A Shrouded World | Book 8 | Asgard

by Tufo, Mark

  “Aren’t you supposed to be with Mike?” Trip asks, waving the relic in my direction.

  The red world with its distant sun vanishes.

  I pop into existence. That’s about the best way to describe it. There was no portal transference or any sensation other than I was standing in one place one moment and in another the next. I’m getting rather tired of these abrupt transitions.

  Hauling my carbine to my shoulder, I quickly check out my surroundings. I’m on a grass prairie with two suns shining down from a bleached-out sky. This looks very much like the whistler world I left, which is where I was trying to get to anyway. In the very far distance, I see several of those inverted pyramids. They seem tiny, so they’re miles and miles away, considering the true nature of their size.

  I only remember seeing the one, so I wonder which one Mike is in. I’m not all that eager to venture back in there, but we need to start taking the whistlers down a notch somehow. Plus, the number one goal here is to help Mike escape.

  As I’m staring across the distance, I suddenly feel the lack of oxygen. Sitting down, I cut away the long tubes of the mask and place it on my face. The fans turn, compressing the air and allowing me to breathe more easily. I test the mask to make sure I can take it off and replace it readily. With that, I set off across the prairie, watching the surrounding area for any sign of whistler patrols.

  After walking a while, I’m about to crest a rise when I hear a faint whine. Going to ground, I crawl through the grass until I’m able to see what’s causing the noise. In the far distance, one of the large hovercraft is accompanied by a smaller version. Glassing them, I watch as they settle to the ground. Two whistlers emerge from each one to stand in a circle next to one of the craft. It looks like a road crew gathering at lunch.

  Removing the sniper from my shoulder, I look through the scope and determine that the range is nearly that of the towers. The whistlers landed on another hill, nearly level with the one I’m lying on. So, the bullet drop should be an inch or two less than back at the portal complex. Taking aim at the one nearest with its back to me, I fire.

  The bullet streaks over the valley to crash into the back of the whistler’s head. The creature drops straight down as if all of its knees suddenly didn’t exist. Quickly switching to the one now visible and facing me, I set my aimpoint and pull the trigger. The second whistler staggers backward, hitting the smaller hovercraft and slumping to the ground. The third and fourth alien look around, searching for their assailant as their hands raise their stapler weapons.

  I fire. The third launches to the side as if attached to a bungie rope, slamming into one of the craft and dropping out of sight. The fourth starts running, staggering in mid-stride as my round hits it in the shoulder. I fire again. The whistler falls forward, tumbling through the grass before coming to rest. With four down, I keep my scope focused on the landing sight, waiting for any others to emerge or for a sign of movement from the ones I downed.

  After twenty minutes of not seeing anything, I cautiously start for the craft, thinking of taking one or the other. Looking up, I notice several lights transitioning overhead, all heading to or from a central area that lies in the opposite direction from the pyramids. I wonder if they’re some kind of ship, satellite, or maybe even drones. I stop, looking toward the distant pyramids and back to the opposite point. I feel a pull toward where the lights are originating, but the last I saw of Mike, he was at one of the pyramids. I sure wish Trip had been a little more clear. I’ll contemplate the direction to take as I head toward the hovercraft. Hopefully, the right answer will leap out at me by the time I make it there.

  8

  Mike Journal Entry 4

  If I thought the whistlers could live up to their namesake, they were nothing in comparison to the operatic aria this creator was singing. If it hadn’t been across the room, my eardrums would have surely burst from the assault. I did what I could, which wasn’t more than stand and cover up my broken wrist. So, basically, nothing. I was watching Bob and the creator go at it; I was much like the Japanese farmer trying to stay out of the way as Godzilla and Mothra duked it out. Bob had the element of surprise, as he was the first to strike, but right now, he was getting as good as he was giving. He had absorbed a small section of the creator and was holding on like a novice horse rider might on the saddle of a runaway. I didn’t know what Jell-O would smell like with a blow torch applied to it, until now. I didn’t like it.

