by Aaron Frale
He stepped into the recovery room and saw that a vast majority of the people were still dangling. The neophyte was nowhere to be seen, and more cultists flooded through the doorway. His new band of warriors stepped out behind him, and he ordered them to charge. The two groups met with a clash of steel. Half the kids who volunteered to fight their way out died in the first couple of blows. Even the girl with the two years of martial arts was bleeding out on the floor with an open head wound.
While DeAndre took out more than his fair share of cultists, the waves kept coming. The explosion must have brought the swarm. Before the Order of the Flame overwhelmed them, there was a surge of power, and a bolt of electricity tore through the cultists coming through the door. Another flash fried a new group at the threshold.
DeAndre and his makeshift army were able to turn the tide of battle once the flood of new cultists was being taken out as fast as they were coming. They finished off the last of the horde.
After he clunked the last cultist in the skull, he whirled around to see who had saved them. It was Hailey’s sister, Sarah. She wore a collar to assist with the gravity. From the number of fried collars at her feet, she looked like she was shorting them out to create the bolt of lightning.
“How’d you know how to do that?” DeAndre said.
“I saw a guard get blown across the room once after mishandling the collar,” She shrugged and then added. “I figured it was worth a shot. I’m just glad I didn’t hit you. Aiming the burst isn’t exactly a science.”
“You really are like your sister,” DeAndre said.
“You know my sister?”
“She’s here.”
“Here? We’ve got to save her!”
“We have people already on that. Our number one priority is getting all of you to safety. Let’s get collars on the rest of them. Anyone who’s not healthy enough to walk. We carry. Sarah?”
“Yeah?”
“Blast anyone else who comes through that door.”
∆∆∆
The door shattered and crumbled under the weight of Meathook’s final swing. An arrow still stuck out of his calf. Two had hit Magdalena, and she lay unconscious on the floor. He dragged her over the rubble into the room beyond. He went back out and grabbed the placard and wedged it in the doorway. That should slow them down at least.
He turned on the flashlight feature on his TF3 and saw they were indeed in a storeroom of Universe One artifacts. It was the only one in the structure. If they destroyed the machine, the lab behind the throne room, and this place, the cultists would be trapped. Mainly because the information needed to rebuild the device was in the lab, and the spare parts were here.
Meathook quickly scanned for medical equipment and saw Ludie’s old med bag. He pulled out a serum and yanked the two arrows from Magdalena. He stopped the bleeding with the serum and made sure she was still breathing and her heart was still beating.
After he had stabilized her and took care of his wound, he looked around for anything he could use. The plan was to smash all the stuff in the room with his hammer, but there was too much. There were people already outside the door attempting to force the placard out of the hole. Ludie had made it sound like a closet, and this place was more like a warehouse overflowing with stuff.
Meathook was about to turn around and fight some more when he stubbed his toe on a generator. It was like the one they had found on 87c. He realized that all he needed to do was disable the safety protocols, and he could send this entire place up in smoke. He also lacked a way out. One problem at a time.
He fired up the generator, and with a few commands, its cooling system shut down. It began to overheat. He looked around for the answer to his next problem. Before he had to resign his death to the cost of saving the multiverse, he had an idea. He slung Magdalena over his shoulder and pounded on the placard. It popped out of the doorway, letting daylight into the storage room.
He climbed out with his hands up and said, “I give up. I give up. You are too good at this.” The cultists stood around him, confused. Before they could react, he pointed to the generator beyond the doorway and asked, “Is that normal?”
The generator shook, and critical warning lights flashed. Meathook picked up the placard when the cultists were distracted and hid behind it with Magdalena in his arms.
The generator exploded and took out the storage room and half the castle wall with it. Meathook and Magdalena were blown across the courtyard and hit a wall. A charred corpse of a cultist skittered to a halt right near where they had landed. He tossed the burnt placard aside and scooped up his friend.
It was time to make the rendezvous point.
16
Ludie entered the lab at the base of the statue. Several priests were inside and drew their weapons. The first one ejected blades from each hand. Ludie pulled out his sword and waited for the guy to come within striking distance. He danced past the weapons and stabbed the man through the heart.
A male and female priest were next. They both had nunchucks. The beatings DeAndre had given him had paid off. The two were nowhere near as skilled as him, and Ludie made short work of them.
Several more went for him, and he calmly dispatched all of them. When the last cultist landed dead at his feet, he walked over to a computer desk. He pulled up a camera that was embedded in the statue of the first High Priestess. The battle between the High Priest and Jon was underway. The two danced around each other, looking for a weak spot in their defenses.
After watching the battle for a moment, he realized why Hailey had chosen Jon over himself. It was pure animal instinct. Jon was a better protector. Ludie had to train long and hard to get to the point where he was now. Jon came in and learned everything very quickly.
If Ludie was honest with himself, he didn’t know if he could go head-to-head with the High Priest and keep up. The priests had pushed him to his limit even though he didn’t show any of it on his face.
It was sad that people still used their animal brains when it came to deciding a mate. He was a far better choice because he offered intellectual superiority. No one had ever outsmarted Hector except for Ludie. He couldn’t understand why Hailey didn’t see that. He fumed at the way her heart pattered for a guy who happened to be good with a sword.
