The Monument
A Short Story – By L. L. Ash
“Hannah! Let’s go!” I called out to my sister, rolling my eyes as she checked her makeup for the third time.
Seriously, it was just her and me going to The Monument. It’s not like she needed to look like a model to see some hunk of metal and stone.
“Damnit, I’m coming!” she growled back through stiff lips while she slicked on another layer of lip gloss.
Whipping out my phone, I looked up The Monument and copied the address, pasting it into my Google Maps. It didn’t pay to have an Apple phone and be a Google apps user. Ugh.
Touching down on the enter button, the little icon spun as it loaded, just as Hannah dragged herself away from the mirror.
“C’mon! We don’t have all day!” she called as she brushed past me, getting into the car.
Rolling my eyes again, I followed her, locking the door on the way out.
The Monument was seven hours away, a drive that, if we were careful, we could make in a single day, there and back. It was just going to be one hell of a long day.
“It’s too bad Mom and Eddie couldn’t go with us,” Hannah sighed as she fussed over her phone in the passenger seat.
I sank into my seat behind the wheel and started the car engine.
“I know,” I murmured.
Mom was supposed to come with us, but she was too busy with her new boyfriend. Not that I blamed her. Fourteen hours in the car didn’t sound like a grand idea to me anymore, either.
“I mean, I could do a lot with Eddie in fourteen hours” Hannah grinned mischievously at the thought of so many hours with her boyfriend.
“You do know I’m your brother, right?” I groaned. “I don’t want to know about any of the stuff you do with your boyfriend!”
She laughed, but quieted up as she, presumably, was texting the guy.
It was insane to me how life had gone on.
There we were, taking a drive to The Monument on the holiday weekend, not even twenty years after The Invasion.
“Can we turn some music on?” Hannah asked, breaking her eyes off her phone just long enough to turn on some crappy music.
I didn’t bother saying anything. There wasn’t much of a point, anyway, because Hannah was going to do what Hannah wanted to do. It was always best to just give in if it didn’t really matter, or there would be a fight to deal with.
By the time lunchtime rolled around, I was starting to get cranky. Or, ‘hangry’ as Hannah called it.
“Oh my God, just stop and get some food. Seriously, Benj, I can’t handle your hangry face.”
I couldn’t help laughing at her comment. Hangry face? What the hell was that?
“You coming with me?” I asked her.
Stopping in front of a fast food place, she shook her head.
“I’m going to go pee, then I’m going to call Eddie. So, take your time.”
The stuff big brothers shouldn’t have to know about their sister.
“Ew. I’m going,” I told her, quickly escaping the car.
It felt nice to stretch my legs after so many hours, but I knew that we were only about an hour away from our destination. Once the ceremony was over and pictures were taken, we would be back on the road like thousands of other people.
After using the restroom and getting my food, I sat at a booth in the back and slowly picked at my fries while I pulled my phone out.
While Hannah and I had agreed that going to the monument during The Ceremony of The Last Battle was something we both wanted to do at least once in our lives, I hadn’t anticipated going with just her, and having her so completely occupied. Before boys and college, we’d been pretty good friends, hanging out with the same people and doing everything together like the twins we were.
But I guess that being the big brother by twelve minutes was something that managed to wedge us apart once she went to the community college and I went to State. Since then, we hadn’t done more than say hello at family dinners, and it really sucked.
Sipping on my Coke, I cast a glance over my shoulder and saw her grinning away while she talked on her phone with her boyfriend.
Maybe I just needed to get a girlfriend.
Unlocking my phone, I lifted it to my face and watched Google Maps pop up again with links to its website and pictures from past ceremonies.
Bored, and seeing as I had no real idea of what the ceremony entailed, I clicked on the three hundred pictures and slid through a good fifty of them before dropping out and going into Street View.
The Monument itself was impressive. Massive marble and steel, twisted up pieces of what was left of the Golden Gate bridge after the Great War.
It was equally magnificent as it was terrifying; what we’d lived through, and how we’d managed to survive and thrive.
I’d only been a kid at the time of the Great War, but I remembered the horror of it. I remembered the fear that lingered like a thick fog around every human on the planet.
A knocking on the window scared the crap out of me, and I jumped just before seeing my sister banging on the glass right next to me. I pointed to my food, then my mouth, and she groaned silently behind the glass before heading into the restaurant.
While she was at the counter ordering some food for herself, I zoomed out a little, then back in when I saw a group of people gathered near The Monument.
Letting my curiosity get the best of me, I moved through the crowd, some faces blurred, some faces crystal clear until I found one that made me stop.
What the actual hell?
I zoomed further in and…
No…
“What’re you doing?” Hannah asked, her receipt and call number in her hands as she waited for her lunch.
“Do… Do you see this?” I motioned her over, not able to tear my eyes away from the face glaring back at me from my phone.
