Unfortunately Seth was right. My hands were shackled behind me, then I was shoved roughly into the elevator car.
We plummeted, and almost instantly slammed to a sudden stop. The forward ramp automatically dropped down, kicking up dust. I squinted through it as I was pushed out and . . .
Felt panic. Huge Perfect Storm waves of horror and dread and shock.
No! I thought. This can’t be my home.
For mile upon mile, as far as my eye could see, corkscrewed metal girders and wrecked vehicles poked out from mountainous piles of scorched rubble. The few buildings that were still standing were warped, shattered, windowless. The prevailing sound was the whistle of wind over tumbled bricks. From horizon to horizon lay the demolished remains of a massive city, one that had been as big as New York or London.
Staring at the destruction, I stood frozen with despair. Grief for my people and my ruined world filled me. Seth had gotten me yet again, I realized. Hey, look, Daniel. Here’s your home planet. Oh, I forgot to mention, it’s been leveled.
Chapter 64
I CAUGHT HIM staring at me, a mirthful smile on his fetid alien face. He’s fooled me twice, I thought with a shake of my head. Shame on me.
Twenty feet below the rim of the elevated landing ramp was what looked like a derailed bullet train. Someone had scrawled DEATH TO ERGENT SETH in its dust-covered side.
“You did this,” I said, turning to Seth. It wasn’t a question.
Seth took a long cigar out of his pocket and lit it with a gold Zippo as he winked at me.
“I know,” he said, blinking as he shook his head at the desolate vista. “Unreal, isn’t it? Sometimes even I can’t believe it. I mean, ever since I was little, I always dreamed of committing mass destruction. But on this kind of scale? It’s more than even I had a right to expect.”
Seth raised a claw and saluted his handiwork. Half a mile away, a massive pit was being carved out of the rubble. Insectlike machines of the same green-gray metal as the spacecraft were moving around and around in slow circles. There were more pits in the distance beyond it, and more busy insectile machines.
“They’re called World Harvesters, my race’s greatest invention,” Seth said proudly.
“They’ll chew through anything—rock, garbage, dead bodies, you name it—and remove every atom of valuable minerals and elements. It took half a million years for your people to build the city of Bryn Spi, the shining jewel of your planet. It took me one and a half hours to blow it into a billion shiny pieces. And by this time next year—and this is my favorite part—it will look like nothing ever stood here at all.”
My heart seemed to be unfastening inside my chest. “Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Your fellow Alparians? The few who are still alive scurry through the ruins like rats. They have no powers, no hope, no reason to live, really. But still they stumble on. Pathetic.”
Seth shook his head in disgust.
“Protectors of the Universe?” he said, tapping the ash from his cigar with one of his talons. “Guess they should have worried more about protecting themselves.”
Chapter 65
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, Protectors of the Universe?” I asked.
“You are clueless, aren’t you?” Seth said. “I keep forgetting you had all this thrust on you at three years of age. Behold, Alpar Nok, the home of the Alien Hunters, the universe’s answer to injustice and evil! Your parents were sent to Earth to protect the oh-so-special humans from the Outer Ones, as they like to call us.
“Because a few pathetic Alparians were born with some ability to manipulate the universal force, it was thought you could protect the good from the evil. As if good and evil aren’t just fairy tales made up for small children. There are the strong and then there are the weak.”
I looked out at the ruined city again. Seth and his buddies had left just enough standing for me to see how amazing it must have been.
Fragments of exotic spires, pyramids, domes, pagodas, minarets, columns, and obelisks peeked out in every direction. Right next to us was a giant sculpted building that looked like a hundred-story violin made of glass and metal. Now it leaned precariously because a huge hole had been blown in its base.
Wait a second, I thought. It was leaning toward us.
Maybe that was a good thing.
Chapter 66
IT COULD HAVE BEEN the air of my homeland, or maybe a coincidence, but ever since I’d stepped foot on Alpar Nok, power had been flowing into me. I could feel my energy surging as if I’d just downed about a dozen Red Bulls. Can you imagine it?
