by Leia Stone
Then I put in a call to Tatum, checking up on her and her family. She’d started at the academy and was getting her butt kicked as expected. She and Emilia had become fast friends and formed a group to go into the Dream Wars with. She was overall settling in well, but missed being my waker, and had asked advice on a few things. She had become like a little sister to me, so I was more than happy to give her some pointers.
I also spoke with her mom and told her I wanted to keep Annie on my staff, even if I wasn’t using her right now. I made a shitload of money, so the least I could do was help out a friend. She’d been overcome with gratitude, and said Annie was ready whenever I was.
Damien and Jeremy worked into the night, and nearly all of the next day until Brisk and Josephine arrived. Now we each had a universal plasma brick controller, and a prototype suit with tubing. I think we were all a little skeptical and scared of what experimenting could do to us, but I guess there had to be sacrifices in science. Hopefully, not ones that sliced my body into a hundred pieces.
Now, we all sat around the dinner table eating curry that Ronnie and Mr. Hansen had cooked up.
I took a bite of the spicy yellow broth and moaned. “This is amazing. What’s that sweet tangy flavor?”
Ronnie and Mr. Hansen shared a look. “Pineapple,” she said proudly.
It was yummy. Jeremy was eating mac and cheese with french fries. He wasn’t a fan of flavor.
“So, what took you guys so long?” I asked Brisk and Josephine. She was supposed to have been back the day before but ran into some kind of trouble.
The caramel-skinned beauty just shook her head, causing her curly hair to move about her shoulders. “Some thugs in Mexico tried to jump me on the plane. They were trying to catch a free flight out.”
I dropped my spoon. “Are you okay? What happened?”
She shrugged. “I killed one of them in the scuffle, so I had to stay back for paperwork. By the time I wrapped up with the federales, I just told the pilot I would stay for the flight to Japan and meet up with Brisk.”
Holy hell, she was so badass. A former soldier, now in her forties, who was only bothered by all the paperwork after she killed a man.
“I’m glad you’re okay.” Mr. Hansen brushed his hand along her arm.
Ronnie and I met each other’s gaze across the table and grinned. There was totally something romantic between them.
“I missed you. Damien doesn’t make my hot chocolate how I like it,” Jeremy told the table.
Josephine beamed ear to ear. “That’s because I put extra love into it.” She reached across and patted his shoulder, but he shrugged away from her touch.
“Did you miss me, Ronnie?” Brisk asked, giving her a sweet smile.
She rolled her eyes. “As much as I missed Josephine.”
Brisk just smiled before shoveling more food into his mouth, undeterred by Ronnie’s put-down.
Reaching across the table for his water glass, Damien took a sip and then cleared his throat, getting right down to business. “All right, tonight when we go to sleep, we’ll be projected into the Dream Wars. When we get there, we’ll pair up and put each other’s blood into the tubing of our partner’s suit.”
“Can we do it before?” Ronnie asked.
“No!” Jeremy said, panicked. “My calculations show that’s too risky.”
Ronnie’s eyes widened. “Okay….”
Damien nodded. “We want to minimize variables, so we’re going to do the blood exchange once we’re in.”
“I want to be partnered with Josephine.” Jeremy stated, staring at his mac and cheese.
Damien looked worried for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, bud.”
“I’m with Ronnie,” Brisk said, making more than one of us to grin as she huffed.
“Maxine?” Nox asked.
She nodded, giving him a sweet smile.
There were three of us left. That was going to leave someone alone.
“I’m a tough brute. I’ll be fine on my own,” Mr. Hansen affirmed, looking at Damien and me.
I guess it was settled. I was partnered with Damien.
He nodded. “Okay, so when we get out of the Dream Wars, hopefully together with our partners, call Francisco. He’ll pick you up in the jet. He knows to bring everyone to the new loft in Vancouver.”
Francisco was Damien’s private pilot. Always handy to have around, especially since we’ve been showing up all across the planet lately.
