Earth Eternal (Earthrise Book 9)

by Daniel Arenson

  She returned to her quarters. She showered. She considered putting on her bathrobe—she was off duty for the night—but decided instead to don her uniform again. The war was so close. The alarms might blare at any moment. She needed to be ready.

  She looked at her prosthetic arm, slick and silvery. She opened the hidden compartment on her forearm. Her derringer lay within. She took out the small pistol. Her grandfather had given her this gun on her twelfth birthday—her first gun. It was her only memento from the old general. It was, perhaps, the most precious object she owned. It was her only connection to her past.

  I was always a soldier, she thought. Ever since I was a girl. Even now I carry my first gun with me. Even now, a captain of HOPE, I wear my HDF dog tags under my uniform.

  She returned the pistol to the compartment on her forearm, then closed the hatch, sealing it within. She kept the derringer loaded. It was not just a family heirloom. It was insurance.

  She lay on her made bed atop the blankets. She picked up a book from her beside. Love in the Time of Cholera. But the words blurred. Her mind was a storm. Finally she placed the book aside, shut off the lights, and lay in darkness.

  She had dared not show Lailani weakness. She would not even show that weakness to herself in a lit room. But in the darkness, Ben-Ari wept. For Earth. For Marco and Addy. And for what she had become.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They must have crossed hundreds of kilometers before Addy fell.

  It happened in a dusty valley under dark clouds. She and Marco had been walking for many hours straight, limping, sweating, trembling. Their food was gone. Their water was gone. For the past day, they had been eating whatever bugs they could catch, rarely holding down the meal.

  They had a map. They were moving in the right direction. But Gehenna was still so far.

  In the valley of shadows and swirling ash, Addy fell. Too weary to continue. Barely able to breathe. She gasped for air and gazed up at Marco with glassy eyes.

  "Addy!"

  He knelt by her. He held her in his arms. She smiled up at him weakly.

  "I slipped," she whispered.

  She was lying, he knew. She hadn't slipped but collapsed. Her cheeks were pale and sunken. Her hair was damp with sweat. She had become gaunt, felt bony in his arms. Her skin burned with fever.

  He himself looked no better, Marco knew. His limbs were thin, rattling inside his spacesuit like twigs in a bottle. Sweat kept dripping into his eyes. He had no mirror, but he imagined that he looked like Addy—weary, pale, a dying wretch.

  He pulled out his canteen. He poured some of the water into Addy's mouth. She tried to swallow, coughed.

  "I know it's still dirty water," Marco said. "We'll find clean water in the city."

  She blinked, struggling to maintain her smile. "It's just over the horizon, right?"

  He nodded and clasped her hand. "That's right, Addy. Just over the horizon."

  She struggled to rise but fell back down. She spoke in a hoarse, weak voice. "You just need to rest for a few minutes. Just to catch your breath, Poet."

  He nodded and lay down beside her. They lay on their backs, gazing up at the swirling smog, and held hands.

  "Just to catch my breath," he agreed.

  A few of the giant bats were circling above, vanishing and reappearing in the smog, perhaps waiting for Marco and Addy to die, waiting to scavenge two pale, thin corpses.

  "Hey, Addy," he whispered, feeling too weak to speak any louder.

  "Yeah, Poet?"

  "Remember when we were kids, how we used to make bullet necklaces?"

  Her smile grew a shade. "I do."

  "There used to be so many bullets around Toronto," Marco said. "Thousands of soldiers everywhere. Scum attacks every day or two. We used to walk outside after the battles and find fallen bullets, the casings still on." He gave a weak laugh. "Funny how soldiers keep losing bullets. Remember the little factory we had at home?"

  Addy nodded. "I do. I would use the plier to take the casings off the bullets. And I'd drain out the gunpowder, then reassemble the bullet. You'd use a drill to make a hole in each bullet. We'd then sling them on strings, making necklaces."

  "We sold a bunch of them!" Marco said. "Some money for books and candy."

  "I wonder what ever happened to the necklaces we made for ourselves," Addy said.

  "God knows," Marco said. "Probably buried under the rubble of the library. You know, Ads, on the face of it, it seems almost gruesome. Two kids collecting bullets after battles, using them as toys. But we had fun, didn't we? Even though we grew up in a war, we had fun."

