Clark almost tripped and fell over something on the floor. It was a skeleton, a female skeleton. The face of the partially mummified skeleton was grotesquely twisted in an expression indicative that the last moments before death had been terrifying ones.
“Not my most flattering look I have to admit.”
Clark looked up quickly, as a holographic image of a woman appeared. Clark didn’t let on to it visibly, but he was shaken by her appearance. Her skin was literally red!
How that had been achieved he did not know or want to know. Her hair was bright green. Only her eyebrows were a normal shade of blackish brown. She had ruin tattoos it seemed everywhere. Everything was visible, as she was only dressed in a series of see-through gauzy veils of different shades of color.
She was certainly exotic, Clark thought, but he didn’t care for her modifications as a man. There was an aura of twistedness about her, as if everything good and wholesome had been thrown out the door and been replaced with every corrupting influence imaginable.
She reminded him of when one time in Africa he’d woken up from a night’s rest to find a cobra upraised off the ground. Its head had been flattened out with fangs bared, as it swayed back and forth slightly. He would’ve been dead, if one of his crew hadn’t poked it with a wire to distract it so he could move away.
Her eyes had the same black glassiness to them as the snake’s had. It didn’t help that during her very frank appraisal of him that her tongue snaked out repeatedly to moisten her lips.
“Well mankind hasn’t degraded in quality of form as much as I thought they would have. A pity that we can’t enjoy what each of us has to offer. It could take years. Years are probably a limited commodity for you though aren’t they? What is it like living only half a century or a century at best? Old and decrepit by the time you finally reach your last days. Hmmmm? Not so nice is it. There was a time when a hundred years was as if but a couple years and one still had hundreds of years yet to experience life. So sad that you won’t get to experience what real living is like.”
Her syrupy sweet words were ticking Clark off. He badly wanted to rattle the bag of bones at his feet, with his boot to remind her, of her own decrepit state, but he refrained rightly guessing what her reaction would be. She was a creature of pure vanity and could see nothing better than herself, even though in his opinion she could have been the opening act of a carnival freak show.
“Tell me young man why have you come here to my tomb, to disturb my peace as to what I can no longer enjoy?”
Deciding to both flatter her and still be truthful Clark said, “Knowledge. I’ve come to seek knowledge.”
“Oh, now that is a good reason. Maybe there’s hope for humanity yet. Knowledge will cure and provide anything one desires. Other than one’s own pleasure, knowledge is the only thing one should focus on actively pursuing in life. As I always say, ‘If one has a problem one just hasn’t learned enough knowledge yet.’”
Her sing song attitude abruptly darkened, as she gazed off to the side.
“If I had but enough knowledge I could’ve strengthened the force field enough to keep the water at bay!” She gestured with her hand indicating what Clark now realized was a huge room.
Most of the room was under water. Clark walked over to the edge of the water and gazed out upon the still waters covering the room. Clark could see that where he stood was the upraised end of what had once been a huge gallery that was now underwater.
“Behold knowledge senselessly destroyed all because a petty God didn’t care for us having fun! So He destroyed it all! He destroyed us with water! Water! Of all things water! Cold, depressing, rushing, choking water! I hate water!” She screamed towards the submerged room beyond, thoroughly lost in her remembered emotions of probably her death scene and her inability to stop the water despite all the powers at her disposal.
Smoothly Clark intoned into her remembered hysteria, “Surely with your advanced technology you could have left this planet and avoided the great flood?”
She turned to him and the clear light of craziness was in her face, “We could have! We could have joined our colonies in the stars, but we were deceived! Locked away here on Earth for hundreds of years, until the end of all as we knew it came by water!”
Clark asked, appearing the soul of consoling demeanor, “What could lock such a mighty and highly advanced people away from their destiny in the stars?”
She stormed back and forth in remembered fury and frustration, “They build a phase interrupter generator! How they advanced so fast in technology I do not know! We couldn’t penetrate the shielding of the complex where they had the phase interrupter no matter how hard we tried to! And we did try! We thought of everything and still nothing!”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Clark interjected softly.
“The Vallians!” She fairly spat the words out.
“The traitorous murdering self-righteous wretches is what they are. You know why I persist and other programs like me, preserving what knowledge and power that we can through the eons of time of the former greatness of the Orlandian Empire? So that we may have revenge! Sweet revenge on those who brought our ruin down upon us! We will rid the galaxy of them! Every last one of them will be hunted down and destroyed!”
“Where they a mightier nation than your people?” Clark asked.
“Mightier, hah! We ruled the entire world, even the fallen stars walked among our number! We were invincible! The Vallians were but seven tribes scattered out over the plains of bar-Seth. They kept to themselves, how were we to know that they were secretly plotting against us? They were great warriors, but how were we to know that they had advanced so quickly? It’s all because of that cursed Ta’lont! He helped them and gave them the secrets to destroy us! The traitorous wretch was supposed to have died! How he lingered on and managed to recover and turn on us is a mystery.”
“Your technology is so amazing I still don’t see how a single weapon could have overwhelmed you so?” Clark asked.
