I know the man and his baffled gaze would haunt me forever. And as I kneel beside him, looking at his dead and hung futures, I nearly weep. I don’t even hear Calyx telling me to get up.
“Let’s go, man!” says Ty, which finally snaps me back to attention. My gaze shifts to their eyes, then to Eli who is sleeping and dreaming in his new pod, a smug smile plastered over his face. I fight the will to smash the pod open and strangle him with my bare hands.
“What did he say?” I ask them. “What secrets did he reveal in urgent breath worth a life?”
“The code to open the last gate,” says Ty.
“Last gate?”
“Supposedly,” Calyx explains, “there’s a humongous blast door at the end of this tunnel system that needs a series of numbers entered for it to open. He told us the numbers. 21122012.”
“This whole story doesn’t add up,” I begin. “If the military is the one who had begun excavating these tunnels, then why would they tell him the numbers needed to open the gate?”
“That’s what I asked him as well,” she says. “But he simply smiled.”
“The old snake lied to us,” Ty spits. “Like I said he would. And after looking at the boy that we killed for this, sacrificed even, I’m not surprised.”
We speak no more of this for the time being and, lost in thought, wander ahead in a semi coherent line.
The number of crystals embedded in the walls around us begins to lessen and I have issues seeing precisely where we are going in the murk. The thumping and grinding noises had since stopped and the hall now stands as quiet as a tomb.
Ty speaks first, “If there’s no gate, I’m heading back to smash the bastard’s pod.” Neither I nor Calyx object his notion. Yet almost on cue, the corridor widens and expands and a round gate at least three times my height waits before us. I can see no handless on it, or any kind of discernable feature that could aid us in its opening.
There’s a small keypad, dimly lit, so dimly in fact, I can just make out the numbers on the transparent keys. I move aside, allowing Calyx to punch in the digits herself.
I step back and watch. Pistons and cogs move in the walls as the gate begins to throb and vibrate. Pneumatic hisses blow out steam in between the cracks of the gate and its frame and whine a shrill sound of metallic grind. Tails of dust fall from the ceiling above the gate and slide down the opening metal. I feel exhilaration intermixing with fear and take a step backwards. The gate continues to slowly open, then halts. The faintest of lights shines through the opening and I can see Calyx inspecting the display on her wrist-device.
“Not good,” she says. “I have a few heat signatures behind the gate, this may be an ambush. Their faint and hardly detectable. It may be due that they’re further away, but still…”
“Need to be careful, aye,” I nod.
“You’re volunteering to poke your head through the gap, then?” Ty snickers. He doesn’t wait for my response and throws his hands in the air, saying, “Fine! You’ve convinced me, I’ll do it!”
“Wait,” I grab him by the shoulder as he heads to the gate. “There has to be a better way.”
“Ideas?” he asks. He doesn’t wait for an answer this time either. “Nothing, eh?” He walks to the illuminated brim of the barely open gate.
Calyx leans closer to me. “Is he suicidal?”
“Mildly.”
Cringing, I watch him take a peak and wait. He looks about inside, then back at us, a stupid grin on his face evident even under the cloth covering half his face. He turns back and sticks his whole head into the opening, then shimmies through. We wait for a few seconds then follow him.
“You know, this whole place makes me a bit suspicious,” I say to her.
“Know what you mean,” she nods. “Where had the men outside been garrisoned? We hadn’t come across any barracks or bedchambers, not even a storage area.”
“Exactly,” I murmur, subconsciously squinting as though expecting to get shot as we step into the chamber behind the gate.
We stand on the top floor of an enormous cavern. Ty is squatting behind the rockface-like balcony which obscures the upper floor from the ground floor. He gestures for us to keep low with his hand. We creep to where he is stationed and I can immediately tell something had spooked him.
“Down there, in the distance,” he says.
Calyx and I stand up, carefully peering over the edge of the balcony. I first take note that the upper floor runs from the gate behind us and curves down to meet the smoothed and dusty ground level. The floor of the main level is so coated it almost looks like a fresh layer of snow had fallen upon it. The surface of it glimmers like the walls within the corridors from which we had come. I can see footprints leading to a large machine about half a kilometer distant. Seven figures stand in front of the thing and as far as I can tell, it looks like a massive drill. It’s obvious they are having trouble penetrating the wall ahead, for the drill part of the machine is not even half-way inside the material. Yet neither the drill nor the people themselves – who are lit by a series of strong halogens placed around them in a rough circle – is what truly locks my attention. What has locked my eyes in place is the mountain of a man standing in their midst. The sheer bulk and size of him catches me off guard as he hulks over the others by at least a shoulder and three heads. It is like he stands surrounded by children. Even from a distance, I can see his massive, armored shoulders rising and falling with the metronomic consistency of his breathing. Resplendent in the light surrounding the men, his face looks like a pentagon-shaped bucket had been placed over his head. Two thick, segmented tubes run from each side of the frontal portion of him helm and into a heavy, clanging pack worked into the suit upon his back. A high, heavy collar obscures his neck, and his whole frame seems encased in some kind of metallic armor. Although he stands with only his side visible to me, I can see a series of grilles worked into the mouth portion of his helmet, with some sort of metal cabling running from the upper side of it and into his backpack. His eyes are slits, shining a dim, golden light.
