No. Look at them.
They’re here to kill me.
Maybe it was the way they held their rifles. Or maybe it was their black clothing and green-lit goggles. Whatever it was, I knew. Each of them walked in the same way, gun held high above the grass.
And when I ran, they fired.
I was lucky to be several hundred meters away. I expected them to fire bullets, maybe even razor flechettes, but it wasn’t until the ropes of dark energy screamed past my head that I suffered my first flashback. The cold, coiling plasma froze the tops of the grass, turning it blacker than twilight. One shot missed by only two meters to my right, close enough to frost my breath and scald my upper arm with frostbite.
I sprinted off the beaten path and cut into the high grass. The sharp green blades made a mess of my forearms, carving me up with every step. I heard the chilling crackle as the weeds and grass behind me froze and caught fire.
God, I thought.
Those guns, they’re almost…
…like Strigoi weapons.
I knew I couldn’t run forever. Sooner or later, one of them would manage a lucky shot and drop me dead. If the rifles didn’t kill me, the grass would cut me up into something unrecognizable.
Think, Joff, I swore at myself as I wove through the fields.
It doesn’t matter why they’re trying to kill you.
It won’t matter if you don’t survive.
I could’ve given up. I could’ve surrendered and hoped for mercy.
But it wasn’t in me.
I’d wiped out entire planets before. I wasn’t about to let three men put me down.
I knew what I needed to do.
With my speed, I’d managed to put four-hundred meters between me and my assailants. When their rifles went quiet for a few breaths, I hoped maybe they’d lost me. I stuck my head up, and in the starlight I glimpsed my house, its glass walls lit from within. I put my head back down just in time. A lance of dark energy cut through the night where my face had been, so deadly cold it froze the sweat on my forehead and hardened the towel like glass on my shoulder.
So much for surrendering.
I shrugged off the frozen towel and darted still deeper into the fields. I crossed a stream, sloshed through a marshy pit, and shoved my way through a wall of brambles. I couldn’t imagine how much I’d torn up my arms and face. It didn’t matter. If just one of the black energy beams hit me, I’d have been killed.
I had a plan.
As I fled, I curled back toward the forest behind my house. The rifles crackling behind me sounded farther away. I knew what it meant.
They’d lost me.
My only chance at survival lay inside my house.
Hidden beneath my glass floor.
Hopefully it still fits.
I plunged into the forest and sprinted between the trees. The shadows were all-consuming, the towering black-barked monoliths ruling over the dark earth like tyrants. If there had been undergrowth, I’d have been doomed, but the voids between the trees were wide and empty. I found my way using the starlight creeping through the canopy.
With each step I was sure I’d plow right into a tree and knock myself cold.
And then I emerged.
I halted at the edge of the field behind my house. The Sabre, whose scythe-like wing I’d cleared almost all the vines from, sat silent in the night, blacker than everything. I hadn’t heard a rifle go off in nearly thirty minutes, and yet I knew.
They’re watching.
They had to know I’d come back here.
I sucked in a breath, willed away the pain of the cuts on my arms, and bolted for my back door. My hope was to get inside before they shot me.
Just sixty seconds…all I need.
As I ran, I remembered something my father had said.
‘Never lock the doors to your own house, Joff,’ he’d said. ‘Let everything in and everything out.’
Of course, that’d been before a killer had broken into our barn.
I made it to the door without dying. If the three men had seen me, they hadn’t fired…yet. I could feel my heart throttling my ribs, banging away at a pace I couldn’t control.
The worst part of having a glass-walled house: at night when the lights were on inside, anyone outside could see everything within.
Lucky me.
I burst through the door. The dark-skinned behemoth standing in the main room’s center spun in my direction. He didn’t have an energy weapon, but instead a standard flechette-firing handgun, which he whipped toward my face.
I hurled the basket of laundry I’d picked up. The ball of wicker and wet clothes hit him just as he pulled the trigger.
