Revelation (The Wasteland Chronicles, #4)

by Kyle West

  “Fine. Let me grab my instruments.”

  The rest of us left the cockpit and headed for the galley. There, Char’s and Marcus’s men stood, talking quietly. None of them appeared happy. Michael and I went to the armory, and started to distribute what few gas masks we had. There were enough for everyone in the main party, plus a few of the Raiders, to have one. The Exiles refused to budge, feeling cheated out of their attack on the Reds.

  “I can go to Gilgamesh and bring the other gas masks here,” Michael said.

  “I’ll help,” a nearby Raider said.

  Another Raider stepped forward. Michael led them off the ship, and into the xenofungal field. Many men stepped back, afraid that the very air would poison them. I knew that wasn’t likely, but being overly cautious was better than being overly zealous.

  I fit my own gas mask over my face. It felt awkward there, and I hated the heat it produced just covering me. My breaths came in and out as hisses, and the straps dug into the back of my head. I pulled my hoodie up, getting ready to enter the Great Blight.

  When the gas masks from Odin had been distributed and put on, Makara stepped forward, pressing the exit button to the blast door.

  “Remember,” Makara said, half turning and her voice warbling from her mask, “we’re here for thirty minutes. Anyone who doesn’t have a mask, stay here until Michael returns. Char, have everyone who goes outside set up a perimeter around this side of the spire. If anything comes, call out, and we’re out of here.” She nodded. “This might be our only chance for a long time to deal some damage to the invasion. Let’s not screw it up.”

  The men looked at each other, grumbling. They didn’t understand fully why we were here, even if Marcus had explained it – and I doubted he had done so fully. I wondered how many of these men knew the full purpose of this mission, or even of the New Angels. That was something we had to fix as well. We just hadn’t had time to explain everything yet.

  “Hold on a bit longer, guys,” Makara said. “What we learn here tonight could help us out in the long run in our war against the xenovirus.”

  “Could?” another man asked.

  Makara rolled her eyes. Well, I couldn’t see her eyes roll in that gas mask, but I knew her well enough to know that she had probably done so. “Right now, the coast is clear, so let’s get out there and do our jobs. Stay alert. Any sign of trouble, let me know immediately. No shooting at anything unless I give the order.”

  The men looked at her another moment before she left the ship, walked down the boarding ramp, and into the Great Blight. Samuel rushed off the ship after his sister, loaded with a large backpack filled with scientific instruments. Several of the men that already had gas masks also filed out, pistols and rifles in hand.

  “This is a bad idea, isn’t it?” I asked, my voice metallic.

  Anna nodded. “Yep.”

  I followed her out the blast door, into the place I had been lucky enough to escape the first time.

  Chapter 14

  Anna and I silently strode out onto the bed of xenofungus, joining the Raiders and the Exiles in the dark night. The wind, warm and moist, crawled against my skin like the exhalation of a beast. The fungus beneath was squishy, sticky. It had been months since I had stepped on it, and just feeling it again made my skin crawl. I gazed out, away from the spire, seeing an endless field of xenofungus out to the point where my view was cut off by darkness. Several, smaller towers rose into the sky like alien trees, each one a good distance from the other. It seemed like their growth, or construction if you prefer, had been planned.

  While Marcus and Char directed their men to set up a perimeter, Michael and his assistants handed out gas masks to anyone who was still without. It turned out that a lot of the men hadn’t listened to Makara’s order to stay in the ship until they got a gas mask. Once done, Michel joined Anna and me in walking toward the gigantic spire. Straining my neck, I could hardly see the top. The most disturbing part about the spire was knowing it was alive. We walked closer, until my feet were nearly touching one of its slimy, gnarled roots, as thick as a tree trunk. Several of these roots grew out of the fungus at the spire’s base, twisting and turning and knotting together as they shot into the air above. The spire’s entire base was wide – far larger than any tree I had ever seen. It was probably more similar in size to one of the skyscrapers of Vegas.

