Hailey's Comet Anthology

by Selma J Lewis

  Negative. No safe landing zone. Send boat to hold over two hundred juvenile and young adult civilians. SS for seven prisoners, one body, many kilos of evidence.

  Derek simultaneously communicated with Hailey by “head-net,” as Hailey liked to call the hyperwave system, and with Sector Security by comm. He finished his conversation with Hailey: Sending SS. ETA: three hours.

  Wait. Did Mané pan out?

  Affirmative. Keeping tabs on him.

  Copy. Thanks.

  Knowing that the Morrisseys’ contact, Mané, was the only name she needed to extract from them, it was time to set the slaves on the Morrissey ranch free. With Pandit in the back of the truck, Hailey returned to the Soto house to pick up the entangled pair. Making them dress and get in the truck, she returned to Conley’s house, ordering him to do the same. She retrieved the body of Cohen, much to the relief of the teens in the house, and laid it in the middle of the truck bed where every other felon had an excellent view of it. Last, she picked up Bridgit Hardy who was glad to be rescued from the houseful of children who thought it great fun to chuck grapes at her from all directions.

  It was an hour past midnight by the time Hailey was back in front of the Morrissey house. She put a circular disk on top of Cohen’s body in the back of the truck telling the cuffed criminals that it was a noise-activated explosive. It was a half-truth: the disk was an explosive, but currently inert. She just didn’t want the captured creeps to warn the soon-to-be-captured creeps about the Wraith.

  Hailey entered the house silently. The Morrisseys were in bed, but their ACME sentry and wagon-pulling bot was on alert. It was armed and dangerous. For her own safety, she had to eliminate the sentry first. Luckily, she had dealt with robots like these many times before. The robot patrolled the downstairs area of the house. Hailey knew there was no sneaking up behind it: it had 360° vision thanks to the thirty-six cameras on its spherical head. Instead, she waited behind a corner with her large blade ready. With three clean slices, quick as flashes of lightning, Hailey cut off the ACME’s weapon, then camera-head, then leg, causing it to topple onto the floor. She headed upstairs.

  The noise awoke the Morrisseys. Erin Morrissey sat up in bed, pointing a gun at the bedroom door with a trembling pair of hands. Harold Morrissey hid in the washroom. Hailey paused at the door, listening to what was going on inside. She could hear the rapid breathing coming from two different locations. She sheathed her blade and retrieved her gun, then she took a step back and pushed the door open, retracting farther into the dark hall to remain unseen. Erin shot into the darkness wildly. Hailey stepped sideways into a spare bedroom to avoid being hit by the sloppy shooting. She knew what kind of gun it was by the sound it made, and knew that unless Ms. Morrissey had an extra magazine, she was out of bullets. Carefully, Hailey advanced on the door, gun first. Erin Morrissey ran to the window, looking for any escape, but it was a four-meter drop to the ground. Hailey knew how to make that leap and tuck and roll to an uninjured ready stance, but Erin’s strengths were not the same. She hesitated on the sill while Hailey entered the room fully. “What the…?” Erin gasped.

  Harold peeked around the corner to wonder the same thing. Hailey went to subdue Erin first. Her fear of the black figure bypassed her rational thinking and she leaned away from the Wraith, moving her center of mass past the sill of the window. She waved her arms wildly as she started to fall. Hailey instantly holstered her gun and reached out to grab the woman’s arm. If she hadn’t had parietal micrometer and singulated cortical implants, she could not have seen the path of the woman’s flailing arm in clear enough detail – in slow enough motion – to calculate where to grab it out of mid-air. But she did, so she prevented the woman’s fall to the ground below.

  Harold Morrissey took a chance at a run. Hailey yanked the woman to the floor and went after her husband. She caught up to him before he reached the stairs. She put an arm around his neck and he retaliated with an elbow to her gut. She absorbed the hit with no reaction and grabbed the offending arm, cuffing it while she pulled his other arm behind his back. Her helmet alerted her to an approaching danger behind her at her seven o’clock. She shifted her weight to her right leg and lifted her left to stop the advancing wife. With an “oof”, Erin staggered back.

