“Well, that was rather anticlimactic.”
“Wait for it,” Patent said.
The bodies of the Nomads filled with gas, and they drifted up off the ground, heading skyward.
Skyhawk said, flicking his fingers, “You’re Patent Pending! Everyone’s talking about you, man. The guy with like a cagillion weapons patents. How cool is that?”
“Not very cool if you happen to be one of those very cute lizards. Would have loved to keep one as a pet.” Patent made the sign of the cross over himself, kissed the gold crucifix hanging from his neck. “God, please forgive me for messing with your creations.”
“Those aren’t his creations; they’re ours.”
“Come on, let’s get out of here. When those things get high enough they’ll pop. Then it’ll be raining their acid blood and guts everywhere. Just breathing the same air as those things can be lethal.”
“Yeah, I think that’s supposed to protect them from people like us.”
“It should, most days,” Patent said leading the charge this time, peeling back rubble to clear a path to a hallway into the rest of the compound that hadn’t been exposed to the sky yet. “Feel free to lend a hand,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m just waiting for a piece of rubble that I can actually lift. You know, something just shy of one of those boulders you fancy so much.”
Patent made a hole big enough for them to fit through long before reaching a piece of debris Skyhawk could actually move.
Crawling after him, Skyhawk got a pebble caught in his boot. “Damn it!” He pulled out the offending smarting object. Held the marvel of pain up in front of his eyes. “Yeah, don’t worry, I got this,” he said, tossing it behind him.
***
Back inside the compound again, standing next to Patent, Skyhawk liked to think he had this whole sexy-runt-of-the-litter thing going on. Long hair parted just so down the middle and combed over his ears, or with the bangs showing. The stubble above his lip and on his chin, groomed as if to imply it might actually grow someplace else if he let it.
Skyhawk noticed Patent looked a bit naked. “Hey, don’t look now, pal, but you’re missing your Gatling gun.”
Patent checked his watch, which was also a GPS unit. “This way,” he said.
They followed the trail marked for them by his watch to where another of his mole machines had dug through the earth to resupply him. He reached inside for some more toys.
Looking inside, Skyhawk nodded. “A mobile toy chest that loyally follows you everywhere so you’re never without toys to play with. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Skyhawk watched Patent load up with more and more gear, just getting bigger in the process. “I think I know how you got to be so hunky. You don’t exactly do the gym, do you?”
“Come on, there’s an embarrassing lack of dying around me. We need to remedy that.”
Skyhawk did his best to keep up with Patent, even loaded down as the bigger man was. “Dude, have you considered living on the pages of a graphic novel? Reality just doesn’t seem to do you justice.”
Patent ignored him, keen on zeroing in on the sounds indicating where the fighting was loudest, and heading that direction.
It wasn’t long before they arrived at a battle scene Patent felt worthy of him. He set his toys down and dug in at a position of advantage.
Turned out the loud noise had nothing to do with a war going on. The machines were complaining because even with all the electricity in the world coursing through them, cutting through the hides of the baby nomads was no small feat. The animals were bound and still alive, and they were forced to endure sections of them being cut away in the giant cafeteria to serve to the customers. It was part butcher house, part fine-dining establishment, serving up the lizard sushi. Either the young ones were prized like veal, or…
It dawned on Skyhawk what was going on. “They’re eating the raw flesh of the baby ones so they’ll be immune from the noxious fumes the even more toxic adults breathe, and from their poison blood and venom. Kind of how the natives eat small amounts of poisonous shrubs so they’re inured to the effects.”
“Cold-hearted bastards. They deserve what’s coming to them.”
Skyhawk was equally appalled by the gay manner in which the scientists partook in the buffet spreads right alongside the soldiers. Ignoring the screams coming from the agonized animals.
Between the outcries from the Nomads and the roar of the whirring rotary and buzz saws, the cafeteria crowd was blissfully unaware of the breech of their compound in progress.
“Whatever we do, we better do it fast,” Skyhawk said, eying the chefs headed their way. They were camouflaged behind one of the buffet islands that hadn’t yet been stocked with food. But soon the cooks coming on duty would want this area cleared for them, and Skyhawk and Patent would no longer be undercover exactly.
Patent lobbed a few smoke grenades at the dining area. Filling the room with smoke.
“Smoke grenades?! Please tell me you have something better than that to throw at them.”
“Wait for it,” Patent said, spraying both of them with some sort of countermeasure.
The next time Skyhawk stuck his head above the counter it was to see what all the latest screaming was about. All the diners, soldiers and scientists alike were running around without their uniforms and without their skin. The gas had eaten away their epidermis. “God, that’s a painful way to go,” he said. “High five!”
Patent scrunched his eyebrows together as he tried to decipher Skyhawk’s gesture.
“Yeah, we’ll have to work on your sign language skills there, Kimosabe.” He returned his attention to the mayhem. “Please tell me those bastards won’t die anytime soon,” Skyhawk said.
“Nah, their screaming will just lure more of the others here, right into our kill zone.”
