Dawn of Hope- Exodus

by Dobrin Kostadinov

  ‘Put the ranks in order! Carry the wounded and the dead away to the medical points,’ Milev instructed again through a megaphone from inside the shelter. The soldiers rushed to all sides, obeying his orders, and I gazed ahead at the mountain. Obviously today luck was not really taking our side–I saw massive cumulative clouds coming our way. And that could mean only one thing–the Vacari were approaching us . . . Again . . . The attack a while ago was just a warm-up before the main event. The grayish-white were coming straight at us, ignoring the meteorological threat, with the single objective of exterminating us. Their beastly cries were once again echoing through the otherwise silent forest and we had to form new defense lines, broken as they were here and there. The Officer, wearing his white uniform, was standing right beside me when he threw the radio on the ground. Seconds ago he was taking over it heatedly, but now things were different. He looked straight into my eyes and spoke to me not as if I was one of his subordinates, but rather as I were his friend–one whose both good and bad sides he had seen.

  ‘Nolan,’ he addressed me by my first name for the first time. ‘The Colonel is alive!’ he said half-excited, half-shocked by the good news he had received over the radio. But I could not feel any happiness because I knew that the good news was part and parcel with a bad one. ‘There’s something else, though. This is by far the gravest attack we’ll had to face. The data we’re receiving are not good, not at all. We have to withstand it, we need to have hope that Thomas will be able to do his part,’ he added.

  ‘What are the news from the bridge?’ I asked impatiently, longing for some clarity on the recent events.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he patted me on the shoulder and went on. ‘Just be brave and stay alive!’ Those were his final words before he turned around and left the shelter. I went out, already impervious to fear and capable of anything. Milev moved away and headed towards the flag whose pole was stuck in the ground where Harry was desperately trying to revive, in a hopeless attempt, one of the poisoned soldiers who perished in his arms. The Bulgarian patted him on the shoulder and the Englishman was evidently in a state of shock due to that immediate experience of his. The flagbearer stood up and the two men faced each other. The Officer started talking, but I never knew what he said. Were they a few kind words of consolation or were they words of precious advice like the one he had given me the night before, it did not matter, as they were, nevertheless, imbued with the emotion that he managed to inspire in me as well. Milev stretched his arm towards the young man, intending to shake hands with him, but Rogers did something else. He shoved Milev’s hand back curtly and then drew him into a tight embrace as though he was hugging an old frend. Maybe now the two men were finally speaking the same language without any trace of spite or accusation–the very thing Dimitar dreamt of. They looked at each other one last time and then the Officer turned and walked back in my direction. His eyes were on the brink of overflowing with tears, yet his face was stretched into a smile as though he was not about to go into battle with an immortal army of beasts. Sorrow, fear, hesitation or wrongdoing–now all of them were suppressed on the inside. He climbed on top of the shelter, stood up proudly in his white uniform, pulled out his sabre and spoke.

  ‘Fighters! Yes, that is what all of you are down to the last one! One final outburst of resistance–that is all that I can ask of you. Don’t do it for me, do it for the people inside. For your wives and children, for the families, for those you know and for those you don’t. Do it for the man that stands beside you and has your back with their own body! Do it for honor and glory because your name and your blood will be what people will remember forever. On the edge of our hope, never ever give up! We need to defeat them or die, we’re left with no other choice!’ He delivered the shortest, most inspiring and emotionally difficult to give speech I had ever heard. Despite the negative experiences, his words managed to convince me to make my way through to the front ranks without a single drop of fear and to become part of the resistance regardless of my task as a cameraman. As always, great plans need great leaders . . . About sixty-five feet ahead of me Harry was advancing on his quest, waving the flag of our humble, yet strong army.

  ‘Soldiers! Show them what sort of sons our wretched planet had brought to life! ‘Chaaarge!’ the Officer yelled in his parade uniform, raising his sabre high above his head, shouting at the top of his voice as the artillery boomed with a rumble behind him.

  The shells fell down close to the roots of the trees and the hellish creatures suddenly leapt out of the forest with severity. Once again we were the first to attack and our tanks and rocket launchers commenced their deadly fire series. Vacari rushed up the slope like a colony of ants which had to vanquish the neighboring anthill. The champions in charge of the offensive dropped and died with deafening cries, scattered by our powerful field guns and the last in their ranks became first. They reached the deep trench and the fence in under a minute. This time, with their battalion of black members, they were one too many and more indomitable than before. I loaded my gun, made sure that the cameras were recording the events and dashed ahead in aid of the second defense line.

  Stronger than ever before in both fortitude and numbers and in spite of the countless victims they assaulted the first defense line where our five fearless heroes slaughtered the enemy, showing no mercy. All of our fighters had it clear that the battle would be fierce, deadly and that the time for sacrifice was now or never . . .

  The fighting units flocked to the passage to guard it vehemently. Suddenly the whole plateau filled up with yells which echoed off the forest and outshouted even the cries of the Vacari. They came in terrible, thick waves, crept and crawled up the slopes which were all covered with the carcasses of their own kind, soaked with the colorless blood of their brethren, but that did not stop them the least bit. With a shower of bullets and projectiles the brave soldiers all smeared with blood, shot out of command, out of turn, each of them seeing to take down one more of the enemy.

