Countdown (Arrival Book 2)

by Travis Hill

  “What the fuck?” I said aloud, my words coming out in a half-sob / half-giggle.

  My mind began to warp. The crushing sense of loss destroyed the remaining hold on sanity that I’d held on to. My legs buckled and I fell to the floor. Hitching, wracking sobs poured out of me as the dam broke. The muffled screams and wails that entered my ears were my own.

  I curled into a ball. I refused to move.

  To breathe.

  To live.

  Grief burned through me, the guilt of my realization that Melly had taken her own life—that it had been her plan all along—forcing my brain to go into emergency lockdown. The strangled shriek that came from my throat was cut off within seconds. I wasn’t sure if I became comatose or had fallen asleep. Wherever I was, whatever was happening, it couldn’t dull the agony, the regret that had forced my body into standby mode.

  My mind began to replay the last moments of my old life on a loop. I hadn’t actually seen the implosion, only the aftermath, but my imagination did its best to fill in the horrific details. A secondary thought began to pulse, once again reminding me that Mellisandra had known all along I could have ran the fifteen klicks alone. The way the Guardian at the portal had stepped aside, even taking another step back to let me know I would pass unmolested hadn’t registered in my brain at the time. I’d been too focused on the other nine Guardians that made a beeline to her when she split off from me.

  Melly… Why? But I knew the answer. Two thousand years and an unimaginable number of men and women she’d truly been in love with… I was the last straw, the final lover that made her realize it would never end. There was no going through either of the portals topside, and there would never be a companion, a soul mate to grow old with to the end of eternity. The vast, unending trail of scars on her heart had finally suffocated the last shred of hope that the cycle of loss would eventually end.

  I knew I would never get over the guilt, even if Mellisandra appeared before me and absolved me of any wrongdoing. I knew I wasn’t to blame, but I couldn’t help wonder if I had left her five or ten years before my departure, would that have kept her from killing herself? It would have been easy to make up some reason or other to start an argument with her, one that I could have escalated until I walked out of her life for good. I knew my way around The Bower, and she’d trained me well enough that I could safely make my way deep into the subcities and have a boring life until it was time to depart.

  I knew it wouldn’t have mattered either way. She would have searched for me, or more likely, I would have crawled back to her, begging her to forgive me. And even if I had left and never saw her again, she would eventually meet another, and when that person died or departed…

  I spent an eternity locked in a battle of emotions. Wherever I was, time was as featureless, as dull as the short hallway I’d collapsed in. I swam from memory to memory, grasping at the fleeting moments of intense pleasure, desire, happiness, and laughter of my time with Melly. I wanted nothing more than to merge with one of these memories and end the bitterness that consumed me, but each was snatched away just as I got a taste.

  I woke up to hear my own voice calling out for Mellisandra. The shadowless gray hallway was unchanged, the silence swallowing her name a final time. I spent a minute on my knees, making sure I was ready to stand and walk to whatever awaited me on the other side of the door. As shaky as my legs were, I decided to get it over with. Nothing could bring back Melly. Nothing could ever pierce my heart again. No matter what hell resided beyond that door, its horror, pain, and suffering would never penetrate the black hole within me.

  I walked the five meters, my legs becoming stronger, more confident by the time I reached the door. I paused with my hand on the latch. I used the last of my emotional willpower to focus on the night Melly first told me she was in love with me.

  I’d fallen in love with her by the third night we were together—though it was probably more likely the first time we held hands as we stood on the railing overlooking Garden City. I wanted, needed that frozen moment in time when her hand stroked my hair, her lips poised to confess her innermost feelings for me. I savored it, a sudden flood of scents, sounds, and physical sensations crashing through me before dissipating on some sort of metaphysical wind.

  I turned the latch and opened the door. My mind went blank at the scene before me. A blood red sky and an endless expanse of broken, rocky terrain was the backdrop for a chaotic, furious battlefield. Except it wasn’t like any battle my brain could have possibly imagined. An ocean of creatures, from humans like me to frightening, massive battle mechs, to indescribable creatures ranging from a meter in height to four high and four wide, boiled across the landscape as they fought in both vicious melee bouts as well as utilizing ranged weapons that were beyond anything I’d ever imagined.

