by Seven Steps
Taklin
Dimensions Origins
Book 3
Seven Steps
Copyright ©2017 by Seven Steps
All rights reserved by the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, or persons, living or dead, is wholly coincidental.
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, recording, by information storage and retrieval or photocopied, without permission in writing from Seven Steps.
Edited by Genevieve Scholl
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Interior book design by Seven Steps
Proudly Published in the United States of America
Also by Seven Steps
Science Fiction Romances
Saving Kiln – Venus Rising Book 1
The Fall of Arees – Venus Rising Book 2
The Martian King: Venus Rising Book 3
Night of the Broken Moon (A Venus Rising Companion Short Stories)
The Escape (A Venus Rising Prequel)
Time Bomb – Dimensions Book 1
Free Fall – Dimensions Book 2
Collision Course – Dimensions Book 3
Saving Nadir – Dimensions Book 4
Leilu – Dimensions Origins Book 1
Phineas – Dimensions Origins Book 2
Taklin – Dimensions Origins Book 3
Contemporary Romance
The Last Rock King
Peace in the Storm
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Taklin
Dimensions Origins
Book 3
Chapter 1
Taklin stood chest high in an ocean of warm oil.
Suffocating, pulsing pressure and heat surrounded him, sending blood dripping down his noses, eyes, and ears. A hazy, orange tint blurred his vision, accented by blue lightning strikes. The lightning hit the oil in three-second intervals, creating splashes and waves. All of the buildings were gone, leveled with the machine’s violent arrival.
A slick hand took his. His younger brother, Troy, yelled something, but Taklin couldn’t hear him. His blood clogged ears had gone deaf.
Troy’s pale hand pointed at the monstrous contraption towering in the center of what had once been Dry Creek.
It was shaped like a snowman with legs. Four black, metallic, rounded cylinders held up two spheres stacked on top of each other. The larger sphere at the bottom was perfectly round, and glowed like heated metal. The smaller sphere at the top had built-in wide windows that wrapped around it. Within the window, Taklin could make out people watching him.
People who must’ve been controlling the machine.
Anger caught fire within Taklin’s chest. The heat around him was nothing compared to the cauldron of rage that boiled inside of him.
These people were responsible for all of this. They’d killed his family and his friends. They’d killed Sarah, the only woman he’d ever loved. Sarah with her silky blonde hair. Her bright blue eyes so full of innocence and sweetness. Sarah, who had melted in to a puddle of oil in front of him. Oil that now splashed about his chest and arms.
Horror, disgust, and grief added to the pot that boiled over within him.
Troy continued to pull his arm and point.
What was he saying? Everything seemed so far away and blurry as if they were looking through a watery glass. Taklin’s knees shook and he fought to stay upright. The heat pounded on his brain, making him wish that his head would split open and release the hammer that danced within.
Taklin’s eyes lost focus.
Were there always two machines?
Troy’s hand was gone. It had slipped away just as Taklin’s legs gave out and he fell on all fours. His stomach rolled, releasing a stream of green vomit in to the oil. His arms felt rubbery. What little strength he had ebbed away.
I’m going to fall in to the oil. I’m going to drown here.
Black spots invaded the edges of his vision. Potent horror rose to the top of his internal stew.
Horror that he was about to die.
Horror that his means of death would be drowning in an oil made up of his friends, family, and fiancée.
Horror that the people in the machine would callously watch him take his last breath.
He forced his arms to remain straight, but there was no strength left in him. His arms gave out and his fell face first into the muck, his lungs filling with the inky black mixture.
He struggled against death. Fought tooth and nail to find his way out. He couldn’t die. He had to have his revenge on the people who had taken everything from him. The people who lived in that machine. He couldn’t allow them to do to anyone else what they’d done to Sarah and everyone else in Dry Creek.
Beautiful Sarah and her bad jokes and inedible cooking.
Sweet Sarah, who’d confessed to him that he was the only man she’d ever kissed.
Tender Sarah and her bright smile.
God. How he loved her.
He tried to scream her name into the oil, but it was too late. His lungs had stopped working. His brain turned to mush.
He felt nothing at all.
Chapter 2
“Tak? Tak? Tak, can you hear me?”
Troy’s familiar voice woke Taklin from his dreamless sleep.
Where am I?
“I think he’s waking up. Get him another blanket. His hands are freezing.”
Light shined from beyond his heavy eyelids as if someone were shining a spotlight in to his eyes.
Where am I?
The last thing he remembered was falling in to the oil. Was he dead?
Warmth imbued him, starting with his feet and hands and working its way up through his appendages.
