Jack James and the Call of the Tanakee

by J. Joseph Wright

  Jack wanted to shrug it off. A tiny cinder in the pit of his gut, though, began to burn a hole, letting in a giant swarm of butterflies. The nervous energy had him running from the garage, crying Amelia’s name. She heard him and waited. Argus waited with her.

  “What is it, Jack?” she looked mad again.

  “I didn’t want you to go. I just,” he looked at Argus. They shared a grouchy glare. “Amelia, can I talk to you…alone?”

  She presented Argus a big, albeit fake, smile.

  “I’m sorry, Argus. Jack seems to have grown quite impolite lately.”

  Jack lowered his head and studied the sidewalk.

  “That’s okay,” Argus responded. “Everybody’s got their little…quirks,” he threw Jack a telling look. It wasn’t smug or grim or anything like that. Just steady and confident, as if he knew something Jack didn’t. Jack narrowed his eyes quite involuntarily.

  “Jack!” she snapped. “Why are you being so rude?” she turned to Argus. “We’ll be just a second, okay?”

  Argus smiled at her, but when she turned her back, his grin switched to that creepy, deadpan expression. She pushed Jack a few feet, behind a large conifer that dominated the James family’s front curb.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you’re being quite a jerk these last couple of days. Argus is new to town like I was. Remember how hard it was for me to adjust? He’s going through the same thing. Why can’t you just see that and help him feel more accepted here in Willow?”

  Jack sighed. “I don’t know, Amelia. I mean,” he peered around the tree, catching sight of Argus standing next to a parked car, checking his hair in the side mirror. “I just—I don’t like him.”

  “What?” she sounded incredulous. “Jack, you’re the True Soul. You’re supposed to see the good in everyone.”

  “I know, I know,” he agreed, though he didn’t enjoy it. “You’re right. It’s not fair of me to not like him, but I don’t. Why do you have to hang out with him, Amelia?”

  “Jack, you’re jealous, and that’s not a good thing for the True Soul to be.”

  “I can’t help it,” he admitted. “I don’t want you to see him anymore, Amelia.”

  She stiffened her lip. “You can’t tell me who my friends can and can’t be, Jack,” she spun on her heel, then eyed him over one shoulder. “No matter how powerful you are with that machine.”

  She stomped on the sidewalk, but she might as well have been stomping on his heart. Straight to Argus she strode, taking his hand and steering him west on Pioneer Street with Ayita scampering close behind. She didn’t look back. Argus did. All grins. Then his cheerfulness disappeared when Takota walked up next to Jack. Instantly, the kid’s face tightened into a wrinkled sneer, aimed at the Tanakee.

  “Is she right, Takota?” Jack said. “Is Argus really a nice guy and I’m just jealous?”

  “I’m not so sure,” his protector answered. “That kid gives me a bad feeling.”

  SEVEN

  THAT NIGHT BEFORE BED, Jack did something he normally didn’t do. He placed the O/A on the nightstand and got on his knees.

  “God…or Eteea…or whoever you are, it’s me again. I just wanted to ask for some guidance. I’m feeling like I might not be worthy of all this power I’ve been given. I mean, I trust Amelia. I trust her judgment, so when she says that Argus kid is all right, well, maybe he is. Maybe I’m just feeling these feelings about him because I’m jealous of the time he’s spending with her,” he sighed. “I’m so confused. Why do I feel so bad?”

  “MOM!” Lily screamed from somewhere downstairs. “Pud took my cupcake!”

  “Ah-hahaha!” Pud roared as Lily chased him. Throughout the entire house their mad game of cat and mouse played out, much to everyone else’s irritation.

  Takota walked into Jack’s room shaking his head.

  “This is pretty much a nightly thing now, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” Jack stood and laughed.

  “Hey, what were you doing?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “We should probably get to bed soon, don’t you think? We’ve got a big day ahead of us tomorrow.”

  “That’s right,” answered Takota. “What’s happening, again?”

  “The town of Willow is putting on a parade, and we’re going to be the Grand Marshals.”

