“Honghui,” said Leon.
Michael turned his head to look at Leon over his shoulder. “What was that, mate?” he asked.
“The old man. His name is Honghui. He … he thinks this is all a dream and he’s waiting to wake up.”
Michael grimaced at the revelation, then straightened his shoulders and marched over to where Honghui patiently bided his time until the strange ordeal around him ended.
“Honghui,” he said, kneeling in front of the old man. “We’re leaving this place, mate. We want you to come with us.”
There was no response other than a steady deep breathing from Honghui, almost as if he really had fallen asleep and needed only to wake up in his own bed.
“Please, sir. We don’t want to leave you behind when we go. I think it would be a bad idea for you to be here alone.”
One rheumy eye opened. From all the way across the room, Leon could make out the glint of amber.
“Do you worry for my wellbeing, child? Or do you worry for your Dharma?”
Michael barked out a small skeptical laugh. “I’m worried about you dying here,” he said.
Honghui closed his eye again and smiled. “I absolve you of responsibility for my fate. Your karma shall not be impacted by leaving me here, and your reincarnation is not threatened by your actions today.” He waved a hand in an odd flapping gesture. “Go. I will not join you.”
Michael returned to the main group, bemused by his interaction with Honghui. “What the hell was that all about?” he muttered.
“He is perhaps Hindu,” said Vinod, in response to Michael’s question. “He mentioned your Dharma. Leaving a man to die is a terrible thing, but he was telling you, and the rest of us, that we will incur no negative karma by letting him stay. I do not think we can change his mind, and therefore any consequences he faces will be of his own doing. In his own way, I think he was trying to comfort us.”
“I suppose,” agreed Michael. “But I still don’t like the idea of leaving him behind.”
“Our only other option is drag him along against his will,” continued Vinod. “I do not like that much better. I think we should respect his wishes.”
Sofia spoke quietly beside Leon. “So, he dies here. I think we’ve already failed our first test.”
“What?” asked Leon, turning toward her.
“Nothing. I was only talking to myself.”
They stood silently, each listening to their own internal monologue regarding leaving a member of their party to die. The test had not even begun, and they were already trying to digest their first casualty. How many more would they lose? Could the rest of them make it out of here, or would none of them live long enough to make it home?
“We, ready to go, are?” asked Hiss when the silence had stretched to almost a minute.
There were nods of assent, but only Malcolm spoke.
“Get us the fuck out of here, already. You lot are beginning to depress the shit out of me.”
CHAPTER 5
Hiss approached the white door. During their intensive search of the room, it remained the only potential exit presented. Everyone gathered behind the Many, accepting him at least for the moment as de facto leader. With no obvious handle to grasp, Hiss placed one of his larger hands against the door’s surface and pushed. The hatch shifted forward a fraction, issued a small click, then sprung gently back toward the group. The door swung inward, opening fully without effort or protest.
Peering carefully through the rectangular space revealed, Leon felt strangely deflated. He had expected something a bit more dramatic, although if pressed for an answer, he could not have explained why. Perhaps he felt that a door in an alien setting like this shouldn’t behave so mundanely. It should have… What? Screeched with rusty hinges like the entrance to a haunted house? Maybe exploded in a flash of colorful lights, balloons, and rainbow confetti?
Regardless of what he expected, it was merely an open door. Yet, mundane as it was, it still represented a very real threat. It was time to leave what little safety they had remaining and step into the unknown.
Hiss walked through first, followed by Shoo and Kack. Malcolm exited next with his chest thrust out and one hand resting on the pommel of his borrowed sword. One by one, the remaining members of the group left the library, with Leon taking up the rear. He slipped through the doorway to find everyone huddled together in a bare white hallway, waiting for him.
Leon turned to poke his head back into the room and call out to Honghui one last time. He rested a hand on the door jamb and leaned forward until he could see the old man still seated contentedly on the floor.
