Adam and Zeke ran up behind them.
“Close the ramps,” Milo yelled to Adam and Zeke. “Now!”
Milo took off, leading the charge into the infected. He blasted them back, exploding their grotesque bodies all over the floor of the dome.
The other three boys followed him into the fray, running and blasting and rising to the level of legend in the eyes of any who would survive the day.
Dozens of infected fell before dozens more swarmed in on the four boys and eventually overcame them, piling on even as Milo blasted a few more shots off killing a couple more before being gutted and falling away from the light. The horde lingered, satiating themselves on the purest flesh left on earth.
Milo and the three had managed to delay the coming horde, but it was altogether too late. There were too many. The ramps should have been up by now. The Project had endured almost sixteen years and it would end with that one final error, trying to save everyone.
Zeke and Adam ran to their ships hoping to get the ramps up in time. They grabbed two guns each from a silver crate left unloaded.
When they glanced back they saw the infected already in pursuit. They stopped running and turned to face them. Milo had taught them the sacrifice necessary to save their friends and their species.
They considered each other briefly with the deepest respect.
“Shoot straight,” Adam said with a sneer.
Zeke returned a brotherly grin. The two boys lifted all four weapons and began to exterminate as many of the vile creatures as they could before they would surely be overrun. They knew it was not possible to slow them down, but they were the two pillars of the project. They had the top two scores on every simulation including weaponry. If it was possible it would be them who could do it, but even so, they would never survive the day even if they beat back the beasts long enough for one or two of the ramps to be closed.
And the beasts fell by the score, but they kept coming like a tidal wave. Other kids were being eaten alive behind them and one small boy kept outrunning a frustrated pursuer. Adam turned and blasted the boy’s nemesis, clearing the way for the boy to finally make it to a ship.
When the beasts finally came for them, Zeke glanced to Adam. “An honor to fight by your side, Thirdborn.”
They had just time enough to blast two more beasts out of the air as the onslaught of infected was about to trample them.
The fire came as a surprise, enveloping everything. Their arms, their legs, their helmets and the beasts. An end in fire, Adam had dreamed of this very same thing, to prove his worth in battle and go out under fire like his ancient father all those years ago.
Like his father, this was friendly fire, but unlike his father it did not kill him. Claudia, battered and bruised, stepped past Zeke and Adam with dual fire throwers strapped to her arms and a tank on her back.
She fried the skinny, once-human rippers like bugs. She stood in front of the boys, bleeding, blackened and bruised. She wore the remains of a shredded tee shirt.
Happy to be alive, the boys fanned out and fought by her side.
Doctors Becker, Naseer and Pappas ran up the ramps to the ships unarmed. Doctor Quarna wreaked havoc with a thick, sawed-off energy blaster on the other side of the ships holding back a smaller surge of the biters all by himself.
“Go,” Claudia commanded. “I got this.”
They nodded to Claudia reluctantly. They both reached out to touch her shoulders before they ran off. Their touch brought instant tears to her eyes as they disappeared from her life forever. She walked forward into the horde torching everything that moved.
Adam reached his ramp and stopped cold in his tracks. Gen was searching for something under his ship.
“Gen,” he yelled and ran to her.
“I can’t find Ada,” Gen told him through tears.
Adam exhaled painfully. “Ada has to be on one of the ships. You can’t be out here, Gen.” He grabbed her. When she pushed back, he just picked her up over his shoulder and carried her away. He hurried up the ramp and set her next to Doctor Becker.
“I’ll look for her,” he said and ran down the ramp holding his gun.
Doctor Becker, not wearing a protective suit, hugged Gen in her bulky air-tight flight suit. Lexi took Gen in her arms as Doctor Becker continued her job, checking for non-secure suits.
The kids who had damage to their suits were put through a scanner at the mouth of the ship and if the scanner beeped they would have to be removed. Two crying girls who had already been determined to have shrapnel damage to their suits stood next to Doctor Becker.
“Don’t be sad,” she said to the girls. “You will come with us. You can live with the doctors.” The girls looked to their friends who had passed inspection. The kids started to say their sad farewells.
On ES1, Zeke stood at the top of his ramp. Sylvia stepped to his side.
“Doctor Pappas is checking everyone for non-secure suits,” Sylvia said. “He’ll have to remove kids from the ships.”
Zeke shook his head, devastated.
She tapped his shoulder. “I need to get back to my ship.”
Zeke rolled his eyes and grabbed her hand. When they made it to ES3 he waited for her to reach the top of the ramp. That’s when he noticed Gen, helping people onto ES3, Adam’s ship.
Zeke left before she ever saw him.
When Gen finally turned around, Adam was running up the ramp. She hugged him tightly. Sylvia looked away and walked into the ship.
“You’re safe,” Adam said smiling down to her.
“You made sure,” she said, letting go of him.
“Close the ramp,” Adam ordered. He walked inside and spotted Sylvia. What could he do? He opened his arms and hugged her too. When Adam turned back around, Gen was nowhere to be seen.
Zeke returned to his ship in time to find Doctor Pappas descending the ramp with three weeping kids. Two boys and a small girl. Zeke stopped and squatted down to the kids, hugging them all at once in his big, strong arms. After all that had happened, those three departing kids were the thing that broke him.
