by M. D. Cooper
“And they don’t mind us being here?” she said, eying up the massive beasts in the distance. “We’re not going to get kicked out by the park’s police, are we?”
“They can’t see us,” he said. “We’re nothing to them. We’re not wearing the locator tags the competitors wear or the staff beacons. We’re not even here.”
“But we’re going to be tearing up the park,” she said.
“Yeah, they’ll probably mind that.”
He stopped, suddenly, then nodded to himself. He dropped the gadget he was holding onto the ground and took a step back, grinning wildly.
And with that, the ground exploded.
Dust and dirt flew into the air. She jammed her eyes shut and coughed, doubling over from the shock.
“And we have a cavern!” Yorick shouted. “See that, Podulk? I’m not crazy! It’s here! The great lost Airport of Atlanta.”
“Quite.”
Katra finished coughing and peeked her eyes open. The man was right: there was a cavern, or at least a very dark hole in the ground. The former pirate threw himself on his belly to look into it.
“It’s not deep at all,” he exclaimed. “Podulk?”
The alien let out a wet slushing noise, which could have been a groan, but sounded more like someone slapping sushi together on a plate. Without a word, though, he hopped into the hole, disappearing into the darkness.
“What do you think? Is it safe?” asked Yorick.
“It is clear.”
“No need to sound excited or anything.”
“I will try to contain my joy, captain.”
Yorick looked up at Katra, his eyes bursting with color. He pushed himself up from his belly, holding her gaze, a look so pure and beautiful she wanted to blast the distance between them and be in his arms in an instant.
She snapped herself out of it. This was so unlike her. Marcus was still there, in her mind, somewhere. She was loyal. She was loving.
“You have just made my dreams come true,” he said, making her forget all of this in an instant. “Do you know how long I have been waiting to find you? And to discover you are exactly what I was looking for?”
“I’m glad I could help you find the lost treasure.”
“I think I found twice the amount I was looking for.”
“I can hear all this, you know,” said a voice in Katra’s ear: Jesi, making her presence known and ruining a glorious moment. This was followed by a slurp from the adult juice box.
Yorick stepped forward, and Katra stepped nearer to him, desperate to feel his hands on her skin again, when he disappeared. His step took him right through the hole he had created, and not into the waiting arms of Katra, but of Podulk.
“You surprised me,” Podulk said, his voice echoing below.
Well, so much for that. Katra stepped to the edge and looked down to where Podulk and Yorick were untangling from each other’s limbs. The mole-like appendages on Podulk’s face were stuck on Yorick’s backpack, which only made the alien more frustrated.
Once clear, Katra closed her eyes and jumped. She landed with a grunt, bouncing lightly in Podulk’s arms before he put her down, without a word. She pulled a torch out of her blue backpack and glanced around the room.
They were in the control tower. A large room with glass windows all around, made reflective from the piles of dirt behind them. Every computer terminal had a little Chinese luck cat, which started to move as a draft of air touched them for the first time in thousands of years.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
“We are on hallowed ground,” Yorick said, dropping his voice. “A holy shrine.”
“We are?” Katra looked around. The cats stared back, their eyes following her as she moved. “They’re nick knacks.”
“The holy Catapus? This is a tomb, is it not? The great queen Charlotte interred with holy statues to protect her in the afterlife?”
“More like a running office gag,” she said, suddenly in her element. After all, she was the only one who had seen the twenty-first century first hand. She found the door of the tower and gave an elegant, pageant wave of her hand in that direction. “Suivez moi.”
She sashayed down the stairs, her torch lighting the way, trying to seem like she wasn’t the least perturbed by the darkness. Not that she had ever been scared of the dark: just that there was something eerie about an abandoned airport, the air cloying like an Egyptian tomb. Katra felt as if at any moment, a mummy would jump out and grab her leg.