The baby Nomads, more adept at patrolling the compound owing to their more manageable size, came running up each of the corridors leading to the cafeteria. Their distinctive headgear on to indicate what side they were fighting on, they were quick to take up perches of advantage. Even before the smoke cleared the flashing lights of their headgear could be seen, marking their positions on table tops, counter tops. Some were even crawling along the roof, using the exposed steel girders for hand and footholds. The juveniles were still small enough to pull that off without bringing the roof down on themselves.
The Umbrage were moving in as well to give the adolescent Nomads cover, like policemen with their guard dogs.
“Better swallow this,” Patent said, handing a horse-size pill to Skyhawk and downing one himself.
Skyhawk swallowed his. Detecting the disturbances going on in his body, he grimaced, and then flexed and relaxed his fists, and said, “I’m feeling diesel all of a sudden.”
“Yeah, increases your cellular scaffolding several million-fold.”
“I’m sure I’ll figure out what that means eventually.”
Patent stood up and fired his modified Winchester model 1892 that was able to discharge when the lever was closed after a round had been chambered, which enabled him to rapid fire the rifle without having to finger depress the trigger. Skyhawk nodded his head with understanding. “A replica of the rifle used in The Rifleman TV series, circa 1958. Yeah, I’m a bit of a fanboy myself.”
“Not the replica, the real thing,” Patent corrected him without slowing with his firing. “Picked this baby up on auction. It was her or the girlfriend, and I was tired emptying out my gun closets so she could hang her clothes.”
The shells lodged in both the Nomads and Umbrage respectively and turned them into charcoal briquettes. They glowed from inside before the heat consumed them in a burst of ash. Up until they exploded, courtesy of Patent’s modified bullets, he had been taking fire from the Umbrage the entire time. Their bladed boomerangs, their slingshots flinging grenades, none of it seemed to matter. Patent was bulletproof and bombproof.
It took one of the grenades bouncing off him and onto
Skyhawk for Skyhawk to realize he was equally blessed. Skyhawk had tossed the grenade, but much of the shrapnel from its explosion and the stuff it blew up, blasted his way, barely scratched him. “Ah, that’s what the pill was for!” It dawned on him. “Hey, how come everyone hasn’t taken this pill?”
“Untested tech. Consider this a pilot study to iron out any kinks.”
“Like?”
“There’s a hundred-fifty-page list of possible side-effects on my PDA in the pouch if you’d care to check.”
Skyhawk gulped as Patent continued to dispatch bad guys as he talked, eyes forever on moving threats. “No, that’s okay.”
Patent was no longer hiding behind the cover of the service island. He had marched into the center of the cafeteria floor to get better coverage of the room as he fired in a three hundred sixty degree circle about himself commensurate with the circular shape of the dining courtyard. Actually the shape he was tracing with his weapons was more of a sphere, considering he had Nomads on the ceiling to deal with.
The Umbrage and the Nomads were both pulling back. Soon the room was clear of them. “All too easy,” Patent said. “I thought these guys were supposed to have more fight in them than this.”
The chamber soon filled with Nomads and Umbrage, like ten times the number as before. Only these were impervious to Patent’s shells, which he’d had the sense to reload with during the quiet interlude. Patent nodded, pleased. “So that’s what they were doing. Testing my weapons and communicating the nature of how they killed to the others. The first wave were just sacrificial pawns. I do like their style.”
He turned to Skyhawk. “Throw me something from my bag.”
“What?!”
“Anything!”
“Oh, screw it.” Skyhawk slid the entire bag towards him across the floor.
“Nice use of those new muscles I just gave you,” Patent said.
“Ah, actually I think they just do a really good job of polishing their floors around here.” Skyhawk noticed he wasn’t exactly popping out of his shirt and pants. Maybe the bodily modifications had more to do with cellular density?
As Patent reached in his bag for another toy, Skyhawk, hiding behind the artificial island, tried to find some nerve. “You’re bulletproof and bombproof you simpering scaredy-cat! If that doesn’t help you grow a spine, I don’t know what will!” he chastised himself. Then he took a couple panting breaths and charged into the open area where Patent was standing emitting a war cry to end all war cries. He skidded to a stop beside Patent about the time he was out of air in his lungs and Skyhawk’s bravado had entirely faded.
“What is this? Some kind of Mexican standoff?” Skyhawk whispered.
“I don’t think so,” Patent whispered back. “They seem more interested in what my weapons can do to them than in what they can do to us.”
“I guess that makes sense if you’re a rapid evolver and you just want to communicate learning to the rest of your kind to make them even more impervious to weapons than ever.”
“So we’re actually helping them by firing at them?” Patent said.
“Yeah, I guess. Anybody likely to bring peace to this world had better figure out how to be impervious to any and all weapons. And failing that, better be able to keep up with the learning curve of their nemeses. So, yeah, every shot is a shot for world peace, brother. Fire away.”
“Good, because this shit is really tearing me apart.” Patent was crying. “Hey, wipe away my tears, will ya? I can’t see, and my hands are kind of busy.”
