16. WORLDS AWAY
MONICA:
ELSEWHERE
I KNEW THIS PLACE. I HAD SEEN IT COUNTLESS TIMES BEFORE—in my dreams. The silvery moonlight of the three full moons that hung high in the night sky beamed brightly through the crystal ceiling of the enormous palace in which I stood. Thousands of people dressed in decorative gold and ivory garments stood below me, watching my every move as I gazed down at them in sorrow. Tears slowly slid from the corners of my eyes as I stared down at the site of Reaper’s lifeless body on the table directly in front of me. The silvery beams of moon light that surrounded us all glinted against the decorative silver and black armor that he wore and created a diffused glow around him that almost seemed angelic.
The thousands of people that surrounded me suddenly looked upward as the deep roar of an engine rang out overhead. The once clear night sky began to shimmer as the roar of the engine continued and a massive disc-shaped spaceship that covered the sky as far as we could see suddenly flickered into view. Chaos ensued as the center of the craft opened and the group that once calmly surrounded me scrambled toward the exits. A deep, threatening hum filled the room as a brilliant ball of concentrated red energy built up in the center of the craft.
My knees became wobbly and my entire body threatened to collapse as I desperately reached for Reaper’s lifeless body just as a blinding ray of red energy suddenly blasted from the center of the hovering spacecraft. Reaper’s body along with everything around me was instantly disintegrated into nothing as the vibrant wave of energy consumed the entire palace. In the end only I remained—surrounded by devastation yet somehow seemingly unharmed. Stricken with grief, I screamed as loudly as I could as I fell to my knees and landed into the nothingness below.
It had been six years since the first night I dreamed of that perpetual nightmare and though I had experienced it off and on for over half a decade, it was still just as heart aching then as it had been the very first time. I trembled with grief as I rested my head on my knees and tried to take solace in the fact that the dream always ended shortly after everything had been destroyed.
“Only a few more seconds now,” I whispered as I clenched my eyes shut and cool tears began to stream down my face.
“Dry your eyes, child, for there may be hope after all,” a faint voice whispered from just behind me.
My heartbeat tripled as I quickly lifted my head and frantically searched for the source of the mysterious voice. What was that? That’s never happened before! I thought as I continued to search.
“Who’s there?” I called out. My voice echoed in the distance and my heartbeat quickened even more as I realized that I was now standing in complete darkness rather than the moonlit wreckage that had been left behind by the spaceship’s death ray. There was absolutely nothing beneath my feet but somehow I was still able to stand in the pitch black nothingness and walk around as if I was standing on solid ground.
“You said there may be hope,” I called out as I stared into the blackness before me. “Are you saying I can save him?”
“Yes, child. You can save him. You can save them all,” the enchanting voice whispered.
“Will you help me?!” I pleaded. “Will you show me how to save him?”
“Yes… I will show you what you need to know,” the voice whispered as a blinding wave of fiery blue light suddenly appeared before me. “...for I am the Goddess of Eden and I bring with me… your destiny.”
17. REMINISCE
http://goo.gl/eK5x7h - ♫
REAPER:
(LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA)
- ONE WEEK LATER
“YOU GUYS WANNA HEAR SOMETHING COOL?” HOWIE ASKED as he beamed at me and Ace from across the table. It had been nearly a week since the “big meeting” with Wells and the Joint Chiefs and the three of us had been working around the clock preparing for what was to come. I still hadn’t truly forgiven Howie and Ace for allowing Monica to fall into the hands of The Righteous but at the same time I wasn’t quite as angry as I had been when I first heard the news. We were all pretty wiped out by the time Friday night came so we decided to take a break and hang out in L.A. for a bit in order to blow off some steam—which worked perfectly for me since I had planned to meet Audrey for dinner in L.A. that night anyway.
“What are you up to now, Howie?” I asked skeptically as he brushed his curly hair out of his face and continued to smile from ear to ear.
“How would you like to hang out at 3D tonight?” he asked excitedly. The Third Dimension, 3D for short, was a large storage unit that Ace had converted into an apartment/club house for us back when we were in high school. It had been nearly two years since I last set foot in 3D so the thought of hanging out there did sound intriguing but we were in California at the moment and I certainly wasn’t up for a spur of the moment drive to Lexington, Florida.
“That’s a hike, Howie. Maybe some other time,” I said.
“What if I told you we could get there in less than sixty seconds?” he questioned.
“That’s impossible, Howie,” Ace replied. “Even Reaper couldn’t get there that fast.”
“He could if he were using a certain device that we were all given,” Howie grinned.
“No, he couldn’t because the destination has to be linked to a wormhole generator and we don’t have a generator at 3D, Howie,” Ace said.
“You sure about that?” Howie grinned.
“No way!” I said excitedly.
“Yes way,” Howie chimed.
