…And they were coming for us.
Fusion
The moon rabbit was probably the worst place to stay.
We had created an Alamo for ourselves. We had essentially trapped ourselves inside a tomb of our own design. The moon rabbit might as well have been a ghost ship with its missing crew, flickering lights and rustic hallways. The stasis chamber inside was full of the dead and missing. Parts of the hull had been torn apart or blown out by the collision with the alien world. Inside the bowels, the heart of the moon rabbit stood what was left of the eight immortals, Chiru, Cassandra, and Lt. Barker. We could hear the daemon horde making there way through the corridors that surrounded us. Their claws against the steel walls like nails on a chalkboard. Their breathing growl echoed towards us. We could smell their rotting flesh and taste the blood in the air come through the small ventilation shafts that hissed above us. It was like something from a nightmare. Our ship had crashed straight a paradise that had somehow sunk into the depths of hell. I thought about the legends of Atlantis, the lost continent of Lemuria. The sacred and hidden places in the world that were forgotten.
I felt like I was staring into oblivion. Michael waved his hand in front of my face but this wasn’t where I wanted to be. I began to dissociate myself with the world around me. I had had a breakdown in the past. That feeling when reality no longer feels real. That feeling there is something more. I remember once when I was younger I was driving down the interstate and got clipped by the car beside me. I remember the rush as I turned the wheel trying to avoid traffic. I could remember aiming for the wall as I tapped my breaks lightly over and over hoping I could slow down enough to not die in a car accident. I barely managed to make it out alive. My car hit the wall at around sixty miles per hour and I had dislocated my arm and broken several of my ribs. My air bag had deployed and nearly knocked me unconscious but I was awake throughout the whole thing. Another car hit me from behind sending me into a spiral. I can remember the glass as it cut against my skin. This is not where I want to be. This was before I met you. When I was alone. When I was studying for my degree. When I could never have imagined a world like the one I am living now. While waiting on the ambulance I saw my life flash before my eyes. I saw my parents, my friends, my teachers, my co-workers. I saw everything I had ever done and then my head was full of all the things I wanted - the things I needed to do.
I met you not long after all of that. Not long after the worst, the darkest time in my life. You were the answer I was looking for. From that first moment to the last I knew I wanted to be with you.
Thoughts of our last fight filled my head.
Where is this coming from?
I could remember being so depressed I wanted to lock myself up in my room for days. I wanted life to stop. Not to kill myself but to rather cease to exist. What was the point. There were seven billion people in the world and at the very least a hundred million other people just like me if not more in the world. If I died you would find someone else. Someone else would make you smile, make you laugh, make you cry. I wasn’t anything special. A temporary stepping stone as you made your way to the top.
After our last fight I thought you were going to leave me. I don’t even remember what it was we were fighting about. Maybe we weren’t fighting at all. Maybe I was just scared and worried that you were growing tired of me. The two of us had come from very different worlds.
I could remember laying in your arms telling you stories how I imagined the world might end. How I hated thinking about it. How I hated how immature so much of the world was. How violent and cruel humanity was. You were a huge history buff. You loved history. I could remember you telling me stories about the world wars. You had even studied World War II for awhile on your own. I thought about your fascination with religions and magic. The way you held your tarot cards to your chest and whispered sweet words like prayer as you used your creative spirit to make gifts for friends. Bracelets, necklaces, scarves, even hats. The things you would paint. The worlds you would create with your mind. I was jealous. I had always been jealous. Why had you chosen me? Your affection made me feel strong but I was always questioning it. If you wake up would you still love me? What if the seed was there? What if you didn’t really want to stay with me? I could see it playing out before me. Like a broadway play inside my head. When this is all over. When we finally kill the daemons and you wake up you tell me that you had planned to divorce me. That you don’t know if you could spend the rest of your life with me - especially the violent man I have become.
Death means so little to me now.
I can see the daemons coming down the hallway like a black mass.
We are hiding behind a barrier that Todd and Michael made.
We look like we are hiding inside a bunker with only a small area to see and aim our weapons. I and the others hesitated to fire that first shot. Michael didn’t. I try to catch my breath. I feel like I’m drowning in the air around me. I feel so alone one moment and the next I feel like I’m surrounded by a hundred thousand screaming bodies. My head is on fire. I can feel a light breeze blow over my face as a cold chill begins waking me from my waking life. Everything around me appears upside down and I feel instinct take control of what use to be my arms and legs. I felt like my body was nothing buy a host, symbiotic to some higher form. A higher form of who or whatever it is that I have become.
What am I doing here. I ask myself. Not aloud. I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to lose this moment. I don’t want to think these thoughts anymore. I face them. I think about laying in your arms. Your bed. Those first few months we made meals together. I think of the pressure of your hand against my head as you bite my lip and press your hips into my own. I couldn’t even move my lips to scream. Not even if I wanted. There seemed to be no end to the daemon horde, to the bad thoughts that bear down against the front of my skull. I think of the roses I bought you. Walking into the store and spending half an hour trying to decide if I should buy red or white with what little money I had. I feel the thoughts hit me again and again like I’m being dragged through rugged ground. Each of us eight immortals must look so fragile to the daemon creatures.
