The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3

by Nicholas Erik

  Johnny had gone down one night to inspect these strange objects. Within the deepest recesses of his mind, he had realized that these objects were familiar. What had they been called? The ship, on which he had arrived on this planet? They belonged to The Blue Maybelle.

  The nano-fusion cores.

  Emerging from the darkness of the underground, Johnny had a fleeting thought that, perhaps this worship was valid. Perhaps they understood the cores’ great power.

  Johnny had felt his own mind fragmenting over the weeks, memories of the past—Keene and the crew—fading from his grasp. Those recollections seemed unimportant. As a ward against complete decay, he set to documenting the once glorious empire of the Incas from fragments of dialogue and the close study of his compatriots’ stories in order to contextualize this city of gold’s vast importance. As if driven by madness, he drew four maps of other, lesser cities, their construction having lent itself to the creation of this: Vilcabamba, the last stand of the Incas against an insurgent force. There was no artistry to the other maps, just facts and precision.

  But the final one, of the Last City, it was a masterpiece. Everything that he felt, he transcribed upon paper. Finishing it, he knew not what was missing.

  Before his mind went, he drew a creature, squat and stout, bearing a lengthy appendage where a nose might be and large floppy ears. He crushed up nearby plants and spread it upon the image, coloring the bizarre animal green. He knew not what it was called, but it seemed appropriate for the power that lay hidden underneath this city.

  Beneath his map, as his final conscious act, Johnny wrote an epitaph. The Last City.

  Then, carrying his maps, he went down below ground to join his comrades in worship. A few of them still did rounds, protecting the outskirts of the city above ground. The rest were below, worshipping the cores to protect the world from cataclysmic destruction.

  A rock. It had been a great falling rock landing near his head that had roused Johnny from his stupor. He hadn’t aged a day, didn’t know how many it had been. Chanting, nearby, both familiar and frightening. He blinked and found he was underground. A series of maps was on the floor nearby, well preserved by the subterranean air.

  Johnny had scooped them up and began walking around, marveling at the structure.

  Wandering through the complex, he found the nano-fusion cores atop an altar. The chanting was in reverence to these strange objects. Spanish and Inca stood before in rapt prayer.

  A sudden terror shook him. These were dangerous, could cause immense harm. Half of his mind was present, the other clouded in impenetrable fog. But he had to take them. Their power was too great to be left here.

  He had grabbed the case, but this had sent the rest of the worshippers into a furious frenzy. Dashing through the underground labyrinth, he barely escaped. The case flopped open as he had ran. When he was out in the sunlight, some miles from the entrance, panting from the exertion, he looked down.

  The cores were gone, but the case remained.

  He’d caught a tour bus back to Cusco. Done some research. Senator Strike had seemed to be a good bet for help in retrieving these dangerous objects. The cores couldn’t remain on this world.

  Johnny had told the Senator about the case, the great cores that it was meant to house. Left it at a secret spot. The Senator had retrieved it, believed him.

  Trust was building. The Senator could be a friend. He would show the maps to him, confirm that this man would help.

  But Catarina had shown up instead, told him what she’d done. Told him that she’d kill everyone in the flophouse if he didn’t tell her where the maps were.

  So he had.

  And then she’d gotten an evil look in her eye and said, “Wait, you can just tell me how to get them.”

  He’d refused, knowing that the cores—the Emerald Elephant—was there, that something bad would happen if she reached the site and found the secret entrance. That’s what he’d told the Senator, on the phone, imploring him to take him seriously. Tremendous evil and destruction.

  The maps told her little. But he could tell her everything. He’d held out.

  And then Catarina, overflowing with rage, had fired off a shot from her pistol, close enough to graze Johnny’s ear. The light inside his head went out and the stupor returned.

  She’d shaken him, but it was no act. So she’d left.

  When she’d returned a week later, he was still there, on the bed, murmuring prayers to an unknown god.

  So she took him along.

  Catarina hadn’t expected to live so long. What passed for science on this planet had accelerated enough by the 20th century to examine her blood, explain why she was aging at such a slow rate. Her cells had mutated from a super-virus formed from New World, Old World and far flung pathogens from her own galaxy. Errors in DNA replication were less frequent, halting the aging process.

  But the virus also seemed to obscure synaptic communication with the hippocampus, which meant that it effectively made the subject forget all he ever had been. She’d caught glimpses of her psyche going blank over recent years. Which lent itself to strange, out of character behavior. Obsessive behavior.

  The virus appeared to be hyper-contagious in its first twelve hours. Thereafter, it seemed to be harmless to others, judging from the simple fact it hadn’t spread across the world.

  Much more than that, however, was a mystery.

  She looked at Johnny. After the shot, he’d gone catatonic. Pressed him too far. He suffered from the same affliction, but had more exposure to the virus, having stayed at the battle. Despite living for over four centuries, Johnny looked as he did on the day their pods were discovered by intrepid Spanish conquistadors. He appeared immortal, the trade-off being his sentience and free-will.

  Catarina’s fate, by contrast, had seen her mental faculties remain relatively intact, while the past four centuries had seen her gradually segue into silver-haired middle age, rather than decrepitude and inevitable death.

