by Aaron Frale
“More than you can fight. We are endless and eternal. We are the will and the might of the—”
Alex tore the doctor’s entrails out with her weapon and said, “Come on, we got what we came for. Let’s get out of here.”
“But they can control the barrier now. They can lock us in this world,” Hailey said, miffed at Alex.
“Let’s party rock star style before we leave,” Alex said as they chopped the chains holding down Ernest. Once he was free, they headed back upstairs. They met with Samira and Azerius. Samira took the wounded man towards the front door, and the others made their way to the control room where all the equipment from HQ was set up.
Hailey opened the door. Several cultists were gathered around the station that controlled the barrier. The group was too engaged with what they were doing to notice the Tuners had come into the room. Alex readied their weapon. Before Hailey could ready hers, she had an idea and gave the motion for the others to stand down. She pointed to the generator they had liberated, and Azerius nodded.
He unplugged the generator and lifted it up. The cultists looked around confused and saw the group trying to back out of the room with the equipment. Hailey said, “Run!”
She closed the door behind her and heard the thump of several weapons against the door. A few seconds later, a battle cry erupted from one of the cultists inside, and it was answered with war cries throughout the house.
They ran back towards the front. In the living room, a group came clomping down the stairs. She could hear more boots on the way, down the hallway, and all directions in the house. Alex and Hailey took out the first two, and Azerius bashed one with the generator, who had leaped over his fallen comrades. A woman with wavy hair and scars crisscrossing her body came running down the hall with a quarterstaff with blades at the tip.
She charged Samira, and Hailey leaped to parry the attack. They fought their way to the front with a seemingly endless supply of cultist streaming in from every direction. After kicking through the front door, they had a clean break to the road. They ran down the lawn, and the cultists flooded from the house after them.
The techs in the barn stormed out with wounded on makeshift stretchers. They all met down by the road. The cultists were gaining on their position. Just when the army of the unholy was about to meet, a semi with a full trailer burst through the gate. Meathook blared the horn and ran down part of the first wave of cultists, and the few with weapons were able to pick off the remaining ones. Hailey and Alex helped people to climb into the back. An even bigger wave of the Order of the Flame was flooding from the house. Once everyone was secure in the trailer, Hailey and Alex hopped into the cab, and Meathook spun the truck around on the giant lawn.
Some of the cultists were plowed down by the vehicle. Others jumped on the back while it sped out of the farmhouse. Meathook brushed the big rig against the trees and knocked a few off the side. Hailey opened the door of the cab, and a blade from a cultist came down at her. She leaned back, and it missed. She pulled the guy down when he was at the apex of his swing,
While the semi bounced down the dirt road, Hailey scrambled out to the top of the cab. There were several more on the top of the trailer and a few hanging on the sides. Alex joined her, and they leaped to the back together.
Abbey pulled her daggers, and the warrior closest to her charged. She ducked, stabbed the person, and flung them off the truck. Alex kicked one who climbed up from the side. Hailey ran forward to meet another, and the truck hit a large bump. She lost her footing and fell on her back. The cultist also fell down and used the opportunity to climb on top of her. The fiend brandished spikes that were screwed directly into his knuckles.
Alex cut the head of the cultist clean off, and Hailey immediately returned the favor by tossing a dagger at one walking up behind them with a spiked club raised in the air. The pair fought their way down the back while the vehicle bounced, and the trailer swung with every turn.
Eventually, they cleared all the unwanted hitchhikers from the back and headed for Rimrock Mall. It would take several trips, but they needed to leave U-42 behind before the High Priest got wind that their plan to ambush the Tuners had failed.
16
When the alarms didn’t sound and the cultists didn’t seem to be on high alert, Jon feared that Ludie was going to go through with his ludicrous plan to kill all the members of the Order of the Flame onboard the station. It meant that Jon had a time limit because he could be breathing the last bit of air while he made his way to where Hector was imprisoned.
It was slow going. He decided to err on the side of caution because he couldn’t afford to be caught. He also made a pit stop for some equipment. After dodging around people in the hallways, tiptoeing past large groups, and ascending several levels, he made it to the entrance of the conference room. There was no use in remaining invisible. As soon as he opened the door, anyone inside would know that it was him.
He turned off the invisibility feature and stepped inside. The High Priest sat on a throne of thorns with two muscular acolytes standing close by. They both had large jagged swords and more scars than skin. Hector was tied to an ‘X’ above the conference table. He was stripped naked, and there was evidence of torture all over his body. He was barely conscious, and a steady drip of blood came from his torso and sizzled in the flame at the center of the table.
The High Priest grinned and said, “I was wondering when you would join us. I’m assuming Hector’s message got out. Did you find what you were looking for in 78f?”
“Sure did,” Jon said. “Do you think those two turd baskets could cut down Hector for me, and we’ll be on our way?”
“His life force will be consumed by the Flame a piece at a time until he is nothing but dust; such is the penalty for betraying the Flame.”
“Were you in drama club? Because you really sounded convincing about that crap.”
The High Priest stood up and yelled, “I will not be talked down to by a petulant child!”
“Good,” Jon said, “because I was looking for a fight.”