  "We had fun," she whispered. "Because we were together." She looked at him. "You're the only thing that saved my childhood, Poet. I was fucking miserable until I met you. My dad—always in and out of jail. My mom—always drunk or high on the couch, beating my ass whenever she managed to stand up. My teachers hated me, stuck me in the remedial class. I was nothing but a stupid juvenile delinquent when we met. I was addicted to cigarettes by eleven. The school shrink thought I was half-retarded. They all told me I'd end up in prison like my old man." Tears were now flowing down her cheeks. "You saved me, Poet. You saved my life. Once I moved in with you, I was different. I was happy."

  He wrapped his arms around her. "We've been through some shit together. I know it. I feel like I can't catch my breath. Like we leap from disaster to disaster. From the war in our childhood. To the army. To the scum. To poverty on Haven. To the marauders. To Tomiko losing her pregnancies, then us losing our house. Now to here. I don't know why we're so cursed, Addy. I don't know why this all happens to us, again and again. I just want . . . a few months. Just a few months to catch my breath. To rest before the next tragedy. We never even get that. But I'm glad, Addy, that through all this shit, we're together. And we'll always fight together. We'll always turn bullets into necklaces."

  Now she grinned, showing her teeth. "When life gives you bullets, make necklaces. I like that saying."

  "When life gives you hot dogs, get a rake," Marco said.

  "When life gives you tits, turn your bra into dust masks," Addy said.

  Marco thought for a moment. "When life gives you a crazy hockey player who keeps poking you in the ribs, make her your girlfriend."

  Addy beamed. "When life gives you freaks, write a book about 'em!"

  "That's offensive, Addy. They're people, not freaks."

  "Freaks are people too!" Addy said. "Like me. I'm a freak now. I have scars on my body. I still have some shrapnel stuck in my ass. Maybe I should be in Freaks of the Galaxy."

  "Addy, you are not a freak," Marco said. "I don't care if you have scars. You are beautiful. You are perfect."

  She kissed his cheek. "Such a poet." She hugged him. "We'll keep going. We'll get this over with. So we can go home. So we can finally catch our breath. So we can finally be happy."

  He nodded, eyes damp. "Finally be happy."

  They rose together. Hand in hand, they limped onward through the valley of death. The smog surrounded them, and endless shadows still lay ahead.

  * * * * *

  By the end, they were crawling.

  Marco wasn't sure how many days had passed since they had crashed their saucer. Perhaps it had been only a couple of weeks. Perhaps it had been years. Time had lost all meaning. He could barely remember his life before these badlands. The past had vanished. Shadows shrouded the future. All there was, all there had ever been, all there could ever be lay around him. Dust. Shadows. Hissing serpents and scuttling insects. Pitiless mountains and dark pits. Stones that cut him. Water that twisted his insides. Fever. Pain. Smoke in his lungs. Him and Addy, two pale, shivering creatures, crawling. They had no more strength to walk.

  We are like the humanoids we found around the campfire, he thought. We are dying.

  It felt like they had crossed continents. Sometimes getting lost. Sometimes falling, needing long hours of rest. Often Marco thought they could never rise again, that the illness, dehydration,
and hunger would slay them. His piss was deep orange and grainy. His head always spun. His lungs, he imagined, must look like the rest of this land.

  And yet they crawled on.

  Meter by meter. They grabbed stones. They pulled themselves onward, over hills, across desolate fields. They ate worms when they could catch them. They used one bullet to slay a bat, and they ate its raw flesh, drank its blood, vomited and lost the meal.

  They crawled onward.

  They would die crawling.

  They would die fighting.

  They would die on Earth.

  On a hilltop, they collapsed, too weak to even crawl downhill. They lay on their stomachs, wheezing, gagging, coughing. Ashy rain fell on them. It seeped through the cracks in their spacesuits. It burned them. It left raw wounds on their skin. The wind gusted and the smog filled their lungs.

  "Another kilometer," Marco whispered.

  "I can't," Addy whispered.

  "Another meter," Marco said.

  Addy nodded. "Another meter."