  Maybe she was more resilient.

  Not completely resilient. Looking at him was like looking into a mirror. No fusion cores meant inevitable insanity, bumbling about these ruins like someone caught in a permanent fever dream.

  This was why she had begun furtive work on a solution to get home, where actual medicine might save her. Her own feeble attempts at a cure had only expedited the aging process and done little to combat the psychological deterioration. So her focus had turned to escape, starting with Franz, the cold fusion, three decades prior.

  But it all had been pointless. She couldn’t find the cores, couldn’t make them. The ship, she’d found that once satellite imagery had been invented. To others it might have looked like a crater or a blip, but she knew what it really was. Had trekked up Cotopaxi, looked inside. It was useless without the cores. And the crew couldn’t help her with those, being frozen for so long.

  She’d left them that time, more than thirty years ago, had barely given it consideration to wake them up. Maybe she’d already gone insane.

  Or maybe it was just the product of four centuries wandering this planet, almost always alone.

  Johnny was her only hope of saving her mind.

  “Johnny…”

  Johnny stared at a speck of wet dirt on his arm, mouth half-open. Drool pooled at the corner of his lip and dripped down on his oversize shirt.

  “Mrragh?” Johnny’s head nodded over in Catarina’s direction. But it was an involuntary bob, not an acknowledgement of her attempts to get through to whatever remained of his brain.

  Far up the road, an unnatural noise cut above the chatter of the wild. A revving engine. Someone else was coming along this trail. Were they in pursuit? Catarina grabbed the rifle sitting on the back seat. She gave a final glance at the map, then decided it had served its purpose. It held no secrets, had jarred loose no hidden memories in either her own mind or
Johnny’s.

  A useless dead end.

  “Come on.” She checked the rifle, and it accidentally discharged, causing her to jump in surprise. A shimmering echo flooded her ears. Johnny, however, looked unperturbed.

  “He’s coming.”

  “What?” Catarina’s arm slid off of Johnny’s shoulder. She could hear that the distant roar was actually a number of separate vehicles combining to form a synchronous rumbling.

  “The one you fear.”

  Catarina shivered despite the humidity. “Who’s the one I fear?”

  She examined the rifle’s chamber again. Loaded in a bullet and test-fired to make sure that it had been user error—rather than equipment failure—that had led to the accidental discharge.

  “Mmmragh. Mmm. Mmm?” Johnny’s eyes shut off, as if some cosmic force behind his eyelids had decided to cease operations for the day. Catarina stood still for a moment, but the impending arrival of the unknown third parties didn’t afford her time to wait. She dragged him from the passenger side of the jeep, Johnny’s legs flapping and bending like a marionette’s. Into the foliage they went, Catarina finding a climbable tree that would offer her a good vantage point from which to view her quarry.

  “Climb.” She nudged the butt of the rifle into Johnny’s back. The engines had cut off. Probably due to the gunshots. If they already knew she was here, another couldn’t hurt. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence, Johnny reacting to them.

  She loaded a bullet into the chamber and fired it into the air.

  Johnny scrambled up the vines. Catarina followed.

  High in the treetop perch, camouflaged from the ground below, Catarina watched as the visitors came into view.

  “Impressive,” she said.

  “You cannot come,” Johnny said. “He cannot come.”

  “I think that ship has sailed, honey,” Catarina responded. “How do I get inside?”

  She took aim at Keene, walking with Lorelei, Derek and the blonde woman along the trail some hundred yards away. It was all very circular, hiding with Johnny in the leaves. Like fate was watching.

  “W-wait.”

  Catarina took her eye away from the rifle’s sight. “Why?”

  “If you spare their lives, I’ll show you inside.”

  The pair watched as the group below milled about, oblivious to the fact that their lives had just been spared.

  For now.

  18 | City on the Hill

  “It’s abandoned,” Keene said. He got off his ATV and stretched, touching the pistol tucked in his waistband.

  The rest of the engines shut off, and his makeshift crew joined him in the middle of the dirt road. Strike went around to the jeep’s front and touched the hood.

  “Still hot. They’re close.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “I got an idea.” Strike took a balled up piece of parchment from the back and gently unfolded it. Pieces of the brittle paper crumbled away into the ether, but enough remained that it was clear what it was.

  “The map,” Keene said. “She’s here.”

  Strike said nothing, but her eyes lit up as she dropped the map into the dirt and began to walk away.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Lorelei called.

  “To get revenge,” Derek said.

  “So I guess we don’t need the map?”

  “We’re already here,” Keene said. “It’s not gonna tell us how this thing ends.”

  They followed Strike into the jungle to find out.

  So this was it. The fabled Last City of the Incas, ensconced by trees. Just a gentle bump, an ebb and flow amongst a sea of undulating peaks and valleys.

  He glanced over his shoulder, but his three associates were out of sight, obscured by the dense greenery.

  Keene turned back to stare down the gentle incline. The faintest hint of a trail snaked through the foliage. Covered, but in a lazy haste. Broken branches and trampled twigs told a clear story.

