Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  I shook his hand, hoping mine wasn’t so covered in sweat it would reveal my trepidation. I thought about the effect of swallowing half a blue Xanax pill, the entire blue oval if needed. The panic receded into the back of my mind like a rat slinking into the shadows waiting for a chance to pounce at the jugular.

  Nat and I followed Jaxon into the corner of the barn across from where we’d parked our vehicle.

  Reaching his hand down through a pile of hay, the astronaut with fang-shaped teeth grabbed hold of something that turned out to be a metal handle. The hay was all one piece, the individual strands glued together to camouflage a door. Jaxon pointed to the opening. He said, “Go on, now.”

  I looked into the hole. Cement stairs spiraled downward into near-darkness.

  Panic claimed me for its own. My hands shook. My head felt so dizzy, I worried I’d fall down the stairs, hit my head, die of a concussion inside the compound.

  Sitting on the barn floor, Nat placed his feet on the first step. He stood and descended a few more steps, then turned around and said, “You coming?”

  I followed, conjuring up images of the man in the orange jumpsuit slamming the door shut, coming back later to harvest our organs or feast on our flesh. Would we be dead at that point, or alive and experiencing every painful assault on our bodies?

  Jaxon stepped down into the opening and pulled the door closed. As he did so, light flooded a passageway at the bottom of the steps. Passing us, he waved a hand and said, “Follow me.”

  We followed him through a long tunnel.

  Childhood memories flashed through my mind, making me feel so claustrophobic, I started to hyperventilate. Once again, I was a small girl crawling on my stomach through a tunnel, practicing escape from the military who would surely come to round us all up. I told myself to calm down, to breathe, to imagine swallowing the Xanax with nice, cool water.

  The walls were dirt held in place by wooden frames. I ran my hands along both sides, using tactile sensation to wash away the anxious feeling of unreality coursing through my body.

  After walking so long my feet ached, we arrived at a metal door. Jaxon punched numbers into a keypad hidden behind a wooden beam. As the door swung open, he stepped inside. After we followed him, he shut the door and locked it.

  We had entered a cold, concrete basement. Light bulbs suspended from the ceiling provided the only light.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw cages lining the two longer walls. Concrete cages with thick metal bars, a bed and toilet and sink in each.

  My life would end here. Obsessed with fulfilling a grant for field research I found fascinating, I had defied all the red flags popping up and screaming in my brain to get out and go back home. A woman had murdered her two children inside the compound. The police had set up a war zone outside. They must have suspected a larger wave of potential violence inside this place where I now found myself hidden away, buried alive in my own terror down in the basement.

  Crossing the room, Jaxon walked over to a set of wooden stairs. We followed. When the man in the astronaut suit opened the door at the top, swung it forward and flooded the basement with light, I felt some relief. We were getting out.

  She touched the girl’s lips with the vial of poison, tilted it, telling her to drink. To this day, I hear her voice echoing through time.

  I followed Nat up the stairs. We entered a large common room where people were milling about. They were all dressed like Jaxon, even the children.

  In a crisp, hurried voice, Jaxon said, “Follow me.”

  I noticed that all the spacesuits had the same two patches. In place of NASA’s official insignia patch, they had one that looked very similar. Imitating NASA’s, it was round and blue, had star patterns and lines in white and red. However, the initials were TAP instead of NASA and the white lines scrolled out like a ribbon of light behind a flying saucer. I assumed TAP stood for The Astral Plane. Similar to NASA’s blue rectangular patch featuring a set of wings and the astronaut’s name, these suits had a patch with the same design except that a row of flying saucers replaced the wings.

  I found it hard to keep up with Jaxon. He was moving quickly.

  When we left the main room, we entered a wide hallway with concrete walls. There were no windows, but it was brightly illuminated by circular lights built into the walls. They reminded me of the round lights—often multi-colored—around the circular rim of UFOs in much of the popular UFO artwork.

  The floor was covered in blue carpeting.

  When I looked up to inspect the ceiling, I found it had been painted blue and decorated with star patterns. There appeared to be distinct constellations, but I didn’t recognize any of them.

  We turned several corners, each new hallway designated by a different color rug.

  After walking to the end of the hallway carpeted in white (it was still in pristine condition without any stains) Jaxon opened an ornate wooden door into which had been carved suns, moons, stars and planets.

  The door led into a hallway with metal stairs that spiraled upward.

  As we climbed the stairs, holding onto an ornate black metal railing, we passed by woven rugs depicting various scenes with aliens and flying saucers or real-life astronomy. One particularly beautiful rug showcased the Milky Way. Another featured the Hubble photo, Pillars of Creation. I’d always loved that image, described by NASA as having a “multi-colored glow of gas clouds” with “wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust.” The outer space aliens on the rugs were mostly the same: green skin, large heads and enormous black eyes. A few had gray skin. A few were short. The UFOs were also repetitions on a theme—round metal disks with lights in various places: around the rim, along the bottom, or shooting a beam out of the bottom to lift people up. One rug showed a terrified-looking man floating within the beam.