  We found Makara and Samuel standing at the bottom of the spire, a good way off, staring up at something at the top of the roots, before they made a sharp turn upward. As I approached, I realized what they were looking at – or rather, who they were looking at.

  “Ashton, you shouldn’t be up there,” Makara called, the gas mask dimming the loudness of her voice.

  Ashton, however, heard, and waved a hand dismissively. He, too, was wearing a gas mask. At least he had taken that precaution. Rather than Ashton coming down, Samuel began to climb up a particularly large root – one that led directly to Ashton. I couldn’t help but notice how the root palpitated as Samuel climbed up – as if it knew it was being climbed on. The entire spire seemed to give a barely audible groan, and the fungus vibrated beneath me. Was it communicating? Everything grew still once more. Once again, the warm wind buffeted my side, pushing me into Anna.

  “It’s not right here,” she said.

  I grabbed her hand. I wanted something to remind me that she was there in the darkness. With my other hand, I held my Beretta. We were in a dangerous spot, but I felt we were so deep into this that backing out was not an option. Likely, crawlers were setting up a circle and just waiting for the signal from this spire to ambush us all. I stared upward, noticing now, in the darkness, that the spire had a slight, greenish glow to it. The green glow allowed me to see the entire structural lines rising up and to see its branches webbing outward from above. Thin, spindly things, like hair, waved in the breeze, growing on the branches’ undersides. Membranes, maybe. Some sort of antenna.

  Samuel now stood next to Ashton. Together, they crouched low, and began to confer and take measurements. Samuel reached into his pack for some sort of tool. A scalpel, maybe. Once he pulled it out, he began digging into the root of the spire. Ashton, meanwhile, began to take pictures, the flashes of his camera like unworldly lightning.

  All I could think, as they got to work, was that it was way too quiet.

  I looked behind at the Raiders and Exiles, who now formed a solid perimeter around our half of the spire. Each guard was paired off with another, gazing into the darkness, ready for something to come at us. But as the minutes crawled on, nothing attacked. The fact that nothing did, the fact that Samuel and Ashton continued to work in peace far past our allotted thirty minutes, was the strangest and most terrifying thing of all.

  When a full hour had passed, Samuel and Ashton had worked their way around to the opposite side of the spire. Makara went after them. Michael, Anna, and I followed silently, and the guards circled around in order to protect Samuel and Ashton from the new direction.

  Ashton and Samuel paused on the other side, speaking quietly. The wind blew again, from the south, carrying with it the faint smell of rot. I looked to the south, imagining that something horrible might be lurking there. But I only saw only a line of jagged, rotting hills, maybe half a klick out, covered with infected trees. Above, the clouded sky was dark, letting in no light. I wondered how it was that we could see, before I saw that it was not just the spire that was glowing – everything covered with the fungus was. It was faint, but it was there. I had assumed at first that it was just the light being reflected. But no – it was coming from the fungus itself.

  Samuel and Ashton were now climbing down from the spire, picking their way carefully down a large root. Now, close to us, they knelt and slid the rest of the way down, landing softly in the xenofungus.

  “Learn anything useful?” I asked.

  Ashton nodded. “I think so. I’ll learn even more when I take these samples back to Skyhome.”

  Samuel stared back at the spire,
craning his neck upward.

  “Any idea on how to bring this thing down?” Makara asked.

  “Bullets wouldn’t do any good,” Samuel said. “You might injure it, but it would only heal.”

  Ashton gazed at the spire sadly. “Do we really have to kill it?”

  We all looked at him as if he were crazy.

  “Ashton, this thing is too dangerous to keep alive,” Makara said. “I don’t care how much research you think you can squeeze out of it.” She nodded, affirming what she had just said. “It goes down tonight.”

  Ashton didn’t answer. We continued looking at the spire. Almost imperceptibly, it swayed with the breeze. It was a living thing – maybe even a living consciousness. It was almost peaceful. But was that feeling true, or did the spire just want us to feel that in order to catch us with our guard down?

