Children of the Fifth Sun

by Gareth Worthington

  “Yes, ma’am.” He sighed and turned on his heel. “Please follow me.”

  The group entered the barn. Inside, it looked very much like any other. Bales of hay, an unused tractor, picks, shovels, and other assorted equipment long past having any practical function were strewn about. It even smelled authentic—damp, old, moldy. But she knew it was just a front for Dulce Base.

  Dr. Parnham pulled a small, plastic remote control from his pocket and held it out in front of him. He pressed the only button on its surface. The groaning and familiar whine of machinery seeped from beneath the old floorboards. A square section of the floor depressed a few inches and then slipped apart. A small, metallic elevator rose from within the dark hole, stopping when it had reached its maximum elevation.

  “Your colleagues will need to wait here.” The doctor glanced over his shoulder at the secret service agents. “Don’t worry, gentlemen, she will be perfectly safe.”

  Their deadpan faces told him they were not convinced.

  “I’ll be fine, wait here. Call in that I am going into the base alone.”

  The men gave a single nod. One pulled a cell phone from his suit pocket and walked away, dialing.

  Lucy and the doctor stepped inside the cramped elevator. He pressed his index finger on a small plate on the inside to confirm his identity. It worked. The doors glided shut, and the elevator descended.

  There was an awkward silence. Neither one wanted to speak. She was nervous to be there, and he was uncomfortable with her presence.

  As they descended, Lucy thought about the cover-up. It was so infuriating. Some governmental department even more covert than the CIA had intervened and cleaned up everything. The President had told her the situation needed to be dealt with, but for now, they had to calm the public and ensure peace with the Chinese. He’d said there would be an enquiry into everything, and he’d promised he’d get to the bottom of it all personally. That had been three months ago. Nothing had happened. Perhaps more important things had taken precedence since the clone was dead and the team that had conducted the experiments at Paradise Ranch was disbanded.

  For Lucy, it wasn’t enough. The Colonel had said he had supporters in New Mexico at Dulce Base. In a last visit with General Lloyd before he was dragged off to jail, she’d asked him about Dulce Base. He had paused, staring at her, and then whispered an address in her ear. That was all she needed.

  Lucy turned back to the doctor at her side. “So, is it true?”

  He peered down his nose at her. “Is what true, Madam Secretary?”

  “The rumors about Dulce Base.”

  “And what rumors would those be?”

  She took a breath. She wasn’t one for gossip or urban myth, but her line of questioning was, at least in part, driven by the need to fill the silence. Deep inside, she guessed she also had a morbid curiosity. “The rumors that this place has seven levels, each worse than the last. The first few levels are benign. But on level four, you have human research in paranormal areas. On level five, there are supposed to be captured aliens. And level six, which I heard is called, ‘Nightmare Hall,’ holds the genetic labs with animals and humans that have been altered. I dread to think what’s on level seven.” Lucy trailed off. She half expected a guffaw, a scoff, or even a smirk, but his face was unmoving.

  “Much of what you’ve heard is of course garbage—scaremongering by conspiracy theory nuts. But all rumors have their roots in some fact. We do have multiple levels. And level seven houses our advanced genetic labs, which is where we’re going now.”

  The elevator slid to a halt. The doors parted and Dr. Parnham exited. Lucy followed. They marched down a narrow corridor, lit by widely spaced spotlights in the rock-hewn walls, and disappeared into a small room.

  As the Secretary entered, her line of sight was immediately drawn to four glass tubes standing in the middle of the room. Each was at least three feet wide, more than six feet tall, and filled with rose-colored liquid. Each contained a strange, balled-up form.

  Lucy stepped close to the tubes and peered inside one at a time. Each creature was the same yet different. One was small, about the size of a cat. Its skin was grayish and rudimentary stalks protruded from the back of its head. The gills were pale. Another animal was slightly bigger than, perhaps as large as a toddler. Its limbs were fully formed, but its strange pear-shaped head had no stalks at all or eyes for that matter. The last two creatures were both as large as fully grown men with long head stalks and full, blood-red gills. Vestigial eyes could be made out, but the animals were clearly blind. All of them hung lifelessly in their glass coffins.

