Sleepers (Convergence Book 1)

by Stephen Landry

  “There are many who don't wish to sleep for fear of nightmares. Sadly, there are many who don't wish to wake for the same fear.”

  - Richelle E. Goodich,

  Dandelion: The Disappearance of Annabelle Fancher

  Trials by Fire

  “Got you,” whispered Todd.

  As the daemon drop ship began ripping through the hangar it left a massive hole in the side of the Perseverance. Without hesitation Todd began to manipulate all the matter around him. I watched in astonishment as the floor, the walls, everything moved at his command. The ground grabbed hold of us keeping our limbs in place as we were pulled towards the opening. He couldn’t do it for everyone. Several teams of soldiers were sucked outside into the vast empty vacuum of space. He covered the patch in less than a minute by grabbing the alien drop ship with his mind tearing it apart piece by piece. The daemons inside were completely defenseless as small pieces of their own ship ripped like needles through their flesh. By the time it was over there was nothing left of them. Todd even used their bone as a part of the patch before he himself freed our feet and fell to the ground unconscious.

  “He gave too much of himself, get a medic over here now!” shouted Emily. “Medic is on her way, don’t worry,” said Ed as a young girl maybe only eighteen or nineteen came our way. She held out her hands as they began to glow a pinkish hue. She kneeled beside Todd.

  “His organs are beginning to shut down, I can stop it but I’ll have to take it from someone else,” she said looking towards Ed.

  “Take it from someone else? What does that mean?” asked Emily who was now kneeling beside both the girl and Ed.

  “She can heal him but it drains her life force, usually if the damage isn’t that bad then she heals right up no problem but in serious cases she needs to take the life force from herself and someone else, and when that happens unlike her the other person won’t heal. They will lose significant years from their life,” said Ed.

  “Take mine,” said Emily.

  “Take mine,” said Michael.

  “Take mine,” said Jackson, Blair, and Bran.

  “Take mine,” I said.

  All of us with the exception of Nate had volunteered to give a part of our life so that Todd wouldn’t die. None of us got the chance. Ed grabbed the girl, who’s name I learned was Cassandra, taking her hand and forcing it against his chest. She was startled at first but she understood. Ed aged a decade in front of us. His dark brown hair turned gray. Deep wrinkles formed under his eyes and across his forehead. I could hear his bones pop as his fingers and forearms shriveled and parts he began to lean over more and more like gravity had become too much for him. He stood there for a moment in front of us. All of us. Todd began to wake.

  “I couldn’t risk any of you,” he said clutching his chest.

  “Listen to me. Lt. Barker will be taking command of your team,”

  “What are you saying? Your going to be fine, you just aged a little,”

  “Sorry Emily, Sorry all of you. I have a heart condition. I wasn’t going to make it back to Earth anyway. This was a one way trip for me. I just needed to play my part,” he said clutching his chest tighter and tighter.

  “I have worked with every single on of you and I know that while each of you have different reasons for being here we all have one thing in common. We are all human and we all want to live. We all want to survive and we will fight at nothing for that chance. I have spent the last few years, the best years of my life training you for this moment. For this night,” he fell to the ground. He was smiling looking at each of us proudly as he passed away before us. Cassandra was pissed. You could see it in her eyes. She had no idea she was about to kill someone let alone someone that had been such a big part of this mission. Tears were falling from her eyes. She turned away from us.

  Ed’s orders were passed through the comms with deadly earnest. The hangar was large. Large enough that it carried several experimental VTOL’s and several dozen experimental jet fighters. On Earth real jets couldn’t make it all the way to space. At least not without an EmDrive or something drastic to give them a boost. The highest most could go was nine miles. One fifth of the way to space. That was not the case with these new experimental ones. The VTOL’s each had small nuclear reactors that while extremely dangerous gave them a boost (this also made the VTOL’s into a weapon, a plan B. If we failed boarding the daemon ship or failed in any way the VTOL’s were set up so that they would ignite). We weren’t sure if nukes had any effect on the daemons ships. When we bombed them in Europe and Chicago they killed many of their soldiers but their actual ships whatever the hell they were barely had a dent. These experimental fighters that surrounded were not bothered by the lack of fuel or air intake. Each one had a daemon engine inside them. Scavenged technology courtesy of our allies overseas. We knew that surrounding the daemon ship there was some kind of strange atmosphere and magnetic field. Our ships would use the same magnetic field as the daemons. They would be our escorts. Without them the daemons would surely tear us apart. By the time we made it to our assigned dropship Lt. Barker was waiting for us.

  “I’m sorry about Ed, I truly am. He was a close friend of mine. The two of us had served overseas together and he himself took me under his wing for awhile and trained me personally,” he said, “I know about all of you. Your reasons for being here, your powers, what they write in psyche reports. Your possible strengths and weaknesses. I’m forgetting all of that. What I know doesn’t matter. Nothing we have ever known matters from here on out, the rules of war have changed. No longer are we fighting man against man with sticks and tools. We are fighting monsters straight from hell. Daemons. Beasts we know very little to nothing about and we are going to be attacking them on their turf. So forget everything and just remember that if we stick together, if you follow my command not just as an officer but as someone who has some experience in bad situations. As a partner. We might survive,” Lt. Barker finished saying some more things about Ed but my mind had already trailed off.

