by Steve Lang
"If you get back up, I’ll deserve what I get!" Susie said. She heard moaning coming from the room the man had rushed from.
Rob looked down at the woman and took his knives out of her, spitting on her corpse. Then he kicked her chair over. Susie walked into the dark room, and in the low light she made out the form of a person on the far end of the room. There was no evident light switch nearby, so she walked forward, removing the pistol from her waistband, ready to fire. When she got closer, she realized the person doing the moaning was a little boy about seven years old, and he had been chained to the radiator pipe. This little boy was emaciated from malnourishment and his clothes were rags. His hair was also ratty and he smelled like puke.
"My god! What have they done to you? Who are you little man?" Susie asked. The boy began to cry.
"My name is Derrick Smalls. They took my parents and chained me in this room. I don't know where my mom and dad are. Can you help me find them? I asked them where my mommy was and one of the bad men told me she's in the soup, but my mom's pretty tall and I don't think she'd fit in a bowl." Derrick said.
Susie wanted to cry for him, but it would have to wait until they were free, and she was going to help him escape. She unchained him from the pipe and helped him to his feet as Rob looked out the window to see if anyone was on to them yet. His head hurt and he was dizzy, like it would after too many drinks. Susie saw Doug's head on the small table and vomited.
"Yeah, babe. I know. These people are not done paying for this." There were tattered curtains beside the window, so Rob took out his Zippo lighter and set them ablaze. They immediately ignited, sending a column of flames up to the ceiling in seconds, and it would not be long before the run down house would crumble like a house of cards. A bottle of whiskey was sitting on a cabinet across the room.
"Ten High Kentucky? Jesus Christ, what the hell are these people drinking?" Rob smashed the bottle over near the man and then lit the puddle.
Susie was holding Derrick's hand in one of hers, and in the other one her pistol. Rob looked out the window once more and could see three people in the dirt yard pointing at the house and coming toward it.
"How good a shot are you?" Rob asked.
"Pretty good, I guess. Daddy's a competition shooter and he taught me, but I've only ever shot at targets."
"Can you hit those barrels across the way over there? I'm too dizzy." Rod asked.
"Sure!" Susie said.
Flames were all around them now, and the people outside were almost to the front porch. She knelt down at the sill, and took aim through the half opened window. Her first shot rang out like a bomb, taking the red necks completely by surprise, and although it struck home, she only opened a hole in the side of a barrel and fuel spilled out on the ground. She fired again, and what happened next looked like a Hollywood movie set. The barrels blew, sending liquid fire and shrapnel into the small crowd outside. People were running around and screaming as burning petroleum turned them into human torches.
"Let's go!" Rob said. He was stumbling a little and slurring words.
Susie opened the door with her pistol out in front as the red necks on fire began to fall to the ground in burning heaps.
"There's the truck!" Susie yelled.
The kidnappers had parked it in a grove of trees, and now that everything was on fire she could see it in the darkness. They began to jog toward it when Rob was hit in the back by something hard, and suddenly fell to the ground. When he rolled over, scraggly beard was standing over him with a twisted, evil scowl on his face.
"You killed mah whole fam'ly!" Scraggly beard screamed.
He had the axe handle in his hands, and was preparing to bring it down on Rob’s head again, when Rob slashed his Achilles tendon with one of his knives. Scraggly beard hollered and fell over while Rob tried to get up. Susie was coming back for him.
"Get to the truck! Now!" Rob screamed.
The axe handle hit him in the knee and Rod howled with pain, scraggly beard wasn't giving up easily and had gotten to one knee again.
Rob thrashed with one of his knives, catching the other man in his cheek. The dizziness was worse now, and flames were engulfing the compound as Rob fought to kill or be killed in the struggle of his life. Scraggly beard hit rob in his crotch with the axe handle but Rob's adrenaline had never been so high in his life, and he felt nothing. With the last of his energy Rob fell on top of the other man and stabbed him in the stomach. With a gasp, scraggly beard made one final attempt to fight, but went limp as he died in the dirt like a dog. Fire rose high into the sky, burning everything in sight, as morning approached on the horizon. Susie could see a strip of light blue to the east and got in on the driver's side of the truck while Derrick got in the back seat.
"Rob, come on!" Susie yelled. "They left the keys in the truck!"
Rob heard her from what felt like a hundred miles away and pulled himself off the ground. He stumble walked like a zombie to the truck and got in, feeling for a split moment that someone was going to grab his arm, but when he turned there was nobody there. Susie drove down the dirt road, leading away from the burning houses, and Rob laid his head back to sleep. After about thirty minutes of driving over a rutted, bumpy road, Susie found the interstate again and turned right. She drove on in silence to the next town.
Rob had been in the passenger side, winning shotgun from his friends after the last convenience store stop and gas-up. He snapped awake from the horrible nightmare and hit his head on the roof of the truck.
"Don't stop!" Rob shouted.
"Holy crap, dude! Are you alright?" Doug laughed. "That's some dream. Ha ha!"
Susie was driving and Jackie was lighting another cigarette as she stared out of the window.
"You almost made me wreck, man! Jesus!" Susie yelled.