  With only one hand cuffed, Harold twisted away from Hailey, but she still had a firm grip on his right wrist. He pulled away from her. While Hailey’s strength far outweighed his, his weight far outweighed hers. He continued to pull against her grasp, but she didn’t release him. He actually managed to drag her off balance while she attempted to pull him back toward her. Erin recovered somewhat and barreled forth again, aiming to push her while Harold pulled. Because she was off balance, she wasn’t able to get her foot up again to block Erin, so she formulated a new plan instantly.

  Point six seconds before Erin ran into her, she dropped to her knees and bent over, making herself a perfect stumbling block. Point three seconds after Erin began to trip over her, she released Harold’s hand. Together, they tumbled forward toward the stairs. Hailey watched as they rolled clumsily down the flight to the ground floor. She stood at the top of the stairs analyzing their vital signs when the pair came to rest at the bottom. Against the odds, they were not seriously injured and both scrambled to their feet, heading for the back door. Hailey trotted down the steps and resumed her chase of the couple as they ran down the path toward the children’s bed houses. Why aren’t they heading for the boat? she wondered. Some of the children had gone to their threshold to see what was happening. The gunshots must have woken them, Hailey figured. Harold ran straight for the boys’ house and grabbed ahold of the smallest child standing there. He turned back toward the Wraith with the boy in front of him. Erin caught up and stood behind her husband.

  “Stop!” Harold cried. Hailey did not, but she did slow to a walk. “I’ll break his skinny neck!” Harold threatened. The boy cried out in fear. He struggled against the master, but Harold picked him up and ran to the side of the house, Erin hot on his heels. Hailey knew the boy. It was Ben. She picked up her pace and rounded the corner to find Ben being carried into the jungle.

  “Damn,” Hailey breathed. She was protected in her suit, but Ben was not and there were snakes in the jungle. She could not fathom why the Morrisseys – with no shoes and only their pajamas on their bodies – would risk going there. Harold suddenly threw Ben to the ground and changed direction. Erin followed him. Ben cried out in fear, even when he saw the Wraith coming to his rescue. Hailey saw his heat signature with her night vision. Half his body was in the ground. She stepped cautiously, not knowing exactly where the quicksand pit started. Ben flailed. “Stay still!” Hailey ordered, switching the helmet’s voice to be her own. “Don’t struggle,” she added after accessing her stored literature on the subject of quicksand.

  “Help, Agent!” Ben cried.

  “I’ll get you. Just stay still.” Ben settled down and his descent slowed. “That’s good. You’re not sinking so much, right?”

  “I’m still stuck!” he cried. Hailey lay down flat on what appeared to be solid ground and put her hand out to Ben. He reached for it, but their fingers barely touched. Second by second, he slipped down farther. She shimmied her body toward him. The ground was soft, but she still had half her body on more solid land. Ben had slid down more and she still couldn’t reach him. Finally, she changed her strategy. She dropped her legs into the quicksand. Holding on to a thin tree trunk at the edge of the pit, she reached out and grabbed Ben around his torso and pulled him close to her as her body sank slowly into the sand.

  “Put your arms around my neck,” she instructed. He did, so she let go of his torso and reached back toward the thin hand-hold she had. With both hands, she pulled against the suction of the quicksand pit. The top half of her body and most of Ben’s were above the sand. “Climb out,” she told him. He crawled over her body and helmeted head and sat, breathing hard, on solid ground. Hailey put her hands on the ground to hoist herself out when s
he was suddenly jerked back into the pit.

  Something had grabbed her left leg. Hailey managed to keep her fingertips on the root of the tree, but the rest of her, including her head, were under the surface of the sand. She didn’t panic. She had plenty of air in her suit. She breathed normally and went through her options. She and the thing that held her left leg were at a stalemate. Neither could pull the other. She let go of the root with one hand and slowly retrieved her knife. There was no slashing the predator through the thick, liquidy sand. Instead, she pulled her knee up and attempted to stab the thing.

  It reacted to the attack with a quick jolt downward, still not letting go. Hailey’s leg was pulled straight, the yank on her appendage causing the hip joint to fail. A surge of pain made her gasp inside her helmet. While she didn’t think the new joint bones were broken, they were definitely dislocated. Her LM flooded her body with adrenaline to help her escape. She refocused on the goal of getting the creature to let go.