  Once again they outnumbered us and Milev would not stop shouting.

  ‘Young fighters, chaaarge! Charge and make not a step back!’ he repeated again and again until he made sure that all of us would follow him to the very end if we had to. He put his sabre back into the scabbard, grabbed the electric shotgun of one of the deadly wounded soldiers and marched ahead, firing projectiles at the enraged grayish-black monsters that had penetrated our ranks. Dimitar went straight into the epicenter of events and led all of his men against the Vacari, marking the new beginning of our resistance. In the very first minute of the skirmish he managed to escape the kiss of death a couple of times, his white uniform turned scarlet, it was indeed sinister to watch. The soldiers went into rapture after seeing the grit and fortitude their commander showed. They flew into the battle with no fear, rushing to aid him and to prove they could mimic his heroic example.

  The Vacari, though, would not stop surging forward and along with them came a light fresh wind which brought cumlous clouds unseen in their size and power. I fired every now and then to cover Milev, hoping not to lose sight of him, but he merged with the five vehement executioners from Iris 1 who had formed a parameter of their own in an attempt to hold off the hundreds of demons that had already gotten past the defense line . . . After more than an hour of battling, the body count on our part increased copiously. Everyone rushed into attack with the bitter-sweet pleasure of dying right there before the eyes of the Universe on that glorious Menoetian edge. The defense systems that had been activated earlier on managed to block part of the assault of the enemy, but that was all it could do. Our ranks and front lines were reduced almost by a half. Little by little we could see how we were retreating. The struggle was relentlessly cruel, nevertheless Milev did not beat the retreat, there was simply no such option for him.

  For Christ’s sake, what is Thomas doing? If he doesn’t hurry, we’re all going to die, flashed through my mind, one of my many thoughts. At that instant something else happened, something we
had expected for a long time. Cold rain started pouring down with drops the size of a walnut–they crashed so hard onto every inch of space that they created a pool of splashed water around the point where they had fallen. The space we were taking up had shrunk even more–we were about five hundred feet away from the ship and the hope for a favorable outcome of the battle despite the large death toll on our part carried along the first thunderbolt which split the sky and hit the nearby forest with a deafening bang. Unfortunately, the result was not precisely as we predicted. The sad faces around me dreamt of being bestowed with yet another victory by the cold shower, but our expectations were shattered to pieces. This time the enemy did not back away. Neither the rain, nor the bolts of lightning seemed to have any negative impact on them even though the weather was progressively deteriorating. Completely unexpectedly, not far from us, the small number of black creatures regrouped. They halted their attack and began forming some sort of shape about three hundred feet away while our attention was diverted by dodging the attacks of their weaker brethren.

  What the heck was going on? The rain and the thunders failed to chase them away and Thomas’s mission had given no sign of success up until that moment. I had a feeling that that was the end. Everyone outside was doomed to be extirpated and the passengers locked inside the ship were sooner or later going to suffer the same fate as us. . .

  It was all so horrible! And just as I was thinking that things could not get any worse something shocking and unforeseen happened. It was an experience that kept you on tenterhooks and that could well help your hair turn white in next to no time. The thing, though, that went beyond my wildest nightmares, not only my own but also those of all human beings who had emigrated to Menoetius . . .

  The black creatures were climbing one on top of the other, thus forming a gigantic shapeless structure which resembled a pyramid of a sort as it was wide in the base and grew thinner as it went up higher until it ended in just one creature. I did not understand what they were doing, yet I knew that things were not headed anywhere good, not to mention that the wind and the rain were growing immensely stronger. Maybe they were trying to construct something like the black colossus or maybe they were attempting to become something like an antennae. I could not fathom their astounding behavior. And as I was trying to determine what to expect of the situation, the sky opened up and poured all of its wrath down on us. At the side of the black mountain an electric current ran through the atmosphere in the form of flat horizontal streaks of lightning. It took them less than a second to get to us, unloading themselves right on top of our heads. Hundreds of thunderbolts that nearly deafened and blinded me landed on the plateau in a matter of seconds. They evaporated all of the grayish-white attackers and struck down many of our soldiers, most of whom died on the spot. The machinery got burnt, the communications were down and the rain and the wind created the feeling of an impending apocalypse. All the cataslisms we had experienced so far felt like a walk in the park compared to what was lying ahead of us. The heaps of grayish-black creatures were struck a few dozen times more before the heavenly scourge came to an end. It was then that I realized that not we, but the shapeless figure was the real target. It started collapsing from top to bottom until at some point it remained steady at a certain level. No new Vacari came to merge with one another. All of them turned into a thick black substance which looked like ferromagnetic particles dipped into tar or some other thick dark liquid. The buzzing sound grew louder, reaching unheard-of decibels and that black jelly-like structure, which somehow found a way to preserve its shape without spilling itself sideways, suddenly started moving. I was flabbergasted and scared to death. What was that? You could not see even one single member of the Menoetian race, but just that weird thingy in front of us. We had no clue what to do. A dead silence fell around the area and the few survivors did not dare to move at all, let alone shoot. At that moment Milev popped up out of nowhere, all covered up in dirt, injured with blood-stained white uniform.