Doctors Becker, Naseer and Pappas ran across the dome with eight kids unable to leave with the rest. They ran back to the doctors’ quarters for whatever time they had left before the island was overrun.
Adam and Sylvia spotted a kid walking below among the dead. Tuna.
“Oh, Tuna, what are you doing out there?” Sylvia said as she fell into Adam’s consoling arms. They watched Tuna wandering through piles of bodies, kids and infected alike.
“It’s Cassie,” Adam said. “He can’t find her.”
Adam’s heart sank when they finally spotted Gen, running to help Tuna dig Cassie out from under two infected corpses. The ramp of ES3 lifted higher and higher until Adam could no longer see her.
“Stop the ramp!” He yelled, but not even he could stop the ramp now. It would never open again in that world.
Gen pulled the last body off as Tuna pulled Cassie into his lap.
“Cassie,” Tuna begged to his lifeless love. “Wake up, Cassie.”
Gen dropped her head. “We have to go, Tuna.”
“I’m not leaving her,” Tuna yelled at Gen with a vicious tone.
The two friends stared at each other determined to save someone very important to them.
“Hey, sugar,” Cassie’s whisper softened every part of his petrified soul. Cassie stared up into Tuna’s eyes, barely conscious but smiling.
“You’re still here?” Tuna said. He hugged her tightly in his arms.
“Let’s go,” Gen reminded them.
Tuna lifted Cassie and he ran by Gen’s side until they realized the ramp of ES3 had closed on them and that ES2 was just slamming shut. When they turned down to ES1 they saw him running with long, gliding strides. Zeke. Her Zeke. Always safe in his arms, she thought.
She glanced back up at the closed ramp of ES3. That closed ramp would be the final image of Adam she would take with her.
Zeke tried to help Tuna
carry Cassie, but he refused. She was his girl, Tuna thought, he would carry her home. When they reached the ramp, Zeke and Gen both noticed the damage to Cassie’s suit. Cassie already knew what had to be done, but she pretended for a while in Tuna’s arms. She stared into Gen’s eyes and nodded.
“Honey, wait a moment,” Cassie said to Tuna.
Zeke and Gen walked slowly up the ramp to safety. They joined Jax at the mouth of the ship. Gen could not turn around to watch and instead buried her face in Zeke’s chest.
Tuna touched the rip in Cassie’s suit near the hip. There was blood. Her suit was no longer secure.
“It’s okay. You are immune. I know it.”
“I can’t come on the ship, my sweet genius.”
His face flooded with love for her. Jax appeared at his side and handed him a small gun. He stared at the gun in his hand. “No,” he said to her as he held it. The ramp started to rise with them on it.
In the distance, he spotted Claudia’s last flame burning out and dying. Hundreds of infected quickly pounced on the last engineer of the Eden Project and began to shred her flesh.
“Our love can never die,” Cassie whispered. She then knocked the gun out of his hand. She gave him one more smile before she pushed away from him and rolled quickly off the edge of the rising ramp.
Jax and Zeke grabbed onto Tuna just as he tried to follow Cassie over the edge. They dragged him back up and into the ship just as the ramp lifted and slammed shut.
-26-Doctor Quarna stood alone on the floor of the dome. His gun had been slapped out of his hands, but they had not stripped his flesh like he had seen them do to Claudia with his own eyes.
The cannibal King walked tall through the horde of bloodthirsty beasts. He had subdued them somehow. They obeyed him. Doctor Quarna had never heard it was even a possibility to rule them.
“Open those ships,” the tall beast commanded with a deep, croaking voice.
Doctor Quarna slumped, bone tired. He greatly preferred being eaten by the horde than having a short, pointless chat with the devil. “I couldn’t if I tried,” Doctor Quarna finally offered.
The tall one walked around the Doctor and considered him dismissively. This beast was unlike any the doctor had ever seen. His eyes were still human and his scars very minor. He must have been drinking uninfected blood by the gallons.
The beast raised his hand and another of the healthier looking infected walked out holding onto Ada still in her protective flight suit. She was unharmed. The crowd of raving cannibals built into a frenzy eyeing the pure-blooded little morsel.
“I believe you,” the beast chuckled deep from within, “but now purely for my own amusement I will watch you watch this sweet bird being ravaged tendon by tendon.”
Ada squirmed defiantly. Doctor Quarna fell to his knees, reaching for his gun to shoot her but the gun was kicked away from him.
“No,” he begged. “You can’t do this. You were human once.”
The beast laughed again, utterly amused by the doctor’s humanity.
“Quite true, my good doctor.” The beast leaned close into the doctor’s face. His horrid breath made the doctor cringe. “But, thankfully, I got over that.”
The tall beast raised his hand and Ada was placed in front of the doctor. The horde started to salivate as they gathered around her.
No one saw the boy coming. He somehow ran up the back of Doctor Quarna like a monkey and launched himself above the crowd. The beasts watched in awe as there was a beauty in the way Trumpet flew and a sparkle to the shiny silver blades in his hands.
