A Flash Before the Eyes

by cliosmuse

Chapter 12

Anastasia Dualla first learned to use a gun after her family was murdered before her eyes.

She'd been a child in South Africa when Greater China first began extending its reach (so slow at first that few in the world really noticed). It moved into sub-Saharan Africa first with the mission (it claimed) of offering social uplift. Poverty-stricken African countries, still reeling from the fevers that had claimed so many lives a quarter century before, were only too happy to accept such help, especially after they were assured that they and their leaders, even the most corrupt among them, would maintain some degree of autonomy despite existing under China's aegis.

Promises always look pretty on paper.

Within a decade, when Anastasia first began thinking of going to university, most of the African continent was being exploited by Greater China for its natural resources. The rest of the world still paid little notice. It never really had, after all. The poorest African countries submitted willingly. In the wealthier countries, fringe rebel groups began springing up, attempting to fight the so-called "invasion." When the umbrella government responded by curtailing the offered courses at the University of Cape Town, widespread student protests broke out. After a week of unrest, the University's doors were ordered closed, and Anastasia's older brother Timothy, a biology student who had intended to pursue a career in medicine, left home to join the rebel cause.

The rebels of South Africa liked to claim that the War began in their country. If the Earth had survived, scholars someday would have found this claim rather debatable, but there was no doubt that the fighting in the Duallas's country was both early and fierce. Anastasia prayed nightly for her brother's safe return; and, when day after day arrived and he did not, she offered God all she could think of: herself. She became a priest.

The rebels fought valiantly. As the rest of the world slowly and irrevocably became embroiled in war, the street soldiers of Cape Town and Johannesburg continued the struggle. But – and, again, if scholars lived to tell of it, they would say it was inevitable – South Africa did fall, and hard. After those early idealistic protests at the university, Anastasia would not see her brother again until he was marched into her mother's home by heavily-armed soldiers (South Africans, she noticed bitterly: not even foreigners). She, her mother, her brother, and her two sisters (the youngest only seven) were kneeled in a line before their kitchen stove and, one by one, they were shot in the back of the head, execution-style. (If only those who claimed this "war" had claimed no lives could see this, her family, lying dead beside her.)

Anastasia was at the end of the line. As she heard the shots, felt the soft thuds, tears coursed down her face. But when her turn at last came there was no shot. A voice behind her, in her native language: "So, little girl, you are a priest?"

A subtle nod of her head was returned with a cruel laugh. Items thrown before her, all found on the kitchen table: her Bible, her rosary. Her passport. "Then go be a priest. But do not do it here." By the time their boots pounded out of the door to her small home the tears on her cheeks had dried, leaving only salt. She would not cry again until the world ended.

She left South Africa that night, under cover of darkness. Found, through various channels, a military airstrip that freighted refugees out, for a price. She left the country on the day before the South African government finally collapsed. Many flights later, she arrived in New York, where she was granted asylum. She turned to the Church, because it was all she knew, but she hated God for making her live.

After a few weeks, she bought the gun and its non-conductive storage chest. It stayed under her bed, but every now and again, she would take it out and toy with the idea of completing the job those soldiers had left unfinished.

But in the end she couldn't. Because by the time she had arrived in New York, Anastasia Dualla had lost her faith in God; and she feared the unknown too much to face it.


When Dualla woke after the blast shook Brooklyn, she kneeled before her church's altar and prayed that she was dead. And when she realized that she was not, she cursed God again – as she had so many times in these few months – and went to her room to retrieve the weapon.

At last she stumbled out into the street, and the first thing she noticed was the death. There had been a few parishioners in the pews of the church, but nothing prepared her for the number of bodies strewn about the city. In a flash, she saw her brother, her little sisters, her mother, their blood pooling on the wooden floor of their house, and she dropped to her knees and vomited until she couldn't anymore.

And then she walked, with no particular destination in mind. Walked and walked – not, strangely enough, toward Manhattan, but rather past Brooklyn Heights (where, she found, death did not distinguish between rich and poor) to the Docks, where she could see the Statue of Liberty. The first night, after looting a bakery of its burnt breads, she broke into a Brooklyn Heights home to sleep, gun clutched to her heart until she finally dozed off near the dawn. She slept on an overstuffed sofa among the gaudy trophies of a life well-lived until sometime in the afternoon; it wasn't until she awoke that the bright light revealed that she had shared the room with the family's dead Doberman all night. She had already put two bullets into a burnt eye before she realized that it was, of course, already dead, and she vowed never to come into a home after dark again (indeed, as long as Anastasia Dualla would be able to remember that moment, she would never again sleep through the night with out seeing its smoked fur and the bullet hole that replaced its eye). She made her way a bit farther; along the way calling aloud for help, but she grew accustomed to the idea that there was no one left to respond.

The second night, she spent huddled in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, a flashlight (the only useful take from that Brooklyn mansion) clutched in the hand opposite the gun. Once, she felt something on her leg, and she screamed and screamed. The beam from her flashlight was all it took to scare the cockroach away. (How horrible, that they're all that's left.)

She was awake that whole night. Occasionally, her thoughts drifted back to the woman in the church, whose presence had frightened her to the bone. Thought back to her words: "I know something about you." It all seemed so trivial now. That woman, her fear – all gone, vanished in a flash before her eyes, and all that was left, it seemed, was ruin. Ruin and Anastasia.

"God is punishing me."

Her voice echoed through the tunnel, against the dead cars and bodies (too loud!), and she threw the back of her hand, holding the gun, against her mouth in an attempt to stifle the noise. But it continued.

With the dawn, she pushed herself upright and made her way to the Manhattan mouth of the tunnel; she squinted against the light on the horizon. Her stomach rumbled and she found yet another bakery with more burnt bread and some dried fruits, just edible. And then to Battery Park, where she sat on a bench and stared at Lady Liberty (charred, it seemed) until her eyes slipped closed.

She dreamed of the dead dog.

It was later that day in Battery Park that Ana would finally encounter the woman from the church. She would not see her again until she joined the military against her father's wishes and was stationed on the Battlestar Galactica, nearly one thousand years later.

"Fear is not a sin," Anastasia Dualla once told Kara Thrace in a church in Brooklyn. If there were storytellers left on this world, they might have later recounted that Anastasia Dualla's tragic flaw had been precisely her fear. But, really, one could hardly blame her. And there would be none left to tell that story, after all.