Chapter Text
Jim Kirk is stealing an airplane when the world ends. It's old MacKinnon's crop duster and Jim's never flown anything before, but he figures he's a quick learner and it's something new to try. Flying that is, not stealing.
So he sneaks over to the rusty machine after he sees the old man park it in a field and go inside the house for lunch. It's nice that no one ever locks their doors or takes the keys out of the ignition out in the rural farmlands of Iowa, because five minutes later Jim's got the plane rolling, the old farmer is hobbling after the plane, yelling and waving his arms, and just as the crop duster is about to crash into the fenced copse of trees at the end of the field, the plane is airborne.
This is easy, Jim thinks to himself through the euphoria of adrenaline that seems to lift off the top of his head and hazes his vision around the edges. He's still low enough to see the details of fields and bushes and the faces turning upwards to stare as he skims the rooftops of the town three miles from the homestead.
Then the sky goes white.
Jim jerks the controls hard in reflex but the plane is suddenly dead, banking sharply to the left and down. He curses and struggles to right it when a low rumble and a wave of heat catches up to him, washing over the tiny crop duster, growing louder and louder over the silence that is the engines until it fills his ears, an incoherent shout that rattles his teeth and makes his eyes water. He claps his hands over his ears and the plane begins to roll again, bucking hard in sudden winds that batter the small craft. He barely notices.
Then the noise stops and Jim grabs the controls again as if in a trance. The sky is fiery red. At the horizon to his left an angry shape billows to the sky, a shape that makes his heart lurch, that's he's only seen before in history textbooks captioned The beginning of the end of World War 2 in the Pacific theater. He doesn't realize how lucky he is to not have been blinded.
It's north or east. Maybe Chicago is in that direction. Maybe New York. Can you even see that far? he wonders crazily. God, is it the Russians? Chinese? the North Koreans? --his mind yammers, and he firmly shuts that part of his mind down. Screaming in panic won't help with what's immediately important: landing in one piece. Priorities. Prioritizing. It's a tactic he learned from his dad, before George Kirk died three years ago in Afghanistan. God, so many must be dead. Is it just one strike, or many? One city, or all? Just America, or the entire world?
Then he realizes he's been hearing a high whine, and as he looks up from frantically scanning the ground for a likely place to crash-land dark shapes are coming at him from out of the red glare on the horizon.
He stares for a moment and the shapes grow bigger, impossibly fast. "Fuck!" Jim screams and jerks the controls hard to the right. But the plane is still incommunicado and even at the best of times not a fighter jet, so it's got all the turning finesse of a dead cow. Holy shit, they're shooting at him. Bright flashes of light arrow past, searing the air.
Then the big metal things are upon him. They look like some sort of futuristic hover plane, his mind screams at him from a distant, compartmentalized part of his brain; the rest of him is working on autopilot. As they go by one clips him and shears the wing off as neatly as running a knife through butter.
I'm only seventeen and I don't want to die, you fucking bastards he thinks, smashed to one side as the plane breaks apart in mid-air, the brown and yellow blur that is the ground coming towards him at frightening speed.
I forgot to feed the cats is the last thing he thinks before he hits.
#
It's snowing.
He grows aware of it as he opens his eyes, fat grey flakes falling from the sky onto his face. But there's something off about it. It's not cold, for one; he can't feel the little spots of chill on his face as they hit, and as they continue to come he becomes aware of a growing sense of unease.
He doesn't realize what the grey flakes are until he's lain there for a while, wondering at the greyness of the sky and at snow in July, and he licks his lips. Then he knows.
Ashes.
Realization comes with memory and he sits up with a gasp, suddenly all too aware of a splitting headache. His wrist protests as he gingerly touches his forehead. Everything hurts so much that he's afraid to look down, expecting to see himself bleeding out into the dark soil, but he seems intact. All limbs there, no wounds beyond superficial scratches and bruises.
God, he's alive.
He twists to look around. The sudden movement brings on nausea so severe he finds himself face down in a pool of that morning's breakfast, breathing raggedly as his vision clears.