  ‘Aim and get ready to fire!’ At that moment all possible weapons were aimed at the black jelly-like thing which seemed to be vibrating. Small tentacles protruded from the sides, trying to stretch themselves out into space. Their movements reminded of the interaction of the magnetic powers which alternated between amplifying and then dropping in the different ends of the titanic figure. It looked like there was something instructing that thing what to do.

  Suddenly a bunch of tentacles crept up the gigantic trunk, sinister and thick, looking like a mythical creature trying to break its way out of the pit. They split up in parts and propagated in the air, then two of the largest came after the ship. The tendrils hit it with a bang and started twining themselves around its body, clutching it tightly. It responded to the pressure with crepitation and it became evident it was soon going to give way.

  ‘Fire at that thing!’ the Officer roared with guttural voice. The gigantic fluid-like trunk got under a shower of lead and the attack of all that was left of our armament. Yet it would not budge. The bullets sank in that thing the second they plunged into it and the artillery fire only managed to partially tear its tunic, sending chunks of that unknown black substance flying into the air. But a few instants after the fire ceased, the pieces got glued back to the trunk.

  What was that? Hundreds of thousands of tons of some dangerous substance whose only objective was to destroy us. It took on new shapes as though it was able to think on its own and on top of that it looked unbeatable. Just perfect! I broke into a run, scared to death. All I wanted was to get to the main gate of the ship and it was slammed in my face, leaving us all outside. I stood there, staring at the large gate that slid shut right in front of me, and the dozens of mobilized people screamed in horror and implored the commander to open at least one of the emergency exits. But that was not going to happen. Those in charge had no mercy for us. We had to face up to that gigantic monster. I turned around and that instant I saw it was ready to attack us. One of the tentacles that was high up landed right on top of our ranks with a bang and splattered partially some fifteen feet away from me. It shook the ground and smashed it beyond recognition; the soldiers together with the machine positioned next to them met their death. I had no idea what to do, I had no bullets left, besides I did not think they would have been of much use anyway, so I could only keep filming until I got crushed. My heart was strong, I felt it wanted to jump out there and fight the enemy single-handedly, but alas. The two monstrous shoots rose up quickly ready to lash out on us again and cause as much damage as they could.

  This was the end. Our ship was under attack, we were under attack and could not fight back. It seemed that Menoetius itself pronounced our death sentence and now its executioner was going to carry it out faultlessly. That was a sinister mythical creature that lived only in legends. A God who arose from the ashes to sweep us away, cleansing the planet. There was no doubt we were the reason why that devastating force appeared . . . I looked skyward and saw the body of the ship was ripped from the outside and the black pulp started pouring itself inside the ship´s cavern, destroying everything in its way. That ferromagnetic fluid had gone berserk in its desire to kill us all, so it started by propagating itself in the form of poison at the front part of the ship, mostly threatening the bridge. That was the worst possible scenario. The shooting was reduced to a minimum and three of the Iris 1 crewmembers tried to climb up the body of German Ascend and find a way to cut short the assault of the dark liquid inside the rooms. The other two attempted to strike the enemy from below, but to no avail.

  ‘Run, kid, run! Go hide somewhere!’ Milev was waving his hands at me from a distance and shouted at me a few times just so I would look away from what was happening above our heads. I set my gaze on the look in his eyes and saw the hand which was waving at me–at that very moment he was swept away. One horizontal blow sent almost everything very, very far away. I got nearly smashed by a box of ammunitions which knocked me over, but luckily it just pressed my leg to the ground. Fort
unately, together with about a hundred other people, I found myself outside the scope of the bump. I used all of my strength to pull my leg out from under the box, I stood up quickly and my eyes landed on a scene of total destruction. Tanks and trucks were turned over, the earth was burning in several places, and humans were crushed as though they had been squeezed down by a train. There were screams and moan coming from all sides. Some of the soldiers were still alive, perhaps wounded or pressed down under something, yet still alive despite the sweeping blow. I was left with nothing else to do but run and try to flee to the fringes of the plateau where the black creature had not yet unleashed its power. I was running as if my legs wanted to dislodge themselves and get ejected into space. Many of the other survivors were running along with me.

  ‘Run! Quickly, move ahead!’ I heard encouraging yells behind my back, but I just could not run any faster. At that very moment the shapeless figure extended its ends and encircled the entire plateau together with the ship and each of my living fellow humans. It was not going to let us get away. Its sole objective was to extirpate us down to the last breathing person, not a single one of us was to remain alive. I stopped in my tracks; there was no longer any place I could go to and the others who followed me were running and looking in all directions, panicked. Some did not even want to go on and just gave up early on. They jumped off the far edge of the plateau in an attempt to escape their death.