by Lysa Daley
“One rat down. Two to go.” Sunglasses Man says. A second later, four big brown street rats appear from the side of the alley.
Actual rats.
Sunglasses Man laughs. “Speaking of rats.”
I frown. That’s weirdly ironic. He mentions rats, and they appear?
The suits see the rodents and join their boss laughing at the irony.
I squeeze my eyes shut. I can’t bare to watch my uncle get shot an instant before me.
Suddenly, a roar fills the air. Then the sound of blasters thunder around us. The ground beneath my feet shakes. Opening my eyes, I see—
Tom!
In his massive alien Drologon form. He stands between the Horlocks and us. Baring his teeth, he lunges at the Horlocks, a low guttural growl echoes off the brick alley walls.
Tom was one of the rats.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sunglasses yells at his agents. “Keep firing!”
Regular old alien blaster fire isn’t going to hurt Tom. He’s pretty much impervious to every weapon he’s ever met. All it does is make him mad.
Still, they keep firing at him as he advances, and I’m afraid the continuous bombardment will eventually get to him.
From behind us, a chorus of smaller, but still fearsome growls, rings out. The agents whip around to see three slightly smaller Drolgons stalking toward them.
It’s Tom’s babies.
I can’t believe how big they’ve gotten since I last saw them. If Tom is the size of a Mack Truck, then the babies are pickup trucks.
“Stand your ground!” Sunglasses Man orders his agents. But as soon as Tom’s pups, snarling and sharp-toothed, advance on them, the agents panic and scatter, running for their lives.
Alone, Sunglasses Man turns back to us. “Fine. Then I’ll end this all by myself.” He points his weapon at me, ready to fire.
But, lightening fast, Tom lunges at Sunglasses Man. He scoops him, swallowing him up to his waist. Then Tom tosses his whole body in the air, like a dog toy, opens his mouth and swallows Sunglasses Man in one fell swoop.
Yikes! I’ve never seen him eat anyone before.
I’m left stunned as the only thing remaining of my nemesis — his Rayban sunglasses — clatter to the pavement at our feet.
Chapter 34
“So let me get this straight?” I begin, my voice just above a whisper. “He was a double agent all along?”
Back in the hotel bunker, my uncle and I are standing outside the makeshift ICU area looking through a glass window at Jax who lies unconscious in a hospital bed. He’s hooked up to an octopus of tubes, cords and wires barely alive.
He’s in what a few hours ago was just a regular old bunker hotel room. We’ve had so many people fall sick or into the “sleep”, that we’ve had to expand our already stressed medical team.
“Double agent? That depends on what you mean,” my uncle replies. “He was working for the Eye in the Sky. So he was a double agent against the Draconians.”
He had me fooled, that’s for sure. And, to be honest, I’m still not certain I know where Jax’s alliances truly lie. I saw the way he looked at Calliope, all lovey-dovy, the night he betrayed me at St. Benedicts. You’d have to be pretty cold-hearted to fake that.
Still, I manage a little laugh. “If that’s true then the Crimson Lord must be upset. According to Fitz, he vetted Jax himself.”
“You still don’t believe Jax is on our side?”
I shrug. “Actually, I’m surprised that you trust him. You don’t trust anyone. How can you be sure he’s truly our ally?”
My uncle looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Because he risked his life to save you. He’s lying in that bed because he stepped in front of a plasma stream for you. Why would he do that? Doesn’t that seem obvious?”
I swallow hard. He has a point.
Before I have a chance to explain, O’Malley pokes his head in. “Sir, Fitz wants you to come to the comm center.”
“Roger that,” my uncle nods.
The meeting has already started when we get there. Tanaka types away on his keyboard, pulling something up on the big smart board in front of the room. It’s underwater video of an oval shaped object that looks more biological than mechanical or structural. It’s sitting on the rocky ocean floor.
Right before our eyes, it seems to be growing and changing. It rhythmically expands and contracts in a way that resembles breathing or a heart beating.