He wipes his mouth with one dirty hand and more carefully turns to see the twisted wreckage of the plane behind him. He must have been thrown clear when he'd crashed, his landing cushioned by the soft, tilled earth of the soy bean field. He realizes the depth of his luck when he notices a pile of rocks only a few feet away from where his head landed, dug up that spring to be thrown away.
Then he looks up, fighting dizziness.
It's a nightmare landscape, that obscene mushroom looming over the far horizon, now stretched to one side in the middle as if pulled by a childish finger. Thick black plumes of smoke rise from points everywhere he looks and they're close, very close. His disoriented mind whirls, wondering briefly if he's died and this is hell, before he picks out the gnarled pine tree that marks the corner of Brody's and Jameson's properties that's the only pine in Riverside County, and he knows exactly where he is.
Houses. Those are houses that are burning.
"Mom," he whispers, and starts to run.
#
The corn blocks his view as he goes, the breath rasping in his throat and his head throbbing with each step. He allows himself the luxury of hope as he nears the Kirk farm, but that traitor part of his mind, the clicking remote part that's cataloguing and analyzing everything like a computer, knows what the pall of smoke means. The chill in his gut grows as he pushes through the tall plants.
Something makes him stop just inside the edge of the field, something instinctual that perhaps was passed from wilder forebears living in hunted fear millions of years ago, and this is what saves his life.
The Kirk farm is still smoldering, and Jim has time to wonder how long he was out and if his mom and Sam might have been able to escape, when he sees movement out of the corner of his eye and freezes.
It looks like a man, but even at a distance it's obvious there's something very wrong with it. Even without the gleam of dark grey metal, the shoulders are too broad, the chest too deep, the legs too long. It's an obscene parody of a man and Jim doesn't truly understand what it is until Frank runs up behind it, screaming incoherently, and tries to take its head off with a shovel. It's a good foot taller than Frank, who's 6'2, and it reaches out one-handed as the shovel simply clanks against its head as if made of tin. Frank screams as it crushes his head like a grape, a terrible, squashing sound.
Holy fuck, it's a robot, Jim thinks numbly, and now knows beyond a doubt that his mother and Sam are dead. The rage and grief that bubble up into his gut make him shake, and he finds his hands curling into fists. The cornstalks around him tremble in sympathy too, a dry, rustling sound, transmitted to other cornstalks around him like a wave.
The robot's head snaps around.
Jim sucks in his breath and eases back on his knees, willing himself to be invisible and to not even breathe, rage going ashen in his mouth. Sam was a child of the 80's and a tv remote-hogger, so Jim’s been hostage to enough bad 80's scifi movies to hope that this particular monstrosity's not equipped with heat detectors or motion sensors or x-rays or anything.
He hears the whirr-clank of its servo joints as it comes over and he knows it's fatal to run. He presses his face into the loam, inhaling the rich organic scent of the earth, and prays.
It stands there, clicking and whirring. If Jim reaches out just two feet to his right, he can touch its leg.
Finally it makes a long sound, an electronic screech-moan like a fax machine crossed with rusty joints, and moves on.
#
He digs the remains of his mother and brother out of the ruins of the house the next morning, looking over his shoulder the entire time, and buries them by the apple tree. He wishes he could take them into town to bury them by his father but he doesn't want to risk being caught out in the open on the road; he no longer knows how safe it is out there, and he thinks they would understand.
He buries Frank where he fell.
They'd never gotten along, the gruff older farmer never understanding or tolerating the rebellious child not of his own seed, who dreamed wilder dreams than he could ever conceive, of life in the big city or even in the stars. They'd been antithetical to each other, both strong-willed and big-mouthed, until Jim had simply begun spending more time out of the house than in and had begun his career as juvenile delinquent in earnest, but he owes the man at least that modicum of respect. No one deserves to die that way, and everyone deserves a proper grave.
The only thing Jim salvages from the house for himself is a charred photograph. His father, mother, Sam. Himself as a baby. They're all at Disneyworld and they all look young and happy, impossibly so in this world that Jim now finds himself.
He turns his face away from the cloud and starts to walk.