by S E Anderson
“Oy, you two, just froz and get it over with already,” Jesi scoffed.
And then again, there was nothing like a nine-year-old telling you to get it on to kill the mood.
“In any case, that is a goal, not a plan,” the girl continued, stabbing her tiny finger at the ancient pretzel stand. “What I need to know is how you intend to sneak past the turnstiles. The entire planet is a theme park.”
“Well, that depends on the location of the airport. Katra?”
He tossed a coin sized chip on the table, and the space above it exploded with color. A gigantic planet Earth swam into view, casting eerie blue and green light across the room. It was Earth, but not the Earth Katra had left: the shorelines were different, craggy and shorter than they should have been, the landmasses smaller. Katra struggled to get her bearings.
“How do I…” she asked, pointing at a spot. It was a general approximation of the city she knew as Atlanta, but it was hard to see at this distance.
The second her finger approached the globe, the massive thing started to grow. She whizzed towards the Earth, moving her finger until she reached the point she was sure once held the airport. It was in the middle of a green area.
Yorick let out a grunt.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, realizing he should have been excited.
“It’s right in the middle of one of the game zones,” he said. “A survival one.”
“Well, this sounds like fun,” Jesi exclaimed.
“Our approach will have to be different,” Yorick continued. “We’ll have to sneak in, but luckily, I have a few contacts on the inside. We might raise alarms, not that they can do anything about it while a game is in place. We find the treasure and high tail it out of there are quick as we can.”
“Not much of a plan.”
“Not much of a crew,” said Yorick. “But we can do this if you trust what I say.”
“Meh.” Jesi dropped herself back on the chair. “I don’t like this, and I certainly don’t like you. If you screw me over, I’m playing the kidnapped card.”
“The what?”
“I’m a child.” She grinned. “At least in body, if not spirit. One look at me and they’ll have you arrested. I risk nothing in all this.”
“So you’ll follow my lead?”
“If it gets me my jewels? Hell yes. Let’s go break into Triassic Park!”
Chapter 7
Return to Super-freaky funland dark-side death-zone powered by MnM
Katra pretended not to be surprised when the dinosaurs came into view.
Yorick had been right: it was easy to get past the security fence surrounding the planet once known as Earth. As a matter of fact, there wasn’t anyone there to check as they flew by, riding close to satellites and other abandoned stations so as to appear as nothing other than space junk.
“The entire planet is an escape game,” the former captain chided, as he piloted the small crew around the minefield of space junk in orbit. “The entire point is that it’s more difficult to get out than to get in. That’s how FunCorp makes its profit, after all.”
It was only now, as they whizzed above the lush green countryside, that Katra really understood why. Or, well, she saw why: down below were massive forms the size of houses, wading through the sea of grass and dwarfing the trees around them.
She wanted to ask, are those real? She wanted to ask why they were everywhere, who brought the dinosaurs back, and what they were doing here. Part of her also wanted to know why they weren’t feathered, as science had begun to understand when she had left Earth yesterday.
In her mind, this wasn’t Earth. It couldn’t be. The only thing it had in common with her homeworld was the color – lush green land, bright blue oceans, oh yes. Apparently, her peers hadn’t succeeded in ruining it. But the coastlines were wrong, the orbit was wrong, hell, even the stupid name was wrong. In her mind, this was just some other planet, a foreign world, far away from home.
“Most of the Crowners – what we call the treasure hunters looking for Earth’s lost royal jewels – have been looking on entirely the wrong continent,” said Yorick, flying the ship low above the grass, sending a herd of massive beasts careening out of the way. “Most are still looking in the former United Kingdom, believing Charlotte left everything behind when she fled. I’m the only one with the map of Atlanta airport, showing precisely where she dropped the loot – to avoid customs - when she sought refuge in the sovereign state.”
“But it’s been 13,000 years,” said Katra. “What makes you think they’ll still be there?”
