Worlds collide architect.., p.18
Worlds Collide (Architects of the Apocalypse Book 2), page 18
“Go ahead,” Axel replied. “We’ll see if there’s anything useful around here and look for shelter.”
“Right away, sir.” Bruce gave the boy a mocking one-fingered salute before turning to jog down the main street. It had been his idea to check the balcony, yet somehow Axel had turned that around, making it sound like an order. He passed another shadowy corpse—this one burned to a crisp. The horns and saddle gave it away. It was a dead triceratops. Like Axel said, the Jakar burned their dead, but he hadn’t expected that to extend to their beasts of labor, too.
Next Bruce came upon the harvester he’d crashed after wresting the controls from Axel and then being intercepted by drone fighters in orbit. Proof that leaving Planet B wasn’t as easy as it seemed. He peered into the ragged hole in the bottom of the ship, wondering if anything was hiding in there. It didn’t look like it, but maybe that would be a good place for them to sit tight and wait for a rescue.
Passing the crashed spaceship, Bruce reached the city square where he and Tom had rescued the others. Here, the scene took on a much more sinister appearance. The square was filled by a mountain of char-blackened human bodies. Little two-legged dinosaurs were picking over the remains. Bruce steered clear of them. They were about the size of a big chicken, so not particularly scary, but their teeth looked sharp, and there were at least a dozen of them.
They scattered at the sound of his thudding footfalls, looking for shelter and hiding places. None of them tried to follow him. Bruce wondered what they were and if they actually could be a threat. Tom would probably know. So far they seemed timid enough. Carrion-eaters, not hunters. But still better to be careful. Bruce scanned the rubble for any hint of a weapon that the Jakar might have left behind. He didn’t see anything, and the failing light wasn’t helping.
Then, on the other side of the square he spotted something metallic gleaming on the cobblestones. He ran over to it. An old rusty sword. He picked it up and swung it around experimentally. It was heavy enough and made a satisfying whistling sound as it cut through the air. Not exactly a lethal weapon, and probably blunt as hell, but it would still be better than nothing if he had to ward off one of those carnivorous chickens, and definitely better than wasting one of the only two rounds in his rifle.
Bruce reached the base of the tower and ducked into the shadowy interior. Nothing but a curving stone stairwell winding all the way up like a lighthouse. He started sprinting up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time—then realized how much noise he was making, and slowed to a crawl.
If there was a guard at the top, it was probably too late to hide from them. They’d likely seen him running down the street to the base of the tower.
As he rounded the final steps to the top, Bruce set his sword down on the stairs and gripped his rifle in both hands, holding it firmly against his shoulder and keeping his eye to the sights.
The curving stairwell fell away, and Bruce found himself standing in a small circular space. Both the top of the tower and the wraparound balcony were empty. Bruce heaved a sigh and stepped carefully out onto the balcony, looking down on the ruins below.
He saw a handful of people walking around the ruins in pairs. He used the sights on his rifle to zoom in on them, just in case. He recognized each of the members of his group, but he did a quick head count just to be sure. Six. All of them recognizable in the bluish-red twilight of the neighboring planets.
Bruce lowered his rifle and looked out to the ocean, seeing those worlds rising swiftly. The nearest and largest one was predominately blue, followed by one that was red and blue, and then another that was yellow, white and gray. Each successive world looked smaller and more distant than the last, and he knew that once they’d fully risen there would be twelve of them stretching from one horizon to the other. According to Alice, this parallel solar system hosted a lot more than that—a hundred and twenty, to be precise—but only twelve planets were readily visible, with the last one being nothing but a speck no larger than Mars when viewed from Earth. At the moment, only the first three worlds were visible, but the others would be rising soon.
Bruce stared at the horizon for a long moment, wondering what alien lifeforms were living on those worlds, if any of them were intelligent, and what that might mean. He was almost tempted to find a harvester and hitch a ride like Alice had to see for himself, but his curiosity wasn’t worth dying for. Besides, they no longer had working pressure suits, or a ship of their own that Axel could use to rescue them if they wound up stranded as Alice had.