He took in a deep breath of air and let it out again.
He was breathing. That had to mean that he wasn’t dead, right? The dead don’t breathe, do they?
He took in another lung full of air. Air that smelled like fresh cut flowers. Roses. But roses didn’t grow in oil.
A hand slid in to his. Rough fingers that intertwined with his own.
“Come on, Tak,” Troy said. “Come on and wake up.”
The desperation that filled his younger brother’s voice drove him to action.
Taklin tried to raise his eyelids, but they were so heavy, like iron weights were attached to them. His entire body felt weighed down. It was impossible to move, and his head throbbed in pain.
“He was without air for nearly a minute,” another voice said. “It may be some time before he wakes up.”
He recognized tha
t voice. It was Leilu Karis from Dry Creek. The last time he’d seen her was when that man—Phineas, was it?—had carried her out of the church after her former fiancé had kidnapped her. What was she doing there? Wherever it was.
“He’ll wake up,” Troy said. “He’s strong. The strongest person that I know.”
Leilu’s voice turned softer, as if she didn’t believe Troy’s words. “Yes.”
There was the soft rush of shoes walking over carpet.
“Just, tell me one thing,” Troy said.
The rush of shoes stopped.
“Why?” he asked.
A pause. Taklin imagined Leilu considering the question.
“Because it's what Phineas wants,” she said. “And whatever Phineas wants, I support.”
“Even the killing of an entire town, and who knows what else. You support that?”
His usually shy brother’s rough words shocked Taklin. He imagined Troy’s pale face turning red, his blond dreaded hair mussed in distress. Everyone said that the brothers looked like twins, with their blond beards and hair.
Another pause.
“Life takes from us,” she finally said. “Sometimes, we must take, too.”
He heard Troy take a sharp breath.
A door opened and closed. He assumed that Leilu had walked out since Troy’s hand was still attached to his.
“Come on, Tak. We’ve gotta get out of here. These people are not who we thought they were. We thought they were just taking the oil from the lake, but they weren’t. They were experimenting with it. Doings things to it.” Troy’s voice cracked, and Taklin imagined the tears running down his brother’s face. A lump formed in his throat, but his eyes wouldn’t work to cry. He wished they would. He wished he could shed a tear for all of the people he’d lost.
“Now everyone is gone,” Troy said. “Melted down and sucked up into those big hoses.”
Warm liquid splashed against Taklin’s shoulder. The lump in his throat grew thicker, nearly choking him. His nose and eyes burned, but, still, the tears wouldn’t come. Frustration sat like a cement block on his chest.
“We’re the only ones left, Tak. Just us alone. What are we going to do?” A heaviness laid on Taklin’s chest. He imagined Troy’s dark blond head there, blue eyes bloodshot, lips red and trembling. “What are we going to do?”
The frustration turned into an aching need to move. To sit up. To comfort his beloved brother. To cry out. To scream. To do something. Instead, all he could do was lie there, trapped in his own body like a flesh covered tomb.
He felt helpless.
Worthless.
Lifeless.
And then, as if God were giving him a sign, a single tear fell.
Chapter 3
Taklin sipped a hot bowl of some sort of meaty soup.
After an untold number of hours struggling to move, his body had finally snapped out of its stupor and allowed him to awaken, sit up, talk, and walk. His head still ached, his toes were still numb, and an odd buzzing sensation ran through his fingertips. But he was hale and whole, and ready to be a support for his brother.
Troy was six months younger than Taklin, but the two grew up like twins, playing together, working side by side, and finishing each other’s sentences. They were more than brothers. They were friends. Best friends who shared the same dirty blond hair color and the same cornflower blue eyes.
Not that they didn’t have their differences. Over the course of their twenty-nine years, they’d had several disagreements that ended with fist and blood. Taklin was embarrassed to admit that Troy had won a fair share of their fights. Not only was their hair different—Taklin’s grew bone straight while Troy’s grew in ringlets—but their bodies grew differently as well. Where Taklin was lean and athletic, Troy was well muscled and, as they grew older, Troy’s bull-like frame continued to get heavier and stronger. Taklin grew accustomed to using words, rather than fists, to deal with his brother.
Their mother died while giving birth to Troy, leaving his father, Beau, with two boys that he didn’t have the slightest clue what to do with. And so, he took another wife, Loras. She lasted ten years before she died, her skull split open when Beau threw her in to the stove for burning dinner one too many times. There were two other wives since Loras, none lasting more than a decade and all of them murdered for being terrible cooks.