I cannot hear what the others are saying, but I can see they’re speaking. When the giant speaks, the words are clear. They echo from the walls of the chamber and hit me with an almost palpable sense of dread. The voice is so raw, so primal, I almost hunker back down. But I cannot, I am stuck in place by the sight of him.
“The intruders are not bound to my concerns,” he says with a sound like raw madness. “If they should come here, they shall come no further. Resume drilling. Now.”
I see a person next to him speaking in turn, but cannot make out a word. Ty pulls me down by the sleeve.
“We need to get outta here, man! That’s a fucking Templar!”
“They’re a myth,” I say to him. He doesn’t pick up on my sarcasm.
“Does that look like a fucking mythological creature to you?” he snarls.
I look up at Calyx who’s still staring down into the distance, her fingers grasping the edge of the balcony.
“Cal,” I whisper. “What should we do?”
No answer.
“Calyx!”
She registers and looks at me, then slides down to our level, a distant look in her eyes. “That’s my father.”
“What? Who?” I ask.
“Down there, operating the machine,” she says.
“And?” Ty asks. “I hope you’re not thinking of going down there, we don’t have a chance against that thing.”
“Why?” she asks.
“Look at it!”
“We can ambush them,” she says. “Once we deal with the rest, he shouldn’t last long under our combined barrage.”
“Ambush? How the fuck?” Ty asks.
“They’re surrounded by light that shines in their faces. They can’t see much beyond the edges of those glares. It’s not possible.”
“And our footsteps? Surely they’ll hear us coming.” On cue, the vast machine begins to drill again, its sounds near deafening. The hall vibrates and the ceiling expel
s more residue that trails down like nuclear snow.
Despite myself, I am reminded of winters in my homeland. How the frost would cover the landscape and at night paint the horizon with a near fluorescent glow. How it made everyone hide within their makeshift houses, some of whom never came out again. I remember how the snow looked more like ash and how everyone got sick or began to defecate spontaneously if they so much as inhaled the stuff, or went in the open a few days after it had fallen. We nearly starved to death once. Ran out of food, fearing to go outside. When I think about it now, I can’t even remember how we managed to live like that. How was it that we survived for more than a decade in such conditions? I realize I didn’t have the faintest clue. But somehow, the radiation had only made me stronger. I remember playing in the ash once, naked and oblivious to the danger, my father rushing out to carry me back inside. He had to stay in bed for a week and had never truly recovered after that. It was the day my parents began to suspect something was odd about me, how could they not? I overheard them talking about it, thinking I was asleep. I still remember my mother’s words. She said, “It’s like his molecules are so rooted in reality, so much more than ours, that they cannot be disturbed even by the most fatal of vibrational patterns. I can’t explain how this could have happened.”
“A mutation?” my father had asked.
“That’s one explanation,” she had said.
“And the other?”
“What are you thinking?” Calyx asks me, expelling me from my mindscape.
“Just reminiscing,” I tell her. “The falling particles remind me of snow.”
“Snow?” she asks. “You must really be from high up,” she says. “But what do you think about my plan?”
“To sneak up on them?”
“Just so,” she nods.
“Sounds like we don’t have a choice,” I say half shouting, I could barely even hear her voice.
“Good. I’ll go first,” she says. “When you see me kneel down, take aim. Ill fire and you two follow immediately after. It would be best if we position ourselves in a line. I’ll take the middle, Ty, you stay on my left, and Nomad you stay on my right. I’ll take down the middle two, Nomad you take down the right two, and Ty, you make sure to aid us in case we miss or our shots don’t finish the job after you’ve taken down the left most soldier.”
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you don’t trust my aim,” Ty cracks a smile.
“It’s not that,” she says. “We need one to start shooting the Templar as soon as possible so he doesn’t have too much time to react and shoot back.”
“But shouldn’t you be the one to start shooting him? I mean, he’s probably gonna want to take down the person who shot him first, and you still have a bit of your shield left.”