Regardless, the scope and scale of this alien wildlife preserve was staggering to contemplate.
Bruce slowly turned from the view and descended the stairs. On his way down he collected the rusty sword, and made his way back across the square to find the others. He only found Axel and Tom, both of whom were standing guard outside a rickety wooden door with spears that they must have found among the ruins.
“Come on,” Axel whispered. “The others are inside.” He pushed the door open. It groaned on old rusty hinges, and Bruce saw Alice’s family sitting on a pile of straw. Preston was there with them, looking exhausted, one hand resting on his rifle.
Axel and Tom shuffled in behind him, and then quickly shut the door and slotted an old half-rotted wooden beam into a pair of rusty iron brackets.
“That should keep the dinos out,” Tom said.
Bruce reached for the door handle and shook it against the beam to test its sturdiness. The door seemed like it would hold, but it wouldn’t stop a determined effort to get in. And if a big dinosaur got hungry enough it wouldn’t take more than batting at the door with their tail or snout to break it down. Raptors could probably also claw their way in or simply dig under the door. Bruce stared pointedly at the shallow ditch beneath the door where it looked like a dinosaur might have done exactly that.
But he decided not to mention his concerns. For now, it would do. And if they were lucky, they wouldn’t have to wait long before reinforcements arrived.
“I’m guessing the tower was empty?” Preston asked.
Bruce nodded.
“Good.”
“You didn’t see anyone else while you were up there?” Tom asked.
“No. Just us.” Bruce went over to the pile of straw and sat down next to Preston. He leaned back and let exhaustion wash over him. He was tired, sticky and grimy from the hike through the forest, and covered in bug bites. He’d been able to avoid trouble with the largest bugs, but for some reason all of the small ones were here, too—as if mosquitoes were ever in any danger of going extinct on Earth. If he ever met the ‘Architects’ he’d be sure to give them a piece of his mind.
Axel went and sat on another pile of straw beside an old skeleton, the skull grinning beneath a rusty metal helmet. Axel set his spear aside, leaning it against the crumbling stone wall. He grimaced and scratched madly at his head, and then his arms, as if this situation were giving him anxiety—or maybe because he was just as sweaty and bug-bitten as the rest of them.
“Everything all right there, kiddo?” Bruce asked, and received a glare from the young man who had been his best friend in high school.
“No, everything is not all right!” Axel exploded. “I warned you. All of you. And this is the second time you’ve put our lives in jeopardy by not listening to me.”
Bruce snorted and crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back insouciantly. “Kinda makes you wish you’d never brought us here, huh?”
“Exactly. I should’ve left you at the mercy of the Architects.”
“Aren’t we at their mercy here, too?” Alice demanded. “What’s the difference, except back on Earth we had lives and homes, and some semblance of civilization.”
“For now,” Axel muttered.
Silence ensued for at least a full minute. All eyes were on Axel.
“Is that what’s going to happen?” Liam asked. “They’re going to invade and destroy everything?”
“Maybe not everything, but you won’t want to be around after they get there.”
“How do you know what it will be like if you’ve never even met them?” Alice asked. “You really trust those other minders that much that you’ll just believe whatever they have to say about it?”
“I do.”
“Why?” Bruce asked.
“Because.”
“Yeah?” Tom growled.
“Because if they lied about that—”
Bruce arched an eyebrow at him, waiting for him to go on. Axel seemed to be struggling visibly, as if he wasn’t really sure about the answer.
“Finish the damn sentence!” Tom snapped.
“If they lied, then that means all of this was for nothing, and I gave up my life and my family for nothing. It means ...” Axel trailed off shaking his head and staring at his hands.
“It means that maybe you should’ve tried harder to escape,” Alice finished for him.
