“They’re dead,” he muttered finally. “They’re all… dead.”
Chen took a deep breath, and half-nodded. She had been expecting this kind of reaction. Inevitably, Cris would have left many people behind. “I’m so sorry, Cris. Really, I am.”
He shook his head. “They’re dead… but, when? And how?”
Chen frowned. “Who are you talking about?”
Cris looked at her. “My wife, and my little girl.” He suddenly became aware that his wedding band was missing from his ring finger. He subconsciously fingered for it with his right hand, and the bare skin beneath the soft glove of his Rãvier felt naked without it. The permanent reminder of the promises he made on his wedding day was gone – only the callous remained. He grimaced, and more tears fell down his cheeks. “I thought I was going to see them again…” he said.
“I’m afraid that most records from before the time of the Apo’calupsis did not survive the catastrophe,” Orillan said, his alien voice sounding cold and calculated in the emotionally sensitive moment. “Therefore, the fate of your family members is unknown.”
Cris was starting to hyperventilate. Chen stepped forward and took his trembling form into her arms. He didn’t resist, burying his face into her chest, and squeezing her tightly. He felt like he wanted to die; the trauma was too much. He should have died all those years ago, in 2012; the cryofreeze was the worst possible idea they could have had. They’d thought he would be revived within decades maybe, not centuries. Experimental vaccines were already being developed when he was frozen…
He pulled back suddenly, a look of confusion and concern coming over his tired-looking features as he stared at Chen. “What about my cancer?” he blurted. “I had colorectal cancer… a malignant tumour.”
Chen nodded. “The machines at the cryopreservation facility told me as much. It was nothing a little Aias fluid couldn’t fix.”
Aias fluid? “You… you cured me?”
“Yes. Aias is a regenerative fluid that will cure most human ailments. I always carry a supply around with me. You never know when it might come in handy.”
Cris blew out a deep breath, and wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his right hand. “So I won’t die from cancer?” he asked, slightly confused and seeking reassurance.
Chen shook her head. “No. You’ll find medicine has advanced much since the days of the twenty-first century.”
Cris nodded. His mind was whirling with emotion. In a way, he was relieved that the burden of his cancer had been lifted, but the overwhelming sadness he felt at the loss of his family overshadowed any joy he might have had. And not just his wife and daughter, but his uncles, aunts, cousins, friends…
Lorelei Chen stared at him. He looked awful, but he’d need to pull himself together fairly quickly if they were going to get out of this city alive. “Are you going to be okay, Cris?”
It was a rhetorical question, but he could sense the urgency in her voice. “I… I guess so,” he muttered. “My entire family is dead, I’m in a completely unfamiliar world… but I should be travelling back through time soon, so everything’s fine.”
She frowned. His voice was thick with sarcasm, but otherwise he seemed to be dealing with this ordeal fairly well.
“I understand how you must feel, Cristian,” Orillan said. “I am the very last of my people, the last of my species. My pain was severe when the others died, but in time, I learned to live with it.”
Cris looked lost, and sad. He understood what the Makaton was saying to him. The gaping hole in his heart was never going to heal.
“Unfortunately, I must hurry you both along,” Orillan continued. “The city’s internal sensors indicate that the people are coming – en masse.”
Chen looked at him. “What do you mean, Orillan?”
The Makaton’s alien expression remained still and unchanged. “They are closing in on this location. They know you are here. If they discover you here with me, I have no doubt that they will destroy you. You must leave at once. I will try to hold them off, for as long as I can.”
“I’m sorry, Orillan,” Chen said, going pale. “We shouldn’t have come.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “Our meeting was fate, not coincidence. This was predestined to transpire.” One of the two pressure doors at the far side of the chamber slid open. “Take this exit. It will lead you to one of the external air locks. Go as quickly as you can.”
The entrance to the chamber behind them was closed, sealed shut. Something on the other side roared, and the door shivered under a sudden savage blow from out there – something trying to break in.
Something big.
