Story Time

by Linell Jeppsen

  He watched as the aliens turned to one another and conversed. Their language was a series of bird-like chirps, squeaks and an occasional low-toned, vibrating hum that made Michael’s teeth ache. They spoke together for a few moments and then the bigger one stepped back, regarding Michael with amusement. “We do not have names, Michael Anderson, not like your people; we have designations—data-markers that identify us within our society. My partner, however, has suggested that names are a quantifiable entity amongst your kind. You may give us names for as long as we travel together on this timeline.”

  Instantly, a number of small hands shot up and suggestions of names for the children’s new pets. “Babar” and “Dumbo” made Michael cringe, as did most of the other names the kid’s came up with. Finally, Michael said, “If it’s all right with you, we’ll call you Uncle and Auntie, okay?”

  The two aliens bowed low, and Uncle said, “Those are fine names, Michael Anderson.”

  Michael raised his hands. “Hey, no offence, but it’s either Michael, or Anderson, not both of them together, okay?”

  Once again, the little beings conversed. This time Michael could have sworn they were arguing. He felt as though he was a witness to a lover’s quarrel and realized suddenly that these two were more than business partners; they were married, or at least a mated pair.

  Finally, Uncle turned back and said, “We are very sorry, Michael And…Michael. We were wrong to call you by both of your names. This planet and the people on it are very different from ours.”

  “No worries,” Michael murmured and then a heard a soft, high-pitched tone coming from one of the Tatularians instruments. Both of the Tats stiffened, and then Auntie said, “Something approaches from the north. We must hurry and place the little ones on the bus.”

  “The bus…the bus is here? Where are we anyway?” Michael moved in the direction that Uncle pointed and saw a doorway at the end of the hall. In the far distance, he thought he could hear the sounds of shouting and…was that gunfire?

  “Hurry, Michael,” Auntie answered softly. “This place is what your government refers to as an underground military base. It is little used, but it appears that others have found it and are moving this way.”

  Great, Michael thought, and moved briskly to the steel door at the end of the hall. Uncle stood at the door and waved his device like a magic wand at the door’s electronic keypad. With a snap, the door clicked open, and pushing through, Michael saw the school bus sitting in what appeared to be a large hangar. The tiny Tatularian ship sat next to it on the painted concrete.

  The sounds of gunfire and screams were growing louder. Uncle shrilled, “Run to the bus, Michael! Take the children and run!”

  Michael gathered as many of the littlest children in his arms as he could manage, and roared, “Run, run…run!”

  Michael Anderson, ex-forward for the Denver Nuggets, ran for his life.

  Chapter 17

  The following excerpts are compiled from interviews and written accounts of Dwight Engle and his followers (CHURCH OF THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST) and the faction group (THE ANGEL’S SWORD).

  By no means do the statements reported in the following reflect the opinions of the writers or reporters of the facts herein; furthermore do we note, that most of the accounts recorded here were given by war criminals and enemies of the state prior to EX 2022. Steven Cummings, reporting for The New World Chronicle.

  Leonard Price –

  I admit to feeling a certain amount of grim satisfaction when the guards came to collect Schmitt. He was dying to share what he considered inside information with me, and was just getting warmed up when I pressed the button on the underside of the table.

  “Hey, wait! I’m just getting started!” he exclaimed, when the guards lifted him by both arms, and led him outside into the hallway.

  “You queer bastard! You’re doing this on purpose!” His voice faded away and I got up to wash my face and hands. Everything about that man seemed to represent what had gone wrong on earth, before EX 2016. Hate, bigotry, and discrimination infested William Schmitt’s soul, like the wormy, rotten core of a pretty, red apple.

  The door tone chimed and the center’s servo-bots swooped in on vacuum cushions of air. The bigger of the two robots clicked once and said, “Are your interviews done for the evening, sir?”

  I nodded and replied, “Yes, thank you.”

