“Well, I’m all dirty now, so I might as well,” the man said, reaching into his suit jacket, and pulling out a six-inch switchblade knife. It was gold plated and had his initials on it. He turned to the brute next to him and grinned.
“This bastard isn’t talking, so let’s not waste our time here. We have plenty more people to see today,” the man in the suit said, turning toward Hutchison, flicking the knife open and without so much as hesitating, he sunk the knife into Hutchison’s neck, blood pouring out of the wound, spraying up the man’s face and covering his white shirt under his jacket.
The Interviewer started cackling as the man in the suit ripped and tore at Hutchison’s throat. He then yanked the knife out and watched as Hutchison’s neck released the influx of life-force that had been coursing through his veins seconds before. It didn’t take long for the ground beneath them to end up caked in blood. The man in the suit wiped his blade on The Interviewer’s bare shoulder, and placed it back in his suit jacket.
“Guess he won’t be telling us shit now,” the man said, turning back around and leaving The Interviewer to dispose of the prisoner.
The man in the suit had a lot to do, and he knew deep down in his heart that Hutchison wouldn’t be the only person dying by his blade come midnight tonight.
Chapter Five
Timson stood at the entrance to the ship and lowered the metal plank so the others could climb onboard easily. He smiled as Gustoff walked past him.
“She’s working like a beauty,” he said, stopping Randy in his tracks.
“I did a few system scans and she has more than enough fuel to get us back to Earth. Plus; her solar panels conserve energy at an impressive rate. I was surprised that the ship was this advanced if I’m honest,” Timson said, pulling Gustoff to one side as the others walked up the ramp and onto the ship. He’d welcomed them onboard to cheers seconds before, but even he was a realist and knew that something was definitely up with the ship and the circumstances they found it in.
“Why are you surprised that it’s so advanced?” Gustoff asked.
Timson leaned in closer as to not allow the others walking past them to hear what was being said.
“I’m just finding it hard to believe that a ship of this caliber would just turn up out of the blue. The way I see things here Gustoff is simple really; either the ship was built by the elderman in secret or Earth sent it to this planet, hiding it in this cavern, waiting for one of you to find it,” Timson said.
Randy frowned.
“You think Earth would do something like that? What’s the point? How would that benefit them?” he asked.
Timson shrugged his shoulders and watched as April slowly walked by the two of them, and up into the ship. She looked disappointed that she wasn’t being involved in the conversation, but as far as Timson was concerned, the only person on this planet he trusted besides from his two crewmates, was Gustoff. There was something about the man that made Timson feel at ease. He was on the same level as him and had a certain way of looking at life. A way that Timson himself shared deep down within him.
“There seems to be little rhyme or reason to this whole thing Gustoff, and I think that wasting any valuable time trying to concoct any logic out of this would seriously hinder our chances of getting to the bottom of this. Sometimes things don’t make sense, and we as humans occasionally put too much emphasis on the reasons behind the truth and not on the truth itself, which is usually of much more importance.”
Randy nodded, watching the last member of the colony walk up the ramp and past him into the ship. He couldn’t believe that he was about to fly off Second Earth and leave his home behind. But he had to be brave. Men had done bigger things in the past, so he wasn’t alone in crossing the fresh hold of the unknown.
“So you consider us human?” Randy asked, surprising Timson somewhat.
“Of course I do. What else could I consider you as?” he said.
Randy nodded.
“I guess you’re right, but I cannot help but think that me and my people aren’t truly human like you. All of this has been very strange. From the crates showing up on our planet many moons ago, to you guys crashing on our soil, to this ship coming out of nowhere. If you ask me, this is all a little too much to understand. I grew up reading books that came from the crates that your planet sent us. Books that not only taught me how to read, but taught me the foundations of being human and the condition that comes with it. I dreamt of one day flying to planet Earth and reuniting with my species. I dreamed of meeting an Earth Man like you. And now that all my dreams are coming true, I’m not sure if I want them to leave the safety of the confines of my head and billow out into the open and become real.”
Timson put his hand on Randy’s arm and squeezed. He could see the fear bubbling within him and understood where he was coming from. He shared the same fears after all. But his were from a different perspective. His were fears that only an Earth Man could have. Fears of how his own people would treat the colony members. Fears of the truth behind all of this.
“Randy, I wouldn’t be afraid anymore. You have us now. You are longer restricted to the soil on this planet or the atmosphere around it. You are soon to be free, along with the others that you call your friends and fellow village people. The only thing that I’d fear at this minute in time is how good a pilot I am, because God knows I haven’t ever flown a ship this big!” Timson said.
Randy smiled, and returned a squeeze of the shoulder himself. He’d never felt comradery with another man before. All the men in his colony had always been uptight and kept themselves to themselves. Randy was the same. He was a quiet soul and preferred to spend the majority of his days pondering the meaning of his very own existence. But Timson was a man of action, a man that knew how to get things done. And for that very trait alone, Randy knew that he had a friend. A friend that he could trust. A friend that he’d always sought after but never encountered on this planet.