  They crawled another meter. They fell again. Below the hill, smog filled the valley, so thick they couldn't see the ground. They would have to pass through it. Marco knew they didn't have the strength to emerge from that soup onto the next hill.

  In that valley, their death awaited.

  They lay in the black rain, exposed to the wind. Lightning flashed in the distance. The desolation was never ending. They were lost. They were alone.

  "Is this it?" Addy whispered. "Marco, hold me. If this is it, hold me."

  He held her. They shivered, cheek to cheek, as the ash burned them, as they lay slowly dying.

  As always, together. Like they did all things.

  The rain washed them.

  And from above, some light.

  Just a glowing haze like a watercolor stain. A golden shimmer in the clouds. Marco raised his eyes.

  "Look, Addy," he whispered, voice hoarse, weak, cracking. "The sun is rising. Behind the clouds. You can almost see its shape."

  They watched it together. A faded yellow patch beyond the smog. A mere smudge above the veil. It was up there. The sun. Their sun. The cosmos. And when Marco's head fell again, and he gazed ahead, he saw it in the dawn.

  The walls of a distant city.

  On the horizon, so distant, so small he could barely see it—a black triangle.

  A pyramid.

  He clutched Addy's hand. "Look, Addy!" He wept. "Look! It's Gehenna. We're almost there! We can make it. We can crawl. Another meter, Addy. Another meter. Together. Come on."

  She saw the pyramid too. The rain returned. The haze thickened. The smog hid the pyramid again, but they knew it was there. They knew it was real. They crawled another meter.

  And a second meter.

  And a third.

  Tears on their cheeks, coughing, trembling, burning in the acid rain, they kept crawling.

  In the valley, they rose to their feet. Leaning on each other, they trudged through the smoke. A step. Another step. The smog hid everything. It was like walking through the underworld, through a sea of pollution.

  They kept walking.

  They emerged from the sea of smog.

  They rose from death.

  And before them, it was closer now, rising in the darkness, flashing when the lightning hit it. The pyramid. Around it—the city. Above it—the saucers. Inside it—the creature they must kill.

  "We're almost there," Marco whispered. "We're almost done. We can do this."

  Addy nodded. "We can do this."

  They dragged their feet across a barren plain, approaching the walls of Gehenna, city of the grays. It was still several kilometers away, but they could see Golgoloth clearly now, the pyramid in the heart of the city. It dwarfed the pyramids in ancient Egypt. The black monument seemed to stare at them from the distance. Marco could imagine her there. Nefitis. Goddess. Sharpening her claws. Waiting. Planning his torture.

  "We can't just walk up to the city gates," Marco said.

  "We'll kill the guards." Addy gripped her rifle. "We have railguns, and these pups can fire bullets through a tank. We've saved ammo. We have grenades. We'll storm our way through the city, killing all in our path, an army of two."

  "Ads, I feel so weak I don't think I could defeat a hamster." Marco nearly fell again. "We need a plan. A way to sneak inside. A disguise."

  They walked in silence for a while.

  "Helmets," Addy finally said. "We need gray helmets. Remember when the grays attacked Earth? We missed the battle, but I saw some of the gray helmets our soldiers captured as trophies. We need to disguise ourselves as gray warriors."

  "Well, your head is big enough already," Marco said.

  "Ha ha, very funny." Addy pointed. "Poet, look. A building outside the city walls. A factory maybe? I see smoke. Let's go check it out. Maybe we'll find helmets there." She winked and gave Marco a weary smile. "Hopefully we don't find hamsters."

  He returned her smile. "Like the old saying: No dogs, no hamsters."

  They trudged toward the factory outside the city. Marco couldn't feel his legs. A pain pounded behind his eyes, as if dwarves lived inside his head, hammering at his eyeballs, determined to knock them out of his skull. Yet the sight of Golgoloth drove them onward.

  Closer to the factory, they lay low and crawled, finally stopping between a few boulders.

  Addy pulled out the binoculars and gazed at the factory in the valley. She gasped. "Oh no! Hamsters!"

  "Give me that." He snatched the binoculars and stared. "Jesus."

