“You. How did you get out?” He raised his revolver, shakily pointing at Terrance, who had stepped in front of Leslie.
“They’re with us,” I said. I glanced over at Mary. “You thought Dean and Mary were killed by the hybrids? I have news for you: you’re looking at us.”
He looked from my face to hers, and back again. “That’s impossible. You’re too young to be. You don’t look a day over thirty-five.”
“It’s the truth. That big man…” I pointed to Magnus. “…is Magnus.” I lifted my chest, putting on a bravado this man might buy in to. “You’re looking at three of the Heroes of Earth. What vessel were you on?” I asked, using my old trick.
“That doesn’t matter anymore. We’re all doomed anyway.” His shoulders slumped, and his gaze lowered to the floor for a moment. Mary went for him, racing to him with her shoulder ready to plow into his, but he spun with far more agility than I would have guessed. Mary went past him, her momentum too much to slow, and he turned with his gun pointed at her.
A red beam lashed out from behind me, striking him in the back just as his gun went off. He went down in a heap and stumbled onto Mary.
I rushed forward, rolling the man off of my fiancée, careless of his condition. She was all that mattered. My throat went dry, and I said her name in a croak, seeing blood on her uniform. Her eyes opened and she grimaced.
“Fast for a skinny old guy,” she said, feeling her abdomen and chest. “It’s his blood. Lucky for me, he’s a poor shot.”
“We didn’t have to kill him,” I said, helping Mary up.
“You want to let that raving lunatic walk around with a gun?” Leslie asked. She was already going for the opening in the bars. “We don’t have time for this.”
The hybrids took the lead, Magnus close behind them. He took a quick look back at the body on the floor and shook his head. “What a waste,” he muttered, and kept moving.
Another body. But given the choice, it was going to be a stranger on the ground instead of my beautiful Mary. I didn’t even ask which one shot him. It wasn’t important.
I grabbed his gun and tucked it away into one of the half-full desk drawers and looked to his belt for a keyring. A guy like this would always keep the keys to the cells close at hand, and from the looks of this place, automation wasn’t in the budget. I found the ring in his pocket but tied to his belt on a leather strap. Pulling out a knife from my boot, I cut the hide and took the keys.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” I asked when no one else was in the room.
Mary looked down at the dead man and back at me. “I’ll be better when we’re back on New Spero, picking tomatoes and having tea on the porch.” The skin at the sides of her eyes crinkled as she forced a smile at me, and I leaned in, giving her a kiss on the lips.
“Me too.”
“Over here!” Magnus called from a distance, his voice carrying to us easily.
I ran to him, unsure of what to expect. What I saw was heartbreaking.
Leslie was fumbling with the locked bars, but the key she had didn’t fit. She was crying, a soft sob as she struggled to open the lock. Beyond it, a dozen or so hybrids were in a mess hall. A couple were lying on tables. Others sat together, heads low to the tables, none of them speaking.
One of them looked up, saw us, and put her head back down like we were nothing more than an apparition. Another one – who looked like Terrance, only ten years older and gaunt – looked toward us and stood up on shaky legs. “Are you real?” he asked, his voice a gravelly whisper.
“Brother!” Terrance called through the bars. “We’re here to bring you to paradise.” The excitement and energy in Terrance’s voice was electric. I took the keys in my hand and went to the lock, trying them one by one until one inserted and turned to the side. Leslie slid it open and rushed into the room.
“Where is everyone?” she asked one of her people, who were still coming to, realizing something important was happening. They seemed like zombies, their skin gray, the flesh tight against their bones. It was horrifying, and we’d done this to them. Humans had locked them up to waste away.
The man who’d first spoken was hugging Terrance, and he broke free to answer the question. “This is all of us.”
TWENTY
“What do you mean, this is everyone? When we left the compound on Long Island, there were twenty times this many.” Terrance stood straight, his posture rigid and his fist cocked like he was ready to punch something.
All of them were now over beside us. Mary had already gone with Magnus to find food from the guard areas for these sad souls.
“They left us here. We heard the guards say something about the Bhlat being here, and within a week, they were all gone except some sadistic bastard. We begged him to let us go, and he said it was his duty to keep us locked up. When we realized he wasn’t going anywhere and wouldn’t let us go, we plead for food. We had a little bit stashed away here, and he wouldn’t dare come inside with no backup, so we ate for the first couple months. Now we have nothing left. You’ve come at just the right time. Steve died this morning.” The first one to speak to us had called himself Byron. His hair hung in his face in greasy clumps as he told us his story.
“I’m so sorry. We thought we would help by leaving.”
“It is you two. Terrance and Leslie, our fate sealers,” one of the women said, her voice so weak it came out like a whisper.
Leslie already looked a wreck, but that comment set her over the edge.
“We couldn’t have known!” she cried. “We were trying to improve our future.” She slid to the ground, her face in her hands.
“All you did was give us a bigger target than we already had, and we didn’t think that was possible,” Byron said, the others nodding along.
“This isn’t all their fault. Were you all on the vessels, piloting our people to their deaths?” I waited for a response that didn’t come. “Humans didn’t trust you from the start. Would you have? If the Kraski had suddenly told you they had a change of heart and they wanted to be your friends, would you have listened?”
