Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  SEVENTY-NINE

  Leon took another small step with the assistance of Rainbow Eyes and halted.

  Disturbing sounds were coming from the theater they’d just left. It didn’t sound like digestive upset from a bunch of Umbrage eating their last meal. Leon and Rainbow Eyes stared at one another. And both switched into warrior mode in the same second.

  Leon moved like a man who’d forgotten he was wounded and in tremendous pain. But then, he was no longer Leon, the man. He was Leon, something more akin to Sergeant Slaughter.

  ***

  A crackling of noise coming from in front of them. Like poor reception on the radio. Just more forceful. More insistent. The static electricity discharging, like the fingers of lightning inside a Tesla bulb, making Rainbow Eyes’ scales stand on end. Flickering blue light pulsated with the omnidirectional tendrils of lightning throughout the old theater, where the only evidence of Jacko’s prior presence was the abandoned board game on the floor. The positive ions spiking to where no amount of air brought any relief to the lungs.

  Everyone focused on the source of the strobing effect.

  “What the hell is that?” Leon asked. As a shape slowly took form.

  “A transdimensional lifeform,” Rainbow Eyes explained. “Summoned by Jacko.”

  Leon noticed the rainbow shone brighter in his eyes whenever Rainbow Eyes was reading a situation psychically. “You mean all we achieved by killing that guy was opening ourselves up to transdimensional warfare?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Leon nodded. “Cool. Maybe Natty can teach me how to be in multiple places at once like Laney. I’d love to add this to my resume, just that I’m a bit preoccupied with more down-to-earth warfare right now. And then there’s that whole Space Cowboys thing—that sounds very cool by the way. Yeah, I figure I need at least three of me, no make that four. Dying to go fight aliens here on Earth too. Please tell me we have a few of those.”

  “We do.” Rainbow Eyes kept his eyes on their intruder as he dialogued with Leon. “I’m sure Natty can accommodate you. Now if you wouldn’t mind handing this one over to me for now. I’m the only one currently qualified to tackle a transdimensional entity.”

  “Really? Well then, let the auditions begin for my Space Cowboys unit. What, you didn’t think I was going to let you in just because you have visions, did you?”

  Rainbow Eyes grimaced at him. It wasn’t easy. His face wasn’t exactly designed to reproduce human emotions all that well. “Get out, all of you! I got this!” he screamed at everyone in the room, standing frozen and mesmerized, Umbrage and humans alike.

  The demon decided not to be so accommodating as to give the others the time to leave. He levitated off the ground and spun about on himself, his staff spewing blue electricity. He managed to take out a few of the Umbrage, the ones with the slower reflexes who didn’t duck out of the way in time. Which was saying a lot, because it was hard to beat an Umbrage for ducking out of the way.

  Rainbow Eyes had already vaulted into the air before the alien was finished his sweep. The warrior had to be at least twelve feet tall. It was next to impossible to tell if that was body armoring he was wearing, or if it was part of his body. But he was as tangible as any ghost, only with a lot more aptitude for stirring things up in this dimension.

  Rainbow Eyes showed Leon visions of earlier. Of the demon standing beside Jacko, by his side, for years now, during Jacko’s summoning ceremonies. One of which his men got a taste of that fateful night during the start of their nano war games. The transdimensional entity waiting all this time to be summoned. But Jacko had never called him. Not till now. Saving the best for last.

  Leon was impressed by Rainbow Eyes’ ability to multitask, feeding him context while fighting off what was clearly a seasoned warrior, whatever dimension he hailed from. It took one to know one and Leon recognized whoever this guy was, he was no fool.

  Rainbow Eyes merged his body with the warrior’s. Hanging suspended in him. Discharging pulses of energy of his own that flashed across the color spectrum. Each time he did so the warrior disappeared, losing his connection to this dimension. By the third colored light emitted from Rainbow Eyes, the warrior drove a sword whose blade flowed like the cresting waves of an ocean on each side through him. The crests of those waves were formed by pulsing plasma barely contained by the magnetic field of the sword itself.

