From the Ashes

by Mark Tufo

  “And what? If they say they can help BT, I think we have to take it no matter what they look like. Looks can be deceiving.” She was saying the words but she wasn’t convincing either of us.

  ‘It is suspicious.’

  ‘We cannot trust him.’

  ‘We know the truth.’

  ‘He must never know.’

  One of the things came out. ‘I am medical, I will help.’ It said as it moved towards BT. I didn’t know whether to grab Tracy and run for the hills or get in the thing’s way before it got to BT.

  BT was the largest man I’d ever seen. Drababan was just about the biggest Genogerian I’d ever seen. And neither of them was as big or devastating looking as this creature. And then it dawned on me with a hundred percent certainty why the Progerians had created the Devastators. They were roughly the same size, not the same shape, though. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why the Progs hadn’t just turned their ships around when they caught wind of this abomination.

  ‘It is scared.’

  ‘It might do something.’

  ‘The device is armed.’

  That last sentence snippet caught my attention. How was I going to play this out like I wasn’t hearing everything they were saying? And more importantly, why the fuck was I hearing it? Hadn’t they ever heard the saying ‘ignorance is bliss’? And to top it off and not for nothing why were they speaking in English? Now I know the English empire in its time spread far and wide, but I’m thinking not quite as far as where these things were from, though.

  “Alright, help him,” I said, although I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have stopped them. BT went rigid. He looked pretty resigned that they were going to be so close.

  ‘There is no need to speak verbally,’ the initial beast said.

  ‘Humans are stupid. It does not understand.’

  ‘Must get the weapon away from it.’

  BT cried out in pain. I instinctually raised my rifle pointing it at the barbed hairy back of the medic.

  ‘Administering medicine.’

  The needle looked like something my folks used to baste a turkey with.

  ‘We must go Michael Talbot. Others are coming.’

  “Others?”

  ‘Its voice grates on my sensory lobes.’

  ‘The death dealers have returned.’

  ‘The hostile ones.’

  ‘Murderers.’

  ‘Marauders.’

  ‘Defenders.’

  I wanted to tell them to shut the fuck up. It was already busy enough in my head without all of them spilling their guts. “The Progerians are back?”

  ‘Yessss.’ That ‘s’ sound trailed entirely too long, striking a discordant chord deep within me. My evolutionary biology was screaming at me to end this meeting and with unchecked hostility. These things were dangerous to not just me but all life on this planet, all life on any planet. ‘Your guardian has left as well.’

  My first thought was they were talking about Dee. I’ll tell you what, that went all the way to the bone to think they were spying on him and my son.

  “How...how do you know that?”

  ‘Easy to detect buckle with correct instruments.’

  “Oh, the Guardian, it left? Where?”

  ‘Ship left, yes.’

  ‘One less to deal with.’

  ‘Fall.’

  ‘Cannot detect location.’

  ‘Running.’

  ‘Destroyed.’

  I looked over at the medic carrying BT as if he were a baby. “Where are you taking him?”

  ‘Ship. He needs more assistance than I can give here.’

  “What are your intentions?”

  ‘To heal, to mend.’

  “I’m talking to Inruk.”

  ‘To help, to aid in your war against the aggressors.’

  ‘He does not believe you.’

  ‘It is as disgusted with us as we are with it.’

  ‘Must not know the truth.’

  ‘Fifteen seconds to detonation. If it will not come aboard kill the female and grab it.’

  “Well I appreciate the help, let’s go,” I said, grabbing Tracy’s hand to pull her on board. She was doing her best to not drag her feet, and so was I.

  “Mike, are you sure?” Tracy was stumbling as I nearly dragged her.

  “Trust me on this one.”

  “You know something I don’t?”

  “I do.” That seemed enough to placate her.

  As I approached the ship I shouldered my rifle, making any attempt to grab it from my hand hopefully unnecessary as I boarded. By the time we got in, BT was already strapped down on a platform much too big for him. The interior was bigger than I would have imagined from the outside yet entirely too small with seven of the Stryvers there as well. The spaciousness was due to the fact that there were no furnishings or instruments for that matter. The platform had either slid out from the wall much like a hidden cabinet in an RV or it was created by a force field.