“No,” the woman said, abashed.
“Then cut these two some slack. They found a world for you to go to. The only glitch was that the wormholes messed with our timelines. We’re going to get you food and water, then take you to your new home. Let this be a new bridge to your future, and let your past go. Mourn for your losses and be grateful for your lives, because we’re all lucky to have them at this point.” The speech was a little overdone, but I meant every word of it.
“A new world?” one of the others asked. “With sunlight?” He raised his face to the dark ceiling, closing his eyes like he was feeling the rays of the sun on his pallid skin.
“Yes, my brother. With sunlight, and rivers, and food aplenty. We live there among others, the Deltra included.”
“Don’t forget swamp monsters,” I said under my breath, getting a glare from Terrance.
“Deltra? What the hell are you doing with them?” Byron asked.
“They weren’t all evil. Even those ones were only doing what they needed to keep their people alive. Even Dean likes Kareem, right?” Terrance looked at me, raising his eyebrows in a signal saying he needed support.
“Sure. He’s a stand-up guy. In an ‘engineer weapons of mass destruction’ sort of way.”
They looked unsure, but the subject changed when Magnus and Mary came back with a duffel bag of supplies.
Magnus dumped it out on a table. Water bottles and bags of chips with Cyrillic script on them fell out. The hybrids scrambled for them, and my heart sank, feeling terrible for them. I couldn’t wait to see their faces as we left the portal and walked onto their new planet.
Thinking about it made the urgency increase. “Gather anything you need, and let’s leave,” I said.
“How are we going to get everyone back?” Magnus asked.
“The transport isn’t big, but there are only twelve of them.” Mary scanned the group as she spoke.
“By the looks of them, they won’t take a lot of room. I think we can make it work.”
“What about Dinkle and his pilot?” Magnus asked.
“I think we have a good spot for them just around the corner.” I followed his gaze to a cell just beyond the mess hall. “We’ll leave them a little water and food, of course. It’s more than they deserve.”
Soon a line of hybrids in tattered clothing, smelling like death, followed us out of the prison, their eyes wide as they walked past the guards’ station and into the main halls. Byron set his hand on the whitewashed cinder blocks making up the wall, looking like he was about to pass out. I set my hand on his bony back and he turned to me, eyes glistening.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You didn’t deserve this. We’ll make it right.” I knew we could never make it up to them, but even though I wanted that Bhlat homeworld portal location, this was important. I was glad Kareem had made us barter for it. These people needed our help.
Snow blew on us as we pushed out the entrance doors, the hybrids covering their eyes from the bright light of the Siberian morning. They weren’t dressed for the cold, and we ushered them quickly to the ship. Magnus and Terrance hauled Jeff and the pilot out of the transporter.
“What are you doing?” Jeff asked, his face covered in blood from his head injury. “You can’t leave me here. The Bhlat are expecting me.”
“Have they seen you before?” I asked nonchalantly.
“No, when would I have met…” He seemed to catch on and hung his head.
“Tell us what you were supposed to do, and we let you live,” Magnus said, standing over the tied-up man.
He looked defiant, and Magnus gave him a light kick. Jeff didn’t need to speak, because the pilot did.
“He was going to take you to them, and in exchange, he was promised he would live like a king among their people. I heard the conversation. I had nothing to do with this. I’m just a hired hand.” The pilot looked up with pleading eyes.
“Fine. Put Dinkle in the back, leave this guy tied in the guards’ room. We’ll call for someone to get him later,” I said, knowing I had no one to call.
“We’ll bring them,” Terrance said. He and Leslie grabbed them by the arms, hauling them both to their feet.
We loaded the hybrids into the transport; I glanced back at Leslie as they entered the prison again. They came back out just as we had everyone set, Mary in the pilot’s seat and Magnus and I squished beside her. From the grim look on Terrance’s face, I wasn’t about to ask how it went. I really didn’t want to know.
With the sun behind the clouds, and a small ship full of potent-smelling hybrids, we lifted off the snow-crusted ground on our way back to Egypt and the Pyramids of Giza.
In a cramped hour, we reached our destination, my back aching from being squished into my seat. When the doors opened, we saw them: ships lowering into our atmosphere. They were bulky, reminding me of the oil rigs used to dig in the ocean.
Magnus stated the obvious. “That can’t be good.”
“We need to hurry,” Mary whispered.
I hoped Kareem was still alive when we got back.
____________
Kareem slowly opened his eyes, blinking away his sleep. He looked surprised to see us, but it quickly gave way to a coughing fit. An attendant held a cloth to his mouth for him, and it came away with flecks of blood on it.
“You did it?” he asked once his breathing was back under control.
“We did,” Mary answered.
“How are our friends doing now?”
I wasn’t sure how he would react to the story, so I elected to keep it as simple as possible. “They’ve been through a lot. Only twelve came back with us.”
He nodded from his lying position, his head propped up on a soft-looking pillow. “We will care for them now. Thank you for helping. Everyone deserves a chance at freedom and happiness. The sins of our past can never be wiped clean, but we can try to learn from them and better ourselves.”