  The creator was continually whipping out with its tentacles, and where they struck, Bob’s flesh sizzled. I needed to help but was entirely unsure as to what to do. Getting myself killed didn’t seem like a well thought out plan. It might have been something Bob was doing, or possibly the fight they were in the midst of, but the creator’s charged glow seemed to be losing some of its luster. It made sense; I mean, if it was energy and he was expending energy in megawatts to fight for his life, it would fade until he replenished his fuel. The way Bob and the creator were whirling around the room, it looked more like a choreographed Russian dance than a death struggle. I knew what I had to do, I just had to get closer. It would do no good to inadvertently shoot Bob.

  As far as the creator was concerned, I no longer existed, and I was fine with that. Letting my wrist go from its makeshift sling took a serious gut check; luckily, adrenaline was keeping the worst of the pain at bay. I was within striking distance of a tentacle if it looked my way. With teeth gritted, I raised my arm and fired and kept firing, moving deftly, as did the tangled duo. The first few dozen shots were harmlessly deflected, but the longer they fought, the more the glow lost its sheen and angry, red, purple welts begin to form where my staples landed. It was screaming, some of it rage, but most of it pain, and I seriously wanted some of what it was feeling to be fear. I hoped that it was absolutely fucking terrified it was about to die. I can’t say that was something I’d ever consciously wanted for an enemy of mine, but this one? Oh yeah. After all the destruction they were wreaking across the cosmos, he deserved to be afraid. The fear would be a minuscule fraction of what he’d been responsible for.

  I kept shooting until the creator looked part metallic, like a cyborg in development; it wasn’t until long afterwards that it stopped moving and I took a look at Bob. Bob’s color had faded from a brilliant red to soft pink pastel. He looked like shit, as he finally let the creator’s side go. He didn’t collapse to the ground, that’s not how he’s built. He more puddled.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I repeated over and over. Even if I’d studied the fine arts of medicine, I wouldn’t know what to do for Bob. I did the only thing I could do and ordered up a smorgasbord. Wasn’t quite a platter of chalupas, burritos and cheeseburgers, but it would have to do. I kept bringing piles over to him, he didn’t even look, his eyes pulled way back into the goo of him.

  “Bob, man, don’t do this. I brought food…ish and water.” I could not get him to react in any way. I did the only thing I could think to do and pretend the food was a solution of medicine and my hand and arm were a syringe. “Please don’t melt my flesh,” I mumbled as I began to push it through the more fibrous outer layer and into the squishy innards. Even through it all, I hoped I wasn’t giving my friend some sort of weird colon cleanse. I must have pushed fifteen pounds of stuff into him. So far, nothing, it sat there, fully preserved like a Jim joke on Dwight from The Office.

  “Bob, if you can hear me, you have to try and eat something. I know you’re hurt, but this will help. An eye may have rolled a bit to gander at me, but just as likely the mechanism that controlled it had eased up and it had moved on its own. I absently ate, knowing my body needed a little help itself. Besides the broken wrist, I was a battered person—purple welts forming on a fair portion of my body.

  “This is gonna suck.” I stood, and, with a feather touch, grabbed the fingertips on my left hand. Due to what I was, my wrist, if given proper time and fuel to accomplish the task would heal pretty quickly. If I helped it along, it would do so faster.

&nb
sp; “I would become a driving instructor in China for a couple of oxys,” I said as I wrenched my wrist into a more natural position. My scream didn’t quite rival the creator’s, but it was a worthy stand-in. Sweat instantly broke out across my entire body. It was then I remembered I was nude, but as of yet, modesty hadn’t caught up, difficult to give a shit what others may think when you’re doing your best not to pass out. I was suffering through the worst of it, when I berated myself for not doing this in a safer manner, like in a laying-down position. Could have done more damage if I’d fallen.