A hail of flechettes tore through the room, shattering the back windows. I sprinted across the room and tackled him at the knees. He went down in a heap of muscle, and I climbed atop him, punching him a dozen times in his arms and face.
He was too big.
I could’ve pummeled him all night and not knocked him out.
I let him grab me.
I let him throw me off with his left hand.
And as I tumbled away, I grabbed his gun.
We fought on the ground. Flechettes sprayed through the ceiling and into my bedroom above. I wasn’t sure why, but the only thought flashing through my head was relief. I was glad I’d never married, grateful the flechettes tearing through the house couldn’t hit the wife and children I’d never had.
And then, with a last burst of tiny, needlelike projectiles, the front window came down. Sheets of glass fragmented and collapsed, a storm of crystalline death raining down on us both.
The only thing was: I’d expected it.
I rolled under the table.
He took a shard in his chest and another in his neck. It must’ve been agonizing. I hated the sounds he made, the gurgling, the choking, and the gasping. Killing someone wasn’t a thing I’d ever wanted to do again.
“House, power down,” I shouted.
The lights died. I crawled through a puddle of the dying man’s blood. Lances of black energy erupted from the fields and tore through the house. My table exploded into a cloud of ash. The chair I’d sat in thousands of times to watch the rain turned to powder, its dark dust coating the back of my ragged shirt.
If I’m too slow, they’ll cut the whole house down on top of me.
And that’s exactly what happened.
I tore a red rug aside and pulled open the hidden glass panel beneath. I tumbled into the gloom of my cellar, which I’d only ever used for storage and brooding in the dark. I hit the earthen floor hard.
I was sure something broke inside me.
No time for pain, I winced.
I clawed through the blackness. I heard a hail of glass falling above me. More black energy bursts carved through the house. A support beam hit the glass panel I’d slipped through, shattering it. The whole world sounded as if it were breaking.
And then I touched it.
Hard and chrome, undisturbed for the last twenty years. Smooth round shoulders. Flexible joints. Impenetrable. Beautiful.
The Vezda suit.
I tore off my boots and stripped away my bloody shirt. Piece by piece, I snapped the Vezda suit’s hardware onto my limbs. Its makers had created it well. With each piece of blue chrome armor I assembled onto myself, the part below powered up and fused together.
Airtight.
Unbreakable.
After all the many years, it still felt like a second skin.
Every armored plate locked perfectly in place.
The hollow arm-cannon fit over my right forearm as if I’d never taken it off.
I lowered the helmet onto my shoulders just as the starlight leaked into the holes my attackers had blown in the house.
Then the whole thing came crashing down atop me. Glass, carbon steel, powered fibers, and furniture hit me all at once.
But in the Vezda suit, I didn’t feel a thing.
Blue lights flickered to life inside my helmet
’s visor. Darkness became clear as day. Nothing could hurt me. I might as well have been a god.
I leapt up to ground level.
In the suit, the three-meter leap was no more than a child’s hop.
The three men surrounding my house, one-hundred meters away on each side, became visible through the plume of dust erupting from my fallen home.
I powered up the hollow tube covering my right forearm. The arm-cannon, smooth and perfect, hadn’t been fired since I’d used it to blast Strigoi coffins.
As the dust cleared and the roiling black clouds evaporated, I stood tall in the smoking ruin of my house.
I heard one of the men shout something.
And I killed them all.
Digging Deep
I didn’t care if they sent more men for me.
I’d proved my point.
Shovel in hand, I wiped the sweat from my forehead and went back to work. Dragging the four dead men into the fields behind my ruined house had been hard enough. Digging graves for them was harder still.
I didn’t know why I bothered. They’d tried to murder me. They hadn’t known me, hadn’t even tried to talk to me. They’d just started firing.
I dug.
And dug.
And dug.
I was a farmer, after all. And damn good at digging holes, I mused.