  “A parade!” Pud dashed in, around, and out of Jack’s room again, evading Lily at every turn. “I love a parade!” he darted down the hall. In a flash of blinding light, Cheyton appeared in his path. Pud, with nowhere to go, skidded to a halt just before the two collided.

  “Pud,” Cheyton reprimanded. “Give Lily back her cupcake.”

  “Oh, all right,” he handed the treat to the blonde, curly-headed girl. She changed from upset to angelic in the blink of an eye.

  “Thanks, Pud,” she said, and turned to go downstairs. Then she stopped and looked at him. He was dejected. Head down. Lower lip curling. She approached him, broke the pastry in half, and shared it with him. Pud’s eyes widened and his face lit up.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you,” he gobbled it down.

  “Come on,” she put an arm around his shoulders. “Let’s get some milk.”

  Ever since they’d fended off Davos, the Tanakee had been spending most nights at the James residence in a state of constant vigilance. Even though they could transport dimensionally at will now, and even though they enjoyed their time at Wind Whisper Woods, they felt it necessary to stay as close to the James family as possible. The sleeping arrangements took some getting used to. Enola insisted on being with Lily, and that was no problem. It was Pud. He felt the need to protect Ben at all times, so he vowed to sleep in the same room, though his snoring and constant rolling didn’t make Liz so happy. As far as Ayita went, she stayed close to Amelia, so she was gone a lot of the time. Cheyton didn’t sleep, it seemed to Jack. He was always up, always standing watch somewhere, unseen and unheard.

  It made Jack feel secure, having such amazing creatures around to protect him. Especially Takota, who’d found a place to sleep right next to him. That’s where the two of them snoozed, side by side. And every once in a while, Jack couldn’t help but snuggle with the little guy. He was just so soft and fuzzy.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, something roused Jack from a deep slumber. The clock on his nightstand read 3:21 am. At first, he thought it was only a dream, and that he’d jerked awake suddenly. Happened all the time. Then, sitting next to the alarm clock, the O/A started whirring and buzzing, and that shocked him further into consciousness.

  The table began to rattle, along with everything on it—the lamp, the clock, the O/A and several Yu-gi-oh! action figures. Hiroto Honda shimmied a few inches before toppling onto Yugi Mutou.

  “What’s happening?” Takota stirred awake, his furry face disheveled and drowsy. “Are we dreaming?”

  Jack wanted to answer, but the noise became deafening, the shaking irrepressible. He thought the house would crumble down on top of them, so he grabbed the O/A.

  “I don’t know,” he screamed. “I think the machine’s running by itself!”

  He pressed and held, trying to force the power-down sequence. No luck. Faster and faster the intricate shapes churned from deep inside the device, a process that seemed to give it ethereal power. Then it began chirping and whistling, a clear indication the omnidimensional field would soon arrive.

  “Can’t you turn it off?” Takota climbed on top of Jack’s knees.

  “I’m trying! I’m trying!” he shouted loud enough for everyone in the house to hear. He was certain at any moment his dad would burst through the door and demand to know what was going on. That didn’t happen. Instead, something else did. Something so mind-bending, Jack thought it had to be a strange and terrific product of his own mind. Suddenly the bedroom ceiling appeared permeable, and, before they knew it, Jack and Takota, still on top of the twin mattress, were suspended in the night air.

  “What-what is this, Jack? Where are you taki
ng us?”

  “It’s not me!” he answered. “Really! I’m not doing this!”

  “Then who is?”

  “I don’t know!”

  The O/A’s brilliant, translucent shell expanded to surround them, head to toe, crackling and glowing. Outside the bubble, Jack saw the night sky. Then he felt a tug in his bowels and looked down.

  “Whoa!” he pointed. Takota was already looking.

  “We’re lifting off!”

  Jack saw his house, then his street, the town of Willow, the Columbia River where it met the Pacific Ocean. More of the sea came into view. Then the North American Continent. Higher and higher they traveled, until the entire planet, a blue and white and brown marble, drifted under them.

