After he signs off, I turn my attention to Forbes. “I found alien tracks in the mountains.”
He freezes and stares at me for a minute, then says, “Our mountains?”
“Volcan Mountains Wilderness Preserve.”
“Wow! That close. Nothing between there and the crater?”
“Nothing.”
Without a moment’s hesitation he says, “So when do we destroy them? You just told Uncle Ted you and I are going out tomorrow night? I’m always ready for avatar time.” He smiles and sips his soda. “More payback for destroying our farm, those bastards.”
That is one of the things I like about Forbes. He relishes the time he spends in the avatars as much as I do and he really, REALLY looks forward to eliminating aliens. He is no shrinking violet in this area. Sitting there in his chair, facing the mantel, there is a fierce gleam in his eyes—or maybe it’s just the reflection of the fire in the fireplace. Whatever it is, he looks, as Messenger would say, “Bad Ass.”
Soliloquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 23
The Next Evening
The drive up Julian’s G Street to the mine is uneventful and quiet for Forbes and me. But waters beneath that silence are thick with tension since we both secretly approach our task with equal parts wariness and dread. For all Forbes’ seeming enthusiasm for what we are about to do, he, like me, is affected by the proximate painful aspects of it. It is no surprise when we arrive at the deserted mine entrance, my mind wanders away into the banal, seeking diversion.
I note that in front of us, under moonlight and gauzy fog, the words “High Peak Mine 1870” glow softly above the dark opening of the mine entrance into the mountainside. Beneath the painted white letters, the weathered wood fades to near invisibility. And for the umpteenth time, I wonder how long ago the sign was repainted. When it was a tourist attraction? Not that the age of the letters matters. No tourists pass through this opening since we closed it down for our private use. The sign could just as well say, “keep out,” but that would be an invitation for seditious teenagers to violate the sanctity of a forbidden mine. Better to let it be a reminder of the innocuous tourist attraction it eventually became.
It’s musings like this that harry me when I’m nervous, avoiding the fact that Forbes and I are about to embark upon another “seek-and-destroy-aliens” mission. If we were like video game players who merely sat behind controls, it would be different. But once we make the transition to avatar, we become them: seeing, hearing—and most traumatically—feeling what they feel. Their wounds are our wounds. Their rage is our rage. Their death is our death. Yet we don’t die, nor do we bleed. We disconnect from them when they cease to function. If our avatar dies and it’s our last avatar, we rebirth and start again. Or as is my case, in death, my avatars rebirth in multiples until their sheer numbers overwhelm the enemy.
Messenger calls me the “Queen of Death,” and he should know. Like me, he was given the flying “blood bomb” creatures as avatars. In death, we destroy with our acid blood. For him, it was only those moments, over ten years ago, when we first fought the alien hordes. For me, it continues—twice more, since that first time, and again, tonight. He is the only one who truly comprehends what I go through each time, and so I’ve talked it out with him after every occurrence. Thank God for that. Otherwise, I might have ended up like Forbes, poor kid.
As the youngest of our group to create avatars, his experience was unique. In some ways, he took to it better than any of us, as if he was born to it. Yet, in other ways, he’s more affected by the violence of it all. It was his savagery that tipped things our way when we spent weeks in battle with the aliens while Messenger was recovering in the hospital. None of us rebirthed as often as he did, and none of us were as selfless as he was back then. It’s that selflessness that stuck with him to this day. It’s how he approaches life in general, always looking out for the underdog, always seeking out the needy and then helping them, with little regard for his own needs.
Unlike Twizzle, whose beautiful avatar was almost a mirror of her mother’s, Forbes’ grizzly avatar was unique. Whereas Twizzle, after the fact, was able to talk through the effects of combat with her mother and have someone who understood completely, Forbes couldn’t. Bob and Ted’s avatars were probably the closest in similarity to Forbes, but Bob and Ted’s age and maturity separated them from him enough that they never managed a close enough connection to what he felt.