  She examined the small plates at the top of each tube—I, II, III, IV. Lucy turned to the doctor. “They’re all dead.”

  “One to four are dead, yes, but not six.”

  “Six?”

  “Yes, six. You discussed seeing them all with the Colonel, correct?”

  She hesitated for a split second, knowing she had to lie. “Of course.”

  “So,” he continued. “Six is at the back in the larger tank. Six is different from the K’in clone. For clone six, we spliced in human DNA. The original idea was to try and speed up the process of communication. Military application was also considered. It was completely separate to the K’in program. General Lloyd and his team thought it had died—this was the Colonel’s pet project.”

  The Secretary narrowed her eyes and studied him. He didn’t seem menacing or evil, just simply a man who followed orders. She turned and peered around the glass tubes. There at the end of the room was another larger tank. She stepped cautiously around the tubes and toward the end of the room until she was a few feet from the tank. “It’s in here?”

  “Yes, but don’t get too close. Six is different. It has behavioral problems.” He moved two paces forward but stopped. “It’s why the military application program was put on hold. Our staff here even gave it a name—Wak. It’s Mayan for six. Given it has issues, Wak seemed appropriate.”

  She gave him a quizzical glance. “Behavioral problems? Issues?”

  The aquarium glass rattled as the massive animal slapped its entire weight on the inside of the transparent prison wall. The creature could only be described as muscular—as if it had received anabolic steroids. The sinews were visible under its translucent, white skin. A huge plume of black gills adorned the six long stalks on its angular, trapezoidal head. Large, fully formed, deep red eyes stared intensely at her—studying her. As it floated there, it repeatedly hit its massive head on the glass. Lightly at first, but as the seconds passed, the hammering became harder and faster as if it were a severely unwell psychiatric patient.

  “Behavioral problems,” the doctor repeated.

  A cold chill passed through Lucy’s body as the blood drained from her limbs. As she turned her head away from the strange animal to steady her nerves, something else caught her eye. Another tank in the very corner of the room. Inside hung another form. She narrowed her eyes to focus, but it was still too far away.

  Slowly the Secretary walked toward the tank. As she drew closer, the form inside became clearer. It was a young woman, hanging naked and motionless in the water. A black oxygen mask covered her mouth and nose, the corrugated hose rising up and out of the water above her head. Long, mousey hair swirled in slow motion in the water around the young woman’s face. The left side of her body was badly burned; charred skin twisted and gnarled along the length of her torso and down her leg. Her left arm, however, was a strange, milky white color. Her fingers appeared almost fetal.

  “Who is this? What happened to her?”

  The doctor picked up a chart and flicked through the pages as he spoke. “She was caught in an explosion a few weeks ago. She was found nearly dead in the wreckage of a large, semi-articulated truck just outside Las Vegas. She had third-degree burns on one side of her body and had lost her left arm from below the elbow.”

  “What is she doing here? Why isn’t she in a normal hospital?”

  “The wre
ckage was caused by a Chinese attack helicopter. She was picked up by our military.”

  “She’s connected with the Chinese attack?”

  “We believe she was part of General Lloyd’s original team. However, we have been unable to identify her. Her limbs were so badly burned we couldn’t identify from fingerprints, and half her face was mangled. All we found was part of a driver’s license in her pocket. She’s not a U.S. citizen, that’s for sure. All we know is her name is Victoria.”

  “And you used your techniques here to grow her a new limb?” Lucy studied the woman’s grotesque arm.

  “Yes. We applied our learnings from the cloned creatures. It was a successful human-creature hybrid and the best place to start.”

  “She’s growing a creature’s arm?”

  “Kind of. We aren’t sure how this will turn out.”

  “You aren’t sure?” Lucy repeated.

  “There are effects. Side effects.”

  “Side effects?”

  The thumping on the inside of Wak’s tank became louder—loud enough to draw the Secretary’s attention. The animal had increased the ferocity of its head-banging onslaught. A long, jagged hairline crack squealed its way through the glass.

