The Legend of Things Past (Beyond Pluto SciFi Futuristic Aventures Book 1)

by Phillip William Sheppard

  Nona returned to her room and looked out of her window. It was dark outside. She stared at the ground. Red lights glowed all over the place. If she looked really hard, Nona thought she could just make out the thin tubes, just large enough for one person.

  She had to get down there. Tobias was healthy—this whole time. She didn’t understand it but she had to find him. Maybe he would be able to help her find Donovan.

  Nona braved the hall again. She was dripping with sweat. The heat was intensifying quickly without the ice. She walked toward the elevators. She wished she could take the stairs.

  Nona’s body was weak, but she pushed through her discomfort. Her legs shook beneath her. Her breathing came in short gasps. She collapsed, banging her knees on the hard floor, and passed out before she had even gone ten feet.

  Chapter 24

  “What is fear of living? It’s being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself- for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don’t know what you’re here to do, then just do some good.”

  —Maya Angelou

  May 20, 2176

  Lohiri

  Donovan Knight

  The images on the walls shifted to show glass tubes glowing with red light emerging from the ground in various cities.

  Donovan realized what Tobias was doing all at once—he was manipulating the sick people in the future so that they would come fight for him in the past. All those civilians were going to come there.

  “Join me, if you wish,” Tobias said. “If not, I will die here. Alone, with the cures.”

  Donovan cursed. He ran faster. The feed died and the projectors disappeared back into the ceiling.

  Donovan, Tracee, and Brian emerged into sunlight a few minutes later. They were on the side of the lab.

  Tracee kept running, breathing hard now. She led them toward the front of the building. Brian began to fall behind. Donovan ran back for him and lifted the man over his shoulder, just as he had done for Jonathan on their last visit. Except, this time, Donovan barely felt the weight and did not tire as he ran.

  They turned around the corner of the building and came to a sharp stop. The clones were retreating! They were running into the lab.

  “Why are they leaving?” Tracee said.

  “When those sick civilians get here they’ll be really confused to see clones of Tobias everywhere. The scene they arrive to has to fit Tobias’s narrative.”

  Donovan could hear the soldiers cheering. They hadn’t seen Tobias’s message.

  “Come on,” Donovan said. “We have to warn them. All those people will be time traveling here without even knowing it. They’re angry and confused. They’ll attack. It’ll be a bloodbath.”

  Brian banged on Donovan’s back. The pressure felt like the fists of a small child. “Can you put me down now?”

  “Oh, sure.” Donovan lowered Brian to his feet. “Sorry.”

  Donovan ran to the massive crowd of soldiers. They were sitting on Tobias’s doorstep with a bomb about to go off and a small army of the infected coming their way.

  The distance was much greater than what it looked like to the naked eye. As they slowly approached, Donovan saw hundreds of red, glowing tubes come out of the ground. It was like a field of flowers was sprouting before their eyes.

  The tubes were about twenty yards from the soldiers. Men and women emerged from them dressed in all different types of clothes. Some of them even wore hospital gowns.

  They quickly spotted the soldiers and began to charge, unorganized. Many of them carried guns. Donovan heard them firing from where they stood. The flashes of blue lights indicated that a good number of them carried e-guns too. They were in trouble.

  Donovan and the others closed the distance between themselves and the soldiers, even as they were beginning to return fire against the civilians.

  “No!” Brian shouted. “Stop!”

  The soldiers either didn’t hear him or ignored him.

  Donovan grabbed the nearest soldier by the arm. “Where’s Lieutenant Chaplain?”

  The soldier pointed. “You’re alive? We thought we were coming to rescue a corpse.”

  Donovan didn’t reply. He spotted Jonathan and ran to him. He was yelling at the soldiers nearest to him, telling them to cease fire. At least someone had some sense. Donovan saw, thankfully, that the soldiers were listening.

  There were many of them on the outskirts of the assembly who weren’t getting the message. They were shooting down the civilians.

  Jonathan, seeming to remember something, suddenly spoke into a microphone on his shirt. Donovan could hear his voice echoing from the helmets of the soldiers around him.

  “Lower your weapons! Cease fire! Those are civilians!”

  The soldiers stopped firing but were unable to protect themselves from the onslaught. Their suits protected them from a lot of the fire but only at a distance. The closer the civilians got, the more soldiers died. And there were only more coming.

  “Jonathan!” Donovan yelled.

  Jonathan stared at Donovan. “You’re alive!”

  “Yes, I need…” Donovan was cut short as the young man threw his arms around Donovan in a bear hug.

  Jonathan let go, grinning.

  “Jonathan,” Donovan said, “I need you to tell the soldiers to run away from the building. We planted a bomb. Tracee, how much time do we have left?”

  “About five minutes.”

  Jonathan looked at her in amazement. “You’re alive, too? We thought for sure you were dead.”

  “Jonathan, focus!” Donovan demanded. “There. Is. A. Bomb.”

  “We need to get everyone away from here,” Brian added.

  Jonathan nodded seriously. “Roger.”