  These thoughts were fuzzy. I was finding it very difficult to concentrate on any one thing. It was late, and the tiredness from the day was finally beginning to hit me. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into my bunk and sleep the night away – and perhaps a good portion of the day as well. I stifled a jaw-cracking yawn, leaning up against Anna for support.

  That’s when she fell down into the xenofungus.

  “Anna!”

  I knelt on my knees, finding Anna’s eyes closed. Was she asleep?

  That’s when I noticed that Michael and Makara were also dreary-eyed.

  Through the haze, I could think of only one other time I had felt this way – at the entrance to Bunker 114, where the xenofungus had released sleeping spores. But – this wasn’t supposed to be affecting us. We were wearing gas masks.

  Apparently, the masks were not enough. These things had found a way to beat them.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said.

  As Samuel tried to wake up Anna, Makara and Michael nodded dully, just now reacting to what I had said. I looked upward, noticing that the spindly limbs at the top of the spire were shaking in the breeze. No, not in the breeze. There was no wind, at least not now. They were shaking of their own will, and what fell from them was a fine, glowing dust that was percolating into the air. It was covering everything – the fungus, my clothes.

  My hands.

  That was how, then. The thought barely registered as I fell to my knees. I twisted my torso in order to call for help from the men guarding us. But none of them were there. It was then that I noticed that they, too, had fallen to the fungus.

  I realized, then, that this was the end. We would fall asleep, and never wake up. I held Anna, her long, soft hair fanning out over my arms. Her eyes were still closed. Above I heard a rustle, not from the wind, but from the spire as it continued to rain the glowing dust onto us.

  Michael was next to fall to the fungus with a thud. Makara and I locked eyes for a moment before her gaze faded. She folded to the ground, collapsing to the fungus.

  I looked upward once more, my vision fading. As I snuggled against Anna, the top of that ominous spire was the last thing I saw before darkness overwhelmed me.

  ***

  What followed was a darkness so long and absolute that I couldn’t be sure how long it lasted. Days. Weeks. Months? Surely not that long, but if it had been months, it would have made no difference in my perception of it. I drifted between consciousness and dreams, or dreams and death. I was in no state to tell the difference between one and the other. I saw alien images and colors that I could have never imagined on Earth. I was a flying bird, zooming across a pink landscape under a bright sun and purple sky, over faded ruins of a far-future Earth where the xenovirus had already taken over everything. I swam in deep, warm water, where I could see the xenovirus evolving, billions of years ago, in a primordial, alien sea, on a planet orbiting a star countless light years away. Where did it come from, this xenovirus? Were these dreams a message, or were they the imaginings of the sleeping spores?

  Something Samuel said, seemingly an eternity ago, came to me:

  Foolish thing – to run into a xenofungal field without the proper breathing equipment. If I hadn’t come along, you would have been dead. Or worse.

  We did have the proper breathing equipment, but the spores must have gotten in some other way, through my skin. Through the fog of dreams I remembered the glowing dust settling on my hands. But this thought slipped from my mind as sand slips through a crack. It just didn’t seem important, now. Not anymore. I saw the effects of the xenovirus, infecting a thousand worlds across our galaxy. Why was it doing this? Why was it expanding? Why did it want to destroy everything?

  Or did it want to save it?

  I didn’t know where this thought came from. All the same, it felt...right. But it couldn’t be right. It was killing us, all life. It turned humans into ravaging monsters. It was twisting animals into warped versions of themselves. And some creatures, like the xenodragons and crawlers, did not seem to be of Earthly origin at all. How could it be saving us if it was killing us?

  It was a wonder that I could comprehend anything when my head felt so addled. In my dreams I found a conscious lucidity that was hard to explain. I felt I suddenly knew everything there was to know, and that this knowledge would disappear as soon as I awoke. It was hard to tell if this was a feeling, or if it was the truth. It felt like the truth. These swirling dreams were my new reality, and that waking itself was but a distant dream. I found myself not caring, either way. Strange as it might sound, this question wasn’t important at the moment. What was important was discovery, of finding answers to all the questions that had been haunting me ever since the xenovirus killed everyone I held dear.

