by A.R. Rivera
Here I Come To Save The Day
When I was seven or so I went through this phase where I was always watching old cartoons. Black and white Mighty Mouse cartoons, specifically. There was a little Felix the Cat in there, too, but Mighty Mouse was my favorite. I would get up extra early on Saturday mornings hoping to catch them. Everyone else in my kindergarten class was into Transformers, or Tom and Jerry, but not me. Mighty Mouse was my guy; way better than Jerry, the typical cartoon mouse, or Speedy Gonzales, whose adventures were always the same. Jerry wanted to kill Tom the cat, and he never succeeded. Speedy only wanted cheese and no one could stop him from taking it because he was too fast. But Mighty Mouse was a hero; a tiny little mouse with super strength and the ability to fly. He did for others, defended others who couldn’t do for themselves.
Running across the slick terrain I relate to that cartoon mouse. In a very real way, I am small and vulnerable to this unknown enemy. But in another, surreal way, nothing is what it seems.
Because the guys in those hovercrafts don’t know what’s about to hit them. They don’t know the power I have or what I can do with it.
The three stones gently glow. I thrust my hands towards the set of hovercraft and rejoice when their engines sputter. They must be electric. The stones absorb the lights beneath them, the ones sending the sonic blasts into the tunnels. As I get closer, the crafts’ steady positions falter. The contour of the ship reminds me of a warped rim on a truck tire. Both machines drop onto the ice craters formed by the blasts, like bottle caps at a picnic. Bent and useless.
I look up, expecting a pointed cloud that leads to a vortex or wormhole. But the sky is empty, the day blindingly clear.
More rumbles ring from beneath my feet. A strange shaking, and then these booming sounds that start in my boots and shoot all the way up my spine, into my teeth. There’s nothing to do but scurry back from the crater as the ground surrounding the downed hovercrafts cracks and breaks.
The tunnels. The people.
Turning on my heel, I follow the shallow footprints in the snow back to the blind I came from. The wall of snow that hid the tunnel entrance is still standing though there’s a large crack running along the bottom.
“Arlen!” I call out, pushing and pulling at the edge of the round hatch, but it won’t budge. There’s no hinges to shoot at. No Biolock appearing on the surface.
All those people. Arlen and his father. Enanda. The nameless ones that passed me in the corridors. How will they get out?
“Arlen!” Hunched over, I’m pounding on the hatch.
I can’t open it.
Then I remember the clumsy-looking gun and take to my feet. Stepping back, I point the wide barrel of the weapon at the locked door. Drawing a deep breath, I let it out and listen for voices over the intermittent rumble that can only be a cave-in down below. Hearing nothing but my own labored breathing, I pull the trigger.
Like being kicked by a steroidal mule, my head jerks back, hits the edge of snow wall—hard. It’s a glancing blow and I keep going. The freezing ground slams my shoulders as momentum takes my feet up and over my head. Splayed like a jellyfish just outside the blind is how it ends. I’m on my side, nose bleeding, facing the sun. My shoulder throbs. My head… for one fleeting moment, I see the rings of Saturn.
The ground is still shaking.
The visor on my hood is covered in white powder. I scrape it away and scramble upright. Coming around the blind, I can tell that the hatch door’s been blown open. My breath catches at the long, rumble fighting its way up from inside the chute, from the bowels of the underground city.
Dust clouds fill the shaft. Flipping my hood up, I hold my breath and listen.
That sound. That same dull sound is closer, reverberating through the vertical tunnel. My legs shake inside my boots. Small bits of ice break from the grounds’ surface, flicking up as if they’re too excited to stay still. The odor rising from the shaft smells bad, like burning oil and shit. I step back, feeling the trembles reach my chest.
Tracing the vibrations with my eyes is compulsory as the ground shakes with greater force. The ice all around me cracks into fist-sized chunks and I stumble back out of the blind.
Over in the crater, a scraping screech catches my attention. It’s coming from the hovercrafts. One of the engines is whirring back to life. The far craft teeters as it tries to take off, cracking more chunks from the ice when it smashes down again. There’s a half-dozen people scrambling around the wreckage inside the craters when plates of ice shattered by the sonic cannons begin completely breaking apart, falling away, exposing deep crevices, like dead pixels on a digital screen. There is nothing below. Black steam rises from the open seams and the muffled rumbling I have felt more than heard isn’t muffled anymore.
The enemy survivors seem to panic and I can only stare at their suits. All smooth white, with a single neon orange stripe down the arms and legs. Some are shouting instructions to get clear of the danger zone. Others are looking at me and reaching for their weapons. I raise mine but don’t need to shoot.
The disaster unfolds too quickly. The deep sound of thunder down below crescendos and all hell breaks loose.
First, a steaming geyser shoots massive chunks of ice and debris into the air. Then, water. It shoots up at least a hundred feet, spraying the snowy landscape and freezing again in seconds. The men that have been trying to climb out of the pit freeze, as if that will save them, as if the sinking ground beneath them is attracted to movement.
The loud shaking stops and it scares me enough to run.
Fractured soil falls away, beginning at the crater and then rippling out in every direction at once.
Flames. A damned inferno erupts behind me. Blistering wind throws me forward. My mask and chest slam against the ice. The pain in my nose makes my eyes water and I can’t see. Doesn’t matter though. Propelled by the blast, I roll up onto my feet without pause and keep booking it.
And I keep running, never slowing or looking back until the heat is gone and the sounds disappear. Until the frozen air has almost frozen my lungs and I can’t take another step.
When I do take time to look back, there’s nothing left. I mean, there was nothing to see before, but now, there’s no invisible blind that hid a hatch in the flat expanse of white ground. There’s truly nothing. No hatch, no crater of wreckage. No crater at all—just blank space and a pyre of black smoke rising from the bowels of hell, into the morning sky.
And me.
I’m still here.
I have hardly any food. A few protein bars and some water. Arlen’s people took the fruit I picked and now they’re all dead.
I glance at the sky, feeling every shade of wrong and sarcastic.
“You’ve got a terrible sense of humor.”
My steps are muffled clicks in the compact snow as I plod toward the city that Arlen talked about and trying not to remember the sound of his voice or the underground tunnels filled with genetically deficient bottom-dwellers that will never again see the light of day.
My eyes stay locked on the snowy ground as I go, looking up just enough to gauge direction and keep on target for the buildings in the distance.
There’s no way I will make it by nightfall, but I don’t care.