The first three, I rolled into their graves. It hurt to do. It wasn’t that I recoiled from the gruesome injuries the Vezda’s arm-cannon had inflicted.
It was my own pain.
Every time I squeezed my hands, turned my hips, or rolled my wrists, all the little tears in my skin screamed at me. Glass dust had gotten into the cuts I’d sustained while wading through the fields. I had twenty bruises at least, some small, others as big as my open palm. I’d washed out my wounds and bandaged myself using strips of clothing. But I’d bled through most of it, and toiling in the midday heat wasn’t helping.
For a reason unknown, I needed to finish burying them.
I stood over the last man. He’d fought me the hardest, firing his rifle even after I’d blown a hole in his side with the Vezda’s cannon. I flipped him over and looked into his lifeless eyes.
I shook my head at him. I wasn’t angry. I just wanted to ask him why? He’d tried so hard to carve me up with a weapon that shouldn’t have existed on Sumer.
Why’d he do it?
Where’d he get the rifle from?
Why didn’t he run when he saw me blow his friends to pieces?
With a grunt, I rolled him toward his grave. I’d already covered up his friends. One more, and I’d be finished.
But then I stopped, rolled him on his back again, and looked at his face one more time.
I knew him.
I’d seen him before.
God.
It’s one of Tabir’s bodyguards.
I stared at his pallid cheeks, his open mouth, and his eyes rolled up in his head. I scolded myself for not seeing it sooner. I’d been so wrapped up in burying them, so distracted by my thousand little pains, I hadn’t seen the obvious truth.
My sister’s husband. He sent these men to kill me.
And I knew why. Oh, did I ever. The reasons were as plain as the suns blazing overhead.
I’d always been alone.
But kneeling there in the dirt, a grave on every side, I’d never felt so solitary in my life.
I stood up and kicked the man into his grave. I shoveled the mound of dirt over him, not nearly as reverently as I’d done for the others. Each time my spade hit the ground, I grew angrier. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be really, truly angry. I could only recall a few times in my entire life my blood had run so hot.
When Doctor Abid made me kill a man.
When Dad lied to me.
When my sister tore off my teddy bear’s arm.
I looked back at my house. Nothing moved in the silent ruin. My only thought, however foolish, was that Alpo, my teddy bear, was lying in there somewhere. I thought about digging through the glass and twisted steel to get him out.
But I couldn’t.
The time for teddy bears was done.
I had a choice to make.
I sat in the circle of graves for a long while. The suns beat down on my neck. I didn’t care. I hunkered in the dirt and let the midday swelter braise my skin and darken my heart.
And then, dripping with sweat, I gathered up the Vezda suit’s pieces and carried them to the Sabre.
The suit was nearly weightless in my arms. The right-side shoulder plate and the left thigh plate had been scalded black by the men’s Strigoi-like rifles, but the armor was intact.
Still airtight. If their weapons were really Strigoi-made, I’d be dead.
Even so, the resemblance was too close.
It can’t be a coincidence.
I stood beneath the Sabre’s belly-hatch and said the password. The Sabre, the most powerful spacecraft ever built by human hands, opened up. The ship was mine. It opened only for me.
As I carried the Vezda suit up the ladder, I considered many things.
I could fly right over Tabir’s tower. Fire up the quantum engine. Turn Arcadia to ashes.
But Aly might be there.
Or her husband out on business.
Inside the Sabre, I laid the Vezda suit on the floor and stood in the shadows. My pain should’ve crippled me, but instead I let it sing to me. I’d become complacent in my isolation. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be alive.
And somehow, with all my hurts, with four dead men buried in the dirt beneath me, I felt alive again.
I walked through the Vezda’s cockpit. The darkness lay heavy upon everything, but with outstretched fingers I touched the walls, the console, and my chair. The feel of the smooth black chrome and dry, crackling leather awakened my memory.