We finished the rest of our dinner in reverent silence. It had been three weeks since we’d given the bands to a large chunk of humanity. By our scientists’ calculations, most of the ghouls were officially starving. That thought brought a smile to my lips.
I am in control, I project peace, I give protection, I harness strength.
The end to the ghouls’ time on our planet had arrived. I could feel it in my gut.
That night, I dropped into the Dream Wars and immediately spun around.
Shit! I popped a short rapid burst of gunfire as the grunt lunged for me. The plasma shield on my wrist shot up just in time for him to crash into it and bounce off, landing on his ass. He was holding his head, whining.
The data dump. I scanned over his prone form. It was sickly looking, skin and bones, and now that he was lying on his side, I could see up his… skin skirt. Grunts didn’t have legs, just floated over the ground, and up his flappy skin skirt were his organs. Bile rose in my throat. Oh my God. I’d never seen one so close, at that angle, for that long before. They were absolutely revolting.
Damien dropped in next to me and did a 360 spin, something we all did when arriving in the Dream Wars. Upon seeing the ghoul cowering on the floor, he frowned. “Is it dying?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I hope so.”
I’d brought us in near the big mountain range. There were over twenty ranges like this in the Dream Wars, huge green glowing mountains with weird rope-like plants that moved. It was usually a good place to drop in, a safe place, but I could see some grunts, and maybe even a sentry in the distance.
“Let’s set up camp,” Damien suggested, then lowered his plasma brick to the ground just as the rest of our team, sans Maxine, dropped in.
The grunt just laid there, panting, holding his head and giving us a view of all of his internal organs. I was sick of looking at him, and even though I hated these flesh eaters with every ounce of my soul, I couldn’t stand suffering of any form. I put a bullet between his eyes, and then he moved no more. Master Aki would be proud.
“Aw, getting soft on us?” Nox purred behind me as he set up his brick to align with our circle. About a dozen ghouls were running toward us, plus two sentries, and it didn’t bother me one bit. I wasn’t afraid of them anymore. Not like I used to be.
I chuckled. “Not on your life. I’ll kill all of these bastards without a second thought.”
Nox grinned and lit his blowtorch. Walking over to the dead grunt, he touched the tip of the flame to the skin of the dead alien. Within seconds, the body of the deceased creature burst into flames, sending a pungent odor of death throughout the area.
“Do you have to light everything on fire?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Just sending a message to his homies.”
The ‘homies’ had arrived. And before Maxine, which was bad news. She’d drop right into the thick of it. Damien, Nox, Brisk and I stepped out of the plasma circle in unison as Damien used the button on his remote to activate the controller. This effectively locked Jeremy, Mr. Hansen, Ronnie and Josephine inside of our safe dome.
“It worked,” Damien exclaimed, and then we were shooting. I wasn’t about to spend all night cowering in that damn dome, while these bastards waited for Maxine to drop in unaware.
The first line of grunts went down quickly, but the others were being weird, falling back and waiting for the sentry.
“What are they doing?” I asked Brisk. The dumbasses usually plowed ahead to their death, but now they looked to be communicating with the se
ntry. He stood tall and lean, having clearly lost a ton of muscle mass, which meant his steel armor had a bunch of gaps in it. It hung loosely on his thick frame.
Before Brisk could respond, the ground started shaking. Damien snaked an arm out and caught hold of my bicep to steady me as the dirt beneath us trembled slightly. What the hell? Then the shaking stopped. Since when did the Dream Wars get earthquakes?
The sentry looked fearful for a split second—I saw it in his eyes and the slack gaping mouth. Then it was staring at me. Even from fifty feet away, his eyes were pinned right on me, and my heart picked up a little. He raised his hand, one long clawed finger pointing right at me. “Kit Steele,” he said, in the deepest tone I’d ever heard.
My legs went weak as fear rushed through me. They can speak? They fucking speak English, and it knows my name? He turned to the grunt nearest him and grabbed him by the shoulders, then opened his mouth wide and engulfed the grunt’s upper half in one clean bite. The lower half of the grunt’s body fell to the ground in a heap of blood and organs.
I’m going to be sick.