  With my wounded wing tucked tightly to my stomach, I ate and then I ate some more, until the pain moved to a burning sensation, then on to intense itching. Somewhere in that process, I’d passed out from exhaustion, kept dreaming about sticking my arm in a fire ant hill. Made sense on a bunch of different levels. I awoke what had to be hours later. My wrist was much better; I wouldn’t so much as shake the hand of a limper, but the bones were knitting together nicely.

  A limper? Well, I’m sure we’ve all encountered that person. I’m not sure in what strange locale they grew up, but upon greeting, the person will present to you their dipped down fingers, and when you go to shake, they do not clasp your hand but rather let you do all the work and pump their arm like a jump rope. Now, this is me, call me Chauvinistic if you want, but it’s sort of okay when women do this, but when some burly-ass dude, limply offers you his fingers to shake, it’s just fucking strange and a little disgusting.

  I checked on Bob; the mound of food I’d pushed into him looked smaller. It was slow, like the melting of an ice cube on a thirty-three-degree day, slow. If his hue had changed, it was imperceptible to my color sight palette. The one eye I had thought had moved previously was now fixed on me and followed me around the room like a strange Halloween picture decoration might. After I donned my clothes, I sat and talked to Bob for what seemed like hours; could have been days. I told him in detail everything I’d been doing since I got there. The torture, the beatings, the killing of my master and how I was now subsequently plugged into the creators’ mainframe. I answered for him when it seemed necessary that he should talk.

  Fell asleep again at some point. When I awoke, I tentatively flexed my left hand; this was met with a modicum of pain, but on an even better note, all of the food I’d given Bob was gone, and his color had moved along to a muted brown-red, burnt sienna, if you will. My favorite color crayon growing up—and just because I was a Marine, didn’t mean I wanted to eat it. In any case, only the purple ones were decent with some Tabasco. I ordered up another plate. Bob, thankfully, grabbed my hand before I could plunge the food into him. I wouldn’t miss that sensation anytime soon. His movements were slow and tentative but he grabbed most of what I offered and ate. Not with enthusiasm, but he was doing all right. I hopped onto the information super-highway; they didn’t have a police blotter or anything along those lines, but I was looking for anything that might show two creators going missing. As of yet, nothing…that or I was looking in the wrong places.

  It was two days and twenty pounds of food later that Bob began to take on his traditional Hershey’s Kiss shape, minus the curlycue on top. Of a quick note, it’s worth mentioning that the company faced a severe backlash when they attempted to downsize their product by ridding the customary coiffure. Funny the things people get hung up over. Right now, I would have punched an ugly baby for a bag of them. No, I’m not serious, might have to think about it for a second before discounting the notion entirely, though. The same people that were angry about the topless chocolates probably would be mad at my less than politically correct joke. Bob still looked like he’d been on the losing end of a fight with Iron Mike Tyson but he was recovering, and for that, I was thankful.

  “Milk.” It was unbelievable to hear a friendly word directed my way.

  “You’re thanking me? Holy shit, Bob; it’s the other way around, man.”

  “Bob.”

  “You’re sorry it took so long? You’re here now; that’s all that matters. A few dozen years of therapy and a pound or two of weed and I might be able to put this all behind me. But none of it is your fault.” But in a sense, it kind of was. Bob did lead us here. Even though I knew we had to be here, that the only way to stop this was from the inside. Still, I could have gone without the abuse. I wanted to physically smack myself; I shook the thoughts from my head. I needed to just be in the moment, to know that I now had a powerful ally in the fight, and that hopefully I would not be stuck forever in this skyrise apartment.

  “Milk.”

  “What do you mean, do I know how to fly the transports? I mean, I know how they work, but they require power, a power that the creators supply.”

  “Bob.”

  “I don’t think digestive juices qualify as electrical power,” I told him. He let out a squelching sound that I attributed to a sigh. We had a lengthy discussion punctuated by a plethora of Bobs and Milks. What we’d finally decided was that there was a more than better chance that we could use a power source from within this space to accomplish what we needed to do. The unfortunate part of the equation was that it was going to be the food-producing machine, as it contained the most power. It wasn’t traditionally wired to the house like an appliance, so that worked in our favor, but it would require a vast amount of rework; the power was now going to be used to make the craft function and not produce food. It wasn’t that the food was anything special, but to take it away…it was the only thing I found some level of comfort and control in. I was not taking it well.