It was left to Maggie to nurse him. But the fit was wrong and he drifted away, taking his own path to recovery, a path that ultimately left him alienated from his parents and out of parental control—a path that recently led him to live with us for the time being.
And so here we are: the two of us doing battle once more. Me, because I’m handier with my avatars than Messenger, and Forbes because Gi made it very clear that Forbes was superior in every way over Bob, Ted, Maggie, and Twizzle when it came to destruction. We stand before the ghostly entry to the mine, silent and deep in our own thoughts, both nervous and doing the necessary mental warm-ups to transition to avatar mode.
Beneath the aging sign, the unimpressive 7’x7’ opening to the mine is blocked by an old homemade security gate of half-inch rusty rebar welded into a mostly 10”x10” grid that is slightly larger than the mine opening. Thick iron hinges bolted firmly into the sun-bleached wood that clad the mine opening are welded onto the grid. Opposite is the shiny padlock that Forbes inserts his key into under the illumination of my LED flashlight.
The do-it-yourself gate it locks is cursory at best. Anyone could easily hack through the padlock or the rebar or just unbolt the hinges and gain easy entry. But the gate is just a deceit. Inside the mine is where the real security, camouflaged and virtually impassable, resides. Forbes silently unlocks the padlock and then swings the squeaky gate open just enough for the two of us to pass. Always the gentleman, he gestures for me to lead through the opening. Once through, he follows and then pulls it shut, but leaves it unlocked. Through this gate, we will exit as avatars.
Passing through the gate is like going back in time. The light from my flashlight falls on the earthen floor ahead where 100-year-old twin iron rails lie parallel and almost buried. The miners’ iron cart they carried long ago is gone, as are the miners who used it. The walls and ceiling are shored and covered with ancient wood, cut and milled before I was born. Implements of the past: a pick here, a few shovels there: leftovers and left-behinds are scattered over the floor. Within twenty strides, the wall and ceiling transition to pure rock and earth carved out over a century ago by hopeful gold miners.
As we advance downward, the air grows musty and stale and the rock absorbs the crunch of our footsteps. The lack of air movement and the ambient below-freezing temperature make it feel like I’m walking through a huge freezer.
We go right at a fork in the tunnel and wind up at what appears to be a dead end. Dutifully, like I’ve done in the past, I place my hand on a moist marbled rock outcropping midway up the wall and then step back. Within moments, the dead end of rock wavers and opens like a giant sphincter muscle. I step through, followed by Forbes who has to duck. As we move on, we hear the barely perceptible closing of the opening. Now we are sealed off from the mine and into the exclusive domicile of Gi. Beyond the opening, everything is covered in a soft greenish luminescence that makes our flashlights ineffectual. The roughly oval pathway tunnel winds downward until we come to a cavern carved out of the sheer rock by Gi. The familiar cucumber shape of the main body of Gi awaits us at one end of the cavern. The cavern floor between Gi and us is a pond of friendly animated twinkling light things.
Together, Forbes and I walk into the light pool, splashing light particles about like tinseled water.
“I never get tired of the odor of chocolate and Captain Crunch cereal,” Forbes remarks. This is how it is for him whenever he wades into the pool of light that surrounds and protects the exterior of Gi. “Why is that? You think maybe when we did this the first time, that was what I was into whe
n I was a kid and it just stuck? It’s like it became embedded in my DNA.”
It’s different for me. The first time for me, it was “toast in the morning with butter and cinnamon.” Now it’s the odor of fresh, cleaned babies since having Zed and Sonnet. It must be a mother thing. Forbes would never understand.
When we finish with the light ritual of the particles enveloping us to inspect us to then fall lifeless back into the pond, we wade up to the entry expectantly open for us. Forbes climbs through and then helps me up and in. Inside we’re bathed in a warm red-yellow ambient glow radiating from intermittent vertical wall sections. Beneath our feet, sections of the floor undulate with hidden life.
