His eyebrows shot up, “We got ourselves a feisty one!” he laughed and looked around at the other men, prompting them to laugh along with him.
“Boss, we should leave the girl and go get the kid,” one of them said. “He’s those dead billionaires’ younger son.”
Q winced at the statement, and his heart clenched. But just a bit. Not as much as it used to.
“Ooooh,” the leader hissed. “I got a double jackpot today, boys. How much ransom would we get? A few millions maybe, eh?”
Q’s mind went blank. He backed up from the hedge, stumbling as he tried to get back on his bike.
“Stop it,” Taylor muttered.
She placed one leg in front of her and transferred all her body weight onto it.
Q sighed, “It had to come to this,” he mumbled.
In one fluid motion, she grasped onto the guy’s hand and pulled down on it, flipping him in the air like a pancake and throwing him to the ground. He didn't look like he was dead, but he lay there for about thirty seconds, the wind knocked out of him.
She turned about and glanced at the other guys. Q couldn't really see her expression but based on the fact that all the other guys apologized to her and backed away, he could safely assume that her face probably looked like she was the reincarnation of the devil.
She dusted her hands, walked away from her would-be attackers, and rode her bike up to Q, her face now breaking out into a cheerful smile. “Shall we get going then?” she said, acting like she just hadn't thrown that huge guy without breaking a sweat.
“Y-Yeah,” he said.
“You’re fine?” she asked.
“What? Because of the dead billionaires thing?” he asked. “That’s fine. I’m used to people at school mentioning mom and dad over and over. It’s okay. Really.”
She looked at him intently, “Really?”
He nodded with a smile, “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Okay then,” she smiled and led the way, heading to the outskirts of town.
Once again the scenery changed from the gray, urbaneness to hilly farmland.
They didn’t stop anywhere on the beautiful terrain, which seemed quite odd to Q, because he’d thought that the greenery was what she had wanted to show him.
They kept cycling and the hills soon turned into flat lands, covered in sparse grass and sand. Time ticked by and his legs started to grow weary. “How much further?” he turned to Taylor, who was cycling right next to him.
“Just a few more miles,” she said. “Be a little patient wouldn't you?”
“Fine,” he grumbled.
Soon afterwards, Taylor swerved into the muddy patches of land on their right and headed down a non-existent lane. Q followed her, tired but eager to find out what it was she wanted him to see. They continued down this path until they reached a large hedge.
Taylor parked her bicycle and disappeared through the thick cluster of leaves.
Q just stood there for a few more seconds before realizing that he had to go through as well. He parked his bike and pushed through the branches, wary of their sharp thorns. What awaited him on the other side could only be described as completely stunning.
A sandy surface met with a crystal-clear lake that stood silent and calm. A tall forest lay to their left, thick with trees whose trunks were as wide as a minivan. Their tall branches reached high in the sky, their green leaves forming a dense weave that let only trickles of light enter through them.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Taylor said and walked down to the lake, cupping the water in her hand and throwing it around.
“Amazing,” he said.
Q didn't take much notice of the lake though and headed toward the forest instead, the dark, creepiness of the place exciting him.
The air had a nice, natural smell, like fresh mud on a rainy day.
He walked a bit further in, winding around the tree trunks and into the darkness. Something seemed to call out to him, drawing him further toward it.
A piercing pain shot through his arm and into his body. His mind went numb, as though there were a void in his head. He tried moving his limbs but they were frozen; his brain seemed to lose control of his body.
His mind shut off, all his thoughts went blank, and he fell unconscious to the forest floor.
***
Q woke up and found himself in his room. He looked around at the clutter of comics and novels that lay half-open on the floor. He made a mental note to pick them all up. It was really hard to keep his room clean when there was no one forcing him to do it.
A bird sat on a branch of a tree next to his window and tapped on the pane with its beak, as though it were urging him to get up.
He got out from under the blankets and walked to the door, still in the pajamas that he couldn't recall changing into. In fact he didn't really remember what he’d done yesterday. He vaguely remembered exploring some place with Taylor and that was about all he could recall.
Maybe his memory was being affected by exhaustion.
“I’ll just sleep it off,” he thought.
He headed out of his room, which was adjacent to Carlos’ study. His legs dragged as he walked down the staircase. It was still dawn, and there wasn't much light coming through since every curtain on the floor had been drawn, blocking out the already scarce source of light.
He tramped down the stairs and headed into the kitchen to get a drink of water. The curtains down there, unlike the upper floor, were all wide open, and the early morning light that entered through gave the room a magical effect.
He gulped down a huge glass of water, put his glass in the sink, and headed back up the stairs. His arms and legs moved robotically as he headed to his room, then he noticed lights coming from Carlos’ study.
A tiny part of his brain noted the strangely colored light, causing memories to flood into his mind. “You can't go in there, okay?” he recalled Carlos telling him when he was little. He knew exactly when these memories had been formed. He’d been around ten or eleven, and Carlos had been much more of a brother back then.
