Children of the Fifth Sun

by Gareth Worthington

  K’in slipped off the General’s back through the manhole and plopped into the water below. The creature looked up through the opening, his neotenous eyes already beginning to change—to develop. They bored into Kelly’s eyes, sending a shiver through his whole body. Transfixed, Kelly wanted to look away, but he couldn’t.

  “Careful with him!” The professor waved his arms in desperation.

  “Stop whining and get in the goddamn truck! Mr. Graham, close that lid. Tremaine, start the truck.”

  “Yes, sir!” The Shadow Man slung the driver’s side door open and leapt into the cabin. He stepped into the sleeper section and threw Victoria onto the pull down bed before climbing back into the perforated leather driver’s seat. A bizarre instrument cluster of hooded gauges with turned aluminum faces in argent-colored housing stared back at him.

  “Can you drive this thing?” Ms. Nilsson had climbed into the passenger seat beside him.

  “If it’s got wheels, I can drive it—just need to find the fucking key.”

  “It’s voice activated!” bellowed the General from halfway down the trailer ladder. “Truck, initiate! Authorization: FEMA, dash, 751, slash omega. Password: Viracocha!” The truck growled into life, shaking the cabin and trailer. “Let’s move! Get the professor in the truck!”

  Ms. Nilsson leaned out of the cabin. The Professor grabbed at her sleeve and hoisted himself up inside, stepping behind her seat and into the sleeper section with the unconscious Victoria.

  “Go, Mr. Graham!” the General ordered.

  Kelly stepped onto the external stair and grabbed Ms. Nilsson’s arm. His entire weight suddenly pulled at her jacket as he screamed and fell to the floor. Warm blood spattered Ms. Nilsson’s face.

  The General leapt on to Kelly’s crumpled body, making a human shield, pulled out his Beretta and fired blindly. Ms. Nilsson and Tremaine leaned out of the truck and sprayed the garage stairwell with bullets. The ammunition tore through the black clothing of the gunman, puncturing his chest and limbs. The sheer force of the onslaught kept the man in mid-air until the ceasefire allowed his broken body to tumble down the spiral staircase.

  “He won’t be alone—move it!” The General clambered to his feet. Blood pooled around Kelly’s shoulder and torso.

  “Freya, triage, now!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The General hoisted Kelly’s limp body from the floor and into Ms. Nilsson’s waiting arms. She strained under his weight. Kelly groaned in protest. With the General’s help, she quickly dragged Kelly into the sleeper section and laid him awkwardly on the bed beside Victoria.

  “Go, go, go!” The General slammed the passenger door behind him.

  The truck screeched into first gear as the Shadow Man pumped the clutch and shifted the stick. The truck kangarooed forward, throwing everyone against the walls and ceiling. K’in sloshed around inside the trailer.

  “Tremaine, make this fucking thing move!”

  “Yes, sir! Move, you piece of shit!” Tremaine slammed his foot on the accelerator, powering the massive machine onward. It picked up speed, its weight adding to the momentum. Second, third, fourth. The Shadow Man shifted up the gears, revving the engine toward its breaking point before making the change.

  The truck gunned through a small opening at the end of the underground garage and into a long, dark tunnel with roughly hewn rock walls. There was barely enough room for the vehicle to fit. Tremaine feared the wing mirrors would be torn off by a protruding stone, and the small hanging light bulbs that were every three hundred feet would smash into the windshield. He twitched and ducked every time something whipped by his side window. Christ, when does this tunnel end? Were they behind him? Had they made it into the tunnel? He didn’t think so, but it was hard to see.

  “Keep going, Tremaine,” the General ordered. “The tunnel blast doors will shut when we pass through, and those bastards won’t be getting out any time soon.” The General hung in the doorway to the sleeper section, rocking from side to side. “Just keep going. When we get through, you’ll come out onto a dirt road. Follow it to the highway, then make for Vegas.”