  Rainbow Eyes dropped to the ground, bleeding from his sternum. Heaving. His lungs burning and hot. Leon could feel them. Apparently Rainbow Eyes figured he needed to know what was going on with him. Several of the Umbrage tried to jump into the fight before he could finish healing. Rainbow Eyes knocked them out of harm’s way with a telekinetic sweep of his hand. They landed nearly as hard as if the warrior had smacked them. Not a bad display for someone mortally wounded, Leon thought.

  The warrior pounced Rainbow Eyes before he could finish getting back up. Ripped his heart out and held it up with a battle cry in a sign of victory and intimidation to the other warriors.

  A whistling sound from behind him. Taunting.

  The transdimensional warrior turned in time to witness Rainbow Eyes healing rapidly. The alien commando was clearly spooked by what he saw.

  Rainbow Eyes held out his hand to him and sucked the ghostly entity into the palm of his hand, like recalling a genie to its bottle. He made a fist, and then released the ball of ectoplasm into the air. The bolus crackled with electricity and pulsed with light, like some sun not yet quite finished collapsing on itself into a black hole.

  The lightning strikes coming from it increased in intensity, like one of those Tesla balls as the thing fought its way back into this world.

  Leon turned away from the action at the sight of two Blue Umbrage sauntering into the old theater whose crimson seats would have done well to mask human blood splatter, just not the blood spill of Umbrage and transdimensional beings. Those stains glowed green and purple respectively. Female Umbrage! Holy shit! The fact that we haven’t seen them before can’t mean anything good.

  The interdimensional warrior regained his shape.

  The female Umbrage, distancing themselves strategically from one another, fired lasers from their eyes at it. When that didn’t do the trick, broader energy beams from their upheld palms. The demon disappeared again. When he materialized less than a half second later, the females hit him with a still broader beam of energy from the center of their chest.

  This time the demon stayed gone for a bit longer.

  But rematerialize he did. Groggy and disoriented. And for now, blinded.

  Rainbow Eyes turned to the females and hissed. “I’ve got this. Stand down.”

  The females hissed back, pushing against his psychic energy like a boulder that had landed on their heads. Finally they gasped and backed off. Instead they provided cover so the males could exit the room. Tossing them out with their two hands when they weren’t moving fast enough. When the warrior fired on the males scurrying to safety, he couldn’t get past the energy shields of the females. So he tried to take a chunk out of them with the electricity whip he wielded, getting nowhere fast. Just depleting himself.

  Rainbow Eyes had made use of the time, psychically reading his enemy. Getting into his head. Part of why the warrior was pressing his palm against his forehead, crying out in pain despite his effort to muffle the sounds.

  “Behold,” Rainbow Eyes said. Some world started materializing about the warrior. Evidently he recognized it. It kept expanding like a holographic projector warming up and not quite at capacity yet to fill the stadium. “I’ve isolated your wavelength,” Rainbow Eyes said. “Now I have access to your world. Stay here another second and I’ll raze it to the ground.”

  The enemy, unimpressed by verbal threats, pushed against that same boulder of psychic energy Rainbow Eyes had used on the females, doing far better with it. Lifting his staff to pierce Rainbow Eyes in the heart, if he ever made it that far.

  Rainbow Eyes, with no other option left him
, delivered on his promise. His race of warriors battling against alien invaders of their own on his home planet, and losing, found themselves disintegrating as Rainbow Eyes aimed the lasers from his eyes at them.

  The female Umbrage gasped, then smiled and nodded, impressed.

  When the alien refused to be as easily dazzled by the deaths of a few of his brethren, Rainbow Eyes zoomed the picture out. He crossed his eyes and focused the two lasers at a point on the map. The energy ball expanded until it wiped out the entire continent.

  That got the alien’s attention.

  The female Umbrage choked and stepped back at the display of power. But they quickly regrouped. Smiled. And nodded.