  An outline of Vilcabamba’s plaza, now overgrown by the creep of moss and jungle fauna, was visible from this vantage point. But what of the trail? The main site, the tourist trap, out in the open air, breathing high above everything, a trail there made sense. But who had been visiting the deepest and most remote ruins of the Last City?

  “Who the hell is out here?”

  His rhetorical question was met by silence. Uncanny silence, given the chirps of the jungle and the erstwhile grunts of his companions. A pinprick bead of sweat began to form on his brow, travelling from his temple to the side of his cheek.

  Sucking down the last of the water, Keene took a single step forward. A branch snapped behind him, and he whirled around, hand snaking around his back to grab the pistol.

  “Easy,” a familiar voice said. “Let it go.”

  Keene’s fingers slipped away from the textured grip to his side as Strike, Derek and Lorelei emerged from the trees followed by Catarina and Johnny. Catarina flung a braid of rope at her three prisoners and gestured towards a nearby tree.

  Strike glowered as she and the others shackled themselves tightly to the trunk.

  Of course—how could he have hoped to beat Catarina? She had always been the smart one. Keene stared at his bound and gagged companions. No wonder they hadn’t answered. Strike was spitting bullets from her eyes in Catarina’s direction.

  “Coming after me?” Catarina nudged Johnny forward to take Keene’s .50 caliber pistol. Johnny complied, sliding it from his former captain’s waistband. He handed it to Catarina. “That’s what your pretty friend told me.”

  “Looks like you have yourself a little lapdog,” Keene said. Johnny avoided making eye contact, instead choosing to look at the ground.

  “This is one of his good days.”

  “It’s not personal,” Keene said. “But I can’t let you leave.”

  “It never is.” Catarina stared at him for an extended moment, then let loose a shrill snort. “How noble.”

  “It’ll destroy the planet.”

  “You think I don’t know?”

  With only a few feet separating them, Keene could see that Catarina’s eyes were beset with a swirling cloudiness. Johnny’s, too, except his former tech analyst looked almost like he had cataracts.

  Johnny wasn’t all there. As for Catarina, the jury was out. Her mental faculties seemed sharp, but there was an unhinged bitterness to her actions.

  Still, she hadn’t killed him yet—so there was that.

  “I’m sorry, am I boring you?” Catarina stepped forward and jabbed Keene in the chest with the tip of her rifle, shocking him from his thoughts. Now the only thing he was aware of was a thumping heart and the gentle grinding of metal into his breast-bone.

  “You don’t want to do this.”

  Catarina waved the gun in his face. “Don’t tell me what I want.”

  “Y-you promised,” Johnny said.

  “But that was before I had all this leverage,” Catarina said. She trained the rifle’s sights on the other captives. Keene rushed forward, but she wheeled around, finger halfway down on the trigger. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Tell her what she needs to know,” Keene said. “Johnny.”

  “I-I—”

  “Do it for them, not for me.”

  “You heard the man, Johnny. Be a hero,” Catarina said with a smile.

  Keene wasn’t convinced the situation was funny, but she held the gun, so he went along, forcing a smile through gritted teeth. “Tell her and it’ll all be okay. We’ll figure it out.”

  Johnny’s strange eyes flitted between Catarina and the captives, his addled mind weighing the benefits. “B-but everyone else.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Come on Johnny,” Catarina said. Now Keene could see the humanity in her eyes, the desperation, the loneliness—everything he f
elt, just amplified. “Let’s go home.”

  “In the plaza, the statues. You turn them to face one another.”

  “Thank you,” she said, blinking tears from her eyes. “Thank you.”

  Then Catarina shot Johnny in the head. In a smooth motion, she whirled around and fired another bullet into Keene’s gut, causing him to crumple to his knees. Everything felt warm and sticky. The light began to fade, and he fell into the grass, rolling gently down the hill, away from his friends, away from Johnny’s body, away from life itself.

  “Enjoy the show,” Catarina said, her voice ringing out across the treetops.

  He saw Catarina’s boots pass by his face, and he flailed at them with gelatin arms, but his fingers fell just short, into the soft blades of grass.

  Keene shut his eyes.

  It wasn’t a choice. It just felt right.

  19 | Echoes of the Past

  Keene, Catarina and Derek wove their way through the heaving, churning outlaw city in the wastelands of Thori. Street urchins ran by, flailing at the foreigners’ pockets to no avail. The crew had lived in the slums for much of their lives. They were no strangers to such tactics.

  As he passed through the squalid, sprawling streets, Keene was struck by one thing—that he and his companions were better outfitted for the bitter cold than many of the inhabitants. Cutting down one tight alley, Keene saw rows of women lining the streets in outfits that would bring shivers in normal climes.

  The prostitutes pressed themselves upon the newcomers, but Keene, the leader of the charge, brushed them away. In his gloved hand, he held a geo-locator map he’d purchased at the gates for a couple dozen credits. The gatekeeper had input the coordinates to the other edge of town, where they could procure ground transportation for the trip to the Coalition outpost. Perhaps even find the parts to repair the busted sensing system.