  Lights crawled along the smooth walls like spider webs. There was no way, none that I could discern, to see outside of the ship or control it for that matter.

  ‘Prepare for flight.’

  The Stryvers spread their four bottom legs out wide for stability. I noted that they were all facing in the same direction.

  BT was secure, as were our hosts. Tracy and I were in danger of rolling around the damned thing like a marble inside a can. Bringing Tracy with me, I went to the far wall and sat down on the floor. The ship was extremely quiet except for BT’s labored breathing and the rustling of our clothing.

  ‘We must accelerate, the bomb has detonated.’

  I could feel the pull of inertia as we began traveling faster. There was a slight rumble as what I believe was the bomb blast washed over us and then all was quiet again.

  ‘Radiation levels are within normal.’

  I was saddened that a nuclear device had been exploded in the States but I won’t lie; I was happy it had killed all the Genos. Although as funny as it might sound, I wish they were here right now rather than the ones that had “saved” me. Now I had to figure out why and for what purpose.

  ‘We are safe now.’ It was Inruk. I could only tell the difference in voice as his was marginally less frightening.

  “From what?” I needed to play dumb. Not really all that big a stretch for me.

  ‘The Genogerians have detonated a device to destroy your factory.’

  Well that was an out and out lie. “Wow, must have been an incredible bomb if we were threatened this far away.”

  “Mike is he talking about...” I put my hand across Tracy’s mouth so fast it could have been construed as a slap if seen from a distance.

  “Yes, um, he’s talking about the Genos’ city busters.”

  ‘He knows.’

  ‘He cannot know the truth.’

  ‘He is dishonest.’

  Tracy was quiet, thankfully, although she did smack my hand away.

  “How did your kind survive the Progerian attack?” I wanted to distract them from their current thoughts.

  ‘Our planet is much hotter and hostile than your home but it is still conducive to Progerian and Genogerian colonization and depletion of our resources. They came in their mighty ships. We had not learned flight yet as our populous had never seen such things. This threat from the sky was unheralded.’

  ‘From the sky they came.’ I got the distinct feeling this one was shivering as he recited the words.

  ‘They destroyed our aboveground cities. We hid deep within the bowels of our planet as death rained down. For five of your Earth years we hid, never venturing out into our sun. We bided our time and then they came. The monsters set foot on our planet and we struck back.’

  Images of those powerful mandibles and forearms shredding into unsuspecting Genogerians began to dominate my vision. It was repulsive. These things not only tore the Genos apart, they drank the blood greedily like a famished vampire. The Genos had been completely unprepa
red for the savagery they met when faced with the Stryvers. I saw vast battlefields where hundreds of thousands of combatants had died from both sides. Stryvers were striking out from holes in the ground, ripping and tearing into Geno ranks before going back down to their lairs. More ships came, indiscriminately raining down destruction on friend and foe alike.

  ‘We were winning. The master race could not supply enough of their slaves to bend us to their rule. They tried, for eleven years they tried. Finally when it had not become worth it for them anymore, they poisoned our planet. Billions of my kind perished. We went ever deeper to escape. Twelve more years we spent down there, surviving on little more than deep-earth worms.’

  Their story was horrible. The Progerians were every bit the monsters I believed them to be. Our paths were similar, except for the winning part. Like them, we also went underground, the Indian Hill bunker being the most famous. But it was still hard to elicit pity for something as ghastly as the creatures in front of me. Ever felt bad for a grub? Yeah, me neither, and I’d adopt a carload of them, even set them up with their own bedroom in my house rather than keep this proximity to the Stryvers.

  “How did you get flight?” From the images Inruk showed me it didn’t even look like they had hit the equivalent of our industrial age. Their “cities” seemed more like huge earthen works.

  ‘Colonists had begun to populate our world. OUR WORLD!’