As he descended, Trumpet cut a hole in the horde with the long silver knives which were fresh from the Project’s weapon storage. He landed softly on his feet. Before they could react he slit throats and cut skinny legs off at the knees.
Ada hurried back into the doctor’s arms as they watched the boy they called Trumpet bathe himself in infected blood. The beasts fell like dominos as the two blades moved everywhere at once.
The confidence of the tall beast withered as he stumbled away from the flurry of death let loose in the middle of his cannibal army. The beast reached into his pocket and pulled out a handheld device.
Before the cannibal King could communicate on his device, the ground began to tremble as the ships clanged and shifted. They began to turn up towards the heavens. The floor gave way and the ships slowly positioned themselves for launch.
The beast screamed through his rotting teeth, “I want those ships. I need that blood.” He clicked the call button on his device. “Two missiles at the island. Now!”
The beast put the device back into his pocket. He walked over and picked up the doctor’s gun. He messed with the controls and smiled when it made a humming sound as it turned on. He easily snatched Ada away from the doctor and put the gun to her head.
The ships lifted up to the top of the dome and broke through the thick glass as they continued to position themselves for takeoff.
The boy tired, but never gave way to the horde. The last few infected were killed with beleaguered swipes of Trumpet’s blade.
Trumpet stared coldly into the eyes of the tall beast who pressed the gun to the little girl’s head.
“Maybe it’s your blood I want,” the beast said studying Trumpet.
The hissing howl turned everyone’s head except the tall beast who had expected it. The missile blasted through the western dome and just missed ES2. The missile did little obvious damage to the ships but its blast wave sprayed thousands of shards of glass and titanium flooring into the launch apparatus.
The ships continued to rise as the buried rockets beneath them began to emerge from the ground. Loud, grinding sounds accompanied the now flawed positioning of ES2. It did not lift to the same height or angle as the other ships. The blast had taken its toll after all.
When the beast noticed Doctor Quarna’s concern for the second ship, he laughed deeply from a belly full of human blood and tissue.
Doctor Quarna noticed Trumpet twitch. Curiously, the boy no longer held both knives. The second knife was now lodged just above Ada’s helmet deep into the mouth and throat of the gagging beast.
When Ada fell to the ground with the giant, Trumpet was already there to help her to her feet. The boy was drenched with infected blood so Doctor Quarna motioned him to stay back from the girl.
Trumpet nodded and quickly buried his second knife into the skull of the cannibal King.
Doctor Becker ran out to help them as the next missile sailed just between ES2 and ES3, over their heads and struck the middle wall blowing a hole open to the doctor’s side of the dome.
The pressure from the blast knocked all of them back off their feet and onto Trumpet’s pile of infected corpses. The ground began to tremble as the three launch rockets ignited. Doctor Quarna struggled to his feet in a daze. His hearing was lost. He was covered with infected blood and when he found Doctor Becker she was covered in it too.
It was over now. The project was over and they would soon be over. He went to her and pulled her into his arms. They kissed each other madly with infected blood on them everywhere. They did not care. The ships were up through the glass and the kids had a chance now. The species had a chance now.
Ada crawled over to Trumpet who lay unconscious with a metal shard dug into his small chest. She pet his hair back sweetly as she sat next to him up on the bodies of the dead.
* * *
ADAM SAT ON THE FLIGHT DECK in his commander’s seat still wearing his flight suit. His crew was not complete. Any that were not with him were either dead or on another ship.
He was stripped of everything, but he still was the best pilot left on earth and he would fly his ship. He waited for the call. The sensuous female computer voice started the countdown. T-minus-ten-nine-eight and how quickly the seconds in that world had run out.
He could feel the rocket power trembling as the ship lifted up through the top of the dome. He knew ES2 and ES1 would be moving up and out at the very same moment. He
closed his eyes and dreamed that somehwere on another ship Gen could feel the rumbling of the rockets, but then he remembered.
She was on her knees on the floor of the dome with Tuna and Cassie. The heat of his rockets might be ending her life now. He hoped down in the deepest depth of his soul that some miracle had occurred and the two people he loved most could have found a way to survive or at least live beyond the moment of the launch. He did not want his first flight to be the means to their end.
He turned on the exterior cameras to see the dome for the last time. The other kids in the flight crew watched on their overhead screens. They were mortified by what they saw. ES1 had made it and they had made it, but ES2 was falling down back onto itself. The floor of the dome was filling up with fire and rocket fuel until the entire dome exploded with the imploding rockets of first ES2 and then ES4.
Air sucked hard into his lungs and his heart stopped. The whole of the island seemed to explode as flames billowed up in an inferno toward them enveloping the ship’s camera in smoke.
They worried the explosion would reach up and throw them back down to the earth to die with the rest of the species, but it never did.
The ES3 lifted high into the sky and approached the heavens. Every cell in Adam’s body ached from irrecoverable loss, yet even as sorrow tightened his chest he knew that none of it mattered anymore.
These few survivors of the planet earth must leave all that death behind and together build a brand new past.
Click here to read book 2 of The Eden Project:
NIGHT WITHOUT END
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The Eden Project: Humanity's Last Chance Page 15