by Maia Starr
The End
Rai-Weredragons Of Tivoso
By Maia Starr
Chapter 1
General Rai Razook
“It is up to us to get this virus to as many humans as we can. We could save millions of them from the Clenok cyborg armies. We need the humans of Earth and they need us,” King Karik said to me as I stood at attention in front of him.
“Yes, I understand, my King. It is important that we do this mission as quickly as we can. You can count on me,” I said to him with a salute.
“You will be one of the few heading south. Be careful. We do not exactly know how powerful these cyborgs are. When will your army be ready?” he asked.
“The brigade is getting ready now and preparing. We will be ready to leave at sunrise,” I said.
“Good. Get all the supplies that you need while you are here at Haven Brook human colony. Take some human food with you as well. I will see to your departure at sunrise,” he said.
“Yes, thank you,” I said and gave him a salute. He was my king. He was the King of the Veruka. We had come from our planet called Tivoso many galaxies away.
We had come with good reason. It was because a plague had started to make our race sick. We did not know why. We simply called it the blackness plague. It was because of this plague that the king decided to leave our planet with a very large army in order to go to a planet called Earth.
We knew of this planet, and we knew of the humans that lived on it. The king wanted to visit them to see if their advances in medicine could help us to defeat the blackness plague that was killing us.
It was only after we arrived on Earth that the king discovered the cure to the blackness plague in a human colony called Haven Brook. He mated with a human female and somehow her DNA combined with his. Somehow, it cured him of the plague. We now knew the cure, having sex with human females. But there was a problem.
There weren't very many humans on Earth because the humans were at war. It seemed sometime in the recent past that cyborgs had taken over Earth and killed most of the population of humans. Now they only lived in small secret colonies of human refugees. They fought the cyborgs as hard as they could, but they weren't good enough. Therefore, they needed us. We were a skilled and vast army of weredragons. We could do things that the humans couldn't. Our weapons were advanced, and we had already proven successful against them at Haven Brook.
But the human female that the king mated with also brought hope. She was a medical doctor and a scientist. She had invented a computer virus. It was tested on the cyborgs and shown to defeat them. Now our king was sending out small bands of armies to human colonies far and wide to distribute the virus. I was in charge of one of these armies, and we were leaving at sunrise.
At sunrise the following day, we left the safety of the human colony Haven Brook. We headed south, while most of the other small bands headed north or east. We were going based on outdated information. Haven Brook had not had contact with these human colonies in years, but they knew where the colonies were, and we were going to try to find them. If they still existed.
“General Razook, we have reached flight altitude. We will be at the destination of the human colony known as Orlando in three hours,” my lieutenant said.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Qon,” I said as I listened to the report. He saluted me and walked down the hall. I walked out onto the flight deck. I was on the main ship with about ten other soldiers.
We had three ships with us, and each one carried twenty soldiers. It was a small army of less than eighty, but it would do. We were sort of on a scouting mission, scouting for other human colonies that we could take the virus to, and maybe even possibly mate with the human females. Doing that would make sure that I was vaccinated against the plague. It was part of my own mission. I might as well do something to protect myself, and the humans owed us, whether they knew it or not. We were there to save them with the virus as well as with our strength. The least they could do was mate with us. It wasn't too much to ask for. The Veruka had sex with Veruka females all the time, a different one every week. It was just the way of things. Being with a human female should not be any different, I assumed.
“We are coming upon the human colony,” Lieutenant Qon said to me a few hours later.
“Let's go to the flight deck,” I said. He followed me to the flight deck. Lieutenant Qon was a new lieutenant working under me. This was my first mission with him. But he did not seem to like taking orders, even though I was his superior. Still, he was a Veruka, and we had tempers.
“Do the heat scan,” I said as soon as I got to the flight deck and looked out the window. This human colony looked strangely deserted.
“Yes, General,” my pilot said.
“I don't see any sign of life. It looks to be deserted unless the humans are hiding,” I said looking out the windshield.
“So far not picking up any life,” my pilot said.
“Keep looking. Let's do a slow flyover. Keep prepared for any hostile activity,” I said.
Outside the windshield were the ruins of a small city. Buildings were only half standing. They seemed to be long ago bombed and destroyed. The walls were black with smoke and smudge. We couldn't see any movement. No humans were walking; no vehicles were being moved. It was just completely deserted.
“Report,” I said.
“Still no heat signature,” my pilot said.
“I want the fleet to hover at a safe distance outside the city. I am going to take the smaller scout ship with a band of ten. We have to make sure before giving up on this colony. Maybe the humans are underground, hiding from us. Remember: they think of us as aliens. They don't know that we are friends,” I said.