"Sorry…it just seemed so real." Rob said. He was rubbing his head where the axe handle hit him, but it was clean and he felt no pain. He shook his head and looked out into the darkness in a daze.
Twenty yards from their truck a young girl stepped out into the road, covered in blood. It was just like in his dream.
"DRIVE!" Rob screamed.
With the reflexes of a cat, he grabbed the wheel from Susie and stomped on the gas, steering them around the bloody girl. Alarm and confusion spread through the vehicle as Rob commandeered his 4Runner for another three miles before giving control back to Susie. While his friends never understood what he did, and Rob never explained, he knew that what he had done saved them all from a terrible fate, and in his mind at least, Christmas would never be the same again.
atlantis returns
Josh Henderson builds a radio telescope from spare parts. Then, he receives the strangest transmission he’s ever seen.
Twenty-six million years ago, planet Earth was inhabited by two dominant races: the reptilians, and a small pygmy race of humans called the troglodytes. Each species developed high technology and had been using it to further their own dissimilar agendas. The reptilians were a cold-blooded race concerned with power over the planet, her people, and natural resources. The troglodytes sought wealth and unrestrained leisure. As it happened, the two societies were able to tolerate one another for almost a million years without territorial dispute because they were on separate sides of the world. But, time moves on and populations grow and multiply. Territory once seen as wasteland or frontier becomes vital to emerging megacities, and when two species who tolerate each other become next-door neighbors, circumstances tend to change.
Their trouble did not begin in a day or a week or even months, but after thousands of years of negligence, pollution and disrespect for each other and the planet. Skirmishes at first; shows of strength and power, and then came the religious zealotry within each group; the signs from God that wiping out the enemy was the path to righteousness. These beliefs and practices were distributed throughout society on both sides and as the fights grew more vicious, the fervor became more intense. The Earth, Gaia, was bombed day and night, as the tw
o competing factions ignored her silent pleas for peace. She became angrier and more wounded with each passing day.
One morning as her father, the Sun, rose over her face, she cried out to her father for help.
"Ra, my father, I must speak with you." She said. The Sun, who had not spoken to his daughter for a billion years, was delighted to hear her sweet voice.
"Yes, Gaia. What may I do for you?"
"My children have gone to war and have ignored my pleas for peace. They have hurt me with their bombs and guns. They do not regard life with the sense of preciousness that they once used to."
"What would you have me do? The Sun asked.
"Father, although my heart is heavy, I beseech you to cleanse my surface with your fiery embrace." Earth said. The Sun thought long and hard about her request, and in one hundred years, he replied.
"Daughter?"
"Yes, father?"
"Is it now as it once was? Does the fighting continue?"
"Yes, and I am ill. My oceans are dying and my blood is poisoned." She said.
"I will help you with your dilemma, but do you understand what it is you ask of me?" The Sun asked.
"Yes, father. My children will die and I will renew."
The sun loved his children and all life in the universe was sacred to him, for he used his energetic core to provide sustenance for all living beings in his sight. Earth loved her children too, and her heart broke as Ra reached out with his fiery embrace and held his daughter close for an entire month. Her skin burned as she wept for the senseless loss of life, and for her part in the demise of the warrior children she had raised.
"Father?" Earth cried.
"Yes, daughter?"
"I will do better next time." She replied. The Sun nodded and released his daughter.
Gaia cried for a million years, saturating the planet and causing rain to fall from the heavens as the oceans filled once more, and tiny microscopic creatures began to grow and multiply. Millions of years passed, and creatures big and small filled the world again, and through a complex system of evolutionary change, humanity was borne upon the planet. Twenty-five million years after the first human stepped on land, Josh Henderson was setting up a homemade radio telescope in the bonus room of his house.
"Dad! Mom told me to come get you for dinner!" Timmy Henderson yelled. He was the ten-year-old son of Josh and Tammy.
Josh stood five foot six, with an athletic build and long brown hair he kept tied back in a ponytail. His beard was short, and neat and he had kind eyes that viewed the world with a sense of wonder and mystery. Josh had been so immersed in the tweaking of the satellite dish that had once been on top of their house, that he did not hear his son the first time. He almost had it working. He had the computer hooked up and the software that Yuri Denokov, a friend of his at the National Astronomy Institute wrote for him. It was a drag and drop, point and click application coded for simplicity of use. Yuri had coded it with a graphical user interface that displayed coordinates of stars and a command line for programming the telescope application if Yuri ever needed to access it again, or if Josh felt adventurous enough to write his own code and implement it. One feature of the application was the ability to translate the feed from neighboring star systems into binary ones and zeros. This information would be easily translatable by copying it into an online binary translator. If anything intelligible came across during a session of listening to the stars, it could convert the signal into English. His obsession had become so all-consuming that his family wondered if they would ever see the old Josh again.
"Daaad!" Timmy sang.
Josh popped his head up. "Yeah! Be right there! Thank you, son!" He said. Josh plugged the USB cable in and turned on the laptop. Josh had the satellite dish connected with a fifty-foot cable, and set it on the little roof overhanging their front porch outside his window. When the computer booted, he double-clicked the icon Yuri had created to resemble Mars and the program opened.
