by Mark Kraver
Zenn could hear somebody screeching in pain through her office door. She rushed out into the hallway where a Z-pod was latched onto a cadet’s head. His screams crackled in her eardrums. She knew she was no match for the muscular mollusk, and that she should not touch the tangled beast, or she would be the next to suffer an unspeakable death. She waved her hand in the air to summons her protectorate cherubim, but none appeared.
Grabbing the first thing she could get her hands on, she dispatched the horrible creature with the academy’s shielded symbol hanging on a nearby wall. Cutting through its center, the Z-pod thrashed out of control, gushing black ink and knocking over everything in the hallway as it reached out in a dying spasmodic discharge of mindless nerve impulses.
Her first thoughts after reading the nothingness from the cadet’s mind was to save Yahweh’s family. “It has begun,” her mind shouted out in horror. Her heart raced with a rush of adrenaline, shifting her eyes back and forth, from scream to scream, she ran cautiously down the majestic hallways and out into the haunted night.
At the edge of the Helios System of Planets the swirling maelstrom of rotating dark-matter was still spinning from the departure of young Pioneer Yahweh when the now-older Creator Yahweh arrived back into the star system. Numen had manipulated the transecting timelines between universes to coincide with the departure of their rescue mission to Earth antons earlier.
Entering the inhabited zone of the star Heaven, they passed one earth-like world after another in a long chain of planets in the Helios System until they fell into orbit on the dark side of Omega Prime. Before contacting the City Center Spaceport, they all marveled at the cradle of Elohim civilization in the Milky Way Galaxy. Oceans and continents jig sawed into the landscape and lit up like beaming vibrant veins of a living organism. Greenish swirls crisscrossed by blue and pink streaking luminescent lines demarcated the coastlines. Circling spirals around enormous mountains emanated from every inhabited surface of the planet in a spider web pattern that looked as though the architect designed everything from outer space with a paintbrush.
“Wow, your planet is beautiful,” Reeze said, with Zenith in a mesmerized stare nodding her approval. Yahweh hadn’t seen his own home world from outer space at night either and was equally impressed.
“Yes, it looks like they are even more wasteful with their energy resources than Twenty-first Century Earth,” Zenith said about the brilliance of the planet’s lighting at night.
“This is not wasteful,” Yahweh protested. “These lights are powered by the magnetic core of the planet. If it wasn’t directed through the electrical infrastructure of the planet, it would be lost in outer space to the solar winds. Now that would be a waste of resources. Solar power and the planet’s core magneto are both supplemented by the kinetic energy between planets in the entire Helios Systems. That produces more energy in a single revolution than would be needed in a thousand years of domestic use.”
Both Zenith and Reeze listened to Yahweh describe the amazing technology with their mouths agape.
“What are we to say when they ask why we are back?” Numen asked, getting ready to request clearance for landing.
“Malfunction, of course,” Yahweh said, shrugging his shoulders. “You were an untested prototype, were you not?”
Numen blinked at his master ‘winging it’ and opened communications. “This is Pioneer Yahweh requesting permission to land at City Center Spaceport.”
After several seconds of no response, Numen rechecked his communications array and repeated, “This is Pioneer Yahweh requesting permission to land at City Center Spaceport.”
“Pioneer,” Reeze laughed, hearing her Creator downgraded to the pioneering class. When she realized nobody else was laughing, she furrowed her brow and asked with new concern, “Maybe there is no one left to answer?”
“Land as usual. If that is inappropriate, then they will instruct us further,” Yahweh ordered.
Numen began their reentry sequence into the thickening atmosphere of Yahweh’s home planet in the usual fashion by first rotating the ship backward and firing a short burst on the main engines. This slowed the ship enough to drop it out of orbit and into the shadows of night on their approach to the spaceport. Zenith instructed Reeze in the intricacies of landing a spaceship on a planet of this size each step of the way to keep her own mind occupied as the stress mounted inside the cabin.
