Age of the Marcks

by Gregory Benson

  The scabs gripped tightly to the wall as they climbed upon them and would shift slightly at times but remained dormant. As they got higher up, a strong, pungent odor filled the air, and the humidity was so thick that breathing felt labored. Bletto reached the opening and waved the others to hurry up. A frothing hiss emerged from the darkness above, and the many scabs stirred for just a moment in response.

  Kerriah struggled to get a footing on one of the scabs as it wiggled loosely against the wall. She pulled herself up, finding a different spot for her foot, but as she did, the scab fell away to the floor and slapped against the hard surface below. The three of them froze, and their hearts skipped a few beats as they waited for the hive to come alive around them. After a few minutes, their arms, hands, and legs were throbbing in pain from holding themselves up against the wall.

  Bletto started to wiggle the scabs from the opening, but the inexorable hissing above them returned, this time louder and longer than before. He stopped and stared upward. There was a frothy growl, but he could not see anything through the darkness. Crix reached the opening and began helping Bletto move the scabs out of the way until a sudden snarl, and lively hiss from above stopped them from their careful task. They stared into the oblivion, unable to detect anything, only shadowy movements. A large, murky, grey object the shape of a giant teardrop oozed down slowly from the blackness. The surface of this entity was shiny and glistened faintly from the distant light below.

  “Don’t move,” Bletto whispered from the corner of his mouth.

  They remained motionless. A large eye with a milky appearance revealed itself at the tip of the oozing bulb, and it curled out sideways to face Crix and Bletto. There was a lengthy pause. It predatorily panned around the walls, stopping at Kerriah before moving closer as she remained frozen. The eye opened wider revealing a mouth with rows of various-sized teeth that had a sticky substance seeping from the top and bottom rows.

  The mouth snapped toward Kerriah but stopped just short of her after hearing a surprising shout from close by. “Over here!” Bletto yelled.

  His life had only been about his own survival; others would come and go, and it didn’t matter to him. However, observing Kerriah and Crix, sharing personal stories with them, had brought things back into clarity. He understood; he remembered what was important. He felt empathetic and merciful for the first time in many years. He felt alive and important.

  Bletto climbed away from the opening and then stopped to wave an arm out while yelling, then again moved further away. “Get going! I got this!”

  The giant mouth full of teeth closed back into the eye and tried to get a position on Bletto. Kerriah swiftly moved up to the opening and helped Crix peel away the last scab that was obstructing their passage. Then Bletto, their unlikely hero, screamed out a torturous shriek. Dangling by his legs, he flailed helplessly in the grasp of the one-eyed monstrosity. Hundreds of needle-like arms moved down from blackness above. The grey, bulbous queen, shot her arms in and out of his body as if he were nothing more than a hunk of brown lard.

  “Get going now!” Crix cried out while pushing Kerriah into the secretive opening.

  Bletto’s screams turned silent, and his movement ceased. The mouth dropped his limp body and morphed back into the eye, scanning the area again. The scabs began to waken and move about like fluid covering the walls. Observing the eye swooshing over in their direction, Crix frantically continued to shove Kerriah further into the threshold, but she was not budging. The eye spotted Crix.

  “Hurry up!” Crix shouted.

  “I’m trying, but I have an issue with a scab up here.”

  The eye formed into the mouth again, and Crix looked around for an escape plan. Its gaping jaws gave out a pungent smell of rot and mold, as it reared back for a strike. Just as it darted toward Crix, a whirling scab plunged into its jaws. It chomped down on the scaly shell and started flinging around violently. The scab gave out an eardrum-piercing squeal.

  All the scabs in that tight space became wildly animated, and Crix found it difficult to hang onto the wall. Kerriah stuck her arm out and grasped Crix’s arm. He felt her fingernails dig deep into his skin. She was not going to let go. She pulled him into the crawlspace. Inside the space were two scabs, half-smashed and motionless, their outer shells freshly beaten.