“What the heck is that terrifying thing?” I ask. “Is it alive?”
Fitz turns his attention away from me toward the image on the screen. “This is what the Draconians are calling the brain.”
“That’s the thing Kraken was talking about?” I ask. “How big is it?”
“Our best estimates are that it’s the size of a city bus. It’s a cross between a massive computer processor and a sort of advanced highly evolved synthetic being.”
“So that thing is alive? Like alive-alive?”
Fitz frowns. “Well, it might be more accurate to say it’s like artificial life.”
“Where are they keeping something that big?” my uncle asks. “Even underwater, you’d need a lot of room to keep this thing hidden.”
“That information was tightly guarded. Jax was never able to break into any of the areas where that data was stored. If he had prior knowledge, he didn’t communicate it to us. We’re damn lucky he managed to get this much to us at all.”
“How will we know when it’s been activated?”
Fitz shakes his head. “I’m not sure. The only person who may know that information is now teetering on the brink of life and death.”
He means Jax. A wave of sickening guilt and grief pretty much bitch slaps me. And I know I deserve it.
Just then Dr. Maggie sticks her head into the conference room interrupting with urgency, “You need to come to the infirmary right now.”
Chapter 35
Before she can explain what's going on, Dr. Maggie hurries back down the hallway. Does she mean only Fitz should follow her, or all of us?
Either way, we all stream after her into the infirmary at the end of the hallway.
For the last day, Ruby’s father Mr. Lee and Waylon were only two of the numerous patients in the small regular ward. Dr. Maggie’s staff had to enlarge the medical rooms when the implantees all fell into their coma-like state.
Simmons, along with the three other civilians from the hotel’s bunker, were all being monitored from their makeshift hospital beds.
Mr. Lee currently sits on the edge of his bed holding a blood soaked bandage to his head. He looks rattled.
The bed next to him has been turned on its side. The mattress lies askew with the sheets and pillows in a tangled mess on the floor.
Ruby, who’s stayed in the infirmary alongside both her father and Waylon, sit slumped over in a chair in the corner while her sister Phoebe tries to get her to drink a glass of water.
Waylon is not here.
“Where’s Waylon?” Fitz asks the obvious question.
Ruby's dad points a shaky finger at the overturned bed. “He hit me. He hit my girl. Then he ran away. Like a coward.”
Fitz turns to Ruby. “What happened?”
“I wish I knew,” she says like she’s stepping out of a fog. “He was crazed. It’s like he woke up in a rage He wasn’t himself at all.”
Doctor Maggie attempts to explain, “We’ve been monitoring Waylon’s vitals since he arrived here in his unconscious state. They've remained steady. His pulse, blood pressure, and heart rate were all stable but extremely low. Nearly identical to someone who's in the coma. So you can imagine our shock when his eyes just popped open, and he sat up.”
“It was like he was possessed,” Ruby adds. “He leapt out of bed like the mattress was on fire. I swear he didn't even recognize us.”
Dr. Maggie holds up a long paper read out. “His vitals practically shot off the charts.”
“He hit you?” I gesture to Ruby’s black eye as
she leans away into the low light.
“No, it’s not like that. I tried to stop him by blocking the door, so he couldn’t leave,” Ruby explains. “But I couldn’t stop him. He was too strong. That’s when he hit me. But he didn’t mean it. I know he didn’t.”
Doctor Maggie continues, “Waylon was unresponsive to anything we said or did. And his physical strength seems to have increased beyond normal capacity like he’s somehow developed superhuman strength.”
“Did he say anything?” my uncle asks.
Dr. Maggie shakes her head. “He was verbally non-responsive.”
“Check the security cameras,” Fitz orders. “He can't have gone far.”
As it turns out, he got pretty far.
The security footage show that after he left the infirmary, Waylon took the stairs to the lobby, walking in a rigid unnatural way. For an instant, he turns to the camera and even though the image is just a grainy black and white picture, we can clearly see that his eyes are now totally black.