  Yeah he had pretty much screamed in my brain, I’m surprised the ugly thing didn’t cause an aneurysm in my head.

  With the threat of the Stryvians thought to be completely wiped away the Progerians began to settle the planet. The colonists, however, were not prepared for the onslaught, as legions of starved Stryvians descended upon the many communities. In less than a year they had taken back their world and with it all of the technology left behind by the invaders.

  ‘We did what your kind did and reverse engineered their ships and weapons, adapting them to our use. We went from a civilization living in the shadows to star-faring conquerors.’

  ‘Do not tell it about the worlds we found.’

  I caught images of many planets flitting through its memory, some with no intelligent life, and others with beings that looked surprisingly human. Many of them contained Progerian settlers, though. Those they destroyed with a crazed zeal.

  ‘When our great enemy discovered our revenge they paid us back with a retribution we have as of yet not been able to reciprocate. They did not poison our planet this time, but they had found a way to peel the atmosphere away. No living creature was spared. Our oceans have evaporated and boiled away and nothing, not even the lowly deep-earth worm, has survived. Our planet revolves around the sun, cold, hostile and indifferent to all life. It will most likely never sustain life again. We have battled them long and hard to hold on to our victories, but one by one they have taken them back. Not by conventional means but rather what you call “scorched earth.” They would rather completely destroy a planet than let us have it. Twenty-six planets have now suffered the same fate as ours.’

  To think of my home as barren, devoid of all color except the browns of rock, affected me more than I can express. To never see anything move along its surface was disheartening. Here were two enemies so hell-bent on destroying each other they would take the cosmos down with them. The Stryvians were no better than the Progerians, not now anyway. Once the battle for Earth was decided and we won or the Progs won, the Stryvers would bide their time and strike. Then the process would repeat itself here like it had in so many other places. Was I aligning myself with a demon to beat the devil? They had a ship, a much larger one somewhere. I knew enough that for whatever reason, to complete a buckle a ship had to have a certain mass and contain the means to produce enough energy to propel through it. This ship lacked both.

  “Where are we going?” I asked with dread. This was the time they all decided to go with “mums the word”. For the last hour they’d been chattering up a storm, now I could fucking hear crickets in the distance. I mistakenly thought the ridge in L.A. was the worst the day was going to offer. I now found myself aboard a ship with monsters indescribable, heading towards a much larger ship with more of them. My son was on a planet about to be barraged from the sky and the only chance we had to make it had buckled away to who knows where. Could it get worse? I’m sure it could, I just don’t know how.

  I was pissed the Stryvers weren’t here to help. They were just setting up a mutually assured destruction between the Progerians and us. They’d given us just enough weapons to make a decent showing of a stand. They’d set us up perfectly; with the rail guns and the bomb BT probably figured he had a chance. He got the gangs unified and exposed. All it had done was get a lot of them killed needlessly. The Stryvers knew the nuke was in place and that the Genogerians were going to die either way. And what of Paul? That nuke was an Earth born weapon and he had to have known that facility was empty. Was it possible he was in collusion with these things?

  One thing was for certain: there was no motherfucking way I was staying with them for any extended amount of time while they figured out how to claim the planet. And of what possible good could I be to them?

  Chapter Thirty - Drababan

  Drababan had initially thought about going to Indian Hill. It had been almost entirely vacated when it was once again “safe” on the surface, but there was sure to be at least some maintenance personnel and some officers and crew to keep an eye on things, especially now that there was a very high likelihood that it was once again going to be needed. His next thought was the remote mountains of the Ozarks. He was not concerned that he would not be able to provide for Travis but he felt the boy needed to be around others of his own kind as well. Living in the rugged area with only him as a friend would be to deprive the youngling of a proper upbringing. He knew what he had to do; he was just wondering how he would be accepted.

  The crunch of gravel was loud as the wheels of the Hummer slowly traversed the unpaved road. He pulled up to a modest home shaped much like a barn hewn from logs. He stepped out of the car and then leaned back in to undo Travis’s safety straps on his car seat.