“It didn’t overwhelm us! We had full use of everything, except our energy particle beam technology. Without it we couldn’t form water vortex channel gates. The inability to do so effectively locked us here. If they had but met us in battle we would have crushed them several times over! Instead they left like thieves in the night.”
“They left? Were there ships immune to the interrupter signal?”
“No most of them had already left before they turned the device on. The rest left in some other way than water vortex travel. We do not know how, but we will learn of it!” She said fiercely and then something finally seemed to dawn on her and she turned back to Clark her countenance full of suspicion and Clark knew the game was up.
“So many questions and yet you seem to have an idea about what we’re talking about. You’ve been leading me on with your questions to find something out! How very clever of you.”
Her words may have been praising, but he didn’t doubt that she intended to kill him now in some way. The door behind him slammed shut. So that was the way of it.
“You’re going to tell me everything and I mean everything!” She said savagely.
Clark thought quickly, he’d managed to manipulate her once; perhaps he could do it again. He had to make her angry and he thought he knew just how to. His hand slipped to his left side pocket unobtrusively to rest on two canisters squeezed into his belt there.
He said, “You’re right I was leading you on with my questions and it was remarkably easy to I have to admit, which explains how my great ancestors duped you so easily.”
“What! Your ancestors! The Vallins all left! They…..”
She stopped and stared at him suddenly realizing, “You came back!”
“Yes, that’s right. Our memories of the past are somewhat sketchy. We’ve been embarked on so many grand challenges out there in the greater galaxy that we haven’t had time to tie up our loose strings so to speak. Having finished eliminating all of your star colonies we thought we
would make a trip back to Earth. Sort of a sightseeing trip, while we were here we thought we would just put the rest of the last of your pathetic and ill-fated cult to eternal rest.”
She screamed in abject fury and brought her hands up and electric power shot out of them into Clark’s chest. It was like grabbing onto a high powered electric wire pasture fence and not letting go. Clark thought he felt his blood boiling, but he held on as through sheer force of effort he pulled the two canisters free of his belt.
“You will die Vallian, but not in this way. I want to see you suffer! To see you writhe on the floor in agony!”
The power binding Clark lessened as a second doorway on the other side of the platform opened. A writhing knot of tangled up snakes three feet high capsized over into the room.
“Our energy both attracts and aggravates them if we wish for it to. Right now you look like the best thing they’ve ever seen to sink their fangs into. I’ll drink in your agony and keep you alive while you feel every cell in your body die!”
Clark’s thumbs flipped the triggers on the canisters and with a superhuman effort against the immobilizing electric shock he tossed the canisters. One landed at snake girl’s feet and the other landed in the fast approaching swarm of venom dripping assassins.
“What is this?” Snake girl screamed out questioningly and the power grip on Clark lessened a little more and with a mighty push off of his powerful legs Clark catapulted over backwards to fall into the cold waters of the lower room level.
Barely two seconds after he sunk below the surface of the water, the platform above exploded into a searing white ball of light, as the phosphorus grenades exploded.
The room above was enveloped in a searing blast of heat so hot it could melt the hardest of steels known to man. Holding his breath Clark waited for a moment and then popped to the surface and pulled himself back up onto the upper platform.
Everything was charred black. Getting to his feet he stepped toward the still open doorway the snakes had fallen through. His boots kicked through piles of charred snake dust along the way. Snake girl still stood there, but there wasn’t much left intact of her holographic image. What was left was sporadically flickering.
Her voice was garbled as she said, “You’ve killed me!”
“You were dead a long time ago. You just didn’t know it and I didn’t kill you. You killed yourself. You had what, five hundred years, eight hundred years or more to repent and ask your Creator for forgiveness and all you did was increase in your excesses and rebellion so much so that God wiped out an entire planet just to purge the likes of you from it! You of all people call the people of today decrepit! They often make the right choices every day, something you utterly failed to do with much more time than they have! Who’s decrepit? The answer is we both are; only you’re more without excuse!”
Clark took a hunk of plastic explosive out of his left pocket and a timer out of his right pocket. She watched him closely, “Your weapons are too primitive for you to be who you claim to be. The last part was meant to lead me on to. You’re after the weapon! Why? Because it no longer casts out its disrupting beam and you want to find a way to reactivate it, because you want to chain us here once again! You are of Vallian blood, I can see that now, but obviously not all has gone well for the Vallians for you to have to employ such primitive devices to halt what is our destiny. Let me tell you something brave but misguided warrior, you may kill all trace of advanced technology in this place, but there are other places like this that still persist. We will attract Earth people not so zealous as you to our underground tombs and we will open the gates of our knowledge up to them. Knowledge is so corrupting isn’t it? In fact it has already begun! You’re too late to stop us and it is worse than you know. We know your ancestors returned many hundred years ago. When they came back to Earth we were able to pick up on their presence and monitor them. We tracked them when they left and we know where it was that they settled. We will give our knowledge to the people of this world and our ways of rebellion we will instill and encourage to grow within them just as before! We will tell them that the Vallians are there worst enemy and our new converts will destroy you and your people down to the last child! We will have our revenge! There is nothing you can do to stop our destiny!” She finished warbly.