“What did you do? Did you move the generator from Area 51?” Ace whispered, his voice dripping with concern.
“Nope. I built my own,” Howie boasted.
“You did what?” Ace demanded, probably thinking he had misheard Howie’s reply.
“I built my own. I got a chance to look at the one at 51 and let’s just say I borrowed some supplies and built a miniature version of my own. Don’t you remember how much fun we used to have at 3D, Jason? Don’t you think it would be good to be able to pop in there and just hang out every once in a while?”
“I actually think that’s a good idea,” I admitted.
“I don’t know, Howie. What do you think Wells will say?” Ace asked.
“It’ll be hard for him to say anything considering he doesn’t know about it,” Howie replied.
“Yeah, but how long do you think you can keep this from him? I just don’t know if we should be playing around with this kind of tech,” Ace insisted.
“Aren’t you always telling me to live a little, Ace?” I interjected. “Maybe you should take your own advice, bro. As a matter of fact, I say we test this thing out right now!”
“No offense, Howie, but we’re talking about using an Equillian generator that was built using spare parts. How do we even know if this thing will work?” Ace questioned.
“Well that’s easy. Number one, I reverse engineered an actual working generator when I built it… and number two, I built it,” Howie sneered.
“Fine,” Ace conceded once he realized that Howie and I weren’t going to change our minds. “Let’s roll,” he continued while turning and signaling the waitress for the check.
TRAFFIC WAS SO BAD ON THE WAY OUT THAT IT TOOK us nearly thirty minutes just to make it to the freeway. By the time Ace’s all-black, crew cab pick-up truck sped out of the city limits the sun had already set.
“How do you have enough power to run a wormhole generator in 3D Howie? I don’t remember there being a power source strong enough to keep a wormhole open in 3D,” Ace said as he drove the truck further down the road.
“Wormholes vary in terms of size. Obviously the amount of power required to keep them open is proportionate to the size of the wormhole. The generator that I built was only capable of opening a microscopic wormhole but that’s all I needed in order to set up a relay system from my generator to the ones in 51 and the one on the moon base. The relay allows me to siphon power and data from those two bases and essentially grants my generator the ability to
open bigger wormholes once the connection is established. The Equillian power sources in those two bases generate so much energy that I doubt anyone will even notice the relatively minimal amount that I’m extracting for my generator.”
“I hope so,” Ace mumbled.
“Is everything okay, Ace?” I asked from the passenger seat, as I realized that he and Howie had seemingly been at odds for weeks.
“What do you mean?” he deflected without taking his eyes off the road.
“I’m just asking, bro. You just don’t seem like yourself, you know?”
“I just don’t want to have to deal with Wells if he finds out about this thing. You know how he gets,” Ace said while flashing an odd glance at Howie in the rear-view mirror. I nodded my head and quietly observed the two of them as we drove onwards. Ace remained silent as he drove onward and Howie was seemingly staring into space but I knew he was really doing something on his smart glasses. They were trying to act normal but I could tell that something had changed between them. I wasn’t sure what had happened but the more I thought about it the more I realized that they had seemed to be on bad terms for longer than I had initially realized.
“You can pull over up here,” Howie said as he pointed to a clearing to the right a few meters ahead. Ace pulled over into the clearing without a word and shut the engine off.
“You can leave the truck on. The wormhole will be big enough to drive the entire truck through,” Howie instructed without looking at Ace.
Ace nodded and restarted the truck as Howie withdrew his thumb-drive sized wormhole beacon and pressed the button on the front. Bright lights suddenly cascaded from the end of the small beacon and an eight-inch virtual screen hovered in the air a few inches above the beacon.
“You know, I just realized I don’t even remember how to use those things,” I admitted.
“Neither do I,” Ace said jokingly, prompting us both to laugh as Howie made several selections on the virtual screen before him.
“Alright, boys! This is it!” Howie said excitedly as a loud noise similar to the cracking of a bull whip suddenly rang out in front of us.
My eyes widened with amazement as a colorful speck the size of a marble appeared three feet in front of the truck then suddenly expanded before us until it was just larger than the truck itself. The sparkling globe of energy that had appeared before us now floated a few inches above the ground, spinning at 1000 revolutions per second and making a constant crackling noise as Ace’s truck slightly rocked forward as an invisible force from within the colorful wormhole gently tugged at us.
“Am I supposed to just drive into it?” Ace asked Howie without taking his eyes from the unbelievably bright ball of energy that lay before us.
“Yes, but take it easy. No more than five miles an hour. We’ll come out the other end in 3D and I don’t want you to crash into a wall or anything,” Howie instructed.
As Ace cautiously drove toward the phenomenon before us the wormhole seemed to spin even faster and somehow it glowed even brighter than before, forcing me to shut my eyes as the tip of the truck entered the colorful orb of light. I clenched my eyes shut and cursed as I felt the truck jolt forward with so much force that I got that same feeling you’d get just as a roller coaster starts a big drop.