  Immediately, the little robots’ arms extended and numerous shelves and receptacles appeared on their shiny metal bodies. Within moments, the room was clean, and the robots left. I followed them out into the hallway and turned left. I stopped at the guard’s desk and handed over my temporary day pass. Assuring the young woman that I would return the next morning, I waved goodnight and made my weary way outside.

  I sat down on a bench by the front entrance and stared at the notes in my hands. It would take a couple of hours to edit the interviews and compile them into a cohesive whole. I felt a fog of depression ooze over me as I thought of the work ahead of me. The Calm-Balm at home next to my bed beckoned me, and I had to shake off an almost overwhelming urge to throw the notes into the trashcan that sat next to the bench where I rested.

  A glow-bird swept out of the inky sky and hovered a few feet in front of my face. Its wings thrummed, and I saw my own reflection in its bubbled exoskeleton. I had never gained back the weight I lost during earth’s final, gasping moments. My gaunt cheeks and hollow eyes stared back at me. I sighed.

  The little bird hummed and flew backward from my exhaled breath. Then its surface twinkled and it shot off into the night. I stood up and shook my shoulders and arms in anger. I had taken on this job—volunteered for it, to be honest—so I had better buck up.

  Our society needed written documentation of earth’s final days. I needed the catharsis of getting it all down on paper (and out of my head). I thought enough time had elapsed that I could maintain a professional distance: be clear, concise and unemotional in reporting the facts. Instead, the memories threatened to swamp me in a rip tide of sorrow.

  I was nearing the twilight of my life. Although it had been almost three decades since earth’s inhabitants had left the planet and come to Harmony, emptiness remained in my soul, a void that could never be filled. The men I interviewed today only succeeded in making the black hole inside of me larger.

  I glanced at my watch. Andy would be home soon; off shift, and tired to the bone. There was a small cask of wine in the kitchen, assorted cheeses, and Andy’s favorite fruit: Lumen-berries, so-called because they glowed at night like twinkle-lights, and tasted like liquid sunshine. I stuffed my notes into my carryall and trudged home.

  The following morning, I sat in the interview room and basked in the rosy glow of early sunlight that streamed through the barred windows. I feel well rested today, and happy.

  Andy and I spent a good evening together. He was very weary when he arrived home, but one look at the sorrow in my face and I was in his arms. Although I am usually the demonstrative one, Andy, as always, sensed and reacted to the needs of others. We ate and drank. He told jokes about some of his patients and co-workers; he consoled me.

  Now, I was ready for the next interviewee. Leonard Price, from all accounts, wasn’t really a bad guy…he just got in with the wrong crowd. He was one of the first to go down into the North Idaho DUMB, with the Angel’s Sword.

  I hear shuffling footsteps and three men appeared in the doorway; Price and two guards.

  “Good morning, Mr. Price,” I said. “Please, take a seat.”

  Leonard Price was quite old. I was just a kid in my early thirties during EX 2016, but Price must have been much older. He was stooped over and gray. His hands and head shook with palsy, and his eyes were milky with cataracts. He smiled at me as he sat down.

  “Would you care for tea, Mr. Price?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he replied. “I’d love some.”

  The front cover on the smaller robot’s belly slid open, and from it, the bot produced a steaming
pot of tea, two cups, and a small jar of Harmony honey. (There are no bees on the planet with which to produce honey, but there is a plant, much like sugar cane, that produces a sweet, sticky, edible sap.)

  I saw that the old man was shivering with cold, so I ordered a blanket brought, while I served the tea. After a few minutes, the bots left the room and I asked, “Mr. Price, what do you remember about the DUMB you and the others entered before you arrived at the Harmony compound?”

  He nodded slowly and I could see that, although he was elderly, the memories were still clear. He said, “Well, it was a mess, of course, and the first real sign of the approaching apocalypse. How much do you know?”

  I shrugged. “Well, I know what everyone else knows: that it was a secret military base, deep underground. That you and the other Sword members ran across a bunch of…Tatulori, right? And, somehow, someone triggered a swarm of bees?”