“But why can’t I go in?” Q had asked him.
“That’s where I meet my alien friends when we plan our conquests.”
“I want to meet them too!”
“Oh no, you can't. They told me they’d just love having a young boy for dinner. You wouldn't want to become their dinner now would you?”
That was the last time he ever asked his brother about the funny lights coming from the study. And that was the last time he’d seen those lights too.
Until today.
The only difference now was that he wasn't scared anymore. Aliens didn't exist. There wasn't anything that’d be waiting to eat him up.
He held onto the handle and turned it. The door clicked, surprisingly not locked, and slowly opened just a crack. He pushed at it a little more, opening wide enough to look into the room. Those lights, whatever they were, had completely disappeared, leaving the room with nothing but darkness. His fingers extended through the gap and ran along the wall, searching for the light switch and then flicking it on.
The ceiling lights turned on and flooded the room.
Q was completely astonished by what he saw. The whole place looked like Dexter’s Laboratory, without the robots of course. He even half-expected ‘Deedee’ to show up.
He whistled, “To think Carlos had a place like this,” he chuckled.
The next ten minutes went by with him running around Carlos’ lab like a hyperactive three-year-old, carefully observing every little device.
There were a few high tech tables in front of him, each one standing under a large machine that was fixed to the ceiling above, like it was ready to kill anything that was put on the table.
A shiver went down his spine. Carlos couldn't possibly be using all this to actually kill people could he? It did seem quite possible when he added in the fact that Carlos never came out of his study for long periods of time.
His twenty-five year old, tech-freak of a brother spent most of
his time proving that he was the definition of lazy. There was no way he was a serial killer or something worse.
He realized any sort of explanation would seem probable so he didn't think too hard about it.
To his right was a raised platform with large bookshelves. The adjacent bookshelves were arranged perpendicular to each other, forming a large square.
He would have walked towards the rows of books if something else in the room hadn't caught his eye.
A huge board covered the opposite wall with hundreds of pictures and clippings linked together with pieces of red thread. He went closer and eyed the complex spider web of pictures and text.
There were pictures of solar flares, eclipses, the moon landing, pieces of text on sticky notes like “Birth of Humanity”, “External Organization” and so on.
Whatever Carlos was doing seemed to be pretty intense, and weird too. At first glance he seemed to be a conspiracy theorist, and that made sense considering he locked himself up in this study for most of his time.
Q stared at the ‘spider-web’ for a few more seconds, hoping to get some information out of it. When he realized it wasn't any use, he headed to the library section of the study.
The books on the shelves were quite old, their covers colorless and dusty. Carlos didn't seem to use these books that often, which made Q question why he’d need to keep them in the first place.
It wasn't anything spectacular. It was just a normal bookshelf, with normal books.
Nonetheless, he looked the books over, hoping to find some content that caught his interest. There had to be at least one good book in this huge library. Carlos could come back at any time so he needed to make the most of it, and the books seemed to be the only thing in the study worth taking.
He searched around for a ladder, trying to start from the top shelf and work his way down. When he couldn't find one he figured he could just climb up using the shelves as a foothold.
He jumped, and scuttled up to the top like some sort of videogame character.
He steadied himself at the top with one hand, and used the other to pull books out and flip through them, waiting to see if anything caught his interest.
He’d flipped through the twentieth book, ‘1984’ by George Orwell, when he felt a searing heat come from the other side of the room. He climbed a bit more, peaking out of the shelves. The source seemed to be between the high-tech tables on the floor.
“Trans-portal travel detected. Activating security protocols,” a feminine voice sounded, the same one that Q heard at the gate to the mansion.
He scrambled up higher onto the bookshelves, hoping to see something using his new-found height.
The machines that stood over the tables started to shift, extending and contracting parts of their body while making a loud mechanical whirr. Soon they’d all turned into some sort of cube structure with a single rod protruding. They rotated, until all three of the rods were facing one point on the floor, a spot right next to the door.
The female voice rang through the room again, “Activating safety measure in three...two...one”
He heard a high pitched shriek from the machines, and the rods blasted some sort of orange beam of light. The beams converged at the spot before the door, creating a large transparent sphere of orange.
Q realized two things. One, that thing was a force field. Two, all this just had to be a dream. Right?
“Receiving trans-portal traveler.”
A circle of light slowly formed, gradually getting brighter and then it expanded in one go. Inside the circle was nothing but a black void.
“A portal,” he thought and shook his head. “Definitely a dream.”
Whether it really was a dream or not, he didn’t want to hang around to see who this ‘trans-portal traveler’ was. Sure, an E.T coming out would be awesome but what if the terminator came out instead?
Not so awesome anymore.
He searched around frantically for some space. The bookshelves were his only solace and that wasn't really comforting. There was something about hiding behind wood and paper that didn't put him at ease.