Just like the Horlocks.
At the checkpoint before the entrance to the hotel lobby, one of the guards must have asked for his I.D. and lobby pass. Totally standard procedure.
The poor guard never saw the blazing roundhouse punch coming.
After that, Waylon just stepped over the unconscious guard and breezed out the front door of the lobby, like no big deal.
An instant later, Simmons and the other three civilians who also fell asleep, follow Waylon out the hotel entrance.
“They’re all awake? At the same time?” I say. “It’s like they’re some sort of zombie being beckoned by their master. Where do you think they’re going?”
My uncle frowns, “No clue. But wherever it is, it's not good.” k-1-2
Something occurs to Fitz, “Bring up the live camera feed from the Putnam Park Facility in California. This was the place we first encountered the sea of empty cots.”
“Good idea,” my uncle nods. “After Waylon fell asleep, the cots were filled with what we can only assume are other abductees.”
They placed a hidden tiny microfiber camera on the site to keep track of what was happening there.
Tanaka taps into the live video feed, and we see what looks like a thousand unmade beds.
“They’re gone,” Tanaka says. “All of them.”
“Or they’ve also woken up,” my uncle suggests.
“That can only mean one thing.” The weight of this realization clouds Fitz’s eyes. “The Draconian brain has been fully activated.”
Chapter 36
“So that’s it? Game over?” O’Malley says, looking suddenly pale. Up until this point, he’s been 100% unshakeable. But the idea of some alien brain waking up so the Draconians can take over Earth has rattled tough guy O’Malley. “We’re just done for?”
“Yes and no,” Fitz says, his voice measured and controlled. He’s trying to stay calm, so no one else panics. “What we’ve been able to gather from our intel is that the brain is a sort of symbiotic system. The former human abductees can't be awakened without the brain, but the brain can't reach maturity without the collective power of the abductees. So even though the brain is now, at least partially, operational, its not fully come into all its power.”
“So waking the humans up is one of the steps necessary for the Draconians to complete in order to fully initiate their plans,” my uncle says, thinking out loud and following Fitz’s logic.
“We think this is one of the last stages that the brain needs to reach maturity.”
“How long do we have?” I ask, afraid of the answer. This whole situation is making me very nervous. “Before it’s fully operational?”
“Probably not very long. Maybe a day, possibly two. The brain has begun transmitting a very powerful signal all over the world in order to wake the sleeping victims.”
My uncle addresses Tanaka, “Then we should be able to trace that signal back to one source if there’s only one primary signal controlling a planet full of people.”
Tanaka spins around at his console, his fingers flying over the keyboard as a flat radar map of the whole world appears on the big screen. Some of the lines representing the signals are bright and thick, while others are faint and dim.
Tanaka quickly makes the weaker signals vanish, focusing only on the more prominent lines. “If the signal is actually that strong then I can find it.”
We all watch while he triangulates the strongest electronic signals on each continent. It doesn’t take long to narrow it down to the single most powerful one.
It’s considerably bigger and brighter than the rest.
But as he zooms in, we realize it’s not one signal, but thousands and thousands of individual signals originating from the same place.
“There it is,” Tanaka points to what looks like a swirling vortex. The map shows hundreds of thousands of lines spidering out from a single point. They all converge in one place. “Where is that?”
Fitz steps forward to study the map. It's coming from someplace in South America. He recognizes the location. “That's Cami Lake in Tierra Del Fuego almost at the southern tip of the continent.”
“Can you be more specific? Which side of the lake is the signal coming from?” my uncle asks.
Tanaka zooms in even closer to the source, “It’s coming from the lake itself. Almost dead center.”
“Of course!” my uncle says. “They’ve planted the brain underwater. That’s how they’ve been able to keep it cool as well as out of sight.”
“Yes, the freshwater will allow for it to continue growing,” Fitz adds. “The salt from ocean water would have killed it.”