“Trust me. I’ve been studying this for most of my adult life. If the jewels had been found, I’d know about it.”
Katra just had to trust him then: this oddly handsome stranger who flew the ship around the dinosaurs just to torment them. She was impressed Jesi was letting him pilot the thing at all, but she just sat in the copilot’s chair, sipping a silver box of something probably alcoholic. What looked like a cute nine-year-old with her juice box was actually a deadly monster bordering on getting wasted right now.
“The airport would be around here somewhere, according to your information, Katra.” Yorick pointed at the view screen, excitement burning on his facial features. “We’ll have to rely on ground scanning to find it from here.”
“Just do your thing,” said Jesi, surprisingly chill for once.
Yorick pressed a few buttons, and red dots appeared on screen, away from the dinosaurs, closer to the tree line. He nodded slowly to himself.
“What are those?” asked Katra.
“The players, and the game keepers,” he said. “Everyone is chipped the second they step foot on this planet. Anyone who works for FunCorp, or anyone who’s playing. I just hacked into their tracking system, thanks to that contact I told you about. This way we know how to avoid them.”
It took well over an hour of the ship flying in a large grid pattern before they found anything substantial. But when they did, Yorick burst with excitement.
“We found it! We frozzing found it!” he screamed, leaping out of his seat. “Jesi, land this thing, will you?”
“I’m the captain, you twat,” she snapped, but he was already out of the bridge and running down the corridor. “Katra, you follow him.”
Podulk, who had been standing calmly behind them all, let out a grunt and followed Katra as she left in search of the captain. Only Owaitt remained with Jesi, and Katra had a feeling that that was exactly how Jesi wanted things.
They found Yorick in a windowless white room, throwing on heavy boots and grabbing a stuffed backpack. He didn’t look anything like the pirate captain they had met a few hours before: he looked like a kid about to go on an adventure.
“You can’t go out dressed like that,” he said, indicating Katra’s fanciful clothing, “This isn’t going to be a walk in the park.”
“I killed three of your men dressed like this,” she replied, shocked by the steadiness in her own tone. “I think I can handle whatever my ancient homeworld throws at me.”
“Fair warning: this place has changed a lot since your time.” Yorick stepped onto a silver pad in the middle of the room, the edges of his body becoming silvery. “It’s not the same Earth you left.”
“Tell me about it,” she grumbled.
Podulk said nothing. Per usual. But he handed out small, tan colored nuts for them all to take. Yorick stuck one in his ear; ah, they were coms. Very Star Trek.
“Right,” came the voice in Katra’s head: Jesi, who burbled a cute little child’s burp. “I’ll monitor things from here. If you even think of betraying me, I’m blasting you all from the sky. Okay?”
“Of course,” Yorick said, rolling his eyes as if to say can you believe the shmuz we have to put up with? He threw Katra a wink, and she felt the heat rising to her cheeks. Damn, that handsome pirate.
And the three of them dissolved into nothing.
Katra’s eyes opened to a lush green world. For a minute, it felt like ho
me. Like the great plains of the far west, that Katra has visited as a child when her parents took her on a tour of the great USA. So different from her home in Columbia. The grass stretched out like a sea before her, broken only by the occasional tree and the herd of…
Dinosaurs.
Suddenly, it didn’t feel so much like home anymore.
And then she threw up.
“Ah, yes, transportation does that sometimes.” Yorick seemed to notice her discomfort, taking her hand and giving it a comforting squeeze.
“Sorry.” Katra wiped her mouth with her free arm.
“They’re not real,” he said. “They’re robots. All part of the game, of course.”
“The game.”
“In this one, the competitors are dropped into the wilderness, and given a week to find their way to the exit,” he said. “Though the exit can only be guessed through clues in the environment. You have to serenade a pterodactyl at one point, lull it to sleep so you can retrieve an amulet that shows you the way if you…”
“Please stop.”