She had only been here a week, days ago, a layover from her flight to Singapore. But the second they exited the stairway and walked into the terminal, the recognition hit her like a sack of bricks to the gut. Everything was the same. The same desks for checking bags in. The same signs warning about Ebola and Measles. The same skeletons…
Shmuz. There were skeletons.
Dead skeletons.
Which was probably much better than live skeletons, but still, Katra stifled a scream.
“So, you find the treasure yet?” The voice in her ear was snippy and high, Jesi slowly losing her patience. “I have a feeling they’re going to find us soon. I saw three ships flying overhead.”
“This is the largest airport in the world,” Katra snapped back, glaring at the crumpled skeleton before her and imagining Jesi in its place. “Or it was, before whatever happened that I don’t give a froz about. Give us a minute.”
“Jebuz, take a chill pill.”
Yorick gave Katra a warm smile before delicately handing her the map. The thing was old, almost worn through, so light Katra felt that even her touch would disintegrate it. She gazed at the logos she knew were dead and gone. The Chipotle. The Chili’s. Even the Popeye’s. Her world was ancient history now.
“It’s this way,” she said through dry lips, leading them forward.
She kept her flashlight low to avoid seeing the dead around her, both corporeal and corporate. She didn’t want a reminder of what’s she’d lost.
But there it was, finally, before her – Aunty Anne’s. Pretzels. Yummy cinnamon and sugar. Everything sitting on the counter as if it was ready to go. Katra had to stop herself from reaching out to grab a glorious bite, knowing that the nibbles were a few thousand years past their sell by date. The place must have been amazingly well sealed for them not to decompose.
“So, where to from here?” she asked, tearing her eyes from the counter top. Good bye, decent snacking.
“According to the cipher I decoded,” said Yorick, pushing past Katra in an excited flurry, “the jewels were hidden in the dark, cold heart of the store.”
“Dark, cold heart?” Katra muttered. Nothing about the original Aunty Anne’s seemed dark or cold. This one, however, had dark and cold written all over it.
“Does it mean something to you?” the captain urged.
“Not really.”
“Podulk?”
“No.”
“Well, this is just perfect,” said Jesi over the coms. “Don’t you come back here until you’ve combed every inch of that slimy place, you hear me?”
“Slimy?” Katra mouthed.
They ventured into the small shop, the space quite tight with Podulk’s hulking frame in there with them. Katra was close enough to Yorick to feel the warmth of his skin wafting off his body, and she yearned to lean in and feel more.
But it wasn’t warmth they needed to find.
Cold… dark…
“The fridge!” Katra blurted out, lunging at the metal contraption against the wall. Yorick dodged out of the way.
“The what?”
“Do you not have refrigerators anymore?” she asked, tugging the silver door open. Right on the middle shelf sat a large plastic box, marked important.
“Well, that looks important,” said Katra.
“It says it is.”
“Thanks, Podulk.” She took the box – it was surprisingly heavy – and placed it on the counter beside the fridge, closing the door with a familiar fwomp. She missed the sound, so oddly
comforting. “Seriously, do you not keep food fresh?”
“Fresh?”
“Wow, I hate the future,” she said, and tugged the lid off the box.
Glittering gemstones gleamed up at her, and she let out a squawk of joy. The royal gems of England: stones of every shape and color, tossed hastily in a box and hidden in a fridge in an airport. Why? Katra desperately wanted to know what had led the stones here, to this place, but she was the only one alive who had any connection to them. Everyone else had died out a long, long time ago.
“Does that dying sound mean you found them, or have you all just been brutally murdered?”
Jesi’s voice was harsh in the quiet of the pretzel stand. The trio was engrossed by the stones, many still a part of the original jewelry, others ripped from their casing and tossed into the box. Katra reached her hands in amongst the stones, carefully, as they were quite sharp, and retrieved the crown she had only ever seen on television.
“Wow,” she said.