To Bruce’s surprise, Axel nodded along with that. He felt his eyes narrow and his pulse quicken with anger. “Hold the farm. You’re saying that you chose to believe them on faith, and now that you have, you’re afraid to question it because it would mean you’d have to admit that you were wrong?”
“Something like that,” Axel admitted.
“You, motherf—” Bruce cut himself off as Alice gave him a sharp look. Right. Sean. He smiled thinly and said, “Don’t worry, Axel, if we end up stuck here because of you, I’ll put you out of your misery.”
“Not if I get to him first,” Tom added.
Axel frowned, his eyes darting between the two of them.
“Enough. This isn’t helping us get home,” Alice snapped. “And for better or worse, we tried to leave several times. Our best bet now is to wait for reinforcements to find us and let them take back the dam. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to use the Gateway to go home.”
“Yeah, and what if the dam got shut down along with the rest of our gear?” Bruce asked.
Preston appeared to hesitate. Alice’s brow furrowed, and Liam looked alarmed. Tom didn’t look happy either, but he didn’t seem as surprised by the question. Clearly they’d both been thinking along similar lines, but the rest of them hadn’t.
“It didn’t occur to you?” Bruce asked, nodding to Preston. The other man slowly shook his head.
“If that’s true, then we really are stranded here.”
“Bingo, and it’s all boy wonder’s fault,” Bruce said.
“Not exactly,” Preston replied. “I would have come here regardless. Technically, I’m here because of my own hubris.”
“Well, good for you,” Bruce replied.
“This is all besides the point,” Liam said. “It doesn’t matter who brought us here, or why—” He added that last part with an accompanying glance in his wife’s direction. “The problem is we need to find a way home. There has to be a way to restore power to the dam, or to override whatever remote command was used to shut it down.”
“That’s right,” Alice said, brightening suddenly. “We might be able to bypass the original systems.”
Axel snorted. “It’s alien tech, and you think you’re just going to come along and re-engineer it to get it working again?”
“Do you have a better idea?” Alice demanded.
“I do. Stop fighting this. Accept that you’re stuck here, and make the most of it. As soon as you do that, I’m sure all of our equipment will magically start working again.”
“Screw that!” Bruce said. “You can stay if you want to. I’m finding a way home even if it kills me.”
“It might,” Axel replied.
“We should get some sleep,” Preston interrupted. He raised his smart watch and the glowing blue screen illuminated his features. “It’s three thirty now. We have about an hour before those reinforcements are due to arrive.”
Tom looked skeptical. “If they didn’t decide to land somewhere else after we warned them about the Russians and the Jakar.”
“We’ll find out soon,” Preston replied. He lay down and rolled over, using his hands and the dirty pile of straw for a pillow.
Bruce regarded him with a frown. A wave of fatigue washed over him as well. He ducked out of his rifle’s strap. Alice and Tom followed suit. The seven of them lay down and waited for sleep to come.
It was a long wait, listening to the creeping silence of the night. Bruce kept expecting to hear a dinosaur snorting and snuffling at the bottom of the door. Or to hear it shatter as a T-Rex bashed it down with his nose. The building they were in was small, a few hundred square feet at best. An open space with rotting beams of wood, several skeletons, and old dirty piles of straw. Maybe it had been a storehouse, or a chicken coop, or a pig pen. It was hard to say. Whatever the case, Bruce noticed that there was only one way in or out. On the one hand that was comforting—they only had one entrance to guard. But on the other hand, if something found them in here, they would be trapped.
Bruce pushed those thoughts from his head and willed sleep to come. But somehow, every time he shut his eyes, they kept springing open. He was exhausted and desperately needed to sleep, but coming down off the adrenaline high wasn’t easy.
Eventually his thoughts dimmed, and his racing heart slowed.
Suddenly, he was back on Earth, tending to his vegetable garden at his log cabin in rural Maine. The birds were out and chirping. Insects buzzed. The Dead River was rushing nearby, providing off-the grid power via his hydro generator.