“Sure.” He grabbed a gadget from his belt and held it up, following it like a man would follow a Google map. Katra followed solemnly.
“And they don’t mind us being here?” she said, eying up the massive beasts in the distance. “We’re not going to get kicked out by the park’s police, are we?”
“They can’t see us,” he said. “We’re nothing to them. We’re not wearing the locator tags the competitors wear or the staff beacons. We’re not even here.”
“But we’re going to be tearing up the park,” she said.
“Yeah, they’ll probably mind that.”
He stopped, suddenly, then nodded to himself. He dropped the gadget he was holding onto the ground and took a step back, grinning wildly.
And with that, the ground exploded.
Dust and dirt flew into the air. She jammed her eyes shut and coughed, doubling over from the shock.
“And we have a cavern!” Yorick shouted. “See that, Podulk? I’m not crazy! It’s here! The great lost Airport of Atlanta.”
“Quite.”
Katra finished coughing and peeked her eyes open. The man was right: there was a cavern, or at least a very dark hole in the ground. The former pirate threw himself on his belly to look into it.
“It’s not deep at all,” he exclaimed. “Podulk?”
The alien let out a wet slushing noise, which could have been a groan, but sounded more like someone slapping sushi together on a plate. Without a word, though, he hopped into the hole, disappearing into the darkness.
“What do you think? Is it safe?” asked Yorick.
“It is clear.”
“No need to sound excited or anything.”
“I will try to contain my joy, captain.”
Yorick looked up at Katra, his eyes bursting with color. He pushed himself up from his belly, holding her gaze, a look so pure and beautiful she wanted to blast the distance between them and be in his arms in an instant.
She snapped herself out of it. This was so unlike her. Marcus was still there, in her mind, somewhere. She was loyal. She was loving.
“You have just made my dreams come true,” he said, making her forget all of this in an instant. “Do you know how long I have been waiting to find you? And to discover you are exactly what I was looking for?”
“I’m glad I could help you find the lost treasure.”
“I think I found twice the amount I was looking for.”
“I can hear all this, you know,” said a voice in Katra’s ear: Jesi, making her presence known and ruining a glorious moment. This was followed by a slurp from the adult juice box.
Yorick stepped forward, and Katra stepped nearer to him, desperate to feel his hands on her skin again, when he disappeared. His step took him right through the hole he had created, and not into the waiting arms of Katra, but of Podulk.
“You surprised me,” Podulk said, his voice echoing below.
Well, so much for that. Katra stepped to the edge and looked down to where Podulk and Yorick were untangling from each other’s limbs. The mole-like appendages on Podulk’s face were stuck on Yorick’s backpack, which only made the alien more frustrated.
Once clear, Katra closed her eyes and jumped. She landed with a grunt, bouncing lightly in Podulk’s arms before he put her down, without a word. She pulled a torch out of her blue backpack and glanced around the room.
They were in the control tower. A large room with glass windows all around, made reflective from the piles of dirt behind them. Every computer terminal had a little Chinese luck cat, which started to move as a draft of air touched them for the first time in thousands of years.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
“We are on hallowed ground,” Yorick said, dropping his voice. “A holy shrine.”
“We are?” Katra looked around. The cats stared back, their eyes following her as she moved. “They’re nick knacks.”
“The holy Catapus? This is a tomb, is it not? The great queen Charlotte interred with holy statues to protect her in the afterlife?”
“More like a running office gag,” she said, suddenly in her element. After all, she was the only one who had seen the twenty-first century first hand. She found the door of the tower and gave an elegant, pageant wave of her hand in that direction. “Suivez moi.”
She sashayed down the stairs, her torch lighting the way, trying to seem like she wasn’t the least perturbed by the darkness. Not that she had ever been scared of the dark: just that there was something eerie about an abandoned airport, the air cloying like an Egyptian tomb. Katra felt as if at any moment, a mummy would jump out and grab her leg.