There is blood raining down all over my suit. They are closer then ever to us. There is blood all over the ground. I must be hurt. A daemon grabs me and pulls me closer to its face and looks me directly in the eyes. I feel like I am floating through the darkness again trapped in my own mind. I don’t recognize any of the voices. They seem to only grow more and more distant. I can’t take anymore. I’m not seeing what they want me to see.
From the corner of my eye I could see Michael begin to transform. Not completely. Just small parts of him. Small parts of his flesh became encased in daemonic armor. He was the living weapon. Perhaps something about the horde was drawing it out of him. I watched his skin turn from pale to black to a red hardened shell to solid black again. His rifle looked like an extension of his body. As he stared down the scope of his gun it was like watching him in the ruins all over again. He killed the daemon that took hold of me the same way he killed the withered. Without sorrow, without mercy.
The smell of burning flesh washed over me like a bucket of ice cold water. A blanket of disease and sickness. The sulfur smell was bad enough but as the bodies of the daemons continued to pile up. As they struggled toward us climbing and running atop their dead somewhere in the distance I could sense something else was coming. The barrier broke down. I could see Chiru drop his gun as he runs out of ammunition and take his sword out. He looks like a ronin. He moves forward in front of the rest of us and plunges it into the heart of the first daemon he sees.
I cleared my thoughts. I can feel the daemons attacking my mind again. Not this time.
I loved you no matter what.
Even if we win.
Even if you woke up and left me. You were worth fighting for.
______________
What are you dreaming about now?
Looking aro
und myself now in this dark room all I see are soldiers lost among ruins. Alone on a ruined world. We are among the forgotten and our time has been wasted. The sounds of gun fire have faded away and I feel like I am listening to the noise stirred from a thousand wasps. We slowly move back, Chiru is lost among the daemons. I can’t see him as the lights flicker above us. Michael is standing in front of us. He is still firing from his rifle with one hand while hacking away at the smaller daemons with his claws. They bite him without remorse. They don’t care nor do they seem confused as to whether or not he is of their kind. I smelt of sweat. Scowling in the heat as I wipe the beads away from my eyes. I’m not scratching my eye with my finger. I’m scratching my finger with my eye. The daemons continued to come forward as if we had taken something away from them. Something with no business in our own world.
Three walls are cracked. The chaos keeps pouring in around us. Todd breaks free of his power armor for a moment opening it from the front. He looks like he is inside some kind of small mecha. He uses his gift to create another wall. Pulling apart the matter behind us and encasing us inside the room. Burying us alive. For just a moment I began to wonder why it was I was helping these people. I could feel the daemons inside my head. Five years. Five years since I have seen you smile. Five years since I have kissed your face. Five years since I have heard your voice. In that time have I forgotten. I am no longer who I was then. Will I still be able to go back if I live through this. Surely this will be my doom.
Todd’s wall buys us a few minutes. Michael and Chiru are left outside.
“We have to find a way out of here, we can’t stay here any longer,” yells Nate.
“Five more minutes,” the voice is that of Lt.Barker. He had been quiet since I came back. He was standing over Emily. The girl we had all unwittingly vowed to protect. She was the reason we hadn’t fled this ‘sanctuary’.
“Five more minutes, she’ll be recovered and I’ll have gone through the data of the moon rabbit, we’ll have our answers, we might even have a way to beat them,” said Lt. Barker.
“If they had a way to beat them then why didn’t they? There were hundreds of them aboard this ship, thousands. They had an entire army sitting still on this world and what the hell happened to them, just look outside, look at what is happening to us now, the daemons have come,” cried Nate.
“Not so fast, I think I have discovered the reason they aren’t around anymore, you’re not going to like it or believe it,” said Lt. Barker. He motioned for Nate to come towards him and so he did. The two of them sat for a moment in complete silence as Nate looked over the transcripts Lt.Barker had managed to translate from the computer.
“We have to get outside, it’s our only hope,” said Nate picking up his rifle and moving towards Emily. He gently began lifting her up. It was as if his personality had completely changed. Something Lt. Barker had shown him had given him hope. We weren’t completely lost. I could see it in his eyes. Jackson was standing next to me as the wall broke. The barricade wasn’t enough. Todd poured his power back into his suit amping it up as much as he could. He ran towards the daemons hunched over like a he was going to tackle a quarterback. He dodged Michael who came running back towards us. His body was bleeding. He was in a state of decay. The upper half of his body was that of a human. His face, eyes, shoulders, his left arm all there just as they had always been but his lower body looked like a daemon. Claws, tail, all. He had a huge cut across the middle of his torso and he was bleeding black vile. It didn’t look like it was hurting him but we knew he was coming back as a retreat. Behind Todd the hallway closed up. We were trapped again.
“I have C-4 in my bag. We can blow a hole to the bridge above and make our way out,” said Lt. Barker.