“My favorite funhouse,” Forbes jokes while trying to maintain his balance on the shifting floor.
I lean on the walls for stability as I tread from one live floor section to the next. Looking like two drunks walking home from a party, we make our way through a tube to arrive at a large open area with small pools of light in shallow floor indentations scattered about. Forbes, who is carrying a flashlight and wearing a backpack of emergency supplies, drops them in a heap next to a wall edge and then steps into the nearest pool.
As the lights begin to envelop him he calls out with what has now become his trademark “Forbes call,” “No probelony, abelone!” right before he’s smothered beneath the lights. For some stupid reason, it makes me laugh every time.
I watch and wait for the requisite larvae to come popping out of the wall before I take my place in one of the pools. Quickly, the wall bulges and a large larva emerges to separate itself from the wall and fall to the floor.
Without waiting for it to gestate and hatch, I step into a pool and stand silently as the lights crawl up my legs to cover me. Inside the bubble, I’m quickly connected with Forbes who lets me know he is thousands of avatars this time, all bursting to come out of his larva avatar.
“Thousands?” I wonder to myself. In the past, he’s always been just a huge wasp-like thing. But then the other two times I discovered alien signatures in the landscape, the openings to get to the aliens were man-size high. This discovered opening is so cramped that even my small winged avatars couldn’t pass.
After my larva is birthed and the avatars inside are released into the air, I’m once again looking at the world through hundreds of eyes that float in the air above my discarded avatar larva. Before me, also hovering in the air, are four clouds of bug-like creatures. On close inspection, I see that they are wasp-like, as was his other avatar, but with tiny appendages like a sloth with large curved claws at the ends. Truly strange. Nothing like them before. I can only guess this is Gi’s response to the small opening of my discovery.
“Diggers?” I communicate to Forbes.
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Forbes communicates back. Obviously, he’s felt them out and knows their abilities.
I sweep around Forbes’ insectile avatars, inspecting and getting a feel for them until Forbes makes his impatience known. He’s ready and antsy to get on with it. Taking that as my cue for action, I stream my black avatars above Forbes’ beasts and take the lead. Forbes is right behind me.
As we move through the Gi tubes, a small contingent of Gi light creatures keeps pace with us. They will be at our side this entire episode. Gi, as in the past, will act as the master coordinator, identifying aspects of the aliens Gi is familiar with and we are not. This is how we operated in the past and this time is no different.
The grace and speed with which we move feels so natural, as if we were born for this. We fly out of Gi, past the lake of light things, through the soft greenish luminescent tunnel, out into the old mine shaft, up to the entry that we easily navigate through, and then up into the frosty night air.
Before long, we arrive at the crevice where the alien tracks still linger, clear and present. The Forbes avatars hover, inspecting the ground below, then launch into the ground and rock with ferocity, ripping and tearing and smashing everything in their way to make a hole large enough for my avatars.
My avatars and the Gi light things hover a safe distance above, out of the way of thrown debris, to stand sentinel, watching for signs of life—alien or otherwise. The noise Forbes makes is akin to a chainsaw against rock and most likely heard for miles away. There will be no explaining this once we’re through. Fortunately, our hole is small and not so likely to be discovered. But discovery is the least of our concerns at the moment.
As the Forbes avatars dig deeper, a mound of debris piles up on the sides of the hole until it becomes a small crater. After a half hour of digging, our Forbes avatars have created a path large enough for my avatars. Together we fly down to discover a large cavern below the hole. Hovering above the floor of the cavern, we look about, taking in everything inside of, what appears to be, a naturally formed cavern.
For humans, the cavern’s lack of light would conceal everything inside. But for us, the world is bright blue-green with alien signature everywhere. Compared to what we found in the past, the degree of alien infestation here is jarringly large scale. The walls of the cavern are covered with alien larva pods. Thousands and thousands of alien spider-things crawl over them, tending the pods, tending the birthing walls, tending everything in sight. The effect is one of a huge undulating skin.