  I walked forward, finding myself on Earth again. I was in the Great Blight, walking toward a line of hills under a boiling, crimson sky. At the top of one of the hills, a lone figure stood, brown cloak and hood swirling in the wind. I walked toward him, unnaturally fast, my gait seeming to take me a mile with each step. The man turned, and walked away – to the north.

  I followed, and was soon running. I wanted to scream at him to wait, but no words came. Instead, I ran, fueled by a panic I didn’t understand. If I lost him, I felt all was lost. Somehow, I knew catching up with the man would help me discover all the answers to the questions that had been maddening me for so long. I sprinted, finally making headway. The miles melted behind as I charged north, across flat plains spread evenly with xenofungus, past copses of deadened trees cocooned in pink growth and dripping slime. I passed lakes and rivers of pink fluid that cut their paths through the fungus, some of the liquid funneling into tiny crevices within the surface, dripping down, who knew how far. I ran and ran through thick, pink trees growing claustrophobically close. Then, as I burst from the trees, there was the man, standing at the top of a ridge.

  I climbed the ridge, and walked up to stand beside him. Something told me not to look at him. Not yet. Instead, I stared straight ahead. I saw that I wasn’t on top of a ridge. The ridge made a wide circle, round and round, like a rim, until it was lost to my sight. A bowl spread out before me, so wide that all of its edges were lost to sight.

  Ragnarok Crater.

  Within that crater I saw nothing but an empty field of pink, countless rocks and boulders, covered with the xenofungus. No, not rocks and boulders. They were the fragments of Ragnarok. An entire, fiery mountain had crashed down from Heaven, had rent itself into Earth, had created Hell. Sometimes, I wondered if it really had fallen down, the Rock – if the world really had ended like this, or if it was only one massive lie, designed to keep all of us Bunker dwellers underground. From what I saw before me, it was all too real. Though I knew this was a dream, in my lucidity, I knew that this existed. This was real.

  Swarms of flyers spiraled out from hidden holes in the ground, from between the cracks of crumbled, jagged mountains. Moving out of their holes, at lightning speed, were crawlers – thousands of them. With high and painful shrieks, they charged toward where the man and I now stood.

  The man half-turned to me. “This is the fate of the world s
hould you fail, Alex.”

  That voice. I could not place it, though it sounded so familiar – both in its tone and seriousness. At first, I thought it was my father. I don’t know where this thought came from. Then, with realization, I remembered where I had heard it.

  It all hinges on you, Alex. You have wondered, more than once, what your place is here. I am telling you now. Without you, this mission will fail. Without you, the world will fall and everyone will die.

  I could finally find my words and speak.

  “You are the Wanderer.”

  I turned to look at him, but the Wanderer’s face was masked in shadow. The terrain had somehow become dimmer, the clouds thicker, and the darkness deeper. The Wanderer gave a slight smile, nodding in wordless reply. From my position, only his right eye was visible. It was completely white.

  I stepped away. He was one of them.

  But something kept me from running, even as the swarm of flyers and monsters rolled toward us in a Blighted tide, white eyes glowing. Though his eyes were white, he wasn’t on their side. Though infected with the xenovirus, he was not a Howler. He had not fallen under the xenovirus’s spell. He was something else. And I wanted to find out exactly what that was.

  “The time is coming soon,” the Wanderer said. “Everything is changing. And you will be the one to stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  He gestured outward, and with a sweep of the hand, including everything now attacking us. “This. This invasion from another world. Though a thousand worlds shall fall, one will remain. It is a prophecy as deep as energy. This cannot be altered. It was written from the beginning, in the fabric of everything.”

  I understood little of what his cryptic words actually meant, this blending of prophecy and science. I was beginning to think that they were one and the same – that the deeper we came to the infinitesimally small, the closer we came to the truth of reality. Was that truth God? Prophecy? Fate? I couldn’t have said.