Yes, deep down, Randy was more than glad that he was about to leave Second Earth. He held no feelings of happiness toward this putrid ground or the cancerous atmosphere that has surrounded him since birth. He hated the planet and the elderman that worshiped it. He was glad that he wouldn’t be seeing them again, and didn’t care about their whereabouts or the reasoning behind the ship he was about to board. All Randy cared about was seeing the big blue planet he’d dreamed of calling home approach through the porthole in the ship. It was a dream that would soon become a reality, and Randy was ever so glad that he was no longer just dreaming.
He was living.
“Thanks for everything that you have done, Timson. The people of Second Earth owe you a lot, and I’m sure that in time, we will repay you ten-fold,” Randy said, shaking his hand and turning around to enter the ship.
He took a few more steps up the ramp, turned around for a second, looked at the ground and smiled. He then boarded the ship, leaving Timson to do the same, closing the hatch behind him, the plank automatically sucking itself back into the side of the ship, clunking when the hatch hissed shut.
Timson marveled at the sight that greeted him inside the ship. The colony members were all smiling at him and had formed a parting in the middle of the deck to allow him to walk to his pilot’s seat. As Timson slowly walked toward the seat, past the colony members, they began to clap and cheer him. Tears of joy ran down April’s face as she hollered at their savior. Randy stood next to the pilot’s chair and gestured at the seat, signaling his friend to take command of the strikingly beautiful vessel.
As soon as Timson sat down on his seat, the colony members erupted in unison, clapping their hands and stomping their feet. Timson swiveled in his chair and grinned at them.
“Time to get off this rock!” he said, turning back around and placing his hands on the controls. He was just about to pull up on the controls when he spotted something out of the porthole in front of him. At first he didn’t quite recognize the sight, but then his eyes widened in shock as he turned
back to the others, who were still clapping, a terrorized look on his face, immediately putting a stop to the ovation.
“They’re here!” Timson snapped, the breath in his lungs lodging in his throat.
***
Commander Williams and the Captain were being pushed as they were escorted down a dark and narrow hallways after getting off the strange ship. The journey through the Jump Gate was surprisingly fast but Williams had spent most of that journey trying to act cool, calm and collected. He’d managed to sneak a weapon on board the ship and still had it now. The only thing left to do was use it, and Williams wasn’t sure when to even attempt it, let alone if it was even wise to do so.
There were many guards escorting the two men, and each one of them was heavily armed, so he didn’t want to risk pulling the gun out only to take one or two men with him. There was no doubt that this many men would be able to defend themselves against just him on his own. He had the Captain with him as well of course, but the best that he could hope for in that particular situation was for the Cap to take one of the weapons off the Marines. But even then with just two men, and two weapons, they’d find it very hard to come out of it alive. He wasn’t an idiot, so his opportunity to strike would have to wait.
But he wouldn’t get his opportunity right now, for he was being shoved into a dark jail cell, along with the Cap. The Marines that had escorted him locked the door behind them and left Williams and the Captain to marinade in their fate. Williams waited for the sound of the guard’s footsteps to recede before he spoke.
“They gone?” The Captain asked, struggling to see his fellow captive standing next to him. It was so dark in the cell that neither of them noticed the man slumped over the bench behind them. He was concealed by the darkness, but soon enough, their eyes would adjust and they’d see him just fine…not that there was much of him to see.
“Yeah, I think so. Where the hell do you think we are?” Williams asked.
“Somewhere we don’t want to be, my friend,” the Cap said as he turned around and tried to get to grips with the four metal walls that surrounded him. Something didn’t feel right about the cell. Like there was a presence lurking within it. A spirit. A ghost even. And if Cap had listened to his intuition, he’d have been right. Because there was very much something in the cell. And it was very much akin to a ghost. They just didn’t see it yet.
“How far from Earth do you think we are? They said they were taking us to the Milky Way, but I don’t believe them for some reason,” Williams said, squinting his eyes, trying to survey the cell. He could now see the Cap as he stood next to him, the outline of his body barely visible in the dimness.
“Who knows? Maybe we’re still in the Andromeda Galaxy? I know we went through a Jump Gate, but they could have been putting on a show and dance for us. This is all about control, and they want as much of it as possible. The only way to gain such control is to manipulate it and own it. And now, I’m afraid Commander, they own us, so what’s to say that they aren’t manipulating us as well?”
Williams nodded. He was still surveying the room, the only source of light coming through the bars on the cell door in front of them. The light only stretched a centimeter from the bars, illuminating the floor slightly, but ended up being swallowed by the darkness around them. Williams took a few steps back and felt for the back end of the wall. All he wanted to do was slide down it and rest. But his feet clunked on something. It was metal. He quickly turned around and felt for it, finding a metal bench. It was cold to the touch, yet wet. Like somebody had spilled maple syrup on it.
“What the heck?” Williams said, feeling his hands and noticing the wetness on them. He held his hands close to his face and saw that they were covered in something. He sniffed them, and couldn’t tell what the substance was. When he pulled his hands away, he saw an outline on the bench.
“Holy shit,” Williams said, walking closer and feeling at the outline. It was as he feared.