  Above ground, Ben had seen one of Agent Ramirez’s hands let go and disappear. She only had four fingers holding on to a root to keep her near the surface. He put his hands into the sand and found her wrist. He pulled with all his might but made no progress in extracting her from the quicksand. He ran off toward the bed houses to get help.

  Five other kids returned with Ben. They searched for Hailey’s fingers but found none. “It was here, I’m sure!” Ben stuck his hand into the sand where he last saw her.

  “No!” Jane yelled. “You’ll fall in again.”

  “We have to help her!” Ben cried.

  “I know! But we have to be smart. Find a long stick.” They all looked around for a broken branch. “Hurry!”

  Hailey decided her only hope was to slice the thing off her leg. She let go of the root at the surface above and bent her body in half so that her head was near her knees. Like swimming in molasses, she moved slowly and finally managed to get her hand on the creature. It was the shape of a worm, but a hundred times bigger in every dimension. She ran her hand along it and found it to be pulling her from the side of the pit. Somehow, it anchored itself in the solid earth next to the pit. What it planned to do with her, she couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was trying to drown her or suffocate her and then eat her at its leisure. Alas, the creature had never caught a Wraith before. It could not get its teeth – or talons or fangs or whatever it had – through her suit, and she was not suffocating. It just continued to pull her down on instinct.

  With a picture in her mind of where the creature was, she brought her knife to its body and began pushing the blade through it. With a few sawing motions, the sharp blade cut through and the pull from the animal ceased. She disengaged her limp leg from the dead coil around it and straightened herself. Hailey needed her helmet to tell her which way was up. She adjusted her position so her head was pointed in the right direction, then she plunged her knife sideways into the more solid earth beside her and pulled herself upward. She extracted a second, smaller knife and repeated the exercise. Hand over hand, Hailey slowly made progress toward the top of the pit.

  When her left hand felt nothing to stab into, Hailey realized she was at the top. She stabbed the knife into the ground and felt around for a root or anything to use as a handhold. To her surprise, she felt several hands grab onto her arm and pull. She sheathed her favorite blade and reached her other hand up to the surface. More hands pulled on that arm and soon her head was above ground. When her shoulders cleared the surface, she spoke to the teens. “OK, I’ve got it now.” She put her hands down on a tangle of roots and hoisted herself up and out of the quicksand. She rolled onto her back and looked around at her rescue squad: Jane, Ben, and the four other boys she had first met back in the warehouse in Trenton.

  “Thanks, guys,” she said, sitting up. “But we’ve got to get you out of here. Snakes.” She checked around for any movement on the ground or in the trees.

  “Here’s your knife,” Ben said, holding out the one she had stuck into the ground.

  “Thanks, cousin.” Ben smiled. She put the knife away and rolled back over to be on her hands and one knee. Her left leg was useless as long as it was not attached to her pelvic bone structure. “Jane, Ben, a little help, please.” She rolled back to sitting and used Ben and Jane as hand-holds to pull herself to a standing position on her right leg. With her arms around their shoulders, she hopped back to the bed houses on one foot.

  “Did anyone see where the Morrisseys went?” Hailey asked the assembled kids.

  “They ran that way,” Stanley provided.

  “To the boat,” Hailey surmised. “Did they stop?”

  “Nope. Just ran across the digging field and into the jungle on the other side.”

  “No help for their comrades, huh?” Hailey said.

  “Huh?” Stanley asked.

  “Nothing. Come on, kids. Wake everybody up. You get to have a feast in the nice house.” Jane and Ben and Hailey started toward the path. Kevin, the leader of the original kids got in front of them.

  “What’s going on?”

  “This is Agent Ramirez. She got rid of the Morrisseys. We’re going home!” Jane explained.

  Kevin looked troubled, but the other kids shouted triumphantly and ran past the slow-moving trio. “We’re leaving?” Kevin asked, still stunned.

  “Boat will be here soon,” Hailey replied. He looked at the helmeted, hobbled agent. “What? You don’t want to get out of here?”