  “We need to get going,” she said, stating the obvious while crawling with extreme urgency through the tight, bumpy tunnel.

  They went a short distance before hearing violent flapping close behind. A venomous hiss assured there was no turning back. They squirmed their way through the jagged rock tunnel, which at times forced them into uneasy, tight spaces. They crawled over the remains of dead scabs that littered the narrow passage.

  Deep within Crix, a calm whisper chanted into his head with a voice that sounded neither male nor female . . .

  “The child of the cherished race will emerge.” He paused and squeezed his eyelids shut to clear his mind. “Unsuppress . . . the power within . . . your spirit is the container.” The whisper became so vivid that he felt like someone was booming in his ear. A chill ran down his neck and all the way through his lower legs. He felt a renewed assuredness as if something within him had awoken.

  The tunnel vibrated slightly around them as they progressed further into the passageway, moving down a dangerously steep pitch, descending . . . deeper and deeper. They gripped the walls until their fingers and palms burned raw to prevent sliding uncontrollably into the blackness ahead.

  The tunnel leveled out. At that moment, a buzzing filled the air, becoming louder, and even louder ahead. Kerriah turned out her light emitter.

  “I see a light glowing up ahead,” she said.

  She carefully slowed her forward movement, taking care of what peril might lay ahead. A rough opening emerged ahead, enhanced by a gloomy red glow. Kerriah approached the opening and stopped. She waved her hand back for Crix to be still. It felt like an hour passed, and his mind started going crazy.

  What is she looking at?

  She slowly backed up into Crix, forcing him to retreat further to give her space. She warily turned herself around inside the narrow tunnel and leaned back against the side of the rocky wall.

  She whispered, “Sentries . . . there are automated sentries guarding the tunnel opening. I think the Marcks have put a defensive perimeter to keep wandering scabs and prisoners out of Level Five. If we move too close to the opening, we’ll be vaporized.” Trapped between frenzied scabs and near-certain disintegration, they both laid there motionless contemplating their options, which appeared to be limited.

  “We can just lay here and die, or I can take those sentries out,” Crix said. He sounded surprisingly enthusiastic considering their dire situation.

  Kerriah squinted at him and equally confidently remarked, “If you use the orb, we could have Marck legions crawling down on us here to acquire it. That’s out of the question at this point. We can wait for the scabs to calm down, and then back our way out. We’ll try again once we devise a way to get past this.”

  Crix placed his hand on her leg. “Kerriah, trust me. I can do this. For a reason that I cannot explain right now, I can do this without giving us away.” She stared at him, exhaled a deeply held breath, and did not ask any further questions. She nodded, placing her trust in him.

  Lying on his back with his arms at his sides, he closed his eyes. The whisper spoke once again. Merging . . . within the son of the cherished race . . . .you will find deliverance. Crix spilled his thoughts into the deepest portion of his mind and found a veiled path into his soul. He took captive every thought.

  The path was a place within him that he had never visited in the realm of his own consciousness. His thoughts weaved back and forth uniformly. He found the orb inside. He grasped it, drawing it into this hidden place. He felt as though his mind and body were trying to escape each other as he tightened his grip. His mind swirled at the very edge of awareness and the tipping point of insanity. To go too far would me
an there would be no going back; he would be forever lost to those that knew him.

  A flash of blue filled his vision and entered like a scream in darkness. The void was no longer black but now filled like a deep blue ocean. Clarity . . . he opened his eyes, and a cloud of blue emerged above him, shimmering and alive. It darted out of the tunnel and into the guarding sentries. Crackling metal echoed out as the ceiling-mounted sentries crumpled like wads of paper. The living blue light breezed back to Crix and merged within him. He raised his head and looked at Kerriah. She witnessed a subtle cerulean glow from his skin now, a glow that was only noticeable in dim light.

  “Your skin, what happened?” Kerriah asked, even though she already suspected the answer but still needed to hear it.