  Price nodded and frowned. “Look,” he said. “I want to say one thing before I get into what happened that day. I am not now, nor was I ever, a member of the Angel’s Sword, okay? Do you have any idea how bad things got after the caldera blew? It was madness! I had a wife and two little girls to take care of. I swear, if you didn’t join up and find somebody to watch your back, you and yours were dead meat!”

  I looked down at the notes stacked neatly before me on the table. I remembered those days all too well—the panic, the bloodshed, the suffering of the innocents. For the sake of the interview, however, I nodded meekly and jotted a note down.

  “There,” I replied. “It’s on the record, Mr. Price. You were not an active member of the Angel’s Sword.”

  He glared for a moment. Then his expression softened. He continued, “Sorry. I just wanted people to know that I never meant anyone any harm. I was raised in the south, you know; my best friend growing up was a black kid, by the name of Jerome. I loved that boy and his family. When I realized the kind of people me and my girls had fallen in with, I could have cried. But it was too late….”

  A single tear etched its way down the old man’s weathered cheeks, and he lifted his face to the warm sunlight that streamed through the window.

  “Anyway,” he continued. “All that aside, I was in the first group of people sent down into the DUMB. We were pretty excited, you know. Topside in those days was all kinds of hell, what with the aliens strafing anything that moved, and bands of outlaws that circled like wolves. We figured that we finally found safe harbor, you know?

  “My wife and I stepped on that platform. I saw the worry and hope in her eyes as the lift started down into the bunker. Our two little girls were in one of the groups in back with the rest of the children. That way, Engle figured that if we met resistance down below, or worse came to worst for the vanguard, the others could seek shelter and safety elsewhere. I never saw them again.”

  Price was weeping openly now, and his lips twisted in grief. I stood up and brought him a tissue, refilling his teacup, while he struggled with his emotions. Finally, he cleared the phlegm from his throat and said, “After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably no more than thirty seconds or so, the lift bottomed out on 7-B; what I assumed meant the seventh floor of the basement level. At any rate, we were deep underground.

  “I don’t know what I expected, but long, shiny, tubular corridors, recessed lighting, and high-end granite flooring was not on my list of expectations…Good God! The money our government spent on that one DUMB had to be up in the billions! You remember what the economy was like, don’t you? Every day, the media folks were screaming about the recession, depression, the high price of gas, home foreclosures, bankruptcies, you name it, and yet when I first saw that DUMB, well, I was…dumbfounded! Ha!”

  I smiled with him, as he took a sip from his teacup. Although it was far too late to do anything about the government’s lavish spending habits in the later years of the twentieth century, the horror and outrage felt by earth’s survivors could be felt even now, thirty years later, on an entirely new and different planet.

  “We stood around undecided for a minute or two and finally, Jackson Engle, our command leader, decided to walk on down the hallway to see what we could find. It was truly incredible. Every fifty feet or so there was a shiny stainless-steel door with one of those palm pad things; you know, a DNA scanner. At first, everything seemed to be in great working order. Although we tried to open the doors, they were all locked tight. The floors were perfect too—no cracks, like top-side, from all the earthquake activity. The place, what we could see of it anyway, was a marvel of construction.

  “Then things changed. We turned left and saw that a large metal staircase led down onto a different floor. There were biohazard signs everywhere, and I saw large picture windows stretching as far as the eye could see. The floors were busted up and crumbling on that level, and a lot of the glass from the windows had shattered and lay in glittering piles on the corridor’s floor. I did not want to go down there.

  “Jacks Engle stood undecided for a moment. Then he made a decision that changed my life and the way I thought about the U.S. government forever.

  “‘We’ll go down,’ he declared. ‘This might be a weapons depot, and we would be remiss to let that kind of opportunity pass us by. Weapons at the ready, now. Seems like the place is deserted, but we can’t be too careful.’

