Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Space Stations (2004), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #96 September 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection (2005) and Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition (2005), both edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November-December 2013. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

A chilling tale of intrigue and betrayal in the aftermath of an American nuclear war, and one of the most inventive novels of alternative history since Robert Harris's Fatherland.

What if the Cuban Missile Crisis had become a full-blown atomic war? So begins Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois, a fascinating novel of tantalizing, speculative history. The place is Boston. The year is 1972. It has been ten years since bombs fell over major cities in the United States and the Soviet Union. Russia is decimated. Omaha and San Diego are virtually destroyed. Washington, D.C., lies beneath a giant crater lake. President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and their families have disappeared and are believed dead. "The best and the brightest" of their administration are disgraced or in hiding. America is a shell of her former glory, a second-rate power dependent upon the kindness of Britain. Martial law rules.

Carl Landry, a young reporter with The Boston Globe, arrives at the scene of a murder. A friendless man, a veteran of the '62 war, has been shot in his bed. Landry begins to suspect that the man has taken secrets to his grave. What was this man doing in the War Room of the White House in October 1962? Who pushed the button that started the war? What is the legend and what is the lie? Who was the betrayer and who the betrayed? And could John F. Kennedy, by some miracle, still be alive?

DuBois has carefully interwoven fact and fiction to create a seamless story of multilayered suspense--an unnerving story of what might have been.

Sixteen-year-old Randy Knox has the usual problems of a teenage boy: getting along with his father, dating his sweetheart, and trying not to fail his junior year of high school. But Randy also has other demands on his time, as a sergeant in the N.H. National Guard, attached to the U.S. Army, and fighting the invading Creepers.

Randy has dim memories of a time of electric lights, laptop computers, television screens and above all, plenty of food at every meal. On his twelfth birthday, he enlisted in the Army to carry on the fight, since most of the world's adults have been killed off and it's up to the younger generations to serve. But now, as a veteran of the Creeper war and with his K-9 partner Thor, Randy has learned to focus on the essentials: the best way to kill a Creeper, scrounge through abandoned buildings for old canned goods, and to avoid being turned into "barbecue bait." He has earned the Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, and the Combat Infantryman Badge. Endless war is all he knows.

But now change has drastically come to his life. The current President of the United States has announced that scattered remnants of the Air Force have destroyed the Creeper's Orbital Base, ensuring victory over the alien invaders. Those surviving Creepers on the Earth's surface will be hunted down and exterminated, as a weary and wary population celebrates victory.

Yet Randy is assigned a new mission: to escort a secret representative from the Governor of New Hampshire to the nation's capital, to meet with the President. And at the last moment, a fellow teen soldier--the beautiful Serena Coulson and her mute younger brother Buddy--are assigned to join Randy.

This secretive mission proves to be the most dangerous assignment of his life, as Randy tries to protect his charges from rampaging Creepers and criminal humans. And as he fights to reach the capitol with a vital mission, Randy learns that all of his skills in combating aliens may not be enough to survive the dark conspiracies of his fellow humans.

U.S Army Sergeant Randy Knox is sixteen, and already a seasoned veteran. He is an alien killing prodigy who has eradicated more of the invading Creepers than anyone can keep track of. But Randy is also a high school student struggling with geometry. And he is a young man whose heart is being pulled in two directions by two very different girls. One, Abby Monroe, a straightforward warrior. The other, Serena Coulson, dangerous and mysterious.

Randy, with the help of Serena's strange brother, alien interpreter Buddy Coulson, has convinced a Creeper base to surrender. After a decade of conflict, misery, and the death of millions of humans, it finally seems that the war may come to an end. But then the surrender effort turns into a bloody ambush. More disturbing, Buddy and Serena Coulson arrive, having escaped torture and interrogation at the hands of a C.I.A. operative. It begins to dawn on Randy that, as much as he doesn't want to believe it, the powers-that-be may not want the war to be over.

Now, as Randy's hodge-podge military unit makes a desperate stand at a remote outpost, young Sergeant Randy Knox learns just how far he will go to protect those he loves--and what it takes to save humanity from total alien domination.

More than ten years ago, the alien Creepers arrived in Earth's orbit and started a war that was a slaughter for humanity. Nuclear weapons detonated in the atmosphere destroyed all electronic devices, asteroids dropped into oceans and lakes swamped cities with artificial tsunamis, and the nearly invulnerable Creepers arrived on Earth, going forth from their dome bases to attack civilians and military units at will.

Sixteen-year-old Randy Knox, a newly minted lieutenant in the U.S. Army, has been fighting the Creepers since he was twelve. He has seen friends, family members and fellow soldiers killed by the Creepers, and he is tired of war. At one point, it seemed the war was over when the aliens' orbital battle station had been destroyed.

But a second Creeper orbital battle station has arrived.

The war no longer seems to be over, and while returning to his home unit, Randy's convoy is ambushed. Separated from his fellow soldiers and his K-9 companion Thor, Randy faces the ultimate horror of every American serviceman: to become a prisoner of war of the aliens.