Exodus (The Domus Series Book 2)

by Spartan Kaayn

  No one was home.

  A military artillery shell had torn down the wall of the guest room and the adjacent media room. The garden was pretty dug up. Looters had had a swipe at her house, making away with the TV and the home theatre, which Alex had installed the year before in the media room. The house as such was more or less structurally intact, save for the guest room wall. Sienna made dinner out of some packaged non-perishables and they decided to spend the night there. Sienna found the comfort of her bed after what seemed like a very long time, but she did not find much sleep, tossing and turning between nightmarish visions of her husband and her daughters. Carter too had a fitful sleep on the couch in the living room.

  They got up early next morning and Sienna fixed them a quick breakfast of cereals. There was no electricity in the house but then she remembered about the field generator in the garage. Carter set to work on it and found a drum full of diesel in the garage. He got it going and the first thing Sienna did was to switch on the TV in her bedroom to look for any news on Florida.

  The news was agog with a ‘breaking news’ item of some alien crafts having landed in the Joint Base Andrews Air Force base in Maryland. The aliens had shot down a news helicopter circling over the base. The base had been evacuated of humans and the news copter had captured images of brand new shining metallic oval alien pods and planes parked all over the base tarmac. An unnamed government source on conditions of anonymity had revealed details of terms of surrender of the U.S government to the aliens.

  Sienna and Carter had a firsthand account of the circumstances and the terms of surrender. There was not much news from other cities, none from Florida. The ticker reeled the names of the deceased, which just went on and on, endlessly listing all conceivable names. There were helpline numbers too but the Florida one had no information on University students as of then. Sienna followed the ticker list for some time to see a few Susans and an Alex, albeit with different surnames. She realized the futility of that. The list was too huge to have any meaning. She had to find out for herself. Carter readily agreed to accompany her. They packed some provisions into their car and set off for Florida, hoping against diminishing hope, to find her family.

  Chapter 15

  The Plan

  Alien Mother-ship

  29th January 2019

  Alex had spent close to two days in the slave quarters. He slept with them during their sleeping hours, squeezing with Willaim on his bunk and when they went to work, William hid him in the ‘library’. Alex waited hours in the library, going through the archives. He went through the history of the Alienkind, history of their planet, the war that had driven them off their planet and turned them into cosmic nomads.

  He went through archives of their science. He learnt what he could about their technology and their biology. He could not understand the script but he gathered as much as he could from the images. There were pages upon pages of what looked like equations and symbols, which meant nothing to Alex. They however indicated to Alex that their technology was finite and dependent on rules of mathematics and physics, which could be broken or bent for the benefit of humans. They have had the advantage of time on their side and with all their aggression externalized and directed to a war against other species, they had survived so far without turning on themselves. They had managed to turn their ship into a very efficient war machine. Nevertheless, they had not progressed beyond the rules that governed the running of the Universe. They were still bound by rules and that was good news for humans.

  Similar was the case with their biology. They derived their energy from carbon matter. Their bodies were efficient engines that ran on any form of organic carbon. They had evolved and integrated technology into their bodies that allowed them to assimilate energy generated from any organic matter, the way plants soaked up Sun for all life. However, their bodies were organic and they must have frailties and defects that all organic bodies have.

  They were not Gods.

  It was only a question of finding that single deficiency in their mortal bodies.

  Their ship had the ability to soak up the Sun but this energy was utilized only for the peripheral functions of the ship. The core of the ship and most of the vital machines ran on the energy that was generated from organic matter. They generally stopped over at any planet for a period of seventy to a hundred years, during which they depleted the planet of all its organic carbon and moved on.

  William was right.

  There is no dearth of life, organic life. They had the technology to move through space and time and that ensured that they could maintain this parasitic lifestyle indefinitely, hopping from one world to another.

  Never had Alex tried to cram so many facts in so less a time. The two days vanished in a blur, spent walking amongst the holograms in the ‘library’.

  On the night of the second day, William came up to Alex

  ‘Tomorrow’s going to be the day. You will walk out with us to the ship bay and we will bundle you out on a harvester.’

  Alex nodded

  ‘How are you going to accomplish that? Will they not identify me?’

  ‘No they won’t. We are cattle to them. We just need to keep our numbers correct. You just follow my instructions tomorrow and everything will be alright, or rather should be alright’ William chuckled and then looked at Alex thoughtfully and asked

  ‘What will you do once you get back?’

  ‘Well…I will search for my family.’

  ‘And after that. What will you do then?’

  Alex looked at the intensity on William’s face. He knew what he meant

  ‘I guess there’s only one option for a soldier. Once a soldier, always one. I will fight.’

  William shook his head in concurrence and smiled

  ‘Same here. Once a General, always one. I will wait for you, for your signal. We will be ready for your war. If you and your war manages to reach here, we will do all we can from our side. That’s a soldier’s promise.’

  Alex smiled back and gave a mock salute to General William. He nodded, a bit more serious in accepting the salute than Alex was, in granting it.