She had only been here a week, days ago, a layover from her flight to Singapore. But the second they exited the stairway and walked into the terminal, the recognition hit her like a sack of bricks to the gut. Everything was the same. The same desks for checking bags in. The same signs warning about Ebola and Measles. The same skeletons…
Shmuz. There were skeletons.
Dead skeletons.
Which was probably much better than live skeletons, but still, Katra stifled a scream.
“So, you find the treasure yet?” The voice in her ear was snippy and high, Jesi slowly losing her patience. “I have a feeling they’re going to find us soon. I saw three ships flying overhead.”
“This is the largest airport in the world,” Katra snapped back, glaring at the crumpled skeleton before her and imagining Jesi in its place. “Or it was, before whatever happened that I don’t give a froz about. Give us a minute.”
“Jebuz, take a chill pill.”
Yorick gave Katra a warm smile before delicately handing her the map. The thing was old, almost worn through, so light Katra felt that even her touch would disintegrate it. She gazed at the logos she knew were dead and gone. The Chipotle. The Chili’s. Even the Popeye’s. Her world was ancient history now.
“It’s this way,” she said through dry lips, leading them forward.
She kept her flashlight low to avoid seeing the dead around her, both corporeal and corporate. She didn’t want a reminder of what’s she’d lost.
But there it was, finally, before her – Aunty Anne’s. Pretzels. Yummy cinnamon and sugar. Everything sitting on the counter as if it was ready to go. Katra had to stop herself from reaching out to grab a glorious bite, knowing that the nibbles were a few thousand years past their sell by date. The place must have been amazingly well sealed for them not to decompose.
“So, where to from here?” she asked, tearing her eyes from the counter top. Good bye, decent snacking.
“According to the cipher I decoded,” said Yorick, pushing past Katra in an excited flurry, “the jewels were hidden in the dark, cold heart of the store.”
“Dark, cold heart?” Katra muttered. Nothing about the original Aunty Anne’s seemed dark or cold. This one, however, had dark and cold written all over it.
“Does it mean something to you?” the captain urg
ed.
“Not really.”
“Podulk?”
“No.”
“Well, this is just perfect,” said Jesi over the coms. “Don’t you come back here until you’ve combed every inch of that slimy place, you hear me?”
“Slimy?” Katra mouthed.
They ventured into the small shop, the space quite tight with Podulk’s hulking frame in there with them. Katra was close enough to Yorick to feel the warmth of his skin wafting off his body, and she yearned to lean in and feel more.
But it wasn’t warmth they needed to find.
Cold… dark…
“The fridge!” Katra blurted out, lunging at the metal contraption against the wall. Yorick dodged out of the way.
“The what?”
“Do you not have refrigerators anymore?” she asked, tugging the silver door open. Right on the middle shelf sat a large plastic box, marked important.
“Well, that looks important,” said Katra.
“It says it is.”
“Thanks, Podulk.” She took the box – it was surprisingly heavy – and placed it on the counter beside the fridge, closing the door with a familiar fwomp. She missed the sound, so oddly comforting. “Seriously, do you not keep food fresh?”
“Fresh?”
“Wow, I hate the future,” she said, and tugged the lid off the box.
Glittering gemstones gleamed up at her, and she let out a squawk of joy. The royal gems of England: stones of every shape and color, tossed hastily in a box and hidden in a fridge in an airport. Why? Katra desperately wanted to know what had led the stones here, to this place, but she was the only one alive who had any connection to them. Everyone else had died out a long, long time ago.
“Does that dying sound mean you found them, or have you all just been brutally murdered?”
Jesi’s voice was harsh in the quiet of the pretzel stand. The trio was engrossed by the stones, many still a part of the original jewelry, others ripped from their casing and tossed into the box. Katra reached her hands in amongst the stones, carefully, as they were quite sharp, and retrieved the crown she had only ever seen on television.