“General, is that wise? You are too important to be on the ground. Let me go,” Lieutenant Qon said.
“No. It has to be me. I need to be the one to have the first contact with the humans. You might say something that could turn them hostile. You will stay here,” I said walking away from him. I heard him groan as I did so. He did not like what I said to him. But I didn't like that he was questioning my orders in front of everyone on the flight deck.
Minutes later I was on the ground with ten soldiers at my back. I thought that maybe we should shift and fly over. But if there were humans, I did not want to give them cause to be alarmed. When we were shifted into weredragon form, we looked less like them with massive five-foot emerald wings and scales. So I decided against it.
“Find any signatures?” I asked my engineer who was searching for any sign that humans might be hiding underground.
“No, nothing. There is a network of drain systems, but they are not registering with any human activity,” he said.
“Then it is truly deserted. Either the humans that were here left, or they have all died as a result of cyborg activity. Let's get back to the ship,” I said.
We headed back to the scout ship them back onto the main ship of my fleet.
“What do we do now?” a soldier asked.
“Let me see the map that we were given of the human colonies,” I said. The soldier nodded and brought up the map that Haven Brook had given us. He projected it on the wall.
“It seems there is a concentration of human colonies to the northeast. That is where most of our army has gone. I think we should head there and support them in the outlying regions. We will see if we find any human colonies near these that are plotted. Humans tend to stick together,” I said.
“So we had north?”
“Yes, just outside of this one. The one called Willow Springs that I believe Jex was assigned to. We will go thirty miles to the west of it to see what is in that area. Plot a course for right here,” I said pointing on the map.
“Yes, General, ” the pilot said.
“Send a message to the king that we are headed to that region and give coordinates. But remember to send the message in short burst when we are getting on the same line with Haven Brook. Do not keep the transmission running. The cyborgs cou
ld pick it up,” I said.
“Yes, General.”
So we left the south and headed north. I wasn't going to give up on this mission. I wasn't going to be the only general to give up simply because the human colony that I was assigned was deserted. I wasn't going to go back to Haven Brook with my tail between my legs. No, I wasn't going back to Haven Brook until I had successfully given the virus to a human colony and defeated a band of cyborgs with it. I wasn't going to go back to Haven Brook empty-handed. I was going to have victory in the one hand, and a human female mate in the other. That was my vow to myself, and I wasn't going to break it.
Chapter 2
Hannah Maven
“What is our distance?” I said looking over at Scott.
“We are fifty miles to the east,” he said looking at his gadget.
“This is farther than we have ever gone. I think we should dock soon,” I said.
“There are some houses on the shore,” Jared said pointing to the shore. We were all in a boat; there were eight of us going on a supply mission. This was how we kept our colony going. Most houses in the area were abandoned and were abandoned with haste. So food and resources were left in the homes. We raided these abandoned homes and took what supplies we could find, like canned food and bottled water. We did these supply runs about once a month, but we had never gone this far before. But it was necessary because we had hit all the houses near the human colony that we lived at.
“Looks good to me; let's start paddling toward the shore,” Scott said.
I looked at the shore looking for any sign of activity. By activity, I meant the Clenok cyborgs. They had taken over the Earth in a quick sweep. None of us were expecting it. My sister Helen and I were twin sisters. We were vacationing on Long Island in a cute little bed and breakfast at the very tip of the island when the first wave of attacks happened. The cyborgs had amassed armies without us even realizing it. The first city they hit was our home city of Atlanta Georgia. Because of this, we knew that we couldn't go home, so we stayed on Long Island as we mourned the loss of our family and our home in Georgia. The city had been shut down while the Earth armies tried to fight the cyborgs. So we decided to just stay where we were at the bed and breakfast. During that time, we thought that the cyborg army would fall, and everything would go back to normal. But it never happened. We were all wrong, and I underestimated The Clenok cyborgs. The battles went on forever and spread from Georgia. The machines were hitting every major city, and people were in a panic. Society as we knew it had collapsed. Before we knew it, we had been staying on Long Island for several weeks, and eventually, it turned into years. The bed-and-breakfast owners had abandoned the place, and soon we were on our own. That was when we set out to find better shelter, and fast, because we knew the machines were coming our way.
We stumbled across a human gathering at an old nineteen-twenties Art Deco estate called Willow Springs. They were setting up a fence and some protection. They were setting up resources like a garden and gathering water and food from other houses to keep it going. For my sister and I, it was better than being out on our own, so we joined the Willow Springs gathering of humans.
But before we knew it, a couple of years had passed, and we were still living in Willow Springs, and we were still fighting the cyborgs. But most of the human armies had been decimated. As far as we knew, there were only human colonies like us spread out in what used to be known as the United States. We were all on our own, trying to survive.
