Nemesis: Book Five

by David Beers

  "Sir, we still don't have any idea where the queen is."

  The word just came to Knox, queen. He kept his eyes on the screens, but didn't see anyone turning to look at the person who uttered such a strange phrase. It fit. Like an ant or bee, she was the queen of these overly powerful insects.

  "She's in there somewhere," the President said, gesturing with his hand to the aerial view. "That's a lot of space to cover, but we'll get to her, as long as we keep moving forward like this."

  "Will the cold stop her?"

  Knox knew everyone's name around the table; that kind of parlor trick was a necessity in his line of work, the ability to meet and remember everyone's name he came in contact with. The man was a French diplomat—his name Adrien, accompanied by the head of their army, though the diplomat spoke much more than the General.

  Adrien didn't look at Knox, but at the President, which was fine. Knox thought this idea up, but he didn't believe in it, and he didn't have any answers for Adrien or anyone else.

  "We think it will, though we haven't seen it in action with her yet."

  Adrien stood from the table, reaching into his pocket for his phone. "Excuse me a moment."

  He left the room, and no one turned as he walked away. Everyone stared at the screens as if it showed the final seconds of a tied Super Bowl.

  Knox looked to Trone, wanting to know if he needed to follow the diplomat. Trone only looked ahead, which meant that every conversation the people in this room had would be monitored. Nothing Adrien said would be a secret from Trone.

  The man wasn't incompetent, Knox had to give him that, if nothing else.

  He didn't know how long everyone would stay in this room. Perhaps they would want to keep watching this slow take back of America for days, only leaving to use the restroom. That's what Knox wanted. No one in here had any clue that he let Will loose. He had a plan as to what he would tell them when they finally found out, though Marks could destroy it with a few words—if he had been listening.

  He was and you know it.

  Knox wouldn't try to keep everyone in here, but his long term prospects increased with each hour they didn't venture in to talk to Marks. That was coming, though—really, that was the whole reason he let Will go, because they would end up back in Marks' room, begging him to lead them to victory.

  If this didn't work, the ice storm they unleashed on the alien, then Will was their last hope. Marks was a false prophet. He would lead them to victory, but only his victory. The rest of the world was expendable. Will was their last hope.

  Knox brought his hand to his mouth, hiding the smile coming to his lips.

  Hope. They had none anymore. Because each path they laid out for themselves only ended in either ineptness or full disaster.

  They called this place Texas.

  They called a lot of places a lot of different names, that's what Junior understood. Even inside Texas, humans created names for subdivision after subdivision, all the way down to individual streets. How any single one of them could ever hope to know them all was beyond him, the thought alone so idiotic he didn't truly comprehend how they managed to move across the world.

  Junior found himself wondering about these questions as he made his journey across this 'country' (yet another name for something that was little more than imaginary lines enforced with weapons).

  He had outpaced the strands' growth, and now floated above a city. He saw what humanity created clearly, things that he couldn't see when the Var's strands covered the landscape. Buildings, tall, trying to stretch to the sky, shot up from everywhere. Roads wound around them, some lifting off the ground and taking to the air, others going beneath the ground. These creatures created far too many roads, an overproduction without any doubt. He simply couldn't see a reason for the endless miles—most of them not used for much of the day.

  He saw very few people beneath him, though. They were down there though, hiding. And wouldn't he be too, had he been facing what they now were? If his world was being consumed by something he couldn't understand, something he couldn't fight?

  "Now you want to be philosophical?" he said.

  That time had passed, if it ever existed at all. Perhaps on Bynimian, but in the end, it overstayed its welcome, resulting in the destruction of the entire planet.

  Junior floated downward, slowly, his aura wrapped tight around him. The closer he moved to the ground, the more people he saw, though still too few out and about for a city of this magnitude. He didn't want anyone to see him, not yet. He didn't want them to scatter, because he planned on using them for what came next.

  He landed at the city's outskirts.

  Dallas, he thought. He didn't know what the name meant, nor the history of it. Perhaps humans would still be able to track their history, at least for a bit, and Dallas would have something very important to remember after today. More important than anything else to ever happen here.

  He stood in the center of one of those never ending roads. None of the traveling machines moved around him and he felt sure no one saw him as he came down. He imagined this city and the people in it weren't looking at the sky. They were looking across the landscape, trying to forecast when the white plague would reach them.

  Junior waited.

  He wanted some theater.

  He came alone, the others not quite ready for this, and he didn't want to make things harder on himself than need be. Theater created fear, and fear created confusion, and confusion would allow him to march straight through the city, changing it as he saw necessary.

  An hour passed, and still Junior didn't move. He thought, perhaps too much, but other than that remained still.

  And then they came, as if The Makers themselves created the situation for him.

  One heading in either direction, into the city and out of it. Their passing wouldn't be perfect, but Junior didn't need perfection to complete what he came here for.