It was fortunate for Arcadia the Sabre’s weapons were depleted. I’d fired every last missile, bomb, and projectile during my battle against the Strigoi. None of it had done any good, of course. The dying sun Hera had been their destroyer. But I’d tried. And after everything, an entire Strigoi planet had burned away.
And I’m still here.
Lucky you, Arcadia.
With a bottomless sigh, I left the Sabre. I climbed down her ladder and ordered her hatch to seal. No one could hurt my ship from the outside, I knew. Even with the scars from the Strigoi death lances, she’d survived.
I’ll be back. I touched a landing strut as I walked away.
…unless they kill me.
I walked away, but stopped halfway to my ruined house. Sweat streamed down my face. My head and everything in it ached. With a glance behind me, I considered marching right back to my ship and retrieving the Vezda suit. I could’ve used it. If I’d have wanted, I could’ve dressed in my perfect armor and invaded every city on Sumer. I probably could’ve slaughtered everyone on the planet, including Tabir.
I’m not a murderer. I shook the thought away.
Well…not a murderer like that.
In the piles of glass and destroyed technology, I rummaged through my house’s ruins. I found my dented thermos, three packets of freeze-dried rations, and a shirt with only a few burn holes. I wrapped it all in a blackened cloth I’d once used as a curtain and shambled back out to the circle of graves. After sliding into a pair of black pants and boots I’d pulled off one of the men I’d killed, I slung my belongings over my shoulder.
The forest beckoned, silent and full of shadows.
I could’ve brought the Vezda’s arm-cannon.
I could’ve done many things.
But instead, as the clouds began to blanket the world, I trotted into the gloom beneath the trees.
One-hundred ninety kilometers to the nearest city.
Another three-hundred fifty to Aly’s flat in Arcadia.
I have to warn her.
* * *
I’d never slept in such perfect darkness as in the Sumerian forest.
At home, on an Earth that w
as no more, I’d never had the chance. While training in Doctor Abid’s fortress, I’d longed to walk in the frozen woodland beneath the mountains. I’d gazed out my window for hours at the tops of the old pines, and I’d dreamed of escaping.
But I’d never dared.
And on my farm in the valley between three mountains, trees had been sparse and the nights too full of moonlight. Somehow I remembered the stars being brighter on Earth, as if the Strigoi had destroyed so many hundreds of thousands since I left they’d managed to dim the sky forever.
In Sumer’s woods, there were no stars.
The trees were gods, the spaces between them vast and empty as still-watered oceans.
I walked beneath leaves larger than houses, and I used them as shields against the rain.
I found fruits the size of my skull. Some were poisonous, but others nourishing, even if tasteless.
With no animals or human settlements, I marched on without concern. The suns’ hot light, ever a scourge in the open fields, couldn’t find me beneath the canopy.
And neither could the starlight.
On both of the first two nights, I found hollows in the trees to sleep in. The dirt was softer than any bed I’d ever felt. The roots made dens big enough for me to hide in. If Tabir’s men were pursuing me, they’d have never found me at night. I slept in the deepest, darkest corners of the forest, and I made no sound.
The long nights were exactly what my wounded body needed. During mornings, I washed myself in crystalline streams. And during the days I walked my pain away, losing myself in thoughts so deep I couldn’t believe I’d never come to the forest before.
It would’ve been easy, so easy, to walk somewhere other than Arcadia.
I could live out my days here.
If the Strigoi come to snuff the stars, I won’t see it until it’s too late.
If not for Aly, I might’ve wandered into lands far and wide of humanity. After all, more than ninety-nine percent of Sumer was unpopulated. The Exodus settlers, those who’d left Earth hundreds of years earlier, had mapped out the world before landing.
But there weren’t nearly enough of them to explore it all.
I could’ve been alone forever.
I was tempted, so tempted.
On the third morning, I unfolded the tiny electronic map I’d scavenged from my house. The little blue light pinged on its surface. The nearest city, Venya, lay eighty kilometers northwest of me.
Shadow of Forever (Eaters of the Light Book 2) Page 4
