Prodigal (Maelstrom Chronicles)

by Jody Wallace

  What was happening to him inside there? By her count, it had been twenty minutes since he’d emerged from it and ten since he’d returned. The leviathan had thickened at the rear end. Its color darkened, not yet the black it had been, but no longer translucent. She could barely make out Adam’s blurry form inside the gelatinous wall. Since the monster was still flailing itself in that spot, she assumed he was doing…something.

  Something it didn’t like.

  That ominous rumble she’d noticed before the leviathan had shifted position the first time vibrated her eardrums. The monster trembled, ripples everywhere, as if raindrops were hitting it. It sparkled, too.

  Uh-oh.

  The leviathan surged forward like an avalanche. Dragging its bulk and any contents—like Ship and Adam—down the trench, it advanced. Slow but deadly, and straight toward her and everyone else, including Sarah and her injured soldiers.

  “Move out, move out!” Niko shouted over the arrays. “Get out of its way!”

  “Stupid fucking place to set up,” Claire cursed. She chugged back the way she’d come, with no idea how fast the leviathan could go. Would it stay on the ground? Would it take flight? The soldiers with the cannon fiddled with the gun, shoving the tripod into the dirt and setting it on auto-fire, before hightailing it toward the trench walls. The leviathan wasn’t heaving along at any great pace, but it was so huge, it didn’t have to. It was gaining on them. Soon the field hospital would be in tentacle range.

  Or maybe it would crush them all.

  The leviathan’s surface burbled everywhere, boiling. Did it need air bubbles to gain enough buoyancy to move? Was it inflating itself? Was it turning into a fucking bubble-wrap monster now?

  The leviathan released a thunderous coughing sound. Some of the polyps exploded into separate pieces of black. Maybe. She was running backward, it was getting dark, she was pissing mad. She couldn’t be sure.

  When she nearly toppled over a rock, she twisted her ass around and picked up the pace. Angeli swooped toward the wounded en masse. The carrion rot stench of entity filled her sinuses, something she hadn’t realized wasn’t present until now.

  Her entity alert pinged. She was about to rip the array out of her head when a dark, winged figure whooshed past her.

  It wasn’t a soldier.

  A maroon figure skidded to the earth in front of her, and she barreled right into it.

  Daemon.

  They hit the ground. Her shoulder screamed with agony, and the daemon screamed in her face. Awesome. It clawed her vest, its arms scrabbling, uncoordinated. Its slitted, yellow eyes twitched but had no focus. It almost seemed like it didn’t know she was there.

  Was it sick? Injured?

  Who cared?

  She blew its head off before it could bite her. Daemon ichor spattered her upper half.

  The black substance burned the hell out of whatever it touched, but she didn’t have time to rub it off. The leviathan was coming. She clambered over the daemon’s twitching body and…

  “It’s breaking apart!” someone shouted. Not over a comm line, a real shout. “The leviathan is breaking apart.”

  Claire turned. A mass of shades gathered around the base of the bubbling leviathan. Daemons popped out of its surface, from the bubbles, as if being born. But instead of attacking, the daemons floundered unsteadily, birds that had no idea how to use their wings.

  The leviathan ceased all forward progress. The shade pool continued to expand, filling the dirt valley from ridge to ridge, deadly for anyone in their path. Unlike the daemons, the shades zeroed in on the sentients in the vicinity and hissed with excitement.

  They rushed forward—but as shades. Just shades. Shades she could kill.

  The roar of shuttles soared over the wreck site. Huge spotlights blazed on, improving visibility. Claire dodged another aimless daemon with no interest in pursuing her and thanked the same God who’d kept Adam alive for befuddling the daemons.

  A shuttle landed next to Sarah’s hospital to load up the remaining wounded.

  Claire raised her blaster arm and shouted into the array, “All remaining ground troops in the trench, fire at will!”

  She wasn’t the only one witnessing the leviathan’s disintegration. Other soldiers pounded into the enemy, some striking the leviathan, some the shades. The chemical scent of laser fire mingled with shade stench. She raked her beam across the front of the incoming shade pool, and their shrill death screams satisfied her soul.