“Alright, boys, we’re here,” Howie chimed a few seconds later.
I opened my eyes in disbelief, but sure enough, as the bright lights that surrounded us faded away, I realized that we were somehow back in our long lost secret hideout.
“That was much shorter than I thought it would be,” Ace admitted as he stopped the truck in front of Howie’s old computer on the left side of the room and shut the engine off. I laughed at his remark because I had been thinking the exact same thing. My mind was completely blown as we exited the truck and looked around, marveling at the place that we used to spend more time in than our actual homes.
Besides the dust, it was just as I remembered. On the outside it looked like just an average storage unit, but, back in high school, Ace had converted the inside of it into what could easily be considered a state-of-the-art apartment. He had expanded the original layout to include two bathrooms as well as three small bedrooms, although, back in high school, we always spent most of our time in the front. The right side of the front room was always my favorite area due to the large flat screen televisions mounted on the wall that surrounded the even bigger 3D projector screen that we would use to play video games. On the left side of the room I noticed an odd piece of machinery about the size of a water cooler that now stood next to the supercomputer that Howie and Ace had built back in the day. That weird piece of machinery was the only thing different about Howie’s work space and I assumed that it was the wormhole generator that he had built since it didn’t quite look like any piece of machinery that I had ever seen before.
“I’ve got dibs on the recliner!” Howie yelled as he darted toward the comfortable recliner and flopped into it before we could protest. I took a seat in the sectional couch in front of the projector screen and kicked my feet up as Ace took a seat in another chair adjacent to Howie.
“This was a great idea, Howie,” I said as I nodded my head and soaked in the nostalgia. Lexington, FLORIDA was such a tiny town that I never thought I’d actually miss it once I moved away but as I sat there on that couch, surrounded by all the memories that me and the boys had shared, I realized that a part of me actually did long to return. Even Ace, who had been a bit grumpy the entire night, was smiling as we relaxed and reacquainted ourselves with our long lost second home.
“So what do you guys want to do now that we’re here?” Howie asked.
“I’m cool with whatever you guys want to do. To be honest, I’m just glad we got a chance to do this. Thanks, Howie. This really means a lot, man,” I said as we locked gazes.
“You really miss this place, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah, I do. This is like… it’s like coming home, man. This place always felt like more of a home than my actual house did back in the day.”
“I know what you mean,” Howie replied. “What do you miss most about Lexington?”
“I dunno,” I said as I rubbed my chin. “Besides Monica and 3D, I really don’t miss anything, but somehow, now that I’m here, I kind of feel like I never should have left, you know? Like being out there trying to save the world isn’t really what I was supposed to do with my life,” I admitted.
“You know that’s not true, Reaper,” Howie reassured. “You just feel that way now because you’re blaming yourself for what happened to Moni—”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I said firmly. There were a few moments of uneasy silence after that but Howie finally nodded his head and turned to Ace as he leaned back in his recliner.
“What about you, Jason?” Howie asked. “What do you miss?”
“Nothing really. There’s not much to miss. Everything I loved about this town is in this room,” Ace replied, still not looking at Howie as he spoke.
“What about you, Howie?” I asked. “What do you miss about this thriving metropolis,” I said jokingly.
Howie bit his lip and stroked his chin as he pondered the question. “Yeah, I’ve got nothing,” he finally grinned and we all broke into laughter.
“I can, however, tell you what I don’t miss!” Howie continued as our laughter died down.
“What’s that?” I questioned.
“I’ll give you a hint. He’s about 6’4” and weighs around 400 lbs,” Howie chuckled. “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if he was pushing 500 by now!”
Ace and I burst into laughter as we realized that Howie was talking about Fat Pat, who had been both figuratively and literally the biggest bully at our school back in the day.
“Whatever happened to Fat Pat, anyway?” Ace asked.
“Didn’t he drop out of school or something?” Howie offered.
“It wasn’t just school though, remember? Once he stopped coming to school we didn’t even see hi
m around town anymore,” Ace recalled.
I was fighting hard not to laugh because I knew exactly why Pat had left town but I had never mentioned it to either of them.
“What’s so funny, Reaper?” Ace asked, narrowing his eyes as he looked at me.
“Nothing,” I replied still trying in vain to hide the obviously guilty grin on my face.
“You know what happened to him, don’t you?” Howie pushed.
“Alright, alright! I’ll spill the beans,” I jokingly groaned. “I’m pretty sure he transferred to a different school. I’m not saying this is the reason why… but I might have roughed him up in front of his boys a few days before he left.”
“Really?! Why didn’t you tell us about this?” Ace demanded.
“I dunno. I guess I was kind of ashamed. I think I went a little overboard,” I admitted.
Savior Part 2: Son of Eden (The Savior Series) Page 17