“Sure, pal. Just dial back the nature channel specials, huh? I think it may be seriously screwing with your ability to kill things.”
Skyhawk wiped Patent’s eyes of tears. “Here, let me get you started.” He reached into Patent’s bag, pulled out he didn’t know what, and threw it.
“No you didn’t!” Patent barked. He dropped his Winchester into his satchel and scooped Skyhawk up in one hand, the tote in the other, and ran them out of the cafeteria.
He stopped in the hall just long enough to see what was going on, setting Skyhawk down.
Skyhawk turned to take in the hole opening up in the floor and swallowing up everything inside it, Umbrage, Nomads, cafeteria service islands, tables, floor, walls, ceiling. To say nothing of the screaming, skinless soldiers and scientists, only too grateful for the mercy killing of being launched into the vacuum of deep space at the other end. “You opened a miniature black hole?”
“No, you did, you idiot.”
“It’ll stop, right? As opposed to going until it gobbles up the entire planet?”
“In theory.”
The black hole reached the size of about half of the diameter of the cafeteria courtyard. It stopped growing in size, but that didn’t mean it stopped swallowing things. Only, the sentient serpents were popping back into this dimension, jumping right out of the hole.
“Can’t believe you did that.”
“You should thank me!” Starhawk gestured. “I think if you can survive a black hole, you’re pretty kill proof. They are now officially the most bad-ass sons of bitches on the block.”
“Let’s get out of here before that black hole decides to gobble us up. I like our chances of jumping back out the black hole on this side a lot less.”
“Yeah, I’m with you on that one.”
Patent ran in the direction he was headed earlier.
“What, no ride this time?!” Mumbling more to himself, “Did he even check to see if I could get my legs working after that sight?” He felt himself sliding back in the direction of the black hole and hightailed it after Patent. “What do you know, my legs work just fine. If you have to pick a body part to shut down, Skyhawk, I recommend your eyes.”
When he opened up his eyes again he had actually lost ground. “Shit!”
Patent scooped him up and headed back the way he’d came. “Thought I was traveling light.”
***
Patent and Skyhawk found a place to take a breather and reload, far enough away from the sphere of darkness with the big appetite. “How is it those things can survive a black hole and still not be able to free themselves from the influence of that headgear?”
“I’m thinking the pain the headgear administers to cloud their thinking was interrupted the instant they fell into the abyss.”
“So, the even bigger question is, how do you think those lizards survived a black hole?” Skyhawk asked.
Patent thought about it as he filled the clip on his gun one bullet at a time. “The first thing they’d be exposed to on the other side, if the damn thing ripped a tear in the fabric of space time, would be the no-atmosphere environment of deep space, and super cold temperatures. That’s an awful lot of computing capacity to solve those real world problems on the fly. It’s just possible their entire bodies are DNA computers. But the same cells doing the computing would have to be able to morph into the genetic adaptations they needed.
“Then of course there’s the compression field of the black hole going and coming. I suppose they’d have to survive that even before they dealt with the deep space problem. The creatures are supposed to be psychically connected, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, that’s the rumor.”
“Maybe they can work like parallel-arrayed computers to enhance their survival ability if you get enough of them together. Still, damn impressive. They’d have needed to perform the necessary calculations and morphing in the corona, before they slipped into the hole itself. We’re talking fractions of a second to a few seconds, at best.”
“So, you’re saying we should probably take on these things one at a time.”
“Probably not a bad idea,” Patent said stuffing the clip into his gun. “Just not my style. Too unmanly.”
The ungodly sound the artificial black hole was making in the distance came to a stop. It was just possible it had resealed itself as it was designed to.
Either way, Patent had decided rest time was over. Skyhawk gestured as he hiked after him. “
Can we just discuss this whole ‘unmanly’ thing? Because I think your macho notions might just be a bit dated. Possibly even sexist by today’s standards.” Skyhawk sighed. “Of course he isn’t listening to me.” He gestured some more. “Wall to wall soldiers, and I land the one who’s more primitive than the dinosaurs, which also aren’t supposed to be roaming the earth, by the way!”
***
Laney stopped with her troupe of juvenile Nomads and Umbrage to marvel at the levitating, revolving human skeleton. It appeared petrified and ancient. Protecting it was a moat of sorts, a chasm too big to jump over that descended apparently to the center of the Earth.
Leon ran into her and, curious about what had caused her to forget that she was in a middle of a war, stared at the same phenomenon. “What does it mean?” he said.
“Do you still have that compass Natty gave you?”
Leon reached into his pocket and held it out for her. Together they watched the needle spinning, only slower this time, and in complete sync with the skeleton.
“It’s the eye of the tornado,” she said. “This compound is sited on what was probably an ancient site for spiritual adepts and shamans. A place to come meditate. They could likely feel the energy moving through here. The planet has chakras and energy meridians, just like our bodies, which you probably know about from acupuncture and acupressure. When two or more of these energy veins cross, a tornado-like effect is created, a vortex of spinning energy arising from the intersection of currents, running perpendicular to it.”
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 51