Hailey was twice the fighter Jon ever was and didn’t need some meathead around. He could have offered her so much more. If she had shown there was even a slight chance, they would be at HQ, and Hector would be alive. Ludie didn’t have it out for any of the Tuners or even Hector.
They were short-sighted sometimes, mean at other times, and inconsistent. However, Ludie could have worked with that if he had someone to go through it all with him. In the end, it wasn’t about who would be the best partner for Hailey; it was who would bring down the mastodon. No matter how many universes where humans evolved and achieved technological greatness, they were still just cave people seeing who could throw the spear the furthest.
What Hailey and Jon didn’t know was that Ludie could do anything better than either of them with technology at his side. The cultists were dead at his feet because of a suit designed to make him strong like Meathook and invincible like Patel. He could run the entire show himself if he put his mind to it.
However, at the end of the day, all his ambition meant nothing if he didn’t have anyone who could share life with him. Having all the money and power he wanted was just as empty as his existence with the Tuners.
There was only one way out of it. He turned off the fight, unable to watch Jon anymore. Instead, he pulled up another system. It was one he had encountered when he was going over the schematics of the lab. There was a failsafe built into the room.
The decision to have the throne room on a lake of lava wasn’t for purely aesthetic purposes. While the seat of power in a fire cult wasn’t lost on him, it had practical purposes as well. The lab had all the information a person in authority would need. It seemed natural to build an easy way for the current leader to destroy th
e lab if it fell into the hands of the enemy.
If Hector had been smart, he would have installed a self-destruct option in Tuners HQ. Blowing the station to pieces would have been a better option than letting the cult move in. Once again, that short-sightedness was biting them in the end.
He pulled up the failsafe protocol and looked it over. While he couldn’t be sure exactly what it would do, Ludie figured that it would sink the island in the center with the lab and him in it.
He hovered on the activation button for a moment. If he went through with it, it would kill him, Hailey, and Jon. While he could care less about himself and Jon, Hailey did give him pause.
In the end, she was as much to blame. She could have not listened to her animal instincts and given Ludie a chance. It wasn’t fair that guys like Jon always got the girl, and people like Ludie sat on the sidelines. His anger boiled up again. The whole system was screwed up. It was time to hit the reset switch.
He activated the protocol and pulled up the camera feed of the island. He zoomed in on Hailey and waited for the end to come.
∆∆∆
Jon's arms and legs burned. He fought with every last ounce of strength, and the High Priest was beginning to show signs of exhaustion too. Jon was afraid that it was too late. He was becoming sloppy and almost received a wound from the High Priest’s poisoned blades.
It wasn’t until he happened to steal a glance from Hailey. She mouthed, “You got this.”
Jon found the strength for one final push. He cried out and furiously hacked away at the priest knocking the smaller blade from the man’s hand. The High Priest looked surprised, and Jon used the opening to hack the man’s sword arm clean off.
The other blade with the hand still attached clattered to the floor. Jon kicked the High Priest down and held his sword to the man’s neck. The High Priest spat blood and laughed. “You’ll never make it, you know.”
“Bargaining for your life doesn’t look good in front of your followers,” Jon said.
“I am not begging. If the Flame has decided it is my time, then I must accept. No, you will not make it because once I die, every clan leader on that bridge over there who thinks they can be the High Priest will fight for it. All they need is to kill you to prove they are worthy of leadership. My soul is prepared. You will serve me in the afterlife.”
The High Priest leaned forward and cut his own neck on Jon’s sword. He gurgled while the blood gushed out, and he died with a grin on his face. Jon kicked the body off and backed away. The cultists on the bridge gave out war cries, and the others throughout the room responded to the call. They all pulled their weapons and charged.
He backed up into Hailey, who had used the moment to subdue her captor and take his weapon. She had torn the bottom of her dress off and flung it into the lava. Cultists were closing in on all sides.
“What’s your plan now, Jon?” Hailey said.
“I don’t have one,” Jon said.
“You don’t have one! You think you could just fight the High Priest and walk away from it?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d figure it out along the way.”
“That’s the difference between you and Hector. He never got us into something without knowing how to get us out.”
“I’m not Hector.”
“Clearly, but if you are going to lead the Tuners if we get out of this—”
“Me? Lead? Naw. I’m more about the heroics.”
The cultists were almost within arm’s reach with more coming across the bridge when a series of explosions halted everyone in their tracks. The giant statues in the room all burst from the ankle. They swayed back and forth, sending the cultists sitting on top into the lava. They all fell into the lake and sprayed magma onto the bridge. Some of the splashes were large enough to decimate entire clans. When the statue on the island went down, Jon had to dodge a spout of lava himself.
While it helped reduce their numbers and halted the assault temporarily, it wasn’t enough to make a difference. The surviving cultists charged, and Jon and Hailey fought back to back. They might be able to fend off the first few waves, but it was still a losing battle.