  “Helm! Come on right one-five, lets keep the range on them,” shouted Lt. Barker. The Perseverance heeled over in sharp turns as several of the jet fighters and VTOLs made their way out as the hangar doors de-pressurized the inside of the ship - aside for the central stasis chamber which was sealed off. A door once passed locked from the inside. Lt. Barker was already planning our next move. At thirty thousand yards we didn’t have any hope of penetrating the daemon ship and as far back as we were with all that stood before us we had little hope of closing the distance. Just getting near the daemon ship would surely be a victory. However even one mistake would mean this whole thing was a defeat not just for us but humanity as a whole. The Perseverance heeled again over in a sharp turn swinging us out like we were some being launched by some kind of slingshot. I knew as we turned several of our fighters were surrounding us escorting us. There was nothing but silence all around us. We began to float again but not in the way we had when there was no gravity. There was gravity. It was pulling us towards the daemon ship. We were being sucked towards it. Faster and faster. Every time we shook I thought it was going to be the end.

  A shell from the Perseverance found its mark. It passed through the daemons upper fantail without encountering anything substantial to detonate but it did create a small fissure. It was enough. I could only imagine what the daemon ship looked like as I have never truly seen it on the outside. At least not at an angle in which I could see it as a whole. From what we had seen in renderings the daemon ship was similar to a small asteroid. Covered in an metal alloys and organic matter it was insanely large. The Perseverance would have been the size of an ant on your arm. The moon rabbit which rammed into the side of it did nothing but cause a few small cracks like broken skin. More then ever believed that nightmares and monsters were real. They had always been there coming for us and we somehow knew it. They were drifting across space ever closer towards us drooling over us as their next meal. That was my theory. H
ell must have been a real place somewhere in the depths of dark space. Uncharted territory. We can barely see even a small percentage of the night sky so why not? Why wasn’t it possible that somewhere out there in that infinite sea there was a planet or world that resembled the underworld. Why couldn’t daemons be real. Why wouldn’t they be coming for us. This whole thing felt like a child’s nightmare. I began to wonder if I was the one that was sleeping.

  Several of the fighters that were with us began pinpointing all of their fire on that one spot. That one small fissure was our answer. Our keyhole. Our slit little opening. They hit it over and over until finally it opened up. We could see nothing on our monitors but darkness inside. That didn’t matter. We had all the equipment we needed. The daemon fighters began to pull back. There for a moment it seemed as if there had been several swarms of them. A VTOL to our right explodes. We feel it shake our ship as we fall forward into turbulence. It feels like we are flying through the air. We are inside the daemon’s atmosphere.

  The need to sprint ever closer was removed. The daemon ship was visible now right were we wanted it to be. Relief coursed though us all. At least for a moment. The outside world became a complete blur. Lt. Barker was right when he said to forget everything. We weren’t fighting a war with anything we had seen before. I’ve seen burned forests and deserted towns and things no one would ever wish to see. Peace and beauty in green grass, parks in the middle of cities in the rain. I tried to find my place in the world once. Traveling. I moved from one state to another from one relationship to the next until I found you.

  I had to tell myself over and over again why I was here.

  I had to remind myself again and again what it was I was fighting for.

  I could feel them.

  I could feel them crawling inside me as we moved towards the fissure.

  “What the hell are you doing?” yelled Lt. Barker towards the pilot.

  His screaming broke my thoughts. For a moment I felt as if I had forgotten everything. Who I was. What I was. What I was doing. Everything seemed like a shadow. Everything except for an image of you. An image I was holding onto like a sigil. You were my anchor holding me in this harsh reality when I wanted to give up.

  It was another daemon attack. Another defense they had.

  This one attacked the mind.

  A war somewhere in the desert - A country as far away from me as the moon. I see myself running down an alley. I'm holding some kind of modified M16. The desert is hot, burning hot. I feel the dust hit my cheeks like razors being carried by the wind. I catch my reflection in a broken window. I am wearing desert armor. I have a bandanna covering my face. I can't even see my eyes. My unit is behind me. Following me. We approach a doorway. The soldier on my six bursts through the door as it stands before us. I watch as he falls to the ground while at the same time my body twists in ways I never knew it could.

  I watch myself gun down a house full of bad guys before I turn around. Everyone is dead. Todd, Micael, Lt. Barker. Blood is flooding the floor.

  A slim blond haired woman is being held in the closet. She is an American. Blue eyes. The same blue eyes that remind me of you.

  If not for the blond hair I would swear it was you.

  She tells me she is a journalist like it means something to me.

  Her screaming and crying is making my ears want to bleed.

  "Where is the artifact?” I sound more like I'm growling then talking. I don't know why I'm saying or doing these things. It's like I have no control. On my hand I see a number written. 1327. I have no idea what it means.

