Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [32]
Trip looked up at the screen. The flickering light of the vintage projector showed a group of men and women clad in dark steel-blue jumpsuits, shooting lasers back and forth at blue-skinned aliens with antennae. Andorians, Trip thought. He recognized them. He couldn’t quite remember the plot of the film, or even what it was called, but he recognized most of those people in the jumpsuits.
Suddenly, a new alien came onto the screen. It was a tall and scaly reptilian with armor and spikes. It seemed to face the audience and look out at them, and Trip experienced a visceral sensation of belly-clenching dread. The creature stalked forward toward them, its head getting larger and larger as it approached.
Finally, it opened its mouth and roared, sending a gout of very hot, very real flame out of the movie screen and into the theater. Trip ducked to the side, rolling onto the floor between the seats, feeling the heat roil over him. He heard screams and sickening popping sounds, and then, utter silence.
It was only then that he remembered his sister. Quickly struggling to get up, he found that the floor was hot and sticky, clutching at his feet like a puddle of quicksand. At first he thought it was gum, but it seemed more like black tar sucking him downward as though he were a Cretaceous dinosaur. Using every ounce of strength he could summon, Trip pulled himself up out of the mire, and back onto the nearest empty seat.
He looked next to him, but found the adjacent seat empty; there was no trace of his sister, or her remains. “Lizzie!” he yelled out as he surveyed the rest of the theater, most of which lay behind him. He could neither see nor hear anyone else. The rows of seats went on for as far as he could see, their backs illuminated by the flickering blue light of the projector. They reminded him of a vast graveyard full of identical tombstones, ranks of monuments set up to commemorate centuries of wars, and the soldiers who fought and died in conflicts initiated by others.
He turned back around and looked at the movie screen. The reptilian alien, the Andorians, and the jumpsuit-clad people were all gone now, both replaced by a tranquil scene of a woman lying on the neatly manicured grass of a storybook meadow. She had a large art pad with her, and as the camera slowly zoomed in on her, he could see that she was drawing a building. The design was fantastic, combining sleek modern designs with Old World eighteenth-century European architecture.
A shadow fell across the girl, and she turned and looked up. She was pretty, with long, free-flowing, blond hair, cut to flat-bottomed bangs above her wide, brown eyes. A man crouched into the frame, handing her a glass of yellow liquid in which ice cubes clinked.
“Thought you might like some lemonade,” the man said.
“Why, thank you,” the woman said, and Trip suddenly realized it was Elizabeth, all grown up now. But she’s still a little girl, he thought, still caught up in the absurd logic of his dream. And we came here together to see a movie. And she was scared about…something.
“So, when are you gonna tell your family?”
Elizabeth held up her hand, looking at the engagement ring on it, almost as if appraising it. “I dunno. When I finally decide it’s real, I suppose.” She grinned up at the man then, her face glowing. “I want to tell Trip, but he’s off in space somewhere. Probably on some secret mission.”
“You think he’ll come to the wedding if we give him enough notice?” the man asked.
Her expression suddenly becoming serious, Elizabeth turned her face further upward, her gaze pointed toward the skies. “Maybe. It’s hard to say. He’s a pretty busy guy, thanks to Starfleet. Doesn’t even have the time to save my life.”
And in an instant, a fire from above engulfed Elizabeth and the grass and the drawing and the lemonade and the man and everything around them.
In an instant, all that was left was a smoking chasm that smelled of char and sulfur and ozone.
Trip could feel hot tears sliding down his cheeks as he reached out for his sister. But his hands began to vibrate, and