  “Stop right there!” He heard the ratcheting of a bullet into a rifle chamber.

  “May I stand?” Dee called out, still hunched over inside the vehicle.

  “Just let me see your hands when you do so!”

  Dee came out of the car holding the baby.

  “Pop, Pop!” Travis exclaimed.

  Tony, Mike’s dad, immediately put the safety on the rifle and placed it down on the porch as he quickly came down the steps. Travis’s affectionate name for his grandfather was ‘Pop, Pop’. They’d tried to get him to say Poppa, but he’d just always preferred the former and it had stuck.

  “Dad, what’s going on?” Mike’s sister Lyndsey was next out.

  Her father obscured Travis and she didn’t see him when she first stepped out. She gasped when she saw him racing to the beast in the driveway. For a split second she thought he was charging the much larger Genogerian and was about to have his head removed from his body.

  “Ron, get out here!” she screamed.

  Ron, Mike’s brother, had been sleeping but barreled down the stairs in record time, desperately trying to get his head through an arm hole in his shirt. He quickly tossed it to the side when he saw the Genogerian and then his father with Travis in his hands. He was thrilled to see the boy, but his parents were nowhere in sight.

  “What is going on, Drababan? Are you alone?” Ron asked.

  “I do not bring good tidings, sibling of Mike.”

  Dee related everything he knew. He told them the Genogerian uprising was most likely caused by the Progerians and that Paul had sent Tracy to deal with them because Mike had been injured on an emissary mission. Lastly, he let them know Mike had gone to join his wife on the battlefield. All of this was told with a heaviness upon his heart.

  “I fear that they could not have possibly survived against such grievous odds.” His
head dipped down. “Michael made me promise to care for Travis. I would have done so without the oath. I have a depth of love for the youngling that I cannot express in words. When Beth threatened to have him taken away, I ran. I do not know if it was the right thing to do but I felt it was right.”

  “Pop-Pop.” Everyone turned to look at Travis, who was showing his grandfather his muscles.

  “You did the right thing,” Tony said, his eyes shining with the happiness of seeing his grandchild.

  “What now, Drababan?” Ron asked.

  “I am torn. My word is honor-bound to Michael, yet I feel that I must go to his aid should he still need it.

  “A lone Genogerian traveling across the country during a time of war is not that good of a decision,” Ron said.

  “And if the Progerians will soon be here you will most likely be on their most wanted list,” Lyndsey added.

  Tony could see the pain in Drababan’s eyes and was going to do his best to alleviate it. “You made a promise to my son. He would want you to keep it no matter the circumstance. That boy’s entire life has been about escaping dangerous situations. When he was just a little older than Travis, he pushed a screen out of one of the bedroom windows. Crawled his little ass right onto the roof.”

  “You never told me this, Dad!” Lyndsey exclaimed.

  “I never told anyone.” He smiled. “I was watching him while your mother had you two out getting school clothes. I was watching the Red Sox and got a little wrapped up in the game. I should have known something was up by how quiet he had gotten. By the time I figured to go and look in on him, he was halfway down the roofline. I thought my heart was going to burst. I called to him as I started to crawl out the window. He turned to look and lost his footing, toppling over on the roof and rolling off. I almost ran off the roof to go and check. I think I missed the entire staircase on the way back downstairs.”

  Lyndsey had her hands to her mouth.

  “And you know what? He was fine. He’d landed on the damn trampoline we had. He was laughing up a storm when I grabbed him off that thing, like he’d just been on a carnival ride. I think my heart had finally calmed down by the time the three of you got home. I made sure from that point on to never let him out of my sight. He’s been doing stuff like that ever since. Whoever his poor guardian angel is deserves overtime and hazard pay. I’m just thankful he or she is so vigilant. So you see, Drababan, as much as I am concerned for the safety of my son and daughter-in-law I have to believe in my heart that if there is some way for them to survive, he will have been shown that way. You will stay here and watch his son like a Guardian Angel. And as for Mike…he will find his way back here. That’s what I choose to believe.”