“Hey!” he shouted to the quiet figure. Before he could finish whatever he was going to say, a hand fell heavily on his shoulder, grabbed a fistful of the nylon windbreaker he had thrown on that morning, and jerked him roughly backwards.
Leon stumbled and almost fell from the force of the pull. He turned to confront whoever had grabbed him, annoyance and anger screwing up his face. Vinod stood beside him, pointing at the door. Or rather, he was pointing to where the door used to be. The opening Leon moments before had his head poked through had been replaced by a solid white wall. If Vinod had not pulled him back, he would have been cut in two. At the very best, if he weren’t killed outright, he would be permanently stuck with his head in the wall.
“I saw it start to close,” Vinod told him, his voice almost apologetic. “I didn’t think you wanted your head in there when it closed completely.”
“No, I didn’t. Thanks, I…” Leon trailed off. Vinod had already turned away.
Leon jerked his jacket straight around his shoulders while checking out his new surroundings. The hallway ran straight ahead for a hundred feet or more, a featureless, square tunnel of solid white walls, floor, and ceiling. There was plenty of light to see. The hall was as bright as it had been in the library, although Leon could not find any obvious source for the illumination. All surfaces seemed equally lit despite the complete lack of lamps, bulbs, or other types of common lighting equipment. Come to think of it, he had not noticed any common light sources in the last room either. Leon searched the floor for his shadow to offer some clue to the mystery but found only a diffuse area of slightly darker space surrounding his feet.
Dismissing his curiosity for the moment, Leon brought his attention back to more immediate concerns. The hallway ended in a door that appeared to be an exact duplicate of the one they had come through, except this portal did have a gold-colored, metal handle on its surface. Hiss trudged forward while waving both of his larger arms in a manner indicating everyone should follow.
“The door, as soon as opened, we, through, must go. The hallway, remain, will not.”
After the manner in which the first door had disappeared, no one needed to be prodded further to follow Hiss’ lead. The group walked with a studied purpose toward the only remaining exit from their current location.
Hiss grasped and turned the metal handle. With a push, he swung the door forward. It opened as easily as the first door, and he and the other two Many passed through without hesitation. Leon chose to go through last again, but this time he had no need to turn back and risk getting his head removed. Out of curiosity, he watched the door swing closed, staring in wonder as both sides of the jamb slid together. The space sealed like an elevator door closing, but when the two sides met in the middle they did not stop. They melded seamlessly together. When fully closed there was no hint that anything other than a solid wall had ever existed in that location.
“Silence, please,” urged Hiss, behind Leon. “Sound and movement, dangerous, is.”
The room in which they found themselves looked like a giant, medieval stables constructed of uniformly cut stone blocks. The floor was comprised of tightly set cobblestones covering forty feet from side to side and abutting against rock and mortar walls. The walls were each twenty feet high, and the masonry was so polished and clean Leon doubted he would be able to find a hand or foot hold anywhere on its f
ace. The remarkably smooth surface may as well have been a wallpaper rendition of a stone wall.
Above the top edge of the wall, open space dominated where a roof should have been. Leon gazed up at a clear, unimpeded view. He saw no sun or celestial bodies of any kind, just an odd purple blanket of air overhead. There was slightly less light here, although enough remained to allow him to see his surroundings easily. It looked like early sunset back home on Earth, but there was no doubt in Leon’s mind that this was not Earth. Had this been home he should have seen stars making their first appearances in the growing gloom. There was nothing above them. Only an unending veil of violet sky.
The room – or perhaps alley would be more correct as there was no roof to speak of – stretched ahead of them for over a hundred yards. The entire length was empty except for what appeared to be a pen or animal stall about fifty feet from where the group gathered. The stall consisted of two wooden post fences, one on each side of a gap, both terminating against the stone wall. The end of the stall facing the room was unimpeded by a gate or any other barrier. Inside, a layer of straw insulation covered the stone floor and provided a comfortable resting place for a huge, armored boulder.