  “Yes, sir.” Tremaine fixed his eyes on the dark tunnel, focusing on each dim light bulb as it sailed slowly toward him and then shot past at the last second.

  Kelly groaned, squirming on the floor. Blood was streaming from his open shoulder. Ms. Nilsson tried to hold him still and examine his gunshot wound.

  “Kelly!” she yelled. “You need to stay still. I think the bullet is still lodged, and I need to retrieve it and cauterize the wound. If I don’t do this, you’ll die from blood loss. Do you understand me?”

  Her voice was stern and commanding. He stopped squirming and nodded.

  “Is he going to be all right?” the professor asked.

  “I don’t know. He’s losing a lot of blood. I’ll see what I can do, but he needs a hospital—as does she.” Ms. Nilsson nodded toward the slumped body of Victoria. “I think she smashed her elbows hard. There might be bone damage. Nothing I can do for that.”

  “Morphine?”

  “Maybe, but I need that to remove his bullet. I doubt there will be enough for both.”

  “Give it to her.” Kelly coughed and winced as he tried to prop himself up. His face was pale and sweaty. “Give it to her. She’ll need it. Just dig this thing outta my shoulder and I’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t think ...” started Freya.

  “He’s right. Do it. Triage, Freya. He’ll pass out, but he’ll be fine.” The General’s tone was soft.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “One way to find out, Freya.” Kelly forced a weak smile. “Let’s do this.”

  “Okay.” Freya nodded. She opened the cabinet above his head. The internal fluorescent light flickered on as the doors parted. She scanned the contents. Various first aid items lined the inside—gauze, tape, syringes, needles. There it was—morphine. She grabbed the vial of clear liquid, a syringe, and a needle. Having ripped off the sterile wrapping, she attached the needle to the syringe, pierced the aluminum lid of the vial, and then turned the precariously formed vial–syringe construction upside down. Freya pulled the plunger, sucking liquid into the syringe. The vial gurgled empty. She threw it to one side and pressed the plunger of the syringe gently, forcing liquid into the needle. She grabbed Victoria’s arm, pierced her clammy skin, and pressed the clear liquid into her flesh.

  Victoria groaned but didn’t wake.

  “Done. Now you.”

  “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

  Freya tugged at Kelly’s leather belt.

  Kelly coughed a laugh. “Thinking of distracting me?”

  “No.” Freya continued to remove his belt while answering.

  “You’re going to need something to bite down on.” She tugged hard, releasing the belt from under him, and placed it in Kelly’s mouth. “Bite. Hard.”

  Freya pushed a pair of steel tweezers into the open wound. Kelly let out a muffled scream and then lost consciousness.

  Location: Escape truck, Nevada Desert, USA

  Dark, cold, afraid. Raw emotion and adrenaline coursed through Kelly, keeping him alert. He couldn’t say he was straining to see or hear, but it didn’t feel like his eyes or ears were functioning. It was like his environment was trying to speak with him, pouring information through his pores into his being.

  He sensed others around him, moving slowly. Strange noises came from the flapping holes in their faces, and the constant babel gave him a headache.

  The dim, blue haze barely lit the smooth walls. Water sloshed around his head, swirling, forming miniature eddies and whirlpools. Kelly lifted his head from the water and looked down at the blue-black surface, a rippling mirror. K’in’s reflection stared back at him.

  * * *

  Kelly woke with a start as the truck lurched, swerving around an animal in the road.

  “Sorry!” called Tremaine.

  “You okay?” Ms. Nilsson sat next to Kelly, one hand on
his bandaged shoulder.

  Kelly groaned, straining to lift himself onto his elbows without success. “What happened?”

  “You passed out as I was removing the bullet,” recalled Ms. Nilsson. “It’s been an hour, but we are not far from Las Vegas. You have been twitching and making strange noises in your sleep. Were you dreaming?”

  “I guess so, but ...”