“Uhh, let’s get in the dome,” Damien said beside me.
Brisk swallowed hard. “What the fuck just happened?”
“We’re not leaving Maxine to drop in on this shit,” Nox stated, pointing his gun right at the cannibal sentry.
“Kit Steele,” a deep voice said from somewhere far behind me.
I spun, my trigger finger ready to fire away. I was in a living nightmare; there was nothing scarier than hearing a human-eating alien say your name aloud.
Peering toward where I’d heard the voice, I could see Jeremy was in the dome, headphones on and blindfold across his eyes. Behind the dome, about thirty feet, was another sentry, his face mask off and his head cocked to the side. In his arms was a skinny, starved grunt. When he knew I was watching, he opened his terrifying mouth and wrapped his several sets of teeth around the body, taking half of it off in one swallow.
I felt dizzy. What in God’s name is happening?
“They’re showing us that they’ll survive. No matter what, they will survive,” Nox said ominously.
Finally our redheaded beauty queen dropped in and spun around just in time to see the two sentries dining on the half-starved grunts.
She started shooting at them. Maxine was a ‘shoot first, think, or ask questions later’ kind of person. Which was probably the best way to go, honestly. “What the hell?” she said afterwards, perplexed.
With one click, Damien lowered the plasma shield and then grabbed my upper arm, dragging me inside just as Nox did the same to Maxine.
I didn’t realize the damn sentry in front of us had a gun until he shot at the freshly lowered dome, hitting Maxine right in the shoulder. “No!” I shouted, too late.
Her body blew backward with the force of the projectile and nearly knocked me over as she crashed into me. I stumbled forward with her half in my arms, half in Nox’s, laying her on the ground inside of our circle.
Damien raised the plasma dome around us before any more bullets could get through, but the damage was already done.
Falling to my knees, I ripped Maxine’s black leather jacket off to see that she was wearing her Kevlar tank top, but the bullet had hit just a quarter of an inch outside the safety of the vest.
God dammit!
“Why did you wear the tank top!” I shouted as my hands shook with adrenaline.
Maxine was staring at the sky, eyes wide in shock. “It makes my cleavage pop,” she declared.
I laughed, which turned to tears. I was pressing against her wound, trying to stem the flow, but the blood was coming so fast. Are there arteries in the shoulder? How high do the lungs go?
Suddenly Ronnie was there, removing my hands and replacing them with her own gauze-laden ones.
“Hey, sugar plum. You got a little gun bite, didn’t you?” Ronnie said to our most treasured member of the team. It was true—ask any of us and Maxine was the favorite. You couldn’t help but love the shit out of her.
“Flesh-eating asshat,” Maxine mumbled, gaze flicking over to the sentry. Right before my eyes, she was growing paler.
Brisk was tearing into Ronnie’s med bag, handing her things she asked for as we all stood around in shock. She’d been hit before—we all had—but it usually didn’t bleed this bad. The last time she got hit was in her leg, and it stayed there until we woke up. No big deal.
‘Why is she bleeding so bad?’ I sent mentally to Ronnie.
She stiffened a moment at the mental invasion, then glanced back at me. ‘Torn brachial artery. She’ll bleed out if I can’t repair it.’
I didn’t know what to say. For once, I was speechless.
I slipped my hand in Maxine’s just as Nox started to stroke her long red hair. He began to hum, an ancient Native American tune, and Maxine looked up at him with adoring eyes.
“I’ve had a crush on you since that first day at the academy,” she confessed to him, to all of us.
That was news to me. She’d always been sweet to him, but I just took it as her regular Maxine charm.
He stopped singing, face frozen looking down at her.
“But you’re not the kind of guy who… loves a girl like me,” she declared.
His face crumbled into agony. “Oh, Maxine. Why would you think that? You’re completely lovable.”
I couldn’t breathe. I think panic was wrapping around me. Why are they talking like they aren’t going to have tomorrow?
Maxine winced as Ronnie put a shot of something into her arm, and started digging around, shouting off orders to Brisk.