Once they were in sight of the spaceport the usual tractor beam failed to engage and Numen piloted the ship in for a manual landing. The view over the city was spectacular. The red and blue glowing building spires were nestled between forests of green luminescent plant life. Everywhere they looked were brightly lit, thin white gravilator tubes completing the surrounding landscape into a spiderweb mosaic masterpiece. The spaceport was clearly demarcated in vibrant yellow rectangular docking bays lined up in a gigantic circle, like the many spokes of a large rotating wheel.
The ship touched down perfectly inside an empty landing pad and sat quietly.
“Where is everyone?” Reeze asked.
“Unkno—good question,” Numen said, deleting the word ‘unknown’ from his vocabulary and replacing it with the more common phrase, ‘good question.’ “This spaceport was busy an hour ago. It is still a time of commerce. Maybe they are somewhere else, dinner perhaps?”
“Everyone?” Zenith asked.
“Good question,” Numen said again, already making this new expression obnoxious.
“I think ‘unknown’ is better than ‘good question,’” Reeze said. Yahweh and Zenith nodded in agreement without saying a word.
Numen puckered his artificial lips and performed an ‘undo’ command to his vocabulary processor before waving his hand over the posterior wall and dematerializing the ship’s hull. Everyone exited the vessel, cautiously stepping onto the landing pad without encountering a soul.
Yahweh said, “This all feels like déjà vu.” He turned to Zenith and said, “You and Reeze stay with the ship. Have it readied to leave at a moment’s notice? You may be our only escape.” He then took a deep breath and said, “Numen, Bullet, take me home.” When Bullet didn’t appear, Yahweh looked at Numen, questioning.
“It appears that a general order sixty-six recalling all cherubim to their storage pods has been issued by Prime Prole Braniff, for all of Omega Prime,” Numen reported after checking the Helios Wide Net.
Reeze quickly looked back over her shoulder and asked out loud, “Oscar? Melvin? Theodore?”
“Interesting,” Yahweh said.
Numen led Yahweh out of the landing port and into the scream-filled night. Between the glow of luminous trees and vibrant bushes, sounds of struggle and terror reverberated from the shadows. Yahweh and Numen began running to assist, but the screams stopped with a gasping silence. Carefully, they walked to explore further. Numen switched his vision to the infrared, and saw their worst nightmare. A Z-pod was feeding on the brains of a young female human. Invasion was confirmed.
Streaks of lightning blasted from Numen’s fist, exploding the Z-pod's twitching flesh onto the adjacent wall in a splash of inky goo. Another Z-pod, seeing the threat, contracted its musculature chromatophore skin cells to camouflage its retreat, before slithering back into the sewer drains to alert the others. The sizzling smell of the smoldering Z-pod’s exploded burnt body permeated Yahweh’s nostrils and backpack sensors. The undigested blood and neural tissue streaming from its hard beak reminded him of the smell on the command deck of New Jerusalem after their initial confrontation with the Z-pod in the blue universe, but amplified times ten.
“My family!”
Numen stood motionless for several seconds staring at the strange patterns on the ink-stained wall.
“What wrong?” Yahweh shouted. Inside his head he felt a blast of telepathic energy discharging in every direction. “What was that?”
“It appears to be a signal I’ve just sent out. It must have been pre-programmed into my subroutines,” Numen postulated.
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br /> Deep under the city, sewage and storm water drainage pipes were the perfect places for Z-pod to hide. Slithering through the underworld, they left a barely perceptible conductive slime layer behind that they used as a communication line to each of their kind in the surrounding areas. Across this network of interconnecting stench, in a matter of moments, every Z-pod in the city was alerted to their worst enemy.
Specialized sentinel mollusks called Z-com slinked to the surface to locate the seraph and his master. Once on the surface, they began to metamorphose into floating bladders, with organized bacterial colonies inside their gut breaking down their digestive content into hydrogen gas. As more of the effervescing bubbles coalesced inside their intestines, their bodies started expanding, lifting their heads and gigantic eyes high into the sky. Anchoring one tentacle to the grounded ooze, they slowly uncoiled their outer layers of skin into a long cable like a kite string, each one lifting its head high enough into the air, so it could spy on a sizable portion of the city.
