by Mark Harritt
Lenny threw a rock at one of the stalactites on the cave floor, “Well, it’s not good news.”
Mike laughed, “I didn’t think it would be.”
“It’s not going to stop.”
“What’s not going to stop?”
“The dragons. They’ll keep on coming until one of them finally claims this location. It’s their way.”
“Their way, huh? Maybe we can change their ways.”
“I don’t think that’s possible. M.A. says that there has always been a dragon in this valley. When one dies, another replaces it. Sometimes the one replacing it hastens the dying process. That’s what they do.”
Mike mulled this over. He wanted a place that they could use as a base. From what Lenny was telling him that was going to be impossible in this location.
“And, it gets worse.”
“Good Lord, Lenny, you’re just the bearer of bad tidings today.”
Lenny looked glum. Mike saw the look on Lenny’s face. He softened his voice, “Hey, Lenny, don’t worry about it. I’m just kidding you. I would rather you tell me the good news and the bad news. I need both, so that I can make good decisions. Bad news doesn’t get any better with time. It stinks worse, like road kill in the sun.”
Lenny nodded, the look on his face lightened a small bit. “Mike, you know those dead dragons in their eggs, in the shaft. The ones we had to drag out with the mother?”
“Yeah, that was a big mess.”
“Well, it turns out that was a blessing in disguise.”
“Mmmmm, and why is that?”
“Well, think about the size of those things. They were the size of large pit bulls, and M.A. tells that they get bigger than that before they’re born.”
“Yeah, but they’re all dead.”
“Well, these are.”
Mike put his head down into his hands, then ran his hands through his hair.
“Let me guess, there are other females with other broods.”
“Yeah, there are. Probably not around here, because we just killed two females. One that had a brood about to hatch, and another that was going into estrus. When the brood hatches, they gang up into packs, and go hunting, until they get big enough and can’t stand to be around each other.”
“You’re telling me that we’re going to be dealing with not only the big ones, but the little ones as well.”
“Yeah, that’s about it.”
Mike thanked him for the information. The rest of the day was spent doing maintenance on the mech armor, to make sure that it was ready for more hard usage.
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He dreamed of a lazy Saturday. Before they got the pups, when they had just started trying for a baby. He was lying in bed and Jo was sleeping on his chest. He was looking up at the ceiling, watching the patterns of light as the sun crept through the blinds and the shadows of the ceiling fan as it moved. It was a sweet day. Any day he had with Jo was an amazing day. He looked at her beautiful face, her breath tickling the hairs on his chest.
He stretched, and she shifted as he moved. When she slept, Jo would hold her hands together, like she was praying. As he moved, one of her hands moved across his chest and then stopped on his stomach. He leaned his head forward so that he could inhale the clean smell of her hair. He breathed in deep, enjoying the aroma. He kissed the top of her head. Her hand shifted across his stomach, to the other side of his body, and her body shifted in closer to his. His skin warmed as more of her body came into contact with it.
He kissed her again, on top of her head. She shifted her head so that he could kiss her forehead. He twisted his body so that he was facing her. She moved her arm under his body as he slipped his other arm around her. She moved her head so that they could kiss. The kisses started small, slow. Jo started exploring his body with her hands and he explored hers. He loved her lean, muscular body. Yoga was such a wonderful thing. The kisses grew in length as they explored. The kisses became full, long, and languid.
Jo whispered his name, “Mike.”
He kept kissing her.
“Mike, hey Mike.”
Mike woke up. He was dazed as he looked around. Finally he recognized his surroundings. The cot that he was on creaked as he shifted his weight. He let the air out of his lungs in a grunt.
“Hey buddy, are you okay?”
Mike opened his eyes and looked at the smiling face of Rob Torres.
“Hey Mike, you were groaning in your sleep. I was worried about you after today.”
Mike waved Rob off, “Yeah, don’t worry, I’m okay. No problems. It wasn’t nightmares, it was memories.”
Everett walked over, “Hey, everything okay?
Mike nodded, “Yeah, just dreaming about Jo.”
Everett looked concerned. This was the first time Mike had mentioned Jo since the incident. He was worried about Tom and Mickey as well. Neither of them were big talkers. He and Rob had talked about their families, the ones they had left behind. Everett knew it wasn’t going to get easier as time moved on. He would have to monitor the team to make sure they were okay.
Everett was on watch. From now on, there would always be one leader on watch with the guards. The days on this planet, or this dimension, or this universe, whatever the hell it was, were much longer than they were on Earth. The team had figured that out the first full day topside. The day didn’t seem like it would ever end. So, they timed the day length, hoping the information might help them figure out where they were. They timed the day from sunset to sunset to figure out how long the day was. This was complicated by the cloud cover in the area, so it wasn’t precise, but they discovered the day here was about thirty-three hours long.
They broke down the day into four eight hour shifts, which would slowly rotate as that extra hour came into play. Mike, Everett, Jen, and Lieutenant Jondreau, or Ken as he now preferred to be called, were the leaders of the shifts. Security was evenly divided into four shifts, ready to be called in case of emergency. Bodies were packed in close across the cave floor. Maintenance and logistics were broken down into shift rotations as well. Rob, Mickey, and Tom pitched in to ensure that all necessary tasks were taken care of.