“Lora!” Cris howled, scared out of his wits. Another thud on the door, and the ivory-like material splintered inward. Cris almost jumped out of his skin.
“There is a cabinet beside the computer,” Orillan said, as Chen took Cris by the hand and led him to the open doorway at the rear of the chamber. “You will find a Chronoscepter inside. Take it, and good luck.”
Without question, Chen obeyed, taking what looked like a large weapon from an open compartment on the biological computer system. She held the thing, which resembled some kind of organic shotgun, in her left hand, while helping Cris along with her right. As they moved to cross the threshold of the open doorway, Chen turned back. “Thank you, Orillan,” she said. “For everything.”
“Go!” the Makaton roared. “Make with haste!”
They ran, and the chamber’s main entrance door blew inward.
Cris could feel the muscles in his legs burning. He was running faster than he’d ever done in his life, thanks in part to the assistance of the Rãvier suit. Lorelei Chen was slightly ahead, leading the way through another winding ivory tunnel. They passed through various rooms and chambers of strange design, but were so focused on evading their bloodthirsty pursuers that Cris didn’t have time to notice much of the surroundings. His mind was racing; everything was happening so fast… it was difficult to keep up.
His heart pumped fiercely in his chest.
Just run.
Then, a tremendous, thundering crash came from somewhere behind them, a sound like walls being torn down, like glass exploding, like a bull in a china shop –
- and Cris heard Chen say, “Mah Gorg!” in breathless disbelief. Around them, the bioluminescence of the city’s lights began to falter, plunging the entire scene into intermittent darkness.
“What’s happening?” Cris puffed.
“It’s Orillan,” Chen said without stopping. “He’s dying.” She gulped, tears forming in her eyes. She was overwhelmed by fear and awe.
Cris didn’t know what else to do but run. He risked a glance back, to see what was going on behind them, and there, running along the side of the tunnel, chasing them like a titanic spider, was a huge, pale creature from some nightmarish vision: powerful arms and hind legs riddled with muscles and thick veins, massive razor-sharp claws extending from its hands, along with a human-looking head covered in bushy, spiked hair.
“Oh, shit…” was all Cris could say, as two, then three more of the mutated behemoths came bounding toward them through the twisting passageway. “They’re gaining on us!” he shouted.
Chen turned, and muttered something obscene in her own dialect. The lights were flickering on and off constantly now, making it difficult to see. Through her fragmented vision, she raised the weapon she carried in her left hand, fingering for the control.
As she did so, Cris felt the closest creature’s clawed hand attach itself to his Rãvier leg, and he fell, tumbling to the floor and slamming against the wall. There was a crack of bone and Cris cried out, blood spluttering from his mouth.
Chen’s weapon fired just as the first creature leapt at her, and the tunnel was lit by a jumping beam of yellowish energy which forked into the creature, knocking it back with considerable force. Without hesitating, she turned the weapon on the others, quickly taking out the second creature, but wasn’t fast enough to stop the thi
rd, which managed to swing its considerable arm and embed the claws firmly into the side of an ivory column supporting the roof. Cris hauled himself to his feet, dazed, cursing through pain issuing from a broken nose, but before he could think about running again, the creature gave him a tooth-filled grin and yanked viciously on the column. It blew apart, and Chen registered the accompanying groan of stressed walls, then screamed as the tunnel above them gave way. Water surged violently into the tunnel and in no time at all it was over their heads.
Cris didn’t have time to think. He managed to gasp a deep breath of air just as the maelstrom of bubbles engulfed his senses, and in an instant he was being thrown around by murky current like a spinning plastic toy. His mind racing, Cris knew that he would have to act fast in this situation if he were going to survive. His only chance would be to get out, to swim against the water current and out of the city.
The water was excruciatingly cold, and it seemed to pierce at his skin like a million hypodermic needles. He kicked his legs frantically, struggling to comprehend what was happening. In the space of a few seconds he had gone from one dangerous situation to another. Now, survival was all he could think about, desperately trying to figure out which way he should swim. If he didn’t drown in this tunnel, he would probably die quickly from hypothermia – if he wasn’t picked off by one of the mutant creatures, which he could see faintly through the murky water as dark shadows swirling through the current.
