by Phil Maxey
Scattered across the floor were rags, dark rotting magazines and what she thought were the hallmarks of people having lived there, but long since had left or died. The whole place felt like death and she had sacrificed everything to be there.
The idea was growing inside her, that the reason she had made the journey was simply because it was home. That it was the last place she knew her parents were, but her subconscious mind had put together some elaborate story to get her to come, otherwise she never would have.
She swallowed and wiped her cheek, then picked up the driest looking pieces of paper she could find, scrunched them up and placed them between the pieces of wood. Pulling a lighter from her pack, she ignited the paper, blowing on it to keep it going, then watched as the flames grabbed hold of the smaller pieces of wood. It wasn’t long before smoke was rising and the fire was warming her hands.
Mo gave a quiet squawk.
“Yeah, fire, yay. Hey, maybe we can cook whatever that is you’re holding.” It was a joke, for the idea in reality turned her stomach a little. She needed humor, it was the only thing that was keeping her sane.
Sitting down on the sofa, she reached into her pack and pulled out her hand radio. The battery was dead. Even if it weren’t the idea of pulling Zach and the others into this hell, was something she couldn’t do. They would die trying to get to her. Then there was Clovis. He was coming. It wasn’t a sensation, like she felt with knowing an E.L.F was nearby, it was more of a hunch, an expectation.
He’s going to kill me.
She sighed and threw the radio back into the backpack.
As the flames danced, her eyes grew heavy.
* * * * *
Abbey’s eyes sprung open.
What was that?
The light from the day had been replaced with a wall of darkness around her, with the dying embers of the fire being the only source of light.
A bang echoed in the distance making her get to her feet. She immediately pulled her Glock from her belt, and waved it into the gloom. It wasn’t an E.L.F, she would sense it if it was. This was something else.
A crunching noise came from behind her, making her whirl around and fire off a round. A boom echoed around the walls and momentarily the lobby lit up allowing her a glimpse of a person ducking on the other side of the room.
“I see you there! I got a gun and I’m a Cascader, so I—”
“Abbey?”
It was a voice she knew, but one that couldn’t be there.
Am I dreaming?
She lowered her hand. “Raj?”
More sounds of wood breaking and something stepping towards her. She raised the gun again.
“Don’t shoot!”
She quickly reached into her pack and brought out the flashlight and pointed it towards the voice. Raj was looking back at her, trying to cover his eyes.
“Raj?” She walked forward, still with her gun pointing at the figure in front of her.
“Please lower your gun, it’s me.” He said walking up to her.
“But how?” She looked around. “Are the others here?”
“No. I’m alone. Do you have any water?”
She walked back to her pack and pulled her bottle out. “Here. It’s all I have.” She handed it to him.
He took a few gulps and handed it back to her. “Who would of thought being in a space craft would make you so thirsty.”
“Uh?”
He stepped forward, throwing his arms around her, taking her by surprise, her gun still in her outstretched hand. “It’s good to see you are still alive.” He let go and stepped back. “Elcher informed me he had been trying to keep a close eye on you, but he can’t watch you all the time, and—”
“What are you talking about?”
He pointed at the sofa. “I think you should take a seat.”
CHAPTER 17
The senior staff all sat around the large table in the outpost’s basement. On the comms General Mitchell had just finished telling them and Trow who was linked into the transmission, their story. Of how the decision was made to expand the bunkers early on in the Cascade, and how that choice saved thousands of lives.
Brad leaned in to Zach. “Still not seeing why they have been quiet all this time. Would have given people hope to know others were out there.”
Zach nodded, although he hadn’t heard much after they moved on from recalling how a young woman had been discovered in the tunnels a few days earlier, and how she had trained some of them, only for other Cascaders to show up and kill someone.
Clovis.
As General Trow and General Mitchell exchanged ideas as to how to lift the siege of the Boston bunkers, Zach could only think about how alone the woman he loved must be feeling. Even with her pet by her side.
“Don’t you think?” Said Bower to Zach.
He hesitated, trying to remember anything that had just been said.
Brad leaned forward. “Obviously Clovis has brought others together, like himself and the Cascaders in the bunkers will be no match for them.”
Zach nodded, pretending he knew what they were just talking about.
“And they presumably can control more of the E.L.F’s that are in the area. So we are trapped down here. Over,” said Mitchell on the radio.
“And you have supplies for four months you say? Over,” said Trow.
“Yes, but that’s not the issue. A number of tunnels are shuddering, as if—”
“They are digging…” Said Zach.
“Yes. We have a lot of firepower down here if we need to use it, but it will get messy real quick if their creatures break into the bunkers. Over.”
Bower was shaking his head as she was talking. “We’re not going to let that happen, General.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves Captain,” said Trow. “Boston is a good two days away by road and it won’t be easy getting planes up there. General. Do you think you can hold out for three days? Over.”