  The circuitry, if that’s what it could be called, was far advanced from what we had on earth. The entire brains of the outfit were on a speck smaller than a grain of sand. It was not something I could even begin to manipulate, if I even had the knowledge to do so. There were specs about the chip Bob was holding, online, plus the craft’s, and I had to continually feed Bob answers as to what offshoot supplied what power voltage to where and what resistors or transistors tied into it. It was exhausting work keeping track of the thousands of etched pathways on the board. I’d always had trouble concentrating for more than a few minutes at a time; had I been younger, I’m acutely aware of the diagnosis I would have received, along with a number of drool-enforcing drugs.

  There were perhaps thousands of leads, and we had to go through each one. We weren’t halfway through when I realized I hadn’t eaten since yesterday. I debated asking Bob if he could restore the chip to its factory settings so I could get a bite. Decided against it when his eyes rolled around in the soup of his head and fixed on my grumbling stomach, it seemed to me he was angry with the distraction my hunger was causing. Wasn’t like I could tell it to stop; stomachs are much like two-year-olds, they don’t listen to your demands—they want what they want and they want it now. Couldn’t even hazard a guess as to how long we’d been working on the thing. My vision crossed multiple times. When Bob was done working on it, he held it above his head, reminiscent of the Circle of Life scene from Lion King. Now came the hard part, according to Bob.

  “The hard part? Are you kidding me? I figured you were done. Isn’t it just plug and play?”

  Bob wasn’t familiar with the terminology and let me know in an extended raspberry what he thought about it.

  “I need to rest, Bob. I can’t see straight.”

  “Milk.”

  “What do you mean the thing will degrade if it’s not hooked up? Oh, for the love of…fine, let’s get started.”

  There’s a thing on Earth called redneck engineering; it’s when you take ordinary things and repurpose them. For instance, a broken or missing shower head can be replaced with a beer can by punching holes in the bottom and duct-taping it to the outlet pipe. Or maybe if the front wheel of your bike is gone, you weld it to a shopping cart, it’s not pretty, most likely not safe, but it does function. To call what Bob was doing redneck engineering was an insult to rednecks everywhere. Instead of duct tape, the everyman’s fix all, Bob was actually and disgustingly using pieces
of himself as adhesive.

  “Are you even conductive?” I asked, just as fascinated as disturbed by what he was doing.

  Bob ignored me, as he was tying everything together or off, as the case may be. My mind could not even conceive of how something so tiny contained a power cell. But then, I was thinking on the pyramid. The entire operation had been run by that electrical ball, although it was being powered by slaves, so that was a poor example. It was all beyond my scope, and, in the end, what did it matter, as long as we could fly. I wanted it to be away, but that was unlikely, and a waste of an opportunity to do some damage. Plus, Church was still out there. Bob hadn’t given me an update; he would have, had he known anything. And honestly, since he’d been here, he’d either been recovering or working, and I couldn’t necessarily ask while he was doing that.

  Every once in a while, Bob had to push me awake. Eventually, we got through it; it had been a day, most likely two, as my thirst could attest to the time taken. It was going to do no good if we flew around only to crash from lack of water.

  “Bob!” he exclaimed triumphantly.

  I wanted to be excited, but I also wanted to sleep, eat, and drink, and it was anybody’s guess in what order I wanted to do all that.

  “Milk.”

  “Go? Go where? What do you mean we only have an hour of flight time? Please tell me that is some sort of translation issue. That you meant to tell me one earth year.” Made complete sense; we were asking something that maybe used as much wattage as a toaster to run a Tesla, and even then, the creators were a walking, talking recharge station. Without one of them, once the cell was drained, we became a coconut-laden swallow, and from all I’d gleaned, they didn’t fly so well.