He decided on which way the current was flowing and swam hard against it, trying to picture in his mind where the breach in the structure of the tunnel would be. By now, the lights in the place had gone out completely, so he assumed that meant the Makaton was dead. He was now flailing about in virtual blackness, guided only by what he figured was a faint emergency light. Through the force of the current it was next to impossible to orient himself, and he was fast running out of air. Swimming was a monumental effort; his body felt heavy and clumsy in his waterlogged Rãvier, and pain was spreading from his lungs to his head. He tried to ignore it as best he could, concentrating on swimming through that impossibly strong current.
As he moved, he could sense the creatures blundering about in the water around him. He had no idea where Lorelei Chen was; he certainly couldn’t see her, and he had no way of knowing if she was even still alive. He swam on, trying to ignore the dark clouds closing in on the edges of his mind, all the time feeling the pressure in his ears growing.
It took almost a minute before Cris’ hands felt the top of the tunnel, and the gaping aperture through which the water was flowing. He scrambled to pull himself out, and rather unexpectedly got a kick in the face from someone (or something) else who had made it out and was striking for whatever was out there. Rather than discourage him, this gave him renewed confidence. He roared to himself, pulling through the aperture and thrusting his body forward and up, toward distant light overhead.
I’m going to make it, he told himself. I have to make it…
He stopped with a sudden jerk. Something was pulling him back, holding him down by the ankle. It was then he realised, with horror, that one of the mutated creatures had grabbed his right foot and was trying to yank him back down into the murky depths. In desperation he tugged and twisted, struggling to kick the thing away, but he wasn’t able to, despite the extra strength being fed to him by the suit.
No…
Then there was something else, a human hand on his left leg. He saw a flash of yellow light, what could only have been Lora’s weapon – and the mutant relinquished its grip on his ankle. He realised that Chen had saved him, that she was just below him, fighting off the horrendous leviathan.
He plowed on towards the distant light, driven by his suit’s strength, and after what seemed like an age, his head broke the surface suddenly, and with it the instinct for survival reasserted itself. He dragged in deep breaths, utterly exhausted and disorientated. Nothing in his life had ever felt so good as inhaling that warm, sulphur-rich air. The darkness cleared from his mind, and as his eyes opened and took in his surroundings, he could make out the shore in the distance. It looked to be half a mile away, but perhaps in reality it was only a few hundred yards. The water was quite rough, but his suit was supporting him. Overhead, the night sky was blanketed with stars.
He splashed around for a few moments, desperate and unsure of what to do. He could see no sign of Lora. Then he spotted flashes of light coming from the shore; what looked like a group of people running around, shining torches and shouting in the moonlit darkness.
Who…?
After another moment, Chen’s head bobbed out of the water, and he saw her gasp for air, then choke water out of her lungs. She struggled to regain composure, but was soon staring at him with an expression of relief and exhaustion.
The people at the shore were beckoning them over now. Chen licked her lips, spat salty water out of her mouth, then managed to smile. “It’s Paramo!” she yelled with unmeasured delight, waving her arms and paddling their way without a second thought. “He came for us!”
Cris blinked. Relief washed over him as he saw Paramo and his ‘children’ providing cover fire, shooting various energy weapons at the creatures as they breached the surface of the water, giving him and Lora a chance to reach the shore safely.
Lahmia was finished, and the Makaton was dead, but Cris had his memory back now and was going to survive the ordeal, just as Orillan had promised. Had they achieved what they had set out to do there? Yes, they had. Whether this was a good thing, he had not yet decided.
8
Morning sunlight beamed pleasantly through the open window, stirring Cris from a deep and restful sleep. He’d been dreaming about his wife, Alexis… having passionate sex with her in their marital bed, laughing and smiling about times long gone. But then she was calling to him across an open field; the closer he got to her, no matter how fast he ran, the further away she seemed to sink. She looked sad. It was incredibly frustrating. Kimberley’s voice had provided some comfort, telling him to keep going, to not give up… but where was she?