  A hand grabbed me and pulled me through the doorway.

  “Power up, soldier!” a strange looking animal shouted in my face. My mind tried to picture a frog with a beard made of worms before it blanked out again, only rebooting after the creature viciously shook me. “Power up!”

  The frog-thing shoved a sleek, deadly looking rifle in my hands. I stood there, stupidly looking at it, with absolutely zero clue of what was happening.

  “Power up or you will be recycled,” the frog-thing said before bounding off on three legs toward a swarm of creatures locked in mortal combat.

  I had no idea how to “power up” or even what that meant, but the instant I thought the words, my clothing morphed into a skintight black quicksilver layer. I screamed as the living black substance coated my face. The moment it locked into place as a single unit, the world in my eyes shifted. I instinctively knew I could view the battle in the visual spectrum, infrared, and even x-ray. Markers began to light up, each linked to an individual. Half were red, the other half blue, though both winked out almost as fast as my eyes could mark them. Waves of red markers streaked toward the fight. I turned around, expecting to see the door I’d entered this hellscape through, but only saw thousands of blue markers pop up in my vision.

  COMBAT PARAMETERS INITIATED

  I stared at the words flashing at the bottom of my vision, unsure of what to do. My view of the world flashed red as a warning icon blinked urgently to my left. I turned to see five beasts rushing toward me, four-legged nightmares with an extra set of limbs that resembled exaggerated arms which ended in even more exaggerated spikes.

  My reflexes from two decades in The Bower kicked in. I swung the strange rifle around and keyed the electronic trigger. I figured out how the targeting system worked after the third beast tumbled to the rocky dirt. By the time I finished the last one off, I’d become familiar with the rifle’s many functions, as well as the most basic tactical computer functions of whatever I’d “powered up.”

  I had no idea what to do other than kill anything with a red marker. I assumed the blue markers were on my side but I shut down my thoughts other than the ones that allowed me to focus my sudden explosive fury at the enemy. I checked the rifle’s readout to make sure I had enough ammo or energy or whatever powered it, then began to walk straight toward the battle in front of me.

  I cut down a dozen mechanized quadrupeds before anyone noticed me. At least fifty of the enemy turned their attentions to me, but I calmly waded through the swirling, screaming mass of combatants, picking off one and sometimes four aliens at a time. I didn’t know for sure if they were aliens, but I couldn’t fathom what else they might be other than twisted nightmares that were cursed to haunt me for an eternity.

  Ten minutes into the fight, a thousand blue markers rallied around me as we marched forward, driving back the endless sea of red markers. Explosions rocked the battlefield, distracting me for a few seconds as I finally noticed the second fight going on in the skies above. A solid thump from an enemy mech forced me to pay attention. I bolted forward faster than my human legs should have been able to carry me. I saw the icon in my vision for close combat weapons and focused on them. My rif
le morphed into two swords and I cut a path into the heart of the enemy’s advance.

  The blades must have had some kind of energized edge or were forged to have a cutting line a single molecule wide. Screams, howls, guttural roars, noises my brain couldn’t even translate into identifiable sounds followed me as I disemboweled two meter tall aliens with four arms each holding a weapon of some kind. I stepped smoothly into a knot of waist-high blobs, deftly avoiding whatever substance they sprayed at me as my swords cleaved them in half. My arms became fused extensions of the blades, the left beheading two insectoid aliens with a single swing, the right puncturing the dull armor of a smaller mech. I twisted my right arm and the blade cut through the power couplings inside the mech’s chest cavity.