“It’s… beautiful,” Yorick’s eyes sparkled like the gems before him. They were heavy with water, thick with tears. His life’s work had been accomplished. The lost treasure of Atlanta had been found. “So beautiful…”
“Right, not dead,” Jesi continued. “Come up here – now. We’ve got company.”
“Company?”
Yorick ripped his eyes from the crown. His hands had been reaching to take it, but they snapped back to his sides before touching even the fur of the rim.
“What kind of company?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jesi said, letting out a heavy sigh of annoyance. “The big spaceship kind. There’s a lot of them. They’ve got it in their heads they’re going to board me. So, you might want to hurry. Oh! And don’t you dare forget to drop off my gems. And – Owaitt, get him! Ack!”
The line fizzled and went dead. Before another second could pass, Yorick grabbed the box of treasure from the counter, leaped over the sneeze guard, and dashed through the dark terminal, leaping over the dead littering the ground.
Katra put the crown upon her head. She hadn’t worn a crown since she had been crowned Miss Universe. That was, of course, before the actual Universe came to visit them.
The crown felt so right, that in a second, it brought back every memory of this place. She was Miss Earth. And she was damn well going to protect her planet.
CHAPTER 8:
Only the most recent in a long line of alien invasions
By the time they reached the control tower, the sky above their little exit hole was filled with ships of every size.
Massive, gray leviathans that sent thunder rumbling through the heavens blocked out most of the light, making it look as if the sky were about to storm. Yorick clutched his bounty against his chest.
“Froz,” was all that he could say.
Katra reached up to readjust her crown, giving herself time to think. Her degree in marketing really wasn’t helping right now. Not to mention she wasn’t quite sure what was happening in the first place.
“What’s happening?” she asked, staring up at the sky hole.
“Apparently, Super-freaky funland dark-side death-zone powered by MnM is being invaded,” said Yorick.
“Ah,” said Katra, her heart dropping. “By whom, exactly?”
“Not sure,” he replied. “Podulk?”
“By spaceships, sir.”
“Whose spaceships?”
“I do not know.”
“Thanks for the insight, Podulk, my good friend,” the former captain muttered.
“And what about Jesi? Or Owaitt?” Katra urged.
“Probably dead.”
As if to punctuate his sentence with some extra tension and drama, the sky went entirely dark as a ship flew low above the sky hole. A ladder fell right down in front of them, slamming the floor with the metallic crash.
“Get in, losers,” shouted Jesi from above, “and bring those frozzing jewels, will you?”
“Or, you know, she’ll have dismembered anyone who boarded her ship.” Yorick shrugged, but his grin was so wide Katra could practically see the relief flooding out of him. “After you?”
Katra climbed hastily up the ladder as Yorick and Podulk tossed the treasure into one of the blue backpacks. Owaitt awaited them at the top of the ladder, looking gleeful. A massive smear of black tar covered half of his face.
“Oh, hello,” he said, “are you our guests? I have tea ready for you. Anybody up for a bit of fun?”
“Thanks, Owaitt,” Katra breathed in relief. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Oh, yes, all very exciting,” said the android. “You see, we were invaded by…”
And with that, his eyes went dull, and he toppled over, at a loss for words.
Katra leaned over and turned him back on as her companions made it into the ship. Owaitt powered up, getting slowly back on his feet, making eye contact with everyone as Podulk reeled up the ladder.
“Hello,” he said, smiling broadly. “I am O-8, your personal service droid. How may—”
“Katra, Yorick, and Podulk,” Katra counted off, pointing to everyone in turn. “Our captain is Jesi, You just defended her from some unknown assailants. Is she alright? Do you know where she is?”
“I apologize for any and all inconvenience my absence may have caused and must excuse my current lapse of memory. I simply do not recall. What is my purpose so that I may get back to my station at once? I am here, after all, to please man.”
“Don’t waste your words,” the queen pushed past him. “I’ll find her myself.”
Jesi sat in the break room, sipping an ornate pink drink with her feet up on the lunch table.