Now, I was on one of those supply missions to bring supplies back to the people of Willow Springs, including my twin sister, whom I had talked into staying at the estate while I went out on a run.
“We are approaching,” Jared said.
“Everyone be on guard,” I said. Finally, the boat reached a pier. We tied up the boat and walked down the pier on to the lawn of the first house that we saw. It was the only one on the shore. The rest of them were set back in the trees a little, and I could only see two.
“Let's check this house out, and if it's empty, we got to keep going into those trees,” Scott said.
We spent some time looking through the house. The refrigerator was empty. There was nothing to be found. So we went through the trees to the other two houses set back far from the shore. Those two houses also did not have anything.
“We are not having any luck here. We got to keep going,” Jared said.
“We are heading toward a main road. If we keep going through the forest, there should be a main road with more houses,” I said pointing to the trees.
“All right, let's do it,” Scott said.
We hiked into the wooded area for about fifteen minutes. The forest was getting dense. I was starting to get nervous. I pulled the handgun that I kept in a holster around my thigh and cocked it.
“What is it?” Scott whispered to me.
“Nothing. I just have a bad feeling,” I said.
“You and your sister with those feelings. Just because you are twins does not mean you have some sort of superpower,” he said rolling his eyes and then continuing to walk ahead of me.
But five minutes later, I was proven right.
“There! There!” we heard someone shout from a far distance. It wasn't any of our people. We stopped and looked at each other. Suddenly we heard the sounds of blaster guns; they weren't human guns. They were cyborgs.
“Clenok! Get back to the boat!” I shouted. But all of a sudden, we found ourselves in a battle. On one side there were Clenok coming through the brush. On the other side, we could hear humans. I felt a blast from a gun go by me, and I dove to the ground. I looked up to see cyborgs coming through the trees. I couldn't believe it. We were suddenly being assaulted by the things we feared the most.
"Clenok! Grenades!” I heard a man shout. I turned to the other direction to see a group of people I had never seen before. They were dressed like they had been in the army. Then I saw what they were doing. The man pulled the pin from a grenade and was about to chuck it in my direction. I quickly got to my feet and ran. Everyone was running in all different directions, and I couldn't see anyone that was with me on the supply run.
Boom! The grenade went off. I caught the tail end of it as it launched me into the air. I fell to the ground. I blacked out. I thought that maybe I had died.
But when I woke up, I wished that that were true because I had suddenly found myself in a fate worse than death. I opened my eyes. I could see the leaves of tall trees over me. They were passing over me as though I was on a boat floating down the river. But then I felt the searing pain around my ankles. It took me a while to shake off the sleep.
I looked toward my feet and began to panic. But I didn't dare scream. My ankles were bound together by a rope being pulled on by a cyborg. I looked around me, and I was surrounded by them. They were marching forward together in unison. My heart was racing. What the hell has happened? Why are they taking me? Where are they taking me? I cannot believe this was happening. Fuck.
I looked over to my right. That was when I noticed a woman being jerked forward. She was walking. Her wrists were tied together and a cyborg was in front of her pulling her along. She looked at me with wide eyes filled with fright. I had never seen her before. She was not from the Willow Springs colony. I wondered if she were part of the human group I saw in the woods. But she gave me a look as though she was happy that I was awake, and not dead. She looked relieved to not be alone with the cyborgs. I found no relief in it.
I looked at the cyborg in front of me. They were terrifying. They had the same shape as a human, if a human was a weredragon. They were a shiny silver color. They were machines. The legs were long metal poles that looked like human bones, like human legs without the skin and muscle. It had been revealed a long ago that the machines copied the human form. They walked just like us. Even the head looked like a human skull, but with glowing eyes and no emotion. They continued to drag me across the forest floor, and I felt the sting of the brush on my back.
Cha
pter 3
General Rai Razook
We made our way into the northern territories just east of the Willow Springs human colony. Our fleet was moving slowly high in the sky so as not to be detected by cyborgs.
“I think it is time that we lower our altitude. Let's go low and scan with the heat radar,” I said to the pilot.
“Yes, General, ” he said. The ship started to fly lower and lower until we were over a wooded area.
“I am detecting a significant amount of heat in this area,” he said.
“Good, take as many readings as you can. Get the smaller scout ship ready for me. I am going to go down there and see if there are humans. I will make contact,” I said.
“Yes, General, right away.”
I went to the back of the ship and unplugged my gun where I had it charging. I put it in my belt. I checked my weapons belt for all of the fun toys I had at my disposal, like bombs. I was good. I was ready. I was going to make contact with a human colony no matter what.