  “With those words, we headed down into hell. The first door we came to was locked. We could have scrambled through the broken window, but it was easy to see that the room beyond was some sort of office space, and it was pretty much empty. There were five desks with expensive, holographic computer screens perched on each. The back wall was filled with TV monitors and what looked like electronic, medical readout screens. The lights there were dim, as though the whole level was being run on generator power.

  “We moved on. The hallway reeked of antiseptics, like a hospital. There must have been some sort of spill. The further we moved down the corridor the more the smell of rubbing alcohol and bleach chafed our noses. My heart started beating faster. I looked over at my wife, who held her crossbow at the ready. Her eyes were wide in alarm.

  “The door to the next room was ajar, and the heavy miasma of dead and rotting flesh blew out into the hallway like rancid fog. I could hear the sound of water dripping, and I wiped cold sweat off my forehead with one arm. Unfortunately, the glass windows were on the far side of the door. I think that if we’d had a preview of what was in that room, we might have just kept on walking. As it was, Jacks elbowed the door open and stepped inside. That’s when we heard him scream.

  “Although I really wanted to bolt in the opposite direction, me and the others in the unit hesitated for a second, and then crowded in behind our commander. Jacks stood a few feet inside the doorway, shaking and wiping tears of shock and fear from his eyes. We looked beyond him and saw proof of what our government had done to guarantee mankind’s safety in a vast and deadly solar system.

  “We were in some sort of perverted nursery. Clear, plastic coffins lined the walls and filled the room’s interior. The coffins were filled with the bodies of children…children that were no longer human.

  “It looked, at first glance, like the specimens (for that was what they were) had all died, and for that I could only feel gratitude. Then, I saw that many of the creatures were still alive, struggling weakly and mewling in pain and horror. My wife fainted out cold on the tiled floor. Understand now, my wife was no weakling; she was a tough bird who had been raised on a farm and could out-hunt and out-fish me any day of the week. But one look at those poor kids did it for her. I pulled her away to the outside corridor and reluctantly stepped back inside.

  “There were kids who had gills and giant, cloudy eyes like a fish. Their legs had been amputated and in their place long, scaly tails writhed and shuddered in stagnant water.

  “There were kids with tentacles like those of an octopus, or squid. They must have somehow been injected with the DNA of the sea creatures, because it looked as though their nec
ks had dissolved so that their poor heads lolled on rubbery shoulders. Their shrunken eyes peered up at us in hopeless agony.

  “There were children with four long legs and cloven hooves, and babies with broken wings. There were cages filled with giant spiders, whose shrunken heads hung below them in bulging, dilated sacs. The eyes of those kids were filled with horror, yet their fang-filled mouths snapped open and closed in fitful, hungry wrath.

  “We had stepped into Uncle Sam’s Little Shop of Horrors. More than one of us bent at the waist and heaved up whatever little we had left in our stomachs. Then, a door opened, and a doctor stepped into the room. This was no ordinary doctor, though.

  “It was an alien. He (or she) was tall, really tall, maybe eight feet or more, and thin, like a Praying Mantis. Its skin was bluish gray and it had long, vibrating antennae. Its shoulders were large and muscular, and its mouth was filled to over-flowing with teeth.

  “It took one look at us, pursed its lips and whistled a sharp, ear-shattering shriek that made my heart stop in fear. Within one hour all but three of us were killed by the Tatulori medical staff and their guards.”

  Chapter 18

  A person may plan his own journey, but the Lord directs his steps…The dice are thrown, but the Lord determines every outcome. Proverbs 16: 9, 33

  Naomi – 2045

  “October 4th, 2015…that day will live on in our memories for as long as human beings exist. It was the day earth was dealt a mortal blow. It was the start of our planet’s depopulation and deforestation. It spelled the doom of our mighty oceans. It was the end, eventually, for over four billion people. It was the day that the Yellowstone Caldera blew.

  I knew nothing about any of it though, at least not for a few days.” Nana Nay smiled out at the silent audience. She was old now, and weak, but her smile stirred the crowd and set the purr grass to vibrating in the lavender dusk.