When he came of age, Taklin decided that he didn’t want to be like many of the other men in town. Brutish and rough. When he met Sarah, he treated her in the exact opposite way that his father treated his mothers. He held her hand as they walked in the valley. He listened to her talk for hours as they picnicked in the yard behind his house. He touched her face when he kissed her. He dried her tears when she cried.
She’d been so taken aback by his behavior that she tried to break off their relationship at first. She didn’t understand that a man could be capable of such love and tenderness. But he was determined to be different. To show his brother that a man could be different. And so, he’d been kind to Sarah and she blossomed in the sunshine of their love.
He built a life for them, turning his ring ship from a booth in the back of his father’s house into a thriving business with a store front on Main Street. The men came in for rings for their fiancées, as well as earrings for their animals and jewelry that they wrapped around their long, dreaded hair and beards. The brothers made a comfortable living, and everyone in the town knew Iba’s Ring Shop.
When he proposed to Sarah, he promised her a life of comfort, with no bruises and no wishes for the lake of death to find her. He and his brother would nurture and care for her for the rest of her life. She’d nearly fainted.
We would have been husband and wife by now, Taklin thought, his chest tightening in grief. She would have been Mrs. Taklin Iba. I would have protected and loved her, and she would have done the same for me.
Tears fell in to his soup.
He welcomed them. His sorrow needed an outlet.
And so did his anger. Anger that simmered beneath the surface of his skin. Anger that begged for retribution.
He wondered where Troy was, and if he was angry, too.
A knock on the door announced Leilu Zorg. She stood in the doorway, her hands awkwardly clasped in front of her. Her long blonde hair fell in soft waves on her shoulders. She wore a white dress that teased her ankles.
How could a woman so beautiful have hands so full of bloodshed?
“I came to check on you,” she said. “To make sure that you’re feeling better.”
She walked forward, her feet shushing along the white carpet.
Everything in the room was white. The ceiling, the walls, the carpet, the sheets on the bed. The only splashes of color came from the metallic bed post and Leilu’s sky blue eyes.
She placed one hand on his forehead, feeling it for a temperature
Had he been feverish? He couldn’t remember.
Taklin put his warm soup down on the white table next to him. His throat felt like sandpaper. The soup had helped some, but his voice sounded quiet and coarse when he said, “I know you.”
A coughing fit caught him, and he sputtered and hacked.
She waited patiently for him to collect himself, then handed him a tissue from the table to wipe the spittle from his chin.
“I know you, too,” she said.
“You lived in Dry Creek. You were one of us. Then he came.”
“He gave me something to look forward to besides death.”
“I watched everyone I ever loved get melted down into oil while you two sat up in that machine like you were at a church sermon. That sounds an awful lot like looking forward to death to me.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I understand plenty. He offered you the world, and you took it. Now, look at you. Sitting up here in your white palace while oil and blood run beneath you. You sicken me.”
Her lips shook, and her eyes watered.
“It's progress,” she said, though she didn’
t sound like she believed it.
“It’s a sin, and God will punish you for it. You will burn for what you’ve done to Dry Creek.”
Leilu’s hand went to her belly just as another man appeared in the doorway.
The man who’d brought death to Taklin’s life.
Phineas Zorg.
Taklin’s face flushed with caged anger. He wasn’t yet strong enough to take his vengeance. But that day would come, and it would be mighty.
“I see our patient is up,” Phineas said, stepping in the room. His hair was shorter than Taklin remembered. The blond strands were cut low on his head. His body looked stronger, like he’d been lifting boulders for the past few months.
A heavy tension filled the room and, for a moment, Taklin imagined that he was back in Dry Creek, with the pressure and heat making him sick.
Leilu stood and quickly scurried to her husband’s side as if she’d been doing something wrong.
Taklin stifled a snort. If there was something eviler than genocide, he didn’t know what it was.
“What are your plans?” Phineas asked.
Taklin inclined his head. “Plans?”
“Where do you intend to go?”
Taklin looked from Phineas to Leilu. They had just murdered everyone he ever knew, and nearly killed him and his brother. Now they wanted to offload him? He could barely walk, and he didn’t even know where he was. What could they possibly think his plans were?
“Nowhere at the moment,” he said.
“And your brother?”
Taklin shrugged. “I haven’t spoken to him about anything.”
Phineas’s eyes held Taklin’s for a long time. There was a threat in that gaze. A malice that was undeniable.
Taklin didn’t back down. He was a man with nothing left to lose. There was nothing that Phineas could do to intimidate him.
When Taklin didn’t cringe or shrink back, Phineas cleared his throat, his gaze turning unreadable.
