by Jerry Hart
Owen gulped as the display changed to the four scepters the giants had planted. A spherical ship appeared over the scepters, and bolts of energy shot down from the ship to them. Fireballs shot out of the four lenses on the scepters, incinerating everything in their way.
* * *
They left Demetrius’s office a minute later and Owen stood against the guardrail to look down at the floor, even though he knew it would make him dizzy again. The floor looked like a bowl, and in the middle of the bowl was an opening. What was down there?
“You see the seriousness of the situation,” Calvin said, leaning next to Owen and looking down as well.
“You can’t just destroy Earth like this,” Owen said urgently. “It’s not right.”
“Our hands are tied, Owen,” said Calvin. “Walk with us.”
The three of them walked down the spiraling path and went through a door on the ground floor of the main ship. Then they went down a staircase and were in what looked like a hangar. Owen walked up to a guardrail and looked down.
It was a hangar. There were dozens of small, round ships. They were all blue, just like the one he saw Armenus piloting. There was an airlock in the middle of the hangar floor, with two guide tracks on either side. Owen looked up to see a dome-shaped ceiling. He could see up into the main ship from here through the large opening in the middle. He suspected this was where he ended up before he awoke and found himself being escorted to the green room.
Calvin and Claude leaned against the rail on either side of him. They looked worried.
“We were once astronauts, Owen,” said Claude. “My brother and I were experimenting with inter-dimensional travel—this is our ship—” Calvin roughly nudged Claude with his elbow. “We ended up in some strange primitive world overrun with monsters. The leeches were everywhere, scouring the barren, dry wastelands. The people there—Demetrius and the others—lived in fear of these monsters until we came along.
“We did everything we could to teach the people to fight back. We taught them our technology. We tried to teach them our language, but it seemed pointless since there were more of them than us. So they taught us.”
Owen listened, not knowing where this was going. He wanted more than anything to just get back down to land. He eyed the small round ships. They were all lined up in front of hatches in the walls. The platform they were standing on wrapped around on both sides, making Owen wonder just how big this ship really was. It was clearly spherical like the smaller ships below.
“Together, Calvin and I helped the people reclaim their world,” Claude finished.
The twins turned Owen to a monitor placed by the main doorway. Claude punched in a few commands and a video began playing. Owen watched as thousands of small, black creatures swarmed over a brown landscape like a wave. He recognized them as the leeches he had fought with his friends. Only there were many more now.
“It was a damn infestation,” Calvin commented as if reading Owen’s thoughts. “We were greatly outnumbered. We had to act.”
Owen continued to watch as the plague of leeches rampaged through what looked like a town filled with houses made of white stone. He could also see pale figures running away from the leeches in terror.
“This is just a re-enactment,” said Claude. “But it’s basically what happened.”
And now the blue giant dropped from the hovering spherical ship and planted its four scepters into the ground, facing north, south, east and west. Then, Blue was retrieved by the ship along with the fleeing group of pale citizens.
Suddenly the screen went completely white.
“Well,” Calvin said, “you can guess the rest.”
“How long ago was this?” Owen asked.
“Oh, twenty years ago, maybe,” Calvin said. “Give or take a few years.”
“Which planet?” Owen asked quietly.
“Armenus is Demetrius’s son,” Claude said, ignoring Owen’s question. “This is a personal thing with Demetrius—his son betrayed him. We need your help finding Armenus, and the orb. We don’t want your world destroyed. We can try to delay the scorching only for a little while. But we’re going to have to work fast if we’re to save your people from destruction.”
“From those scepters?” Owen asked. “Why would you build something like that?”
“That’s not what they were built for,” Calvin said. “They are like … solar batteries, so to speak. But we found a way to use them to unleash a tremendous amount of energy once they are aligned. But they need a bolt of energy to jumpstart them.”
Owen shook his head in disbelief. “And the giants? What are those for?”
“Well, let’s just say we had an encounter with a giant once. It tried to destroy our world, so we built our giants in order to retaliate. But the giant disappeared and never came back. So now we use ours for exploration and heavy lifting.” Calvin smiled innocently.
Too innocently. Owen wasn’t sure if he believed the friendly-looking alien, but he had no other option.
CHAPTER 16
As he stared out at the field by his house, Jason wondered how long it would take for his friends to arrive. Not long, he hoped. He was ready. He’s been ready for a long time.
It was a little after six in the evening, but it felt much later. The sky was very cloudy. He knew why it was undeniably dark in this town. They were here, and they wanted the orb. But they weren’t going to get it. Not if Jason could help it.
Soon his followers would be here—he had already sent out the signal for them to follow, though on a low bandwidth that he knew the unwanted visitors from above wouldn’t be able to detect.
As Jason waited, he decided to check on him. He walked through the spacious farmhouse, which looked similar to Owen’s, until he was standing just outside a room near the rear. He opened the door slowly and saw Michael lying in a bed against the far wall.
Jason shook his head sadly. Though it was very dark in the room, he could see his younger brother perfectly … and wished he couldn’t. The encounter they’d had with Owen and his friend at the garage downtown had taken a terrible toll on Michael.
