CICADA: A Stone Age World Novel

by M. L. Banner

  Yet, in spite of the significant learning curve, the hovercraft was an amazing vehicle from its quiet hum during operations to its propulsion method, which Bill still didn’t even comprehend after several attempts by Cockerell to explain it to him. He was pretty sure if this machine had been constructed before the Event, this scientist would have been a billionaire because everyone would have wanted one. Or, he would have been bankrupt after the first crash and subsequent class-action lawsuit.

  He could see a few specks on the roadway ahead of him. He decided if they were the invaders he was trying to gather intel on, he was too visible flying over the road. He pulled up on the stick and took her up above the treetops and then maneuvered to the left, about twenty meters in from the tree line, hoping that would be enough cover. He was getting the hang of this now.

  Within a few minutes he slid—completely unobserved—past hordes of men and women in red robes. There were hundreds of them, marching like fire ants heading to their next leafy conquest. Except these red ants had automatic rifles and a few carried larger-caliber weapons.

  “Shit, the threat was real,” he said to the wind, which instantly puffed up his cheeks with warm dryness. He knew he should turn back and report this to Preston, as it was his sole purpose for being out here, but when he looked up, in the distance he could see the oval walls on top of a mesa that he guessed was Bios-2. He needed to check this out too while he was here. Then he would zip back hours before the marauders arrived at Cicada.

  With his friend Max… missing… He had difficulty even considering this, and forced himself into not accepting the story of his death. Either the story was false, which would make sense, or somehow Max would survive, as he always seemed to do. And maybe, he would find Max and help him, return a favor that had run its course way too long. Regardless of whether he found Max or not, he knew he was alive. And, Cicada (and Max, when he returned) would need Bill’s intel. His efforts were much more important now. Everything pointed to his checking out Bios-2.

  He pointed the toaster-craft directly at the mesa-top complex shimmering on the horizon.

  “I want to speak to Francis alone,” the Teacher told the six apostles who accompanied him on this journey to Cicada. The other four remained with John at their camp outside of Bios-2.

  “But Teacher, you haven’t yet chosen a replacement for Stephen and we wanted to give you some options,” whined Stanley.

  “That can wait. We must now prepare our minds and bodies for the battle that may come at Cicada. Sometime after I have taken Cicada and I’ve had a chance to discuss it with Brother John, I will announce my decision. Now, tell Francis I wish to speak to him alone.”

  Stanley said nothing more and rushed forward to get Francis, who was leading them toward Cicada. The other six slowed their pace from the Teacher’s, to give him privacy with the soldier.

  While the Teacher waited for him, so that they could discuss strategy, he thought about their march so far. They had been walking in the brutal midday sunlight for a couple hours now, right down the middle of the road, where no shade existed as the tree line’s cover was too far off on each side. Walking closer to the tree line was not an option since each side was littered with abandoned cars and nature’s own detritus, all of which would only slow their progression, and only for the benefit of a few moments of shade. But they would have to stop shortly to give everyone a rest so they would be stronger when they arrived.

  “Yes, Teacher, how can I serve you?” Frank called out, hesitant to interrupt his Teacher deep in thought.

  “You understand the plan, Francis?”

  “Yes, Teacher, I do. We’ll arrive at Cicada in the evening, when we’ll make our demands. They will have already been contacted by that fork-tongued devil at Bios-2, so they should not need time to think. If they do not open their doors to us, we will attack them using the explosives we have been given. I will have all our men and women ready to take their north gate when it is time. Then, if we were told the truth and we are able to open the other gates, you’ll march in with the remainder of our warriors and we will take Cicada. The siege should only take a couple of hours, assuming they resist.”

  “Excellent. I knew I was correct to place my faith in you. I have no doubt that your transition to a god like me will be a short one.” Teacher grinned as if he was offering him the golden pot at the end of the rainbow.

  Frank didn’t know what to say to this part, which was just so weird. He had been raised a Christian, and although he didn’t have a strong faith, he believed there was only one god, and that was the God of Abraham. When the Teacher saved him from the noose and his family from the knives of cannibals, Frank would have probably followed him at that moment if he had said he was the chief duck priest from a cult of duck gods. Instead, this man they all called the Teacher spoke words from the Bible, albeit a little twisted. They seemed to be walking down a path of order and justice in a very orderless and unjust world. It was during this time that the Teacher had come to trust him because Frank believed in always speaking the truth when he was asked, never candy coating his answers to what he thought the Teacher wanted.

  When the group had been struggling, John and the Teacher returned after being gone for a few days, talking about gods, and not the one and only God, but many gods. They started preaching from the Book, which was the genesis of their mutual revelation. Through it they preached the doctrine that any one of them could be a god; they just had to focus their energies inward and follow the Book. Frank had a feeling that John had written the whole thing himself, knowing that the Teacher was not very literate, as he admitted to Frank. Everyone bought into this, but he hadn’t. Now what could he do? His life and his families’ lives were dependent on the Teacher and the Teacher’s fortunes. They were connected to this man, no matter how screwy his beliefs were.