  He spoke into his microphone. “Retreat! Retreat! Go back to the ships! Retreat!”

  The soldiers didn’t need any further prompting. They ran.

  Donovan and the others followed.

  The civilians chased after them, cheering, thinking that they had won. They followed the soldiers, anger making them intent on hunting them all down.

  They ran as fast as they could. They were halfway toward the ships.

  “How much time?” Donovan asked.

  “Two minutes.”

  They weren’t far enough. They would get caught in the aftershock of the explosion.

  Jonathan apparently had the same thought. He reached for his microphone. “Faster! Run for your lives! The building is going to explode and we’re still within range!”

  The civilians had closed in on them, mixing in with the soldiers, shooting them down. Jonathan repeated his command. A civilian nearby heard him. From there, the news spread like wildfire. The civilians were murmuring then shouting.

  “The building is going to explode!” They were screaming, running now to protect themselves, forgetting all about killing the soldiers.

  They ran together like a startled herd of deer, all trying to get as far away from the threat as possible.

  “Twenty seconds!” Tracee called out.

  Jonathan yelled into his microphone. They ran harder.

  “Eight…seven…six…five…,” Tracee counted down.

  Donovan grabbed her and Brian and shoved them behind a tall rock. “Duck!” he shouted. He saw Jonathan dive behind a boulder just before he joined Tracee and Brian Umar on the ground.

  “Three…two…”

  They covered their heads. The force of the explosion ripped around them for several minutes. They could hear the booming of giant pieces of the building that crashed to the ground. It was like being inside a thunderstorm.

  When everything finally quieted, Jonathan chanced a peek around the rock. The whole landscape was covered in a cloud of dust. He couldn’t see the lab. He couldn’t see anything.

  Dead bodies littered the earth several yards away. They had only been a few more steps from saving their lives
. Donovan wondered how many others had suffered such fates. There were still people coming through the time machines when these had started running. Those later arrivals were almost certainly dead, as well.

  Donovan got up. He pulled Brian and Tracee to their feet. They looked exhausted, covered in a fine layer of red dirt. He imagined he looked much the same.

  He went to look for Jonathan. The boy was okay. He was already up and about, giving commands to the soldiers and civilians, not caring in the least that less than five minutes earlier they had all been fighting to kill.

  They found their way back to the ships and sent parties of civilians to the base. The civilians didn’t question the soldiers or try to kill them. They just seemed happy to have escaped death. Some of them cried.

  They couldn’t all fit on the ships so several trips had to be made. It was a while before Donovan made it back to the Fort. When he did, he was finally beginning to feel tired. He was glad for it—he had almost begun to feel inhuman, running and fighting for so long and not showing signs of fatigue.

  Within a few hours, General Umar had explained everything to the civilians and sent them back to their own times. To placate them, he had them injected with what they believed to be the cure before sending them off.

  They wouldn’t need the cure now that Tobias had been defeated. The Army and Air Force would administer the cure in this time period and none of those people would get sick in the first place.

  The people of 2176 would never know they had been infected, would never know they’d been cured. General Umar sent fresh soldiers to Lohiri to look for survivors. They found nothing.

  Donovan reported to Brian in his office, along with the rest of his team. Everyone’s stories got pieced together.

  Midway between Tracee’s report, Donovan began to feel oddly faint. He wondered if the E-X45 he had taken was another one of Tobias’s false formulas. He stared at his hands.

  Was his skin getting lighter?

  He looked up at the General to say something, but the General was fading, too. What the hell was happening to him? Was he dreaming?

  The General looked at him and jumped from his seat. The others gathered around him, touching him, shaking him. But he could barely feel their fingers.

  “What’s happening to me?”

  Donovan slid from his chair to the floor, unable to control his body anymore. He couldn’t even feel his body. His body? Did he even have one? Wasn’t he just a mind, floating in the space of creation?

  “Donovan!” General Umar said.

  Donovan opened his eyes. Oh yes, that was his name. He had almost forgotten.

  General Umar looked sad. “You’re fading, Donovan. You’ve saved us all. Now you’ll never get sent back to the past. This version of you won’t exist anymore.”

  Donovan felt giddy. He laughed and the sound echoed around his face like warm water. “It’s okay, General. I’m okay.” Donovan remembered something important, but then it faded from his mind’s grasp. Why was this okay again? It was something about Tobias not being the real Tobias. Something about evil and good.

  Donovan couldn’t remember.

  Donovan? Who was that?

  Who was he? Was he anybody?

  He decided that he was nobody. The light of his mind fell into an even greater light. He drifted and was no more.

  Chapter 25

  “Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.”

  —Robert A. Heinlein

  May 5, 2258

  Santa Monica, CA

  Donovan Knight

  General McGregor was an imposing man. He was a full head shorter than Donovan but still managed to make him feel like a teenager if he ever did something wrong. He reminded Donovan a little of his dad, though they looked nothing alike. For as long as he had been a part of the army, Donovan had answered to this man above all others.