Once the first Z-coms locked gazes on the running duo and transmitted their coordinates, hundreds of Z-pods were mobilized to bring them down.
Yahweh and Numen reached his family’s home without encountering a single slimy beast. Screams echoed in practically every home they passed on their way hastening their resolve. Banging on the door, Yahweh was alarmed that no one answered. He reached for the biometric key fob under the front door flower pot and the doorway exploded. Numen had used his newly-acquired electric fist bolt to disintegrate the front entrance.
“Works for me,” Yahweh said, running into the house expecting the worse, but no one was at home. Teela’s monitor showed he was the only lifeform in the building. As the furniture began to rearrange itself automatically, Teela began to speak, “Hello, you have elevated levels of epinephrine, are you excited—”
“Teela quiet,” Yahweh said quickly, listening for familiar footsteps. “Where’s Numen?”
Numen looked at his master, puzzled and began downloading the home’s data for assimilation.
“Here boy. Where’s my little Numen?”
“Master?” Numen asked, waving his golden hand, attempting to assess his master’s eyesight.
“Maybe he’s outside in his hole?”
“Okay, but hurry,” Numen said, playing along with his master’s strange behavior with caution. “The screams are advancing.”
“Numen? Here boy. Where are you, Numen?” Yahweh led his seraph swiftly through the house and out the back door.
Numen the terrapin had dug a hole in the backyard and was hiding. He reluctantly poked his head out to look around.
Yahweh sighed loudly with relief. “There’s my boy.”
Numen the terrapin came out of his shelter wearing a hologram displayer on his shell’s back.
“Hey Numen, meet Numen. What’s this on your shell, boy?” he asked, activating the hologram.
Numen the seraph began accessing stored files on his master’s pet when the unzipping information was disrupted by a projection.
Projecting from the holographic display strapped to the terrapin’s shell, a figure of Headmaster Zenn bent over speaking appeared: “Help us Yahweh. If you receive this message, we are in grave danger. Z-pods have invaded the city and are feeding upon the population. I have brought your family to the seraphim station for protection. Help us Yahweh, you are our only hope.”
Yahweh tapped the terrapin gently on the shell. “Sorry boy, can’t play,” he said affectionately. “Okay Numen go back into your hole, and hide until I come back. Okay boy? Good Boy.”
The perplexed seraph filed his master’s behavior and Zenn’s message away for later analysis.
“How did Headmaster Zenn know we were here?” Yahweh asked.
“How did she know about the Z-pods?” Numen asked, equally confused.
They hurried over the bare spot in the vines on the backyard wall, down the pathway between the housing complexes, and past the antigravity park. The front doors of the academy were just ahead, wide open. They could shorten their route to the seraphim station if they cut through the academy’s long, dark corridors.
Spoiling the sweet-scented luminous flowers lighting the walkway with a twinkling of pastels was a fetid musky stench. A small herd of horned micro-horses stampeded out of the park, evidently spooked by a nearby Z-pod ambush. Numen focused into the darkness on the monstrosities within and unleashed a bolt from his fist that strobed the surroundings, blowing the slimy tentacles apart, and scattering quivering chunks of flesh over the closely cropped grass. Yahweh was now torn between going back to help Zenith and Reeze, and saving his family, when without warning the ground became alive with slithering hungry kraken crawling out of every shadowy crevice.
“Numen, we have a problem.”
Numen blasted right and left in a continuous wave of destruction as bright as Heaven at high noon, lighting up the night’s sky in a crackling storm of bursting sparks.
“Impressive firepower,” Yahweh shouted, ducking behind him so not to get in the way.
“A limited resource at this rate, I assure you,” the seraph said, scanning the darkened recesses for any more undesirable movements.