Just as he was digging up a potato and a couple of carrots for dinner, he heard a deep, thrumming roar. The whole world seemed to shiver with the sound, and all of the birds and bugs abruptly stopped singing. The sun passed behind a cloud, and he looked up—
And saw that it wasn’t a cloud. A giant, curving black hulk was cruising low over the forest. That thrumming sound accompanied it. Dozens of glowing blue apertures indicated what might have been some type of thrusters holding it aloft.
Swarms of tiny W-shaped black specks began streaming from it. A pair of them came screaming down directly overhead. The sun came back out, blinding him. He threw up a hand to shield his eyes and slowly rose to his feet, the basket with the potatoes and carrots falling from limp fingers.
And then a bright flash and a scalding wave of heat incinerated him. An agonized scream died on his lips—
And he awoke, his body cold and drenched with sweat.
He sat up and glanced around at the others, all of them still asleep. He lay back down and stared at the rotting wooden ceiling of the storeroom. Outside, he heard rain pattering down. A flash of lightning flickered through the gaps between the boards in the door, followed by an ominous rumble of thunder. Rain dripped steadily from holes in the ceiling, but it didn’t appear to be getting anyone wet. Bruce lay there in silence, struggling to collect his thoughts and piece together the fragments of his actual situation.
The door rattled. Then banged.
Bruce’s attention snapped to it.
Lying closest to the door, Axel stirred. “Wha ...” he mumbled sleepily.
“Shhh,” Bruce hissed as he scuttled over to the door. He brought his rifle up, aiming it at the door.
“Maybe it was just the wind?” Alice suggested.
Bruce nodded. “Maybe.”
Another bang! issued from the door. The beam barring it began to splinter. An animal grunted, and a beastly bellow sounded, followed by the thunder of heavy feet hammering the ground.
“Get away from the door!” Bruce shouted as the sound reached a crescendo.
He dove to one side, and the entryway splintered in a thousand pieces.
Chapter 22
3:48 PM, February 25th, 2070
“Well?” Layla’s mother knocked on the bathroom door. “What’s it say?”
“Hang on,” Layla said. She was sitting on the toilet, waiting for the result of the second test. She’d bought two, just in case. The first one was sitting beside the sink, and now she was waiting to confirm the result with the second.
It had taken her a few days to get up the courage to tell her mother what had happened. For some reason Abigail was more focused on the prospect of having another grandchild than the possibility that her daughter might have been violated or artificially inseminated without her knowledge.
Layla’s mouth twitched bitterly. But she was no longer eager to end this pregnancy. Something was going on. She hadn’t seen the shadow man return, but then, she’d been sleeping more deeply than usual. In fact, she’d never felt so rested, or so energized and vibrant. It was as though life had suddenly been painted in different colors—brighter, happier ones. If this was what it was like to be pregnant, she suddenly understood why some women were so eager to have kids.
Layla resisted the urge to tap her foot as she waited.
She didn’t have long to wait. The word materialized on the tiny display.
Pregnant.
She couldn’t believe it. Setting the test aside with the other one, she stood up and zipped up her jeans. She emerged from the bathroom with both tests in hand. Her mother’s eyes were wide and sparkling, her hands up, palms out, and her mouth slightly agape and smiling, as if she were just about to crush Layla into a hug and start jumping up and down for joy.
“Let me see!” Layla’s mother grabbed both tests in a fist and checked them. It took a moment for the news to sink in. And then she exploded. “You’re pregnant! This is incredible! Oh, honey, I know it’s not what you expected, but you’ll see! This is going to be such a good thing for you. There’s nothing in the world like being a mother. No greater sense of fulfillment.”
Layla frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. Her mysteriously good feelings on the topic diminished with the need to put her mother’s feet on the ground. “Did you forget what I told you?”
“Hmmm?”
“I don’t know who the father is. This wasn’t the product of some one-night stand before I disappeared, or after. This is something that happened to me. Without my knowledge.”
