“Brother, this thing has been around for a few centuries.” Ray stopped the old man before he dove into another story.
“See? It still exists after all these years and we still have a use for it.”
“Whatever you say.” Ray crouched and entered the pod, crawling to the controls. The craft was designed to host four passengers but the collapsed roof made it hard to make it to the controls.
“You found it yet?”
“I’m not even there yet!”
“Oh, all right.” The old man left Ray to his work. “I will be around if you need me. I will see if I can find some herbs.”
Ray focused on the task at hand. He reached the console and tried to remove the plating beneath the main panel. Cursing, he used the back of the flashlight to break the clasps.
Instead, he hit his thumb with the flashlight. “Bloody!” Ray reflexively kicked something under his right leg and smashed at the metal lock with the flashlight. A few more attempts bent the lock, giving him enough room to remove the covering plate. He stopped to calm down, staring at the bent metal and his newly found—now broken—flashlight. “Great,” he sighed, and reached for the panel.
To his luck—for a change—the emergency recorder was intact. Ray removed the box and started the crawl back out. “Argh!” Something stung his palm and gave his hand a nasty cut. “Bloody hell!” He fumbled, ready to beat his anger out on the thing, but halted when he saw the object—a locket, covered in soot, one of its rings broken and become sharp. Ray reached for the jewelry gently, removed it with great care. The thing had seen better days, but it was still in one piece and he thanked whatever deity was watching over him.
Ray crawled back out of the pod, and put aside the flight recorder. “I thought I lost you for good.”
“I told you, I was around the pod, looking for some herbs.”
Ray looked up and smiled at Brother Cavil. He didn’t realize he was crying until a few tears dropped on his hands, clearing a path through the blood and dirt covering his skin. He clumsily cleaned his hands on his shirt, carefully avoiding the disapproving look this earned him. Brother Cavil had already lectured Ray about personal hygiene and properly washing his apparel a few times in the past few days. Ray hastily removed the soot and mud from the silver necklace as best he could, then gently opened it, checked inside and sighed with relief. He’d feared the worst but the photo was intact.
“Who is she?”
“My daughter, Elaine,” he answered, his voice tender. Ray had a hard time keeping his hands from shaking.
“A beautiful child.”
“She’s beautiful.” Ray smiled in concurrence. He closed the locket and clasped the chain around his neck.
“She will be happy to hear you are in one piece.”
“Elaine…” Ray’s words died in his mouth.
Brother Cavil lowered his stare. “I am sorry, son. The Light has her now.”
“What?” Ray raised his stare from the pendant, “No, nothing like that.”
“So, she is alive?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say so? I was worried!”
“You are crazy, old man. She’s alive. It’s just”—he hesitated a moment—“we haven’t talked in years.”
“Bah! That is fixable. Death is not. You should be careful with your words.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
Brother Cavil waved his hand impatiently at the black box Ray had removed from the craft. “Anyway, play that thing. I am curious about the whole thing.”
Ray focused on the box and flipped the power switch. The recorder made a few fuzzy beeps and turned itself off, its power dying out.
“Stupid machine!” Brother Cavil raised the stick he’d been using as a walking aid and hit the box fiercely. “Work, work!”
Ray tried to protest, but it was too late to stop the old man’s sudden animus. To their luck—and Ray thought they were pushing it a tad—the box made a few weird, mechanical sounds and suddenly started the playback.
“See, it always works!” The old man announced his success in glory, reaching for a kumat in his pocket.
A holographic view of Canaar’s bridge appeared. In the video, Ray was fighting a dark figure. The dimmed lights made it hard to spot the details but occasional sparks shed some light on the disarray.
“Well, it is no wonder your ship crashed,” Brother Cavil remarked with a full mouth, “if this is how you keep your bridge. Being tidy is an important trait in one’s character.”
Ray shaking his head in disbelief was quickly turning into a habit. Perhaps ‘crazy’ was a harsh description, but there was definitely something different going on inside the priest’s head.