  “Now,” the Teacher continued after a long pause, “let us have all our warriors stop and rest in the shade for a bit; we wouldn’t want to be exhausted just before the battle.”

  “Yes, Teacher.”

  Frank excused himself and jogged ahead to the front of the group, where he told his lieutenants and steered them into a clearing, just inside the tree line cover.

  There they rested.

  Bill never knew he was in trouble until it was too late.

  He arrived at Bios-2—the other Cicada—quick enough. The size was amazing, a little bigger than Cicada, and laid out very similarly. Their walls were taller and seemed more fortified. They had giant cannons with weird dishes at the end of each. They reminded him of a 60s sci-fi movie’s ray guns. There was a tower in the middle, practically a skyscraper, with antennas on top and a large smokestack in the middle that bellowed rippling white clouds. And above the tower, he saw something perplexing.

  The whole time Bill kept rubbing his eyes, trying to understand what he first thought was the shimmering effect of the heat or the tiring of his eyes. The semi-visible dome was surely a mirage, which would disappear when he got closer. Yet, as he closed the distance to less than a mile, the form looked more solid. He had to see it from above. Maybe he could even do a quick pass overhead at the craft’s max speed. He should be safe because they wouldn’t expect him to fly over; no one would be staring into the intense light of the sun above him. They would expect threats to come from the other side of the walls, from the ground.

  He pulled up hard on the yoke and gained altitude. When he was high enough that he could go forward and down to gain the most speed, he pushed the accelerator button—stupidly placed by his left knee—and lightly pressed on the stick. Just after he passed over the wall he noticed a problem.

  The hovercraft lurched a bit and then sputtered, and he quickly lost some valuable altitude. He pulled up, slowing himself, but it didn’t help with his dropping. It then lurched violently, as if his propulsion system was cycling on and off. He was falling like a big, blue brick. It lost all maneuverability and all Bill could do was hold on and go down with the ship. He doubted he co
uld survive a drop of at least three hundred feet.

  He watched as he torpedoed toward a large open space in the complex; people were scrambling. So much for passing over unnoticed. One of the people on the wall turned his ray gun-cannon toward him. He was screwed.

  As he approached the dome at literally breakneck speed, he marveled that it was both solid and yet translucent, seemingly made up of gridlines of pulsating light. Would he pass right through and splat on the ground, or just smash into the top of it?

  He couldn’t close his eyes.

  The hovercraft then hummed to life, for just a moment, shooting him forward and up so quickly that his body crashed into the craft hard and he almost let go and fell out. Like a stone skidding on the surface of a placid lake, the blue toaster with Bill clutching it desperately skipped across the pulsating light-dome that protected Bios-2.

  Maybe it was the impact with the craft, or the g-force, but he had a sense of being in an old Warner Brothers cartoon, with all the silly animated noises. “Boing… boing… boing.” Then he was falling again, now past Bios-2’s far wall, over a vast smoldering field of black and brown.

  A thought popped into his head: reboot! Bill punched the “on” button twice to turn it off and then on again, hoping it was like rebooting a computer, which had solved almost every computer problem he had in the past. It seemed to work as he felt the hovercraft fight against gravity’s pull. But it wasn’t enough thrust. He hit the ground hard, just outside the wall.

  He might have been unconscious for a bit, because his eyes flicked open and he saw people standing over him. They lifted him up and carried him, and then everything went black.

  To say the atmosphere around Cicada was electric was a laughable statement of the obvious. Everyone ran around as if they were on fire. Most were seeking information, going from residence to residence or building to building, asking about the coming invaders, or trying to confirm that their founder was actually dead. A few like Sally sought solace alone, in their own way, in a place where they felt comfortable. For Sally, it was the Library. Preston had added the Kings’ thumbprint data into the system. And although she had experienced the power outage once, she still felt safe down there. It had technology and books, her two favorite things on earth; and it was quiet. She rationalized her decision by figuring at this point, all she could do was worry, and she had been doing that almost nonstop for the better part of a year now.

  She brought along Max’s crazy-looking flashlight, one of the type he called “Frankensteins” because of the protective covering. It was perhaps overkill in an underground building, which was heavily shielded against EMPs, but she was no longer taking chances getting stuck in the darkness like before. Although, even the darkness and its solitude would be comforting at this point. She just wanted to have some control over the light. More to the point, she was hoping to escape her worries by reading a new novel. She didn’t want to deal with these newest crises; Uncle Max maybe being killed and an invading army about to strike were too much for one person to take. She was numb.

  She pretended for a moment that she was back at the university, searching the library bookshelves for a new hidden gem to get lost in. Looking up and down the aisles, she finally found an interesting shelf, stocked full of several large tomes by Stephen King. She wasn’t into horror stories, but then remembered Preston had a copy of The Stand on his desk and said there was another at their Library and she should check it out. He had told her very strongly, “It reminds me of the struggle we are constantly involved in, every day of our lives: a struggle between good and evil. We don’t have to look very far for evil these days, but good is a lot harder to find. This book is about that good and how with God’s help, good will win the day over evil. Mark my words, we all will have to make our stand someday.”

