Android Alien Apocalypse Harem - Arc 1 Box Set

by Natalie Hunter

  "I think you should stay here. I know how to get to the exit, and, well, there's no point risking you being seen coming back after I've left, is there?"

  "Won't you feel better if you don't have to do it alone, though?"

  "I'll be alone as soon as I'm on the other side of the door anyway. At least, I hope I will..."

  Madeleine conceded that he was right, that what little comfort she might be able to give on his walk to the door wasn't really of great enough worth to take the risk, and with a tearful hug, she told him she'd be praying for him every day, and that she would never give up hope that he was alive out there, and on his way back for her, to take her to a better world.

  Trying not to tear up himself he replied:

  "Don't get too ahead of yourself. Save the prayers for if I'm not back in a couple of hours with my tail between my legs because I got chased by a wolf or something..."

  He was joking, of course, a wolf - at least as far as he knew from the archives, having never seen any kind of animal himself - would still be higher on his list of things he'd like to face than Janice and her chemical castration.

  Madeleine sniffed a little, and so he kissed her, and told her that the best thing she could do was get some rest. He knew she wouldn't be able to, but there was no other advice to hand, really. He felt guilty, knowing that she was in for a tough time of it, covering for him, and also that he'd be leaving her burdened with so many unknowns about what had become of him after his flight from Sanctuary.

  But, needs must.

  ***

  The main exit was past the lake, and up a steep incline that everybody in Sanctuary pretty much ignored. Most kids would have at one point asked someone 'where does that path go?' and been told that it just lead to the dead end of the door that people had used to enter Sanctuary on the day humanity fell. Some, like Curtis, would be curious enough to walk that long, steep path, but only once, because it was tiring and the door really was that boring. For people who knew their whole world needed to be kept inside of these caves or they'd surely die, a door like that may as well have been no door at all.

  The lights used by the farm were bright even when all of the other lighting was off for the night, so it was no different from walking around the clear, clean lake in the middle of the day, only Curtis couldn't help but wonder if soon, he might actually get to see what the middle of the day looked like under the real sun. He needed to take out his flashlight though, the one he used for getting around Sanctuary after hours when he was needed to work on the archives, or when he was sneaking out to Sophie's room because she'd made some lame yet successful attempt to lure him and toy with him, to make it up the path to the door itself.

  He also needed his flashlight to look at the copy of the code that had come out of Madeleine's bible, and to use the safe-style turning lock to input it into the door. This thing had been built to last. Mercifully there was no sticking or grinding as he turned the dial, despite its many decades of neglect. Adrenaline rose inside him as he got to the final parts of the code. Will it really work? Did I make any mistakes? If it worked this easily, will it work again if I need to come back through? His heart pounded with every move of his fingers.

  The last character in the code was an N. And unremarkable letter, but the one that would decide whether or not his first attempt at getting through the longwinded series of letters and numbers without error was a success. It was with both relief and dread that he heard a loud clunk from inside the thick metal structure of the door as he entered his N. It had worked, at least, it had done something to the door, and that meant that now, he actually had to use it.

  Apart from dust falling down on his hair, nothing stood in his way as he opened up the door, and, flashlight pointing ahead, stepped through it. What was on the other side was just more of the same rocky path, but that was to be expected - Sanctuary was underground after all, he couldn't expect to be able to tell what sort of world awaited on the surface from here, where it was still very easy to say no to it and go back.

  "Well, here goes nothing, then," he whispered to himself, as he closed the door behind him as gently as he could, hearing it clunking back into its locked state automatically.

  Chapter 7

  As he felt the air change, and began to see some glimmers of what must be natural light against the stone pathway, he also started to see things that had never existed in his world in Sanctuary before. A patch of green here that was a real plant, one that grew here for no other reason than because it could, rather than because it was being cultivated by people for food. A small creature with lots of legs - a real live spider. Nothing lived in Sanctuary, where there was no light that wasn't man made and nothing to feed on that wasn't created for humans, so all he knew about such creatures had come from reading. He was still unclear on whether these things were safe, though, so he didn't scoop up the spider to examine it, even though he really wanted to.

  Finally, there was an opening, though it was overgrown with ferns and he had to tear his way out. He didn't mind the green stains and sap on his hands, though - it was fascinating to get to touch something wild.

  But as he pulled his body out of the darkness, he realized that one of the most basic truths he had held in his mind for his whole existence was in fact, a lie - or at least, a misconception. The network of caves that made up the foundation for Sanctuary were not deep below ground at all. They were inside a mountain.

  Wind whipped at his hair and he felt the chill of an early morning outside for the first time, as he looked out from the cave entrance he had emerged from over far more of the old world than he had been expecting to see. Perhaps time was a little off on the clocks in Sanctuary after all these years, or perhaps it had taken him longer to get from the door to here than he had thought, but the sun was almost fully up, and the view he had was both clear, and bewildering. To one side, he saw rows and rows of tall white windmills on hills of green, next to more fields with gleaming panels that he guessed, due to them being next to the wind farms, were for gathering solar energy - something else he knew about from his deep dives into the culture of the old world in the archives.