  The loss of such a colossal landmass in a single stroke took the last of the fight out of the alien. He kneeled before Rainbow Eyes in a show of respect, gripping his staff. “Please, I had hoped to claim this world for my people. A place to retreat to. We’re losing that war against a superior enemy. Save our world.” His strange voice, as if he was speaking underwater, was clearly being translated by Rainbow Eyes for the benefit of everyone in the room.

  “Give me a second to read them as I read you. I need to know who the good guys are in this scenario.”

  The alien’s reaction was not immediate. Clearly waiting for the translation at his end. But he nodded gratefully. The time for the translation was enough for Rainbow Eyes to complete his psychic reading of the enemies of his enemy. Again with the multitasking, Leon thought.

  “As you wish,” Rainbow Eyes said. He zoomed the picture out further, exposing the planet, rotating it before the alien’s eyes, showing the eradication of the vermin infesting his world. A kind of crab-like life-form that was all exo-skeleton. Of which there were many varieties of “crab.” The audience had taken in that much earlier when the hologram was focused on just one battlefield.

  Rainbow Eyes zoomed out the picture further to show the alien ships in orbit. And disintegrated them.

  The female Umbrage mouths were actually hanging open. Leon didn’t get the impression that it was particularly easy to impress them.

  “It is done,” Rainbow Eyes said.

  “But how?”

  “The monsters were of your own making. The amount of energy your higher dimensional bodies can handle without being blown asunder is easily redirected in the absence of the rituals you enacted once to cleanse your minds. Ironically, you as a member of the warrior class, are closer to those higher spiritual vibrations now. Hence your ability to wield the staff of truth. As such, it falls upon you to be the shamans for your people.”

  The warrior bowed repeatedly. “We are forever at your service. Call on us anytime.” He lingered just long enough to lock eyes with Rainbow Eyes. Though it was doubtful he could see much through his tears. And then he disappeared.

  The females had been driven into heat by Rainbow Eyes’ display. They purred like kittens and stroked themselves. “Not now, ladies,” he said.

  Cassandra and Cronos were walking in, in time to hear the “Not now, ladies.”

  Cronos said, “Hey, I’m okay with sloppy seconds, or femme fatale firsts as the case may be.”

  The Blues bandied him aside, throwing him across the room with a telekinetic wave of their hand, as they stormed out of the room, fuming. Leon got the impression as eager as they were to improve the germline with their own breeding program, they were even more eager to detox from the presence of being so close to so many “vile” creatures. In that regard, they shared something in common with Cassandra, who was no less famous for her alone time.

  Cassandra just shook her head at Cronos trying to pull himself up from the floor. “Idiot.”

  “So, did I pass the audition?” Rainbow Eyes said to Leon.

  It took him a moment to get his face muscles working again. Finally he managed a smile. “Yeah, you’ll do.”

  “Lest you be overly impressed, I should inform you this place is built on a power spot. Left to be seen if I fare half as well away from one.”

  “Power spot? How come I don’t feel any mightier?”

  “Well, it helps to have some higher consciousness to begin with.”

  Leon smiled. “With a mouth like that to go with the fighting prowess, I do believe you will be the perfect fit for OMEGA FORCE.”

  EIGHTY

  Cronos entered the FORESCO armory to find it had been destroyed. One of Truman’s people must have gotten wise to the ruse, and figured opposition from the sentient serpents was tough enough already.

  With a sigh he padded back in Leon’s direction.

  He heard a roar, laughter and clapping coming from behind a set of double doors beside him as he was passing by. “What the hell?” He nudged one of the doors open with the snout of his rifle.

  Inside, customers dressed in white smock overcoats were buying popcorn and soda from the venders behind the counter. The place looked like a theater lobby.

  The customers, upon hearing the flapping of the door turned to take him in. Several of them swallowed hard before clapping him.

  “So this is where the scientists have been hiding out?” he mumbled, ignoring his adoring fans. He hiked over to one of the pairs of double doors leading past the lobby to the theater, pushed the door open.

  Inside, the auditorium was packed with scientists, all dressed in white smocked overcoats. All absorbed in the blow by blow fights underway inside and around the compound. The footage was being edited on the fly by the crew in the orchestra pit working the security cameras.