  Suddenly they changed trajectory, and velocity. Now they were rocketing like a slingshot around the Earth, past the moon so close Jack made out individual craters. Jack saw planets, asteroids, comets, and even thought he caught a glimpse of Voyager One. Then they were out of the solar system. In the blink of an eye, they departed the Milky Way Galaxy, allowing Jack an amazing view of the pinwheel, great arms extending and twisting like some celestial sea monster, each one comprised of billions and billions of stars.

  Jetting through space, with a mattress the only thing left to provide any sort of anchor to the real world, neither Jack nor Takota had time to say a word. Constellation after constellation zoomed past them as they traveled faster than any other living being had ever traveled. Faster than the speed of light. Much faster. Jack did some quick calculations in his head, watching the galaxies go by, counting the superclusters, and gauging the distance. So far, in just a few seconds, they’d travelled two hundred megaparsecs, the distance it would take light about 650 years to travel. At that rate, their speed was beyond staggering.

  As Jack would soon find out, their destination would be even more staggering.

  They voyaged into an unknown, uncharted, unnamed part of the universe. Jack knew that because he’d done a ton of research in developing the 3D space simulator he called the Holoversarium. More importantly, though, he knew it due to the recent experience he had showing the Holoversarium to Amelia, when they, or she, had spotted the unexplained empty chunk of the cosmos.

  He recognized the twisting galaxy shrouded in a giant purple magellanic cloud. He saw the void, an empty, desolate blackness where it seemed the galaxy, its stars and planets, were being ground to dust.

  “This can’t be the same galaxy,” Jack muttered. “Can it?”

  “What is this place?” asked Takota. Jack said nothing. Takota tried again. “Jack! Where are we?”

  “I can’t believe it!” he watched the nebulous clouds dissipate as he and Takota zoomed closer and closer to the interior of the galaxy, heading to a place which seemed quite familiar.

  “What? Can’t believe what?”

  “This-this galaxy, this solar system,” he pointed at the group of planets approaching swiftly, circling a monster of a star, a red giant pulsing and radiating energy.

  “What about it? Tell me!”

  “This is the same place I showed Amelia on the Holoversarium.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you get it? Amelia just randomly pointed at this place, with no idea what she would find. And it just so happened we spotted an anomaly,” he pointed at the absolutely vacant void looming close. Too close.

  “What is that?” Takota trembled.

  “I’m still not sure, but I know it’s not good,” he observed tons of debris, the size of small planets, mixing and spinning at the leading edge of the emptiness, the rubble and destruction one would expect to find in a flash flood.

  “Not good at ALLLLLLL!”

  Takota’s last word stretched with their sudden dive. The mattress flew out from under them and the O/A changed course drastically, taking them in the direction of an incredibly large planet, twice the size of Jupiter. Spinning around the great globe, the O/A banked and sped toward a smaller object. Much smaller. The closer they came, the more Jack realized the planet had the same dimensions and hues as Earth. A habitable exoplanet.

  Soon they were in the planet’s atmosphere, streaking through the clouds like a meteor. Jack and Takota held each other tight as the O/A went down. Feeling the pull of gravity from the strikingly Earth-like world, Jack saw vast green forests and wide open plains, rugged coastlines and tall, snowcapped mountains. He also saw other things, things that disturbed him. Cities. Many cities. But they weren’t bustling and modern like on Earth. They were bombed, broken, devastated carcasses of once great metropolises. Smoke streamers and billows of gray dominated the skies, the residue of warfare. The only lights Jack saw were from fires dotting the landscape. No life. No movement. Nothing but nothingness.

  “What happened here, Jack?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

  The O/A stopped unexpectedly over a clearing in a deep, dark woodland. Now hovering, the machine’s protective bubble shined as bright as the red sun. Then it descended to the valley floor. As soon as they landed, Jack felt tension in the air. Takota must have felt it too, and when the O/A’s force field dissipated, and the machine finally felt like it had powered down, Jack’s protector dove into him, pushing him to the ground.

  “Get down!”

  Jack tasted the soil of an alien world. Surprisingly, it was much the same as his home planet. Maybe a little grittier, maybe the scents were a little more intense, but strikingly similar. He didn’t have time to think much about it, though. As soon as they hit the dirt, several swift and silent projectiles skimmed over their heads, missing them narrowly.