Mike swung his feet out of the sleeping bag, and then moved into a sitting position. There was a fire at the mouth of the cave, with a murder bird roasting on a homemade spit. It turned out that murder bird was edible and very tasty. Plus, they were too stupid to run away when they saw a hunting party. They were like murderous dodo birds. He wondered about their eggs. He could use an omelet.
Mike looked out past the fire and he could see that night had fallen. He yawned. Everett squatted down next to the fire, and filled a canteen cup with coffee and moved over to Mike and Rob. Rob sat down on the edge of the cot. Everett came over and gave them both cups of coffee. Everett sat down on his heels, and they were quiet for a minute as they thought about the people that they left behind.
Rob asked, “Do you think we’ll ever get back?
Mike looked at him, “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know where we are, or where they are, or how we can go back.” He paused, “Hell, I don’t even know if the brain trust downstairs can figure out where we are or what we can do about it.”
They grew quiet again. Mike sipped his coffee, wondering when the last of it would run out, “Who’s in the mech armor?”
Everett answered, “I put Murph in.”
It had been agreed, on conference with the brain trust and security leadership that more people needed to get acclimatized to the mechs. The others may not have the athletic ability that Mike and his team did, but the work that they had done paved the way for others to use the mechs. Plus it made sense. If Mike, or anybody on the team were hurt, they would need to be replaced. Now, the Air Force personnel and civilians were being rotated through systems training so the AI could get used to them. The AI had been reprogrammed so that it had profiles for the people that rotated in and out of the equipment. Mike even ensured that the profiles for Mik
e and his team were located on each suit of mech armor in case they couldn’t get to their original mechs.
This training was extending to more than just mech armor training. Mike and his team were shifting back to their Special Forces background, and starting to train everybody on weapons systems, hand to hand combat, survival, small unit tactics, and first aid. While the older guys weren’t able to fully participate in some of the more athletic activities, such as the hand to hand combat training, a lot of those guys, especially the ones that had prior military training, were death with a rifle or hand gun.
Their major problem was ammunition. They were getting low on ammunition. They dealt a large amount of damage to the dragons, and other predators. The rub was, these were large animals, and required a lot of damage to bring them down.
Tom was working with Hank, the fabrication lead, to build a few rifles big enough to take down the dragons. This led to other problems though, such as brass, gunpowder, and primers. They had the fifteen pieces of brass for the .50 BMG that was expended in the first fight with the original dragon. They only had thirty-fiveunfired cartridges left. They would have to figure out how to make new bullets. That wasn’t an easy prospect when you didn’t have an industrial base to work with. So they were looking for ways to create weapons that would deal with the problem.
Luckily, the small bullets for the rail guns were made of iron, so a pass with a homemade magnet over the area where the carcasses were eaten or decayed, picked up some of the iron that had been fired. Some of the iron had been eaten with the chunks of meat, and scattered. They wouldn’t be able to recover it all.
Still, staying where they were was untenable. They couldn’t stay in the facility for several reasons. Climbing up and down the ladder everyday would get harder for the older people, and was, in fact, hard enough for some of them as it was now. So they needed a base that was on the surface. There was also the problem that the structure was sitting at an angle, putting stress on the materials that it was constructed of, stress that it wasn’t designed or built to hold. Plus, they had to deal with the dragons that would continue to drift into the valley.
That last part was significant. Talking to Matki Awrani, who was some kind of hunter/scout/biologist for his people, he found out that, while the last beast that he fought was a big critter, some of the dragons could be as much as two tons larger. Mike didn’t like the thought of having to fight two of three of those gigantic beasts at the same time. He didn’t think that they would be able to survive that encounter. While the beasts might not be able to crack the mech armor, what would happen when they ran out of ammunition for the rail guns, and the security team ran out of ammunition for the rifles that supported the mech team?
That wouldn’t be a good day for anybody.
Mike asked Matki Awrani if there were any places that the dragons wouldn’t, or couldn’t go. Matki responded by pointing at the mountains behind them. The mountains would stop the dragons, but it wouldn’t stop the packs of young dragons that might roam, looking for prey.
Mike stood and stretched, “I think I’m going to get some fresh air.”
Everett stood and said, “I think I’m going to join you. You don’t mind do you?”
Mike smiled, “why would I?”
Everett shrugged, “Well, you were thinking about Jo.”
Mike motioned towards the cave entrance with his head, “No prob, come on.”
“Well, if you don’t mind, then I’m comin’ with you,” Rob added.
They walked out, enjoying the cooler night air. During the daytime, the guys in the Mech armor chopped up the meat of the dragons and had taken it far away from the cave. They drug the carcasses very close to the mouth of the valley, about fifteen kilometers away from the entrance of the cave. Even with the blood and gore strewn across the meadow, everybody was hoping that the distance and amount of meat would keep the other, larger scavengers away.
“God, this is a strange world,” Everett said.