  A roar behind me was followed by a surge of bodies as the ones with blue markers once again rallied around me, wiping out a counterattack push the enemy had begun as it realized we were forcing them to retreat. Or die. I screamed in fury as I ran toward a four meter tall mech, its two arms ending in chainguns that laid waste to anything it targeted, enemy or not. I ran up the back of a frightening spider creature and leaped onto the mech’s back, driving both of my swords down into its head compartment. The mech bucked and swung its torso around in circles until I pulled my swords and jammed them into its chest, twisting both arms while pulling them out in a wide arc. The mech’s armor crumpled, spilling its internals into the dirt.

  I fought for hours, days, maybe weeks. I had no need of food, water, or to relieve myself of bodily wastes. Sleep didn’t exist. Only killing. I never paused in my march toward wherever I thought the enemy leaders might be. I took multiple blows from hundreds of different types of weapons but few penetrated the strange semi-liquid suit that encapsulated me. Those that did were unable to break through the black hole that protected me.

  I wondered if I would keep fighting for tens of thousands of years until I was finally killed. I laughed at the idea that once the fighting was over, all of the wounds I’d suffered would still be unable to penetrate the vacuum that consumed all of my thoughts, feelings, or sensations beyond the destruction of anything with a red marker attached to it. If the battle ever ended, I felt confident the darkness within me would collapse and I would drop dead, the devastating injuries finally allowed to affect me instead of being held at bay by the sheer strength of my will to continue living, to continue killing.

  The desire to grind up the enemy was powered by fusion reaction at the core of my being. These aliens, these soldiers from a child’s worst night terror, they were the reason Melly killed herself. They were the cause of me being born with a timer that couldn’t be disabled. The enemy before me was the entire reason humanity lived in a closed loop, feeding its living remains to the portals for a cause that no one beyond the automated control systems remembered anymore.

  I would never stop until my thirst for death was quenched, until my revenge against whoever or whatever took Mellisandra from me allowed me to power down for a final time.

  “Arrival” coming soon!

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Stuff goes here. Not a sequel or prequel. Don’t eat lead paint. If you’re reading this, I demand you poke yourself in the eye with your left ring finger. COOKIES!

  *ahem*

  Okay. Hello, readers. I always write myself little notes on unfinished pages as a reminder to eventually fill them in. I liked the note above enough to leave it and leave them in when it comes to future books. Right. Let’s get to my explanation of what you’ve just read. I am assuming that you’ve read “Departure” already, as if you didn’t, this book probably didn’t make a lot of sense. Yeah, I know, just another way to get you to buy some other nonsense I’ve written.

  So… “Countdown,” as I’ve said quite a bit somewhere on the internet and in my head a thousand times, is not a sequel or a prequel to “Departure.” It’s a companion story. While it does take place a few years in the future from “Departure” (kudos to you if you saw the direct link), it isn’t a sequel. “Departure” was all about the normal, everyday life of humanity in the story’s universe. The Bower was referenced as being a pretty dangerous district, considering how scheduled and orderly life in the upper city is. Indeed, The Bower is not a pretty place.

  But every ordered, utopian society or civilization needs a steam valve. An outlet for misfits (not necessarily a derogatory term) and others who cannot make it in such a strict, orderly society. And then there’s the Justice portal, a sort of ominous bogeyman in “Departure” and a (somewhat) frightening reality in “Countdown.”

  But where does the Justice portal truly lead? All we get is a glimpse, and it probably seems a bit puzzling since we’re not told why. Haha, man, how pretentious does it sound talking about the story like I’m on stage at a huge book conference? I’m so lame!

  Anyway, at the end of “Departure” it says something about “Arrival” is coming soon. But then there’s this weird story instead. I didn’t actually intend to write this story. Like most story ideas, it just sort of punched me in the head one day while I was vacuuming the floor (my favorite “work” activity, by the way… and I’m not exaggerating… but I am married already and you can imagine there’s no way she’s letting go of a dude who absolutely lives to push the Dyson around the carpet for half an hour twice, sometimes three times per week).

  (we have a lot of cats, by the way, and a big garden, so… you know, hair, dirt, little annoying pieces of dry cat litter that gets tracked everywhere… grrrrr, why did I want cats???)