  The shade pool began to dissipate under this much firepower. But the leviathan kept shrinking—reverting into the shades and daemons that had merged to create it. This had to be Adam’s doing. It was nothing the scientists had projected might happen, just as Adam was nothing the scientist had dreamed was possible.

  When the white ovoid of a begetter drone bulged out of the leviathan’s side, the leviathan’s shrinkage became more apparent. The top edge of Ship gleamed silver through the monster’s bulk.

  The disintegration didn’t make the leviathan feeble, though.

  The fucker quickly changed shape and size yet again. It slimed completely off of Ship’s framework, becoming compact. Mobile. Spotlights gleamed along its flickering blackness, revealing a long, agile shape like a lizard or a caterpillar. Countless tentacles beneath its reduced bulk scrambled along the ground with ease, while others, razor-thin and agile, struck at the sentients and airships harassing it.

  Claire took off, not a moment too soon. A wire stung her calf as she ran, but she didn’t falter. Hot blood soaked her pants. Probably bad. But it would be worse if she stopped to check and got a tentacle to the neck.

  Over the command line, Niko gave yet another order to retreat. This battle couldn’t stay the same for five fucking minutes. The monster was coming straight down the trench toward them, and she didn’t see Adam anywhere.

  Claire had experienced so many gut-wrenches of terror over Adam’s safety in the past few days that another one merely annoyed her. What next? It was a hell of a lot easier to fight a giant blob than the thousand-legged worm of doom.

  The whomp-whomp of approaching helicopters became interspersed with the curses and shouts of their troops and the occasional scream of a confused daemon. Soon a swarm of Terran aircraft darted among the Shipborn shuttles, firing at the leviathan and remaining shades. Cries from the ridges, too, indicated that reinforcements had finally arrived.

  Under the increased assault, the razor wires from the leviathan recoiled. Small favors.

  Claire reached the shuttle, but it was full. Anyone left who could sort of walk was hurtling out of the leviathan’s path on foot.

  Sarah directed her medics frantically, waving them toward the ridges. “Ori, carry Kenna. The shuttle’s about to take off. The less weight it has, the better.”

  The Shipborn doctor, equipped in full battle gear and almost as bloody as a corpse, slung the teenager over his shoulder. “You come, too, Sarah.”

  “Just a few more wounded. Go. That’s an order.” Sarah applied sealant sloppily to a man’s injured arm and sent him lurching toward the ridge.

  Ori obeyed, but Claire didn’t take orders well. She grabbed Sarah around the midriff with her free arm. “Niko will kill me twice if you get hurt. Let’s go.”

  “But—”

  Claire dragged Sarah away from the last soldiers, who hobbled into the shuttle under their own steam. The small craft wobbled into the air. She and Sarah ran together toward the closest ridge, dodging a daemon. The leviathan no longer covered the entire trench, but its wires were another story.

  She and Sarah hit the slope at a dead run. Escapees above them scrambled through the chaos of dirt and rock toward the top.

  When they were a third of the way up themselves, the ground shifted under them. “Watch out! Avalanche!”

  Well, hell.

  Claire tried to shield Sarah with her body at the same time Sarah was trying to shield her. Their heads stupidly bonked, and they rolled down the slope along with the landslid
e. Sticks and rocks pounded into them, pelting their bruised bodies. Dirt wedged into every exposed inch of skin and clothes, and Claire lost her grip on Sarah as they tumbled helplessly.

  She landed hard against a stone. Something in her body cracked.

  Her other fucking arm. Fucking hell.

  Claire screamed out her rage, shook her head to clear the dirt, and focused her eyes on the scene, looking for Sarah.

  But instead she saw the leviathan, which was skittering toward her—directly toward her.

  It leaped. She screamed again, as if the force of her voice could redirect it.

  Maybe it had. It hit the wall to one side of her with a tremendous thump. The ground shook, and the leviathan tunneled into the earth as if the dirt were no more substantial than wood ash, and disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Where was he? Who was he?

  He blinked repeatedly, but what he was seeing made no sense. Huge spotlights flashed and spun all around him. He stood in a giant swath of rubble, and black puddles of ooze kept disappearing after they were struck by light. Laser guns?