In the middle of the fight, something else happened to change the flow. When the statues began melting in the lake, large pockets of gas burped from the wreckage, and it began to boil. When enough of the former High Priests melted, the lake began to rise. The lava was going to swallow the island whole.
The fighting stopped as the cultists desperately tried to get out of the path of the lava. There was no time for anyone to escape. Jon and Hailey held each other and waited for the end. In the final moments, Jon figured it out. Seeing the cultists fall to their doom while the lava swallowed them made him realize that he was just as bad as the cultists.
His rigid, inflexible thinking had not only pushed Hailey away but almost cost him his humanity. What was the point of being a Tuner if they didn’t look for a better way? The cultists were the ones who destroyed worlds. Seeing the cultists die, he realized he was the destroyer. Even though it was Ludie’s hand on the trigger, Jon had brought the kid here, hoping the former Tuner would just destroy the lab, not murder them all. Many of them were just scared kids taken from their homes.
“Hailey,” Jon said.
“Yeah?” Hailey said.
“I’m sorry.”
Jon heard it before he saw it coming. The sound was screeching tires, and the roar of the engine echoed in the cavernous room. It was Alex’s car. The red and white New Yorker blazed through the bridge, knocking the cultists out of the way like bowling pins and swerving out of the path of the lava puddles.
They skidded to a halt right in front of Hailey and Jon. A dead cultist on the grill plopped on the floor. Alex pushed open the door and said, “Get in.”
Hailey and Jon hopped in, and Alex revved the engine. The car peeled out, and they roared across the bridge. The lava level rose to the point of swallowing the island. The arch of the bridge meant they had a little more time but not much. Alex hit the accelerator, and they charged back through the gauntlet.
“Consider this pro bono,” Alex said as they smashed through a group of cultists and swerved around a hole in the bridge made by one of the lava spouts when the statues had collapsed.
“You’ve been doing a lot of that lately,” Jon said. “Ever think about joining the Tuners?”
“I thought the Tuners were dead,” Alex said.
“Funny you should mention it,” Jon said. “Hailey and I were just talking about it.”
“Maybe we should talk about it when we aren’t in a room filling up with lava!” Hailey said.
They dodged around a part of the bridge that began to flood with lava. Alex punched it, and the car roared to the end that was already covered in magma.
“Well, it was good knowing you,” Jon said and regretted it. If they managed to survive, Hailey would no doubt tease him for his dumb last words.
“I’m not dying with you,” Alex said. “I plan to die rich and fat.”
They hit the button on the accelerator, and the fins on the back descended, and out popped the rocket engines. Jon had forgotten about that feature. When his stomach lurched from the excessive speed, he remembered why. They went so fast that the car went airborne when they hit the top of the arch. They flew over the last part that was already drowning in lava. They landed in the tunnel that had led into the room.
Alex shut down the engines, and they smashed the car into the side of the cavern wall. They crawled out of the wreckage, and Alex said, “Nothing lasts forever.”
Alex kissed their hand and patted the top of the car.
“Come on,” Jon said after he had noticed the rising lava didn’t stop when the bridge was gone. It flooded out into the tunnel.
He grabbed Alex, and they ran. He popped his headphones in while they booked it and listened for the nearest tuning point. It was above their heads.
They ran through the tunnels while the entire place was being engulfed in magma
. Lava burst through the rock and nearly killed them several times over. Cultists were overtaken by the flows and were burned alive. Jon, Hailey, and Alex ran as fast as they could. When they encountered stairs, they took them two or three at a time.
Finally, they got to the top. Jon pointed to the nearest tuning spot. He saw a cluster of people wearing collars. DeAndre appeared, and Jon yelled, “Go!”
The final group of survivors held onto DeAndre, and they disappeared. Pillars of flame erupted from the castle. The whole place was crumbling around them, and they ran toward the tuning spot. Jon readied his app.
The entire mountain peak exploded. Hot ash sprayed into the atmosphere, and lava boiled over and flowed down, setting the surrounding trees on fire. A hoard of rats scurried away from the volcano raining fire on the land.
17
Anya waited nervously by the platform. It seemed like the Tuners had been gone for days, even though it had only been a couple of hours. Carrie looked up from her terminal and said, “Relax. You’re stressing me out.”
Anya didn’t pay attention to her and continued to pace. She had stayed back at the base because her real talent was healing. She was a doctor, and in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of her home, that was the most valued profession among all others. It was how she was able to keep the family home when her mom went off the deep end and decided to join the clergy.
Before her mom decided to talk in riddles and meditate for hours, she was the local healer, and Anya, being the dutiful daughter, was always helping with the practice. Unlike Alex, who would wander off and hitch rides with the scavenger missions. They might be identical twins, but they were nothing alike.
Anya had learned to set a bone at the age of ten, whereas Alex had learned to break them. Her kin would get in fights while she would stop them. Meanwhile, their mother was increasingly disconnected from their lives. Soon it was Anya who cooked all the meals, brought food home from the market, cleaned the house, and washed the dishes. All this while having to see clients her mom had forgotten about. Eventually, the electorate put her in charge of the clinic while Alex and mom both disappeared for long periods of time. Once her sibling got that car, it was over. Alex was the ghost of the house.