Maxine’s teeth started to chatter. “I’m broken, Nox. You know it and I know it. We all know it. Sometimes I wonder if I’m even capable of love,” she muttered to the stars.
I was going to pass out. She was saying goodbye. Why would she do that?
“Maxine!” I smacked her leg lightly. “How can you say that? First kisses, and dolphins, and chocolate, and all that, remember? You’re so full of life and love. Nothing about you is broken.”
She looked down at me, and I saw a haunted expression cross her face. “Oh, Kit. You’re so strong. Nothing fazes you.” She became a little breathless as she continued. “Every night that we come into this godforsaken place, I want to die inside, and being angry is the only thing keeping me from being swallowed into the dark black abyss.”
Tears were freely rolling down my cheeks now. I didn’t know what to say. I knew she had mental health issues, but she dealt with them so well on the outside that I forgot sometimes how much it must eat her up inside.
Suddenly a spurt of crimson splattered across the space, and I shrieked as Maxine’s eyes rolled back in her head and she lost consciousness.
Ronnie swore and feverishly threw gauze after blood-soaked gauze on the ground.
“Should I wake us up somehow?” I asked her. Maybe I could have Master Aki do something, anything.
She just shook her head. “No guarantee we’ll wake up together, and you don’t want her waking up alone. She’ll bleed out.”
Oh God. I feel sick. Passing out in the Dream Wars made you more susceptible to a coma. What if she laid there for weeks and never woke? Only to be eaten by ghouls when the plasma bricks finally ran out of battery? Or she’d die of thirst and starvation if we couldn’t find her the next night we dropped in.
“She’ll be okay. Let me do my thing,” Ronnie snapped at me, as Brisk handed her a suture line.
Damien rested a hand on my shoulder then and I looked up. He pointed to something beyond the plasma shield, and I spun just in time to see Dawn lowering from the sky, and spitting fire onto the leftover ghouls that lingered about. The remaining two sentries had been feeding off their own people, but upon seeing Dawn spit fire onto the pile of bodies, they ran.
Sentries running away… that didn’t happen.
We’d finally gotten the upper hand. In their weakened, starved state, they had grown fearful. Thank God.
�
�I’m so glad you’re okay,’ I told her mentally from the safety of the plasma dome. I wouldn’t leave Maxine’s side.
Dawn walked toward me in her majestic and graceful way, lowering her head to look at Maxine on the ground.
‘I’m sorry for your bleeding human,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’ I hadn’t seen her in a while, and it was good to know she wasn’t hurt.
Dawn looked toward the large mountain with wild colored ropes draping off it. ‘Dawn must warn Kit of great terror in future.’
I almost didn’t want to respond to her. I wasn’t sure what more I could take on this night, but my survival instinct had kicked in. ‘What’s wrong?’
Again my feathered friend looked at the mountain. ‘The mountains are waking up, and when they do, they’ll be hungry.’
My eyes widened as bile lurched into my throat. I had to swallow it down in order to speak.
“What?” I said aloud. Did she just say the freaking mountains are waking up and they’re … hungry?
‘Is Kit upset?’ She stepped closer, kindness showing in her eyes.
‘Yes, Kit is upset, but not at you. Just try to explain what you’re thinking. How can mountains wake up?’
Maxine was bleeding out and Dawn was talking nonsense. I was trying and failing to keep my grip on reality.
‘You call tall ones ghouls, yes?’ she asked.
I nodded. ‘All the aliens on this planet that eat humans are ghouls to us, yes.’
Her eyes saddened, suddenly darker. ‘Mountain is sleeping ghoul. Wakes up every twenty Earth cycles to eat.’
I was sure I was going to black out. A wave of darkness passed before my vision.
I was almost too scared to ask. ‘What… what do they eat?’
‘Meat. They eat human, ghoul, Galadria—they don’t care. Eat one hundred fifty humans a day for a year, and then go back to sleep.’
Oh fuck me.
Four
After Dawn dropped the giant sleeping ghoul bomb on me, she said she had to go help a friend and left.