  Well, I can guess what they are for, but they look well maintained, and not like they were ever in some kind of apocalypse either. Does that mean this place didn't actually get hit by the invasion after all? Or does it mean that these energy farms weren't here before, that there are other people here now, using electricity and keeping them running?

  There was no other clue in this vista as to what kind of world awaited him if he descended from the mountain - his view was blocked in one direction by a large tree growing out from the rocks next to where he stood, and beyond the wind farm he could only see forests and more fields - too distant to tell if they were tended or overgrown.

  It was with great trepidation that he decided to try and go around the mountain and see what could be seen from the other side. It wasn't just that he wasn't convinced his crappily made shoes - the only shoes he had owned in Sanctuary, issued to him to use when he worked out in the communal gym - had any grip to them at all. It was also the fact that there was something symbolic about moving away from the entrance to Sanctuary. Something that meant he was really, actually doing this, not just getting his thrill of seeing the sun and the sky and the green living world, and dashing back to the unpleasant yet known future Sanctuary held.

  Don't be so stupid, as long as you can find your way back it's no big deal. Can't just stand here scratching my ass waiting for this not to feel dangerous.

  He took a deep breath, after giving himself this little pep talk, and began to very, very carefully follow the stony remnants of a path that wound around the mountain, but also downwards toward the world below.

  I guess this was how our ancestors got up to Sanctuary that day. It must be a fairly safe track, given how much stuff they must have shifted into Sanctuary when they were building it, and how fast people would have needed to access it if it really had ever been used because of a nuc
lear war.

  But if it had once been a well maintained path, which the evidence of what would once have been a wooden handrail suggested, it was now overgrown, and while this may have been nothing to a seasoned outdoorsman, to Curtis it meant slow progress, with every step carefully premeditated to avoid nettles and brambles and other suspicious looking flora.

  It was after a good twenty minutes of this that his view began to change, and show him something new.

  There were roads. At least, there was one road, that he could see clearly down below, passing by close to the mountain's base, he guessed, and off in the direction of the sunrise. But a road alone didn't mean anything. No, it was the thing he was sure he had seen pelting down that road, sunlight glinting off of metal, or glass, and much too fast for an animal or a person.

  A car. It has to be. Or, at least, some kind of vehicle. And if there are cars, moving, traveling cars, then there are people trying to get to places.

  There are people out here.

  Squinting at the horizon in the direction the car had been going in, he could just about make out the structured forms of buildings. That had to be it - some kind of civilization that still existed out here, with cars and a town and who knows what else. Old world things he had only read about, and progress too, progress people had made while he and his community were jerking off in a big cave thinking they were the last of humanity.

  He wanted to laugh at them, waking up inside the mountain for another identical day (though of course, it wouldn't be a normal day at all, once people noticed he was gone). He felt a surge of excited optimism that damn near made him want to sprint down the rest of the mountain and run with all his power until he reached that town, or another one, or until one of the cars stopped him and, fascinated to hear his story about the silly people in the caves, took him to their amazing, hi-tech home and let him drink beer and taste meat and flirt with their pretty daughters.

  But before he could get too carried away with that idea, the more cautious part of his mind spoke up.

  Unless the car, and the town, and the energy farms don't belong to humans. What if the invaders destroyed humanity after all, and then just stayed?

  Of course, whatever there was down there, alien or human, the option to stay on the mountain alone wasn't a viable one. Yes, he could probably find a way to survive hiding up here if he had to, but that was probably a plan for after running away from the aliens, if there were any.

  With his mind flipping from thrilled anticipation of the wonderful new human civilization he was about to encounter one minute to imagining what an alien that feasted on human flesh might look like the next, Curtis made the painstaking journey down the trail, with the road below his goal.

  Chapter 8

  When he reached the bottom of the mountain, finding a flat pathway that seemed to branch off in two directions, he needed to take a moment to rest and get his bearings.

  It was hot now, the morning almost over, and the exertion of climbing down with the canvas bag of supplies on his back had made him sweat. He sat on a boulder, took out some water, and looked back up the mountain, trying to pick out the height at which he'd started. It was so weird to think that he'd spent his whole life inside that mountain, and that everyone he had ever known was still in there now. To them, where he was right now was another world, and yet, he was so close. With a last look at it, and a last silent promise to Maddy that if this went well, he'd be back for her straight away, he stood to make his choice about which path to take.

  If he followed one part of the path back around the mountain, it would probably lead to wherever the people in Sanctuary had originally come from. Little had ever been known - at least by his generation - about where Sanctuary was in relation to other things in the outside world, or why the particular people who first made their way up there on the day of the invasion had been chosen, or had known about the advanced nuclear shelter in the first place. Had they all been people working on it, and had had to use it before they'd had a chance to sell spaces there to people? Had they been local VIPs from some nearby city? Was it a secret that Sanctuary existed, or were there projects to build structures like it all over the place? He had a lot of questions, and he was sure that following the trail they must have taken would lead him to plenty of clues about his ancestors, and the intentions of the place he was born in.