  The stairs led to a landing that looked like a waiting room or reading area. Hardwood floor, leather couch, several matching chairs and a coffee table.

  Jaxon walked straight across the area and knocked on a door.

  A man’s voice inquired, “Yes?”

  Jaxon gave his name and said, “Our guests are here to meet you.”

  The voice on the other side replied, “Come in. Please.”

  Opening the door, Jaxon motioned for us to enter.

  A man sat behind a massive wooden desk. At first, I thought he was old. He reminded me of a suntanned Gandalf the Grey. He had long gray hair and a flowing gray beard. His skin was rough and weathered, with deep lines reminiscent of parched gullies. His blue eyes, however, were clear and vibrant and his voice sounded no more than middle-aged.

  He asked us to sit. Nat and I chose the cloth-covered couch directly in front of the desk.

  He smiled, revealing perfectly straight white teeth. Introducing himself, corroborating what we’d already assumed, he said, “I’m Leader Razkazeel. I know who both of you are. When I heard you wanted to speak with me, my assistants did some research. I don’t meet with just anyone.” Looking at Jaxon who was pacing around the room, he added, “For the safety of myself and everyone else in the compound, you know. There are those who want to harm us.”

  He paused and looked once again at Jaxon. Turning his attention back to us, he said, “You’ve seen the militarized police force outside?”

  Nat answered, “It would be hard to miss them.”

  Knitting his thick gray eyebrows into an expression of deep concern, Razkazeel looked from Nat to me and replied, “Yes. Do you know why they’re here?”

  Hoping it wouldn’t enrage this leader of a bizarre cult, I ventured an honest answer. “The news is reporting that one of your members killed her two children inside this compound and the police are responding. I’m assuming they hope she’ll give herself up; but, if not, they’re prepared to force their way inside to arrest her.”

  Razkazeel said, “That’s their excuse.”

  Suddenly, there were footsteps behind the wall on the opposite side of the room from where we’d entered. Fo
r the first time, I noticed another door there.

  Nat asked Razkazeel what he meant.

  I felt unnerved that the guy we were talking to didn’t seem especially concerned about the murder.

  A stabbing pain shot through my head, shearing my conscious mind from the logical progression of conversation.

  A lovely woman in a long flowered dress holding a vial of poisonous liquid to the lips of a little girl. My twin. We had a deep psychological connection. We shared one psychic brain. Filling her veins with lethal contaminant, you might as well have sliced through my own corpus callosum. My father grabbing my hand and the hand of my brother. Running. Running. Me screaming for Crystal. Did I really scream for her? Had I even tried?

  Again, as in the airplane, odd foreign images flooded my brain.

  Babies with green skin floating in glass tanks. Large black eyes. Women lying in beds, crying.

  I rubbed my forehead.

  Turning to me, Razkazeel asked, “Is your head hurting?”

  I tried to swim up from the depths into which I’d fallen, tried to focus my thoughts on the here and now. I managed to say, “Yes.”

  Razkazeel said, “I can give you medication for that. It will get better. You have the kind of empathic ability we need.”

  Medication? Ability they need…? I feared I’d be drugged and held against my will, never let out of the compound.

  Running. Running. My feet were too little, my brother’s even smaller. My father picking him up. My terror that I’d be left behind.

  As though he had never switched subjects to address my headache and whatever kind of ability he thought I had, Razkazeel said, “Zyrielle did murder her baby girls. Hailey and Skylar, precious three and one year olds.” His eyes filled with sorrow. “But that’s not why the police are really here. Did you see the tanks?”

  Nat shook his head yes.

  Razkazeel said, “Those aren’t the police. The military is here to take that which frightened Zyrielle to kill her little girls. She was only trying to protect them. She feared that which is not an actual threat.”

  Vial of poison. Not to protect, but to transport Crystal into another dimension.

  Razkazeel said, “I need your help. I hope I can trust you. I have to take this leap of faith.”

  I felt incredibly confused. My head was pounding with pain and memories and strange intrusive images.

  Never one to turn down an opportunity to delve deeper into field research, Nat said, “Of course you can trust us.”

  Making eye contact with Jaxon, Razkazeel nodded his head. He had obviously said yes to something.

  Jaxon walked to the door behind Razkazeel’s desk and opened it. Gazing into the open space, he remained quiet.

  As he returned to the middle of Razkazeel’s office, two humanoid creatures with green skin, large black eyes and bald heads followed behind him. At first, I thought they were nude. It took me a few seconds to realize they were wearing skintight green bodysuits.

  My head exploded in pain and images.

  Creatures bending space-time, folding one era onto another, pods skipping from one point to the next. Earth dying over and over again. Rivers drying up. Glaciers melting. Oceans rising into monstrous waves. Tsunamis drowning us, our screams swallowed by the void of death.

  I found it difficult to breathe. I drowned in images, began losing my mind, lost the boundaries I had carefully constructed about who I was.

  The shorter of the two aliens approached me.

  My heart beat against my chest like a trapped bird.

