Children of the One

         Corporal Jake Carter stared out at the bleak landscape of Western Europe from the turret of an old M-60 tank. The winter winds whipped past his space suited body as he scanned the horizon for any sign of the enemy. There was no one out here. The fanatics of the Children of the One were not showing their faces today. No one ever showed their face anymore in this bleak wasteland. Everyone stayed in their respective bio domes where they were safe from the radiation.
         Carter started up the eighty year old tank that had been his home for three days now. It was time to go back to the New Munich bio dome. By tonight he would be in the loving arms of his German wife and sleeping with her under the covers of his own bed. Of course he had six hours of decontamination protocol before he could be with her. It would be the longest six hours of his life.
         Carter lowered his space suited head through the driver’s hatch and closed the pressurized door. Back during the cold war with the soviets, the tank had needed a four man crew to operate. Now everything was automated. Jake could drive the vehicle, aim and fire the cannon and even operate the computer operated machine gun from one console. It was even more automated than the M-1 Abrams that had initially replaced the M-60 series.
         He put the old tank in gear and climbed over a ridge. He pulled onto a black strip of concrete that had once been the autobahn. Rusted hulks of cars would occasionally block his path and Jake would gently nudge them to the side with his passing. This part of the road had not been cleared yet of debris. There was not enough traffic this far east of Munich to warrant it.
         Carter carefully veered off of the autobahn momentarily to circumnavigate the crumbling remains of a highway overpass. It looked as if an old style tractor trailer had been stalled on it for the past one hundred years and the bridge had finally given way to the vehicle’s weight. He looked at the sight of it on his view screen in wonder as he passed. He tried to imagine what the world was like before the war. He wondered what life was like before the mutations started to take over the earth.          
         He still couldn’t believe that life had found a way despite the intense radiation. There were rumors that huge forests of bizarre plant life were now thriving in what had once been Russia. Of course they could just be rumors for he had not ever seen one mutation since he had joined the military.
Jake was honestly convinced that only more desolation lied past the waste lands of Poland. There was no way that life could exist in this environment. It just wasn’t possible. Little did the man realize that he was about to find out just how possible it truly was.
         Jake had gotten twenty miles closer to Munich when he first saw them. His mouth went dry when he caught his first glimpse of the Children of the One. It was the first time that he had ever laid eyes upon the enemy; upon the genetic mutations. They were what many had called, The New Race. He found it hard to believe that these creatures had once been men. Men don’t usually have pale, reptilian like skin or stand twenty-five feet tall.
         There were two of them and they had apparently ambushed a military troop convoy that was en route to Munich. There wasn’t much left of the convoy. The men and women inside the trucks never stood a chance. Some had been eaten out right, spacesuit and all. Other people had been dropped into specimen jars so that they could be taken to the convergence. None of them would ever see the Munich bio dome in a human occupied state ever again.
         Jake had pulled the tank up behind the wreck of a tanker trailer truck and cut the engine. One of the two children had flipped over a supply truck and was now picking through the contents with the wonder of a child. Heavy crates were smashed open and artillery shells tossed aside as if they were small acorns. The two mutants had not spotted Jake’s tank as of yet. The howling winds of winter had masked his approach.
         Jake was so entranced by the nightmarish sight of the two children in front of him that he had neglected to watch his aft monitor. A third Child of the One had flanked him and had approached from the rear. He didn’t know that she was there until he felt the back end of the tank lift up.  Jake suddenly found his tank being flipped over the wreck of the tanker trailer. It would be the last thing that he remembered; as Jake Carter that is.
         He would wake up three days later in what appeared to be some sort of isolation booth. He couldn’t remember his name or remember what had happened before he blacked out. He only knew that he was thirsty. His reptilian tongue kept darting from his mouth and tasting the air around him. It was seeking out any source of moisture that might be in the air.  Reptilian tongue; that wasn’t right, he thought. Men don’t have the tongues of a snake. Or do they?
         He heard a door open and he sat up to see the most beautiful female he had ever seen. From his recollection it had been the only female that he had ever seen. She looked familiar somehow. Hadn’t she flipped his tank over? Wait, he thought. What was a tank?
