by Phil Maxey
Fiona’s eyes flicked opened. In front of her in the dim light, a man in his thirties with a strong dark beard stood looking anxious.
“Sorry to wake you.”
“What do you want? Who are you?” Fiona’s memory hadn’t fully returned from the pit.
“I’m Corey. Your friend, the guy who was sleeping next to you, he’s in the Observatory.”
“What?” Fiona looked to her right, as the night before, a rumpled sheet had replaced Cal.
“The observatory, he’s in there, doing something, he seems to have changed the position of the telescope, although I’m not sure how he’s done that.”
Fiona sat up, wiping her eyes. “This observatory, is it far?”
“No, but it’s above us, we access it on the east side of the building.”
Fiona looked around her, some were stirring in their sleep, but most were silent as statues. “What time is it?”
“An hour before sunup.”
“Why are you awake?” she wasn’t sure why she asked this, but it felt a natural thing to ask.
“When I can’t sleep I monitor the cam’s.”
Fiona, pulled her boots on, and got to her feet. “I need you to take me to this, observatory.” As Corey walked to the corridor entrance, she grabbed her rifle.
Corey walked fast through the halls, past exhibits that were surprisingly pristine in their condition.
Fiona stumbled forward trying to keep the light of his candle focused in her eyes, while taking her own flashlight out of her pocket. “Slow down, you’re going too fast.”
Corey continued his impatient rush to the outer reaches of the building until he stopped at a door, with the sign “Observatory” above it. He went to open it, but Fiona stopped him before it was more than a few inches open.
“It is just at the top of these stairs?”
“Yes, but…”
“I’ll go first. Actually you should go back, you can see what’s happening from those monitors of yours anyway.”
Corey looked as if he had been scolded, and walked away.
Fiona walked into the stairwell. The cold air inside took her by surprise, and the mist created by her heavy breathing slowly drifted away. She pointed her flashlight up the stairs, then leaned forward to see what she could, but the stairs above were empty. What if he’s totally lost it? What if he’s got his gun with him? Shit, I should have checked before I came up here. Harming him was no option, unless it had to be.
Fiona ascended the stairs, keeping the beam of her flashlight focused ten feet in front of her. Quickly she got to the top, where another door was. She looked through the grilled glass and into an impressive domed room, with a large telescope in the center. The curved silver plates, which made up the roof, were partially open revealing tiny specks of starlight. All of this was lit by a single candle that sat flickering on the floor near a small ramp at the base of the telescope. Cal was nowhere to be seen.
She pressed her shoulder on the door and it opened easily. As soon as she was partially inside she was hit by the intense cold, and the whimpering sound of a man. It was coming from across the area, on the opposite side to where she stood. She stepped further inside, and swept her flashlight’s beam across the large cylindrical instrument, which dominated the scene and just caught a glimpse of someone huddled against the back wall.
She bent over slightly as she walked forward to try and see with better clarity through the obstructions in front of her. “Cal?”
The man’s whimpers turned to talking, but if it was directed at her she wasn’t sure.
As she walked around the outside ring, she grew ever closer, and pointed her beam on the unfortunate who lay, arms and feet huddled together. It was Cal.
She ran towards him and then stopped realizing she needed to check if his gun was nearby, it wasn’t. She finished her movement, and kneeled down close to him.
Cal was rocking back and forth. “Why, me. Why, me,” his words coming so fast they were one long sentence. Fiona put her hand on his arm, and he recoiled looking at her with horror. “No, you mustn’t touch me, I might change you.”
She went to reply, when she heard a commotion outside the door she had just passed through. The flickering light of candles then appeared. “Cal, you can’t stay here, the others are coming, they might think you’re a threat.”
He blinked a few times as if coming to a realization, and started to get to his feet, this time allowing her to help him. Just as he was fully upright, the observatory door opened and Zach, Abbey, Travis and Caroline appeared, all holding candles.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Travis’s words echoed around the chamber.
“He’s fine, he just had a nightmare, you know we all get them,” Fiona said this last part with a smile, as Cal leaned on her.
“The telescope has been moved, did he do that? Why did he do that?”
“How the hell should I know, he was dreaming.”
Zach walked forward and placed his old shoulder below Cal’s. “He’s had a bad time of it lately, he just needs some rest. It looks like your telescope hasn’t been damaged.”
“Okay, fine, let’s get downstairs, Corey needs to get the shutters closed, who knows what might fly in.”
They all filed slowly out. Abbey lingered. She was always fascinated with astronomy as a kid, and looking at the twenty-eight inch reflector telescope she couldn’t help but be excited. The rest were now halfway down the stairs outside as she drifted towards the observing deck, directly below the instrument. Bending over she put her face on the finder scope. Her eyes took a while to adjust, until something came into sharp focus. She stood up and looked toward where the telescope was pointing. The subtle hint of blue was starting to emerge from the rising sun, but the rest of the sky was still intensely dark with pinpoints of twinkling light.