  Okay, it wasn’t light reading and didn’t exactly take her mind away, but she wanted to be reminded that good could win over evil. She spotted the dog-eared paperback, its blue-black cover hanging by a few fibers. She snatched it.

  Then she found a soft chair at a table with a bunch of books stacked like some chaotic game of Jenga, sat down and started to read.

  As she read about the Walking Dude, the book’s evil antagonist, a man burst through the Library door, searching for someone. She slunk behind the bramble of books and held hers in front of her face, like some shield of protection against the world’s intrusion. Every few seconds, she peeked over the top as casually as she could. When the man looked her direction a jolt of recognition hit him, and he hurried in her direction. She didn’t recognize him at all, but as he came closer, he seemed surer that she was who he was seeking. She held her book up higher, completely obscuring her face, and pretended to be captivated by it.

  “Sally King?” he asked from the other side of the table.

  She put the book down. “Yes.”

  “Your mother, Lisa King, is looking for you. She’s with Mr. Tanner in the infirmary. Mr. Thompson is alive and being treated. They’re asking for you and your father. Do you know where he is?”

  She leapt from her seat. “Uncle Max is alive? Ah, no I haven’t seen him since this morning.” Also, she was wondering where her dad was. She wanted to run and follow this stranger to see Uncle Max, but then she looked around, trying to figure out what she needed to do to officially borrow her book, when the man spun around and hurried away. She hollered, “Wait. Are you going to show me to the infirmary?”

  “No,” he hesitated, “I’ve been asked to find Bill King after I found you. Infirmary is upstairs on the second floor.” And then he was gone.

  28.

  Bios-2

  She woke to congratulatory voices. Men full of their pride and their own self-validations. They were loud and boisterous and they were inside her aching head. Melanie’s eyes flicked open. The assault of light was like a splash of acid on each brain cell of her pounding head. She squeezed them shut and collected herself, her head pulsating pain with each breath. The last thing she remembered was… shooting Westerling. She let one eye squint open, letting in a bearable amount of sunlight from the outside window-wall. The voices continued: Lunder and Westerling, but the bastard sounded no worse off for her efforts.

  Lying on her side, she was hog-tied like some prized pig ready to go to slaughter. Her rage built up again, their laughter lighter fluid to its fiery coals. Melanie had been working hard to keep it in check since she had been in Bios-2’s captivity, and with Carrington, she was able to hold it back. But she no longer desired that. Now, she wanted to embrace her rage.

  She couldn’t see them, but she could hear them as if they were standing over her. A quick look confirmed they weren’t there, and she realized that she was pointed in the wrong direction, with her back to them. Carefully she rocked onto her other side, facing into Westerling’s office. He was definitely unharmed, even though she remembered having him in her sights and squeezing the trigger and feeling the release. Then somebody, she guessed it was Lunder, had knocked her out. A little blemish on the window-wall separating her from them, told her the answer. “Shit, bulletproof glass,” she whispered.

  Westerling and Lunder shared looks of adulation. These two men acted like they controlled the world. She hated them and wanted them dead more than she wanted anything. Then she thought of Carrington, and as if cooled by a momentary cloudburst of calming rain, her rage simmered.

  She hoped that he’d gotten the note she left for him. But if he didn’t make it to their apartment, perhaps he found out from Rush. She wanted him safe.

  What was in store for her couldn’t be good. They would probably make an example of her to the other scientists and the other workers of Bios-2; she now knew they were in fact all prisoners here. Regardless, she had to find a way to escape. She reached down to the back of her shoe and pulled out the small knife she had hidden there. Carrington joked about it, calling it her James Bond knife, but he would have thought it smart now. After getting it free, she was about to slice at the zip-tie bindin
g her hands but stopped.

  She looked back at the two men who didn’t yet notice she was conscious. She was in plain view of them. Even if she could free herself, how far could she get before being caught again? The hallway, the elevator, certainly not the building exit. No, patience had always served her well in the past. She would wait for the right time. And if she was lucky, she might be able to surprise and kill one of them at close range. She had done it before, and she would look forward to doing it again. So she closed her eyes, clutched the cool comfort of her knife in her palm, listened to them and waited.

  Carrington had been waiting for so long behind the secretarial desk outside Westerling’s office, his legs were cramping up. He figured that someone else had a similar idea, because that person had already taken out four guards at the tower’s entrance door, left wide open. He had been able to walk right up to Westerling’s door, but then he had heard the voices and ducked behind this desk. Deanna and Leanne were escorted out of Westerling’s office; they all walked to the elevator. Still, he waited. Now he heard only two voices in Westerling’s office: Lunder’s and the senator’s. It was time.

  He peeked around the desk in both directions and saw just one guard standing between him and the door. This guard was playing with his radio, fumbling with the volume and squelch control and then the talk button. No doubt, he was frustrated by the disturbance Carrington had created. Each time he depressed the talk button, it would squeal. Unfortunately, so did the two radios he had bound together and later placed in the drawer of the desk he was currently hiding behind. The guard studied the desk, trying to figure out what he was hearing in front of him. Carrington could see him through a small hole the computer cords snaked through under the desk.