Ray pressed a button. The next holograph was from the elevator camera. The picture was corrupt but Ray managed to pull out a still image of him and the horror that had attacked. It looked human but incomplete. Like a premature fetus. Everything was there. The jawless face, the legs, the arms, but they all looked hollow, missing something. It was as if it had tried to imitate Dr. Sanders but come short. He pushed back again the urge to cry for his friends.
“Ugly,” Brother Cavil said, taking another bite of his kumat.
“You don’t say.”
The only other data Ray could pull out was some technical information about the systems and another corrupt video—someone limping, making for the escape pods before Ray had arrived at the engineering deck, but he didn’t have time to inspect the footage thoroughly. The power died again, the box refusing to start even when Brother Cavil used his elegant techniques. The flight recorder didn’t have any footage of Canaar after the escape pod launched, but it was enough to confirm Ray’s thoughts about the other pod.
“Sarah,” Ray said, scratching his stubble.
“She is limping.” Brother Cavil reached for Ray’s shoulder, patting him. “So, it seems you are not the only survivor.”
“We don’t know that yet.” Ray’s face was stern. “There’s no way of knowing the fate of that pod until we find it.” Ray prayed for Sarah’s safety with his body and soul but tried to avoid optimism. In his experience, it always hurt in the end. “She’s the only thing left of my recently destroyed life.”
Brother Cavil nodded, observing Ray with the eyes of a teacher with children. “Let us get back to the camp. We will go to the city at first light and search for your friend.”
Ray’s mind buzzed with ideas and possibilities. He’d hoped the recorder might shed some light, but it had only created more questions.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE APOCALYPSE
They had been running for half an hour now. Ray wouldn’t call it running per say, but he and the old priest were moving as fast as their bodies allowed. The morning had been peaceful, with birds announcing the start of a new day. They woke with the first rays of sun weakly illuminating the dense shade of the forest, and packed the old man’s camp.
When they cleared the heart of the woods, it was Ray who first noticed the huge, dark gray cloud hovering in the distance, creating an unfitting contrast with the otherwise clear sky
“What is that?” Brother Cavil had asked when Ray showed him the darkness hovering.
“I fear something horrible, old man.”
“A fire?”
“Probably the worst you’ve ever seen.”
All of Ray’s fears turned out to be true. By the time the two arrived at the outskirts of the forest and looked over the city from the hillside, Brother Cavil was already in tears, mumbling prayers to the Light.
The outskirts of the city seemed intact. However, a huge, cylindrical barrier circled the city center, separating it from the rest. Inside the pinkish, semi-transparent wall, the buildings were mostly demolished, only a few still standing. Molten rivers flowed from the center of the dome to the surrounding streets, creating flashes of light where they touched the barrier. Flames were still high, especially in the middle of the dome. Even the dense smoke rising couldn’t cover t
heir daunting, orange brightness. It looked as if a chimney a few kilometers wide had been built in the middle of the city.
It was the core of the dome that mesmerized Ray and Brother Cavil. In the middle of the barrier, an orange pit was dug deep, as if the mouth of a volcano. There was nothing for hundreds of meters around the crater but dust and ashes. No one would believe it had been the very heart of the capital.
Within the smoke, Ray thought he saw bits and pieces of one of the tanks Canaar had towed.
“How…” Brother Cavil couldn’t complete his words.
“Niobium,” Ray whispered.
“Niyo…”
“It’s ship fuel. Very hard to contain and suppress.”
“But…your pod, I found it almost two weeks ago!”
“I don’t think Bunari have the necessary equipment to extinguish that.” Ray narrowed his eyes, watching small craft hovering over the destruction zone. Shuttles landed and took off from the outer border of the dome every minute. “If it wasn’t for that emergency barrier, those flames would’ve covered a lot more.”
“Somehow, that does not comfort me in the least, Raymond. Come on, we have to go down there.”