  He waited until the vehicles were close, one on either side of him. They slowed as they looked at the strange thing in the middle of the road, the vehicle's inhabitants all resembling each other—mouths agape, eyes wide. Neither vehicle stopped, though. Of course not. They had somewhere to be, and strange sightings in the road couldn't stop that.

  Junior's aura whipped out to either side of him, moving much faster than the cars it went after.

  Each car, facing opposite directions, kept driving at their slow paces even as the blue color wrapped around their undercarriage. The aura sped over the top, and then back down again, creating a loop over each car, stretching out as they finally passed Junior.

  He tightened his aura and listened as the tires screeched and metal crunched. Burning rubber filled Junior's nostrils, though he didn't look to either side. He kept his eyes focused ahead, on Dallas. The people in the vehicles screamed, somehow their voices louder than the twisting metal around them.

  Junior didn't consider whether he should leave them alive for what came next. If he thought about their wants, they probably would have rather died quickly, immediately.

  His aura lifted the bent cars off the ground.

  The screams from inside continued. The burnt smell still rose from the ground.

  Junior launched them, first the one on his right, followed quickly by the one on his left. He threw them with all the force he could find, and the cars flew through the air like broken, metal birds. His aura released them, and they tumbled over themselves, climbing higher and higher into the air.

  They reached the top of their arc, and began their descent.

  Junior had launched missiles.

  He watched as they plunged into two separate buildings, tall ones that tried to reach the clouds.

  Fire exploded as huge, gaping holes appeared.

  Junior couldn't hear the screams, but he knew they were there—screams, and even terror, rising off the inhabitants like heat from the asphalt beneath him. He rose off the ground and headed toward the city.

  The woman, Rigley, was worried about thes
e humans coming for the Var. For him. For her. For all of them. Junior didn't understand that worry though, now that he saw the enemy up close. These creatures were weak, less than anything he had imagined.

  They tried, though.

  He would give them that—even if trying had little to do with accomplishment, at least in this endeavor.

  A man stood in front of Junior with what looked to be a weapon in his hand. Other men surrounded him, all of them wearing the same clothing, all of them holding similar weapons. Junior looked to his left, seeing another huge building next to him, in fact, more buildings surrounded him than these uniformed attackers.

  People fled, up and down the street. They probably screamed, but finally the noise rose above any sounds they could make. Fire roared, coming from windows, cars on the street, and even people themselves. They rolled around on the ground, trying to extinguish the pain engulfing them.

  The men around Junior shot things at him, his aura telling him they were small pieces of metal. The objects entered his aura and then dropped to the ground, lifeless and immobile. Junior wasn't concerned with these men or the objects they flung at him. To fight these humans one by one would be a tragic waste of time. He needed massive destruction.

  His aura streaked up the building on his left, leaving his body slightly vulnerable as it spread around the structure. The small objects flying at him wouldn't break through, but perhaps something more massive might. It didn't matter. This wouldn't take long. The light blue spread across the base and rose fifty feet high, enveloping the building like a sleeve. He looked to it briefly, able to see the building through his aura.

  Junior closed his eyes and tilted his head toward the ground.

  His aura told him what he needed to know. The weight of the building, the important structural pieces, even the amount of people inside. None of it mattered, though. He simply wanted to experience it, the knowledge, and yes, even the power.

  Junior's faced tensed as his aura did. The building was so much larger, so much more structurally sound than the cars had been.

  Focus, he thought as the magnitude of what he wanted bore down.

  His aura pressed inward, and with his eyes closed, Junior heard the minor explosions as metal and glass burst from the building. He didn't stop, kept his aura pushing inward, collapsing the building in on itself. He heard the shots around him slow, heard their complete absence as the men firing looked at what he was doing. They shouted, ran, and Junior felt people trying to leave the building as well, trying to escape through the bottom doors, though his aura had them trapped like a net, refusing to release them. Some even tried to escape through the windows, ready to fall to their death, but his aura caught them—keeping them alive for just a few more moments.

  The building swayed, the top moving to and fro as Junior's aura continued working.

  He would bring it down.

  He felt it fall, slowly, moving toward the street, toward him. He didn't run, but stood solid, his aura already retreating back to him, forming a protective cocoon around him since it didn't need to continue pushing the building.

  In all its glory, the building fell, dust and smoke rushing out before it. Junior kept his eyes closed as his aura's blue formed a large circle around him. The building crashed into another skyscraper across the street, the middle of it breaking in half, glass and metal pouring down like poisoned rain. All of it fell around Junior, building materials and broken pieces, breaking into even smaller fragments when it touched his aura, cracking and breaking around him instead of on him.

  Fire bloomed in the street. Those running collapsed from the smoke filling their lungs.

  Junior walked forward, his aura sweeping the wreckage away from his feet. These were only the first buildings. There were many, many more.

  Hundreds of miles away, Bynums understood.