There was no time to think this over. I had to do something outrageous and unexpected before Seth found out that my abilities were coming back. This qualified as pretty outrageous, I figured. The question bouncing around my head was whether outrageous equaled really dumb or really ingenious.
I scanned the already weakened base of the building that was tilted toward us. I did some quick calculations in my head. Checked the math. Then I unleashed everything I had at the thinnest part of one of the bent girders.
Here goes nothing. Or, I guess, everything!
The landing party of horse-skulls turned as the girder sheared with the loudest imaginable crack.
There was a deafening groan as the tower shuddered, then—TIMBER!—it collapsed against the side of the ship’s landing shaft. Actually, it disintegrated the shaft.
Seth’s cigar went flying. Next I shattered my shackles with a violent flex of my shoulders. And because I couldn’t resist, I threw a roundhouse punch into Seth’s snout. He. Didn’t. Even. Flinch.
Then I leaped off the ramp, hitting the rubble at a run. Or should I say, dead run?
I turned into the nearest alley, then skidded to an immediate, lifesaving stop.
I was right at the edge of one of the strip-mining pits, a chasm at least three or four hundred feet straight down, maybe a city block wide. I had missed falling into the pit by inches!
My chest was heaving as I spotted what appeared to be a tunnel opening on the opposite wall of the chasm, twenty or thirty yards across. I backed up and yelled—for extra strength, and to distract me from my fears. And common sense, maybe? Then I ran forward and jumped off the edge, using every ounce of energy I had.
I made it by inches—and then I heard Opus 24/24 gunfire from above.
Bullets rained down everywhere, burrowing into the ground like steel fists.
I turbo-crawled maybe twenty feet into the darkness and waited an eternity—until the thunderous gunfire finally stopped.
Then I heard the cackle of Seth’s laughter. It echoed against the walls of my planet’s version of Death Valley.
“Go ahead, run-un-un,” Seth yelled, echoes trampling all over his slimy words. “You’re a cockroach in a dump-ump-ump. Fall on your face! Stay here in this graveyard if you like-ike-ike. Does it matter? You’re just one more useless slave-ave-ave! Welcome home, loser-ser-ser!”
I took the time to yell back, “Kiss my butt-utt-utt.”
Then I ran until, finally, I was a blur.
Chapter 67
I DON’T KNOW how long it was that I ran, then jogged, then stumbled through the totally unfamiliar semidarkness. Unfortunately my stomach wound was bleeding again.
I found some kind of monorail track thing and followed it for at least a couple of hours. You wouldn’t think that a city could be so big, but Bryn Spi seemed to go on forever.
I think I actually fell asleep walking at one point.
The next thing I knew, I was waking up as I heard somebody, or some thing, breathing in the darkness above me.
“Hey!” a kid’s voice came as I reached up and grabbed a head of longish hair.
A flashlight came on next.
“Lay off! Let me go!” a dirty-faced kid yelled, waving his flashlight. He was emaciated, dressed in filthy rags, and furious with me.
“And what do you think you’re doing, hovering over me like that?” I asked him.
“I practica
lly tripped over you lying like a rotty corpse in the middle of the tunnel, you idiot. Leggo my hair now!”
I released my grip.
“Smart move, sucker,” the kid said, frowning and rubbing his scalp. “Nobody messes with Bem. Even the Outer Ones better watch their step with me.”
“Oh, I’m sure they do, Bem. They would never mess with the likes of you.”
I stood for a moment just gazing at the boy. I couldn’t believe I’d finally come into contact with one of my people!
“Quit staring,” he said. “You’re creeping me out.”
Okay, then, I thought. I guess all of us aren’t telepathic.
“Is your mom or dad around?” I asked the boy.
“Died on FirstStrike. It’s just me and Kulay now. Kulay’s my sister.”