  A thud in the woman’s tank pulled Lucy’s gaze back to the aquarium in front of her. The woman inside was convulsing, her limbs flailing and knocking into the tank wall.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Like I said—side effects. We used tissue from Wak to grow her new limb, but it seems she’s connected to it now.” His voice trailed off.

  The woman’s juddering ceased, leaving her once again to hang seemingly lifeless in the water. Lucy moved closer and peered inside, trying to see under the swathe of hair that covered Victoria’s face. Closer still. The hair glided to the side, revealing Victoria’s now open eyes. They were crimson—no iris, no sclera, no visible pupil, just crimson—and boring a cold stare deep into the Secretary.

  “This can’t be good,” Lucy said under her breath.

  “No, Madam Secretary. It certainly is not.”

  Location: Dulce Base, New Mexico, USA — One Year Later

  The drone of the internal alarm was deafening. On. Off. On. Off. It wailed like an injured child into the thick smog that quickly filled the facility. Overhead lights flickered and fizzed while electrical cables torn from their fixtures sparked and crackled.

  Freya hoisted her head from the cold floor, her skull still ringing inside. Her eyes stung from the acrid smoke, and her breathing was labored. She knew she couldn’t stay where she was. Her attacker was still in the room with her—somewhere.

  With a grunt, Freya shoved herself upward and supported her weight on her one good ankle—the other was badly twisted, maybe even broken. Blindly, she limped forward, her arms outstretched to feel for a wall. She’d lost her Beretta and didn’t have time to search the floor for it. As she moved, her knees clanged into the metal frame of the bed. Shit. That hurt.

  She tried to focus on the task at hand rather than on her burning ankle and now throbbing knee. Behind her, the smoke was a lighter gray, and the light from the tank illuminated the thick atmosphere. That meant she was dead center in the room. If she circumnavigated the bed, the door would be ten feet in front. Using one hand to guide her around the cot and the other to feel out in front, Freya hobbled on.

  A scuffle in the corner.

  Freya froze. Her heart beat fiercely in her chest. Freya squinted, hoping to see something—a shape, anything—but there was nothing. Breathing out her fear and controlling her nerves, Freya hopped forward again. Almost there. Her fingers left the safety of the bed frame. Ten feet to go.

  A clang—this time from the opposite side of the room.

  Shit. Have to dash for it. Freya clenched her jaw, bracing for the pain of trying to run on her damaged ankle.

  Whump.

  Before she could take another step, Freya was thrown clear over the bed. She smashed into the floor and slid to the back of the room amongst the illuminated smog. Before she could regain her composure, Freya was lifted by the neck of her shirt and thrust against the cold aquarium. Her head thumped on the glass, sending a ripple of sound through the water inside.

  From within the dense smoke, the sickly, drawn face of a woman appeared. The sunken, crimson eyes, hidden behind a mass of limp, blonde hair, bored a stare into Freya’s soul. The woman’s teeth were bared. The animal instinct within her giving only one command—kill.

  Freya squirmed against the vice-like hold. As she struggled to free herself, a menacing shadow entered her peripheral vision.

  Wak swam up from within the aquarium to the glass and then slowly sank down to Freya’s level. It gazed outward, fixed on the women. A powerful seizure gripped the animal, forcing its head to turn to the side, and its eyes to clamp shut. It lasted a few seconds before letting loose its painful hold. The creature then banged its head on the tank’s glass—over and over.

  “Victoria—” Freya’s sentence was strangled off by one of the woman’s strangely powerful hands.

  A brief, controlled explosion blew in the door to the room. It crashed and rattled about the floor. Behind the smoke, Freya heard the voice of a soldier calling her name.

  “Ms. Nilsson, are you in there? Are you okay?”

  Victoria hissed in anger and tightened her grip on Freya’s throat, squeezing out her last gasp of air.

  “Ms. Nilsson!”

  Freya kicked in the air, desperately writhing as her body fought asphyxiation and lungs screamed for oxygen. Then, there was only darkness—peaceful, quiet, eternal.