  As if in a nightmare, I tried to scream, but couldn’t get my throat to emit noise. It was as though I had become paralyzed. I don’t usually succumb to fear, but this was different than any terrifying situation I’d ever experienced in my entire life. These beings had taken over my brain, hacked into it and planted thoughts and images I couldn’t block. The loss of control over my own mind had stripped away my ability to function.

  One of the green creatures bent down close to my face. She gazed into my eyes. I say she because her humanoid facial structure appeared feminine. Her eyes were reflective. I saw myself within the shiny black structures, looking small and petrified.

  She reached a hand with long green fingers toward me. Placing her hand on the top of my head, she sang in what sounded like an ancient language.

  My headache disappeared and my body relaxed. A sense of peacefulness and utter calm took over.

  And then she communicated with me in the way that Crystal and I had communicated so many years before: through telepathy. She told me she was in danger of being captured and unable to ever return home. She was frightened that she would be experimented upon.

  Her thoughts were clear and separate from each other, not the earlier chaotic jumble of information that had surpassed my ability to process.

  I wondered if Nat was experiencing the same thing.

  She communicated: “Being a twin, your mind is more open to this. You’ve had experience with this type of communication before.”

  That freaked me out. I did not like her reading my mind. Crystal had been my identical twin. Our communication still held its own kind of privacy. We had split from the same egg. No one from the outside could break into our shared thoughts. Not even my mother who had born our single egg and birthed our tiny separate bodies into the world.

  The creature with green skin and mesmerizing black eyes read my discomfort and backed off. She sent me information about herself instead: My name is Paloma.

  I thought: Wait. Paloma? That’s an Earth name, a name used today on Earth.

  Paloma communicated: Yes, I’m not from another planet. I’m from another time.

  Again, I saw the bending of space-time. And this time, maps. There were complex maps and graphs…coordinates, places for crossing over from one space-time location to another.

  Razkazeel interrupted. He said, “If the military barge in here as they’re most likely planning to do…my guess is they’re waiting for night when many of the news reporters leave and they’ll have cover of darkness…they’re going to capture Paloma and Zander. You know they’ll experiment on them and torture them and cause them great physical pain…for research. We thought the beings we believed in would come from somewhere beyond the stars, but I opened my mind and listened to them upon their arrival. The government won’t do that. Angry, fearful crowds won’t do that. These creatures are us. They’re no different than us except in certain aspects of their physical appearance. It’s up to us to save them, to protect the future of the human race.”

  Not all of this made sense, but the smell of fight or flight filled the room and seeped into my bones.

  Nat asked, “What do you want us to do?”

  Razkazeel said, “Take our two visitors to your van. The officers outside don’t know you’re here. Drive them to a safe place. Contact me when you get there.”

  I said to Paloma and the other creature whose name I now knew was Zander, “Are you ready?”

  They both nodded their heads yes.

  Jaxon led the way. Opening the door through which we had entered Razkazeel’s office, he led us out through the waiting room and down the stairs. Rather than taking us through the community room, however, he took us down another flight of stairs, straight down to the basement. From there, we moved quickly through the tunnel.

  Running, running, my lungs and muscles burning. Escaping those who would kill us, their twisted precaution against irrational fear.

  Part II

  Jade Whitaker

  5

  I’d just started a new job. My last one hadn’t worked out. I’d been working as a barista in a coffee shop. I’d earned my Bachelor of Psychology degree a few months before starting that, but soon discovered it was almost impossible to get a job in the field of psychology without a graduate degree. In order to support myself, I’d taken the first job I thought I could live with: coffee shop barista.

  My new job was closer to the kind of work I wanted to d
o: Social Worker at the Archer-Knight Hoarding Center. I knew the name came from the two founders: Elizabeth Archer and James Knight, but I kept imagining that a knight and an archer presided over the place. I also pictured them secretly stockpiling arrows, devoting entire secret rooms to hoarding their own weapons.

  Something had been happening to me over the years, but more recently it had become intense and problematic in work environments. I seemed to be able to read people’s minds. Not everything a person was thinking, thank God. That would have driven me insane. Rather, I had developed a keen sense of what was on a person’s mind, the thing they were most concerned about or most focused on. It spoke so loudly to me, I tended to respond to that, rather than to what they had actually shared with me. As I’d come to learn the hard way, the thing that’s uppermost in a person’s mind is often the exact thing they’ve been working hard to hide.

  At the coffee shop, I felt that my ability to experience empathy had simply leveled up. Perhaps I had become a full-blown Empath. Maybe I was so bored with the job, my brain had grown an Empath section in order to keep itself entertained.

  People moved through long lines to order caffeinated drinks, one after the other. Some days I served an extraordinary number of people. My interactions with them were brief. When I worked at the cash register, it was always the same combination of sentences or some close variation. I greeted them, asked what they’d like, answered questions, then gave orders to the person making the drinks. Some days, I was the person making the drinks. When we weren’t too busy, I did both.

  I felt like a robot. Hello! What would you like today?...Hello! What would you like today? How many times could you repeat that same question and still be happy to wait on the next person?