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For What It's Worth 3/3
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
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He has to pick up pieces of himself in order to reach wakefulness. The heat is all around him, curling too close, but Daniel Jackson barely feels it. Through the crisscrossing cracks in his glasses, he sees the clutter of artifacts and bodies strewn carefully over the sand. Companions, workers, all killed by the scaffolds as they fell, by rocks or-- well, there are small fires, burning here and there. His hands reach out, trying for pulses and retrieving pit of clay as he gathers enough strength to climb to his feet; but there are no heartbeats, and everything seems so much beyond repair. Shock has blasted his pre-waking thoughts from his mind-- the world is strange and full of luminous fear. He knows, with the instinct of a child's throat clutching around a warning, that the chains are about to break and fall.
The world is all painful yellows and oranges-- even the sky is a dull kind of lemon, with it's two pyramids casting shadows their shadows over the sun. The impossibility of it all makes Daniel dizzy, but he locks his knees and moves up the dune, unable to focus on anything save the sheer mechanics of walking. It hurts to think, to breathe, and he smells the dead around him like some grotesque ceremony's incense. These bodies aren't going to last long, not in this heat. Reaching the top of the dune, he falls to his knees without thinking, and the sand moves to embrace the lines of his body. He's holding a piece of pottery, with the beginnings of what could be either the glyph for sun or star-- the bottom part has broken off. Raising his eyes to the uneven horizon, he sees the pyramids of Giza has he has so often in his life-- a familiar image. The comforting landscape has been made surreal, because there's a smooth, chrome-glossed pyramid sitting atop the ones he knows. He was right in so many ways, he thinks, blinking at the glints of sun gathering around the base of the structure. Armor. Soldiers, he realizes after shielding his eyes, and a voice he's never heard before tells him he'd better fall back and take cover. He stumbles down the sandy angle he just recently climbed, loosing his footing and making small sobs that he never does realize are coming from him.
Someone else built the pyramids, he'd said. Jeers from the audience, laughs and shakes of heads. Condescending looks that made his bones shrink back to childhood.
Well then, they asked, who did?
He said that he didn't know, and watched them leave, carrying their laughter in their throats. The few who stayed whispered in mock sympathy.
Do you think it was aliens, Dr. Jackson? The greys they have over in the bunker at Area 51? Gods, immortals, creatures of light? The tooth fairy?
But-- and he could shout wildly, spin like a madman with hands up to grip his victory-- he was right, damn it, right because here as a technology he'd never seen using the pyramids in a way no one had ever imagined.
The last laugh is really wail of despair.
He sits, folded amongst the corpses of his excavation team, near the mouth of a tomb of a little known King. The sun seeps into him like radiation, burning his shadow against the sand. Memory takes her time rising from the depths of Lethe-- he remembers the screams of panic and the flash of silver gliders, like the elegant arches of cranes' wings. This is the end, someone had been saying as he fell into unconsciousness, this is the last day of our world. The hairs on the back of Daniel's neck rise, mattered down by drips of sweat. Colors jump and shapes waver in a crazy native dance as he reaches behind his head, but his fingers come away red.
(the red nile, flowing crimson and inspiring thirst.
let my people go!)
He realizes that he is bleeding, before his body becomes too heavy to hold up. The sun flays him naked and crying in his dreams.
Someone is shouting, but it's not him. Awake again, blinking painfully in his delirium, he crawls towards the sound. It's in the sand, or half buried under it; he turns over the scorched body of an Egyptian woman to find the girl-child wailing underneath. Were they trying to run? From what?
(from what indeed, my good doctor. there are pyramids in the sky, what indeed!)
Briefly, he touches the woman's burned back, and her skin peels away like paper-- a type of wound he's never seen before. The girl's hands are in her mother's crumbling pieces too, and he pulls her away, gently covering her mouth when her scream begins to sing again. He can hear marching, the pound of feet on the sand, and it lodges in his back, too terrible to be fear. The girl clutches him madly-- they are together in their fear-- and he feels the press of something hidden under her dress against his side. It hurts, but he can't focus, can't think what it might be. Half-carrying her, he stumbles back towards the partly collapsed mouth of the tomb. Hidden in vague shadows, he holds her in his lap, brushing the dark tendrils of hair from her cheek. She's all varying shades of night-brown, this girl-- hair, eyes and dusted tan skin. Her pupils are moons, dark and alien, widening as he hears rustling outside the tomb. Their hearts beat long, low and loud, bound by want of a human hand to hold. She can't be more than eight, and outside her mother is shifting away like leaves in the wind.
"I know," he murmurs in Arabic. "I'm scared too." The girl clutches at him until her tiny nails pierce his flesh, but he doesn't care. He's very sure he's about to die, he can smell the Reaper and see the flash of the scythe down in the darkened passageway.
Rocks are moved, shafts of light fall with the same deadliness as bombs. Daniel jerks up to see the faces of Earth's conquerors, and they are much like his own-- two eyes, human face and lips and nose under the blazing gold emblem of a snake.
(maybe i expected them to have green skin, two heads, tentacles, i don't know)
Another flash, metal again, but out of the other corner of his eye; the linguist turns in time to hear the thunderclap, to see the slight recoil of the handgun clutched in the little girl's grubby palms.
(girls, even modern ones, don't seem to want to play with guns)
One down, God only knows how more to go; there's the alien invader slumped over the rumble with a hole in his head.
(they can die, like humans)
Her hands, her arms, her whole body is shaking, but the girl doesn't let go. It occurs to Daniel that he does not even know this child's name, and when another face appears, she clicks the trigger again and again. There is no sound this time, only the moan of an empty barrel. Wolf-like, she bares her teeth-- she is as angry as all the survivors will be, Daniel thinks. Understanding of death flitters over her face, animalistic and vague; she's frightened by what she has done. Her sweat smells of terror and pain. He moves to pull her back, time flowing far too slow, but this next enemy's face has an rage that eclipses hers. The alien soldier takes quick aim and looses on the child not a bullet, but a net of light that plays and burns against her young skin. Again, and she jerks in the throws of the electricity's embrace. A third time, and she's falling to pieces in his hands, disappearing in darkness and light. Shifting away.
(my turn now)
The first blast hits him with all the force of a wave, lifting him up to pain he didn't even know was possible. Through his own screaming, he seems to hear words; through the inferno, he feels gentle hands lifting him up. He is still on the ground, and the second blast is shaking him, but he feels these these ghostly touches all the same. There is someone's quirky half-smile, a familiar stranger's face, blazing in his mind. This person is saying, 'Hey, Daniel-- I think we got cheated this time around. They didn't even give us a chance. Let's say we, you and me, give it another go?'.
Dr. Jackson feels arms coming to cradle him as the third blast devours his body whole.
.... but that just might have been something a soldier imagined, facing the cool eyes of a Jaffa and the beam of a zat'nic'atel as they ushered him to Death.