Gi keeps us in the air and has us touch nothing while our avatars range out of the cavern and into the tunnels beyond to determine the extent of the alien infestation. What we find is beyond what we expected. Using Gi’s sense of direction and place, we’re able to determine that the infestation goes all the way back to the crater that was our agave farm. Even more alarming, they extend westward nearly to the abandoned gold mine that Gi inhabits. And the numbers are staggering. There are aliens everywhere we look. The cleanup could take days—or weeks if things get tough. This is not a simple two-person exercise. We’ll need the entire family. But this is a problem. It will take at least a day or two to assemble the entire family. The hole Forbes dug might be discovered tomorrow. Fortunately, the hole is small enough that no human could enter. The dig will remain an enigma for anyone who discovers it.
But our presence is noted by the aliens. Already some of the pods are birthing out creatures to combat us. Before they get the upper hand, Gi directs me to start smashing my deadly avatars into the emerging beasts. Gi directs Forbes to fill the hole he made and then return to the mine and bring the others when they arrive.
I brag to Forbes that by the time the family returns and he makes a bigger opening, only a flood of Soliloquy avatars will greet them and all the aliens will be finished.
He communicates only angst. He reminds me I’ll be trapped for twenty-four hours inside of Gi and worries about my stamina.
I communicate, jokingly, maybe I should have worn some “Depends” diapers for my long stay inside the white orb.
All I get back is his worry.
As I attack the first alien birthed out of a larva, I hear the sound of stone and dirt being thrown back into the hole by Forbes’ avatars. In moments, the small patch of moonlight that had shown through the hole is blocked out and the sounds are gone. I am now completely alone with the aliens.
And then I am back in Gi, disconnected from my avatars. My solid orb is now transparent and I find myself staring at a confused Forbes who stares at me through his transparent orb.
Immediately, a sense of fear rises up within me.
We have been here before, cut off from our avatars by something greater than Gi. When this last occurred, Gi attributed it to an entity embedded within the alien ships. Once we were out of the ships, its ability to cut us off from our avatars diminished. After the crafts were blown, we were back in complete control. So the question is “Where is the new entity? How do we destroy it?”
Soliloquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 24
The Next Night
“Truth in advertising,” David says as he re-reads the descriptive text on the beer bottle. “They don’t have this in my time. Much appreciated, Messenger.
” He’s relishing the bitter taste of an Arrogant Bastard Ale and sitting calmly at the kitchen table in the guest house. The digital clock on the counter behind him reads 11:20 PM. A half-eaten sandwich on a plate sits in front of him. Soda cans populate the table top. A box of opened crackers lies on its side. The odor of heated bread and melted butter and cinnamon permeates the kitchen from Twizzle’s freshly made toast.
Forbes and I have just returned from San Diego Airport with Bob, Maggie, and Twizzle who flew in from Northern California for the family assault on the alien den. Ted paces. Bob and Maggie and Twizzle converse with Forbes who is in animated retelling of the incident on the mountain. I sit across from Messenger who is seated next to David at the table. It’s like some gala family reunion without the gala. No one is happy, especially Ted who stops pacing to speak to David.
“You’ve been lying to us the whole time. Why should we trust you now?” he challenges. He refuses to accept what David has told him.
“I haven’t been lying to you, at least not completely. Yes, I apologize again for the small untruth about claiming that none of you are selected, but technically, none of you are of the Chosen. You’re different from me. Yes, I sense no Chosen in this era. That part is true.”
“So you are something superior,” Ted mocks.
“Ted, those are your words, not mine. I’m evolved differently, that’s all. That’s my worth to you and to Gi.”
“This is Mischa’s doing, his interceding to counter our ineffectiveness. He knew this was going to happen and he pulls you out of the future to come to our aid.”
“Your aliens have evolved, Ted. Now you must evolve and I’m that evolution.”
Aliens, Tequila & Us: The complete series Page 22