  He raised his aching head, smelled something horrible, and nearly gagged. His body felt like he’d been beaten from the inside with sledgehammers, but his outside, the skin, itched like poison ivy. The foul smell leached into his mouth, and he spat.

  A tall, red man-thing raced past him at an awkward gallop.

  His eyes must be broken. Did it have wings? He rubbed his face and counted to ten, but the scene didn’t change. He was tired enough that he was either hallucinating or…

  Where was he? Hell?

  He broke into a shambling trot, anxious to get out of Hell. Maybe there was a gate. To either side, human figures scrabbled up crude dirt slopes, taking them out of the trench he was in.

  Those people were escaping Hell. He headed for the slope that seemed the shortest, as if it had drooped because it was as tired as he was. A big hole in the ground next to it had halfway caved in.

  As he ran, he noticed bodies around him—red winged people, brown people, people with white wings, people in armor. His legs and feet were covered in a black shiny material that kept him warm, though his upper half was in a regular shirt. The skin of his back felt like it had been flayed raw, stinging and burning. It didn’t hurt as much, though, as whatever the sledgehammers had done to his insides.

  He was amazed he could stand up and run, but what were his choices? Remain in Hell? Or climb out?

  Climb out it was.

  An oozing blob of black hissed nearby, and he dodged it, stomach churning. Didn’t seem like a good idea to wander into that. He neared the portion of the wall that looked the easiest to ascend and saw a woman half-buried in dirt. Blond. Small. She muttered something he couldn’t quite hear and started crawling out of the ground. She must be okay.

  A second strangled moan came from his left. He slowed, scanning the churned up dirt, and saw another woman.

  This one stopped him in his tracks, but he couldn’t say why.

  “Adam?” she choked out. “My God. Adam.”

  The lights revolving around Hell revealed that she had dark skin and dirt-colored hair—no, her hair was full of dirt. She also had a proud face, torn up clothes, a silver vest, and two apparently broken arms.

  He jogged over to her. “Who’s Adam? Never mind. Do you need help?”

  A huge tree branch lay across her bottom half. He threw it aside with one hand. Wow. How had he done that? Well, this was Hell. Things must not work the same way here.

  When he drew her to her feet, mindful of her injuries, she surprised him by kissing him full on the mouth. She didn’t wrap her arms around him—broken—but she leaned against him and kissed him and cried a little.

  If she hadn’t been crying, he’d have said it was an excellent kiss, even if it had dirt in it. For a second, all his pain, his itching skin, the abrasions on his back, disappeared. He embraced her carefully, wondering if he should offer to carry her, but her legs seemed to work. She smelled like pine and coconuts. And dirt. And blood.

  “Thank you,” he told her huskily. For this lady, he’d cast aside his exhaustion and doubt. “What do you say I get you out of here, ma’am?”

  “You don’t know me?” she asked, eyes big and wet.

  “Should I?” He’d like to know her. She wasn’t as tall as he was, but there was something solid about her, something reliable and strong. He couldn’t remember what he’d done to be tossed into Hell—in fact, he was starting to realize he had zero memories of anything—but the fact she was here meant it wasn’t all bad.

  “Shit,” she cursed. “Amnesia?”

  “So it seems,” he agreed. A bit of panic nibbled deep inside his bruised, weary body. But because she was here—looking at him, stabilizing him, confirming his existence—he didn’t freak out. “I take it you know me?”

  She pressed her cheek against his briefly, warm against his cold skin, before pulling back. “I do. The doctors need to have a look at you.”

  “I don’t like doctors.” Doctors in Hell seemed kind of oxymoronic. “I’ll take you to see one, though.”

  She kind of laughed, but it was strained. “Yeah, my arms really fucking hurt.”

  They headed toward the slope. She’d been buried twenty or so yards away from it. Now that he was more alert, he had to wonder about his original assumption. “Is this Hell?”

  “Hold that thought.” She called to the blond woman, who’d brushed the dirt off herself and was trotting toward them. “You okay, Sarah?”

  “I’m good,” the woman called back. “I assume the leviathan’s gone. After I check you two out, I’m going to find Niko. My comm’s dead.”