“There’s a Goddamn head on this bench!” Williams cried, picking it up and seeing that it was human and had belonged to a man. Suddenly, the lights in the cell came on, revealing a bloody mess, life matter sprayed up the walls, chunky blood on the floor, and a pale white horrific expression cemented on the head that Williams was holding.
The Commander wasn’t squeamish, and could only remember two times in his life when he’d recoiled in horror. The first time was when he saw his mother dying of cancer in the hospital, and the second time was when he got caught in the bright lights holding a severed human head. He immediately dropped it on the floor, a horrible crack echoing in his eardrums, followed by the sound of the iron cell door sliding opened and somebody walking in.
In shock, Williams turned around, blood drenching his hands and torso, a look of repulsion on the Cap’s face, and the stare of a new man. A much bigger man. He was shirtless and holding a cutting implement in his mitts. He smiled a disgusting smile at the two men in front of him and took two steps forward into the cell.
“I see you’ve met my previous customer. He unfortunately wasn’t a happy camper, and decided to withhold vital information from me, which he ended up paying dearly for with his own life. I hope that you two will be different. The two of you can still walk out of here, heads still attached firmly to your necks. All you have to do is cooperate,” the shirtless man said, the cutting implement in his hand waving as he spoke.
Williams and Cap looked at each other and then at the menacing figure in front of them.
“What the hell is this about?” Williams asked, the concealed weapon in his trousers burning against his lower back. He wanted to pull the gun out so bad and stick a bullet right in the middle of this freak’s head. But he knew that he had to be patient, or the two of them would end up dying.
“Don’t you worry about that. All you need to do is answer me some questions,” the man said, waving the implement once again.
Cap frowned.
“Questions? Are you mad? You stick us in a cell with a decapitated head and want us to answer your questions? We have questions of our own damn it!” Cap said.
The man took two more steps toward them and laughed.
“There’s a reason they call me The Interviewer. I ask the questions around here,” he said, grinning at the frightened men at his very mercy.
***
Timson tried to start the thrusters on the ship, but something was stopping him from doing so. He didn’t know why, but he had the uncontrollable urge to take flight. He was antsy. Frightened. Confused. And he didn’t know what to do, because standing outside, the elderman surrounded the vessel. They encased it, holding hands in a circle, around the ship, chanting at the top of their lungs. He heard their words bounce off the steel the ship was made of. Timson was worried that something was about to happen. The skies above him had been clear and blue seconds before, but now an ominous darkness blanketed the sun and blocked it from view.
A storm was brewing above, and it seemed as if the elderman were very much responsible for it. As they held hands, looking up at the sky, their eyes rolled into the back of their heads, teeth gritted as they chanted, Timson knew that they were summoning some sort of power, a power that was stopping him from getting airborne.
“What in the hell is this?” Gustoff asked, peering over Timson’s shoulder.
The craft rocked from side to side as the elderman outside summoned their mysterious powers to turn the sky above into a hail of rain, sleet and snow.
“They’re manipulating the weather! How can that be?” Gustoff asked, shocked at what was transpiring.
He’d never seen anything like this before. He’d never seen the elderman use black magic, and it surprised him that they were able to do the things they were doing. Before, he’d seen them as a nuisance. A hindrance to his experiments. Experiments that had deep foundations and ties to the laws of physics and science as a whole.
But this was something else. They were unnatural in the way they chanted and shifted the weather above.
It made Gustoff scared. Scared that he ever even dared to cross their paths before. He couldn’t even begin to fathom what would have happened to him and April if he’d took it a step too far and antagonized them beyond repair. But now, now he saw their true power and he was terrified of it.
“You have to do something!” April shouted.
The other colony members behind her sobbed and moaned in fear. They were just as terrified as she was. The difference was, she didn’t feel helpless. She knew that there was a way out of this. She just needed time to think.
But before she could think any longer, the hail got worse outside. Chunks of hard ice battered the exterior of the ship, visibly weighing down the metal and forming dents on the inside. Everybody gasped in horror as a crack spread across the pane of reinforced glass separating them from the elderman outside, who were still chanting at the top of their lungs, summoning strife upon the vessel and its occupants.
“Do something!” April screamed, the crack seemingly getting bigger with every fallen hailstone.
“What do you suggest I do?” Timson snapped. “Kill them?” he asked, breathless, sweat pouring down his face.
April knew what needed to be done. She pushed her way to the front. She leaned over Timson, grabbed the stick on the control panel, flicked a button and pressed it down. A whining sound ripped through the ship, and then suddenly a large array of synchronized bangs peppered the air.
Looking out of the window, the human circle had disappeared and the elderman were now on the floor. Some of them lay on the ground motionless, while others struggled to their feet. Her plan had worked. The binding grip they’d had on the ship was now gone and the vessel started to ascend. The colony members roared in triumph, while Timson stared at the elderman on the ground below. With every passing second, they grew smaller, and Timson’s heart grew larger. He was more than thankful.
Thankful to be alive. Thankful to be going home. Thankful to have found the people of Second Earth.
Second Earth: The Complete First Novel (Second Earth Chronicles Book 1) Page 20