“Where do you live?”
“In Undertown, of course. Where else? Where you been?”
“Will you show me?”
The feisty kid squinted at me and put up his fists. “Why should I?”
I concentrated and levitated Bem a foot or so off the ground.
“Okay, that’s a good reason,” he said, and started to walk. “Keep up!”
The tunnel we traveled through gradually began to widen. More tunnels branched to the right and left until finally we stepped into a massive chamber. One, I noticed, that was crowded with people.
My people.
Maybe I could find someone who knew my parents! I thought as I approached the crowd. Imagine if I had a family? Real aunts and uncles and cousins?
It didn’t take long for my hope to wither. Undertown wasn’t doing so hot. Every inch of the chamber was covered with crude wooden and cardboard shanties.
“Numbdown, git sum, git sum!” called a tough-looking kid around Bem’s age. He was waving dirty vials in my face as I passed. Numbdown must have been Alpar Nok’s answer to crack.
I smacked the drugs away from my face onto the concrete floor and crushed them under my sneaker.
“Common sense!” I said to the kid. “Git sum, git sum.”
Chapter 68
BEM AND KULAY’S HOME was a cavelike structure about the size of a toolshed, with a rusty drainpipe in the corner for a toilet. And, I think, a sink.
Kulay turned out to be four and was doing about as well as her “big” brother. She was pretty, but thin and bony, and one of her feet looked like it had been crushed recently and had healed wrong.
“Take me,” Kulay said to her brother as he opened the corrugated sheet of metal they used as a door. “Take me. Take me. Take me.”
She didn’t seem to notice that I was there, and I was curious about where it was that she wanted to go.
“I’m busy, Kulay,” Bem said, exasperated. “Can’t you see that? Can’t you see him?”
I searched the pockets of my jumpsuit and came out with a crushed blueberry energy bar I’d managed to keep hidden from the horse-heads. I tore it open and gave them each half.
That seemed to win Bem over. I actually saw him drop his permanent scowl for a second as he chewed.
“Where does Kulay want to go?” I asked.
“It’s . . . the only good thing left in this crummy city, I guess. It’s . . . hard to describe. You have to see it. Do you want to? Anyway, she won’t stop bugging me until we go.”
“Take me, take me!” I said in response, and even Kulay grinned this time. Cute kid. I wondered if she was one of my cousins.
Chapter 69
I LIFTED KULAY, who weighed next to nothing, and followed Bem out the hole in a wall that served as a door. We walked to the outskirts of the ramshackle underground town and went through a busted gate into a narrow corridor.
We walked for maybe an hour through a labyrinth of corridors until we came to a set of metal stairs.
After climbing seven stories, Bem opened a door into a huge concrete room filled with silent, turbinelike machines.
Behind one of them was a circular door in a wide pipe with a spin valve opener.
“What are you doing?” I said as Bem went down on all fours, spun the valve, then pulled open the door.
“You’ll see,” Kulay said with a giggle as she crawled out of my arms and into the pipe. “Take me, take me!” she shouted.
Bem was right on her tail.
I shook my head, but I followed along.
Trap? I wondered.
I had trusted people before and look where it had gotten me. Phoebe Cook had turned out to be Ergent Seth. So who were these two kids?
I crawled right behind Bem, close enough to grab him if I had to. Well, I wriggled, if you want to get technical, since my shoulders just barely fit.
Suddenly I heard Kulay yell, “Wheeee!” and then there was a loud, wet splash.
“What the —?” But it was too late. The pipe tilted downward, and I was sliding, then free-falling.
I didn’t have time to scream before I belly-flopped into a humongous, double-Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool.
I came to the surface, gasping.
This was totally amazing, like nothing I’d ever seen.
All around me, shafts of light streamed in through cathedral-sized windows of translucent glass.
The unchlorinated water was the cleanest I’d ever drunk, let alone swum in. I suddenly felt like I could run a marathon.