***
It took them another forty-five minutes to descend the hillside and another hour to make it to a relief camp formed at a safe zone far from the city center. The towers in the middle of the religious capital were gone. Sun Towers, Brother Cavil had called them, shaped like loose spirals. They had reached out to stars with the symbol of Light at their tips, made of white omen was how Brother Cavil described them. They’d been replaced by a huge crater that shone with bright orange flames resembling the Lake of Fire in Bunarian religious texts. The home of evil. Brother Cavil’s words, but Ray didn’t think them far off as a description of the madness. “Beautiful gardens they were. Beautiful monuments,” the old priest mumbled over and over again.
The camp they had arrived was a field hospital and it surprised Ray to see injured people still coming from the blast zone, though not as many as one would hope.
“Mostly trapped people, rescued from under the debris at the edge of the blast zone,” a nurse named Elnaz explained as Ray and Brother Cavil joined the relief effort, trying to help with whatever they could. Ray carried boxes of medicine from Bunari Central Hospital shuttles and helped with distribution while Brother Cavil tended the injured, trying to soothe their pain with his prayers.
“How bad was it?” Ray asked, wiping his sweat. No matter how far they were, Ray could feel the heat. He didn’t feel anything but heat. He tried to feel. Nothing. Only heat.
“Very. The first hour was about understanding whether it was the end of days,” Elnaz said, changing an old man’s bandage on his injured right leg. “Then, someone at the civil defense realized it was a crash and activated the containment barrier before it got worse. That was eleven days ago.”
“And they’re still finding survivors?”
“These are people who were stuck under debris from one of the underground warehouses at the market square. They were lucky. The coldness of the cellars and the stocked food help them sustain all this time.” Elnaz stood up and took a vial from the box Ray held, preparing a shot for another woman lying right beside the old man. “The fires though, they are still causing problems. Smoke inhalation mostly. We’re trying to keep folk away from the blast zone.”
“Why would they try to go back?”
Elnaz raised her head and looked at Ray. “Hoping to find their loved ones in there, somewhere.”
Ray, you moron! Elnaz’s words were what Ray needed to snap out of his trance. He looked around to observe the field camp.
“Mina! It’s me, Aram! Where are you?” A man searched the body bags brought on the last shuttle from the blast zone.
Ray watched the man, Aram, stumble over a body bag. Aram’s robe had been torn to pieces but he seemed unaware. The man’s face was covered in dirt that looked more than a few days old. He wandered with a crazed look.
“Mina! Have you seen my wife? Mina?” Aram looked at the corpse’s left wrist.
“If it was his wife, she would have had the bracelet he’d given her on their anniversary,” Brother Cavil said, right behind Ray, making him flinch.
“A tradition?”
“A most sacred one, Raymond.”
Ray tried to swallow what he saw but it was overwhelming. Did I do this? He turned around slowly, watching the city burn behind the barrier in the distance.
An old man, his long beard smudged with soot, ran past Aram, heading toward the main gardens or what was left of them. “The light has punished us for our sins!” The old man fell on his face but stood right back up, ignoring the blood trailing down his nose. “The light has punished us for the evil within!” He was missing one of his sandals.
“That man has been running around for the past week,” Nurse Elnaz said. We seized him twice, applied some sedatives but he jumped back on his feet the moment their effects wore off.”
“It was a comet!” a girl told her mother on the other side of the street as her mother sat before a relief tent, tending to a little boy in her arms. “Ma, I’m telling you, it came out of the sky!”
Suddenly, a very old man came out of nowhere and held Ray’s arm firmly, turning Ray to himself. “Burning shards have fallen from the sky as the comet descended upon us!” He was raving more than talking. “The descriptions were clear in the Book of Light! Wherever the shards hit, they burnt and they drilled. There had been nowhere to hide! We are punished!”
“That’s enough Nirus,” Elnaz interfered, leading the old man away from Ray. “Sorry about that.” She called another nurse to tend the old man. “So, where were you again, when all this mess happened?”
“Deep inside the forest. I was on my way to the Temple of the Rising Sun,” Brother Cavil answered, looking at Ray. “He is from the town Sakkra. He was visiting the temple with one of the pilgrimage groups.”