“Doesn’t seem we have much choice. Over.”
As if waking from a dream, Zach realized he had hardly contribute anything to the discussion. “We don’t have to tackle Clovis’s people head on, we just have to draw them away. And if he knows I’m in the vicinity, it will do just that.”
Bower looked frustrated, but didn’t get a chance to vocalize it, because Trow talked first. “Zach, we just got you back, and—”
“I’m the senior officer in command up here. So this is what we’re going to do.” He then went to lay out a plan, which involved himself and a small detachment of soldiers, moving as quickly to Boston to distract the attackers, while a larger force moved from Austin to the outpost, and then joined them in Boston. It was a good plan even if it was just something he had thought of within the last few minutes.
He looked around those in the room, then to the mike in front of him. “So we in agreement General? Over.”
“We are. The force will be ready to roll by the morning. Over,” said Trow.
“Give us hourly updates, General Mitchell. Over,” said Zach.
“Will do. Over.”
And with that the link between the outpost, the camp and the bunkers was ended.
Silence fell across the room. “I’m not sure not telling them about the aliens was the right move,” said Bower.
“They got enough on their plate Cole. We’ll tell them once we have taken care of their Clovis problem.”
Bower nodded.
Zach looked around the room. “I want a squad put together and ready to leave by zero six hundred hours, which gives us plenty of time to get some rest and get prepared.”
“Yes, sir,” said most in the room.
“I’m going to get some air.” Zach stood and walked to the stairs. Michael, who had remained silent for the entire meeting followed.
Zach continued through the hallway and out the front, standing on the porch. The brisk night air helped clear his head. “Just when you think we’re getting ahead of the game, the game changes,” he said wi
thout turning around.
Michael stood next to him. Both men watched the construction that was being completed on the buildings in front of them. It was 9 pm and the lights which lay strewn twenty feet up in the air, burned brightly.
Zach looked at his friend. “I bet you wish you stayed in the camp?”
Michael smiled. “And miss all this alien shit?”
They both laughed.
Michael swallowed. “Anyway, it’s what Cal would of wanted. Us together, until all this craziness is properly taken care of.”
CHAPTER 18
A scrawny looking man with grime-laden clothes and a sack thrown over his boney shoulders, scrambled up some rubble. He used his flashlight to help him find his way, but more than once he had fallen painfully. Only half of the building he was trying to get to the top of remained. He clambered over pieces of office furniture and then into what remained of a stairwell, finally emerging on the fourth floor, which was now the top most floor of the office building and was open to the night sky above.
A man with a leather jacket and black hair with streaks of gray stood looking out into the darkness, listening to the E.L.F’s causing even more destruction to the area around them.
The man walked to him, out of breath and dropped the sack onto the dust-covered floor. “Got some nice stuff, few cans of ham, some bags of candy and a few bottles of soda. How’s it looking out there?”
“Our friends are doing their best to gain access to the catacombs, but they are well constructed so it’s going slow,” said Erin.
“Are we sure it’s worth being in the middle of this? Clovis seems to have a bug up his ass for the old government people.”
“If we can into the bunkers then there will be riches for us all Dale. With what we find down there, we might be able to call this our home.” He turned to face the older man. “Clovis said there will be good things in our future if we trusted him, and he was right.”
Dale frowned. “I still don’t trust him. He’s off.”
Erin smiled and placed his hands around the shoulders of his fellow Cascader. “Of course we do not trust him. He may be ‘like’ us, but he is not ‘one’ of us. For now though he knows more about what’s left of the old world than we do, and that’s worth its weight in gold.” He looked down to the piles of food on the floor. “Take this to the others, I’m not hungry.”
Dale picked up the bag and went to leave. “Oh and Sandy wants to see you, said you’ll know what it’s about.”
Erin nodded and turned back to the sounds of dragging and scraping.
A mile away, Bryan sat on an old chair, surrounded by the others in Clovis’s group. A fire blazed in an old barrel not far away.
He briefly looked at Lilly’s bruised face. He didn’t want to think about what Clovis was doing to her and his part in keeping it going. Since when they had met Erin’s group, she had become Clovis’s personal plaything and it was his job to patch her up and make sure she didn’t die.
I have to escape.
Maybe he could take Brett and Lilly with him. The young man had already pleaded with him on a number of occasions to leave with him, but Clovis wasn’t stupid. On joining up you were told of the ‘rules’. The first being if you tried to escape, everyone left behind would be slaughtered by his creatures. The second being if anything should happen to Clovis, then the result would be the same. The third was, you pull your weight or you become the next meal for his ‘boys’. The effect of all of that was, no one but Brett had even shown a hint of trying anything that the boss didn’t agree with. Brett though was young, desperate and didn’t care about the others. He just wanted out and it was becoming harder each day for him to hide it.