  “Not a normal dream for you?” Victoria’s voice was calm and quiet, though a little slurred under the influence of the morphine. She was propped up against a wall and still sitting on the bed. Both arms were crossed and held close to her chest as if she lay in a coffin. A single sling supported both her broken elbows. She looked pale and clammy.

  “No, not really.” Kelly looked confused and stared off into the distance.

  Freya looked at him and, for the first time, saw real emotion in his face. No quick quip or sarcastic comment—just the pain of losing someone so close. A pain she knew well and had her own way of hiding. She thought about touching his face in reassurance but shook her head. Focus. Being soft was not going to help here.

  “Where’s the General?” Kelly asked. “I have to speak with him.”

  “Up front with Tremaine,” Freya replied.

  Tremaine’s eyes were fixed on the road as he gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles pale. Miles and miles of desert lay before him with little civilization nearby. The roar of the engine and the giant tires tearing up the dirt track were muted by the thick walls and glass of the cabin. It made Kelly feel safer.

  The General was in the passenger seat, silent, staring out of the window, lost in thought. He didn’t even notice Kelly had entered the cabin from the rear and stood behind him, both hands on the back of the seat—partly for a menacing effect and partly because he was too weak to stand on his own.

  “My best friend just died in there, so I think you ought to do some fucking explaining, don’t you? Who the fuck would attack Area 51 and risk a war with the U.S. Government?”

  There was a lasting silence. An eternity with only the drone of the road. But Kelly didn’t push the General. He knew the answer was coming.

  Without turning from the window, the General said, “In 1946, Chinese explorers found a frozen corpse in the northern part of the Asian continent. Our intelligence at the time told us it was not human but humanoid. The People’s Republic of China wasn’t founded until 1949. Prior to that, it was a country ravaged by a century of foreign invasion and civil wars. So it was easy to go in and take what we wanted.”

  “You just waltzed into China and took it?”

  “We were the most powerful nation in the world, Mr. Graham. We thought we could do whatever we wanted. Anyway, the Chinese had already thawed it out by the time we got there. After we acquired it, our operatives constructed a thermal insulating device to try and keep it cool. We put it in an aircraft and transported it back to the U.S. On the way back, we had a technical problem with the aircraft, and it went down in a backwater town.”

  “Wait. Backwater town? Are you talking about Roswell? You gotta be shittin’ me. This just gets better and better.” Kelly laughed out loud.

  “Yes, Mr. Graham. The debris and the supposed alien body found at Roswell was from that transport.”

  “And rather than scare the human population with the knowledge of an earthly creature more advanced than we are, you fueled alien stories.” Kelly already knew the story before it was told.

  “Indeed, Mr. Graham. Think about it. What would be scarier to the people of that time: something home-grown that could hurt them or something from millions of miles away that probably wouldn’t come here again? Plus, aliens are less believable. Urban myth was easier to deal with. We did what was needed. Given our little piece of extraction from China, it wasn’t wise to tell the truth.”

  The General paused, sorting out the facts in his head. He wanted to be sure he told the story accurately and in order.

  “We had been studying the creature’s anatomy, biochemistry, etcetera. However, a frozen corpse is still a frozen corpse. We needed a live specimen, and this wasn’t possible until recently. Modern technology has afforded us the possibility through cloning. K’in is a clone of the original body found by the Chinese.”

  “Okay, but it’s sixty-five years later. Why the hell would the Chinese Government wait until now to attack you?” Kelly asked.

  “I’ll get to that. When we realized the creature was from Earth and not an alien, it scared everyone. We were a paranoid nation anyway, but the thought that the specimen or another like it would fall into international hands worried us. As a result of this, and the existing political issues of the time, President Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947. He reorganized military forces by merging the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into the National Military Establishment and created the U.S. Air Force. The act also created the CIA and the National Security Council, and our organization. We have been working for the last sixty-five years on finding out everything we can about K’in.” The General took a deep breath.

  “Wait, and just who are you?”