  “I got no place to go,” Kevin revealed.

  “Don’t worry,” Ben said. “We’re all gonna help everyone find a place to go. We made a pack.”

  “A pact,” Jane corrected. She looked at Kevin compassionately. “Come on, Kevin. It’ll be OK.”

  Kevin turned and began his last journey down the paved path. Up ahead, the whooping turned to screaming as kids were dragged off the path by their ankles. All the ruckus had alerted whatever nocturnal things lived in the ground to the fact that something was up above, and they came to investigate. Hailey picked up her hopping pace with Jane and Ben keeping up. Hailey let go of Ben and pulled out her big blade. She fell to the ground and hacked the nearest giant worm that held on to Stanley. She crawled forward and freed another boy, then a girl, telling them to run to the house as fast as they could. Kevin held his arms around a younger boy whose leg was captured by one of the tentacle-like creatures until Hailey could get there to free him. Kevin pulled the boy to his feet and together they ran for the safety of the house.

  Only Jane and Ben remained, watching intently for approaching worms. Hailey was on her stomach, watching the retreating kids to make sure they got inside. She knew from her helmet that two teens remained behind her. “Jane, get Ben to the house,” she called. Jane and Ben nimbly stepped over Hailey but didn’t go to the house.

  “Turn over, Agent. We’ll help you stand up,” Jane said.

  “No. Go to the house!”

  “But—”

  “Don’t argue with me. Go. Now!” The pair reluctantly left their Agent on the path. “Run!” Hailey ordered. They ran to the safety of the porch, then turned to watch the Wraith.

  Hailey put her head down when the last of the children were safe. She took a moment to breathe, sheathed her blade, then started to army-crawl along the path, dragging the useless leg along.

  The ground was still moving as the riled creatures crawled around beneath the surface. The adrenaline in Hailey’s body was waning and the pain in the entire left side of her body increased. She had progressed only a few meters when one of the single-minded pests threw its body at her again, landing, then coiling, around her left leg. She flipped over; her helmet registered moving life forms all around her, but the one on her leg was the only one partially out of the ground – until another one on Hailey’s right trapped her right arm and pulled it toward the dirt. Despite her considerable strength, the creature pulled her arm straight.

  She lay on her back being pulled in opposite directions by the two beasts. For the first time in her c
areer, she actually screamed in pain. Frightened by the Wraith’s outburst, her teenage friends screamed as well. Hailey grabbed her knife with her left hand but couldn’t reach either worm. With no strength or leverage in her left leg, she tried to kick the coil off with her right foot, but the thing was all muscle. She concentrated on getting her right arm free. She twisted and circled her hand around the thing, trying to undo the coil, but the resolute worm-zilla didn’t give up. It doubled down and pulled all the harder.

  Hailey screamed again as the pain overwhelmed her. The helmet alerted her to an approaching person on the path. “No!” she yelled at the kid. “Go back.” The teen didn’t. Next thing she knew, the pressure on her right arm was released. She strained to look and found that the teenager was… “Falcon,” Hailey breathed.

  She sat up and slashed the creature that held her leg. Derek put his hands under Hailey’s armpits and pulled her toward the porch. Hailey pushed along with her right foot, dragging her left, helpless foot along the path. She kept watch and only once had to swing her blade at a curious tentacle. Derek helped Hailey onto a chaise on the porch. She lay on it, grunting as she removed her helmet. She rested her head, at last, on the chair.

  “Thanks, Falcon,” she said quietly.

  “You’re injured?” he asked.

  “Dislocated hip. Can you shove it back in for me?”

  “Just a moment,” he said, removing his helmet. “Ready?” he asked after a few seconds.

  She nodded, closing her eyes and gritting her teeth. He took hold of her thigh and twisted and pushed it back into the socket where it belonged. He inspected the position of the leg and asked, “Feel right?”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” Hailey answered. Sector Security personnel and social workers began to move through the house and back porch, speaking to the children and taking notes. Hailey waved one of them over.

  “Five more houses full of kids. Six perpetrators are in the back of the truck outside.” She turned to Derek. “Two got away. I think on their boat.”