He blinked his eyes open, and took a deep breath of the warm breeze that flowed his way from behind a pair of long, open curtains. The view from where he lay was gorgeous: beyond the blood-red curtains, an impressive stone balcony opened out from a cathedral-like archway, with Corinthian-style columns supporting the ceiling in regular intervals. A number of coconut palm trees and cycads swayed in the breeze outside, obscuring an otherwise perfect view of an enormous expanse of emerald-green ocean which dominated the reddish horizon.
Cris sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed. It was a simple mattress resting on a solid, flat raised surface, part of the structure of the room. The only other furnishings in the room were a couple of cushioned wooden chairs sequestered by the entryway and a large, antique vase beside one of the support pillars. It was certainly minimalistic; Paramo obviously didn’t spend a great deal of time here, despite his boasts to the contrary.
Images of Alexis and Kimberley flashed through his mind, and Cris frowned, fighting back tears. He was having trouble dealing with their loss; every time he started to feel okay about things, and enter into any kind of comfort zone, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about them. Naturally, he loved them and they were built into the very fabric of his being; he felt like his soul was being strangled without them. Like in his dream, he wanted to reach out and touch his wife, put his lips to hers, have her tell him that it was all a big misunderstanding; that she and Kimberley had simply gone away for a few days. But deep down, he knew this was just a fantasy, that he would never see them again… not ever.
Or could he?
He got up and padded across the room, away from the ocean view, toward the wooden entryway. He was dressed in a simple, black Cashmere gown. From the timber-framed window here he could see the spacious, cobbled inner courtyard of the monastery below. In the middle of the courtyard was a dilapidated catholicon surrounded by the wings that housed the living quar
ters, the guest-house and the refectory. Though the entire complex was deteriorating and overgrown with putrefying vegetation, it was still in fairly good shape considering it had gone unused for the better part of four centuries. There were a number of dark clouds gathering in the orange-red sky, over the mountains: a storm was coming.
Maybe… just maybe…
There was a loud knock on the wooden door, stirring Cris from his thoughts. “Come in,” he said absently.
The door opened with an abrasive creaking sound, and Lora Chen stepped across the threshold, dressed in a loose-fitting silver dress entirely embellished with beads; sleeveless, with a simple neckline. Her skin was tanned and radiant beneath.
Cris was taken aback. It suddenly occurred to him that this was the first time he’d actually seen her without her Rãvier suit on, which usually covered most of her body. He licked his lips, blinking. She was incredible. “Lora, I hardly recognised you.”
She smiled at him. “There is running water here. Can you believe that? I just had the most glorious shower, the best since I left Einek two years ago.”
“The dress looks nice on you,” he said.
She nodded. “Thanks. Courtesy of our host, of course. I cannot believe that places like this still exist… it’s an archaeological goldmine. I thought all traces of the old world were wiped out after the Apo’calupsis.”
“Paramo tells me that this… monastery… is one of only three sites he knows of that survived the disaster,” Cris said. “He stumbled upon it by chance a few years ago. Due to the… remote location, nobody else seems to know about it.”
“Een’crigonón,” she muttered. “That man is just full of surprises. I fear that without his help, we would both be dead right now.”
Cris nodded. She was probably right. Paramo had gotten his hands on a small bioship – a cargo hauler – which had apparently crashed in the Shadowlands two days previously, and had used it to transport Cris and Chen from Lahmia to this place, which he used as a safehouse when travelling the globe on his ‘business’. It looked like some kind of Eastern Orthodox monastery, though Cris couldn’t be perfectly sure. For as well preserved as it was, there were very few inscriptions on the stonework he’d seen, and it hadn’t weathered the past few centuries terribly well. That, and he had no idea where they were in relation to the world he once knew. Had they travelled east as far as Europe? It was difficult to say, though it seemed likely. The bioship had been silent running, yet absurdly fast. Faster than any jet aeroplane he’d ever flown in, for sure.
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