She bent and looked again. It was still there. What she was looking at made no sense. Dark ellipses, like pieces of the sky were missing. One large, with two smaller, and what were those things moving inside? The metal dome started to rotate, and the shutters started to close, making her jump. She looked up at them domed ceiling readjusting and the gap onto the night sky growing smaller. No, No. She looked again, straining her eyes to see as much detail as possible. The strange object was still there, and then it was gone, replaced with a blank grayness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The remaining hour before sunrise passed without incident. Zach sat with Travis in his small office area, both were drinking coffee.
“I’m sorry if I came across too hard, hours ago, it’s just the observatory takes a lot of power to operate. Obviously it’s power we need for other things. I still don’t know how he managed to use it.”
“If you did decide to stay, I was thinking we could go out with your people on a supply run.”
Travis nodded. “That would be extremely helpful. Water and medical supplies I would say would be our biggest requirement.”
“Have you mentioned to the others about leaving?”
“I mentioned it briefly last night, told them to sleep on it. I know Corey wants to stay. He says he prefers the devil he knows and all that. The others I’m not sure.”
“And yourself?”
“That would depend on the others. I’m an old man. Would I be better off in a bustling metropolis, where it’s every man, woman and child for themselves? Or here, where I get to control what happens to me?”
“They are making a go of it in Bravo, it could really be something.”
“But they are still being attacked by E.L.F’s daily? What if what happened to Portland happens there? Here we are not any kind of target for the creatures.”
Zach finished his coffee, placing it gently on the desk. “Well, I need to know soon because if you are all leaving with us, then there will be no need to go on a supply run, if however any of you are staying, then we need to go soon, so we can be back on the road shortly after.”
“Of course, I will gather my peo
ple together shortly and get you an answer right after.”
Zach got up and returned to where most were now sipping on hot drinks, including Cal and Fiona that were back in their original positions against the wall. Zach approached them both.
“How are things?”
Cal looked straight ahead and continued to sip on his drink.
Fiona smiled best she could. “Coffee makes everything better.”
“That’s… good. We might be going on a supply run, to help these folks out. Cal, maybe you sit this one out.”
“Okay.”
Zach then looked directly at Fiona. “You up for that?”
She hesitated.
Cal looked at her. “It’s okay, I’ll be fine. You go.”
“It depends on if any decide to stay here or not, if they do then we will see what we can find for them locally. We won’t go far, just check out the local mall.”
Thirty minutes later, Travis appeared, and approached Zach who was sitting on the sofa studying the maps he had. “Zach, can we talk?”
Zach got up and they both returned to Travis’s office.
“I’m staying. So is Corey, but Caroline and Esther want to return with you, if you’re okay with that.”
“That’s fine,” they both sat down.
“Are you sure, you are going to manage here alone?”
Travis sighed, looking into his coffee mug. “Like I said, this is my home, this town at least. If there are just two of us we can last years just on what we already have. Also we are a useful outpost for the General.”
“Okay then. You know this area, where’s a good supply of bottled water and medical supplies? I was thinking one of the large Malls.”
“There’s Nate’s. It’s a large store, just a few miles from here. We tried exploring it a number of times, but we can never spend long enough there before E.L.F’s show up.”
“Okay, we will check that out. We will just be taking one vehicle. The team will be myself, and three others. Do any of your team want to come with us?”
“Do you have any doctors in your group?”
“No.”
“Then maybe Caroline should go, she has done some basic medical training before she got her doctorate in anthropology. She’ll know what we’ll need.”
Zach nodded.
It wasn’t long before, Zach, Caroline, Fiona and Michael were sitting in Caroline’s white pickup. Corey closed the large boarded door, and she started the engine.
Zach, who was sitting in the passenger’s seat, looked at Caroline. “How far?”
“We head back to where I met you yesterday, then it’s about two miles, and you will see it on the left. A large bright yellow store.”
Michael leaned forward from his position sitting behind Zach. “That doesn’t seem far, what has been the problem getting supplies from there?”
“If we’re lucky there won’t be one,” as she pulled out flickers of white ice fell from an almost opaque grey-white sky.
They sped past bland fields, until they were passing large office buildings and then restaurants and hotels, eventually arriving at the junction from the night before. They turned right, and had to slow to avoid all the vehicles including semi trucks that were lying on their sides, and cars looking like they were tossed aside by an angry child. They weaved in and out, and moved quickly between clear spaces when they could.
Zach looked over his shoulder, looking at Fiona. “See anything?”
“All clear, but the cloud cover is low, there could be anything above us and we wouldn’t know it. What attacked you before?” Fiona looked at Caroline.
“Usually it’s from the skies, but there have also been these, things, they are hard to explain, they are like a mass of…”
“Smaller creatures, moving as one?” said Zach.