But he didn't really have another choice so he climbed down a bit, just enough to hide his body while still letting his eyes look at the portal that was still active.
A humanoid exited the portal and the circle of light collapsed into a bright flash. The creature slowly brought its hand to its helmet and took it off.
Q’s heart beat faster, and then it stopped.
“Oh my god.”
***
1-2
It was Carlos.
Q could see it clearly. The man in front of him looked exactly like his brother. Both the short brown hair and beard he kept trying to grow confirmed his suspicions.
A plethora of questions rushed through his head and cluttered his mind.
Why was his brother in a high-tech suit?
Was this what he’d been doing every single time he’d locked himself up in his room?
“Ethosien,” Carlos said and his armor detached itself from his body, reattaching into a watch on his wrist.
Q lowered himself a bit more, making sure he couldn't be seen that easily. His brother wouldn't be the happiest person in the world if he found out that this weird secret of his had been exposed.
The door thudded shut, and he instantly knew that Carlos had left the study.
He continued lowering himself down. Now that his brother had left he could explore the study properly.
His legs slipped on a chipped part of the shelf and he tumbled down. He scrambled about desperately, his hands managing to latch onto one of the books. The book slowly tilted towards him, as though it were falling off the shelf in slow motion.
He heard a soft, almost inaudible, mechanical sound and looked down to see a section of the floor slide open. He heard a few gears move behind the shelf and the book jerked back to its original position. The sudden movement caused him to lose his grip on its leathery cover, and he fell straight through the gap in the floor.
The darkness around him revealed absolutely nothing and he hit the floor fast, landing on some sort of hard surface that nearly broke bones and knocked the wind out of him.
He realized he’d fallen a much deeper distance than he’d expected. A drop from the first floor to the ground floor couldn't have lasted that long. The only possible answer was that he’d fallen even deeper, which meant he was probably underground.
His body still ached with every inch he moved, and he flexed his joints to make sure he hadn't broken anything.
All he could think about was why he’d opened up that stupid study door in the first place. None of this would have ever happened if he’d just chosen to leave it alone and go back to his room.
But noooo. He just had to open up the door and put himself in this mess.
Oh and speaking of doors, the one above him seemed to have slid back shut, cutting off the only source of light.
Just great, he thought.
His hands moved about as he headed forward, trying to make sure he didn't bump into anything else. The last thing he needed was to activate some random switch and open another trap door he didn't know about.
He scouted his surroundings, moving around carefully. He tried to find some sort of object or wall while making sure ‘banging into it’ wasn't the means of discovery.
“Welcome,” a feminine voice said and lights shone from the ceiling.
The flooding lights temporarily blinded him but as his eyes adjusted he could see that he was in some sort of corridor. The walls and ceilings around him were lined with some transparent material that showed the rock walls on the other side.
This place really is underground, he thought.
He walked ahead until the corridor opened up into what could only be described as a high-tech underground base. Well, it was half-tech and half-stone-age. The base was semicircular in shape, with a solid rock wall on the left, and a sleek metal one on the right, with sensors and screens built int
o it. The stone ground was a dark brown and matched the ruggedness of the walls.
A large computer screen lay embedded in the rocky wall, its keyboard and peripherals attached to rocks below it. A black chair rose from the floor as though it were some sort of ancient throne.
Q only had one question in mind. Was his brother a superhero? It made more sense the more he thought about it.
Carlos had money.
Their parents had died when his brother was still a teenager.
He wore weird suits and came out of even weirder portals.
And he had a secret underground base.
He just had to be a superhero didn't he?
That was about when Q realized he was acting like an idiot, so he stopped with the superhero stuff and focused on properly figuring out what was going on. The computer looked just as high-tech as Carlos’ suit, so there didn't seem to be much chance that he could turn on the thing, let alone actually access it.
“Opening hatch door,” the feminine voice said, and he heard the same mechanical noise from when he’d fallen through the floor.
Carlos, he thought and scouted around, searching for a place to hide.
Luckily for him, the floor had quite a few large rocks jutting out of it, and he took cover behind them, hoping his brother didn't sniff him out.
He heard the soft thud of someone jump down. Footsteps echoed across the corridor, slowly getting closer toward him.
No doubt it was Carlos. “Welcome, sir,” the voice said. “I hope your travel was good.”
“Much better than expected,” Carlos’ voice echoed off the walls.
Q peeked out of his hiding spot and saw Carlos seat himself in front of the computer, his face serious and focused.
He’d never, seen his brother like this before. His mind was beginning to question if he even knew his brother at all. Everything about him was suddenly different. Well, to be fair, he and Carlos weren’t exactly buddies, but even then, this sort of a development was way too much for him to handle.
“I have assimilated data from the creature while you were away.”
“Very good. Any improvement?”
The Quest Saga Collection: Books 1 - 5 Page 2