“If the stories about them are true,” she says. “He won’t even carry a gun.”
“I don’t want to do this, to be perfectly frank. Getting shot isn’t on my list of priorities.”
“You can stay here if you want,” she says. “I won’t blame either of you, but I’m going to do this.”
He sighs. “Merde. We can at least pick up some of those soldier’s guns. Maybe then this venture won’t be a total waste.”
I don’t answer as she looks at me, I nod.
We head to our right and down to the lower level. What had at first seemed like a reasonably well thought out plan, soon turns into a travesty.
The Templar sees us first. His visual apparatus mounted over his right eye-slit spots us before we even come close enough to take a shot with any confidence or accuracy. The giant points his meaty, armored gauntlet at us and I hear the rasp of his metallic voice even over the drilling, “There.”. The other five look unsure at first, then start to rush us from the luminous center, firing blindly. I feel one of the shots swoosh past my cheek as though a hot whip had cracked millimeters from my face. The spot begins to burn soon after. The three of us get on one knee almost simultaneously. We open fire. The recoil is minimal, the carnage optimal. Spitting death in horizontal slices of air, the guns color the insides of the hall orange as they fire, their hissing sounds nearly unheard, drowned by the sound of drilling. The men begin to yell as the hot bolts hit them and spread over their bodies like paper set to smolder. Steaming and flesh-fused plasma blows off their fizzling bodies in chunks as it hits and then envelopes them. With the pain, they forget about shooting back and instead try to grab or attempt to halt the spread of it with their hands, but it’s like trying to stop acid that has a life of its own. The engagement is over in less than five seconds. Soon there is nothing left but charred, skeletal remains collapsing to the ground. Even bones begin to melt into a soup bubbling as though simmering. A thick, acrid smell fills the cavern.
All that’s left is the Templar.
“Hold your fire a moment!” says Calyx. I’m not sure why at first, then spot her father, directly behind the armored giant. He sits cramped inside a tightly enclosed compartment, shielded from the constant vibrations by a series of shock absorbent hydraulic suspenders. The sound of the machine, however, must be deafening, as the man doesn’t even turn to look upon the commotion, his attention centered on the machine’s cockpit displays.
The Templar lifts a hand as tough pointing, his fingers balled into a fist. A half-transparent screen manifests above his wrist and I can see him selecting through some kind of menu system without doing anything else than standing, looking. He puts his hand back down and his form wavers out of existence. By the time I notice footsteps leaving traces in the dust it’s already too late. A crack sounds and Ty is thrown back, hit in the jaw, hard. He slides across the floor. Dust billows around him as he travels a few meters then stops. He doesn’t get up.
Calyx begins to fire and I add my own shots to the fray. I can see some hit against something approaching, the plasma dispersing in fireworks flying about like specks of lava. I hear the heavy breathing of the man, close and constant. His suit systems hum like a coil with a low currency passing through it. The Templar’s feet thump the ground, and before I managed to blink again, Calyx is swept aside. Side-kicked to the gut, she flies and lands on the floor, but isn’t knocked unconscious. An ‘oof’ escapes me as I am punched in the stomach. Yet the punch doesn’t even hurt. I cannot say the same for the next one, however, which smacks me in the temple. The world swirls for a moment. I drop the gun in confusion, but notice the plasma ejections had made the Templar’s invisibility near obsolete, his is outline visible. I spot a fist ready for another strike. My senses return faster with each nanosecond. I dodge the fist swung at me by a hair’s length and catch him in the face with a right hook. My hand throbs. The Templar is thrown aback. He staggers. I see a dent in his helmet and see my chance. I brace myself and manage to build some momentum, then hurl myself shoulder first at him. It feels like I had run into a wall and my shoulder burns with the clash. He’s swept back, but remains on his feet. I repeat the procedure, this time using my knee and targeting his gut. He growls behind the helm as I hit him, his voice nearly shaking my skull. He limbers over to the machine still thumping and drilling away while I rush to help Calyx on her feet and turn around. The Templar punches into the dome-like compartment where Calyx’s father still sits, oblivious. There’s look of surprise on the man’s face as the Templar tares away at the shattered plastic with his hands. The safety protocols must have kicked in then, because the machine suddenly stops, and I hear the man shout, “What in the name of shit are you doing?!”
The Templar pulls the man out by his collar and hefts him up, turning around. “What is wrong with you!” the man protests.
The brute lifts his fist and shuffles through more menus.
In sliver specks like veins behind the eyes bursting, the two slowly begin to fade out in a waving heat-haze.
CHAPTER 9