“I see. You were lucky,” Elnaz said. She saluted the two and went back to attend another bunch of disaster victims.
Ray eyed Brother Cavil, his jaw tightened. “You lied.”
“I avoided an unpleasant situation.”
“I’m not a criminal to hide, Brother. It wasn’t my fault.” Was it?
“I believe you, Raymond.” Brother Cavil’s face was stern. “However, others did not see the footage of your pod and it would take considerable effort to prove your innocence.”
“I can’t hide behind you in fear,” Ray said, moving his stare to the man, Aram, still looking for his wife near the body bags, then to the city guard standing beside the shuttles. “I didn’t do anything. And these people have a right to know why they suffered such a fate.”
“You will be prosecuted, son.” His eyes were reddened. “Harshly.”
“I know.” Ray smiled weakly and walked toward the nearest guard.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A BRILLIANT WHITE LIGHT
Ga’an stood in a dense fog, the cold, sticky touch of the mist on his skin. The heavy smoke danced before his eyes like a veil. His clothes were covered in dust and sand. Ga’an realized he was sitting on desert soil. Not dead perhaps.
He tried to stand up, only to fall on his knees, the pain reminding him of his injuries. Definitely alive. The last thing he remembered was diving into the Baeal gate and Mira exploding. Not an explosion, he corrected himself, but a brilliant, white light.
He saw a metal rod nearby that looked very much like one of Mira’s handrails and reached for it. He took another shot at standing up, this time with his newly found cane. All right, now what. Every direction was the same; sand and rocks for a few meters and then the wall like mist. He picked left—it seemed as good as any.
His pace was slow and he was hungry. Every now and then, he bumped into a bush or some rubble, but mostly it was just sand. Ga’an felt an incline under his feet. It wasn’t a stiff climb but his leg throbbed with the effort. He was gaining altitude. Good. Perhaps I wil
l clear this damned mist.
He thought he walked for another hour or two before he glimpsed the sun. Abruptly, he came to the top of a hill and the mist cleared as if he’d emerged from water. The sudden brightness hurt his eyes. He blocked the sunlight with his hand and looked around.
It was a desert planet. Moon he corrected himself, seeing the big green sphere in the sky. The dense fog that had trapped him extended for kilometers in every direction, and beyond was sand. Endless sand, Ga’an smiled bitterly. He turned and noticed a familiar sight; the half-torn wreck, smoking in the distance. “Mira,” he whispered.
Ga’an wondered how he’d ended up so far from the ship and how he was still in one piece. Mira looked awful; sand buried almost all of her bow. Half of its hull remained in the open, torn apart, and he saw the interior of the stern decks. A dense, black smoke covered the back of the ship, coming from somewhere down in the mist. The super-titan was missing more than two-thirds of its rear fuselage, still looking like a huge monument hidden deep in the mist. He looked back at the sky and tried to remember the location of Mira. If he ended up needing to go back, finding Mira would be difficult without some reference or another high vantage point. He couldn’t find any; everything was mist and sand.
“What else,” he murmured, turning to see more of the moon. A huge mountain formation stood in the distance with a canyon dividing it. Ga’an thought he saw tiny beams of sunlight reflecting from the canyon.
He needed to find water and food. He could either try to go back to his ship, or toward the mountain formation hoping to find shelter and water. A settlement, perhaps. A voice in the back of his head warned him of bumping into aliens—Maybe you are the alien—or worse, Baeal, but he ignored it and fixed his stare on the mountain. Maybe he was on one of the far-reach colonies. Mountain it is. Easier to spot.
Ga’an dove back into the mist, focusing on his steps. If he missed one, he might break a leg and that would be his demise.
He kept as straight a course as he could toward the mountain. There is still strength left in this body. He knew only too well he would eventually need to nourish. The hunger gave him headaches and he became careless in his steps, more than once tripping over scattered rocks.
Shadows Bear No Names (The Blackened Prophecy Book 1) Page 7
