EPILOGUE I
New Haven was more than just a sanctuary. It truly had become a full working city, with a slightly different style of life than most people really had ever known before the world ended.
It was a giant community that people turned into more than a home. Every able person in the ever growing city pitched in a shared obligation to support and grow the community, to rescue other survivors, to sow crops, raise livestock, and guard.
The Yautja ships were sometimes visible in the skies, mostly at night when their own lights shined brightly. Rarely were they noticeable during the day hovering far above the world while the community of New Haven restored something of a true way of life back to the human race.
Days turned into weeks, weeks became months. A winter passed. A spring blossomed. A summer sun raged over head, but life began anew for the growing populous of New Haven.
Only on rare occasion could the sounds of a stray bug be heard shrieking in the night. Sometimes, in the farthest distance that the look outs could see, a fire might burn as a sign of a battle that was still ongoing.
Carlos resumed his duties as a physician, heading up a hospital district in one section of the city. The military had been reshaped, and as radio communication was slowly restored, eventually, a new governmental structure had been initiated.
Lewis, promoted through the ranks for his efforts, had taken not only new duties and a new found bit of fame, but also a wife.
The school district became home to a new style of education. Teachers taught, and it was clear from the start that the new version of Earth's history would change in a dramatic way. Children learned about a world that existed differently than the horrors that they realized, and as months and months passed, they also learned about how one human girl influenced an alien warrior culture to save the human race.
Lewis and Carlos remained close, living in houses just across the street from one another and as a summer sun began to slowly fade out of the sky one late afternoon day at the end of July, they heard a murmuring from the people around them.
It was a sound of excitement and maybe just a bit of alarm and concern; notions that were almost easy to forget as human life found its way once again.
"Look!" someone called and Lewis, Carlos, and others around them glanced to where the woman was pointing; straight up.
A large fleet of Yautja ships, easily fifty strong, of all different sizes became apparent. They were scattered throughout the clouds for miles, as far as the eye could see, and each one of them began to glow shades of white, blue, and orange.
Their engines were firing up; coming to life and they were descending in small clusters.
"What are they doing?" The crowd murmured.
"They're landing!"
The murmurs turned to whispers.
The whispers turned to exuberant conversations, and soon as Lewis walked to his superiors with Carlos just behind him, all eyes fell upon him, for he had been written into the new world history as one of the two closest friends of the Yautja princess.
"Is it over?"
"It must be done!"
"Are we safe?"
The voices listed into one as people wondered aloud and watched space ships streak across the sky over the next hour, leaving sight; leaving orbit.
Lewis met with his superiors and contemplated the meaning of the ships leaving. There was obviously only one explanation, though somehow, he knew people were looking to him for more information that he simply did not have.
It had been months, and he had not heard from K'Shai at all. He had no idea if R'chnt survived his injuries, and simply did not know about anything the Yautja did or did not do beyond what he could see before him.
Plans were made to send scouting parties out beyond the wide, secured perimeter of the city. Dozens of people, more than a hundred, volunteered for the duty, each one wanting to be the first to step out into the cleared territories beyond their sanctuary.
Suddenly, the eager shouting and exuberant voices grew ever louder and Carlos and Russel headed excitedly towards Lewis to flag his attention. He turned to see them gesturing, shouting.
"Come! Look!" They said, waving their arms in a direction towards the main broadway of the city.
As Lewis and the others rounded the corner and glanced down the street, they saw a massive crowd of people gathering, pouring into the area for a view. From the buildings and the rooftops people gazed into the wide street, watching with excitement and anticipation.
Slowly, Lewis and Carlos began to push through the crowd and in a moment, the excited murmurs and rumblings suddenly grew quiet. People parted ways, eyeing Lewis and Carlos with wide gazes and they looked down the long street to the entrance gates to the city.
An entourage of heavily armored Yautja, each one towering over seven feet tall, males, and females, some wearing their hunting biomasks, some not, entered the city and the crowd fell silent. Lewis and Carlos stepped into the clearing, only barely noticing his superiors tip toeing in behind them, their eyes were locked on the large group of alien hunters.
Between them all, inches away from the very same female they knew to be Neh'rti, was K'Shai. She spotted Lewis and Carlos slowly approaching with awe struck faces, and smiled thinly, lowering her eyes slightly as she stepped forward past the Yautja, who all stopped.
Lewis and Carlos quickly scanned the Yautja group once again before their eyes returned to K'Shai.
She had changed dramatically over the months of her absence.
If they did not know her before, they would not have recognized her. She was clad in a combination of hunting armor and leather robes that shimmered and changed colors from golds to deep blues and greens as she moved.
Her long black hair was adorned with an ornate array of beads that appeared to be made from precious metals and jewels. The faded scar of her clan marking was only barely visible as they got closer to her.
Her entire body had been tattooed with black and deep red markings that looked somewhat like tiger stripes and Yautja wording. She barely looked human at all, and as they gazed upon her without a word, they certainly did not miss her round belly from the child that grew within her.
K'Shai approached her friends, and two of the looming females stepped forward from behind Neh'rti, as though they were K'Shai's body guards. They remained close, but out of arms' reach.
"Lewis! Carlos!" K'Shai spoke lightly, through a pleased smile as she extended her hands forward and greeted them.
"Wow! Look at you, K'Shai." Lewis said graciously.
He turned behind him and invited a reluctant looking woman forward.
"My wife, Diana." He said simply.