  Telepathy didn't tell them what was happening, nothing as mystical as that. Perhaps in their next stage they would achieve that level of evolution, but not in stage five. No, the strands told them. The strands communicated in ways that Bynums couldn't, because where one went, they all went. Junior, though the Bynums didn't understand his name yet, had brought a handful of strands with him. He planned it that way, not to seed more growth, but he wanted them—his army—to see what he meant.

  Because he had spoken to them in the language they understood, the language of auras, but even so he didn't think they fully understood.

  They did now though. Every one of them.

  They saw their leader destroying the city, saw it as clearly as the strands they stood on. That's what he wanted from them, that ruthlessness, that fight. That's what his conversations had been about. What they saw all those miles away—he had been trying to prepare them for it.

  The Bynums watched him march through the strange city, watched him destroy everything he wanted, and realized they would soon accomplish the same.

  22

  Present Day

  Rigley paced.

  She had never been a pacer. Usually, when stressed, she sat still, perhaps cross-legged in a chair if no one was around, and simply stared forward. She would lose herself in her mind, letting her thoughts take over.

  The ones that whispered so much negativity and hate.

  She couldn't sit still now, though. She couldn't go into her head, wouldn't let her thoughts take over. The thoughts in there … every one of them was much worse than she could remember them being in the past. Her mind was a hornet's nest, and the hornets were ready to attack any interloper—including Rigley.

  Back and forth she moved across the bedroom. She knew that Junior had left, though she didn't know where he went. Or at least she hadn't in the beginning. It took her a minute to think through what she needed to do, which was hilarious given how much her life had always depended on the flow of information. She resorted to the television, wanting to understand what was happening outside the world, but it appeared that Comcast wasn't delivering service to her area of Georgia anymore. Perhaps her area of the country.

  So she paced until she realized that she had a cellphone.

  Which.

  Was.

  Hilarious.

  The little piece of metal was practically her husband, as it spent more time with her than anyone else on Earth for years on end, yet she forgot about it somehow.

  When she remembered, she rushed to pull it out, only to find it dead. So then she rushed to find a charger in the house—which she did. What she saw on the phone …

  It caused her to pace even more.

  Junior was destroying Dallas. Rigley had been there a few times, and her mind kept going back to the white X on the street, the one marking the shot that killed Kennedy. For some reason, she wanted to know if the X was still there, despite the pictures CNN showed her over the phone. She wanted to know if the collapsing buildings and the fire flooding the city had destroyed that piece of history.

  Thinking about that was certainly better than going inside her head.

  She paced and she focused on that white X, completely oblivious to the boy who entered her room. He didn't knock, but simply opened the door and then slowly shut it, the click of it barely audible. Rigley didn't know how long he stood there, only that when she looked up, he was there—staring at her.

  Boy might have been the wrong term. Or maybe the right one. He was in that weird stage of life, late adolescence, at which he wasn't nearly a man, but was still too old to be called a child.

  It didn't used to be that way, Rigley thought, another flare in her mind completely disconnected from the reality around her. Used to be, when you were eighteen, you were a grown man and went out and started your life. Now we coddle them until twenty-six.

  "Hi," he said, making Rigley realize that she had been staring back at him, but saying nothing.

  "Hi," she said, her body still for the first time in over an hour.

  "Why are you here?" the boy asked.

  You know his name, though. You know everyone's name in thi
s whole business, because this business is your business and has been since the beginning. Bryan, that's his name. He's one of the original four.

  "Hello?" he said.

  "I'm here to help. To help stop us from massacring them. I'm what the Indians never had." She giggled as she spoke the last word, finding humor in the comparison, suddenly seeing hundreds of people with bumps across their skin and fevers burning their bodies, lying under the same blankets that gave them smallpox. "What about you? Why are you here?"

  The boy paused for a moment, his eyes flashing just behind Rigley, to the wall, before coming back. "I'm here to help too. They brought me and Wren to help them understand us. Humans in general, I mean."

  Rigley looked at the kid, her eyes narrowing.

  Morena had said nothing about that.

  But did she say anything at all about why these other two were here? Why the other boy was walking around with red eyes? (And have you asked anything, Rigley? Or did you just let those little tidbits go?)

  No, Morena said nothing either way. Rigley didn't like this though; suspicion of the boy, of the man, of the whole goddamn thing reared up in her mind like a King Cobra, flexing its neck for all to see.

  "There's something though, something happening that I'm not sure she—Morena—knows about. I'm not sure we can even tell her." The boy walked across the room and sat down on the bed, still made, having not been slept in. "I'm scared to tell her, but we have to find a way."

  "What are you talking about?" Rigley turned with him, her eyes following his movements.

  "She's in danger."

  "She is? What about her children?" Rigley said. More flares shooting into the dark sky of her mind, flares full of fear, because Morena's children must live at all costs.

  The boy nodded, not looking at her, but staring down at the floor. "All of them, if we don't do something. She saved us, me and Wren, and I need to find a way to help her."