  “Someone’s trying to kill us!” Jack exclaimed.

  “Shhh!” said Takota.

  “If you’re trying to hide, you’re nuts. We just landed in a spaceship lit up like a roman candle.”

  “You’re right,” Takota agreed rather reluctantly. “But still…LOOK OUT!”

  Another volley of swift, deadly missiles came right for them from a few hundred meters away. Luckily, the O/A had a mind of its own, and sensed danger even before Jack did. Its shield flared up again, surrounding Jack and Takota, and absorbing the warheads. Several deafening explosions went off at once.

  Suddenly, all around were the sounds of full-scale conflict. Gunfire. Artillery. Great armored machines rumbling on the ground and aircrafts swooping overhead. A world war had broken out it seemed, with every gun aimed at Jack and Takota.

  Nothing hit the mark. In the middle of it all, as Jack and Takota held each other tighter and tighter, the O/A maintained its lustrous, buzzing shield, fending off the projectiles as if they were simple dandelion seeds drifting in a summer breeze.

  “HOLD!” a voice in an alien language echoed through the forest. With the help of the O/A, Jack was able to understand perfectly. Another shot from behind hurtled toward their position, a solid streamer of smoke trailing it.

  Ping! the rocket hit. KABLAM! it exploded, creating a brilliant display of white hot light, but not much more. Jack and Takota remained unharmed.

  “I said HOLD!” demanded the supposed leader, though he didn’t seem to have much control. “He’s the True Soul!”

  An immediate hush. Everything mechanical shut down, operators spilling out onto the dusty field. Murmuring and staring at Jack and Takota, the figures inched forward. At first, Jack thought they were still on the attack, the final assault. But the looks on their faces told another tale.

  The beings were strangely humanoid. In fact, they looked almost exactly like earthlings, though Jack knew this wasn’t Earth. They were shorter than humans, and more robustly built, probably the byproduct of the stronger gravitational pull from the slightly larger planet. Other than that, though, they seemed perfectly normal. Except for their skin color. They didn’t have any. Their flesh was almost perfectly transparent, quite unsettling when Jack got a good view.

  “Are you?” an abnormally tall and lean alien stepped ahead of the others. He wore a colorful uniform, the
livery of one in charge, no doubt. “Are you the True Soul?”

  Jack stood up straight and cleared his throat. He felt Takota holding his knee.

  “Um, yes. Yes I am.”

  More murmuring, shuffling, vying to get a better position. Then a crack of thunder made everyone cower close to the ground. The lead alien stood again, prompting everyone else to do the same.

  “I am Rix, and this planet is called La’oon,” the alien gestured for one of the others to come closer. Smaller, with softer features, yet still with unsettlingly invisible skin. “This is my daughter, Lark. Her protector called you here before they…they destroyed him.”

  The girl bowed her head and sobbed. Rix pulled her close, trying to console her.

  “What do you mean, destroyed him?” asked Takota. Rix only sighed. Another deafening clap of thunder. This time Rix didn’t cower.

  “We need you, True Soul!” he pointed up. “They’ve destroyed all of our Eteea warriors, along with their protectors. You’re our last hope!”

  “Who? Who did this?”

  “The Nagas,” Rix’s words brought Jack’s heart to a standstill. He looked down at Takota and they locked eyes.

  “He’s not the True Soul,” one of the shortest stepped down from a massive mechanized beast. “He’s a Nagas!”

  “But he has an Eteea machine!”

  “I’ve heard of Nagas using Eteea machines!”

  The little one’s argument sent a ripple of concern through the ranks. The chatter came to a crescendo when Rix quieted them.

  “This young one is the True Soul. My daughter’s protector called him here.”

  “Sir,” the short, surly one pleaded. “We cannot trust this-this alien and his little beast. They may be imposters!”

  Rix had no chance to react. Another explosion cracked a hole in the heavens. Night turned to day as if it was raining magma, spilling disaster upon the planet. Out of the flames came swarm after swarm of dark streaks. They descended closer, and Jack made out details of the individuals in the swarm. Distinct and familiar shapes. He fought to catch his breath.