  Chapter 16

  Grief

  Florida, U.S.A

  30th January

  Sienna and Carter reached Florida late in the night. The highway was littered with mangled remains of vehicles incinerated by the alien blasts, many still on fire. Houses and buildings had been ‘Afghanistanized’. Along the highway, Sienna did not see a completely intact roof on any building. The walls of the buildings were riddled with black pock marks and gaping holes, made by the exploding alien death-rays.

  In spite of the widespread destruction, they did not see any corpses or carcasses. Not even one. The aliens had very effectively mopped up, scavenging all biological matter after them. Most of the trees had been uprooted and left gaping holes in the ground, where the soil lay upturned. That left a cold, dark and barren land over which hung a dark smog of soot, billowing from the burning flames.

  It was a depressing journey that slowly hammered away on Sienna’s hopes of seeing her family alive.

  They made it to Susan’s hostel late in the night to find a rubble of concrete and mangled steel. Most of the buildings of the University had been reduced to that. There was no one in the hostel. Sienna went to the College office. The College had opened a temporary office, erected out of corrugated sheets. Parts of the main building had been severely damaged and the parts standing will have to be reviewed for safety and worthiness before being occupied.

  The skeletal staff in the office were of no help. They had a small list of dead and missing students which was growing by the minute. Carrie and Susan were not on the dead list. Sienna added their names to the list of missing and left the office. There was a big crowd of parents and guardians outside the office and many were sticking photos of their missing children wherever they could. There was a huddle of students who had escaped the carnage and Sienna asked them about Susan and Carrie. One of them kne
w Susan but had not seen her since the attacks had started. Sienna gave them her contact number.

  Carter turned to Sienna when they were walking back to the car

  ‘Where was Alex last when he talked with Susan?’

  Sienna tried to remember the conversation she had with Susan

  ‘Susan said he had reached Florida, about to reach her at the University. And then he just vanished’ her voice suddenly turned grave as she said those words. Carter saw that and came closer to her

  ‘Let’s search for him. Maybe Susan is busy doing that now.’

  Sienna nodded

  ‘Yeah. Let’s do that.’

  ‘What car does he drive?’

  ‘He was probably driving the Kia. It was missing from the garage back home. It is a black Kia Sorrento, 3 years old.’

  They hopped into the car and drove off. They searched on roads leading to the University campus, stopping at each site of attack on the road, taking a look at the buildings by the roadside and for any signs of vehicles having driven off the road. There were many abandoned vehicles by the roadside but they did not find Alex’s Sorento.

  They had not had a wink of sleep the whole day and their search went on till late in the night. Just before they decided to give up for the night, Carter spotted a track. He turned the car around, flashing his headlights on the roadside, where a section of the pavement wall was damaged just wide enough for a truck to pass through. He jumped off the car, keeping the engine running, lights focused on the track that led into the shrubbery and then on into the tree line by the roadside. Sienna followed Carter into the tree line. They saw the tree line disrupted and there were tell-tale signs of an alien attack there. Many trees had been uprooted for ‘harvesting’ whereas many others bore marks of alien shelling; trees broken into shards and splinters, incinerated through and through and a few burnt down to cinders. Carter treaded further into the tree line and less than fifty meters away, he came across the mangled and burnt Sorento.

  Sienna shrieked when she saw it. She recognized it immediately. It was Alex’s.

  They rushed over to it. The interior of the truck had been completely burnt down. There was no sign of Alex. Sienna began to cry in fits. Having no news was probably better than having bad news.

  Carter came over to her, held her by arms

  ‘This doesn’t mean anything Sienna. He could still be alive. I am sure he is. You have to believe he is.’

  Sienna nodded her head and stifled her sobs. They searched across the road and stood mute, terrified witness to the scene at the Chapel Hill Cemetery. Almost all the graves had been dug out. Carter had heard about how alie n harvesters had been digging even graves for bodies from a fellow survivor at the hideout. But the sight sent a chill down his spine nevertheless. They looked at each other. There was nothing to be said.

  They silently walked back to the car.

  Carter drove them back to the university campus, where after searching for almost an hour, they found accommodation in an empty house amongst the staff residences. They had a quick meal of boiled noodles and then they retired to makeshift beds for the night, both trying hard to steal some much needed sleep. Sienna’s tired body fought hard with her troubled mind, succeeding finally in finding some sleep and a temporary sanctum from her grief, fears and insecurities.

  Carter got up on hearing Sienna’s mobile ring. He picked it up and silenced it before Sienna got up. It was a student, who had some news about Susan, Sienna’s younger daughter. The news was not good and Carter did not know how to break it to Sienna. He gave Susan’s friend the address and asked her to come over.