  No one seemed to remember a time when Hesekiel McGregor was not in charge. He was a four-star General—commander of the entire army.

  Donovan stood at attention and gave his report while General McGregor listened with an expression almost like a glare. He always looked like that—like he was on the edge of anger. But this was his neutral expression. Donovan knew him well enough to see that he was actually quite pleased.

  The criminal had been loaded into a car only minutes before, cuffs still intact around his wrists, body sagging in the arms of two Privates. They dragged him in unceremoniously, knocking his head against the door twice. Donovan felt a sense of accomplishment. There had been no deaths. Tons of action but no property destroyed.

  “You did a good job,” the General said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I have another mission for you, Knight.”

  “Already sir?”

  The General raised his eyebrows. “Crime never sleeps, Knight. So neither can we.” The General opened the door to his private skycar. “Get in.”

  Donovan climbed into the back. The General sat across from him and closed the door. The driver steered them toward the sky.

  “Knight.” The General leaned forward, looking Donovan in the eye. “I have a lot to tell you. And you’re not going to believe a word of it.”

  Donovan tried not to laugh. “What is it, General?”

  Donovan didn’t believe it. Not at first. It was a wild tale—about him. Him and his grandfather and General McGregor. A tale of idolizing a monster only to discover that Donovan had been right all along—Tobias had betrayed General McGregor a few years after the lab was destroyed.

  It made no sense. Donovan couldn’t remember any of it, so how could it have happened?

  “That version of you disappeared because I won’t send you back in time tomorrow.”

  Donovan still didn’t understand. “Even if what you’re saying is true, why are you telling me all this?”

  The General cleared his throat. “Well, we got the results back of your last physical. It revealed some… abnormalities.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We found the primer virus in your blood, coated with an altered version E-X45.”

  “What?” Donovan said. He suddenly felt itchy. “What does that even mean?”

  “It’s like I told you. E-X45 enhances the virus Tobias created. It gives a person almost supernatural strength, hearing, sight…”

  “But I don’t feel strong. I don’t feel any different.”

  “We believe that this altered version is a little slower acting than the original. But you will feel strong. You will change.”

  “Why would this be in my blood?” Donovan asked, ignoring the implications of what the General was saying. He didn’t want to think how this would change him. He didn’t want to know the things he was being told.

  “There’s only one explanation for its presence in your body—Tobias is alive.” The General watched Donovan carefully. “We need you to help us find him.”

  “And you need to keep a close eye on me while this thing develops inside me.”

  The General nodded.

  Donovan dropped his head into his hands. He didn’t know what to think. Time travel? Seriously? He would think this was a joke if he didn’t know that the General had no sense of humor.

  “I can prove it to you,” the General said. “I can show you all of the classified files. It’s all documented in detail.”

  They flew to Fort Belvoir in Virginia. Donovan called his wife to let her know he wouldn’t be home until late.

  The General led Donovan up to the fifty-fourth floor. He used a white access card. They went into an office at the back of a huge, empty room filled with rows and rows of desks loaded with computers.

  Once they sat down, the General began to play back the recordings. Even though he’d been warned, he was still startled to see his own face appear on the screen and hear his own voice saying words that he never remembered saying.

  “I stole the formula and went to Lohiri, hoping to get information from Tobias.”

 
The record cut to a woman with blue streaks in her hair. “I survived the attack because one of my comrades accidently knocked me out. When I awoke, I went into stealth mode and entered the lab.”

  Later there was a young boy, white with red hair and freckles dotting his face. “I went with the solider to help rescue Donovan. I had to do something.”

  Who was this kid? Why did he use Donovan’s first name?

  “I fought with Colonel McGregor. The E-X45 gave me the strength to defeat him. I left him alive but with serious injuries. No doubt the formula healed his wounds. I just couldn’t kill him after knowing the man he would become. It was for nothing, though—he probably died in the explosion.”

  Another man appeared. “I had to do something. I couldn’t just let Jonathan fight alone. So I took the bomb and joined him. He created a distraction for me while I snuck inside the lab.”

  Donovan’s own face showed up again. “We ran and hid behind a boulder for protection against the bomb. There were a number of casualties. The exact amount was undetermined. We sent the civilians to earth.”

  The footage paused.

  “Is that enough proof for you?”

  “Tobias, the real one… he escaped the explosion?”

  “Yes. We had secret escape pods. Our security detected the bomb just as soon as it was planted. That was how I got away, as well.”

  “This is unbelievable.”

  “But true,” the General said.

  “But true,” Donovan repeated.

  “We don’t know Tobias’s goals, but he’s clearly still playing around with that virus of his. Will you accept this mission, Donovan? It’s completely voluntary. After what I did to you last time… Well, I can’t send you on another mission in which you don’t know the full details.”

  His own grandfather had tried to kill him. His own grandfather had injected his blood with some mutant disease. Tobias might even come after Donovan’s own family.

  There was no question about it.

  Donovan looked the General in the eyes, wondering for the first time who he really was. He was going to find out. He would accept the mission.