  “This is not a Hollywood movie, Mr. Graham. Having a name would simply make us traceable. After President Truman, we were black boxed. No one knew we existed. Our research at Area 51 was hidden even from the normal military personnel on the base. Now, shall I continue? Three weeks ago, we heard from our intelligence operatives in China that we had not recovered everything from them in 1946. It turned out there was also an object in the ice with the body. The Chinese have been studying it for years. This was considered a threat to national security. We couldn’t tell the Chinese we knew they had it, or they would know what happened in 1946. So, we planned another extraction.”

  “That’s what we were doing out there? You were stealing the object, the thing they had?”

  “Not quite. We had already extracted it. The ship you were on was theirs. They were transporting the object. A Special Forces crew had gone in and ... dispatched everyone on board. We were meant to rig it to look like an accident at sea. However, during the incursion, we lost the package overboard. We tried retrieving it but, as a result, lost many good men. That’s when your services were acquired.”

  “Are you fucking insane? You’re telling me I just helped the CIA, or NSA or whatever, steal something really fucking important from the goddamn Chinese? That’s why they attacked us? That’s why Chris is dead? You fuck!”

  “There was a time, Mr. Graham, when I would have defended my country’s actions. But I’m a tired, old man. I carry dozens of medals on my chest, honoring me for my bravery, but they just serve as reminders of how I helped one huge, greedy nation destroy much smaller, weaker ones—all in the name of the American dream.” He sighed. “I feared going into China this time to get the object. If the professor was right, China was in possession of an incredibly powerful thing. But equally, I couldn’t bear my own government having it either. We had to find a way to end the stalemate.”

  “You and the professor, working together on this one? Seems unlikely.”

  “Oh no, it is quite likely. The professor and I had worked together for many years and watched as our government played God and meddled with life. When you’re young, you follow orders—do as you’re told. It’s what you’re trained to do. But when you reach our level, you are the one giving the orders and taking the responsibility. It’s a different ballgame. The professor and I decided we would just even the score if necessary.” The General turned back to the window and stared outward.

  “What did you do?” Kelly asked.

  “We gave the information to the people,” the professor said. He was standing in the sleeper doorway, looking at the floor. Kelly had no idea how long he’d been there.

  “What do you mean, you gave the information to the people?”

  “Humans are arrogant. We believe we are the superior organisms on this planet. We believe this so much that we are arrogant enough to state God, if he exists, made us in his
own image, because of course, what other image would he have? We corrected this arrogance a few hours ago.” The professor had now fixed his gaze on the General.

  “Stop being fucking cryptic! What did you assholes do?”

  “If the object turned out to be what we thought it was, then neither government should have sole possession of it. Instead, it was time for humans to take a step into enlightenment. So, we fed satellite information of our incursion in the South China Sea to a couple of average computer programmers—men whose jobs were to deal with global mapping projects. A couple of innocuous but educated men who would be intrigued enough to investigate a little further without dismissing it. Once this had been done, we were to provide the same men with all of our information on K’in and his species—secret files.” The professor paused.

  “Why didn’t you just do it yourselves? Why involve random people?”

  “Because they are harder to track. Our enemies will have files on all of our operatives and watch our movements much more closely. Using civilians, particularly ones who don’t know what they are doing, is more covert. Plus, if they are captured, they cannot be tortured for any more information—they have none. What’s more, we didn’t want our own government knowing what we were doing.”

  “But this civilian anonymity didn’t go to plan, did it?” Kelly asked.

  “No, it didn’t go according to plan, did it, Benjamin?” continued the professor. “The Chinese must have found out the men had the visuals of the incursion. One of the men was killed in his home. The other died in an Internet café in Los Angeles. It seems the Chinese exposed the latter to a weaponized hemorrhagic fever virus—similar to Ebola. But he still managed to upload the files we gave him to the Internet, using a computer virus to spread the data through every multimedia channel and social network on the web. Now everyone knows.”