  Chapter 17

  The Descent

  Alien Mother-ship

  30thJanuary 2019

  Alex accompanied the slaves to their worksite next morning. Waffendorf had stayed behind, hiding in the ‘library’, so that the total head count remained the same. They reached the harvester bay, which looked like a giant runway with a long line of harvesters neatly parked along the sides. They had been given what looked like giant mops with tubing that spewed a slimy cleaning liquid on contact with the metal floor. He scrubbed and cleaned for half an hour. William signaled Alex to move closer to a harvester while cleaning. After the floors had been scrubbed, William, Alex and three others were asked to clean the insides of the harvester next to them. The insides smelt of dried blood and had dark stains splattered all over the floor and the walls. They got to the work diligently and started cleaning the stains under the wary eyes of a lone alien guard, standing by the door a good thirty meters away. William moved up to Alex and nudged him to a corner while cleaning. When the guard was not looking, he found an opportunity to push Alex into the crevice that ran along the sides of the floor and at the same moment, rammed his arm into a sharp, protruding, steel socket. He cried out in pain and fell to the floor, masking the noise of Alex dropping through to the underbelly of the craft. The guard was alarmed and came running in towards William, while others converged on to William and supported him off the floor. William held and compressed a bleeding gash on his arm with the other hand. Workers did get injured while working on the ship and William knew that he would be taken to the sick bay. Waffendorf had slid out of the slave quarters and was hiding near the sick bay, expecting William and others to reach there. He joined the group of workers returning to the hangar after leaving William at the sick bay, thereby correcting the head count at the end of the day.

  Alex had doubts whether such a simple plan would work but William had told him that it was the only conceivable way of getting off the ship and Alex knew he had to risk it.

  After dropping through the panel to the underbelly of the harvester, Alex was hiding in there for close to eight hours. The hangar was busy, with pods, planes and harvesters coming in and leaving the hangar all throughout. He saw long coils of metal claws and hoops that he now knew were being used to scoop people, animals and trees into the harvester. The metal in those claws seemed continuous, devoid of joints.

  He looked at the floor below, which had to be retractable to allow these instruments to descend down from the harvester. He found a hiding place in a corner in that chamber, lest someone came for some kind of preflight check-up.

  There was no pre-flight check-up.

  After about eight hours, Alex felt the harvester move and slowly rise off the hangar floor. A moment later, he felt an almost imperceptible hint of acceleration and he knew he was airborne. He felt the gentle swerves that the harvester took, while maneuvering itself out of the mother ship. Then there was a period of relative calm but Alex felt motion and knew that it must be the harvester accelerating and hurtling down towards Earth. He braced himself for the shock of atmospheric entry and it came, a moment of slight and momentary jarring when the ship entered the Earth’s atmosphere. It was nothing, compared to the G-forces they felt in a jet-fighter. The ship had some kick-ass dampeners, which very effectively countered the G-forces. Alex was impressed but not surprised that the atmospheric entry of the craft was so smooth. After all, these aliens were a space-faring species, thousands of years and billions of air-miles ahead of Earthlings. While that was intimidating, he reminded himself yet again that there was no black magic here. It was just that their understanding and mastery over the laws of nature was superior to that of ours but they still had to play by the rules.

  Twenty minutes later, they were hovering and Alex readied himself to take the plunge. The floor retracted away under the claw chains and the claws began deploying. Alex peeped over the edge of the opening. They were five hundred meters above the ground, ground that looked to be a green mattress of tall trees. The claws had resorted to uprooting trees for harvesting and Alex knew this was his time. He had to hold on to a chain and slide down to reach the ground.

  Alex tore a part of his tunic and held the chain wrapped in the cloth, slowly releasing his grip in bursts to slide down, a little each time.

  ‘This can be done’ he took a deep breath and started slowly descending a
long the long chain.

  As he descended further and further down, the movement became worse. The claws were thrashing about below, holding and violently yanking the trees, uprooting them from the ground and then drawing them up into the ship. The chain under Alex’s hand became taut and straight and Alex realized it must have grabbed onto something on the ground, perhaps a tree that it was trying to yank out of ground. Alex tightened his grip on the taut chain but just as he was taking his next step, he came unstuck, his legs flailing in the air for a moment as he hung by the grip of his hands. But right then, the tree came unstuck below, jerking the chain upwards and Alex lost his grip. He was thrown off the chain and he sailed in the air for a good two hundred meters before hitting the top of the trees.

  He fell on his back and the branches under him snapped, allowing the force to get dissipated. But, he fell further and bounced over a thick branch, tumbling onto another where he landed on his upper leg. He heard the snap and knew in an instant that he had broken his femur. He fell further through the branches, tossing and turning from branch to branch and landed on the ground, face first.

  The last thing he remembered was the smell of the wet Earth, before darkness enveloped his eyes and he lost consciousness.

  Chapter 18

  The Man Who Fell from the Sky

  Kitale, Kenya

  28th February 2019

  Alex spent the month after, flitting in and out of consciousness, deep within the numerous cave systems littering the forests in the foothills of the Masabi Mountain in Kitale, eastern Kenya. He was aware in bits of having been moved every couple of days to a new location. He saw black, pierced, painted faces tending to his wounds, sponging his body during numerous fevers that he had and cleaning and dressing the numerous wounds on his body. He was snapped into consciousness when they changed the splint on his fractured thigh and then unable to bear the pain, he passed into unconsciousness yet again.