Leon tried to inch forward to get a better look at the domed rock heap, wondering why anyone would place such an item in their path. Were they supposed to avoid it, or use it to some as yet unknown purpose? Should he climb it? It might be a way for them to scale the wall and get out of this stone-walled box.
Then the boulder moved. Everyone in the group except the three aliens, shifted back in surprise.
“What the fuck is that thing?” growled Malcolm. His knuckles turned white around the sword pommel.
Hiss waved at them, indicating they should be still and remain quiet.
“The…, to us, do not attract,” warned Hiss.
Whatever Hiss had called the thing, Leon had not heard any translation in his head. There was apparently no earthly equivalent to it. This creature had segmented armor; what had at first appeared to be stone, Leon could now see as layered rings of gray, leathery skin and bone that flexed and accordioned as the beast shifted. The closest thing in Leon’s limited experience that he could relate it to was an armadillo. But that would only apply if an armadillo had no tail, no real head of which to speak, and towered ten feet tall from the ground to the peak of its back.
The creature was blind, Hiss explained in quiet tones. It had no natural enemies on his planet, as nothing living could penetrate its body armor, and it was, unfortunately, omnivorous. It would eat anything it decided was food and was slow enough for it to catch. Because it could not see, the rockadillo, as Leon decided to call it, relied on smell and sound vibrations for hunting. The animal knew something had come into the alley, it could hear them and feel the vibrations of their movement along the ground, but it had not yet decided if they were edible.
Leon felt a slight breeze touch his face, a slow but steady wind that blew from the distant end of the alley to their present location. As soon as the group moved far enough forward that they were upwind of the rockadillo, it would scent them and, at that time, it would most likely decide they were food. When that happened, they would need to move swiftly for the door.
The creature was not fast, Hiss told them, but it was relentless once it decided you were prey.
The hastily constructed plan was for Leon to lead the group at a run to the far door. Hiss warned that this door was likely to be locked and Leon should have his ring of keys in his hands ready to use. Once the door was open, everyone was to immediately go through with Hiss bringing up the rear. He explained that while Leon worked on opening the door, he would keep the rockadillo busy. He seemed confident that he could do this safely and revealed that he had a secret weapon to help him deal with the monstrous beast.
Reaching into a pocket in his vest, Hiss pulled out one of the wrapped cubes he had collected from the equipment room. “The rockadillo, this smell, will love. Its focus, will keep, long enough for Leon, the door, to open.”
“What if we stay right here? What happens if we don’t move?” asked Sofia.
Hiss touched both small hands to his chin. “It, to us, eventually, will come. It, ignore us forever, will not.”
“We could try to go over the wall,” she countered.
“This, not so easy, would be,” Hiss assured her. He stroked a large hand along the wall’s polished surface in demonstration. “We, the wall, cannot climb.”
Leon unzipped his backpack, pulling the zipper tab slowly to minimize the noise. He removed the ring of metal objects from the front pocket. The keys clinked and jingled as they slid along the ring and Leon flinched at the unwelcome racket. The rockadillo shifted in its pen but did not move out of the confines to explore.
Leon closed his pack and slung it back over his shoulders.
“I’m ready, Hiss. Just say when and I’ll make a run for the door.”
“Go.”
Leon took off at a dead run. The others moved at the same time and tried to stay with him. Annie, Malcolm, and Michael had no difficulty keeping up, but Vinod fell slightly behind, with Sofia barely a heartbeat behind him. To Leon’s surprise, Shoo and Kack stayed with Hiss who loped easily along behind the running group until reaching the rockadillo. All three slowed to a stop.
The armored animal rumbled out of the pen as the group rushed past. It circled in place for a moment as if gauging the direction of its intended prey, then began lumbering toward the running humans. Hiss had been right. It did not move quickly, but it was not so slow that it didn’t present a threat. Moving at the speed of a quick walk, in these limited confines the creature could eventually corner and attack the members of the group one at a time. The humans and the Many would eventually grow fatigued enough to stop, and the rockadillo would trap and consume them at its leisure.