Jon pulled his crossbow from his backpack and shot the door. The bolt stuck in the lock, and it slid closed right as a group of guards was approaching. They pounded on the metal when they couldn’t open it. The two bodyguards raised their two-handed weapons and walked calmly towards Jon. The High Priest sat back down to enjoy the show.
Jon didn’t have time to reload and drew his blade. The two large men swung in synchronicity from above their heads. Jon turned at the last moment, and one weapon barely missed his nose and the other cut his backpack from his shoulders. He used the moment to stab one and kick the other. His blade bounced off, and he nearly broke his foot.
The two guys must have come from Patel’s world or at least one like it. Jon was lucky that they were slow, and he was able to dodge their follow-up attack. To make matters worse, he could see sparks flying off the front door as it was cut with a blow torch. It wouldn’t be long before the whole station flooded into the room.
Jon needed to go to plan B. He jumped up on the table as two blades crashed behind him. He kicked the Flame from the table, and the priest’s grin turned to a frown. Jon chopped the restraints on Hector while dodging attacks from the two brutes. After getting both arms free, Hector fell limp and dangled by his legs.
The two men had maneuvered their way so there wasn’t an easy path to dodge their blades. He abandoned freeing Hector for now and dove for his backpack on the floor. He reached inside and grabbed an explosive he had liberated from Ludie’s lab. He had assumed correctly that the kid would be too busy shutting off the air to care about an intruder in the lab.
While Jon couldn’t be sure about what precisely it did, because it had a pin and a squeeze trigger, he assumed it would explode. He rolled when two more blades from the pair came down at him. He yanked the pin and tossed it towards the window to the control room below. Thankfully, the High Priest had not raised the barrier.
The next few moments seemed
to blend together. The High Priest jumped from his throne to shield himself from the blast. Jon was almost gutted by one of the blades, but the explosion was more significant than he had intended and blew him and his attackers back. The ‘X’ holding Hector to the ceiling was destroyed by some debris and sent his limp form crashing to the floor. The door that had almost been breached was blown out, and it took out the cultists cutting through it.
Jon rose from the spot where he had been slammed into the wall and saw Hector moaning on the floor. He ran for his boss and lifted the guy up. Jon was beginning to feel light-headed.
The air was running out. He limped towards the open window to the control room.
The High Priest was nowhere to be found. One of his bodyguards had been impaled by the other’s weapon. The living one rose from a pile of debris and picked up his comrade’s sword and walked toward Jon. The giant man lifted the sword and raised it for an attack. Jon was way too weak to dodge. Just before the attack came, the man’s eyes glazed over. He wobbled and came crashing to the floor. The explosion must have eaten up the spare oxygen in the room, and Jon could feel a wave of sleepiness wash over him.
He pushed forward and dragged Hector towards the window. If they could only make it to the platform—but it was too much. He felt like he was in the deepest part of the ocean. His movements were sluggish, and he could barely walk. Just before he passed out too, a hand materialized and grabbed him.
It was Carrie; she was in an invisibility suit. She wore it over a helmet that looked a lot like Ludie’s power armor. However, this one was made for a woman. She unzipped the front of the invisibility cloak and opened a panel on her chest. There were tubes underneath. She pulled one and oxygen sprayed out. She handed it to Jon, and he breathed the fresh air. She put the pipe down Hector’s throat next and then inserted it back for herself.
“It looks like Ludie had another one made for someone special.” She smiled. “His invisibility cloak came in handy too.”
“If I wasn’t dating someone else, I’d kiss you right now,” Jon said.
“Woah,” Carrie said. “Did you even watch the sexual harassment videos?”
“I think I missed it between the martial arts and weapons training.”
“Just because you are a handsome romantic lead type doesn’t mean everyone wants to kiss you! You keep those paws to yourself, or I will cut them off!”
“Okay, okay. Let’s get out of here already.”
They hoisted Hector on their shoulders while sharing the oxygen. They dragged him to the broken window that overlooked the control room. The cultists down below were already unconscious on the ground. They lowered Hector over the edge and let him drop the rest of the way. They did the same for themselves. The distance wasn’t enough to hurt, but Jon’s foot was already aching from kicking that cultist.
They dragged the wounded man to the platform. They all took one last gulp of air, and Jon grabbed Hector with one hand, and Carrie held onto his shoulder. Once Jon was in contact, he pulled out his TF3, flipped through the dial, and hit the tune button.
17
Patel and the others followed Anya through the desert for days. She had her doubts about their guide, but in the end, she had to trust that Hector wouldn’t have directed them to this world if it wasn’t necessary. If Alex’s peculiar sister wished them ill will, she could have let them die in countless ways. The easiest was the scarcity of water. Anya knew what to look for in the soil to tell if they dug a little way, they’d find water. Every time their canteens emptied, their guide would be on the lookout for more.
There were also fierce electrical and dust storms that ravaged the land. Anya knew where to hide and spurred them to a spot when she saw the signs of one coming well before Patel could even register a change in the atmosphere. There also was a time where they had to sprint to cover as the lightning and dust crashed around them.