Clark simply shook his head, “You talk too much, but thank you anyway for the heads up.”
He abruptly stuck a gob of C4 to the corner of the room’s main console and walked out not bothering to look back. With fingers that couldn’t touch matter but simply passed through it digitally she tried to halt the progression of the ticking red numbered countdown clock.
She screamed in frustration and fear as her physical form must have when she had died gasping for air during the great flood so long ago.
Clark pulled the tablet out of midair and quickly tapped a message out and sent it. All the tablet’s considerable power drained away in mere seconds as it sent a transmission into space. He hoped the message got there in time and then that someone would be there to read it, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He had a lot of work to do.
It would probably take the signal several months to reach his homeworld, if it reached it at all. It was safer to assume that the message didn’t reach his homeworld and that everything depended on him to keep the resurgent Orlandians from destroying his world. God help him!
He tossed the tablet towards the open hole in the ground and then grabbing his pack he ran.
Clark was well into the jungle when the C4 explosion ripped through the humid air. The aftermath explosions were worse than the first one and Clark tumbled to the ground at the shock of the secondary explosions.
After five minutes the explosions died down to muffled rumbles and Clark got up and moved swiftly down through the rain forest that had been shocked into silence from its usual daily uproar.
Chapter Six
Beat Down
I was careful not to spend too much money. I kept my and Rafael’s meager diets much the same as they had been before the advent of Clark.
I would give Clark a couple more days to return. If he didn’t show, then I and Rafael were leaving. I would find someplace else to live, where no one knew me and perhaps get a job. A good job, if I couldn’t find a job than I would leave Rafael with as good a family that I could find, while I would starve to death if need be.
One thing had become clear over the past week. I was never going to be a whore again!
It wasn’t worth it for any amount of money and life wasn’t worth holding on to, if it came at the cost of little chunks of my soul being eaten away every day.
I headed back towards the apartment with a small bag of groceries in one arm, it was already late afternoon and I wanted to get home before it grew any darker. I managed to get out half a scream before a hand clamped down over my mouth and crushing arms enveloped me from behind.
I was being mugged!
Then I got a glimpse of one of the two men restraining me.
Oh no! Came the horror stricken thought, as I recognized the men as being some of Victor’s men.
The crushing blow to the back of my head sent my consciousness reeling. I didn’t need to worry about starving to death now; rather it would be how long death would be in the coming.
I woke up from my induced unconsciousness and gradually came to an awareness of my surroundings. Where else, but Victor’s study. I was handcuffed to a chair and surrounded by Victor’s ever present henchmen. Some openly sneered at me, while others I didn’t think had anything upstairs to think one way or the other.
The doors opened behind me and I knew it had to be Victor from the nervous energy that suddenly filled the room with tension. My head was wrenched backward abruptly by a savage grip on my hair and I stared full into the demented eyes of Victor above me.
I knew that I was going to die, but it was up to me to determine how I went out. I spit full into his face and he reeled backward in shocked surprise. I turned my neck slight
ly to watch him wipe my spit off his face disgustedly.
I’d gotten into his personal space and he didn’t like it. He recovered from his disgusted surprise and screaming he charged me with a raised fist. I was mad and madness gave me courage. I pushed up with my feet lifting the front legs of the chair, I then abruptly leaned to one side putting the chair onto one leg and I spun it with one foot.
Unbelievably the chair didn’t fall over backwards with me in it. The straps to one of my sandals had finally worn out and I’d had no choice other than to go grocery shopping in my stripper stilettos. They were sharply pointed on the ends and I let Victor have both of them as hard as I could, one in either shin.
He screamed shrilly and dropped to his knees before me. Big mistake! I had the chair back on two legs as I thrust out with both of my legs. The points of the stilettos sank satisfyingly into Victor beneath each of his shoulders. He screamed like a stuck pig and threw himself backward before I had a chance to kick at him again. He had gotten to his feet and had backed away even further from me.
“What’s the matter Victor? Cat got your tongue, you limp noodled excuse of human garbage not big enough to have sex with a rabbit, even if it would have you!”
So trash talking wasn’t my thing, but at least it got the point across. He grabbed a gun and pointed it at my head shaking uncontrollably, as sweat flowed off of his forehead and mingled with the bloody stains at the front of his shirt.
“Go on you coward shoot me before you’ve even questioned me, as to what was stolen from you and show us all what a fish brained half crazed rabid squirrel you are!”
I swear I could feel his finger’s pressure on the trigger.
“You don’t even bother to hide your part in this conspiracy! You realize what you’ve done? I’ve promised something of great value to a client and I’ve already received half payment for it, but I don’t have the purchased item, because of you and the stranger that no one knows anything about! You’re going to tell me everything you know about this man and help me get my item of interest back! If you don’t I’ll have you tortured until you beg for death.”
A Warrior's Return Page 5