Jason looked in a corner of the room and saw an axe and a sword leaning against the wall. They made him smile. Michael had stolen them from Les Huntington. Jason knew his brother loved sharp, exotic weapons, his large curved knife being his prized possession. Michael had killed David Hernandez with it.
As much as Jason loved his brother, he knew there was really nothing he could do for him. Looking at him now in this condition reminded Jason of what had happened two years ago when Michael, who was sixteen at the time, told Jason of the ship he’d found in a field. A bona fide spaceship, and it had just appeared out of nowhere. So Jason followed to check it out.
There they had found the spherical ship, just like Michael had said. What they’d found inside a jar in the ship, however, changed their lives.
There was a noise coming from outside the room. Jason looked down the hall and saw someone standing on the porch, staring through the screen door. It was a young man with a black hoodie and jeans, with long, greasy brown hair in front of his pale face. Jason recognized him.
Making his way slowly down the hall and passing the robot D in the living room, Jason opened the screen door and noticed, but was not surprised by, the large number of people standing in his yard. There had to be at least fifty people, and they stood silently, staring up at him.
His minions were finally here. Some were the walking dead, others just victims of the leech venom.
And this was only a fraction of them. Jason looked back at the one on the porch with him. There were dark tear tracks running from his eyes past his cheeks, and though Jason had never officially met the boy before now, he knew him to be Chris. He knew because Michael had known. This was the boy responsible for Michael’s condition. He was the one who had thrown that weird bomb that caused the garage to collapse while the orb was sending its signal, putting Michael into the coma. Jason wanted nothing more than to rea
ch out and snap Chris’s neck, because Chris was one of the venom-infected zombies.
But no, he’d do much worse to the boy. Jason was going to make Chris his slave and make him do evil things, things he and Owen and the others swore to prevent with their little club, the Unstoppable Titans.
They’re not so unstoppable after all, he thought. Ever since Michael had extracted the information about the orb from Owen’s head, Jason had had the luxury of viewing some of Owen’s thoughts at leisure. Right now he was thinking about all of the softball games Owen and Chris had played together. But they would never play again.
Not after today.
Jason placed his hand on Chris’s throat and slowly squeezed it. Chris started to sputter and his face turned red and then blue. But he didn’t fight Jason in the slightest. Jason finally grabbed control of his anger and released the boy. He placed his hand on Chris’s shoulder and led him down the steps, to the grass. Despite his anger over what Chris did to Michael, Jason just couldn’t bring himself to kill the monster hunter. Not yet, anyway. As they walked to the yard, Jason could see more people wandering off the road in front of the house. Everyone who stood before him shared the blank, pale face of Chris himself. Jason knew why that was, and it made him angry.
The leeches were attacking people at random now that the orb had been activated, and that’s not what they were supposed to do. Jason looked down at the orb in his hand. The glow in its center was very faint now; it needed recharging.
And for that, he would need a leech.
He looked at Chris standing next to him and said, “Go find me a leech and bring it back here. Don’t kill it. And be swift about it.”
Chris took off across the field, past the growing crowd of zombies, and ran full speed down the dirt road. Jason marveled at how fast he was moving, and instead of taking joy in his minion’s abilities, he feared them. That was a side effect of the venom of the leech, and he knew he would have to work on that. The venom that powered the orb was only supposed to act as a brain-paralyzing agent, but for some reason, it also gave anyone caught in its wave the strength of the leech as well.
Jason knew how dangerous that made his minions. If they ever decided to turn against him, they would be able to take him out with no trouble at all. Especially since the orb was running on empty right now. After a while, he wouldn’t be able to control his followers, and there was no telling what they would do without guidance.
* * *
They were getting closer, according to the tracker in Doug’s lap. They were driving down a dirt road about twenty minutes from the Matthews place.
“We’re lost,” Curtis said for the tenth time.
“We’re not lost,” Doug said, not taking his eyes off the screen. “We’re almost there.”
“How accurate is that thing?” Curtis asked, looking around. There was a wooded area on his left side and an open field on his right with another wooded area beyond that.
“My brother built it,” Doug said, “so it’s very accurate.”
Curtis said no more.
Something didn’t feel right, though. And then he saw, with the very little light they were getting from the sky, a huge footprint in the field. And then another. They were going in the same direction.
“Silver,” Curtis whispered.
“Where?” Doug asked, jumping in his seat and looking around furiously.
“Not here,” Curtis answered, shaking his head at his jumpy companion. “He went through here, though. Look.” He pointed to the craters in the field. Silver had abruptly left the street where Owen had reclaimed the orb, and Curtis figured the giant had gone after him. So if Silver was here, so was Owen.
But what was Curtis going to do when he found Owen? He wasn’t sure. Perhaps they could stop fighting and figure out what to do together, like Doug had suggested. Curtis wanted to believe that was possible. He had to believe it.
“What time is it?” Curtis asked, not taking his eyes off the field.
“Nearly seven o’clock,” Doug answered, looking at his watch.