While they could survive without food, a desert rodent or a tasteless plant was better than going hungry. Even with the meager rations Anya could forage, Patel had dreams about the candy bar DeAndre had shared with the group on day two of the journey.
Not that sleeping was any better. They would usually sleep in a rocky outcropping, in a decaying building, or even one time in the shade of a giant cruise liner that Anya proclaimed had been picked clean long ago. Once the sun was low enough on the horizon, they would get up and walk all night, somehow trying to sleep in the sweltering days.
Then there was the instability of the anomalies that ravaged the landscape. Patel saw purple bursts throughout the journey associated with objects hurled into this universe. Yesterday, one had opened up in the sky over Patel, and Anya had pushed her out of the way of a large construction vehicle that was torn in half from its passage from one universe to the next. Anya had jiggled her headphones to remind Patel to listen for the reverberations that signaled when a portal was about to open. While Patel was invulnerable to most conventional attacks, Meathook could give her a bruise, and several tons of twisted metal would send her to an early grave. She wore her headphones for the rest of the journey, and lucky she did because Anya wasn’t always close enough to save her.
The treacherous terrain was not the only problem. There were humans. Meeting one in the desert who wasn’t going to rob you or worse was a rarity, and unless Anya knew the person, she didn’t risk it and had them hide. Despite the amount of time they spent hiding from one danger or another, the estimate of five days was reasonably accurate. On the fifth night, just before dawn, they crested a hill, and Anya pointed to a large canyon dividing the valley below.
“There,” she said. “My home.”
“In the canyon?” Patel asked.
“No, in the walls.”
When they got closer, Patel could see rope bridges crisscross the gap. There were cave openings throughout the rocky cliff face. The lowest was at least thirty meters from the dry riverbed on the canyon floor. People, families even, crossed the bridges on their daily routines. Patel could see a little boy teasing his sister about throwing something over the edge.
“This is where you grew up?” Patel said, fascinated by the human spirit. Anya nodded and trotted down the hill. There seemed to be no conditions where humans couldn’t thrive. Even though she had been to half the known multiverse, there were still ways of life that would surprise her. Back in her home universe, India was very much like the one in Jon’s world. Some of the names were different, but her home country too was occupied by European conquerors, except it was the Dutch and not the English who had carved up her homeland.
Just like in U-42, a line drawn in a map had caused members of her ethnic minority to be on the wrong side of the border when Pakistan was broken apart from the empire. Even though her family had lived in relative harmony for hundreds of years in the same valley, political forces created an atmosphere where her people were massacred, and her great-grandparents fled to America when her grandparents were just children.
Even though the tragedy was a historical footnote in her family tree, the stories had influenced her family generations later. Traumatized by their youth, her grandparents were strict and had high expectations of her father. He had to succeed because anything less would mean death when the political climate changed and the Americans decided to run her family out of town.
Her father was eager to please and very successful. He rose to the top ranks in the banking industry. They had a beach home on the California coast, and one of the priciest apartments in New York. Despite Patel’s privilege. Her father still had the attitude that the hammer could drop any moment and expected nothing less than excellence from her.
Since she was the only child, everything was laser focused on her. She was probably the only middle schooler with a caffeine addiction because she spent all night doing her homework for her advanced classes. By the time she was high school-aged, she was in college, and by the time she joined the Tuners, she had a Ph.D.
Despite her high level of achievement, it still
wasn’t good enough for her father. He never raised his voice or a hand against her. But she could tell that he disapproved of her choices. She was interested in physics and the universe and wanted to understand how it worked. Quantum physics seemed like the right place to start.
As far as her father was concerned, science was a waste of resources and would do nothing for her when history repeated itself. Money was the only thing that made things happen. She had tried to explain to him about all the economic advances from science, but the family trauma triumphed in the end. All the milestones a parent should celebrate with unbridled enthusiasm were interrogations where her father would ask how she would pay for college, what jobs she expected to get with a physics degree, and lectures about teachers being one of the lower-paid people of society.
When she discovered her ability to tune, she thought she was going crazy like most Tuners do. However, being a scientist, she was methodical and wandered the mall until she could find all the spots where the noise was the loudest. DeAndre had spotted her writing down the coordinates on her tablet when he happened to be in the area, and Hector had recruited her days later.
Her parents thought that she had been hired by a firm in Singapore to do research. For a family who could barely accept the impact of science on their day-to-day life, she had to make up a story that would keep her gone for long periods. Ever since the fall of HQ, she hadn’t been able to email or text her parents. For all they knew, the hammer had fallen again on their family, and she had been killed in a political uprising.
Now that she was standing on a hill looking over a village packed into a cave system in a cliff, she was amazed at the human ability to survive. Her family was also survivors like the people down there.
The Tuners made their way down the hill, and Anya guided them toward the canyon edge. While they walked, she explained that the settlement was one of the few that wasn’t run by gangs or any of the ruthless cartels. The naturally defensible location made it too hard to invade. Not that people hadn’t tried. The Terando clan threw bombs at the bridges and cut off the two sides of the colony. They waited for people to starve but eventually had to leave because they were on the brink of starving themselves.
