Strangers and Shadows

by John Kowalsky

  “Listen, the only thing I can do for him is take him to the hospital. That’s it, man. I’m sorry.” Jack was about to interrupt but Frank continued, “With the extent of his injuries, he’s going to need a team of doctors, maybe x-rays, a blood transfusion—I really don’t know, but they will.”

  “Alright, let’s stop wasting time then,” Celia said. “Frank, take us to the hospital.”

  He started the car and pulled out of the alley. In the rear view mirror he could see the woman’s eyes staring back at him. Hauntingly beautiful eyes—they scared him a little, and yet, he couldn’t look away. “They’re gonna ask questions when I show up with a gun shot victim and his two friends. The police will be called.”

  “What do you suggest?” Celia asked.

  “Let me take him in alone,” Frank held a hand up. “Before you disagree, let me finish… They know me there. If I say I found your friend alone in an alley and brought him in, it will go over a lot smoother with any authorities. You have to face it, whether or not he pulls through, he’s going to have to stay in the hospital for a while… at least a week or two. You’re going to have to leave him with me when we get there. Unless, that is, you want to explain to the police what an energy weapon is?”

  Jack and Celia were silent.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “What will you tell them?” Celia asked.

  “Mostly the truth—that I was walking from the grocery store to the florist’s, which I was, by the way, to buy some flowers for my wife, when I saw him lying in an alley. I saw blood on his clothes and he was passed out. So I took him to the ER as fast as I could.

  “Will they believe you?” Celia asked.

  Not waiting for Frank’s reply, Jack said, “Whether they do or not, you’d better make sure he’s well taken care of.” It wasn’t quite a threat, but it was close.

  Frank stopped the car a few blocks from the entrance to the ER and Celia and Jack got out. They continued walking toward the hospital on foot. Jack had to know that the guy was going to be alright.

  Celia sensed his concern. “You’ve grown fond of him, haven’t you?”

  “Asher?” Jack grunted. “Yeah, I guess I have. The guy’s been dealt a pretty shitty hand. No one deserves to go through that.”

  “Are you talking about him getting shot, or about him and his princess girlfriend?”

  “Both, I suppose,” Jack paused, gathering his thoughts. “I mean either one of those is intense enough, but one right after the other…? It’s not fair.”

  “Listen to you,” Celia smiled. “Who’d have thought that my big, strong, mean man would have such a soft spot for young boys.” She was laughing as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

  Jack feigned injury but couldn’t help but laugh too. “Ya know, remind me to keep my big mouth shut next time I’m in a sharing mood.”

  Celia pouted her lips. “Aww, I’m sorry, Jackie. I promise I’ll never ever point out the obvious again.” She laughed again.

  “You sure are something.” Jack pulled her in closer to him as they walked through the doors into the reception area.

  Jack and Celia had been waiting about twenty minutes when Frank came back with news.

  “Alright, they’ve got Asher into surgery. The doctor on call says he should be fine. He suffered some blood loss, and they couldn’t find the projectile, though I couldn’t explain to them that they wouldn’t. But anyway, they said there was no internal bleeding and he should make a full recovery.”

  Jack let out a deep breath and Frank continued. “But, as I warned you, the cops are on their way. In fact, they should be here any second. Just thought I’d give you a head’s up.”

  Celia was already rising to her feet, taking Jack by the hand. She started for the doors, but stopped as the police cruiser pulled up with its lights flashing. “This way, Jack.”

  Frank turned and watched them hurry off toward the hospital’s interior. Several paces down the hallway Jack turned back. “Look after him, Frank.” They turned the corner and were gone from sight.

  And so another weird chapter of Frank’s life came to an end. He couldn’t help but wonder if, or when, he would see them again.

  Rings and Things

  Maybe it was only a bad dream, Kid thought. A quick glance up at his arms and down at his legs confirmed that it hadn’t been.

  He had been sleeping last night when they came for him. A noise woke him up. At first he thought it was nothing, maybe a stray animal outside his window, or a tree branch scratching the roof, but then, just as he closed his heavy eyes, the door to his room creaked opened the slightest bit. A crack of light from the hallway spilled into the room. He sat up, his heart pounded in his chest.

  “Shit. You woke him up, dumbass,” Kid heard a man’s deep voice drawl. “Quick, hold him down.”

  Two men burst into the room. The nearest was on top of Kid before he could react. Kid struggled, but the man was too strong. As he opened his mouth to scream for help, Kid felt a sharp pain in his neck.

  He couldn’t hear his voice yelling for help, in fact, Kid realized he couldn’t feel anything at all. The world seemed to move in slow motion. His eyes weren’t listening to the commands he was giving them—they began to close. It was as if someone was slowly closing the curtains. As his vision darkened, and just before he lost consciousness, Kid heard more voices. They were funny, and the words they said made little sense. “...told us... appened to her..... oh-a head the.. an.”

  Kid’s vision came into focus as his head cleared of the drug they had knocked him out with. He was suspended vertically in the middle of a large metallic ring. His arms and legs were stretched out in an X, bound by the wrists and ankles. The position made Kid feel vulnerable and exposed, but it was not entirely uncomfortable. The ring was inside of a bright white room, perfectly square. The walls were smooth and shiny. He could see himself in the reflection.