  I scream at the journalist. "WHERE IS THE ARTIFACT?” She continues to cry, "I don't know what your talking about." Then one of my unit sees an opening in the floor. It's a cellar door. I watch as I reach my hand out. She takes it. "You’re going to be alright. Just stay behind me." One of the other soldiers shoots a round into the floor. Pulling back the cellar door reveals a staircase leading underground. "Command this is Alpha-1 we are going below, repeat, we are going below"

  I lead myself down inside the bunker.

  At first it was like entering a dim lit cave. The walls were made from rock but soon the rock began to mix with straight flat black metal. Then the whole cave was nothing but a metal hallway. It reeked of piss and puke. I saw the journalist throw up. We stopped for a minute to get our bearings.

  We were alone. We finally entered an open room. The room couldn't have been more then twenty by twenty feet and in the center was a red box. The box wasn't more then a few feet tall and maybe six inches wide. I recognized it as a black box from a dropship, at least that was what my mind was telling me. Why we were here to get this and what was so important about it I couldn't tell you. Why I kept wanting to call it the artifact I couldn’t tell you either. I could just feel this was my mission. This was what I was suppose to be doing. We grabbed the box and secured it. I pulled out a strap and some thin rope and wrapped it around the box and threw it over my back.

  We continued to run into resistance as we fought our way through the tunnel. After fighting our down the dark hallways and what looked like a sewer we came to a ladder. We climbed. When we opened the hatch and reached the surface we found ourselves inside a storage facility. Dozens of daemons surrounded us in tubes 12 feet high filled with some kind of jell substance keeping them fresh. All of their eyes beat down on us. We felt like we had just walked into one of those horror movies. Walking through it felt like we were surrounded. Maybe we were. So many daemons. It was a nightmare. My squad mate. Michael appeared at the end of the room. He was alive again. He was staring at me. His eyes and ears looked like they were bleeding. He started firing. Not at me. He fired on the daemons that surrounded us. I watched as the liquid jell mixed with blood creating a purple substance that stained the floor. The bodies fell to the ground, wires, tubes sticking out in the open air. We heard people in the back screaming. Devon continued to fire and soon I joined in as well. We wouldn't let a single daemon survive. It was a massacre.

  A large VTOL was hovering above the ground. The same one. The same one I was currently dying inside. It was waiting for us. We watched it land. The blades on the sides gave it a very gritty look. The wings were beautiful. It looked like a giant black bird just waiting to swallow us whole.

  We got on board. I made sure the journalist went first... this was my mistake.

  Before we were off the ground. One of theirs came out of the dust. He or she, I couldn't get a close enough look, all I saw was the black body armor covered in blood and dust and holding some kind of curved machete. They stabbed me in the back. I felt the blade tear through my skin and hit my bone. I could feel it stop. Michael immediately started firing on them and pulling me in at the same time. I felt the metal blade leave my body the same way it went in. I fell into the VTOL. I felt like I had a million needles running down my spine. I kept saying your name over and over.

  A new face was standing over me but all I could make out was a black silhouette. I was back inside the VTOL. Back inside space. We were still on approach towards the alien ship. Blair had just taken a small black sword and plunged it into my side. He was screaming at me, his eyes were bleeding. He was calling me a daemon. Michael grabbed him and shoved him off of me. I was still screaming your name when I finally came back to my senses completely. Cassandra was standing over me. She had hitched a ride with us last minute. I had almost forgotten about that. She was still hiding herself from the rest of us ashamed for having taken Ed’s life. She had one hand against my chest and another against Blair who was being held down by Jackson and Michael. Blair had gone insane. He had a vision just as I had. Just as all of us except for Nate, Cassandra, and Michael. Nate didn’t get it because of his high intellect. He was easily able to tell what was and wasn’t real. Cassandra didn’t get infected because of her ability to heal. Michael, at this point I wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps it was his ability to siphon off other people’s powers. Either way Blair had lost control and k
illed both Bran and the pilot. Lt. Barker was flying the drop ship. Cassandra was taking from Blair his life and giving me back mine.

  The Pilot’s Gauntlet

  The back of the dropship shook with turbulence again and again as we made our descent towards the daemon fissure. The Perseverance was still firing and our pilot was doing his best to keep out of their line of sight but once in awhile we could hear the buzz of a missile fly by as it pierced our ears. Jackson had the hardest time. The side of his face was bleeding and he was refusing help from Cassandra. Lt. Barker gave him a set of headphones to cancel out the sound but you could still tell he was hurting every single time. I could only guess how strong his hearing was. During training when they turned us into weapons he was always our eyes and ears. Half the time he wore a special set of ear plugs especially when firing a weapon.When we were lost in the woods of Alaska it was his hearing that guided us to running water. When we lost direction it was his hearing that led us home. We had been miles out then so as close as we were now he must have been in an innumerable amount of pain.

  Jackson’s eyes darted around the room. Something was wrong. He got up and ran towards the cockpit. Every confused movement from the pilot’s fingertips. From Lt. Barker. Both of their eyes as well as ours at this point became fixed on the video screens in front of us. Lt. Barker relaxed his long arms and sat captivated by what he saw before him.