  Location: Lima, Peru, South America

  Heavy clouds emptied their burden upon the small, grassy knoll. The raindrops were large and made slapping sounds as they fell on the already-sodden soil. Beneath the veil of water, three figures stood hunched around a rectangular hole. Each was dressed in black or gray, which appeared black with the wetness of the rain. The lead figure was holding an umbrella and reading in Spanish from a small book. The other two had not sought the shelter of umbrellas, instead allowing the rain to envelop them.

  Kelly peered out from under the mat of hair covering his face. The water that filled his ears and the frequent rumbling of thunder overhead meant he rarely heard what the priest was saying. There wasn’t much the holy man could say that would offer any kind of comfort anyway. The fact that only he and Minya, who had flown in all the way from Siberia, were at the service spoke volumes. Alejandro had always been a loner.

  In the last twelve months, the old man had taken to writing relatively frequently to Kelly. He never wrote about anything meaningful like Izel, or Carmen, or Chris, or even about K’in and the ordeal in Siberia. No, instead, it was about the old man’s latest academic work—translations and discoveries of some sort.

  Kelly had rented a post office box that only a few people knew about in a nearby village and had never expected it to be used, especially not by Alejandro. It had been two months before Kelly had bothered to check the box. There had been four letters from the old man inside. At first, Kelly had not known what to make of them. He wrote back, more out of a sense of duty than anything—duty to his dead wife and daughter and duty to his brother-in-law. But as the letters flowed, the underlying reason for Alexandro’s contact became clearer. The old man had stage four cancer and wasn’t sure how much time he had left. From the tone of the letters, Kelly got the feeling Alejandro, despite himself, saw his ex-son-in-law as his only remaining family. In a strange way, Kelly felt the same.

  Through the cloak of rain, he stared across at Minya. Minya, the only friend of Alejandro whom Kelly had ever met. Even that meeting had been brief—a few hours in a remote part of Siberia more than a year ago.

  The woman stood silently, her hair, now dyed auburn, dripping wet. Her almond-shaped eyes were closed in reverence. She was a difficult woman to read—emotionless. Her facial expression was flat and unmoving. Perhaps she didn’t speak Spanish and therefore couldn’t
understand the prayers. Perhaps she simply required no comfort. Either way, the scene was quite uncomfortable, a flash into Kelly’s own future, reminiscent of some dark Charles Dickens novel. He imagined his own funeral. No family. No friends. No one to mourn.

  The priest finished his speech, closed the book, and strolled over to Minya. He spoke quietly to her before moving toward Kelly. Placing a hand on Kelly’s shoulder, he mumbled something inaudible and then sauntered off in the direction of a little church shrouded in a curtain of rain.

  Kelly sighed. Alejandro was gone—his last tie to the D’Souza family. He grunted away the fear of having to truly start again. The rain was still smacking the ground around him.

  He focused on Minya, who was now walking in a tight circle. She held an umbrella in one hand, had a cell phone sandwiched between her right ear and right shoulder, and a finger wedged into her left ear to block out the ambient noise. Kelly frowned. He hadn’t heard a phone ring or noticed where she’d pulled an umbrella from. Then again, he had been lost in his own thoughts. He watched her nodding over and over.

  He meandered his way back to the worn out, blue Toyota pickup, yanked open the door, climbed in, and shut it behind him. Kelly shivered and shook off the rain, his wet hair flailing about.

  For more than a minute, he sat in a motionless daze. The rain slid down the windshield, obscuring the outside world from him. Inside the truck, he was safe and blocked off from the pain of life. He cursed himself for thinking about it again. He needed to go see a shaman. It had been more than a week since his last session. He needed the escape.

  The engine of the truck growled into life as Kelly turned the key in the ignition. He shifted the stick and pressed the loose accelerator. The gears groaned as the wet tires struggled to gain traction on the drenched mud. Eventually, they found some grip and pushed the vehicle forward.

  Minya came to stand in the deep, wet tracks Kelly’s truck had dug just seconds earlier, watching it speed off into the distance. She frantically waved the cell phone aloft in her right hand. Yebat. He didn’t see her. She put the phone back to her ear. “He left. Ya ne znayu. Da, da, Charasho. I will try and follow him.”