“Yeah, but there is a lot about it that is very familiar. It’s almost as if we landed in a dimension just off from ours. I mean, what if the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out by that big meteor in the Yucatan. Would the world have ended up like this?”
Mike continued to sip his coffee. The sounds of the small animals and insects drifted across the meadow. This was a good sound. Hopefully it meant that there weren’tpredators out there hunting them.
“So, what are we going to do?” Everett asked.
“Well, I think we need to move back up into the mountains. We need to send a scout team out to find a place we can fortify against predators. That would give us some space to be able to drag everything out of here up to there, and maybe we can set everything up so that we can have electricity and some capability of fabrication.”
Everett nodded agreement.
Mike continued, “That means we have to get everybody on board. And I’m not sure these people want to be dragged further out of their comfort zone.”
Everett added, “Yeah, They’re so far outside their comfort zone, I’m amazed more of them haven’t gone off their rocker, like Jamison.”
Mike shook his head at the mention of the name, “Yeah, all he does now is rock, drool, and keep saying it isn’t his fault.”
Jamison was failing at an alarming rate. The docs were thinking that it was a series of strokes or maybe even a tumor.
Everett spoke, “How could it be his fault. I mean, what the hell.”
A light source was trying to peak out from behind the clouds. The clouds were still pretty thick, but there was definitely a glow behind them, indicating the presence of some kind of satellite. Silence descended again, as they sank back into memories. A light wind sprung up across the meadow. They watched as the breeze made the grasses in the meadow shift in rhythm. They relaxed further as the natural world moved around them.
Everett spoke, “Well, I think I’m going to go ahead and get some more coffee.”
“Yeah, I think I’ll get another cup. I’m going to stay out here for a while. I need some fresh air after sleeping next to Stein. What about you Rob?”
“No, I still have some.”
Mike and Everett walked back to the fire. They poured some water, then sat the cups next to the fire, until it began to boil.
Sergeant Joseph nodded as he walked past to go out to the latrine. Mike watched as the big security policeman walked past the large mech armor towards the latrine. Nobody dared to piss in the meadow anymore. Mickey put his foot down pretty quick to ensure that people weren’t squatting down anywhere they decided, leaving urine and feces all over the place. He designated an area, then a ‘hey you’ work detail dug a slit trench for a latrine. Some of the women were upset at the lack of privacy. They got over it when it was pointed out that at the present time, walls would impede the security over watch from doing their jobs.
Joseph stood at the slit trench and Mike looked away. Even though they worried about disease vectors, the slit trenches were pretty close. People shoveled in dirt to cover urine and feces when they were finished with their business. White toilet paper glowed in the night.
Rob said, “Hey, that’s the first time I’ve seen the moon out here.”
Everett and Mike looked up at this revelation.
Mike called out, “What, the moon is out?”
“Yeah, clear as a bell.”
Everett looked at Mike, “I guess the wind blew the clouds away.”
Mike replied, “Well, let’s take a look.”
He and Everett walked out and took a look at the sky. The moon was three quarters full.
“Wow. That looks fantastic.”
Joseph zipped up and joined them.
The moon glow across the meadow, along the bobbing high grass, was mesmerizing. They stood a few minutes and stared at the moon. The moon didn’t look quite the same. It had scars that Mike didn’t remember.
“Well, we know we’re on Earth.”
Rob, Mike, and Sergeant Joseph
looked at Everett, “What do you mean?”
Everett looked back at them, motioning towards the moon, “Our moon, our earth.”
“Wow.” The group looked over at Rob. Rob looked like he was deep in thought. Evidently, Everett had triggered something in his memory.
Rob asked, “Who’s in the mech armor?”
Everett looked at him, “Murph.”
Rob reached into his pocket, pulled out his ear bud, and put it in his ear, “Hey Murph, do you know how to use the visual functions on the mech armor.”
Murphy’s deep voice replied, “Ah, no, I’m just kind of watching the screens that are already up.”
“Okay, no prob.”
Rob walked over to the side of his mech armor. He started climbing up the side.
“Hey Rob, what’s going on?” Everett asked.
“Ah, nothing really, I just want to get some pictures. Something is nagging at a corner of my mind, and I need to see if it clicks with anybody downstairs in the brain trust.”
“Anything we can do to help?” Mike asked.
“Naw, just give me a few minutes and I’ll be back out.”
Rob climbed in. This wouldn’t need a full fire up, so he didn’t even climb all the way down inside of the armor. He clicked on the switch that fired up the electronics, then pulled the helmet up and switched it on. He put the helmet on and watched the head’s up display light up.
As it lit up, he watched the drone feed spin up. Finally it blinked on and showed the valley. He re-targeted the lens so that it was looking up at the moon in the sky. He took several pictures. He reset the drone camera back down to the valley below. He turned off the helmet and shut down the electrical systems. He shut the hatch of the mech armor to keep moisture out, and climbed down the side.
“Get what you wanted?” Everett asked.
“Yeah, as good as I could, I guess.”
“Anything you want to talk about?” Mike asked.
“No, I’ll just wait until morning and drop downstairs and see if anybody knows something. It might be something, but it’s probably nothing.”
Mike kept quiet, trusting Rob’s instincts.