Luckily Clovis hadn’t been around much lately, instead choosing to be alone with his creatures.
The door to the ruined building they were in, opened and what hushed conversation there had been immediately fell quiet.
Clovis appeared with his backpack on his back, and stood near the fire looking at the others. “I’m leaving. You all stay here and help Santiago and his people get into the bunker. I’ll be back in a few days.”
Bryan’s inner joy only lasted a few seconds, for the big mans eyes then rested on him. “You’re coming with me.”
Momentarily Bryan’s mind protested and the emotion almost made it’s way to his face, but instead he got to his feet and started gathering his things into his backpack.
* * * * *
Raj sat in the high ceilinged lobby, while the fire burned in front of him. To his side laid Abbey sleeping. Once he had told her what he had learned, she burst into tears and hugged him. They sat there for a few hours until he realized she was asleep, and then he helped her lay down. He then spent a frustrating hour trying to get the fire back up again.
He looked at the woman near to him and wondered what kind of dreams you have when you learn that you were responsible for the deaths of eighty percent of humanity. No words came from her once he finished talking, only tears, but they were the tears of someone who already knew some of what he had told her, that he was sure of. Either way, sleep was the best thing she could be doing right now, and he himself needed time to think and work through Elcher's plan.
Elcher he learned was one of the Hulathen, a high-ranking official, but a bureaucrat nonetheless. They had never planned to ‘transition’ the earth as he called it, but several years before they had received a message on a ‘very basic frequency’ from this region of interstellar space, which was quite clear. “The earth needs a reset.” This in itself wouldn’t of meant anything, except it had come from ‘one of their own.’ This last part was the biggest revelation to come from the brief chat he had with the alien. The Hulathen had already been to earth. Thousands of years prior, and had genetically altered certain humans with a virus, which would lay dormant until the Hulathen had need for the planet. “We do not transition all the planets we have previous seeded, only those that are on the brink of their own destruction. The earth appeared to be one such place. Once the virus is triggered in the host, it spreads to all life on the planet, which decreases the population to a more manageable number for what altered life is left.”
Abbey’s angry protest at her corrupt employer had led to the downfall of the human race. Go figure.
Elcher said he had first visited Cal, as he thought Cal would be a good candidate to help stop what was happening, but he found Cal to be emotionally ‘unstable’ and when he died, he decided to concentrate more on Abbey.
Thinking back on all he had been told, Raj felt the same roller coaster of emotions he had at the time and just as before he suppressed them, for exploding in anger at beings such as the Hulathen wouldn’t have helped, and as he found out might have actually ended any chance of saving what was left of earths population.
Elcher said he and a few others felt transitioning the earth was a mistake, just as they later realized the message from Abbey had been as well. But the ‘high council do not admit mistakes. We are the Hulathen. If such knowledge became known then many societies we have transitioned would collapse.’ He went on to say that they do not hide themselves from a transitioned world, and in fact the new worlds are usually offered technology to help them progress even faster. “Those that you call Cascaders are connected to the universe around them in a fundamental way, even more than you or they realize.” Raj wasn’t sure what that meant at the time.
But either way, Elcher felt the destruction on the earth had been too extreme. He did not know why the Cascade accelerated why it did, but for some reason “Everything changed here too fast and to a greater extent than had been planned. Leading nature to devour itself.” Raj learned they initially try to slow down the process, but found they could not and it was decided it was better to forget about the earth, and their ‘mistake’.
Elcher disagreed, and wanted to do something to help. But ‘If the others find out, than I will not be able to help anymore.’
Then there was the ‘other’ thing.
&n
bsp; “The other Hulathen have decided they cannot allow the Cascaders to continue,” said the alien.
Raj looked again at Abbey and felt guilty. On seeing her hours earlier, he knew what he had to tell her might break her, but at the same time it was too big for one person to keep to themselves, and the feeling of relief he felt on relaying his story to her was palpable. He still had no idea how she was going to react once she was awake, and he was not looking forward to finding out.
He glanced up at Mo who was equally asleep, laying on some pipes on a balcony on the second floor.
His eyes felt heavy as he looked back at the fire, but he shook his head to try and flick them open and thought again about Elcher’s plan. “The Cascaders, can not only control animals, but all forms of altered life on the planet. They can stop the cascade from going any further if they combine their powers. A strong individual needs to bring them together, but we do not have long for this to happen.”
CHAPTER 19
A small convoy of two Humvee’s, one turreted, a truck full of soldiers and another housing a drone and fuel, sat with their engines idling near the gate of the outpost. The sun still hadn’t made an appearance but the black of the sky was beginning to be tinged with blue and orange.
“You know this could go badly wrong, right?” Said Fiona slapping her hands together to keep warm in the driving seat of the first Humvee.
“How’s that any different to any other mission we have been on?” Said Zach.
Fiona raised her eyebrows and nodded.