  He felt focused and energized. “I know this is going to sound a little odd, but I have been able to fully merge with the orb. It’s part of me now. The strangest part is that the orb explained to me how to do it, as well as how to use its power without releasing a major detectable energy signature. Also, I believe now I can better control the amount of power I dispense when I use it and make it less likely to be detected, especially in these depths.”

  “It? You mean the orb?”

  “That’s correct. It has whispered things to me for a while now. I used to think it was just my mind playing games with me, but now, I realize it was the orb the whole time,” Crix observed. His eyes looked wiser now as if he had grown decades in a few minutes. His hair was now all white.

  “Well, I like the iridescent blue look you’re sporting now and the white hair. You pull the look off well.” She winked at him, and he smiled back. His heart melted. She turned back around to refocus on the task. “I just hope it doesn’t stand out in the daylight as much as it does in the dark.” Now would not be the time to announce to everyone that he had the blue orb.

  Kerriah edged forward, and then popped her head of out the passageway. It opened out on the ceiling of Level Five. The buzzing was now clearer.

  “Ohhhh boy. I sure hope you have more surprises in you because I think we’re going to need them.” She looked down from the ceiling to the massive area below. Far below them many stories tall were racks filled with powered down Marcks, row after endless row going almost to the top of the twenty-story-high ceiling. In the distance, she saw an opening with radiant green light spilling out, mixing with the dim glow of the recessed lights that illuminated the Marck storage area. The buzzing was steady and soft, coming from tall, rectangular units evenly spanned throughout the racks. Each large unit had ribbed tubes that fed into each rack.

  Kerriah looked over with a smirk. “You wouldn’t happen to have a ladder back there, would you?” She asked.

  Crix crawled forward and grabbed her waist. She felt a strange tingling sensation from his touch. They slid out from the tunnel opening and into the open air. Hovering high above, he pulled her in close, and then steadily lowered them both to the floor below. “I guess you did have a ladder after all.” She turned and gave him a soft kiss on his cheek and a playful half-smile as she turned away.

  “These Marcks look to be outdated. My guess is they are the same model that relieved the old UMO forces a generation ago,” she said, brushing her hand against one. The Marcks were polished and clean with little to no dust on their armor—strange for outdated units to be in long-term storage in a place like Dispor.

  Crix had an uneasy feeling in the midst of a Marck army, even powered down, and as such, he scanned the area for an escape route. “Let’s just hope they aren’t easily awakened.” There was no apparent way out aside from the way they came in or the lighted green opening in the distance.

  “Yeah . . . good point, let’s get a closer look in that chamber ahead. Try not to touch anything, just in case.” Kerriah carefully and quietly moved forward, staying clear of the Marck storage racks. As they neared the opening, the light flickered as if something passed in front of it.

  “Someone’s in there,” Crix whispered. Kerriah did not respond and continued to walk slowly ahead, but now more to the side, staying out of the direct sight.

  There was a faint purr in the area beyond the opening. The purring intensified, and the light dimmed. Kerriah dashed back between two Marcks and motioned for Crix to do the same. The purring now echoed loudly into the Marck storage area. Kerriah peeked around the Marck she was hiding by to get a look.

  A small platform hovered a few meters above the floor. Mounted atop the platform was a strange, mutated figure that had a mix of both tendrils and arms, some mechanical and some flesh. The arms squirmed about from a blob-like body that appeared to be fused to the floating platform. She ducked back out of sight as it continued down the rack aisle. It moved past her without pause. Its limbs flailed around, grasping at unseen things floating in the air. A faint, incoherent grumble came from the creature as though it was speaking to something.

  It stopped near Crix for a second then started to ascend to the Marcks in the higher racks and halted three rows up. There was a flickering, bright flash as sparks showered down for several minutes. Slowly, it lowered back down, grasping a Marck arm and head.

  It started to move ahead toward the lighted chamber but stopped just as it approached Kerriah’s hidden position. Both Crix and Kerriah remained deathly still and flat against the metal rack, hidden between two Marcks. A wet spattering noise came from the creature as a black globe peeled out from the topside of its torso. A thin linkage held the globe up, and it bent around in Kerriah’s direction. The creature dropped the Marck parts on the floor and mumbled loudly. A hollow voice echoed out from loudspeakers scattered throughout the storage area.