Hiss unwrapped the first package. Leon could not smell the stuff in Hiss’ hands as he ran, but the effects on the rockadillo were obvious and immediate. The creature paused, then pivoted to focus directly on the alien. Shoo and Kack moved further away from Hiss, scuttling toward the running pack of humans.
Leon had seen football players run a hundred yards in a matter of a few seconds, however they were generally in better shape than he was. He was a physics student, not an athlete, and his typical exercise regimen consisted of nothing more strenuous that an occasional game of frisbee in the quad, or perhaps a half-court pickup game of basketball. Leon panted from his efforts. His sprint slowed to a jog and he had covered only half the distance to the door. As his breathing grew ragged, he felt the beginning of a sharp pain building in his side. Leon pushed forward, trying to breathe through the discomfort and keep moving. Annie and Michael kept up with him stride for stride. They slowed when he did, however Michael seemed to be slowing down only to keep pace with Leon rather than from any need for rest.
Wheezing and gasping, the pain in his side now reaching a level that had him concerned he might have torn something important inside, he at last reached the door. Leon coughed asthmatically as his body crashed against the white barrier. He choked, and coughed again, almost vomiting from the exertion of the run. He wanted to put his back to the door and slide down onto the floor to catch his breath, to take a moment to recover from the mad dash across the cobblestoned room. That moment was a luxury he knew they couldn’t afford.
Leon grabbed the door handle and turned. As Hiss predicted, it was locked. The metal bar rattled in place, refusing to budge up or down at Leon’s insistent urging. He scanned the front of the door for a keyhole but found nothing.
Except for the handle, the entire face of the door was a flat, unvarying surface of white. No visible holes, slots, grooves, or recessions of any kind existed that might accept a key. Refusing to let panic take control, he next checked the doorframe for anything that might work as a lock.
Again, nothing looked promising.
“I don’t see where the key goes,” he called out to Michael, Malcolm, and Annie
. Sophia and Vinod arrived as Leon scanned the door façade. “Help me look.”
He checked the walls above and to either side of the door, running his hands over the stones as he searched. All he found was the same smooth, polished surface of rock that surrounded the entire alley. In desperation, he slapped the key ring against the door under the palm of his hand. He slid the ring over the bare surface while pulling at the handle, hoping there might be an alien version of a proximity sensor that would pop the door open.
Kack arrived behind Leon, looming over him and watching the human’s frantic efforts with a puzzled tilt of his head.
“You, why delay?” he asked.
Leon thought he heard disgust in the alien’s voice, although that may have been his own sense of frustration ringing in his ears.
“There’s no lock,” Leon panted, still rubbing the key ring over the surface of the door. “It won’t open.”
Leon stepped away, letting Kack take a closer look. The Many had been put through these trials before, so it was possible the damned door was designed for an alien to open. All he knew for certain was he had no idea what to try next.
“They’re getting closer,” said Annie, pointing toward Hiss who was moving in their direction. The rockadillo followed close behind.
Wiping sweat from his forehead with his jacket sleeve, Leon took a deep breath, trying to calm himself and slow his heart rate. Running to the door felt like it had taken forever, but as he watched Hiss and the massive rock monster walking toward him, they seemed to be covering the distance much too quickly.
“Hiss!” he shouted. We can’t get the door open. We need more time.”
Leon watched as Hiss waved an arm in acknowledgement and removed another of the wrapped stink bombs from his vest. The alien peeled away the wrapper, then using the waxy paper to keep the black tarry substance from touching his hand, he wiped the noxious stuff on the nearest wall. As soon as he dropped the wrapper and stepped aside, the rockadillo butted against the wall and levered itself upward high enough to reach the black smear.
Testing Grounds (On Dangerous Grounds Book 1) Page 6