I floated on my back as I looked up at the soaring dome of the ceiling. Intricately drawn on it was what looked like this world’s largest Renaissance painting.
In the center of the mural, kids ran and played games involving complex and very colorful kites. The detail was extraordinary, like nothing I had ever seen on Earth, even at the Louvre and the Met.
I shook my head. I could have stayed there for weeks and weeks. If this kind of craftsmanship was evident in public pools, I wondered, what did they display in the museums?
Kulay spit a spray of water at me before hopping out the side like a little seal.
“Come on,” she said, giggling. “Take me, take me!”
“What? Aren’t we here?” I asked.
“The pool? You haven’t seen anything yet,” Bem said. “The pool was just to clean ourselves up a bit.”
Chapter 70
I FOLLOWED the two of them, dripping wet, down a gallery walled with strange but beautiful glass windows. At its arched end, I suddenly stopped.
Look out, ground, I thought, here comes my jaw!
It took me a second to process what I was seeing. Think of Central Park. Okay? Now imagine the universe’s biggest solarium built around it.
We’re talking trees, softly rolling grass hills, cobblestone strolling paths, ponds, beneath a sky of bright, startling blue.
“Hey, wait a second, Bem. This doesn’t make sense. Why wasn’t this destroyed like everything else?”
“The sky isn’t real. It’s a dome,” Bem said.
“My dad told me it’s made of a special glass that does something to light, lets it in but not out. Long ago, there was a war and the Children’s Park was bombed, so they made this new one indoors. Even the Outer Ones couldn’t find it. Even Ergent Seth couldn’t!”
“We’ve met,” I told Bem and left it at that.
What caught my eye next was a massive gray stone structure. I followed Bem and Kulay around a curving path and up its mystery steps. When I got to the top and saw what was beyond the front gates, I felt tears brim in my eyes.
All is not lost, said a voice in my head.
It was a zoo.
But not just any zoo. Inside the gates was a large viewing platform, and beyond it, on grassland fields to the left and right, were elephants!
Chapter 71
AFRICAN ONES! Indian ones! Calves! Mothers! Herd upon herd of elephants. There were hundreds, maybe thousands. Definitely thousands.
I thought I was going to need a defibrillator when I saw what was rolling in the mud to my immediate left.
Trunk, check.
Ginormous ears, check.
Woolly brown fur? Check!
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Twenty feet away I had spotted a family of cute, short-trunked creatures.
They were mastodons! Had to be.
They were supposed to be extinct, but I guess that was just on Earth.
I stood there feeling electroshocked as a female approached. She was twice as big as the largest elephant I’d ever seen on Earth. Forty, maybe fifty thousand pounds.
Her head came above the ten-foot-high viewing platform. Her trunk was as thick as a telephone pole.
Then—she extended her trunk to me.
How do you do? she said in my mind. My name is Chordata.
For a second, I was unable to think straight, or breathe, actually.
I’d never communicated telepathically with an elephant before. I finally recovered a little and shook her trunk.
My name is . . . I started to say.
Daniel. Yes, I remember you from when you were a baby. You used to come here every day with your mother. We would communicate like this.
You’re the only two-leg I ever met who was able to. An elephant never forgets, you know. And never ever forgets a friend. I was very sad when you left. But happy now that you have come back. How are you doing, Daniel?
I’m pretty much blown away right this second, Chordata, I thought, smiling as I stared into her beautiful violet eyes. So this was why I loved elephants so much?
I see you’ve met those two little monkeys Bem and Kulay. Cute, aren’t they?
I nodded, then lost my breath as Chordata’s massive knee bowed—and she offered us her back.
Please, come with me and meet the others. You can trust me, Daniel. An elephant never betrays a friend.
Bem, Kulay, and I were all able to ride on her rolling ship of a back, with room to spare.
From all over the grassland, elephants started moving toward us. One of the mastodons trumpeted, and then from everywhere the others started joining in, a happy symphony of welcome.