  “It’s okay, Guttel; they are our guests. Bring them to me.”

  Guttel picked up the previously discarded Marck parts and began to leave the storage area. Crix and Kerriah slowly emerged from their hiding places but did not follow. The hollow voice rang back out again.

  “Please follow Guttel, and the answers to your questions will be revealed. Don’t be afraid, come.” The hollowed voice in some strange way, was inviting. Crix followed a safe distance behind Guttel.

  “Let’s go, Kerriah. At this point, hiding is pointless. Let’s get what we came for.” She followed close to Crix, however a little less enthusiastic about tailing the strange creature.

  As they entered the illuminated area, the radiant green lighting was so intense that it filled every crevice. It was so immersive that it brought on a faint, nauseous feeling that started in the mind and crawled into the gut. All around them were parts, both mechanical and organic. Limbs hung from boney wires of various lengths. Some of the parts looked to be animated, twitching and flinching without rhythm. There were so many different parts that the area around them looked textured in some sort of horrific, yet artistic scene. Piles of rifles and assorted weaponry littered the floor. Most likely the former armaments of the Marcks in the containment area.

  They both trekked ahead boldly in spite of the revulsions around them, weaving around a maze-like path and through the dangling parts. The maze of parts ended at a tunnel lined with glass conduits that contained a bizarre array of cyborg warriors, each one menacing in their own unique form. Some were Solaran, others Hybor or Mendac, and there were even some morbidly weaponized Thraxons in this display hall of sorts. A hall of what appeared to be someone’s apparent science experiments and trophies of war and weaponry.

  The unfortunate beings in the glass showcases had found themselves outfitted with various blades, rifles, disruptors, and projecting explosive apparatuses, and each one was bulky with mechanical reinforcements of their limbs that looked to aid their movements and augment their strength. A dusty mist swirled within each tube as if some sort of suppressant or preservative kept these organic fixtures of warfare asleep.

  Crix tried to keep his eyes on Guttel, even as he passed a particular Thraxon that had shiny blades fused into the ends of each of its six arms and a thin spike protruding from its mouth. He was sure that its head turned, b
ut it must have just been an illusion from the swirling mist within its enclosure.

  Kerriah and Crix could not help to be alarmed by these sights, but they tried not to make an obvious observation of them and, instead, looked at each other, verifying through their eyes that they were of the same mindset. They were likely walking into the jaws of death.

  The long hall opened to a ghostly vastness where seemingly endless rows of clear cubes gradually disappeared into the darkness beyond. Each cube contained a body. The faces and frozen stance of these bodies bore a look of shock as if a reaction to their last sight or a brief moment of immeasurable pain.

  Nearby, a small contingent of Marcks stood nearby armed and at attention but took little notice to the approaching trio. To one side, a snaking stairway rose to a mezzanine above them. All around, vapor spewed from massive machines with wide bases and heads that coiled around, poking and dipping into vats of liquid metal and fluids. Other machines were slender with segmented attachments working tirelessly to stitch optics and cable through strange skeletal bodies.

  “Well, well, well . . . what a surprise we have here today,” a nearby voice announced as a slender figure emerged from the shadows. “We haven’t had unexpected visitors in quite some time. However, these are particularly special guests, to say the least.” He stepped further into the scattered light that provided a glimpse of his eyes, which consisted of thick, perfectly rounded metal rims embedded into his face, each with a backlight illumination that changed subtly from blue to red with the tone in his voice. His left arm was fully mechanical and outfitted with numerous gadgets used for medical and scientific precision. He approached with an aristocratic swagger in his stride, filled with arrogance. A metal dome capped his head, topped with a raised plug that blinked red occasionally. He was garbed in a form-fitted grey coat less the left sleeve that draped to his knees.