  Cronos was letting light into the theater. Several of the angered scientists turned toward him to give him a piece of their mind, shouting, “Shut the doors!”

  Cronos backed out the way he’d come in. It was for the best. Another second breathing in their cavalier attitude of people dying for their entertainment and he might have opened fire on the throng.

  He growled and stormed out of the theater, determined to reunite with Leon. Let him know additional help would not be forthcoming from the armory. Perhaps he had made do as he always did.

  ***

  “I don’t know if we should be calling these things zombies,” Stanley said from the orchestra section of the FORESCO compound theater, staring up at the big screen.

  “Why not?” Dubois inquired, reaching into Stan’s bucket of buttered popcorn.

  “They seem to lack what I would call ‘zombie panache’. A certain je ne sais quoi.” He stuffed so much popcorn into his mouth that he had to cough some back out.

  On the IMAX screen the former soldiers and scientists, stripped of their clothes, and instead plastered with armies of tiny crawling bleach-white crab-bots, closed in on one of the good-guy juvenile Nomads they had cornered in one of the halls. They were coming at it, inching along the ceiling, the walls, the floor on all fours.

  Several of the zombies sprang at once. The one grabbing hold of the shoulder and biting down on the tough hide of the Nomad and getting nowhere adapted. The zooming camera showed the tiny bots migrating into his mouth and filing down his teeth to make them all more fang-like. And then interlocking legs over the finished product as a kind of reinforcing enamel. Other miniature crabs migrated to his jaw to reinforce his bite strength. Soon he had the overgrown lizard screeching in pain.

  Another morph-bot puppet, eying how effectively the Nomad was using its tail to swat the other zombies off of him, emulated the fighting technique. Growing a tail of his own, formed by the robots crawling into position, like army ants, one over the other, until they’d interlocked themselves to make an effective tail. The tail-wielding zombie then used his new appendage to wrap around the head of the nomad he was on, scissoring it off.

  The animal, minus its head, collapsed to the ground. The rest of the zombies rushed in and began ravenously devouring him.

  “See, this is what I’m talking about!” Stanley protested with a gesture to the big screen. “What self-respecting zombie has a taste for lizard sushi?”

  All the “oohs” and “aahs!” f
rom people recoiling at the site of the Nomad being eaten alive, along with the claps, cheers, and cat whistles from those only too happy to see the creature succumb for the sake of moving the storyline along, drew the attention of the zombies in the hall.

  The zombies’ heads all turned as one.

  And then the zombies moved toward the double doors leading to the movie theater.

  “Oh, shit! That’s not good,” Dubois said.

  “You think? Friggin’ moron!”

  “I’m not sure they’re going to appreciate our Siskel and Ebert debate over the finer points of zombieism.” Dubois swallowed hard watching the big screen, even as the zombies burst into the theater lobby, swarming the venders.

  Stanley and Dubois watched the salesmen being ripped apart, limb by limb so fast that their severed heads were still mouthing “Fuck! Fuck!” even if no more sound was coming out. The venders’ expressions conveyed escalating emotions because their brains hadn’t yet registered that there was no point to reacting further; they were already dead. Their choice reactions, all rendered with smooth editing, as the cameras zoomed into the faces at the crucial moments, generated clapping and cheering in the audience.

  “These idiots know what’s coming next, right?” Dubois said, turning from the screen finally to regard the theatergoers.

  Stan turned at the sound of zombies charging the auditorium. People screamed and jumped out of their seats finally as the reality only now set in that they were no longer just watching a movie.

  Unable to check his emotions, Stan grimaced at the rising tide of carnage before him. “I told you we should have gone to Hollywood instead of coming here.” He wiped his face from the blood splatter. “Everything looks so much better in Kodachrome.”

  “At least this settles the debate once and for all.”

  “Yep. They’re definitely zombies. I particularly love how they don’t stop to relish the one they’re devouring. Just the sight of someone unaffected makes them forget the joy of the moment for the hunger of things yet to come.”