“So? You got my treasure?” the girl gloated, “I see you’ve picked out your share already. Who died and made you queen?”
“You be the captain, I be the motherfrozzing queen,” said Katra. “I’ve waited thirteen thousand years for my crown. At least let me have this moment.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.” The girl dropped her feet from the table as the man, droid, and alien entered. She noted the massive box, wringing her hands together in anticipation. “Is that my treasure? Gimme gimme!”
Yorick said nothing as he tossed the bag on the table. The girl tore at it like a lion to an antelope’s carcass. She ripped the fabric open, her eyes growing wide and bright as she took in the gemstones and jewelry.
“My precious!” she screamed, flinging herself onto the table. She rolled on the pile, laughing like a hyena as the entire crew watched. It had to have been painful, but she made no other sound than maniacal laughter. “Rich, Rich, Rich!”
“You’ve got something on your pants,” Katra pointed out, transfixed by the big black smear. Her arms and face were assaulted by the blotches.
“Whatever.” The girl sat up on her pile. “Great work, crew. Now let’s get away from this Gob-forsaken place. I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to.”
“Erm,” Yorick stammered, “isn’t it going to be a little hard to leave?”
“Why?”
“Alien invasion and all?”
“Oh, right, that,” said Jesi, hopping off the table. “Well, I was thinking we could hide out in that lost airport of Atlanta of yours. Just for a little while, until this invasion blows over. And then we’ll go and spend our money.”
“So Earth is actually being invaded, then?” asked Katra. There wasn’t exactly a window in there to check.
“Yeah, by these assholes.” Jesi kicked her foot at a body under the table. A large, monstrous looking being lay crumpled at her feet, its entire body covered by a hard black shell. The face, if it even was a face, looked a little like a cockroach being forced to sit still for a school photo – pudgy skin stuffed into a helmet with coils and wires that squeezed everything in place.
And the body was sliced cleanly in two.
“What is that?” asked Yorick, leaning down near the face. “Podulk, have you ever seen anything like it?”
“It is a Tagriffian, former captain,” the alien said.
Yorick seemed surprised. “You know this thing?”
“They are, as the now-captain says, assholes, sir.”
“Yeah, but how do you know them?”
“We share a binary star system with them,” the alien said as if it were the most natural thing in the universe. “They are, as you say, not cool.”
“Right. And what are they doing here?”
“Invading, it would appear, sir.”
“But why invade Earth?” asked Katra, “or the planet-formerly-known-as-Earth? It’s nothing but an escape game planet now.”
“One could assume their timing is not a coincidence,” said Podulk. “I mean to say, that the fact they arrived shortly after we did might be an indication of their intentions.”
“They want my treasure?” Jesi pulled the gems towards her with a large scoop of her tiny arms. “No. Hell, no.”
“That, or the airport of Atlanta,” said Podulk.
“Or they want Katra,” said Yorick.
Katra looked up at Yorick, then realized all eyes were on her. She took a trembling step back.
“What? Me?” she scoffed. “Why me?”
“You are the oldest living thing in the universe,” he continued, his eyes wide in bewilderment. “Maybe they want you for the same reason I wanted you – to ask you a question about the Earth-that-was.”
Katra’s heart swelled at those words – Yorick, wanting her – but then it fell once again. She crossed her arms over her chest, seeking to warm herself.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. It was heavy, what with the crown and all. “They probably want the jewels. They must have followed us somehow.”
“Or they just want the planet,” said Owaitt.
Four sets of eyes turned to stare at him. The droid, who had been quietly, patiently waiting his turn in the corner, beamed at the opportunity to speak.
“Maybe this is nothing more than an invasion?” he said. “Maybe the fact that we are here has nothing to do with their arrival. Maybe they want the planet because it has high-ranking members of the Order on it right now. I am not used to talking for so long, why isn’t anyone interrupting me?”