         “Welcome, new one.” The female said in greeting. “I am glad that the transformation was a success. Many of the pink skins don’t convert well.”
““Where am I?” Jake asked her.
         “You are in a place that was once called Moscow. The children call it Deliverance City.” The female said with a smile. “It is a city set high in the Tarawa trees among the highest branches.”
“I don’t remember anything.” Jake proclaimed to her. “Who am I? For that matter, who are you?”
         “I am Lateen, daughter of the chieftain of the city. You are of the newly reborn. You have been named Jayden by my father.”
“Jake,” he replied with hesitation. “My name is Jake. I remember my name being Jake!”
         “You are no longer the human, Jake!” Lateen said sternly. “You will not mention the name of your former self again! You will not mention your former life as a pink skin. It is no more!”
         Lateen’s reptilian like eyes seemed to grow soft in the next moment. She stared intently at Jake and after a long moment reached out and pulled him close to her. They embraced in a passionate human style kiss, although there was nothing human about it. Two snake-like tongues suddenly caressed each other in a moment of passion. In that moment Lateen had chosen her mate.
         The kiss would lead to much more and they would both fornicate right there in the isolation booth. They would wrap their prehensile reptilian tales around one another in a passionate embrace. They would clean the parasites from each other’s scales with their mouths. They would mate.
         Later that afternoon Lateen would return to her living space and lay the eggs that would start the new colony in the Munich bio dome. Most of the pink skin abominations had been removed from the dome and the ones that the children hadn’t been able to convert had been eaten. Jake Carter had come close to succumbing to such a fate. Lateen had almost eaten him after she had pulled him from the tank.
         Instead she had chosen him as a mate. She had chosen him as the future of her people. Soon the last remnants of the pink skins would be swept from the Earth and the children’s task of reshaping the world would be complete. Her father would be pleased.
         She finished laying the new eggs that would be taken out to Munich. Lateen stood up from her task and walked over to a small, atmosphere controlled bird cage that was suspended from the ceiling of her living space. She opened the cage door and grabbed the frightened female human inside with her claw. She tossed the squirming German woman into her mouth as if the pink skin was nothing more than a breath mint. She swallowed the woman much the same way a snake would a mouse. A bulge slid down her long neck.
         Lateen had no way of knowing that she had just eaten Jake Carter’s wife. If she had she would have found the idea rather amusing. In a symbolic way she had swallowed the last aspect of her new mate’s humanity. She had taken the last shred from him that might have held him bound to the pink skins.
         Lateen walked from her living room and stepped out onto her balcony to gaze at the surrounding forest. Everything glowed with a pink ambience. The trunks of the Tarawa trees snarled their way up to the sky all around her. Stalker birds flew among the upper branches in search of fresh prey. The world was beautiful to her. She couldn’t believe that she had once been a pink skin herself. She couldn’t believe that she had once viewed this lush pink environment as an abomination.
                Lateen had once been a human named Anastasia Cherenkov. Her father had once been the premier of Russia. Her father had been the very man who had started World War three one hundred years ago. He had been the only one on the earth brave enough to reshape humanity into a brave new image. He was the only one with the vision and daring to take the human race into the next phase of its evolution.
                She suddenly looked up into the sky with surprise as something appeared above the trees. A great metal bird was flying through the air. It had fixed, swept back wings and a grand tail rising vertically from its back. It made a strange whining noise as it soared overhead.
                The strange metal bird was dropping eggs down upon the city in an effort to make them hatch. Lateen had never seen an airplane before. Unfortunately, it would be the last thing that she ever would see. It would seem that some of the remaining pink skins living on the Earth did not wish to be converted.
                The hidden remnants of the U.S. Air Force had resurfaced that day. Through a massive bombing campaign they eradicated the Children of the One from the planet. Jake Carter would never become the king of Deliverance City. He would not even get to see the brave new world that Lateen had tried to make him a part of. By the end of the day all of the Children of the One would be dead. World War three had finally ended.