Hannah peeked over my shoulder, intrigued at my tremulous voice.
“Ok, I admit, that’s a bad picture of you, dude. Try and get it a little more flattering next time. I’m happy to help you take a couple for your dating profile…”
“Han, this is at The Monument,” I whispered, gulping back my confusion and fear.
It was me.
It was me at the Goddamn Monument. The Monument that I had never stepped foot near before.
“What?” she asked, sliding into the booth beside me.
She slid her fingers on the screen, zooming out until she confirmed for both of us that, yes, it was The Monument in San Francisco.
“The hell?” she murmured, zooming back in again.
But the group of people was gone. Absolutely gone.
She lifted her eyes to me, mirroring my confusion and alarm at seeing a friggin’ picture of myself at a place I had literally never been in my life.
“You have a serious doppelganger out there,” she said finally. “Either that, or Mom had a third twin she didn’t tell us about.”
Third twin? Not likely.
But a doppelganger… as creepy as it sounded, that seemed like the more likely answer. A doppelganger that just…was wearing they same olive green jeans and black, “Megadeath” t-shirt as I currently had on.
I bit my lip, shoving the thoughts of anything more mysterious than that out of my mind. It was impossible.
Even with Hannah’s proffered, and most likely correct answer hovering above us, the remainder of lunch was somber and the car was quiet again when we got into it, heading the last hour into San Francisco.
“Just a doppelganger,” Hannah repeated a couple of times, looking at my shirt twice and shaking her head each time.
“Probably just looked like it,” I told her, trying to make her feel better just as much as I was trying to ease my own troubled thoughts. “Or he has great taste in music, too.”
Hannah snorted and looked at me, some of her spunk and easy charm coming back out as she managed to shake off some of the strange coincidence.
She turned the music back on and head-banged to some pop/punk stuff that we both had listened to in high school and it made me smile.
Hey, if it took a spooky dude that looked just like me to get Hannah acting like herself again, I’d deal with the creepy factor any day.
We laughed and joked the whole rest of the trip, excitement starting to buzz around us as we pulled into the massive park where The Last Battle had happened that had freed mankind from its extraterrestrial foe.
“Wow, it’s pretty spectacular,” Hannah breathed as she leaned forward and craned her neck to see The Monument in the near distance. We could just see it, surrounded by thousands of people who were already waiting for the yearly ceremony to start.
“Sometimes I can’t believe they were here for so long,” Hannah sighed, staring at the beautiful sculpture.
Two years, she meant. Somehow we’d survived two years with those things fighting for our planet. But we’d beat them off, and we’d rebuilt. It was almost as if nothing had happened, if you looked around at the world. Except Dad was gone. He’d been a first responder when the initial attack happened, and he just…never came home. And damn, we missed him.
Looking at each other, we got out of our parked car and, even though I wanted to stare at the majesty before us, I was looking for that doppelganger. I had to see with my own eyes that it wasn’t me.
“You looking for him, too?” Hannah asked as we got closer to the crowd.
“Hell yes I am,” I laughed at myself for being so weird about it.
She looked at me and gave a commiserating grin before she led the way through the crowd and toward the monument.
It really was something to behold… All the people who died for our freedom…
Suddenly a sharp clack split through the air around us, like thunder resonating off the bay below us.
Everyone paused around us, looking around.
Lightning and thunder during the day?
What the hell?
Low rumbles continued as blue lightning licked across the puffy white clouds above us.
“Oh my God,” Hannah breathed, her eyes wide and panic starting to take over her face.
Then people started to move around us, heading toward the large, metal, lightning conductive monument.
A flash of olive green caught my eye as someone brushed past me. That body, those jeans…
The man turned around, glaring at me as he walked past us, his eyes, matching pale blue to mine, flickered with electricity.
My heart started to beat harder, rumbling with the bashes of thunder that assaulted our ears.
It was me. Somehow it was me, but it wasn’t me.
I swallowed hard, backing up with the rest of the people while the small group of people I saw earlier on Google Maps went to The Monument and stood around it like sentries.
They stood so still, their eyes all cracking with electricity as the blue lightning in the sky got stronger; more violent.
No…
They had told us what the first battle was like…There were videos of how the sky turned to thunderclouds and the people just…
Lightning sliced through the air accompanied by a deafening clap of thunder, the light almost blinding me. But I saw it.
I saw the people around The Monument breathe in the lighting, their skin splitting and melting off until they were the creatures from the videos of the First Invasion.
It wasn’t a prize skin like they used to think. They wore copies of us like a camouflage. It wore my skin like a camouflage
Taking my sister’s hand, we ran for all we were worth toward the parking lot where we’d left our car, those creatures picking off people one at a time behind us.
It was happening again.
They were back