The comment struck home, and I thought of the bodies I’d left in my wake as we’d struggled to survive over the past couple of years. “It’s time, Kareem. It’s time to tell me how to access the hidden worlds with the Shandra.”
“A bargain is a bargain. But it’s for your eyes only. Do you understand?” He looked from me to Magnus, and then to Mary, lingering on her for a moment longer.
Mary and Magnus began to leave the room, but Kareem shook his head. “Stay. It is us who are leaving.”
Kareem’s attendant helped him sit up, and he bent over, rummaging through the small nightstand beside his bed. He pulled out a small device and smiled at me. His teeth were yellow, with small dots of blood on them. I almost pulled back, away from him, but he grabbed my arm with unexpected strength and pressed a button on the device.
A tingling energy pulsed from my toes upwards, and soon my whole body was vibrating. Mary was standing, looking at us with horror. I saw her mouth move, but no sound made it to my ears. The room around me faded, but Kareem was still there, gripping my skin, his hand hot as sauna rock against my arm. His smile was terrifying, but it told me he was enjoying his little game.
When our surroundings came back to focus, we weren’t in his room any longer.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, still feeling the energy coursing over me, even though he’d let go of my forearm. Looking around, I recognized the portal on this planet we’d just come through with the hybrids earlier that day. “How did you do that?”
“The answer to both those questions is the same.” Kareem’s knees gave way, and I caught the tall man, finding that he weighed less than I would have guessed. Standing up, I could see how rail-thin he was; his white cloak billowed around him like an oversized sail on a small boat. “This is another one of my inventions. I’m willing to give it to you to complete your mission. I have a feeling you’ll need every bit of advantage you can get.” He handed it to me. “It isn’t magic. You just have to set the coordinates of your target location in. Ideally, you program it in when you’re first at the spot.”
“You got us here by being in this exact spot before, then saving the location?” I asked, looking at the light device. It seemed obvious it was made by the same people as the smaller Shield device I’d used against the Bhlat. The look and feel was the same. He spent a few minutes going over the simple process with me, and when he was sure I understood, he moved on. I was holding him up by then; his sick body didn’t have the energy to stand on its own.
“Kareem, how long do you have?” I asked.
“It won’t be long now.”
I half-walked, half-carried him to the portal room. He made me stop at the entrance and said a string of Deltran words: likely a prayer of his people. He regarded the room with a reverence that I hadn’t, and it made me think of the portals differently. So far, they’d been a tool to help me survive, but they’d been put in place thousands of years ago by an ancient god-like race. We were standing in something older than anything we could imagine, with the power to transport us from planet to planet. The longer I thought about it, the more in awe I was of the whole scenario.
Kareem coughed a few times. “Never take it for granted.”
“What?”
“Any of it. We’re specks in the universe. We all think we’re so much more, the centers of our own worlds. We fight each other. Even my people orchestrated the deaths of races to their own benefit. There’s something different about you. Bring them together. Make them see the universe has more to offer than killing. When I look at you, I see the aura of a Theos.”
My heart hammered in my chest, beads of sweat forming on my brow. What was this man talking about? “I’m just an accountant from New York who got lucky a few times. I’ll leave all of that to the professionals. I just want to help us survive.”
“Don’t you see? It’s saying things like that, that makes you special. You didn’t say ‘you’ just want to survive. You want to help your people. Therei
n lies the difference between you and ninety-nine percent of intelligent life. Your instincts put them first, and you second.”
I didn’t know if he was right, or if by allowing myself a chance to survive, others had been saved. “I’m no god.”
“That’s right, because they eventually died and were forgotten. You’re something new.” With that, he entered the portal room unassisted, taking hesitant steps.
I walked behind him, hands ready to catch him if needed. The closer he got to the table above the large gemstone in the middle of the room, the brighter the icons and hieroglyphs glowed on the walls.
“Come. See the missing worlds,” Kareem said, his voice strong once again. He tapped on the screen, accessing files no one else would have known were there. He showed me the unique string of symbols I’d need to open it again, and we spent half an hour going over it, until he was sure I’d memorized them. “You cannot write or save them anywhere but in your mind, do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Do you understand?” He stood straight, towering over me, his face grim.
I stepped back from the threat and answered him properly. “Yes, sir. I do.”
“This information isn’t even known by modern Gatekeepers,” he said, quietly locking eyes with me.
Gatekeepers. I mouthed the word, my lips sticking together as everything suddenly went dry.
The table screen showed the icons I was familiar with, but Kareem directed me to scroll to the left now. I did, and red icons appeared, each with their own unique symbol.
“If you type your code in, you can access information on each world.” He had me tap it, and then the icon for the first red one. What had to be a hundred language options appeared, and he showed me how to access English.
Trellion: Class three ice planet. Life forms: Core-dwelling bipedal. Intelligent.
The details went on for pages, and under different circumstances, I could have spent days reading about other worlds and learning why some were hidden over others. I thought back to the huge drilling ships we’d seen entering Earth’s atmosphere hours ago and knew I didn’t have time for that now.
The Survivors: Books 1-3 Page 58