“We won’t make it through the hallways, do we have any rope? We can repel down the side of the ship one by one if we have to, the room above us is the bridge and there is a gaping hole in the side,” said Jackson.
“Smart man, almost as smart as me, I was about to say the same damn thing,” said Nate.
“No rope, we’re going to have to fight our way through,” replied Lt. Barker as he gently pulled the tab on the C-4 and set a small timer next to it. The next thing I knew we were all taking cover behind several medical tables The explosion was pointed downward and the room was just big enough we were in the clear. The C-4 blew a hole right through the floor of the bridge.
“Why didn’t we just blow a hole to the outside?” asked Jackson.
“The hull is made to withstand a nuke, wouldn’t have done anything but teased it, the inside of the ship however is barely put together aside from having the most expensive tech we could get our hands on. Hell you yourself could probably punch through one of these walls,” said Lt. Barker.
“I’d love to see that, do that next,” said Nate laughing as he picked Emily off the ground and began moving towards the open hole.
“Check for daemons,” Jackson yelled.
Lt. Barker was first up and then Emily, Cassandra, Nate, Myself, Michael, and Jackson. As we moved to the upper floor we saw Todd get pushed back inside the room. He lifted his hand towards us and we watched as the hole began to close. Daemons overran him. They surrounded his fallen body and tore into his armor with their teeth. They looked like a pack of wolves that hadn’t had a decent meal in days. Before the hole closed Todd used his power to begin killing as many as he could. Every piece of matter in the room became a razor slicing through the air around him. Small pieces that flew in and out of the daemons one by one as he held on to life. The floors below us began to disappear as if they were evaporating into the air. The walls became fluid and the floors became quicksand. Todd sucked as many daemons together as he could fusing them to the inside of the ship. In the process he had done the same to himself. The only place on the moon rabbit that was untouched was the room we stood in. There was silence. Both Chiru and Todd had fallen.
Codex
Log X
The first few days after we lost contact with Earth there was chaos. We almost lost control of the ship. Then we aligned the stars. They had drifted but not far enough we couldn’t figure out where we were. We ran dozens of simulations and did hundreds of tests. We spent days creating algorithms to test our theory. That we weren’t lost. The Earth itself was gone. We had somehow been transported to an alternate plane. Some weird time distortion had separated us from the time and place we called our own reality.
The first week several of the crew took their lives. We were a ghost ship floating in a void. Not wanting to die in the nothingness that surrounded us we spent days searching the sky for anything. That was when we found the debris from the alien world. We thought it was some kind of asteroid belt but buried inside each and every element we found the same signature. Cold black empty space. We are on our way to nowhere. Time itself is our only enemy now. The ship smells old and musty as the air is constantly being recycled. It wasn’t meant to stay in space this long. It’s amazing we can even breathe. The air is stale. Most men or women would have gone insane. You can feel the abyss that is cold space outside trying to push itself in on you. It’s like diving beneath the waves of the ocean. The deeper you go the walls are always closing in. The darkness reaches its hand in front of your broken face. It is ready to suffocate you. It begs you to let go constantly reminding you there is nothing out there. No one is coming for you. Everyone you have ever known is dead and you are not worth saving.
Log XX
Days have turned to weeks. We were now only hours away from dropping out of immer and descending down to our destination. We found a planet. Another world. It’s not Earth but it seems to have appeared out of nowhere with an Earth like atmosphere. We aren’t going to be able to set the moon rabbit down gently. We are going to have to control our crash. As we smash into the world below us I am thankful that we have at the very least come this far. Whatever pulled us away from our war with the daemons damn it. Damn it to hell.
Log XXX
Log XXXX
We were wrong. We thought we were alone. Lost. Abandoned but not long after our controlled dive the daemons found us. We began searching around for what we thought might have been other ships. We found nothing. Nothing of any real value. Nothing we could understand. Then we found the city. The ruins of an alien world. Another planet the daemons had destroyed. That was our first thought. We spent years fighting the daemons. They attacked at random. Sometimes in small groups. Sometimes in larger groups. Most of them were grunts. Feral creatures with little to no mind of their own. They might as well have been withered. They were easy to take down. A couple of our kids had some really fantastic powers. We had one kid that could use shadows to kill people. Something about the absence of light and using it as a weapon. We spent years studying the ruins. Finally we managed to translate. We found out where we were. Then we realized this wasn’t another world. This was Earth. Not our Earth. It was some alternate dimension. We sampled the soils, the water, the fauna. All of it was just as it would have been back home. All of the same elements were there but something in the air wasn’t right. This world was more artificial than ours. Everything had trace elements of sulfur and silicone. The air we breathed was full of radiation though not enough to harm us. Some nights it seemed we could see the stars as clear as day. Others they seemed to fade away even when there were no clouds in the sky. We orbited a star that looked very much like our sun. That too we found through further study was artificial. Created just as this world by an advanced dying race. The daemons or whatever the hell they were had found a way to rip a hole in reality.
Sleepers (Convergence Book 1) Page 12