  Kid was alone in the room, but he could sense other people around—lots of people. He didn’t know how—he just knew they were there. It felt like he was being watched, and another scan around the room revealed several small camera lenses recessed into the walls and ceiling. He was just about to ask what the hell was going on, when the ring started humming.

  His eyes darted up to the top of the ring. A faint glow began to emanate from the ring and then it grew brighter. The hum grew louder and an even brighter light began to spin in the opposite direction of the glowing ring. Strands of static lightning crackled and popped all around him, starting at the ring and shooting outward, away from his body. His hair stood out at all angles, and his heart thumped in his chest. He couldn’t tell if his chest hurt, or if he just couldn’t breathe.

  The static lightning grew more intense, reaching down to Kid’s extended arms and legs. The pain was incredible as the voltage flowed into, through, and around him. He wanted to scream but he couldn’t control any part of his body, let alone his voice. He managed to grunt and growl through tightly clenched teeth, his molars grinding together. The noise would have made him shudder, if he could have heard the sound over the hum and crack of the lightning.

  The opaque white walls surrounding him suddenly changed to clear glass, and Kid could see that the small glass cube he was in, was itself, in a much larger room. It was easily the largest room Kid had ever seen. Fighting through the pain, he could not see the wall opposite him in the larger room, only the ceiling and lights extending on to the horizons.

  Like his smaller room, the big room had a ring too. The top of which reached nearly to the ceiling. Thousands of soldiers were lined up in formation before the ring. Battle craft and troop transporters were also among the ranks.

  Though he saw nothing physical connecting them, Kid somehow knew that the two rings were linked. A portal opened within the larger ring and Kid heard a loud voice over the noise of the ring. “Commence the invasion.” The voice was familiar—he couldn’t place it at first, but then he remembered. It belonged to his mother’s ri
ght hand, Dorian.

  The assembled troops began to move through the larger ring. The first few waves consisted of soldiers on foot. These were followed by several waves of hover tanks and speeders. There was a brief flash of light and then the tanks and soldiers were gone, transported to wherever the ring led.

  Kid had little time to worry about these details, as each wave of soldiers and equipment going through the ring brought a new threshold of pain with it.

  Trying to focus through the white, blinding pain, Kid began to count the waves of troops that went through the ring. He made it to the thirteenth wave before the pain was too much. He lost consciousness.

  Desmond jumped into the hangar in the Seventh and saw the linked rings. He gambled that they wouldn’t be able to have an EM field up while the rings were operational, and he found that he was both relieved and disappointed.

  A small figure was suspended in the middle of the smaller ring. “Kid,” he whispered. He was already too late to stop the vision he had seen in Julia’s mind.

  He reached out for his young son’s mind and recoiled at the wall of pain he found there. They were torturing his child. Worse still, they were using his son to open a door between verses which could very well destroy Desmond’s world and the people who were a part of it. A people that his son had yet to meet.

  He had to stop the torture of his son. Desmond moved toward the smaller ring. As he did so, he saw a bright ball of light rise up from the center of the ring, where Kid was, and move straight up through the roof of the hangar and out of view.

  Kid was gone but the smaller ring remained, and Desmond had no explanation for what had just happened. To make matters even worse, the connection between the rings was still active, and wave after wave of the Seventh’s military kept passing through into his world.

  If Desmond was going to give his world a chance, he needed to act quickly. The rings were easy to find in the energy field. If the energy could be seen with physical eyes it would have burned a brilliant white. It was a kind of energy that Desmond had only ever seen in life sources before—suns, stars, springs, and humans that were untainted with metallic machines. That was one of the biggest reasons why his world was against the nanite technology of the Seventh—because it made a human being less of a being. True, on the outside, it appeared to have a host of benefits: cell repair, enhanced communications, strength, and speed, but nothing came close to what Desmond’s people had—the ability to be fully human. To experience this life as they were born to live it, and to strive to be a perfect expression of what it meant to be human—that was the want of Desmond’s people.

  Desmond wondered how it was possible that a mechanical contraption could possess such life sustaining energy, and then he felt something familiar. No, not something, someone… Realization dawned on him like a supernova, exploding through the synapses of his brain. Kid.

  They had somehow infused his life energy into the machine. The horror of such a possibility was astounding. Such a thing should not be possible. The Mother Brain Construct was involved, Desmond was sure of it. The gateway had to be closed. The rift between verses could not be allowed to stay open. But what would become of Kid if the rings were destroyed? Would what was left of his son be destroyed as well?

  It was a difficult decision for a father to make. Desmond knew he only had one rational choice, but knowing didn’t make it any easier.

  The rings had to be destroyed. He stepped out from his hiding place and stretched out his arms, gathering all of his considerable telekinetic strength. With the most violent of intentions he tried to rip the two rings apart.

  Nothing happened.

  Desmond’s chest heaved with the effort. The muscles in his face constricted, and veins popped out on his forehead.