  Right. As I was saying, This story just sort of popped into my head. I’ve got all these other dumb stories in progress and so “Arrival” is still on the back burner for now, but I thought I could keep this around novella-length and release it as a stepping stone between “Departure” and “Arrival.” Mostly because “Arrival” is a full-length novel. Well, it will be when I get to it.

  “Arrival” is… large in scope. Beyond our puny little Milky Way galaxy. A story like that doesn’t just come to me, but instead has to be pieced together from many different ideas. Stuff I like to call “eureka!” moments because I’ll be pushing my little Dyson across the carpet while silently cursing my cats for giving each other haircuts every six feet when suddenly I’ll think of another piece or part or aspect of the story. I then stop what I’m doing and grab my phone to send myself an email. Mostly those emails go something like “hey, stupid, you should make sure that the quantum entangler is formulated to intersect with Robinson’s string theory datum.”

  And yes, that’s an example to see if you’re still reading. Because it totally sounds like I just made stuff up out of words that sound cool when used together in a sentence. I’m not a scientist. I don’t even play one on TV (though if I did, they would probably kill my character off in the first four minutes of the pilot).

  *

  Okay. So some beta readers asked me “why two women?” I didn’t get the vibe that they were upset about some gay stuff. But then again, maybe they were, I don’t know. I tend to only think something odd is afoot when I get asked certain questions. Like… why would a straight white dude write about two lesbians in a science fiction story? Especially after “Departure” was basically a love letter to my wife on my 40th birthday.

  No doubt some probably think it’s a weird fantasy (hint: pretty much every straight dude on Earth has fantasized about it and then watched some pornography in that same genre). But for me, it’s somewhat a story I wrote for my daughter, and somewhat wrote because in my circle of life, I have just as many LGBT friends and family as I do heterosexuals. Weird, right? No. It’s not for me. If this gay stuff bothers you… I will suggest you never read anything I write in the future because I include LGBT characters, with some as main characters.

  But why?

  That’s easy. Because Dave wants to read science fiction books about space marines or ace starship bomber pilots that has characters from his own real life universe. Dave knows that being a gay man puts him in a subcatego
ry, and mainstream fiction isn’t written for nor typically inclusive of his life experiences. Dave sees gay characters written as stereotypes, bit part players, set pieces to be abused or murdered or shamed or such by the main characters (strong hetero males and occasionally a female).

  Not always shit on in the story, but rarely as the heroic space marine who stomped the guts of those bug-faced assholes from Gemini-III before he returns home to his faithful, worried, loving husband. Or maybe returns home a broken soldier after seeing so much death and destruction at the hands of an almost unimaginably frightening insectoid alien, and Mark, his husband, struggles to cope with the night terrors, the sudden bursts of rage, and the implosion of his lover’s personality as Dave is consumed by PTSD that no amount of counseling and prescription drugs can soften.

  I guess my goal was to write a story that appealed to all readers, including lesbians, bisexuals, transgender persons, and even gay men. Or maybe especially to them. They don’t get to be the stars of the show very often. Even though they’re just like you and me. They have faults, strengths, fears, and all the same aspects of humanity that everyone else does. Especially love.

  Love doesn’t care if two adult women are attracted to each other. Love doesn’t give two shits about a black man and a white woman falling for each other and getting married (and producing just about the most gorgeous children I’ve ever seen). Love cares not for the stupid shit the Capulets and the Montagues do to hate each other, it only cares that two humans are willing to sacrifice themselves to be together. I think that’s how that story goes.

  Not really sure as I sort of hated Shakespeare. Not as a person, I mean, that was like five centuries or something ago, and I don’t have a time machine. If I had a time machine, I would NOT go back and kick Hitler in the balls. Not because I love Hitler or anything, but I’d probably go back way before that and see a dinosaur, and like a bumbling, idiot time traveler, I’d step on a pre-Cambrian roach or something and we’d all be born with sixteen legs and four mouths.