Caroline took a left and drove into the parking area of the building. “Yes, you have seen them before?”
“A few times. How big were the masses?”
“About the size of this pickup,” she shivered when remembering them. “It was one pack of them that killed Abigail, Travis’s wife.”
They stopped a few feet from the open glass doors. An ice machine sat on its side to their left, as did garbage bins to their right. Inside, only silhouettes of shelves and goods could be seen, resisting the light from the outside.
“They appear to come from underground, so listen for any strange rumbling noises from below. If you hear anything like that, let us know. Two teams of two. I’ll go with Michael to find water, Caroline and Fiona you get the medical supplies.” Caroline went to get out, but Zach stopped her. “You got your radio?”
She pointed to her pocket, and then picked up her shotgun from the side of her seat. “And this,” she said with a smile.
“If you run into any problems, let us know.”
She nodded and they all got out.
Back at the museum, Travis looked at the image of the night sky on the monitor. It was wrong. He stroked his chin.
“And this is what that man positioned the reflector to look at?”
Corey sat back in his chair. “Yup.”
Travis leaned in further to examine the pixels even closer. “Are you sure it’s not a glitch?”
“Without switching the scope back on, I can’t be sure, but it doesn’t look like one. I think it’s something in the sky.”
Travis’s expression changed to one of confusion.
Corey sat foreword. “You do realize what it looks like don’t you?”
“I know what it looks like young man,” said Travis dismissively. “But for there to be a black hole of that size, let alone three of them, let alone this close to the planet, the gravitational tidal forces alone would have already torn us apart.”
“But what do we really know about black holes? It’s all theory.”
Travis shook his head. “Maybe they are black satellites, stealth technology. From what Zach told me, some of his people are military, perhaps this guy too, Cal I think his name is. Maybe he was aware of these devices in space and for some reason pointed our telescope at them.”
“Why would he do that? What’s the point?”
Travis stood upright. “Who knows, he was not very lucid when we got to him. Anyway, there’s not much we can do with this information.”
“Are you going to mention anything to them?”
“To Zach?”
“Yes.’
“I don’t see what good that will do. Don’t delete it though, it might make for an interesting project,” Travis, then left the security room, closing the door behind him. Jacob was looking at some of the fossils that were on the racks.
“Oh, hello, I don’t believe we have met?”
Jacob smiled, and held out his hand. “Names, Jacob.”
“You have an interest in fossils?”
“I’ve always thought we need to know what went before to know what lies ahead.”
“Indeed, what you were looking at, that’s Dinosaur Dendrolithus Hadrosaur.”
“The Duckbill dinosaur.”
“Ah, you know your dinosaurs.”
“Had an interest when I was younger,” Jacob continued browsing the shelves. “These E.L.F’s, how do we know they are just creatures from our past returning? Maybe it’s cyclical.”
“There might be some truth to that, but the creatures that I’ve seen and I’ve heard about, they are more like extensions of what we already had. Mutations that would have naturally, well I say naturally, but who knows what ‘natural’ really means anymore? But would have usually taken millions of years to evolve. Instead they took a few months and in some cases it seems less than even that.”
Jacob looked at the makeshift sleeping area. “You have made quite a home for yourself down here.”
“Thank you. We do what we can. If you don’t mind me asking, what did you do before the Cascade?”
“I was a sheriff, of a small town in New Mexico.”
“Long way from here.”
Jacob smiled. “It sure is.”
Travis went to speak again, when Megan ran in front of him, stopping abruptly.
“Hello, little one.”
Megan looked up at the eagle like features that framed Travis’s face, and then ran back from where she came.
Travis and Jacob both laughed.
Zach quickly pulled gallon plastic bottles of water from the shelf and piled them into one of the two shopping carts he had tied together. Michael was a few yards further along, doing the same.
“How’s your side?”
Michael winced a little as a heavy water container landed in his cart. “Painful sometimes, but I’m not dead, so there’s that.”
“We were lucky Morgan was with us when she was.”
“I hear that.”
Zach started to talk then stopped, grappling with how to frame his next thought.
Michael stopped working and looked at him. “You want to ask me about Cal?”
“Yes.”
“I know about as much as you do, probably less,” he continued placing the water in the cart. “We haven’t been doing much in the way of talking since the base.”
“So you’re saying something changed, then?”
Michael stopped again. “Maybe, I don’t know. Who knows how any of this shit affects our brains? I mean, he killed that young guy, it wasn’t self-defense, he just killed him. He has to be pretty scrambled about that. You should talk to Fiona, she’s with him all the time now,” Zach noticed a slight tinge of resentment in his words.
“I think this is about as much as we’re going to be able to take back,” Zach, heaved the two carts sideways then pushed them forward. Michael threw one last bottle into his cart and joined him. The clear plastic bottles, threatened to spill over the sides as they both moved along the aisle.