  The distant building was all black stone and jagged, rusty iron. Three chimneys pumped out smoke. Piles of corpses lay in a courtyard, stripped naked. Corpses of grays. A handful of figures moved around the corpses, clad in black robes and hoods. Large eyes shone within those hoods, and beaks thrust out, curved and cruel. Those strange hooded birds were loading corpses into wagons, wheeling them across the yard, then dumping the dead into ovens. Smoke belched out with every corpse burned.

  "It's a goddamn crematorium," Marco said. "Fuck. Who are those beaked creatures? Some mutant birds?"

  "Undertakers, I reckon," Addy said.

  "Cowgirl." He poked her ribs.

  She gasped. "You did not just poke me!"

  "I reckon I did, little lady." He tilted an imaginary cowboy hat.

  Addy grabbed the binoculars and stared. "Dude. Those aren't birds. Those aren't real beaks. Those are masks. Look."

  He stared through the binoculars. She was right. One of the creatures turned to load a corpse onto a wagon, and Marco caught a glimpse into its hood. The undertaker was wearing a gas mask. The filter was beak-shaped rather than circular.

  "They look like medieval plague doctors," Marco said. "Those beaks are gas masks. They probably don't want to smell the corpses. Addison, my dear, to hell with helmets. I shall require a beaked gas mask."

  "Capital idea, old chap," she said. "By the way, why are we British now? What happened to cowboys?"

  They loaded magazines into their rifles, deeming this raid worthy of a few bullets. They crawled forward—partly from exhaustion, partly to conceal themselves. After so long in the wilderness, they were covered in filth. From a distance, they would look like two miserable boulders.

  Once they were closer, they paused and looked through the binoculars again. The plague doctors were tossing the last few corpses into the ovens. Then the creatures turned and entered the rusty tower. A single plague doctor remained in the yard, watching the ovens work.

  Marco glanced at Addy. "Can you run?"

  "I think so. I'll pretend an evil hamster is biting my ass."

  This was good, Marco thought. A plan. A hope. Some banter. They needed these things as much as water, food, and fresh air. It was amazing, he thought, how hope could give such strength.

  "Let's go," he said. "On my mark, we charge."

  They crawled closer, then rose and ran.

  The plague doctor in the yard saw them. A bullet from Marco's gun tore throu
gh his head, shattering both gas mask and skull.

  They kept running. More plague doctors burst out from their building. Marco and Addy fired their railguns. Bullets slammed into these twisted plague doctors. Blood sprayed.

  They ran onward, adrenaline pumping, using their last drops of strength.

  Another plague doctor emerged, this one firing an electrical gun. The bolts hit the ground around Marco and Addy, raising clouds of dust. In this state, Marco didn't think he would withstand a single blow, not even with his armored spacesuit. He fired, taking down the plague doctor.

  They raced across the courtyard, passed by the ovens where corpses were smoldering, and burst into the building, guns blazing. Several more plague doctors were here. Bullets tore through them. The creatures fell, their beaked gas masks clattering against the floor.

  Marco looked at Addy.

  "Let's scan the area," he said. "See if there are more."

  She nodded. Both were exhausted. Both were moving on shaking legs. They forced themselves to search, every step a struggle.

  The building was tall but narrow. Shelves lined the walls of the ground floor, brimming with oddities. There were statues of hybrids, shrunken heads, dried severed hands, fetuses in jars, and many other curiosities. Ladders led a loft, perhaps a living area, where Marco and Addy found candles, cloaks, and parchments with lurid drawings of deformed, naked grays.

  "Ooh, gray porn!" Addy perked up.

  Marco shook his head. "Medical texts. The creatures we killed were some kind of doctors. Well, morticians, at least."

  Addy raised an eyebrow. "Not very good ones. They looked pretty ugly to me."

  "Morticians, not beau—" He sighed. "Never mind. Let's check the basement."

  They climbed down from the loft. Between the lurid curiosities, they found a trapdoor on the floor. Addy aimed her rifle, and Marco opened the door, wondering what horror might leap out. He peered down into the shadows.

  He froze.

  Tears filled his eyes.

  He fell to his knees.

  "Addy," he whispered. "Oh God, Addy, are you seeing this too?"