“Is that it? Is that his house?” Curtis was looking at a two-story house coming up on their right.
Doug looked down at the tracker, then shook his head. “The signal is coming from farther away than this. Keep going.”
So Curtis kept driving.
* * *
The crowd parted to let them through. There was a lot of thrashing coming from the dark creature as Chris dragged it to the front. Jason grinned as he walked down the steps from the porch to meet them. The leech was being dragged in a fierce headlock and was letting out loud gagging noises. Jason’s grin faded—Chris didn’t have a scratch on him, but the leech itself looked beaten up. Jason hadn’t expected that.
He walked up to the snarling creature before him, the orb in his right hand. Chris held the monster down on its knees. This was the first one Jason had ever seen with his own eyes. He had memories of it, but they weren’t his memories. He knew there were only ten of them—the ones Armenus brought with him to do his experiments—so he would have to use this one carefully.
That would be difficult, though. Sifting through Owen’s memories, Jason knew that the Unstoppable Titans had killed almost all of these precious leeches so far. And using the unstable link he had with Owen, he was able to see what the boy had seen every now and then. Jason knew three more leeches were dead—one at Birch Plaza and two at the Matthews house. Without their venom, the orb would be useless.
Jason touched the creature’s bald scalp with the tips of his fingers, then worked down to its chest. The creature stopped struggling and stared at Jason with its big yellow eyes. It looked almost like a child now. And why not? They had been children when Armenus had experimented on them.
And then it screamed as Jason thrust his hand into its stomach and pulled out something small and pale. It was the venom gland. Then he dug into its chest and pulled out its heart. The heart was red and beating, and it looked so much like a human heart. Though he knew it was just an animal as Armenus knew this, Jason’s human self couldn’t get past the shock of what he had just done.
Then, suddenly, the leech melted away in Chris’s grip, splattering to the ground in a smelly, dark slush. Jason turned back to the house, carrying the gland in one hand and the orb in the other.
A few moments later, Jason was ready. He sat down at the desk in the study with a cup full of venom he’d extracted from the gland. The fluid looked like liquid gold and was pleasing to his eyes.
He set the orb on the desk and slowly poured the venom onto the shiny marble surface. As soon as it touched the orb, the surface immediately went from solid to liquid, yet it retained its spherical shape. Jason smiled at the miracle that was Armenus’s powerful weapon.
The venom gathered in the center of the suspended liquid shape and swirled around counterclockwise. It reminded him of water circling a drain, only it was beautiful. The orb began to glow white, the light filling the entire study and Jason’s widening eyes.
* * *
Doug was seeing it, but he was having trouble believing it. Curtis had parked a few yards away from a farmhouse where the tracking signal appeared to be coming from. What they found was a mass gathering of people. And not just normal people. Curtis and Doug had been watching for at least ten minutes and the people in front of the house hadn’t moved an inch.
“It’s the zombies,” Curtis said. “I’m telling you, it’s them.”
“But what are they doing?”
Curtis was silent for a long moment, then he said, “They’re waiting.”
“For what?”
“For orders,” Curtis whispered. “They’re waiting to be told what to do.”
A silent minute passed between them as they sat and watched from a relatively safe distance the strange events unfolding.
Earlier, through some binoculars they’d found in the backseat, they had seen a blond guy come out of the house and approach the growing crowd. What he did beyond that was a myste
ry because the zombies blocked him.
What Doug and Curtis knew for certain, though, was that this guy had the orb. They had seen him carrying it with him. After a few minutes’ discussion, they came to figure the guy was Michael’s brother, Jason.
And then they saw Jason going back into the house, leaving the crowd standing silently in the yard.
“What do you think happened to Owen?” Doug asked. “You think he’s in the house?”
“He has to be,” Curtis said. “He took the backpack. He has those tracking things.”
“What do we do now?”
“We go in there and rescue him, of course.”
“And get the orb back,” Doug added carefully.
“Yep.”
“Funny. You wouldn’t think Owen would need rescuing.”
“Something must have happened—” Curtis frowned. An uneasy thought just occurred to him. “You don’t think he brought the orb to Jason, do you?”
“What, like they’re working together?” Doug shook his head vigorously. “No way. He wouldn’t do that. Those guys killed his friends. They killed your friend. They killed my brother!”
“It was just a thought,” Curtis said defensively. “Why is Owen here, though?”
“Maybe this is his house. Maybe Jason ambushed him here.”
“A whole lot of maybes,” Curtis mused. Then he hopped out of the truck and ran to the other side of the road. Doug saw him dip his fingers into some mud and draw tracks on his cheeks, leading from his eyes.
“What are you doing?” Doug asked.
“I’m trying to look like the zombies.”
“Why?”
“Dude, use your brain. We’re going to join the crowd, then sneak into the house and get Owen. And the orb.”
“‘We’?”
Curtis sighed. “You wanna stay in the truck?”
Doug was silent for a while, thinking what he wanted to do. He didn’t want to go anywhere near the zombies after his experiences with Owen’s friend Chris in the plaza and Daniel at Les’s house.