"Josh, come down for dinner!" Tammy yelled.
"Be right there!" Josh said. He left his radio telescope on and ran downstairs to eat before he got in any more hot water with her. What he did not know was that his radio telescope had been pointed directly at the sun, and if he had been up in the bonus room five minutes later, Josh would have seen a transmission of ones and zeros coming across his screen.
Tammy had the table set when he got downstairs and they had already begun to eat.
"You're always so consumed with that thing up there. I'm beginning to think we may never get you back." Tammy said.
"I'm almost done, I promise." Josh said. He sat down next to Timmy and rubbed his head, winking with a smile. "I just turned it on before I came down here, and if it works, we'll be able to hear the stars talk." Josh was excited.
"I get it, I do, but we haven't seen you in a week." Tammy said. She was pretty with long brown hair and soft skin he loved to touch. Tammy reminded him of Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island, which often helped her get anything she wanted from him.
"After dinner we can go see what it does." Josh said.
Tammy had been with Josh for over twenty years, through all of his ups and downs, and although she sometimes scolded him for his flights of fancy, below the surface she was proud to know him and loved his imagination.
"OK, sounds like a plan, now let's eat before it gets cold." Tammy said. She smiled at Timmy, who nodded and bowed his head.
Timmy said grace, and as he did, Josh closed his eyes and bowed his own head. Like a flash of lightning, Josh saw an image of the sun in his mind's eye. Roiling, rolling mountains of flame undulating over one another as the star closest to the earth beat like a heart in the vacuum. "It's alive!" His mind told him. Josh opened his eyes.
"…and thank you for the food we are about to eat. Amen." Timmy said.
Josh was stricken by his vision.
"Josh, are you alright? You look pale." Tammy said.
"I'm fine, I just had a weird vision when I closed my eyes. It's nothing."
"I made a paper turtle in art class today. We covered a wire thing with wet paper and it looked like a turtle when we were done!" Timmy said. Josh and Tammy turned to their son.
"That's pretty cool, buddy! I did something like that with a balloon and paper in first grade, but all I made was a weird face. Pretty cool, though. Congratulations." Josh rubbed the small boy’s head.
"Trudy and Bill are going out to the lake this weekend and invited us to go with them. You interested?" Tammy asked.
"Meh, I don't know…" Josh rubbed his chin.
"They are two of our best friends, and it’s a free chance to chill out at the lake on a boat. What's to discuss? Plus, it's been so hot lately; I need to cool off." Tammy said.
"Yeah dad, let's go. It's going to be fun, and besides, Bill is a nerd like you. You two can talk about your telescope." Timmy said.
"I am not a nerd! OK, you might have a point there. I'll go."
"I'll call Trudy after dinner. I sort of told her we'd be going anyway, but you can be our plus one." Tammy smiled.
"You're a real comedian."
"You married me for my quick wit and good looks, remember?" Tammy said.
"No, I married you because your dad was the sheriff and he said he'd shoot me if I broke your heart." Josh replied.
"Well, that's Daddy. I'm sure he was mostly kidding."
"He showed me the gun, and wrote my name on a bullet with a black sharpie." Josh said. He fixed her with a dry gaze.
"He's got a sense of humor. You can't blame him though, he's only looking out for his little girl."
"Yeah, right. He tried to kill me once, you know?" Josh said.
"You're bringing that up again? That was an accident." Tammy replied. She rolled her eyes.
"What happened, Dad?" Timmy asked.
"Your grandfather and I were out hunting deer about three years ago. We got split up while tracking a buck, and when I turned around he was about fifty yards from me. I'm standing dead st
ill, when all of a sudden the buck walks right out in front of me. Well, your grandfather decides to take the shot, and hits me in the shoulder!"
"That was a flesh wound, you didn't even need stitches." Tammy said.
"He shot a deer while I was behind it!"
Tammy shrugged her shoulders and put a fork-full of meatloaf in her mouth. They had talked about this before, and it always ended the same way. She defended her father and accused Josh of overreacting.
"Let's finish up dinner, I want to go see what the telescope found upstairs!" Josh said. He wolfed down the rest of his food and then patiently waited for Tammy and Timmy to finish their meal so that he could do the dishes.
After dinner was over, they all went upstairs to see the telescope, and to Josh's surprise, some data had been captured on his screen.
"Check that out! Weird." Josh said. The message on his screen was in binary code and he would need a translator to decipher the meaning, but it read:
01001110 01101111 00101100 00100000 01100100 01100001 01110101 01100111 01101000 01110100 01100101 01110010 00101110 00100000 01000001 01110100 01101100 01100001 01101110 01110100 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01110100 01110101 01110010 01101110 00101110 00100000 01000001 01101110 01110100 01100001 01110010 01100011 01110100 01101001 01100011 01100001 00101110
"Any idea what that means? Where's that thing pointed?" Tammy asked. Josh looked out the window and saw that his telescope was aimed at the setting sun.
"No idea what that means, and it's pointed at the sun." He shrugged. "That's cool! Now, to figure out what it's telling us." Josh brought out his laptop and found a binary-to-text translator, and then he plugged in the numbers.