Running as quickly as they dared through the front doors of the ghastly academy halls, they found themselves stepping over dead bodies of sapients and superiors alike. Yahweh recognized them all. Each looked like they had their brains sucked out through their eye sockets.
“Doesn’t look like they are interested in making everyone into zombies today.” Yahweh surmised, taking in the pattern of death and destruction and sensing no one was left alive.
“Master, the quickest way to the seraphim station is through this gravilator tube,” Numen said, holding open the tube door on the backside of the academy.
Shooting through the clear tubing they saw the station in the distance surrounded by a growing contingency of Z-pod and Elohim zombies.
“What is Zenn up to?” Yahweh asked.
“Maybe she is activating seraphim to help in the fight?”
Without missing a step, they both bounded out of the tube. Numen laid down a wide field of fire, opening a pathway into the station. When they entered the building, Dexter was lying on the ground, dead, just inside the doorway. A large gaping hole in his eye socket left no doubt to his fate. A screwdriver in his hand was stabbed into the head of a dead Z-pod, still wrapped around the chief engineer’s lifeless body in a death grip.
“Headmaster?” Yahweh called out.
Flora and Zenn were busy activating hastily-assembled seraphim parts as fast as they could when Zenn heard the call.
“Yahweh!” Zenn responded, as an army of walking dead Elohim advanced on their position with handheld weapons.
“Looks like they are using zombies after all,” Yahweh yelled, recognizing some zombies as his classmates from the academy. One in particular, he had considered his friend. His sunken eye sockets now made him look oddly wanting. “They must have raided the armory.”
“Master, it is against my programming to kill Elohim,” Numen complained.
“Rewrite your programming. They are no longer Elohim, they are zombie.”
“Works for me,” Numen said. He twitched and then opened fire, exploding Yahweh’s armed zombie friend’s head from the inside-out with crackling lightning bolts as they retreated deeper into the seraphim station.
“We are running out of parts to activate,” Flora shouted to Zenn as Yahweh entered the room and Numen held off the zombie/Z-pod army with his impressive firepower.
“Yahweh,” Zenn gasped, “they are in there.” She was pointing to the backroom.
Flora and Zenn remained busy booting up seraphim parts and sending them forth in emergency protect mode. Headless seraphim and grasping arms were not very effective against the swarms of Z-pod attacking the station, but were better than nothing.
Hesitating for a moment to look at Zenn’s familiar aged face, Yahweh nodded and turned. He rushed into the backroom wher
e his parents and little sister hid behind a large hibernation pod. As Yahweh locked eyes on his sister Nina, emboldened Z-pod began slithering on the ceiling toward his family.
“Numen, protect,” Yahweh shouted.
“I cannot.”
“Numen I order you to protect my family.”
“It is against my programming. Protecting them may harm you.”
“Numen, I will never forgive you if you do not obey me now.”
“I am sorry, master.” Numen punched keys on the palm of his hand erecting a force field around his master as several zombies opened fire directly at him.
Yahweh slammed his fists against the field trying to reach his family, yelling as loudly and fiercely as he could, “NUMEN!”
A determined Z-pod dropped its tentacle toward Nina, and Numen blasted it with precision as another reached for Yahweh’s mother.
Suddenly, Zenith erupted into the room, blasting several Z-pod and zombies, exploding them in half. Reeze then appeared next to her, clearing the rest of the room with her blasting pistol fire. Zenith and Zenn locked eyes. Numen released Yahweh from his protective field and he ran to his family's’ side.
“I told you to stay in the ship,” Yahweh shouted at Reeze and Zenith, reaching out for his parents and Nina.
“Aren’t you glad we didn’t follow—” Reeze was cut off by the sight of Zenith’s abdomen bursting open. Her guts splattered against the far wall, gunned down from behind by one of the mindless hordes of zombies and undulating Z-pod.
“NO!” yelled Reeze, raising her pistol and blasting the monsters apart. Their inky entrails exploded all over the walls and flooring.