  The sound of metal on metal rebounded across the hangar. Still, the rings crackled with power, and still, more troops moved through the portal and into the peaceful world on the other side.

  Desmond’s actions had not gone unnoticed. Many of the soldiers looked up at the rings with alarm. Some began to look around, searching for a cause to the effect.

  Desmond quickly ducked behind the crates of equipment next to him.

  A loud voice came over the intercom. “Squads twelve and thirteen, commence a perimeter security sweep.”

  Damn it, Desmond thought. He was running out of time. It would only be minutes before the security sweep discovered his position. He had to destroy the rings now, but he had no idea how. They had withstood all of the power Desmond had at his disposal and then some. The energy connecting and sustaining the rings was too strong for his powers. It would take something on the magnitude of a sun or—that was it!

  Desmond had an idea. If the gateway was opened with the life force of a human being, it would take an equal amount of force to close it. He had no desire to die, however. In fact, faced with sacrificing himself, he had never felt the need to live more strongly than he did right now. He wrestled back and forth with the decision briefly, but there was more at stake here than his life or his son’s.

  Once more, Desmond reached out for the rings. This time, his intent was not to wrench it apart, but to add his own life force to it. He could feel the weaknesses in the connection between the rings. With enough energy added, it would overload that connection and the entire system would blow apart.

  At first Desmond felt cold, as the energy left his body and flowed into the rings, but he soon found that the life force energy in the rings provided some warmth and comfort to him.

  The part of his mind that wasn’t concentrating on the transfer recalled how lucky it was that he was the one here to deal with the situation. As far as he knew, he was the only one of his people who knew how the technique was performed. There may have a been a few elders still alive, living in seclusion, who also knew the technique, but most of the others had already moved on.

  Desmond took some solace in the fact that although no one left would know of the ascension technique, it would not pass away forever. Whether it took hundreds, or thousands of years, when a human reached the point in his evolution where he was ready to move on, past a physical existence, they would be able to perform the technique. After all, the first of his people to discover it had no one to teach them. It was just another part of human development, much like the way a child loses his baby teeth and grows permanent ones only when he is ready.

  A presence touched Desmond’s mind. “Who are you?” the presence asked. “You feel familiar.”

  Desmond halted the transfer. “Kid? Is that you?” Was it possible that Kid’s consciousness was still intact within the machine?

  “That is what the man, Jack Spade, called me, yes.” The presence became more forceful. “WHO ARE YOU?”

  “You know who I am, Kid.”

  “We are connected, somehow,” Kid said.

  “Yes, Kid. I’m your father—biologically speaking.”

  “No. You misunderstand,” Kid replied curtly. “We are connected right now.”

  Desmond frowned. Was his son all there? He feared he may have suffered some kind of psychological damage. Unless… “You mean the rings, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Your energy is inhabiting the same space as mine. WHY?” The last word was spoken with such force that Desmond’s head began to ache. The pain was continuously growing.

  “Kid, you’re hurting me.” Desmond realized his nose had also started bleeding. He immediately felt the pain fade.

  “What do you want?” Kid asked.

  “I have to shut down the gate. My people are being invaded.” Desmond could feel Kid thinking. He could also feel how powerful Kid’s energy was, and how on edge his son seemed to be.

  Then again, how would he feel if his mind and energy had been ripped from his body against his will. “Do you remember how you came to be where you are?” Desmond asked.

  “Of course. A woman took me away from Jack. She said she was my mother and she needed my help. She deceived me. She had me bound and drugged an
d placed me inside the ring’s interface,” Kid said. “The pain… It hurt too much to stay there, so I left. Now, I am here.”

  Realization dawned on Desmond. Kid had somehow achieved the very technique that he himself had been attempting only moments before.

  Kid’s psyche seemed to have changed in the process. Desmond didn’t know if it was due to the pain, or perhaps Kid was too young and immature as a being to go through the process. There was no time to waste thinking about it now.

  “Kid, you’re still connected to the rings. Is there anyway you can shut them down?”

  There was a long pause before Kid replied. “Yes.”

  Desmond exhaled in relief.

  “I will need your assistance, however,” Kid said.

  “Of course. Anything you need.”

  “When I tell you, funnel the energy around you into me, adding it to mine.”

  Desmond nodded his understanding.

  “Father…?”

  “Yes, Kid?”

  “What will happen to me when the rings are destroyed?”

  Desmond swallowed dryly as he searched for the words. “I don’t know.”

  A moment passed silently between the father and son.

  “I’m ready,” Kid broke the silence. “Let’s begin.”

  Desmond reached out, gathering all the energy at his disposal. The lights dimmed as he drew power from the electrical grid. Soldiers all around began to drop like flies as Desmond drained them of as much energy as he could without killing them.

  As all other light sources dimmed, the rings glowed white as the plasma surged around it. A wind picked up, whipping around in all directions, a strange occurrence inside of a building.

  Desmond heard nothing from Kid as he focused the energies flowing toward him. When Desmond had gathered all he could without damaging himself, he said, “Alright, Kid, that’s all I have.” He groaned with the effort and waited for a reply. He hoped his life force would not also be needed, but he was willing to sacrifice himself along with his son, should it be required.