“If I’m not mistaken,” I say, thinking back to 11th-grade geography. “Cami Lake is one of the deepest of all the freshwater lakes on the planet. And one of the coldest.”
“The signal is coming from a depth of 222 fathoms,” Tanaka reports. “That’s just over 1300 feet deep.”
“It’s July in South America,” O’Malley comments.
“F.Y.I. - it’s July everywhere,” Tanaka adds, being a smart ass.
“Ha ha.” O’Malley glares, not in the mood for his joke. “July is the dead of winter in the southern hemisphere. That water is going to be freezing.”
“He’s right.” Fitz goes on, “July means the water in Lake Cami is somewhere around 40 degrees. Just above freezing.
“Parts of the lake are probably frozen over,” O’Malley adds. “At least 50% of the surface is likely frozen solid. That lake was formed by a glacier.”
“Even if we can get to it, can the brain even be destroyed?” Fitz asks.
“Everything can be destroyed,” my uncle says. “Especially anything organic and living.”
“It’s not an accident that they’ve chosen such a strategic location in the middle of a massive flat body of water,” Fitz says. “There’s no way to approach without being seen. And if you can somehow make it to the site of the brain, then it will be extremely cold and dark. Not to mention, I know they have Red Tailed Gorbins down there.”
My uncle reacts. “Where did they get something as nasty as Gorbins?”
“We had intel months ago that there’d been sightings in several South American countries,” Fitz explains. “They’ve scared the daylights out of a few tourists, but haven’t shown any aggression. Up until now, we had no idea why they would be there. Now it makes sense. They were most likely smuggled in by the Greys.”
“What’s a Red Tailed Gorbin?” I ask, again not wanting to hear the answer.
“Think of a great white shark, but three times the size, with two heads and more teeth,” my uncle explains.
That conjures up a terrifying image in my brain.
“Let me guess,” I say. “Kraken?”
“He’s the most likely suspect,” Fitz nods.
“We could try a torpedo?” O’Malley suggests. “From inside a Navy sub. Some of the new L.D. class submarines are small and maneuverable enough for a lake that size. ”
> My uncle shakes his head, “Won’t work. I’m sure they have the shields up. Torpedos would never penetrate the outer shell. But we might be able to get at a small area that would allow us temporary access.”
“We could attach an explosive directly to the brain,” I suggest what seems like the obvious solution. “That will take out any life — synthetic or not.”
“Yes, I suppose.” Fitz looks skeptical. “But that would mean you’d have to swim in the open water in order to get to it. And be nimble. So nimble that their radar just thinks you’re another fish. Which would be hard to do in a big, clunky coldwater wetsuit,” Fitz reasons it through. “So unless someone can withstand freezing temperatures outside a wetsuit, we’re back to the drawing board.”
My uncle’s eyes go wide as he turns toward me. “Not necessarily.”
Chapter 37
The water in the hotel pool is usually kept at a balmy 79 degrees.
But not today.
Right now, the swimming pool looks like an oversized glass of ice water. Fitz’s team has managed to dumped something like a metric ton of solid ice, mostly in one-foot blocks, into the water.
The air conditioning is also cranked to full blast. The temperature hovers just above 30 degrees.
So while I’m standing in a thin hotel robe that covers my blue one piece Speedo tank suit, everyone else is bundled up in sweaters, jackets, and a couple of exceptionally wimpy individuals are even wearing gloves.
Still, it’s cold enough that you can see everyone’s breath.
“Okay, Astrid. Are you ready?” my uncle asks, walking over to me. “Beause it’s okay if you’re not. You don’t have to do this.”
“Um, I don’t?” I ask because up until now it sort of felt like I do have to do this. “This whole thing was your suggestion.”
“I know.” His face looks pained, and I realize that he’s regretting having told Fitz and his men that it’s quite likely that I am temperature resistant. It’s my lame superpower. “I could do it instead.”
“Except you can’t tolerate the cold,” I say. Then I add sarcastically, “You weren’t gifted with such a glorious and magical power.”