K'Shai nodded and lowered her eyes, bowing her head just a little lower. Her mannerisms were different than Lewis and Carlos had known her to be. She stood differently, carried herself with both humility and pride at the same time. She smiled softly yet kept a clenched jaw when silent.
She bowed her head and eyes respectfully, deeply to Diana and just enough to Lewis and Carlos to be polite as a Yautja would be.
"Incredible!" Carlos whispered as he released his grip on K'Shai's hand.
He cleared his throat, clearly trying to delicately step into an uncomfortable, but obvious, question.
"K'Shai, it's good to see you again." He said. "Where is R'chnt?"
She eyed him with a thoughtful gaze and took a deep breath before a small smile cracked her lips again.
"Carlos. You should know, that what you did for him that day…." She spoke slowly, almost a little as though she had to think about how to say the words in English. "… will never be forgotten. Not by me, as I am eternally grateful to you. R'chnt will not forget, and our children will know how you helped him that day. He is alive because of you."
Lewis and Carlos seemed momentarily relieved and perplexed. She said clearly that he was alive, but yet he was also not present.
"Is he…" Lewis started to question and K'Shai gazed to him.
"He will be along in a few moments." She informed him.
"I just wanted to see you again. I cannot stay long. This child, she will be coming soon."
They smiled and offered congratulations. As they talked, Kelly excitedly burst through the crowd and threw her arms around K'Shai happily while Nancy looked on quietly, smiling and nodding an acknowledgement to K'Shai.
Her eyes scanned the crowd and she noticed more than a few familiar, stunned, faces gaze at her and then quite noticeably caught their attention drift back towards the entry gates, past the two dozen hunters standing quietly in the street.
The Yautja parted to each side, clearing a path for a new group of hunters who brought with them, on a hovering platform, the massive head of a queen of the bugs. At the head of the formation was R'chnt. He stepped forward powerfully and moved next to K'Shai, nodding to Lewis and Carlos quietly as she clutched her hand into his.
Carlos scanned R'chnt's body as he approached and noticed the once gaping hole in his side had healed over into a large, obvious scar; a sign of the battle he barely survived.
R'chnt spoke curtly. His deep, alien voice resounding across the hushed crowd.
"K'rut bpi-de."
Lewis and Carlos looked to K'Shai and she smiled.
"It is done." She said loudly, casting her voice across as much of the crowd as she could.
The following cheers, howls, and rejoicing carried on without end. Some of the crowd of spectators moved off to celebrate in their own way while others remained gazing at the Yautja and trying to catch a glimpse of the Yautja King and the human princess that had come to be his bride, as they had learned of the pair now standing before them.
A man appeared between the parting crowd and behind Lewis and Carlos, surrounded by his own backing of uniformed men and women. He stopped before K'Shai and R'chnt, just a few feet past Lewis and extended his arm forward as she spoke throatily.
"I am honored to meet you. I have heard so much about you."
With a growl, R'chnt stepped forward, disallowing physical contact with K'Shai and the man stepped back with alarm. Lewis sidled closer, positioning himself in between R'chnt and the man as he spoke.
"This is the President of the Western World Coalition." He said to K'Shai, who did not seem as impressed as she clearly was expected to be by the man's title.
"President Atwater, this is K'Shai and R'chnt."
Lewis indicated between them and the man stepped forward hesitantly again, eyeing R'chnt carefully.
"Thank you. Thank you so much for all you have done." The President said.
"Our world has already begun to change and rebuild, and now, we can move beyond the walls of New Haven. Thank you. You truly have changed history." He looked between R'chnt and K'Shai as he spoke, clearly trying to gauge their reaction.
K'Shai remained equally as motionless and quiet as R'chnt for a moment before she turned to Lewis.
"I will see you both again, some day."
She paused and reached into a satchel at her side and retrieved two necklaces with dangling pendants that looked to be made from gold embossed bone.
Each one had a blue spot in the center that almost appeared at first glance to be some kind of crystal. As Lewis and Carlos took their pendants, they realized the center of the medallion was glowing softly.
"I will find you."
K'Shai said as she nodded to the pendants, obviously implying they had some kind of tracking device in them.
"We must go."
The President stepped forward with a start.
"There will be… a celebration tonight! Won't you both… and your people… stay? I would like to learn about you."
K'Shai smiled dismissively and repeated her words.
Lewis, Diana, and Carlos walked with her through the city, out of the gates, and to a full size Yautja ship, R'chnt's hunt ship as she identified it, that was landed a short distance away. W'rsa stood tall at the ramp, with a dual-tipped spear taller than he was, at the ready in one hand.
He nodded his helmeted head to the familiar humans and returned into the vessel a moment before R'chnt and K'Shai as she said her goodbyes.
Lewis and the others watched her walk up the ramp at the back of the vessel, and a door slid closed as the ship rumbled to life and rose off the ground.
K'Shai took a deep, content breath and walked through the elliptical kehrite, sparring arena, at the back of the ship, past trophy cases that displayed the skulls of kills of all who had hunted under R'chnt's tutelage.
As the doors slid closed over the trophy racks, K'Shai only barely glanced at the skull of a Yautja of the M'jor clan, with a broken lower right jaw.
She looked to R'chnt and delicately caressed him down his arm and across his chest, running her hand down to the healed wound on his abdomen as she smiled at him.
"We will be home soon, my K'Shai." He said quietly as he stroked her face with a small smile on his upper tusks.
She tipped her head into his palm and smiled widely, then gasped with pain as she grabbed her belly and grimaced.
"It's time!"