled. Blood was seeping out of his wound faster than he could think, yet he smiled and laughed and cried.

Mason looked over when he heard the hysterical laughter coming from the dying man. Horror filled his eyes when he saw the spear piercing through his gut, realizing that he could have saved him. He could have saved a man that meant so much to his parents, to his dog, to that girl that was nervously waiting for his text after their last date.

The man he had a hand in killing.

Collapsing to his knees, Mason exhaustedly crawled on his elbows to the man he had unknowingly murdered with his carelessness. Why did he have to show off like that? There was no need for him to use that stupid pole to his advantage, he could have easily defeated the alien on his own with no outside assistance.

Who cared about saving the world when he might have ruined someone else’s?

Yet John continued to laugh and laugh and laugh because it was truly ironic, wasn’t it? He had been used for his whole life, and he had never been given credit for the homework he had done for someone else or the counseling he had given his friends. But now, here he was, under a weeping hero that apologized and thanked him over and over again for his  ‘sacrifice’.

Because he was the stepping stone needed to save the world.