  But that wasn't the path he took.

  There would be a time later, if he still cared to find out, to worry about Sanctuary's history and why his life up until now had been the way it had. He couldn't prioritize learning about the past - no matter how personal it was - over figuring out what the present was like. And so he took the other path, the one that would lead to the road. Somewhat refreshed by his little break, he did something he'd never done in real space with a real destination before, too. He ran.

  It seemed that on the flat, dusty path he could exert himself without the same problems as on the mountain. He didn't really question it - he had spent hours every day working out because that's just what people in Sanctuary did, and so it didn't occur to him that he was making any particular demands on his body, or that his stamina was good. Instead, he just enjoyed it.

  The scrubby little tress and hedges around him were alive, there were birds wheeling in the sky, the sun was just... everywhere. He had never been hot before just from existing. It was the same temperature all the time in Sanctuary, and so while he'd read about weather and seen pictures in the archives of people in fur coats out in the snow, and people in little more than underwear standing on sandy beaches in the heat, he had had no concept before that your skin could feel hot or cold without you doing anything to make it that way, like working out or taking a cold shower. It felt strange, the almost searing feel of the powerful sun on his skin, but he welcomed it, this was how people were supposed to feel, right?

  Of course, he was actually burning horribly. There were UV lamps in Sanctuary, but his pale skin had never been out in the real sun before, and all of the sensations he was experiencing, that were to him these wonderful signs of being alive in his natural environment, were really the signs of a pasty idiot running around in the middle of the day in summer with just a t-shirt and shorts on to cover himself. The sun was too bright for his eyes, too, but he didn't know that either.

  By the time the road was in sight, he was in a state that anyone normal would recognize as moderately severe sunburn, with a good measure of heatstroke setting in. But while he wasn't comfortable, that was for sure, he was putting it all down to some kind of adjustment his body needed to go through, and trying to ignore the pounding headache and the increasing tightness of his skin. He'd take some of his aspirin when he stopped. Maybe he'd stop now, by the roadside. There weren't any cars yet - he had been listening for the sound cars made in old videos, and he hadn't heard it - so perhaps it would be a good time to stop and rest, and watch the road. He would see when a vehicle did come by, if he could make out if the driver was alien or human.

  Like the harshness of the sun, shade was a new concept to him, but he found that by an old billboard - the poster on it weathered beyond recognition - there was a patch of shadow where it was cooler to be. It stood to reason that it would shield him from the sun, it had just never occurred to him to seek out cover before. He sat on the dusty ground, realizing his legs were stiff, and the skin on them, and his arms, was an angry pink. He took two of the little pressed aspirin pills and washed them down with a mouthful of now, warmish water, thinking as he swallowed them of Madeleine, and wondering if the things she had packed for him would last long enough if he had to walk as far as the buildings in the distance to attain any other supplies. He wondered too, if she was OK, if she'd found a suitable lie or a way of denying she knew anything about his disappearance.

  He closed his eyes for a little while, marveling at how the blackness behind his eyes was actually red out here, if he pointed his sore face at the sun. He realized he was very, very tired. He hadn't slept for so long, but so mu
ch had happened and changed that he'd forgotten for a while there that sleep was even a part of life. He was just beginning to doze off in his patch of shade, his canvas bag making a horrible yet functional pillow, rough and lumpy against his burnt skin, when a subtle rumbling rose up through the hard, dry earth underneath him, and the sound of something rolling, rolling fast, caused him to snap to full alertness instantly.

  He stumbled to the side of the road, shielding his eyes as he tried to look at what it was that was coming. His plan had been to try and see whether the first vehicle that came by had a human looking driver, and if so, try and flag down the second. If the car was being driven by something else, well, he'd have to form a new plan - one based around hiding, more than likely. But this didn't sound quite as he had expected a car, or one of its variants that he was aware of, like a lorry or a motorcycle or a tractor, to sound at all. It didn't sound an awful lot like anything. It was as if there was no hefty motor powering it, but wheels were definitely carrying something heavy along the road, rumbling towards him. A blinding gleam was coming, the sun reflecting off of the machine, so he could place it, but he couldn't see what it looked like at all.

  But it could see him, that was for sure. It was slowing down.

  Chapter 9

  His throat tightened. This was indeed a car, a red car, in fact, and immaculately maintained. Clean, too. The lack of sound must have meant it was powered by electricity or something, he realized. That had been a thing, too, in the archives, he had just internalized the sound of the growling racecars he'd watched in videos as a kid and expected to hear that. But his plan, his plan to stand here ignored and try and pick out the shape of the driver as the vehicle sped past, well, it had been pretty flawed to begin with.