  “You don’t have to do that. We’ll find another doctor. Besides, I think someone wants to see you,” Claire told her.

  The blond lady, almost as dirt-covered as his companion, cast Adam a curious glance, but a flying man with white wings swooped down and carried her off.

  Claire watched them go. “To answer your question, no, it’s not Hell. It’s Earth. Terra. There’s an apocalypse, kind of ongoing. We just got attacked by this big ass alien, and we survived. You helped.”

  An apocalypse was more logical than Hell being so tiny that all these people could simply climb out. Besides, he noticed things, normal things, that he recognized. Trees. Rocks. Dirt. Humans. Red bat people.

  No, wait, he didn’t recognize those. But she’d mentioned aliens.

  “I helped kill the alien?”

  “You definitely did. Your name’s Adam Alsing. And you’re…” She tossed him an almost defiant glare. “You’re my…”

  There was no way she was getting up that slope as injured as she was. He swept her into his arms. She winced as she adjusted her shoulders. “I’m your what?”

  “You’re mine,” she said, lips thin with pain. “Mine. You’re my chosen one, and you just saved the world.”

  He—Adam—felt his shoulders relax. He hadn’t even known he was tense. He had a place. He had a name. He was her choice. And he’d done something worthwhile. “I can work with that.”

  Epilogue

  Adam’s memories returned over the course of several weeks—at least the ones from after he’d hitched a ride in a silver pod back to this dimension. The scientists assured him that if he went longer without absorbing shades, the rest of his memories would come back, too. They were particularly insistent that he reawaken his memories of his time in the other dimension.

  They wanted to know how he’d become what he’d become. They wanted to know if he’d been sent back to them or if he’d sent himself. They wanted to know how to make more of him.

  They wanted to know everything, but sometimes it seemed that they didn’t understand much.

  Cutting him off from shades would mean he wouldn’t be useful in the war against the entities—and now against the leviathan. He’d lose his power, his strength, and his abilities. That wasn’t acceptable.

  When Adam was filled wi
th shade-energy, the leviathan wouldn’t come near wherever he was. That meant he had to be a lot of places. They were teaching him to fly a shuttle, and he was scheduled to undergo the enhancements necessary to implant him with a wing pack.

  But he always returned to Camp Chanute, Claire, and the child who wasn’t his biological daughter but who had completely wormed her way into his heart.

  The scope of the battle for Terra had changed, for the better. The Shipborn had become fully engaged, since the threat of waking a leviathan was now past. They’d teamed with Terran forces to further decimate the shade and daemon population. They’d already reclaimed Texas and parts of Alaska and were looking into ways to get at the entities crossing the ocean floor. The appearing and disappearing shade pods continued to be a nuisance, but augmented sensors and predictive patterning averted disasters like Riverbend, Fort Berthold, and Acapulco.

  Besides the all-too-human warlords, the biggest threat was now the leviathan worm, which popped up at random, usually straight out of the earth, and tried to eat people. Not only was it difficult to fend off, it tended to leave behind a deposit of shades. Adam remained on call twenty-four-seven for these events.

  At least it could no longer fly. The daemons it had absorbed, giving it that ability, had escaped and seemed disinclined to get anywhere near the leviathan anymore. They didn’t, however, seem disinclined to harass the human populace as they continued to evolve—or de-evolve. The jury was out on that one.

  While he’d taken out many shades—the Shipborn and Terrans usually handled the daemons—Adam hadn’t been able to get his hands on the worm again, but one of these days, he’d destroy it the rest of the way. Even if he lost his memories for good.

  He’d fall in love with Claire again regardless. He had the first time, he had the second time, and he would again. It was a risk they’d jointly decided he’d take.

  His willingness to plunge into the leviathan hadn’t just saved the planet. Niko, Raniya, Cullin, and the rest of the science team, working together, had been able to preserve a kernel of Ship’s sentience. Thanks to the way Adam had disrupted the leviathan’s feeding, Ship hadn’t died, though it was in a type of coma. He’d learned Ships were known to hibernate after receiving damage to their matrix, as part of a self-healing process.